Déjeuner
sous les arbres
They'd buried her that morning, Briony, but Paul above all
wouldn't let it rest—reviling the man who'd had the gall to show up at the
cemetery, dove gray hat in hand, floozy sent back to the hotel in a taxi, and
make a show of being sorry she'd 'misunderstood.' Guillaume chain-smoked the bad Italian
cigarettes his friend Puccini gave him when they hunted ducks at Torre del
Lago, not responding to Paul's rant.
Virginie had eaten nothing of the omelet or salad. She stirred and stirred her cold coffee,
knowing that any minute her mischievous tart-tongued Bri would come towards
them through the diamond-dapple of midday under the late October trees, just
like her entrance in Giselle in
diamond-dappled tulle, or her emergence from the river naked that dazzle of
summer mornings at Fontaine de Vaucluse, grousing "you're all so
stupid—could you really think I'd die for such a one as him?"
Stealing Away
She'd slipped out of the city, the apartment in the
Fens, the thirty-year familiar room of maps and antique globes, to this place
off all maps—Tucumcari? Tumacácori? There was, she'd read, a spice shop, a
mission. But having come this far she
found she couldn't make herself go out, go any further. She couldn't leave the little tin trailer,
sardine can without key; could only sit in the revelatory August heat and
contemplate the stolen pot, imagine her bare arms shaping a hug around its
pregnant belly, the old Apache pot she'd taken from the conservation lab without
anyone noticing, thinking maybe (if she had stopped to think) it would somehow
make up for the daughter not for the taking.
Or the baby, whose name she'd never know, though in time she would learn
the names of stars, tribes, roads away, and twelve varieties of turquoise,
riddled with imperfections.
—Christie (originally published in First Class Lit)
