Attachment (9 page)

The rain showed no sign of easing as Sophie, shivering and empty-handed (her shirt unrecovered), headed for the door. Jean reached out to touch her and made Sophie promise, without offering a specific date, “absolutely and without fail” to come by for a drink before they left.

“You are so kind.” A look of alarm crossed her wan little face. “If you’re sure Mark will not be sorry?”

“Sorry! I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see you again, as will I.” Poor Sophie, she thought, as awkward and fragile as a fallen hatchling. Relieved to be alone, she at last pushed her damp load across the counter, knowing she might as well dump it right into an incinerator. She was unsettled by Sophie de Vilmorin. If something was seriously wrong, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to invite her over. What if she was crazy? No coat, and no shirt either, as the dry cleaner insisted. Had she followed Jean inside just to talk to her, the lost laundry ticket a fabrication? Every now and then she made this kind of mistake, getting drawn into intimate correspondence with a troubled reader… She wanted to rewind now, and take shelter in the earlier, nicer surprise of the afternoon: Larry, with his grace of movement and that steady blue gaze that beamed his entire, focused intelligence straight into you. She could be persuaded she’d only dreamed him, wearing—what was it? A nightgown and crown of weeds.

H
ow could you leave
her alone in London at this vulnerable age?” Phyllis asked, standing erect, fists on hips, clearly refreshed. Her question, possibly prompted by the sight of a couple kissing right on the same bench as her dozing daughter, jolted Jean out of her reverie, and for a moment she thought she was asking about Sophie de Vilmorin. But instead Phyllis was “concerned”—that is, accusatory—about Victoria. “Who’s looking after her?” Jean knew it was useless to say Vic didn’t need looking after, that Victoria had always looked after
them.
She only rallied with the next concern. “How on earth did Victoria become so interested in communism? Do you think maybe it’s a reaction to the kind of work Mark does—contriving to sell people a whole lot of stuff they don’t need?”

“Marxism, not communism,” Jean said, ignoring the attack on Mark, and not bothering to ask how long Phyllis would last without her refrigerator. She’d made the mistake earlier in the day of mentioning a Marxism seminar Vic had been particularly stimulated by, which belatedly set Phyllis off. This was new, the way she could be
launched
at any time by a detail she then would not let go of. Jean knew exactly what her mother was worried about—the scruffy sort of boys Victoria would meet in such courses. Just like Phyllis to have it all ways: Mark’s
capitalism was filthy and unworthy; Vic’s “communism” a desperate fate.

“Victoria is wonderfully attuned to every kind of social injustice, exactly as one should be at nineteen,” Jean said. “She’s switched to anthropology and sociology—she’s really found her subject. Or subjects. I couldn’t be more pleased. And what, may I ask, is wrong with Marxism?”

She couldn’t believe she’d started down this road. She might as well push her mother into the lily pond, if they could ever find it. But there was no stopping now. “The Marxists are great theorists. The analysis is right. It’s just the solution that’s always wrong…” She thought of her searching conversations on the subject with Victoria who, as it happened, had trouble with the same distinctions. “Oh, forget it,” Jean said, petulant. She immediately regretted losing her cool, though her mother’s downcast eyes and compressed lips suggested she thought she’d lost that some time ago. Possibly when she gave up law. All that education and then—nothing. Phyllis couldn’t understand it. Imagine telling her mother she’d just been daydreaming, at extraordinarily detailed length, about her favorite lawyer. Marry Larry—Phyllis’s silent command that long-ago summer. Jean walked and her mother followed, leaving behind the indifferent couple still conjoined at the lips, until they found the lily pond.

Enormous round leaves with raised edges like trays dotted the green surface. Mother and daughter watched bubbles rising to the surface, a frog or a fish, or, Jean liked to think, underwater waiters—and on their trays, proudly delivered up, the glory of the tropics, the great water lily of the Amazon. Jean bent and squinted, to read:
VICTORIA AMAZONICA
.

“Hey!” they said in unison, exchanging a rare look of complicity, and headed for the exit.

