I smiled weakly at her. As soon as I was alone in my room, I sent Sophie an SMS asking where she was. It was after two in the morning.
I opened my window to let the cool night breeze into my stuffy bedroom, then checked my phone once more. Nothing. My situation seemed unimaginable, so much so that I felt I couldn’t really be in it, that if I went to sleep, I would wake to a different reality from the one I was now in.
I pulled back the covers and got in bed, repeating to myself again and again the futile phrase It will be fine. It will be fine.
I WOKE TO my alarm blaring in my ear after a brief and fitful sleep. I had forgotten to turn it off for the weekend. As my mind first surfaced from my dreams, I was blissfully untethered from reality. Then slowly the facts came back to me in all of their pernicious detail, ending with me in my bed alone and the whereabouts of Sophie and Alex unknown.
I rolled over, wanting to go back to sleep in hopes of waking to some different outcome, to something other than this terrible uncertainty. I looked at my phone, but there were no messages. It was too early to get out of bed on a Saturday, but I didn’t feel as if I could fall back asleep. The house was oddly quiet, and then I remembered that Pierre was away on business and Nicole had taken the children to see their grandmother in La Baule for the weekend. It was a small mercy to have the house to myself. I lay there for perhaps another hour on the drowsy threshold of sleep but unable to give myself over to it. Best to get up, I decided, drink some coffee, and figure out what to do. My legs and arms felt leaden, as though they had registered and physically manifested my despair.
The morning was warm but cloudy and the air heavy with humidity. It was going to rain at some point today. You could feel the moisture gathering. I ground some coffee and put it in the press, staring out the window as the teakettle heated up. Suddenly, I heard my phone ding.
Sophie had sent me an SMS. My hands shook as I opened it.
Hi! Just saw your message. What are you doing? Come meet us for breakfast!
The teakettle screamed and it startled me so much that I dropped my phone. I bent down to the linoleum to pick it up: there was a tiny dent but it was otherwise unharmed. I put it carefully on the small kitchen table and went to pour the boiling water into the press.
Us.
Surely Sophie wouldn’t be inviting me to come and join her and Alex for a postcoital breakfast? It was beyond the realm of reason. You do not betray someone and then cavalierly invite them to breakfast. So she must be at home; she must have gone home after all.
I sat down and sent Sophie an SMS: Where are you????
I repeated my text, my heart now pounding: Where are you?
The de Persauds.
Putting my phone down, I steadied myself with one hand on the table; her words had a dizzying effect. My phone beeped again after a few seconds. I stared at it for a moment before reaching out to pick it up and read her message.
Come over! I’m making breakfast!
I walked to the counter on shaky legs. I pressed my coffee down, watched the liquid go jet-black, then sat at the table and stared at my phone. Maybe, I thought, and stopped. What could I even tell myself now?
Suddenly my phone rang. The noise filled the room, the whole house. It was Sophie calling, and when I didn’t answer, she called again.
Why aren’t you answering?? What’s wrong??
An odd and sudden calm came over me; the thing I had feared all this time had finally happened. Had the fear been worse or the thing itself? It would certainly be the latter, but just then I felt only numb. Dazed, I looked down at my phone, which was ringing again, then leaned forward and turned it off. I refilled my coffee cup and went out into the backyard, wearing only my sweatpants and a thin T-shirt. I sat on the back step and pulled my knees in close to my chest.
I felt a deep unease, as though I were still in the stages of uncertainty, as though I still suffered only from the fear that this thing had happened instead of the knowing it had. And as I sat there, I could feel my future slipping away, the summer in Cap Ferrat, Alex, Sophie. And so another fear was confirmed, that none of it had ever been quite real, that none of it was really mine to have or lose. I saw what would happen now: I would call my mother later that day, burst into tears, and tell her it was just homesickness. I would take my exams. I would get on my flight in two weeks and go home, as it had always been my destiny to do.
Some tiny, desperate part of me wanted to believe there was an alternative to all of this, an alternative in which Sophie had a reasonable explanation, but I knew in my heart the truth, the terrible, inevitable reality. His fingers on her cheek. Sophie’s odd behavior that morning in Cap Ferrat.
Sometime later there was a knock on the door. At first I ignored it, thinking whoever was knocking was looking for the family, and I didn’t feel like explaining that they were gone. It was convenient, this city house with no car in the driveway to betray your presence. But the knocking persisted, became more urgent. And, of course, it wasn’t for the family.
She was standing there with an anxious smile when I opened the door. The sight of her made me queasy with the dueling instincts of wanting to shut the door and wanting to tear her to pieces.
“Brooke! I was about to send out the gendarmes! Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Her eyes looked frantic. Though I felt actual, visceral pain at the sight of her, the street was no place for this discussion.
“Come in.” I closed the door behind her, staring all the while at the floor, unable to look her in the face. I walked silently around her—studiously avoiding any contact—through the kitchen and back out onto the porch. I returned to where I’d been sitting and stared up into the branches of the trees. How could I look at her? She wasn’t the Sophie I’d known, not the Sophie in my head and in my heart. Not my Sophie who loved me and whom I loved. Had she ever been?
