FOR THEIR own sordid entertainment, their parents had named each of them Eve. However, the sisters outsmarted, distinguishing themselves with pronunciations that corresponded to their charms, or lack thereof. The youngest, a winsome girl, who had summoned her best friends - her sisters - to the Parisian Bistro de la Fleur Noire, earmarked hers with an initially faux French accent, Ehve, the product of a pretension predating the family's relocation to France from the States. The others: sweet Evie; spinsterish E; mercurial Eeahve.
Despite their dissimilarities and lengthy tenure in France, they all maintained certain American penchants. The most unrelenting of these, stronger than not only their proclivity for bathing suit tops seaside, but even artificial cheese product flavor, was their faith in the institution of marriage.
Evie sat amongst her sisters, inhaling in pantomime from an unlit cigarette while burping her infant Churchill, as she considered Ehve's predicament.
“For more than two weeks, I've been checking the mailbox incessantly, hoping to receive a letter from California. Something seems terribly wrong, but I don't know if I should call him,” Ehve said, sidestepping the elusive nature of a reminder her sisters and she normally shared. “He told me he was a famous director. However, I just found out exactly what kind of films he makes. I'm so stupid!”
Her eyes circulated around the bistro Evie had suggested, one she suddenly hated, with its claustrophobic wallpaper of black flowers that seemed to lift ominously from their background. She squinted and the atmosphere acquired an eerie, graphic quality.
“Oh, a movie-maker! How romantic!” Evie said. “How can you blame yourself for falling for someone like that?” She pressed her hand against her sister's dampening cheek.
Was she serious? the other three worried.
E frowned to disguise her jealousy-fueled jubilance.
Eeahve listlessly folded, then unfolded her arms.
“Does he star in his own movies, too?” Evie said.
“Oh, God! I didn't even consider that possibility!” said Ehve as her eyes begged E and Eeahve to quiet Evie down.
“What?” Evie said, feeling excluded, as she regularly did.
“Nothing,” said Ehve to her favorite sibling, “except I was just thinking, you're the only one of us who has managed to happily balance love out.”
“That's because I don't wonder what could've or might happen.” Evie eyed her up and down. “Why are you so bloated?”
“I'm fine, just the heat and all. It's not like I'm pregnant or anything,” Ehve said, to the chagrin of E, who, nevertheless, said, “Well, that's a relief, isn't it?”
“It's really not worth such glumness. Just call him,” said Evie as Churchill loudly burped, fascinating childless E as all of Evie's unspectacular children did.
“I'm young, but soon I'll be getting older, and the only permanence I've experienced in love is its very indifference to permanence,” said Ehve. “I think it's not completely up to luck, you know, if a person is alone. I have to pursue it. But with him?”
Older she will be, privately concurred E, and I am older than she.
“Why do you like him?” said Eeahve.
“Well, strange things. Like how his feet feel around mine when, you know - ”
“Nobody gets to write their life out the way they wish!” E said, slamming her hand on the table. But then, noticing Ehve's face clenching, “Although, maybe you should e-mail him.”
“Get real. What you thought would work out obviously isn't going to,” said Eeahve, newly divorced. “Don't call him.”
“Well, what a beautiful group of ladies,” a blobby American tourist remarked, shamelessly staring at E while his spindly wife grimaced.
The peculiar couple experienced, as the sisters sensed, a stalwart bond, though the sisters could not conjecture the reason, namely, that they suffered from equally absurd limits of speech. The husband could speak only in pleasantries, for when he ventured to say ill, he unwittingly screamed, while his wife could utter only negative statements, for when she tried to deem something as good, her voice went mute, leaving her with just prehensile grunting. Nonetheless, their division secured their seemingly cursed union, as they shared a snarky humor regarding how frequently their remarks were the same.
“You're so uncivilized!” she said as he eyed E's bosom.
“I know, I am very uncivilized,” he said contentedly.
She laughed, and tried to say she adored him, which sounded like “Uoouh, uuoh.”
“For God's sakes, shut up!” he said.
The sisters spun disparaging looks as he glanced at his wife remorsefully.
The couple sat and ordered. The Eves posed like right angles in a strained circle around the table, the inky walls dribbling over them its morbid flower leitmotif, while a candle cast through a matching shade shadows like auguries. A bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape arrived, compliments, the waiter snarled, of the pair they had just snubbed. The four sisters filled their wine glasses. Three sipped. All watched their compatriots dining as if it were a sport.
Seeing such companionship, both Ehve and E further wallowed.
“Sis, I'm going to drink your glass of wine, if you're not,” E said. She grabbed then gulped. A calm settled over her. Her terrible luck with men wasn't her poor sister's fault, she contemplated. “You know, you shouldn't think that it's foolish to love him.”
Ehve leaned in closer. “He's a director of Adult Films. Everyone we know will judge him. And me, if we live in the States like he had proposed.”
Her sisters jerked up. There was a tense silence.
“But pornographers are judged by others only because they possess the generosity of spirit not to judge others themselves,” E said finally, straining to hide, along with her sisters, her shock.
“I guess, but he hasn't even called,” Ehve said. “Maybe he's just apathetic.”
As if to chime in, Churchill relieved himself, and the stench accosted the American husband so brutally that he coughed. Or, at least, so the sisters believed, amused, until his skin started turning blue.
Ehve leapt over and pulled against his midriff sharply. Out came a putty-like chunk of le lapin that plummeted onto E's shoulder. The stranger ogled her with a revived conviction, and, blushing, she indulged in envisioning that his arrogance resembled that of the director who had careened off with Ehve's heart; pictured that in a dimly lit room, his eyes might glimmer like the shifty, all-accepting eyes of a pornographer.
Or of fate.
