The Last Life (15 page)

As with Thibaud's question under the swimming pool, I knew there was an appropriate response that had nothing to do with the truth. This time, mercifully, I could guess what that response should be. "Cool," I said.

I still had two and a half weeks to spend there, and in that moment I had my choice: I could spend them with Jane Eyre or with Becky. Becky, at least, was alive.

I watched her draw in the smoke and hold it in her lungs like a diver, and when it was my turn I copied her. I didn't choke, or cough, and I forbore from complaining about the burning in my throat, which was, after all, no worse than that caused by an unfiltered Gitane. Three or four times we repeated the little ceremony, passing the pipe back and forth, our cheeks ballooning, our eyes watering. It didn't seem to have much effect on me, or not that I could tell. I felt readier to laugh, maybe; but that readiness may also have been an expectation that laughter was the effect of marijuana. Becky, though, was transformed—not into some intoxicated monster, but into a possible friend, indulgent, beatific.

"God," she said. "This stuff is great. Around here you really need it, y'know? I don't know what your family's like, but mine—arrggh!" She made a show of tearing her hair and slid back, flat on the grass. "Isn't the sky incredible? Aren't you so bored? Isn't my dad ridiculous?"

I laughed. I lay back too, and could hear the tiny tickings of the grass blades. The earth smelled like pennies. "The sky is incredible," I agreed. There was no breeze, but high above the clouds were chasing across the ether, their shapes erratic and amusing.

"Sometimes I just want to fall in," she said. "You wonder if it'll ever get any better, y'know? I tell myself I'll give it till college—till I'm away from these guys—and if it doesn't get any better then, then
Bam.
"

"Bam?"

"Then I'll kill myself, of course. I mean, it can't be any worse to be dead, and maybe it's really cool, y'know?"

"If it's awful, you're stuck there. You can't come back."

"Maybe. I'm thinking about reincarnation, whether I believe in it or not."

"Do you?"

"I haven't decided. It wouldn't be so bad to be a plant or a horse or a shark or something. It's being human that sucks. We're responsible for all the bad shit. Our parents' generation has poisoned the planet, and we'll all probably die soon anyway."

"Things like Chernobyl."

"Oh my God, and pesticides and all that. I saw a show on TV about what they do to the fruit and vegetables and stuff. And then we eat it. I'm never having kids."

After a minute, she said, "Will you?"

"I don't know. I never thought about it."

"With all the shit around, they'd probably be born deformed or something."

"Maybe." I sat up. I was thinking of Etienne. She suddenly was too.

"Oh Jeez. I'm sorry. I never meant—I didn't think."

"It's okay. He'll never have kids, anyway."

"No."

"It happened at birth, you know. He wasn't made that way."

She was sitting, too. "What's it like?"

I plucked at the grass, not looking at her. "How do you mean?"

"Well, he doesn't talk, right? That's what Mom said. So, I mean, how do you—"

"I don't know. He's always been there. I don't, I mean, he's not—he's just a part of me, or of us, y'know?"

She considered this in silence.

"And he's happy. He's always happy to see me. He laughs a lot."

"Right." She stood up. "Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be reincarnated like him. Happy, and, well, he can't do anything wrong, right?"

"I'd rather not be reincarnated at all. I'd rather go to heaven."

"Yeah. Wouldn't we all?"

We heard the car pulling up, and the doors slamming.

"Shit. Shit!" Becky was stuffing the bag and the pipe into her shorts. She started running clumsily across the lawn with the tail of the bag still flapping behind her. "Quick, let's get upstairs before they come in. Can't you just hear Rachel—'You guys smell funny.' Jesus! We'll go in your room, then they won't make us come down."

I left Jane Eyre rusding her pages under the tree.

Once we were in my room, the door shut, we laughed so hard that I had to sit down on the floor.

"Stop," Becky gasped. "Stop or I'll pee in my pants." And then: "Oh my God, I can't, I'm gonna—"

She flung open the door and disappeared down the hall.

"Hello?" Ron's voice curled up the stairs. "Are you gals up there?"

"We'll be down in a bit."

"No need. I just wanted to be sure. Do whatever you're doing."

