“But there are no kittens this year,” Odette laughs. “That naughty Minette ran off with a big old tomcat and never came back.”
“Naughty, naughty Minette,” the girls intone, before collapsing into another fit of giggles. Another pregnant (pardon the pun) glance between Lucy and Richard. Ever since they were able to talk, Olga and Sophie have been shockingly wise to the carryings-on of the Minettes and tomcats of this world, as most egregiously evidenced last summer by Sophie’s dinner-table remark that “Mommy once liked Daddy so much that she let him put his willie inside her.” This delivered in the peculiarly accented English both girls have picked up in Prague, and which is definitely getting thicker.
“They’re beginning to sound like Bela Lugosi,” I remark to Isabelle.
“Yes, isn’t it hilarious? I’m convinced they have a future in horror movies. God, I’m starving!” She leans across me and grabs a piece of bread on the table, a movement that simultaneously plunges her cleavage to dizzying depths and pushes her breasts upward, where they more or less remain as she slathers the bread with a half inch of butter before stuffing it in her mouth. Jane nudges me and winks in the direction of Yves: Caught in the grip of a strong emotion, he’s forgotten all about his smoldering cigarette.
“Who made you the lovely costumes?” Jane asks. Sophie proudly informs us that it was Grandma Maria—Grandma Maria being Maria Orlik, the stage designer and legendary femme fatale of Prague’s theater circles and mother of the philandering Jiri, who had to get it from somewhere. Most of the adults the girls know are famous in one way or another, in the Czech Republic at least, where it seems everyone including the president knows their father. Which is perhaps why Jiri and Isabelle have always treated them like miniature grown-ups. From the earliest age they’ve had the run of Prague’s cafés and theaters, not to mention bars and nightclubs and even the Royal Castle, most notably when the Rolling Stones visited. Isabelle actually has a picture of them sitting on Mick Jagger’s lap. Still, for all the lack of family values, they seem to have come out okay. For one thing, you can actually have a conversation with them—an impossibility, I find, with most kids.
“Where’s Electra?” Jane suddenly asks. It seems I’m not the only one who’s forgotten all about Electra, because Lucy looks panicked, until Jane says gently, “Ah, there you are, love. Aren’t you going to say hello to your cousins?”
It turns out she’s been hiding behind Richard’s legs all along, from where she’s observing Olga and Sophie with undisguised fascination. The girls stare back at her until Sophie breaks the silence by brandishing her fairy wand and yelling, “Electra! You are under my spell!”
At first Electra just stares back, and then her doughy face crumples up and I have a horrible feeling she’s going to burst into tears. Instead she points back at Sophie.
“Zap!” Olga yells, running up with her own wand extended. Another look passes between Lucy and Richard, one of relief this time that strikes me as ineffably sad, much as I can’t help but find a certain poetic justice in the situation. Even more, though, I’m relieved, as is obviously everyone else in the room, that Electra isn’t going to throw another fit.
I shoo away Jim and Yves and help Isabelle up with her bags. In her room I open the shutters, flooding with light the marble-topped dresser with its clutter of antique perfume bottles from the Canonica flea market, and the faded Renoir poster on the wall. Odette must have cleaned up in anticipation of her arrival. The bed is covered with a nubby white coverlet, and the assorted cushions and stuffed toys without which my sister cannot find repose have been arranged in a neat row along the headboard. With a happy sigh she flops down and throws a pillow at me.
“I can’t believe you took over Lucy’s room, you sly dog. Did she have a cow?” Isabelle has always been big on animal metaphors. I think it has something to do with her European upbringing.
“You’d better start acting a little more dignified, you know,” I retort, tossing the pillow back at her. “Odette was getting all the wailing women lined up and you breeze in looking like a lingerie ad.”
“Oh no, am I being a pig?”
“No more than usual.”
