Barge Tiebreaker

I turned fifty-two in March and my youngest moved out in June, which means I spent the summer learning how quiet a three bedroom house can get. The answer is very. I work as a dispatcher for the school bus depot, so my days are full of other people's schedules, and then I come home and there's nothing on the schedule at all.

My sister said I should take a trip. She said it in that tone she uses, the one that means you're becoming a hermit, Allison. So I booked a week in the Loire Valley, alone, and I told everyone at work it was for the wine. It was partly for the wine.

The place I'm staying is a guesthouse outside Amboise, and the owner, a woman named Colette who is maybe sixty and misses nothing, told me on my second night that there was a pub quiz on the barge moored at the dock in town. Every Thursday. She said it like she was doing me a favor, and maybe she was.

"A quiz," I said.

"Trivial pursuit, but French, but also not French. You will see. The man who runs it is an American who married a woman from Tours, and they live on the boat." She shrugged. "The wine is cheap and the chairs do not match."

That last part turned out to be very true.

So Thursday evening I walked down to the dock. The barge is long and low, painted dark green, with a ramp up to the main cabin. Inside it's narrow, ceiling low enough that the taller men keep ducking, and the chairs are all different. Wooden ones, a folding chair, an office chair with one broken wheel. There's a corner piled with what I took at first for junk: a rolled up rug, some crates, a dress form with no head. I found out later it's all props, because the barge also rents itself out as a location for films, which is a thing I did not know barges could do.

I paid my five euros, got a glass of red, and took the last open seat at a table near the middle. There was a man already there, mid forties, short brown hair going gray at the temples, wearing a clean flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had the forearms of a guy who works with his hands.

"Allison," I said, because he was looking at me expectantly.

"Kyle." He shook my hand. "You here for the quiz or just trapped by the crowd?"

"The quiz. You?"

"Same. Fair warning, I take it seriously."

"Good," I said. "So do I."

He laughed, and we got down to it.

The quizmaster is the American, a big cheerful guy named Jed who wears a vest covered in small embroidered fish. He read out questions in both languages, mostly English since the crowd was mixed, and the format was simple. Eight rounds of five questions, write your answers on a card, hand it up between rounds.

The first round was geography, which I was happy about. Capital of Australia. Longest river entirely in Switzerland. Kyle wrote his answers and slid the card to me to check, and I'd written the same things. He raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

Second round was films, which I figured would favor him. It didn't, because half my job is listening to drivers complain, and one of them talks about movies the whole route. The question about which 1960s film won the most Academy Awards, we both had it before Jed finished reading the options.

"You're kind of good at this," Kyle said.

"I'm very good at this," I said. "You're not bad yourself."

Between rounds he ordered us another pitcher without asking, which I appreciated, and asked what I did. I told him I was recently retired, more or less true if you squint, and that I'd taught geography for thirty years. I don't know why I said it. It just came out, and then it was easier to let it stand than to walk it back. He nodded like that explained everything.

"What about you?" I asked. "Carpenter?"

He looked down at his forearms and laughed. "Yeah. Set work, mostly. Local stuff." He said it a little too smooth, like a man reading off a card, but I let it go. Not my business.

Rounds four through seven we tied ourselves in knots of a pleasant kind. History, he took the lead. Science, I took it back. There was a music round where we both got the ABBA question wrong in the same way, writing the same wrong song title, and when the cards came back Jed held ours up and said, "These two tables are cheating or soulmates." The cabin laughed. Kyle bowed in his seat.

By the last round the scoreboard had us dead even, and one other table, three French students who were frighteningly good at English history, one point behind.

Jed read the final question. "In what year did the Erie Canal open?"

Kyle and I both wrote 1825 at the same moment, and I mean the same moment, our pens stopped at the same time. He looked at my card and I looked at his and we both put our pens down.

"1825," Jed confirmed. "Which means we have a tie for first."

The cabin made an approving noise. The French students looked personally offended.

"So," Jed said, climbing onto a crate so he could see over the crowd, "tradition on this boat is a tiebreaker. One question, sudden death, the tied teams go head to head. Or in this case," he pointed his pen at us, "tied teammates. You two are on the same card, so you'll answer together, one answer, you have to agree on it."

"We're not a team," Kyle said. "We just sat at the same table."

"You're a team now. The prize is shared anyway. A bottle of Sancerre and a plastic trophy of a carp, which I want to say has been dropped twice and glued three times."

There was a rustle of interest from the crowd. Somebody near the back said, oh, make them sweat.

"Fine," Kyle said. "One question. Allison and I will confer."

"Confer away." Jed pulled a folded paper from his vest pocket. "Tiebreaker. Arrange in order of length, source to sea, shortest to longest: the River Loire, the River Seine, the River Rhone, and the River Rhine as it runs along the French border."

There was a low groan from the French students, because of course it was rivers, and of course it was their home rivers.

Kyle leaned toward me. "Okay, professor. You're the expert."

I had a sip of wine to buy a second. "Loire is the longest, over a thousand kilometers. That one's easy, it goes last."

"Agreed. Rhine through France is short, it's barely in the country. That goes first."

"Agreed. So it's the Seine and the Rhone in the middle, and that's where it gets ugly."

