“They are,” said Aegina. “And more coming.”
“How can they possibly fit them all onto a single aeroplane?” asked Gerald, for whom there would always be only one spelling and pronunciation of the word—that machine forever being the size and kind that he had come to know during the war. In 1942, after he’d lied about his age and enlisted in the Royal Navy, Gerald sailed aboard the battle cruiser turned aircraft carrier HMS Furious, as she ferried RAF Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes between Portsmouth and Malta. Dainty aircraft, pretty as small sailboats and operating in much the same way: featherlight airfoil sections controlled by wire the size of fishing line. They had the tenuous rigidity of large box kites and wobbled like shrubbery as they were pushed about on the flight deck. Gerald thought them marvelous until he began to see them crash. Pretty aeroplanes hurtling from the sky in fiery descents, in every case to explode spectacularly into the sea or on rocky coastlines. Even without antiaircraft bombardment, they suddenly seemed too improbable, the conceit of mad inventors. During the war and after, Gerald sailed all over the Mediterranean, between Alexandria and Gibraltar, in every kind and size of watercraft. Some of these had leaked, a few had foundered, but at no more than a stately cruising speed, and one always had the chance of swimming or paddling away from wreckage in the water. It had been a natural decision that he would never board an aeroplane. Once he’d lost his own vessel in the waters off Mallorca, Gerald had been effectively marooned. In the absence of convenient alternatives, he made one round-trip journey by air between Mallorca and London in 1979 for Aegina’s wedding. It had surely been the freakish unreality attending every aspect of the reissue of his book that had flattered and sufficiently unmoored him into agreeing to fly to London for what was in fact no more than a cocktail party at the British Museum. Had they told him he would have to fly in an aeroplane to see his book in print and pick up his fifteen thousand pounds, he might not have agreed. He would have recognized it as a chimerical Siren lure.
“Perhaps we won’t get on,” he said, hopefully.
Aegina smiled at him. “We’ve got tickets, we’ll get on.” She wrapped her arm around his. “Don’t worry, you’ll live. We’ll go have a coffee and a bocadillo after we check in.”
Two
Lulu had arranged numerous birthday presents for herself. No one knew what she wanted as well as she did. The first was a hot, flaky, sugar-powdered ensaïmada, the spiral-shaped Mallorcan pastry, for breakfast. She rarely ate them, but they looked so lovely and retained an allure (usually dispelled on eating more than one) because of the infrequency of her indulgence. One, every now and then, was satisfactory and sufficient.
Floriana was another birthday present, though this was simply an addition to the normal weekly routine. The strong, silent, Indian-featured Brazilian woman came at four to give Lulu a massage. They were not friends. Floriana said, “Bon dia, señora,” and got on with it. She oiled, kneaded, swept her strong hands over the long, still quite tautly fleshed, lissome body on her table with some kind of dowser’s absorption of the secrets summoned from the nerves and muscles beneath Lulu’s skin, until Lulu felt herself falling and letting go any shards of tension, any disagreeable thoughts.
She had her big present planned for later.
• • •
Luc woke from his siesta to the chatter of voices, the clinking of plates outside the closed shutters. He’d arrived late last night and he’d drunk too much wine at lunch. The room was noticeably cooler, the light softer than the stabbing hard-edged bars that had shimmered beneath the louvers when he’d fallen asleep. A gentle flower-scented breeze played across his face and chest; he heard the wind in the pines outside.
He rose from the bed, naked, walked to the window, and cracked open the shutters. Below, in the wide courtyard beneath the wrack-boughed canopy of pines, the catering crew hired for his mother’s birthday party—young, dark-haired Mallorcan men and women in tight black trousers, black trainers, and white shirts—were laying the tables. The massive, enigmatic Bronwyn, in baggy shorts, a vast T-shirt not concealing the roll of her breasts and belly, was briefing the crew grouped around her.
Luc’s eye rested on one of the crew. She was tall; he could only see her back, a narrow but well-rounded ass in tight black pants, dark tightly waving hair pulled back. A billowy white shirt that told him nothing about what it covered. She turned, and he saw that she had a pronounced high-bridged, hooked nose. He watched her as she listened to Bronwyn with her mouth attentively open, until she walked quickly toward the kitchen and out of sight.