She stretches and rearranges herself amongst the bedclothes, then flashes me a wicked grin that reveals the gap between her front teeth that she always refused to get fixed. No fool, my sister. “To tell you the truth, it’s a little difficult to play the grieving widow when you’ve been getting stuffed like an octopus for the past two weeks by the most devastatingly sexy playwright…. Hmm, you might even know him.”
“I doubt it,” I say. It’s our little family joke that I only read the Wall Street Journal, while Isabelle, Lucy, and Jane have the monopoly on things cultural. Actually, I’m a big fan of the nineteenth-century novel, but I’d hate to give up my reputation as the in-house Philistine.
“Anyway, you’re right. I’ll go down and have a cup of tea with her as soon as I’ve unpacked. But enough about me….” She makes an owl face. “Aren’t you going to tell me about your boyfriend? What a dish: I love those green eyes!”
“What do you want to know about him?” I say guardedly. It’s not that I don’t want to gloat—I do—but confiding in Isabelle doesn’t exactly come naturally to me.
She looks at me like I’m retarded. “What’s he like? Where did you meet him? What’s his favorite color? Does he have a big you-know-what?”
“He’s nice. I met him at work. Blue. Not really.”
“Thank you. Already I feel like I know him intimately. So, how long have you been going out?”
“It’s called dating now.”
“Really? That’s not what we used to call it.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to worry about AIDS.”
“Ugh, thank God! We have it in the Czech Republic now, too, you know. Are you in love with him?”
“I don’t know. Define in love.”
“Constance, you are hopeless.”
“I don’t get weak in the knees at the sight of him, if that’s what you mean.”
Isabelle clutches at her breast. “Would you sacrifice your life for him?”
“Oh, please, like you would sacrifice your life for anyone.”
She considers this. “I would have for Jiri, once.”
“Good thing you didn’t,” I remark.
“He wasn’t always a shit. When I first met him he was sweet. He had this pair of black jeans that he wore all the time and I was washing them once and they had these patches on the inside of the knees. He’d sewn them in so they wouldn’t wear out.”
“You mean Maria sewed them in.”
“Whatever.”
“Wow,” I say, “that’s really moving. It completely changes my opinion of him.”
Isabelle yanks the pillow out from under her and hits me on the head with it. “You’re a heartless pig. I’m just saying he wasn’t always such a big shot. Under communism he only had one pair of jeans, like everyone else.”
“I’m weeping,” I say. She whacks me again. We lie back on the white coverlet and stare up at the ceiling. A mildew stain has been spreading out from one corner over the years, its blistered edges assuming ever more fanciful shapes as it eats its way into the plaster.
“Definitely a camel,” I say.
“No way, it’s the Taj Mahal, the Temple of Love.”
“Camel.”
“Taj Mahal.”
“You’re both wrong,” says Jane from the doorway. “It’s the crack in the ceiling that had the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.”
Isabelle sighs, “Don’t you sometimes wish you were still little?”
Jane and I exchange glances. The crazy thing is that she means it: Isabelle would love nothing better than to be a child again.
CHAPTER six
In a Victorian novel I’d be the plain sister, but there’s no such thing as a plain woman anymore, at least not in New York. It’s too bad really; there must have been a certain comfort in not being beautiful, a sort
of restful anonymity that gave you the space to develop your mind, like the Brontë sisters, or Jane Austen. Today if you don’t look good it’s your own fault, for not exercising or making more of yourself, all of which I do sedulously. I may not look like Isabelle but I am trim and athletic and even chic in a non-threatening American way. Why, then, did it take me so long to find a boyfriend? Based on the mating behavior I have observed around me, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more an indictment of my character than of my looks.
For one thing, I’m too blunt. Isabelle, of course, is blunt, too, but in a charming way. I just put people off. What with that and my impatience with empty rituals, I was pretty much a disaster on the dating scene. I did manage to lose my virginity in college, with a frat boy called Rob whose face I don’t remember—I’m not even sure he was called Rob, to tell you the truth—and I’ve had a string of one- or two-night stands ever since—I happen to like sex; it’s not like there’s something wrong with me—but Jim is my first de facto boyfriend.
