The Sixteen Pleasures Read online

  Yolanda: Like the emergency stop?

  Ruth (nodding): Yeah. Maybe it’s not important, but I’m learning to look at things. Really look. Like these pictures. Chartres Cathedral. Little stuff like that, or that guy with the funny hat. They all add up. It’s like getting new glasses.

  Yolanda: How about the announcement on the PA system?

  Did you get that?

  Ruth (looking at her notebook): Pardonnay something or other, that’s all I got. How about you?

  Yolanda: I drew a blank. (Looking out the window.) I thought France was supposed to be beautiful?

  Ruth (thumbing through her guidebook): We’re in Alsace-Lorraine. Remember Alsace-Lorraine? I think it used to be part of Germany—lots of heavy industry and potash mining. Joan of Arc was born here.

  Yolanda: Swell. How long does it last?

  Ruth: Till we get to Switzerland, I guess.

  Yolanda: It’ll be dark by then. We won’t be able to see the mountains.

  *

  The train, an express but not a “crack” express, had settled into a steady, comfortable rhythm that made me think of the books I’d read as a child in which trains went clickety-clack, clickety-clack, down the track, down the track, clickety-clack. I shrugged my shoulders mentally and turned back to Lessico famigliare.

  Ruth and Yolanda got out their notebooks and spent another hour writing—less strenuously this time—and then they read aloud what they had written, which I found more disturbing than listening to them talk about their sexual escapades with Philip. Disturbing not because it was embarrassing but because their stories brought me, against my will, into the quiet centers of their lives, to places where Philip had never been. And yet they didn’t know I was there. I was totally invisible. So invisible that I hadn’t even been noticed in their furious cataloging of authentic European details.

  Ruth read first, staring down hard at her notes. Her father, she began, was an avid sailor. Sailing was his passion, and he knew the Chesapeake Bay like the back of his hand, from the Delaware Canal to Cape Charles; the Outer Banks too. But he was blind. Blind as a bat. He’d been blind since he was fifteen and had fallen off a horse, knocked his head, something like that. Anyway, he kept on riding, and he kept on sailing. He invented all kinds of nautical instruments for the blind—an audiocompass, a knot meter, a Loran-C with a verbal read-out. He always kept a man to look after his sailboats and to sail with him, to be his eyes; and sometimes he took one of his children, though not Ruth’s mother, who was afraid of the water.

  “We were beating upwind into the Port Arthur Narrows when we should have been heading home with the wind behind us. It was starting to rain, and there was too much of a chop. The shoal water was boiling, and we were slamming into the waves, and Daddy made me strap on a life jacket, but he wouldn’t wear one himself. He wouldn’t believe we couldn’t do it—he never believed there was anything he couldn’t do—but we couldn’t do it. We made two more passes, and then we had to pull off the wind to run back home. Coming about we got hit by a big sea, like a big hand slapping a fly, and we went right over. I came up under the sail, and when I got myself out I could see Daddy swimming the wrong way, away from the boat, out into the bay. I held onto the boat—I was afraid to go after him. He was a strong swimmer and I’d never have caught him anyway. I kept on screaming and screaming until I couldn’t scream anymore—the wind had picked up, and I couldn’t even hear myself—and then I closed my eyes and prayed. I prayed that Daddy would turn around. I promised God that if Daddy got back to the boat I’d never be naughty again blah-blah-blah. No more masturbating, no more sneaking the change out of the jewelry case on Daddy’s dresser, no more sassing Mom, no more goofing off in school. You know how kids are when they pray.”

  “And?”

  “And Daddy turned around and swam right back to the boat, and fifteen minutes later the Coast Guard picked us up, and the only thing Daddy said was, ‘Don’t tell your mother. Ever.’”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I never told anyone before. Not one word.”

  “Did she ever find out?”

