by Maile Meloy
Jamie said nothing. Josephine’s light had gone out in the main house, and one of the lights was gone in the guest wing: Saffron’s.
“Her with other men,” he said finally.
“Like Martin?”
“I can’t even say his name—it makes me crazy. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
As if ashamed at having said too much, he said nothing as they crossed the last of the lawn, and then they were in the house, where they quietly climbed the stairs. He stopped outside her room and whispered, “I guess I can’t come in?”
“No,” she said.
He nodded as if he hadn’t expected anything different, and went into his own room.
Abby sat down at the little desk to change the names. She was acutely embarrassed that she hadn’t changed them yet. It had seemed pointless to stew over names when she might have to throw the whole thing away. But now it seemed important to change them, to keep the book and its invented but controllable plot distinct from the real and chaotic world.
30
CLARISSA FOUND IT impossible to break up with Del, and she thought this was the real problem with lesbianism. With a man, you might be friends eventually, but when you stopped sleeping together, there was a break. With a woman, how could it end? You were friends, you were best friends—you had confidences and other friends in common. Even if you stopped sleeping together, it could go on forever like that.
In the grocery store, in the dairy aisle, she got half-and-half for her own coffee, and two-percent for Del. Rounding the corner toward the produce, she found herself facing a handsome man with graying black hair. He stared at her.
“Clarissa Santerre?” he said.
She frowned.
“I’m Greg Haines, I was friends with Jimmy Vaughan. At Hermosa High. You went to Sacred Heart.”
“Hi,” Clarissa said. She didn’t remember a Greg. And he looked so old.
He said, “You look exactly like you did then.”
She laughed, a little bitterly, but pleased.
“I remember you so well,” he said. “I was really jealous of Jimmy. I wasn’t very popular, at Hermosa, and no girl like you ever talked to me there.”
“We didn’t have any boys, at Sacred Heart,” Clarissa reminded him. “We were happy to meet anyone.”
“No, but it was just in you,” he said. “To be warm and good.”
“You were friends with Jimmy Vaughan?”
“It’s okay if you don’t remember me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What are you up to?”
“Oh,” Clarissa said. “A lot of different things.”
Greg picked up a tomato, weighed it in his hand. “Look, this is weird,” he said, “but do you want to have dinner?”
“I can’t. I have plans.” The last thing she wanted to do was have dinner with a past she didn’t remember.
“Take my card,” he said. “I just moved here on a job. Call if you feel like it. It’s okay if you don’t.”
“Thank you,” she said, and she took the card. She couldn’t get over how old he looked. She was desperate to see a mirror, even the polished chrome around the dairy case, to see if she looked that old, too.
That night—having studied her face for a while in the bathroom, inspecting the crow’s-feet around her eyes—she had a shockingly explicit dream about having sex with Greg Haines in a Chinese restaurant. She didn’t even like Chinese food. She woke up from the dream in a sweat, and was surprised to see Del sleeping beside her.
31
ABBY WENT TO THE helipad at Josephine’s estancia to meet Fauchet when he arrived in the afternoon. He was a tall Frenchman with graying hair and a dark tan, who ducked as the helicopter rose again in a rush of air. He had two small bags. He shook Abby’s hand, and they walked along the path toward the house.
“Horrible machines,” he said. “I take a little pill.” He spoke English as if he had learned it in London in a hurry. “A marvelous invention, this pill.”
“You could take the car instead,” Abby said.
“I need two pills for that.” He eyed her. “Why are you in this crazy house?”
“My uncle is engaged to Saffron.”
He seemed thrown. “Is she here ?”
“They’re both here.”
“Well,” Fauchet said. “Your uncle is a fool. But she’s lovely to look at, yes?”
Abby shrugged.
“Women will never say it, to a man,” he said, “but they understand a charming girl better than men do. They know how to analyze all the points.”
“Maybe,” Abby said. “She’s in a bad mood. Josephine is forgetting a lot.”
“I see,” he said and seemed distracted. “I have thought about the man Saffron would marry,” he said. “He must be a Rubirosa, your uncle—a talented lover?”
“I don’t know how I would know that.”
“Of course not,” he said.
They were nearing the house, by the back, where the kennel was, and the two blond Labs barked happily at them. Abby lifted the latch and let the dogs come leaping out. The little boy, on the back patio with Magdalena, squealed when he saw them.
“Dogs!” he cried.
“Yes,” Abby said. “Dogs.”
“He learns English,” Fauchet said. “Splendid.”
“I don’t know why he can’t stay here and speak Spanish.”
“No one should stay in this country,” he said. “All the gifts in the world, the most beautiful land, owned by murderers and thieves. Argentina is like a beautiful woman who becomes a fascist’s whore.” He kissed the maid hello and said to the boy, “Viens, mon petit.”
The boy held up his arms, and the graying Frenchman scooped him up. Magdalena went inside with the bags.
“Bonjour,”the Frenchman said to the child. “Comment vas-tu?”
“Très bien,”the little boy said.
“Tu as une nouvelle amie americaine?”Fauchet asked.
“Oui,”the little boy said.