Luc closed the shutters. He was staying in the end room in the two-story addition to the main house, which contained most of the guest rooms. The barracks, his mother called it: a long rectangular building, white, tile-roofed, its windows framed with shutters painted the same sage green as the shutters on the main house. Its looming monolithic shape had softened over the decades as Cape honeysuckle, bougainvillea, palms and geraniums had grown and spread around its base and walls. Other than during the brief period at the beginning of his life when his father had been married to his mother, Luc had never had a permanent room of his own in his mother’s home. Out of season, or when there were few guests, and he’d stayed in a small room in the main house. In his teen years, before the barracks had been built in 1970, he’d fashioned a lair inside a terra-cotta block-and-stucco hut near the back wall of the property, one of several rude original outbuildings used for gardening tools, perhaps at one time for animals. He’d fixed it up himself with a mattress on boards and bricks, a string to hang clothes on, shelves for books, and an electric wire run from the house whose two exposed ends he twisted around the screws in a lightbulb socket to read by. It was the size of a small solitary cell, but Luc felt at home in it. It was as far as possible from the house and the bar and the other guests and, most of all, his mother. He could come and go by the path to the garage without seeing anybody or being seen. He could live a secret life. People forgot about him for hours, sometimes days, at a time. Between his long summers in Mallorca, when Luc was back at school in Paris, living in his father’s high-ceilinged, tall-windowed apartment in the sixth arrondissement, the walls inside his toolshed grew black with mold and had to be repainted white. He arrived every July to his newly painted hovel, holed up with books, with immense plans for sex, and lived through the season at the Rocks in a background corner like a watchful spider. But his little bunkhouse and the other outbuildings had been torn down to make room for the barracks, and since that time Luc had always occupied one or other of the rooms—wherever a guest was not—in the new building.
He saw himself in the mirror on the wall and pulled in his stomach. Still okay for mid-forties. He put on a bathing suit, a T-shirt, grabbed a towel, and padded barefoot down the tiled stairs. He walked around the tables and the caterers, heading across the courtyard toward the gate to the road.
“Hello, Lukey, darling!” a guest called from the bar across the patio.
“Hi,” he said, waving.
He found April across the road, on the narrow ledge of rocks above the sea. She was lying faceup on a towel, topless. She had just come out of the water. Drops of seawater beaded on her pale, oiled skin.
“Hi,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, hi.” She put her hand to her eyes and squinted up at him. “I’m doing great. Are you going in? The water’s, like, incredible.”
“I might,” said Luc. He spread his towel beside her and sat down on it. He didn’t feel like going into the water, getting wet, jolting his still sleep-warm body awake. April had removed her hand from her face and lay with her eyes closed.
“Aren’t you going to get burned out here?” he said.
“Uh-uh. I’m covered with bulletproof sunblock.”
April was in her mid-twenties. She’d been cast in the film she had just wrapped, which Luc had written, for her ethereal, almost translucent milk-white s
kin, strawberry-blond hair (above and below). The sets and locations were monochromatic in tone: an urban wasteland of apartment towers in Paris’s banlieues; the movie was shot almost entirely during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk. The exposed film had been desaturated of most of its color, so the girl (April), stalked by her obsessive former boyfriend, could blend or vanish into concrete wherever she went, and drive him insane. The unreal, liminal effect of her character was heightened by the fact that before shooting, Luc and the director had decided to cut most of April’s dialogue and have the rest dubbed in breathy whispers to avoid the shattering effect of her San Fernando Valley accent on even the most monosyllabic French.
She looked healthier now. Her skin, faintly freckled up close, was alive—light goose bumps rose on her arms; the peach-pink areolae around her nipples had contracted and puckered as the salt water evaporated off her in the light sea breeze. Luc bent forward and placed his mouth over her cool, wet nipple, licking salty drops—
April flinched, pulling away. “Don’t!” she said.
“Why not?”
“Someone might see you.”
“There’s no one here.”
“Well, I’m not comfortable with you doing that in public.”
“Whatever makes you comfortable, then.”
Luc pulled his knees up to his chest. He looked out over the flat blue sea at a gigantic insect-shaped motor yacht steaming inshore to round the easternmost point of the island on its way perhaps from Palma to Pollença, or to drop its anchor off the plush Hotel Formentor.
“So, okay,” said April, her eyes still closed, “I want to talk about your mother.”
“Okay.”
“Well. She’s very beautiful.”
“That’s nice.”
“I mean, like, I can’t believe she’s seventy!” she said, ending forcefully, as if Luc had been deceiving her about his mother’s age for months.
“You think she looks younger.”
April made a sharp exhalation. “Yeah! Like, forty? Maybe? And she has a really—I don’t know—is that an upper-class English accent?”
“That’s what it sounds like now. It’s what used to be called RP, or Received Pronunciation. It was the way some people in England spoke about ninety years ago. You hear it in old newsreels where they talk about the Suez ‘Ca-nell.’”
“Then how come you have sort of an American accent when you speak English?”
“Because I am an American. I told you, my father was American. When I spoke English, I spoke with him.”
April was silent but cogitative in the sun for a moment. “So what happened with your mother and father? How come they split up?”
“Why does anyone break up? They didn’t get on.”
“So, does she, like, have a boyfriend?”
“Not in the way you think of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s had friends. And visitors. Friends who fly down for a few days.”
“You mean they come down to see her and they have sex?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, wow. That’s different. Does she know to use protection?”
“You know what, April sweetheart? I don’t go there.”
“Well, she’s from an older generation, and she’s, you know, out there.”
“I leave those things to her. It’s sweet of you to concern yourself, though. Are you coming in soon?”
“In a while. I’m just, like, it’s so peaceful here.”
“Take your time.”
Luc stood up and walked back across the road.
• • •
There you are,” said Lulu, gliding across the patio between the bar and the main house. Their paths crossed.
