The Last Life (22 page)

I had always anticipated them, just as I knew that Marie-José would be in another classroom on another hall, and that if I was careful our paths need not cross. What, then, was different? I was. Or they were—the other students, my friends. Either they passed notes and whispered about me, or else I imagined that they did: the difference matters little. I cut my conversations short; I manufactured activities and engagements; I slithered past smoky knots of chatter in the lobby, at the bus stop. I'm not sure whether I declined invitations until they stopped coming, or whether there were, from the start, none to decline. I assumed, at the time, the latter. Even the friends who tried to stick by me, perhaps them most of all, I found repulsive, fearing that they wanted only to gawk, to cadge invitations to my house and spy upon us there, or to lure me back to the Bellevue and to ask "Was it here? Was he standing there?" Or worse: "Is your grandfather at home? Could we go see him? Does he look different?"

These fears recalled those I had suffered as a small girl, new to school and its brutal society. Innocent then, I was taught to be afraid. At five or six I had, as other children did, invited little girls for games and
goùter
in our back garden, only to discover, one balmy afternoon early on, that my playmates had little interest in tag, or in my rows of fluffily attired dolls. They circled instead around my inert brother—it was his first appearance in their time—who lounged in a madras-lined, specially designed basket on the patio slate, at three or four immobile as an infant, blinking peaceably at the swaying branches and the sky's inviting blue.

"What's wrong with him? Why doesn't he move?"

"He's so big. He's not a baby."

"Didn't you know, he's like an animal, my mother said. She said Sagesse has got a brother who's no more than a dog."

"What does he eat? Can we feed him?"

"He's like a doll."

"But horrible. All spitty."

"Will he never talk?"

"What's wrong with him? It's gross."

"He farted!" The gaggle started back in fits of artificial gasping, plugging their noses.

"Will he eat dirt?"

"I don't know," I said, in agonies, twisting my frock in my fingers, looking, like my brother, at the sky.

"Let's see. Let's try." She was a chubby girl with amber ringlets, the leader. Delphine. At recess I had seen her clamp her bulk upon another girl's chest and yank her victim's hair, her knees digging into the other girl's ribs. I feared her, wondered that I had—willingly, no less—invited her to play at my house, so that now here she was.

The other girls, three of them, followed her commands with chirrups and squeals, their little fists balled around matted clumps of grass, grey soil and pebbles. They were descending upon my brother, who burbled oblivious at the sparrows, and all I could do was stand by, my dress twisted up above my underpants, twisting it further in my alarm. No sound would come out of me—as though my mouth were crammed with grit and ash—and I was uncertain even if I was breathing because everything in me stuck. I didn't know whether I should save him, or even if I could.

My grandmother (why was she there?), God-like, scattered them like chickens: suddenly among us, she batted them back and brushed my brother's grimy face, and stuck her fingers, diamond ring and all, into his mouth to scoop out any stones. She hoisted him, as if he were an ordinary child, upon her hip, his silken hair splayed against her bosom, and retreated, leaving me alone with my guests, who cowered and shed crocodile tears, but only for a moment. Delphine suggested that we play dress-up next, and so we did: I duly traipsed upstairs to fetch the dress-up box, and we festooned the garden and our bodies with my mother's garish mini-dresses until the other mothers, one by charming one, came to take their daughters away.

But I, I moved through the afternoon as if through ice, aware, like a child in a fairy tale, that I had let evil into my house and could not control it; and obscurely unsure of whether my brother was me, whether all my promises to him had made us one being; or whether I was no different from the others, my hands full of dirt. I had not stopped them, after all.

My parents didn't punish me for the afternoon's events; nor did my grandmother. But for many years I didn't invite children to my house. I went to theirs, or else we played on the grounds of the Bellevue, on the pretext that there we had more space for our games. Zohra fixed our afternoon tea in my grandmother's kitchen, which, safe but for the occasional dancing wasp, held no disclosable secrets.

As I grew older, I bestowed rare invitations the way I would later give my nakedness: the sight of my brother I reserved for those I loved most, as a test, and over time more than one had failed it. Only when my girlfriend had taken on Etienne as she had taken me would I allow a titter, or a joke, at the expense of his flailing arms or spasmed tongue: those jokes—and I had shared many with Marie-Jo—were at the heart of me, the place where I was both like my brother and like everyone else, conjoined.

