Life Studies Stories

Mimi with a Watering Can Paris, 1876Jerome did not want to go to his sister's garden party. He did not want to mix cordially with her motley Montmartre neighbors, did not want to sit on a crumbling stone wall among buzzing insects in her half-wild yard drinking that sharp piccolo from the last scraggly Montmartre vineyard, making trivial conversation with some tinsmith or shoemaker or painter Claire might have invited. ?But this is the second time she's asked,? Elise said, sipping her coffee in the sunny breakfast room with their four-year-old dancing a paper doll around her bowl of porridge. ?She'll think you despise her.' He loved his sister, but he would much prefer to stay in his dressing gown all morning reading Baudelaire and Verlaine, his method, though of dubious effect, of resisting self-pity, and to spend the afternoon walking one of Baron Haussmann's new grand boulevards with Elise and Mimi, which might make him feel expansive. Maybe stopping for lunch at Chez Edgard might help him throw off this malaise of dullness. Then they'd stroll home through the Tuileries, or cross the river to Luxembourg Gardens, and not have to talk to anyone else. All week at the bank he had to be with people, affecting cordiality to clients and to Monsieur le directeur, when there was no juice of cordiality on his tongue. He saw only gray walls, gray desktop, gray ledger books, gray suits, gray hair. He had stood face to face with the director the day before, not even listening to him, only noticing the sickening grayness of the man's skin. He'd wanted to scream, to curse the monotony right in front of the man, to leap out the door and never come back.A disappointment in life had taken hold of him lately, originating nowhere, everywhere, a resentment with no logical reason because he had all a man could want'except the thing he couldn't identify. This morning the dull power of that irony had shocked him. As he lay in bed, just at the moment of waking, the instant when he became conscious that it was Saturday, which should have made him happy, he couldn't open his eyes. They were stuck shut. With a shudder of panic, he'd made a conscious effort to lift his lids, but the dryness underneath had sealed them shut, and all he succeeded in doing was raising his eyebrows. He lay disoriented for a long time before he tried again. One eye opened part way, with a soft pop, but he'd had to push up the lid of the other with the pad of his ring ?nger. An absurd experience. Ridiculous to attach any signi'cance to it. Still, he wanted to erase the fear of its happening again by doing something absorbing, by thinking of something exquisite'by reading poetry. He ?nished his coffee and noticed Lise's hopeful, liquid blue eyes. ?All right, we'll go,? he said, not sure that he could be very sociable. Mimi jumped down from her chair, and stretched her arms out to her sides, raising one arm while lowering the other. ?Can we see the windmills, Papa? ?Naturellement.' He touched Mimi's head and felt her blond childhood curls slip between his ?ngers like silk threads. Upstairs, in their bedroom easy chair, he had time to read one poem before Elise came in to sit at her vanity and dress her hair and prepare her toilette. In a moment she would talk, and the poetic thought would ?y away. C'est l?Ennui!, he read, l'oeil charge d'un pleur involontaire. An involuntary tear. And for what? Because Baudelaire couldn't recognize present beauty? Because life is too good? Because in a moment the silk of his wife's dressing gown might slide down to reveal the shape and smoothness of the globe of her breast and he might smell her sweet musk scent? It made no sense. ?Life is good,? his father had a'rmed the last time he'd seen him, chuckling before he added, ?but better spent if not devoted to making a living.' This from a man who worked all his life at a desk, uncomplaining, until a montVreeland, Susan is the author of 'Life Studies Stories', published 2005 under ISBN 9780670031771 and ISBN 0670031771.