Winner of the 2017 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction
INDIA
Vegetabilize (v.i.): To turn someone away from meat and lead him (or her) into the cleaner green light of plant life. This is what India is trying to accomplish with Carl—in France, land of tripe and boeuf bourguignon—and today she’s been to the organic market on the mainland, buying huge unsprayed carrots, eight-grain cereal, and unsulfured raisins. Carl refuses to go on these expeditions. For the sake of his weight and longevity, he is learning to eat her kind of food, but, he says, “I’m damned if I’m going to spend an hour and a half on a boat going to get it.”
India waits with the other passengers as the ferry docks, a lengthy process that always reminds her of a large and vocal sea mammal settling itself in grumpily for a nap by the shore. Several grindings of gears, a whine of machinery, and the door finally opens. The crowd surges forward, releasing her into a salty breeze. She walks up the embankment toward the weathered storefronts, cafés, and bike-rental places that frame the island’s main port. Since June, this venerable semicircle has been spliced by a cluster of bright new shops selling fast food and clothing: almost a mini mall, with cheesy green and yellow signs. By the ticket office she sees a table with a sign condemning the “degradation of nature” (in French it sounds better) and announcing a demonstration tonight. The leaders—tanned, smoking—brandish a petition, soliciting signatures and talking gravely to anybody who stops.
Although India is of course in sympathy, she doesn’t stop. Her French is too uncertain for a political discussion, she tells herself, but it’s not the entire truth. She’s changed. Thirty-odd years ago, she was game for any sit-in, protest, or squat. Now she has only her made-up first name (her checks say Iris Horowitz), her vegetarianism, her long hair, and a certain cynical view of the world as tokens of a former rebelliousness. She and Carl call each other, affectionately, “sellouts.” She’s a freelance copywriter for beauty companies, touting the dubious glories of blusher and neck cream; he’s a photographer who shoots weddings or ads for jewelry and food.
Here, though, Carl doesn’t think of commerce; he roams the island all day, hung with lenses and cameras, in search of uncommon images. India tries not to mind that this work is more important to him than she is, that they are no longer ardent comrades but old marrieds: twenty-five years together.
Up the steep hill she climbs, dodging bicycles, her gray-brown striped hair streaming in the wind. She’s tired, but when she reaches the village church, she doesn’t take the road directly home. Instead, on impulse, she turns onto the overgrown path that loops around the cliffs on the southern coast. There’s something seductive about the late-day light and the evening chill starting to sidle in. The weather on this small Breton island is always cool while the rest of the world bakes, which is one reason they’ve been coming here for five summers. And the backpack isn’t that heavy. She didn’t buy much this time because they’ve got only a week left. India hates wasting food.
The buzzing and humming of insects surrounds her as she enters a tangled corridor of blackberry bushes. Spiky thistles with thorns rear up alongside the path; purple heather peeks out of a cage of nettle. Everything out here is so defended, she thinks. Me, too. She catches an unwelcome glimpse of herself as she imagines others see her. Party pooper. Spoilsport. Wet blanket. “I am no fun,” she whispers fiercely. On their evening walk a couple of weeks ago, she shouted at a woman with a freshly plucked bunch of honeysuckle, accusing her of destroying the environment. She thinks Carl was a little embarrassed by her outburst. But now she reaches down to pick some heather, angling her hand sideways to avoid getting pricked and glancing guiltily over her shoulder as if the petitioners from the port were watching.
She carries her little bouquet home with a pleased sense of defying her own rules and puts it in a water glass on the kitchen windowsill so she can see it while she cooks.
CARL
Today he is out at Pen Men, the big lighthouse on the western shore of the island, a point so windy that all the trees are permanently bent, the branches almost horizontal. He rides their one bike there, eating blackberries on the way; then he takes a picture of his own hands, stained with deep purple juice. But his true interest is the old woman who lives in a little house, more hut than cottage, the only dwelling on this whole broad expanse of cliff.
