The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles (9 page)

Set between the sea and the dunes, the Dupin house was gorgeous. There was fishing every day and a party every night, when
they grilled the catch on a barbecue while inventing new cocktails. The girls would flop onto the sand, pretending to be drunk.

Joséphine returned to Paris reluctantly. But when she saw the size of the check that Philippe’s secretary handed her, she didn’t regret having worked so hard.
There must be some mistake!
she thought. She suspected Philippe of overpaying her. She saw him rarely, but from time to time he would send her a note saying how pleased he was with her work. Once he added a P.S.: “Coming from you, I’m not surprised.”

One day the associate she submitted her work to—her name was Caroline Vibert—asked if she felt up to translating full-length books from English for her husband, a publisher.

“Books?” Jo asked, opening her eyes wide. “Real books? Of course!”

Caroline gave her a number to call, and everything was arranged very quickly. Joséphine was given two months to translate a British biography of Audrey Hepburn—352 dense pages. Two months, Jo realized, meant that she had to be done by the end of November!

She wiped her brow. It wasn’t like she didn’t have other things on her plate besides the translation. She’d signed up for a conference at the University of Lyon, and had to write a fifty-page paper on female weavers in twelfth-century workshops.

Joséphine paused, her pencil in midair. Suddenly a terrifying thought came to her:
I forgot to ask how much I’ll be paid for the Audrey Hepburn job! I should have written down my questions before going to a meeting like that. I have to learn to be quicker, to work smarter. I’ve been living like a studious little snail up to now.

Shirley turned out to be a great help with the Hepburn translation. Joséphine would jot down the English words and idioms she didn’t know, and run next door. Their landing saw a lot of back-and-forth traffic.

Jo would have loved to buy herself a computer, but she knew she couldn’t afford it.

In one column in her ledger, Joséphine listed her earnings, in the other, her expenses. She wrote down possible debits and credits in pencil, definite ones in red ballpoint. She tried to build in a small cushion, but in fact, she had no cushion at all.
One unexpected snag, and I’m sunk.

And she’d have no one to turn to. Before, she had been part of a team. Antoine had taken care of everything. When it involved paperwork, he would point, and she would sign. He’d laugh and say, “I could get you to sign anything.”

They still hadn’t discussed divorce, and Jo went on obediently signing the various papers he handed her—no questions asked, eyes closed—to keep the bond between them alive. Husband and wife. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer.

When Antoine came to pick the girls up at the beginning of July, it had been very painful for her.

The elevator door slammed shut.” ‘Bye, Mom, work hard!”

“Have fun, girls! Enjoy!”

Joséphine ran to the balcony and watched as Antoine loaded the girls’ suitcases in the trunk. Then she suddenly noticed something in the front, sticking out on
her
side of the car: an elbow in a red blouse. Mylène!

For a second, Joséphine had an impulse to run downstairs and grab the girls. But she realized that Antoine had a perfect right to do what he was doing. She slid slowly down onto the concrete floor of the balcony. Palms pressed against her eyes, she wept and wept. The same images kept running through her mind, like an endlessly looped film. Antoine introducing the girls to Mylène, Mylène smiling at them. Antoine had rented an apartment. The words “The girls and Mylène . . . Antoine and Mylène” kept coming back, like a refrain.

Joséphine took a deep breath and yelled, “Fuck this blended family shit!” Hearing herself swear startled her. She stopped crying.

That was the moment Joséphine understood that her marriage was really over.
That glimpse of red blouse means it’s over
, she told herself.
O-ver. Over and out.
She drew a red triangle on a piece of paper and hung it up over the toaster, where she would see it every morning.

The next day, she went back to her translation work.

It wasn’t until later in the summer when she went to Iris’s place in Deauville that she learned that Zoé had cried a lot that July.

“Antoine told the girls they’d better get used to Mylène because he was planning to move in with her,” Iris said one day in August. “That they had a joint project they would be starting in the fall. What kind of project? No one knows.”

“Those poor darlings are getting off to a bad start in life!” declared Henriette magisterially. “Lord, what we put children through these days!”

Joséphine hadn’t seen her mother since the scene in Iris’s living room in May, or spoken a single word to her. She wondered if their confrontation had given her the energy to work so hard.

“You get positive energy when you’re straight with people.” That was Shirley’s theory. “You were honest that night, and look how much you’ve accomplished on your own!”

The other day, in the narrow library stacks, Joséphine had bumped into a man she hadn’t seen coming. Her armload of books crashed to the floor, and the stranger stooped to help pick them up. He made a funny face at her, and she burst out laughing. She’d had to go outside to pull herself together.

She saw the man in the library another time, and he gave her a wave and a sweet smile. He was tall and skinny, with chestnut hair that fell over his eyes, and hollow cheeks. He carefully hung his navy blue duffel coat on the back of his chair before sitting down. Joséphine thought him handsome and romantic.