“Brooke, what’s wrong? What’s happened? Did you get bad news?” Sophie sat beside me and put a hand on my knee. I froze and briefly stared at the audacious hand before shrugging it off and turning to face her. There was, I saw, no other way to have this conversation than in plain, frank language.
“Sophie,” I said, bravely now, looking her in the eyes—those eyes I thought I’d known—“did you or did you not stay at Alex’s last night?”
Her surprise appeared genuine. “That’s why you’re upset?” She blinked at me.
“Just answer the question.” I looked away from her, unable to sustain eye contact.
“Well, yeah, I did but . . .”
“And you slept with him?” The words burned my tongue.
She paused for a moment, and from the corner of my eye I could see her whole body go rigid. “Brooke . . .”
I got up from my seat and walked down onto the lawn, unable to stand being so close to her. I raked my fingers through my hair. My hands needed to be occupied, to be restrained from what they might otherwise do.
“Brooke, I don’t understand why you’re so upset. It isn’t like that. You know I would never do anything to hurt you!”
She was standing now too, a few paces from me in the yard as though we were preparing for a duel. Who was this girl? She looked so much like my friend. She looked so much like someone I trusted.
“That doesn’t even make sense, Sophie! Those phrases together don’t make any sense! How did you think it wouldn’t hurt me?” I was aware that the neighbors could hear us and I didn’t care.
“Because I just thought we were beyond this. We’re not like everyone else, Brooke! Don’t you know that? Don’t you see that? I wanted to be free like you are, like Alex is. I thought it was something we could share, all of us. You said there would always be room for me.” She was gesturing wildly and her eyes were lit up like a zealot’s.
I felt a series of tiny implosions in my mind and heart, a swift collapsing. Her face was earnest, a mask of innocence. She believed what she was saying, but how? Had Sophie made her world so small that only we three were in it now? That the
distinction of who was a friend and who was a lover no longer even mattered? Had she just decided to rewrite all of the rules and expected me to follow along? Impossible. Yet the tiniest part of me saw a glimmer of reason in it all. Didn’t I want both of them too?
“You thought we could share Alex? You cannot be serious.” My voice was quiet with rage. What I really meant was How could you make me compete with you? Because that was the truly cruel part of what she’d done.
She looked down at her hands, fingers twisting around each other.
“He said it would be all right. I was worried, but he said it would be all right.” She spoke directly to the ground, suddenly childlike.
Only now did it occur to me that Sophie wasn’t the only one who’d betrayed me, but Alex as well. My anger doubled accordingly. Did he not think he owed me anything? Not even the decency not to sleep with my best friend?
“Oh, he said that, did he? I wonder what his motivation could have been. I refuse to believe that you’re this naive, Sophie. And after all your talk about how sex should be special.”
“It was special,” she said, landing the blow.
I took a few steps away from her, back toward the house. “I really didn’t need to hear that,” I called over my shoulder. I had to get away from her just then.
“It was special because of our time all together, because of the three of us.”
“Stop, Sophie. Just stop.” My tears came suddenly, the anesthesia of the shock wearing off at last. I choked them back and turned toward her. “We are not some bohemian artists, Sophie, this is not a ménage à trois. We are Americans and you’ve slept with the man your best friend is in love with. Stop trying to make this something else. You know what I think? That you just have to have everything. It’s not enough that you’re beautiful and rich. You couldn’t stand to just let me have this one thing! This one thing.”
She looked at me as if I’d slapped her. “You never said you were in love with Alex,” she said quietly, carefully.
“I did, Sophie. On the train to Cap Ferrat. Is that really your excuse?” My voice was shrill and I was nearly screaming.
“No! It’s just that it didn’t get through to me. I’m so sorry, Brooke, you have to believe me that I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. I only thought . . .”
I said nothing, just shook my head. I wished so much that I weren’t crying.
We stood for another couple of minutes without saying anything.
“You should go,” I finally told her.
“I can’t leave it like this, Brooke.” She came over to me and reached out to touch my shoulder. “Please say you can forgive me.” She had begun to cry as well. “You’re my best friend in the world. I won’t even so much as talk to Alex ever again if you don’t want me to. I won’t look at him!”
“I don’t see what good that would do,” I said, shrugging her off.
“Then tell me what I can do, tell me anything. You’re the one I care about, the one I love.” Her voice rose in octaves of increasing desperation, her fingers clawed at the fabric of my T-shirt.
I shook my head again and walked back into the house. She followed me through the corridor to the front door.
I drew close to the doorframe to let her pass, and when she was safely outside, I looked at her again.
“Brooke . . .”
“Sophie, I just need you to go right now. I need some time.”
She gazed at me plaintively.
“I’ll speak to you Monday,” I said, my voice a little softer now.
Sophie relented and took a couple of slow steps toward the street. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. So very sorry.”
I nodded once, looking down at the pavement, and said nothing. Then I closed the door.
I DIDN’T EMERGE from the house for the rest of the weekend. Normally I was careful about how much of the family’s food I ate, but unable to face the prospect of going to the store, I took liberties. I gave myself over completely to my anxiety about our upcoming final exams—this being far preferable to whatever else I’d be feeling if I let myself—and buried myself in studying, taking breaks only to eat and watch a couple of badly dubbed American movies that the family had on DVD.
