Now here he was again after twelve years, breaking through the ice, drowning. At the Pile, Grant lived inside Katznelson’s abandoned things. The Chinese robe was Katznelson’s; he slept on Katznelson’s monogrammed sheets in the high draped bed, drank Katznelson’s liquor, bathed with his soap, shaved with his silver shaving things. If his attitude had been different, if his posture with those things had seemed careless or flippant, it might have seemed a desecration to use them in Varian’s naked presence; instead, Grant’s unerring tenderness toward those objects seemed a reminder, a reproach.
One afternoon, as they lay in bed with the remnants of the day’s persimmons, a knock came at the door. The sound rang through the hexagonal atrium as if through the insides of a drum, and Grant leapt from the bed and pulled Katznelson’s robe around him.
“Who could it be?” Varian said.
“No idea. No one comes here.”
“Go answer. If anyone asks, I’m not here.”
Grant smiled and ran downstairs, and Varian could hear him in low conversation with someone at the door. He couldn’t make out the words, but he heard the clink of coins exchanged. A moment later Grant was back, a cable in his hand.
“It’s from Gregor,” he said.
Of course. “Open it.”
Grant did. He sat at the foot of the high bed and ran his eyes over the thin blue paper, his breath quickening. “Tobias is alive,” he said. “He wrote his father from Lyon, in code. Then another letter from Valence, no information other than that he was there.” Grant read for another moment in silence. “Finally, a cable from Avignon. Again no information. That was the last. All this mail waiting for Gregor when he got home.”
“When was the last communication?”
“Some weeks ago.”
“At least we know he’s alive. And that he’s heading south.”
“Yes,” Grant said. His eyes fell to the cable again, and when he looked up, his expression had grown more complicated, pain-laced. “Gregor’s rather unhappy back in New York,” he said. “He spent the extra two bits to tell me that.” He looked away, toward the half-open casement window, and Varian pulled himself from the bed. He went into the bathroom, where a single faucet dispensed auburn water into the basin. A mirror framed in gilded wood hung above the sink; it returned the image of a haggard man, a man whose life hung in the balance.
“You’ve got to go up to Avignon first thing tomorrow morning,” Varian called to Grant. “If the boy’s still there, he might not be too hard to find. And if he’s already gone, there may be a trail to follow. I know Mehring’s got some friends in the area, I’ll tell him to write them at once.”
Grant came up behind him and pressed the warm length of his body along Varian’s. “Go to Avignon in the morning?” he said. “Tout seul?”
“I can’t leave town again just now, Grant.”
“All right.” The water ticked in the bowl; from outside, a bird’s vespers.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Varian said. “A day or two away.”
“Right,” Grant said, his calm unbroken. Varian experienced an inward roil of shame: Couldn’t he have protested, didn’t he object? In Grant’s hand still was the cable from Katznelson, even as he leaned against Varian, gently at first, and then less so, even as he insisted himself against Varian’s body, pressing him against the cold white marble of the sink. A voice in Varian’s mind called for Grant to stop, but instead he found himself returning Grant’s insistence, laughing almost, asking and receiving, wanting, as always, more.
* * *
________
Two hours later—they had managed, somehow, to bathe and dress, and had caught the inbound tram—they arrived in town, at the head of the Canebière, to see Miriam and Mary Jayne for dinner. They were to meet at Basso’s, a swank bouillabaisserie on the Vieux Port, where a Nigerian singer named Micheline Osondu had been defying the official ban on jazz. They walked the blocks from the tram in silence, through the streetlit yellow fog of the Marseille night. A uniformed doorman ushered them in, and there amid the white-draped tables were the women, both of them in gossamer, with glittering rhinestones in their hair. At Miriam’s side was an American officer nicknamed Beaver, a former Foreign Legionnaire, tall and closely bearded, who chose to ignore Miriam’s engagement to her absent Yugoslavian; and next to Mary Jayne, a stern, dark-eyed young man named Raymond Couraud, who’d been coming around the office with fancy gifts that could only have been stolen. Last week he’d given Mary Jayne a gold serpentine necklace hung with a pink diamond; this week, a fur capelet from Mainbocher. The boy—barely out of his teens, Varian guessed—bragged about being a Legionnaire too, though the rumor was that he was faking it, that he’d stolen a dead Legionnaire’s papers. Mary Jayne had affectionately nicknamed him Killer, for his butchery of the English language. Varian suspected that what she felt for him was not unlike what she’d felt for her airplane, that impractical, unpredictable, exciting, and possibly dangerous thing she knew how to control, except when she didn’t.
