Such Fine Boys

by Patrick Modiano

  Mme Portier, sitting on the sofa, lit a cigarette.

  “I remember that you came by with his father very late one evening to pick up a suit. And they were bombing . . . But we didn’t go down to the cellar.”

  “That’s all ancient history,” Mme Portier said, letting her cigarette ash fall on the floor.

  “I went looking through all those old documents to see how long we’ve known each other . . .”

  Mme Portier shrugged. Christian had come up to us.

  “What were you talking about?” he said.

  “About the past,” said Mme Portier. “Do you like your suit?”

  “Thank you, Claude.”

  He bent over and kissed his mother’s forehead.

  “You should wear it this evening,” said Mme Portier.

  “As you wish, Claude.”

  And there, in front of us, he changed clothes again, removing his corduroy pants and sweater and slipping on the “dark flannel.”

  Mme Portier took her son’s arm and led him out of the room. The tailor and I walked behind them.

  “Good-bye, my dear. And thank you again for thinking of me for this suit.”

  His gaze lingered on the “dark flannel” that my friend was wearing, and that shone with a funereal glow in the yellow light of the stairway.

  Mme Portier held out her hand.

  “Elston . . . Do you think I’ve aged?”

  “Aged? Not in the slightest . . .”

  Christian bowed his head, embarrassed.

  “Are you sure? Now that he’s old enough to wear a suit, I won’t be able to cheat anymore . . .”

  “First of all, no one would ever think that this strapping young fellow is your son. You haven’t aged a day, my dear . . .”

  He had enunciated those last words, hammering out each syllable. The hall light went off. Elston pressed the switch again. He watched after us, leaning on the railing, as we walked down the stairs.

  Now that my friend owned the “dark flannel,” I felt a bit ashamed of my old wool blazer with its gold buttons and the high-water pants that made me look even younger than my fifteen years. Christian’s mother gave me a silk tie. I wore it for all of our outings and it restored a bit of my self-confidence.

  On summer evenings, she treated us to dinner on the banks of the Seine. Was it in Rueil? Chatou? Bougival? I’ve tried several times to find that inn. Without success. The outskirts of Paris have changed so much . . . Below was a large wooden platform lined with cabins, two diving boards, a slide. A line of paddleboats was moored to the pontoon. We could hear the dull, rhythmic drone of cascades, perhaps the Marly waterwheels. A sparsely graveled terrace. The houseboats floated among the willows on the banks, and my eyes followed the green light on the prow of one of them. When we were finished dining on the terrace, a heavyset fellow with gray hair came to sit at our table, the owner of the inn, a certain Jendron. He, too, was wearing a blazer, but much more elegant than mine, and a sailor sweater. He looked about a decade older than Mme Portier. He always offered Christian and me American cigarettes, and he called Mme Portier “Claudie.”

  The snatches of their conversation blended with the tepid air of those evenings, the slap of the paddleboats against the pontoon dock, the smell of the Seine . . . Jendron had managed a garage before the war, which had also employed a certain Pagnon, whose name cropped up often in their conversation: a friend of Mme Portier’s, since she called him “Eddy.” Whatever could have happened to that Eddy Pagnon, for them to mention him in such whispers? It all predated Christian’s birth. Had Jendron known the Greek, Christian’s father? My friend wasn’t listening, but instead slipped off in the clear night to the pontoon dock and took a paddleboat. I preferred to stay at the table with Jendron and Claudie. I wanted to understand.

  At around midnight, we crossed the large platform, moonlight casting the shadows of the slide and the diving boards onto the wooden planks. At that instant, it was as if we were in Cap d’Antibes. We went looking for Christian, who was playing ping-pong with the bartender.

  Jendron walked us to our car. He patted Christian on the back of the neck.

  “So, you working hard?”

  And my friend, despite his “dark flannel,” looked like a small boy next to that corpulent man.

  “What do you want to do with yourself?”

  Christian, feeling shy, didn’t answer.

  “Can I give you a piece of advice? Become a lawyer.”

