We followed them upstairs to a sun-drenched, enclosed patio. As we made our way across the neat, faded blue tile, I took in the wondrous flora that covered the perimeter of the room—bougainvillea and lavender—and marveled at how these plants thrived so well in the city. I remembered then that Alex had said his grandmother Virginie’s most beloved place was the family house in Cap Ferrat, and I wondered if this was an attempt to re-create that for her, as she must be too frail now to make the trip there. With the clear, late-afternoon sun shining through the glass dome that covered the patio, the Mediterranean effect was especially convincing.
I was so blown away by the surroundings, it took me a second to notice that Virginie was in the garden already, taking the four of us in with a look of mild confusion. As Alex approached her, he seemed to come into focus and her face registered delight. “Alex, mon petit chou!” It occurred to me that she might have been sitting there in solitude for quite some time. The idea that Alex and Véronique had left her there alone struck me as ineffably sad.
“Bonjour,” she said to the three of us. Her voice was stiff, but her cloudy-blue eyes twinkled and a smile seemed to be lurking at her lips.
“Mamie, je vous présente Sophie et Brooke.”
“Et quelle des deux filles est votre femme?” she asked, allowing a tiny grin to slip over her face. She spoke softly but mercifully slowly, meaning she would not have to be asked to speak un peu plus lentement for the slower of the two Americans.
Alex laughed and looked at her affectionately. “No, Mamie, neither of them is my wife. They are friends.”
She made a harrumphing sound and pulled him in close. “Pas encore.”
Not yet. At this we all giggled, which seemed to thrill her, and she gently commanded us to sit. Sophie sat closest to her at the edge of the rattan bench with me at the other end and Alex in between. Véronique took the chair across the table from her.
“Thank you so much for having us today, Madame de Persaud,” Sophie said. As she spoke, a look of recognition crossed the older woman’s face.
“Katherine?” she said, even more quietly, as though her voice had escaped her in her surprise.
“Oh, no. Actually my name is Sophie?”
Madame de Persaud looked at Alex, her face suddenly distressed.
“What’s wrong, Mamie? This is Sophie, one of my American friends who has come for a visit.”
“Mais non,” Virginie said defiantly. “This is my sister Katherine.” With this, she reached for Sophie’s hand, which Sophie offered with trepidation, looking at Alex nervously.
Alex looked at Sophie as though suddenly equally uncertain who she actually was. “My God,” he said under his breath as a broad smile came to his lips. “She does look just like Great-Aunt Katherine when she was young, doesn’t she?” He added a little more soberly, “But this is not Katherine. This is my friend Sophie, she’s American.”
“Then where is Katherine?” Virginie asked impatiently.
“She’s not here, Mamie,” Alex said, a tired frustration revealing itself in his voice. I understood from his tone that Katherine was not only “not here in the house” but also “not here among the living.”
“Indeed,” Virginie said, at last releasing Sophie’s hand and patting her on the arm. Virginie smiled to herself as though she was onto this little trick and had decided to humor us and go along with it. “So you’re American. Are you from New York City?”
“No,” Sophie said, “the other side, California.”
“I might move to New York when I finish school,” I said, desperate to add something to the conversation. I was disappearing beneath the waves.
“Oh, yes? I lived there just after the war and I had a fine time. I used to know that writer. Who is that writer I knew back then, chéri?” she said to Alex.
“Henry Miller, Mamie.”
“Ah, oui. C’est ça.” She looked pleased.
The housekeeper reemerged carrying a full tea service. She was so quiet and conservative in her movements that you forgot she was there even as the delicate china and impossibly perfect little pastries and tea sandwiches appeared before us.
“He was a very strange man. But you know they all are.”
“Writers?” I asked.
“Americans.”
At this we all laughed without anyone noting the faux pas.
“Brooke is a writer,” Véronique said.
Virginie’s head swiveled between Sophie and me, as though trying to determine who Véronique was referring to. “Novels?” she said to the space in between us.
“Short stories,” I said, “but hopefully someday a novel.”
She nodded. “I knew a writer once. An American, what was his name, Alex?”
The conversation went on like this for another hour or so, going in circles, looping back around, full of sharp turns and non sequiturs. The effort of trying to both keep up but also to not react to the surreal nature of the conversation was exhausting. Madame de Persaud drank several cups of tea but left the food untouched. When Alex urged her to eat something, she scolded him and told him she was watching her figure.
“Well, I think I shall go and take a little rest,” she said to Alex. “Katherine, walk with me to my room.”
Sophie looked at Alex with surprise, and he smiled apologetically.
“Why don’t I go with you as well?” Véronique offered, at least knowing where Madame de Persaud’s room was and perhaps some other vital protocol.
“You’re Alex’s wife?” Madame questioned Véronique as Alex helped her to her feet and Sophie came around her other side to take her arm.
“Oui, Mamie. C’est ma femme,” Alex said quietly, grinning at Véronique, who beamed back in collusion. I sat stiffly, again the only person lacking a vital role. I was glad for the prop of my teacup to occupy me, even though the tea in it had become cold.
