Going Topless

by Megan McAndrew

  “Quelle bonne idée, Constance!”

  “What happened to those old Chinese lanterns in the back closet?” Jane asks. “We could string them up on the fig tree.”

  “I don’t know,” Odette says doubtfully. “We don’t want them to think we tried too hard…. And besides, it will be light,” she adds, which is true: The sun doesn’t set until nine in July and prescribed apéritif time is between six-thirty and eight. If you wanted people to stay later you’d have to invite them for dinner, which would constitute a major upset of the social order, dinner being second only to sex on the intimacy scale. As Odette keeps reminding us, this is not Paris. The not-trying-too-hard also extends to the menu, hence the banishment of Lucy. Odette has made a pissaladière, a sort of tarted-up pizza, with frozen dough from the Super-Géant now cooling in the pantry, and Jane and I have been delegated to scrub down the kitchen. This is fine with me. What with all the comings and goings, I haven’t really had a chance to talk to Jane since she arrived. She’s seemed a little subdued and I’ve been meaning to ask her if everything is okay.

  “So,” I say, pouring us both a glass of wine after we’ve scoured all the surfaces with Ajax—another Anglo-Saxon trait that Odette frowns upon: drinking at all hours—“how’s Marge?”

  Jane was sketching up on the roof earlier and still has a charcoal smudge on her nose. She pushes her hair distractedly out of her eyes. “Oh, busy defending the rights of minorities as always…. She’s thinking of running for the local council.”

  “So I guess she won’t be joining us again this year?”

  She laughs. “Oh, God, no…. I’ll be staying longer, though, trying to get some work done.”

  “Uh-huh?” There was a little pause at the end that makes me think there’s more to this than she’s letting on.

  “Actually,” Jane says, her eyes not meeting mine, “we’ve decided to spend some time apart.”

  “You mean you’ve broken up?”

  “I don’t think so.” She looks wistful for a second, then brightens up. “It’s more of a sabbatical. At least I hope so.”

  “Can I ask why? I mean, you’ve been together for years.”

  Jane sighs. “Oh, the same thing it’s always been I suppose: I’m not politically engaged enough. She wants a lifetime partner who shares her ideals—not that I don’t, but … well, I’ve never been much of an activist….”

  She looks so crestfallen that I decide not to open my big mouth. Although this would conceivably be a good time to do so, I am not going to confess that I’ve always found Marge insufferable with her incessant harping on the World Phallocracy and her insistence on bringing up genital mutilation at the dinner table, which is really what got her in trouble with Odette. I am not going to say that Marge has some nerve dumping Jane, who is way smarter and prettier and funnier, not to mention a distinguished artist of international stature. Who does Marge think she is, anyway?

  “I’m really sorry,” I say.

  Jane pats me on the arm. “Thanks, honey. It’s honestly not as bad as it seems. I’d be more concerned about Isabelle.”

  “Isn’t it amazing how everyone is concerned about Isabelle except Isabelle?”

  Jane smiles. “Well, no one will ever accuse her of practicing the examined life … but she seems almost too cheerful: It’s a little disconcerting. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure she ever let herself properly grieve for Ross, and then to have the divorce on top of that …”

  I shrug. “She says she’s fine. She’s got a new boyfriend already.”

  “How many men are going to take in a woman with two small children? Isabelle will never manage on her own.”

  “That’s a very unfeminist sentiment you just expressed there.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a compliment,” Jane says dryly.

  “Alors,” the mayor says, “have you heard? The Costas have sold their house.”

  “Ah, bon?” says Yolande, obviously as startled as we are by the mayor’s announcement—which makes you wonder about the reliability of the local rumor mill—and miffed as hell, too, I’ll bet, that a whole house changed hands right under her nose.

  “Tiens,” says Odette with studied neutrality, “quelle surprise.” She’s handing out pastis and the awful Santerran rosé that everyone dutifully drinks before dinner to support the local wine industry. Jim, obviously not aware that pastis tastes like liquid licorice, takes a big sip and tries not to make a face. I nudge him and pass him a glass of wine. Lucy, unlike Yolande and Odette, can’t hide her astonishment.

