I think Sylvia felt the same apprehension as me. We didn’t actually know anything about these people who had invited us to lunch. Why did Neal seem to be in such a hurry to see us again? Was it that warmth and familiarity that Americans often demonstrated at a first meeting, calling you by your first name and showing you pictures of their children?
When they came they apologized for being late. Neal was a different man than the one from the other night. He no longer seemed adrift; he was freshly shaven and wearing a loose-fitting tweed jacket. He talked without any hesitation or trace of an American accent, and his volubility, if I remember correctly, was the first thing to rouse my suspicions. It seemed strange for an American. In certain slang words he used, in the turn he gave to certain phrases, I detected a mixture of Parisian intonations and an accent from the south of France—but held back, reined in, as if Neal had spent a long time keeping it hidden. His wife spoke much less than he did, and with the same dreamy, somewhat absentminded air that had surprised me the first time. The way she talked didn’t sound English either. I couldn’t help saying to them: “You speak such perfect French. It’s hard to believe you’re not from France . . .”
“I went to a French-language school,” he said, “and spent my whole childhood in Monaco. My wife, too. That’s where we met.”
She nodded in agreement.
“What about you?” he suddenly asked. “What did you do in Paris?”
“I was an art photographer.”
“Art photographer?”
“Yes. I’m planning to continue that line of work here in Nice.”
He seemed to be considering what the profession of art photographer might be. He eventually said: “Are you married?”
“Yes, we’re married,” I said, giving Sylvia a fixed stare. But she didn’t react to my lie at all.
I don’t like it when people ask me questions. Besides, I wanted to find out more about them. To evade Neal’s suspicions, I turned to his wife and said, “So, did you have a nice trip?”
She was embarrassed and hesitated before answering. Neal, though, said very smoothly: “Yes . . . A business trip.”
“What sort of business?”
The abrupt way I asked the question surprised him.
“Oh . . . It’s about a perfume deal I’m trying to set up between France and the U.S. I’m working with a small manufacturer in Grasse.”
“Have you been doing that long?”
“No, no . . . Just in my spare time.”
He had said that last sentence a bit arrogantly, as if wanting me to know that he didn’t need to work for a living.
“We’ve even invented some new beauty products. It’s fun for Barbara . . .”
Neal’s wife had found her smile again.
“Yes, I’m interested in the whole beauty product side,” she said in her dreamy voice. “I’m happy to leave the perfumes to Virgil. What I want is to set up a beauty salon here on the Riviera . . .”
“We’re not sure where exactly,” Neal said. “I think somewhere not too close to Monaco. I don’t know if that kind of salon would work in Nice . . .”
When I remember this conversation, I’m sorry I didn’t have the information Condé-Jones was to give me later. What a face Neal would have made if I had said, in a suave voice, “So, you’re relaunching Tokalon?”
And then, leaning my face close to his: “You’re the same Virgil Neal as the one from before the war?”
Sylvia had a kind of obsession with putting the diamond in her mouth and keeping it between her lips, as if sucking a hard candy. Neal was sitting across from her and the gesture had not escaped him.
“Careful, it’ll melt.”
But he wasn’t only joking around. The moment Sylvia relaxed her lips and the diamond fell back onto her black sweater, I noticed the attentive eye Neal fixed on the stone.
“That’s a nice stone you have there,” he said with a smile. “Don’t you think, Barbara?”
She had turned her head, and she too was examining the diamond.
“Is it real?” she asked in a childish voice.
Sylvia and I exchanged glances.
“Yes, unfortunately it is,” I said.
Neal seemed surprised at my answer.
“Are you sure? The size is impressive.”
“It’s a family jewel my wife’s mother gave her,” I said. “It’s more of a hassle for us than anything else.”
“You’ve had it appraised?” Neal asked in a tone of polite curiosity.
“Oh, yes. We have a whole dossier about it. It’s called the Southern Cross.”
