The Last Life (4 page)

"You would have me believe that we"—my grandfather's ire was a fierce steeliness in the quiet of his tone—"that we, around you here in this living room, behave with as little regard for anyone outside ourselves as you and your little friends?"

Tempted to insist that my friends were not "little," but wise to the cost of such baiting, I adopted my most innocent and childish voice, and said, "Oh no, nothing like that. No, I meant the woman in the market today. Right, Maman?"

My mother, who sought only to slip invisibly through these evenings, glared at me and pressed her lips.

"What woman?" asked my grandmother.

"Yes, what happened?" My father seized on any strand that might divert his own father's discourse.

"It was nothing," my mother insisted.

Etienne squirmed. My grandmother tilted his juice cup to his slippery lips.

"That's not true, Maman. You were terribly upset."

"Carol, what happened?" My father leaned forward in his chair. My grandfather's gaze, from beneath his wild brows, burned my mother's cheeks.

"Oh, Sagesse makes a mountain out of a molehill. It was just one of the pedlars, in the market, who didn't like the look of me for some reason."

"She spat at us," I explained.

"Whatever for?" my grandmother asked.

My mother shrugged. "Just rude, I suppose. She was a nasty, tough old thing."

"She accused Maman of being in the National Front, in town for the funerals."

"Probably a communist," my grandmother said with a sniff. "You didn't take it to heart?"

"Of course not. But she was very unpleasant." My mother adjusted her skirt.

"As if—" my grandfather took a breath and spouted "—as if our country's troubles stemmed from the National Front! As if that were an insult! How absurd!"

"How do you mean, Grand-père?"

"I don't vote for Le Pen," my grandfather said, "but I'd defend any man's right to. For a start, because we—you too, my little girl, although you know about as much history as a spotted dog—we, all of us in this room, owe that man a debt. To the last, he fought for our country, he believed in our people, he understood what it was, what it meant."

"Algeria." I whispered it.

"That's right, my girl. Algeria. And anyone who votes for him, maybe they're merely repaying that debt. I don't happen to agree with a lot of his policies, and I think it's political suicide for representatives of the FN to come down here and associate themselves with a posse of undisciplined children, children who exemplify the very anarchical destruction—in this case, self-destruction—that I've just been talking about. Left, right—the politics don't matter. It's chaos, it's entropy, and anyone with any wit should keep away. But the FN's not the problem. People who think it is are misguided. It's just a symptom of the problem. Of the problems. Plural. The problems that this nation faces, overrun with immigrants—Arabs, Africans, the English-speakers, all of them—our culture assailed on all sides. Our children, for God's sake, building bombs for no reason! And our government—this decrepit, farcical liar who fancies himself emperor—our government has nothing to say about it, nothing at all!"

My father coughed and looked into his drink.

"Le Pen, at least—he says the wrong thing, I think, for our time and our moment, but at least he has something to say. At least he knows his own mind. That's what you should've said to the pinko fishwife—"

"She was selling olives, actually," my mother murmured.

"Olives, fish, garlic, whatever. That's what you should've said to that peasant—at least he doesn't wait for advice from Moscow on how to respond to a local crisis. At least he has an honest response—a French response." My grandfather grunted, sipped his scotch, rattling the ice cubes.

I sat deep in the back of the sofa, swinging my feet slightly, watching, as my brother, strapped in his chair opposite me, twitched and rolled his bright grey eyes. I was quite impressed by the firecracker I had so nonchalantly launched in our midst: I hadn't known I would provoke so fulsome a response, so ready a distraction from the pettiness of late swims in the Bellevue pool.

At supper, my grandfather said almost nothing, as if he were spent. He looked small, slumped over his
jrìssaladière,
then over his slices of lamb shoulder. He sipped indifferently at his rosé and stared out to the now-dark sea, and when my father asked him about the notion of a security guard at the front gate, he seemed not to hear. My father looked at my mother as if to say "I told you so," and she raised a finely arched brow.

"Who's for more potatoes?" urged my grandmother, at her head of the table. "More peas?"

When we got home that night, I helped my mother bathe Etienne and put him to bed, because Magda had the evening off. Etienne lolled, half asleep, as we put on his nightshirt, his limbs heavy and slightly damp in the heat, and we left him to the cool air that drifted into his darkened room with the tang of the sea on it.

