The Gutters of Grenoble

Ethan stared at his rival, so confident with those did-nothing-to-earn-them good looks, dressed in that stupid Venetian boat-shirt, always with the bon mot, his mouth never needing to consult his brain. He watched Carolyn savor every word as if Yves was the most interesting person she’d ever met. Oh, close your mouth, girl!

Six students sat at the table next to the café’s front window that looked out onto one of Grenoble’s many open plazas. Late on a summer Saturday, the plaza was empty except for the occasional couple handholding their way home from a party. Those sitting at the café’s outside tables had been moved inside at eleven as required.

The friction of rubbing languages warmed the café’s interior. The scene’s signature was constant motion — hands gesticulated, waiters delivered; in the kitchen, chefs pressed citrons, sliced jamon, and drew long, soft baguettes from the warming ovens; bus boys cleared and wiped tables for the next coterie.

Ethan knew tonight was his last chance. First, he had to get Carolyn away from Yves. If he was halfway successful, this summer could top the best of his eighteen years — living and studying in France, meeting students from all over Europe, talking until cafés closed, hitching rides to the Riviera in the back of produce trucks that loaded up at four a.m. every Thursday in the Centre Commercial Grand'Palace.

Ethan thought to himself that he could play Yves’s game: inundate Carolyn with insight, drown her in dogma, show her life as she’d never seen life before, get her to drop her jaw and not close it for two minutes. He could, but then he’d be just like Yves, and hate himself.

His ghostly image reflected in the flat orange glare of the streetlights against the window, a stoic still life etched in glass, surrounded by animated university students conversing in five languages — none of them French — a visual metaphor of how he felt: an observer, not a participant. Tonight marked the sixth straight evening he'd vowed to make his move with Carolyn. Hell, whom was he kidding? He’d never work up the courage. Ethan finished his beer, leaned back in his chair, and soaked up a few final moments of warmth before he headed for his unheated flat.

Ethan looked over at Carolyn, twirling her hair as she peered out into the plaza, disconnected from the table conversation. There were no classes tomorrow, so everyone would hang until M. Gloubert shuttered the café. But Ethan was tired, defeated, depressed. He mouthed some excuse and slid his chair from the table. Carolyn matched his move, standing when he did.

“Ethan, it’s so dark out. Would you be a love and walk home via my place?" Ethan considered her request.

"Please, Sir Knight, protect this fair maiden from evil foreigners.” She spoke the last phrase with her hand straight up, fingertips touching the bottom of her chin, head tipped slightly left. This was the first time a girl with breasts had done the demure damsel on him. What choice did he have?

The couple walked out into a mid-August evening, one of those breeze-free nights in which the air seemed to disappear, like floating in a sensory deprivation tank, unable to locate the water/air line.

Ethan and Carolyn turned the corner onto a side street with no name that had little ambient light and was, simply put, spooky. Ethan had seen this street before, in half the mystery movies ever filmed, filled with strange-shaped shadows, each a two-dimensional manifestation of something evil.

Their steps quickened and fell in synch as they left the protective glare of the lighted plaza. They looked like children lock stepping through a playground. Carolyn shivered, hooked her arm inside Ethan’s, and squeezed closer — as, he imagined, she might if they were dancing at her party in Virginia, planned for the last week in August.

She’ll dance almost exclusively with him. They’ll sit outside in the warm, jasmine-filled southern night, using talk as an excuse to look into each other’s eyes. Their fingers will touch; their lips will follow. They’ll walk hand-in-hand down the gravel path from the great house to the cottage by the pond, enter and light a candle. He’ll slowly unbutton her blouse and lay her down on the day bed.

After, they will look at each other and know they’ll marry the next summer, know he’ll find a good job and she’ll soon be a mother, know they’ll live in the country and do all the yard work themselves, know he’ll let her sleep late Sundays while he feeds the kids —

Her voice dissolved his reverie. “Awfully quiet tonight.” Why hadn’t he acted on his feelings before now, before it was almost time to leave the magic of Grenoble and that handful of freckles peppered over her nose and sprinkled across her cheeks? He was such a pushover for freckles.

“I was thinking of attacking you,” he said

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Would if I thought you could handle it.”

