French Girl with Mother

by Norman Ollestad

  “They’re lying to cover up their affair,” Jean Luc asserted. “Where are the nudes?”

  I shook my head. “That’s bullshit,” I told him. “You know I never made any nudes.”

  Jean Luc charged at me and I stepped aside. He went stumbling into the far wall. He turned, caught his breath, and pointed his finger at me.

  “You’re a fucking cancer. I forbid you to be in my house. Leave now.”

  “If he leaves,” Anaïs spoke up, “then I leave too, Papa. You’re drunk and it’s not his fault that your little game with Maman has gotten out of control. He’s desperately trying to make it as an artist and you used that against him.”

  His face was red, almost comical, but for the fact that he looked like he wanted to tear me to pieces with his big hands. Then he glanced at Sophie.

  “You’re a fucking whore,” he said, and he pushed off the wall and stomped across the kitchen. He got to the landing and his heavy body thudded down the steps, then the creak and bang of the door. The three of us didn’t move, each frozen in place.

  “You were all sneaking around behind my back,” Anaïs finally broke the stalemate.

  “But I really had no choice,” Sophie said.

  “Of course you had a choice.”

  They studied each other.

  “Oui,” Sophie acquiesced. “I was trying to keep the family together. That was what I chose.”

  Anaïs’s brow lowered and her mouth parted. But she didn’t speak and her reaction was inconclusive. The moment seemed to hang in suspension.

  “Did he encourage you to flirt with Henri, too?” she said after a few beats.

  Sophie cast her eyes away with shame, nodding. “It’s hard to explain, Anaïs, what goes on between a man and a woman after so many years of marriage. We become so full of compromises.”

  “Did you sleep with him on the boat?”

  “No. Nothing. I just asked questions and let him talk about himself.”

  “De rigueur.”

  “Oui, de rigueur.”

  Anaïs turned to me. “But sitting for someone is quite different, no?” she said, and then she returned to her mother for an answer.

  Sophie made a dismissive gesture with her head.

  I caught Sophie’s eye. If you don’t tell her, I will. Protecting the double portrait was one thing, but I couldn’t lie to her any more. She’d stood up for me. I owed her the truth.

  Just the thought of divulging our intimacy seemed to overwhelm Sophie and she closed her eyes.

  “We did not sleep together,” Sophie said with her lids shut. “But we touched.”

  Anaïs raised her arm and slapped her mother across the cheek, sending her wheeling out of the chair and onto the floor. I leapt between them and grabbed Anaïs’s wrists. She thrashed her arms and kicked at my shins. Pulling her close, I smothered her in my embrace and she bit my shoulder. It took a vicious tug on her hair to pull her off me.

  “It became insufferable,” Sophie called up from her crumpled position on the floor. “Jean Luc kept insisting that Nathan wanted me. It excited him to no end. But having to lie about it was too much, too humiliating. It was a matter of dignity.”

  I’d loosened my grip on Anaïs’s hair and she was standing very still with her arms crossed. She watched her mother with a dumbfounded, openly gawking face, then shot me a strange, contemplative look and her eyes flashed with surprise.

  Was she in the beginning stages of a nervous breakdown?

  “Anaïs,” I said to snap her out of it.

  “It’s not all just black,” she said to no one in particular. “It hurts . . . but it’s not killing me . . .”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s good. Let’s sit down.”

  “Show me how you touched her.”

  “That’s not going to help. We should take a walk, get some fresh air.”

  She ignored me and crouched down, eye-level with her mother.

  “Show me, Maman,” she whispered. “I don’t want to have to always wonder. Please.”

  Sophie didn’t hesitate. She got to her feet, one cheek bright pink with Anaïs’s handprint, and approached me. I tried to step back and lost feeling in my body, going numb. She took my hand and slipped it down the front of her pants. With her palm over the back of my hand, she pushed my fingers inside her.

  I didn’t look at Anaïs. This was going too far—it would stain an indelible impression of us forever. I pulled my hand free and cast my eyes to the floor.

  “Voilà,” Anaïs sighed, and I turned.

