by Andrea Lee
Then, suddenly, it was over: the taxi pulled up in front of a hotel, in a cobblestoned courtyard with an old well and clipped golden trees, the lake a jewel in the background, so different from Lake Geneva. And the tall blond boy was there, eagerly opening the car door, and the small father wafted the driver and her terror away with a fistful of francs. She had arrived where she was meant to be, where she had been heading all her life. And though they winced at her clothes, they were immediately complimentary. Ravishing, the father said, clapping his son on the back as if they had settled a bet. Very American, as you said, but with something more. He made a rectangle with the fingers and thumbs of both hands and peered through it as if through a camera. A very definite something, he added.
* * *
Now, at lunch, they even praise Anna for her good appetite, as if eating were somehow a rare talent. Eating course after extraordinary course with flavors intensified by their incantatory names: feuillantine d’escargots à l’achillée et pimprenelle; rissoles de poires aux fruits secs et sabayon. And wines: Chignin-Bergeron, Mondeuse. And coffee, and a plate of little squashy pastries that she wants to snatch and stuff into her elephant bag. She devours them and the chocolate truffles that follow, taking fewer than she’d like, forcing herself for the sake of decency to pause between each one. She tries an old liqueur from a bottle with spidery writing on the label, and it gives her throat a hot glazed feeling as she listens to the father talk about politics. There has been an election, an important one, and he has had something to do with it. It doesn’t interest Anna, but it gives resonance to the cloud of language around her, gives her the sense that she has stepped into a realm where high deeds are performed by grave men in dark ambassadorial suits, and the fates of nations decided.
When the father sees her straining to look attentive, he immediately stops talking about politics and switches back to compliments. How small her wrists are; how instinctively well she chose her food; what a wonderful university she will attend next fall—yes, he knows the name; who does not?—how remarkable that she speaks French with such ease and can even recognize a reference to Mallarmé: le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui. The son says little, staring at both his father and Anna. Occasionally he shows off by speaking in stilted nasal English. The father asks about Anna’s family and laughs as she describes her sisters: Barb the saint, who is playing the guitar on a Catholic youth tour this summer; Becca the slut, with her secret tattoo, whose boyfriends always end up going after Anna. Described in French they sound somehow fascinating, not boring or sleazy at all. Three beautiful sisters, the father laughs. Like something out of the Brothers Grimm.
The restaurant is a short walk from the hotel, and they stroll back in the dazzling sunlight as speedboats drone far out on the water. The hotel is a low ivy-covered building that wraps around the courtyard where the taxi arrived. It has small arched windows set deep in stone, and palm trees in pots, and an air of fitting the spot where it sits between the village and the lake promenade as a diamond fits the setting of a ring. It is called the Clos Saint Barthélemy and was once, the father says, a Benedictine abbey, built by the monks expelled from Geneva during the Reformation. Anna pays little attention to this, because as they walk the son is squeezing her hand. She feels tipsy and reckless, her head swelled like a balloon by all the homage. She is drawn to this boy, whom she had judged dull and strange-looking earlier, but who now seems like one of the lords of the earth.
It is unclear what is going to happen. Three in the afternoon after an epic meal: obviously time for a rest. They talk of this in the hotel lobby, another oasis of polished wood and mandarin-faced servitors. The father—Anna has begun to call him Olivier, though she continues to address him with a formal vous—proposes with some hesitancy that she spend the rest of the day and the night there at the lake, and that the next day he and his son will make a detour from their drive to Paris and take her back to Lausanne. The hesitancy, she realizes, in one of her few accurate feats of perception all day, is because Olivier is suddenly faced with an ironclad obligation: he must treat her as the proper young girl he has, despite all her efforts, understood her to be. An image she wants to toss aside completely. From a very early age, for all her angelic looks, Anna has on occasion displayed a calm, almost casual inclination to step far outside the usual limits, a trait that has alarmed her sisters—even Becca the slut—and boyfriends alike. It’s at work now: at this point she would agree to anything, from more wine and compliments to stripping naked and celebrating a Black Mass.
