“It isn’t just the question of where we’d live or go to school. I have to work during the summers, Soph.” It embarrassed me to have to point this out to her. I got the feeling that it somehow embarrassed her as well. She was quiet for a moment.
“I bet Alex could help find you a job. Maybe at that café where he knew the owner! Think of how much money you could make in tips from all those rich tourists,” she said excitedly.
“Maybe,” I said, a little touched by her enthusiasm. Maybe, maybe.
Alex returned looking exasperated. “The service is terrible at this place, les filles, I don’t know why you come here. Let’s get some dinner at La Cigale and then go back to the house.”
Véronique met us at La Cigale. When she arrived, she looked rather relaxed for someone who was running so late.
“Where have you been, ma chère cousine?” Alex asked.
Véronique smiled and lightly flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I was seeing Jean-Marc and I forgot the time.”
Jean-Marc, I thought, smiling at Véronique, who could even keep track?
The waiter came to the table and Alex ordered champagne.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“Why, don’t you know, chérie?” he said. “It’s a toast to you and Sophie, who are never leaving France.”
Véronique looked intrigued. “Ah, oui, c’est vrai? When was this decided?”
The waiter arrived nearly instantaneously with the champagne. I was aware from his demeanor that he was familiar with the de Persauds.
“It was always decided,” Alex said slyly, “only the girls have just realized that this is their fate. And you cannot fight fate, isn’t that right, chérie?” He leaned over and squeezed my knee under the table. Smiling at him, I felt jumpy and short of breath at his nearness. After my first glass of champagne I felt sure he was right; it was fate and I should just let go. What was the worst that could happen? That I would lose a year in school? It could surely be made up. People did this. I didn’t always have to be responsible. And with another summer, another year, what Alex and I had together could only grow stronger. We could finally spend some real time together without my departure looming.
“That’s marvelous!” Véronique said.
“Véronique, you must come to Cap Ferrat too!” Sophie’s voice was so buoyant it seemed to be coming from above our heads.
Véronique sipped her champagne with a little smile. “Well, yes, of course. Merci bien, Sophie, for the invitation.”
After a tiny but certain pause, all four of us laughed, assuredly for four wholly different reasons. I suddenly worried a little for Sophie.
“I am so happy that we don’t have to say goodbye to our American friends, Alex,” Véronique said.
“Yes,” Alex said, again looking at me across the table, “on a de la chance.”
It was I who couldn’t believe our luck.
We ate oysters and steak and went through the champagne and two more bottles of wine. Véronique regaled us with stories of her favorite pastimes on the Mediterranean: sailing and sunning and a nightclub in a cave that we simply had to visit. Suddenly, the exams and schoolwork that had so preoccupied me, along with my worries about my mother, had disappeared as though they’d never been. I was back under the spell without knowing it was a spell. It not only all seemed possible, but likely. Certain. Fated. All I needed, all I desired, was here with me at this table.
Back at the house, Alex’s mother was nowhere to be seen.
“Back to la campagne,” Alex said when Sophie asked him where she’d gone.
We returned to the atrium and took off our shoes. The tile was still warmed from the late-spring sun that had beaten down on it all day. To be in this room again—this room designed to remind Virginie of her beloved Cap Ferrat house that she would likely never see again—made me slip one degree further away from the world I’d once thought myself so chained to. I allowed myself the fatal thought that only someone in such a malleable state could believe: maybe I did belong here after all.
Other people came, including Véronique’s friend from all those months ago. How could I ever have thought she was a threat? She seemed like such a silly thing now.
“What ever happened with Grégoire in Cap Ferrat?” I asked Véronique when it seemed obvious that he wasn’t going to show up.
Véronique huffed, “He doesn’t understand me!”
“In what way?”
“People like him never understand anyone with artistic ambitions. He’s too political. Fucking Marxist.”
I nodded as if I knew the type, though I didn’t. “Sorry about him. You should be with someone who gets you.”
She looked at me. “You know something about that these days, do you?”
I blushed. “So you know?”
“Of course I know. Chérie, it’s obvious.” She smiled broadly. “Speak of the devil, where has he gone?”
I looked around, and as she said, Alex was nowhere in sight. Sophie was also missing. I felt a momentary lurch of panic but then reminded myself how unnecessarily worked up I’d gotten when I’d woken up on the couch in Cap Ferrat, how silly I’d felt when I’d found Sophie lying in her bed alone, innocent. And it was doubly unlikely—impossible even—now that Alex and I had actually slept together, now that we weren’t merely theoretical.
I told Véronique I would be back and wandered into the corridor. Met with the silence of the hallway, I realized I didn’t have much of a plan, and I’d had a lot of wine: a bad combination. Plus, I didn’t know my way around the house as well as one would think for all the time I’d spent there. Despite its tidy appearance from the outside, it was vast and confusing inside, and my visits had mostly been confined to a few of the rooms in the house: the atrium, the dining room, and of course Alex’s darkroom. I understood that there would always be parts of this house that I wasn’t meant to see, wasn’t meant to know, and it felt like a transgression to be outside the rooms where I knew I was welcome.