She is tiny, her spine twisted like the trees. She always wears a black dress, and although she looks to be about a hundred, her hair is not entirely white but has auburn mixed in. It’s anybody’s guess what she lives on, for she never goes to town and has few visitors. She owns a goat, a loping yellow dog, and a garden thick with tomato vines. Carl spies on her; he has been waiting to take her picture for three weeks, and he’s damned if he’s going to go home without it. He is ethical, however: he will not photograph her from afar with a zoom lens without her permission, and so far he’s glimpsed her only a couple of times, too fleetingly to ask.
Carl has already taken a number of portraits on the island—grizzled ex-sailors with distended stomachs, steeped in wine; a tired baker with strong, flour-streaked arms; a ruddy-faced farmer in overalls—and usually even the most wrinkled, least lovely people are flattered to be approached. His pictures show this straightening-up before the camera, this dignity, this endearing desire to be looked at and loved.
But the old lady seems forbidding, and he speculates that she is fond of neither human company nor self-revelation. He’s noticed, and so has India, that the men here are more ingratiating than the women. They tend toward a sort of yearning sweetness and easy sociability that might be an inheritance from their restless seagoing fathers and grandfathers: the island was the premier tuna-fishing center in France until 1940; now, all that is gone, yet the women—perhaps because they or their mothers were used to threshing wheat, bearing children, and doing everything at home, alone, while the men sailed away—have a toughness, directness, and independence that can be disconcerting.
The worst the old woman can say is no, Carl thinks. Not true, he corrects himself, sitting cross-legged and hot on the sharp, sparse grass some distance from the hut, wishing he had worn a hat: she could make him feel small and ashamed for asking, and might.
The sun is getting lower, and he knows India will be getting home with her healthful loot. He feels guilty about the roast chicken he had for lunch, but her trips to the mainland are now his only opportunities for meat. She swears that you can get complete protein from a combination of dairy products and tasteless legumes like chickpeas and white beans; she showed him a chart once, with equations and nutrient chains so complex that he couldn’t imagine anyone choosing this much work over a nice, simple burger or slice of ham. He can’t believe, either, that she doesn’t hanker for meat the way she still hankers for a cigarette—especially here in France, with its infinitely cool blue packets of Gauloises—but she says she doesn’t. “It’s a gut thing,” she says. “I see the animal’s eyes.”
Finally Carl packs up his lenses and rides off, a slightly rotund but handsome man in his late fifties, browned by the sun, with iron-colored hair that recedes at his brow and is grown long in back as if to compensate. He opens the white gate and walks the bike up the path to their rented house. Garlic and onion drift out the kitchen window.
“Smells good,” he says as he opens the door.
“You have blackberry juice,” says India, gesturing at her own mouth. Married people do this.
Carl rubs his lips roughly, glad he removed any trace of chicken fat and took the bag of bones and gristle with him for disposal outside the house. India misses nothing. Although she claims to have no interest in being a food cop, she often slips into the role without realizing it. He wishes now he hadn’t told her his cholesterol count, which is way over two hundred.
At times he wonders if India’s obsession with, well, wholesomeness is a substitute for something else—a child, a dog, a novel? Amateur shrink talk, but still, she’d won that short-story contest when she was in her twenties; her work was described by one of the judges as “Austenesque.” She used to talk to him about a Pride and Prejudice for the twentieth century, “but I’d bring out the ambiguity of marriage for women,” she’d said. “Elizabeth and Darcy go to couples counseling!” She’d been careful to add, “Nothing personal.”
She no longer mentions it, though, and while her ad copy is clever and ironic, Carl thinks she could write serious things, stories or essays, when she’s not on deadline. He doesn’t say so for fear that it will seem like a reproach.
“Any luck at Pen Men?” India says, cutting bread to go with the vegetable stew.
“Nope. She’s still playing hard to get.”
“Speaking of the elusive wilderness,” says India, “there’s a demo tonight at the port, to protest the new shops.”
“Are we going?” he asks. India tends to make these decisions.
“Let’s see how we feel,” she says, a marital formula that generally means “no.” She leans over her bowl, mouthing a large, extremely hot carrot. “I should have cut these smaller.” Which is his cue to say the carrots are fine, and so they coast through dinner, the stew followed by green salad with blue cheese, followed by pears from a tree in the back yard, stewed with red wine and cloves.
