The Suitors
Page 4
With feigned modesty, our governess would caress Marie’s hair before pinching my cheek, in a brusque gesture of apparent affection and reinvigorating comfort for my desperate fate as a homely little ingrate. It was as if she were trying to say, Don’t worry, your mother loves you anyway, even if you’re not as pretty as Marie. While she was wearing a fake smile to fool my mother and her guests, however, she was really pinching me, and it hurt. She was punishing me, I realized sadly, punishing me for being less lovely than my sister and thus spoiling the pretty picture she wanted to present to these society people, and I steeled myself not to cry in front of “the grown-ups.”
I was too young, unfortunately, to confide in Marie about how I suffered from our mother’s neglect, or even to reveal the nanny’s treachery toward me, since her cruelty was so insidious that Marie would never have believed me and might secretly have thought me mean and twisted. This must have been what led me to psychoanalysis: the desire for enough knowledge and authority to persuade mothers not only to take a real interest in their children, but also to be intelligently aware of their own behavior, for mothers may well be irreplaceable—and with the wisdom of my experience (bolstered by that of Alice Miller, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein), I was certainly in a position to know!—but they may also do more harm than fathers, if they are all-powerful like the unhinged matron in charge of my upbringing.
As for my father, he paid hardly any attention to us at all. Like many men, he had handed over to his wife the bothersome chores of daily life, including the raising of their children. And so, vacillating between gratitude and guilt, he felt our mother was acquitting herself splendidly of this task through the aid of a governess, and he never gave a thought to protecting us. In any case, he considered our mother’s lack of interest far healthier than the obsessive attention mothers these days lavish on their children.
As a result, I did not know my father. Rather, I knew only what my mother said of him: “Hush, your father is sleeping” or “He’s working.” He was the figure at the end of the upstairs hall. A blond giant with bushy eyebrows, who made silly faces and smiled kindly when addressing his children. Although hardly a stranger to us, he was inaccessible, a sphinx enshrined in work that was never, ever to be disturbed. He was the Man of the House. And we were brought up in the cult of his well-being, thus burnishing the halo of prestige with which our mother had endowed him. Isolated by all this deference and devotion, however, my father was like a walk-on dignitary in an operetta: he never had a say in anything. My mother was merely giving him the illusion that he was the center of her life, for no matter how often she claimed that “between her husband and her children, she had chosen her husband,” I just could not believe in her self-styled role as a loving wife. Because in my eyes, she was as incapable of caring about her husband as she was about her children.
Given the adults in our lives, L’Agapanthe was a fixed point in an unreliable world. Our life there was comfortable and unchanging, in spite of the onerous rules and prohibitions Marie and I had to observe, which left us with a faint but constant melancholy ennui. We knew that this misery sprang from a noble motive, which our parents called education. Ours was Jansenist in inspiration, except that far from inculcating in us a characteristically aristocratic and religious contempt for money, our austere upbringing made us familiar with luxury while forbidding us to enjoy it. As a result, impressed by the sumptuous décor of the house, guests at L’Agapanthe imagined us living pampered lives they would never have conjured up for us had we been observed in a house in Brittany or on a farm in Limousin, and they never suspected that not only were we excluded from the privileges reserved for adults, we were also deprived of their pleasures, such as swimming, which we could enjoy only while they were napping, and with strict instructions to abandon the beach under some pretext as soon as any grown-ups showed up, so that we would not be a bother to them.
We learned, therefore, to be self-effacing. A lesson in tactfulness for which I am grateful to my parents, although it condemned my sister and me to watch others take bold advantage of the opportunities of life, whereas in our chosen professions, we sit on the sidelines, interpreting their language or unconscious minds. With that same reserve, we have both conformed to the images assigned to us since childhood, Marie as the pretty girl who picked a career in which her beauty works wonders, even though she could have gone into academia, astrophysics, or banking, and I as the smart girl who decided on a profession in which I can use my mind without being put on display.
Still, L’Agapanthe did bond us together, my sister and I, as soon as Nanny began going on her own vacations instead of accompanying us there. Marie and I “rubbed off on” each other. I pushed Marie to break free of the idea that she was simply some dumb blonde, and I succeeded so well that she quickly rose to the top of her profession and set up her own agency. She no longer works as an interpreter for anyone but the President of the Republic, whom she accompanies on all his travels. And Marie in turn has helped me to find my own beauty, even though my work has always been more important to me than my appearance. I was so used to being not much to look at that I had to make a real effort to stop feeling invisible. Thanks to Marie’s guidance and assistance, though, the glances I get from men these days tell me that I’m nicely visible indeed.
And L’Agapanthe has become part of our identity. By demonstrating the subtle framework of our codes and contradictions, this house, all by itself, could illustrate our education, how we became who we are, as well as the refinement and culture of our parents. We had come to realize, of course, that L’Agapanthe was being changed by time, even deformed, in a way, through repairs and renovations, and we knew that the life we led there, already anachronistic, would soon become almost an aberration. But the house was still standing, and up and running for a few months every year. And I was glad that my young son was able to join me every August after spending a month with his father. That way, he could understand the upbringing I had received there and inherit this culture naturally, without any formal instruction. Because L’Agapanthe was also, like any other family house, a wonderful instrument of transmission linking the past to the future.
