1.16 Breakfast at Le Gardon
1.16.1 Scenes Disturbing and Painful
Hôtel-Restaurant Le Gardon
About 7 am Thursday 3 April 1987
The following morning Alenby awoke out of a vaguely disturbing dream of a woman in black--le Gardon's enigmatic propriétaire, he realized as consciousness returned. At dinner in the small, sparsely occupied dining room, the woman had focused her attention almost exclusively on Ada, greeted her with a forced smile—more like an angry grimace, actually—and alternately pushed forward aggressively and withdrew in apparent diffidence, as if burning to put a question yet terrified of the response. In the end Ada had put her off with a promise of a short interview the following morning.
Yet despite her gauche manner, the woman in black was damnably attractive, Alenby thought, with that slightly hunched yet otherwise shapely figure--no, not so much shapely as strong and flexible--and a shoulder-length mane of blue-black hair that swung heavily from side to side with the undulations of her hips. Most intriguing, her person gave off a pronounced aroma of sauce hollandaise....
He half raised himself out of bed. By the gray morning light he recognized the second-floor bedroom of le Gardon; the wallpaper, the little rattan chair, the armoire in which he had stored his clothes overnight, the dressing table, and on it his wallet, the key to the Mercedes, the by now familiar pump, a selection of everyday medications. But—where was Ada?
Ada, he realized, was his sole guardian in an alien universe. Without her, how long would he last before being threatened, exposed, written about in the tabloids, "looked up to" as a U-person?
He flopped back in the bed and pulled up the covers in a spasm of anxiety. Another, even uglier thought had struck him. Without Ada, how long would he last before being hunted down by PROFATPOL, found to be a user?
A little later, calmer after his first Paxitin of the day, he realized that he ought to be more accommodating to Ada’s wishes; to submit more willingly to the inflationary action of the pump, to listen more attentively to her ramblings on the subject of the administrative post she wanted, the Czarinaship as she called it....
For the moment, though, he felt no need to worry about Ada. There were no signs she contemplated abandoning him. Her personal items--her green fedora, the ultra-thin dress she'd worn at dinner--were still where she'd dropped them in a customary access of lust. The depression in the mattress next to him still gave off the cinnamon-toasty scent of her body, as did the top part of his chardonnay and pinot-noir striped silk pajamas, which she’d insisted on wearing because otherwise her shoulders got cold, and which now lay where she had dropped it on her pillow.
Fully awake now, he got up and put on his woolen plaid dressing gown. He opened the window and breathed the damp outside air, listened for a moment to the rustle and murmur of the Vienne.
A morning fog, typical of the place and season, still lay thick along the river and had barely begun to lift along its near bank. A Citroën hycell inched across the bridge behind low-set amber headlights. No point in leaving for an hour or two, he thought as he closed the window. No point in staying, either. No point in anything at all in the petit pas-pas of this accursed universe....
Yesterday, for example--utterly uneventful, a day wasted. Breakfast must be more than an exotic coffee, however excellent, to register as an event. Lunch must be more than a belly-full of greenery, dinner more than bean soup....
No denying it, though--the presentation of the soup was attractive. Black and white components casually swirled in a yin-yang pattern, that was a sign of an artist at work. And on the palate, acid balance nicely adjusted as well....
He shaved and dressed with his customary care. Into his jacket pocket he slid a silk handkerchief diffusely striped in pale shades of orange and red. Then he took out the handkerchief and put it back again, being sure to set the stripes carelessly askew.
After a last glance in the mirror, he checked his supply of LiftiorpH to keep his heartburn banked for the time being, and Crudulax to ensure safe, natural bowel regularity. Then he headed downstairs to the bar in search of whatever apology for petit déjeuner might be on offer, and Ada.
He found her sitting at a little table set for two, engrossed in what appeared to to him to be an exceedingly light and thin computer monitor. "A digital reader," she explained, "loaded with tabloids--all sorts of interesting U-trivia. Listen to this about a cult thing, BBQ it's called for some reason. 'Bizarre ritual--killing animals or buying dead ones at special cult sites--cutting up corpses, burning and eating them. Present day throwbacks to prehistoric cave dwellers, say docs and shrinks.' Isn't that fascinating?"
Alenby agreed that it was fascinating and asked if she had slept well.
