The Last Life Read online

  "I think I'd stick to buying fish."

  8

  That evening we went to my grandparents' apartment for supper. It was always a production to take Etienne there, because the Bellevue, and in particular its staff block, had not been designed with wheelchairs in mind. No matter which path one took—whether around the main drive, past the main hotel and the pool, in a wide loop, or straight up from the gate to the back parking lot and the staff building beyond—there were steps. My mother and I together could lift Etienne in his chair, but the effort made both of us bead with sweat, and soiled our hands and rumpled our blouses, and my grandmother would silently frown upon us. Carting Etienne was much easier when it was my father and me—or better yet, my father and one of the gardeners, or Zohra, my grandparents' maid.

  That day, however, my father had gone straight from his office in the hotel to the apartment, so my mother and I panted and struggled while Etienne, drooling onto his fine white shirt, bucked and crowed and tried to reach for our hair or our arms or our shiny necklaces, and we all arrived at my grandparents' door flushed and dishevelled.

  "Come in, chéris," urged my grandmother from within her cloud of Guerlain (a particular perfume concocted, appropriately enough, for the empress Eugénie). Even though we were the only supper guests, an evening en famille, she had powdered and rouged, had draped her neck with jewels and her body in flowered silks. "The men are just sorting out the drinks."

  Apéritif was ritual at these family gatherings: even Etienne had his cup of orange juice, a special red plastic cup that had a lid with a straw in it, so that his dribbling could be more or less controlled.

  I hadn't seen my grandfather since before the swimming pool incident, although my grandmother had roundly chastised me on his behalf the following day. I wasn't certain whether to apologize directly, to clear the air but possibly to elicit an indignant tirade, or to pretend nothing had happened and hope for the best.

  In the living room, my father and my grandfather stood side by side watching a fleet of little sailboats tack across the vista, back towards the port, as the early evening colors, soft and roseate, fell like dust over the receding rocky headlands and the great bowl of the sky. Both men held their hands clasped behind their backs; both allowed their lower lips to ride up slightly over their top ones, in a vaguely smug expression, as if the splendid view were of their making, the bonny white blips of sail a diversion solely for their pleasure.

  There the resemblance faltered. My grandfather stood a head shorter than his son, a dapper man in an old-fashioned suit with a blue handkerchief at the pocket. His frame was slight and his face, animate, almost ugly, seemed too big for his body. His nose loomed imposing and bulbous above his broad mouth. His ears, too, were large and fleshy, their pink lobes disproportionately pendulous. He was fairskinned, greyed, his tonsured locks cropped close. My father, swart, bulky and hairy beside him, emanated excess. Formerly muscled, he was now merely fleshy in the shoulders and neck, with a second chin sagging, incipient, below the first. Dark curls crept down his nape and under his collar, from beneath his cuffs along the backs of his hands—like a werewolf, I had teased him when I was younger, until my mother told me he was ashamed of his hairiness. My father's eyes were large and profusely lashed, but these were his only outsized feature: his nose was fine and straight and of medium length (his mother's nose); his mouth was a sensuous but restrained bow; and his ears—he was proud of his ears—lay small and flat, as if asleep, along the outline of his skull. The two men looked at once utterly different and the same, in their attitude before the ocean.

  "Surveyors of the beyond?" inquired my grandmother with a brittle hoot, jangling her bangles. "Will neither of my men pour us a tiny little glass of port? We're parched!"

  We assembled in our specific places around the coffee table, my father and grandfather in facing armchairs, my mother and I on the sofa—which was particularly high, or deep, so that we both had to choose between dangling our feet above the ground and perching at the front of the slippery cushions: I always chose the former and she the latter—and my grandmother, with Etienne parked at her side, closed the circle, in a tapestry chair with carved legs and futile little armrests: a lady's chair.

  Before sitting, I kissed my grandfather hello. He seemed preoccupied, and registered no displeasure. Indeed, he seemed barely to register who I was. But then, when drinks had been poured and I was quietly crunching potato chips from a blue bowl, I caught him frowning at me, his eyebrows, ever exuberant (their hairs were very long), working, as if the sight of me in the middle distance had provoked an aggravating memory.

