The Last Life (12 page)

I hid my head between my knees, sand and salt all over me, and shed salty, sandy tears for a while, waiting for his arm to snake around my shoulders as it so often did, proprietorial, sweaty, not entirely pleasant, and yet I wanted it. But the touch didn't come, and when I looked up, blinking in the afternoon light, Thibaud was gone.

I stopped crying at once, partly out of anger, and partly because I knew that nothing looked more foolish than a girl alone in a public place in broad daylight with her face a sodden mash. I didn't know what to do, and didn't have the energy to move, and although I was furious, it also seemed logical that Thibaud, too, would leave me, unsightly, Medusa-haired pariah that I was—until he reappeared along the shore, shining as ever, his maw crammed with a
chantilly-
slathered waffle and another, wrapped in wax paper, for me.

Thibaud was stealthy and committed, and I compliant, and we managed to arrange several evening meetings, too, in the shadow of the fort between the hotel and my house, an hour or two snatched from my distracted family on flimsy pretexts. We climbed the fences into villa gardens whose owners were away, and lay among the trees there, nightly reentwined, I ever vigilant that my jeans not come down off my waist, no matter how often his fingers reached inside to prise me open. It was always I who eventually grabbed Thibaud's wrist and turned the luminous face of his watch skywards, only to gasp, with exaggerated horror, at the hour. He could have prolonged these stolen embraces forever. I, too, noticed that in the rhythm of our kissing the time seemed to trickle away at unearthly speed. I never asked myself if I enjoyed it: it was my gift to Thibaud, the price I paid for his company. But I did enjoy it. I craved it even as it frightened and sometimes bored me, just as I craved the oppressive pressure of his arm around me; and each night when we parted, it felt like falling, like falling away from myself and back into a place where I didn't exist. Walking home, I counted the days left to us, and as they dwindled, I became aware of a sensation like vertigo, a sound in my head like the whipping wind. I did not know what I would do when he left, with five blank weeks of summer still ahead.

In those days, tinged as they were with desperation, etched as precisely as a picture in a frame because we knew—I knew—that they would so soon come to an end, that it was a story, not real life; in those days, I pushed my family to the edge of my sight, so they were but blurry images wafting inconclusively there; and I imagined that they did the same to me. But they were parents, and I a child, and although their outward selves had made no sign, they were all along plotting a path for me.

On the Sunday before Thibaud's departure, my family, having forgone them the week before, returned to its rituals of religious devotion: we went to mass. My mother even convinced my father to go, and we took my grandmother with us. My grandfather remained in his room in our house, to watch the service on his private television (his only connection, at that time, with the world), and he suffered Etienne to be wheeled in alongside him.

I dreaded the outing: the brave smiles, the guarded curiosity and malice of the other parishioners, the tender concern of the priest, who clasped my grandmother's hand between his fleshy palms and kissed her forehead, whispering, "The Lord tests us. He tests our faith."

I, who usually enjoyed church—a year or two before, for a whole winter, I had seriously considered that I might have a vocation—hated every second of that Sunday. It did not worry me that God—whom I imagined as benevolent—knew of our troubles, or that the priest—whom I disliked for his gluey baldness—did also; but that he spoke of them there, on the church steps, that everyone else around us knew (yes, there was Thierry, at the front, skipping out the side door so he wouldn't have to speak to me), that they discussed us over their three-course lunches or on the telephone ("They all came but
him.
Well, he wouldn't dare, would he?"), that they scrutinized us slyly from under their sympathy-creased brows ("Haughty as ever, the old bitch. You'd think this'd bring her down a peg or two—but no!"). My mother hated it too, I could tell: her face was fixed in a mask of terror that looked, alas, more like disgust. Her forehead and chin perspired through the makeup, and she daubed at them repeatedly with a lace-edged hanky.

We got through it, though, and we escaped (at so leisurely and sociable a pace that no one would have guessed it was an escape) to the air-conditioned isolation of my father's car.

"Wasn't so bad, was it?" cajoled my father, reaching across to pat his mother's hand.