“Hello, Mother. Are you having a nice birthday?”
“Yes, I am, darling. Come inside and have tea with me.”
Luc followed his mother into the house.
“I’ll have my tea now, Bronwyn,” Lulu called as they passed the kitchen door. “And will you bring a cup for Luc?”
“Right!” came the reply, in stolid Estuary English.
They went into the living room that looked out over the shaded front patio, over the bougainvillea that obscured the dirt road but revealed the Jerusalem stone–colored rocks and the sea. Lulu arranged herself on the pale blue slipcovered sofa. Luc sprawled in a battered leather club chair opposite her.
“She’s very lovely, your April.”
Ah yes, he thought, here it comes. “She is.”
“And is she any good?”
“What?”
“Is she a good actress?”
“Oh. She’s not bad. You know. She’s just starting out. She did well, as far as it went. She looked right—”
“And are you pleased with this film? Are you hopeful?”
“Well, it’s not going to be Lawrence of Arabia.” Luc’s favorite movie, the benchmark for what films once were, against which he measured the subsequent impoverishment of cinema.
“Why not, darling?”
Luc smiled indulgently. “It’s small, Mother. An indie film. A sort of noirish thriller. But it’s edgy. I think I did a good job with what they gave me. Depending how well it turns out, if it gets some good reviews, has some legs, then my stock will go up; if it doesn’t, or if it disappears, then I’m none the worse off, it’s been a reasonable payday, and I’m on to the next.”
“And what decides how well it turns out?”
“How it all cuts together. What the performances are like. What they—”
“Who are they, darling?”
“The director, the editor, the producer—”
“I thought you were going to produce your next film.”
He laughed good-humoredly. “Well, I’m trying. It’s not that easy. Lawrence of Arabia may be the greatest film ever made, but it couldn’t get made today—”
“You told me yourself—you’ve complained for years, in fact—that the writer has no power. You’re a hireling. But if you produce it, you’re the boss. You get the right people and tell them how you want it done, and you have control of the end result.”
“Yes, but—”
“But you have to come up with your own project, right?”
“Yes, Mother. That’s right. And the money. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve told you. I’m writing stuff, I’m always reading, looking at properties, talking with people—”
“Now you sound like a schoolboy making excuses about your homework. Luc, you’re forty-five. You can’t be a beginner forever. You’re treading water. You’ll be none the worse off if this film drops into a black hole because nobody’s ever heard of you. What happened to that novel you were going to write? It sounded wonderful. Why don’t you write that?”
“I did write it, Mother. You read it. You thought it was rubbish. Evidently, you were right, because no one wanted to publish it.”
“You were going to write a better one. I’m talking about that wonderful novel. Why don’t you write it? Look at the rubbish that sells. You’re a better writer than that. Write a good book.”
“That’s a great idea. I hadn’t thought of that—”
“I can’t stand to see you wallowing in failure.”
“Mother—” Luc took a deep breath. He smiled. “I’ve written four films and made some money. I own a nice apartment in Paris—”
“Your father’s apartment.”
“Never mind, it’s mine now, and I own it. It’s worth a fortune. I work. I have friends. A nice life. Where, exactly, is the failure part of that?”
“You’re throwing yourself away on dross. And look at this one—this girl you’ve brought down. She’s pretty, sweet—extremely simple—but is she the girl for you? I mean, what are you doing, darling?”
“Listen to you: this
one, she says,” Luc said more irritably than he’d wished. “I mean, what about you? When’s the last time you tried having a relationship with someone?”
“Darling, I have many dear friends, as you know. I don’t do relationships, like taking the waters at Baden-Baden.”
“I know. You’re completely self-sufficient, apart from regular servicing. I, on the other hand, try to engage with the human race now and then. I try to have relationships. They’re difficult, but at least I try. I’d still even like to have children someday. I should think you’d be pleased that I bring someone down, but you’re not. Instead you’re—I mean, what are you talking about, Mother?”
Lulu looked at him steadily. “I’m talking about the joke you once told me, about the position of the writer in the film industry.”
“Which of the many jokes was that?”
“The one about the starlet who’s so stupid that she sleeps with the writer.”
“Ah.” Luc looked at his watch—his father’s old stainless steel Rolex—as if reminded of an appointment. He stood up. “Well, I’m going to have a shower before I dress.”
Bronwyn came in with a tray.
“I’ve got your tea,” she said to Luc. “Do you want to take it with you?”
“No, thanks, Bronwyn.” He left the room.
Outside, Luc started toward the barracks, then changed his mind, swerved left, and walked across the patio.
“Hallo!” said the cheerful blonde behind the bar. Lulu’s staff were always British girls, usually very young and fantastically thrilled to spend a season in Mallorca for very little pay. Luc hadn’t met this one. She was wearing a loose sarong.
“Hi. A San Miguel, please. I’ll just have it in the bottle.”
“Sure. You’re Luc, aren’t you, Lulu’s son?”
“Yes. And you are?”
“Sally! Hi!” She stretched her hand across the bar and Luc shook it.
Rocks, The Page 3