The Fontaine family home is both a physical contrast to the Walker family home and an introduction to Joe Fontaine’s world: its instruments are displayed like works of art, while his bedroom gathers music and everyday clutter into a vivid counterpoint. In the house and outside its open front door, Lennie Walker and Joe share the musical and personal closeness that makes the place more than a backdrop.

Setting and Contrast

Lennie’s first impressions establish the house by comparison. The Walker family home is low-ceilinged, dark-wooded, and crowded with rugs, paintings, and signs of everyday disorder; the Fontaine family home seems to rise into the sky. Its many windows look over wind-moving fields, dark woods sheltering the river, and the river winding into the distance. The contrast makes the Fontaine home feel expansive and open beside Lennie’s familiar, enclosed surroundings.

That impression is complicated by the first sounds inside. A telephone rings without Joe seeming to notice, while a distant answering machine plays a girl’s voice that briefly reminds Lennie of Rachel Brazile before she decides it is not Rachel. The house is spacious and composed, but it is not silent or entirely removed from the lives and calls reaching it.

Instruments and Joe’s Room

Guitars of different colors, shapes, and sizes hang on the walls, appearing almost animated. Joe explains that his father makes instruments, including mandolins, lutes, and dulcimers. The display gives the house a distinct musical identity: these are not merely possessions tucked away for use, but visible presences that shape the rooms Lennie explores.

Joe’s bedroom overturns the orderliness of that display. Lennie finds instruments she cannot identify among CDs, music magazines, books in French and English, posters of unfamiliar French bands, comic books, notebooks, sheet music, stereo equipment, and broken-open amplifiers. Blue marbles, rubber animals, playing cards, knee-high piles of clothes, dishes, bottles, and glasses add to the crowded accumulation. A small John Lennon poster above the desk gives Lennie a point of recognition amid the unfamiliar objects; the room’s jumble suggests a different kind of musical abundance from the guitars arranged throughout the rest of the house.

Music and Late-Night Intimacy

The house also becomes a place where Lennie and Joe try out the musical connection between his guitar and her clarinet. Their first attempts are awkward: they stumble over one another, look up embarrassed, and begin again. Gradually they find a shared rhythm, listening closely and meeting each other’s eyes when they lose their way. Joe praises the lonely quality of Lennie’s tone, though she does not feel lonely in that moment and instead feels that Bailey is listening.

Later, Lennie and Joe sit on the grass with wine Joe has taken from his father, eating cheese and a baguette while a French singer’s music plays through the open front door into the warm night. Lennie thinks of herself as finally being in France with Joe and smiles; she also notes that she has never drunk wine before. The scene gathers the home’s recurring features—the instruments, the French music, and the open threshold—into an intimate setting where shared music and ordinary food make Lennie feel close to Joe.