The Suitors

by Cecile David-Weill

  Suiting the action to the word, Alvin began fiddling with the fingers of his right hand again, but this time with confident ease, as if he’d delivered this particular litany many times before.

  “The definition of Jivamukti yoga is ‘liberation through life,’ meaning a way of being in the world. Reserved for those who seek to expend intense physical effort, it has won over such adepts as Sting, Christy Turlington, Donna Karan, and Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  “But what is it exactly?” I asked gamely.

  “There are five pillars of Jivamukti instruction …”

  But instead of listening to Alvin, I was waiting for the moment when he would start ticking things off on his fingers, which he then proceeded to do.

  “The first pillar, nonviolence or ahimsa, might be described as: recognize yourself in others, in humans as well as animals. The second pillar, devotion or bhakti, stipulates that we must offer all that we experience to a higher entity than ourselves. The third pillar, meditation or Dhyana …”

  “Well, now, that’s certainly much clearer,” exclaimed Frédéric sweetly at the end of Alvin’s lecture, while the rest of us sat speechless.

  Floored by Alvin’s virtue and gibberish, we were about to leave the table when the butler came to tell me that my son was on the telephone.

  Wondering if he’d timed his call to reach me just after dinner, I went to the “phone booth” (it looked rather like a confessional) just outside the living room, in which you had to sit down on the banquette to activate the ceiling light.

  “I can’t go to sleep, Mummy! Do you think it’s serious?”

  At first I dealt with this lightly, but I soon realized that Félix was really worried. My idiot ex-husband had managed to terrorize him by predicting disaster if he didn’t get “a good eight hours of sleep.”

  “But what will happen if I sleep less? Or more?”

  Although I tried to soothe him, his anxiety kept him focused on that quota of hours.

  “You see, it’s eleven now, Mummy, and the au pair’s going to come wake me up at eight, so if I don’t fall asleep in an hour, I won’t get enough …”

  It was hard to stop his looping. And my growing ill temper wasn’t helping my attempts to calm Félix down. What infuriated me wasn’t that his father would want some time to himself in the evening to be with his new companion, which was only reasonable, but that he would as usual formulate his needs and desires in the guise of an educational principle. Why would he upset a child on vacation like that? He should have told our son, ‘I need to be on my own now, so why don’t you hang out in your room, do some reading or play until you get tired.’ Félix would already be asleep instead of phoning me—and developing a sleep problem it would probably take me at least six months to get rid of! In the end, I comforted him as best I could, at least I hoped so, since I couldn’t do more over the phone.

  When I returned to the living room, I sat down next to my father in the vague expectation that he might comfort me, but before I could open my mouth he began telling me how entertaining it had been to sit next to Vanessa at dinner.

  “She’s a living doll!” He beamed. “She told me that until Nicolas came along, she’d only been interested in stuffy, affected guys who were always droning on about something. Who could have imagined she would ever find pomposity attractive!”

  Was it the ecstatic twinkle in my father’s eyes? The attention he was paying to the American beauty instead of to his daughters? Whatever it was, I found myself blowing up at him.

  “Fine, then I can assure you that Alvin takes himself seriously enough to be her kind of guy! But luckily Nicolas won’t have to worry—first, because Vanessa seems crazy about him, and second, because I’ve decided to put the moves on Alvin to get him to marry me so that he can buy L’Agapanthe, since you’ve put it up for sale without even consulting us …”

  Taken aback, my father looked at me in puzzlement for a moment but then acted as if he’d misunderstood me or just hadn’t heard correctly. And instead of asking me to repeat what I’d said or replying in his usual way, he turned without a word to my mother, who was freshly appalled by the butler’s latest blunder: setting out tea bag packets of every color on a coffee table, like magazines in a waiting room.

  “Tea bags, how awful!”

  “And fanned out, like a shop-window display!” added Astrid, to show that she, too, found the sight distasteful.

  Alvin asked around if anyone could give him the house telephone number, since his BlackBerry seemed unable to get any reception and he was expecting some phone calls.

