The Age of Hope (17 page)

Five days with this group. She could not imagine what they would do. What they would talk about. It turned out that the men played golf and the women sat by the pool, or had pedicures, or went into town to shop for cheap clothes. Hope read. Interestingly, she found herself stuck by the pool with Denise, who said that she had no interest in snorkelling, or fishing, or having a massage, or shopping for trinkets in the market. She told Hope that if she had wanted to hang out with housewives, she would have stayed at home and phoned up Flip’s wife. She lit a Camel. Called the waiter over and asked for a glass of white wine.

“I’m a housewife.”

“Oh, no,” Denise said. “Not like them. You’re a little strange, Hope, but in a good way. You’re not shrill. The other wives hate me. They’re threatened, you see. They catch their husbands ogling me and they dissolve. Roy is so polite. I don’t think he even knows I exist.”

Hope laughed. “Oh, he knows.”

“Well, he’s very courteous.”

“He’s probably afraid of you. Anyway, his oldest daughter is your age.”

“So is Flip’s.”

“How old
are
you, Denise?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Judith is nineteen. She’s in Spain, chasing matadors.”

The glass of wine arrived. Hope indicated that she would like the same.

“I was the receptionist at Flip’s dealership. I had big plans. I know, I know. I’m a cliché.” She narrowed her eyes, perhaps expecting a rebuttal. Not getting any, she continued. “Flip’s getting a divorce. And then we ‘re marrying. He wants more kids.” She shrugged.

They finished their wine and ordered more and they talked through lunch, which was served poolside. Fish and chips and coleslaw. They swam and then read and slept, and at some point Denise said that she wanted to go down to the hotel’s private beach, she liked to sunbathe topless and she didn’t think the hotel guests would appreciate that. Would Hope join her?

“Oh, I don’t think so. I like to keep my body to myself.”

Denise laughed. “No, I just wondered if you wanted to sit with me. I don’t expect you to go topless.”

Hope was slightly insulted, and then amused. Denise was so much like her eldest two daughters, patronizing and self-centred. On the beach Hope found an umbrella and a chair and sat beside Denise, who lay on a mat in just her bikini bottoms, face to the sun. She did not sneak any looks at Denise’s perfect body—she felt it would be unseemly—though several times as they conversed she caught a glimpse of a breast or a nipple, and for some reason this made her want to cry out, “Leave him. Leave him.”

Late in the afternoon, as the sun descended, Hope said directly and out of the blue that children could be depressing. Did Denise understand that?

“Oh, come on. You have four.” Denise had turned over onto her stomach and this made it easier for Hope to address her directly.

“Exactly. Children will drive you insane. Literally.”

“You’re not insane.”

Hope smiled. “A number of years ago I took a seventeen-year-old girl down to the States for an abortion. You mustn’t tell my husband this. He doesn’t know.” This was a surprise, telling Denise this intimate secret. She wondered where this sudden need to confess had come from.

“One of your daughters?”

“A friend of my daughter’s.”

“That’s so sweet. And brave.”

“‘Sweet’ is a new twist. The father was an older man. He left her high and dry.”

“Flip wouldn’t leave me high and dry.”

“Of course not.”

“He wouldn’t. I keep him very happy.”

“Well.”

On the second-last day at the resort Denise told her that the girls were planning a party for that night. She had taken to calling the other wives “the girls.”

“Oh,” Hope said. “I guess that’s nice.”

“Not just any party. A key party. I thought I should give you a heads-up. Anita Stark’s idea, along with her husband. The men are gung-ho.”

“Oh my. That’s so embarrassing.”

Denise hooted. “You’re perfect, Hope. You might want to warn Roy.”

“What about you? Are you? You know?”

Denise shook her head. “No way, Jose.”

But she didn’t warn Roy. She wasn’t sure what words to use, and in any case he came back from golf quite tired and he had a nap and then they dressed for dinner, and by the time they were walking up the pathway to meet the group, she didn’t want to get him all twisted up, and so she said nothing. As usual, there was a fair amount of drinking at dinner, and later there was a steel band that had to be tolerated, and then Louis, the car dealer from Montreal, took his wife Lila’s hand and suggested they all gather at his villa.
“Ça va?”

Alistair, who was sitting across from Hope, winked at her and said, “Absolutely.” He had been flirting with her all week, and she had astutely and politely ignored him.

Anita raised her arm and cried out, “Let us go,” as a few of the women giggled nervously. The men rose.

Roy took Hope’s hand and announced that they would pass.

