“You can ride Ida and I’ll ride Shep,” he told her. “Shep’s got strict opinions about things.”
She smiled and hopped down to the earth and he helped her fit a sneaker into the saddle’s iron stirrup.
“I’ll just give you a little boost,” he said, but his hand accidentally wound up on her fine behind and he blushed, just as she did. “Oops,” he said, and smiled bashfully for a few seconds before he got serious again. “Don’t let go of Ida’s reins or she just might take ya shopping.”
She hunted the irregular verb in her memory before saying, “I have ridden a horse before.”
“Oh, I could tell. You have that equestrian poise.”
They rode out into the countryside through high rustling foxtail weeds that almost reached the cinches. Angus cattle were tearing up hanks of grass and blandly chewing in the sunshine, and some were full enough to lie down on their bellies and ruminate and stare.
Dick glanced over his shoulder. “You about got the hang of that horse?”
“Yes. She is very . . . docile.”
“Placid too,” he said. He considered the shifting herd. “You know what we call those cows?”
“Angus?”
“And here I took you for a greenhorn.”
“I have read all about the West.”
“I used to read about the Count of Monte Cristo. Joan of Arc was my heart-throb when I was a boy.”
“Have you ever been to France?”
“My dad was. 1944. Summertime.”
She was pleased by the coincidence. “My mother, she is from Bayeux, in Normandy. We have visited Omaha Beach many times. My grandmother owns a hotel in Port-en-Bessin. On the shore of the English Channel.”
“What was her first name?”
“Sophie.”
“Don’t recall him mentioning a Sophie. But then my dad had his head ducked too much to see a whole lot of the population. Did say your people were real cultured and friendly and happy to see him. He always appreciated that. S’pose your mother wasn’t even born then.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t either.” He stared at her seriously. “In case you’re wondering, I’m fifty-two.” She said nothing. “So I guess that’d make you half my age.”
She smiled. “And so I am a ‘trophy’ for you?”
“Well, no; you’re a pleasant companion.”
The horses wove around cottonwood trees and through shaded green timothy grass and ferns as Dick guided them alongside Frenchman’s Creek. Wild deer feeding on the sapling leaves that they could reach had created a flat browse line on the underside of some young box elders and Dick educated Natalie on it. “Whole terrain hereabouts used to have so much wildlife an Eastern fella once called it ‘the paradise of hunters.’” Admiring it, he said, “Pretty country, isn’t it?”
Natalie was enchanted. “Yes! Like a cigarette ad!”
“Well, I s’pose I would’ve compared it to Eden, but each to her own vista.”
She told him she’d visited America the first time as a junior in high school. She was an exchange student and was sent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the guest of husband and wife mathematics professors and their two appalling children. She could not believe how boring their lives were. Clavichord music. Algebra problems at the dinner table. Wine only on holidays. And no television—
Dick interrupted, “No television? Sheese. Was there plumbing?”
“We are talking ten years ago. Rules may have changed.”
“No television,” he repeated.
Shep furiously shook his head and horseflies twined in the air.
“And they were strict vegetarians,” Natalie said.
The cattleman reached out and touched her hand in consolation. “You poor child.”
Which was not so bad, but neither the husband nor wife could cook and seemed to subsist only on rice cakes and chunks of tofu.
Dick Tupper gritted his teeth. “The bastards!”
She continued. The household insisted on speaking their gruesome French whenever she was around and so she was forced to become their teacher and each grew to hate her corrections and she spent much of the nine months in the United States upstairs in her attic room, weeping with loneliness and filling thirteen journals with poetry and self-pity. And when she got back to France her teachers claimed she spoke better English before she went to America.
“Well, as far as that goes, your language skills may be ruint if you stay in Seldom too dang long.”
They rode up a slope to a ridgetop of tan prairie that was surrounded by green patches of skunkbush and dog-wood, and then they went down a hillside steep as stairsteps as Dick named the green ash, basswood, and bur oak trees. Natalie pointed to green herbs in the shaded understory and asked, “What’s that?”
