The Last Life (41 page)

The very next morning, as I resumed the lonely pattern of my days (although not for much longer, as it was August), I was already conscious that this memory was precious, dizzyingly private. To my mother, on our return, I had said only, and cheaply, that it had been "fun"; but at breakfast I asked her, tellingly, how it might be possible to preserve the gardenia, which had wilted on my nightstand; and had ruefully submitted to its pressing, in a volume of the vast dictionary, at the page (I insisted) of "pleasure," by which we all might, later, retrieve its flattened significance. I did not know quite how precious the evening was to be, nor that it would resurface in my dreams for years, sometimes as a whirl of bliss and other times as my most dreadful nightmare: a petrified perfection, a poison in every glorious instant, in which I was aware that if I asked, if I could only find the right question, I might preserve my father (as I did the flower), and yet always unable to deduce, and I knew, sinkingly, beforehand, that I would be unable to deduce, what the question might be; and each time I remained silent, as I had in fact remained silent, hoping, mistakenly, that the wine and the silver and the twirl along the waterfront would be sufficient to keep him always with us, with me.

But the imaginary life that this one exotic outing assumed was not enough to alter the everyday; and for my father, whose aim undoubtedly had been to win me unconditionally to his side, it must have seemed a failure. I moped and skulked still, and although for an evening or two I made efforts at conversation in memory of the event, I could not retain its sheen, and at my father's first absence lapsed back into my mother's shadow, again picking stubbornly at his excuses, and coming to believe that for a night I had been bought, and simply addled by luxury, as I had fleetingly suspected at the time.

I turned my thoughts, then, gratefully, to school. I attributed the resurgence of my skin troubles to a healthy anticipation, and told myself my back would clear, finally, with cooler weather and with classes. I assembled my textbooks a week before the lycée opened, in tidy piles at the foot of my bed, and stacked a half dozen new notebooks (the fruit of an expedition, with my mother, to the largest stationer in town, the one in front of which I had ambushed Frédéric so long before) beside them, with my name and my various subjects carefully lettered inside their pink and orange covers. I took a new and conscious plunge back into my own life, as if the summer had been a sentence or a cure not unlike my grandfather's, due suffering for my accumulated and unconfessed crimes. I foresaw a period of choice; I believed I spied the future at not so great a distance. Change, I told myself, would come about in my own quarter, at my own hand; I would will it.

I wasn't free of my anxious waking nights, and still occasionally hallucinated violent endings for each member of our family. I noted that a calm had settled over the LaBasse clan, in which only events I considered "normal" seemed to take place. My brother was growing; my mother was praying; my father was losing his flush of enthusiasm for the Bellevue, bucking against his own father's clandestine yoke, fretting joylessly about its accounts (the economy was bad, the recession told on the receipts). My grandmother took to trembling, a habit which affected the force of her character not at all and was later to be diagnosed as incipient Parkinson's—but this, too, could be deemed normal: grandparents, being old, were expected to be ill. They were not, however, expected to be criminal.

In mid-September, the stout, beaky nurse left our service to marry a naval cook and was replaced by a smooth-skinned West African woman of my mother's age, named Iris, in whose capable ebony arms Etienne, the lover of skin, thrived and clucked. I kept an intermittent eye on the workings of my family, but focussed my attentions upon life beyond, thirsty for it. I discovered the dowdy twins, Aline and Ariane, gratefully, in the first week of classes. In their gangly reserve, they weren't thrilling company, but they didn't know, or knew first from me, of my family's recent history (the beads of the story mine to fashion, the ellipses mine to select), and they basked in my eager attention. I gathered that back in Chateau-roux, from where they had come, they had been teased for their skim-milk pallor and the redness of their hair, and had relied, by and large, on each others company. They wanted above all to do well in school, considering an occasional ice cream at the stuffy parlor behind the library a risqué interruption of their work, for which they were grateful to my naughtiness and my pocket money.

