by William Boyd
Preston rents a small studio apartment with a bathroom and kitchenette. It is a neat, pastel-coloured and efficient module. On the wall are a series of prints of exotic birds: a toucan, a bataleur eagle, something called a blue shrike. As I stand there looking round I think of my own temporary home, my thin room in Madame d’Amico’s ancient, dim apartment, and the inefficient and bathless bathroom I have to share with her other lodgers, and a sudden hot envy rinses through me. I half hear Preston enumerating various financial consequences of his tenancy: how much this studio costs a month; the outrageous supplement he had to pay even to rent it in the first place; and how he had been obliged to cash in his return fare to the States (first class) in order to meet it. He says he has called his father for more money.
We ride up to the roof, six storeys above the Promenade. To my vague alarm there is a small swimming-pool up here and a large glassed-in cabana – furnished with a bamboo bar and some rattan seats – labelled ‘Club Les Anges’ in neon copperplate. A barman in a short cerise jacket runs this place, a portly, pale-faced fellow with a poor moustache whose name is Serge. Although Preston jokes patronizingly with him it is immediately quite clear to me both that Serge loathes Preston and that Preston is completely unaware of this powerful animus directed against him.
I order a large gin and tonic from Serge and for a shrill palpitating minute I loathe Preston too. I know there are many better examples on offer, of course, but for the time being this shiny building and its accoutrements will do nicely as an approximation of The Good Life for me. And as I sip my sour drink a sour sense of the world’s huge unfairness crowds ruthlessly in. Why should this guileless, big American, barely older than me, with his two thousand Louisiana cigarettes, and his cashable first-class air tickets, have all this. . . while I live in a narrow frowsty room in an old woman’s decrepit apartment? My straightened circumstances are caused by a seemingly interminable postal strike in Britain that means money cannot be transferred to my Nice account and I have to husband my financial resources like a neurotic peasant conscious of a hard winter lowering ahead. Where is my money, I want to know, my exotic bird prints, my club, my pool? How long will I have to wait before these artefacts become the commonplace of my life? . . . I allow this unpleasant voice to whine and whinge on in my head as we stand on the terrace and admire the view of the long bay. One habit I have already learnt, even at my age, is not to resist these fervent grudges – give them a loose rein, let them run themselves out, it is always better in the longer run.
In fact I am drawn to Preston, and want him to be my friend. He is tall and powerfully built – the word ‘rangy’ comes to mind – affable and not particularly intelligent. To my eyes his clothes are so parodically American as to be be beyond caricature: pale-blue baggy shirts with button-down collars, old khaki trousers short enough to reveal his white-socked ankles and big brown loafers. He has fair, short hair and even, unexceptionable features. He has a gold watch, a Zippo lighter and an ugly ring with a red stone set in it. He told me once, in all candour, in all modesty, that he ‘played tennis to Davis Cup standard’.
I always wondered what he was doing in Nice, studying at the Centre. At first I thought he might be a draftee avoiding the war in Vietnam but I now suspect – based on some hints he has dropped – that he has been sent off to France as an obscure punishment of some sort. His family don’t want him at home: he has done something wrong and these months in Nice are his penance.
But hardly an onerous one, that’s for sure: he has no interest in his classes – those he can be bothered to take – nor in the language and culture of France. He simply has to endure this exile and he will be allowed home where, I imagine, he will resume his soft life of casual privilege and unreflecting ease once more. He talks a good deal about his eventual return to the States where he plans to impose his own particular punishment, or extract his own special reward. He says he will force his father to buy him an Aston Martin. His father will have no say in the matter, he remarks with untypical vehemence and determination. He will have his Aston Martin, and it is the bright promise of this glossy English car that really seems to sustain him through these dog days on the Mediterranean littoral.
* * *
Soon I find I am a regular visitor at the Résidence Les Anges, where I go most afternoons after my classes are over. Preston and I sit in the club, or by the pool if it is sunny, and drink. We consume substantial amounts (it all goes on his tab) and consequently I am usually fairly drunk by sunset. Our conversation ranges far and wide but at some point in every discussion Preston reiterates his desire to meet French girls. If I do indeed know some French girls, he says, why don’t I ask them to the club? I reply that I am working on it, and coolly change the subject.
Steadily, over the days, I learn more about my American friend. He is an only child. His father (who has not responded to his requests for money) is a millionaire – real estate. His mother divorced him recently to marry another, richer, millionaire. Between his two sets of millionaire parents Preston has a choice of eight homes to visit in and around the USA: in Miami, New York, Palm Springs and a ranch in Montana. Preston dropped out of college after two semesters and does not work.
