The Last Life (11 page)

"I suppose. Yeah, okay."

"I can't really face the hotel, but I feel as though—well, we've got so much to talk about. My grandfather, you know—it's crazy."

"Yeah."

"What's it like over there?"

"You know. Look, Sagesse, I'm really busy right now. Lunch, yeah? I'll call you back, okay?"

Which she did not. I eventually learned—from Thibaud, of all people—that Marie-Jo was to be a prosecution witness at my grandfather's trial. And so she and her mother had decided it would be best if she didn't speak to me about the event, if she didn't speak to me at all.

To describe it now, it seems a small matter. But to my fourteen-year-old self it was a first loss, an unimagined betrayal, a radical skewing of my everyday world. Marie-Jo had not, after all, moved away; she had merely moved away from me. I knew that her diversions described an arc only minutely different from before; but that infinitesimal alteration separated our steps, one from another, with brutal absoluteness. I missed the glow of her skin, her laugh, her lewd asides, the musty smell of the rug in her bedroom. I would have publicly denounced my grandfather—so quiet, with his sedatives, reading and praying in the room down the hall, deprived of his view of the sea, quieter than Etienne, as quiet as an absence—to get my life, and Marie-Jo, back. But between them, he (simply by being there) and she (simply by not) had chosen my side for me.

For a long time I was, literally, hungry for her company: I could feel my longing burning calories, hollowing out my stomach and scratching at its walls. But such deprivation has its limits: we are not made for constant and precipitate pain, just as we cannot sustain surprise or even disappointment. Being human, we cicatrise. And Marie-Jo would come to seem as distant, as unknowable as anyone. When, much later, she sought to mend our friendship, I could muster no emotion for her. This was an abiding lesson in my fickleness, in my aloneness. In time I would come to see it merely as a question of refining the movement from one state to another, of rendering it more efficient, less painful.

Thibaud, it turned out, was my unlikely savior. He telephoned that same afternoon, after lunch, his the only hand, or voice, extended to me from our former circle. Our grappling beneath the pool united us, perhaps, in some way bigger than itself. Or maybe, for him, it was simply the force of an adolescent boy's lust.

Luncheons in my parents' house had suddenly become infinitely more dreadful than those I had loathed at the hotel. My grandmother and my mother shovelled silently, casting occasional meaningful glances at the ceiling; beyond which, somewhere, my grandfather consumed his meal from a tray; and my plumply fatuous Tante Marie, her second and third chins quivering, her cheeks winter-rosy, offered comments worse than silence between her bites. "Etienne is such a big boy now," she might say, smiling falsely at my emaciated, heavy-headed brother. "How tall—or long—or whatever, is he? You do keep track, I imagine?" Or: "I spoke to the boys"—her rapacious sons, Marc, Jean-Paul and Pierre, three, five and six years my junior, who had remained at home with their father—"and Jean-Paul is very concerned that I should tell you about his firefly collection, Maman. He adds to it daily. He wanted to send you a jarful, but I told him the bugs would probably die in the mail."

"Yes. They would." My grandmother was at her stiffest with her daughter. Marie was my grandfather's favorite, but my grandmother preferred Alexandre.

Above, behind, throughout the meal, my grandfather hovered, mentioned only in undertones or after a stammer or a nervous pause. Except from Marie who, bless her, behaved as though nothing were amiss and regularly included "Papa" in her random prattle. My own father did not partake in these lunches: all bluster, he might have made them more tolerable. Whereas "the incident" weighed on everyone else, so that our very movements seemed a trick of time-lapse photography, it infused my father with a zeal, almost an exuberance, that whirled his solid form through the days and nights, in meetings, surveying and patrolling, into town and out again, his sleek BMW scattering the gravel of our driveway often only when the rest of us were in bed. He had come into his inheritance—who knew for how long, but still—and his gestures, always large, were at last purposefully so. In an obscure and unspoken part of himself, he was grateful, for the first time, to his own father. Gunshot or no, it was about time.