"Seine's longer," he said. "It has to be. It winds all over, it's not direct at all."

I thought about the map in my head, the one I'd drawn for classes back when I still had classes. "No. I think the Rhone edges it. The Seine cuts across fairly directly once it gets past Paris. The Rhone comes down from the Alps with the Saone added in."

"The Saone counts?"

"It's part of the Rhone system."

"Then I'm with you. Rhone, then Seine." He looked at me. "You're sure?"

"No," I said. "But I'm sure enough."

Kyle turned to Jed. "Rhine, Rhone, Seine, Loire."

Jed looked at his paper for a long moment, which was agonizing, and then he smacked the crate with his palm. "That's it! Correct order. Your winners."

The cabin clapped, the French students argued with each other in fast French, and Jed came over with the bottle of Sancerre and the carp trophy, which did indeed have visible glue lines.

"Congratulations," Jed said. "First time in two years the students have lost on their own rivers."

"We'll take it," Kyle said, and held the trophy up.

Colette's wine was cheap, Jed's was cheaper, and by the time the quiz crowd thinned out it was past eleven. Kyle and I stayed at the table with a jug of water and the prize bottle, which we only sipped at, since technically we'd won it together.

"You know," he said, "I don't actually know anything about you except that you're terrifying with a pen."

"That's most of it," I said. "Divorced, two grown kids, one just flew the nest. Over here proving I can still do a thing."

"Doing a quiz alone in France is a decent proof."

"It's what I had."

He turned his glass on the table. "My kid is eleven and lives with her mother in Lyon, so I get the barge most Thursdays. It's a good crowd."

I noticed then that the low lamp above our table had gone warm and orange, and that the cabin had emptied down to Jed stacking chairs and a couple lingering at the bar. I also noticed I was having a good time, which caught me off guard. It had been a while since a conversation ran that easily.

There was a rolled up rug by our table, the one that kept getting kicked around all night. I reached down to move it out of the walkway and Kyle reached at the same time, and his hand landed on mine on the canvas.

Neither of us pulled back right away.

"Sorry," he said, and didn't sound sorry.

"Don't be," I heard myself say.

Then he leaned in and kissed me, quick and unsure, like he was asking a question with it. The cabin was low ceilinged and orange lit and I kissed him back, which was my answer.

"Well," he said, pulling back an inch.

"Well," I said.

The rug stayed where it was.

We sat there a second longer, both of us pretending the rug was fascinating. Then Kyle moved his hand off mine, slow, like he was setting down something breakable.

"So," he said. "That wasn't in the quiz rules."

"No, it wasn't!"

"Is it going to be a problem?"

"I'm fifty-two, Kyle. I've been divorced for nine years. A kiss isn't a problem, it's a Tuesday."

He laughed at that, a real one, and some of the nervousness went out of his shoulders. He refilled my glass from the Sancerre. His hands were steady doing it, which I noticed more than I probably should have.

"Can I ask you something?" he said. "Thirty years of geography. What made you retire now?"

I had a sip. The truth was I wasn't retired, I dispatched school buses out of a depot that smelled like diesel and burnt coffee, and I'd be back at it in ten days. But I'd said professor two hours ago and it had felt good, and by now correcting it would take a longer story than the wine deserved.

"Honestly? My youngest moved out in June. The house got quiet and I got itchy. So I booked a week here and I'm figuring out the rest as I go."

"That's a good reason."

"What about you? How long have you been doing the, uh, the local work?"

"Couple years now. Before that I was on bigger productions, travel stuff. I got tired of living out of a duffel bag." He rubbed a thumb along the table edge, as if checking it for level. "The thing is, the work's not really about the wood, you know? It's about how a space feels to people standing in it. You change where the light falls and suddenly the whole scene reads different."

I nodded along to that, because it sounded like carpentry philosophy and I didn't want to admit I had no idea what he meant. Light falling? I knew where the sun came up over the depot parking lot and that was the extent of my lighting expertise.

"That's sort of what I figured," I said, keeping it vague. "Hands-on kind of guy. It shows."

He looked at his forearms like he'd forgotten they were there. "Yeah, well. Occupational hazard."

Jed came by with a rag over his shoulder, stacking the last of the mismatched chairs. "You two want the light on or off? I'm closing the cabin in ten."

"Five more minutes," Kyle said, and Jed shrugged and went back to the bar.

"Five more minutes," I repeated. "That sounds like a man with a plan."

"No plan. I'm being honest about that up front. I just like talking to you and I don't want to do it on the ramp."

I could have pointed out that talking was going to get harder in about ten minutes when the lights went off. I didn't. Instead I reached down and picked up the rolled rug, mostly so my hands had a job, and went to tuck it under my chair again.

"That rug has been chasing people all night," I said. "Somebody should put it out of its misery."

"Careful. That might be a magic carpet."

"It's a boat, Kyle. Where's it going to fly?"

"Nowhere. That's what makes it magic. A carpet that knows it's on a barge and stays humble about it."

"That is genuinely the worst joke I've heard since I got off the plane."

"And yet you're smiling."

I was. I set the rug down and it immediately rolled off my knee and thunked against the table leg, which made him laugh again, and I thought, well, this is either going somewhere or it isn't, and either way I was going to enjoy the next five minutes.