The Last Life (46 page)

"They work hard."

"Not like that skanky bunch you were consorting with last year. That creepy druggy guy and his friends. And Frédéric. Geez. What a bunch of losers."

"They're all right."

"Thierry is thinking of preparing the exam for naval college, did you know?"

I shook my head. Marie-José proceeded with unbroken strings of gossip, a chatter as light and as constant as a brook, while I sat and looked at her, up close. This was what I had wanted, why I had called: to see her, to memorize her, to measure whether she had changed. Her features had altered their proportions, slightly: her nose seemed faintly broader, her left eye rounder. Her mane of hair remained the same, its gilded streaks shining and faintly stiff, like raffia. Her breasts were fuller. I wondered if she was on the pill, after her escapade. Her tongue had a new way of flicking the corners of her lips, self-consciously, when she paused. She seemed emphatically womanly, ripe as a fruit, a creature to whom school had become a childish and obsolete distraction. I waited for her to mention my father, or even my grandfather, directly, but she did not; she skirted around them, around me, as if I were any vague acquaintance. I felt cold, in my extremities. She had grown as foreign to me as someone else's abandoned doll, a human approximation. I could not quite believe what we had shared.

After a while, at a breach in her flow of verbiage, I inquired, "Did you have anything you wanted to say to me?"

"Me?" She was suddenly wary, her oval eyes narrowing. "What do you mean? I don't—no."

"Because you called, that time. That's all. I thought you might have wanted to say something."

"Oh, no, nothing specific. It was just—I'd heard, about, you know, your dad, and I thought, well—you know."

"Yeah. Thanks. Listen, I'd better be going, I think. My mother's expecting me."

"Sure."

"So, good luck with everything, huh?"

"And you." She hugged me again, more gingerly this time, as we neared the door. "Send us a postcard from the States, okay?"

"Right," I said. "Sure."

The marvel, for me, of the encounter, was how firmly that door of my past had been shut, how little I yearned to return to what I had long thought of as the innocent days of our friendship before my grandfather—so long ago, by then—had fired his gun. I could not muster even a twinge of my former affection for my former friend; I could not imagine the person I had been to hold her so dear, to see her as anything other than fatuous and gabbling. I felt as if, in watch ing her, I had at last seen her clearly, in her womanly ordinariness. She had become what she would be, and she would be that always (I was not far wrong; within three years she would be married, to a man ten years her senior, a salesman met through her brother, and expecting her first child), whereas I, like an old woman and a child at once, felt freighted by my knowledge of precariousness, and wholly uncertain of my path. I might, I thought, become anything; but not that, what she was. She did not even know (nor care to) that there was a veil over things, let alone that it could be torn away.

The other call I made, in those last weeks, was to Frédéric. He agreed to meet me at the café on the beach where, in another life, I had sat with Thibaud, before our first, tremendous stroll along the sand. I was sunk in a plastic chair, scanning the menu for the umpteenth time while the late afternoon sun beat upon my brow and the hordes of bathers josded and shouted along the sand, when he rode up, on a new motorcycle, a full-fledged Honda, with rearview mirrors like antennae and a sleek vermillion frame. He had cut his hair very short, so that it stuck out at right angles to his head, accentuating his unstuck ears, and he carried his cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt, like a 1950s rocker.

"Quite an entrance," I observed, as he slung into the seat opposite, after pausing, barely, in his fluid slide, to kiss my cheeks. "New wheels?"

"I promised my mother they'd make me study harder."

I laughed. "Right. As if."

He frowned. The stubble grown artfully along his jaw caught the sun. His skin was a color from my childhood American pencil box: "Indian red." "Seriously. I am. Studying."

"At the beach, it looks like, if your tan's anything to go by."

"Yeah. Well. What about you? Really? Are you okay?"

"Hanging in. Just about."

"Or not? Tell me honestly. You've had a hell of a time. I wanted to call, but—"

"But it seemed too strange. I know. I got your note. Thanks."

"When something like that happens—none of us knew what to say, you know?"

"It was sweet of you. There's nothing much to say."

"Lahou cried, you know. Seriously. She sobbed. She really was upset. I don't know if—"

"She spoke to me. At school, on the last day. I didn't—I mean, it's hard. I don't really want to talk about it."

"Sure, of course. Sorry."

"I'm grateful, but it's too strange. It doesn't always seem real to me, even."