Carl is fidgety, crumbling his bread into little pieces like a bored child. Maybe it’s the old woman, the frustrating way she evades his camera’s eye, and now this oppressively virtuous meal. Almost daily he feels the urge to go to the bakery and grab a huge almond croissant straight off the shelves and take a big, messy bite, powdered sugar and nuts flying everywhere as he slaps down his money and gallops off, a lone ranger of calories, a cowboy of cake.
INDIA
In the three weeks they’ve been here, India and Carl have settled into a routine, and the evening part of it involves washing dishes (he does it), then settling with books into the only two comfortable chairs in the living room until the sun starts to set around ten. Then they go for a nighttime constitutional to help them sleep better—India insists on it the same way she insists on taking steep hills at a fast clip, because it’s good for the heart. She worries sometimes that Carl’s expanding waistline and borderline-high everything—blood pressure, cholesterol—will kill him before he’s sixty-five, and then what will she do? She imagines herself, briefly, as a widow: an island woman bringing home her drowned sailor. Black bonnet, granite face, tragic, powerful.
Their evening walks do nothing to stop her insomnia, though. She usually gets up in the middle of the night and goes onto the porch to read for an hour or two. It’s gotten so predictable that she leaves her book and glasses out there, along with a blanket to keep her warm. Tonight, though, India puts down her book almost as soon as Carl has dried the last plate. She intended to reread Henry James this summer, all of him, but so far she’s done only the easier, shorter ones, The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square. It passes through her mind that their life here, Americans in France, is rather Jamesian; maybe she could make a story of it. But something stops her from following the thought, and now she is falling asleep over The Bostonians and wishing she had a nice cozy Agatha Christie instead.
“Why don’t we go to the port?” she asks. It’s an impulse, like the earlier turn toward the cliffs. She’s quite proud of herself for messing with the schedule.
They pull on their sweaters and walk out into a cool lavender evening thick with the sound of doves and crickets and the smell of cut grass. They go single file along the roadside, not speaking, for this walk is so familiar it is almost a ritual, something done in silence that roots and comforts them.
Down the hill, past the yellow house and the pale rose one, and then the forest of masts comes into sight, and the two lighthouses, red and green, and the ocean lying quiet and silver. But when they reach the bottom, it’s clear this is not a normal night at the port. On a bandstand between two of the main cafés, men in black T-shirts and jeans are setting up drums and doing sound checks while nearby, contained by gendarmes, surges an unruly body of people with signs, shouting, “Save the port!” or words to that effect.
It seems to India, though, that the police aren’t having to work too hard to keep the demonstrators from bursting through to disrupt the music. There is an earnest, gentle quality to the protest, as if they are more grieved than angry. She is amused to notice that they’re smoking even as they chant the slogans, so a gray cloud swirls over them, like a portable thunderstorm.
India and Carl thought they’d watch from their regular café at the far end of the port, but they can’t get through the crowd—it’s like algae, sticky and pervasive. They are nearly ready to give up when, with a sudden blast, the band starts. According to a sign on the stage, this is something called “Cajun swing,” and it involves a small accordion and a harmonica in addition to the usual guitar, bass, and drums. It may not be authentically New Orleans, but it sure is catchy, with a fierce, syncopated beat, and soon Carl and India have no more thought of home and sleep: they are dancing—even though nobody else is, even though India feels self-conscious at first.
It’s been years since they danced. They used to, from the time they met in the early seventies, when people their age were the center of the middle-parted, bell-bottomed, dope-smoking, love-child universe. The way they instantly picked up each other’s rhythm always seemed to India a sign that their love was meant to be.
Now they invent their own silly versions of the fads of their youth: the pony and the stroll and the lindy hop and the twist. India bucks and struts, hands on hips, while Carl swivels, his body low and intense, the way he did as a high-school kid in back-belted khakis and a short-sleeved shirt winning the citywide jitterbug contest in Chicago, circa 1957. Gradually other people join in, even some from the demonstration. India and Carl dance every dance, two gray-haired people in large American sneakers cutting up, but finally they have to sit out a really fast tune.
