Going Topless

by Megan McAndrew

  “You know,” she pondered, “there’s something to be said for blasting the system from within….”

  “Marge!” Jane exclaimed, horrified, “you can’t possibly be thinking of becoming an investment banker!”

  Marge settled herself more comfortably in her armchair. “Why not? When you think about it, it’s just another crumbling bastion of the phallocracy—put in a few good women and watch ’em shake things up…. If these places were properly run, we’d have the third world on its feet in no time. I just read somewhere that if the top financial firms contributed a hundredth of a percent of their profits to a development fund, we could put running water in every village in Africa.”

  The funny thing is, I can totally see Marge on Wall Street.

  We’ve never stayed on Santerre this late into the season. The Parisians and the Marseillais are already packing up, their laden Renaults snaking their way up the road like weary mastodons. There’s not exactly an autumn chill in the air, but the heat has mellowed into a lambent glow that I can feel on my shoulders as I line up the champagne flutes on a tray. Beyond wanting his ashes scattered over the sea at dusk, Ross didn’t go into a whole lot of detail as to the final disposal of his remains; in fact, he never actually used the word memorial, which has left us a bit stumped as to the form the ceremony should take, especially now that the mayor is coming after all. It was Lucy who suggested that we serve champagne. “He would have wanted something festive,” she asserted, drawing the line at hors d’oeuvres, which she thought the mayor might have found undignified. Jim thought maybe we could have some music, but a survey of our collection yielded only a dusty Claude François tape (“Where did that come from?” Isabelle wondered) and The Beach Boys Greatest Hits.

  We decide to skip the music.

  “I wonder if the mayor will really show up,” Lucy now frets as we wait for everyone to show up.

  “He said he would,” I say. “Yolande’s coming too…. I keep meaning to ask, what are you going to do about the fishing hut?”

  Lucy’s face grows pink. “I sold it back to her.”

  I whistle. “Boy, she’s really cleaning up, isn’t she?”

  She reddens some more. “I know you think I’m rich, but there’s hardly anything left, really, and now, with the divorce … Oh, I might as well tell you: Yves and I want to get married. His family’s from the Auvergne, you know, and you can still get fabulous stone houses there, completely untouched, for pennies.” Lucy’s eyes light up at this prospect, but she sounds a bit troubled as she adds, “It is uncanny, though: It’s almost as if Yolande knew that she had me in a tight spot…. I actually sold the cabin back to her for less than I paid for it.”

  “You know what I can’t figure out? Why, if she’s so eager to buy up more properties, she sold it to you in the first place.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought the same. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “Unless she arranged to have it blown up.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know, maybe there was something wrong with it—you said it needed a lot of work. Or maybe it was an insurance scam, or maybe she was trying to scare us…. Either way, she obviously ended up making a profit.”

  “I never did trust her,” Lucy says.

  “It’s a bit late for that,” I remark.

  “I wish Jane and Marge would get back with the flowers,” Lucy says. “It looks so bare….”

  Jiri comes out of the house, followed by the girls in full dress-up. He himself has shaved and put on a tie. Sneaking up behind Lucy, he swats her on the butt.

  “Jiri! I wish you wouldn’t do that!” Her eyes fall on Agnes, who, her eyes rimmed with blue and her mouth painted red, has the rather unsettling appearance of an Indian totem. “Goodness, darling, what have they done to you?”

  “We curled her hair too!” Sophie crows. “Doesn’t she look great?”

  “She looks,” Lucy says, searching for the right word, “amazing.”

  Agnes silently picks her nose.

  Lucy sighs, “Oh, darling, I wish you wouldn’t … ,” but the girls have already run off. “She has lost a bit of weight, hasn’t she?” she says to me.

  “Definitely.”

  Isabelle comes tripping across the patio, unsteady in her high-heeled sandals. She’s wearing a red dress with a slit up the thigh that, Lucy observes to me, doesn’t look very funereal. A gust of perfume envelops us as she draws closer.

