And Their Children After Them

by Nicolas Mathieu

  Stéphanie had known Serge Simon ever since she was a little girl. He was an old friend of the family. He would come over for drinks, go hunting with her father. The two men owned a boat together that was anchored in the Mandelieu-la-Napoule harbor. Serge had two daughters. The elder was finishing pharmacy school in Lyon. The other one was in the United States, where she claimed to be studying, but was mainly having a good time on one of those campuses like you see in the movies with manicured lawns and tall buildings, both historic and brand-new, not to mention all those athletes, each dumber and more attractive than the next. Or at least that’s how Stéphanie imagined it.

  Two years earlier, Serge Simon was still teasing her, pinching her nose and telling dumb jokes. For her fourteenth birthday, all he could think of to give her was a Swiss Army knife. But for some time now, a curious reversal had been taking place in their relationship. Steph would sometimes catch him staring at her legs, or gazing into her eyes. It wasn’t exactly unhealthy, but it felt hung up, stuck. When fat old Serge realized he’d been caught in the act, he would pull himself together and let out his weird, strangled laughter. Stéphanie and Clémence had turned it into a gimmick. Heh-heh-heh…A forced, chesty laugh. Their verdict: an IQ of five, and all in his cock.

  That’s what the girls told each other, anyway.

  Serge and his wife had come to dinner the night before. When Myreille was there, he generally behaved himself. Which was why Steph had painted her toenails and worn a super low-cut tank top. Aside from that, she hadn’t done anything special to turn him on. She actually didn’t say anything all evening, just acted grumpy, strolling around the house barefoot in her tank top, like a guy at loose ends.

  It was funny, how men talked to her now. They used that bass voice, deep and well modulated. Especially Serge. They would go through the same routine each time. Steph would leave the table after dessert, and at some point during the evening Serge would come find her. He would stick his head into the living room, or crack the door to her bedroom, and say, “Good night, sweetie-pie.” Yeah, right. It scared Stéphanie a little, but at the same time she didn’t mind feeling this successful man’s eyes on her.

  It was too weird, having men circling you with their heavy bodies and hulking shoulders, their cigarette breath, their strength, their hairiness, and their heavy, sexy, sickening hands. Stéphanie found it confusing; she was wary of them, but drawn to them. She also thought of what the men could do, with their big German cars and their credit cards. These were guys who supported a family, paid exorbitant business school tuition for their clueless offspring, had a boat nearby, gave their opinions, and thought that being the mayor of their village wouldn’t be a bad idea, with their mistresses, their debts, their enlarged hearts ready to burst, their little whiskeys with friends, and their XXL Ralph Lauren shirts. Yet all that power would shrink to nothing because of some girl.

  What did they imagine was going to happen?

  Sniffing and vain, they could sense that the girls’ first time was coming soon, and it moved them, made them angry. They, who were headed for the end of the line with their pointless business deals and carcinogenic responsibilities. One of these days, those aerodynamic gamines, with their perky breasts and legs that looked like they’d popped out of a mold three seconds ago, would get into bed with boys. They would spread their thighs and take pink cocks in their mouths. The imminence of this event left the older men dazed and inconsolable. Innocence was about to be lost in sweat, and the men would have liked to have had the privilege of erasing some of that virginal whiteness one last time. They were tormented by the girls’ sleek lines, their flat stomachs, their skin so tight you’d think it was spray-painted on. These men, who had won it all, now realized that the only thing that mattered was the beginning.

  * * *

  —

  Steph was now in the shade on the balcony. She leaned on the railing and continued chatting with Clémence. When the girls weren’t together, they spent all their time on the telephone. In fact, arguments regularly erupted between Steph and her mother, Caroline, who claimed the phone bills would bankrupt them. Steph’s father instinctively defended her, at which point Caroline turned on him. The rivalry between mother and daughter needed to be resolved, but Pierre ducked the issue out of magnanimity or cowardice. So they all stopped talking to each other, and each retreated to a different part of the house, which fortunately was large. The father, especially, started arranging distant jaunts to avoid being hassled. His workshop had gradually become an office and was beginning to look like a small studio apartment. He even got an estimate to install a shower next to the garage. This highly political plan was the object of a maternal veto, however. Recognizing the outsized scale of his intentions, he settled for a chemical toilet, which was fine.