“Keeping that good-looking wife to yourself, eh, Roy?” Alistair said, and he hit Roy on the shoulder.

Walking back up to their villa, she realized that Roy had been many many steps ahead of her, and at first she was grateful and surprised, and then she wondered why they hadn’t discussed this whole sexual escapade. It was as if Roy had decided for her. How did he know what she wanted? Well, of course she didn’t want to have sex with Louis or Alistair, or any other Tom, Dick, or Harry—that was a given—but shouldn’t she choose for herself? She removed her hand from his and stepped sideways so that there was a space between them. He allowed this.

Roy said, “Like rabbits.”

She snorted. “Shenanigans.”

And no more was said of it. They did not have sex that night, and she wondered why this was so. Perhaps Roy was in fact disappointed and, having held a fantasy in his heart all week, was bored by his wife’s humdrum body. What pleasure could be taken from the same old pot when there were new and varied pots? Roy slept but she did not. The window was open, the smell of frangipani wafted in. The surf in the distance. The laughter over at Louis’ villa. The noise of the party rose and fell.

She was awakened by a cry, a scream or perhaps a laugh. It pulled her from her sleep and up out of bed and to the window. Roy still slept. Her hearing was much better than his. She stood in the darkness, her hand parting the cotton curtain. A figure appeared. Anita Stark, stark naked. She was crying out in fear, or so it seemed, and then Flip, Denise’s lover, ran down the path and caught Anita, who laughed and then whispered. All of this was too much for Hope and she turned away and climbed back into bed. Eventually, the human noises disappeared and were replaced by the croak of frogs, the breeze, and once again the surf. When Hope thought about Denise she felt sad. How did this happen? Poor thing.

In the morning, she and Roy ate breakfast on the patio café that faced the ocean. Roy read the local paper while Hope delicately ate fresh pineapple and stared at the sky and watched the other guests. They had just finished their last coffee and were rising to leave when Flip and Alistair appeared and took a table at the far end of the restaurant. Roy made his way over and talked to them. She was amazed, as always, by Roy’s ability to push past discomfort and face the facts. She left, sliding down the path, hoping not to meet any of the group. Later, safe on the plane, she took Roy’s hand and held it. “I had a good time,” she said.

“Did you?” He seemed surprised.

“Yes. I did. Thank you.”

“I’m glad.”

“Denise was a lost little thing, wasn’t she.”

“I thought she held her own.”

“It seemed so, and then it didn’t seem so.”

“Flip was crazy for her. But then, why wouldn’t he be?”

“If I were to rank those people, I’d put Flip and Anita Stark at the bottom of the ladder,” she said.

“Anita did have a high voice.”

“Always at full volume.”

“What’s the ranking based on? Looks?”

“On goodness.”

“Your problem, Hope, is that you think everyone is as full of effort as you are. They aren’t.”

She wondered what that meant. That she tried too hard? Trusted too much? That she was too forgiving? So be it. She wasn’t going to change now.

Eight months later, Judith returned from Europe and announced that she had met a man in Paris, a collector and seller of art. Within the month, she planned to return to Paris, where she would be living with Jean-Philippe in his apartment in the 6th arrondissement. “It’s gorgeous,” Judith said. “You walk into his place and come face to face with a Monet. And there are books everywhere. He has parties and suddenly a famous movie director shows up, or an actress.” Roman Polanski had been at Jean-Philippe’s one evening for a late dinner. French dinners began around 11 and went till 2 a.m. It was marvellous. And the most marvellous thing was that Jean-Philippe saw possibilities for Judith’s photos. “He thinks I should have a show.”

Roy asked who this Mr. Polanski was.

“Oh, come on, Dad.”

Later, in Judith’s room, watching her pull dirty clothes out of her backpack, Hope sat at the edge of the bed and asked how she had met this Jean-Philippe.

“At a café. I was working as a server and he talked to me and then asked me for a drink and things took off from there.”

This was bewildering, this notion that “things take off,” as if there were numerous paths and one just chose a path willy-nilly and then, that having failed, chose again. Well, that wasn’t how life worked, and Judith would have to discover the hard way that the world was an unforgiving place. Hope worried that her children did not adequately understand the ways of the world. Well, perhaps Penny did, but sometimes she could be too cynical.

“I wish we could meet him,” she said.

“Oh, you’d love him, Mom. He’s very sophisticated. And kind. And brilliant.”

It turned out that he was forty years old. Judith managed to slip that in at some point, in an offhanded way, as if it were a minor detail.