  “What is that scent?” Lucy says, wrinkling her nose.

  “Don’t be such a snob, Lucy, it’s French—I bought it on the airplane. Doesn’t Agnes look fabulous? The girls dressed her up.”

  “You look fabulous,” Jiri growls, bearing down on her and making as if to suck on her neck. Lucy rolls her eyes. “Look at those tits!”

  “Jiri!”

  “Forty years old and as firm as a schoolgirl!”

  “Honey, don’t be such a pervert….”

  “Tell me honestly,” Lucy whispers, “what do you really think of his poetry?”

  “It’s kind of heavy-handed,” I say.

  “Remember that collection he wrote for Isabelle: Goddess?”

  “Talk about soft-core porn for the bourgeoisie.”

  “I’m not so sure about the soft….” Lucy giggles and then frowns as if an unpleasant thought had just struck her. “Oh dear, I hope Richard doesn’t show up.”

  “Do you really think he would?”

  “You never know; he might feel he ought to. Poor Richard, he so hated Daddy for not liking him. Do you know that he never even made a toast at our wedding?”

  “Yeah, I remember. It was a crummy thing to do.”

  “Yes, it was, wasn’t it, especially after the way he carried on when Isabelle got married, clasping Jiri to his breast and calling him son. He might at least have pretended…. I wonder sometimes if it would have changed anything,” she muses, “if Ross had thought more of Richard.”

  “Do you really think it would have?”

  She smiles. “No, not really…. Oh God, the mayor is going to be here any second and Jane and Marge still aren’t back—I’ll go see if the champagne is cold.” Watching her hurry off, it strikes me that Ross wouldn’t have thought much of Yves, either. In fact, of the present company, Jiri having gone off to find his camera, the person who comes closest to Ross’s ideal of a guy’s guy is Marge, just now coming down the path with a huge beribboned arrangement in her arms. We were all a bit surprised when she offered to drive into Flore for the flowers, but as Jane once observed to me, Marge is a conventional middle-class English girl at heart.

  “Simplest thing they had in the shop,” she says. “Had to pull half the ribbons out as it was—I’d hate to see what they do for weddings.”

  “Oh dear,” says Lucy, who had initially planned on gathering a bouquet of wildflowers in the maquis, until it was pointed out to her that whatever decorative vegetation it once contained had long been fried to a crisp by the heat. “The lilies are quite pretty—maybe we could take it apart and the children could throw them in the water….”

  “Not on your life! D’you have any idea how much these cost!”

  “Darling,” Jane says soothingly, “she doesn’t really mean it.”

  “Like hell she doesn’t; if she’d had her way, we would’ve tossed a bunch of weeds in after him. Isabelle,” she barks, “as long as you’re just standing around in your underwear, why don’t you make yourself useful and go find a vase?”

  “Feast your eyes,” Isabelle says saucily.

  “A good spanking is what you need,” says Marge, leering.

  “You wish….”

  “Why,” Jane sighs, “do the conversations in this house always have to degenerate into sexual innuendo?”

  “I suppose you’d rather discuss the Great Authors,” Marge says.

  “You guys … ,” Jim sighs. The chug of an approaching Renault makes us all turn our heads. “Well, blow me,” Marge exclaims as the mayor and his depu
ty come into view, the deputy obscured by a gigantic wreath with a black sash across it. “Looks like we rated the works after all.”

  “I should hope so,” Lucy says. “All those pétanque tournaments Daddy sponsored—they should erect one of those roadside mausoleums to him.”

  “With weeping angels and a cherry on top,” Jane says.

  “Sshhhhhhh!”

  Now that he’s got our attention, the mayor picks up his pace, hastening toward us with his arms extended. “My friends, I hope I am not late!”

  “Not at all,” I say. “We’re still waiting for Yolande.”