  “What do you want to do this afternoon?” asked Clémence.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I just don’t know. I don’t think I’m even on his radar right now.”

  “You’re kidding, right? He’s crazy about you, he wants you. It’s perfectly obvious.”

  “You think so? I don’t,” said Steph, savoring her false modesty.

  “For real…”

  Steph didn’t know what to do about the guy. She and Simon had been in third grade together. He’d been a good student, noisy and pretentious, who wore 501s and Kickers. But he had changed a lot since then. Now he wore a leather jacket, smoked all the time, and looked sad. Through him, Steph had discovered Leonard Cohen and the Doors. She listened to them constantly. It was too beautiful.

  “Well?” asked Clémence, getting impatient.

  “Let’s just go to the park.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Well, what else is there?” asked Steph placidly.

  “We went there yesterday.”

  “Okay, but I’m warning you right now, I’m not going to go back to that guy’s house.”

  “Yeah, you got me there,” admitted Clémence.

  Her visit to the cousin’s place hadn’t been exactly memorable. That was the trouble with bad boys; as often as not, they lived like gypsies. That said, the cousin was really super cute. Besides, he was the only guy to have any hash in this whole shitty town. Clémence wanted to see him again.

  “And what about that mother of his?” snickered Steph. “Seriously, did you see her? Totally gaga.”

  Clémence didn’t pursue it. She and the cousin had a date to meet that very evening near the decommissioned power plant. They’d already met a couple of times. He hadn’t dared anything yet, but she was confident. She shivered just to think about it.

  The two girls remained without speaking like that for a few moments. Steph was pacing back and forth. The tiles felt cool under her bare feet. It was pleasant in this heat. She went back out to the patio. The man with the mower was gone, leaving behind a pile of fresh-cut grass. She caught the smell; it was delicious, spring-like.

  “Man, I really hate this town.”

  “I adore it.”

  “The sooner we get out the better.”

  “Just two more years.”

  “We’ll never make it.”

  “Well, if you keep loafing in school I’ll obviously have to leave by myself,” said Clémence.

  “What would you do without me? You’ll never be able to fuck them all.”

  “You might start by managing to fuck Simon.”

  “Yeah, that,” said Steph, feeling depressed. “All right then, we’ll go to the park.”

  By park, they meant the skate park the city had recently built near the fire department barracks, on the road out of town. It consisted of a ramp, three flat rails, and two low walls. It attracted a disparate fauna, from rich kids to notorious punks. They did a lot of skating and even more drinking, and when the time was right you could find good hash and really gorgeous girls. De
spite a phlegmatic style on his board, Simon did the best ollies in town, to the point that he pretty much neglected all the other tricks. He wore Vans with holes in them, jeans that showed his underwear, and a different T-shirt every day.

  “We’ve already gone four times this week,” said Clémence with a sigh.

  “So what?”

  “I dunno…It’s always the same thing.”

  “I just hope that fat whore Christelle won’t be there.”

  “Relax, that chick’s nobody. He could give a shit.”

  “You think?”

  “Seriously.”

  Stéphanie started on Simon again, excited, desperate, talkative to the point of exhaustion. She had to go over it all again, analyzing each encounter with him, his slightest gesture, his smallest inflection, like last night, the night before, like tomorrow. Clémence was a really good friend. She let Steph go on for nearly forty-five minutes. At the end of it, Clem announced that she would come pick her up around three, as usual.

  * * *

  —

  Steph made herself some lasagna and ate it alone while watching a rebroadcast of Cap Danger. Then she went up to her room, feeling weary and a little sad. At times, she was sick of everything, even of her bedroom, though it had been the fruit of an epic struggle. When she was little, her room was across the hall from her parents’. Then, when she was twelve or thirteen, she started pestering them for a change. Various solutions had been considered, the most expensive of which involved converting the attic. That was the one they settled on. Unfortunately, the temperature up there fell below zero in winter and was over a hundred during the summer. Insulation, ventilation, and air-conditioning quickly ran to fifteen thousand francs. But Steph now had a place of her own, with an unbeatable view and a little corner with cushions near a mullion window, like in America. Not to mention her own bathroom.