Of course, she says impatiently, she will stay. At this the son, with his sheep’s face and curls, puts his arm around her and kisses her cheek with a ceremonious air, as if she were a cherished young bride. And the father spreads his arms in a delicate sketch of an embrace that includes them both, and says, in a magnanimous paternal tone, So, children. You would like a room; cela saute aux yeux. You can have the special one I reserved. It is such a rarity that it even has a name—La Chambre du Prieur—and I do hope you will appreciate it. He asks for Anna’s passport and goes to the desk to reserve another room for himself and inform them that mademoiselle will be staying.
In the elevator, Anna kisses the son, Étienne. It’s not as glorious a kiss as it should be: his lips and tongue feel oddly wooden. But none of that matters when he leads her down a hall to a door with a gold handle—the key swings from a fat silk tassel—which opens to reveal a wonderful room, a room that is like a chapel, a cave whose walls and ceilings are covered with a swarm of painted figures. Amber, red, blue, green, both somber and resplendent. Frescoes of saints and angels and Biblical throngs, curling vines and dim gilded fruit running in and out of the hollows of a coffered ceiling. Deep red rugs, a bed with a velvet canopy and cover, old paneling shining with wax. This is the room where the prior—a rather sybaritic prior—ran the affairs of the old abbey hundreds of years ago. The sumptuous apparition takes Anna by surprise, and for a second she is unable to speak. It is the first time that she has been in a room of such splendor without a museum rope to keep her from touching things. This is the first time, actually, that she has even been in a hotel room not paid for by her parents. But she quickly rises to the occasion, as she has been doing all day. She feels, in fact, that she was born to rise to such occasions.
She and Étienne stand by the window; they kiss, they kiss more, and then they undress clumsily and make love in haste, yanking back the velvet cover on the bed and flinging themselves on heavy linen sheets knobby with embroidery. Anna doesn’t enjoy it much, except as an appropriate element of the intoxication of the day, the frantic sense of life converging at the place where she is. She liked the pastries at lunch more. She thinks briefly about her boyfriend and the other boys back home, about wilder times in places that were sometimes awful and uncomfortable. But one thing she enjoys: how beautiful the two of them are, naked, in the beautiful room, how they complete it. The French boy has hairless pink skin more delicate than her own. After each orgasm his chest remains mottled for a long time with a bright-red flush. His penis is pink and large, though it seems somehow childish to her, a novelty because it is uncircumcised. In bed, he gives up the stilted English he is so proud of and talks to her in French. Away from his father, he is more commanding: he comments knowledgeably on her body and its loveliness, with finicky precision spreads her open, makes her display herself to him.
They exchange life stories. She tells him about the taunts she and her sisters endured growing up in a mixed-race family in the suburbs. He tells her about the taunts he endured as a boy, in a provincial town in the Ile-de-France, because his parents had never married. Curiously enough, these confidences don’t make them feel closer; instead, they thicken the peculiar mist between them that might be called “glamour”—the opacity that makes them more attractive to each other. He tells her how his father, who left the provinces and got rich doing something with newspapers and politicians, took him off to Paris at age seventeen to be an apprentice at Le Figaro.
He brags about the trips he takes to Dakar and Marrakech, and describes an extravagant and disorderly bachelor life in Paris. Eventually, he tells her that he loves her. She trembles and embraces him tightly at this, not because she is moved but because she wants to shake off the tepidness of her own response, to quash a tiny commonsensical voice in the back of her mind which remarks that he must be slightly feebleminded to blurt it out like that. In a tone whose decisiveness, although she does not know it, exactly resembles that of her mother, the Enforcer, Anna says that she loves him, too. In French, which makes it sound so different, so much more important.
They fall asleep and wake up and then sleep again, and after a while it is like being bound and gagged in silk. She is aware only of a series of isolated flashes: his rough curly head, the sound of a horn from the lake, the mineral water they gulp down, the soreness between her legs when she splashes awkwardly in the bidet, how in the deepening light the figures in the frescoes seem to lean out of the walls.
* * *
At six o’clock, Étienne says that they should go and join his father. They dress, and he says, You know, I’d like to buy you some nicer underwear. Like French girls wear. White, blue, with lace. He doesn’t let her put on her clumsy skirt and tights. He says, Here, wear my jeans. I have another pair with me. Now you look gorgeous. Like a French girl. She lets him zip the jeans up, as if he were a lady’s maid. They are heavy denim, completely different from American jeans, and they hang loosely but handsomely on her slender hips. By the way, he says as he opens his bag, My father is a misogynist—do you know what that is? He dislikes women, but he really seems to admire you. Not like most of the girls I introduce to him. Isn’t that lucky?
