Appropriate Place Read Free

armoire that had travelled via an Outremont antique dealer from
a seigneury to an apartment in Laval. She should have insisted on oak floors, but
the carpet was included in the price of the apartment, she hadn’t anticipated the
musty smell that was trapped there in winter and did not disappear altogether in the
spring. There are decorators nowadays who are bringing back a kind of linoleum with
a permanently waxed finish on which to lay Oriental carpets woven of strong silk
that won’t wear out. That’s something she’ll have to look into.
    Finally, into a tall glass Gabrielle pours Pernod and orange juice,
drops in ice cubes one by one. She has never developed a liking for the liquorice
taste, first experienced in France. But it’s what you drink in the summer when you
finally settle into a white wicker chair with an apple green cushion, looking out on
the Rivière des Prairies at the testosterone-powered boats. At least from here she
can’t hear the roaring made by men who wouldn’t dare to live by themselves in a
fourth-floor apartment in Laval, who’d think they were surrounded and would break
things to prove otherwise.
    For her, so sure of herself, this is an appropriate place. A honeycomb
cell where Gabrielle can finally experience the “after.” She sips her drink. She
contemplates putting on music, the posthumous
Nocturne
by Heinrich Wilhelm
Ernst, played by Midori at Carnegie Hall, one of the few discoveries made through
her membership, now expired, in the Columbia Record Club. But if she did that, at
the beginning of this evening that’s so bare, in her mind’s eye she would see the
slender image of a foreign woman straining over her strings, and the crowd at the
concert. And there would be noise.
    The ice cubes dissolve, the water dulls the accents of orange and
liquorice, the caned chair back scrapes the shoulders of Gabrielle Perron, who
thought that she was capable of existing amid silence.
    She has nothing to think about. Nothing. A very beautiful spider,
pitch black, clings to the railing, apparently without a web. Five more hours till
midnight. She really should have some ivy on the eastern exposure and, in the flower
boxes, red geraniums. She has always been able to think about something, but never
about meaningless things like Jean-Charles’s knee or the oozing brains of a calico
cat. She gets up to open a tin of white asparagus and the new bottle of
cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil, uncork the Sauternes, light the broiler.
She’ll see tomorrow. The salmon steak — it’s perfectly normal in this heat, which is
definitely outrageous — tastes slightly off. It’s just as well that there were no
choux à la crème
, they’d have gone bad.
    Two
    A MONTH LATER, Pierre has brought the
place under his control. He has transported gallons of paint, bought brushes and
rollers, piled and protected the furniture in the middle of the living room. His
dexterity is remarkable in a boy his age, who’s not supposed to know how to work. He
has respected Gabrielle’s silence on the days when she was listing her entire
library on computer, he even helped her modify the program to add
cross-references.
    Outside, there’s a drought. The river will become a prairie, Gabrielle
predicts, when they meet on the balcony at noon, where he has helped her put up an
awning. She prepares lentil salad, cold pasta with clams, roasted peppers, sugared
raspberries. He joins her in drinking light sangria. They had very little to say to
each another until the day when he began to show an interest in her paintings.
    First, in the retriever portrayed by Anne Ashton between two
rosebushes, a dog indifferent to the hunt, posing on the tips of his long, arched
legs, a print for the boudoir of a marquise. It wasn’t modern art, he was surprised
to note, claiming that he’d spotted some everywhere else in the apartment and that
he preferred a beige