  “A sad occasion,” the mayor intones, his eyes sliding from the table with the champagne glasses to Isabelle, advancing precariously in her tarty outfit with Marge’s bouquet in a vase clasped to her breasts. “Ah. Mademoiselle Wright, you look charming as always—allow me to help you!” He rushes forward, but Isabelle, laughing, has already plonked the flowers down on the table, where they look strangely festive—more, indeed, like a wedding bouquet.

  “It’s Madame Orlik, really, you know,” she says with a coy glance at Jiri, whose rumored revolutionary past has always made the mayor a little nervous, though he looks quite relaxed now as he accepts a glass of champagne from Yves. With a little cough he adjusts his glasses on his nose, as if the better to take in the scenery, until he notices his deputy still standing there with the wreath.

  “Eh bien, aren’t you going to put it down?” he snaps. The deputy—whose name no one ever seems to remember—looks helplessly about until Jiri, taking pity on him, strides over and relieves him of his burden. He props it on the low wall against the fig tree so that we can all make out the gold inscription on the sash:

  À un ami

  “Very nice,” Yolande murmurs, for she has finally made her appearance, robed and turbaned like a fakir, her wrists loaded down with gold bracelets, a pear-shaped amulet dangling between her breasts on a beaded leather thong. As if repressing a strong emotion, she dabs at her eyes, prompting Isabelle to elbow me and mutter under her breath, “Cow!”

  “Is she going to perform a rain dance?” Jane whispers.

  “It feels so final,” Yolande says in a choked voice.

  “It’s been a year, actually,” Isabelle says.

  The garden gate crashes open and the girls come racing out, the state of their dresses suggesting that they’ve spent the past half hour rolling in the dirt. “Mommy!” Sophie whines, tugging at her skirt. “Can we throw the ashes, please?”

  Isabelle turns to me. “I hadn’t even thought about it—I always thought Odette would do it….”

  “Please, Mommy!”

  I shrug. “I don’t see why not.”

  “A charming idea,” the mayor says uncertainly. He falls silent and we all look expectantly at each other. “Well,” I say, “we might as well get started,” which is when I remember that the ashes are still on the shelf in Odette’s room. “I’ll get them!” Sophie shouts. Before anyone can stop her, she’s galloped up the stairs, charging back down with the box clutched tight in her hands, so excited that she forgets about the step in front of the house, which she trips on. We let out a collective gasp, but the box has already flown into the air and opened, releasing a cloud of grayish powder that rises and then, slowly, drifts to the ground.

  “Oh,” Lucy says.

  “Shit,” Marge says.

  Yolande crosses herself.

  Sophie just stands there, her mouth open.

  CHAPTER forty-nine

  Yolande bought the house. I thought there was a certain poetic justice to this, since she always felt it was rightly hers, but Isabelle was outraged. It turned out, however, that the suddenly miraculously valid deed was in Odette’s name, and she needed the money. By now Yolande must own half the village. She’s moved into the countess’s mansion and rents out the rest of her empire to assorted Belgians and Germans. Our house, which has a new kitchen and two bathrooms, is particularly popular with big families. All this I hear from Jojo, who writes devotedly. He would love to visit New York and, to this end, has offered to sell me his share of the hameau, Lucy having lost interest now that she’s renovating Yves’s ancestral home in the Auvergne. The Auvergne, she reports enthusiastically, has just as many abandoned hilltop villages as Santerre, and the charcuterie is far superior.

  If you were thinking that Jim and I were going to get married, think again, though I probably shouldn’t have burst out laughing when he proposed. As wounded as he was, he had to admit in the end that it was a pretty dumb idea, and that he was only doing it for sentimental reasons. In his heart of hearts it’s Odette he wants to marry, but that’s not going to happen, either. He went to see her in Paris, only to find her cold and distant, though I suspect what he came up against was just French formality. He’s dating a woman at work now—Karen Rothbaum, in Mergers and Acquisitions—and while I don’t think she’d mind merging with him eventually, she looks decidedly askance at what she’s described to Jim as our “weird relationship.” Poor Jim, he wants to do the right thing, but deep down, he’s as much of a reprobate as I am.

