Isn't It Romantic? by Ron Hansen

Author:Ron Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

15

Children were squealing on rides at the Seldom fair-grounds and the night just above the horizon was brilliantly streaked with the scarlet and yellow and blue neon lights of wild machines and game arcades and food booths filled with pizza slices, hot dogs, and sweets. Waiting their turn at the Dairy Delite were Iona and Pierre, each wearing jean cutoffs under Owen’s green gas station shirts. Pierre’s hung loose but Iona’s was tied above her firm-muscled stomach. She handed Pierre a vanilla ice cream cone that a churring machine had stacked like a minaret, and he sculpted it with his tongue as they strolled.

Iona asked, “When you got here? Why was Natalie upset with you?”

“We have an argument,” he said.

“And what was the topic?”

Pierre shrugged and said, “She says I never pay attention to her. . . or something like that.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t about the wedding?”

Pierre halted a second in confusion, and then he resumed his stride.

“Don’t worry,” Iona said. “You don’t have to pretend. Anyone can see you still like her. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so mean.”

She’d lost him. She seemed to want a comment. “But it’s you I like,” he said.

She cocked her head and became coy. “Why?”

Pierre stepped away to give her a hair-to-toe appraisal as he licked the balconies of the ice cream. Even in Owen’s shirt she was gorgeous. “But you are so natural and beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Elemental. Passionate. Erotique. Like Brigitte Bardot before she went crazy for animals.”

She blushed. “I’m not like that, really. I just want normal things. To be friendly to people. To love and be loved. To get to know someone really well and to have him know me in the same way.” She paused. “You probably don’t think that’s very ambitious.”

“But no! To love and be loved is the highest ambition!”

She smiled. “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you.”

“At what?”

“Romancing a girl.”

Complacently, he said, “Well, I’m French.” And then he continued his hobby, turning his shrinking ice cream cone this way and that. The soft August heat was melting it too fast and he was not practiced in the art of such eating. “Il fait trop chaud pour une glace,” he said. (It’s too hot for ice cream.)

“Are you getting it all over your hand?”

“I fear yes.”

“Here.” She licked a tear of ice cream from the cone and then coquettishly licked some more from his hand.

“Sank you.”

“Good flavor,” Iona said.

“Vraiment?” (Truly?) He licked his cone and then Iona’s hand. She giggled. “Yes,” he said, “very good that way.”

She saw people who knew her and all seemed to have children either on the rides or waiting for them. All stared at Iona with worship or leers or silent opinions, some of the men nodding in a hidden way or waving hello with the twitch of a finger. She told Pierre, “You don’t know what it’s like growing up here. With it being so claustrophobic. I mean, they’re the salt of the earth, but every person in Seldom has known every blessed thing about me since I was one year old.

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