Free The Music School by John Updike Page B

Kenneth felt he should stay with Marie and make conversation. Both remained sitting. He wondered how much longer it would be before Janet returned and rescued them. The unaccustomed sensation of yearning for his wife made him feel itchy and suffocated.
    “
Le français
,” Marie said, spacing her words clearly, “
est difficile pour vous
.”
    “
Je suis très stupide
,” he said.
    “
Mais non, non, monsieur est très doué, très
”—her hand scribbled over an imaginary sketch pad
—
“
adroit
.”
    Kenneth winced modestly, unable to frame any disclaimer.
    She directed at him an interrogative sentence which, though she repeated it slowly, with various indications of her hands, he could not understand. “Nyew Yurrk?” she said at last. “Weshing
ton?
”
    “Oh. Where do I come from? Here.
Les États-Unis
.” He took up the pad again, turned a new leaf, and drew the Eastern Seaboard. “
Floride
,” he said as he outlined the peninsula and, growing reckless, indicated “
Le Golfe de Mexique
.” He suspected from her blank face that this was wrong. He put in a few dark dots: “Washington, New York,
et ici, une heure nord à
New York
par avion,
Bos
ton! Grande ville
.”
    “Ah,”
Marie said.
    “We live,” Kenneth went on, “uh,
nous vivons dans une maison comme ça
.” And he found himself drawing, in avidly remembered detail, the front of their house on Marlborough Street, the flight of brown steps with the extra-tall top step, the carpet-sized front lawn with its wrought-iron fence and its single prisoner of forsythia like a weeping princess, the coarse old English ivy that winter never quite killed, the tall bay windows with their transom lights of Tiffany glass; he even put the children’s faces in the second-story windows.This was the window of Vera’s room, these were the ones that Nancy and Charlie watched the traffic out of, this was the living-room window that at this time of year should show a brightly burdened Christmas tree, and up here, on the third story, were the little shuttered windows of the guest bedroom that was inhabited by a ghost with a slender throat, sleek hair, and naked moonlit shoulders. Emotion froze his hand.
    Marie, looking up from the vivid drawing with very dark eyes, asked a long question in which he seemed to hear the words
“France”
and
“pourquoi.”
    “Why did we come to France?” he asked her in English. She nodded. He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter,
“J’aime une autre femme.”
    Marie’s shapely plucked eyebrows lifted, and he wondered if he had made sense. The sentence seemed foolproof; but he did not repeat it. Locked in linguistic darkness, he had thrown open the most tightly closed window of his life. He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air.
    Marie spoke very carefully.
“Et madame? Vous ne l’aimez pas?”
    There was a phrase, Kenneth knew, something like
“Comme ci, comme ça,”
which might roughly outline the immense ambiguous mass of his guilty, impatient, fond, and forlorn feelings toward Janet. But he didn’t dare it, and instead, determined to be precise, measured off about an inch and a half with his fingers and said,
“Un petit peu pas.”
    “Ahhhh.”
And now Marie, as if the languages had been reversed, was speechless. Various American phrases traditional to his situation—“a chance to get over it,” “for the sake of the kids”—revolved in Kenneth’s head without encountering anyequivalent French.
“Pour les enfants,”
he said at last, gesturing toward the outdoors and abruptly following the direction of his gesture, for Vera had begun to cry in the distance. About twice a day she speared herself on one of the cactuses.
    Janet was walking up the driveway. As he saw her go in to the baby-sitter he felt only a slight alarm. It didn’t