As my mother put it, I perked up: I ventured, on occasion, to the twins' house on weekends, and politely praised the lean lunches their mother provided. She was a small, tense creature with her daughters' red hair, but faded and lackluster, and a habit of holding her mouth open, a dismayed o among her freckles, a woman of whom my own mother would have approved on principle, as industrious and unthreatening, although the modesty of their family situation did not encourage a parental encounter. Their father, moreover, was no likely companion for my parents, a beefy, walleyed brute forever hidden behind the sports pages, who emerged only to criticize his wife and daughters with a lopsided scowl that set them all shivering. He acknowledged me only in order to make occasional, hostile references to the comparative comfort of my upbringing ("I'm sure you're better fed at home than here, am I right? Oysters and caviar, is it?"). They inhabited a sad-eyed pink stucco house on the hill at the back edge of town, where Monsieur, having embarked upon
bricolage,
found he lacked either the energy or the time to complete it, so that the weedy back yard was stacked with bricks for an unbuilt porch, the living room with piles of flossy insulation material wrapped in brown paper for an imagined extension, and the bathroom walls were only half tiled. No progress was made with these improvements in all the time I visited the house, and I never saw Monsieur so much as wield a trowel.

From this hideousness I considered the twins' emergence—their survival—to be impressive, and I was relieved to find company whose dermatological fragility outstripped my own. They were asthmatic in the bargain, equipped at all times with blue plastic inhalers which they whisked from cloth pouches their mother had embroidered with their names, and which lent them, for me, a particular mystique, that of ailing nineteenth-century heroines.

Aline wanted to be a doctor, and when at last I invited them for an afternoon at my house, they did not gawk, at the statuary or even appear to notice the Bay of Algiers on the living room wall, but were rather, genuinely and unabashedly, interested in Etienne, with whom Aline sat for an hour or more, talking quietly and examining his limbs in a pseudoscientific fashion. Etienne, heartily accustomed to medical inspection, idled passive and cheerful in his chair throughout, while his nurse came and went around him, rolling her eyes in amusement at Alines questions about the boy's bowel movements and his capacity for mastication.

In short, the twins were in every way a relief. They admired even my brother; they considered me prettier than they (as, to be honest, did I); they were very good at mathematics and welcomed my help, in return, with history and French. And above all, they fought a domestic dreariness that seemed to me more impenetrable than my own: they thought my concerns glamorous, and larger than theirs (again, secretly, for all my protests, I concurred); they seemed convinced, as I so wanted to be, that I must be destined for a greater future (I was half American, had been to New York) and when I compared our lives, relieved, I was inclined to agree. They made me feel that my friendship was a favor, and I prized the feeling.

At Christmas they presented me with a pair of pillowcases they had sewn, evenings, side by side in front of the television (their father had it always blaring, when he was home: although their house was small, sets dominated both the living and dining rooms, and there was another, I had been informed, beside his bed), with multicolored daisies and with my initials, in large, looping script, threaded in baby blue. I was delighted that such effort had been made on my behalf, yet could not help but notice that the cases, a blend of synthetic and cotton, had the slinky feel of cheap hotel sheets. Nobly claiming them too precious to use, I folded them and retired them to my underwear drawer, where they lay untouched, until, much later, they accompanied Etienne to his ice-green room, as a reminder of me, and of home; and were used there week after week, boiled in the institutional laundry, until the daisies blanched and the threads unravelled and my visiting mother, in a spasm of guilt at my brother's incarceration, disposed of their ragged remains. I gave them each, in return, a pair of earrings, little green stones for Aline and little pink ones for Ariane, purchased in haste from the costume jewellers' in the shopping mall, and the girls gushed as though I had bestowed on them pearls without price.

It is small wonder, perhaps, that in the thrill of such pliable and devoted companionship, I failed to gauge my father's disintegration, to note that, not merely a foil for our miseries, he had embarked alone, and ploughed a furrow more isolate and determined than any of the rest of us, towards his own destruction.

