Going Topless

by Megan McAndrew

  Lucy turns majestically around. One eyebrow rises—a neat trick, I’ve always found. “I beg your pardon?”

  All of a sudden I feel like a cretin. But then, Lucy has always made me feel like a cretin, so I have to wonder why I’m even surprised.

  CHAPTER three

  Jane heads up to the third floor, which, until I upset the apple cart, was where the mateless dwelled. There’s no bathroom up there and the mattresses are lumpy. The walls are thinner, too, and a mere curtain separates the connecting rooms that Jane and I usually occupy. I feel a twinge of regret now as I realize that, by my defection downstairs, I am relinquishing the pleasure of late-night chats with her. Not that I’m planning to budge.

  I’ve always been close to Jane, closer in a way than I am to Isabelle, if for no other reason than that we both know what it’s like to live in the shadow of a beautiful sister. She and Lucy moved in with us when I was six, after Ross married their mother, Daphne. Our own mother, Vera, had died of cancer two years earlier. We’d lived in Paris until then, where she had a ballet studio on the Rue Vavin. After her death, Ross couldn’t bear the memories, so he moved us back to the States. Two years later he met Daphne at an art auction in London.

  I didn’t mind Daphne. I was too young when Vera died to have anything but the haziest memories of her, but Isabelle, who was fourteen, was bereft. In New York she papered her walls with stills from Vera’s days as a ballerina, losing no opportunity to reminisce about her, especially when Daphne was in the room. I used to think she got away with it because she was Ross’s favorite, but in fact, I’m not sure he even cared. Ross was never in love with Daphne: He’d married her in a moment of weakness, still reeling from the loss of Vera. I think that Lucy sensed this and that this is why she set out to seduce him, as if she could somehow get him to love her mother by proxy.

  In her zeal, though, she tried to unseat Isabelle. Jane and I watched bemusedly from the sidelines as the two of them went at each other, knowing all the while that Lucy was doomed to failure, for my sister has something that Lucy never will: a combination of wacky charm and restive pheromones that appear to make her irresistible. Why will be a matter for the history books: Like Josephine with her rotten teeth, Isabelle is more than the sum of her parts. She’s not that smart—she barely got into Bennington, and then only by sleeping with her high school drama teacher—nor clever; and while she unquestionably has a spectacular pair of knockers, her nose is crooked and her butt is too big. But none of these defects have mattered a bit to the droves of men who have grown besotted with her, our father included. Poor Lucy, it must have driven her crazy: There she was, blondly perfect, top of her class at Brearley, admitted early to both Yale and Harvard and, in due course, winner of the Rome Prize, and who got the attention? Lazy, slatternly Isabelle, who got thrown out of Saint Anne’s for smoking dope.

  And who everyone said was the spitting image of our mother.

  Daphne never had a chance. From the beginning, Ross seemed more in awe of her than anything else. My father didn’t come from money—I’m not sure he even finished high school—and all his life he was dazzled by the world of art and culture that Daphne represented. Not only was she a Sotheby’s expert on French Impressionism, she was (extremely remotely) related to Vita Sackville-West. But Ross was a commodities trader at heart. Daphne couldn’t handle his cowboy side, and in the end she bored him.

  The sad thing is, she never stopped loving him. I’m afraid Ross had that effect on women: They disconnected common sense in his presence. So they hobbled along for five years—a happy time for Jane and me, who were under the care of a nice Irish housekeeper called Bridie, but a Calvary for Lucy, who took it all personally. When Ross and Daphne finally split up, she was devastated, all the more so as the rest of us barely noticed. It wasn’t until a good two years later that he met Odette, on an airplane, but the way Lucy carried on, you’d think she had lured him straight out of Daphne’s bed.

  And so, here we are—or most of us, at least. I follow Jane up under the pretext of helping with her bags but really to apologize for deserting her and gloat a bit about my incursion into the blessed regions below—which, naturally, she picks right up on.

  “Making mischief, little sister?”

  Through the wall we hear Lucy snapping at Richard to open the window. Thumping sounds follow.

