The kid was looking at his phone again.
“Ah, back to the screen.”
“You talk a lot, dude,” Michael murmured without looking up.
“Well, I was a teacher.”
But not anymore.
Five floors high, six windows wide. Since his mother had snapped this hotel, the dull black doors had acquired a Hotel Excelsior in gold on the columns to either side, and an H.E. in tasteful neon scrollwork overhead. Once past its gracious lobby, the quirky decor the website boasted of began to hurt Noah’s eyes: old trunks had been whimsically converted into coffee tables and cabinets, the wallpaper and stair carpet covered in magnified scribbled words as if guests were trapped inside a can of old postcards. But Noah supposed everywhere else was probably booked out now for Carnival.
Their Comfort Suite was decorated in electric blues, with a gaudy painting of the Prom filling the wall behind the bed. Also a see-through Philippe Starck chair, which Michael found hilarious. But the only bed was the slim kind that passed for a double in Europe, and (how absurd) a mesh-sided crib stood wedged between it and the radiator. “Damn it, I asked for a child’s bed!” He must have used the wrong term after all.
“So where am I going to sleep?” The boy was already curled up in the crib.
“I’ll sort it out. Get out of there before you dirty the sheets.”
But Michael panted through the mesh like a dog. He held his phone at arm’s length and took grotesque selfies.
Noah unzipped his bag and hung up his shirts and pants.
“So how come your mom took a pic of this place?”
“Beats me, Michael.”
“That one with the hair all up, is that her?”
Noah slid from the envelope the headshot of a woman seen from behind. “I don’t think so.”
“She could have snapped herself from the back, except I guess they didn’t have selfie sticks yet.”
“Oh, I’m sure there were ways: a string to pull the shutter release. But it says MZ, and Margot was MP, for Personnet, then MS after she married my dad.” Coiled hair, black, dark brown? Hard to tell in black and white. He remembered his mother with sleek silver hair; she’d stopped coloring it brown in what, her fifties? This woman could have been anything between twenty and eighty, or a dummy in a wig, even. The shoulders of her jacket were boxy, with that slightly homemade look. Noah thought aloud: “It’s not glamorous enough to be a fashion shot. Maybe a how-to picture for an article on hairstyles?”
Michael smirked.
“Yeah, well, your sneakers will seem silly, too, in seventy years.”
“They’re genuine Air Jordans,” the boy told him in an offended tone. “Hey, maybe MZ’s a handle, like Nodaddy Ding’s.”
“Oh, a pseudonym?” Noah didn’t really think so, but… “Possibly.”
Michael went into the bathroom. “Two toilets!” he called.
“If one of them has a little faucet, it’s a bidet, for washing your butt.”
A squawk of disbelief.
“Well, you asked.”
“Wish I hadn’t.”
Noah heard the repeated shutter sound that meant Michael was photographing the bidet.
Hopefully no butts are involved, Joan murmured.
The boy wandered back into the room. “Why aren’t the pillows normal?”
It was the usual European bolster-and-square-pillow combo. “The whole point of travel is to learn there’s no such thing as normal.” Noah got out his toiletries bag. He straightened up and noticed Michael struggling to press his phone charger into the outlet. “Stop!”
The boy goggled at him.
“You could fry yourself,” Noah said in a shaking voice. “The voltage in Europe is 220. Twice as strong as back home.”
“’Kay,” Michael said in a small voice. He sat on the edge of the bed and hugged the bolster with his arms and legs like a wrestler.
“You can use my adaptor as soon as I’ve charged my own phone.” Noah let himself down now too, and fell back on the mattress. Just to be flat for five minutes; the sweetness of horizontality.
“What are we waiting for?” Michael wanted to know.
“I need a little down time.”
“I don’t.”
“We’ve been up all night. Give me a minute.” Noah managed to toe off one shoe, then the other, before his eyelids fell.
IV
The Promenade
From a dream of lost passports, Noah awoke with a start to the whir of a photo being taken. Behind the phone, Michael’s unsmiling face was looming over him.
He reared up.