He ordered a
citron pressé,
I, a coffee, although I was sweating in the sun in my white shirt, which I had worn because it covered me fully. My skin was no better—if anything it was worse: a little rash had sprouted between my breasts.

After the waiter left, Frédéric watched a hive of coffee-skinned girls pursuing one another in circles in the sand. They wore Day-Glo bikini bottoms and their flat nipples sat like American pennies on their bony chests. They were wholly free in their movements. The rules of their game were not clear.

"Adorable, eh?"

"You pervert! They're about ten!"

"They'll grow up. Quickly, too. Look at the one in pink—a real little Lolita."

"Is this what you do all summer? Ogle babies?"

"I told you, I'm studying."

"No girl?"

He shook his head, lit a cigarette.

"Still carrying a torch for Lahou?"

He brushed as if at a fly, but did not answer.

"She and Sami still together?"

"Yep. One abortion on."

"Not really?"

"Don't sound so shocked, my girl. What do you think they do when they're alone? Hold hands?"

"Shit. That's rough. Poor Lahou."

"I was the first person she told. Before Sami." Frédéric sounded proud. "He had some crazy-ass notion she should have the kid, that they'd set up house, play families. She knew he would; that's why she talked to me straight off. 'Get rid of it,' I told her. 'You're too young.' It was what she needed to hear."

"Who paid?"

"He did. In the end. He's still dealing, in a little way. He's got a job now, too, with his old man."

"In the bakery?"

"Terrible hours. Up before dawn. He smells like burnt sugar all the time."

"How long will that last?"

"Not long. He hates his dad. Not long." Frédéric lit another cigarette off the end of the first.

"You're smoking too much."

"You think you're in America already?"

"So you've heard?"

"This town is small, sweetheart. Are you excited? You're doing it, getting out, seeing the wider world, leaving the dopes and cretins behind."

"It's not like I'm going to New York or anything. It's a boarding school, in the middle of nowhere, in the country."

"Hm. Your mom make you?"

"I want to. She just had the idea."

"It's a long way."

"You're telling me."

"I think it's great, Sagesse. Seriously. You'll blow them away."

"Or vice versa."

"You'll be the French girl. It'll be cool. It's much cooler to be the French girl in America than the American girl here."

"Thanks a lot."

"You know what I mean. Or than your nasty old grandfather's offspring."

"Or than my dad's?"

Frédéric poked with his spoon at the congealed sugar at the bottom of his lemonade. "I didn't mean that. You know I didn't."

"I know." I peeled my thighs from the chair and stuck my hands under them. Leaning forward, so that my hair fell over one eye, I was aware that my face was pink, that sweat had beaded unbecomingly along my upper lip. "I wanted to ask you a favor. A going-away favor."

"Anything. Ask away."

"We're friends, right?"

"You bet."

"So you won't laugh at me?"

"Try me."

I spoke with my eyes on the sea, my chin out. "I wondered—I thought—well, because you're a friend—I wondered if you'd sleep with me."

Frédéric snorted. "Come again?"

"You heard me."

"As in 'make love'?"

"You can say no."

He was quiet, fiddling with his cigarette box. Marlboros, red, like the motorcycle. "Why?" he asked, after a time. "It's not that I don't—but we're not—it's a—God, you're weird sometimes."

"That's no, then?" I couldn't look at him.

"I didn't say no. I just asked why. It's out of the blue—I mean—"

"I'm not asking you to pretend you're in love with me or anything. I'm asking for a simple thing. I thought you were burning for it, all you guys."

"Maybe you should askjacquot."

"Thanks. A ton."

"I don't get it. Explain. Elucidate."

"It's like—" I had considered my request for days, and its reasons were so clear to me; but when called upon to present them I found that the words were hard to find. "My American cousin has a phrase, it's that someone 'screams virgin.' I don't want to. The best way is not to be one. If I'm going to start an adult life, a new life, I feel like I want to get it over with."

"Couldn't you just pretend? Just lie. Tell them what you like. Who would ever know the difference?"

"I would."

"But what if you met some guy, over there, say, even in a couple of months, and you didn't—I mean, you wanted it to be the first time, and it wouldn't be..."

"Well, I could just as easily lie about that, couldn't I, as the other way around?"

"You're not making sense."

"I've thought a lot about it. It's not for anyone else. It's for me, so I won't be afraid."

