What She Saw... by Lucinda Rosenfeld

Author:Lucinda Rosenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430182
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

7. Claude Duvet

OR “Semester-Abroad Claude”

HE’D HAVE A name like Claude Duvet.

He’d be twenty-six, unemployed, and staying with a friend.

He’d be a tortured artist.

He’d be wearing eyeliner.

His parents would live in Brittany, or in the suburbs—in Roissy.

She’d meet him on the rue de Something-or-other.

He’d walk up to her in the middle of a crowd. He’d say, “Are you American?”

They’d take leisurely strolls along the banks of the Seine.

They’d hang out at O’Niel.

He’d drive a Vespa, and he’d take her on the back of it through the serpentine streets of the Left Bank. She’d lean left when he leaned left, and right when he leaned right.

They’d have dramatic fights in public.

They’d spend the weekend in Normandy.

They’d do Ecstasy in crowded nightclubs.

He’d tell her he loved her.

She’d only laugh.

She’d walk around barefoot in mint-green tap pants and a matching mint-green lace brassiere. It would be the morning, and the velvet drapes would keep the sun at bay.

The hair on his chest would be dark blond.

So would the hair down there.

They’d plan a getaway to Florence. They’d have a huge fight about when to leave. She’d throw his Guide Routard into the Seine. It would be very dramatic.

It would be a foreshadowing of things to come.

In the sleeper car, he’d undress down to his boxer shorts in front of four other passengers.

She’d find it beyond gauche.

They’d have a bad time in Florence.

She’d tell him, “So long.”

He’d cry bitterly. She’d walk away unfazed.

She’d have her eye on someone new—the guy who tended bar at O’Niel.

He’d have a name like—Guy. He’d wear a leather jacket. He’d have a criminal record.

They’d have meaningless sex—at least, it would seem meaningless to Phoebe.

She’d come home with definitive views about the superiority of French birth control pills.

She’d come home dreaming in French, and wearing too much eyeliner, and smelling of clove cigarettes and underarm sweat.

You know how they think American girls are promiscuous? They’d be talking about girls like her.

She’d come home smelling of sex, sex, sex, and more sex.

She would.

Really.

But she didn’t, truth be told.

She came home smelling of vomit—gamy, verdant, vertiginous, verisimilar vomit.

With a blotchy face.

And no adventures to recount, no snapshots to stimulate impromptu approbation of the “Ohmigodhe’sSOcute!” variety— only this sinking feeling in her heart that she was just one of those people who would always and forever be standing on the outside of things looking in, her nose pressed to the glass, a perpetual tourist, an Ugly American par excellence, a drooling, pink-eyed monster stuffing brioche into her mouth until she thought her stomach would burst, her heart give out. And then it did. She couldn’t share that; she couldn’t tell them about how, somewhere between Here and There, the world divulged itself in all its various shades of gray and brown, and it was disappointing, to say the least.

She came home haunted by the gleeful cackle of a stingy landlady with stiff black hair, who took her to task for using too much strawberry jam on her brioche, too much hot water when she bathed, too much toilet paper on her bottom.

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