The Suitors (29 page)

 … On my father’s side, it was only virtue that counted: work, loyalty, seriousness. Refinement was suspect, a sign of frivolousness, a pretext for expense and licentiousness. This bourgeoisie wanted to ignore the fact that it was wealthy, spent only what was strictly necessary, loathed luxury, stayed mostly at home, and knew no other distractions besides family and friends. “Respectable people” were those who worked a lot, led regular lives, fulfilled all their duties. Doubtless they were bored. But boredom was like the furniture or the servants: unnoticed. The reasons for living and dying were obvious and eternal. Amusements were undertaken only in moderation. Any suffering was borne with discretion. Even death provoked no revolt, as long as one died with dignity
.

 … These two bourgeoisies ignored each other, and probably despised each other. The one claimed to be virtue incarnate, and the other, the embodiment of elegance. Each accused the other of being narrow-minded and annoying, or flighty and perverted. They never saw how similar they were, attentive only to appearances, so distrustful of life!

“What are those dreadful things?” I exclaimed, pointing to two tall glass cylinders of cloudy water, placed at either side of the couch on the veranda, in which bundles of lilies stood leaning like brooms in a closet.

My mother sighed. “Oh, spare me. It’s the new head butler. He finds this more elegant than our bouquets …”

“Ha! Well, he’s done quite a job on us!” Marie said sarcastically, noticing that our coffee tables now held plates of gravel bearing square vases filled with cacti and sticks of dark wood.

“You did say something to him, I hope?” I asked.

“Yes, but … the time it takes to fill a new order … He won’t be able to change the vases until Monday.”

“My poor Flokie,” Gay said cheerily, feeding a morsel
of cake to Popsicle, “at least it’s a change from Roberto, who sprays all your bouquets with Visine!”

“With eyewash?” marveled Astrid Girault. “Whatever for?”

“Really, dear: to make them look dewy fresh!” Gay laughed.

“Gracious, I never would have thought of it!”

“And on top of that,” added my mother, “speaking of domestic problems, just imagine: the chef is marrying off his daughter tomorrow and has found us a replacement for the day.”

The Giraults then launched into the story of how they’d just bought a house in the hinterlands of Nice, but I was listening only distractedly to their tale, musing nervously about the imminent arrival of my guests as I watched squirrels clambering through the parasol pines, when my father startled me with a sudden question.

“So, girls, who are your clients?”

“Well, Nicolas Courtry is the only one I actually know,” I replied. “There will also be his wife Vanessa, and a friend of his, Alvin Fishbein, whom I’ve never met.”

“And speak of the devil!” announced Frédéric, who had detected the crunch of gravel out in the courtyard.

I soon heard a faint exchange between my guests and the butler who directed them to their rooms, so I thought I still had a little time before the new arrivals would join us in the loggia. And then a sublime creature materialized in the doorway! Hypnotized by her beauty, Laszlo missed his cup and poured tea into his saucer, while Frédéric cried gaily, “My gosh, Penelope Cruz! What a good idea to invite her!”

And it was true that the young woman standing before us and looking faintly embarrassed closely resembled that Spanish actress. But she was even more beautiful.

“I’m … Nicolas’s wife. I’m looking for Laure,” she said softly, batting her eyelashes.

“I’m Laure, and welcome, Vanessa!” I replied.

“Nicolas would like to see you. He’s upstairs.”

“Ah? Fine, I’ll go see what he wants. I’ll leave you to introduce yourself.”

I went up the stairs four at a time to the main entrance hall, where I found two men I had no time to acknowledge and Nicolas, who, far from greeting me with his customary effusiveness, cut right to the chase.

“Here’s the situation: your suitor (don’t worry, he can’t speak a single word of French) doesn’t go anywhere without his yoga teacher. But what I’ve just learned is that he wants to have him stay in a room next to his.”

“Which is, naturally, out of the question.”

Nicolas seemed so worried that I added, “But we can find him a hotel room nearby.”

“We could always try …”

“I mean, with advance notice, that would have been another story, but as it is, he’s got some nerve!”

“Yes but, put yourself in his place! He was so astonished to be invited that I told him you weren’t people who stood on ceremony, that you’d really welcome him. So now, to have to explain that the house rules are so strict …”

“Oh, I see …”

“Well, listen, I did my best to get him here and it worked! That’s why I’m telling you, I’m not going to be the one to break the news. You’ll have to deal with it, however you want.”

“Which one is he?” I asked, glancing at the other two men just long enough to make me hope my guest was the tall one, rather handsome in a smoldering way, and not the one with the pasty complexion and a ponytail.

“The tall one,” replied Nicolas to my great relief, before introducing me in English: “Laure, here are Alvin and Barry, also known as Anagan. Alvin, Anagan, let me introduce you to Laure, who is our hostess, and the dear friend I have told you about.”

I gave them a big smile before describing to Alvin the situation with the house, unfortunately (and most unusually!) completely full, and the charming little hotel that would certainly have room for Anagan, whom I placed in the capable hands of Roland, the chauffeur. But although I blithely ignored my suitor’s extreme irritation, I had by no means dealt completely with the problem of his guru, I gathered, when Nicolas informed me that Anagan was not only Alvin’s yoga teacher and spiritual guide, but also his cook.

“His cook!?”

“Yes, didn’t I mention that? Your suitor is a vegetarian or vegan, whatever, because I don’t really see the difference.”

“This gets better and better,” I groused, escorting the American to his room, and when Nicolas seemed about ready to start in again, I spoke up first: “Yes, I know: I asked for it, I got it, but still …”

The second we entered the Yellow Room, Alvin interrupted me to ask if he was allowed to move the head of his bed to point north, because otherwise he would be unable to sleep, and seeing my amazement, he added that this was one of the golden rules of feng shui.

