The Suitors

by Cecile David-Weill

  At the end of our Sunday evening, Marie and I would make one last effort: “What about Moumouche de Ganay? Gary Shoenberg? Or Perla de Cambray?”

  “Now that’s a good idea,” our parents would murmur. “We really should think about that.”

  But we already knew they would ignore our advice completely, because they’d never intended to take it in the first place. As usual, they would do as they pleased. And we would have to wait until we arrived at L’Agapanthe to find out whom they had cast as their guests for this summer and to discover that, in spite of all their precautions and the vaunted qualities of their visitors, the assembly would include, as everywhere else, its share of hypocrites, boors, and spongers.

  That Sunday, however, nothing happened as expected, although my father did open the proceedings by complaining. Visibly depressed, my mother then bluntly declared that perhaps they were getting too old for the demands of such hospitality, so my father felt obliged to crack a joke.

  “Do you know what the English say about the calamities of old age? Consider the alternative!”

  Marie and I looked at each other: this was the first time our parents had ever revealed their vulnerable side. The first time they’d ever seemed to simply give up in front of us, in front of those whose role was supposedly to push them into their graves and take their places. We both hoped they hadn’t really thought about what they’d just said and wouldn’t take the shocking implications to heart.

  For some time, now, we had been careful not to draw attention to the fact that we had grown up. Our friends, our lovers, our patients, our bosses had now become cabinet ministers, ambassadors, film directors, writers, CEOs of giant companies. In other words, we were sought-after young women, and they were getting old. We had done our best to let them stay in the spotlight, and Marie, who worked as an interpreter for the President of the Republic, was even careful not to let them know that she was privy to the results of national elections before the official announcement.

  There was something odd, though, something disquieting about our parents’ behavior. It was as if there were a kind of faint haze between us. To my surprise, I found myself offering to provide them with new guests, home-delivered like a box of chocolates.

  “Why don’t you just invite the usual suspects, and we’ll bring along the new ones? That way you won’t have to deal with any of it.”

  My father agreed.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said solemnly. And as I sat stunned by the enormity of what he had just said, he continued: “Avery good idea indeed. Particularly since we’re feeling less enthusiastic this year … because … you see, girls, we’ve decided to put L’Agapanthe up for sale.”

  “What?” my sister and I exclaimed.

  “Are you in some kind of financial trouble?” Marie blurted out, crossing in an instant a line we had always respected, the quid pro quo we honored in exchange for our parents’ tacit assurance of financial support.

  “No.”

  “Well, then, why?” I demanded, almost shouting.

  “Come now, girls. It’s the only responsible thing to do, because no matter what you say, I don’t think either of you can afford to spend the millions necessary to maintain the place.”

  That was a low blow, because he knew the state of our finances better than anyone else. Aside from my salary as a psychotherapist and Marie’s paycheck as an interpreter, our income came from him.

  The verdict had been delivered. Contesting his decision was useless. Was my father hiding money problems from us? Or, thinking rationally but unfeelingly, did he consider it absurd to have us bear such a burden when he would no longer be there to foot the bill? Having been taught never to contradict a man, or even openly question the validity of his decisions, we said nothing further.

  We needed time to learn more about the family’s finances, assess the situation, and plan a counterattack.

  Before getting into her car to drive home that evening, Marie turned to me, exhausted.

  “We’ll talk soon,” she said sadly.

  The first person I called the next day, however, was Frédéric, the uncle I would have loved to have. Ever since I was a child, he’s been telling me, “You, you’ve got that sparkle in your eye!”—although he also used to say he found me very serious for my age, probably his way of letting me know he thought I looked bullied and unhappy. He was on my side and made no bones about showing his preference for me by making me laugh and giving me the affection I craved.

  “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.” He sighed into the phone. “You’re talking too fast and I’m too hungry to think. Meet me at one o’clock at the Relais Plaza. You know their escalopes de veau viennoise are—”

  “To die for, yes, I know. Thank you, Frédéric. I’ll see you later.”

