French Leave (4 page)

 

Lola was coming. Lola would be with us. Lola hadn't let us down, and the rest of the world could just go hang.

Simon put on his dark glasses.

He was smiling.

His little Lola was on the train . . .

 

They have this special thing between them. First of all, they're closest in age, only eighteen months apart, and they were really
children
together.

They were the ones who were always getting up to mischief. Lola had an irrepressible imagination and Simon was pliant (already . . . ). They ran away. They got lost. They got into fights, tormented each other, made up. Mom likes to tell us how Lola would needle him all the time, always going into his bedroom to bug him, grabbing the book from his hands or kicking something straight into his Playmobil. My sister doesn't like to recall these acts of war (she worries she's being lumped in the same basket with Carine), so then our mom senses that she'd better change tack and she adds that Lola was always eager for something new, she'd invite all the kids in the neighborhood and invent all kinds of new games. She was like one of those cool scout leaders who can come up with a thousand ideas a minute, and she watched over her big brother like a broody hen. She'd make all sorts of inedible snacks for him with mustard and Nutella and she'd come and lift him out of his Legos when Grendizer or Captain Harlock was on television.

 

Lola and Simon grew up during the Golden Age. When there was Villiers. When we all lived out in the sticks and our parents were happy together. For them the world began outside the front door and ended on the far side of the village.

They would streak across fields pursued by imaginary bulls, and creep into abandoned houses haunted by ghosts that weren't imaginary at all.

They rang the bell at old mother Margeval's until she was ripe for the asylum; they destroyed the hunters' traps; they pissed into washtubs, nicked the teacher's dirty magazines, stole firecrackers, set off the ones called mammoth, and rescued little kittens that some bastard had sealed up alive in a plastic bag.

Boom. Seven kittens all at once. You bet Pop was happy!

And the day the Tour de France came through
our
village . . . Lola and Simon went and bought fifty baguettes and sold sandwiches by the dozen. With their earnings they bought practical jokes and gags, and sixty Malabar candies, and a jump-rope for me, and a little trumpet for Vincent (already!), and the latest
Yoko Tsuno.

Yes, childhood was different back then . . . They knew what an oarlock was, and they smoked creepers and knew the taste of gooseberries. And then there came the biggest major significant event of all, what a huge impact it had, and it happened right behind the door to the shed:

Today Ar April 8 we saw the preist waring shorts.

 

Then they went through our parents' divorce, together. Vincent and I were still too little. We only really figured out what a raw deal we were getting when the day came to move house. But they'd been able to witness the entire show. They would get up in the middle of the night and go and sit side by side at the top of the stairs to listen to the “discussion.” One night Pop knocked over the humungous kitchen cupboard and Mom drove off in the car.

While ten steps up from there they sat sucking their thumbs.

 

It's stupid to go on telling that side of the story: they were close for any number of reasons that, in the long run, meant more than the tough times. But still . . .

 

For Vincent and me it was completely different. We were city brats. Less bicycling and more time in front of the box. We had no idea how to stick on a rubber repair patch but we did know how to dodge a subway fare or repair a skateboard or sneak into the movies through the emergency exit.

And then Lola got sent to boarding school, and there was no one around anymore to fill our heads with whispered mischief or chase after us in the garden . . .

We wrote to each other every week. She was my beloved older sister. I idealized her; I sent her drawings and wrote poems to her. When she came home she would ask me whether Vincent had behaved himself during her absence. Of course not, I'd say, of course not. And I'd describe in detail all the horrible things I'd had to undergo the previous week. At which point, to my supreme satisfaction, she'd drag him into the bathroom to acquaint him with the riding crop.

The louder my brother screamed, the wider I grinned.

And then one day, to make it even better, I wanted to see him suffer. To my complete, flabbergasted horror, I burst in to find my sister whipping a bolster, while Vincent bleated in time, reading his
Boule et Bill
comic book. A mega disappointment. On that day, Lola fell from her pedestal.

Which turned out to be a good thing. Now we were the same height.

 

Nowadays she's my best friend. We're sort of like Mon­taigne and La Boétie, for example . . . Because she is who she is, and I am who I am. The fact that this young woman of thirty-two years of age is also my older sister is totally beside the point. Well, maybe not totally, it's just fortunate we didn't have to waste time trying to find each other.

 

She's all into Montaigne's
Essays
—she likes grand theories, the notion that one is punished for stubbornly wanting, and philosophy is just learning how to die. Give me the
Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
—infinite abuse and all those tyrants who are great because we are on our knees. She'll take true knowledge, I'll take tribunals. As the wise man himself said: “I was so grown and accustomed to be always her double in all places and in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself.”

 

And yet we are very different . . . She is afraid of her own shadow; I sit on mine. She copies out sonnets, I download samples. She admires painters, I prefer photographers. She never tells you what is in her heart, I speak my mind. She avoids conflict, I like things to be perfectly clear. She likes to be “a little bit tipsy,” I prefer to drink. She doesn't like going out, I don't like going home. She doesn't know how to have fun, I don't know when it's time to get some sleep. She hates gambling, I hate losing. Her embrace is all-encompassing, my kindness has its limits. She never gets annoyed, I'm forever blowing a gasket.

She says the world belongs to early risers, I beg her to tone it down. She's romantic, I'm pragmatic. She got married, I flitter and flirt. She can't sleep with a guy unless she's in love, I can't sleep with a guy unless there's a condom. She needs me.

Ditto.

 

She doesn't judge, she takes me as I am. With my gray complexion and my black thoughts. Or my rosebud complexion and my buttercup thoughts. Lola knows how it feels to lust after a pea jacket or a pair of heels. She completely understands how much fun it can be to max out a credit card then feel guilty as hell when the bill comes. Lola spoils me. She holds the curtain for me when I'm in the fitting room, and she always tells me I'm beautiful and no, not at all, it doesn't make my butt look big. She asks, every time, how my love life is going, and pulls a face when I tell her about my lovers.

