Sometimes this paradoxical intimacy plays tricks on me. Unable to say much of importance about any of these often prestigious people with whom I’ve been superficially acquainted since forever, I rarely mention that I know them from L’Agapanthe. If I happen to run into one of them anywhere else, my real friends are then surprised when I say hello.
“You know So-and-so?”
“Yes, a little.”
And the next second, So-and-so calls out gaily, “Laure, dear heart! How’s your backhand? And how are your loonies? Don’t cure them too much, or you’ll do yourself out of a job. Don’t you think I’ve slimmed down?”
So right away I look like the modest little hypocrite who pretends she can barely stand up on skis, until, having dazzled her companions on the slopes, she confesses that she’s the all-around champion of France. And my friends, wrongly assuming that my discretion stems from my loathing of name-dropping or my professional habit of keeping secrets, remind me that not saying anything can be just as annoying as boasting.
Eyeing Frédéric, who was leaving an astronomical tip on the table, I remarked fondly, “I gather that you’ll be perched in a box seat at L’Agapanthe, eager to critique any dramatic developments.”
“Precisely.”
“What do you mean, a rich husband?”
Marie had actually gasped in disbelief when I suggested Frédéric’s solution on the phone the next day.
“Why not?” I countered.
Wasn’t that the oldest game in the book? Women from Paris to Moscow and on to New York went husband hunting! All right: the idea would never have occurred to me before my conversation with Frédéric, because I’d always considered this sport something reserved for women who were flat broke, which I wasn’t. So joining the hunt, I’d felt, would be immoral, a ploy as unthinkable as my applying to get my health expenses reimbursed from the Sécurité sociale.
“Why not? Because we already are.”
“Are what?”
“Rich, dummy!”
Marie was right. We were rich. At least on paper. We were shareholders in companies that didn’t pay dividends, but we were still good catches.
“And so what?”
“But … how would we get started?” Marie insisted.
Ironically, unlike true gold diggers, we were used to being courted ourselves by people dazzled by money, and we could smell them a mile away.
Romantic idealists, my sister and I were interested only in love and friendship. Money turned out to be a most inconvenient advantage, attracting fortune hunters while often driving everyone else away. Few decent men even dared approach us if they weren’t well-off, and if they were, they couldn’t quite stomach the fact that we frankly didn’t need them to get by. It was the same thing with friendship. How could we invite people on holiday or to a restaurant if they couldn’t return the favor? It was equally complicated for us to give our friends gifts without unintentionally making them feel obligated to us.
“No arrogance, no ostentation”: the mantra of our childhood. As if we’d needed that! Because we were so miserably conscious of our wealth that we had always tried obsessively to hide it from our friends.
Sometimes that was easy. We never mentioned our trips on private jets or those endless afternoons in the changing rooms of couture houses with our mother, the couturier, and his head seamstress. And we hardly risked bumping into our little pals chez Givenchy, Saint-Laurent, Ungaro, or on the tarmac at Le Bourget, Teterboro, or Biggin Hill.
Our predicament turned dicey when we had to convert our nanny into an English granny, or the driver picking us up at school into a family friend. It became frankly hair-raising when we had to keep coming up with the appropriate traffic jams to explain being late for school on Monday morning after a round-trip to New York on the Concorde.
Our house betrayed us. Rare were the friends Marie and I dared invite home. We’d tell them that our town house was just an ordinary apartment building sheltering many families. Already puzzled by the maze of service stairs we climbed to reach our floor (thus avoiding our imposing front door, which would have given the game away), our guests invariably wondered why there was no kitchen and no bedroom for our parents. So we’d casually refer to our “duplex” to reassure them, as well as to account for the dumbwaiter that delivered our meals, which were revolting, actually, because our chef, no doubt considering himself too distinguished to feed mere children, handed this chore off to a kitchen boy.
Later, during those tough internships when our father decided to introduce us to the real world, Marie and I continued honing our skills in the art of dissimulation. At one point I was a lowly employee in the accounting department of a construction and public works firm where I wasn’t allowed to leave the building without permission from my boss, a truly odious bully. I used to slip quietly away, however, to the office of the CEO (a living god accessible only to department heads), who just happened to be a friend of my parents and welcomed me with piping hot coffee and a game of chess. One day my creepy little boss discovered the scam. Drenched in sweat and worry, he buttonholed me in a hall to apologize while begging me to put in a good word for him. His obsequious flip-flopping disgusted me, but I was chiefly relieved that my colleagues, who had taken me under their wing (and for whom I surreptitiously punched in every other day), did not suspect a thing. Otherwise, they might have felt like fools, and in a way, they would have been right, since I had never really been one of them and thus had never needed their protection, which my visits with the CEO would have made cruelly clear.
I’d been a coward, behaving like someone safely ensconced in a cushy position. In my defense, though, I should say that at that time, the wealthy were all considered assholes. And it didn’t help that most people I met flaunted their “political consciousness” mainly by posing as enemies of the rich, a situation that would reverse itself ten years later, when heirs and heiresses would be welcomed to parade around in magazines like movie stars. Deep down, though, nothing had changed, because money, having neither reputation nor personality of its own, is a constant magnet for fantasies and projections, and will always channel its share of bitterness and dreams.