I heard a voice from a few feet away expressing alarm at the sight of me. I looked up to see Virginie standing two doors down, clinging to the doorframe and looking startled, frightened even. She was in a long nightgown that covered her frail arms down to her wrists, and her white hair was flowing loose around her shoulders. I had never seen her like this, for whenever she’d spent time with us, she’d always been made up and coiffed, her hair pulled back and pinned. I’d never realized it was so long.
“I’m so sorry, Madame de Persaud,” I said, coming a little nearer, then stopping in my tracks when I saw that she was recoiling.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Brooke,” I said dumbly. Sometimes she had seemed to remember me, but perhaps she was only ever playing along, and she would naturally drop the pretense when caught alone in the night.
“What are you doing here? Why are you in my home?”
My heartbeat sped up as though I were actually an intruder and not an invited guest. “Alex,” I stammered, “I’m a friend of Alex’s.”
She looked none too relieved. I hoped that I was not going to find myself in the awkward position of explaining who her grandson was.
“Then why aren’t you with him, young lady? You shouldn’t just go wandering around people’s houses. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said, backing away. “I was trying to find him and I got lost.” I smiled at her weakly. “Bonne nuit, madame,” I said as I walked away. She didn’t go back into her room until I had left the corridor, and I could feel her eyes on me as I retreated.
I felt as if I might burst into tears. What a sad creature I was, drunk and wandering around a house where I didn’t belong, looking forlornly for my disappeared Alex and my erstwhile best friend, startling old ladies in the middle of the night. I made my way downstairs to the empty kitchen to compose myself. All I could hear was an echo of the din from the atrium. Of all the things one could say about the rooms in this beautiful old
house, they were far from soundproof. The door that led down to the wine cellar and Alex’s darkroom was open, and when I crept toward it, I could hear muffled voices from below.
I tiptoed down the stairs. My heart sank as Sophie’s sudden laughter rang through the passageway. Putting one foot in front of the other, I prepared myself for whatever might meet me at the bottom.
Their backs were to me and I was able to watch them for a moment before they were aware of my presence. They stood innocently side by side with no part of their bodies touching or intertwined as I’d envisioned. I was paranoid, I told myself, I was the bad friend for being so suspicious.
“Brooke!” Sophie said, turning around as though hearing the sound of my heavy thoughts out of the thin, stale air.
“I was showing Sophie some of the pictures from Cap Ferrat. Come and see.” Alex held his hand out to me. I smiled and folded myself under the shelter of his arm. It was as though they’d told me to meet them here, so unsurprised were they to see me, as sure a sign of pure intentions as I could imagine.
I glanced down at the photo that Sophie was holding; she was looking into it searchingly as though trying to place the person in it.
“Let me see,” I said gently. She handed it over. It was a picture of her, standing in the ocean with the water up to her waist. She was looking back over her shoulder, her face in profile, nearly obscured, her wet hair splayed over her bare shoulders. I vaguely recalled that Alex had had his camera with him that night, but then didn’t he always? He was surreptitious; his gift required stealth and trust, a talent for both disarming and disrobing his subjects. Sophie looked, if possible, even more perfect in this picture than she did in real life. I glanced at her standing next to me, and she too appeared transfixed by this image of herself. And I knew, of all the things about Alex that made him desirable, the eyes through which he showed you yourself—a self perfected, a self that he made you certain you could be, perhaps even were already—was the most seductive.
“Beautiful,” I said. We all stood there quietly for another moment.
“We should probably go back upstairs, les filles,” Alex said, “before Véronique’s friends start stealing the silverware.”
Our footsteps echoed throughout the empty house. When we were back in the atrium and had refilled our wineglasses, Alex went over to comfort Véronique, as it seemed something in her night had gone wrong and she appeared on the verge of tears. I sat quietly with Sophie on the bench, waiting for her to say something, and at last she did.
“He’s so incredible,” she said dreamily, her eyes flashing quickly over to Alex and then down into her glass, “as a photographer, I mean.” She looked over at me and smiled.
I smiled back cautiously. “Yes, he is. He has a gift.”
“I’ve never really seen any of his photographs before tonight. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It’s as if it’s more than an image, it’s like he . . .”
“Really sees you.”
“Yes! It’s like you look at one of his pictures and you feel understood.”
We were both quiet for a moment, considering this.
“I don’t think I could ever do what he does,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“With my art. Make someone feel like that, like they’re more understood. That’s what good art does, doesn’t it? I don’t think my paintings have that, I think they’re empty.” Sophie looked desolate.
“I’m sure they’re wonderful.” I cringed at how false this sounded, despite my good intentions. “If you’d ever let me see them.”
“Like you ever let me read your stories.”
“Point taken. But you know we just have to keep working on it. Maybe Alex wasn’t any good when he was our age either.”
“I bet he was. I bet he was always good.”
“Well, we’ll have lots of time to learn from him.” The wine had gone to my head and I’d decided we could stay.
Her face finally perked up. “Don’t say we’ll stay if you don’t mean it, Brooke. I want to so much.”
