The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles Read Free Page A

and that it had been love at first sight.
    Philippe was an uptight corporate lawyer full of his own convictions. He’d started an international business practice and formed alliances with big law firms in Paris, Milan, New York, and London. He was successful and couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as well. “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” he liked to say.
    At the wedding, he looked at his wife’s assembled friends with nonchalance mixed with disdain. His mother and father wore a slightly superior look that suggested they thought their son was marrying beneath him.
    The wedding guests left in disgust. Iris was no fun anymore. She was no longer the stuff of dreams. She had become horribly normal, and in Iris, this was in very poor taste. Some of her friends disappeared forever. She was off her pedestal, her crown rolling away.
    In time, Iris wound up embracing the same verities Philippe held so dear: a child behaved and did well in school; a husband made money and provided for his family; a wife took care of the household and made her husband proud. Iris didn’t work. “There are women who suffer an embarrassment of leisure and those who master it,” she said. “Doing nothing is an art.”

    I must live on another planet
, Joséphine thought, listening as her sister’s semiautomatic chatter was now coming around to the topic of Antoine’s unemployment.
    “Tell me, has your husband found anything yet?” was Iris’s favorite line, to which Joséphine would always say no.
    “Really? So he still hasn’t worked that out? How can he afford to be picky, with such modest talent?”
    Everything about my sister is phony
, Joséphine thought, wedging the phone against her shoulder.
    “Is anything wrong?” asked Iris. “You sound odd.”
    “I have a cold.”
    “Poor thing. Don’t forget, we’re having dinner with Mother tomorrow night.”
    “Tomorrow night?” She had completely forgotten.
    Every other Tuesday, Iris had Henriette over for dinner. Antoine tried, with some success, to avoid those dinners. He couldn’t stand Philippe, who seemed to need to give Antoine footnotes when he spoke to him. He didn’t like Iris either. When she talked to him, she made him feel like a wad of chewing gum stuck to the sole of her stilettos.
    “Yes, darling,” Iris said. “Are you bringing Antoine, or is he vanishing into thin air again?”
    Joséphine smiled sadly. That was one way of putting it. “He’s not coming.”
    “We’ll have to make up another excuse for him. You know Mother doesn’t like his not being there.”
    “To be honest, I really don’t care.”
    “You let Antoine get away with way too much. I would have thrown him out ages ago. Anyway, you’re never going to change, poor darling.”

    For as long as she could remember, Joséphine had been the brainy one, the one who spent hours in the library doing research papers along with the other losers and misfits.
    She aced exams but couldn’t be trusted with eyeliner. Shetwisted her ankle going down the stairs because her nose was in a book by Montesquieu. She even plugged in the toaster under running water because she was listening to France Culture on the radio. Jo stayed up till all hours studying while her seductive older sister went out and conquered the world.
    When Joséphine passed a prestigious teaching exam, Henriette asked about her plans. “Where is that going to get you, dear? To be target practice for high school kids out in the slums?”
    When she finished her dissertation—“France’s Economic and Social Development in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries”—and got her doctorate, her mother had again reacted with cynicism. “Poor darling, you’d do far better writing about Richard the Lionheart’s sex life. That at least would interest people. A film could be made out of it, or a TV series. You could pay me back for all those years I slaved to pay for your studies.”
    Henriette had been hard on Joséphine