The Suitors (4 page)

“But I don’t know any.”

“Oh, please. As if that were a problem.”

Frédéric was right. There was no need to know a person to invite him or her to L’Agapanthe. All I needed was to know someone who knew that person.

“Think of Laszlo and the Démazures,” he added, referring to Laszlo Schwartz, who’d been introduced to my parents by a couple who were now regular guests at L’Agapanthe.

Henri Démazure was an insipid international lawyer, Polyséna Démazure a dull Italian who mangled every language she spoke, and they bored the pants off my poor father. Yet they came to L’Agapanthe every
summer because they had introduced my parents to Laszlo Schwartz, a gallery icon whom my mother admired and whose paintings, acquired by museums throughout the world, were worth a fortune. The Démazures, however, were total pills, and now my mother was stuck with them.

“Well, thanks a bunch, but I’d rather not! They came to dinner and never left!”

The problem was that my mother had had to invite the Démazures to L’Agapanthe in order to ask the artist to come: it was a question of manners, as elementary as not seating engaged couples and newlyweds separately at a dinner party. The Démazures accepted eagerly, but without bringing along Laszlo Schwartz, who was busy in Japan with a show. My mother persevered and renewed her invitation the following year, when Laszlo did come along with the Démazures. The third year, relieved of her obligations toward this couple, whose vapid personalities were now only too obvious, my mother tried to think of a way to keep inviting Schwartz but without the Démazures. This was risky, because she didn’t want to offend either them or Laszlo, who might decide to stop coming. But when Henri Démazure lost his job that year, it became impossible for my mother to drop him after such a blow. And so the Démazures notched up another
summer. Then, when it was finally acceptable to get rid of them, they called my mother to whine about their straitened circumstances, beating around the bush before finally saying what a joy it would be for them to return to L’Agapanthe. Embarrassed, my mother let them have their way. This had been going on for years now, and I’d eventually realized that unless they committed some unforgivable faux pas, the Démazures could count on their heavenly holiday for the next twenty summers.

“No, no,” Frédéric said with a laugh, “it doesn’t have to be
that
complicated. You can even invite your candidates sight unseen, without knowing them. I’m sure they would come.”

Frédéric was right. Knowing people can mean so many things. It’s like books: there are plenty of gradations between the books one has read and those one hasn’t. There are the books one has heard of, those with a plot or style we already know by heart, those we can tell by their cover, those whose jacket copy we’ve read. Those we want to read and those we never will. One can also read a book and forget it—in fact, that’s my specialty—or just skim through it. It’s the same with people.

Can I say that I know the guests I’ve seen summer after summer at L’Agapanthe for all these years? Their political opinions and literary tastes are familiar to me,
of course, and I know whether they’re funny or wearisome companions, chatty, timid, or reserved. I have an informal relationship with them. And yet I hardly know them. What are their characters like? Are they happy? What kind of childhood did they have? What do they think of one another? I haven’t the foggiest. At L’Agapanthe, the courtesy de rigueur in a “good house” encourages us all to keep up the finest of fronts, thus preventing anyone from speaking from the heart, just as our luxurious life in the villa shields us from those petty details of day-to-day existence that inevitably reveal our deepest natures in their failings and virtues alike: thoughtlessness, fussiness, generosity, stinginess, devotion, silliness, or lazy self-indulgence.

Sometimes this paradoxical intimacy plays tricks on me. Unable to say much of importance about any of these often prestigious people with whom I’ve been superficially acquainted since forever, I rarely mention that I know them from L’Agapanthe. If I happen to run into one of them anywhere else, my real friends are then surprised when I say hello.

“You know So-and-so?”

“Yes, a little.”

And the next second, So-and-so calls out gaily, “Laure, dear heart! How’s your backhand? And how
are your loonies? Don’t cure them too much, or you’ll do yourself out of a job. Don’t you think I’ve slimmed down?”

So right away I look like the modest little hypocrite who pretends she can barely stand up on skis, until, having dazzled her companions on the slopes, she confesses that she’s the all-around champion of France. And my friends, wrongly assuming that my discretion stems from my loathing of name-dropping or my professional habit of keeping secrets, remind me that not saying anything can be just as annoying as boasting.

Eyeing Frédéric, who was leaving an astronomical tip on the table, I remarked fondly, “I gather that you’ll be perched in a box seat at L’Agapanthe, eager to critique any dramatic developments.”

“Precisely.”

“What do you mean, a rich husband?”

Marie had actually gasped in disbelief when I suggested Frédéric’s solution on the phone the next day.

“Why not?” I countered.

Wasn’t that the oldest game in the book? Women from Paris to Moscow and on to New York went husband
hunting! All right: the idea would never have occurred to me before my conversation with Frédéric, because I’d always considered this sport something reserved for women who were flat broke, which I wasn’t. So joining the hunt, I’d felt, would be immoral, a ploy as unthinkable as my applying to get my health expenses reimbursed from the Sécurité sociale.

“Why not? Because we already are.”

“Are what?”

“Rich, dummy!”

Marie was right. We were rich. At least on paper. We were shareholders in companies that didn’t pay dividends, but we were still good catches.

“And so what?”

“But … how would we get started?” Marie insisted.

Ironically, unlike true gold diggers, we were used to being courted ourselves by people dazzled by money, and we could smell them a mile away.

