The Suitors

by Cecile David-Weill

  No doubt eager to downplay the bad impression produced by his arrival via helicopter, Béno countermanded the driver my mother had arranged for him in Cannes and drove up casually in a Mini Moke at 7:00 p.m. He had to ring several times at the front gate before gaining entrance to the property, because the servants were at dinner and the bell rarely managed to make itself heard on the first ring over their animated table talk. But to his surprise, greeted at last by Marcel, he was asked to park his car at the service entrance before being taken on a tour of the house!

  Nevertheless, Béno complied, thinking that perhaps this was some peculiar family custom. He began to suspect a mix-up when Marcel, beginning with the garages, explained that we had originally had our own gas pump but now fueled our vehicles like everyone else at the local gas station, where we did not even maintain an account because the attendants there no longer knew what such a thing was and required payment via Carte Bleue with each transaction. Old Marcel’s indignation seemed genuine, but Béno could not understand why this man—the chauffeur? the butler?—had decided to engage him in a conversation that was doubtless urbane but singularly unusual.

  As his guide led him off toward the servants’ quarters, Béno decided it was a case of mistaken identity, but he was enjoying the mishap too much to clear matters up just yet. Besides, before introducing himself as a houseguest, he was curious to discover for whom he’d been mistaken!

  “There are ten bedrooms along this hall,” Marcel informed him, “but they are all essentially alike and I think you will have a good idea of them all if I show you just one.”

  Was he supposed to be an architect? Were the Ettinguers contemplating some remodeling? But the other shoe didn’t drop until Marcel added, “I’ll show you the beaches; Madame advised me explicitly to take you along the service path so as not to attract the notice of the guests or the rest of the family, because not everyone in the house is happy with this idea, you understand.” A real estate agent! The Ettinguers were putting their house on the market, and trying to do it discreetly.

  What kind of a hornets’ nest had he gotten himself into? Thinking quickly, Béno felt it was time to wrap up the joke before the butler said something more explicit he might later deeply regret. Since it was better to seem like a simpleton than to humiliate this man and upset the Ettinguers, Béno came up with something to save face all around.

  “Ah, now I understand why you showed me the garages and servants’ quarters! But I must tell you, I’m not the architect you were clearly expecting. My name is Béno Grunwald, and Monsieur and Madame Ettinguer have very kindly invited me here for the weekend.”

  When Marcel went pale at the thought of the gaffe he’d just committed, Béno gently reassured him.

  “I’ll tell Madame Ettinguer how much I envy her, having someone like you in her employ, trustworthy enough to handle things as demanding as important renovation projects. And allow me to thank you, because I must be the only guest ever invited to such a house tour!”

  Meanwhile, I was having a mirror-image misadventure, since my sister was still suffering from jet lag and had assigned me to welcome Béno. Up in my bedroom, it was impossible for me to distinguish among the different bells ringing through the house, so I’d been waiting with a book in the loggia to be certain of hearing his car arrive.

  The pantry was in fact the only place where one could hear all the sounds of L’Agapanthe, a kind of acoustic pilot’s cabin allowing the staff to interpret such signals and respond accordingly. Hanging on the wall over the house telephone exchange was a bell board, an old-fashioned apparatus we used more frequently than the household phones that rang in jangling anarchy here and there and, for the most part, in vain.

  In every bedroom were a pear-shaped wooden bell-pull by the bed and a push button near the bathtub, so that the occupant could summon help in case of need or ask for breakfast to be sent up. Each call bell had its distinctive tone; my mother’s sonic signature, for example, comprised two re notes in succession, whereas a short do and a long re meant Flora’s Room, where I was.

  If there were the slightest doubt about two call bells with similar notes, the servants could consult an auxiliary panel on which the name of the room in question would light up.

  The pantry was also equipped with the most modern technology, to wit: monitors for the security cameras around the house and grounds, in particular the one at the entrance gate, where the electronic chime had a hard time cutting through the summons of our good old bell rung at mealtime for the staff, a ringing that echoed easily all over the property.

