Noah tried pushing the Designation of Person in Parental Relationship form into the hatch, but it crumpled up. He pointed to it and said, “Voilà, je suis…une personne avec une relation quasi-parentale à ce garçon.” Parentale, legally, not quasi-parentale; when Noah got flustered he erred on the side of pomposity.
“He is what to you?” the agent demanded of Michael.
“Great-uncle,” the boy said.
“He is great?”
A snort.
“Son grand-oncle, monsieur. L’oncle de son père, his father’s uncle,” Noah added so clearly and loudly it sounded as if he was calling the man an idiot.
Their passports finally got stamped.
Michael didn’t comment on the encounter. Worn out, Noah wondered? The boy would be used to hearing foreign languages in New York, but not to finding himself trapped inside one.
After all the hurry, they had a little time to kill before their flight to Nice. Noah glanced at the newspapers as they passed a bookstore. His eye was caught by something about La haine la plus ancienne, the oldest hatred: a sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes already this year.
At the gate, Noah settled down with his biography.
“Mother of butt!” Michael muttered at his small screen.
Noah’s mouth twitched with amusement at the phrase. “What’s the problem?”
“Out of ammo.” Almost tenderly to the menacing figures, “Too good, boyo. You ready to square up?”
“The red feathery marks, what are they?” Noah asked.
“Where I’ve shot someone.”
Stylized blood, then, but Noah couldn’t tell if it represented the bullet’s path toward the victim or its exit trajectory. “How do you know who’s the enemy and who’s not?”
An impatient shrug. “Just have to guess. It’s pretty much run and gun at this point.”
The game struck Noah as relentless. Even watching over the boy’s shoulder was exhausting. But clearly it enthralled Michael.
“Oh yeah,” the boy crooned to a fallen avatar, “you just got schooled.”
Noah supposed a new form of fun such as video games always triggered a moral panic about its capacity to rot the brain and pervert the character. Like comic books, when he’d been a kid. À chaque âge ses plaisirs; “Every age has its pleasures.” That old proverb floated up unprompted—was it one of his mother’s? Chacun voit midi à sa porte, that was another Margot liked: “Everyone sees noon at their own door.”
A ferocious face loomed on Michael’s taped screen, then a clash of limbs. The scene exploded.
“What’s the rating on this one?” Noah asked.
“Why d’you want to know?” Michael muttered.
“Just curious.”
“M.”
Middle, Noah wondered? “M for what?”
“Mature.”
That made him laugh. “Is that what you are?”
“But like, if a cigarette gets stubbed out in someone’s eye you don’t see it close up,” Michael added.
“Delightful.”
“The graphics resolution on this is for shit, though.”
“On this game?”
“On the phone. The game’s made for a console.”
Noah thought of the boy’s uncle Cody and his PlayStation, out of reach in Queens. “Why bother playing it on this, then?”
“Duh.”
Meaning better than nothing, he supposed.
As they filed onto the smaller plane, Noah took the window, this time; he refused to miss out on his first glimpse of Nice since 1942. In fact, it struck him that he’d never seen his hometown from the air.
When they reached the Mediterranean they flew out over it as if heading south to Algeria, oddly, then turned back to approach the coastline from the water. Noah kept thinking he’d spotted Nice, but it would turn out to be Antibes, or Cannes; the whole stretch was so built up, sprinkled with the whites and oranges of apartment blocks, that he couldn’t tell one resort from another. Surely this was Nice, now, the long curve like a ballerina’s arm, the Baie des Anges? Tiny boats leaving their streaks. Feeling bad for hogging the window, Noah nudged Michael and flattened himself back against the seat, chin tilted up, so the kid could see past him. “The whole area’s called the Côte d’Azur, the Blue Coast, and this particular stretch is the Bay of Angels.”
A cursory glance. “How’s it like angels?”
“Well, doesn’t it look heavenly?” Mountains slanting down across a pale blue sky to a more vividly azure sea edged with rippling foam.
“How come you’ve never been back till now?”
