“Langoustes, actually,” Lucy corrects Jim. “An infinitely subtler crustacean….”
“Hey, whatever,” Jim says gamely.
“Shockingly expensive, but you only live once, right? And besides, it sounds like we might have something to celebrate.” She puts a couple pieces of fish into a bowl, covers them with a ladleful of soup, places a rouille -slathered crouton on top, and hands the composition to Odette, who graciously tells her how delicious it looks.
“What are we celebrating?” Jane asks. I realize suddenly that I haven’t seen her all day; in fact, if I were the paranoid type, I would say she was avoiding me. From the paint on her nose, though, it seems she was just off somewhere working.
“The extremely unlikely event that Ross left us anything besides debts,” I say. I explain about the girls finding the box. “Pretty crazy, huh?”
“Why is it crazy?” Jane surprises me by saying. “Why wouldn’t Ross have had a stash hidden away somewhere? It would be just like him try to hoodwink everyone one last time.”
“I’m not questioning that the account existed,” I say patiently. “I’m questioning whether there’s anything in it. I spent a month with a team of estate lawyers and accountants taking the empire apart, remember? I ended up paying for his funeral, in case you forgot.”
“I still think it’s worth looking into,” Jane says. “Maybe you overlooked something.”
I wish she would meet my eye; she’s acting really strange. “Of course we’ll look into it,” I reply, trying to mollify her. “I’m just saying, don’t get your hopes up.”
“What if it were true, though?” Lucy says wistfully, a forkful of lobster halfway to her lips, which are dabbed, I now notice, with the palest of pink glosses. “Just think: We could buy the hameau….”
“Right, with Jojo in it.” I tell them about running into the mayor down at the beach. “You know, sometimes I think he must take us for complete morons. What authority does he have to sell a whole village, anyway?”
“I think there’s a way he can declare it officially abandoned or something,” Lucy says.
“Right, after collecting fifty thousand affidavits and submitting a dossier to the prefectural authorities in Canonica, which would bring us sometime into the next century….”
“Hey, this is great stuff!” Jim says, slurping his soup.
“You must thank Yves,” Lucy says. “He did all the work.”
“Eet’s not true,” Yves says modestly, gazing at her with reverence. She certainly looks beautiful in the glow of the candles, her hair pulled back to reveal the perfect planes of her face. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear she was flirting with him.
“Look,” my sister suddenly blurts out, as if she’s been holding it in all evening, “I think we need to talk about who’s going to go to Zurich.”
“I’ll probably be there on business at some point in the fall,” I say. “I could check it out then.”
Isabelle gapes at me incredulously. “What, you just want to sit around and wait?”
“I’ve been sent on enough wild goose chases by Dad.”
“I don’t believe you. Can’t you see he’s sending us a sign?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, stop it, you know exactly what I mean.” Her eyes grow wide. “Don’t you see, he knew we would all be here; it’s perfect. …”
“How could he know?” Odette says reasonably. “He would have had to know that he was going to die.”
“Oh, God, that’s not what I mean!”
“Well, what do you mean, then?” I ask.
“I didn’t mean for his memorial! I mean he knew we’d be here in the summer,” Isabelle concludes, suddenly a tad hesitant. Perhaps she’s becoming aware of the holes in her reasoning.
“It does sound like the kind of thing Daddy would do,” Lucy observes.
“See?” Isabelle says triumphantly.
“On the other hand,” Lucy continues, “I can’t imagine him really thinking in terms of his own demise. I don’t think he really believed that he was ever going to die….”
“But he wrote a will!”
“Oh, everybody does that,” Lucy says dismissively.
“I don’t have a will,” Isabelle says.
“You don’t have anything to leave,” Jane points out.
Jim raises his glass. “Ladies! I think a toast to the chef is in order….”
“The chefs,” Lucy corrects him.
“Mais non….”
We all click glasses. Second helpings of soup are passed around. Sophie and Olga, having been told three times by Odette to stop chanting mournfully, “Beautiful SOUP! Who cares for FISH!” are sent to bed.