“Thought you died in your sleep, maybe.” In only a red T-shirt and sweatpants, without a hoodie to create the illusion of bulk, Michael looked even younger.
“So your first reaction was to take a picture?” Noah rubbed his face, feeling foul. He wondered if Michael had seen his grandma laid out. He supposed Rosa would expect him to get the boy expressing his feelings. Women generally—
Not me, Joan pointed out.
Well, no, Noah conceded. You’re the exception to all rules. Why do you think I picked you?
It was me who did the picking, she reminded him.
They’d met over the university’s first oscillating U-tube digital density meter. Joan had been the elder by three years, much better looking, and at least twice as clever, with that knack successful people had of knowing which chances to seize. All Noah could congratulate himself on was that he’d been wise enough never to let go of his luck, his Joan. He’d known he’d be playing second fiddle; maybe one spouse always did. (Hadn’t Margot and Isabelle both done it for Père Sonne?)
“You were asleep forever,” Michael complained.
“It was only a nap. How did you pass the time?”
The boy held up his phone. “Thirty-one kills.”
“Lovely.”
Noah’s generation had gotten more fresh air, he decided, but also probably more fractures, playing such perennial favorites as Johnny-on-the-Pony (in which one team leaped on the backs of the other until the whole human pile crashed to the ground). He wondered now how a gamer like Michael had broken his collarbone.
Every bit of Noah was aching from last night’s flight. He remembered the stretches: Chops, the Superman Pose, Dynamic Hugs, the Silverback Gorilla. While Vivienne could still see, she’d affixed a leaflet to his freezer with (an extra joke) a magnet of Matisse’s La Danse. But Noah didn’t want to attempt the moves in front of Michael, who might try to film the humiliating ritual.
He called down to the front desk and had a tense conversation that ended with the management promising to swap the crib for some kind of child’s bed by tonight. Then he thought to log in to the Wi-Fi and scan in some of his mother’s other photos.
“Found what they are?” Michael asked.
Noah shook his head and tilted his tablet to show the boy. For the rectangle with the circle between two dashes, the only suggestion offered was “Best guess: house door.”
“That’s not a door,” Michael said disgustedly. “More like a gravestone.”
“You think?” Very abstract for a tomb, though, and where was the name?
For the dandy with the cane, Noah was offered a set of “visually similar images,” but they were just random white people, not similar to the man in the photo at all.
Michael pointed: “Some of these aren’t even guys.”
Noah was amused to recognize that face as Greta Garbo’s.
“You think he was, what, a friend of your mom’s?”
There was something in Michael’s tone; it made Noah look at him hard, then at the dandy again. What could this fellow have been to Margot? “He is what to you?” as the passport checker had asked this morning. A sexy devil, leaning on his cane. Noah shook his head to dislodge the cobwebs of suspicion.
“Hey, let’s say your dad did ran around on her”—
“Did run.” Noah automatically amended the participle.
—“so once she was on
her own, she paid him back with this guy…”
This really wasn’t a conversation to have with an eleven-year-old. Besides, the mathematics of marriage wasn’t as neat as that. “I very much doubt it,” Noah said repressively.
But his pulse was racing. A banal theory; all the more likely to be true. Two years unencumbered by husband or child; two years of assignations at the elegant Excelsior? Then, what, had things soured between Margot and her limping playboy, or had he been killed or torn away from her in the chaos of Liberation, and for want of any other future she’d sailed for New York to try being Madame Selvaggio again?
Schlocky, Joan complained. I’m not buying it.
Michael was channel surfing now past chat shows in French, soaps in Italian, English-language news.
“You should do your journal before we go out for lunch. A little every day,” Noah told him.
A wordless groan.
“Like killing rats.”
The image made Michael’s eyes bulge.
“Whack each one as soon as you see it, so they can’t form a pack.”
The boy dug into his backpack for the notebook, and Noah began the not-to-be-rushed business of getting his shoes on.
The February air was perfumed. A lemon tree was ripening, dangling over a wall. Noah felt his shoulders relax. He spun around until he spotted a burst of open blue sky: the seafront.