“But, Judith, that’s almost a twenty-year difference.” Hope was breathless and felt panicky.

“He looks way younger. Like thirty. And his spirit, his mind, is very young.”

“Has he been married before?”

“Once, for two years. To an actress. It ended badly.”

“And does he have children?”

She shook her head, exasperated. “He loves me, Mom. And I love him.”

Hope told Roy that he needed to have a talk with their daughter. “This man will break her heart, I can see it already. French men do that. They have a different code that they live by. He probably wears a scarf. And her photographs? It’s terrible to say, but they don’t seem especially original.”

Judith had proudly shown a number of black-and-white photographs to her family, laying them out on the kitchen table. They were of people in the streets, but taken from above, from windows and fire escapes. Judith explained that the perspective was objective. “Jean-Philippe calls it godlike.” She pointed at one photograph. “And then suddenly, there is a face, looking up, and it is intimate.” Her voice, when she said this, sounded French, and Hope imagined that she was parroting someone, probably Jean-Philippe. At the table, studying the photographs, Melanie had exclaimed, Conner was indifferent, and Penny, skeptical like her mother, had shrugged and said, “Nice.”

Roy said now, “She won’t listen to us, Hope. That’s Judith. So we can either take pleasure in her plans or fight her, and fighting her will only cause more friction.” He paused, and then said, “And if this Jean-Philippe thinks she can make money from her art, good for her.”

He was far too practical, Hope thought, though she knew he was right. Still, sometimes she wished he would be more emotional. Did he not care that their eldest daughter had a French lover who would eventually abandon her?

One day after supper she found Judith in her bedroom. She stood in the doorway and said, “May I come in?”

Judith was sitting on the bed, her knees drawn up towards her chest. She was writing a letter to Jean-Philippe. The thin airmail sheets crackled as she laid them aside, face down.

Hope took that as a yes and stepped forward. She stood in the middle of the room, aware at that moment of her daughter’s hair colour and the shape of her face and the angle of her eyes, and she said, “Oh, you look so much like your father.”

Judith wrinkled her nose, not exactly in distaste, but impatiently, and said, “What do you want? I’m busy.”

“This man, is he trustworthy?”

“God, Mother. Of course I
trust
him. What’s wrong with you? Are you jealous?”

“What do you mean?” She was standing in the middle of the room, wearing a housedress and slippers, and she saw herself as Judith must see her, and she was embarrassed. Certainly, any French woman her age, at this time in the evening, would be wearing a dress and high heels and makeup. “I haven’t met him. All I have is your description. Do you have a photograph?”

“No. I don’t. Anyways, what would that prove?”

“I love you, Judith. And your father loves you. If this is what you want, then we want it for you as well.”

“I know, Mom. Thank you.” And she went back to her letter writing.

That night Hope lay in bed, unable to sleep, and she thought about what she might be jealous of. Judith’s freedom? Her youth? Her love life? When she was Judith’s age there had been no room in her imagination for an older French lover who lived in the 6th arrondissement. Even now, there was so much that Hope could not imagine. It made her head ache. She wondered if jealousy was a form of desire. Sure it was. But the two were not necessarily attached. She desired Roy, and she wasn’t jealous of him. Thinking in this manner, and resolving nothing, she fell asleep

The following year, travelling to Berlin for an automobile show, Roy and Hope stopped in Paris for three days to visit Judith and to meet Jean-Philippe. They stayed in a small hotel off boulevard Raspail. During the days, Judith took them to all the tourist spots—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre—though she did this grudgingly. She had little interest in the traditional fare. One night they met Judith and Jean-Philippe near Les Halles and ate in a tiny French restaurant. “Isn’t this place amazing?” Judith whispered. “It’s three hundred years old.” Jean-Philippe was a real gentleman. He greeted Hope by kissing her on the cheeks, once, twice, three times. He would not be distracted. He focused on Hope, and Hope was immediately besotted. His hair was long and slightly grey and he wore a purple silk scarf that he kept throwing backwards with one hand as the other held a ubiquitous yellow Gitane. He was short but well dressed. His shoes were exquisite. Hope had an eye for shoes. He spoke English with an up-and-down accent and Hope understood almost immediately why Judith would love this man. They ate short ribs and drank red wine and by the end of the evening Hope was quite drunk. As they walked through the narrow streets later, Jean-Philippe took her arm and guided her. Judith and Roy followed. Jean-Philippe whispered, “You have a most beautiful daughter, Hope.” Her name, coming out of his mouth, was missing the “h.” It went up in the air and floated away, as her heart was also floating away.