She didn’t dare tell Shirley about the man, because she knew what she would say: “You should have asked him out for coffee, found out his schedule. You’re so pathetic!”

Well, nothing new there
, Joséphine thought with a sigh, doodling on her accounts book.
I see all, I feel all, I am the depository of thousands of details that stab me like shards of glass, and that other people don’t even notice.
The hardest thing was resisting panic. It always struck at night. Curled up under the covers, she would go over all her expenses in her head until her eyes were wide with terror.

Today, though, to her relief, the numbers written in pencil
and red ink looked okay.
If the money doesn’t disappear too fast, I might be able to rent a house at the beach for the girls next summer, buy them nice clothes, take them to plays and concerts. They could eat out once a week. I’ll go to the hairdresser, buy myself a pretty dress. Maybe Hortense won’t be so ashamed of me.

Joséphine suddenly remembered that she’d promised to help Shirley deliver an order of cakes for a big wedding.

Shirley was waiting on the landing, tapping her foot. Standing in the doorway, Gary waved good-bye to them.

“I think I just got a glimpse of the man your son will be in a few years,” said Jo. “He’s so handsome!”

“Don’t I know it! Women are already starting to check him out.”

“Is he aware of it?”

“No, and I’m not going to be the one to tell him. I don’t want him to get too full of himself.”

“Tell me, was his father good-looking?”

“Yes, he was. The handsomest man on earth. That was his only real quality, for that matter.” She scowled and waved her hand as if to chase a bad memory away. “Okay, let’s get moving. You watch the cakes while I get the car. Ring the elevator and hold the door.”

Joséphine did as she was told. They stacked the cake boxes in the back of the car, Jo keeping a hand on them so they wouldn’t fall.

“I was scheduled to deliver these at five, but they called and said to come at four or to forget the whole thing. He’s an important customer, so he knows I’ll do whatever he says.”

A moped cut in front of her, and Shirley unleashed a volley of choice Anglo-Saxon curses.

“Good thing Audrey Hepburn didn’t swear the way you do. I’d have trouble translating that.”

“How do you know she didn’t curse like a sailor from time to time? It’s just not in her biography, that’s all.”

“But she seemed so perfect. Did you know that she never had a love affair that didn’t end in marriage?”

“After what she went through as a teenager, she must have wanted a real home life.”

Joséphine had learned that at fifteen, Hepburn had worked for the Resistance in Holland during World War II, carrying notes hidden in the soles of her shoes. One day, on her way back from a mission, she was arrested by the Nazis and taken to the Kommandatur with a dozen other women. She managed to escape, and hid in the cellar of a house. After a month, she finally came out of hiding in the middle of the night and found her way home.

After hesitating for a moment, Joséphine decided to take the plunge.

“There’s this guy I met at the library . . .”

Joséphine told Shirley about the collision in the stacks, the books dropping, the laughing fit, and the immediate attraction she’d felt to the stranger.

“So what does he look like?”

“Like a perennial student. He wears a dark blue duffel coat. It’s the first time I’ve looked at a man since, well . . .” Jo stopped herself. She still had trouble talking about Antoine’s departure.

“Have you seen him again?”

“Once or twice. He smiled at me. We can’t really talk at the library, so we speak with our eyes.” Joséphine blushed. “He’s so handsome!”

“Look at the map and see if I can turn right somewhere. We’re not going to be able to get through this way.”

“You can turn. But then you’ll have to take a left again.”

“I’ll take another left. The left side is where the heart is; it’s my kind of place.”

Joséphine smiled. Life with Shirley was never dull. She knew exactly what she wanted and went straight for it. Joséphine was sometimes shocked by the way she was raising Gary. Shirley talked to her son as if he were an adult, never hiding anything from him. She had even told Gary that his dad ran off the day he was born, but she also told him that she would reveal his father’s name if he ever wanted to look him up. She said she’d been madly in love with the man, and that he, Gary, had been wanted and loved.

Shirley usually took Gary to Scotland for school vacations. She wanted her son to know where his ancestors were from, to speak English, to learn about another culture. But this year Shirley had come back in a sad, gloomy mood. She announced that they wouldn’t be going back, and never mentioned it again.

“What are you thinking about?” Shirley asked.

“I was thinking about how mysterious you are, about all the things I don’t know about you.”

“I wonder the same thing, as it happens.”

They pulled up at the gate to Parnell Traiteurs at four o’clock sharp.

“You stay in the car and move it if you have to. I’ll go deliver these babies.”

Joséphine nodded. She slipped into the driver’s seat and watched Shirley maneuvering the cake boxes.

Shirley soon came bounding back out and kissed Jo on both cheeks.

“Hooray! I’m loaded! The guy gets on my nerves but he pays well. Want to go to a pub and treat ourselves to a cold one?”

On the drive home, Joséphine was thinking about how to organize her paper for the conference when she suddenly noticed a man crossing the street right in front of them.