That evening, Mark took Phyllis and Jean out for dinner at the Royal Palm, the best hotel on the island, but not, therefore, one devoid of a steel band. Their table was near the moonlit dance floor, and so the three of them sat and watched, Phyllis air-tapping a tiny foot—no question of Mark dancing with either of them. But he’d danced with Giovana, Jean knew (recklessly, gaily), hence the “Ginger.” On many St. Jacques nights the betrayal of
dancing
burned most bitterly of all as she lay rigid with sleeplessness on the cliff edge of her side of the bed, listening to whole congregations of frogs in the puddles outside, chiming and pinging through the dark hours just like a steel band. Why was the dancing such an affront? Because he didn’t dance, and therefore, all these many years, neither had she. Ginger even boasted about sambas and tangos. Come
on.

Jean leapt up from the table—the ladies’ room, she pleaded. In the dim hotel garden she passed a kissing couple, one she’d seen earlier on the dance floor, a beautiful young woman in an asymmetrical blue dress and a much older man. Of course, the Royal Palm was a very expensive place, catering to old French couples who had to get through their money and to pairs like this one pressed up against a palm tree—hardly a consoling sight for Jean. She turned back to the dining terrace. Did Mark take Giovana to fancy hotels? Did he then pretend in the elevator that he didn’t know her? Did he buy her overpriced presents from the lobby shops and tell the salesgirls they were for his wife? Or didn’t people bother with that anymore? Nowadays it seemed more likely that, for a mere lunch break in the Presidential Suite, the salesgirls might themselves become recipients of these shiny trinkets. Anyone could, anyone but a wife.

As a matter of survival, Jean started each day of Phyllis’s visit with a run along the road. She avoided the gym in Toussaint:
too close to the Internet café. But one week into this routine, Jean found herself driving into town. Not trusting her daughter to have the basics, Phyllis had packed a nontravel hairdryer along with a five-pound transformer, but to no avail. She fretted for days under a halo of humidity-generated frizz before Jean took pity on her and brought her in to see Aminata. Later, Mark would pick Phyllis up and take her out on the boat belonging to the American who ran the Bamboo Bar. Jean, desperate for a day off, hadn’t wanted to point out that her hair would of course be reruined.

She headed straight for the Internet café and settled in to look at her readers’ letters and to check the joint account. There was a business e-mail from France for Mark (
À l’attention de M. Hubbard
), a notice from Amazon and another from e-Bay, no word from Victoria. With nothing worth opening, she signed out.

And then, absolutely determined not to open Naughtyboy1, Jean reached for the next best thing: real pornography—the world behind Thing 2.
Research,
Jean told herself, the most reassuring word in the dictionary. She logged on purposefully, beginning at the only site she could come up with, Playboy.com.

Settling in for a good look, Jean was impressed, above all, by the hard work that went into being wanted. It reminded her of sixth-grade preening and posturing and parading in the cafeteria, often by girls who were pretty and already popular but still had this unaccountable
drive,
though she suspected it was the formerly not-so-popular girls who were putting in the real man-hours.

She gravitated to the amateur sites where she supposed she had to place Giovana, among the other would-be actresses and models—along with housewives and students and travel agents and caterers, swimming instructors, accountants, product-safety inspectors, as well, she had no doubt, as lawyers, posing in bad lighting on half-made beds, squeezing breasts together as directed, peeking up from lowered heads or down through hooded eyes, generally looking evil or sedated. Occasionally there was a hairy arm at the edge of the picture, presumably the husband or boyfriend, positioning this woman, his prize pig at the county fair, her flesh oozing like melted cheese over too-tight mail-order bodices. Cheesy piglets. In fact, these images gave her just the uncomfortable feeling she had whenever she saw pictures of animals dressed in clothes or performing in a circus.

None of us has any idea how we look, she thought, and particularly not, for obvious reasons, from behind. The one other thing you could safely say about the amateurs was that they were all optimists. Giovana’s pictures looked more professional than these, Jean noted, confirming her hunch that her correspondent was a working model, probably doing catalogs for “full-size” ladies—with the distant dream of Page Three. Mark met these girls all the time during auditions for new campaigns. She wasn’t even a runner-up, but he’d taken her number, “just in case.” He often worked closely on an ad, in quiet conference with a bevy of stylists and whichever ponytailed ego they were using as a photographer. Sitting here examining the images people put on the Internet all by themselves, for the first time she appreciated those stylists.