"Awful," hissed my mother, under her breath, to me in the back seat.

"Next week I'll make Jacques come," my grandmother said. "We have to put this behind us. He must be seen. He's not a criminal, after all."

Isn't he? my look asked my mother. She frowned.

"Only if Papa is ready," said my father with his newfound authority, backing the car smoothly up the lane and pausing to nod and smile at a couple from the church. "It'll all be fine. Things will settle down."

"It's your father I'm concerned about. Not them," my grandmother sneered. "Those people—with a few exceptions—have never done a thing for us. He has to realize that they don't matter."

"Surely he knows that," said my mother, brushing invisible smut from her blouse. "What's troubling him isn't other people, surely. It's that he's done something he never thought he could do. It's facing himself that's the problem. Surely?"

Neither my grandmother nor my father said anything for a moment, and then my father said, as if it were a joke, "But that's what all of life is, isn't it? Being tripped up by unpleasant truths? Just got to get back on the horse."

"He was not in the wrong," my grandmother interjected. "He was very tired. Overworked. That's all."

"Lunch?" said my father.

Over that meal—we travelled twenty miles inland to a castellated village on a hill, where the restaurant tables, beneath their crimson parasols, were occupied by foreigners: we had had enough of the familiar for a while—my parents divulged their plan for me.

"There are still five weeks before school starts," my father said, toying with his cutlery.

"I know."

"And our lives are ... disrupted. Yours too. You don't play with your friends, just now—"

"We don't 'play.' I'm not five years old."

"You don't go to the hotel," said my father, looking at me. "You trail around town. And that fellow you're so fond of is leaving soon."

"Thank God," said my mother. My grandmother, her mouth a moue of distaste, focussed on her melon.

"What I mean is—" My mother was struggling, suddenly, to keep me on their side. "You're too young for—for attachments. I know that this has been hard on you, but—"

"No harder than for you."

"What your mother is trying to say is that we thought it might be good for you to get away for a while. Till things settle down."

I grimaced. "Summer camp, Maman? Are you going to do what you've always wanted and send me to summer camp?"

"How about the States?" said my father. "Wouldn't that be fun?"

"Would it?"

"I spoke to your Aunt Eleanor," said my mother, "and she suggested it, actually."

"Aunt Eleanor? Jesus."

"Sagesse." (My father.)

"Sorry. It's just ... it's not her, so much. It's Becky and Rachel, that's all."

"You haven't seen them in five years." (My mother.)

"I've seen them enough to know I don't like them."

"People change," said my mother.

"Quite," said my grandmother, who hadn't thus far spoken. "Your parents think it would be good for you. For a few weeks. And then life will be back to normal, and everything will be fine." She sliced decisively at a wedge of cantaloupe, speared it along with some prosciutto, and ingested the mouthful with her unique precision. And it seemed there was no more to be said.

I could have struggled. Like my father when barely older than I, with his own father, in Algiers, I could have planted myself and roared and said no. But I did not see the point. I was being offered an escape. And when I returned—they promised—everything would be back to normal.

The morning Thibaud was to leave, we met at the fort and walked around its lower ramparts. We could hear the recruits drilling in formation, behind us, up above. We leaned against the rib-high stone wall and looked out at the sea. The fateful aircraft carrier—American, of course—still idled at the entrance to the harbor, its tiny seamen invisible in the morning haze. Thibaud put his arms around me, and I felt as though I floated overhead, among the exercising soldiers, watching the couple that we made. A tricolor snapped erratically. Our words seemed like lines, memorized.

"You'll come visit, in Paris, in the fall," he said. I smiled. "And we'll be back next summer." I didn't believe, at that juncture, in next summer. "Maybe I can get my parents to come down at Christmas. Maybe I can come alone."

I fingered the buttons of his cornflower blue shirt. He was incongruously dressed up for the highway, the drive home.

"Will you write to me from the States?"

"Of course I will."

"I love you, you know."

I looked at him, unable to believe he had said it. I felt an overwhelming urge to snicker. I knew an answer was expected, and also that I couldn't bring myself to form those words. "Me too," I said.