Romantic idealists, my sister and I were interested only in love and friendship. Money turned out to be a most inconvenient advantage, attracting fortune hunters while often driving everyone else away. Few decent men even dared approach us if they weren’t well-off, and if they were, they couldn’t quite stomach the fact that we frankly didn’t need them to get by. It was the same thing
with friendship. How could we invite people on holiday or to a restaurant if they couldn’t return the favor? It was equally complicated for us to give our friends gifts without unintentionally making them feel obligated to us.

“No arrogance, no ostentation”: the mantra of our childhood. As if we’d needed that! Because we were so miserably conscious of our wealth that we had always tried obsessively to hide it from our friends.

Sometimes that was easy. We never mentioned our trips on private jets or those endless afternoons in the changing rooms of couture houses with our mother, the couturier, and his head seamstress. And we hardly risked bumping into our little pals chez Givenchy, Saint-Laurent, Ungaro, or on the tarmac at Le Bourget, Teterboro, or Biggin Hill.

Our predicament turned dicey when we had to convert our nanny into an English granny, or the driver picking us up at school into a family friend. It became frankly hair-raising when we had to keep coming up with the appropriate traffic jams to explain being late for school on Monday morning after a round-trip to New York on the Concorde.

Our house betrayed us. Rare were the friends Marie and I dared invite home. We’d tell them that our town house was just an ordinary apartment building sheltering
many families. Already puzzled by the maze of service stairs we climbed to reach our floor (thus avoiding our imposing front door, which would have given the game away), our guests invariably wondered why there was no kitchen and no bedroom for our parents. So we’d casually refer to our “duplex” to reassure them, as well as to account for the dumbwaiter that delivered our meals, which were revolting, actually, because our chef, no doubt considering himself too distinguished to feed mere children, handed this chore off to a kitchen boy.

Later, during those tough internships when our father decided to introduce us to the real world, Marie and I continued honing our skills in the art of dissimulation. At one point I was a lowly employee in the accounting department of a construction and public works firm where I wasn’t allowed to leave the building without permission from my boss, a truly odious bully. I used to slip quietly away, however, to the office of the CEO (a living god accessible only to department heads), who just happened to be a friend of my parents and welcomed me with piping hot coffee and a game of chess. One day my creepy little boss discovered the scam. Drenched in sweat and worry, he buttonholed me in a hall to apologize while begging me to put in a good word for him. His obsequious flip-flopping
disgusted me, but I was chiefly relieved that my colleagues, who had taken me under their wing (and for whom I surreptitiously punched in every other day), did not suspect a thing. Otherwise, they might have felt like fools, and in a way, they would have been right, since I had never really been one of them and thus had never needed their protection, which my visits with the CEO would have made cruelly clear.

I’d been a coward, behaving like someone safely ensconced in a cushy position. In my defense, though, I should say that at that time, the wealthy were all considered assholes. And it didn’t help that most people I met flaunted their “political consciousness” mainly by posing as enemies of the rich, a situation that would reverse itself ten years later, when heirs and heiresses would be welcomed to parade around in magazines like movie stars. Deep down, though, nothing had changed, because money, having neither reputation nor personality of its own, is a constant magnet for fantasies and projections, and will always channel its share of bitterness and dreams.

“As for knowing how to hunt down a rich husband,” I finally admitted to Marie, “you’re right, we’re probably not up to this. And I’m only attracted to weirdos. I like trying to fix problem men, I can’t help it.”

“Yes, so I’ve noticed,” said my sister slyly, alluding to my two years of nightmare wedlock to a man I’d found irresistible and who’d proved mad as a hatter. “But why couldn’t you fix up a
rich
weirdo?”

Good point. I laughed. “Shall we give it a try?”

“You bet!”

“But how do we find these Prince Charmings?”

“Oh,
please
!”

Marie and I are very close. I’m thirty years old, she’s thirty-two. We live a few blocks from each other. At the local café we’re known as “the sisters,” even if we go there separately, I with my son and Marie with her lovers. Our close relationship hasn’t always been obvious because we are quite different, almost opposites. My sister looks Swedish, while I could be Brazilian. She has our father’s blond coloring and the svelte silhouette of our mother, a brunette like me, and I got my solid, down-to-earth looks from our father. Marie is always impeccably turned out, whereas I seem to be at loose ends, my curly hair and curvy figure creating an impression of undisciplined excess, the way words can sometimes outrun thoughts.

When we were children, though, we had even more reason to feel different from each other. Taking her lead from our nanny, Miss Ross, our mother had declared that Marie was the pretty one and I the smart one, insisting all the while that she simply doted on both daughters, a charming affirmation we learned to periodically reinterpret as time went by. In fact, our mother never quite knew what to do with us or, what’s more, what to make of us. Beginning with our conception. What if pregnancy spoiled her figure? True, she was a beauty. A tall, whippet-thin brunette with superb cheekbones, she had glowing skin, an aristocratic nose, slightly almond-shaped black eyes, and she carried herself like a dancer, as truly beautiful women so often do. Her anxiety over losing her figure soon gave way to that of losing her marriage, and she resigned herself to pregnancy only under pressure from a husband so resolute that he threatened her with divorce. She was determined, however, never to become one of those “loving and frumpy mothers who devote themselves to their children and give up trying to look attractive,” as she put it. So she hired an Englishwoman in her sixties to take charge of our upbringing, an undertaking with which our mother was most careful not to interfere.