While they are catching their breath on the sidelines, India watches two girls prancing like dressage horses; a grave elderly couple dancing everything half-time, elegant, imperturbable, precise; a mother skipping with her little son, who looks at his feet as he tries to imitate her steps, then up at maman, laughing. The two of them … India had wanted kids, though she isn’t at all sure she’d have been a decent mother. Too rigid. Too scared of what other people think. She’d thrown away her pink plastic circle of birth-control pills. But it hadn’t happened, year after year. They got a dog, a cocker spaniel named Gladys whose ears dipped into her water bowl when she drank. She’s dead now.
CARL
Morning. He is in the shed in back of the house, which he has taken as his darkroom, but he isn’t developing pictures; he is thinking, and eating. He has secreted several chocolate bars here, and even the thought of them, safe and waiting, is enough to calm him. He’s staring at a black-and-white photo taped to the wall: Pompier, Paris, 1950. The fireman, unsmiling, has on a metal helmet and is carrying a great circle of curled-up hose. It’s by Irving Penn, part of “Small Trades,” a series picturing workers in Paris, London, and New York. Carl reveres Penn, now eighty-one. He was a fashion photographer for Vogue; he shot ads for Clinique and General Foods. He wasn’t too proud to earn a living. It was no bar to his artistry.
Carl likes the distinction, in French, between oeuvre and travail. Covering a wedding is travail—labor, pure and simple. Oeuvre (production de l’esprit, a product of the mind, says the dictionary), on the other hand, is the work he wants to do: showing how people present themselves—carrying their tools and wearing their uniforms, or perhaps dressed in their Sunday best—while hinting at a deeper, less formal truth. He has yet to be discovered, however. Although he is a perfectly successful commercial photographer, he is sick of dishonest lighting, retouched faces, and fruit sprayed with oil to make it shine. He jokes about it because he is ashamed.
He hears India and switches the light off so she won’t come in—she would never open the door while he is working; she is too respectful. He sucks the chocolate quietly as she calls, “Carl! Do you want the bike? I’m going to the village.”
They’d decided to rent only one bike. They are giving up a lot of income to be here—freelancers don’t get paid vacations—and, as India said, “It’s ridiculously expensive for two. Besides, walking is good for us.” Privately, Carl thinks she just wants to control his comings and goings.
“Nope! Thanks!” he yells, trying to sound preoccupied. He hates all this sneakiness, but even in a modern, spacious marriage, certain strictures grow up out of habit, stealthy and binding, like ivy. He never thinks of betraying India; he merely evades her.
INDIA
She rides the bike into town, the empty backpack slapping her spine. She felt warmed by their dancing last night; she felt relieved, as she always does after they make love. It’s only this morning that she realizes she was worried that she and Carl weren’t okay, as she puts it to herself; why, she’s not sure. The marriage has a hum, a note that sings them along from one day to the next. But sometimes there’s a faint, discordant noise underneath, a ping like a splinter out of nowhere, and then these sick, hollow feelings come upon her.
She goes slowly because she’s still a beginner; she learned to ride a bike just a few years ago, when they spent a month in Holland. There, the land is so low and flat that you scarcely need brakes. Here, India still walks the bike when she comes to hills because she doesn’t have the strength to climb them or the courage to zoom down.
She buys whole-wheat bread at the bakery, where, like a puritan in a sex shop, she shoots a few hot, guilty looks at tarts bejeweled with fruit. She buys the day-old International Herald Tribune at the newspaper store; the front page is dominated by the Monica Lewinsky scandal: the semen-stained blue dress; Hillary’s drawn, betrayed face. At the market in the parking lot she gets a half-kilo of tomatoes, a bunch of leeks with long green tails, and red basil and green beans from the vendor she thinks is best and cleanest. Also in the parking lot, undaunted by last night’s clash, are the save-the-port people. India, feeling pleased and competent after her errands, thinks, What the hell, I’ll sign the petition; their hearts are in the right place. She approaches and asks bravely, stumblingly for a pen.
The woman at the table mutters something unintelligible.
