Isn't It Romantic?

Iona said, “He’s French, number one.”

Opal asked, “I forget: Was that a good or bad point?”

Iona smiled. “C’est bon!”

Ursula said, “He’s a hunk.”

Mrs. Christiansen said, “He’ll be a good provider.”

And old Nell said, “He’s always carrying around that duck.”

She was stared at.

Iona said, “You’re thinking of Chester.”

“Oh.”

Opal folded her arms with finality. “I have it on good authority that he’s a philanderer.”

“Oh, he is not,” Iona said.

“You say that like it bothers you,” Ursula said.

“Are we talking about Chester?” Nell asked.

They all shouted, “No!”

Cigars made Natalie’s quarters as gray as a political back room as Dick straddled a Shaker chair he’d spun around and Pierre hunkered on the floored mattress, his head in his hands, his jacket and bow tie off.

With some heroism, the rancher said, “You know, actually a guy like you couldn’t make a better choice for a wife. She’s smart, fun to be with, beautiful, and you can tell in an instant what a good person she is. And it’s as plain as the nose on your face that she loves you . . .”

Pierre jerked his head up, his door-damaged nose heavily bandaged and no longer noble. “She loves you!”

Dick held his cigar in his mouth as he gave that solemn thought. Cigar smoke lengthened toward the ceiling, waving like seaweed, and he said, “She was trying to make you jealous.”

“She’s crazy!”

Skinny Carlo was stooping to tap cigar ash into a plastic cup on the floor when he noticed the Ferragamo loafer Pierre tore on his Wednesday walk into Seldom. “Whose shoe you s’pose this is?”

Pierre turned, struck by her tenderness for him. “She kept it?”

Dick said, “See there?”

In Mrs. Christiansen’s many slept. Ursula was on Iona’s floor, a hand slung over her boom box. In the hallway, the guys with the scuba tanks were hugging them against the main staircase railing. Owen was next to the hallway food table on a dining room chair, balancing precariously on its hind legs as he snored. Carlo was underneath the hallway table, jam dripping onto his cheek. The trucker from Sidney was sitting upright against his pony keg, in his hand Natalie’s gift of a mallard wine decanter, now half-filled with beer.

Even though it was nearing sunrise, Dick was still awake and soldierly on the Shaker chair, paging through the heirloom journal of Bernard LeBoeuf that he’d given Natalie.

The Reverend Picarazzi was face down on the yellow sofa downstairs, his sneakers off, his Volkswagen van’s keys fallen to the floor beside a limp hand.

In the upstairs bathroom Pierre was washing up. Water ran in the sink as he shook back his wild blond hair, straightened his bow tie, gently touched his bandaged nose, and for a long time looked haggardly into the mirror. “Tu es un imbécile,” he said. (You are a fool.) Then he turned off the water and exited the bathroom.

At the far end of the peopled hallway, Natalie was facing him like a gunfighter. She held high Reverend Picarazzi’s Volkswagen keys. “Allons-y,” she said. (Let’s go.)

And Pierre asked, “Ou?” (Where?)

Sunrise in Nebraska. The indigo skies high overhead were lightening to electric blue and magenta just above the inky tree canopy and to a soft mist of rose and gold at the eastern horizon. The old Volkswagen van was stalled on an iron-girdered bridge high above Frenchman’s Creek as two side doors winged open and Natalie and Pierre got out, their clothes off. Sun rays streaked through the woods and the golden sun rose like something wet and molten behind them as she got up onto the bridge frame’s sidewall and then he. They looked down to the sun-painted creek twenty feet below as she counted, “Un, deux, trois,” and they flung themselves naked into the chill water. They gasped when they broke the surface, but soon got used to the morning cold as they swam. She told him, “We have too many hindrances to our marrying.”

“C’est vrai,” he said. “Par exemple . . .”