“You can’t wear it around like that,” Neal said. “If it’s real . . .”
Apparently he didn’t believe me. Of course, who would have? People don’t casually wear diamonds of that size and clarity. They don’t hold them between their lips before letting them drop onto their black sweater. They don’t suck them.
“My wife keeps it on her because we don’t have anything else we can do.”
Neal furrowed his brow.
“What else should we do? Rent a safe-deposit box at a bank?” I said.
“When people see it on me, everyone thinks it’s from Burma,” Sylvia said.
“From Burma?”
Neal didn’t know this argot for a fake.
“We really want to sell it,” I said. “But the problem is, it’s hard to find a buyer for a stone like this.”
He looked thoughtful, not taking his eyes off the diamond.
“I think I can find you a buyer. But first it’d have to be appraised.”
I shrugged. “That would be great, if you could find a buyer. But I don’t think it’ll be easy.”
“I can find you a buyer. But you’ll need to show me your dossier,” Neal said.
“I get the feeling you still think it’s from Burma,” Sylvia said.
We left the restaurant. The car was parked on Quai des États-Unis, in front of the shivering old men squeezed onto benches, taking the sun. I recognized the diplomatic plates. Neal opened the car door.
“Come over for a coffee,” he said.
I wanted to get rid of them. Just like that. I asked myself what they could really do to help us. But we couldn’t just ditch them because of a passing mood, we had to stay the course. They were the only two people we knew in Nice.
Just like the first time, Sylvia and I sat in back. Neal drove slowly up Boulevard de Cimiez, and the drivers behind him honked their horns for him to let them pass.
“They’re crazy,” Neal said. “They always want to go faster.”
One of the drivers yelled a flurry of curses at him as he passed the car.
“It’s my diplomatic plates that make them angry. Plus I guess they have to hurry to get back to their offices on time.”
He turned around to me.
“Have you ever worked in an office?”
The car stopped by a wall with a railing. Neal pointed: “That’s the house up there. It has a commanding view. You’ll see. It’s a very nice house . . .”
I noticed the marble plaque over the gate that said: “Château Azur.”
“My father named it,” Neal said. “He had the house built before the war.”
His father? That was reassuring.
Neal closed the gate with the turn of a key, we set foot in the garden that ran down to Boulevard de Cimiez, and we climbed the staircase. The villa, recalling the Trianon, struck me as luxurious.
“Barbara, could you get us some coffee please?”
I was surprised there was no butler in a house like this. Maybe another sign of American casualness. Despite being very rich, the Neals were clearly a little bohemian, and Mrs. Neal made the coffee herself. That was it, bohemian. But rich. At least that’s what I tried to convince myself.
We sat on the white wooden chairs that I would see again in the same place a year later, when I first met Condé-Jones. But the swimming pool was not yet empty. Branches and dead leaves were floating on the surface of
the murky water before us. Neal picked up a stone and skipped it across the water.
“We need to empty the pool and do something about the garden,” he said.
It was in bad shape. Bushes obstructed the gravel walkways, which were overrun with weeds. The lawn was a wasteland, and off to one side there was a fountain basin cracked down the middle.
“If my father could see this, he wouldn’t understand. But I don’t have time to take care of the garden.” His voice sounded sad and sincere. “Everything was different in my father’s day. Nice was a different city, too. Did you know that the police officers on the streets used to wear pith helmets?”
His wife put the tray down on the tiled floor. She had changed out of her dress into jeans. She poured the coffee and offered a cup to each of us in turn, with a graceful movement of her arms.
“Does your father still live here?” I asked Neal.
“My father is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled to help me past my embarrassment. “I need to sell this house. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s so full of childhood memories. Especially the garden . . .”
Sylvia had nonchalantly headed toward the house, and she was pressing her forehead against one of the large French windows. Neal watched her with his face slightly tense, as though afraid she might discover something suspicious.