“Freaky.” Michael had stopped to examine a four-wheel motorbike, parked next to a one-person car with a zipped plastic window. “And I’ve never seen so many turds in my life.” He jumped over a particularly moist, orange-tinged pile.
Noah nodded. “Make things beautiful, then let your little dogs crap all over them: I’m afraid it’s the French way.”
“I’ve got to post this one.”
For a surreal moment he thought Michael wanted to send the dogshit by mail. But the kid was only taking a close-up of the coil. Michael edited the image with rapid tweaks of finger and thumb.
“If you’re really fond of someone, here,” Noah told him, “you call them ‘ma petite crotte’—‘my little turd.’”
“You’re shitting me!”
When they rounded the corner, the crescent bay opened out like the curve of a dancer’s arm. Gigantic palm trees shook their heads all along the sweep of the Prom. Behind the line of gracious buildings, the city sloped up toward the darker mountains with their swath of snow.
Six lanes of traffic to cross to get to the sea: an appalling development since Noah’s day. “Wait. Michael! Give me your hand.”
“Hell no.”
“Then just hang on till I say it’s safe.”
“It’s safe, dude,” Michael called from three lanes across.
Noah paused on the median strip under a lush shrub: oleander? Bird-of-paradise bushes, each flower preening with its crest of orange and blue and a long tapered beak outlined in flaming red. The massive palm trees had bark scored horizontally, and the same pattern appeared on the lampposts as an homage.
A knot of tourists whizzed by on identical heavy blue bicycles.
“Watch out for the bikes!” Noah scuttled across the next three lanes to join Michael.
As the two of them turned west, past the ice-cream cake of the Hotel Negresco (snowy walls, pink dome), the wide expanse of path was thick with promenaders. Sun-leathered women arm in arm with wizened men; kids wobbling and veering on those scooters with two little wheels in front. A tangle of ancient joggers ran by. A teenage girl walked past with jeans half unbuttoned over a thong bikini, which appalled Noah. Boys on in-line skates zoomed through obstacle courses of little orange cones or upturned plastic cups that they’d laid out, it seemed, for the pleasure of mastery. So many North African faces and head scarves—from the former French colonies, of course. Panting slightly, Noah caught up with the boy. “This is called the Promenade des Anglais, the place the English walked.” A big lungful of the salt-sweet air. “It stretches for five miles.”
“Are those people in the water?”
Dark spots on the waves. “Yep. It’s so mild here, some Niçois—locals—swim all year round. My dad said it was easy enough if you never broke the habit.”
“Hard-core,” Michael murmured.
Though several of these swimmers were wearing wetsuits with neoprene hoods, Noah noticed. Maybe this generation was a bit tenderer than previous ones.
“How come your family didn’t move back here after the war?” Michael asked suddenly.
Oddly enough, Noah had never considered this. “Ah, things were pretty rough in Europe.” This very Prom, for instance; defaced with concrete barricades and rolls of barbed wire. “Parts of the city were smashed up, rival gangs feuding, not enough to eat…” As he spoke, this all sounded to Noah unnervingly like Michael’s ungentrifiable corner of Brooklyn.
He leaned over the rail to look at the bright blue wooden deck chairs and parasols laid out for rent on the gray beach below.
“How come there’s no sand?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “It’s all pebbles around Nice.”
“Why did the French make the English walk here, was it a punishment?”
Noah grinned at the idea. “Actually it was a luxury thing, having time to go for a walk. The English were the swanky visitors, before the Russians, and then the Americans. ‘Winter swallows,’ they were called, here for the sun.” He was summarizing what Max Harstad’s book said about the grandmother Noah had never met, Isabelle Personnet of the bad lungs. (Though she’d lived another half-century, as it turned out, and what had finally killed her was a bowel complaint.) Noah wondered whether Pierre—who, on the evidence, had begun as an undistinguished painter—would have reinvented himself as a fearlessly original photographer sooner or later, somewhere else, if he hadn’t had to bring his wife south to Nice. Was genius a weed that sprang up anywhere, or did it need a particular habitat? “Lots of them had TB and hoped the sea air and sunshine would cure them. Unfortunately, bacteria don’t care about the weather.”