‘Why should I?’ he argues reasonably. ‘They’ve got more than enough money for me too. Why should I bust my ass working trying to earn more?’
‘But isn’t it . . . What do you do all day?’
‘All kinds of shit . . . But mostly I like to play tennis a lot. And I like to fuck, of course.’
‘So why did you come to Nice?’
He grins. ‘I was a bad boy.’ He slaps his wrist and laughs. ‘Naughty, naughty Preston.’ He won’t tell me what he did.
It is spring in Nice. Each day we start to enjoy a little more sunshine and whenever it appears within ten minutes there is a particular girl, lying on the plage publique in front of the Centre, sunbathing. Often I stand and watch her spread out there, still, supine, on the cool pebbles – the only sunbather along the entire bay. It turns out she is well known, that this is a phenomenon that occurs every year. By early summer her tan is solidly established and she is very brown indeed. By August she is virtually black, with that kind of dense, matt tan, the life burned out of the skin, her pores brimming with melanin. Her ambition each year, they say, is to be the brownest girl on the Côte d’Azur . . .
I watch her lying there, immobile beneath the iridescent rain of ultraviolet. It is definitely not warm – even in my jacket and scarf I shiver slightly in the fresh breeze. How can she be bothered? I wonder, but at the same time I have to admit there is something admirable in such single-mindedness, such ludicrous dedication.
Eventually I take my first girl to the club to meet Preston. Her name is Ingrid, she is in my class, a Norwegian, but with dark auburn hair. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly, uncomplicated soul. She speaks perfect English and German.
‘Are you French?’ Preston asks, almost immediately.
Ingrid is very amused by this. ‘I’m Norwegian,’ she explains. ‘Is it important?’
I apologize to Preston when Ingrid goes off to change into her swimming costume, but he waves it away, not to worry, he says, she’s cute. Ingrid returns and we sit in the sun and order the first of our many drinks. Ingrid, after some prompting, smokes one of Preston’s Picayune cigarettes. The small flaw that emerges to mar our pleasant afternoon is that, the more Ingrid drinks, so does her conversation become dominated by references to a French boy she is seeing called Jean-Jacques. Preston hides his disappointment; he is the acme of good manners.
Later, we play poker using cheese biscuits as chips. Ingrid sits opposite me in her multicoloured swimsuit. She is plumper than I had imagined, and I decide that if I had to sum her up in one word it would be ‘homely’. Except for one detail: she has very hairy armpits. On one occasion she sits back in her chair, studying her cards for a full minute, her free hand idly scratching a bite on the back of her neck. Both Preston’s and my eyes are draw
n to the thick divot of auburn hair that is revealed by this gesture: we stare at it, fascinated, as Ingrid deliberates whether to call or raise. (After she has gone Preston confesses that he found her unshavenness quite erotic. I am not so sure.)
That evening we sit on in the club long into the night, as usual the place’s sole customers, with Serge unsmilingly replenishing our drinks as Preston calls for them. Ingrid’s presence, the unwitting erotic charge that she has detonated in our normally tranquil, bibulous afternoons; seems to have unsettled and troubled Preston somewhat and without any serious prompting on my part he tells me why he has come to Nice. He informs me that the man his mother remarried was a widower, an older man, with four children already in their twenties. When Preston dropped out of college he went to stay with his mother and new stepfather.
He exhales, he eats several olives, his face goes serious and solemn for a moment.
‘This man, Michael, had three daughters – and a son, who was already married – and, man, you should have seen those girls.’ He grins, a stupid, gormless grin. ‘I was eighteen years old and I got three beautiful girls sleeping down the corridor from me. What am I supposed to do?’
The answer, unvoiced, seemed to slip into the club like a draught of air. I felt my spine tauten.
‘You mean –?’
‘Yeah, sure. All three of them. Eventually.’
I don’t want to speak, so I think through this. I imagine a big silent house, night, long dark corridors, closed doors. Three bored blonde tanned stepsisters. Suddenly there’s a tall young man in the house, a virtual stranger, who plays tennis to Davis Cup standard.
‘What went wrong?’ I manage.
‘Oldest one, Janie, got pregnant, didn’t she? Last year.’
‘Abortion?’
‘Are you kidding? She just married her fiancé real fast.’
‘You mean she was engaged when –’
‘He doesn’t know a thing. But she told my mother.’