Thrown by the question, Noah said, “I don’t know. I’ve been busy.”
So low, now, as if the plane’s wheels might touch the water. No sign of land yet.
Michael was looking distinctly nervous.
The runway appeared underneath them at the last minute, and they were touching down.
In the baggage area, soldiers in camo toted machine guns. Michael lifted his phone to—
Noah pushed it down.
“What the fuck?”
“Just keeping you out of trouble.”
“This is my mom’s phone I’m looking after.” The boy’s eyes were ablaze. “You smack this phone, I’ll smack you.”
“Michael, I didn’t smack it.” Noah thought of the day Amber must have put her phone into her, what, nine-year-old’s hands and said she wasn’t going to be needing it for a while, could he keep it safe for her? “I’m sorry, but the soldiers, they might think we’re—” He didn’t say the word terrorists. “Photos put them on edge, they feel spied on.” A certain irony there. France was so surveilled and militarized, since this wave of attacks had begun in 2015, that half its total forces were patrolling its own streets. “Tapis Bagages,” Noah read aloud, to change the subject. “Tapis means carpet, like tapestry—it’s a carpet of baggage.”
Joan asked, You do realize you’re talking to yourself?
The carousel was dotted with gliding suitcases. Noah saw signs in Cyrillic lettering, which suggested that Nice was still popular with the Russians. He felt wobbly; how could Michael move so energetically after the night they’d had?
Noah got euros out of the machine. “I need a coffee and a croissant before going any further.”
All Michael would accept, at the café, was some kind of gourmet re-creation of an American iced doughnut.
Noah’s café crème came as a tiny puddle of espresso in a big cup.
“That’s a rip-off right there,” Michael muttered.
“No, I get to pour in all this hot milk, see?” Noah loved being able to do it himself, making it milky enough but not too milky.
The boy scanned the other customers. “Are French guys all gay, or what?” he asked in a low voice. “Actual gay, I mean.”
Noah counted four men having coffee, two of them with their legs crossed at the knee, one with a lemon cardigan draped around his shoulders. “Not necessarily. They just aren’t afraid of things that American men call sissy.”
“Huh.” Michael inserted his entire doughnut into his mouth. He took a selfie of himself with eyes bulging as if he were suffocating.
Noah averted his gaze.
He missed his sister, suddenly. He should have come here before now, with Fernande.
A few summers after Marc’s death—this would have been the mid-1970s—she’d pressured Noah into signing up for what she’d called a “nostalgia trip” (though she’d been born in New York herself), to surprise their widowed mother by “whisking her home.” Privately Noah had thought it a terrible idea, because of the surprise and the season; the heat and crowds on the French Riviera in August were as bad as in Manhattan. He’d been relieved when Margot, getting wind of the plan—Fernande hadn’t been able to resist dropping hints—had turned it down civilly. She’d offered no explanation but the proverbial one: On ne se baigne jamais deux fois dans le même fleuve. (“You can’t step in the same river twice.”)
But why hadn
’t he and Fernande gotten around to going some winter, just the two of them? Noah couldn’t remember, now, if she’d ever raised it; if he’d failed to hear the suggestion.
As her executor, last spring, reading her will (a free downloaded form she’d filled in by hand, but valid), Noah had been both touched and irritated to find that although the proceeds of the Brooklyn brownstone were to go to a children-at-risk project, Fernande had set aside a lump sum that Noah was obliged to spend within a year on SOMETHING FUN!!! (That was his sister all over: hadn’t she been their small family’s bonus prize, free giveaway, something fun?) So here he was. Not that he expected this to be pure FUN!!! even before Michael Young had been added to the itinerary, but he knew it would please Fernande to think of him finally making the crossing.
Would have pleased. Such convoluted grammar death required: what tense to describe the hypothetical emotions of a woman who didn’t exist anymore? Someone on NPR the other day had been talking about how he’d “have hated to die without having heard” a certain revelation. Which made no sense—you could hardly be tormented by not knowing a secret if you never learned there was a secret to know—but Noah got what the fellow meant.