The group had installed itself at a stageside table and ordered tall glasses of beer. Micheline Osondu, wrapped from breasts to ankles in turquoise Ankara fabric, leaned toward the microphone and sang “Blue Moon,” while a narrow-shouldered pianist chased tender disharmonies along the keyboard and a bassist plucked honey from his upright. Mary Jayne whispered orders to a sleek, pomaded waiter. Dining with Mary Jayne, Varian knew, meant never having to look at a menu; what came would invariably be excellent and plentiful, and at the end of the evening you did not insult Mary Jayne by offering to pay.
When Mademoiselle Osondu finished her set, Beaver and Killer excused themselves to enjoy, as they said, something stronger than lager. They invited Varian and Grant to join them, but Varian could guess their drugs of choice easily enough, and had left them behind in his Harvard days: stimulants gave him palpitations, marijuana left him wordless, and heroin could hardly be savored under the circumstances. Grant and Miriam got up to fawn over Mademoiselle Osondu, and Varian found himself alone at the table with Mary Jayne.
“I’m glad I’ve got a moment to speak to you,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. “I have a rather serious subject to introduce.”
“What can it be?”
“We’ve found a house, Miriam and I. An honest-to-goodness manor house, or villa, I suppose.”
“A house?” Varian said, and smiled. “And what will you do with a house? Throw a party in it?”
“Live there, for the time being,” Mary Jayne said. “And not just me. You too, Varian. I mean to get you out of that hotel.”
“You intend this house for me?”
“Yes, and for poor Lev Zilberman, boxed up all day with Mehring. And a few others, friends of mine. The place has eight bedrooms, and a splendid salon overlooking the Val d’Huveaune. It’s at La Pomme, not far from Katznelson’s.”
At that moment Grant and Miriam returned from paying their homage, and Grant must have caught the look on Varian’s face.
“What’s happened?” he said.
“Mary Jayne’s found a house,” Varian said. “At La Pomme.”
“Yes, and it’s thanks to you, Grant. You remember the little park you mentioned, the one with the scenic path along the ridge? Miriam and I took the tram out to have a pique-nique with Beaver and Killer. And just as we got off the tram, we came across a handwritten ‘for rent’ sign pinned to a tree at the head of a drive. Down the lane we went, and there was the house, a three-story villa on a hill. The landlord was there, working in the garden, so he gave us a tour. That garden! Tiered, like in a storybook. With a fountain. And the house is splendid, perfect for our purposes. It comes with a cross housekeeper named Madame Nouguet. Apparently she’s not a bad cook.”
So Grant had sent Mary Jayne that way; he must have known what might transpire. Of course Varian could not live in La Pomme,
half an hour from the office and just down the road from Grant; of course he couldn’t live anywhere with half a dozen roommates. But then Grant’s knee met his own beneath the table, firmly and with meaning, and the arguments died on his tongue.
“I know the place,” Grant said now, his expression inscrutable. “You mean Air Bel, off the avenue Jean Lombard. It’s quite splendid, you’re right.”
“The ERC can’t afford a splendid country house,” Varian said.
“He wants only fifteen hundred a month!” Miriam crowed.
Less than Varian paid for his hotel room. He glanced toward the door of the restaurant, where Beaver and Killer were returning from their amusements.
Grant followed his glance. “Maybe we’d better have a look ourselves.”