  He turned to me.

  “Don’t you think that’s a good thing, being a lawyer?”

  He shoved into each of our jacket pockets two packs of American cigarettes.

  “What do you think, Claudie? Like to have a lawyer for a son?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  We climbed into the convertible. Christian, although he wasn’t old enough to have a license, sat at the wheel. Mme Portier sat next to him, and I on the back seat.

  “You shouldn’t let him drive, Claudie . . .”

  “I know.”

  She nodded, in a sign of helplessness. Christian peeled off. He got onto the westbound highway. The night was warm and silent, the road empty. He turned on the radio. I leaned out from the car and the air whipped my face. I felt dizzy and happy.

  He handed Claudie the wheel just before the Saint-Cloud tunnel.

  Mme Portier lived in a building on the corner of Avenue Paul-Doumer and Rue de La Tour, with a glass entrance door. I don’t have a very clear memory of her apartment, except for the sitting room, half-living room, half-dining room, which was divided by a cast-iron grate; and the bedroom, with its gray satin wall covering, where we brought her breakfast on the afternoons after poker.

  The first Saturday afternoon they brought me to their home, we drank orangeade in the living room. Christian seemed impatient, as if he had prepared a surprise or prank and was waiting for an opportune moment to spring it.

  Mme Portier smiled. I looked for something to say.

  “You have a very lovely apartment.”

  “Very lovely,” said Christian. Then he turned to his mother. “Shall we tell him, Claude?”

  “Yes, tell him.”

  “It’s like this, old man,” Christian said, moving his face close to mine. “I don’t live in my mother’s apartment . . .”

  She had lit a cigarette. The insipid odor of the Royale mixed with her perfume.

  “Last year, Claude and I decided, by mutual agreement . . .”

  He paused for a moment. Mme Portier walked to the other end of the room and picked up the telephone.

  “We decided not to get in each other’s way . . . That’s why Claude rented me a room, here in the building, on the ground floor.”

  I was listening to Christian, but I would also have liked to know what she was saying on the phone.

  “Don’t you think that’s a good solution?” asked Christian. “This way, we each have our own lives . . .”

  Who could she have been speaking to in such a low voice, almost a whisper? She hung up.

  “Claude, we’ll be leaving,” said Christian. “I’m going to show him my place. Shall we get together this evening?”

  “I might not be free,” said Mme Portier. “Call me around six.”

  “Claude got them to install a telephone in my room,” Christian told me, looking delighted.

  Pinned to his door was a calling card with the name Christian Portier. The room, about the size of a ship’s cabin, looked out on Avenue Paul-Doumer through a sash window. Christian’s bed was covered with a plaid blanket. An armchair in the same fabric against the tan wall. A long shelf supported model airplanes and a globe of the world. A photo of Yvette Lebon on the opposite wall. Or was it Mme Portier? Christian caught me looking.

  “You’re wondering which one it is, right? Claude or Yvette?”

  He folded his arms, like a schoolteacher who has just asked his student a trick question.

  “It’s Claude, old man.”

  He was proud to show me the ivor
y-colored radio integrated into the nightstand. Then the narrow bathroom, with its navy blue tiling and hip bath.

  “You mind if we listen to the radio?” he asked.

  He turned the dial. An announcer said, “For those who love jazz.” A trumpet played a slow, serene melody, like the trajectory of a seabird hovering above a deserted beach at dusk.

  “Hear that? That’s Sonny Berman . . .”

  We were both sitting on the edge of his bed. Christian had taken a bottle of whiskey from the closet and half-filled his toothbrush glass. We took turns drinking while listening to the music, and the shadows of passersby, projected against the wall by a streetlamp in the avenue, brushed over us.

  On those Saturday evenings we were often alone, just the two of us, and we dined like adults in an empty restaurant on Square de l’Alboni, thanks to the fifty francs in pocket money that Mme Portier gave her son.

  “I’m writing all this down in the accounts book,” he’d told me, “and I’ll reimburse Claude when I turn twenty-one.”

