The Last Life Read online

  "What did he do then?"

  We were both leaning forward, our bodies plumped in the grubby pink shag carpet that had always, since I knew her, covered Marie-José's bedroom floor.

  "He turned on this monster flashlight. Huge, like a searchlight, and he shone it on our faces, and then when it landed on Thierry—I mean, he's never liked me, he thinks I'm badly brought up, but Thierry, he thinks of him as polite, you know, because Thierry always says 'Good day, sir' in that brown-nose way. So he gets the flashlight on Thierry and he says 'Come here,' and Thierry steps forward. And then your grandfather steps back a bit, I guess, because the next thing is, he's shining the light on all of Thierry, you know? He's exposing him."

  "Geez. Jesus Christ."

  "So there's little Thierry, with his hands over his balls, twitching around and whimpering and completely humiliated."

  "Oh Jesus."

  "I felt for him, I really did. Even you would have, I swear. Your grandfather stood there, aiming this great beam of light on skinny Thierry, and he starts this interrogation. Like 'Does your father know you're here?' and 'Don't you have summer school homework and shouldn't you be doing it?' and 'Is everyone here a resident, or are these little friends from town?' and 'Do you have any idea what it's like to be trying to sleep or to read with this racket?' And Thierry tried to point out that we were next to the staff apartments, that the guests were hundreds of meters away and couldn't possibly have heard, but that just seemed to annoy your grandfather more."

  "And then?"

  "In time he just turned off the light and left us to get dressed. I'm surprised we didn't all catch pneumonia, we were standing there naked for so long. In-sane. Thierry was pretty funny about it, considering. But I suspect Cécile lost interest, once she got a good look. I wonder whether it would've been you, if you'd been there?"

  "Me?"

  "With the flashlight. Whether your grandfather would've lit you up like a Christmas tree."

  "Naked? Don't be sick."

  We doubled over with laughter. Marie-José peeled the wax off her leg with a scream and we found that, too, unreasonably funny.

  "How was your night, anyway?"

  11

  I hadn't been at the poolside because Thibaud had, at last, asked me out. I say "at last" because for the past three summers he had come with his parents to the hotel for a month, in their fat white Mercedes, from Paris. And for three summers I had eyed his black curls and his impish hazel eyes, had marvelled at the pattern of freckles on his brown back, had preened and tried to cast interested but veiled glances at him, my skills at twelve and thirteen fairly primitive, so that Thibaud could not help but know of my infatuation. But at twelve and thirteen I was still scrawny and flat-chested, and he, two years older, showed no interest.

  A year older than me, Marie-José, whose breasts had burst forth by the time she was eleven, and who at that age had already reached her full, impressive height, she who learned early to flick the golden brown waves of her hair in an insouciant but enticing way, and who was to be caught, later that same year, with an eighteen-year-old army recruit, in her little-girl's bedroom with its pink shag rug—Marie-José had been flicking and winking at Thibaud for a couple of years. Voice of experience to my thinner, unvoluptuous youth, she had assured me several times that "the vibe wasn't there": "I think he might be gay," she'd said, pursing her lips in modest disapproval. "Men have a way of looking, of appreciating, even if they aren't planning anything. I mean, your father looks like that at me."

  I had so long envied and feared her mysterious power that I usually accepted her judgments—the sexual ones, that is—without hesitation. But with Thibaud, I kept faith secretly, and continued to tan my skin with the touch of his fingertips in mind, and to stuff my bra, which did not seem to fill out fast enough on its own, with carefully folded bulges of white tissue.

  At last, that summer, he spoke to me as we climbed the cliff back from the beach one afternoon. I was not surprised, although it was so surprising. I had imagined the moment so many times that it seemed, on the hot gravel path, that I might have misheard. When, later in my own room, I played our brief exchange over in my head, I heard different nuances with each repeat, and felt tremors in my body that were half delight, half fear. He had asked if I wanted to go for a drink and I, feigning ease, had said simply, "Sure, whatever."

  I didn't tell my mother. Even slight sins of omission, though, have a way of tripping you up, and it was upon hearing from my grand father of the previous night's events, when she was expecting to have to punish me for partaking, that she discovered I hadn't been at the hotel, or at least hadn't been swimming with the others.