“Pardon?” says India, wishing she had minded her own business. She notices that the woman has a very chic, very short haircut and is wearing exquisitely tailored pants; her hips can’t be more than thirty-two inches. India is aware of her own tangled, graying hair and oversized sweatshirt, her backpack with the leeks sticking out; she feels messy, old, and, worst of all, stupid. “My French,” she says, gesturing apologetically. “It is very, very bad.”
The woman smiles pityingly. “You are German?”
“No, American.”
Eyebrows up. Slow, accented English, as if it is painful for her to speak a lesser language: “You know what our petition is about?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t live here.” Skeptically.
“No. Well, just for the month,” says India, regaining some of her composure. “Is that a problem?”
The woman shrugs, as if her signature made no real difference one way or another, and hands her a pen. India observes a recent manicure and faint nicotine stains. She signs quickly, her hand shaking. She is sure the woman has noticed.
“You won’t need the bike again, right?” Carl says when she comes in with her packages.
“No,” she says. “I had an awful time in town. Fuck the fucking French!” She needs an ally, quick.
“What happened?” He is already out on the porch, strapping his equipment to the bike.
“Nothing, really.” She’s embarrassed by her own touchiness. “Stupidly I went to sign the petition—you know, about saving the port—and the woman at the table gave me a hard time. You’re going out before lunch?”
“I’m not hungry. I’ll get a sandwich out there.”
She makes a face. The fast-food truck at the lighthouse, a sort of mid-ocean McDonald’s, exudes a deep-fat smell and peddles second-rate ham sandwiches, fries, soft ice cream like paste, and frozen pizzas.
“You’re okay?” Carl says, poised to mount the bike.
“Oh, yeah.” She’s not; she feels doubly let down—at least making lunch would have given her something to do—but Carl is clearly intent on leaving.
CARL
He rides to Pen Men like a boy on a fleet horse getting out of chores, relieved but not guiltless. He should have stayed and talked to India, eaten a saintly lunch, been a good husband. But he needed not to. He needed to flout the rusty, dusty parental authority that has somehow established itself within the formerly green and pleasant land of their marriage.
He thinks it started when India left her full-time magazine job. She’d always been uptight about time and calories, but gradually it’s gotten worse, as if to control vast acres of unstructured life. Especially here in France, where she has no work but wife work.
He leans his bike against one of the wind-swayed, bristly evergreens on the path to the hut, and he sits on a bed of needles and cones and waits. He is lucky. After a few minutes a man emerges from the hut with the old lady; he embraces her, gets on a motor scooter, and starts it up.
Carl runs out of his hiding place, battling branches, to intercept him. “Wait!” he shouts.
The man pauses, his machine rumbling. He wears no helmet, and his hair is auburn.
Carl takes a chance. He says, in very loud, imperfect French, “I want to photograph your mother.”
The man shuts off the motor and squints, puzzled and slightly amused. “What for?”
“For art!” Carl says, still shouting; then, realizing how it sounds, he repeats himself, softly, gravely: “For art.” He explains that his book—this is the first time he’s admitted to himself that it is a book he intends—will contain portraits of the islanders. He emphasizes that it is all very dignified. “I can show you examples,” he offers.
“Not necessary,” the man says, sticking out his hand. “Jules,” he says. “Jules Yvon.”
“Carl Horowitz.”
“German?”
“No, American.”
Jules gets off the bike and gestures for Carl to follow him. Carl feels a spurt of terror and joy, as if he is entering the witch’s forest house in Hansel and Gretel. He stoops at the low door and passes into an almost lightless room—just one square window on the sea, and a small fire. He sees the reason immediately: Madame Yvon is blind; webbed cataracts make her eyes seem almost white. She presses his hand firmly and invites him to sit down.
Jules explains that Carl is a photographer from America. Any glamour attached to this is lost on Madame Yvon.
“You bombed us,” she says flatly in the big, clear accents of the local people. It is true. During World War II, when France was occupied, the island had German guns on it; of course the Allies attacked.
Carl thinks, But it was against Hitler! Also: I’m Jewish; six million of us died! Aloud he says, plaintively, “I was two years old when the war ended. A baby!”
“A baby!” She laughs, and her face takes on great beauty: the reddish hair floating over her pale, finely lined brow. She seems to possess most of her teeth. Jules smiles, too, and after that, it is easy: she agrees that Carl will return in two days to take her photograph.