“I can handle anything you’ve got, cowboy.” A soft punch to his arm punctuated her acceptance of the challenge, continuing the tease they had going all summer, the dance of the boastful virgins.

He started. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m tons of fun.”

“Tons?”

“More than you can handle,” she said, hands perched on hips.

“I could handle you with one hand.”

“I could handle you and you wouldn’t even know you were being handled.”

Ethan looked around the corner and down Rue de Gausse, lined with four-story stucco buildings silhouetted in the glow of gothic streetlamps posted every twenty meters. On the right, a wide cobblestone driveway disappeared into a darkened courtyard. Perfect!

“This way.” Ethan grabbed Carolyn’s hand and pulled her across the street. She feigned resistance but followed him through an arch and into a cobblestone courtyard.

Ethan could imagine this mansion, now twenty apartments, as it must have looked a hundred-and-fifty years ago, home to a well-to-do family, with carriages and ponies parked here instead of Citroens and Peugeots, with servants scuttling across the stones in their daily drama.

The cobblestones were large, maybe a third of a meter square, worn uneven from centuries of hosting hooves and well-laden wooden conveyances.

A movie unfolded in Ethan’s mind, preceding his actions by scant seconds. He veered sharply left, twisting Carolyn’s hand so she was forced to turn and face him. Unafraid, eager, she took in his eyes as his other arm went around her waist and drew her forward, inward. His lips targeted hers, the air saturated with his testosterone and her anticipation.

She leaned toward him — thighs, waists, chests, inches from contact. Then her foot caught the edge of a cobblestone. She tripped, fell forward, and forced him against the building wall.

Up to this point, up to this very point, everything had been just like the movie in his mind. Then reality left the Rialto.

Ethan felt a hard object press against his spine. A three-story drainpipe split into four sections and cascaded onto the cobblestone courtyard, pulling with it a long line of gutters from the roof, making more noise than line-dancing skeletons on Halloween.

The debacle unfolded in ultra-slow motion; time paused patiently, wringing out embarrassment and dismay from each micro-moment before moving on to the next.

CLATTER! All the bells in hell overflowed the empty courtyard. A third-floor window lit up. CRASH! BANG! Metal hitting stone, metal hitting metal. A light appeared on the second floor; a third light followed, then four, five, six as awakened tenants opened windows and tossed French epithets into the dark.

Carolyn laughed, louder than the falling drainpipe. Not a girlish giggle, rather a deep-throated, double-me-over belly laugh — and she couldn’t stop. The infection spread, surrounded him, entwined them, and he joined her, bonded forever in the ludicrous scene.

Ethan whispered to her through the continuing clatter. They doubled back to the street, running hand in hand, their laughter echoing off stonewalls and bouncing forward for blocks.

Safely outside the building, they stopped and faced each other, to see if there was anything to salvage from the imagined embrace they’d left behind.

"I'm more coordinated on the dance floor. Honest"

"You'd have to be." The sound came from a quicksand smile that captured him and reeled him in like a lake trout on the line. As Ethan drew closer, Carolyn’s mouth opened. She kissed him, her tongue moist and moving. Seconds later, the belly laughter, unfinished and building pressure, resurfaced — a whale's waterspout, Yellowstone's Old Faithful, the fabled “force of mythic proportions” drove away all other options.

They might have been much more than summer friends, but that opportunity now lay in metal shards. A silken thread had snapped, collapsing the cobweb of a future that was now not to be. Someone else would claim Carolyn’s heart, someone else would unbutton her blouse and gently lay her on the day bed, someone else would let her sleep late Sundays while he fed the kids, someone else would …

As she doubled over in laughter, Carolyn’s wallet slipped from her purse; credit cards, money, and photos decorated the granite curbstone.

Ethan bent down to pick up the pieces and spotted a photo-strip, the kind where you get in a little booth and make funny faces — four photos for a franc. The pictures were of Carolyn and Yves kissing, not in fun and not pretend.

Ethan imagined Carolyn months later, sitting in a college dorm room with three or four other girls in flannel pajamas, and telling them the story of the “Gutters of Grenoble.” He wondered if the story would cause hot cocoa to come squirting out their noses.

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