“I’ll go to Zurich if you want,” Jane says.
I’m not exactly surprised when Isabelle follows me into the bathroom. My sister has never considered peeing to be a private activity. She slams the door now, however, and leans against it, as if to ward off intruders.
“Can you believe that!”
I congratulate myself on having put on a skirt rather than jeans: At least I’ve spared myself the indignity of having to wriggle back into them in front of her “What?” I say, pointedly flushing the toilet. In fact, I was as amazed as she was by Jane’s offer.
“The nerve!”
I observe her with bemusement.
“Oh, don’t be so naïve, Constance! Can’t you see what she’s up to?”
“You mean Jane?”
“Yes, Jane!”
“Oh, her,” I say, turning on the tap to wash my hands.
“Stop being so superior. You always act like she’s your real sister, not me!” I half expect her to stamp her foot for good measure, but she obviously thinks better of it and, instead, rearranges her features into a beguiling pout.
“Will you lend me the money to go to Zurich?”
“Why? Jane just said she’d go.”
She pauses for a beat, then changes tack. “Okay, so we’re just going to leave it at that?”
“Why not? I think it’s a dumb idea, too, but better her than me. I don’t even like Switzerland.”
She eyes me craftily. It’s a good thing Isabelle was dissuaded by Jiri from going into acting, though she thinks it’s because her Czech accent wasn’t good enough. “And if she finds something, she’s going to come back and tell us.”
“That’s the general idea. Can we go back to the table, please? I hear Lucy made chocolate mousse for dessert; I’d hate to miss it.”
But there’s no distracting her, she’s like a dog with a bone. “Why do you think she would even be interested? She’s got her trust fund, not to mention all that money she makes from her paintings. Why would she even care if Dad had left us anything?”
“Well,” I say, “I guess because part of it would be hers. People are strange that way.” I keep forgetting that you just can’t joke around with people who have no common sense.
“Exactly!” Isabelle slaps her hand down on the counter, upsetting Odette’s neatly lined-up vials of homeopathic medicine and the sordid jumble of her own cosmetics case, gaping open to reveal a hair-matted brush and several greasy pots of the Romanian face creams that keep her eternally young. “And now ask yourself: Why would Dad leave Jane and Lucy anything? He knew they were loaded!”
Ah, so that’s what she’s getting at. “Let me see if I follow you: You want to make sure that Jane doesn’t take off with the loot that is rightfully ours?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way exactly. I’m just looking out for our interests.”
“Well,” I say, drying my hands, “I’m perfectly comfortable with Jane looking after mine.”
I can practically see the gears turning while she digests this. “They’re not even his daughters, really,” she says.
“Except for the minor detail that he adopted them.”
“Yeah, well, that was because he felt sorry for them, with that pasty-faced mother of theirs….”
“Whom he married.”
“Yeah, whatever….” Her eyes alight on Lucy’s zippered sponge bag. She snatches it up and opens it. “Ha, I knew it: fertility sticks! You’d think she’d just give up….”
“You are completely out of line,” I say.
She narrows her eyes confidentially. “You know, Richard made a pass at me the other night.”
All of a sudden I feel queasy. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
“He was drunk out of his mind, but he pawed me, right on the stairs. I think Lucy stopped putting out years ago; poor guy must be desperate. In a way,” she muses, “it would be kind of funny … but charity sex really isn’t my thing.” She smiles at me like an angel. “Let me have the money.”
“Okay,” I say.
She gives me a little hug. “You’ll see, you’ll be glad.”
CHAPTER twenty-five
When Isabelle announces that she’s prepared to go to Zurich, invoking the flimsy pretext of an old friend of Jiri’s who runs an émigré press there, Jane just looks amused and says, “Be my guest,” meeting my questioning glance with a bland smile. Isabelle, meanwhile, armed with my credit card number, has already booked her ticket over the phone. I offer to drive her to the airport—not out of any charitable impulse but because I wouldn’t mind getting away for a day.