Abby said, “No one told me he spoke French.”
“Mais tu parles très bien, n’est-ce pas, mon cher?”Fauchet asked the boy.
The boy nodded shyly.
“We’ve been naming things,” Abby said. “He never once gave the French word for something.”
“He’s very intelligent. He knows what to speak to whom.”
“What do you call him? Everyone here calls him something different.”
“I call him le petit . It saves trouble.”
Magdalena came back to say that Monsieur Fauchet’s room was ready, and she led the new visitor away.
At dinner, with Fauchet beside her, Josephine seemed buoyant and happy. She wore more makeup than usual, and a narrow white ribbon in her hair. Saffron had kissed Fauchet on both cheeks, but he didn’t pay her too much attention in front of her mother. The table was set in green and white, and there was cold cucumber soup, but Josephine barely noticed the food. She seemed to ring the little bell by her plate whenever she felt like it; the soup bowls stayed a long time while she talked about the terrible situation in Romania, and the meat course was taken away before anyone was half finished. Hector the butler seemed unsettled.
When Josephine’s monologue flagged, Monsieur Fauchet said, in the silence, “Miss Collins was surprised to learn that le petit speaks French.”
Saffron said, “He does?”
Josephine stared at Fauchet as if she were thinking very hard about the question, but it had startled her for a moment.
“Yes, of course,” Fauchet said. “I speak with him. He does very well.”
“Mother, why didn’t you tell me?” Saffron asked. “I speak French.”
“I forgot,” Josephine said, flustered.
“That he speaks French?”
“No!” her mother said. “I forgot that you speak French. So you see, I didn’t think it would matter.”
“But you speak it, too,” Saffron said. “You could talk to him.”
“We speak Span
ish together,” Josephine snapped. “My Spanish is just fine.”
“But French is your first language.”
“Shut up, Saffron!” her mother said, in a shrill, high voice. It was the first time Abby had heard her say anyone’s first name. They fell silent as Hector brought orange soufflés.
“O-kay,” Saffron said softly, when he left.
“I knew he spoke French,” her mother insisted. “I just—forget, sometimes.”
There was a long pause, and then Fauchet said, “What a beautiful soufflé. You have the most brilliant chef, Josephine.”
“I discovered him when he was only a rôtisseur, ” Josephine said, out of habit. She had said it at every meal so far. “I taught him how to cook.”
Saffron said, “Don’t you dare touch that bell before we’re finished.”
“I never ring it to finish,” Josephine said. Then she sat chastened at the head of the table, looking diminished and sad. Even the white bow in her hair looked wilted. She had let her bright, defensive expression go and looked ten years older.
After they all left the table, Fauchet walked Josephine up to her room. Saffron and Jamie went to play backgammon in the guest wing, and Abby sat outside, to avoid being drawn into the game. Fauchet stayed in Josephine’s room for a long time, and then he came out onto the dark patio.
“Ah, hello,” he said. “I was coming to smoke. Should I go somewhere else?”
Abby shook her head, and he sat in a wrought-iron chair, a little distance away, and lit a narrow cigar.
“Where do you come from?” he asked.
“California.” The smoke drifting over smelled sweet.
“I love California,” he said. “I was there as a boy, during the war. My mother knew some Americans in the movies, and she took me to Los Angeles, to get out of France.” He smiled, a little sadly. “I fell in love with Rita Hayworth, and I wouldn’t eat for weeks. I was so enraged at being only fourteen, and meeting such a woman.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It got better. It’s strange now, Los Angeles. You live there?”
“My grandparents do. I grew up north of San Francisco.”
“You’re very close to this uncle, James.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Please, my dear. I have lived a long time.”
“Yes,” Abby said. “I am.”
“He is not the match for Saffron, you know.”
Abby said nothing.
“She was an immensely spoiled and beautiful little girl. With the adored father who is never there. So there is never enough for her, and she has learned to get more. This charm has the desired effect. Men go to her, but one thinks—this will be a problem.”
“I think Jamie knows it’s a problem.”
“But he is engaged still?”
“I guess.”
Fauchet smoked his cigar and looked out at the dark lawn. “I knew Josephine when she was twenty-three in St. Jean,” he said. “You should have seen her then. More beautiful than her daughter. She was charming and happy, great fun. I used to take her up in a plane. Everyone wanted to take her up in a plane. There was a whole family of Brazilian playboy brothers, they were all in love with her, they would wait in line to take her up in the air.”
“Where does the money come from?”
He laughed. “The great question. The father was in the shipping. He was not principled, I think, but very rich.”
“Was Josephine the only child?”
Fauchet nodded. “Little Magdalena the maid is a good friend of mine. She says you write in your room.”
Abby flushed.
“Is it a book?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have things here for it,” he said. “Already you have the Brazilian playboys and the swindler’s daughter.”
“Thank you.”
“This is not the kind of book you’re writing?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You can keep the playboys,” he said. “For the next one. Also the boy starving himself for Rita Hayworth.”
“Okay.”
“Bon,”he said, putting out his little cigar. “I will think of more.”
