Since Sophie and Véronique laughed, I decided I was being uptight in thinking that this comment was cruel. I couldn’t be upset that we’d decided to eat the chocolates, though, they were too divine. I silently swore to myself that I would never subject my taste buds to a waxy See’s or Russell Stover again as long as I lived.
“So you must really tell me now,” Alex said, looking at Sophie and me, “what you think of France. You have been here several months now. Have you learned all of our secrets?”
“We love it,” Sophie and I said nearly in unison, which made us giggle.
“And you don’t miss the U.S.?”
I shrugged. Sophie said, “Non, pas du tout.”
It seemed unimaginable that we’d be leaving in a few months. I knew I wouldn’t be ready then, if ever, to go back to what I’d known.
“But it’s your home,” Alex said.
I did miss my mother, but didn’t want to sound childish saying so.
“Home is an overrated concept,” Sophie said, “we just might never go back.”
We all laughed a little, though it seemed she wasn’t joking.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” Véronique said evenly. “So, how was your little treasure hunt?”
“Hmmm?” Alex asked.
“Did you manage to find any decent pictures of your great-aunt Katherine to show Sophie before you began pillaging the wine cellar?”
“Oh, yes! I brought one to show you.” Alex pulled an old black-and-white photo from his back pants pocket, then reached across the table to hand it to Véronique.
She took it from him and examined it, shaking her head. “Extraordinaire, really just like you, Sophie.”
Véronique passed me the photo. In it, two young women in their twenties were standing by the seashore. The brunette was apparently Virginie, as lovely in her youth as I’d been told. Next to her a lithe blonde was smiling, holding her pinned-up hair in place with her hand. The resemblance to Sophie was undeniable. The back of the photo read, Cap Ferrat 1938.
“Incredible,” I said dutifully. My heart sank; it was as though Sophie had always been here, so much did she belong. She took the picture for a moment, staring at it a little wistfully as though the memory actually belonged to her before returning the photo to Alex. I watched them closely and saw again that something seemed to flicker between them, some secret exchange. It could easily have been my imagination—or so I told myself. Ever since they’d returned to the room, I had been hyperaware of the space between them, searching for an afterglow of what I imagined had taken place while I’d been sitting with Véronique. It took me considerable energy and another glass of wine to let it go.
“I think Mamie has a soft spot for you now. All the better,” Alex said, gazing away as though no longer speaking to the three of us.
Eventually several more people, including Véronique’s friend from the first party who had thrown herself at Alex, showed up at the house and helped us to finish off the bottle of wine along with a couple more. The friend flirted mercilessly, but in light of the day we’d had, she suddenly seemed harmless.
When it was at last time to leave, Alex walked Sophie and me back down the stairs and kissed us goodbye in the foyer. Véronique stayed behind.
“You must come over anytime you like,” Alex said. “You have no idea how happy I am to have such interesting company around. This can be your second home in Nantes, non? Sophie, you could come and paint here, and, Brooke, you could write in your journals. Ça serait formidable.”
The invitation felt so genuine in the glow of Alex’s presence. But once Sophie and I were out in the street, it was as if we’d gone through a portal and the house had disappeared the moment we’d left it. I didn’t express this sentiment aloud to Sophie for fear that saying it would somehow make it true.
It was late by the time I got home and I fell into a slumber that gave me no sense of having actually rested, a sleep from which I would not remember any of my dreams but would leave me with the sense that I had sweat out fear and desire in the night like a fever. In the morning I felt empty and wrecked.
AS WE pulled up from the depths of the winter into March and the days began to grow longer, much to my horror time seemed to speed up. The sun stayed up later into the evening and the air during my morning walks became less and less frigid, and I was reminded that summer was approaching, that my days in France were numbered.
My contempt for my fellow American students had only deepened as I’d grown closer to Alex and Véronique, and also as I’d grown closer to Sophie. It felt increasingly as if Sophie and I were from a different country than the other students. The longer we were all here, the more tightly drawn into each other they seemed to become.
I found myself becoming smug toward them, and the boys in particular were the subjects of my ire. They reminded me too much of the boys at home, the boys to whom I knew I had to return when this was over. I held them accountable for the sins of all those frat boys whose inattention had in part driven me to the disastrous relationship with Regan. Those boys who blindly worshipped Sophie because she fit their narrow view of beauty, not because of the person she was, the person that I saw, that I believed myself alone in seeing.
Sophie remained in preternaturally good spirits, and we were now spending much of our free time at Alex’s mother’s house. Though Alex’s mother was still absent, his grandmother was always glad to see us if she was awake and feeling well—especially Sophie, whom she continued to regularly mistake for her sister. Sophie, despite her initial uneasiness with this, had adapted to playing the role and had eventually seemed to almost believe that she was somehow there on behalf of the erstwhile Katherine.
Just as Alex had said we would, we spent long afternoons in the garden room, drinking and chatting and supposedly working on our artistic pursuits. Sophie did indeed paint and I did bring my journals. I was occasionally productive but was open to any distraction that presented itself, such as when Véronique came in wanting help running lines for Le Cid, in which she was going to be performing the lead role with a small underground theater troupe.