A peek at my criminal grandfather was not, however, a gift I wanted to give; and I thought myself old enough to keep anyone from asking. My American forays with my cousin had taught me that there were people, my age or slightly older, who would, by force of their own immediate interests, accept me without questions, as long as I could make my interests mimic theirs. That is to say, I knew to seek out the very pot-smokers whom I had, with others from my school, readily disparaged little over a month before. Our small town was not Boston: the clique to which I turned was smaller and, to parental eyes, still less savory than Becky's friends, not least because its leader, a lanky, shaven-headed youth a year ahead of me, was an Arab, the son of Algerian immigrants who kept a North African sweet shop—piles of fly-kissed lurid orange cakes and greasy sugar-soaked donuts behind smeared glass; the sort of place my mother hurried past with her chin up, holding her breath—in a shabby side street off the market. Sami—whose name I had long thought was an American affectation, not realizing it to be, to a Muslim, as common as John or Peter—had a reputation as a dealer of hashish. He worked on it, too: his movements were jerky and surreptitious, and he carried his bookbag as if it were contraband. His jeans, like an American rapper's, hung in folds from his scrawny hips and marked him as a rebel. His girlfriend, a soft-fleshed girl named, unwieldily, Lahouria, but called simply "Lahou," was in my history class. Cocoa-skinned and curvaceous, she worked at slackening her features into an aggressive pout, but was by nature as frothy as her inundating chevelure, a mass of curls so carefully oiled that it recalled running water without actually moving at all.

Their intimates included a pointy-faced, spotted boy we all called Jacquot, known for sliding his fingers along girls' thighs during science films or on the bus; and Frédéric, who had dabbled in my own—my erstwhile—social set the year before, when Marie-Jo had favored him briefly with her attentions. He was the son of a prominent pharmacist, a woman and a widow, and so had teetered on the verge of Bellevue acceptability. Now, though, it was said, he pilfered pills from his mother's vault and sold them, repackaged in sandwich baggies, in the schoolyard after class.

He was the one I approached, in the early weeks of term. It was lunch hour, and he had taken shelter from a sudden downpour under a bookstore awning, three blocks from school. I had been sliding among the stationery shelves inside the window, feigning interest in binders and envelopes, willing the hour to pass, when I glimpsed his shivering back.

"Long time," I said at his elbow, loudly enough to be heard above the rain and the swishing traffic.

"Hey." It took a minute. "Sagesse, right?"

"Yeah."

"Marie-Jo's friend?"

"Well. I was."

"She doesn't speak to you either? She is one prize bitch. Bet I know why."

I shrugged. I didn't want him to bring it up. He didn't.

"You in Lahou's class?"

"Yep."

"Ponty's a dragon, I hear." He was the history teacher.

"He's okay, if you know how to deal with him."

"She doesn't, then. He gives her a lot of grief, yeah?"

"I guess."

"You going back?"

"Got to. I've got lit class in ten minutes." We looked at the curtain of rain; I eyed the dark down on his lip.

"Shall we make a run for it?"

I giggled. "Unless you've got a better idea."

Back at school, our clothes stuck to our skin and our shoes squelching on the linoleum, we loitered a moment by the stairs.

"We should have coffee sometime," he said, reaching for a soggy cigarette from his jacket pocket.

"If you promise not to talk about Marie-Jo."

"No problem. With Lahou, maybe?"

"Why not?"

"You look like you could use a laugh or two."

"Or a smoke or two "
"You?"

"Why not?" I called this from the stairs, over my shoulder. I made it seem casual, or tried to. I made it seem as though I wouldn't otherwise be on my own. But that was the thing about Sami's crowd: they were all involved in the same deception, and without each other, would each have been alone. I doubt Frédéric was fooled; but he didn't mind, either. In this way, and swiftly, I insinuated myself into their group. It seemed, at the time, that I was choosing a new place for myself.

I entered their circle, of course, thanks to Frédéric. He was the link; he could vouch for me. At that first lunch, in a burger joint with mucky floors, Lahou was suspicious of me, and of my goodwill.

