The Last Life (6 page)

Zohra's hands were gnarled and stubbed with work, and when I remember my grandmother's lunches, what I recall most clearly, aside from the half-lowered blinds which the unremitting glare of sun and sea strove to penetrate, and aside from the powerful, wet clacking of my grandfather's mastication, are Zohra's dark, trembling fingers clasped around my grandmothers porcelain serving dishes, looking edible themselves, warty little sausages on the edge of a mound of beans, or poking towards the mashed potatoes, or glistening at the tips where they had slipped, for an instant, into the platter's pool of
jus.
Zohra was always good to me, obsequious and secretive: since my earliest childhood, she had pressed gifts of chocolate or jellied fruits into my greedy palms, baring her wrecked teeth with delight and murmuring "Poor little one, this is for you"—a poverty she located not in my person but in the sad condition of my brother and in the austerity of my grandparents.

My grandmother was a formidable and beaky woman, whose aquiline visage, in its austere definition, distracted from the soft spread of her girth. Although she had peppered my childhood with her versions of our family's history, which I thrilled to hear, she was not the sort of grandmother who crowed over my every endeavor, whose bosom offered welcome refuge. Rather, she expressed concern through criticism: "Sit up straight," "Don't chew with your mouth open," "Don't run in the corridors." She believed that meals should be sedate times, given to the full enjoyment of our food and to the sound of her husband's voice.

When he was there, and in good humor, my grandfather told jokes or stories, spilled over with anecdotes from his work, or from their long, exceedingly long, lives; or else he prised the details out of my days like an expert fisher for pearls. When he was angry, the table quivered with his rage, whether audible or present only in his violent thrusts at the china and silverware. When he was not there—and in that gloomy week of my grounding, the week before the shooting, he was not there once, too busy in his madness to leave his desk, or if he did, then only to roam the hotel grounds and spy on his employees—then my grandmother and I would sit in near-silence, serenaded by Zohra's humming and cleaning in the kitchen. I would watch my grandmother eat, the way she brought her fork precisely to her mouth and pulled her lips back over her teeth in a snarl so as to protect her lipstick, the sinewy grappling of mouth and food beneath her cheeks, and the bald, froglike swallow at the end. She always paused between bites, and her eyes, then, would focus and glitter as she inspected her plate, or mine, or the line of sunlight on the carpet. When it was just the two of us, I hated those lunches, struggled through them only by peering, as often as discretion allowed, at the turquoise swathe of the pool beneath the balcony and counting the minutes until my friends began to trickle into view.

"Grand'-mère," I would ask, often my first word of the hour, "may I please be excused?"

She would nod, slowly, as if considering my request; and then, sometimes, smile. "Go. Have fun, my dear. But remember, no swimming for an hour. Digestion. Remember."

And as I gathered my towel and prepared to run, she cautiously, gracefully, folded her napkin and began preparations for her siesta.

Daily there followed, in that apartment, a trough of silence as deep as death. Zohra slunk away and left the shuttered rooms to the breathy seesaw of my grandmother's snores. On weekends, my grandfather would lie beside her with a magazine until he too succumbed, the two of them beneath the rosary-draped crucifix on the wall like curled offerings, Christ's ever merciful eye upon their wrinkled bodies. It was fearsome, as a child, to discover that the world could be so still during daylight: I had had to endure it, when I was smaller and my mother left me in their care for the day; or in the winter holidays, even at fourteen—but at least in winter the wind cavorted angrily around the window frames and the raindrops spat against the glass, disrupting the unending rhythms of their sleep.

That summer, though, that week, the luncheon hour alone was sufficient penance: I was paroled before siesta, a criminal loosed onto the back pathways to the beach or snoozing—somehow a livelier sleep, with the breeze at our skin—on the bridge over the pool. Everyone knew that I had lost my night privileges, and they knew why. My date with Thibaud, which otherwise might have been a source of gossip and speculation only behind his back and mine, became everybody's favorite joke. Not even Marie-Jo would defend me. Thierry was the most insistent: "Locked up for your lover boy, eh? Like Rapunzel in her tower. Thibaud, you'll have to go rescue the damsel in distress. Better hope the grandfather isn't standing guard."

"Too much necking and you'll get your head chopped off!" was another of Thierry's cracks. Marie-Jo knew there hadn't been any necking at all, but she kept her own counsel, smirked. Later she said, "Come off it, Sagesse, it's good for your reputation. Do you want people to think you're a frigid prude?" She laughed, not kindly. "It's doing him a favor too. My God, what is he? He didn't even try? Not even a kiss? I told you, he's queer, that one. You'll see."