Alex often wouldn’t be there with us. He would welcome us at the door, help us to get settled, then disappear into his darkroom, though he would sporadically emerge with mysterious questions about women.
“Les filles,” he would say to us, “tell me, does a woman want her hand held or to have the man’s hand on the small of her back when she walks into a room? Does a woman prefer to make love in the evening after drinking or in the morning after dreaming? Does a woman like her hair stroked or pulled?”
We would answer enthusiastically, bicker amiably. We were willing participants in his personal laboratory.
“Hand held. It shows he thinks of her as an equal!”
“But you hold a child’s hand; the small of her back makes her feel like a woman.”
“At night—who wants sex before coffee?”
“In the morning—best way to start the day.”
“Pulled.”
“Pulled.”
“Tiré. Absolument.”
Sometimes I would find myself dreamily watching over Sophie as she painted. It wasn’t her work that interested me—she kept the easel turned away and was secretive about her paintings—but Sophie herself while she was working. Facing her canvas, her focus was immutable. After working for a while she would often pull back from her canvas, surveying it with a range of emotions displayed on her face, from confusion to mild disgust to a manic, grinning wonderment. She never seemed aware that I was looking at her, and since no one else was there, I watched unabashedly, occasionally recording her reactions in my journal as though studying an opponent in a chess match. When she almost had something just right, she would stick her tongue out just a little. I knew because this expression seemed to always precede a big smile.
One day as I was watching her, Alex called to me from the doorway in a stage whisper: “Brooke.”
I worried for a moment that he had
been there and seen me staring at Sophie paint, but he was lingering in the doorway out of her sight line. He beckoned me over.
I got up quietly, apprehensively laying my journal down and walking toward him. Sophie was in a trancelike state and didn’t seem aware of either of us.
“I want to show you something.” He took my hand, loosely at first and then interlacing his fingers with mine as we walked. We walked down a set of stairs off the kitchen.
“Where are we going?”
He squeezed my hand in return and said nothing. My imagination reeled and I could feel my blood crashing through my veins as we wound down the increasingly narrow stairway.
For the amount of time I had spent with Alex—to say nothing of the amount of time I spent thinking about him—he remained utterly mysterious to me. I felt he would open one door only to reveal yet another door. Infinite doors stretched before me like an image in a fun-house mirror.
I followed him into the dark, humid room. I gasped, overpowered by the scent of chemicals.
“Sorry, darling.” Alex turned and placed his hands on my shoulders. “I’m so used to the smell, I completely forget.”
I shook my head and smiled to indicate that I was fine. That it had just taken me by surprise.
Several shallow bins of chemicals were laid out before us, and numerous photos were drying on clothespins.
“I was just developing these photos from the other night and I wanted to show you.”
I hadn’t even realized that Alex had been taking photos of us. How formidable his talent must be for him to have gone unnoticed by someone who practically chronicled his every move.
He pulled me by the hand to the corner of the room, where a series of four photographs of me and Sophie sitting on the bench in the garden room hung in a row. The images were like a stop-motion film of her telling me something and my incredulous face, her whispering something in my ear, the two of us laughing, and then the two of us a little more composed and exchanging a knowing look.
I let out an astonished giggle and clamped a hand over my mouth.
I looked at Alex; he appeared to be glowing under the intense red light of the darkroom and was watching me intently. What an odd thing it must be to see someone absorb a piece of your art of which he or she is also the subject.
I looked more closely at the photos; Alex had captured something. Would a stranger see it, I wondered, the bond between Sophie and me? That we were having the time of our lives? It seemed so plain in the photos, so evident. Even as I gazed at the images, I saw them as separate from myself and felt envious of the two girls in the photo. My doppelgänger looked happier than I believed I had ever been.
This feeling of seeing myself from an appealing distance was something entirely new and almost unsettling. I didn’t normally like looking at pictures of myself. Photos always seemed to do nothing but highlight the flaws that I saw in the mirror and preserve them at a higher resolution. The ones that occasionally came out well seemed to be lovely only by some serendipity of accidental shadows and angles.
But these shots were different. I couldn’t ever remember a photo of me where I had looked better. Was this the way the world saw me? Was this the way that Alex saw me? As long as the latter was true, I supposed I didn’t care too much about the former.
“You are blushing. How charming.”
“I wonder what she was telling me. I can’t remember.”
“I don’t think it matters. It might have been nothing at all. But I love the way the two of you are so unguarded here. Sans défense.”
He moved closer to me to point to one of the middle photos, and I could smell his skin, a musk of sweat and a twinge of the chemicals from the photo. I’d never smell these things again without thinking of him.
“You are very special to each other, you and Sophie.” He cocked his head to one side. “Almost like sisters.”
“It feels that way.” I longed to know how he felt about Sophie, about me. “It’s been good to be here with her.”
“And good to have you here. Here in Nantes, here in my family’s home. My friends in Paris are quite intrigued when I tell them about you two. Les deux belles filles américaines who spend so much of their time with me.”
I blushed and turned away. “Sophie is very beautiful.”
“And you. You are too.”