"How would you know what it's like?" she asked, licking ketchup off a plum-varnished finger. "Ponty's not up your butt. You're his pet, for God's sake."

"He's easy, if you get on his good side."

"Like how? Be reborn white and rich?"

"I'll show you, if you want."

"Sure." She shook her head, and snorted. "I'll believe it when it happens."

Lahou, far more even than Marie-Jo, was a man's woman. She was surrounded not just by Sami but by Jacquot and Frédéric, and they treated her not like one of them but like an orchid. Like sex, indeed, which is what she represented to them, her cleavage enhanced by underwire and Lycra, her snub features perfected with paint. She and I had nothing but Ponty in common, and now Frédéric, and eventually marijuana, which would ease the way somewhat; but that was all, and sitting on the orange plastic molded seats in the Flunch, sizing each other up, we knew it.

She was the child, I would learn, of a French mother and a Tunisian father. The latter was elusive and the former a shrew. Lahou's older brother had become an observant Muslim, and he was known to slap his sister and call her a whore. She had three younger sisters, and defended them fiercely. I never went to her apartment, and she never told me any of these things: they seeped somehow into my consciousness, probably through Frédéric, and knowing them made me obscurely proud of her, although she did not know that I knew them and we still had nothing to discuss but the boys and their behavior.

Sami was moody, his murky home life the cause of unforeseeable swings from rowdiness to black silence. He was vain, and thought his hawkish features alluring: he made a great effort to grow sideburns, and removed them; then fashioned a wispy goatee which proved a source of friction between him and his girlfriend ("It's pubic! It's totally pubic!" Lahou insisted), and, as testament of his love for her, dispensed with that in time. He had tapering fingers of astounding mobility, which reminded me of spiders' legs, and a pronounced, sweet smell, of cinnamon and smoke. He was an actor, his role part American gangster, part raffish Frenchman. It led him to shoplift an expensive watch for Lahou's birthday—a gesture that moved and appalled me in equal measure—and to believe (or purport to) that not doing homework was a revolutionary stance, rather than simple foolishness. He was fond of money, and liked to whip the pile of notes from his deep pocket and count it, openly and again, while his friends talked around him. Once, in a particularly gaudy temper, he rolled a spliff with a five-hundred-franc note, and none of his cohorts had the courage to tell him that they thought the act preposterous. I only saw him break out of his persona twice, and the self beneath seemed shabby and afraid.

Jacquot was Sami's foil, his fool. Always funny-looking, he had adopted early on the role of clown, and by the time I knew him it had become an ill-fitting garment in which he was trapped. He did not want, I would discover, to paw the girls: he wanted hopelessly, dog-like, to be loved by them, touched by them, and he knew no other means but that one, a monstrous self-parody and guaranteed to fail. He smoked to forget his awkwardness and would often grow intent afterwards, his scabby cheeks aglow as he devised schemes to end world hunger or bring down the government, or discoursed upon friendship or fate, brushing ever more fervently at the lock of oily hair upon his forehead, and pausing only to suck his incongruously white teeth.

"And another thing—" he would cry, with an ill-timed parry at Sami or Frédéric "—I've just thought of this..."

They did not appreciate Jacquot the philosopher, and Sami was apt to grapple his friend around the neck or cuff him, with a menace only half indulgent, and hiss, "Shut it. Do you hear me? Shut ... up."

But I liked him, and he me, and as was perhaps inevitable, given the narrowness of his acquaintance, he took to following me with little gifts (a candy bar, a fountain pen) and showed all signs of childish infatuation—doomed, as ever.

In this company, among whom I moved unbelieving, Frédéric was the closest thing I had to a friend. The others were so far from my world and possibilities that their carryings-on, like Becky's, seemed neither to contain nor to implicate me. Their interactions were like a television program that I watched, albeit religiously, and I felt for them the detached fondness that one reserves for fictional characters. I was aware that our lives were overlapping only briefly, and thought this certainty would keep me safe. It was the same for Frédéric as for me, although we never spoke of it. He, like me and unlike them, went home to a large house overlooking the water and altered his posture and the cadence of his voice as he walked in the door. He knew that he would pass his exams and go on to university—he planned to study law—and that his forays into the "culture" were but a form of adolescent rebellion, acceptable to himself if not to his thin-lipped mother.