When Becky came back, she smelled of soap. She lay down on my bed, backwards, with her feet on my pillow. She was dreamy now. I wanted to play with her hair, which was fanned out across the sheet, but I didn't know her well enough. I missed Marie-Jo, but our friendship seemed far away, like a novel I had read long ago.

"Do you have a boyfriend, at home?" Becky's eyes were shut.

"I don't know. Sort of."

"Do you love him?"

I thought of Thibaud's letter, now crumpled in the bottom of my bag. Several times, in spite of myself, I had taken it out and read it again, always hoping there would be more, hoping his handwriting wouldn't look so childish.

"I think I'm too young to be in love," I said, realizing as I spoke that I was echoing my mother.

"Juliet was your age. You know, Romeo and Juliet."

"Yeah, well ... do you? Are you in love?"

"Nope. My plan—" she folded her hands behind her head and raised her face a little to look at me "—is to have lots of mad affairs with guys who love me far more than I love them." She lay down again. "I plan to be adored. In the meantime, I'm trying to get over the hurdles."

"Meaning?"

"I figure it's time I lost my virginity. I mean, have you?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. I'm pretty good at telling. But what's cool about you is that you're foreign, so it's harder to know. You don't scream 'virgin,' or anything."

"How can you tell?"

"Just can. I don't seem like a virgin, I don't think. I try not to. But maybe guys can tell anyway. The thing is, guys don't want to do it with a virgin, not unless it's a serious relationship. So seeing as I don't want a boyfriend, I just want to lose it, I've got to behave as though I've already done it."

"So how do you do that?"

She shrugged. "Act like it's no big deal."

"But can't they, I mean, won't they be able to tell?"

"Not necessarily. I don't think necessarily. And if they can, then not till it's too late, so it doesn't matter."

"I guess."

"Don't you want to?"

"I don't know."

"I bet your boyfriend wants to."

"I guess."

"You could do it here, you know, in America, and then it'd be a lot less scary there, with him."

This logic seemed somehow flawed. I must have looked skeptical, because Becky grew annoyed and retreated into her old brusqueness. "Think about it, anyway," she said. "I'm going to take a shower."

After she had gone, I lay on the bed with my head where her feet had been, over her imprint. I thought about it. I was afraid of sex, but maybe she was right, it was just something that needed to be done. I was intrigued by what she had said about me, about it being hard to tell. Nothing mattered, there, in that three-week space: I wasn't anybody in particular, so I could be anybody I wanted. I could, if I felt like it, have sex. Or I could pretend that I had when I hadn't. I wished I hadn't told her that Thibaud and I hadn't done it: but even so, I might have been lying. I could tell her I'd been lying and she would never know for sure. My self seemed like a fistful of puzzle pieces thrown in the air: I was free to rearrange them into any design I chose, adding in new bits, leaving old ones out, and if I didn't like the result I could simply re-jig it. I pictured my limbs and torso and head floating, detached, through a sky of floating limbs and torsos and heads, and then falling to earth in different combinations, forming different girls who were all me. It was thrilling, and my heart sped up at the thought, hammering inside my heavy chest.

"Whatcha doing?"

It was Rachel, still in her tennis outfit, her dark hair struggling to escape its ponytail. "I thought Becky was in here, too."

"She was."

"Are you and she going to be friends now?" Rachel stepped cautiously around my room, picking things up and putting them down again: a T-shirt, a French mystery novel, my hairbrush. She stood plucking my hair in wads from the brush. "Are you?"

"What?"

"Going to be friends."

"Maybe."

"But you're still the Gecko, right?"

"Right."

"You lose a lot of hair. Y'know, in the brush."

"I guess."

"Does that mean you don't want to come to the séance tomorrow after all?"

Rachel had invited me to a'séance at her friend Elsa's house, five doors down, the next evening. In the basement, after supper. A horde of giggling eleven-year-old tennis players.

"Of course I'll come. I don't really believe in that stuff, though."

"That doesn't matter. As long as you come. We're going to call up the ghost of Elsa's grandmother. It'll be way cool."

"Great."

"You can call up a French ghost, if you want."