  In fact, my evening with Thibaud had been disappointingly innocent. I don't know what I had anticipated, but I had felt my heart like a great snare drum beneath my lace-edged T-shirt. I wore my favorite one, the color of a rosy shell, showing off my slender arms to best advantage (it was not long since they had been skinny and without advantages at all). I wore my most presentable pair of Levis, their hems fashionably clipped at the ankle, and a thick black leather belt. I wore my sandals, my newest, all straps, and I carried over my shoulder a navy cardigan I had stolen from my mother. I hesitated awhile over my hair, and ultimately chose to leave it loose, knowing that although it did not have Marie-José's pre-Raphaelite waves it could nonetheless be played with nonchalantly, and that, windblown by the ride into town, it should seem, if clean, sultry rather than a rat's nest. I glossed my lips.

  Thibaud, when we met by the hotel gates, said nothing about my appearance. He asked whether I had managed to get hold of Marie-José's moped for the evening, and when I said I had, asked me to drive it. He wasn't surly, just silent, and I couldn't tell whether he was nervous, or whether he regretted his invitation. He was a Paris boy, and wealthy; and this was only a summer seaside town, and I the hotelier's granddaughter, a gawky girl in jeans who idled year-round in these beautiful but vacant surroundings. I was smart enough and afraid enough to recognize these facts, and the possibility that he had changed his mind.

  But fourteen is not an age at which you ask outright for answers: not yet. Those in-between years are a haze of second-guessing and dialogues entirely of the mind. The possibility of human proximity seems greater than ever it will again, trailing still the unreflective clouds of childhood, the intimate, unsentenced dialogue of laughter or of games. Children do not have the words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood.

  Adolescence, then, is a curious station on the route from ignorant communion to our ultimate isolation, the place where words and silences reveal themselves to be meaningful and yet where, too young to acknowledge that we cannot gauge their meaning, we imagine it for ourselves and behave as if we understood. Only with the passage of years, wearied, do we resort to asking. With the inadequacy of asking and the inadequacy of replies comes the realization that what we thought we understood bears no relation to what exists, the way, seeing the film of a book we have read, we are aghast to find the heroine a strapping blonde when we had pictured her all these years a small brunette; and her house, which we envisaged so clearly and quaintly on the edge of a purple moor, a vast, unfamiliar pile of rubble with all its rooms out of order.

  As I drove the moped down the corniche towards town, Thibaud with his hands on my waist, so tentative, and me without a license to drive—as we took speed on the hill all possible interpretations of his reticence, from adoration to nervousness to distaste, visited me, bright as fireworks, each in its moment seeming wholly and uniquely true. But by the time we reached the café on the sea wall, I had run the full gamut and begun again with no certainty, while he had done no more than tighten his grip around me on the sharp turns in the road and try to keep the flailing strands of my hair out of his mouth.

  The café, on the boardwalk directly above the beach, was popular with people from my school. Festively l
it with multicolored lanterns and hung with bits of boats and plaster fish, it was more like a stage set than a café, and attracted a younger clientele. Thibaud and I took a table on the terrace, in uncomfortable white plastic armchairs still gritted with the sand of day visitors in their bathing suits. He ordered beer and I a Coke, and we talked, desultorily, almost dully, about the hotel and its guests and our friends. Only at the moment when, reaching for the ashtray, his fingers brushed the back of my hand did I feel a current snake the length of my body and erupt into tingling, and with it, that moment swelled beyond all natural proportion.

  We had not been there long when four people I knew—a year ahead of me at the lycée—wandered in and, after kisses and introductions, joined us. For an hour or more we exchanged the gossip of the summer: who had failed their exams and was incarcerated at home, the long summer afternoons, with their books; who had been injured on a motorcycle while on holiday in Corsica; who, we all suspected, had started running with the druggie crowd and was more often than not red-eyed and dazed; and what would happen to them all when September came (as if September were the end of real life, or its beginning; with the summertime one was never really sure); and which teachers I might have that these guys had suffered under, and of the worst one, a Monsieur Ponty, whose red-tipped nose signalled disaster and who felt himself free to rap the knuckles of the unprepared with his metal ruler.