I shook my head. I wished I hadn’t said anything.
“Regarde celle-là.” Alex pulled another photo from a clothesline farther back. I studied the sepia print of me in the garden, alone on the bench clutching my teacup. “I snuck back when we left you to find the photos of Katherine the first time you were here.”
My face in the photo appeared vaguely anguished. I’d been worried about where Alex and Sophie were, what they were doing. What relief it would have been to know that he was in the corridor with his lens focused on me, not thinking of Sophie at all. I wanted to go back and whisper in the ear of the girl with her teacup, tell her the truth. But then I thought of Alex observing me unnoticed and knew that to tell her would be to take this moment away.
“I don’t know what they say about this girl in America,” he said, standing behind me with his head on my shoulder, looking down at the picture, “but here she is beautiful. And you cannot argue with the French about these things; we are renowned all over the world for our aestheticism.” After a moment’s pause, he continued, his voice unnervingly serene, “Tell me how you feel when you see these photos.”
I shrugged, wishing we could move on. He pulled away to gaze at me, smiling and folding his arms across his chest as if he could wait all day.
“I guess in some ways,” I said cautiously, “I feel like it’s not me.”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“I mean, I know it is me, but it’s just that seeing myself captured like this, I know I won’t ever be quite that same person again. Someday in the future I’ll take out this picture and I’ll be completely different. I’ll look different, have a different life. And I know I’m already heading towards that moment, my future self. When someone’s taking your picture, it seems like they’re capturing the present, but really they’re turning it into the past, they’re making it an illusion because you can’t go back to when the photo was taken and know exactly how you felt. You just know it’s gone: the moment, whatever you were feeling, whatever you had with the other people in the room with you, all gone.”
When I finally had the courage to look back up at Alex, a strange expression had crossed his face. The air in the room seemed to have thinned and he seemed knocked off-balance.
“Sorry,” I muttered, “that probably doesn’t make any sense. You’re a great photographer, I really like the photos, I’m sorry—”
“Stop!” he said. Arrête!
I bit down on my lip, feeling as if I might cry.
Reaching out abruptly, Alex grasped me by the shoulders. “No one understands. People, they think what I do is superficial, and it is! It is superficial when I am taking pictures of models and handbags. It’s so manufactured! None of it’s real.” He was working himself up now, nearly yelling. He released my shoulders and began to gesture wildly in the small space of the darkroom.
“But you understand. You see how sad it all is.”
I nodded. The moment felt surreal. My nerves were frayed.
“You should see, Brooke. You should see what these photo shoots are like: all the makeup, the lighting, the artifice. All to create a false moment! But here”—he came up behind me now so that we both faced the pictures that hung on the clothesline—“these moments are real, they were real. As you said, we can capture them, save them from the erosion of time. Virginie was beautiful once as well, remember?”
I let myself lean back into him and he nuzzled my cheek with his head and put his arms around my waist. My skin felt hot and my pulse erratic. I wanted to stay until something happened. Stay until I felt his lips on my neck. Stay until I felt his hands underneath my clothing. Stay. Just stay.
But reaching up to the clothesline, he took down the photo of me with my teacup. “You won’t always be her,” he said softly, “but I want you to remember her. Even when you’ve lost what she had and found something to replace it. Don’t let her go. Not completely.”
I was light-headed.
“Back to the garden? Back to watching our Sophie paint?” He took my hand, and I nodded weakly. If Sophie was ours, was he as well? Was there simply no separating any of us?
My stomach sank in despair as I realized that if nothing had happened with me alone with Alex in his darkroom, it never would. I was glad that I was in front of him on the stairs so that he couldn’t see my face.
As we reached the landing at the top of the stairs, just as we were about to step out of the gloom, Alex stopped me. “Ah, wait one moment, you have some ink.” Crouching down, he licked his thumb and rubbed a spot on the bare skin of my thigh just below the hem of my skirt. I froze.
“There,” he said once the spot had been erased. He looked back up at me and laughed. I knew I was blushing.
“Don’t laugh,” I said helplessly. But he wasn’t listening. He pulled me into him and kissed me. My head spun. He wove one of his hands into my hair and tugged it. I let out an involuntary little gasp.
“You like that,” he whispered in my ear, letting his tongue follow his words. “I know because you told me.” The hand that wasn’t wrapped in my hair, he plunged between my thighs. “You’ve told me everything I need to know.”
I gasped for breath and he kissed me again.
Then, just as suddenly, he stopped. Leaning against the wall with one hand over my shoulder, he smacked the wall with the other with a little burst of laughter, then sharply drew in his breath as if steeling himself. He looked at me as if he might kiss me again but instead walked away, leaving me there to catch my breath.
Later that evening, Alex’s mother finally returned from the countryside. Sophie had already put away her canvas and paints in the studio where Alex let her keep them, and I had abandoned even the pretense of writing. Alex had joined us in the garden and I was furiously trying to catch his eye when he mentioned wine; I offered to fetch it myself if he would tell me where to look. He relaxed back into his chair. The wine cellar was right next to his darkroom, he explained. I could pick anything I liked.
Losing the Light Page 13
