By the Time You Read This: Stories by Yannick Murphy

Author:Yannick Murphy
Format: epub

TOO MUCH FOR ADELE

ADELE MEETS CHARLIE AT A PARTY. He’s an American who speaks to her in his poor French and tells her he would very much like to date her. Adele laughs when she hears him talk, and then she puts her hand around his mouth to help him form the sounds he needs to make his French understood. He brings her to a pension where he is renting a room. He photographs her in bed after lovemaking, with her feet together up against the wall. He tells her she has beautiful legs. “Really?” she says, and she looks at her legs, wondering what Charlie sees when what she sees are the bony caps of her knees and a bug bite on the wrinkles of her Achille’s tendon.

Adele learned English in school. She is in terminale lycée, which is the equivalent year of a senior in high school. She makes fun of the way Americans dress, telling Charlie that his shoes are so big and thick, they remind her of loaves of bread.

During the day Charlie kisses her under the Eiffel Tower, and at night he tells her he hasn’t enough francs to take her out to dinner. She says she doesn’t care about going out to dinner, she’s always going out to dinner with her father anyway, and sometimes she’s tired of a waiter always refilling her water glass when sometimes she just doesn’t want any more. And so Charlie and Adele buy wine and drink in the pension without using glasses at all, just trading the bottle back and forth.

Adele is the daughter of a diplomat. Her father is a liaison for the consulate. Adele’s mother died when she was young, and she and her father and her younger sister all live in a flat in Paris.

Adele’s sister looks like a waif with a haircut that looks like she’s wearing a bowl on her head. Her legs are as thin as her arms. Adele has nicknamed her Little Gnat, Le Moucheron, and Le Moucheron pleads with Adele to take her with her when Adele and Charlie go for a walk. Le Moucheron walks behind them, whining for sweets or chestnuts every time they pass a vendor’s cart. Charlie tells Adele he has to go back home in less than a week because he’s run out of money, and when he takes Adele and Le Moucheron back to their flat after the date, Adele tells him to wait just a moment. She runs upstairs, her heart beating hard and in time, she thinks, with each fall of her foot on each marble step. She comes back down with a cigar box and hands it to him. Inside the box is more spending money than Charlie’s parents gave him to vacation in Paris in the first place. “Now you can stay!” she says, her voice out of breath and so weak she thinks he may not have heard her.

He sits down on the low curb, his knees rising high. “This curb’s so much lower than what I’m used to back in the States.

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