  Arriving a trifle early, I sat at his usual table across from the bar. He walked in looking dapper: oatmeal-colored suit, lilac handkerchief in his breast pocket, cashmere sweater draped across his shoulders, because he is always cold, even in midsummer. He’s an old man, now. More soigné than affected, he might seem sad and frail, but he’s a mischievous little devil.

  “Monsieur Hottin!” cried Serge, the maître d’, rushing to greet him.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur,” added the cloakroom lady, brightening into a smile.

  It’s undeniable: Frédéric is fantastically popular. First of all, he’s a celebrity. In fact, he and his late sidekick, Brady, are to the world of variety theater what Ben and Jerry are to American ice cream: a gold standard. He is also very generous, particularly with the staff, whom he tips royally even though he isn’t rich (although he does live comfortably off copyrights since Brady’s death). And breaking every rule in the book with the naughty insouciance of an old man who’s nobody’s fool, he treats duchesses and chambermaids exactly alike, refusing to take anyone seriously, especially himself. He has even become something of a cult figure among trendy young authors, TV stars, culture vultures of all kinds, and nostalgic souls yearning for a Paris of cabarets and flash parties. They endlessly repeat his best lines and make a fuss over him in clubs where reality TV stars have taken over from the band of buddies he once formed with Françoise Sagan, the painter Bernard Buffet and his wife the actress Annabel, a society columnist named Chazot, and a few actors and comedians.

  “Darling, bring me a bullshot with lots of ice, will you?” he asked the waiter. “So tell me. What’s all this about L’Agapanthe?”

  I summed up the situation; Frédéric understood perfectly. He was one of the habitués at L’Agapanthe, a “pillar” of the house, my parents would have said, since they classified their guests according to their level of familiarity and seniority at the villa, and even treated them accordingly, like frequent flyers whose memberships vary in prestige and worth, depending on the regularity of their journeys.

  Frédéric was at the apex of this hierarchy, as was Gay Wallingford, his nearest and dearest friend for over thirty years, and the family had more or less adopted this picturesque couple. Then came the regulars of the house. The term might seem dismissive, yet it referred to the happy few who were invited each year and had their designated rooms. Their role? To guarantee the basic ballast of visitors required to stabilize the villa on its cruise through the summer, and to mentor novice guests, whose very novelty was meant to spice up our season.

  Then came the luncheon crowd known as the “cafeteria club”: neighbors who were writers, museum curators, artists, golfers, more often than not single or down on their luck, who came for lunch every day, attracted by the quality of the food and the company. Last came those run-of-the-mill arrivals who rolled in for lunch from Monaco, inland, or Saint-Tropez, and who—not being handpicked like our overnight guests—brought an eccentric midday fauna of rich Texan dames pumped full of Botox, drug-fiend photographers and gallery owners, demimondaines, artists in floppy hats, and self-made men tanned to within an inch of their lives, whose sole redeeming feature was their ability to animate the conver
sation.

  “Could our parents possibly have money problems?” I asked Frédéric.

  After looking thoughtful for a moment, he replied, out of the blue, “Tell me about your love life.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, I mean it, I’m interested,” he said in an insinuating tone I found irresistible.

  “Well, it’s a catastrophe.”

  “Oh, come now. When was your divorce?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “And then nothing, nobody?”

  “No. Or, not exactly. You really want to know? I scare men away. It’s unbelievable. There isn’t one who’ll dare pin me down on a sofa or hop into bed with me for the night. Before they even kiss me they’re already wondering if they’d be willing to leave their wives or marry me. That she’s-the-daughter-of thing, albeit a social plus, is toxic. I am too chic, too independent, and probably too smart, because I’ll spare you what happens when I confess that I’m a shrink. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world is awash in men who aren’t meant for me. Actually, not meant for us, because ditto for Marie.”

  “No!”