  The skin above her cheekbones and along her brow softened. Sophie was watching her with a wholly unguarded, defenseless expression that I’d never thought was possible in her. Anaïs stepped forward and hugged her mother. It was the first time I’d ever seen them embrace, other than the perfunctory greeting kiss on the cheek. No matter how dubious or perverse, I surmised, Anaïs had, at long last, gotten what she most wanted from her mother: evidence that she wasn’t perfect, that she too was flawed and vulnerable.

  They both began to cry in each other’s arms, and it was clear that they’d been starving for this moment for a long time.

  sixty-four

  I went up to our room so they could be alone. Yes, I’d sacrificed everything for the double portrait, protected it like a baby, but now I wondered if it was worth it.

  I put my face in my hands. I saw myself sitting alone in some apartment, the portrait up on the wall, even up on some big collector’s wall, and there I was gazing at it, trying to squeeze some sort of affection, some sort of inspiration from it. But it was made of linen and paint, not flesh and blood. A single golden nugget, not the source, not the mother lode, and I couldn’t picture fleeing the château and leaving Anaïs behind. She was part and parcel of how and why I made art now, my wellspring, and without her by my side I saw it all evaporate.

  But, after tonight, the double portrait might be all I have left.

  If she doesn’t come up soon, I’ll go downstairs and plead with her, bribe her, anything. If anyone would understand why I did what I did, it would be her.

  Screaming. Echoing from below. I listened and walked out of the bedroom, following the sound of another voice. When I reached the landing, I heard Anaïs.

  “Put it down, Papa.”

  I descended to the kitchen.

  Jean Luc was holding an old, mottled pistol in Sophie’s general direction, where she stood in the middle of the kitchen. Anaïs stood an equal distance from them, but not in the line of fire. As I came down into the kitchen, he trained the pistol toward me. I stopped on the last stair.

  “You’ve turned them against me,” he said, eyes bloodshot, fixing the pistol barrel on my chest—a small dark portal of death at the mere twinge of a finger.

  “We’re not against you, Papa,” Anaïs pleaded.

  “Jean Luc,” Sophie said to him. “Anaïs and I thought our little misunderstanding was over.” She looked to Anaïs.

  “Yes, Papa. It’s over now.”

  While Anaïs continued to try to convince her father that it was all behind them, Sophie shot me a pointed look, urging me toward action, then turned back to Jean Luc.

  “We love and adore you,” Sophie said with an angelic smile, but there were grooves of disdain along her upper lip and around her eyes. “Let’s all go to bed now. You have to leave early in the morning.”

  He was distracted and I eased off the last stair, moving barefoot across the floor, focused on his bent arm holding the pistol. Sophie reached out for him with upturned palms like a figure in a Renaissance painting. That’s when I burst into a sprint, crouching to tackle him, one arm chopping at his elbow like a football player trying to strip the ball. My shoulder planted into his ribs and I drove him into the pantry door. The wood split and I heard the pistol smack the floor.

  I yelled for Sophie to pick it up. The impact had knocked the breath out of him and I used the opportunity to pin his arm behind his back, palming his head, pressing his face into the floor.


  I glanced behind me. Anaïs was setting the pistol on the counter-top. Jean Luc twisted and bucked, trying to free himself, so I clamped his arm further around his back. He groaned and gave up.

  “He needs a good sobering up,” Sophie called to me.

  “Yes, he does,” Anaïs added.

  They were standing together as if cheering me on. I lifted him up, guided him down the rickety steps, and used his body to punch open the door.

  sixty-five

  I’d walk him to Bernard’s and he’d take over from there.

  “They call you Le Dildo, did you know that?” he sniggered.

  “Really, Monsieur Limp Dick?”

  “Be careful,” he said in a grave, threatening voice.

  “I’m not the one pointing guns at people,” I responded, and he jammed his foot against my ankle, using all his weight, and tore free.

  Immobilized for a moment, I shook out my leg and watched him stagger, zigzagging toward a horse stall—luckily not toward the one on the end with the canvas.