“I’ll have to have you over once the house is all straightened up,” he said in a loud, imperious voice. Maybe he wanted to keep her from walking through the half-open French doors into the house.
He walked over to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and brought her back to us by the pool. It was like he was fetching a child who had wandered away from a sandbox while his parents were distracted.
“We need to completely redo the house. I wouldn’t want you to see it like this.”
Seeing Sylvia far away from the French doors seemed to reassure him.
“We don’t live here much at all, my wife and I. One or two months a year at most.”
I wanted to head over to the house myself, to see how Neal would react. Would he physically prevent me? If he did, I would lean over and whisper in his ear: “You seem like you’re hiding something in the house. What is it, a body?”
“My father has been dead for twenty years,” Neal said. “As long as he was here, everything was as it should be. The house and the garden were impeccable. The gardener was an extraordinary man . . .”
He shrugged, pointing to the shrubs and the walkways overrun with weeds.
“But now Barbara and I are going to be in Nice for a while. Especially if we open that beauty salon. I’m going to fix this all up.”
“Where do you live most of the time?” Sylvia asked.
“London and New York,” Neal replied. “My wife has a very nice little house in London, in the Kensington area.”
She was smoking and seemed to be ignoring her husband.
The four of us were sitting on the white wooden chairs in a semicircle around the pool, each with a cup of coffee on the right arm of the chair. The symmetry made me vaguely uneasy, once I realized that it was not only due to the coffee cups. Barbara’s faded jeans were the exact same cut and color as Sylvia’s, and since they were sitting in the same relaxed pose, I could see that they had the same narrow waists, emphasizing the curve of their hips in the same way, to the point where I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart just by looking at their waist and hips. I took a sip of coffee. Neal had raised his cup to his lips at the exact same moment, and our gestures of putting the cup back down on the arm of the chair were synchronized too.
The Southern Cross came up again that afternoon. Neal asked Sylvia, “So, you really want to sell your diamond?”
He leaned over to her and took the stone between his thumb and index finger, to examine it more closely. Then he gently placed it back onto her black sweater. I chalked it up to the offhand way Americans had. Sylvia hadn’t budged an inch; she looked off in another direction as if trying to ignore Neal’s gesture.
“Yes, we do,” I said.
“If it’s authentic, there won’t be any problem.”
He was obviously taking the matter seriously.
“Don’t worry,” I said in a condescending voice. “It’s real. In fact, that’s the concern. We don’t want to keep such an important diamond.”
“My mother gave it to me for my wedding and advised me to sell it,” Sylvia said. “She always thought diamonds bring bad luck. She had tried to sell it herself but couldn’t find an appropriate buyer.”
“How much do you want for it?” Neal asked. Then he seemed to regret having asked such a direct question, and forced himself to smile. “Sorry, I’m blunt that way. It’s because of my father. He worked with a major American diamond dealer when he was young. That’s where I got my taste for gemstones.”
“We want about a million and a half,” I said drily. “That’s a very reasonable price for this diamond. It’s worth twice that.”
“We were planning to take it to Van Cleef’s in Monte Carlo so they could find a buyer,” Sylvia said.
“Van Cleef?” Neal repeated. The name, with its massive, dazzling glint, took him aback.
“I don’t want to keep wearing it everywhere like a leash around my neck,” Sylvia said.
Barbara Neal gave a sharp little laugh.
“Of course not. You’re right,” she said. “Someone might snatch it on the street.”
And I wondered if she was serious or making fun of us.
“I can find you a buyer,” Neal said. “Barbara and I know Americans in a position to buy it, don’t we, darling?” He mentioned a few names, and she nodded in agreement.
“And you think they’ll pay our price?” I said very softly.
“Definitely.”
“Would you like something to drink?” Barbara Neal asked.
I glanced at Sylvia. I wanted to leave. But she seemed to be enjoying herself in this sunny garden, the back of her neck against the back of the chair, her eyes closed.