“Yes,” said Mary Jayne. “Tomorrow morning!”
“I’m off to Avignon in the morning,” Grant said.
“Avignon? The first train that way doesn’t leave till noon, as I happen to know. We’ll meet you at ten.”
“What are you all so excited about?” Beaver asked, taking his seat again beside Miriam and threading an arm around her shoulders.
“Oh, that lovely house we saw! The one with the swimming pool.”
“It’s not exactly a swimming pool,” Mary Jayne said. “It’s an irrigation pond.”
“Of course it is!” Miriam insisted. “When we live there, we’ll swim every day. Oh, wait until you see the place, Varian.”
A house down the street from Grant, in La Pomme: he might as well hang himself now. And yet if Grant found Tobias in Avignon, they would need a place to hide him, a place that wasn’t the Pile. And it was true that Zilberman must be moved out of the Splendide; he couldn’t continue forever in that room with Mehring. And then there were the others who had just arrived in town, a new crop of artists from his list: the Russian writer Victor Serge and his son, and André Breton and his wife and daughter. A house in the country with Breton! He imagined writing about it to Eileen, imagined her reading about it in the drafty kitchen of their apartment on Irving Place, the thin blue paper shivering in her hand.
“All right,” he said, finally. “We’ll see it in the morning. And then I’ll decide.” He watched as a flush of pleasure overtook Mary Jayne’s features; she looked at Miriam and smiled. A subtler look had come over Grant’s—anticipation, perhaps, laced with something darker, something like capitulation, like surrender.
“Now we are too serious,” Killer said, adjusting his own serious-looking glasses. “We must dance. The jazz is marvelous!”
And it was. Black-market connections—where weren’t they, here in Marseille?—must have turned the ear of the police aside, allowing what might otherwise have sounded like a flagrant celebration to proceed without interruption. Killer grabbed Miriam’s hands, pulling her to the dance floor; she laughed at his unexpected attention, and Mary Jayne accepted Varian’s hand, her expression cut with jealousy as she watched Miriam throw back her head and laugh at something Killer had said. Wanting to distract her, Varian leaned toward her ear and told her where he’d first heard her name: at the Parrishes’ on Morgan Bay, some twelve years earlier.
Mary Jayne’s ear flushed pink. “The Parrishes!” she said. “What must they have said about me? I was besotted with Oswald then, that shallow boy with the red Citroën.” They turned as Mademoiselle Osondu’s voice turned; the bass fiddle slipped in and out of her agile alto. “Our families used to ski together at Chamonix. But Oswald and his sister Vivian considered me beneath their notice. East Coasters are terrific snobs, you know—no offense to you, Varian. I was from Chicago and I hadn’t gone to college, and you can imagine what that meant to Oswald and Vivian.”
“But they admired you,” Varian said, quietly, under the beat of the jazz. “Oswald said—I’m not exaggerating—he said you were the most daring woman he knew.”
She gave a wry laugh and edged closer. “He must have meant it as an insult.”
“Not at all.”
“You haven’t any idea what happened to him, do you?”
“I haven’t seen a single Parrish in years. But Oswald was impressed by that plane of yours. Not just by the plane—by the fact that you flew it yourself. And not just that. By your gumption, as he called it.”
“Well, I was a Masters School girl,” Mary Jayne said, lifting her chin to wink at Varian. “Our motto was ‘Do it with thy might!’ I took it to heart. Sometimes too earnestly, you’d probably think.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Varian said. “You seem to have an innate sense of irony. I can’t imagine you’d have lost it at the Masters School.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I intend it to be,” Varian said. And at that moment Killer stepped in, having been stripped of Miriam by his jealous friend; and Varian retreated to the table, where Grant now sat alone with a tall flute of beer and the remnants of three dozen oysters. Varian sat down beside him and drained his own flute of beer; he was drunk enough by now to slide his ankle along Grant’s, under the table.
“You sent them to that house,” Varian said.
Grant shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “But I can’t say I’m displeased.”