  “You’re a real pain in the ass,” I sighed, and I trotted after him.

  He threw open the stall doors and disappeared inside. I followed him in and heard a crack, steel on steel, like a big lock closing. Pivoting just in time, I ducked as a shotgun shell blew past me. I scrambled out and sprinted toward the entrance gate. He came out firing. A panel of the gate cracked apart in front of me. A lamp mounted to the side of the gate cast too much light and the gate would take too long to open.

  I ran for the lawn, darker, and used the weeping willow to obscure myself. A limb burst to pieces above me and I got behind the trunk. He was shooting and stepping closer with each reload. The hanging limbs, skeletal and lifelike, were confusing him, so I stayed behind the trunk. I needed him to pass on one side or the other so that I could get behind him, or run.

  He stopped moving, trying to wait me out, putting me at a disadvantage. I took off my jeans and got on my stomach and crawled toward the barrier. Lifting the jeans, I swung them high into the air, wafting them up and over the barrier and into the river, then snuck back toward the trunk.

  He bit, shuffling quickly toward the river, shotgun at the ready. While he searched the water, I crawled up behind him. Three feet away, I exploded off the ground and slammed into his back. He fell onto the barrier, the shotgun discharged, and he bounced and rolled and then plunked into the river.

  I heard splashing and looked for him but the water was black and then the splashing subsided. He’d swum to the far side. Would probably go down to the levee or beaver dam, cross, and come after me again.

  “Thank you,” I heard Sophie’s voice, huskier than ever, behind me.

  I turned and she stood on the lawn, a damsel-in-distress wax to her eyes, the mottled pistol dangling loosely in her hand.

  “Let’s hope that fucking shotgun is jammed,” I said. “Maybe we should get the hell out of here.”

  “He’s not coming back.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He can’t swim.”

  “What?”

  Her eyes were big and wild, and she nodded, tossing the pistol into the river.

  I swung my head over the water, moved along the barrier to where a slant of light from the house grazed the levee. My jeans were tugging back and forth at the apex of the levee, snagged by something, unable to take the ride over the fall. No Jean Luc though.

  I dove in and traced the submerged portion of the levee all the way across the river. Nothing. I scoured the river floor a few feet away, the current carrying me into the levee twice. Nothing but silt and rock. Surfacing, shivering from the cold, I tore my jeans free of a lodged stick, oared my way back to the barrier, and pulled myself out of the water.

  Sophie’s intensity had eased. “As far as we know,” she said breathlessly, “Jean Luc left, walked toward Bernard’s.”

  Head ringing, I blinked—she was concocting an alibi for me. Not wanting it to be true, I took off and searched downstream. As I moved further down the river, it got darker and the water blended with the night. I stopped to let my eyes adjust.

  “Jean Luc,” I called.

  “It’s okay,” Sophie’s voice answered, startling me.

  She appeared from the dark, moved closer, her breath warm against my cheek, sour, and then she kissed me on the mouth. A reward.

  “He could’ve killed me,” I told her. “It was self-defense.”

  “Your secret is safe with me,” she whispered.

  I saw myself in handcuffs, in front of a judge, then in a jail cell. My limbs turned to straw as I relented toward the inevitable: he was dead and she’d seen me push him into the river.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said, taking my hand.

  sixty-six

  Anaï’s was in her mother’s bed, under the covers, waiting, when Sophie led me into the room. I glanced at the window facing the river. It provided a view of the entire scene between Jean Luc and me, albeit shrouded in darkness and obscured by the sprawling willow.

  “Was he shooting at you?” Anaïs said, sitting up.

  I nodded.

  “Where is he now?”

  I deferred to Sophie. “He must’ve gone back to Bernard’s,” she said. “Hopefully he ran out of bullets.”

  Anaïs got out from under the covers and kissed me.

  “You saved us, mon amour,” she whispered in the same breathless way her mother had.

  I couldn’t get my bearing, the room seemed off-kilter, and my mind spun, roving the deep verses of the riddle. Over Anaïs’s shoulder I saw Sophie watching us and I wondered if she was happy to be rid of him.