  To relieve her boredom, she told herself she ought to do some reading. Everyone was after her about that: you had to read. Her bookcase mainly had the required stuff for school: Zola, Maupassant, The Imaginary Invalid, Racine. But she also had other books that she liked better. For the past month she’d been trying to get into the strange plot of Le Grand Meaulnes. The little love story was pretty nebulous and hesitant, but she liked it. It had an atmosphere that sometimes suited her when she was tired or had eaten too much. She opened her night table drawer and found a package of Balistos. She took one, slipped it into her mouth, and felt the chocolate melt on her tongue as she returned to her reading. It was warm in the room, whose open windows let in a little breeze, stirring the pastel-colored curtain. She ate two more Balistos before falling asleep. Twenty minutes later she woke up feeling hot, with an unpleasant taste in her mouth. Though it wasn’t even two-thirty, Clémence was outside, honking the horn on her scooter.

  “I got the hell out of the house,” explained Clémence. “My father was nagging me again about taking a préparatoire course.”

  “Don’t you want to do prépa?”

  “Sure I do, but this is August sixth, so right now I could give a flying fuck.”

  Steph laughed. Clémence was a funny one, with her upper-class airs and her gutter ways, her daring and her insolence. Still, she would be starting senior year with an A average, and Steph was nowhere near that.

  “On the other hand, I left in a rush. I spaced out about bringing you a helmet.”

  “Oh well, no sweat.”

  “Yeah, sorry. C’mon, get on.”

  Steph straddled the scooter and put her arms around her friend’s waist. From a dozen feet away, it would be hard to tell them apart. They wore the same kind of clothes, the same flip-flops, and they both had ponytails. With a nasal whine, the scooter carried them off.

  At that time of day, there weren’t many people on the road. People with jobs were in their offices, at their machines, or at campgrounds. Old people stayed home to keep cool. Only teenagers would be out looking for adventure in this heat. That said, speed softened the air and made the wind silky. The girls could feel its caress on their bare feet. Steph looked at the highway over her friend’s shoulder. Speeding along on the departmental highways, microscopic and in movement, the girls felt free, silently counting the promises that life owed them.

  * * *

  —

  When they arrived, Simon, his brother Romain, and their weird longhaired friend Rodrigue were sitting in the shade of the skate ramp. With them was a girl nobody had ever seen before.

  “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Steph absentmindedly redid her ponytail while Clémence put the scooter on its stand.

  Everybody said hello, even the girl, who was smiling. The mood wasn’t exactly welcoming. Steph looked at the new girl with deep distrust.

  She and Clémence didn’t dare sit down.

  “What are you guys up to?” asked Clem.

  “Nothing special.”

  Simon’s brother was holding a freshly lit joint.

  “So you have hash now?”

  “It’s Anne,” Romain said, pointing to the girl who had shown up out of nowhere.

  “She’s Belgian,” added Rodrigue, as if that explained everything.

  “Is that so?”

  Steph did her best to smile at her. The girls still hadn’t managed to sit down. They were standing there like a couple of twits.

  “She’s staying at the campground with her cousins. They’re crazy, they smoke nonstop.”

  “Cool.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Brussels,” Anne answered.

  “Super,” said Steph.

  She was studying the girl’s legs and face. For somebody from Brussels, the bitch looked awfully Latin. Her light eyes almost clashed with her skin color. And her hairstyle was all over the place. Steph and her girlfriends wore their hair long, with barrettes and scrunchies. It was their pride and joy, and they were forever pampering it. By contrast, this chick sported a do that said well-mannered punk: half bangs, half Patti Smith. And naturally, no bra under her blue T-shirt. Steph could’ve wept.