The event, in all its television drama, came, at the time, as a shock only because I had for so long been vigilant against disaster, aware of its potential from the moment of my grandfather's gun—or from the moment, indeed, that Etienne arrived in our lives, his delay in my mother's womb a matter of so little time and yet of such ineluctable import. I considered that I had antennae for disaster—our household prophesied gloom in the Gulf when the press buzzed in congratulation at the efficiency of the Western assault, and was not surprised by subsequent footage of Kuwait's oil wells aflame: I had been trained to anticipate, even to feel relief at, the worst, because the worst always came and it was safer to know it—and yet my wariness had lapsed in the pursuit of my own, seemingly innocent, existence, at the library and the ice cream parlor and in the living room of two dingy, earnest girls whose inoffensiveness was extreme to the point of parody.

Which is to say that when my father killed himself, the act was not, in some absolute way, a surprise; but that its timing—in a valley of apparent quiet, so long after the era of tribulation had settled, and my little life had begun to sprout, seemingly, its own patterns, for the first time not wholly dependent, in submission or reaction, on the patterns of my family—was. In the intensity of my unilateral engagement, I had wished my father dead; just as, paradoxically, I had believed that that engagement, that very wishing, was the certainty that kept my parents safe. And although all reason had told me my will had no part in their story, that the practical demands of Etienne, or of my grandfather, might hold the family together, but not I, with my fevered but impotent imagination, once that will had been diverted from the present, from the past—from their lives—onto the future, and my own life, it seemed that some central, invisible force that had kept the LaBasses in organized orbit had vanished, flinging each of us, and my father furthermost, out into the ether alone. As long as I was wishing for it, or against it, as long as all my wishing was bound up in it, our family had retained its family-ness; and then?

My father's death came in the springtime. It had been almost a year since my grandfather's release. It was only a few weeks to my sixteenth birthday (I wondered how he could not have wanted to see that, and then remembered the year before, the rattling of my doorknob, and my father's thundering insistence that there would be no locked doors in his house; when in fact I had spent my time learning that life was but a succession of such doors, the very image of a corridor an illusion because nothing, and no one, could be anything but alone). It was twenty years since he had met my mother on the boulevard in Aix. It was springtime. (Who, without expertise, would have guessed that this was suicide season, that the very signs of nature's hope were enough to kill some people?) The submarine had come up for air. How could the seamen, tiny but visibly waving in their delight at land, not have given him pause? How, in the maze of uncertainty, of possibility, could my father have found the resolve for such an act? And was it, like my own embrace of life, a departure after his own star? Or was it, as all my other acts had been, a frenzied mothlike beating in the web of the LaBasses, a petty but fatal reaction? Or again, was it a meeting of wish and will, a poisonous confluence in his brain, like my hallucinations of all our deaths, but one which had spilled, unbidden, beyond the realm of fantasy?

The abiding question, too, for me, was this, and remains this: was it fate? Is our ending inscribed in our beginning—and, if so, in whose beginning? In his own, or mine, or Etienne's? Or in his father's, or in the very distant footsteps of Tata Christine, who returned to France and could not abide it, who retreated to the mountains of Algeria, became African in her very soul? Was my father locked in a destiny, visible or invisible, from which no turning could have spared him? Was it that tense which locked him, perhaps, the pluperfect: the turning before he knew there was a turning, the choice made before he had known there was such a thing as choice, so that any future he might have wanted glimmered in that unreachable place, the might-have-been?

I dream that I could have saved him—if I had been a different daughter, if, that night in the restaurant, I had so much as knocked on the door of his heart, tried its handle, asked; but would I not have had, rather, to enter the watercolor of the Bay of Algiers, to try to change the course of history from long before his birth, a feat impossible even in the imaginary realm of childhood to which I had long ago lost access? And even then?

How is any one of us different from my brother, I am led to ask; and the obvious answer is, for all our stories, not at all.

In the immediate wake of my father's death, however, the questions were far more practical. His body was still unburied when, home from school on account of the tragedy, I overheard my grandmother and my mother arguing, in hushed voices that hid nothing, about the possible catalysts for his deed.