  “There goes their sex life for the next month,” I remark. It’s a long-standing joke that no one but a crass exhibitionist would attempt sexual intercourse on the third floor, Isabelle being the only one to have ever tried.

  “Whereas yours, I gather, will be flourishing,” Jane says with amusement.

  “So, what do you think of him?” I say. I don’t really care about anyone else’s opinion but Jane has a sixth sense, which probably explains why she became an artist, and an awfully successful one too. She paints gorgeous, voluptuous pictures of naked ladies that people actually buy—I own one myself—and shows at one of the top galleries in London.

  “Nice. Very sportif.”

  I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, and watch her unpack. Jane doesn’t look at all like her sister. While Lucy is all angles, Jane is big and soft and messy, her hair perpetually escaping from the various ineffectual clips with which she tries to hold it back. I was the first to figure out that she was gay. Jane isn’t the kind of person who comes out to people, but the clues were obvious if you were paying attention, which no one else was. Daphne thought all those girls with crew cuts and hairy legs that Jane hung out with in college were female athletes, even though Jane has never shown the slightest interest in sports, and both Lucy and Isabelle were too self-involved to see anything beyond the tips of their noses. As for Ross, I think the concept was just too foreign.

  “He’s obviously boosted your standing with Odette,” Jane adds, and I feel a surge of love for her, because she at least is not going to make a big deal about my finally landing a man. Jane never makes a big deal out of anything—not even Odette, who is single-handedly responsible for one of the more tragicomical crises in our family history, the one that resulted in Jane’s girlfriend Marge refusing to ever set foot in Borgolano again. On her first and only visit, Marge did not take well to being relegated to the third floor while all the straight couples got the good rooms downstairs. Her dark mutterings about the heterocracy, however, were completely lost on Odette, who finally cooked her goose by exclaiming at the dinner table, in response to Marge’s accusation that she didn’t consider gay people to be normal, “Mais enfin, you are not normal! Normal is a man and a woman!” Jane has come alone ever since, compromising by only staying for ten days.

  Next door, a wrenching sound followed by a furious “You bloody idiot!” suggests that Richard has succeeded in opening the window, and breaking it. Jane and I glance at each other.

  “What’s going on with Electra?” I ask in an offhand way. Last summer, the Delicate Topic was the fact that Electra, then age three, hadn’t started speaking yet. Lucy put her in some kind of special therapy but, based on the scene in the kitchen, it doesn’t seem to be working too well. You have to wonder if it was such a great idea to saddle the child with a pretentious ancient Greek name, especially considering this latest development.

  “What do you mean?” Jane says.

  “I’ve never seen a four-year-old pitch a fit like that.”

  Jane, who is piling up T-shirts in the cupboard, shakes her head with irritation. “She was hungry. You’d be raving, too, if you were starved.”

  We are, I see, going to tiptoe around the fact that Electra looks like a blimp. Jane doesn’t have many hot buttons but this is a big one, eating disorders being something of a spécialité de la maison. The fact is, you can’t look like Daphne or Lucy without interfering with your bodily functions, and no one knows this better than Jane, who’s always struggled with her weight. I am saved from the temptation of further commentary, though—on, for instance, the exquisite irony of Lucy’s having a fat daughter—by the app
earance of Lucy herself, who can’t possibly have heard us since we were whispering and, I can tell from the look in her eyes, is not about to forget my little coup d’état. I’m going to have to watch my back.

  “I don’t know about you,” she announces, “but I can’t believe that less than a year after Dad’s death, Odette is disporting herself with some revolting little Frenchman.”

  Jane looks at her quizzically. “Really, Lucy, you have the most lurid imagination.”

  “I see. So you’ve actually been taken in by this ‘old friend’ non-sense?”

  “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought about it,” replies Jane, calmly closing her suitcase.

  “He’s very nice, actually,” I say. “He knows a lot about schist layers.”

  A look of withering contempt travels in my direction. I often wonder if Lucy is aware that she acts like a caricature of herself.

  “Well,” I announce, “I’m going down to make Isabelle’s bed. She’s arriving this afternoon,” I add gratuitously.

  It has escaped no one’s notice, I am sure, that Isabelle’s room was available all along for the taking, but that not even Lucy would go that far.