  “My poor fellow,” replied Charles, “the technology at L’Agapanthe is still stuck in the 1920s! It would be no help at all to you if I provided the phone number here, because when the ancient switchboard rings, no one hears it, and if you answer when it rings in the booth next to the living room, picking up the receiver while sitting in front of a skirted vanity table and a tarnished mirror is positively a trip backward in time!”

  “But then what does everyone else do? Am I the only one not to get any reception?”

  “Some of us have resigned ourselves to our fate and even learned to appreciate this peaceful atmosphere of a spiritual retreat, while the others—and I am one—haunt the driveway like poor damned souls just outside the entrance gate, where the reception’s a little better. But it can depend on the rooms: which one are you in?”

  “The yellow one.”

  “Lucky you! If you go stand by the window, you should get some reception.”

  “And the Internet?”

  “Here again you’re in luck, because this is quite a recent development: Edmond and Flokie have just had a bathroom remodeled into an office equipped with an Internet connection. But I’m warning you,” added Charles with a sly smile, “there’s stiff competition for access to this lifeline!”

  The sudden swoop of a dragonfly over the sofa drew my attention away from Charles and Alvin, whom I was only pretending to listen to, since I felt I deserved a breather, so I let Alvin shift his interest to the Giraults, who were busily chatting with Georgina, Marie, Frédéric, and Odon. Determined to remain mopey and ill humored, I contemplated my father, flushed with love, talking to Vanessa and Nicolas who, against all expectation, wound up saving my dinner party.

  In fact, they were a huge hit when they told us about the role-playing game they liked to get up to at winter resorts. Nicolas enjoyed pretending to be a domestic tyrant in front of skiers lined up at lifts, who make the ideal public for his kind of performance. He would hand his skis off to Vanessa to carry and swat her on the butt, saying in a loud, grumpy voice, “Get going, you dope! I’m paying, you’re lugging, that’s how it is!”

  And Vanessa would meekly comply, as the onlookers stared in appalled astonishment.

  Then Vanessa explained to us that the reason their little number (which made them laugh until they cried) was so convincing was … that she actually was a submissive woman and her husband a bully.

  “Oh, really?” cried Laszlo, Charles, and my father with one voice.

  “Decide for yourselves,” she said and began a story about the university studies she’d undertaken (rather on the late side), all because she felt stupid and uneducated after skipping them when she was younger while trying to make her way as a model.

  After pausing for sympathetic expressions of commiseration from the misty-eyed gentlemen in the audience, Vanessa continued.

  “The only problem was Nicolas, who was dead set against my plan and insisted that my passion for studying was unseemly and even perverse.”

  “Surely not!” I exclaimed, commenting ironically on the idiocy of men with an up-front bitterness not unrelated to my father’s earlier attitude.

  “Oh, yes, but the worst thing was, you see, that Nicolas was right! It was perverse. In his place, I would have been jealous, because I went off to my classes as happy as a lark, even though I did feel sorry for him, dying of boredom in his office. So one day, to buck up his morale, I wen
t to Madison Avenue and spent a fortune. I came home completely bushed, naturally, after such a marathon of shopping. Then when Nicolas counted the number of bags and saw that I was too exhausted to give him the slightest little caress …”

  And here Vanessa heaved a huge sigh.

  “… well, he begged me to go back to school!”

  Dazzled by Vanessa’s cheek, the gentlemen turned toward Nicolas in wonderment at how he’d managed to win such a prize, only to find him already deep in conversation with my mother.

  Nicolas is short and rather ugly, but he has charm, confidence, and never feels obliged to make a show of his success.

  “What does he do in life, anyway?” my father asked me.

  “He made a fortune on the Internet, but don’t ask me how, I have no idea.”

  At that point Alvin, repressing a yawn, got up. “I’m sorry to run out on you like this, but I’m the early-to-bed type, and I meditate at sunrise. Good night, all!”

  Alvin’s departure prompted others to follow suit, and Marie and I soon found ourselves with Nicolas and Vanessa, who seemed unwilling to call it a night.