She licked her forefinger and used it to smooth the arcs of her eyebrows. We were in her bedroom, she at her child's vanity table, gazing into the mirror, I on the edge of her bed, raking the carpet with my toes. She was ostensibly changing to play tennis, but sat for ages in her bikini, a woman on a little girl's stool, making faces at her reflection.

"Not a bad hoax, though. Marry a gay guy with rich parents, and then have your pick of lovers, rich or poor, all of them gorgeous and madly in love with you ... And then you could blackmail him: 'Darling, I want a fur coat. Or I'll tell your poor
maman
about Félix, or Jean, or Paul, or whoever' ... 'Darling, a diamond necklace'—fantastic!"

"He's not gay. Only you would think of such a thing."

"Because I am a woman of the world," said Marie-Jo, exchanging her bikini top for a lacy bra, baring her pointed brown breasts at me as proof of her assertion. "There would be a sex problem, though. I mean, for the son his parents would want you to bear him. It might be impossible, if he couldn't even—"

"Stop it." I stood up and strode to the door. Marie-Jo was spinning out her jest as she rummaged in her drawer for her tennis skirt.

"Poor sweetie," she cried, rushing clumsily across to hug me with one foot in a white sneaker and the other bare, her long body brown in its white underwear. "You really like him."

"It's not that. Of course I like him. You know I do. But also, I just..." I trailed off.

"Forget it. C'mon, I'm late. My racket's under the bed—grab it for me?"

The fact was, Thibaud had retreated. He didn't even seem to look at me anymore, let alone try to swim near me or walk with me. And as I had no part in the night gatherings, and only Marie-José's reports of them to go on, I had no idea what Thibaud was thinking. More tormenting than my dreary lunches, or my mother's heavy sighs at night over her English novels, was my mind's picture of everyone assembled on the steps under the oldest plane tree; and the accompanying soundtrack, the conversations that in my absence might—would, I was sure of it—stray to cover me, the questions Thierry or Renaud would ask of Thibaud: "Can she kiss? Too much tongue or too little? Her tits aren't much, are they?" Over the years—over that very summer—I had played along in the grilling of other girls, or boys even; I knew I wasn't fanciful.

I hid one night, two, three, four, in my parents' leathered library, prone on the slippery black Danish sofa in the aquatic television light, watching old American cop shows and black-and-white westerns dubbed clumsily into French. Ordinarily I spent such times lip-reading, trying to pick out the American dialogue beneath the sonorous French voices, gloating that it was my secret language, these words of two hundred and fifty million people but all of them far away. Discerning a sentence was a triumph, proof that someday I would escape my sultry palm-treed prison for a real life, with my American self (who existed thus far only in the privacy of my bathroom mirror), in English. But on those nights—one, two, three, four—I barely saw the screen, and certainly not the lips of the Americans upon it. I stared for hours and saw nothing but myself, walking along the town beach at Thibaud's shoulder, or sitting, our hands just touching, in the café by the shore. Like a sorceress with a crystal ball, I saw, too, the screeching, gesticulating crowd by the pool, in their cloud of cigarette smoke, and I heard them making fun of me.

On the fifth day I decided to take matters into my own hands. I didn't think of it as going against my mother's wishes, or betraying her trust. I knew that my parents, together, were going out for dinner that night, invited to the home of an aspiring politician on the other side of town. My mother was suffering, even at breakfast, from one of her nervous complaints.

"His wife is a terribly cold woman," she confided. "She preens like a peacock. Her hair is the most unnatural shade of purple—eggplant, you know? One of these women who ought to be shrivelling up from all those years in the sun, but somehow manages not to. God, if I tanned like she does, I'd look like a prune! But it's some French gene."

"An evil one, of course, like all French genes."

"Don't, Sagesse. I don't need it."

Knowing that they would be out, that they would never know, certain that with each passing day I was further forfeiting any possibility of romance with Thibaud, I seized my chance. That day at my grandmother's table, I didn't wait to see the troupe assembling beneath me at the water's edge. No sooner had Zohra brought in the two leaky rum babas that were our dessert (it was a stroke of luck: I was known to loathe them) than I scraped back my chair and slipped my napkin into its ring.

"Already?" asked my grandmother, blinking at my request.