And Dick told her, “Wood nettle.”
“And this?” she asked.
“Wild columbine,” he said. “Stops flowering in June.” She shifted in the saddle to look down at a plant near her stirrup and Dick immediately named it, “Jack-in-the-pulpit.”
She smiled. “Are you a botanist?”
“Well, I’ve lived here all my life. You just naturally like to know who your neighbors are.”
She faced forward. “Nature is not so interesting to Pierre.”
Considerately, he said, “Oh, he’s expert in other things, I imagine.”
She seemed not to approve of those other things.
Willows colonized the floodplain of another part of Frenchman’s Creek where the pebbled sand was hard-going for the horses, but at a turning they strode at a quicker pace toward a spot they seemed to remember. Shade trees and soft grasses moved in the breeze and creek water pillowed over smooth round stones near the bank. Dick jumped down from Shep and helped Natalie down from her horse. “Go ahead and give me your foot. I’ll try not to get too personal with ya this time.”
Natalie smiled. “I am not bothered.”
Dick walked her down to the creek bank with a red picnic blanket that he flung out and let float on the air and softly settle. She sat on it while he squatted beside her, unscrewing a canteen filled with Owen’s wine as he told her, “French trappers used to ship pelts from hereabouts to fur companies back east. One fella’s name was Bernard
LeBoeuf. Had a rough time of it, I guess, and thought he was a goner. Wandered around like a zombie and fell into the water here. Woke up an hour later halfways healed. Had himself a new lease on life.”
“What was his problem?”
Dick thought about it. “Thirst, for one thing.” He paused. “And I guess a grizzly bear before that. Torn up pretty good. Ever since, this has been called Frenchman’s Creek and tales of its magical powers are still being told.”
“And do you believe these tales?”
“Why I brought ya down here.”
She held out a plastic cup and he poured wine into it. “Is it you want to make love with me?”
He hesitated, and then got a plastic cup for himself and filled it. “Well now, I’m a tad bit old-fashioned about that.”
“What is it you want then, Mister Tupper?”
Skiffs of sunshine rocked on the water as he watched it move. “I’ll tell ya what I have. Twelve hundred acres plus farm buildings, machinery, and feeder pens. I have a four-bedroom Victorian house that’s just had itself done over by an interior desecrator named Mitzi. I have five percent of the last Holiday Inn you passed on the highway, nine percent of the largest Chrysler Dodge and Plymouth dealership west of Lincoln, and half a dozen employees that call me Mister Tupper. What I don’t have is a wife.” He paused. “She left me high and dry.”
“She was stupid,” Natalie said.
“Don’t expect me to argue the matter.” Dick looked sentimentally at her and then was ashamed of his forwardness. “Hell, I’m too old for the hunt anyway.”
Natalie protested, “Mais non! You are not old!”
Dick recited, “‘Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destr
oying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years.’” He smiled with some embarrassment. “I got that from a movie.”
Natalie was nodding. “But yes! The Palm Beach Story. I like very much the films of Preston Sturges.”
Dick considered her with amazement. “Wonder if we met in a past life.”
She watched as some shade trees furiously shook. She could see a pair of shining minks playing and twirling in the creek, the noise of it shifting over the rocks with the sound of party conversation. She said, “No. This is my first life. That is why I’m so happy and surprised.”
Dick took pleasure in that. “So you like it here.”
“I love it here!” she said. “It is so odd and old-fashioned and naive, and no one is trying to be smart.”
“Are you sure those are compliments?”
She put a hand to his cheek. “And you, Deek Tup-pair. You are as faithful and honest and natural as a horse.”
Each of them looked to Shep as he nuzzled into shaded grass, his tail whisking right and left. But it soon turned into an unfortunate moment and they turned away.
