I give it one more turnover and there’s an embarrassed sniggle from the motor, a flirting response, a hobbling hopscotch skipping of almost going, then nothing.
I wait two full minutes in the dark, exercising my pagan excuse for prayer; creating appropriate expletives against fate, humbling myself with beseechments and benedictions to the engine. I promise I’ll give it an oil change a thousand kilometers early; I’ll give it winter oil, maybe even have the transmission repaired.
No, that doesn’t make sense, it’d cost more than the value of the car. I suppress for a moment the treacherous, wonderful, obvious truth; I’m going to junk this car and get another. In fact, I’m already courting several possibilities.
Get thee from me, Satan!
I clear my mind. I twist the key as if it’s a July day and this is a new car. It turns over, starts, roars, before I even hear the starter motor! What’s the secret? I sit there in the dark, glowing, floating, freezing, listening, as all four cylinders begin to synchronize, mutually warming each other. I pull back the throttle and climb out to swing open the huge grange doors before I asphyxiate myself with carbon monoxide. It’d probably go down as just another unexpected Christmas suicide.
‘None of us noticed anything, but then he was always secretive. It was hard getting close to him, even his wife was very reserved. Philosophers are a weird bunch. You know, he wasn’t even sure the world was real. Can you imagine that?’
Now I leave the car running, my effort at Christmas suicide self-aborted. I dash back through our cellar to the still warm room. I make the bed, unplug the transformer for our American electric blanket, quickly brush my teeth, wash up; listening, always listening, to hear if the car’s still running. I clean out the fireplace ashes, body warm; set up twists of paper, faggots, thin twigs, dry branches, all overlaid carefully with two split logs for an easy fire start when we get back. I’m listening; the car’s still running.
I leave matches by the fire, turn the butane heater down to minimum; butane bottles cost seventy-eight francs each and it means a five-mile drive into Chatin to buy them. I check wallet, checkbook, car papers. I pack expansion wrench, screwdriver, pliers. I pick up a coal scoop in case I get stuck in the snow. I’ll shovel gravel under my wheels from the piles along the road, if I can find gravel under snow in the dark.
I’m ready as I’ll ever be. I leave the single light on over our table. I hate leaving; it all looks, feels, so cozy, just right for a long winter’s day before a fire, sipping frozen vodka, thinking, pondering, speculating along my usual well-worn tracks; what’s it all about? Why am I here? How can one actually know anything? What would make Lor happy? I think I know, but am I really ready? Boy, the heart and the mind are hard to compromise. Just what the hell is love? How much of it is respect, admiration, how much passion? How can I hold it together, or keep it apart? One or the other.
Down in the grange, my car’s still purring. There’s even some interior heat. I push in both choke and throttle. At the entrance to our grange, outside the door, just under snow, it’s deep frozen mud. In reverse, I power my way out and onto the road, frontwheel-drive spinning. I brake skiddingly, stop just before crashing into Madame Le Moine’s snow-bedecked blackberry patch, where the old stable used to be.
I get out, and, from inside, close the large interlocking grange doors, pull down and engage a huge hasp; there’s a small hobbit kind of hatchway cut in the left door for mere humans. I go out, pull the latch to, and step out softly, trying, ineffectively, to avoid cracking through the new snow and thin ice into thick mud.
The first two kilometers of my journey will be the test. Since we are at the bottom of a bowl into which three streams flow forming the mill pond, there is no way out but up, rather steeply up. In each direction there’s an unrelenting slope of at least two kilometers. Summer jogging here calls for a reserve of foolhardy courage.
I’m back in the car, auto heater more or less keeping ahead of steam condensation, snow and ice on the windshield slowly melting. I lean out and brush the side-view mirror; look at my watch. It’s seven ten. They’ll arrive two hours from now; I’m obviously postponing the obvious. I force the clutch, get into unsynchronized first, then start grinding up the steep hill to Vauchot.
I make it fine up the first tough pitch, the part where I enjoy making my brave downhill finishing sprint, summers. I stay in first, rounding the banked curve, past where Monsieur Pinson has a gate to his lower field. The back end of my car tends to veer left and right samba-style.
I slalom up the hill, knowing if I stop I’ll never make it. Finally, I arrive at the top in Vauchot. It should be really exciting going downhill.
I glide-slide through Vauchot.
Now there’s a long curving downgrade twisting toward the town of Corbeau. Going up this hill on a motorcycle is where our Mike would practice speed-shifting while slanting his machine at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. That desert trip of Mike’s begins to seem like a quiet, sane and peaceful way to spend Christmas.
I stay in first gear. The car slips twice but holds and I’m on the straight stretch to Corbeau. I shift up to second for the first time. The next ten kilometers are twisting ascending and descending curves but none worse than the five I’ve just negotiated. I begin to hope I shall actually make it to Nevers; never-never land of the Bourgogne.
The first light is beginning to glow gray through the falling white when I intersect Route Nationale 978 toward Nevers. I see that, on this well-traveled road, the snow has been squeezed to slush on the sides so the dark road surface is visible. I ease out carefully, speed-shift from second to fourth, past that nonexistent third, switch my lights to low, fight down the window and wipe off my side-view mirror. The rear window is fogged from the steam of anxiety.
The French have a bumper sticker saying AU VOLANT LA VUE C’EST LA VIE. I was never sure if it meant ‘While stealing, visibility can mean your life’, or ‘While driving (actually steering) vision is life’, This gives some idea of my high-quality French. Even though I did my master’s thesis on Albert Camus’ concept of ‘cherish your illusions’, my French is weak, to say the least.
I wrestle my window up again to half-mast and wipe mist from the windshield. The snow seems to be slowing down some. I sneak a peek at my watch in the rising light. I have almost an hour left and only forty-five kilometers to go.
It’s five till nine when I roll through Nevers. The medieval stone buildings, crisscrossed with half-timber wooden beams, lean over narrow cobbled roads. I work my way to the train station; park and check the station clock. I’m fifteen minutes early, my watch is five minutes fast.
I go into the station restaurant; order a black coffee and a croissant at the bar. I pay and sit down at a table. There’s clatter all around me as a French boys’ school group, wearing school ties and school jackets, struggles with skis and ski equipment, preparing to board the train from which I hope to see Loretta and Ben descend.
The smell of my coffee, the first sip, sends me on a search for the restaurant toilet. I find it, a shared sink and mirror with separate bisex johns. It’s a sitter not a squatter. There’s no light and I assume it’s one of those French logique affairs where the light comes on when you turn the latch. There is the right kind of latch but when I turn it tight nothing happens. I reopen the door to locate: seat, toilet paper, flusher (chain), paper (individual-sheet, slippery). I grab a handful of the paper, get all my angles, vectors and locations set, then prepare to shut the door.
A woman in a fur coat comes out from the other john and is fluffing her well-cut hair. I wonder if there’s a light in that one, consider dashing in behind her, instead, elect for gallantry, maybe modesty, close my door and settle down in the dark.
When I’m finished, after some dark fumbling with buttons, hooks, snaps, I grope for the latch. I’m wearing long johns over regular underwear, then black ski pants,