Free First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey Page B

streams—two college boys, sun-tanned and healthy, in T-shirts and shorts, so angry with each other that we rode our bicycles ten or fifteen feet apart. When an infrequent car passed us, I would wonder if Duncan would see it in time, but he always did.
    There was a moist, sticky quality in the air. The villages were far apart, and when we came to one, the houses were shuttered and unfriendly. The French were barricaded in their cool, high-ceilinged rooms, cutting into ripe pears with tiny pearl-handled knives, while we bicycled the hot and dusty streets, only to emerge, on the other side of the gray church and white stucco café back in the flat open country.
    The heat was unbearable. At Luçon, we turned off the main road and headed toward the sea again, to a village on the map called La Tranche, which turned out to be three or four buildings along the highway. Just beyond La Tranche, our road climbed to the top of a ridge, and we saw that the flat, grassy countryside humped into the ridge we were on and then flowed into the Bay of Biscay, with no beach, or wall of rocks. The grass of the meadows, green and glowing, waved in the salt sea breezes and melted into the water. One could see the grass continuing underwater out of sight, probably to the rim of the low tide. Cows squooshed through their pasture; around their hoofs bubbles clung like necklaces. French boys and girls, their bicycles lying in the grass, swam over the submerged meadow. A few yards offshore, fishing boats with blue and yellow painted hulls swung to and fro at their moorings.
    I stopped and called to Duncan, who continued a few yards and then stopped. I walked toward him, wheeling my bicycle. “It’s really lovely, isn’t it—” I began.
    Duncan turned to me, and in a voice shaking with fury he said, “Do you always have to say something? Do you feel it’s like dropping a coin in the box at church?”
    We rode the rest of the day in silence. At sunset, we stopped in La Rochelle, where the old Huguenot fortifications still surround the tiny harbor, and we found a room in a strange old hotel near the railroad station. Our bedroom had two huge brass beds with swollen mattresses, which rustled whenever we moved. The back of the building contained a stable. The smell of horses permeated our room, and there was a vast rose trellis outside our window. The roses were blooming. All night long, we drifted on the ebb and flow of the oddly complementary odors; and every hour or so we could hear a train arriving or departing.
    The next day, we bicycled on to Bordeaux. By midafternoon, we were racing, with neither slowing down or asking to rest. We reached Bordeaux at seven in the evening, and we went at once to a café and ordered a bottle of wine and began to quarrel. Several times, the waiter, a fat, black-browed Basque, came running on his toes, one pink round finger to his lips, and we nodded and said, “Pardon, pardon,” and lowered our voices.
    It seemed that Duncan could not stand the way I whistled when I shaved, the way I talked to waiters, the fact that even when I felt bad I smiled. “Is it something the corn belt does to the disposition?” he asked.
    I told Duncan, at the top of my lungs, that he was childish, an arty son of a bitch, and a snob.
    “You’re ill-bred,” he said. “You’re yelling in a café.”
    He said that he’d always thought of me as an intelligent vulgarian but he’d had no idea how really ill-bred I was.
    “All right,” I said, rising to my feet. “That’s it! That’s it ! Let’s fight.”
    Solemnly we walked out of the café. The waiter ran after us and waved his bill in our faces. We had to figure out the bill and pay it; as usual, we were overcharged. I hadn’t realized until that minute how dear Duncan was to me or how much he’d taught me. It also occurred to me that Duncan outweighed me by fifteen pounds.
    We walked along, wheeling our bicycles. “All my friends have turned out to be no good,” Duncan