Carl doesn’t tell India about this success. He feels oddly possessive about it, as if she would somehow steal it from him.
The appointed day dawns stormy and stays that way, the sky so deep in clouds it is nothing but a glare of white. A fine rain falls without stopping and blows in Carl’s face as he rides—on the inland roads it’s not bad, but out on the cliff the wind slams him, hard. He has to fight his way to the hut.
Madame Yvon has heard the wind, naturally, and she knows that her dog, now lying by the fire, has a wet coat; still, she has no real idea of the weather outside, so she has prepared for Carl as agreed, with a brooch at her neck and a white shawl over her usual dress. He wishes he could shoot her in the dark of the hut, but he would need special lights to do it in the gloom. “I’ll have to come back another day,” he explains. “I am so sorry.”
“No, stay a while,” she says, patting the chair, handing him a mug of coffee that tastes as if it’s been boiling for days—but it’s hot—and a plate of the folded, burnt-sugar-encrusted Breton pastry known as kouign amann. She says, “I’ve been making it so long I can do it blindfolded,” and then laughs heartily at her own joke.
Soon Carl learns that her first name is Céline, and that when she was a girl she wore wooden shoes, sabots. Yes, her father was a fisherman and her husband, too—what else? Both are dead. She forgets exactly when she moved out here, but even though no one else is allowed to build on the cliff, the town council leaves her hut alone. “They figured they’d be rid of me soon enough,” she says. “But I keep on.” She seems pleased to be inconveniencing the authorities by continuing to live.
Warm and dry in front of Céline’s fire, Carl strokes the yellow dog and thinks he would like to stay here forever. The old lady is stuffed full of words she hasn’t been able to let out for years—“Jules isn’t a talker,” she informs Carl—and he listens and eats until he realizes he’s been there more than four hours and had promised India he’d be home for dinner. “The next sunny day, I’ll be back,” he assures Céline, and she kisses him four times on alternate cheeks, an old style of hail-and-farewell that nowadays most of the French have no patience for, so they do it just twice.
INDIA
Carl is different, India thinks the next morning, watching him at breakfast. He shaves, whistling all the while; he is carefully coordinated in a brown jacket and pants, and red linen shirt. He is perfectly nice to her but seems to be listening to a sound she can’t hear. While eating his third piece of hazelnut toast—one more than usual, spread thickly with goat cheese and strawberry preserves—he looks past her, out the window into the wild blue yonder.
“It’s a lovely day,” India says, putting a stingy portion of cheese and jam on her own toast. “Going to Pen Men? Still waiting at the hut?”
He takes a sip of milky coffee and nods. “Yep.” His eyes dart. For a moment he looks shifty.
“We’ve got to reconfirm our flight to Paris,” India says, fussing, “and figure out which ferry to take on Sunday. I think the 10:15.” She’s already looked at the timetable, of course.
“Relax,” Carl says. “The 11:45 is early enough.”
It’s an old marital quarrel, but today it bothers her more than usual. If we miss the 11:45, we miss the plane, she thinks, and her anxiety rises.
Carl puts down his cup and carries his plate to the sink. “We’ll talk about it later. I need these last few days. For work,” he adds.
His work, India thinks wearily, trumps anything else. “Okay,” she says, watching him load up the bike.
“You don’t need this, do you?” he says, slapping the handlebars. It isn’t really a question.
“I can walk. Better for me.”
As soon as Carl leaves, India marches into town, clutching her water bottle so hard that the thin plastic caves in. She descends to the port, rents a bike for the day—a silver one, splendid and new—and asks how to get to Pen Men. The rental guy jabbers out the directions; she makes him repeat everything twice, speaking slowly and using a map.
I never could have done that three weeks ago, India thinks, walking the bike up the hill. The French respond to a confident eye, a commanding voice. If you’re tentative, they’ll gobble you up. This thought buoys her until she is safely on the road. She watches the carefully textured rows of wheat of the farms around town give way to untamed fields dotted with poppies, and then, as she nears the cliffs, to a great expanse of scrubby moorland stitched with yellow and purple flowers. Venturing this far west is an adventure, like going to sea. Back in the civilized world, the morning ferry hoots, warning of departure. The traffic falls off; the sky spreads above her like a beneficent blue tent.
