French Lessons (15 page)

Patrice wished us
bon
appétit
and moved on, checking the tables, watching the staff,
keeping an eye on the entrance for new arrivals, smiling, smiling. I wondered
how he managed to stay charming seven days a week throughout a long season that
would inevitably include some truly poisonous customers.

“The
secret is,” said Bruno, “that it’s only once a day, because
they only open for lunch.” He grinned at me over the top of his menu.
“Mind you, with a bit of luck, lunch can often go on until six. What are
you going to have? We’d better get the food organized before the
rush.”

Mesclun and mussels and
friture
were ordered;
more wine was poured. We noticed two men out on the beach, each with a cell
phone, staring toward the triple-decker boat. “Bodyguards,” said
Bruno. “They’ve been poking around here for half an hour, making
sure there aren’t any kidnappers hiding in the salad.”

We
watched a speedboat set off from the mother ship, leaving a long white-crusted
curve in the water as it came toward the beach. I could make out a man standing
in the stern, one hand up to his ear. What did bodyguards in these
circumstances do to keep in touch before they all had cell phones—wave
semaphore flags?

I turned to Janine. “Here come the
girls.”

She shook her blond head, making those busy little
clicking noises with the tongue the French love to use when you offer an
opinion they don’t agree with. “You’ll be lucky,” she
said. “With three bodyguards, it’s much more likely to be
Yeltsin’s grandchildren.”

Whoever they were, it was clearly
a highly valuable group of people, and the entire restaurant watched as one of
the bodyguards led his precious charges to a table not far from us. Alas,
despite our hopes of having exotic or celebrated neighbors, they turned out to
be a perfectly normal (even if abnormally rich) American family, complete with
baseball caps. Two of the bodyguards stayed out on the beach to frustrate any
attempts by topless sunbathers to mount a sudden attack. The third took up his
post against the wall behind us, adjusting his black belly pouch as he sat
down. Weapons of one sort or another were concealed in there with the cell
phone, I was sure—a few stun grenades, a baby Uzi—and I
couldn’t help noticing that our table was directly in the line of fire if
things turned nasty and someone made moves of a threatening nature toward the
baseball caps.

I was soon distracted from thoughts of perishing in the
cross fire by a nudge from Janine.
“Voilà. Les mimis
arrivent.”

There were three of them, average age around
twenty, swaying through the tables on the platform-soled shoes that were the
fad of the season. Their tans were of the luminous, well-established
kind—impossible to achieve in the course of a normal vacation—which
require many weeks of judicious oiling and broiling. One had the feeling that
even the crevices between the girls’ toes would be the same dark caramel
color as their long legs, their fashionably concave stomachs, and their jaunty,
high-slung bosoms. They had all made the same gesture toward modesty by draping
flimsy, brightly colored pareos around their hips. But by some extraordinary
mischance, these had become damp on the way to the restaurant, and they clung
like another skin to every cleft and declivity they were supposed to
conceal.

“Did you see the girl at the back?” Bruno asked.
“I swear her sunglasses were bigger than her bra.” He looked toward
the entrance. “I wonder where the wallets are.”

In fact,
the nubile trio were making do with a single companion, an older, leathery man
with a grizzled froth of chest hair escaping from an unbuttoned shirt. He
settled himself among his girls, arranging his lunchtime essentials on the
table—cigarettes, gold lighter, and cell phone—before reaching over
to pinch the cheek of one of the
mimis.

Janine sniffed.
“Their uncle, of course.” It takes a Frenchwoman to recognize these
distant family connections.

By now, there was a continuous flurry of
new arrivals cruising the tables to greet long-lost acquaintances, some of whom
they hadn’t seen since dinner the previous night. The air was loud with
chirrups of joyful surprise—
“Tiens! C’est
toi!
”—
and the moist little smack of social kisses.
The festival of
nanas
was warming up, and it was possible to identify
two distinct generations by their choice of clothing. For the young: vestigial
bikinis (baseball caps optional), shorts trimmed off to just this side of
decency, revealing a hint of the lower curve of the buttock, and T-shirts worn
as dresses. The more mature ladies were almost discreet by comparison: sarongs,
silk shirts, gauzy transparent trousers—in some cases rather too
transparent—profound cleavage, and emphatic jewelry. There were also some
interesting examples of the cosmetic surgeon’s art to be seen, and we
were fortunate in having an expert to instruct us in the finer points.