“I really have a good feeling about this,” Isabelle says as we get in the car the next morning. It rained during the night and the air is rinsed and sparkling.
“Seat belt.”
She pouts. “Oh, come on….”
“Seat belt,” I repeat.
And so we’re off, all the windows down and the radio blaring French pop songs to which Isabelle knows all the words from her teenage years. She can actually tell the difference between those twin icons of seventies easy-listening rock, Julien Cler and Michel Sardou; and, it goes without saying, she worships Serge Gainsbourg. As we pass the black beach at Orzo, Johnny Halliday’s immortal hit “Que je t’aime” comes on. “God, I love this song!” she cries, closing her eyes ecstatically and humming along. At the refrain she joins lustily in: “ ‘Que je t’aiiiiiiiiiiiiiime, que je t’aiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiime, que je t’aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime!’ ” she belts out. “ ‘Que je t’aiiii-iiiiiiiime, que je t’aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime, que je t’aiiiiiiiiiiiime!’ ”
“He sure had a gift for lyrics,” I observe.
“Oh, come on, it’s brilliant!”
“Did I hear correctly? ‘When your body on my body, heavy like a dead horse …’ ?”
“Don’t be such a prude; it sounds different in French.”
“Huh.”
“Oh, you are such an American, Constance. Do you know the main difference between us?”
“Ten thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia?”
“No, silly. You’re such a product of New York—and I don’t mean that in a bad way—whereas I will always think of myself as a European.”
It’s funny she should say that, because I’ve always thought of Isabelle as having a hokey American side that I completely lack but that Ross also possessed. I’ve noticed that expatriates are often more American than anyone in America, as if they’d picked up their sense of national identity from Happy Days reruns. But I’m not going to burst her bubble.
“But then, of course,” she concludes, “I grew up in France.”
“What was Vera like?” I ask.
She looks confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what was she really like?”
Isabelle hesitates, as if describing our mother were somehow sacrilegious. “She was … well, she was lovely—graceful and elegant, and so beautiful…. Men used to stop and stare at her on the streets.”
“But what was she like as a person?” I persist, because in fact, I have no idea. When I was little, I made her into a fairytale character: the beautiful ballerina mother I never knew. As I got older, though, her glamour took on a touch of the sinister. I suppose I was jealous that Isabelle had real memories. I hated the way she and Ross turned Vera into a goddess—it seemed such a cheap trick—and so I distorted her, giving her ugly, calloused feet and a bad temper. Suddenly it occurs to me that maybe those are my memories.
Isabelle takes the deep and fatalistic breath that, I’m sure she’s convinced, is the indispensable prelude to weighty revelations. “Well, you know, she was Russian. She had a real sense of style. I used to watch her dress in the evening—she and Dad went out practically every night—and it was like a performance. Everything she did was really dramatic somehow, even the way she smelled. She used to spray herself with clouds of Shalimar,” she adds wistfully, as if this were a definitive personality trait.
“I don’t remember any of that,” I say flatly and focus on driving. After the vineyards of Ursulanu, the road starts to wiggle its way up in a series of hairpin bends as it traverses the mountainous spine that runs up the cap.
“Well, she didn’t really spend that much time with us. You were so little you still had a nanny, Dominique. She was from Côte d’Ivoire.”
I do remember Dominique, though more as a vaguely recollected sensory presence than an actual person.
“And she spent all day in her dance studio. It took up the whole downstairs of our building. The lobby was always full of little girls in pink tutus; they were so cute. It was one of the top ballet schools in Paris, you know?”
It strikes me suddenly that what I resent is not so much Isabelle’s enchanting European childhood as her immutable sense of place. I sometimes I feel as if, like Athena, I just sprang one day fully grown out of Ross’s head.
“So, did you go there too?” I ask.
“Me? No, I had no talent.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. I mean, I had to audition like everybody else. She didn’t take just anybody.”