  CHAPTER four

  Why are we all here? Because it’s what Ross wanted. In his will, a document that turned out to be a spectacular exercise in wishful thinking, the only practicable request that he made—gifts to various museums and the New York City Ballet, which to my knowledge he never attended, having been rendered moot by the state of his finances at his death—was that we meet in Santerre to scatter his ashes at sunset over the Mediterranean. Most people don’t realize this, but under all the testosterone, Ross was a romantic fool. This goes some way toward explaining why he thought that once he was no longer around to keep us in line we would want to get together at all. It also elucidates another seemingly inexplicable trait, the one that got him into trouble in the first place: my father’s lifelong allegiance to gold. For Ross was what is known in the financial world as a goldbug, an unwavering adherent to the belief that gold and only gold is money. This means that in the late seventies he got very rich. Then the price of gold tumbled and, undeterred, he went on a shopping spree. Gold was going to go back up again. It had to. After the big crash, all the fools who had been seduced by the fairy dust of high-tech stocks would rush back to the one true store of value, that radiant yellow metal that, as Ross liked to remind people, has held humanity in its sway for three thousand years.

  Still, even I, who am supposed to understand these things, did not realize the full and glorious extent of his monomania, as revealed by the state of his affairs after he crashed his two-seater plane into a New Hampshire mountain, making us the outright owners of two gold mines, and shareholders in every prospecting concern on the planet. Our empire spanned the globe from Canada to Zaire, ranged from soaring mountains to African jungles, and was worth nothing. The New York apartment and the East Hampton cottage—even the plane in which he met his demise—were mortgaged to the hilt. All that was left was the house in Santerre

  And Odette, his final folly. Even Isabelle, who likes her, never understood why Ross had to marry her. After he and Daphne got divorced, we thought he’d learned his lesson. No woman could ever supplant Vera, who everyone knew was his one true love. As the legend goes, he saw her dancing one night at the Kirov in Leningrad and became so obsessed that he risked his life to smuggle her out of Soviet Russia. It all sounds rather cloak-and-daggerish today but this much I know is true: As a rising ballet star, Vera was not the kind of person the authorities were eager to see decamping to the West. On the other hand, Ross was buying a lot of Siberian gold in those days and had all sorts of official and not-so-official connections in Moscow, so he could conceivably have just bribed her way out. Either way, their marriage had a mythopoetic quality that was going to be hard to beat, as Daphne and Odette both discovered, along with every other woman Ross became involved with.

  If you’re getting the impression that my father was some kind of pathetic philanderer, that’s not entirely the case. He was a thrilling man and women flocked to him, and I’m convinced that each time he truly believed he was in love, because if Ross was good at one thing, it was self-delusion. At heart he was an optimist, as evidenced by his investment philosophy, and he hated letting people down, so that when he did—as he invariably did—he just disappointed them all the more. With the exception of Vera, of course, frozen forever in perfect youth; and Isabelle, who has her exaggerated Russian features, her canted eyes and full lips, and her unstable Slavic temperament.

  And who, I remark to Jane, should be arriving any minute now. I am intimately familiar with my sister’s itinerary, since I bought the tickets for her and the girls. Isabelle, like most free spirits, never has any money. Jane and Lucy and I meanwhile are moving the teak garden furniture Lucy ordered from an English catalog onto the patch of dirt that separates our house from the Costas’ next door. Last year they got there first, colonizing our somewhat fancifully designated patio with a plastic lawn set that Lucy, whose finely honed aesthetic sensibilities cringe at the slightest hint of bad taste, declared the most vulgar thing she had ever seen in her life. The Costas have been a thorn in her side ever since they inherited the house two years ago from an uncle, the Costas being the kinds of French people who refuse to conform to her ideas of how the French ought to behave. I should explain that Lucy’s notions of French culture are culled largely from Elizabeth David, the great expert on French provincial cuisine, whom Lucy worships almost as much as she does William Morris. One thing is for sure, Elizabeth David couldn’t have had Santerrans in mind when she wrote about Mediterranean savoir-vivre. The sight of Madame Costa returning from the Super-Géant in Canonica laden with cans of stew and ravioli would undoubtedly have pained her as much as it does Lucy—even more than their annexation of the patio, which, due to the incoherence of French inheritance laws, belongs neither to us nor the Costas but to Mr. Peretti up the road.