Barbara Neal headed toward the house. Neal gestured to Sylvia and asked me quietly: “Do you think she’s asleep?”
“Yes.”
He leaned toward me and said, in an even softer voice: “About the diamond . . . I think I might buy it myself, if you can give me proof it’s authentic.”
“It is.”
“I want to give it to Barbara for our tenth anniversary.”
He could see from my face that I was suspicious.
“Don’t worry, I have plenty of money.”
He grabbed my arm very tight, to make me understand that I needed to give him my whole attention: “It’s not thanks to me—I was just born into the right family. I inherited a lot from my father. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is . . . Do you trust me now? You think I’m a serious customer?”
He laughed. Maybe he was trying to make me forget the aggressive tone with which he had made his proposal.
“We can’t have any mistrust between us. I can make a down payment . . .”
Neal offered to drive us home, but I said we’d rather walk. Back on the Boulevard de Cimiez, I looked up and there they were, leaning on the balustrade, watching us. Neal waved. We had agreed to talk on the phone the next day and arrange a meeting. After a few steps I turned around again, and they hadn’t moved, with their elbows on the railing.
“He wants to buy the diamond himself, to give to his wife,” I said to Sylvia.
She didn’t seem surprised. “For how much?”
“For what I said. Do you think they really have the money?”
We slowly walked down Boulevard de Cimiez in the brilliant sunshine. I took off my coat. I knew it was winter, that night was coming soon, but at that moment I would have thought it was July. The confusion of seasons, the few cars on the road, the sun, the shadows outlined so sharply on the sidewalk and the walls . . .
I grabbed Sylvia’s wrist.
“Don’t you feel like thi
s is all a dream?”
She smiled at me but looked nervous.
“And you think that at some point we’ll wake up?” she asked me.
We walked in silence to the bend in the road beneath the curved façade of the old Hotel Majestic, and took Boulevard Dubouchage back to the center of town. I was relieved to find myself back under the arcades on Place Masséna, in the noise of the crowd and the mass of people strolling or leaving work and waiting for the bus. All the hustle and bustle gave me an illusory sense of escaping from a dream that had been holding us prisoner.
A dream? It was more like the sensation of days following one after the other without our realizing, without any bumps or handholds that would let us catch them. We were advancing on a kind of moving walkway, and the streets slipped past, and we no longer knew whether the walkway was moving us, or we were motionless in a landscape sliding past all around us, like a scene in the movies shot with rear projection, or as it’s called in French: transparence.
Sometimes the veil parted—never during the day, but at night, when the air was crisper and the lights sparkled. We walked along the Promenade des Anglais, making contact again with terra firma. The stupor we had felt since our arrival in this city dissipated. We felt masters of our destiny again. We could make plans. We would try to cross the Italian border. The Neals would help us do it. In their car with diplomatic plates we could enter Italy without passing through passport controls or attracting attention. We would travel south, to Rome, our goal, the only city where I imagined we would be able to settle for the rest of our lives—Rome, so perfect for natures as indolent as our own.
During the day, everything slipped through our fingers. Nice, with its blue sky, brightly colored buildings like gigantic frosted cakes or ocean liners, its deserted streets in the bright Sunday sun, our shadows on the sidewalks, the palm trees, the Promenade des Anglais—it all slipped past, like a rear projection. On the interminable afternoons when the rain beat on the tin roof, we would stay in the moist, musty smell of the room, feeling abandoned there. Later, I got used to the idea, and today I feel at ease in this city of ghosts where time has stopped. Like people passing in slow procession along the Promenade, I accept that I have lost a certain resilience. I am released from the law of gravity. I float like the other inhabitants of Nice. But back then, at the Sainte-Anne Pension, that state was new to us, and we still lurched this way and that to try to fight off the torpor overwhelming us. The only solid, consistent thing in our lives, the sole inalterable point of reference, was the diamond. Had it brought us bad luck?
Sundays in August Page 6