“I’m not going to be your neighbor at La Pomme. You know I can’t, Skiff.”
“I don’t know what I know,” Grant said, putting his fingers to his eyes for a long moment. “I’m going to go up to Avignon tomorrow afternoon to look for Tobias. Maybe you’ll be my neighbor when I get back, maybe you won’t. In any case, Varian, we’ve got to talk. We’d better talk. Or maybe just shoot ourselves. I don’t know.”
“You’ve drunk too much, darling.”
“I thought I told you not to call me that,” Grant said, smiling, and inclined away from Varian, just slightly, as their friends returned to the table.
* * *
________
The house was exactly as Mary Jayne had billed it. They all met there the next morning, Grant with his suitcase in hand, Varian with a terrible hangover, Mary Jayne and Miriam in crisp fall tweeds, Killer having acquired a black eye. At the head of the long driveway stood a pair of flaking stone pillars, one of them inset with a brass sign that read VILLA AIR BEL. On the other, a hand-painted wooden sign: FOR RENT. INQUIRE WITHIN.
They climbed the drive until they cleared a little ridge; below lay the beginning of the valley’s slope. The air in the Val d’Huveaune was a gold-blue haze, sun filtering through shattered clouds to strike the scrublands below. It smelled of sage and of lavender, of the chamomile that crowded the verge of the drive. Overhead, plane trees made an arch of broken shade. Half-hidden by a gentle rise was the villa itself, of buff-colored stucco; beneath their feet the dirt road changed to close-set stones, and they passed the low carriage house that served as the caretaker’s home. The inner gate was unlocked, and Mary Jayne pushed it open with a proprietary gesture. They crossed the stone driveway and stood looking down into the garden, where an old man in a feather-decked homburg dug with his spade. A four-lobed fountain splashed at the center of the garden, and overgrown paths snaked through the tall grass in all directions.
“Monsieur Thumin!” Mary Jayne called. “Here are the gentlemen.”
The old man looked up, wiped his brow with a smudged handkerchief, and rested a foot on the shovel. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” he called in French.
They descended the stone stairs to the garden. Monsieur Thumin brushed dust from his lapels and drew himself up straight. He was twiglike, small, his hands crabbed with arthritis; in his gaze, a mild confusion at odds with attention and engagement.
“Oh, gentlemen, I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said. “Mademoiselle Gold thought you would like the house.”
“Will you show it to us?” Varian asked, and Monsieur Thumin did. First the garden, its fountain big enough to wade in, an
d a stone-rimmed irrigation reservoir wide and deep as a swimming pool. There were wild flower beds, tangles of fruiting vines, a kitchen plot dense with late squashes and tomatoes; beside the house was a glass-walled conservatory crowded with miniature palms and lemon trees.
The house itself stood three stories tall, its back windows staring into the valley. They followed Thumin through a terra-cotta-floored kitchen that might have been the twin of the one at the Medieval Pile, then into a dining room with a massive walnut table, each of its twelve chairs densely carved with leaflike curlicues and slit-eyed elves. A trompe l’oeil forest grew on the surrounding walls. Beyond was a salon with satin-covered sofas; then a library bristling with books in French and English and Latin. On a wall plaque above the mantel, a pair of hawkless hawk wings lifted in mid-beat, and on the marble shelf beneath, a tiny glass dome housed a perfectly preserved mole, small as a pear, seeming to sniff the air with its crushed flower of a nose. A shelf opposite held a mounted branch on which five stuffed finches perched, one of them in the act of catching an iridescent beetle. Surrealists, Varian thought, would appreciate the place.
They toured the bedrooms upstairs, each with its carved bed and dresser, its washstand, its massive wardrobe. The green-gold view poured in from every window. An upstairs bathroom held a bathtub large enough for two; the tub rested on the milk-white backs of tiny swans. The third story housed more bedrooms, each filled with a flood of Mediterranean light. In the last of these, incongruously, stood a long narrow harpsichord, abandoned to dust and arachnids.
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