Janine, although unlifted herself, says she can spot
le lifting
from a distance of twenty paces. Why, only the other night she had been at a
dinner party where three of the guests, one a man, were displaying what she
called “signature lifts.” All three of them, she could tell, had
been performed by the same surgeon.

I wondered if he signed his work.
And if so, where? And how? A maker’s mark under the left breast? A
monogram behind one ear? An actual signature, even, somewhere on the downy
reaches of the upper thigh? With status labels being so popular these days, it
wouldn’t have surprised me. But it’s nothing as crude as that,
apparently; it’s more a question of individual style, not unlike the
distinctive cut of a couturier. Cosmetic surgery has its Diors and Chanels, and
when looking at a suspiciously taut and chiseled jawline or an artfully hoisted
bust, the informed eye can often identify who did what.

With some
women, the urge to tinker with nature turns into the hobby of a lifetime, and
what started as a minor nip and tuck around the eyelids is extended downward,
until very little remains of the original bodywork. Janine told us of one
legendary fixture on the Côte d’Azur each summer (her winters were
spent under the knife and in recovery) who had been lifted so many times and in
so many places that when she smiled, the skin on the backs of her ankles could
be seen to tighten and twitch upward.

“There’s another one
who’s overdone it,” said Janine, nodding toward a woman of a
certain age who had stopped on the way to her table for a chat with some
friends. “Watch when she lifts her arms.” I watched as the woman
raised her arms to tuck a few tendrils of hair behind her ears. “See?
C’est la poitrine fixée.
The breasts don’t move.
They have been anchored like buttons on a waistcoat.”

I
don’t think I ever would have noticed. But once it was pointed out to me,
I found the phenomenon fascinating, and I had to force myself to look away.
“It’s terrible,” I said to Bruno. “I can’t stop
staring.”

He shrugged. “Why do you think she had it done?
Nobody comes here to be ignored. It’s a show. The bodies are here to be
looked at.” And he went on to tell us of an incident that illustrated his
point.

A lovely and amply endowed young woman discovered, in the course
of a particularly animated conversation, that one breast had managed to slip
out of the top of her swimsuit. She could quite easily and unobtrusively have
slipped it back in, but instead, she let out a piercing
“Ooh-la-la!”
This, of course, had the desired effect,
attracting the attention of all those at the neighboring tables, who were then
treated to the sight of the young woman seeming to have an enormous
problem—a
crise de sein—
persuading the playful breast back
into the swimsuit from which it had escaped. One of the gentleman spectators,
sympathetic to her difficulties, was heard to call out, “Waiter! Bring
the lady two large spoons.” He then added a considerate afterthought.
“And be a good fellow—make sure the spoons are warm, will
you?”

On paper, the story seems extremely unlikely. And yet,
surrounded as we were by an exhibition of near nudity, it was easy enough to
imagine that it had happened. Nobody, or at least none of the women, had
dressed to avoid being noticed. Inevitably, there were one or two cases where
optimism had triumphed over age, and the desire to create a striking effect had
been somewhat misjudged. The leopard-print swimsuit worn with a black mesh
miniskirt was one example; a pair of see-through floral-print tights was
another. Both outfits were worn by women long past the bloom of youth, and
looking up at them from a seated position—seeing the involuntary judder
of flesh as they passed—one was aware of that old enemy, gravity. But, as
so often with French women, these two had refused to acknowledge the passage of
time. In their hearts, they were stars of the beach, confident of their eternal
allure, and had dressed accordingly.