“I do mean it,” I said quietly, feeling once the words were out that it must be true.
Sophie took my hand and squeezed it. “I just want us all to be together. I don’t want it to end.”
“Come on.” I stood up and pulled her by the hand. “Let’s see what’s going on with Alex and Véronique.”
“Brooke!” Véronique said as we approached.
“Yes, chérie?”
“Come outside with me. I need a cigarette and some air.”
I smiled a little at the contradiction, then briefly locked eyes with Alex and felt something pop in the air between us. I wanted so much to move the night forward to when I could climb in bed next to him, feel his skin on mine, but it seemed as if I’d been waiting forever, so what was another hour? I followed Véronique around the shrubbery to the almost-hidden door that led to a small balcony overlooking a side street.
She pulled her cigarette case from her pocket, drew two out with her delicate fingers, and handed me one.
“Is everything all right?” I asked finally when she had taken her first drag and had still said nothing.
She sighed. “I just had to get out of there for a little while. I was going crazy. You three left me alone with all of Alex’s horrible friends.”
“He said they were your friends.”
She shook her head. “See, he probably doesn’t even remember where he met them. He picks up strays everywhere he goes.”
I blanched a little at this, but Véronique had introduced us to Alex, so she couldn’t mean us.
“Anyway, I told him to make everyone leave. I thought if we came out here, no one could blame me. He always makes me look like the one who isn’t any fun. I swear, sometimes I feel like I’m the older cousin.”
“I could see that.”
Véronique leaned in and nudged me. “I’m glad you’re staying, I would really miss you.”
“Me too.”
“Alex would also.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “He is something, your cousin.”
“Oh, yes, he means well. He just doesn’t live on the same planet as the rest of us most of the time. But some people are just that way, the rules do not apply.”
I nodded.
“Your friend Sophie is growing on me,” Véronique said after a pause. “I’ll admit I thought she was a little silly when I first met the two of you. Head in the clouds, as they say, such a California girl. But she’s smart, just not very serious. You and I are a little serious.”
I laughed. I wanted Véronique to like Sophie, as I wanted Alex to like her. So long as each of them preferred me. “Sophie also doesn’t always live on the same planet, but . . .”
“She means well?” Véronique said, stubbing her cigarette on the railing.
“Exact. So you want to tell me about this Jean-Marc?”
She smiled in the way one smiles when one absolutely cannot help oneself, with her whole face, her whole body. “He is a very wonderful man but there is the small issue of a wife.”
“The issue being that he has one?” I said with a little chuckle.
“Perhaps. Though he says he’s not happy with her. But I don’t want him to leave her or he’d start acting like all of the rest of my boyfriends. Always around.”
“Wouldn’t want that. But I’m in no position to judge you. The heart wants what it wants, I guess.”
“And wants nothing more than what it can’t have,” she said as I nodded. “Maybe when we’re older, we’ll understand how to have something and love it all at the same time. Really have something I mean, not just for a night or, in my case, an afternoon.”
“Maybe. Maybe sooner than we think.”
We lingered on the balcony a little longer. The street below us was empty and it suddenly felt late.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Safe to go back inside?”
Véronique nodded. “He’d better have gotten rid of them. If
he’s back in there chatting and drinking . . .”
We moved back through the foliage into the main room, ducking under palm leaves. The detritus of the party remained—the full ashtrays and empty wineglasses—but all of the guests had gone. Sophie and Alex were gone as well. I surveyed the room as though in the midst of a crime scene.
“Well, Alex did his job”—my voice was overly bright, a little shrill—“everyone is gone. I didn’t think he’d send Sophie home as well, though.”
I watched Véronique carefully for a reaction. She was hugging her arms to her chest as though cold. She didn’t look me in the eye as she walked slowly to the table where her handbag was. “Poor Magdalena, look at this mess.”
“Should we clean up a bit?”
“Mais non. Of course not. She hates me anyway.”
I waited, rooted in the spot where I was standing, expecting Alex and Sophie to reemerge. They could be in the darkroom again, I thought, my mind pushing up against its own walls.
“Maybe they’ve gone downstairs to get something to eat,” Véronique said softly.
We walked silently down the stairs into the dark kitchen, then stood there for a moment, their palpable absence surrounding us.
“Let’s get a taxi,” Véronique said finally.
I couldn’t move. The image of him brushing her cheek caught in my mind, stubborn as a burr.
“They could be anywhere,” Véronique said gently, “you know how Alex is, he might have suddenly decided that he needs to show Sophie what the power station looks like in the moonlight. He does these things, Brooke.”
Nodding helplessly, I followed Véronique out the door and into the quiet night. We walked to the corner without speaking and hailed a cab. The buildings went by in a blur as we headed down familiar streets; my mind and body reeled from the wine, the adrenaline of my suspicions, my pent-up and unresolved desires.
When we pulled up outside my host family’s house, Véronique finally spoke. “Don’t worry.” She leaned over to kiss my cheeks. “It will be fine.”
Losing the Light Page 22