The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

Despite the differences between them—thirty-three years, two billion dollars in stock options, and a set of sparkling veneers—they both make profligate use of each other’s first names when they talk, and this colors their conversations with a refined touch of venomous hypocrisy. If the English language had such niceties, they would use the familiar “you” singular, rather than the more formal “you” plural. Like a middle-class man claiming to be friends with his gardener, Prior allows himself to believe in this fictitious friendship, but Joanna isn’t fooled at all. In Prior’s fixed grin she can read the unspeakable Southern characteristics that hover about him, the signs and symbolic nuances that pervade all interracial exchanges; she recognizes the spontaneous gesture that allows a rich white woman with perfect hair to give her black chauffeur her most radiant smile, a devastatingly affected smile that reveals her imperious conviction that this descendant of a slave is beneath her, the poisoned smile that hasn’t moved an inch since Gone with the Wind, the same smile that, all through her childhood, Joanna saw appear on the powdered faces of her seamstress mother’s clients.