I, too, bade my good nights, and my mother returned to my father in the living room below, her heels resounding on the stone staircase. While I brushed my teeth, my mouth full of minty foam, I tiptoed onto the landing to listen to my parents' quarreling.

"...These interminable lectures, as if we were all Sagesse's age—no, for God's sake, as if we had the wit of Etienne!"

I couldn't hear my father's reply, but could deduce it from what followed.

"How many years have you been saying that? 'He's difficult,' 'It's a difficult time,' 'I couldn't leave him now'—come off it, Alex, what about our life? Your life?"

The bickering was as familiar as a dream. I returned to the bathroom to spit and rinse, and brought my nightie from my room so I could change for bed and listen at the same time. It would not end until my father exploded, and won. I could practically hear the ice cubes in his after-dinner glass of scotch, which I knew he held, and put down, and held again as he paced the room, around the furniture, seething like an animal until he would have to roar.

I stood, barefoot, in my underpants, my nightgown frothy in my hand, leaning forward. My heart pumped and tingled in my extremities; my neck was rigid. I could feel my veins tightening. It was always this way. I was waiting for release. By witnessing their arguments, their hidden confessor, I unthinkingly believed that I controlled and contained them; I would not retreat until their voices subsided, until I was certain that no hand had been raised (none ever was), that nothing, tangible or intangible, had been truly broken.

"Enough! Your incessant shrieking!" my father's bass thundered. I imagined his face purpled, his curls quivering, his hands, in fists, held tight as though they might escape him. "And how, exactly, would you have us live—with your taste for maids and nurses and luxury all around? Do you think it's so easy?"

My mother whimpered complaint. She would cry soon.

"Spoiled! You're nothing but a spoiled American daddy's girl, still, after all this time. You think it's easy? It's work, every second of it is work, hand-dirtying, mind-numbing. You think I like it? You have no idea. I survive it. And he taught me that—which isn't nothing—and we've built something. Christ,
I've
built something, part of it, a large part, even if it's all in his name now. But his name is my name, it's our name, it's the only thing that makes a life mean anything—"

My mother said something else, inaudible; but conciliation was beginning.

"It will be our life; it's the only life, the only place we've got. He won't go on like this forever. It's mine—it's your due. For the kids, for our family name. Jesus, Carol, walk away? You want to walk away? Then, walk—"

I could tell she was crying; she would be trying to embrace him now.

"I haven't thrown these years away for nothing. Not all these years. And it's our place. It will be our place, and we'll make it ours."

"Of course we will," my mother was saying. "Of course we will."

The volume was ebbing.

"It's going to belong to us," my father said, almost in his normal voice. "If you'll just be patient."

I slipped my gown over my head and prepared to retreat. They would turn out the lights now. They would come upstairs, maybe even together.

"Agree with him?" my father said. "Don't ask me that. I don't even fucking hear him. I don't hear it, so how would I know?"

If they continued, I decided, it would be on the relatively quiet ground of politics, for which neither could muster much venom. I had ridden out the storm. I went to bed, pausing only to catch the soft, wet snores from Etienne's room, to make sure that he, too, was safe.

The second nocturnal swim, a week later, took place without me. I could not have prevented it, and could only laugh when Marie-José told me. She sat outstretched on her bedroom floor with her spatula and honeyed mire of melted wax, smoothing it in even swathes onto her long brown legs and tearing, with exaggerated winces, at the invisible fair bristles. She told me the story in between the stripping sounds, and waved the sticky spatula for emphasis.

"Your grandfather—Christ, girl, he's a madman. It was earlier, you know, than last time, so I guess we thought it would be okay. It must have been before ten, nine thirty even, and we were trying—we saw his lights on—trying to be quiet. But I think it was Cécile, she was screaming like a pig in the water. I think—" She paused to slather the back of her left calf. "I think she has a thing for Thierry. Don't laugh; it's obvious. You wouldn't think anyone could go for him, the shrimp. But she's no Vogue model herself."

"And she's short," I said.

"And he's older than she is. And I suppose she doesn't know him very well. So anyway—she gets on my nerves, that girl—every time he swam near her, she'd start shrieking, even though the rest of us were doing our best to shut her up. He was loving it, of course."