‘The . . . the child was –’
‘Haven’t seen him yet.’ He turns and calls for Serge. ‘No one knows, no one suspects . . .’ He grins again. ‘Until the kid starts smoking Picayunes.’ He reflects on his life a moment, and turns his big mild face to me. ‘That’s why I’m here. Keeping my head down. Not exactly flavour of the month back home.’
The next girl I take to the club is also a Scandinavian – we have eight in our class – but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blonde hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unselfconscious about her disability.
‘Hi,’ Preston says, ‘are you French?’
Danni hides her incredulity. ‘Mais, oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.’ Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake, and makes light of his disappointment.
Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.) Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes, as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.
‘Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.’
This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do as there is no one else in the club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston, ‘Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.’
‘Fuck you, Serge,’ he says amiably and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is now overt, almost a challenge.
After Danni has left Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the club now stands at over $400 and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for 500 francs.
I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses ofluxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks . . .
Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions – I feel vaguely pimp-like, oddly smirched – that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.
Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like ninety per cent of students, she has chosen American.
I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently enquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?
The next morning, on my way down the rue de France to the Centre I see Preston standing outside a pharmacy reading the Herald Tribune. I call his name and cross the road to tell him the excellent news about Annique.
‘You won’t believe this,’ I say, ‘but I finally got a real French girl.’
Preston’s face looks odd: half a smile, half a morose grimace of disappointment.
‘That’s great,’ he says, dully, ‘wonderful.’
A tall, slim girl steps out of the pharmacy and hands him a plastic bag.
‘This is Lois,’ he says. We shake hands.
I know who Lois is, Preston has often spoken of her: my damn-near fiancée, he calls her. It transpires that Lois has flown over, spontaneously and unannounced, to visit him.
‘And, boy, are my Mom and Dad mad as hell,’ she laughs.
Lois is a pretty girl, with a round, innocent face quite free of make-up. She is tall, even in her sneakers she is as tall as me, with a head of incredibly thick, dense brown hair which, for some reason, I associate particularly with American girls. I feel sure also, though as yet I have no evidence, that she is a very clean person – physically clean, I mean to say – someone who showers and washes regularly, redolent of soap and the lingering farinaceous odour of talcum powder.
I stroll back with them to the Résidence. Lois’s arrival has temporarily solved Preston’s money problems: they have cashed in her return ticket and paid off the bar bill and the next quarter’s rent which had come due. Preston feels rich enough to buy back his watch from me.
Annique looks less mature and daunting in her swimsuit, I’m pleased to say, though I was disappointed that she favoured a demure apple-green one-piece. The pool’s heater has been ‘fixed’ and for the first time we all swim in the small azure rectangle – Preston and Lois, Annique and me. It is both strange and exciting for me to see Annique so comparatively unclothed and even stranger to lie side by side, thigh by thigh, inches apart, sunbathing.
Lois obviously assumes Annique and I are a couple – a quite natural a
ssumption under the circumstances, I suppose – she would never imagine I had brought her for Preston. I keep catching him gazing at Annique, and a mood of frustration and intense sadness seems to emanate from him – a mood of which only I am aware. And in turn a peculiar exhilaration builds inside me, not just because of Lois’s innocent assumption about my relation to Annique, but also because I know now that I have succeeded. I have brought Preston the perfect French girl: Annique, by his standards, represents the paradigm, the Platonic ideal for this American male. Here she is, unclothed, lying by his pool, in his club, drinking his drinks, but he can do nothing – and what makes my own excitement grow is the realization that for the first time in our friendship – perhaps for the first time in his life – Preston envies another person. Me.
As this knowledge dawns so too does my impossible love for Annique. Impossible, because nothing will ever happen. I know that – but Preston doesn’t – and somehow the ghostly love affair, our love affair, between Annique and me, that will exist in Preston’s mind, in his hot and tormented imagination, embellished and elaborated by his disappointment and lost opportunity, will be more than enough for me, more than I could have ever hoped for.
Now that Lois has arrived I stay away from the Résidence Les Anges. It won’t be the same again and, despite my secret delight, I don’t want to taunt Preston with the spectre of Annique. But I find that without the spur of his envy the tender fantasy inevitably dims; because in order for my dream life, my dream love, to flourish I need to share it with Preston. I decide to pay a visit. Preston opens the door of his studio.
‘Hi, stranger,’ he says, with some enthusiasm. ‘Am I glad to see you.’ He seems sincere. I follow him into the apartment. The small room is untidy, the bed unmade, the floor strewn with female clothes. I hear the noise of the shower from the bathroom: Lois may be a clean person but it is clear she is also something of a slut.
‘How are things with Annique?’ he asks, almost at once, as casually as he can manage. He has to ask, I know it.