He kissed me: I loved his smell, I loved the line of his back under his clothes, I loved the slight, soft roughness of his adolescent skin. But I could not have said with any certainty that I loved
him.

"I'll miss you."

"Me too."

We kissed again, our tongues dancing in the tunnel of our joined mouths. Somebody above us whistled appreciation.

"I'd better go," Thibaud said. He looked at his watch, holding his wrist with his other hand. My gesture.

"Yeah. You'd better."

"Everything will be okay, you know."

"Sure."

As we parted, he handed me an envelope, my name written on it in his spiky script, and underlined.

"Don't open it till you're on the plane."

"That's days from now."

"Oh. Well, whatever. But not till later. Much later."

"It's a letter?"

"What else would it be?"

"I'll wait."

I placed the envelope with my ticket and passport and the travellers' checks my father gave me, in the sacred pile of absolute necessities. I imagined its contents many times in the dwindling days at home. I filled Etienne, as I pushed his chair down the drive and out into the world for walks (I had used to do this more often; I did it in off-seasons, still, when the call of outside society was less enticing), with all the truths I imagined Thibaud might have set down on paper. I had never received a love letter before. Perhaps, I told my captive brother, these lines would hymn my limbs, the sheen of my hair, the curve of my lips. Perhaps Thibaud was confessing the duration of his passion, its stretch either into the past ("I have loved you, from afar, since first I stepped into the Bellevue years ago") or into the future ("We will marry. Can you wait for me? Are you as certain as I am? You must be!"). Certain of nothing, I desired, I demanded, Thibaud's reassuring certainty. With it—although its substance was still only imagined—I could be proud: I had a boyfriend who loved me in spite of, or because of, or alongside my terrible family.

I did not want Etienne to be jealous (I could not promise him that "love," like an airplane, would ever transport
him
beyond the reach of our history) but I didn't care enough not to tell him. Or else, for all my protestations, I did not believe strongly enough in the existence of his cloistered mind; and, like everyone else, assumed he didn't understand.

Whatever I willed into Thibaud's sealed envelope, it was to the end of self-disclosure. My reaction to his serenade—my reaction would reveal to me who I was, or where, and how I felt about Thibaud (I missed him, a great deal; but I missed Marie-Jo also, possibly more), and this was why I fingered the creamy stock nightly, and kissed it before going to bed, so that by the time I set off on my own journey, the envelope in my new handbag was no longer crisp, its ink smudged slightly by my moist caresses.

I was, officially, an unaccompanied minor, but old enough to protest the humiliating plastic placard announcing the fact. I flew from the airport at Nice to Paris, jittery about flying and about the miles opening between me and everything I knew. I watched the sea and then the mountains recede beneath us as the plane circled back over the land and headed northwards. The stewardess, as promised, took special care of me, her painted smile particularly broad as she offered me orange juice, a tiny sack of nuts. I felt like my brother, incompetent to the world, and resisted by refusing to smile. I pretended to read, feigned sleep.

Waiting in one of Roissy's chime-filled satellite pods for the flight to Boston, my fingers greasy with newsprint and potato chips, the rubberized, stale smell of airplanes already in my skin and clothes, I toyed with Thibaud's envelope. I toyed, too, with the thought of calling him (he was there, in Paris!) and fished for a coin and his number and then, at the thought of his eggplant-haired mother (who else would be home, at three in the afternoon?), I shuffled back to my seat.

Only in the broad anonymity of the 747, a mother and infant struggling in the seat beside me, the plane swooping up between the bumpy puffs of cloud—only then, before the grinning stewardess (a new one, of course) and her trolley of drinks could bear down on me again in pained solicitude, before my legs cramped from disuse and before my clothed annoyance at the baby, the mother, the stewardess, the terrible film soon to air, the plastic tray of plastic food, my parents, my spoiled American cousins and their horridly cheerful mother, my aunt, at all that was behind me and to come and at my symbolically uncomfortable present in the bargain, broke free and tainted Thibaud's letter completely—only then did it seem the right moment, at last, to open it.