  “They’ve sold it? But it was never even put on the market!”

  A pitying look passes between Odette and Madame Benoît. They’re both wearing nice grown-up French lady clothes, unlike Yolande, who is decked out in some kind of Indian caftan with assorted beaded necklaces and amulets and whose purple eye-shadow has caked into the creases in her eyelids. Borgolano is not exactly famous for attracting normal people. On top of the usual tax evaders and Santerran nationalists, we have our share of jailbirds and sex offenders, though we don’t normally see much of them outside the local bistro, La Marmite du Pêcheur, the one where Ross has a drink named after him and where it seems Yves has taken to hanging out. He must be there right now, since he’s not here.

  “Eh bien si, Madame!” The mayor winks jovially at Lucy. “Perhaps they advertised at one of the Canonica agencies…. In any case, a Parisian has bought it, un écrivain.” Reverent pause here, to allow us to share in the mayor’s delight that yet another interesting personality has chosen our little community. The mayor, I should explain, cherishes a vision of Borgolano as a kind of international artists’ colony, a vision that Ross encouraged and that so far rests entirely on the shoulders of Jane (artiste-peintre) and of the Countess Fatulescu, the mysterious Romanian poetess who bought the estate above the old monastery last year. Like most Santerrans, the mayor is short and dapper and smells agreeably of cologne.

  Further discussion of our new neighbor is aborted by the arrival of Isabelle, who, she charmingly apologizes, has been washing her hair, as evidenced by the damp ringlets that cling to her temples.

  “Ah, Mademoiselle Wright, every year you look younger!” the mayor exclaims, tripping forward to kiss her on both cheeks and disregarding the fact that she is technically Madame Orlik. She flutters about now, butterflylike, dispensing kisses and trilling in her flawless French under the approving eye of Odette, who considers the rest of us to be socially retarded—especially Lucy, who can’t resist competing and, as Isabelle relates to the mayor a droll anecdote from her journey, jumps doggedly in with both feet.

  “Monsieur le Maire,” she painstakingly enunciates, “qu’est-ce qui se passe avec le hameau?” A smart conversational move, you might think, since she is referring to one of the mayor’s long-standing ambitions, the unloading on us of the abandoned shepherd’s hamlet above Borgolano, but in fact a dumb one since the mayor would rather flirt with my sister right now than talk real estate. Plus, everyone wants to hear about this writer from Paris—including, I should have thought, Lucy, who would like nothing better than to raise the social standards in the neighborhood.

  “Madame Townsley, nothing has changed: The offer still stands. I welcome you at your convenience in my office to discuss the particulars.”

  I can see Lucy wants to forge on, but Odette takes the situation in hand: “Alors, what can you tell us about our new neighbor?”

  The mayor smoothes his mustache. “Eh bien, Madame, he is called Philippe Kahn. You may have read his novel La Cloche Fêlée. I confess I only just started it myself; it is rather, shall we say, conceptual.”

  “Mais bien sûr!” exclaims Yolande. “A very good-looking man; I saw him on Bouillon de Culture.”

  “Golly,” says Jane, “won’t he find our society a bit pedestrian?”

  “I’ll bet you he finds our society pretty stimulating,” Isabelle says archly.

  “I should imagine he’ll be having friends down from Paris,” Mada
me Benoît says eagerly.

  “Surely he will have the house remodeled first,” Odette demurs.

  “I am not so sure, Madame. He was specifically looking for une maison de charactère.”

  “Some famous French writer is moving in to the house next door,” I explain to Jim, who is looking lost. Odette has noticed too.

  “Jeem, would you be adorable and bring another bottle of rosé?”

  Jim ambles off. Odette seems to have taken a liking to him and is always sending him on little errands, which is just as well, since he is the kind of guy who likes to feel useful.