She spots the hut right away and stops at a safe distance, close enough to see Carl’s bike—their bike—leaning against one wall. Gulls swoop around, crying, which makes her feel desperate and lonely here at the very edge of the world. The ocean boils against the rocks as if it wants to knock them over and rush foaming over all land, everywhere, until there is nothing but sea. She knows this moment is immense: the end of something she’d counted on, a vastness she’s falling into.
She lays her bike down on its side like a sleeping animal and squats beside it. A dog by the hut looks at her and cocks its head. It’s yellow, with floppy ears and a feathery tail, the sort of dog she likes, but when she calls softly, it doesn’t come. She crouches there for what feels like hours, wondering if she will have the courage to knock on the door.
She waits until the lack of lunch makes her faint, and her water is gone. She buys a packet of French fries at the gaudy food truck, which is parked unscenically in front of the lighthouse, and eats them as she rides back to the port, one-handed. She doesn’t even notice when she coasts down a hill, fast, with the wind in her lioness hair.
When Carl returns in the late afternoon, he rockets around the house burning with coffee and pride. Before, he was reticent; now he wants to boast. “I got her,” he tells India, who is at the kitchen table eating yogurt. “The old woman. Céline. Her name’s Céline, and she’s blind.”
“Really.” She keeps her head down, afraid of what he might read on her face. She’s shrieking inside.
“I’ll have to see what I’ve got, but I think I really did it,” he says, sitting down, tearing into an orange. The smell fills up the room.
She notices grains of sugar around his mouth but says nothing. I’m not his keeper.
“Something wrong?” he says.
“Nothing,” she says, but of course, she lies. It’s nothing if by something you mean unlawful sex or grand theft, but still, it’s something; she’s not sure what. It’s a crack, a palpable crack—his secrecy, her suspicion—and all the rituals and vegetables in the world can’t get her contentment back.
The pictures of Céline are wonderful. Carl invites India into his darkroom to see the prints pinned up, drying: the old woman sitting with her dog staring sightlessly at the cliffs and water; inside, with the fire and the window lighting her sweet, crafty face; tending her garden and feeding her goat. Jules dropped in for a few minutes with milk and bread for his mother, and Carl took him holding Céline in his arms, both of them grinning, her petticoats showing.
Yet even with the proof before her of Carl’s artistry and innocence, India feels desolate. She’s on shore, landlocked, and she doesn’t want to be. She wants to be out on the verge the way he is, where the wild ocean starts, and the earth ends.
CARL
India is an unmoving lump under the pink blanket when he rolls himself silently out of bed Sunday morning, the day of their flight to Paris. She’d stayed up late packing and cleaning, and then she stayed up even longer reading her book, which is all about women’s rights a hundred years ago—Carl glanced at the jacket blurb and wondered if her choice is a message to him. It’s eight, earlier than he usually goes out with his camera, and the gray-blue roofs and white walls of every house are bathed in rosy light.
Prowling around the open market in town, he photographs flowers in pails—bunches of marigold and deep-pink zinnias—and catches a bronzed farmer’s wife smiling over giant red-purple onions like torches. Proceeding to the main square, he shoots the stream of women in warm cardigans and head scarves going to nine-o’clock mass in the little church with its decor of sailing ships and anchors, and its rustic wood benches and cold stone floor.
He aims his lens up at the steeple. As he watches, a trapdoor opens, and a small, spry man in bright-blue worker’s pants and jacket appears. There is a ladder leading up from the trapdoor; he climbs it nimbly, takes a cloth from his pocket, and starts polishing the silvery weathervane in the shape of a tuna fish that sits, in lieu of a cross, at the very top.
Carl is clicking away like crazy, as many exposures as he can manage. Forget asking the guy’s permission; there will never be another chance like this.
“Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the door, and here are the people,” says India, turning up by his side and holding out a paper bag that smells rich and sweet.
The little man on the steeple looks down, not dizzy but smiling, blessing any venture. The sky beams. He flourishes his cloth like a flag. 