“As for knowing how to hunt down a rich husband,” I finally admitted to Marie, “you’re right, we’re probably not up to this. And I’m only attracted to weirdos. I like trying to fix problem men, I can’t help it.”
“Yes, so I’ve noticed,” said my sister slyly, alluding to my two years of nightmare wedlock to a man I’d found irresistible and who’d proved mad as a hatter. “But why couldn’t you fix up a rich weirdo?”
Good point. I laughed. “Shall we give it a try?”
“You bet!”
“But how do we find these Prince Charmings?”
“Oh, please!”
Marie and I are very close. I’m thirty years old, she’s thirty-two. We live a few blocks from each other. At the local café we’re known as “the sisters,” even if we go there separately, I with my son and Marie with her lovers. Our close relationship hasn’t always been obvious because we are quite different, almost opposites. My sister looks Swedish, while I could be Brazilian. She has our father’s blond coloring and the svelte silhouette of our mother, a brunette like me, and I got my solid, down-to-earth looks from our father. Marie is always impeccably turned out, whereas I seem to be at loose ends, my curly hair and curvy figure creating an impression of undisciplined excess, the way words can sometimes outrun thoughts.
When we were children, though, we had even more reason to feel different from each other. Taking her lead from our nanny, Miss Ross, our mother had declared that Marie was the pretty one and I the smart one, insisting all the while that she simply doted on both daughters, a charming affirmation we learned to periodically reinterpret as time went by. In fact, our mother never quite knew what to do with us or, what’s more, what to make of us. Beginning with our conception. What if pregnancy spoiled her figure? True, she was a beauty. A tall, whippet-thin brunette with superb c
heekbones, she had glowing skin, an aristocratic nose, slightly almond-shaped black eyes, and she carried herself like a dancer, as truly beautiful women so often do. Her anxiety over losing her figure soon gave way to that of losing her marriage, and she resigned herself to pregnancy only under pressure from a husband so resolute that he threatened her with divorce. She was determined, however, never to become one of those “loving and frumpy mothers who devote themselves to their children and give up trying to look attractive,” as she put it. So she hired an Englishwoman in her sixties to take charge of our upbringing, an undertaking with which our mother was most careful not to interfere.
Nanny
I’m ten years old. No one suspects a thing. Not even Marie, who is incapable, luckily, of imagining Nanny’s duplicity. So I keep quiet. Just as I keep to myself all the terrible ways she mistreats me. Because I don’t want to spoil Marie’s fragile happiness by revealing how our governess tortures me as soon as we’re alone together. That madwoman actually beats me, using any pretext to take her resentment out on me with vicious blows. And I am in such fear of these violent episodes, which leave me staggering in terror, that I live mesmerized by her moods, like an appliance plugged into a wall socket, picking up on the fluctuations of her emotional current and preparing myself for the next crisis.
Her anger comes on like wind billowing a sail: I can see the rage course through her, taking over, and I await in despair the moment when Nanny will take me away with her, out of sight, to vent her fury by attacking me like an evil giant. A formidable opponent, she has endless tricks up her sleeve.
She has decided, for example, that I am absentminded and has made it her mission to root out this flaw that seriously threatens my chances in life, when in reality I have found in daydreaming a way to escape from the nightmare she forces me to live. The upshot is that Nanny spends her time testing me in front of my sister and parents by sending me to fetch a certain paper in the library, or a phone number in her address book, or some object on the night table in her room, when the object is actually in her closet.
Off I go, my eyes already blurry with tears. Beginning my search, I lose time looking without seeing, hunting without thinking about what I want to find in the room. Like Gretel, I am lost, as surely as in a forest at nighttime, but Gretel didn’t know how lucky she was to have Hansel by her side when she met the witch who ate children. I am alone when Nanny walks in, supposedly to help me in the task she has set me. “You’re useless, you stupid girl,” she screams, “clumsy and pathetic! You’d better hop to it, you hear me? Or I’m going to lose my temper!”
She often pulls my hair or slaps me, when she’s not throwing dictionaries, chairs, or even small tables at me. Sometimes she just crosses her arms and hisses through her teeth, “Go on, look, show me how you do it. Oh, you’re a fine sight, with your runny nose and that hair in your eyes, you poor thing, I feel sorry for you.” And before I find anything, always before I can succeed, she points a long finger at the object I seek: “And that? What’s that?” I bow my head in submission and defeat, but she piles on humiliation, stoking her fury: “What is that? Are you going to answer me or not!”
Then I tell her what she wants to hear, but I already know that her excitement has crested and must subside. And in fact, sated with violence, she quickly emerges from her trance to tell me coldly, “Go wash your face, it’s an ugly mess.” Then she turns on her heel to rejoin my parents, my sister, and the eventual guests before whom she immediately plays the model employee who has just had to deal with the teary tantrum of a poor neurotic child. And when I reappear, she pats me on the head, pretending to forgive me: “Oh! She’s still all upset …”
An apparently well-meaning exclamation I correctly interpret as an extra insult intended to let me know that my face is swollen from crying, so I now look a fright.