This enthusiasm was not, however, infectious, and had to be masked from the clutch of grieving womenfolk, who saw only the LaBasse reputation in jeopardy and the glory of the Bellevue under threat, not to mention the spectre of my grandfather, who refused to rise above his humiliation. My grandmother had to bully him, in those early days, into dressing and shaving. After he fired the gun he simply stopped, the way animals in freezing water will shut down long before they die, their vital signs a faint and intermittent murmur that can be nurtured and reinvigorated, or else allowed to lapse altogether.

None of us—not even my formerly rebellious mother—would let my grandfather simply lapse. Deprived of his defining presence, we could not imagine our lives, which had been but atoms spinning around his. Ours was a vortex of complex emotion, to be sure, but even if one's energies are devoted entirely to hatred, it is a tragedy to lose their object. And not even my mother hated him purely.

In that first week, each luncheon, each afternoon, proved slower and more agonizing than the last, and I seized upon Thibaud's phone call in spite of my confusion about our tryst, and about him. He thought we might meet at the hotel, and I declined, suggesting instead a café in town behind the central post office, next to the porn cinema, where nobody I knew would ever go.

"Like criminals on the lam?" he joked.

"Just like that," I said. "You don't know what it's been like."

We met at four o'clock, when the city was still calm, the workers in their offices and the summer people at the beach. In the café, among the few furtive single men and tarty, thickening women, Thibaud shone, his black curls lustrous. He seemed, like my father, healthier and more cheerful for our trouble.

"Your grandfather's really done it this time," he said, bending a tiny espresso spoon around his thumb. "This one won't go away."

"I guess it won't. Glad you think it's so funny."

"What's it like at your house, then?"

I told him, as succinctly as I could because I didn't want to talk—or think—about it. "My brother finds it hilarious," I said. "Like you. He's taken it better than anyone else."

"It is hilarious, in a way."

"Not for Cécile. Not for the hotel. Or my grandfather."

"He'll go to jail, you think?"

I shrugged. "But you tell me. I'm the one in quarantine. What are people saying? Do you all still hang out? Did your parents say anything?"

"My mother was appalled, of course. She thought we should leave at once. But then she felt a bit better when I told her I hadn't been there."

"Hah."

"Yeah, well, it suddenly made it someone else's problem. And she loves her room and her routine here, and her masseuse, and all that, and I guess my dad won her over. Said he didn't know if we could find another place at such short notice, and certainly not for the price, so maybe we should just go home if she felt that strongly about it. And she found she didn't. She even called Cécile 'that rude girl whose mother cheats at bridge.' So we're staying the next ten days."

"Your dad didn't care?"

"He said he thought it was about time. Couldn't understand why we hadn't been stopped from hogging the pool before now. That was the failure of management, he said, and this was just the inevitable result. He went on about how many times we've spoiled his afternoon swim, and said, you know, as a joke, that he might've done the same if he'd ever had a gun handy. He was pretty funny about it. He doesn't really give a shit, to be honest."

"Thank God somebody doesn't."

"But he did ask about you. He said it must be hard on you."

"How does he even know I exist? Did you tell him about..."

"No, no. But he's not a fool."

"And everybody else?"

"Half the people are gone. Boom. Just like that. The hotel's weirdly quiet, except that your dad is all over the place the whole time, pressing flesh, generating goodwill. It's bizarre."

"You're telling me. But Thierry, say, or Marie-Jo—what about them?"

"It's strange, you know. I think they're all still meeting somewhere, but they don't invite me. Guess I'm not part of the target practice club. I ran into Thierry yesterday, and he has this bandage on his arm—it's nothing, really—and he was friendly enough, but secretive, or something. He said he couldn't swim till his arm healed, and he can't play tennis, and that he's taking advantage of the time to do his summer school work. But he was in a hurry to go somewhere, and when I said 'Will you be at the tree tonight?' he looked at me like I was crazy. I haven't seen the others from your crowd, the year-rounders. The rest of us, the guests who are left, we all swim like adults, on our own, now, and then head off to our separate corners. It's a different place. I don't mind it so much. They're mostly jerks anyway. But I wanted to see you."

"And Marie-Jo?"

"Not a trace. But I get the feeling she's militant, from what Thierry said."