  My grandmother was telling a story about an aging Italian opera singer who had visited the hotel every year for a decade—a woman we all knew, who wore grand, flowing tunics and who annually pinched my cheeks between her curiously strong fingers—when my grandfather interrupted her.

  "Our country, in this time, has a problem of manners," he began. "It is not a uniquely French problem—indeed it stems, in part, I, like many, would contend, from the influence of your country"—he nodded at my mother—"although not, naturally, from your own gracious influence. What preoccupies me, however, as a nationalist—and I'm not afraid to say it, implying thereby only a love and a reverence for my nation, culture and history above all other nations, cultures and histories, which is perfectly natural and in no way implies disrespect for those others—anyway, as a nationalist and a Frenchman, I am concerned with the manners and mores of this country, and of our people. And it seems to me—" here his roving, appropriative gaze, which had been sliding like oil around the assembly, and beyond, to the Provençal plates on the wall and the darkening corner of sea he could distinguish from his chair, came to rest upon me—"that the loss of certain basic courtesies among our citizens, and among our youngest citizens above all, does not, of itself, comprise the fairly innocent informality that well-intentioned liberals would have us believe. No. It is, I am convinced, a symptom of a far-reaching and truly distressing cultural collapse, one in which the individual places his own will and desire above the common good in ways we, who are now aging, would have considered unthinkable. Rudeness is, I argue, a symptom of the profound anarchy that our culture currently faces but refuses to acknowledge, a chaos in which everyone has lost sight of his place in a natural—or rather, civilized, which is far greater a compliment than the natural, civilization being what distinguishes us from mere beasts—hierarchy. What motivates good behavior—" He paused and sipped his scotch, with a slurp rendered louder by our silence; even Etienne, whose eyes rolled to the ceiling and whose feet twitched, sensed that our grandfather's discourses demanded attention. "What motivates good behavior and what motivates excellence are the same thing: fear. Fear of God, fear of the rod, fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of pain. And that is a fact. And in our society, today, nobody is afraid of anything. Shame, rebuke, imprisonment—none of it means anything to anyone. Kids need to be taught," he said, looking now at my father, who managed to meet his gaze without apparently seeing him, "that their actions have repercussions, real ones. Kids should be a lot more afraid than they are."

  "Not just kids," I said, nodding and licking the salt from my lips.

  "You would have me believe that we"—my grandfather's ire was a fierce steeliness in the quiet of his tone—"that we, around you here in this living room, behave with as little regard for anyone outside ourselves as you and your little friends?"

  Tempted to insist that my friends were not "little," but wise to the cost of such baiting, I adopted my most innocent and childish voice, and said, "Oh no, nothing like that. No, I meant the woman in the market today. Right, Maman?"

  My mother, who sought only to slip invisibly through these evenings, glared at me and pressed her lips.

  "What woman?" asked my grandmother.

  "Yes, what happened?" My father seized on any strand that might divert his own father's discourse.

  "It was nothing," my mother insisted.

/>   Etienne squirmed. My grandmother tilted his juice cup to his slippery lips.

  "That's not true, Maman. You were terribly upset."

  "Carol, what happened?" My father leaned forward in his chair. My grandfather's gaze, from beneath his wild brows, burned my mother's cheeks.

  "Oh, Sagesse makes a mountain out of a molehill. It was just one of the pedlars, in the market, who didn't like the look of me for some reason."

  "She spat at us," I explained.

  "Whatever for?" my grandmother asked.

  My mother shrugged. "Just rude, I suppose. She was a nasty, tough old thing."

  "She accused Maman of being in the National Front, in town for the funerals."

  "Probably a communist," my grandmother said with a sniff. "You didn't take it to heart?"

  "Of course not. But she was very unpleasant." My mother adjusted her skirt.

  "As if—" my grandfather took a breath and spouted "—as if our country's troubles stemmed from the National Front! As if that were an insult! How absurd!"