“Of course,” I replied.

“I have the feeling we’re going to have some fun,” Nicolas told me as we watched Alvin drag his bed around.

“We can only hope.” I sighed, leaving Alvin in his care until dinnertime.

I still had to ask my mother to put up the guru and speak to the chef so that he would allow him into the kitchen.

“It seems your guest is rather eccentric, so we can certainly allow him the same leeway we give Charles, with the excuse that he’s an English lord!” she said before busying herself with finding a room for the yogi and asking Roland to get him settled there.

In short, she was so pleasant about the whole business that I was at first disconcerted. Then I realized that she was critical only of people with whom she was familiar, and Alvin’s lifestyle was so different from her own that she had no point of comparison from which to judge him. And I couldn’t help noting, watching her adopt this benevolent and open ethnological approach to him, that she seemed content to be relieved of her role as the supreme arbiter of gracious living by this case of force majeure.

“In your opinion, this yogi, do we invite him to sit with us?” she asked.

“I think not, since he’ll be in the kitchen!”

“How silly of me, of course. Anyway, luckily for your vegetarian, this evening there is a soufflé.”

The sea was still glittering like sparkling amethysts when Alvin arrived for cocktails, wearing a
shalwar kameez
ensemble, a collarless Indian shirt of tunic length worn over loose pajamalike pants gathered at the ankle—a sartorial choice that seemed like a manifesto it was up to me to interpret. Stalling for time, I wondered whether the subtle exoticism of this beige and off-white palette was intended to evoke the Eastern subcontinent … or perhaps Western beatniks, or hippies? I didn’t want to succumb too quickly, as a psychologist, to the reflex already prompting me to examine Alvin’s possible relationship with his parents. One of the pitfalls of my profession!

Still, I couldn’t help thinking that his choice of clothing betrayed a desire to step outside the family circle.

Then I brought myself to heel: Alvin was not one of my patients but a suitor, so I would do better to consider him strictly from that angle. And noticing once more that he was handsome in a dark, Jeremy Irons sort of way, I imagined him dressed differently to see if I liked him: tall, graceful, aristocratic, he would no doubt be stunning in a dark suit. When Alvin spoke to
my mother, however, my retouched vision of him went up in smoke.

“L’Agapanthe faces the northwest, does it not? Did you know that with an earth element between the building and the sea, whose energy circulates toward the house—while firmly anchored by the Lérins Islands near Cannes—L’Agapanthe has the ideal site of ‘the earth dragon’s lair,’ like Hong Kong, where the energy entering the bay is safeguarded by Victoria Peak?”

Convoluted as it was, Alvin’s compliment struck me less than did his gestures, because he punctuated his delivery by holding out his right hand, palm up, and systematically ticking off his points by bending each finger back in succession with his left index finger, as if seeking to give structure to his little speech. Well, I thought, so much for trying to set himself apart from the average American with his clothes and his yoga and meditation! Alvin still exhibited American behavior patterns, like that mania for counting anything and everything on his fingers. Next he’d be raising his arms and twitching two sets of fingers to sketch imaginary quotation marks, those clichéd precautions demanded by political correctness whenever a controversial subject crops up.

The truth was that I was particularly annoyed by all the American gestures that have spread throughout the
world via that country’s many TV series. As disastrous as their fast food, American behavior has insinuated itself into the smallest corners of our rituals, changing even the way we pass around the holy-water sprinkler at funerals! I’d observed that instead of crowding around the coffin the way we used to do, we all now stood a few yards away with the patient docility of model citizens, a routine we felt obliged to adopt when waiting everywhere from now on, from the post office to customs clearance to restaurant lines, stepping one by one over imaginary boundaries on the ground. And at funerals, as it happens, this is truly inconvenient, since the single person up at the coffin has to go back to the other mourners to hand over the aspergillum to someone else, making everyone wait that much longer.

But, given the flippancy with which I’d recruited my suitor, I reflected, I might have had worse luck, because he did seem intent on being courteous to my mother.

“Laure tells me that you live in New York?”

“Yes, for part of the year, since I also live in California.”

My mother hesitated to go on, for her familiarity with the genteel neighborhoods of Manhattan risked proving useless in conversation with this bohemian, and she refused to make a fool of herself trying to find out if they knew anyone in common, under the pretext of knowing
lots of people there. Still, she did venture to ask, “And where in New York do you live?”

“Fifth Avenue, at 998.”

“No!” exclaimed my mother, who couldn’t believe it.

Because she knew all the prestigious buildings on the Upper East Side by heart and by name, considering only those built before the Second World War, such as 720, 740, and 778 Park Avenue, or 810, 820, 830, 834, and 960 on Fifth, to mention a few. Not forgetting 998, which occupied an entire block and still had apartments with columned ballrooms and extensive servants’ quarters. All those buildings were co-ops run by powerful owners’ committees, which made buying an apartment there more difficult than joining the Jockey Club.

But Alvin went on to tell her about his mansion in Rhinebeck, on the Hudson, a gigantic main house with an annex containing an indoor tennis court and a white marble swimming pool.

“Was that the house of the So-and-so family?” asked my mother.

“Yes, it’s where they used to organize ‘white weekends’ in the 1910s.”

“What are those?” I asked, to join the conversation.

“Cocaine weekends,” replied my mother with disarming casualness.

With a pang, I realized that my mother’s cocaine dependence had completely slipped my mind since the previous weekend, when Marie had convinced me that her addiction bothered my mother even less than if she’d suddenly developed a sweet tooth. And there she was, indeed, as lovely and serene as always.

“Do you know the Lachmans?” she asked, encouraged by the tokens of upper-echelon tribalism Alvin had just given her.

“No, I can’t say that I do …”