Outside the terminal, the sun stabbed him in the pupils and the air smelled almost floral, despite the tang of fuel. Noah lit up with desperate gratitude.
The boom made his cigarette fall from his hand. Like a volcano blowing its top, or an avalanche; most of all, like a bomb.
“Jesus Christ,” Michael cried, in a half-crouch.
“I remember this!” Pulse still banging, Noah checked his watch. “It’s a cannon on the hill over there, in the middle of town. They fire it every day at noon.”
“What for?”
Noah shrugged, Gallicly, and picked up his cigarette.
The taxi ride was long, sluggish, and so expensive that he told himself to pretend euros were worth the same as dollars. At least, en route, there was art. Guarding a traffic circle, a giant made of boulders shackled together with barbed wire. A huge bronze woman, peeking from a cleft in the gray facade of a hotel. A massive metal swoosh like a lopsided smile, with tourists perched on its shorter end.
Noah tried out his French on the driver, who insisted on answering in fluent English, telling him Nice was still pretty quiet but would be “super crazy” by the weekend.
“They’re expecting half a million tourists for Carnival,” Noah passed on to the boy, “on top of the third of a million people who live here.”
“Fun in the sun, yes? Three hundred days,” the driver remarked, trying to catch Michael’s eye in the rearview mirror.
“Three hundred sunny days a year,” Noah explained, “or so they claim.”
The concrete ribbons of roadway were thick with vehicles. Two-seater Smart cars looked like toys to Noah. Michael was whispering the names of his favorites, incantatory, as he spotted them: “Maserati. Ferrari. Another Maserati!”
“Nice was where car racing really got going,” Noah told him. “The first hill climb, drag race…” He riffled through A Life’s Work. “Wait till you see this. A factory owner called Leon Serpollet broke the seventy-five-miles-per-hour land-speed record, and my grandpa was right there.” The photo had remarkable depth of field, from the car’s wheel looming in the foreground all the way back to the mountains in the distance.
“Seventy-five, that’s not fast.”
“This was 1902! The thing was powered by steam. They nicknamed it the Easter Egg.”
Michael grinned at the ovoid contraption. “That driver looks like a baby chick breaking out of the shell.”
Now their taxi was snagged in traffic. Noah pointed out a huge mural on the windowless side of a high-rise. It showed cypresses, palm trees, and the sea beyond; a picture of what it had replaced. Cynical or poignant? Better than no view at all, he supposed. “You could take a picture of that.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’re quite the shutterbug.”
“What did you call me?” Michael demanded.
“It means someone who takes a lot of pictures.” Noah made the old-fashioned clicking-at-eye-level gesture. “I’m just saying you could get a good shot of that mural, since we’re stalled here anyway. It’s very Nice, very typical.”
“Trompe l’oeil,” the driver supplied.
Noah hadn’t heard that phrase in so long. “Trompe l’oeil, that means the style that tricks the eye,” he told Michael. “Back in Renaissance times—”
“It doesn’t trick my eye,” Michael scoffed. “Why don’t you take your own pics?”
“Oh, I haven’t traveled with a camera in donkey’s years.”
“Duh, use your phone.”
“I mean, I don’t…I want to see things, but not have lots of photos to deal with afterward.” Oddly enough, Noah had never felt very comfortable with a camera. Made awkward by his grandfather’s fame, he supposed. Of course he used to take holiday snaps; Joan had liked looking through the albums in moments of leisure. But for the past nine years, there’d been nothing Noah felt the need to record. He was just freewheeling, at this point; the race was pretty much over.
Billboards for junk food, circuses, water parks slid by. So far, nothing rang much of a bell. Noah asked the driver if the film industry was still thriving.
“All gone.” The man explained that a plane landed every two and a half minutes, so it was impossible to record clean sound anymore.