"No, she said, "I did not sleep at all well because of that roaring noise you made."
"Excuse me, not roaring. You mean, I believe, snoring."
"Whatever it was, it kept me awake all night. Oh, I must have slept a little, because I had a hellish nightmare—flames and wavering shadows and singed flesh, just as in the tabloid—but your snoring went on and on. I’ve never heard such a racket!"
Alenby allowed he should have slept on his side. "But I felt cramped," he explained. "I’m not used to such a small bed. Now if we’d had a queen-sized—"
"But Alenby, we already had jack size, which is two steps bigger! Queen size is the smallest, you see, because the queen is the most respected royal personage. King is next, and Jack—ah, here is Madame with our petit déjeuner."
In contrast to her antic manner of the previous evening, the restaurateuse approached with a controlled step. She set out a bowls of fruit salad—papaya, mango and star-fruit—and little cups of what Alenby identified approvingly as Colombian Excelso. "Bon appétit, Your Lowness, Excellency," said she with a graceful élévation. She took the standard two paces back and turned about, tossing her massy black hair to one side with a haughty gesture, and returned to a task at the sink behind the bar: taking up newly-washed goblets one by one, inspecting them and sliding them on to an overhead rack.
Impressive, Alenby thought idly as he followed her deft movements out of the corner of his eye. Poised, dégagé, all that. She caught his eye, and his pulse took a sudden hop. She had a heap of firepower under the hood. Personality, du chien as you say in French. But then she spoiled the moment by curling her lips lasciviously in the French equivalent of Hello, Big Guy--a gaucherie to which he could find no polite response save to pretend he hadn't noticed it. But even as he followed that cowardly formula, he felt a piercing identification with the woman of his dream. Meanwhile, flushing deeply, she turned away, hung up her towel and stalked out of the room.
***
"Several of my other lovers slept on their backs," Ada was saying at a measured pace as if she had not witnessed that little scene. She unwrapped a packet containing three thin sugar wafers, dropped one wafer into her cup, stirred the coffee and tasted it carefully. Satisfied, she laid the remaining two wafers aside.
"But not one of them," she continued pensively, "not one—what’s that word again?—snored. Not one of them snored like that." She picked up several sugar packets, and started arranging them in different patterns.
Alenby gratefully registered the word "other;" so he qualified as a lover, despite his reliance on the pump.
He pictured Ada’s other lovers: small, sinewy, libidinous no doubt, and active as the bubbles of freshly-popped Clairette de Die before dropping into silent slumber. Could impotence, like snoring, be so rare in u as to lack even a name? Could it be just a diet thing?
He permitted himself a moment of optimism. Already, after only a day of the lean u-diet as backup to his usual meds, he was feeling lighter, less tight about the waist. More relaxed, too, on the whole. Paxitin was clearly getting some traction on his anxiety problems, and here was something new--a light, unblocked sort of feeling as if one were not constipated. Apparently his persistence with Crudulax was paying off at last. Next, perhaps, his snoring meds would kick in. And after that, the hitherto ineffective virility boosters? He smiled at the prospect of becoming a lover, a spontaneously virile lover, a lover in the full meaning of the word. A lover to Ada. Perhaps a lover to—but that was looking too far ahead. He put the idea out of mind, but left a way open for it to get back in again.
***
Ada meanwhile continued to toy with the sugar packets. She brightened. "Oh look, they’re puzzle pieces. They have different parts of a scene on them, and you can assemble them and—hmm, it’s something to do with prehistoric cave dwellers. Based on highly reputable, peer-reviewed research, according to the fine print. Quite an easy puzzle, actually…there, it’s done!"
Her elation was short lived, however. After she put the last piece in place, she studied the completed scene with evident unease. "Alenby," she whispered, "it’s a scene from my nightmare! Those reddish things those cavemen are depicted as eating—I thought it was a salad or something like that, but all of a sudden it came to me, it’s—it’s bloody animal parts!"
Alenby studied the puzzle. Ada was right. It wasn’t a salad, at least not a correctly composed one. It would have had to contain far too much radicchio and rouge d’hiver, a multiply-repeated gesture of ruddy notes throwing the whole concept out of balance.
"You’re quite right, Ada. It’s animal parts. Meat."