Alex stood until his grandmother and the two girls had left the room, then sat down with a long sigh and turned to me. He was smiling. “Some days she is much worse. I had hoped she’d be a little more lucid for your visit, but we never know these days.”
“It’s okay, it’s not necessary to apologize.” My words tumbled out one after another. It caught me off guard to suddenly be alone with him after imagining it so many times.
“I’m not apologizing.” His smile grew wider as he extracted a silver cigarette case and pulled from it an unusually long cigarette. He offered me the case and I took a moment to study it before handing it back to him, explaining that I didn’t smoke, though I wasn’t certain if this was true anymore. It had become Sophie’s and my shared vice, but I couldn’t imagine doing it in front of him; I was too afraid it would make me appear unappealing, that I would somehow do it wrong.
“Bien sûr, les Américains. The case is charming, though, no? I have to special-order cigarettes for it.” This seemed both indulgent and in keeping with my idea of him. He took two deep drags. “I do appreciate that you came today. And the two of you showed such grace. The woman Virginie once was would have appreciated your composure in the face of such lunacy.”
“Happy to be here.” This sounded wrong somehow.
“My mother can’t bear to be around her. It’s ironic because they fought all the time before the dementia, and now it would seem my mother wants nothing more than to go back to that. I think seeing her foe so disarmed is deeply disturbing to her. You women are strange creatures.”
“It seems that all of my associations today are damning. Women, writers, Americans . . .”
Alex laughed. “You’re so clever. Why can I never meet clever girls like you, mmm?” He inched now just a bit closer to me on the bench.
But you have met me, I wanted to say. I feared he meant that he could never meet clever girls whom he also wanted to sleep with. So instead I only shrugged and stared into the remaining few drops of my now-cold tea. Alex took the teacup gently from my hands and set it on the table. My gaze, robbed of its diversion, returned to Alex.
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br /> “Tell me, then, how is your writing going? Have you written many stories while you have been here in France? Does this place inspire you?”
I wanted to say that this place—meaning this splendid garden room and furthermore the inhabitant I shared it with right at this moment—inspired me very much. “A change of scene is always good for creativity, I suppose,” I said instead.
“Do you suppose?” he asked playfully. “This is what I’m hoping for, coming back here. I think Paris has dulled my senses. The city of too many lights.”
“And what do you take pictures of?”
“What do I take pictures of?” he parroted.
I felt we were in some precarious sparring match that I hadn’t meant to enter into. “Yes, well, en fait still lifes or landscapes or . . . ?”
“Ben, non,” he said as if these mundane suggestions left a bad taste on his tongue, “people.” Les gens.
“Right. Models.”
“No, not if I can help it. As I said the other night, I prefer to shoot a regular girl. More interesting.” He smiled gently and I wondered if this was supposed to somehow flatter me. What a useless word interesting was, conveying both multitudes and nothing at all.
“Not much money in regular girls, though, is there?”
“My other work is art, and I’m afraid that, as you say, the intersection of art and commerce is usually poverty. You will see once you have left school whether or not you really want to keep writing your ‘little stories.’ ” He said the last two words in English.
I blanched. “My ‘little stories’?”
He thought for a moment, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Excuse me, your short stories. I forget the difference in English from time to time. You have more words than we do, which is lucky for you, my writer bird. I only mean that you will know what is really in your heart when you have to worry about paying the rent, buying food, that sort of thing.”
It seemed unlikely to me that he knew much about struggling to live off his art, or poverty of any kind. He seemed rather relaxed for someone on the ragged edge. There was a hungry gleam in his eye, but not in that way.
“Isn’t it scary to live like that? From one project to the next? With that uncertainty?”
“Sometimes yes, it is.” He smiled and leaned in, whispering now as though he didn’t wish anyone to overhear him, the smell of smoke and of him overwhelming me. “But with fear you must learn to not only face it but to make yourself its master. Otherwise, chérie”—his face was so close now that I couldn’t look him directly in the eye—“it will always be yours.” With this he kissed me on my jawbone right below my ear, nearly on my neck. I breathed in sharply, and before I could stop myself, my fingers flew to where his lips had touched, to capture the fleeting sensation of the kiss.
He had returned to his chair and was leaning back with one foot crossed over his knee. He regarded me as though gauging how well I was absorbing what had just happened. I called upon my remaining reserves of will to seem detached or to somehow emulate the look of slight amusement that he and Véronique always wore.
Finishing his cigarette—the smoke from which still burned my eyes—he stubbed it out in the elegant ivory ashtray next to him on the seat cushion.
A thousand questions thundered through my brain all at once. Was he trying to sleep with me? Was it possible that he didn’t know the effects of what he’d just done? Or did he not care? He was watching me as if he knew exactly what I would do next and was just waiting for me to get around to it.
“So you are not afraid,” I said.
“No, that is not what I said.”
