The Attempt (20 page)

14

“L
OUISE'S BRAIN IS A CONSTANT SOURCE
of amazement to me.” Louise clapped shut Andrei's diary. No, she didn't want to read it right now.

She and Mimi had spent the night with friends. The doctors gave Mimi a shot of sedatives, so she slept peacefully, face turned to the wall. Louise sat for a long time out on the balcony, smoking, but then she too took a pill. She had a busy day ahead of her. She and Mimi had to clean up the house and arrange the funeral. And after the funeral she would have to take Mimi to Saint-Tropez. She couldn't be left alone right now.

She blamed herself for not coming sooner. She shouldn't have listened to Andrei. It might not have happened if Mimi hadn't been alone with him.

How could he do that to her? What could he have been thinking?

The next morning she went into the house first, leaving Mimi to sit in the yard. The kitchen looked like it always did, nothing out of the ordinary. At first glance nothing was out of place in the bedroom either, just a rumpled bed covered with a blanket. She decided to leave the blanket on and pack up the mattress, together with the sheet and covers, tie the whole thing up, and carry it outside.

Mimi sat quietly beneath the lemon tree. When Louise
called out to ask if she could find or borrow a ball of twine, she got up and went to the landlords'.

Mimi came back with the twine and the landlady, who insisted on helping them. She said she had wanted to clean the apartment herself, before they came back, but she hadn't been sure if Mimi would mind. Also, the police had been there. When they left, she had wiped up the blood on the floor and covered the bed with a blanket.

“Oh, my dear sweet girl,” the landlady cried, giving Mimi a hug. The same Mimi she had gossiped about all over town, asking why on earth a girl would want to live with a man old enough to be her father.

“What are you going to do, now that you're on your own?”

Mimi broke free of her arms with a look of alarm on her face. She sensed she was in danger but didn't quite understand how.

The landlady helped Louise tie up the mattress and covers and then called her husband, who dragged in a cart and, with a lot of grunting and panting, loaded up the package and hauled it uphill to the village dump.

Before she left, the landlady asked Louise for the last two months' rent and reimbursement for the ruined mattress and bedding. She said she realized it wasn't the right time, but she hoped Louise would understand. Mimi might disappear, leaving her debts unpaid.

Once the owner had left, Mimi stretched out on the sofa in the kitchen and closed her eyes. Louise, with her permission, opened the drawer of Andrei's desk and found a journal lying on top. She knew that notebook well. It was the only one Andrei had used for the last ten years. Mechanically, she opened it up and flipped through to the last page: “Louise's
brain is a constant source of amazement to me.” She put down the journal and began going through his papers. She knew his will was in there somewhere. He himself had shown her the yellow envelope.

The envelope contained two letters, one for Mimi, one for Louise. In his letter to Mimi, Andrei apologized for not leaving any money behind and gave her a list of friends she could turn to for help. He also begged her to reconcile with her family. In his letter to Louise, he called her “my girl” and wrote that she needed to carry on her work for both of them, that she mustn't succumb to feelings of futility, but think of the future. He thanked her for her friendship, the years of life they had shared together, and all the help she had given him. “You're a good sailor, Louise. You could sail a ship out of any storm. Please help Mimi. You're the only she's got. Your A.” The letter also contained instructions for the funeral. Andrei asked to be cremated and for them to spread his ashes wherever they saw fit.

In the afternoon they returned to the hospital. Louise had to choose Andrei's clothes for the coffin, since Mimi was still too upset. She took the best she could find: a cambric shirt, a silk tie, a light summer suit, a pair of new shoes. Andrei always had enjoyed dressing nicely.

They still had to decide what to do with the body. The nearest crematorium was in Marseille. The transport and cremation would come to eight thousand francs. Eight thousand!

Louise gasped. She could put the money together, but it seemed like a sin to throw so much money away on something that was ultimately so unimportant. Surely Andrei would have agreed. A burial would come out cheaper, and whether he was
burned or rotted away, he wouldn't return from the darkness he had gone into of his own will.

She called a few friends who lived nearby—people she and Andrei had come to know over the years while living in the south of France. An English couple, two Americans. On Tuesday, at ten o'clock in the morning, they buried Andrei at the English cemetery in Nice. The sky shone blue over the tips of the cypress trees, as blue as the sea in the bay below. Louise spoke over the open grave about faith in a free and rational future for humanity, as well as about her personal loss.

15

I
N
1931,
AFTER ANOTHER UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT
at being friends, Louise had written to Mimi Stein:

I would like to take your hand and lead you to a bigger world, more beautiful and more free than any you can imagine. But you refuse. Not because you lack intelligence. But because you cling to the values with which you were raised.