“There wasn’t even an airport when I was four,” Noah said to Michael. “From Marseilles—west of here—I went by ship to Barcelona. From there, another ship took me all around Spain to Portugal, then across the Atlantic.” He could picture little of his journey except the time he’d thrown up on deck and slipped in the puddle. He must have missed his mother badly, but it was hard to disentangle that feeling, now, from the general confusion of the voyage. Marc had been chafing on the docks in New York, waiting for a boy he must have known he wouldn’t recognize. “My father had been gone for two years already when I turned up.”
“How come?”
“Well, my mother…” What was the right verb for it? “She didn’t feel able to leave Nice when Marc did. American universities kept offering Père Sonne jobs, to get him away from the war, but he wouldn’t budge. And she wouldn’t let me go without her, not till it looked like the Italians were really going to invade, in ’42.” Then she’d sent little Noé off, and stayed on with her father because someone had to.
At least, that was the family’s explanation. But those snapshots…
He pressed on. “There was a matron on the ship in charge of us”—Noé must have been one of the only Gentile kids fleeing the Continent on that voyage, though he’d understood that only later—“and then in New York, I had a nanny to teach me English. A pretty nasty one.” Miss Sprule must have seemed meticulous during her interview, and Marc had been working such long hours at the gallery, how could he detect the nanny’s mean streak? But if Noah didn’t hold a grudge against Marc for hiring her, or for having stayed an ocean away from his son for the previous two years, he had no right to resent Margot either. Mothers always got the lion’s share of blame. “Well, parents did what they had to, you know? The war was an awful time. The Italians surrendered, but the Nazis moved in right away. Then the Allies started dropping bombs, and Père Sonne died.”
Michael produced a convincing machine-gun mime, with sound effects.
“No, of pneumonia. So Margot joined me and my father in New York, and the next year Fernande—your grandmother—was born.”
Noah had always assumed that his sister’s conception had been an accident, since his mother and father had been 45 and 53 respectively, and too Catholic (Margot by conviction, Marc by upbringing) to consider ending a pregnancy. But now he was struck by the possibility that she’d been a reconciliation, a celebration of having come through what the French called les années noires, “the dark years.”
Michael was staring out the taxi window.
Kids bereft of pare
nts and homes could be said to be living through one long wartime, Noah realized. Did Michael blame his mother for being out of reach?
“By the way,” he said, an awkward segue, “as soon as we get back from France, I can take you up to see your mom.” He made a mental note to find out how to arrange a visit: by bus, maybe?
“It’s all a mix-up.” The boy muttered it to the glass.
Noah waited for more. “Amber being…”
An impatient glance. “In the slammer. She didn’t do it. She’s always on my back, saying, ‘You stay away from that shit!’”
Did the boy know or guess that the stash had really been Victor’s? “Yeah,” Noah said warily, “I think there may have been a mistake.”
“Goddamn government.”
So this was how Amber had softened the truth: she’d blamed it all on Uncle Sam and done her best to steer Michael down quite a different path from his father’s.
Minutes passed. Noah found his head lolling back against the seat. He didn’t want to slip into a doze, or he’d be completely discombobulated when they pulled up at the hotel. He tugged a magazine out of the seat pocket: Plaisirs d’Azur. It was bland, gushy stuff about “le lifestyle des expats.” He puzzled over what distinguished an expat from an immigrant; it seemed the word was reserved for whites from the West who decamped to sunnier climes.
As the traffic loosened, Noah began to recognize glimpses of the hills that hugged the city on three sides. High on a wooden slope, that little white dome… He pointed it out. “There’s the observatory, for stargazing. I remember we went up there in a cart pulled by a mule.”
The kid looked incredulous. “When was this, cowboy times?”
“Mules are better than cars on a dirt track. They never slip.”
“We nearly there?” Michael let out a huge yawn.
“Nearly.” Actually Noah had no idea. “You know, we complain about how tiring travel is, but our ancestors would have called us pussies. Coming down here from Paris used to take two weeks by road, and when you got to the river Var—just past where the airport is now,” jerking his thumb over his shoulder, “you had to hire local passeurs, ferrymen, to drag your carriage through the water. Or carry you on their shoulders, even.”
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