Magdalena reappeared to clear away the remains of the tea service. I had no idea how to behave around a servant and folded my hands in my lap like a child in a church pew. Alex said something to her in what sounded like German, a request she acknowledged with a grunt without bothering to make eye contact with him. He remained silent until she was well out of the room.
“If you knew me better, you would know that I am always afraid,” Alex said.
“I don’t believe you.”
A look of irritation crossed his face. “It’s true, but people see what they want to see. You will see what you want to see.”
I found myself staring into the chasm of hostile silence that had opened up between us. I wanted to dismiss it as pouting, but I could see in his face that something had unsettled him, and all I wanted was to make it right. Where were Sophie and Véronique? What was taking them so long? But maybe it was better that I had a few more moments left to undo the damage.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said at last, futilely searching for the word for “offend.” Now was not a moment for the ubiquitous comment dit-on.
“Upset me?” He gave me a measured smile. “Never.”
The chasm had closed, but so too had some important window. I felt the fatigue of trying to keep up with someone who was not only speaking in another language but speaking enigmatically at that.
“It’s just hard to imagine someone like you being afraid. That’s what I meant. You seem so confident. But it’s always a mistake to think you know everything or really anything at all about someone. Especially someone you’ve just met. Thank you for reminding me.”
I was again at a disadvantage; when the words themselves take so much energy, the tone can so easily get lost.
“Actually, I have the feeling”—he leaned forward just a bit—“that you are a girl who can know a person just by looking at them.”
“Maybe so.” I smiled as though he’d guessed a secret of mine. “But still, you have to be careful.” Il faut faire attention.
Magdalena reappeared with a bottle of wine and four glasses. She put them down on the table and opened the bottle of wine. I noticed that she didn’t bother to be quiet when Madame de Persaud was gone from the room.
Alex thanked her in German as she left the room, and again she left without acknowledgment.
He smiled coldly and shook his head. I looked at him questioningly. “Magdalena doesn’t like me, or my mother. If it was her choice, they never would have left that ugly old château in the Loire Valley. She doesn’t like ‘the city,’ as she calls it, and she knows she’s out as soon as my chère grand-mère leaves us. She thinks we’re after the old woman’s money.”
“Well, are you?”
To my relief, he laughed. Before he could say anything more, Sophie and Véronique came back into the room.
“Ah, génial! Du vin,” Véronique said.
“Bien sûr.” Alex leaned forward and filled our glasses with a crisp sauvignon blanc, then turned to Sophie. “I cannot believe my poor demented grandmother thought you were her sister. You’re a good sport.”
“Did you know your aunt Katherine well?” Sophie asked. “Do I actually look like her?”
“I never met her, she died young. But from photos it does seem that you look a lot like her, yes. In fact”—he finished the bit of wine that was still in his glass—“I think I know where there are some photos upstairs. I will show you.” Standing, he reached out a hand to Sophie, which she took and followed him. I felt the spotlight of his attention shift onto her, watched her settle into it.
Since Véronique remained rooted where she sat, I surmised that we were not invited to come along and watched as Sophie and Alex left the garden room hand in hand.
Maybe they would be right back with a photo album and we would all look at it together, I told myself. But then why did Alex take Sophie with him and not simply go fetch it and bring it back?
Véronique smiled at me as she refilled first my glass and then hers. For a moment I was worried that she had somehow read my thoughts. “I told you they were a complicated family,” she said, reclining and taking a long sip.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask her, and none of them seemed appropriate. For starters, did she know which of us—presuming it was one or the other—Alex preferred? What had he said about us? Surely they’d spoken about les fi
lles américaines when we weren’t around. Or if he had said nothing, what was she inclined to believe? And what was the deal with the grandmother? Did some vast Astor-like fortune hang in the balance?
“They seem fascinating,” I said distractedly. Sophie and Alex weren’t coming back, at least not right away.
“You will meet Alex’s mother at some point. I will be curious to know what you think of her.” I liked this reference to a future time when we would all be together here again, implying that Sophie and I had passed the test.
Eventually Véronique went for another bottle of wine. I sat quietly alone in the room wishing with every fiber of my being that Sophie and Alex would reappear. What was taking so long, looking at the pictures? I wanted them sitting in front of me so that I could banish the images that were racing through my head of the two of them alone together.
“Voilà!” said Véronique, appearing with another bottle of the wine we’d just been drinking. No sooner had she filled our glasses than Alex materialized behind her with a different bottle of wine and the gold box of chocolates.
He laughed when he saw that Véronique had already produced a second bottle. “Mais c’est un rouge”—he gestured to the red wine he carried, brushing a bit of dust off the decrepit-looking label with its peeling corners. “We will open it and let it breathe then, that will be better, non?”
“You should see this cellar,” Sophie said quietly to me in English as she sat down beside me, her eyes wide.
“And the chocolates.” Alex pulled the ribbon gingerly away and opened the box. “So lovely of you girls to bring these.” I had forgotten about them, that we were meant to have them with the tea. “Tomorrow we’ll tell Mamie that she was very bad and had three of them at tea,” he said playfully.
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