  “A charming idea, this apéritif alfresco,” declares the mayor. He clears his throat and grows solemn, our cue to pipe down. “I would like to take this opportunity to express the great loss we all felt at the news of Monsieur Wright’s passing. I shall save my full remarks for the memorial. In the meantime, I wish to drink to the memory of a great man, a great friend to the Commune of Borgolano and to me personally.”

  “Très bien,” murmurs Madame Benoît.

  “Oui,” Odette agrees.

  “What did he say?” asks Jim, who has come back with the wine to find us all with grave countenances and raised glasses.

  “Cet enfant vous appartient?”

  We all turn to find Madame Paoli advancing onto the patio, a glum Electra in tow.

  “Yes, of course she belongs to us,” Lucy says irritably; then, as if suddenly realizing that something is out of order, “Where did you find her?”

  “In my kitchen, Madame, eating our dinner.”

  “But I …”

  Madame Paoli’s expression conveys just what she thinks of these anglais who, while they themselves feast on hors d’oeuvres at ostentatious outdoor parties with public officials, leave their children to scavenge food from the kitchens of strangers—a sentiment evidently shared by Madame Mayor, whose eyebrows also descend a fraction.

  “I am terribly sorry,” Lucy says stiffly. “Thank you for bringing her back.”

  “Pas du tout, Madame. Bon appétit.”

  “Tiens,” says the mayor, looking at his watch, “it is getting late….”

  CHAPTER eleven

  Our guests quickly disperse, leaving Lucy free to fly off the handle.

  “Where the hell were you?” she hisses at Richard.

  Why does Richard put up with Lucy? you might wonder. Because he has to. They could never afford their lifestyle on his solicitor’s salary. The reason they live in one of the most expensive parts of London, and buy teak garden furniture and take the whole summer off, is that Lucy is loaded. Jane too. When their father, Hugh Nicholson of Nicholson Breweries, died, he left them a trust fund, and it wasn’t all tied up in African gold mines, either. Lucy has always had Richard under her thumb, but never more so than since Electra was born. If you ask me, she blames him. Not that there’s anything overtly wrong with the guy: He’s a perfectly average upper class Brit. He went to Cambridge and reads The Guardian and has so far only suffered minimal hair loss. But Lucy being Lucy, I’m sure she figures there’s some sort of genetic flaw on his side of the family. She’s always going on about how eccentric they are, which in England seems to be code for not-one-hundred-percent-there, and she loses no opportunity to intimate that there was nothing wrong with her results on the fertility tests.

  “What do you mean, where was I? Where were you?”

  “I was entertaining the mayor and you were meant to be watching the children. Oh, God …” Lucy bursts into tears. Richard observes her stonily.

  “Calm down, Lucy,” Jane says. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

  “I’m making a big deal out of nothing!” She’s hysterical now. “The child breaks into a neighbor’s house and—”

  “She didn’t break in, the door was open.”

  “You think this is normal behavior?” Lucy shrieks.

  “We should have invited Madame Paoli,” I remark. “Then she wouldn’t have been such a bitch about it.”

  The conversation is getting too weird for Jim, who, seeing Yves coming down the path, hastens off in his direction.

  “You think normal children sneak into people’s houses and steal food?”

  “I’ve had enough,” says Richard through clenched teeth. He stalks off in the same direction as Yves and Jim. Lucy heaves another sob and shouts after him, “You were meant to watch her!” before running down the path toward the cliff, followed after a second by Jane.

  “Why doesn’t anyone have the guts to say it? There’s something wrong with Electra.”

  We’re in the kitchen cleaning up, Odette washing glasses and Isabelle and me drying. “And I don’t just mean the weight,” Isabelle continues. “She hasn’t spoken a word since we got here.”

  “You’d be fat and speechless, too, if you were Lucy’s daughter,” I say.

  “Don’t be so flippant, Constance. I’ll tell you something: I have some friends in Prague whose daughter is autistic, and Electra behaves just like her.”

  Odette crosses herself. “Ah mon Dieu! Don’t say such things….”

  “Why not? It’s worse not to.”

  “For you, maybe,” I point out.