Jean ordered a ham sandwich before the owner—he was also the cashier, cook, and cleaner—stepped out, leaving her alone in her corner. And she went on looking, either for the variety she herself now craved, or because she still hadn’t cracked why anyone—Mark, say—should really need a constant supply of fresh material. Hadn’t people done just fine with one battered magazine passed like the town slut from hand to hand? But now they had to contend with a gallery of new girls,
a roster, a harem, a yearbook of new faces,
every day.
And with this relentless variety, why the samey feel? Real difference—along with noninadvertent humor—was elusive. While you can marvel at the supposedly endless range and specialization of human need and human want, Jean thought, in the end the physical possibilities are pretty limited.

Maybe pornography was like the bullfight. The first stage might be mesmerizing, upsetting, with scattered moments of surprising grace, each in turn or all at once. Yet by stage three you’re looking at your watch and wondering if you should stay just because your seats are so good. Jean knew she didn’t have much to go on, but she thought that however predictable or disappointing the experience might be, no one in real life yawned like a hippo halfway through. Why
was
it so boring, and how in the world could it be boring and arousing at the same time? Perhaps because porno couldn’t be tender? Actually, she thought it could, if, like her, you constantly wondered how these girls got themselves into this mess in the first place—a generic sympathy she rarely extended to Giovana.

Still, and these viewings confirmed it, Giovana remained for her a porn star apart. Jean was like a parent at a school play, exclusively interested in this one performer. And not because she had more to offer than a lot of other exhibitionists. No, she thought, only Giovana could shock because she wasn’t an actress. Her faking was for real—and it was all for Mark, a fact that not only continued to hurt Jean, but that also now confused her as she found, disagreeably, unmistakably, neglectedly, that she was
jealous,
and not of Giovana.

Soon she would sign out; first, a last little tour, skipping the gruesome S-and-M stuff, which—and this was at least something—she felt sure wouldn’t have anything to tell her about Mark. So: there
were
specialist sites featuring women who’d retained their pubic hair. And there was a more wide-spread fetish, Jean was glad to see, for “mature” women. But she soon discovered that this didn’t mean older women or experienced women but, rather, desperate women. (She imagined the geriatric journal she subscribed to changing its name accordingly:
Modern Desperation.
) Then she found the MILFs, Moms-I’d-Like-to-Fuck, and though at least these weren’t the producers’ own moms, she was still disappointed that the moms in question were barely out of training bras.

Jean was just thinking that they never accounted for cold in pornography when, with delicious serendipity, she stumbled on a Norwegian product, set in a winter wonderland that hung suggestively with opalescent icicles. A giant blonde dressed only in fur boots was draped over the balcony of a snowcapped chalet, poised to lick an icicle, transported not by hypothermia but rapture, apparently unconcerned that her tongue might get stuck to it. In need of the lifeline of comedy, Jean wondered how she herself might feature. Working at her desk in her birthday suit? Or spinning lettuce at the kitchen sink wearing nothing except flip-flops—thongs for the feet. But she realized she’d merely look like an outtake from some documentary about a German nudist colony: a cure for sex.

She found nothing here to help her with Mark; there was no fit. How could that be, since Giovana was so unmistakably rooted in all this? What did Giovana do that wasn’t done better at Superboobs.com, at Asstastic.com, Farmgirls.com, Golden shower.com, or by the indentured youth at www.lilteens? The answer, Jean realized, was this: Mark’s Giovana-featuring productions were, like all his other work, funny—childish, prankish, but somehow witty, and
light.
Whereas with this stuff, it seemed to Jean, the thread was hatred—always humorless—whatever else it pretended to be about: men determined to con and dupe, to corral and harness. Head’em up and move’em out. The format was as reliable as any Western—the cowboys
using not only the good-hearted whores and sultry señoritas but also the Indians, the horses, the cattle, and sometimes even the faithful little dog.

Jean signed out. She didn’t believe that turning away could restore her to a state of innocence or, for that matter, get rid of Giovana, with whom she had so incongruously and enthusiastically grappled. But at least she’d learned something—that she’d had enough.