  So, like most things around here, it’s a big free-for-all, and under the nervous eye of Odette, who doesn’t believe in alienating the neighbors, we dispose this very expensive-looking furniture in the shade of the fig tree.

  “This must have cost a small fortune,” I observe, running a hand over the fine-grained wood. Lucy isn’t exactly cheap, but when she does spend money it tends to be on herself—plus, they had to have it all shipped from London at great expense, as Richard pointedly mentioned at lunch. He’s off somewhere right now with Electra, who threw another fit when Lucy wouldn’t let her have butter on her bread. How do you put a four-year-old on a diet? In any case, Richard seems to be the only person who can calm her down. My suspicion is that he feeds her candy bars when Lucy’s not looking.

  “Trust me, it’s worth every penny,” Lucy says grimly, dragging the final chaise through the dust. There’s a canvas parasol, too, that Jim and Yves are assembling over in the corner.

  Jim is fitting in much more smoothly than I’d expected. He climbed down the cliff for a swim this morning and declared the water amazing—on a day like today it takes on a spectacular shade of turquoise, and is so clear that you can make out every sea urchin underfoot—and then actually coaxed enough hot water out of our dribbling shower to wash and rinse his hair. The juxtaposition with puny Yves definitely works to his advantage. I never really got the point of European men.

  Jim and Yves are just hoisting the parasol when a car door slams up the road and little Olga and Sophie come bounding down the path, followed in due course by Isabelle, who, hair flying and bracelets jingling, does not exactly cut a tragic figure. She is wearing one of her Esmeralda outfits, a full, vaguely Indian-looking skirt with red peonies splashed across a sea-green background and a cherry-colored bustier upon which the eyes of Yves and Jim become instantly fixed. My sister’s breasts have been likened by their many devotees to peaches and apples and even melons, their implausible combination of weight and aloftness endlessly marveled upon. It kind of makes you wond
er about the masculine mind, the fruit thing, but that’s another story.

  “Ah, mes petits anges!” cries Odette, rushing toward them, her heels clicking on the uneven flagstones and her small thin arms held out. She’s so tiny that Isabelle practically enfolds her, making it look like it’s Odette who’s being comforted—and maybe it is. I, too, have run toward Isabelle, and one look at my sister confirms what I’ve known all along: that once again she has emerged unscathed from love’s battlegrounds. Lucy, hanging back in the doorway, cannot entirely hide her disappointment.

  CHAPTER five

  “G od, that turnoff! We nearly went over the cliff!” Peals of laughter. Only Isabelle would find the idea of a car wreck with two small children screamingly funny. Olga and Sophie, after two hours of immobility in the little Renault, are bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls, babbling away in Czech and opening all the cupboards in the kitchen in search of last year’s kittens.

  “Ravissantes … ,” Odette trills, and they are indeed ravishing, with Isabelle’s green eyes and their father’s lighter coloring, so that their tangled curls are auburn instead of black. They’re both wearing fairy outfits, with somewhat tattered wings and little tiaras, and I catch Lucy and Richard exchanging a glance—the one about how Isabelle imposes no discipline and lets her girls do anything they want, such as screech like banshees and bang cupboard doors and wear grubby fairy costumes on airplanes.

  “Mommy! Mommy! There are no kittens!” Sophie shrieks. At six she’s the oldest and definitely the most obnoxious. Isabelle had her girls barely a year apart—not that she planned it that way; she just, as she charmingly put it, kept getting knocked up. Another sensitive topic, this: Lucy and Richard tried for years to do the same, and in the end they had to get fertility treatments. The summer Lucy finally got pregnant, they showed up in Borgolano with a big box of fertility sticks, the kind you have to pee on every morning to see if you’re ovulating. Of course it had to be Isabelle who found them in the bathroom cupboard behind a pile of towels and spent the rest of the vacation lewdly speculating about what Lucy and Richard were getting up to whenever they disappeared for more than fifteen minutes.