  “It’s worse for Electra too. We’re all going around pretending she’s normal, beginning with Lucy. For all we know, she needs to be in an institution.”

  “Quelle tragédie …”

  “You’ve been in Eastern Europe too long,” I say. “We don’t lock them up anymore.”

  “That’s not what I meant. All I’m saying is that she probably needs treatment and she’s not getting it.”

  “I agree with Isabelle,” says Odette. “I have thought from the beginning that that poor child is retardée.”

  “She said autistic, not retarded.”

  “Franchement, what is the difference?”

  Jane comes in, putting an end to these deliberations.

  “How is Lucy?” Odette asks.

  Jane sits down and pours herself a glass of wine, causing Odette to frown. This idea of the French guzzling liters of Bordeaux daily is a myth, at least the women. Odette only drinks at meals and clearly thinks we’re a bunch of lushes—especially Richard, who brought two bottles of vodka from London and has already polished one off.

  “She’s all right,” Jane says wearily. “She’s having a rest. Where are the children?”

  “They are drawing nicely in the living room,” Odette says sententiously. “All this fuss is not good for them.”

  “No, I daresay it isn’t….”

  “I think we will just have salad for dinner, non? It is too late for a meal.”

  It’s long past dinner when, through the open window, we hear voices and the rattle of loose gravel on the path.

  “It seems the gentlemen have returned,” Jane observes.

  “Helloooo,” Richard calls out, bumping his head on the lintel as he comes in to the kitchen. Jim has bashed his skull already on every door frame in the house, which was not built with strapping American farm boys in mind.

  “Hi, girls,” Jim says with a stupid grin. Yves just smirks.

  “What did you do, crawl home?” I ask.

  “Eddie gave us a ride. You know, the butcher. Great guy, Eddie. Here, we bought some meat for dinner: veal or something.” Jim dumps on the table a bloodstained paper parcel containing what looks like ten pounds of pork chops. Odette wrinkles her nose.

  “I suppose he gave you a discount too.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yes, I should hope so, considering that they are not of the first freshness. Eh bien, I suppose they won’t kill us; we can have them for lunch tomorrow. Somebody will have to build me a fire for the grill.”

  “I’ll be happy to,” Jim says gallantly.

  “It looks,” says Jane after they’ve stumbled out, “like the local lads caught on to a good thing. I wonder how many rounds they got out of them.”

  Odette makes an indulgent clucking sound. “Like children …”

 
CHAPTER twelve

  Surprise, surprise: Odette is sleeping with Yves. Lucy, our moral watchdog, caught them in the woodshed.

  “Disgusting,” she stammers, her eyes wide with indignation. “She actually had her skirt up around her waist and he—”

  “Go on,” Isabelle says eagerly.

  “Well, you know.” A furious blush has spread across Lucy’s pale cheeks (she’s allergic to the sun and doesn’t leave the house without coating herself in SPF 45 cream). “It’s perfectly disgraceful; one of the children could have walked in.”

  Isabelle giggles. “Poor old Odette. Why shouldn’t she be getting some, even if it’s only from dweeby Yves?”

  “That’s right, make a big joke out of it. Am I the only one who remembers that Daddy’s been dead barely a year? Not only does she have the nerve to carry on with the little wretch in our house, I suppose she plans to bring him to the memorial service as well!”

  I’ve never entirely gotten over the weirdness of Lucy calling Ross Daddy. Nobody else ever did, not even Isabelle. “Since when are we having a service?” I ask. “I thought we were just supposed to disperse his ashes?”

  “Why are you being so horrible, Lucy?” Isabelle cuts in. “Odette has every right to go on with her life. She’s not the Virgin Mary.”

  Lucy’s on a roll now. “It’s the lack of dignity that makes me sick: that they would carry on right there with Daddy’s ashes on the shelf—”

  “Is that where they are?” Jane says. “I was wondering where she put them.”

  “I thought you said they were in the woodshed,” I interject. “Odette and loverboy, that is.”

  “At least someone is getting laid around here, besides Constance,” Isabelle says. “It’s beginning to feel like Bleak House.”