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.