  Isabelle and Jiri went back to Prague, where Jiri resumed his philandering, though more discreetly. Isabelle has adopted the philosophical stance that as long as he stays out of the tabloids, she can live with it. She’s come to agree with his mother: In the end he will get bored. He’s already showing signs of flagging, which she attributes to his advancing age. Now that Prague is overrun with Americans, she and Maria are thinking of opening an art gallery or a boutique. She laments that it’s getting as expensive as Paris, and someone’s going to have to pay for the girls’ education. They’re going to spend the whole summer this year at Krasna Hora, and Jim and I are both invited. Jim eagerly accepted, but I persuaded him that going off on vacation with me just on the off chance that my stepmother might turn up was exactly the kind of thing Karen was bound to misinterpret.

  I just saw Odette in Paris. We had lunch at Lipp, right around the corner from the new apartment she bought with the proceeds from the house. The way she smiled when I asked if she got a decent price leads me to believe that she drove Yolande a hard bargain. I think there might be a new man in her life, but she kept mum on that, too, except to say mysteriously that she’s been spending a lot of time in Nice. “It’s much more civilized,” she said, tucking a strand of hair back under her headband. There truly is something ageless about her, and it’s not all surgery. With a malicious twinkle in her eye, she told me she ran into Philippe on the subway. He looked right though her but she’s sure he recognized her. There was a young woman with him. “But then, of course,” she added, “there will always be.”

  Afterward we went shopping on the Rue de Buci. I’ve gotten quite chic under her guidance; women at work are always asking me where I buy my clothes. As Odette explained to me, it’s the little things that count, like the cut of a skirt, or a certain way of knotting a scarf. Why do I bother? I’ve just been promoted to vice president. The higher you get on Wall Street, the more important it is how you look, and I plan to go high. The money is only secondary, though that’s nice too. It’s the power that I like. I’m still senior to Jim, which he’s always teasing me about. The truth is, his heart’s never been in it, and I fully expect him to drop out one of these days and open a restaurant, which is what he really wants to do.

  With seed money bullied out of the World Bank, Marge started a micro-lending fund for rural women in Quetzaltepec, Guatemala. They have a 98 percent repayment rate so far, which Marge attributes to no men being involved and, according to the annual report I just received, have financed such diverse projects as a tortilla factory, a dairy, and a herd of goats. All right, I sent a donation. Jane teaches drawing to girls in the attached school—definitely a case of art for art’s sake, as it’s hard to imagine what Guatemalan peasants are going to do with a mastery of chiaroscuro technique. She’s working on a series of paintings for an exhibit in New York next fall that she says are a total departure from her
former style. Whatever money it makes will go into the fund. Now that she’s no longer a bourgeois parasite, Marge has officially proposed marriage to her, though they’re not going to have the reception in Quetzaltepec as they think the locals might not yet be ready for alternative lifestyles. They’ll have it at Daphne’s place in Surrey instead. Jane has asked me and Lucy and Isabelle to be bridesmaids. The theme is going to be fair trade, apparently the latest thing in hippie lesbian weddings, and we all get to wear matching saris.

  Richard isn’t invited but he’s too busy anyway. Shortly after they got married, he and Albertine engineered a coup at the Marmite, unseating Marcelle and Fabrice and taking over the management. Lucy, who went over to sort out some custody issues, says that both Richard and the food are much improved. It seems he’s come into his own as a small town hotelier. Since taking the helm, he has overseen the renovation of the annex, put a dishwasher in the kitchen, and even convinced old Mr. Simonetti to start fishing again, the effects of which are much appreciated by patrons of the restaurant. Lucy chalks it all down to his finally feeling appreciated. They’ve become friends again, which is probably all they should have been in the first place, and Lucy is going to send Agnes for the summer.