"There's nothing to be afraid of. But I think—you're upset, about your dad, maybe, or leaving, I don't know. I just don't think—"

"I'm not asking you to think for me. I'm just asking a favor. You can say yes or no and that'll be that."

"But we're friends, you know? It's not—don't get me wrong—but we're not—I'm not—"

"Okay. It's no. Forget it. It was just an idea." I tried again to picture taking off my clothes in front of him. I tried to see how we could perpetrate the act without him being aware of the boils on my back, the rash on my chest, without him being repelled by them, by me. I couldn't. I had imagined asking, but hadn't been able to imagine any further. By which I should have known that it was not to be.

"I'm really flattered."

"Shut up. Leave it alone, now. It's like my father. We won't talk about it anymore. It was a dumb idea."

"What happened to that guy from Pans?"

"That was ages ago. He's in Paris, anyway. Drop it, okay? Just please—please don't go telling anyone I asked?"

"I won't."

"Promise?"

"Sure. Want another coffee?"

We sat together for a while, and Frédéric held forth about his plans, his mother, a party he'd been to the night before. He was gracious: he asked more about the boarding school, about my American cousins. I didn't want to talk. The skin on my back prickled, and the heat of the sun oppressed and aggravated me; but neither did I feel I could leave, until my embarrassment had been sufficiently swathed and bundled in the fabric of banal conversation, and I at least might pretend to myself that Frédéric had forgotten. And still, when at last we parted, he held my chin for a moment and said, with a hideous, avuncular tenderness, "Don't worry. Everything will come right at the right time."

I had asked because I had begun to have dreams—or rather, nightmares—about sex. They seemed always to involve my father. I dreamed that I stumbled upon him and a woman I did not know, writhing, naked, in the sheets; I dreamed that he stumbled upon me, that I looked up from the arms of—it was from Frédérics arms, indeed—to spy my father in the doorway, smirking, his arms crossed, mouthing "Marie-José." I dreamed again that the unknown man who licked my nipples, who reached his hand down to my groin, transformed, suddenly, into my father, with hair on his back and the old odor of his cologne in my nostrils, and I awoke to find my own hand between my legs and a thrill, like a current, running through me, that was terror and ecstasy at once. In my waking ruminations, I had somehow determined that only the act itself would free my sleep, and I had decided—it seemed so reasonable—that the presence of Frédérics naked body in my imaginary bed was an indication, a sign that I should entrust my defloration to him.

Of my father's presence in these dreams I could make but little; I only knew that I would have preferred his ghost to visit me under other, more decorous circumstances, as precisely the guiding hand everyone seemed to feel I required in that time, rather than as the hand directed at my sex. And yet—there would surely have been no one better to oversee my education in that sphere than a man to whom it had been so vital, the man who in waltzing with me along the pavement had made me feel, for that fleeting instant, so eminently and irreplaceably desired.

Walking home that afternoon from the beach, I hated my father for the freedom he had taken for himself, and the freedom he had forced on us. Following my mother, I had railed against the prison of our family; but with my father's disappearance, the bars around us, too, had melted away, the bonds loosened: so, consequently, had the place of belonging evaporated, like a castle in the air. My grandmother insisted that the LaBasses should stick together; but my mother was not a LaBasse, had never been one, for all her efforts, and my brother and I were her children, foremost. Without my father, the very notion of a family seemed a poor chimera, and all our history like so many arbitrary stories.

It is a terrible thing to be free. Nations know this; churches know this. People, however, seek to skirt the knowledge. They elevate freedom to a Holy Grail, disregarding the truth that constraints are what define us, in life and in language alike: we yearn to be sentenced. When my mother had thrown up the pieces of her youth, she had wanted them, above all, to land in formation, to provide her with a family and a home and the rituals of living. In unhappiness, she had stayed put, because the meaning of her life was there, in its outlines, and the pleasures, or dismays, were merely incidental squiggles in the pattern. Now, in my turn, I clutched a handful of fragments, for the first time uncertain whether they were even mine to hold. (Had I a brother, or did he not merit the title? Had I a home? Had I a history? And if, in America, I were to suppress these facts, would they become less true?) I was about to throw all to the wind, to see what might land around me; and perhaps I would find myself with nothing at all, in a landscape bare of grass or trees, a landscape in which I, alone in my pustulated body (the one, marred thing I could not leave behind, the one thing that would not leave me: the only and inadequate definition of my "I"), would stand, and begin again, from nothing, to imagine a life.