Michael had found a fallen palm leaf, dried into a sword, and was swiping and stabbing at the air with it.
Noah looked down at the broad path underfoot, dark pinkish tarmac. “Actually, I seem to remember the Prom is named for the Anglos because they paid for it. During a famine—the orange harvests had failed—visitors got so tired of being bugged for spare change that they hired the beggars to build a walkway.”
“Why didn’t they just give them the money?”
“Well, rich people used to think handouts made people lazy.”
Used to think? Joan repeated, sardonic.
Noah found himself brooding over Michael’s grandma, dead at sixty-three. Was that what it came down to—was it money that had kept the branches of this boy’s family tree apart? Not so much Victor’s perversity as a standoffish squeamishness on the part of the haves (Youngs and Selvaggios) vis-à-vis the have-not Davises? How hard had Fernande really tried to connect with Amber and this child? Noah would never know, because he’d never asked her.
He pushed on with the story. “So instead they forced the starving men and women to build this road for pennies.” Like Amber metalworking while Noah and her son basked in the sunshine. “Children too, younger than you, lugging basins of dirt.”
“That shit shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Too right.” Noah thought Michael meant child labor, until he followed the boy’s gaze to a middle-aged man in a skimpy Speedo. “Oh, that’s just what European men swim in.” Though Noah noticed some of the younger lollers on the stones were in American-style board shorts.
“Tits, even!”
A young woman, stretching out on the stones just under them, was untying her bikini top. Noah shushed the boy sharply.
“If she lays it all out, she has to expect to get looked at.”
“Toplessness on beaches is no big deal here. Let’s go find a restaurant,” Noah added, beckoning him away from the rail.
“There’s churros.” Michael nodded to
ward a snack van.
“No, no, a proper meal.” Noah led them back across the Promenade.
They passed canopied tables with suave young waiters calling, “Hello, ciao, hola.” The Belle Époque villas were curvaceous, garlanded. “See all the decorations on these buildings? The fancy metalwork?” Noah pointed up at a scroll with curlicues.
Michael grimaced, shaking his head. “All these faces spying on me.”
True, now that Noah looked for them; painted or carved eyes peeked down from nooks and crannies, like a crowd of fairy watchers.
“This frilly shit…” The boy gestured at columns in faux-marble; cement meticulously painted to resemble the more precious stone. “Life’s too short.”
Preoccupied by hunger now, Noah plunged down a side street. “Well, all the more reason to spend your limited time making something that will last.”
“What’d you make? If you never discovered any meds for cancer.”
Nettled, Noah said over his shoulder, “I’m not dead yet.” A pathetic answer, because what exactly did he plan on making, in however many years he had left?
He walked into the first restaurant he saw that didn’t display its menu in English.
But déjeuner was long over, Monsieur.
Noah had forgotten how seriously they took the rhythms of their day here. He was embarrassed to be caught asking for lunch at three in the afternoon; he’d have blamed it on jet lag if he could have remembered the French word.
Finally he found an all-day brasserie with menus in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Several women were lingering over coffee with their little dogs.
Noah ordered himself cod with aioli. Michael picked a burger and fries.
“Un sirop, Coca?” asked the waiter.
Michael caught that syllable. “Coke,” he answered before Noah could say no. He was tapping on his phone already, copying in the Wi-Fi code printed on the menu.
Hoping to distract him from his screen, Noah flicked through the biography. “Let me show you what men used to swim in, nearly a century ago.” There, a wasted D. H. Lawrence, skinny as a changeling behind his beard and in a shoulder-to-knee striped swimsuit, emerging from one of the dressing huts that once stood on this beach. The photo was slightly overexposed, eerily bright. Max Harstad suggested that Père Sonne had been hinting at the notion of death as a reclothing, the shedding of a skin. “How would you like to have to wear one of those?”
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