Wes looked at Delia in mute appeal. He had no idea how she was going to get out of this. He had no idea how he was going to get out of anything.
Delia wrapped her hands around her own cup. She looked into the fire for a moment, and something in her face went soft and inward, like someone looking at a photograph only she could see.
"It was April," she said. "The end of April, 1974. I was doing a semester abroad, and I was living in a dormitory for foreign girls where the hot water ran out at seven in the morning and the housemother locked the doors at ten. There was no washing machine. You had to take your things down the hill to a laverie on the rue des Martyrs. That's a street in the ninth arrondissement. It runs up the hill toward Montmartre, and if you stand at the bottom and look up you can see the white dome of the Sacré-Cœur at the top, sitting on the roofs like a meringue."
Wes's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth.
"It had rained for nine days," Delia went on. "Everything I owned was damp. I had a yellow raincoat that made me look like a fire hydrant and I'd cut my hair short that winter, very short, like a boy's, because I thought it made me look French. It didn't. It made me look like a fire hydrant with a haircut. And I had these enormous tortoiseshell glasses. I was reading Colette, in French, very slowly, with a dictionary, so that people would think I was sophisticated."
Barbara laughed, delighted.
"So I was sitting there in the laverie with my wet raincoat and my Colette," said Delia, "and the door banged open and this boy came in out of the rain. He had a guitar case and a rucksack and he was soaked to the skin, and he walked straight up to an empty machine and started taking everything out of the rucksack and stuffing it in. Shirts, socks, jeans, everything. And then he stood there for a minute looking at the machine, and then he looked down at himself, and you could see him realize that he was wearing the only clothes he had left that weren't in the washer, and they were wet too."
"Oh, no," said Barbara.
"Oh, yes," said Delia. "So he went into the little toilet in the back, and when he came out he was wearing his raincoat buttoned up to the neck and a pair of red swimming trunks, and bare feet, and he put the rest of his clothes in the machine and sat down on the bench across from me with his guitar case across his knees as if absolutely nothing unusual had happened."