  “You must be in shock,” Anaïs said, resting her palm on my cheek.

  I nodded. “I have to rest . . .”

  “I’ll come with you,” she said, and she trailed me out the door.

  “With no memory of climbing the stairs, I eased onto the bed and she curled up against me.

  “You really are my shepherd in the storm,” she whispered.

  Even in such bleak circumstances, the irony was not lost on me. My betrayal, its revelation, had provoked the confrontation in which I’d protected her from her father, and which ended up convincing her that I was her shepherd in the storm.

  Soon she was asleep, head on my chest, and night’s dark voids pressed in from all sides. I’d contributed to her father’s death. How would I ever make that up to her? Like a stranglehold around my neck, I felt infinitely, even obscenely, indebted to her. While at the same time, I worried about what would happen when the body was discovered. If Sophie held to her story, they’d think he fell into the river on the way to Bernard’s and drowned. Could I really count on her?

  Easing out from under Anaïs, I went to the back window and peeked down. Beyond the trickle of ambient light, the river was a depthless plane of ink. Where was his body? Ten miles down the river? Or stuck on the bottom somewhere? I raised my gaze. The forest was a void of blackness, silent, reminding me that I was on my own, with no one to turn to, not really.

  I had to get the hell out of France, Europe, before anyone found his body. It could happen at any moment. Suddenly the knock at the door, the police, the questions—my living in the house, the nudes of mother and daughter, none of it would look good.

  Should I leave right now? Start walking toward the train?

  I crawled back into bed and wrapped my arms around Anaïs. Rising from a deep slumber, she kissed my mouth. “Je t’aime,” she murmured, and she tumbled back to sleep.

  sixty-seven

  A bird chirping. Another bird singing an answer. I must have dozed off. I opened my eyes. Sunlight in the windows, a new day. With time to cull through a vast surplus of narratives and forge a comfortable distance, my unconscious had done its job and rationalized the whole fiasco. There was no reason to lose everything because a jealous, drunk Frenchman tried to kill me and I’d defended myself. That was unacceptable. I’d fought too hard for too long to sacrifice my triumph. I couldn’t bring
her father back; all I could do now was be there for her and try to make something out of all our hard work.

  Every second counted. I had to put the blinders on and take action. First and foremost, secure enough money to send off the portraits and get us on the first plane to L.A. If pressed, Anaïs could surely scrounge up a few thousand euros—put it on a credit card—and once I was safely back in the states, out of the jurisdiction of the French police, it would be a lot easier to comfort her, give her my undivided attention.

  I got out of bed, put on my damp jeans, and went to make sure he wasn’t floating out in the open somewhere. If so, I’d hide him, buying us time to get out.

  Nothing on the levee. I moved downstream, following the bank. Nothing along the muddy edges or in the shallows. I crossed the beaver dam and worked my way along the far bank. Maybe he did make it out of the river, I entertained, eyes sweeping more languidly over the water. Maybe he’s asleep at Bernard’s and soon I’ll collect the money, at least enough to ship the portraits.

  In a crook on the far side, a heap of debris broke the surface. I watched it move. It was trapped in a tight swirl of current, unable to swing free and join the main thrust of the river. It circulated closer to my side and I glimpsed his shirt and saw his back hunch out of the water, head submerged, legs dangling behind. He tried to kill me, I reminded myself, watching him go around for another turn.

  I stopped breathing, went stiff and ice-cold. My legs were rooted in place and only my mind churned: the four of us trapped in the château, under the spell of desire, impelled to act dangerously. If only I’d walked away from her that first day in Paris or had left the château before her mother arrived, no one would be dead. What had compelled me to join in her parents’ erotic secret and betray her trust? Why hadn’t I been able to resist her uncle’s illicit offer? It seemed to boil down to one basic impulse that we all shared: we were hell-bent, even destined, to avenge our underlying need to be loved.

  “Got a plan?” a voice called, and I jerked back, tripping over some sticks.

  I grabbed one of the sticks and got to my feet.