  "How do you mean, Grand-père?"

  "I don't vote for Le Pen," my grandfather said, "but I'd defend any man's right to. For a start, because we—you too, my little girl, although you know about as much history as a spotted dog—we, all of us in this room, owe that man a debt. To the last, he fought for our country, he believed in our people, he understood what it was, what it meant."

  "Algeria." I whispered it.

  "That's right, my girl. Algeria. And anyone who votes for him, maybe they're merely repaying that debt. I don't happen to agree with a lot of his policies, and I think it's political suicide for representatives of the FN to come down here and associate themselves with a posse of undisciplined children, children who exemplify the very anarchical destruction—in this case, self-destruction—that I've just been talking about. Left, right—the politics don't matter. It's chaos, it's entropy, and anyone with any wit should keep away. But the FN's not the problem. People who think it is are misguided. It's just a symptom of the problem. Of the problems. Plural. The problems that this nation faces, overrun with immigrants—Arabs, Africans, the English-speakers, all of them—our culture assailed on all sides. Our children, for God's sake, building bombs for no reason! And our government—this decrepit, farcical liar who fancies himself emperor—our government has nothing to say about it, nothing at all!"

  My father coughed and looked into his drink.

  "Le Pen, at least—he says the wrong thing, I think, for our time and our moment, but at least he has something to say. At least he knows his own mind. That's what you should've said to the pinko fishwife—"

  "She was selling olives, actually," my mother murmured.

  "Olives, fish, garlic, whatever. That's what you should've said to that peasant—at least he doesn't wait for advice from Moscow on how to respond to a local crisis. At least he has an honest response—a French response." My grandfather grunted, sipped his scotch, rattling the ice cubes.

  I sat deep in the back of the sofa, swinging my feet slightly, watching, as my brother, strapped in his chair opposite me, twitched and rolled his bright grey eyes. I was quite impressed by the firecracker I had so nonchalantly launched in our midst: I hadn't known I would provoke so fulsome a response, so ready a distraction from the pettiness of late swims in the Bellevue pool.

  At supper, my grandfather said almost nothing, as if he were spent. He looked small, slumped over his jrìssaladière, then over his slices of lamb shoulder. He sipped indifferently at his rosé and stared out to the now-dark sea, and when my father asked him about the notion of a security guard at the front gate, he seemed not to hear. My father looked at my mother as if to say "I told you so," and she raised a finely arched brow.

  "Who's for more potatoes?" urged my grandmother, at her head of the table. "More peas?"

  9

  When we got home that night, I helped my mother bathe Etienne and put him to bed, because Magda had the evening off. Etienne lolled, half asleep, as we put on his nightshirt, his limbs heavy and slightly damp in the heat, and we left him to the cool air that drifted into his darkened room with the tang of the sea on it.

  I, too, bade my good nights, and my mother returned to my father in the living room below, her heels resounding on the stone staircase. While I brushed my teeth, my mouth full of minty foam, I tiptoed onto the landing to listen to my parents' quarreling.

  "...These interminable lectures, as if we were all Sagesse's age—no, for God's sake, as if we had the wit of Etienne!"

  I couldn't hear my father's reply, but could deduce it from what followed.

  "How many years have you been saying that? 'He's difficult,' 'It's a difficult time,' 'I couldn't leave him now'—come off it, Alex, what about our life? Your life?"

  The bickering was as familiar as a dream. I returned to the bathroom to spit and rinse, and brought my nightie from my room so I could change for bed and listen at the same time. It would not end until my father exploded, and won. I could practically hear the ice cubes in his after-dinner glass of scotch, which I knew he held, and put down, and held again as he paced the room, around the furniture, seething like an animal until he would have to roar.

  I stood, barefoot, in my underpants, my nightgown frothy in my hand, leaning forward. My heart pumped and tingled in my extremities; my neck was rigid. I could feel my veins tightening. It was always this way. I was waiting for release. By witnessing their arguments, their hidden confessor, I unthinkingly believed that I controlled and contained them; I would not retreat until their voices subsided, until I was certain that no hand had been raised (none ever was), that nothing, tangible or intangible, had been truly broken.