32
EVERY TIME SAFFRON forgot where she’d hung her swimsuit, or transposed a French word for an English one, she had a shock of fear that she, too, was losing her mind. The fear made her irrational and anxious, which convinced her even further that she was becoming her mother.
The fact that Jamie wouldn’t sleep with her made it worse. He was just trying to prove he could resist, but it made Saffron feel at once old and ugly, and that her youth and beauty were being wasted. That morning, Fauchet had caught her alone and said this was a nice young man, amusing, but not the one for her. He said the affair of the heart is like tennis. You should not play with someone so far below your ability; it will frustrate you both and make your game worse. Saffron had laughed. But she couldn’t stand sleeping alone.
She went to Jamie’s room and said, “I want to have a baby.”
Jamie looked up at her. He was lying across his bed reading her mother’s copy of W . “You’re kidding me,” he said.
“Why are you reading that?”
“To see if you were in the gossip pages.”
“For what? Going to visit my crazy mother? They announced my going to Stanford and then they lost interest. I was sleeping with boys without titles.”
“Nasty habit.”
“Hard to kick.”
He closed the magazine. “What do you mean you want to have a kid?”
“I do,” she said, and she sat on his bed. “I could start losing my memory soon. I’m twenty-eight. If I got pregnant now, I’d be forty-nine when the kid was twenty. I think my mother’s problems started when she was younger than that. I don’t want to go crazy when my kids are still in college.”
“That’s a lot of hypotheticals,” Jamie said. “ Ifyou had a kid, if you lost your memory, if your kids could get into college…”
“This isn’t funny.”
“You already have a kid,” Jamie said. “Someone will have to take T.J. eventually.”
Saffron made a face. “I don’t want that kid.”
“Yours will be better?”
“It’ll be mine. Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”
Jamie stared at her, and then he started to laugh. “Is that what this kid thing is about?”
She thought about that. Did she really want a baby, or did she just want Jamie to stop acting like she was unfuckable?
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Are you still taking pills?”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
He pushed the magazine off the bed, and she lay facing him. He pushed her hair from her face, and she tilted her cheek into his hand.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “I’m afraid of you.”
“Don’t be.”
His hands were cool on her skin. “If I do this,” he said, “you’ll start cheating again. You can’t be with one person.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is,” he said. He untied the knot in the pireo at her hip and unwrapped a layer of it. She lifted her hip to let him pull the cloth free. “You need two men paying attention to you, so you can play them off each other. It must have to do with your parents.”
“That isn’t sexy,” she said. “And it isn’t true.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Even if it were,” she said, impatiently, “there’s no one here to cheat with. There’s Fauchet and the gardener.”
“And the chef.”
“He’s gay.”
“I’ve seen him look at you.”
Saffron got to her knees on the bed and unhooked the clasp of her bikini top, and she knew she had him. Jamie’s face slackened with lust, and she felt whole again, and wanted.
When they were finished, she lay with his arm across her and thought about the ludicrous idea of her mother�
�s old lover, or the gardener or the fey chef. None of them was a danger.
Then she remembered that Martin Russell would be stopping in Buenos Aires in a week. She thought, as she fell asleep, that she would wait a few days to tell Jamie that.
33
ONE MORNING IN Argentina, when Abby’s days had started to run together, Josephine didn’t come down to breakfast.
Magdalena took a tray up to her room and came back looking bloodless and inscrutable. She knelt by M. Fauchet’s chair.
“La señora se murió,”she whispered to him.
“Oh, dear,” he said. To Saffron, he said, “Elle est morte.”
But Saffron was already running up the stairs; it sounded like she was taking them three at a time.
At the table, they sat in silence, and then Jamie said, “Do you think I should go up?”
“In a minute,” Fauchet said.
Magdalena said that Josephine had been in her bed, as if asleep. She didn’t wake when the maid, noticing a strange smell in the room, set the breakfast tray by the bed, or opened the curtains, or even touched the señora’s hand and felt for her pulse.
“ PauvreJosephine,” Fauchet said. “She was such a lively girl, when she was a girl. You can go upstairs now, James.”
Jamie went. Magdalena slipped away.
“Well, my dear,” Fauchet said to Abby. “There are going to be some surprises now. All the money goes to the boy.”
Abby heard a cry from upstairs—Saffron. But she couldn’t have heard Fauchet; it must have been actual grief. Abby thought of her father’s death, how it had taken her down for months and still exerted a dark pull.
“I expected Josephine would change her mind,” Fauchet said. “I didn’t expect she would die.”
“Maybe she wanted Saffron to adopt him,” Abby said.
“This may be a problem, too. We have a visitor today. Excuse me, please, I have to see some papers.”
He stood with an apologetic nod, and Abby was left alone, feeling freshly robbed of her father among the abandoned coffee cups and jam jars and plates.
Josephine’s doctor came from Buenos Aires in a helicopter, pronounced her officially dead, and called for a mortician’s van to come and collect the body. The doctor had a wide mustache and a wrinkled gray suit. He asked for a drink, to calm his fear of helicopters and heights, and over a tumbler of scotch he warned Abby that the morticians were notoriously late. There was nothing you could do. Then he left.