  “I don’t think so. Daddy paid the Coast Guard not to report it, and he paid somebody else to salvage the boat. He’d done something foolish, and he didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

  Yolanda patted Ruth’s thigh. “That’s wonderful, Ruthy. Really.”

  “I’ve always thought I should have swum after him, even if I couldn’t have caught him—he was a powerful swimmer—but I just let him go. I was too frightened. He had red hair and I could see the top of his head like a buoy that’s lost its mooring, drifting farther and farther away, and then I couldn’t see it at all till he was almost back at the boat. That’s why I’ve never told anyone, that’s why I didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “And you’ve been a good girl ever since? No sassing your mom? No playing with yourself?” Yolanda leaned over and planted a sisterly kiss on her friend’s cheek.

  “No, no, nothing like that. You know me.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Ruth said.

  “It’s so trivial compared to yours. It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes it does, Yolo. You can’t judge your own writing anyway. Philip said that over and over. You can’t really see it yourself. That’s why you need a reader, an audience. ‘Every work of art needs a receiver.’”

  It took a lot of persuading to get Yolanda to read what she’d written, but eventually Ruth prevailed. Yolanda opened her notebook, but she didn’t look at it. She looked out the window and just talked.

  “One day when I came home from school I opened the refrigerator to get a glass of milk and a rat jumped out.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “My mother died, she just died. She was standing in the doorway, all dressed up to go to the club. You should have seen her face. Here she is in this pink shantung suit, and this rat comes charging out of the refrigerator and runs across the floor into the butler’s pantry.”

  “Oh my God,” Ruth said.

  “She stood there for about thirty seconds and then she closed the kitchen doors so it couldn’t come back in and got on the phone. She told the exterminator that she was pregnant and that if he didn’t come within half an hour she’d miscarry, and then when he did show up she made him go back out and pull his truck into the garage because she didn’t want the neighbors to see it in the drive! Milton, my little brother, came down to see what was going on, and he kept shouting, ‘A rat, a rat, there’s a rat in the house!’ And Mama couldn’t shut him up, and she couldn’t get us to go to the Hendersons, who lived up the Bay Road. She wanted us out of the way; but she didn’t want us to tell Mrs. Henderson what was going on.

  “The exterminator had a rat detector, kind of like those metal detectors you see people walking around with at the beach with a little box thing on a shoulder strap. We followed him all around the kitchen—the rat, he said, had probably come up through the wall and made a nest under the fridge and then eaten through the insulation. Kitchen, laundry room, back hall, butler’s pantry, dining room. The thing started buzzing a little in the living room. ‘It’s behind the couch,’ he said. ‘Would you please leave the room and close those doors.’

  “Mama protested. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to kill it.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Please, Mrs. Kazen, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  “Between us we got Milton out of the room and closed the sliding doors. We heard the sound of furniture moving. Then a shot. Then another shot. I had goose bumps.

  “Mama was sweating. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her really sweat.

  “When the exterminator came out into the hallway, he had the rat in a kind of pouch. Milton wanted to see it, but Mama told him no.
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  “‘That’ll be fifty dollars.’

  “‘Fifty dollars? You can’t be serious. That’s highway robbery!’

  “‘Look, lady, you called me. Hysterical. You’re about to miscarry if we’re not here in half an hour. Now you’re telling me you don’t want to pay fifty dollars, which is standard for an emergency like this? I got a business to run.’

  “‘Really, I think you’d better talk to my husband.’

  “‘You want me to show him the rat? Here, where you want me to put it, here on the dining room table? Or maybe back behind the couch? On the piano?’

  “So Mama got the checkbook and paid him, and he took the rat away and was gone, and the next day we had a brand-new refrigerator.”

  There was a moment of silence, just slightly awkward, in which it wasn’t clear whether the story had come to an end.

  “That’s it. The end. It’s not very good,” she began to protest, not giving Ruth a chance to respond. “It’s dumb, really. I don’t know what made me think of it. So there was a rat, and the man shot it. So what? It needs more theme, but I don’t know what. I mean, where’s the conflict?”