  I’d barely had time to watch a few lizards stroll out onto the veranda when Gérard appeared to announce Béno’s arrival.

  “Monsieur Grunwald has just driven up, Madame. In a Bentley Continental GT coupé.” Probably taking my astonishment for curiosity, he added, “a model halfway between the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti and the Aston Martin DB9. I mention this simply for Madame’s information.”

  I was just struggling to keep a straight face while thanking Gérard when a nattily dressed man strode into the loggia. Although I’d never met Béno, I had seen several photographs of him (half hidden behind his supermodel wife, to whom he was wisely ceding the spotlight), but I had the strange feeling that I’d never seen this dapper man before. Given the circumstances, I proceeded with caution.

  Instead of introducing himself, he announced, “I’m so thrilled to find myself here. You cannot imagine how impressed I am!”

  “Well, good, how nice,” I replied, playing for time in the hope he would soon say something easier to interpret.

  The man’s age and corpulence seemed to match my image of Béno, but something still wasn’t right. He was too rich looking, too flashy to be the real thing, I finally decided, remembering the lesson I’d learned the first time I’d seen Laszlo Schwartz. He and I had landed in Nice at the same time and my mother had asked me to bring him in the car she’d sent to pick us up at the airport. The only description she’d given me, however, was, “I’m sure you’ll manage to find him somehow. He’ll be accompanied by a graphic artist whom you’ll drop off in Antibes on your way here.” Which I had done, except that I had mistaken that artist for Laszlo, and all because he’d seemed the spit and image of a painter, with his longish hair and a shirt with a ruffle at the neck, whereas the real Laszlo, having nothing to prove in the creativity department, had been dressed like a banker in a three-piece pin-striped suit. And it wasn’t until I saw the graphic artist leave the car in Antibes that I’d realized my mistake.

  Well, this guy in the loggia was gleaming, impeccable. And his watch was too showy, his city shoes too polished for him to be Béno Grunwald, who was certainly going to show up in linen slacks and espadrilles with a plastic watch on his wrist.

  “And what,” I ventured to ask, “may I do for you?”

  After explaining who he was and what real estate company he represented, the fellow recapitulated the phone conversations he’d had with my parents prior to this visit and finally assured me he was quite aware of the discretion he should show regarding the houseguests and other family members, who had not been informed of this appointment. Obviously taking me for the secretary, he asked me a touch nervously if we shouldn’t leave this rather exposed veranda to begin viewing the house more “behind the scenes,” as it were.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I agreed, ushering him into the pantry, where I asked him to await a colleague who would conduct him around the premises.

  Then I summoned up enough courage to barge in on the staff in their dining room, causing a pall of silence to fall around the table. When I interrupted the secretary at her meal, she was so taken aback to discover that I’d found out about the hush-hush visit from the realtor that she seemed relieved to take charge of it, in return for my silence about this unfortunate incident.

  Hardly had I placed the real estate agent in her hands, however, than I had to dash to my room for a good cry, because at their first mention of habitable squ
are foot-age and exceptional luxury property, I’d thought I was going to throw up.

  I realized that I had not for an instant believed my parents would actually put L’Agapanthe up for sale. I’d found it perfectly understandable that they might feel the need to play around with the idea, but I’d never doubted that they’d reject it. And that had left me feeling carefree enough to launch into husband hunting—an undertaking made appealing doubtless because it had little actual connection to its supposed raison d’être.

  Now that a real estate agent had turned up, however, my parents’ idea had become a project they might just carry out. Even so, I still had trouble considering all its implications, as if the entire business were frankly unreal, like a sudden death. As if I could no longer feel what I knew and know what I felt. Which was why I kept telling myself, “They did it, I don’t believe it.”