I met him at work, of course. I picked him out early on, when he was a junior associate. Even though he’d gone to Harvard Business School, Jim was from Kansas and it still showed. The most exciting place he’d ever lived was Boston, and he was thrilled at actually having made it to Manhattan. That he was interested in my area, emerging markets, didn’t hurt, either. He wanted to know more about the Czech mass privatization program, so one night I suggested a drink, which he could hardly refuse, since I was his senior.
Sometimes people will surprise you. It turned out that Jim, on top of being a genuinely nice guy, was also that other rarity, the man who doesn’t freak out when you sleep with him on the first date. Personally, I’ve never seen the sense in waiting around, an attitude that I’ve noticed some guys find alarming, and apparently Jim was of the same mind as I was. Either that or, being a bit of a rube, he thought this was just the way people did things in the big city. In any case, we turned out, in bed at least, to be extremely compatible—he has the kind of thick, veined penis that I like—and soon enough we were as close to an official item as you can get in investment banking, working out together at the gym and spending the night at each other’s apartment and, occasionally on a late night at the office, fucking in the thirty-seventh-floor utility closet. Then, by one of those coincidences peculiar to Wall Street, we both got headhunted by Solomon Pierson Webb, which allowed us to grab our bonuses and run, working in a four-week vacation in the interim. That was when I got the idea of luring him to Santerre.
Call it entrapment if you like. If I glossed over the business of Ross’s memorial and somewhat misrepresented the island’s charms, it was only in the service of seizing opportunity. I don’t believe in fairy tales; that’s Isabelle’s department. Jiri actually proposed to her on his knees on the Charles Bridge with the castle in the background, shrouded in mist, and look where it got her. All the same, my sister remains a force to be reckoned with, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong in thinking that in some way, I hope to reel Jim in through her agency. I guess I think of her as a kind of good luck charm, even though I know that it could all blow up in my face.
CHAPTER seven
It’s time for our first shopping trip to Flore, an undertaking necessitated by Lucy’s announcement that she’s cooking dinner tonight. As always, she has come equipped with sheaves of twenty-seven ingredient recipes clipped from food magazines, much to the amusement of Odette who, being French, just throws things together with whatever she has on hand. Do you know how much frozen food the French eat? There’s actually a supermarket chain in Paris that only sells the stuff. Lucy’s gastronomic endeavors, on the other hand, inevitably require items not available at our local shop, such as dandelions or wild mushrooms or pumpkin seeds. Not that we’ll find any of these in Flore, but Lucy retains a touching belief in the existence, and availability, of native organic products even though the selection at our village store strongly suggests that the locals live on frozen fish sticks and macaroni. This year she’s brought new evidence: an article from Gourmet on the organic Santerran olive oil industry, copiously illustrated with pictures of the author in the company of grizzled old men in berets.
“Remember the chestnut flour?” Jane whispers to me at breakfast as Lucy labors over the shopping list. Last summer we traveled seventy miles on some of the island’s worst roads to a mountain village in search of this rare delicacy. The three-hundred-year-old mill was closed, of course, for the vacances, though we did in the end find a souvenir shop that sold bags of rock-hard traditional chestnut cookies at twenty francs apiece.
“I found the village charming, actually,” says Lucy. “If we left things up to you lot, we’d never go anywhere.” Lucy and Richard and even Jane share the English compulsion to go off on expeditions, preferably with a picnic. I can’t count the hunks of Santerran salami I’ve gnawed on, perched on a rock, a glass of sour wine balanced precariously on my knee. I’m sure Jim will find it all very romantic. The assimilation process is going well: He and Richard went jogging this morning, a promising sign of male bonding.
“It’s very expensive, Flore,” Yves cautions us. “You should go to the Super-Géant in Canonica.”
“I must say, I find it endlessly shocking, how cheap the French are,” Lucy declares once we’re in the car. “Frankly he should be buying the groceries, seeing he’s getting a free holiday.”
“Maybe he’s paying his way through services rendered,” Jane suggests.