  “Some Trivial Pursuit?” I suggested halfheartedly, then did my best to take an interest in a game won handily by Nicolas, a history buff.

  “Who crowned Clovis, the first king of the Franks, at Reims?”

  “Archbishop St. Rémi. ”

  “Who discovered Greenland in 982?”

  “Eric the Red.”

  Since the jet lag was in their favor, our guests appeared eager to keep going all night, and Marie seemed ready to stay up with them.

  “I’m about to drop,” I announced. “Would it destroy you utterly if I toddled off to bed?”

  And I did.

  Saturday, 8:00 a.m.

  I awoke with a start the next morning and waited until eight o’clock to call Félix. When I asked him if he’d slept well, I learned that his father, who had a hard time accepting that his son was afraid of the dark, had come into his room several times to turn out the light, which Félix had turned right back on. My ex found this fear ridiculous. And he probably thought his method of dealing with it was educational! The sadism of his behavior left me fuming, however, and I realized that it wouldn’t take much more for me to begin hating my former husband, a man from whom I had parted without the slightest resentment.

  “Don’t worry,” I told my son. “In two days we’ll be together!”

  As I hung up, I felt that I’d been reassuring myself as well as Félix. And I knew it was time for July to be over so that I could have him back—because the present state of affairs could not continue. Really, his father … But when I thought about seeing my son again, my anger melted away.

  And only then did I think about what had happened at dinner the night before. Fascinated by Vanessa, my father had paid no attention to what I’d blurted out, and clearly I couldn’t expect him to speak frankly with me about the situation, so I had no time to lose if I wanted to highjack its outcome with a love affair. True, Alvin Fishbein wasn’t about to fall into my arms, given my less-than-charming attitude toward him so far, and yes, he’d struck me as something of a prig, but would I ever be satisfied with anyone? I was critical, narrow-minded, and on the defensive. No matter what goal I had in mind, it was time for me to change my attitude. I went down to the beach.

  From the top of the steps leading to the sea, I could see Alvin and his guru sitting facing one another in the lotus position. There was something strange about witnessing this oriental ritual, so spiritual and austere, on a beach that was so French and so perfectly designed for pleasure, yet the stillness, the silent concentration of that solemn prayer commanded such respect that one instinctively kept one’s distance. And in any case, I could hardly see myself barging in on their communion like a thoughtless fool. Then I had a bright idea, one that made my pulse quicken: I could spy on Alvin and Anagan from the servants’ beach! It’s not every day that one may play the voyeur with a clear conscience under the pretext of not bothering someone, and besides, wasn’t it my duty to take a more serious interest in Alvin?

  “We’ll perform a pranayama, the Nadi Shodhana,” said the yogi.

  Hidden behind a bush, I saw Anagan lead a breathing exercise that involved closing first the right nostril with a thumb, then switching to the left nostril with the ring finger.

  “Let’s move on to Sat Yam, or the purification of the heart. Imagine a light in the heart chakra,” the yogi said softly. “You will feel it grow with each intake of breath, and draw back toward the heart as the breath leaves. Now, for eighteen minutes, you will think of nothing. If a thought occurs to you, push it away and return to nothing.”

  Unwilling to admit my disappointment with what I was witnessing, I reflected that meditation was by its very nature hardly a spectacular sight. I would have abandoned my spying on the spot had I not been such a voyeur!

  Placing his hands over his eyes, the yogi concluded the séance, intoning, Om Namah Shivaya. Om shanti shanti shanti, namaste.”

  “Namaste,” replied Alvin.

  Since I couldn’t very well pop out of my thicket to say hello, pretending that I’d neither admired nor seen them, which would have been a lie in both cases, I retraced my steps to the loggia, where all the men in the house had found different excuses to be courting Vanessa. As soon as I showed up (were they hoping to head off any caustic comments I might make?), they bombarded me with questions, inquiring after the state of the bay at the bottom of the lawn as if it were a dear relative bedridden in a distant clinic: was it cold, turbid, sandy, infested with jellyfish?