  I was in shock, chain smoking as I wondered if I should awaken Marie to break the news to her, when I noticed that Félix had tried several times to reach me on my cell phone. The message he’d left said nothing about why he’d been so eager to reach me, which left me high and dry, especially since he did say specifically that I would have no way of getting in touch with him before the next day. My throat tightened with anxiety.

  So I was understandably light-years away from Béno Grunwald when my mother rang me in my room.

  “I’m told your guests are wandering around the house. Really, you might pay some attention to them!”

  Béno, Mathias, and Lou were indeed drifting on their own in the front hall of a house left to its own devices while the secretary and butlers were busy confessing their blunders to my mother, but it didn’t take me long to show the guests to their rooms, tell them when dinner would be served, and notice that Béno bore a slight resemblance to Steve McQueen. A dreamboat, this guy, I mused, and tried to stop worrying about my son, who kept interfering with my thoughts.

  News of Béno’s misadventure had made the rounds of the house before cocktail time, but that didn’t stop him from stealing the limelight from Mathias and Lou Léva, who paled in comparison when he gave a hilarious account of the fiasco.

  Béno may have been a dazzler, but he still set out to win over everyone in sight, as if he’d had a handicap or something to make up for. He began with my mother, whom he captivated in record time. To begin with, he had the good taste not to mention his helicopter trip, plus he brought her the ideal gift: a hundred matchbooks engraved with the name of L’Agapanthe. He then deployed in her direction a panoply of attentions between flirting and deference, by rising to his feet the moment she seemed about to move elsewhere in the room, by praising her voice (“You’ve never thought about a career in radio?”), and by flashing her a radiant smile whenever she spoke to him. Next he tackled my father, to whom he pledged allegiance with a few words over an apéritif: a modest and convincing spiel about his hedge fund, followed by a request for a five minute tête-à-tête sometime that weekend for a few words of advice—and that was that.

  For his finale, Béno sent us all into stitches by making fun of his family’s embarrassment over the original recipe for that photographic gelatin, which turned out to be made with bones from India. “Okay, fine, sometimes there were a few femurs,” admitted his mother. And he didn’t spare himself, allowing that his expensive habits were such that he’d really had no choice but to make a fortune. He’d studied up on his Cap d’Antibes history, too, and was abreast of all the latest juicy inside scoops.

  Béno commanded so much attention that Mathias attracted very little in spite of his glaring blunders, which were legion. With striking linguistic ineptitude, he proudly claimed to have been the “investigator” of my encounter with Béno, and he introduced Lou to my parents as an actress “destinated” for a great future. With a flourish, he then produced his gift, a particularly garish scarf, which he presented to my mother who, although she had an absolute horror of designer logos, nevertheless went into ecstasies with professional aplomb over the entwined pink and blue initials that formed the sole decorative pattern of her gift.

  Nothing, as it happened, was more vulgar in my parents’ eyes than luxury brands, two words they considered a perfect oxymoron. The offspring of marketing and manufacturing, brands—Walmart, H&M, Monoprix, Zara—were used to put objects within the reach of everyone, whereas luxury implied the made-to-measure expertise of craftsmen skilled at rendering material goods worthy of interest. Which ruled out any desire to possess the latest accessory de chez Dior, Vuitton, or Prada, an ambition my parents found as pointlessly petit bourgeois as going into raptures over the purchase of an ice-cream maker or a fondue set.

  When Lou Léva made her appearance at cocktail time, I felt a ripple of disappointment pass through every man present. The gentlemen had doubtless envisioned some sexy creature, bold as brass, and had hoped to find the actress dripping with sensuality à la Marilyn Monroe, a girl whose heart would belong to daddy. Instead of which, in walked a thin, pale young woman who rather disappointingly resembled an orchid: exotic, true, but somewhat off-putting. With short black hair, a hank of which fell across one side of her face (when it wasn’t held back by a girlish barrette), she was pretty, but in an ethereal way. She might even have been touching, if she hadn’t affected a fragile and sorrowful air she hoped might lend her some gravitas, for she thought that sadness was chic.