Anna is studying herself within the tessellated gilt frame of a mirror. Complete, as if in an old portrait, she sees a girl in French jeans, her long hair in place, her taches de rousseur, her mascara-smudged eyes, and she doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t seem to expect a reply.
Then they go downstairs and through the lobby, feeling the hotel staff and the well-dressed loiterers watching, observing with approval because the two of them are young and handsome and have clearly been in bed all afternoon. Anna thinks back to an Elizabethan poem she studied in A.P. English the previous fall, in which the poet describes the circles within circles of creation: Heaven, nature, the newly discovered continents, all of civilization revolving around a pair of lovers on a bed. This was what the painted bedroom, the famous restaurant, the omniscient faces of the concierge and the maître d’, the mountains and the lake were created for—as a setting for the small naked object that she and this boy make when they are joined together.
Étienne is behaving like a proper boyfriend now; he wears a stunned expression of bliss while he strolls with his arm tight around her. The sun is beginning to set as they enter the village and pass into a small square where they find his father sitting in a café. Beside him, smiling, is a swarthy young man in a khaki military uniform, who seems hardly older than Étienne. Both the young man and Olivier are drinking glasses of something cloudy, and they are chatting so merrily and confidingly as Anna and Étienne arrive that Anna supposes the soldier must be a family friend, encountered by chance. But no—Olivier introduces him as Paul, and says that he met him a half hour ago, when Paul’s platoon band gave a Saturday-afternoon concert. Paul played the trombone. And I could see he was a very promising young man, Olivier says, in a teasing voice. Paul the soldier turns red at this. He looks as if he might be part Turkish or Algerian, with a melon-shaped head on which his shaved hair makes a bluish shadow, round olive cheeks, jug ears, and a pair of melting brown eyes with bizarrely long eyelashes.
Anna and Étienne sit down at the table and order two more of the cloudy drinks. It is Anna’s first Pernod: with the ghostly licorice taste in her mouth she feels as if she were living in the pages of her sixth-grade French textbook, where Monsieur LeBrun meets Monsieur LeBlanc pour l’apéritif. Étienne acts satisfyingly infatuated, and keeps staring at her, playing with her hands, praising the way she looks in his jeans. The lake is red in the glow from behind the mountains, and elegant people are walking by and sitting around them. Anna spots a tall woman with gold hair piled in a rigid construction of knobs on the back of her head, and a pink suit trimmed in white leather. The woman is intensely beautiful in an adult way that Anna has never seen back home, and Anna announces that she wants to look like that when she’s older.
You will if you want to, Olivier says. But you have to be at least forty, and you have to know certain things, to be beautiful like that. His eyes cross Anna’s and offer a momentary bland challenge, which for the first time that day gives her the sensation of danger.
The atmosphere has shifted now that the soldier is there. Anna did not expect to step into Paradise when she took the taxi across the mountains, but she quickly got used to it. These people were complete strangers, but they offered her instant worship. Greedily, she expected it to continue. But the focus has changed, and not because of Étienne but because of his father. As at lunch, Olivier sits at the table offering a constant stream of sophisticated compliments—but they are all for the round-faced, jug-eared, red-cheeked soldier. Paul, it seems, is a handsome boy, an extraordinary boy, an intelligent boy, even a brilliant boy. All this is observed in the older man’s cool voice, as he smokes cigarette after cigarette. He pauses once to eye his son and Anna benevolently. Ah, one can tell that the children had a very good time this afternoon. There is that slight flush, that delicate, weary bloom. Did you like La Chambre du Prieur, my dears?