  “Well, sort of. She does have more lovers than I do, seeing as she’s got more choices, what with all those security and secret service guys she works with.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the ones with earpieces who are in charge of security whenever world leaders have those summits—she hangs around with them all day. They haven’t a clue who she is and wouldn’t give a damn if they did, because they’re tough guys, right? But as for finding a lover with whom she might actually like to live, Marie’s in the same spot I am: nowhere. And for the same reasons. Even though she does her absolute best not to scare them away. Listen, on the phone she’ll tell them that she’s in Limoges for a radiologists’ convention when in fact she’s in Davos or Rio—with the president!”

  “This is ridiculous. You’re both young, beautiful, rich …”

  Serge brought the order to the table.

  “… Ah! My escalope viennoise. Do you know it’s the best in Paris? Look at these little condiments they give you on the side, what a lovely presentation!”

  “Lovely,” I repeated, gently sarcastic.

  “Sorry, you were saying?”

  “I was telling you that the closer men get to us socially, the farther away from us they stay. What can I tell you! That’s just the way it is. What about you? Still crazy about François?”

  “Right, go on, make fun of me …” He blushed, as he did whenever I mentioned his heartthrobs. The current candidate was an understudy whose career he was trying to launch.

  Despite having been married three times and having lived with at least as many boyfriends, including a well-known transsexual, Frédéric was the least liberated of men: reserved, old-fashioned, and he simply hated talking about sex. I changed the subject.

  “And what about Gay? How is she?”

  Gay is Frédéric’s great friend. It was she who introduced Frédéric to my parents and smuggled him into the family like a fox spirited into a henhouse. Indeed, who would ever have imagined that one day this night bird, this court jester, the intimate of lowlifes and drag queens, would even meet my parents, let alone get them to like him! Gay and Frédéric each have an apartment in the same building and are inseparable. Calling her several times a day and taking her everywhere, he brings fantasy and gaiety to her life, while she pampers him like a mother, trying to protect him from himself with a few moral lectures she trots out for form’s sake, and which he promptly forgets, rushing off to the casino at Enghien or the racetracks at Longchamps. In short, this charming and discreet couple keep their personal worries and ailments to themselves, sharing with each other only the best of their moods and lives. And they have a ball party hopping through the hottest spots, where they slip in among the young and beautiful to watch the show, on which they comment conspiratorially to their hearts’ content.

  Gay was fine, said Frédéric, but he seemed more interested in the dessert cart, which he was examining with great care, requesting a description of every cake before finally announcing, “No, I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth. But perhaps you could bring us a small plate of petits fours?”

  “So, Frédéric, what’s your big idea?” I asked impatiently.

  “My idea?”

  “Yes, your idea about L’Agapanthe going on the market and how we could prevent that.”

  “Listen. Your father’s a true gem, but he’s always had trouble reading other people and the effect he has on them. Is this because he’s so modest? So preoccupied with his own concerns? So self-involved? I don’t know. In any case, he probably couldn’t begin to imagine how attached you are to the house, just as he doesn’t have any idea how much you girls love him.”

  “And?”

  “And so you have to show him how you feel, because you know how useless it would be to argue with him in the hope that he’ll change his mind.”

  “Fine, but how do we do that?”

  Frédéric’s idea was outrageous: he suggested that Marie and I look for a sugar daddy willing to foot the bills for L’Agapanthe and the lifestyle it deserved!

  “And your next step would be to pitch the deal to your father.”

  “Deal? What deal?”

  “Well, ‘Either you leave us the house, or we’ll each marry a Mr. Moneybags who will buy it for us.’ I’ll bet you anything your father will be furious and humiliated that you’d been driven to behave like common gold diggers. So: he’ll be furious—but convinced that you mean business. And he’ll keep the house for you.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then you’ll just have to marry those Mr. Moneybags. So be careful to pick nice ones.”

  I was laughing hysterically. “This is some sort of joke,” I said at last and then nervously ate up the petits fours, one after the other.

  “Simply organize some tryouts. Invite a few candidates to L’Agapanthe this summer for an audition. Say, one per weekend. Just like those people I knew who used to do this in August. During the week, it was the family, period. They only had guests on the weekend. They always planned separate weekends for golfing, poker, and the crème de la crème. Why don’t you do the same with a CEO, a film star, an heir to a fortune …?”

  “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.