"You think he's interested?"

"Probably. I mean, how often can he get a look in? None of us would touch him. And at school he's a joke."

"You're starting to make me feel sorry for him."

"Wait for this, then. Because you really will. Even I felt a little sorry. It was so funny. You see, we were trying, except for those two, to be quiet. Well, quieter. I mean, we were talking and stuff, but most of us didn't scream. And we were in the pool for a while, you know, and he—your grandfather—he didn't come out. I think we figured that maybe they were entertaining or something, or maybe they were out somewhere else. I mean, all he had to do was tell us to shut up."

"So? What happened?"

The wax was cold and petrified on Marie-José's leg, but she was too caught up in her story to attend to it.

"Well, all of a sudden there's this voice on the bridge"—there was a walkway over the pool from the courtyard above, with steps leading down to the water—"saying, All right, who is it?' And then, 'I know which ones you are,' and 'Get out of the water.' So we do, I mean, what choice do we have? We didn't hear him coming, you know. It was so weird."

"What did he do then?"

We were both leaning forward, our bodies plumped in the grubby pink shag carpet that had always, since I knew her, covered Marie-José's bedroom floor.

"He turned on this monster flashlight. Huge, like a searchlight, and he shone it on our faces, and then when it landed on Thierry—I mean, he's never liked me, he thinks I'm badly brought up, but Thierry, he thinks of him as polite, you know, because Thierry always says 'Good day, sir' in that brown-nose way. So he gets the flashlight on Thierry and he says 'Come here,' and Thierry steps forward. And then your grandfather steps back a bit, I guess, because the next thing is, he's shining the light on all of Thierry, you know? He's exposing him."

"Geez. Jesus Christ."

"So there's little Thierry, with his hands over his balls, twitching around and whimpering and completely humiliated."

"Oh Jesus."

"I felt for him, I really did. Even you would have, I swear. Your grandfather stood there, aiming this great beam of light on skinny Thierry, and he starts this interrogation. Like 'Does your father know you're here?' and 'Don't you have summer school homework and shouldn't you be doing it?' and 'Is everyone here a resident, or are these little friends from town?' and 'Do you have any idea what it's like to be trying to sleep or to read with this racket?' And Thierry tried to point out that we were next to the staff apartments, that the guests were hundreds of meters away and couldn't possibly have heard, but that just seemed to annoy your grandfather more."

"And then?"

"In time he just turned off the light and left us to get dressed. I'm surprised we didn't all catch pneumonia, we were standing there naked for so long. In-sane. Thierry was pretty funny about it, considering. But I suspect Cécile lost interest, once she got a good look. I wonder whether it would've been you, if you'd been there?"

"Me?"

"With the flashlight. Whether your grandfather would've lit you up like a Christmas tree."

"Naked? Don't be sick."

We doubled over with laughter. Marie-José peeled the wax off her leg with a scream and we found that, too, unreasonably funny.

"How was your night, anyway?"

I hadn't been at the poolside because Thibaud had, at last, asked me out. I say "at last" because for the past three summers he had come with his parents to the hotel for a month, in their fat white Mercedes, from Paris. And for three summers I had eyed his black curls and his impish hazel eyes, had marvelled at the pattern of freckles on his brown back, had preened and tried to cast interested but veiled glances at him, my skills at twelve and thirteen fairly primitive, so that Thibaud could not help but know of my infatuation. But at twelve and thirteen I was still scrawny and flat-chested, and he, two years older, showed no interest.

A year older than me, Marie-José, whose breasts had burst forth by the time she was eleven, and who at that age had already reached her full, impressive height, she who learned early to flick the golden brown waves of her hair in an insouciant but enticing way, and who was to be caught, later that same year, with an eighteen-year-old army recruit, in her little-girl's bedroom with its pink shag rug—Marie-José had been flicking and winking at Thibaud for a couple of years. Voice of experience to my thinner, unvoluptuous youth, she had assured me several times that "the vibe wasn't there": "I think he might be gay," she'd said, pursing her lips in modest disapproval. "Men have a way of looking, of appreciating, even if they aren't planning anything. I mean, your
father
looks like that at me."