I heard nothing from Alex but had an SMS from Véronique on Saturday asking if I was okay. I stared at the message for a long time, wondering how on earth to answer that question. I wondered whether to tell Véronique the whole story but decided I couldn’t face it. It would somehow be that much more true if someone else knew. I lied and said I was fine but busy studying: a half-truth. Somehow I knew that I wasn’t going to see Alex again, that he would remove himself from the picture, leaving Sophie and me to deal with the wreckage. I had the miserable realization that Sophie and I were probably just two of many. I thought obsessively about Alex’s and my night together, but now with the melancholy realization that it had always been doomed, that there wouldn’t be another one like it.
At night I couldn’t keep imagined scenes of Sophie and Alex together out of my head. Along with these troubled fantasies came an insidious sense that it was somehow partially my fault, that I had let this happen. How many times had I almost told Sophie my feelings for Alex? And why didn’t I? In plain English, not as a part of some fantasy future that we were spinning, not in a theoretical, faraway time, but now, in this instant. How hard would it have been, really?
That didn’t mean she wasn’t at fault for sleeping with him—there was no way to play the facts to leave her without culpability—but what if it all could have been prevented by my having had the courage to say the words? I wanted not to forgive Sophie for what she’d done but instead for it never to have happened. I wanted to have never seen her weakness, to have never known that she was capable of this. I wanted to not have to think of him comparing the two of us: the shapes of us, the sounds we made, our scents. I could have told her on the train to Cap Ferrat, going or coming, and we wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe we’d be spending the summer there as we’d planned.
It wasn’t that Alex had broken us up but that we were all intertwined. He was between us, and I between them, and Sophie between him and me. It was all just impossible.
I had tidied the house and positioned myself in front of my desk when Nicole and the kids came home from La Baule. I heard the happy noises of their return, the house coming alive with its inhabitants, and I felt a wave of wanting to be home. For the first time since I’d arrived in France, I thought longingly of California. I yearned suddenly for the quiet evenings when my mother and I would sit on the porch with our tea, making believe that we were somewhere other than a dried-out street in Chino; even the thought of that sorry cul-de-sac was comforting. My former life had been remote and unappealing, but now I saw that I was only ever on sabbatical; my future was entirely nebulous.
I skipped the train that Monday morning and walked the long way to the institute. The morning was bright and warm with no clouds in the sky. The schoolchildren in their uniforms walking in lines were louder and more squirrelly than usual. It’s the sunshine, I thought, smiling for the first time in days, they know the jig is just about up. I found myself full of nervous energy, knowing that I had to see Sophie.
I wanted to be able to coolly look at the facts, to say that all that mattered was that she’d slept with Alex. But part of me knew that it wasn’t quite so simple, that in the context of the past few months it could never be so black-and-white. There was a world that only she and I now lived in—a world that we shared with neither Véronique and Alex nor the other Americans. We had been making up the rules as we went, but she had pushed it too far, and her vision of what we could be to each other had become too elastic. She’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. And now, most painfully, I knew I’d never be like her.
What I feared most was her pleading. I loved her and she’d hurt me. To beg for my forgiveness seemed to be requesting a shortcut. What had happened couldn’t be undone or minimized, I wouldn’t allow it. Yet we would always be bound tog
ether in this hellish threesome. I could never be alone with Alex again as I could never be alone with her again. The other would always be present.
When I arrived at the school, I went into the kitchen. To my relief Adam was there, and to my greater relief he was filling a French press with hot water. I felt myself dragging with exhaustion, the stress having burned through all of my energy reserves.
“Bonjour, belle fille!” he said. I went to him and kissed his cheek. It filled me with a strange regret to see him. I suddenly wished I’d spent more time with him, wished I hadn’t depended so much on my friendship with Sophie. Then maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone right now.
“What have we here?” I asked, leaning my head up against his shoulder for a soothing moment.
“Can you believe? I found this in the closet of lost things. I cleaned it up and voilà! Too bad I didn’t find it earlier.” He looked down at me then and perhaps noticed my dark circles. “I thought maybe we could all do with some real coffee today.”
He pulled two mugs out of the cabinet for us. “So, I heard a rumor that you’re staying the summer with your beau.”
Though it hurt to hear Adam call him that, I figured it would have been worse to hear Alex’s name. I looked at the ground and shuffled my feet a little. “No, no, we got a little carried away after a few too many glasses of vin rouge is all and began planning our lives as expats. But it’s the real world for me, I’m afraid I’ll have to go back to my summer job after all.”
He shrugged. “C’est la vie. Maybe you can come back and visit someday when—” He stopped abruptly. “Good morning, dear,” he said over my shoulder. I turned around to see Sophie lingering in the doorway. “Would you like some coffee? I made some good stuff, not that dégoûtant Nescafé.”
Sophie nodded and walked cautiously over to where we were standing. Her eyes flickered back and forth from the coffee to me as though gauging whether I was going to allow her to come any closer.
Losing the Light Page 23