  Then we went by metro to the ten o’clock showing at a cinema in Auteuil. Christian had told me that the manager of this movie house was a friend of his mother’s. My schoolmate went up to the window and the cashier immediately handed him two complimentary tickets.

  We walked back home via Rue Chardon-Lagache and Rue La Fontaine. I was wearing my duffel coat and Christian a camelhair coat, over his dark flannel. The outfit made him look ten years older, but apparently that still wasn’t enough: he had bought tortoiseshell eyeglass frames that he put on for our outings with his mother. If he could have, he’d have grown a mustache and dyed his hair gray.

  In the building’s cream-green foyer, he proposed under his breath:

  “What say we go drop in on Claude . . . ?”

  Exiting the elevator, he tiptoed up to the apartment, and we remained standing, motionless in front of the door. The timer in the hall light ran out and neither of us thought to turn it back on. Muffled shouts or bursts of laughter. How many guests were there? Now and then I recognized Mme Portier’s voice, but different from the one she used during the day, throatier—as was her laugh, more strident and staccato than normal.

  After a moment, he took my arm and guided me through the darkness.

  Once again, we found ourselves in the foyer, whose walls gleamed in the garish light of the sconces.

  “I’ll walk you to the metro . . .”

  It was right nearby, at Place du Trocadéro. Often, to spend a few more moments together, we circled Trocadéro and followed Avenue Kléber to the next station, Boissière.

  “Claude is still throwing her little shindig,” Christian said. “Or else playing poker.”

  He affected an amused tone.

  “She’s going to have one heck of a hangover tomorrow . . .”

  As we parted company, I noticed his tense features and sad eyes. The prospect of going home alone to Avenue Paul-Doumer, to his independent room, must not have seemed very appealing. And Claude, who was “throwing her little shindig” . . . No doubt he would have liked to confide in me just then, but he pulled back. Before I went down the metro steps, he waved and pressed his fingers against his temple in a vague military salute.

  Much later, I understood that—unlike those mature men who labor to suck in their guts and step lively to look younger—behind the tortoiseshell glasses, the dark flannel suit and camelhair coat, there was only a frightened child.

  That kind of man, of a certain age but still slim, or at least trying to appear so by minding his posture—I had seen several of them with Mme Portier. She had come to visit us at school a few times in the company of one or another of them, never the same one. She always chose the moment when we were on the great lawn for afternoon recess, before evening study hall.

  She introduced us to a “Mr. Weiler” with silver hair and heavy eyelids. He asked Christian a few amiable questions about his studies. He gave off a scent of chypre and kept crumpling a pair of gloves with his slender fingers. After that visit, Christian told me that this Weiler was a very rich diamond merchant whom his mother had met not long before. Another one, a blond with a mustache and athletic bearing, the marquis de Something-or-other, spoke in a booming voice and used slang. While Mme Portier brought Weiler in her car, whenever she came to school with “the Marquis,” it was in the latter’s Buick.

  The profile of a third man, with a sly face and a black overcoat . . . That one, Christian and I nicknamed “the Weasel.” To which of the three—or was it a fourth—had Christian, one afternoon when we were alone in his mother’s apartment, answered on the telephone with the perfect manner of a private secretary: Miss Portier is out but I’ll tell her you called . . . Miss Portier will surely not be home before seven this evening . . . Very well, I’ll be sure to let Miss Portier know . . .”

  Still today, I wonder why she made those visits to Valvert. Was she perhaps trying to reassure all those men by showing them her big son, boarder in a renowned school just outside Paris? And what of Christian’s “independent” room? I suppose it came in handy when Miss Portier welcomed her friends to her apartment on Saturday nights.

  One Saturday evening, in fact, I rang at her door. Christian had been grounded because he got a zero in math, and he had given me a letter for his mother, along with a small tin valise full of laundry.

  She opened the door. She was barefoot and wrapped in a white terrycloth robe. She seemed embarrassed to see me.