  So when Rodrigue offered her the joint, Steph didn’t need to be asked twice, even though she’d sworn to herself to cut back on dope after the Drimblois party. That evening, or as much of it as she remembered, had left her with a bitter aftertaste. She had drunk beer, smoked weed, and done poppers. At one point, Simon joined her when she was almost comatose on the sofa. He’d whispered personal things into her ear, paid her compliments, told her secrets. Flattered and weak, she had let him take the lead. Suddenly, he was kissing her. Later, they wound up in a bedroom upstairs. Simon was holding her by the waist and neck. His hands were all over her. His kisses came as a surprise. They were lively and sweet, really delicious, like an overripe peach. While she was running her fingers through his hair, he very deftly attacked her bra. When he pinched her nipples, she found herself suddenly softening, becoming liquid, a lake. Maybe she told him no, but that wasn’t very clear in her mind. She remembered Simon’s warmth on her cheek, her neck, her swollen chest, the sound of a belt being loosened. He put his hands in her jeans and she spread her thighs. She sighed while he searched through her panties for the damp bulge of her pussy. Then he pushed the cotton aside and found the soft lips. Steph seized his wrist to guide him. She was breathing through her nose, in a hurry, warm all over. She wanted to feel him inside her. Put them in, finger-fuck me. When he was done, he showed her his index and middle fingers, as wrinkled as if they’d just come from a bath. After that, she didn’t remember much. She eventually went for a swim, feeling a little sad, happy, with that yucky feeling like after you’ve eaten too much and you regret it. Since then, nothing, he’d ignored her. It was the shits.

  * * *

  —

  Simon and Rodrigue were skating bare-chested while Romain and the girls hung out at the top of the ramp, legs dang
ling in midair. The repeated slamming of the boards’ trucks ran through the whole structure and thumped in their chests. Romain started shamelessly coming on to Stéphanie. His putting the moves on her was especially annoying because it confirmed Simon’s indifference; otherwise his brother would never dare. It made her feel ugly, sweaty, and put down. Worse, she had to keep looking good, what with the horrible new Belgian girl there, skinny as all get-out. At one point Romain tried to put his hand on her back, and she told him to fuck off.

  “Just who do you think you are?” he snarled, stung to the quick.

  Everybody heard the put-down, and from the expression on his face, he clearly wasn’t going to let it go. At that point, Clémence stepped in.

  “Stop that!” she said. “Like right away.”

  She had gone out with Romain in seventh grade, and that sad experience had given her a kind of hold over him. If she didn’t overdo it, and struck fast and accurately, she could put him in his place without too much trouble. But this time, she had gone too far by snapping at him so sharply. He stood up and walked to the far end of the ramp. Standing there with legs spread, he started to take a piss.

  “You are seriously disgusting!”

  “Ew, gross! Stop it.”

  Romain took his time and ostentatiously shook the last drops off before zipping his fly.

  “You got nothing to say to me.”

  “You’re disgusting,” said Clémence. “Really, that’s just not okay.”

  “Oh yeah? And hooking up with social misfits is okay?”

  Touché. Clémence paled. How did he know about that? What about the others? Did they know too? Since nobody reacted, she assumed that her affair with the cousin was common knowledge. Bummer. She promised herself she would end it very quickly—as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted, anyway.

  Anne suggested that they smoke a joint, to lighten the mood. It was well-intentioned, but Steph refused, and so did Clémence, mainly out of solidarity. Besides, it was starting to get late. Steph was always careful not to be too stoned when she went home. Her mother had the soul of a customs agent and a stopwatch instead of a heart. If Steph had bloodshot eyes or wasn’t home by seven, she’d be treated to litanies about respect and the future. Being five minutes late took on a premonitory aspect. It would spell her future ruin, unwanted pregnancies, alcoholic men, dead-end careers, or, worse, a sociology major leading to a civil service exam. Not that her mother herself had exactly set the world on fire at law school. She made up for it by marrying Pierre, a man with the Mercedes concession and exclusive rights over the whole valley and dealerships as far as Luxembourg. At Stéphanie’s house, people compensated for the shortness of their academic careers by telling themselves tales of strong arms, self-reliance, and the value of work. The story wasn’t completely inaccurate, but it greatly embellished the historical reality. To build his little automobile empire, Steph’s father was lucky enough to count on a family inheritance, which was very welcome after three failures in his first year in medical school.