All through dinner, which they eat at the hotel—in another grand restaurant, filled with rich weekenders and foie gras and syrupy golden light—it is the same thing, the almost suffocating string of compliments directed at the soldier, who continues to blush and duck his head. Anna knows from books and films that men make love to other men, but this is more like a complicated game whose rules she doesn’t understand. Words like “innuendo” drift through her mind, though the older man is quite straightforward about what he is doing. She studies Olivier, who seems ageless in his jeans and soft sweater and jacket; the skin of his face full and radiant, his nose as pointed as Pinocchio’s, his moss-green eyes somehow sad and querulous, even when his voice is at its most caressing. The flattery intensifies, becomes almost Baroque, and it is as if the older man were amusing himself at the expense of the three young people sitting around him, even though he keeps his gaze fixed, with precise intent, on the soldier. As for his son, Étienne, he has fallen by the wayside: he continues to talk charmingly to Anna both in English and in French, to gaze at her, to caress her knees under the table, but at the same time she can feel a careful blankness in his manner, a deliberate unseeing aimed in his father’s direction. Anna orders curried soup and guinea hen cooked with wild mushrooms; she eats caramelized pineapple and drinks verbena tea. For this last she is praised by father and son—We think a girl who drinks a tisane after dinner is very refined—but it is clear that no clever thing she does will make her the star of the show again.
She and Étienne excuse themselves finally, but Olivier says jovially that he thinks he’ll stay downstairs in the bar to chat with his new soldier friend. He rises and gives his son and Anna a warm kiss on each cheek, and Anna for an instant has an urge to slap his face. Only much later in her life will she ask herself whether she had expected him to make love to her, too. Right now she feels toward Olivier the kind of furious disappointment that up to this moment she has felt only when very angry at her parents. As for the interloping soldier, Paul, she can’t even look at him; he might give her a familiar smirk or a wink of complicity, and that would be unbearable.
* * *
Upstairs, in the Prior’s Room, the curtains have been drawn and the bed turned down for the night. And once more between the linen sheets she and Étienne hold each other like fretful children. Anna feels stuffed and queasy from all the eating and drinking, and sore from making love too much. Also, she is suddenl
y sick of Étienne, of his blond smell that is infantile and a little off, like week-old milk, of the fact that he is the only reason she has for being here in this magnificent room. She can’t see her watch, but she knows it is too early or too late to leave. The windows are shuttered tight in the European way, the way they do it back at her dormitory. She is a prisoner here for the night, in a luxury cell. She thinks with nostalgia of her roommates in Lausanne, who have no doubt spent the weekend visiting the public pool, sipping bad beer in the tourist bars down at Ouchy, dancing with South Americans at the horrible student discothèque, Le Treizième Siècle. She is having the adventure that all those daydreaming American girls long for, and it has consumed her, left behind only this small point of alien consciousness, alight in a vigil amid the mountains, the past, the Old Country.
It is probable that Ètienne feels sick of her, too. They have made love in every possible position. He has described to her what hard work it was, back in Paris, introducing his ex-girlfriend to oral sex; confided that he thinks he got a Spanish girl pregnant on a vacation in the Balearics, and that he has to perform a ritual act of masturbation every night before going to sleep. With the air of passing on great chunks of wisdom, he has even entrusted to her several crackpot theories about America—that the wrong side won the Civil War, for one—and he has praised bad American movies and horrendous rock and roll that nobody Anna knows would be caught dead listening to. And Anna, instead of bursting out laughing and telling him that he is full of shit, as she would have done with any boy back home, has listened with solemn attention.
Now they lie in a halfhearted embrace, neither sleeping nor talking, until Étienne moves his legs restlessly and complains of a stomach ache. It was the fish, perhaps, he opines, in a way that Anna doesn’t yet know is very Gallic. My father has something for an upset stomach. I should go and ask him. I’ll just pull on some clothes. Étienne sits up in bed, his pink muscular shoulders looking as new as those of a plastic doll against the lamplight. He swings his legs out of the bed. But then he pauses and looks for an instant back over his shoulder at Anna. There is no expression at all in his round blue eyes. Non, je ne vais pas, he says. I won’t go. I’d wake him. He wouldn’t mind, of course, but—He breaks off, and Anna can clearly picture the melon-shaped head of Paul the soldier, with his smudge of shaved hair and preposterous eyelashes. The steadfast tin soldier, she thinks for some reason, and for a moment she feels sorry for Étienne. He slowly gets back into bed, and there is nothing for the two of them to do but make love again, which they do without any pretense of tenderness until Anna feels scraped raw. Afterward, though, she sleeps so soundly that even a summer storm over the lake barely disturbs her.