  “I love it. Your mother’s hysterical about the rat, and then she doesn’t want to pay the bill. God, I know people just like that.”

  “So do I—my mother.”

  “Maybe you could do more with her worrying about the neighbors seeing the truck. A sociological angle. Did the neighbors find out?”

  “Yeah, Milton told everybody. All his friends came over to see the bullet holes. One of them got plastered over, but the other one’s still there, in the molding.”

  “Did anybody say anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. They talked about it all right, but it wasn’t any big deal. In fact, everybody had a rat story. Maybe that’s the interesting thing. It didn’t matter who it was, if Daddy told the rat story, pretty soon everybody was telling rat stories. Those old houses near the water, you can’t help it.”

  “Kind of like everybody having secret fantasies, maybe.”

  “I tried to write about Philip, too. But every time I write about sex it comes out all wrong. You know, I never did it dog fashion with Teddy. We did a lot of things, but not that. But when you try to write about it, it just sounds stupid. It seems so meaningful when you’re doing it, just physically, and all that mental stuff, too, breaking taboos, you know what I mean? But it’s hard to write about. There’s no good word for you know what. I mean, just plain penis sounds dumb. All those words sound dumb: prick, dick, dork, cock, schlong, wiener, whang. You can’t tell the truth with them.”

  My invisibility had become too uncomfortable. I was oppressed by the weight of an intimacy I couldn’t share, and by the irony of the situation: two American women come to Europe in search of story material and what rises to the surface when they put pen to paper? Mama and Papa, Papa swimming blindly out toward open water, Mama bickering with the exterminator about the fee for killing a rat. I extracted my nylon bag from the luggage rack—a little calf nestled between two big bulky cows—and left the compartment without a word, turning to the left, which is how I found my Saint-Cyr cadet, sans chapeau, on his way back from the toilet at the end of the car. He turned abruptly and entered his compartment.

  I tapped on the door of the compartment and opened it. “Any room in here?” I said. “Une place libre?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, though there was no one else in the compartment, and no suitcases in sight except for his longish brown duffel bag and my nylon one. He’d removed his fabulous chocolate hat, which was on the seat beside him, along with a smart attache case he’d been using as a lap desk. He was writing a letter.

  “You have a very nice hat,” I said in French, “un chapeau extraordinaire.”

  I hadn’t meant to embarrass him, but he blushed and covered the letter he’d been writing with his hands, as if to keep me from reading it.

  “Vraiment,” I continued, but then I got stuck. “Vraiment,” I repeated, but I couldn’t get any farther. “Truly, vraiment, vraiment, un chapeau extraordinaire.”

  Was this a sign, this language amnesia? Was my brain sending me a message, telling me to go home?

  “Are you all right?” he asked in English.

  “Yes, thank you. Whenever I try to speak French it comes out Italian, but I’ll be all right now.”

  His hat was called a casoar, which is a kind of bird—a cassowary—that lives in New Guinea, and his name was Gautier, which I realized later is “Walter” in English—Walt; what a funny name for a Frenchman—and he was quite a nice young man, who was going to Mulhouse to visit his uncle before returning to Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole. He was quite amused when I finally explained about Papa’s frozen dessert. He had never heard of such a thing, and I promised to send him the recipe. He thought his mother would like it. I still have his address and even his phone number in my little black address book, but I never sent him the recipe. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because I’d tried to pin some hopes on him, to invest him with the power to tell me, by some word or gesture, either that I was doing the right thing and should persevere, or that I had made a terrible mistake and should turn back before it was too late, but I hadn’t been able to do it. It wasn’t his fault. It was just that the redheaded blind man kept churning his way through the dark waves of my imagination. What had he been thinking of? I wondered. And why had he turned back? That was the real mystery. And, like Yolanda and Ruth, I was thinking about my own papa and mama—Papa in his old age, alone, swimming blindly out into a darkness from which there would be no turning back. And Mama already there, Mama who once found a rat in the basement toilet. She put on rubber gloves, picked it up and wrapped it in foil and then in plastic so the dogs wouldn’t smell it. Had it climbed into the toilet and fallen in, or had it come up through the pipes? Which was worse, imaginatively speaking? We’d talked about it a lot but never settled the question. You’re right, I wanted to shout. Everybody has a rat story, just like secret fantasies. If things had worked out differently, I would have told you mine.