  Thibaud sat through these exchanges all but mute, his generally mobile face fixed in a distracted half-smile. Finally, when he had drained his second beer, he leaned across and murmured a suggestion that we walk a while along the beach. We abandoned my schoolmates and the gaudy glimmer of the lanterns for the dark whisper of the shore. The beach chairs hovered in the gloom, their white canvas backs like the sails of tiny ships. Occasionally we passed other couples or groups walking, the fireflies of their burning cigarettes heralding their approach. We passed a huddle of gypsies plucking guitars around their fire in the rocks at the end of the bay, and one of them called out to offer us a drink, or a smoke.

  We did not touch as we walked, a failure that seemed purposeful: I felt my restraint because I knew the lightest brush would result, inside me, in a report as forceful as a gunshot, and I would lose the thread of the conversation that, finally, we seemed to be having. These sensations were new in being real rather than imagined (although they fluttered still only in my mind): I was actually there, walking along the soughing sand with this tall and serious boy, the two of us like other couples. My brother, Etienne Parfait, would never amble on a beach at night with the moon floating in the water and the rank salt in his nostrils, wondering in every fibre, and anticipating a touch on the skin so strongly felt without its having happened that it took on the quality of a waking dream.

  When Thibaud and I arrived back at the hotel, it was not late, but neither of us suggested that we seek out the others. We dawdled in the concrete cavern of the parking lot, beneath the flickering bleach of the fluorescent light, serenaded by the trickle of a forgotten garden hose and the occasional scurry of a lizard along the wall. I fiddled with my hair (which I knew by now to be a rat's nest) and he, hands in pockets, toed the ground. Eventually I said I had to go, although I didn't, particularly. He walked me out, along the alley of palms to the hotel gates; and stood there, shadowed by the street lamp, as I turned onto the road and started off in the direction of home.

  12

  For this catalogue of unspoken and ungrasped opportunities, my mother expressed grave disappointment in me. It was a disappointment—as much about the failure of our friendship, hers and mine, an alliance that we both had long lived by, as it was about my breaking any rules—whose depths I could glimpse in her decision not only not to tell my father, but not even to threaten to do so.

  "All you had to do was ask," she insisted, tight-lipped, as we set the dinner table the following evening, when I had heard the story of the pool from Marie-José, and my mother had heard it from my grandmother. "How did you get into town? And who is this boy?"

  "It's nothing. He's just a friend. I don't want to talk about it."

  "I don't know which is worse, you raising havoc with those kids up at the hotel, or sneaking off with ... how old is he, anyway?"

  "My age. Maman, it's no big deal. We met some friends for coffee in a café on the corniche, and that's all. I would've thought—"

  My mother glared at me, her hooded eyes, which I had inherited, spitting light. She waved a knife in her left hand, feeling its weight. "What would you have thought, exactly? Honestly, Sagesse, I've had just about enough. You can't imagine what ... this is the last thing your father needs, to worry about you. The last thing I need. These days—I don't know. I don't know what to do."

  The slip from rage to misery was instantaneous, a familiar melodrama. The knife sagged, suddenly so heavy in her hand that she dropped it, with a piteous (and self-pitying) clunk, upon the table. And as the script of years demanded, I was beside her in a second, with my arms around her, knowing that although I could not see her face, her chin had puckered, waffle-like, and her eyes were milky with tears. When I hugged my mother, I was always aware of how small she was, how close her bones were to the surface, her shoulder blades like spiny wings, quivering, prepared for flight.

  "Don't cry," I soothed, stroking her perfect hair, smelling her perfume and beneath it the faint, delicate odor that was her. "Don't cry. It isn't anything. It was nothing. There's nothing to be upset about." I drew back and watched her features struggle into a hesitant, damp grimace, the approximation of a smile.

  "I'm fine," she said, as much to herself as to me. She dabbed her eyes with her cuffs and resumed the business of arranging cutlery.