“I don’t care what you say, she had no right to invite him to our house.”
“It’s her house too,” I point out.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Isabelle asks.
“Lucy thinks Yves is Odette’s fancy man,” Jane says.
“No way: She wouldn’t go for a little weenie like that.”
“You’re all hopelessly naïve.”
“Well, why don’t I just ask her?” Isabelle teases. “I’ll tell her you were especially curious, Lucy.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Together again…. The children have stayed home with Odette, who has promised to take them blackberry picking, a prospect that left Electra indifferent, though Sophie and Olga went wild. So far they all seem to be getting along. Kids are so strange, you never know how they’re going to react. I half expected the girls would blurt out something about Electra having gotten so fat, but they don’t seem to notice—unlike Isabelle, who pulled me aside as soon as she got a look at her and wanted to know what was wrong, as if I would have any idea. I almost feel bad for Lucy. I know parents aren’t supposed to make these kinds of comparisons, but it’s hard to believe that she wouldn’t look at Olga and Sophie, as bratty as they may be, and wonder where she went wrong.
The drive to Flore isn’t as harrowing as the one to Canonica, where you have to take your life in your hands and cross over the cap. Around Ursulanu, the road stops hugging the coast and the landscape flattens out into a vineyard-filled valley, so that you can actually speed up on the way in to the town. Flore itself is your standard Mediterranean pleasure port, fringed with mountains and quite pretty in a picture postcard sort of way. It also has real shops, including several bakeries and a small supermarket, and a string of restaurants and cafés along the harbor that all serve the same prix fixe of Santerran charcuterie, followed by the purported catch of the day. Since we haven’t had breakfast yet, we head to one of these for coffee and croissants.
“Un café au lait, s’il vous plait,” Lucy enunciates carefully to the waiter.
“Un grand crème,” Isabelle orders with a dazzling smile. She speaks perfect French from her Paris days, much to the vexation of Lucy, who, for all her hours at l’Alliance française, still sounds like she’s trying too hard. In what is partly a legacy of Vera, a fanatical Francophile like all Russians, the speaking of French in our family has assumed an importance ridiculously disproportionate to the language’s actual utility. Not even I have been spared: As a part of my ongoing self-improvement progr
am, I’m taking an evening class.
“Coffee,” I nonetheless say curtly, eliciting a chuckle from Jane.
“That’s right, little sister, wave the flag.”
“Honestly, Isabelle,” Lucy snaps, “you might as well walk around in your underwear. The poor man was practically drowning in your cleavage.”
“Really? I didn’t notice.”
“Of course you didn’t,” says Jane.
“Isn’t this bliss?” cries Isabelle, stretching out her arms. “Sometimes I think I could just drop everything and move here!”
“Right, and give up your fabulous lifestyle in the Disneyland of Eastern Europe.”
Our coffees arrive and soon enough we’re all companionably intent on the ongoing pétanque game in the square, until Lucy blurts out:
“Are you and Jiri really getting divorced?”
A little frown flits over Isabelle’s brow. “That’s what it looks like.”
“But why? I mean, couldn’t you have worked it out. It seems such a shame for the girls.”
Lucy doesn’t approve of divorce; she’s a big fan of keeping up appearances and doing the right thing. Jane ascribes this to Protestantism.
“Well, it’s beyond repair,” Isabelle says sharply.
I often wonder if my sister really is as oblivious to life’s slings and arrows as she makes out. I suspect that for all her bravado, she didn’t take the breakup of her marriage quite as lightly as she would have people believe. For one, Ross, whom she worshipped, was a big fan of Jiri’s. When they got married, he flew us all over and threw a huge party at Lvi Dvur in the Prague Castle, which was attended by all the local celebrities, including Havel. Ross saw a lot of himself in Jiri. Not only were they both alpha males, they were more or less of the same generation—Jiri is twenty-five years older than Isabelle—and, being one of the world’s great bullshit artists himself, Ross always had a fine appreciation of this quality in others.
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