Whenever we haven't seen each other in a long while she takes me to a brasserie, Bofinger or Balzar, to look at the guys. I focus on the ones at nearby tables; she zeroes in on the waiters. She is fascinated by those dorky dudes in tight waistcoats. She can't take her eyes off them, she imagines life stories for them straight out of a Claude Sautet film, and she dissects their perfectly trained mannerisms. The funny thing is that at some point you always see one of them going out the door at the end of his shift. And then she wonders what she ever saw in him. Jeans or even jogging pants in lieu of the long white apron, and an offhand shout to a co-worker as he takes his leave: “Bye, Bernard!”

“Bye, Mimi. You here tomorrow?”

“No way. Dream on, dude.”

Lola looks down and traces patterns in the sauce on her plate with her fingertips. Another one gone . . .

 

We sort of lost sight of each other for a while. First boarding school, then studies, then her wedding, vacations at her in-laws', dinner parties . . .

We still knew how to hug, but we'd lost the art of letting ourselves go. She had changed sides. Teams, rather. She wasn't playing
against
us so much as playing for a league that was, well, kind of boring. Some sort of half-assed
cricket,
for example, with lots of incomprehensible rules, where you go running after something you never see, and it can really hurt, too . . . some sort of leathery thing with a cork core. (Hey, Lola! I didn't mean to, but I've just summed it all up!)

Whereas we younger kids were still busy with a lot more basic things. A lovely lawn⇒yabba dabba doo! Heineken and neckin'. Tall boys wearing white polo shirts⇒honk, honk! The bat in your behind. Well, you see what I'm driving at . . . Not really mature enough yet for strolls around the Bassin de Neptune at Versailles . . .

There you have it. We'd wave to each other from a distance. She made me the godmother of her first child and I made her the trustee of my first broken heart (and did I weep, a regular baptismal fount), but between two of these sort of major events there was not much going on. Birth­days, family luncheons, a few cigarettes shared on the sly so her honey wouldn't see, a knowing look, or her head on my shoulder when we'd browse through old photos . . .

That was life. Her life, at any rate.

Respect.

 

And then she came back to us. Covered in ash, with the lunatic gaze of the pyromaniac who's just handed in his box of matches. Plaintiff in a divorce that no one expected. It has to be said she played her cards close to her chest, the vixen. Everyone thought she was happy. I think we even admired her for it, for the way she'd found the exit so easily and quickly. “Lola's got it all sorted out,” we'd say, without bitterness or envy. Lola is still champ when it comes to treasure hunts . . .

And then crash bang boom. A change of program.

 

She just showed up at my place one day, and at a time that wasn't like her at all. At bath and bedtime story time. She was in tears, apologizing. She truly believed that it was the people around her who justified her existence on this earth, and everything else—her secret life and all the little nooks and crannies of her soul—was not really all that important. What was important was being cheerful and carrying your yoke as if it were the easiest thing in the world. And when things got harder, there was always solitude, drawing, and going for ever longer walks behind the baby carriage, and the kids' books and family life that offered such a deep and comfortable refuge.

So it seemed. That little red hen in the Père Castor series, she was right, the perfect model of housewifely escapism . . .

 

Red Hen's the perfect housewife:

Not a speck of dust on the furniture,

The flowers all in their vases,

And carefully ironed curtains at every window.

What a treat to see her house!

 

Except that, here's the thing, Lola had gone out and cut that little red hen's throat.

I was stunned, like everyone else. I didn't know what to say. She'd never complained, never let on that she had her doubts, and she'd just given birth to another adorable little boy. She was loved. She had it all, as they say. “They” being a load of idiots.

 

How are you supposed to react when you find out your whole solar system is off its orbit? What are you supposed to say? For Christ's sake—she was the one who'd always shown
us
the way. We trusted her. Or at least I trusted her. We sat on the floor for what seemed like ages, knocking back the vodka. She was in tears, and over and over she said she didn't know where the hell she was going, then she'd fall silent and burst into tears again. No matter what she decided, she'd be miserable. She could stay, or she could go: life was no longer worth living.

Bison grass to the rescue. Together, we managed to shake her out of her apathy. Hey! She wasn't the only one who'd been shipwrecked. When the instruction booklet is as fat as a Manhattan phone book and you're running circles on a lawn the size of a pocket handkerchief with no one at your side, or at least not your lawful wedded, well, at the end of the day . . . time to hit the road, girl!

She wasn't listening.

“And what about the kids . . . couldn't you hang on a bit longer, for their sake?” I eventually murmured, handing her another pack of Kleenex. My question dried her tears on the spot. I really didn't get it, did I? It was for their sake, this whole mess. To spare them the suffering. So that they'd never hear their parents fighting and crying in the middle of the night. Besides, you can't grow up in a house where people don't love each other anymore—or can you?

No. You can't. You can grow, maybe, but not grow up.

 

What came after that was more sordid. Lawyers, tears, blackmail, sorrow, sleepless nights, fatigue, self-sacrifice, guilt, it hurts me more than it hurts you, aggression, recrimination, courthouse, taking sides, appeal, lack of air, heads leaning against the wall. And in the midst of it all, two little boys with clear bright eyes for whose sake she went on playing the clown, telling them her bedside stories about farting princes and airhead princesses. This is all fairly recent, and the embers are still warm. It wouldn't take much for the sorrow she felt at the sorrow she caused to drown her again, and I know there are mornings she has trouble getting out of bed. She confessed the other day that when the kids went off with their dad she stood for ages watching herself crying in the mirror in the hall.

As if she were trying to dilute herself.