You are wrong, Mimi. I have nothing against your living with Andrei. I have long been accustomed to my lovers leaving me for other women. Often these same women have come to me for advice and I have become their confidante.

What distanced you from me, and from Andrei's friends for good, was your limited, petit bourgeois world, your jealousy of anything you thought might take Andrei away from you.

She wrote the letter after Mimi's last visit to Saint-Tropez, when during dinner someone had whispered in Mimi's ear,
“Ah, vous avez un ménage à trois, alors?”
Mimi had turned red in the face and fled from the table.

Andrei later teased her that it was just a joke. After all, everyone knew he and Louise hadn't slept together in thirty years. That was the last time Mimi went to Saint-Tropez with him. She preferred to stay behind in Saint-Laurent, even if it meant having to contend with the amorous advances of the
landlord and fend off the gendarmes who were assigned to keep an eye on the anarchist household and always managed to peek in at just the right moment.

“Alone again?” one of them started in. “If I had a young woman like you, I wouldn't leave her alone at night.”

“The gentleman must be quite sure of himself,” said the other.

“Or just the opposite.” The first one laughed, trying to slip his arm around Mimi's shoulders. “Maybe he's thinking, I'll give my young friend some freedom. What the eyes don't see, the heart won't grieve.”

“True, let her enjoy herself with the younger men.”

“Communists share everything, don't they?” the first one said, ogling Mimi's breasts.

Mimi spent her nights alone crying, howling like an abandoned dog. But it was still better than going to Saint-Tropez, enduring Louise's comments and watching all those women smile and pout their lips at Andrei, hoping for a kiss.

When Mimi followed Andrei to France, she was twenty-four years old and in love for the first time. She wanted to get married and have a child. Andrei's friends frightened her, especially the women. They talked loudly about sex, drank too much wine, and smoked, and there was a bottomless sadness in their eyes. The only one she liked was Nestor's wife. She had wanted to like Louise at first. She even took her flowers the first time they went to visit.

Louise coldly kissed her on both cheeks. “I don't feel old enough yet for young women to be bringing me flowers,” she said. “You can wait till I'm in my grave for that.”

Andrei just stood there, pretending not to hear.

On the way home, Mimi cried. The two of them had a quarrel. One of the first, at that time still restrained, of the arguments that were to continue over the course of the next ten years, with their tears, threats, and nighttime walkouts.

Andrei was touched by Mimi's wholehearted devotion. As her first lover, he felt responsible. Louise's freedom wasn't for him. He was afraid of loneliness. But the arguments were draining. He would storm out of the house at night, slamming the door as he shouted he was never coming back. Then he would walk until he reached the coast, where the thundering waves crested and broke against the rocky outcrops. Finally, he could take a breath, calm down, straighten things out in his head. But the emptiness he felt, the overwhelming meaninglessness, was so upsetting, he ended up going straight back home. Anything was better than being alone. Even the stifling darkness. Even the bed soaked with the tears of the human being huddled beside him, a human being who loved him, maybe selfishly and childishly, but who could complain about that? Did anyone have the right to dictate how they should be loved?

A
FTER
A
NDREI'S DEATH
, L
OUISE LET
M
IMI
move in with her in Saint-Tropez. They lasted two weeks together. As the loss sunk in, Mimi spent most of her time splayed, weeping, on the colorful blanket in Andrei's room, or squatting on the doorstep, staring mutely down at the bay's sparkling surface.

The south coast was deserted. Nancy had left Jack and moved to Venice. She no longer kept in touch with Louise. But when word reached her of Andrei's death, she sent a note
of condolence, with a P.S.: “It goes without saying that the house is yours. Do with it as you see fit.”

Louise didn't like the thought of giving up the only property she had ever had, but it no longer made sense to stay on the Côte d'Azur. She sold the villa and left for Spain. She was sorry the civil war hadn't broken out sooner, convinced that if Andrei had seen it, he wouldn't have killed himself. He would have overcome the pain and marshaled all his strength, as he had once before, long ago, when the crackdown on anarchists in San Francisco had shaken him out of his lethargy after he got out of prison.

From Spain she went to London, and after that to Canada, where she ended up staying. When the weather was nice, she could see the shores of America on the far side of Lake Ontario. It was almost like being home.

M
lMI REFUSED TO GO BACK TO HER PARENTS
. She stayed another few months in Saint-Laurent, organizing Andrei's estate. Then she moved to Paris, where she found a position as a secretary with a Viennese marble dealer who had fled Hitler.

But her stomach troubles continued to get worse. The doctor recommended surgery, and she eventually underwent several operations. The last year of her life she spent in a hospital. She died two years after Andrei, at the age of thirty-six.