Free Mai at the Predators' Ball by Marie-Claire Blais Page B

Noémie, a charming young woman, her forehead beaming with willpower, that’s how he put it, and here she was at the feet of his aggressive, phallic Hanging Mural , a heavy, overbearing shape Lou disliked so much, no matter if her father kidded himself with all sorts of Buddhist thoughts on the subject, to hear him tell it the encounter with Noémie was mystical, and though she was every bit as athletic as Lou herself — big for her age and looking ever more like her mother and hardly any taller — she was also meditative, which is what brought her to the foot of Ari’s suspended wall, barefoot in the grassy park she was actually meditating, her perfect proportions contrasting with Lou’s overgrown youth, and they were bound to get on just fine together Ari said to assuage his daughter’s anguish at not being Daddy’s Only Girl, you’ll get on like a house on fire, and if you study hard you can come visit us at Noémie’s apartment in New York, we’ll take you to museums, oh he had his conditions all right, bargaining with Lou, dropping her off at her mother’s or at Rosie’s whenever he had to go off to Noémie’s, the basest fleshly pleasure it was, and her father was only a mystic as far as common ordinary love would take him, a slave to instinct, basic primal needs, no longer the farsighted, attentive man that Lou had once loved, he’d betrayed her and he’d do it again, the same as her mother Ingrid, and she began to doubt he meant it when he said they’d sail to Panama together with her sitting on his lap as she learned to sail, such a long way to go, it had to be just one of those comforting lies he told, just one of those useless promises she thought, because from here on, from here on his real companion was going to be Noémie, yes her , she weighed all the pain in that one word, wasn’t she. And this fog kept on burying the hood of the car in its black smoke thought Daniel, not a heat fog or a sea fog, maybe it was some toxic stuff he couldn’t protect his daughter from, but Mai didn’t seem to need him now, locked in her rebellious silence, yes if this carbon cloud kept enveloping them in its bitter shadow, from Los Angeles all the way to the slums of Mumbai, melting glaciers in the Himalayas, industrial smoke had started to cover the oceans from the Arctic downward, and even the paradise Mai and her friends inhabited was being draped in a funeral pall that caused millions of premature deaths every year on and off the island from sheer suffocation, and what to tell Mai, that it was too late, that this carbon cloud might be coming for her tomorrow just as it might for the polar bears or fish, the melt and burn no measurement could comprehend, an unredeemable tragedy his daughter was too young to imagine Daniel thought, no more than the deer herds or the foxes that he and his ecologist friends had saved from entrapment and certain death, the carbon veil drawn over all of them alike, its invisible pellets blackening all before them, pond water, rivers, the leaves of fruit-bearing trees, but he steered clear of these troubling matters with his daughter, frustrated that his efforts were so often in vain, and simply said I don’t know when this sea fog’s going to lift, but don’t you worry, we’ll soon be home, his way of telling Mai she wouldn’t be late for her evening out and that now she could even use her cellphone, he could see her hand getting fidgety, though he hadn’t yet touched on the real reason for their little outing together, which was to tell her they’d decided to take her out of the public school where she’d been subject to such bad influences and would soon be sending her to a private institution, no, not just yet though, being highly intuitive like him she had an inkling something serious had been determined without her knowledge, being as hard to manage as she was she wondered what words he would choose to back them up, that the school was close to home, no, then she’d