  As the butler brought me my breakfast, Gay looked up from her Financial Times. “Can someone explain to me what these subprimes are?”

  “No. Listen to this article in the Nice-Matin instead,” interrupted Frédéric.

  “In the what?” asked Astrid.

  “The Nice-Morning, the Nice-Matin, you know. Here it is: ‘For a week now, a lost whale calf has been roving off the Côte d’Azur. The orphaned finback whale had suddenly appeared in the middle of the harbor at Antibes, but rescuers had not had time enough to put their floating stretcher in place before the calf headed onto Salis Beach. Sightings have been reported since then in the bay of Cannes, at Théoule, and even at Saint-Tropez, according to the coordinator of the rescue effort, who seemed exhausted by a search that has so far been in vain. A plane had been chartered to locate the baby finback, but the keen eyes of the pilot, an experienced leader of whale-watching excursions, failed to find his quarry. He did, however, spot a pod of adult finbacks just to the south of Cannes, and there is speculation that the calf might have joined them. That would be the calf’s only chance of survival, according to the pilot, who speculated that although there has never been a confirmed case of adoption among cetaceans, by copying their behavior, the calf could learn from the adults how to dive to hunt for food. Since the calf is almost old enough to be weaned, it might thus be saved, because its intestinal flora are sufficiently developed to cope with the change in diet.’ ”

  Like a divine apparition, her lips still puffy with sleep, Vanessa passed briefly through on her way to the beach.

  “Why don’t we try to catch sight of this whale calf?” suggested Laszlo, who set off with all the other men in tow.

  When I got back to the beach with Laszlo, my father, Charles, and Jean-Claude, however, I saw that the yogi had gone off to the kitchen, Nicolas was swimming in the bay, and Vanessa and Alvin were deep in conversation.

  Which didn’t prevent us from noticing that they were both superb physical specimens. Alvin was slender but finely muscled, and his sculpted ribs made him look like Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, yet this body, disciplined like a dancer’s through effort and privations, still left me cold. The men, however, could not resist casually lowering their newspapers or books now and then to sneak glances at the golden, silky, svelte but nicely rounded figure of Vanessa. A student of yoga herself, she had engaged Alvin on the subject, and I went
over to hear what they were discussing.

  “Your yogi, has he achieved samadhi?” asked Vanessa.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?” I asked quickly, positioning myself near Alvin, the necessary first step toward any future relationship between us.

  “That means he has achieved enlightenment.”

  “And that means?”

  “Practically speaking, that he can enter a state that may be studied by scientists: the yogi is awake, but he allows his brain to rest, producing the same brainwaves that occur in deep sleep.”

  “And where does that get him?”

  “He manages through meditation to enter into communion with the cosmos, to be at one with the universe. Because we are part of the universe, but the universe is within us,” explained Vanessa.

  “It opens his third eye, which is called ajna, and that brings him clairvoyance,” added Alvin.

  “Which is …?” I prompted, with the unpleasant feeling that the more I asked, the less I’d understand.

  “It means he can know certain things in advance or learn things during meditation sessions, during flashes when he can instantly master the techniques of painting or photography, for example.”

  “And is he a Sohami?” continued Vanessa.

  “And what’s that?” I asked faintly.

  “An honorary title for yogis.”

  It was a foreign language they were speaking, Alvin and Vanessa, for I had the uncomfortable and humiliating impression that I did not understand them, as when I was a child who couldn’t make any sense of the adult world, unable to fathom their words or how they used them.

  I was in hostile territory, reduced to interpreting the most diverse signals, smiles, frowns, postures, all in an effort to deduce if we were speaking almost in jest, or quite seriously, or condescendingly, or frankly—and this feeling of exclusion was so painful that I understood only too well how someone confronted with a sect and its enigmatic vocabulary might join the sect simply through a desire to penetrate its mystery and to rise in the ranks of an esoteric ideology conceived precisely as a come-on. Then Alvin and Vanessa—kindly, gently, exactly as if they had been members of a sect—tried to rescue me from my confusion.