  Lou seemed to have stopped short of achieving the desired level of soigné manners, however, for she approached my mother with an utterly unchic, “Come on, let’s kiss-kiss-kiss.”

  A greeting devoid of elegance, from the appallingly informal “Come on” to the grotesque “kiss-kiss-kiss,” not to mention the excessive familiarity toward my mother, whose customary welcome was a genteel nod or, at most, a handshake. As for triple cheek kisses, nothing was more provincial.

  For everyone in France should know by now that Parisians give only two pecks on the cheeks, unlike the rest of the country, where regional differences gave rise to all sorts of variations with three or even four kisses, to which the average Parisian good-naturedly adapts by attempting to imitate an embrace of unknown rhythm and duration, like a beginning dancer following the lead of an experienced partner.

  Then, when the butler announced that dinner was served, Lou exclaimed with a shriek, “I’m starving! I haven’t had a bite since noon!”

  This was another botch, since she should not have used the slangy “a bite” so baldly.

  In short, Lou was not one of us, because she was unable to grasp the subtleties of our particular jargon, a fact that we initiates—who recognize one another, like freemasons of refinement—noticed immediately, without comment, but did not dismiss. And we had every right to hold it against her, strange though that might appear, for fewer and fewer people still understood what we were talking about when we talked about such things.

  MENU

  Oeufs à la Chartres

  Dorade Royale

  Potato Purée

  Salad and Cheeses

  Green Apple and Cinnamon Ice Cream

  Seated next to Charles Ramsbotham, Lou quickly struck up a conversation.

  “I believe I heard that you were English. How come you speak French so well?”

  “My mother was Swiss and silent,” intoned Charles in a sinister voice that did not discourage Lou in the least.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you bring your wife with you?”

  “Because she is boring.”

  Charles’s reply happened to fall loudly into one of those unexpected moments of silence that occur during conversations, and so, after a moment of astonishment, our table collapsed into hilarity in spite of my father’s attempts to restore order. After all, none of us had seen Lady Sally for years because, like an exotic fruit, she did not travel well, given that she cared only—in order of importance—for white wine, gardens, dogs, and horses.

  Georgina came nimbly to the rescue. “Edmond, these oeufs à
la Chartres are heavenly, perfectly poached and with just enough tarragon. I’m tempted to have more, but that depends on the main course. What will come next?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” added Frédéric. “This sauce is to die for. What is it? Madeira? Veal stock?”

  “Help me out, Marcel,” said my father, turning toward the butler. “I’ve no idea what to tell them …”

  “Veal stock, Monsieur. And the next course will be dorade, and for dessert, ice cream, I’ll have to inquire about the flavor.”

  The episode with the real estate agent had so shaken me that I didn’t feel up to helping my father with his duties as host, and I left the handling of table conversation completely to him. Art was often the chief topic of our dining discussions, and it cropped up all the sooner in this case since Mathias spoke right up in his capacity as a dealer, thus proving he was keeping his eye on the prize.

  “Do you buy much?” he asked my father.

  While I was guessing whether Mathias would have the nerve to try selling him something before dinner was over, Polyséna began deploring the contamination of the art market by money.

  “Money as pollutant, or money as patronage, it’s a classic debate,” my father told her.

  In his eyes, Polyséna’s besetting and inconvenient sin was to be both intoxicated by her own learning and stuffed with opinions so conventional that she became the very caricature of a pedant, so my father couldn’t help condescending to her slightly when he focused the argument on money as the sole common denominator of our fragmented societies, and the trendsetter henceforth of an artistic taste forged in the past by European courtly life. Vexed at being caught en flagrant délit de cliché, Polyséna played her trump card, making a daring rapprochement between a Renaissance painter and Damien Hirst in a bold attempt to leave my father speechless.