“Well, well,” I think.
Safely over the peak, we begin the looping descent into Canonica. At points the drop down is so sheer that it feels more like you’re in an airplane than a car. I can already see the city below, shimmering in its delicate haze of smog. “Ugh,” Isabelle exclaims, “that smell!” We quickly roll up our windows as the municipal dump comes into view. The huge open pit cascades right down the mountainside into the swamplands, the sky above it woolly with seagulls.
Isabelle says, “It always catches you by surprise, doesn’t it?”
Skirting the center, we swing on to the N74, where Santerre’s affinity with central Long Island is revealed in the garish string of gas stations, discount furniture warehouses, car dealerships, and hypermarkets that extends all the way out to Calmetta Airport. Odette gave me a list of things to pick up at the Super-Géant on the way back: toilet paper, mineral water, UHT milk, coffee, and the teeny cartons of wildly expensive Tropicana juice that Jim tosses back by the dozen, an extravagance that both dismays and fascinates Yves and that Odette seems to find endearing. Maybe I’ll go into town after I drop Isabelle off, check out the flea market, have lunch in the old port.
“Maybe I’ll meet someone on the plane,” Isabelle says jokingly as I pull up to the Departures area, “A dark, mysterious stranger….”
“You’re going to Switzerland.”
“Okay, a dark, mysterious banker. Have you ever heard of the Mile High Club?”
“Look,” I say, “if you need money, I’ll always give it to you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Oh, I know, honey. You’re such a good sister….”
“I just don’t think you should get your hopes up.”
But she’s already out the door, which she slams, too hard as always, before leaning down and sticking her face in the window. She’s wearing makeup—not a lot, just blusher and mascara—and she looks fresh and young and eager for adventure. “I’ll call you when I get to Zurich,” she promises.
As she strides into the terminal on her long brown legs, I see the hungry eyes of the parking attendant following her.
CHAPTER twenty-six
I don’t believe in accid
ents; I think people know what they want and plan accordingly, just as I have been doing since I realized, when I ran into him on the place, that Philippe was mine for the taking. The thrum of anticipation has been building in me ever since, a pleasantly languid sensation that I’m sure there’s a word for in French and that I’ve been basking in like a cat in a sunbeam. All obstacles removed, I pick up the groceries and race back to Borgolano, where, finding the house empty, I stack them hastily in the pantry. Then I walk across to Philippe’s. I was never inside when the Costas lived there, but now I see it’s essentially a smaller version of our house, with a kitchen and a main room downstairs and, upstairs, a big bedroom in the back with windows on the sea, flung open, and two smaller ones on the other side, one of which he’s turned into a study. He’s sitting at a scrubbed plank desk by the window, the top empty but for a pile of books and a laptop, and an old bentwood chair, the kind you can pick up for a couple hundred francs at the Canonica flea market, where I would be right now if I had any morals. Hearing me, he turns and rises. I stay in the doorway. He looks perplexed for a second, one hand still on the chair, then he smiles. I think, Why should I trust him? But he extends his palm and there’s something about this gesture, about its hesitant welcome, that makes me advance. I walk right to him and we kiss, hesitantly, then hungrily, until I pull back and stare at him hard and say, “Why don’t you want my sister?”
“Because I want you.”
I just had to make sure.
I follow him into the bedroom. It’s as bare as the study with just a mattress on a boxspring. We kiss again, our tongues dancing. His saliva tastes like tobacco and wine.
“Sit, right here,” he says.
I lower myself onto the edge of the mattress. He kneels down and pushes me gently back so that my eyes fill with the blankness of the ceiling. As he unfastens my skirt and spreads it open like a kite, I realize in a disconnected way that everyone is sleeping; that’s why I can hear the sound of his breath. We’re in that still part of the middle of the day where time stretches into infinities, and this liquid sensation seems to have extended to my skin, which registers the touch of his trailing fingers as if it were detached from my body.
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