It was noticeable that while all
the ladies had made an effort that day, many of their escorts hadn’t
bothered. The men, for the most part, were not a pretty sight. Some of
them—I imagine they were off-duty captains of
industry—wouldn’t have qualified sartorially to get a job as a
plongeur,
or dishwasher, in the kitchen, let alone as a waiter. They
appeared to have slept in their rumpled shorts and scruffy shirts. Their hair
was lank and uncombed. They radiated neglect—but a self-satisfied
neglect, as if to tell the world that they were important enough not to have to
bother with their appearance. They were not a credit to their companions.

The standard improved around three o’clock, with an influx of older
gentlemen and their consorts. There was a faded, salty elegance to their
yachting clothes, a notable and welcome absence of the logos and nautical
trimmings that make many of today’s sailors look as though they’ve
been gift-wrapped. Even more impressive, the new arrivals had come from their
boats all by themselves, without the benefit of bodyguards, and didn’t
seem to possess cell phones. They were a breath of nostalgia, and might almost
have stepped out of one of Sara and Gerald Murphy’s 1920s house parties,
leaving Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway behind to drink and hurl sentences at
each other.

Our waiter, a young man with the foresight to anticipate a
wine crisis, slipped a full bottle into the ice bucket and asked if we might
like some
fraises des bois
after the cheese. We took a break from the
people and allowed ourselves to be distracted by the food.

To be
consistently successful, beach cuisine should be informal, fresh, and
uncomplicated. A sandy kitchen is no place for a chef who likes to drown his
fish in sauces, or to punctuate the course of a meal with a flourish of herbal
sorbets and pastry-wrapped tidbits. These might all be fine in grand
restaurants, but not here. Sitting with your shoes kicked off under the table,
you should be able to taste the sea as well as look at it. Back to nature, even
if the parking lot is stuffed with Maseratis.

Simplicity and freshness
have been part of the formula at Club 55, and they are clearly two of the
reasons for its enduring success. The fish, the vegetables, and the salads are
the way they should be, fresh enough to stand up for themselves without any
assistance from overenthusiastic seasoning. And the
pommes frites
have
the satisfying texture that comes from two immersions in hot oil—the
first to cook the interior, the second for a crisp outer coating. Anyone
looking for a good lunch won’t be disappointed.

A good lunch,
however—mere food—is a bonus, only part of the experience. The meal
over, but with a ferocious jolt of espresso as an excuse to linger, there is
nothing to divert your attention from the
après
-lunch stirrings
that are starting to take place around you.

A middle-aged man wearing
denim and bright red spectacles, with a crash helmet dangling from one hand,
makes his way through the crowd with a slightly anxious expression, as though
his bike has wandered off without him. Two tables from us, a future
nana,
very young, very beautiful, very bored, sits with her parents,
practicing her sultry expression on passing waiters. Dogs no bigger than
handbags are lifted onto laps and given almond biscuits. It’s four
o’clock, and the rest of the world is working, a thought that contributes
to the agreeable air of decadence that has now descended on the
restaurant.

Table-hoppers resume their hopping, but not with the same
nimble eagerness they showed earlier. Made languid by lunch, they saunter over
for guest appearances at other tables, there to perch and have lengthy
discussions about what to do with the remainder of the afternoon. But it seems
that even lotus-eaters have their problems. Eavesdropping reveals that
waterskiing plays havoc with the digestion, that sunbathing is not recommended
for the skin. (This comment sounds odd, coming as it does from a cocoa-colored
mimi
.) Fortunately for those in need of something to fill those long
hours between lunch and dinner, shopping has not so far revealed any serious
health hazards. And Club 55 has thoughtfully provided its own boutique, only a
short stagger away along the beach. We decide to have a look.

In its
own highly relaxed way, the trip of a hundred meters or so from the restaurant
to the boutique is a model of ingenious design and sophisticated retail
psychology. I think it has been based on the assumption that most men detest
shopping for women’s clothes. They don’t have the aptitude for it,
and they are pathetically lacking in stamina. They flag easily, and then they
mope, and finally they drag their unwilling companions away, leaving the
premises only partly ransacked. This unprofitable condition—purchase
interruptus—has been anticipated by the people at Club 55, who have
installed on the way to the boutique two rest areas, where the reluctant but
occasionally useful masculine accessory can take his ease and enjoy the
scenery.