“Horses’ll do that,” Dick said.
And then they heard a hollering, rollicking group of Owen, Carlo, Iona, and Pierre sailing down the creek on tractor tire inner tubes, squirting Owen’s wine out of goatskins, the men shirtless and sunburnt and in jean cutoffs, Iona luscious in a leopard print string bikini and intently watching the man and woman in the shade as she floated past.
Carlo was giddy at finding the picnickers fulfilling his plot and with a squiggly smile tilted out on his inner tube to see Iona’s face. She seemed properly disappointed as an eddy spun her away. Carlo gave Dick a puckish thumb’s up.
Owen yelled, “Sybaritic pleasures, Dick!”
Dick yelled, “Don’t make me wash your mouth out with soap!” And then he smiled and said to Natalie, “Having themselves a time.”
Pierre swirled around in his inner tube in order to scowl at Natalie on the bank. She haughtily smiled at his jealousy, and then he found a swift passage of water and flew out of sight.
Still staring after him, she said, “Have you noticed how Monsieur Smith does not fit in here? He is like the fish out of water.” She craned her neck to see farther down the creek.
“We better go,” Dick said, and helped her up.
She faced her swain. “And then will you kiss me?”
He smiled. “Oh, I reckon I could do that much.”
They kissed.
She liked it. And he did, too.
15
Children were squealing on rides at the Seldom fair-grounds and the night just above the horizon was brilliantly streaked with the scarlet and yellow and blue neon lights of wild machines and game arcades and food booths filled with pizza slices, hot dogs, and sweets. Waiting their turn at the Dairy Delite were Iona and Pierre, each wearing jean cutoffs under Owen’s green gas station shirts. Pierre’s hung loose but Iona’s was tied above her firm-muscled stomach. She handed Pierre a vanilla ice cream cone that a churring machine had stacked like a minaret, and he sculpted it with his tongue as they strolled.
Iona asked, “When you got here? Why was Natalie upset with you?”
“We have an argument,” he said.
“And what was the topic?”
Pierre shrugged and said, “She says I never pay attention to her. . . or something like that.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t about the wedding?”
Pierre halted a second in confusion, and then he resumed his stride.
“Don’t worry,” Iona said. “You don’t have to pretend. Anyone can see you still like her. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so mean.”
She’d lost him. She seemed to want a comment. “But it’s you I like,” he said.
She cocked her head and became coy. “Why?”
Pierre stepped away to give her a hair-to-toe appraisal as he licked the balconies of the ice cream. Even in Owen’s shirt she was gorgeous. “But you are so natural and beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Elemental. Passionate. Erotique. Like Brigitte Bardot before she went crazy for animals.”
She blushed. “I’m not like that, really. I just want normal things. To be friendly to people. To love and be loved. To get to know someone really well and to have him know me in the same way.” She paused. “You probably don’t think that’s very ambitious.”
“But no! To love and be loved is the highest ambition!”
She smiled. “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you.”
“At what?”
“Romancing a girl.”
Complacently, he said, “Well, I’m French.” And then he continued his hobby, turning his shrinking ice cream cone this way and that. The soft August heat was melting it too fast and he was not practiced in the art of such eating. “Il fait trop chaud pour une glace,” he said. (It’s too hot for ice cream.)
“Are you getting it all over your hand?”
“I fear yes.”
“Here.” She licked a tear of ice cream from the cone and then coquettishly licked some more from his hand.
“Sank you.”
“Good flavor,” Iona said.
“Vraiment?” (Truly?) He licked his cone and then Iona’s hand. She giggled. “Yes,” he said, “very good that way.”
She saw people who knew her and all seemed to have children either on the rides or waiting for them. All stared at Iona with worship or leers or silent opinions, some of the men nodding in a hidden way or waving hello with the twitch of a finger. She told Pierre, “You don’t know what it’s like growing up here. With it being so claustrophobic. I mean, they’re the salt of the earth, but every person in Seldom has known every blessed thing about me since I was one year old. You can’t grow up, really, you can’t change, you can’t even get a little wild. You’re in front of all these cameras. You aren’t supposed to be perfect; you’re just supposed to be predictable.” She paused. “Why don’t we get out of here?”