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Something about a petition. She wants to keep your grandfather from running the hotel."

"But he's not running the hotel. I doubt he'll ever run it again. And he's probably going to prison anyhow. That's crazy."

"Keeps her busy. I wouldn't worry about it. You haven't spoken to her?"

"She basically hung up on me. I haven't seen anybody since that night."

"Just me, eh?"

I tried to look happy about it. "About that night?" I said.

Thibaud frowned. "Yeah?"

"Nothing."

"Want to walk? This place is creepy."

We ambled down to the port, through the dusty streets. He put his arm around me, tucking his fingers into the waistband of my jeans, rumpling the bottom of my T-shirt until he found my skin, which he stroked, slightly, as we walked. A feat of coordination, like patting his head and rubbing his belly at the same time. I was too hot, pressed up against him, and I found each step, forcibly in unison, an effort, but I didn't withdraw. I couldn't afford to.

On the quay, the ferries and tour boats were disgorging and absorbing people in great numbers: old women with sun hats and straw baskets, families in shorts and sunglasses, a few businesspeople looking creased and harried, heading home early. The boats at their moorings clacked in the swell, and gulls strutted the pavement, pausing to poke their beaks at crumbs and abandoned/rites. It was breezy, and the wind was just another noise in the hubbub, fluttering the racks of T-shirts and the tiny animal-shaped buoys on sale outside the stores. Some marines paraded by in uniform. The garçons in the cafés leaned at identical angles, their arms folded, and eyed the proceedings with a jaded air. The children's carousel at the end of the pier threw out a fearful tinkling melody as it rolled its few tiny clients around in gentle circles—on horseback, in cars, or in miniature airplanes that rose and descended and rose again, a whirring foot or two, in time to the music—while the parents, mothers mostly, looked on and waved. The sky was a very bright blue, and the oily port water a murky black, edged with foam and garbage.

We strolled, like other summer couples, just as we had that evening on the beach not long before. Then I had marvelled to think how like them we were; now I was beset by our difference. I was the grandchild of an almost-assassin. If not all, then most of these people around us had seen his picture in the paper and read about his crime. I imagined them turning and pointing at me, calling out, chasing me, the great, disparate crowd united in animus. But when I turned to squint at Thibaud, he was smiling, his teeth bare to the sun, and he bent and kissed me on the lips as if I were anyone else.

For ten days I pretended, with Thibaud, that I was anyone else Not a child of the LaBasse family, not trapped in the whispering unease of my parents' house. My parents, it seemed, were too busy trying to keep our lives from capsizing altogether to want to worry about me. My grandmother and my aunt—who stayed only five days before returning to her bug-enthralled offspring and their tedious father in Geneva—spent all their time attempting to coax my grandfather out of his gloom, and even my brother was shunted to the sidelines, fully into the care of his nurse, which he did not like at all: he raised his voice in protest, waking in the night to wail, mournful, vulpine, in the room next to mine, where I held him and sang to him until he went back to sleep, with little sucking noises and his hair damp on his forehead.

Thibaud and I sat in the all but abandoned air-conditioned cinemas in the afternoons, inhaling the stale air, clasping our clammy hands and kissing; or we took the ferry across the bay and walked along the shore, pretending we were in another country. One day we rented a little sailboat at the beach, and set off to cruise the coast's inlets and bays, but our boat took on water almost faster than I could bail it, and early on I caught a powerful swipe in the back of the head from the unruly boom, and our picnic sandwiches foundered and disintegrated in the salt water at our feet. On the way home the wind came up, and we found ourselves in ever increasing intimacy with a stationary aircraft carrier, whose gunwales leaked urinous waterfalls and whose sailors beetled about, tiny, upon its decks. Thibaud was amused, and I terrified, until finally I renounced my frantic bailing and huddled in the stern of our little craft to cry while he guided us—not without difficulty—back to the marina.

Once on the beach, I gave in entirely to my misery, at which Thibaud registered initially astonishment and then vague embarrassment and irritation.

"We're home safe," he said, "it was funny. I'm starving, though. Aren't you?"

"But it's everything. Just everything. This day, it's like everything else. It's all bad."