Without being aware of it, Dennison began to rub his neck at the base of his skull. His head was pounding. He wanted to drink. He wanted to close his fingers around a tangerine, strip the peeling, smell the strong smell. His mother used to buy tangerines at Christmas, tangerines from California, tangerines and purple grapes, oranges, avocados--pile them on a platter on the dining table.
He wanted a piston to jam, he wanted the radiator hose to split.
He longed to sleep during the afternoon or all night.
Sleep, he thought, sleep ...
* * *
2
The Ermenonville rain was a cold autumn rain, falling out of a dull sky, slanting in a light wind.
Orville stood beside the grave of his father, weather streaks across the red granite tombstone, across Robert St. Denis, and the dates: 1893-1921. Orville warped his hat to shed the rain and tried to button his makeshift coat closer, broken umbrella hooked over one arm, umbrella and coat from a Paris flea market. He had left Paris early in the morning, on a heaterless bus, a trip of delays and Nazi harassment.
When he started to walk to his dad's grave the sky had been bleak but not threatening. Maybe the sky was trying to flip its calendar, turn it back to another rainy day in June, when Robert had been wounded at Bermicourt, his little Renault tank exploding from a direct hit, on that muddy battlefield of World War I.
Orville was peeved that the rain had caught him; he had wanted to sit on the grass and think of other times in Ermenonville. He noticed other graves in this family plot, those of Aunt Irene, Uncle Mark, his cousin, Marcel ... graves under leafless Lombardies. The rain made him resentful of the place and of death. The ground was spongy; the sod could absorb little more; he kicked at weeds with a quick kick. Through the poplars he observed the Petit Lac, its placid water grey: the small poplar covered island, at one side of the lake, with its carved Rousseau tomb, seemed adrift in the falling rain.