She took him by the hand and turned south, away from the booths and exhibits and toward a night where lightning bugs flickered and trembled and described strange golden alphabets in the air. A healthy scent of alfalfa drifted in from the fields. She got to a white plank fence and jumped her rump onto the top rail before quickly swinging her lithe legs over to the greensward on the other side. Pierre finished the remainder of his ice cream cone and wiped his hands on Owen’s green shirt before holding onto a fence post as he struggled over the fence and bulkily fell onto the lawn. She helped him up and he saw they were on the sixteenth tee of the golf course. A 412 yard, par 4. Water hazard on the left. Tricky green. She slipped her right arm around his waist and he pulled her closer so that there was friction as they strolled.
“So who are you really?” she asked.
“Gérard Depardieu. But younger.”
She laughed. “I need more.”
“My grandfather was British. My grandmother, she was a countess. I have herited from her. . .”
“Inherited.”
“. . . a little castle and—I am losing the English—une vigne?”
“Vineyard?”
“C’est juste. And from my father I have the job in the family firm, which is buying and selling the wines in all the world. I am the director of—”
“Your job?” She gazed at him in amazement. “That is such a male answer.”
“I have left out what?”
“Emotions, for starters.” And he seemed so mystified that she decided to prompt him. “Are you afraid of anything?”
“Spiders.”
She could see he was withholding. “And that’s all?”
“Another question please.”
“Heights? Snakes? Failure? Kitchen appliances?”
“Kitchen appliances?”
She felt caught out. “But we were talking about you.”
He stilled as he thought. “I have sree older brothers. All very g
ood at business. And for them I am merely a. . . jouisseur?”
She considered the possibilities. “Playboy?”
“Exactly.”
“Are you one?”
His head ducked in his French way as his mouth puffed a soft puh at the indisputable. “It is the role I have been assigned. I cannot do otherwise.”
“And you’re afraid of what?”
Squirming with uneasiness, he said, “Are not playboys always, finally. . . fools?”
“So you’re afraid of making a fool of yourself,” she said.
“I have said enough.”
“And that’s why you try to act so bristly and cold and highfalutin. So no one gets inside.”
In an effort at deflection he asked, “Is it that you have studied the psychologie?”
She flatly stated, “I just listen to Doctor Laura on the radio. Oh, and hot tip, Pierre: Don’t ever call in.”
Soulfully gazing into her eyes, he said, “She could teach me about my heart’s desire.”
“Which is?”
Without smiling, he quoted her. “To love and be loved.”
Iona smiled. “Clever boy.”
“Really, Iona. I think it is so.”
“Well, I’m touched.”
“And you?” he asked. “Who are you, Iona?”
“The facts?”
“We begin there.”
“I’m twenty-three years old. Raised in Seldom. My mom passed when I was a girl, and my dad was off in Timbuktu by then, so I’ve been halfways on my own for ages. Brownies, Girl Scouts, Four-H Club. Went to high school over in Three Pillows. I was a football cheerleader in the fall, a gymnast in winter, and played girl’s softball in the spring. And I have a letter sweater to prove it. Mister Tupper coached us. Average student. I’ve had nine semi-cute boyfriends since puberty, and only three broken hearts. Oh, and I was queen of the Snowflake Frolic and the Senior Prom. Attended Metro Tech Community College, Associate of Arts degree, and then I got a job at Mutual of Omaha. Shared an apartment with three other girls. We quarreled all the time. Ran out of hot water every morning. Went into credit card debt, shopping just to soothe the melancholy, and decided Seldom wasn’t so bad. I’ve been back with my grandma for three months now.”