  “Oh, hello . . . This is a surprise . . .”

  She stood there, in the doorway, as if to keep me from entering.

  “Who is it, Claude?” came a man’s voice from the living room.

  “No one . . . A friend of my son’s . . .”

  And after a moment’s hesitation:

  “Please, come in.”

  He was sitting on one of the leather ottomans, torso arched forward, like a jockey facing a hurdle. He looked up and smiled at me. It was not Weiler, or the Marquis, or the Weasel, but a dark-haired man of around fifty with a slightly ruddy complexion and blue eyes.

  Mme Portier unsealed Christian’s letter. I held onto the small valise.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  She read the letter, then gave out a brief laugh.

  “My son recommends that I not stay up too late, smoke less, and quit playing poker . . .”

  “Your son’s right.”

  He turned to me.

  “Would you care for some tea?”

  He pointed to a tray on the coffee table, with two cups and a teapot.

  “No, thank you.”

  “So you’re a friend of her son’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s he doing at the moment?”

  “He’s at school . . . He’s been grounded . . .”

  Mme Portier had shoved the letter into a pocket of her bathrobe. She went to sit on the edge of the couch and crossed her legs. A flap of her robe slid open, revealing her thighs. Her olive skin, between the white terrycloth of the robe and the red velvet of the couch, held my gaze.

  “Poor Christian,” she said, “he must be so bored there all alone . . . What about you, Ludo—did they ever ground you when you were little?”

  Ludo shrugged.

  “I never went to school . . . My mother found some guy to teach me and my brother to read . . . And also a gym instructor.”

  I could hardly tear my eyes away from Mme Portier’s long, olive thighs.

  “What if we paid your son a visit?” he said. “It might buck up his spirits.”

  Had she already brought him to the school, like Weiler, the Marquis, and the Weasel?

  “It’s too late now,” said Mme Portier. “And it’s cold out . . .”

  I thought of Christian. An entire afternoon of “gardening” would be followed by dinner time. He would eat in the back of the empty dining hall, with another twenty or so classmates who had been kept in like him. They would not be allowed to speak to one another. After that would come the s
ilent walk, in single file, to the dormitory.

  Ludo stood up and held out a cigarette case.

  “Smoke?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Tell Christian I’ll come see him on Tuesday,” Mme Portier said to me.

  “I’ll come with you, Claude.”

  It was a veritable ritual. Was Christian, with his natural meticulousness, drawing up a list of all the men his mother had brought to visit him since he’d been a boarder at Valvert?

  She caught me looking and quickly pulled the robe back over her knees.

  “It won’t be much fun for you, spending the weekend without Christian,” she said.

  “I guess not.”

  “You can stay with us if you like,” said Ludo.

  He was resting his elbow on the marble mantelpiece. I was struck by the grace of his posture. It came from the elegant cut of his suit, but also from a natural nonchalance in crossing his arms and legs and holding himself at a slight angle.

  “I don’t know, we could . . . play bridge, the four of us, with my brother . . .”

  “Don’t be silly, Ludo. The young man doesn’t play bridge.”

  “A pity . . .”

  She saw me to the door, and as I was taking my leave, her face was so close to mine, and her perfume so alluring, that I felt like kissing her. Why wasn’t I allowed to kiss her?

  “My friend is very nice, you know . . . Christian is very fond of him. Ludo is going to teach him how to pilot a plane. You can come too, if you like . . . He was a flying ace during the war . . .”

  She smiled at me. In the living room, Ludo had put a record on the phonograph.

  “So long . . . And don’t forget to tell Christian I’ll come see him on Tuesday.”

  Walking down the stairs, I realized I was still holding the small tin valise containing my friend’s dirty laundry.

  Inadvertently, or to have an excuse to go back to Mme Portier’s apartment?

  Night had fallen. Still carrying the valise, I went into a self-service restaurant on the avenue, across from their building. I was the only customer. I selected a yogurt and a slice of pie at the counter and sat down at one of the circular tables near the window.