Balloons

 

BALLOONS

First Prize Balwest Competition, Cornwall, UK 1993

Published Sirens, UK anthology 1994

 

ALL BUT ONE of the houses are shuttered, their owners having deserted their holiday homes on the Costa Brava for their year-round responsibilities in Paris, Madrid, London, wherever. Scrub pines bend in the same wind that sends waves crashing against the cliff.

Jean-Michel, his yellow slicker protecting him against the sleeting rain, struggles to shut his door on the one house still occupied. He must lean into the wind to cross the dirt path to the bar/restaurant.

Lightning flashes unnerve him. He has been afraid of it since childhood when he huddled in bed with his brother under the eaves of his family’s Paris apartment. They could see the lightning through the skylight while he waited for the hated the crash that he knew always followed the flash.

The wind grabs the oak door of the bar/restaurant and slams it against the wall, chipping the stucco.

Evan, the only occupant in the large room with most of its table and chairs stacked against one wall, is polishing the bar with a rag and lemon oil. He watches Jean-Michel puddle his way to the bar.

“God! It smells like my mother-in-law’s.” Jean-Michel’s tone makes it no compliment.

“That’s why I do it when no one is around,” Evan says. He automatically pours an espresso. Brown foam coats the top. He puts one sugar cube, not two as he does for other clients next to a spoon and places it in front of Jean-Michel, who unwraps the cube.

Balzac is written on the paper. Jean-Michel wonders why it’s a French and not a Spanish name. He considers French anything superior to Spanish anything. He has the same patriotic and curious thought each time he unwraps a sugar cube which is every afternoon at 14:05. Putting the cube on a spoon, he dips it into the coffee. The liquid turns the sugar brown. Jean-Michel never talks during this ritual nor would Evan interrupt him.

“How much longer? Jean-Michel asks only after the cube disintegrates. They’ve talked over afternoon coffee, early evening drinks and Thursday night couscous from April to October for seven years.

“Two weeks. Almost done.”

Jean-Michel knows that Evan means it is his wish to have everything perfect before he returns to Wales for the winter. Without saying more Jean Michel sips his coffee. From time to time, he checks his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His white mane needs a trim before he leaves for New York.

He thinks of himself as rugged, a new self-image he has just grown into. He laughed the first time Laurie, his lover, called him “rugged.” Betty, his wife, says he’s aging. Forty-two is young to be completely white, he thinks. Even his chest hair peeking through his shirt is white.

Pouring more polish on his cloth, Evan attacks the other end of the bar. The two men are quiet for a few minutes. Finally, he throws down his rag, pours himself a coffee and carries it to the customer side of the bar.

Turning on their stools, they watch the storm out the window on the opposite side of the bar. Evan has put long strips of masking tape on the glass to keep the window from shattering. He’d read that tape adjusts pressure in hurricanes, although this storm is not that fierce.

“You’ll have a devil of a time scrubbing ‘em off,” Jean-Michel says.

Evan doesn’t need to answer. Jean-Michel knows he doesn’t care.

“Heard from your wife?” Evan asks.

The phone of the far side of the room rings. It’s a buzz sounding more like someone giving a raspberry. As Evan picks it up, he hears a crackle. Either it’s the storm or an international call.

“Allo.” Pause. “We were just talking about you Betty.” Wrapping the cord around his hand and playing it out he reaches Jean-Michel and hands his buddy the receiver.

Although Jean-Michel would have preferred to avoid the call, Evan has made that impossible. “Hi Sweetheart. How’s New York weather?”

Evan can hear her through. “Hot. Why the hell aren’t you here?” Betty never makes small talk. “You’re scheduled for a major interview Tuesday. With Artists Today.”

Betty is more than Jean-Michel’s wife. She is his manager and manages him in every sense of the word. Her maintenance of his career and home down to the smallest detail allows him the rigidities he loves.

Strangely, these rigidities disappear when he stands before a canvas. His eyes see the world in an array of colors that flow through his hand and onto the canvas without any of the limitations he imposes on himself in his daily life. Her protection gives him the safety to run free like a wild animal on a well-fed preserve.

If their marriage wasn’t made in heaven, it wasn’t made in hell either.

He had amazed Evan when Laurie had moved in shortly after Betty had left for her native New York City to set up her husband’s exhibition. Jean-Michel was even more amazed than Evan. His orderly lifestyle had no room for affairs.

He’d met her when she was looking at a blue and yellow vase in a village shop window. He had walked by on his way to buy bread, something that Betty normally took care of. He’d been discontent interrupting his work for something as mundane as bread buying, but he also knew when he warmed the meal that his wife had labelled “September 5^th dinner” he would want bread with it. The colors of the vase had caught his eye also.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Laurie had asked in one of the worse Spanish accents he’d heard in a long time. They’d started chatting, first in Spanish, then in French and finally in English. Instead of buying bread, he’d bought her dinner. By the end of the evening they weren’t drunk, just a little buzzed. Neither remembers suggesting going to bed. Maybe it was an assumption, not a decision.

Resting in bed afterward, she told him how she was on sabbatical from Boston University. She didn’t tell him she was using the year to recover from her divorce. She did say that for one year, she was letting her mood of the moment rule all her actions.