She lowered her voice. "Alenby, when U-men eat...meat, do they pick it up and tear at it with their teeth as these savages are depicted as doing? And do women cower in a dark corner of the cave, or do they also eat meat?"
"Members of the weaker sex order meat dishes as often as gentlemen do," Alenby replied, "particularly if a fine red Bordeaux, a 1975 Grand Cru for instance, happens to figure among the wines offered. And in answer to your first question, U-people normally use a knife and fork. However, in the case of certain meats, it is perfectly correct to pick it up and, as you say, tear at it with one’s teeth."
"Ugh, that sounds uncivilized! Are you sure the practice you describe is perfectly acceptable?"
"Certainly. Frogs’ legs, for instance, as prepared in the traditional manner of Grandpère Bach of Chaussin, in the Jura. Chez Bach, delightful place, opposite the now-disused railroad station...."
"Frogs' legs, hmm. So it’s okay, then?"
"Oh, quite. With a finger bowl. A finger bowl, which is to say a miniature wash basin scaled to accommodate the fingers, is offered in such cases to deal with any accumulations of grease that one has not succeeded in licking off those appendages."
"A finger bowl," Ada repeated thoughtfully. "And U-fast food like this Big Mac you told me about—I suppose that the Big Mac is eaten out of hand and so is also served with a finger bowl? By the way, what is a Big Mac, exactly?"
Alenby’s acquaintance with the Big Mac was limited to promotional material he’d happened across in a cardiologist’s waiting room, but he answered as best he could: "In essence, it’s meat of some sort, hachée--ground, you know, converted by a combination of mechanical and thermal treatments into two brown squat cylinders glistening with superficial fat, which are intercalated between grease-absorbent pads that not only render the finger bowl superfluous, but are considered to be themselves edible."
"How elegant! Evidently the eating of meat in U is at a far remove from the uncouth hasty gobbling indulged in by our remote ancestors."
"Oh, quite," Alenby agreed. So saying, in a habitual gesture anticipating a rush of saliva, he drew his red-shaded silk handkerchief out of his upper outer front jacket pocket. He was about to carry it to his lips, when Ada interrupted: "That’s a beautiful handkerchief. Such attractive shades of pale orange and red."
Alenby acknowledged the compliment with a slight inclination. "Pale orange and red, precisely matching the colors revealed upon cutting into a sirloin steak cooked, à point, over the glowing embers of a wood fire, which is to say until a thin dark-brown crunchy crust forms and is bedewed with beads of savory juices."
"Oh, it’s all so agreeably decadent! Meat juices, cooked blood really—" Ada flashed her vee-shaped smile. Spittle oozed from under her slightly protruding upper incisors and gleamed on her red lower lip. She leaned across the table and gestured towards the handkerchief. "May I borrow it?"
Alenby’s hesitation, born of a deeply ingrained aversion to lipstick stains, was brief. Inattentive as he was to the world outside gastronomy and haberdashery, he was nevertheless becoming aware of one thing: Ada, perhaps u-women had no use for such putative attractiveness enhancers as cosmetics. The pale red of the lips presently pressed to the matching stripe of the handkerchief was perfectly natural.
Ada folded Alenby’s handkerchief—carelessly, the way he liked it folded—and stuffed it back in the pocket of his jacket. "Now, my bull gnu," she purred, "the fog is lifting and it nearly time to leave for Chezeley. You must pack. I will see Madame Picpoul to settle our account. And to grant the colloquy she requested so insistently."
***
The colloquy took much longer than expected, and Ada emerged in a sober mood.
In the red Mercedes, as they were about to leave le Gardon's parking area, she clutched Alenby's arm: "Wait," she said. "I must tell you, I have to tell you what Olympe--Madame Picpoul--told me in confidence. They're on to us--PROFATPOL, I mean. They've set up a roadblock. We've got to avoid it."
PROFATPOL. The very word gave Alenby an unsafe feeling. Reacting quickly, he popped a Paxitin.
"It's on D18," Ada continued, "that's the road that runs along the river--the natural way to go to Chezelet. To get on D18, you turn a right after the bridge. So don't turn right! Play it safe--go straight at the bridge, okay?"
"Okay," he agreed readily enough. Of course she was right. No use being half safe.
He rolled the hycell out of the parking and on to the bridge....