Women and Children First by Francine Prose Page A

gone with them, though they always ask. He tells Marianne it’s hard for him to sit still, and she says she understands. But does she? She can sit still, and so can the children, who usually can’t be anywhere without fighting. They must not feel the pressure Vincent does: how little time is left. Marianne loves Vincent’s father; she cries when they talk about him. But the fact is, Marianne’s own father is a hale Lee Marvin type with a twenty-six-year-old wife. Though Marianne and the kids wear hats and long sleeves, they are all deeply tanned—much, much darker than Vincent.
    Vincent can’t tell his father this. His father would hate knowing that, however unintentionally, he’d come between man and wife. Two things he always took seriously: marriage and work. So seriously that even now when, surprisingly, he asks, “How long till school starts?” Vincent can’t groan or roll his eyes or make any of the signs he’d make to another teacher or, he thinks, to any normal high-school principal in the world.
    “Three weeks,” Vincent says.
    Vincent teaches French literature. His specialty is Flaubert, whom he teaches alternate years and will be teaching this fall. Right now he dreads it. Teaching Madame Bovary , he used to feel the thrill he imagined a world-class headwaiter might feel smoothly deboning a very complicated poached fish. Now he wonders how anyone could be thrilled by that. Lately he’s been acutely aware of the skeleton, and of his father’s bones softening. Sometimes the word “bone” crops up in his conversation, inappropriately. A while ago he told Marianne that her dusty, neglected garden would pep up if it just had a bone of rain. Bone of rain?
    What’s more, Flaubert makes Vincent feel doubly pathetic for having become, as he’s finally admitted to himself, infatuated with Laurel. He feels like dopey Emma, pining for dull Leon. He wishes—has been wishing all summer—that he had studied Russian instead so he could be teaching Tolstoy, with his grand passions and grand punishments, or better yet, Chekhov, whose vision was broad enough to see that the slickest little flirtation could at any moment and without warning turn into something mysterious and profound.
    Lately, doing the small, back-to-school chores—caulking windows, getting the car inspected—Vincent has been thinking about Laurel. He knows that she lives alone, in an apartment in Remsenville, and that her family is from Troy. But that’s all. They’ve hardly spoken, though he’s thanked her a hundred times for what she’s doing for his father. Laurel always says, “Oh, God, don’t thank me. It’s nothing.” Then she smiles at him, and Vincent is aware of her tight little body, packed into her white suit. A tomato, he thinks. That’s exactly what Laurel is.
    One form Vincent’s obsession takes is curiosity: How does his mother feel when Laurel crawls all over her husband of forty years? From what Vincent can gather, she’s just grateful. What’s between the three of them now transcends sex and jealousy—it’s just tending to the body. Whenever Vincent eavesdrops on Laurel and Rose, they’re exchanging recipes. Laurel is a serious cook; she talks of making crème brûlée, and Vincent thinks: Who for? But mostly those conversations give him the same sad feeling he gets when he finds himself eye-to-eye with Rose’s spice shelf, with the pint jars of dried homegrown basil and oregano, unopened for months.
    Laurel and Vincent’s mother and father form a kind of triangle so pure that it makes him feel doubly guilty for having sexual fantasies about Laurel. He can imagine digging his fingers in her tight blond sheepdog perm, but not how they got to that point. He can’t picture going to her apartment or to some motel, can’t even see suggesting it.
    So he tells himself it’s not sex he wants. Lately, sex with Marianne has been complicated enough. One week passion is the only thing that matters. Some weeks he