So it was hardly surprising that Marie and I were trying to save it from being sold. And I was thrilled by the idea of experiencing there for the first time an adventure with my sister, one in which we would more fully discover ourselves and each other.
The house
L’Agapanthe has nothing flashy about it. No balustrade or row of columns overlooking the sea. It is a Mediterranean villa, built around a loggia like a monastery around its cloister, the complete opposite of a house with a view. As if the sea had decided to behave like an experienced courtesan and simply suggest its presence, with bright touches shimmering through the shade of lush plants and undergrowth, instead of flaunting itself under the windows of L’Agapanthe like a trollop, as it does before the other villas along the Riviera.
Instead, the garden, with its graphic lines and dramatic effects visible from every part of the house, is an invitation to reverie. The lawn unrolls its green carpet beneath a canopy of umbrella pines whose long silhouettes, like slanting strokes of charcoal, are softened by the silvery grays of their rugged bark. A triangle of sea frames itself in the opening of a hedge at the end of the lawn, like a vanishing point on the horizon.
Here nature is tamed by constant care. The grass preserves the trace of our steps like fingerprints on silk velvet. Pine branches and trunks, like paintings, must be supported with cables to keep them from drooping or falling over one another. Thus domesticated, the garden takes on the artificial airs of a stage set, where one might glimpse a dirty old man trotting after some luscious creature, or a married couple making a scene.
And yet the garden, by creating harmony between indoors and outdoors, links the house to the sea. And that gradual movement from architecture to nature can be seen in the careful arrangement of the landscape. The olive trees, which make an almost urban impression on
the front terrace, where they are set within flagstones like plane trees in a schoolyard, seem wilder a little downhill, among the clumps of lavender dotting the strip of open space halfway down the stone steps to the pine grove. There the cypresses and pink laurels must be content with their decorative role at the bottom of the steps, where hedges, in turn, complete the transformation from vegetation to the mineral world, framing the lawn down to the gorse-studded slopes among the rocks at the beach.
L’Agapanthe is a theater à l’italienne, where the lawn is the stage, the rooms are the box seats, and the terrace forms the orchestra pit, with identical flights of steps on both sides.
One particularity of this house is its perfect symmetry. From the guest lavatories to the shower rooms, everything was conceived in duplicate, and often assigned separately to men and women. Which is certainly not the case for the two sets of steps on the terrace, so why do people always use the ones on the right?
Perhaps the inhabitants of every house establish tacit traffic patterns that may defy all logic and even the challenges of home improvements? At L’Agapanthe, the steps on the right draw us as if marked by invisible and imperious tracks, and we still instinctively avoid the other steps even though the new swimming pool is on that side of the house.
Weekend of July 14
THE FAMILY
Marie Ettinguer Laure Ettinguer
Flokie Ettinguer Edmond Ettinguer
THE PILLARS
Gay Wallingford Frédéric Hottin
THE LITTLE BAND
Odon Viel Henri Démazure
Polyséna Démazure Laszlo Schwartz
THE NEWCOMERS
Jean-Michel Destret Laetitia Braissant
Bernard Braissant
SECRETARY’S NAME BOARD
M. and Mme. Edmond Ettinguer Master Bedroom
Mme. Laure Ettinguer Flora’s Room
(Arrival Air France Thursday 8:00 p.m.)
Mlle. Marie Ettinguer Ada’s Room
(Arrival EasyJet Friday 5:00 p.m.)
Lady Gay Wallingford Peony Room
M. Frédéric Hottin Chinese Room
M. Odon Viel Turquoise Room
(Juan les Pins Station Friday 6:00 p.m.)
Count and Countess Henri Démazure Annex: Coral Room
M. Laszlo Schwartz Lilac Room
M. Jean-Michel Destret Yellow Room
(Arrival Air France Friday 5:30 p.m.)
M. and Mme. Bernard Braissant Sasha’s Room
(Arrival EasyJet Friday 5:00 p.m.)
In alphabetical order for the pantry and telephone switchboard.
In order of arrival, with departure dates, for chauffeurs and chambermaids.
In chronological order with the number in attendance at each meal for the kitchen.
My sister and I had no need to discuss how we would each prepare for the weekend of July 14. Relying on her charm, Marie managed to confirm that our father’s finances were still flourishing, while I scouted around to draw up a list of suitors to whom an invitation to L’Agapanthe would seem both welcome and perfectly natural.
Jean-Michel Destret had the advantage of being a friend of Laetitia and Bernard Braissant, who knew my sister. Destret was rich, but just how rich? Not as much as all that, probably, in spite of his astronomical salary, golden parachute, and holdings in the investment group he managed. A reliable estimate was difficult to come by with celebrity CEOs like him, over whom the newspapers went wild. At last: a French entrepreneur! As for the Braissants, they were delighted at the idea of bringing him along for a weekend at the house, thus introducing this new star in the financial heavens to such prestigious members of the Establishment.