  "Enough! Your incessant shrieking!" my father's bass thundered. I imagined his face purpled, his curls quivering, his hands, in fists, held tight as though they might escape him. "And how, exactly, would you have us live—with your taste for maids and nurses and luxury all around? Do you think it's so easy?"

  My mother whimpered complaint. She would cry soon.

  "Spoiled! You're nothing but a spoiled American daddy's girl, still, after all this time. You think it's easy? It's work, every second of it is work, hand-dirtying, mind-numbing. You think I like it? You have no idea. I survive it. And he taught me that—which isn't nothing—and we've built something. Christ, I've built something, part of it, a large part, even if it's all in his name now. But his name is my name, it's our name, it's the only thing that makes a life mean anything—"

  My mother said something else, inaudible; but conciliation was beginning.

  "It will be our life; it's the only life, the only place we've got. He won't go on like this forever. It's mine—it's your due. For the kids, for our family name. Jesus, Carol, walk away? You want to walk away? Then, walk—"

  I could tell she was crying; she would be trying to embrace him now.

  "I haven't thrown these years away for nothing. Not all these years. And it's our place. It will be our place, and we'll make it ours."

  "Of course we will," my mother was saying. "Of course we will."

  The volume was ebbing.

  "It's going to belong to us," my father said, almost in his normal voice. "If you'll just be patient."

  I slipped my gown over my head and prepared to retreat. They would turn out the lights now. They would come upstairs, maybe even together.

  "Agree with him?" my father said. "Don't ask me that. I don't even fucking hear him. I don't hear it, so how would I know?"

  If they continued, I decided, it would be on the relatively quiet ground of politics, for which neither could muster much venom. I had ridden out the storm. I went to bed, pausing only to catch the soft, wet snores from Etienne's room, to make sure that he, too, was safe.

  10

  The second nocturnal swim, a week later, took place without me. I could not have prevented it, and could only laugh when Marie-José told me. She sat outstretched on her bedroom floor with her spatula and honeyed mire of melted wax, smoo
thing it in even swathes onto her long brown legs and tearing, with exaggerated winces, at the invisible fair bristles. She told me the story in between the stripping sounds, and waved the sticky spatula for emphasis.

  "Your grandfather—Christ, girl, he's a madman. It was earlier, you know, than last time, so I guess we thought it would be okay. It must have been before ten, nine thirty even, and we were trying—we saw his lights on—trying to be quiet. But I think it was Cécile, she was screaming like a pig in the water. I think—" She paused to slather the back of her left calf. "I think she has a thing for Thierry. Don't laugh; it's obvious. You wouldn't think anyone could go for him, the shrimp. But she's no Vogue model herself."

  "And she's short," I said.

  "And he's older than she is. And I suppose she doesn't know him very well. So anyway—she gets on my nerves, that girl—every time he swam near her, she'd start shrieking, even though the rest of us were doing our best to shut her up. He was loving it, of course."

  "You think he's interested?"

  "Probably. I mean, how often can he get a look in? None of us would touch him. And at school he's a joke."

  "You're starting to make me feel sorry for him."

  "Wait for this, then. Because you really will. Even I felt a little sorry. It was so funny. You see, we were trying, except for those two, to be quiet. Well, quieter. I mean, we were talking and stuff, but most of us didn't scream. And we were in the pool for a while, you know, and he—your grandfather—he didn't come out. I think we figured that maybe they were entertaining or something, or maybe they were out somewhere else. I mean, all he had to do was tell us to shut up."

  "So? What happened?"

  The wax was cold and petrified on Marie-José's leg, but she was too caught up in her story to attend to it.

  "Well, all of a sudden there's this voice on the bridge"—there was a walkway over the pool from the courtyard above, with steps leading down to the water—"saying, All right, who is it?' And then, 'I know which ones you are,' and 'Get out of the water.' So we do, I mean, what choice do we have? We didn't hear him coming, you know. It was so weird."