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

fifties.
    "You don't understand, David. This was her hometown. To these people she was like Joan of Arc or something. She came home to rest, and they took care of her."
    "I thought she came from Paris."
    "That's Piaf. Madeleine is the other one."
    "You're being snotty."
    "I know. I just want to make sure you like her for the right reasons. But I shouldn't do it. She can take care of herself."
    "Look," he said, pointing up at the house. I came up on one elbow to see, and for the first time saw the beauty of it. It fronted the sea in several moods, its porch open to the beach and its tower reaching up to look out the whole coast. It had been built a hundred years ago, when people took the sea air without much leaving the house, and it was as vast as the industry that ran a Victorian family. A music room and a sewing room, a central hall large enough to exhibit machinery, and a reception room as big as a parlor, just for callers. Rooms with no purpose were part of the given, like the battery of servants and the reasoning that reasoned that the family was to come here only from the Fourth of July until Labor Day. And yet, for all that, it looked like the opposite of a place to live; there was something poignant about it, something as quiet and washed clean as a ship in full sail. It was shingled with a million shingles, gray and beige and streaked, and was at last the color of the sand or the scorched, late-summer grass. Its trim was the dark green of the forest, a mile of it in strips and cornices, shutters and stairs. A doll's idea of a house.
    "You'd recognize her a mile away, wouldn't you?" David said. As he said it, I finally saw what I was meant to see. Madeleine and Phidias came into focus. They were talking together on the high terrace that was set into the roof at the opposite end of the house from the tower. It seemed like an architectural afterthought, this airy perch, the nineteenth-century version of the spare and bony widow's walks that topped the captains' houses in the old harbors. It was out of place here because no one would have gone to sea out of this balloon-waisted banker's house. And no one would have gone up for a Gothic hour of scanning the sea's far edge for a sail. But David was right. Though the figure was tiny from where we sat above the beach, it was clearly Madeleine Cosquer. You knew it from the hands on the hips and the throwing back of the head as she paced on the battlements. Phidias sat on the railing, his back to us, in much the same way as he had sat on the porch railing three floors below when he joined us after lunch. Madeleine was doing the talking, and she looked mad.
    I turned back to David. "I don't think your plan is going over very big," I said.
    "It isn't my plan."
    "What is your plan?"
    He bent down to kiss me. I turned my head away into the grass, but he kissed me anyway, patting his lips on my temple, moving down my face until he nuzzled the tight cords in my neck and stroked them with his tongue. Very close to my ear, I heard him say in a voice so low I couldn't catch the tone, "I don't have one, Rick." And as my face came away from the grass and I began to hold him, I believed that this was as much of the truth as he knew. I held his head close with one hand and gripped his shoulders with the other. We held still while I gave up. Those who have no plans are so unlike those who plot. I am a plotter, and I know. A plan is wrong-headed to them because it seems untrue to the life of the present, which for them just unfolds and unfolds. For me, a plan is at least something for nothing to go according to. What are we going to do now? I thought. Of course I knew that what we were going to do right now was make love, one way or another, but I couldn't imagine what we were going to do about it. How do you get out of it alive? I wanted to know, because I hadn't the last time.
    We were on our sides, facing each other. I felt his body all along me, but I couldn't answer it or move against it