November 8 - Electricity in the air

The night was warm, under the blue-black sky of a threatening storm. Jon watched her walk up the steps to the restaurant, a loose black dress hung on her thin, pale shoulders. Although the other women had dark shawls thrown about their shoulders or draped about their necks, Martine somehow managed not to notice the chill in just her sleeveless dress, as though her body alone provided enough heat. She still made Jon’s breath catch, after all this time. He had not seen her in twenty years, not until that morning, out walking her small dog in the place Bellcour. Martine was a tall woman, and for some reason, this had always made her gravitate towards things that were constructed in miniature. He remembered well the bottles of travel-sized lotions and shampoos she used, leaving them behind in his apartment, or scattering them about her room, even at times when she wasn’t traveling. “Because the bottles are so cute!” she purred. Miniature lotions, miniature handbags, now this miniature poodle. Martine hadn’t recognized him at first; that was what hurt.

“Martine,” he said in English. “It’s me.”

“Mon dieu,” she breathed back in French. “It is you.”

The awkward silence of everything that had happened in twenty years fell between them. It was sifted through, layered, discarded like the clothes of a woman about to meet her lover in bed, then refolded, put carefully on the shelf, some of it kept, some of it thrown out.

“You’re married,” he said for her, looking at the rock on her second finger. Her nod said everything that had been in that pregnant pause.

“You too,” she said to his band of gold. They both looked away then, understanding that what hung in the air between them was too violent to act upon, had a life of its own like the feelers of an octopus, was too palpable, making the air itself a living, breathing, kinetic thing. They turned to walk away.

“Martine,” he said, whirling back, grabbing her slim upper arm. “Martine, meet me. Tonight, for dinner.”

She looked around. The poodle yipped.

“Not here,” she said. She wrote down an address. When he presented the folded piece of paper to the taxi cab driver, the car took him beyond the confines of Lyon to a village ten kilometers away. The restaurant still looked suited to Lyon’s exacting standards of taste. He watched Martine ascend the steps to the terrace under the blue-black sky.

She sat in her chair and stared at him.

“The wine list, Madame, Monsieur?” asked their server. They nodded, not breaking the filament that had constructed itself, extending from her iris to his.

A clink on a glass rim, the gurgle as the wine poured out, the deep stain of red in the glass. Only then did the spell break.

“Santé,” she whispered.

“Cheers,” he said back. The glasses clicked.

They didn’t speak the whole meal, but Jon heard the conversation. It went something like this: remember when we met. Oh yes! remembered with laughter, remembering her on a college campus in the States, furious that the bartender wouldn’t let her in when she was eighteen years old. “You have to be twenty-one,” Jon laughed at her, finding her in so much distress. “Where do you think we are?”

“France,” she shot back with a pout. He blinked at her a time or two, then burst out laughing. “Come,” he took her hand in his, the fingers slender but surprisingly long. “I know a place where they won’t card.”

She ordered a glass of cognac. She said she liked the small glasses it came in. He ordered a vodka soda and let the ice melt without sipping. He was afraid he was so intoxicated just looking at her that taking even one sip would drive him over the edge.

They made love for the first time that night in his apartment. He was a sophomore, no longer living in the dormitory, and she liked the brooding atmosphere, the maroon sheets, the way the static electricity would make blue sparks fly when she rolled back and forth on his bed like a kitten. “I think I like this better than the dorm,” she mused, propping herself on one elbow and staring about the place.

“Then move in with me,” he said on impulse. They stayed that way for two years. He would make her gourmet meals almost every night, though this was years before he chose to go to culinary school. Invariably, she liked the mini tarts, the tiny hors d’oeuvres, better than the larger plates. “Bite-sized,” she said with a nip to his neck. For two years they fucked and ate this way.

And then she left. Back to France. She was homesick, she said, no matter how she loved him. “Don’t come to the airport, my love,” she said into the phone. “Don’t you dare come wave goodbye. It will hurt less this way, you understand? A clean break.”

He threw several of the items in his kitchen, his four-hundred dollar stand mixer among them.

“Jon, Jon!” she cried. “Stop it Jon!” You’ll move on, she had told him. You will marry, you’ll find someone to love.

She was right, in a way. After she left he immersed himself in the food that he made, each recipe more convoluted and copious than the one before. He took to catering for crowds of hundreds, giant vats of things served in communal bowls, instead of dainty bite-sized one-at-a-times. He met Kara while catering her parents’ anniversary party; they had dated for three years, been married for twelve. There were two little girls now, ages six and five. Kara loved France as much as he, and they vacationed in a different city every summer. They had worked their way through Provence and into Bordeaux, up into Brittany, and through the wine-soaked towns of Burgundy and Alsace. They had spent so many weekends in Paris that each trip bled into the next. “We went to Pere LaChaise on our sixth visit, honey,” Kara would bicker. “Not our eighth.” He would acquiesce; it wasn’t worth quibbling over. Time and again, however, the one place to which he found himself consistently drawn was Lyon. He knew Martine had grown up there, but he told himself it wasn’t for that. It wasn’t that he ever really expected to see her while he walked past the brasseries and stared up at the gaudy ceiling of the Basilique, or attended tastings with the renowned chefs of the area. But she was still everywhere he looked; she was the angel glittering in mosaic tile; she was the scent of rosemary that wafted from the kitchen when the waiter brought out his roast duckling; she was the woman in a dark coat disappearing around the next corner, always a step ahead.

The check came. The wine was gone from the bottle. Jon was surprised to find crumbs on his plate because he couldn’t remember eating. Martine nodded that she understood the silent conversation that had just passed between them.

Like that they were upon one another. Her lips tasted of the Saint-Emilion they had drunk, of olives and herbs, of pink flesh, of sex. She reeked of sex. He devoured her tongue, wanted to eat every morsel of her . He was afraid to touch her skin lest electric sparks jump off.

She pulled back first, breathing heavily.

“We should go now,” she said, and Jon saw guilt flash across her face for the first time. He cleared his throat roughly and stood. The other diners turned their heads discreetly as they passed.

The thunder that had been rumbling distantly began to growl overhead as they walked from the terrace, her arm looped gently through his.

“Will I see you again?” Jon asked loudly, over the next rolling clap in the blue-black sky. With a sizzling crackle, the lightning bolts began to dance across the sky, and the clouds opened up like a sieve to let the water down on their heads. As Martine opened her mouth to respond, the lightning crashed to the earth nearby, bursting the ground into a fountain of dirt and grass. Startled diners gave a collective shriek, and the manager rushed out, ringing his pudgy hands on a white napkin. Another bolt struck, then other, still a third. Jon had his arm around Martine, who had ducked her head protectively into the crook of his shoulder, and he shielded her with his body as they rushed back indoors.

Martine pressed her face against the glass panes. Jon looked at the startled, milling diners, now all huddled inside and clucking angrily to one another. Never seen anything like it… Ever heard of such a thing… Her breath fogged the window.

“What is it?” Jon heard himself ask, frightened. “What’s happening out there?”

“Electricity,” Martine whispered. “It’s reminding you it’s dangerous.”