The Braissants were by no means my cup of tea. They belonged to that category of phony leftists whom Marie ran into while on the job, important “cultural figures” who’d found their place in the sun by exposing the official cultural elite for their lack of social consciousness through their endless petitions and loudly righteous indignation. Their role models? Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for beauty and glamour; Sartre and Beauvoir for charisma, moral authority, and the art of pulling strings. Tirelessly trumpeting their political righteousness, they appropriated the allure and importance of any problem they championed, be it the tragedy in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, or the plight of illegal aliens. And they expected to be treated with the gravity and respect such weighty issues deserved. Anyone reluctant to show them enough deference they dismissed as callous, brainless or, even worse, bourgeois, in which last category they naturally filed me away as a rich “daddy’s girl.”
Marie, doubtless benefiting from her association with powerful people (and the Braissants’ healthy self-regard), escaped that fate. The couple treated her with a mixture of condescension and benevolence. They had selected her to be their “rich heiress,” the way anti-Semites invariably befriend a “good Jew.” Except that instead of proving they weren’t racists, they sought to show that while making an exception for my sister, they despised money. It was the least that could be expected from the editor in chief of a satirical magazine and the communications director for a politician, and from left-wing intellectuals in general. In short, the Braissants were freeloaders. I found them as unbearable as they were pretentious. Still, as Marie reminded me, they were serving us up Jean-Michel Destret on a silver platter.
Friday, 7:00 a.m.
“Can you possibly explain to me why this young man is bringing his car and chauffeur down from Paris when he’s flying into the airport at Nice this afternoon?”
Even at seven in the morning, my mother was determined not to be impressed by the prestige of her daughters’ guests, since a success achieved by anyone other than herself, my father, and their friends irritated her purely on principle.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just imagine, his secretary called yesterday to ask if we could accommodate his driver. Couldn’t he rent a car like everyone else? It’s unbelievable! And so ill-bred.”
“I have to admit it’s rather strange, and certainly cheeky, but would you be able to put him up?”
“Yes, luckily enough, in one of those two small rooms over the garage.”
Having arrived late the previous evening, I was eager to take a tour of the house, making it my own again the way I did at the beginning of every summer. I felt that I bloomed at L’Agapanthe like those Japanese paper flowers that unfold their petals in water.
I went down to the beach. Carved out of the living rock and jutting like a promontory into the water, it nestled at the midpoint of a bay wide open to the horizon and that seemed to hold the sea within its arms. At this early hour, the water was as smooth as a slick of oil. I looked to the left, at a house that was constantly changing hands and where I’d once seen a James Bond movie being filmed. This time, the flag flying near the water’s edge was Russian. Probably a “Russkaya” mafioso. Mother must be tickled pink, I thought treacherously, forcing myself to stand at the edge of the boardwalk even though I felt dizzy. At the bottom of the ladder, I dipped a foot into the water but found it too pale and cold in the early-morning sun for swimming.
I breathed in a scent of curry from the plants growing among the rocks, and the smell of kelp, lying stagnant in the grotto fitted out as a shower, and the intoxicating musty odor of the little cave that had been made into a bar. Then I strolled along the seaside path to the other beach on the property, a triangle of flat rock at water level reserved for the household staff. An entertaining irony of fate thus made our servants neighbors with one of the world’s richest men, a Saudi prince who had bought several houses on the bay to the right of ours. Posted every thirty yards, the armed guards of his security force all stared at me intently as I walked along his beach, and I nervously quickened my pace. Wishing I’d thought to bring the cigarettes I allowed myself from time to time, I climbed back up to the house, arriving out of breath.
“So, all’s well, you’ve done your little victory lap? Ask for your tray and come sit with us,” F
rédéric said firmly.
In the pantry, the butlers were already busy in aprons and shirtsleeves preparing the apricot and raspberry juices for breakfast, the pyramids of dainty cucumber sandwiches for teatime, and grating the lime zest indispensable for the evening’s cosmopolitans.
“Madame Laure!”
“Marcel! How are you? And your hip, it’s getting better? The children are well?”
Marcel was a sturdy, good-natured fellow from Mont-de-Marsan. He was married, had arthritis, and two daughters, one of whom was beginning a promising career in banking. And that was all I could say about him, because like the other members of our staff, he belonged to a shadow army about which we knew almost nothing.
Numerous and omnipresent, they worked so discreetly, silently, and invisibly that it remained a mystery to us how they managed to complete their tasks. Through what miracle were our rooms made up? And how did the living room, which we abandoned late at night, become spotless again by seven in the morning? Not to mention the towels left at the beach or around the pool that turned up, freshly laundered and neatly folded, in baskets by the pool or in the grotto down by the water.
The staff shifted constantly between work and discretion, at times preferring to quietly withdraw rather than attract notice. And their choreography—with the imperceptible refinement of our grandmothers’ hems, sewn with lead weights to muffle the rustling of their skirts—produced an effect close to perfection. Like a pleasure dome freed from all material contingency, the house inspired reverie, and even happiness. It was only upon leaving this womblike world that we could realize or remember that no one lived like this anymore. No one lived like us.