"We thought we might go down to the town beach," I lied. "And rent
pédalos.
If you don't get there early, they're all gone."

"If you'd mentioned it before, I would have moved lunch forward. But all right. Be careful. How will you get there?"

"On the bus. Don't worry." I was already standing. I knew that if she saw us at the pool upon waking from her nap, I would have only to say that the tourists had beaten us to it, and rather than wait our turn, we had come back.

"Don't swim, dear. Not for an hour."

"Of course not."

As I left she was spooning the oily sponge of her baba rather sorrowfully to her mouth.

I ran, the shortest way, through the shrubbery to the back path, to the hotel. It was a risk, loitering in the lobby—that my grandfather or even my father might pass through, that Cécile or Laure might come up before Thibaud did. I could see him, through the glass doors of the restaurant patio, at a large table, under an umbrella, with his parents. His mother was wearing a yellow straw hat with a vast brim and square sunglasses, and his father's thick back was towards me, bent over the end of their meal. Thibaud I saw in profile. He sat, expressionless and silent, turning from one parent to the other as they spoke, like the umpire in a tennis match, occasionally brushing his hair back from his face with an irritated hand. He kicked his sneakers idly against the legs of his chair. His mother asked him something, a fine trail of cigarette smoke wafting from each nostril just before she spoke, her cigarette clamped between lacquered vermillion claws. Underneath her hat, I knew she had eggplant-colored hair, immovable and shiny: she was the type of woman my mother feared.

Thibaud shook his head in response to her question, and stood to leave. At the far end of the terrace, I saw Cécile and Laure winding among the tables, and I cursed my luck; but they turned into the restaurant. He came on alone, into the cool marble from the glare outside. He did not know he was being watched, but still his face gave nothing away. He was about to cross to the elevators when I called out.

"You don't often come in here," he said.

"Too risky. Might run into my father and grandfather."

"So what's up today?"

I had not prepared a lie. "I never had a chance to thank you for the other evening. With all the fuss about the swimming..."

"No. And the fuss about me. Sorry about that." He seemed almost to be laughing, so I did.

"Parents, y'know. They're all the same."

"Mine don't care what I do."

"You're a boy. And you're older. A bit."

"I suppose."

He fingered his room key, clacking the metal against the translucent plastic square with the number on it and
HOTEL BELLEVUE
in gilded capitals.

"You headed to the pool?"

"Of course. What else is there to do? I just ... I wondered ... I wondered if you wanted to meet up tonight."

"Tonight? But you're under lock and key, aren't you?"

I shrugged, in conscious imitation of Marie-José's nonchalant shrugs. I was fiddling with the ends of my hair, flicking a swatch around my forefinger. "So?"

Thibaud emitted a strange blowing noise, like an attempt at a chuckle. This, I could tell, was not how he expected me to behave. "What did you want to do?"

"It's difficult for me to go into town. I might run into somebody, it might get back to my folks ... I thought we could meet here, maybe go for a walk. I don't know."

"Why not? I'm not sure I can stand another evening with Thierry, anyhow."

"Isn't he a jerk? You almost feel sorry for him."

"Maybe you do."

We fixed a time, and a place—by the round bench, where the little children played; none of our group would ever wander over there—and then I left him, a shadow slipping between the mirrored jaws of the elevator. I managed to duck out of the lobby just as Cé- cile and Laure were coming down the stairs from the first floor.

As my parents prepared for their outing, I danced attendance with rare goodwill. I zipped my mother's dress and cooed over her new shoes. I fixed a scotch and soda (the chink-tink of the ice cubes, the viscous liquor, the sizzling froth on top) for my father, and balanced it next to his toothbrush while he shaved. I propped myself on the edge of the tub and watched him, as I had done as a very small child, teetering in the steamy air. My eyes monitored the flesh at my father's nape, rolling and unrolling, damp curls appearing and disappearing, as he angled his chin for the razor. I was eager, and my eagerness felt wholly pure: for an hour, I was their golden girl. I asked about the dinner, and who would be there. I made jokes about the adults that I knew: the man with the funny shoes; the lech whose wandering hands, like heat-seeking missiles, found women's breasts when he moved in to kiss their cheeks. I imitated the owl-faced mining heiress who, slightly hard of hearing, parroted whatever was said to her to be sure she'd understood. I could sense my parents' surprise, and their pleasure. It seemed to me a sort of blessing, because I couldn't entirely believe that they didn't know of my plan, and in being so loving, forgive me for it.