"Maybe." I didn't have any to call up. The ghost of a country is harder to summon. I was too old for seances, and I thought Rachel probably was too, but she was very keen.

"I think I'm going to have a nap before dinner," I said. "Wake me up?"

"You bet."

During the evening meal, a purposefully civilized affair at the dining room table, in the course of which Rachel was called upon to detail the progress of her tennis game, a duty in which she revelled as it gave her a chance to display her not negligible anecdotal gifts, my mother telephoned. It was after seven in Boston, so past one in the morning at home.

"Is everything okay?"

"Fine, sweetie, fine. I was just missing you, that's all." Suddenly, now, French was our language, our way of being private. I was on the phone in the Robertsons' kitchen, and they moved in and out around me, clearing the table, clattering at the sink.

"How are you? Is everything okay there? Your cousins aren't so bad, are they?"

"They're all right. Why are you up so late? Where's Papa?"

"Oh, he's so busy nowadays. He'll be home soon, I'm sure. He might sleep at the hotel. I was reading, and I thought, why not?"

"And everyone else?"

"Everybody's fine. Your brother's asleep, of course. He misses you, too. I catch him looking at doors. To see if you'll come in. He doesn't understand."

I wondered if Etienne had really noticed that I was gone. I hoped he couldn't tell how long time took to pass: I'd been told that dogs couldn't tell, so maybe he couldn't either.

"And your grandfather has gone home, so that's a good sign. Your grandmother took him back yesterday. I think he's coming out of it. The antidepressants take a while to work, but now it's all going to be fine."

"Are you lonely?"

"A little, maybe. We miss you. But you're having a good time?"

"Fine." I couldn't think of anything to say. "We're going to Cape Cod, sometime. Everyone's very kind. Do you want to speak to Aunt Eleanor?"

"It's okay. We spoke already."

"It's dinnertime, is all."

"You'd better go then. I just wanted to see how you were. Be good, sweetie. We love you."

Later, upstairs, I worried about my mother. I could not imagine what she was doing all alone at one in the morning, nor why my father was not home. I wondered what she did—besides take care of Etienne; but the nurse was there for that—when I wasn't there. Her life seemed suddenly implausible, a great, empty mistake. This place, practical and vast and so American, was where she was from: it had been home to her. What did she feel, now, there? As though she'd thrown up the jigsaw pieces of her life, for a lark, and when they toppled towards the earth they didn't fit together at all anymore. And then she was stuck with them (with me, with Etienne), and there were no more tosses, no more chances. I tried to imagine how I'd feel if someone told me that was it, I had to stay with the Robertsons forever. I'd have to behave as if it made sense, day after day, and then hope that by force of habit I would simply forget that it didn't. But I would always be lonely, the way my mother was lonely. I'd always be pretending.

Then I thought about my father, and my grandparents. About the Bellevue Hotel, which was their way of forcing reality, their bulwark against absurdity. Maybe my grandfather had simply got tired of pretending. Maybe it was as simple as that.

Many years later, I have learned a little about scientific ideas. I learned that in the eighteenth century, in a burst of rigor, scientists deemed it necessary to study, for the first time, the structure of the female skeleton. They had been examining men's bones for years, but it occurred to them that the peculiar afflictions of women required special attention, that their secrets lay in the osteal geography of the fairer sex. Their conclusions revolutionized not only medical but social understanding. Woman, the scientists explained to scores of German medical students, all eyes on the female skeleton dangling cheerily at the lectern, Woman has a smaller brain, and wider hips. Her constitution is lower to the ground, and that great, gaping cavity in her abdomen is the center of her soul. Woman is mother, a separate creature from man, with a distinct and scientifically proven role. She is the Angel in the House, they said, or others said after them: it's bred in the bone.

What the scientists did not mention, perhaps forgot themselves, was that the woman on whom this analysis of Woman was based wasn't one. Her hands and head and hips and ribs were not born together. They were the bones of different women, wired together. The scientists threw the pieces into the air, and this is what came down. And there were no more tosses, no more chances. Women were stuck with Her, even though she didn't really exist. It made me wonder, how much is pretending?

The séance was a pretense, one in which Rachel and her friends delighted. Becky couldn't believe I'd agreed to go.