  "I think it would be better," she began again after a moment, "if you didn't go out in the evenings for a while. You're hardly ever here. How much time have you spent, this summer, with your brother? And your father and I—well, your father's very busy, I know, but still, he'd like to feel he knew what his own daughter looked like. At your age I was—"

  "You were working in the summertime. I know. You had a summer job. But that was in America, Maman. Things are different here. It's a different century, practically."

  "Sometimes I think you ought to be sent to summer camp, if your father won't have you going out to work."

  I snorted. "Nobody goes to camp, Maman." I meant, only poor kids did, and not anyone from our town: who would leave, when in front of us stretched the enticements of the open sea, when we were already in the place where the entire nation sought to come on holiday? "And nobody I know works. Nobody."

  "You lack discipline. All of you."

  "Papa says there's time enough for that later, that now is for learning."

  My mother shrugged. "And everything, as we know, is always your father's way. We live your father's life, after all."

  "Speak for yourself."

  "Believe me, you do too. You just don't know it."

  Eventually my mother came back to what it was she wanted: I was to be grounded for a week. She did not have the force to command me, so her promise was wheedlingly drawn, a pact between friends, born of guilt. But I agreed.

  At that moment, it did not occur to me that I was lying. I didn't mean to lie. Although if I had seriously considered the prospect of seven long evenings pacing the marble floors or riding up and down in Etienne's elevator; if I had taken the time to picture myself squashed into the dark, airless hours my parents inhabited after supper, I would have known that I couldn't do it, not for all the love I could muster for my mother. For Etienne, perhaps: but evenings were not Etienne's domain. Almost immediately after dinner he was whirred along the hall and up to bed, because somebody believed his mute, spastic body required more sleep than the rest of ours; or because the night was the only time my mother had to close her eyes to her burden; or because my father, aside from an awkward, sticky embrace and a sequence of horrified glances over the table, could not really bear the sight of his son.

  Certain
ly I would not have done it for my father, for the fleshy, ingratiating, explosive man who wandered in and out of our days. When he was adoring, his hairy, perfumed arms would reach out to clutch me to him, his sentimental eyes would shimmer with emotion—and I was appalled. Littler, I had charged across rooms and lawns to seek out his broad lap and nuzzle against his chest. But somewhere I had noticed that his love was offered only in the wake of rages, or in compensation for a hideous absence, and it grew sour to me. Much later, I would regret my bitterness, my inability to bend to the generous swoop of his bulk and his tender blandishments—" ma belle," "mon petit ange," "mon trésor"—to concede to the only love he knew how to give. But by then it was too late. And at fourteen, short of a command, and possibly not even then, no word from my father and no love for him could have made me relinquish the pleasures of my friends. In any event, he didn't ask; he was hardly home that summer; and it was solely a contract between my mother and me.

  13

  I had promised, and I tried. She didn't ask me to give up my daytime routines, after all. They continued to blend into one another, bathed in sunlight and the cicada song, scented with suntan oil and the dry, hot smell of the pines, interrupted only by the quiet hour of luncheon, which I generally took at my grandmother's table. Mindful for the first time of my figure, I picked miserably at lasagne, or at great slabs of steak, served by Zohra, my grandparents' aged Arab servant, whose wrinkles were marked out, forehead and chin, by blue tattoos.

  Zohra's hands were gnarled and stubbed with work, and when I remember my grandmother's lunches, what I recall most clearly, aside from the half-lowered blinds which the unremitting glare of sun and sea strove to penetrate, and aside from the powerful, wet clacking of my grandfather's mastication, are Zohra's dark, trembling fingers clasped around my grandmothers porcelain serving dishes, looking edible themselves, warty little sausages on the edge of a mound of beans, or poking towards the mashed potatoes, or glistening at the tips where they had slipped, for an instant, into the platter's pool of jus. Zohra was always good to me, obsequious and secretive: since my earliest childhood, she had pressed gifts of chocolate or jellied fruits into my greedy palms, baring her wrecked teeth with delight and murmuring "Poor little one, this is for you"—a poverty she located not in my person but in the sad condition of my brother and in the austerity of my grandparents.