“There’s no reason to make such a fuss, after all!” she concludes, letting me know that the incident is closed, that I’d better not tell my mother about it, because Nanny is the boss, able to disguise her cruelty as affection and turn my tears of suffering into the whimpering of a little girl prone to overdramatize. I could have killed her.
After such episodes, Nanny avoids my eyes for a few hours, no doubt unnerved by the hatred she can read there, as well as my understanding of her pitiful attempt to dominate her charges by buying the good graces of Marie—who looks up to her—while trying to destroy me, even though I could unmask her.
She hasn’t even enough goodness in her character to realize that I would never do that, wouldn’t ever deprive Marie of the illusion of having a kind governess who dotes on the delightful little girl in her care. For that would spoil the tiny bit of joy my sister finds in her relationship with the woman we’ve nicknamed Louis XI because she shares that sour, stern profile found in our history books. I can tell that Marie quite often pretends to be happier than she feels. Why let her know about the vile injustice I endure? Complaining about it would make me seem jealous, as if I envied Marie instead of taking comfort in her naïveté for accepting at face value the simulated love of a substitute mother. For I have already understood that despite appearances, our governess doesn’t love Marie any more than she does me.
In reality, my sister isn’t better off than I am. When she worries about receiving bad grades in school, for example, Nanny tells her it isn’t serious instead of encouraging or helping her. Scholastic achievement, she says, is useless because the world is full of intellectuals with fine diplomas who amount to nothing in life. A speech offering the triple advantage of telling my sister that since she’s not an intellectual, she’s probably an idiot; informing me that my successes in school and supposed intelligence will get me nowhere; and playing the two of us off against each other, as usual.
Deep down, our governess is a fool. Wishing to dominate us, but incapable of fulfilling her ambition, she must both clip our wings and divide us, for fear that we might denounce her if we finally find strength in our true beauty and intelligence, and pool our forces to put together the puzzle pieces that will reveal her weakness.
Nanny always wore a white smock and was dreadfully ugly, with skin tanned by the sun in Egypt, where she had spent much of her life. She had a slender hooked nose, lips as thin as a scar, red-rimmed, washed-out blue eyes, and breasts that rested heavily on her stomach. Marie’s beauty so bewitched Nanny that she really seemed never to tire of it. She would take Marie in her arms, touching her as if somehow to strengthen her claim on the child, and she photographed her everywhere, all the time.
Did my mother, who lived in constant fear of our governess giving notice, find this attachment convenient? Or did she allow herself to be swayed by our nanny’s preferences? In any case, following her lead, our mother crowned my sister the star of the family. Our closets contain entire albums devoted to Marie at all ages: an infant as perfect as an Ivory Snow baby, a giggly little Goldilocks, a mischievous young lady miraculously untouched by the indignities of puberty. And hundreds of snapshots of the ravishing and lissome blonde she became are tacked to the walls of my mother’s private rooms, framed on the chintz-skirted tables of her boudoir, or displayed on silver easels on the mantelpiece.
My mother could thus claim to have gone perfectly gaga over Marie, at least in the etymological sense of the word, as she literally spoiled her silly with the toys that cluttered our playroom: pretend grocery stands, playhouses shaped like castles (where we tried to hide from the governess), rocking horses with real horsehair manes (to which I was allergic), and pedal cars that seated four. In short, these expensive and exquisite playthings were accessories intended for the nanny’s own satisfaction, objects she could then parade before her colleagues to show off urbi et orbi the extravagance of her employer’s taste, lifestyle, and love for her children. Above all, this avalanche of toys allowed Miss Ross to savor the sight of Marie on a horse, in a car, or playing lady of the house, enjoying everything our nanny had never had as a child. Because she was really playing dolls with M
arie, dressing her, arranging her hair, constantly asking my mother to buy my sister new clothes with matching barrettes and bows.
Of course, my mother didn’t buy clothes and toys only for Marie. I had some, too. But when she gave Marie a miniature kitchen with a working oven and real china, I received an exercise mat as well as a children’s encyclopedia intended to make up for the difference in the cost of our presents. Her unfairness to me was not that obvious, for my mother simply thought she was granting wishes we had supposedly expressed to our nanny and was thus taking into account our respective characters, which Miss Ross was actually inventing to gratify her own desires.
The same thing happened with our clothes. When it came to Marie, the governess would insist that we were growing so quickly that our mother needed to replenish our wardrobe. In my case, however, she thought it best to have my mother save a little money. So I often wound up wearing my sister’s old clothes, so tight they turned me into a sausage. In other words, I looked like the shabby plump one, trotted out as a foil for Marie’s charm when we were summoned to politely greet the guests. Even if we were already in our pajamas, we had to get dressed all over again, complete with matching hair ribbons, to perform to perfection our role of model little girls who knew how to bob a curtsy: Bonjour, Madame, how do you do …
The Suitors Page 3