  The second seating for dinner was announced, but Gautier was planning to eat with his uncle in Mulhouse, and I didn’t feel like eating. I wasn’t hungry. I offered him a Life Saver, which he accepted, and then I returned to my book and he to his letter. I managed to doze off for a while and was sleeping when my old friend the Italian conductor entered the compartment and offered to escort me back to my own seat.

  I protested, but it was quite impossible, he said, for me to remain where I was. The couchette assignments could not be changed, and besides, the car I was in would be detached from the train at Mulhouse, along with the vagone-ristorante, the dining car. When I returned to my compartment Ruth and Yolanda were unhappy.

  “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. I’d heard it before in Europe, but usually as the prelude to a complaint about American foreign policy, not as an attack on my character.

  “How did you find out?”

  “The conductor told us. He speaks a little English.”

  The conductor had already made up the berths, two on one side and one on the other, so the three of us were standing in a row in the narrow space that remained—Ruth glaring at me over Yolanda’s shoulder.

  “You might have said something.” Yolanda, who was doing the grilling, was hunching up her shoulders in righteous anger—I didn’t blame her—breathing deeply and deliberately.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t planning to fool you, I just . . . It’s just that I was speaking Italian with the conductor when you came in, and then I guess I thought it would be easier to be alone. I didn’t feel like talking.”

  They looked at each other in disbelief. A female, one of their own kind, who didn’t feel like talking to them?

  “But you listened to every word we said, didn’t you? I’ll bet you t
hought that was pretty cute.”

  “By that time it was too late. You know, there was a point right at the beginning where if I’d spoken up, it would have been all right, but once we were past that point . . . It was too late. I’d already heard too much.”

  “And you could have warned us that they were taking the dining car off the train. By the time we figured out that they were announcing dinner, it was too late. There’s nothing to eat. Even those little carts that were coming by for a while have disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have some Life Savers in my book bag. Would you like one?” But these women were not about to be appeased with Life Savers.

  “Life Savers! Jesus.”

  What could I do but retreat, pull into my shell like a tortoise, climb into my berth with my clothes on and pull the blanket up over me. They kept on scolding and grousing for a while, but in a nondirectional sort of way, sending out complaints at random as I gradually faded from sight and as they struggled with their suitcases, taking turns because there wasn’t room in the compartment to open both at once. They’d been expecting cozy Pullman accommodations, not these flat, drafty bunks with paper blankets and paper pillows. And they were hungry, really hungry. I was getting hungry too, but I tried not to let it bother me as I watched them undress.

  Despite the unsatisfactory accommodations, they were not about to compromise their sleeping arrangements, not about to wrinkle their tailored suits by sleeping in them. They pulled down the shades and stripped right to the buff, teetering and tottering in the narrow space, bumping into the sides of the berths and into each other as the train swayed from side to side, showing themselves to me, from neck to knee, as freely as if I weren’t there at all. I had resumed my invisibility.

  Lying on my back, observing this display of bare leg and bare buttock, I was reminded of Meg and Molly, whose mysterious flesh I had often observed from the bottom bunk in the room I shared with Molly.

  Ruth, like Molly, had bright red pubic hair and tufts of bright red hair under her arms, as if her body were bursting into flames. Yolanda bent over to remove her nylons and I inhaled, along with the gentle aroma of expensive perfumes, a powerful damp-dog smell. Someone was having her period.