Laurie was the first woman he had slept with since his wedding. His passions were for his painting not sex. She brought out a new passion and he found himself wanting more and still more.

What he doesn’t know is how she feels about him. If he’d ask, she would have told him. Sometimes she likes him. Mostly she is amused at his insistence that everything be just so.

They’d had one fight. He insisted the forks on the dinner table be prong down when she’d placed them prongs up. Only when she said, she would leave did he stop picking at her to do things exactly as Betty did. Her presence in his bed was more important than fork prongs, although he flipped his fork when she wasn’t looking.

As Jean-Michel talks with his wife, Laurie, her sensualness and fork prongs are banished from his mind. Betty’s anger unsettles him worse than the storm. “Now Sweetheart, have I ever missed an important show?

He whines. She orders. That’s their communication style, woven deep into the cloth of their marriage.

“Yes.” The words cackle or maybe it is just the bad connection or the storm. “Get your ass over here. It’s been two years since you marketed yourself in New York.”

“I feel like a can of peas.” For a moment he wonders why he married a hard-driving American businesswoman as he pictures himself in quantity on a grocery shelf. His miniature clones paint at tiny canvases with even tinier brushes.

Without Betty, he would still be hawking his work to tourists near Sacre Coeur in Paris instead of living in financial security. He doesn’t know how much money the couple has. He doesn’t care. It’s part of the freedom within his chosen cage.

The door flies open as Laurie blows in: her hair is slicked to her head and her cheeks are flushed. She has taken a long walk.

When they’d made love earlier, she told him how storms and high tides produce primordial waves in her inner being. After lunch she’d gone for a long walk to communicate with the weather and the sea.

Evan puts his finger to his lips before she can speak. She absorbs the situation as water drips off her slicker.

Jean-Michel nods his head as he listens to his wife. He rolls his eyes.

Evan pats him on the back, then pours Laurie a coffee which he carries to the table nearest the window. He sits next to her, both their backs to Jean-Michel as they watch the storm.

Occasionally, Jean-Michael interrupts with a “but…” the only word he can say before Betty renews her rampage.

“Let me speak,” he finally barks. His tone works. Betty is silent. “Okay, I’ll catch the damned flight on Monday. From Barcelona. I’ll be there for the fucking interview.” He is positive that Laurie is trying not listen. “Me too,” he says to his wife’s parting, “I love you.”

Years of bartending have taught Evan when to be invisible. He disappears into the storeroom.

After Jean-Michel hangs up, he watches Laurie watching the storm. Her back is to him. He makes himself another espresso, quickly drops a sugar cube into it. He walks across the room and places his cup next to hers. The table is almost covered with cups.

“Look at the storm,” she says.

Ignoring her words, he turns her head toward him. He’s not sure if there are tears on her face. He wants to think that she cares enough to cry a little, but not too much. “Laurie?”

“We both knew it was temporary. Even if you were free, I doubt I could stand you long term … unless we spent the entire time in bed.” She smiles, but her lips stay closed.

He blushes.

*

Monday, they ride to Barcelona. He offers her the use of his car. “Leave it at the airport before the end of the month.”

“No, I’m supposed to walk the pilgrimage trail, but gracias, merci, thank you.”

“You’re riding now.”

“Maybe they won’t give me my shell.” She refers to the pilgrim’s symbol. “But how will they know. I can’t imagine a monk checking my bum for upholstery marks.”

He never is quite sure when she is joking. Betty never jokes.

They drive the autoroute, stopping for tolls, saying little. Last night they spent almost the entire night making love. Jean-Michel is surprised by his stamina. Maybe he is more rugged than old.

“Will I see you again?” he asks. Part of him wants to keep her as a spare in case something happens to Betty. He doesn’t tell Laurie, which he thinks is wise.

“I doubt if I’ll be back. You probably won’t ever be in Boston.”

“Will you give me your address?”

“There’s the Barcelona exit.”

He brakes in time and manoeuvres the car through the toll booth. The national road runs through fields once filled with sun flowers. An army of stalks remain standing at attention having given their seeds for oil.

The country turns into a city of yellow and white stucco building highlighted by black iron railings. When a rainbow of color catches his eyes, he slams on the brakes and jumps out. Horns honk as he weaves between cars.

He buys a bunch of helium-filled balloons. Getting them into the car takes patience. They want to fly out the doors and windows. They fill the back seat and bounce into the front. Laurie keeps pushing them back so Jean-Michael can see the road.

“The airport is the other way,” she says.

“I’ll still make my plane.” He looks for a dirt road that he’d passed about twenty minutes before. He finds it. Several horses stop grazing to watch the car pull up to their fence.

“Get out,” he tells her. She does as he struggles to free the balloons from the car. He kisses her nose and lets a red balloon go. “I wish you happiness,” he says. He hands her a blue balloon.

She understands and lets it go. “And I wish for yours.”

Soon the sky is filled with the color of their wishes. When the last balloon flies away, they hug.

“Thank you,” he says not knowing why.

They rush to the airport. At a red light, Laurie opens the door. “I hate long goodbyes, I’m outta here.” She grabs her backpack and blows him a kiss.

He wants to watch her, but the light changes. Instead, he sees himself in the mirror. He feels old more than rugged.