Free Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette Page A

self-improvement. Yoga and vitamins and foot massage. Everyone sighed a lot at me."
    "You sound like me."
    "Do I? But you keep doing it, David. I'd rather work the toilets in the Boston Public Library than lie in the sun anymore. I'm all cured."
    "I know. You're a mystic now. Get to the part about Madeleine."
    We were being a little whorish with each other now. It was the way we had always played when we had a good time, and it had its roots at the very beginning, on the Georgia-to-Boston run in the Chevy. We would talk like hookers and tease each other. It made us feel very much alike.
    "Well," I said, "you get to a day at the end of August when the sun is just too damned low in the sky. You're as tan as you're going to get anyway. So they took me ashore in the launch, and I headed inland. I took a train as far as Burgundy, and then I hitched rides through the wine country. A trucker picked me up one morning in Beaune, and since he didn't have to get to Dijon until the afternoon, we stopped at the vineyards along the way and drank their samples. When he let me off on the road north of Dijon, I was cross-eyed. Wine gives me a headache."
    "Do you have a headache now?" he asked, brushing the back of his hand across my forehead.
    "I'm on the downhill side of it."
    "Good." With a little throb in his voice. It deepened when he made love, getting husky and close.
    "So I walked up into this hill town and took a room in the little hotel. I had a view of the Romanesque church and the clay-roofed houses, but I drew the draperies and slept all afternoon. When I came down to the terrace for dinner, Madeleine was the only other person eating. They sat me down as far away from her as they could, but I saw who she was. She was wearing a white linen suit and a man's straw hat."
    "What year?"
    "Nineteen fifty-eight. I told you, I was twenty-eight."
    "No Passport. MGM. She was fifty."
    "Fifty-six. She had finished that piece of shit in the spring. So she said to me, 'Come on over to my table. I have the view.' So I did."
    "What did you talk about?"
    "I don't remember. The town, I think. The hotel was supposed to close for the month of August, and they were keeping it open just for her. For the accidental tourist too, but it was the sort of hotel whose clientele would know it closed in August. There must have been six or eight people working there. The whole kitchen was kept open, just to cook for her."
    "I like that about her," he said, grinning. "She always does what she wants."
    What he was assuming about her was the myth of luxury. She was wildly rich, he was thinking, so rich she could keep a whole hotel open on a whim. He was missing the whole point of the story, though of course it is partly Madeleine's doing that there is a myth at all. Money, her clothes always say, is no object. But I remember falling in love with Madeleine that summer because she knew she was broke again and not getting any younger, and still she was hoping and making plans. She had settled down in this picture-book country inn to regather her forces and plot her next campaign. In the afternoon, she sat at the same table on the terrace drinking Perrier, writing letters to her agent. "I know more about the business than he does," she would say to me. "I have to give him ideas." You could have called it sad, like an old matinee idol fishing for a cameo. You could have almost called it a bit of Sunset Boulevard. But Madeleine was the beloved queen of a medieval town that summer, and she glided through it as fittingly, as much suspended in time, as the lady of the manor in a thousand-flowers tapestry. And in the course of those letters, she also came up with the idea of a nightclub act and thus began her second career. Within a year she was an international event again, the cabaret star in the sequined gowns. So it wasn't sad at all really. But it wasn't what David thought either, champagne and sturgeon roe and five-dollar tips. You can't confuse the thirties with the