I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (33 page)

“But how?” I asked. “How do you get them interested in the first place?”

“Le regard,”
she said, surprised I did not know something so obvious. “You scan the party for the one that pleases you and you give him
le regard
. Then you look away, and you wait for him to come talk to you.” She told me, also, that it was important never to be the best-dressed woman in the room, especially if you were the host but even if you were not. You must look flawless, but not like you were trying, and you must always wear comfortable shoes.

“But in my generation, men courted you. Perhaps it's different with young men these days.”

“Hm,” I said. “Maybe.” I pulled out my book to read.

“You know,” Josée said, “I was glad you said ‘he' when you were talking to Julien.”

“It means a lot to me that I can share that part of myself with you,” I said. “I don't need to tell all of your friends. I figure you'll tell them if you want to.”

“Of course you can tell my
friends
!” she said. “Just not Julien. He's the village concierge. It would give him gossip for weeks. If you wanted to come back here with a boy one day you'd have to explain yourself all over again.”

“
Mmhmm
,” I said. “I don't mind. It's still true, in all the ways that matter. I'm in love, the person is in New York, she does draw comics sometimes. The pronouns aren't important.”

“I understand,” she said. “You're in love with a being.” She stared out at the ocean. “Do you think you'll make your life with her?” she asked quietly.

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm still too young to be sure with anyone. But I love her. It seems possible.”

She nodded. I felt Josée understood this part of me, in all of its constant fluidity, better than anyone else I had ever spoken to—better, even, than I often understood it myself. I wanted to ask her if she had ever had experiences with women. But when I turned toward her, mouth open, trying to phrase the question, she'd already gotten up. She was walking out toward the ocean.

—

W
HEN
I
DID
MANAGE
to ask, a few months later, Josée responded without hesitation. She told me about a passionate affair with a woman who was a famous tennis player. I looked up photos of her on the Internet as soon as I got home. She was not beautiful, but her gaze was intelligent and seductive. She was masculine in appearance, just like the women who'd always attracted me. In many of the photos, she was behind the wheel of a race car. In one, she had a baby cheetah on a leash. This tennis player, Josée told me, had seduced all of the most beautiful women in Paris.
She'd seduced Josée as well. In the summer of 1981, they'd spent a torrid night together on the houseboat. The next morning Andrée complained of the noise they'd made. The tennis player put Josée in her convertible car and they drove down south on a whim, all the way to Saint Tropez, the wind whipping at Josée's hair. They'd had a wonderful time, Josée told me, but their affair was brief.

“After that,” she told me, “I renounced women. They're even more possessive than men.”

—

O
N OUR LAST
NIGHT
, Josée took me to a restaurant a friend of hers had recommended. It was set back from the road, built right on top of a sleepy beach at an inlet where the ocean dipped into the curving coastline.

We sat outside on the wooden terrace, at one of the tables closest to the ocean. We ordered a pitcher of rosé and a plate of shrimp, mussels, and sardines grilled over a fire of grapevines. The other tables slowly filled with couples on dates and well-dressed families. Their low murmur joined with the sound of the wind and the waves. Over Josée's shoulder I could see a stone staircase that wound down a hill and straight into the ocean.

“I am just . . . ,” I said, breathing in deeply and sweeping my hand to take in the table, the water, the stone staircase. “I am just so . . .
happy
right now.”

I smiled, but I didn't even need to smile. My veins were filled with light. An uncomplicated, inexplicable joy surged through me, taking me by surprise. I tried to keep it in my peripheral awareness. I knew how happiness slipped into the present only in bright, brief flashes. Most of the time, it belonged to the past or
to the future: “I was happy” or “I will be happy” and not, or almost never, “I
am
happy.” Even trying to savor the moment tinged it with nostalgia.

Josée beamed at me, her cheekbones lifting her face.

“
La plénitude,
” she said authoritatively. “A feeling of fullness—nothing more you could want.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, exactly.” But the feeling was already beginning to slip away.

As I savored my last spoonful of dessert, Josée said, “We should give them back the table. They must need it for other customers.”

“Okay,” I said, casting a final wistful glance at the ocean.

“Do you want to take a swim?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, caught by surprise. I had my bathing suit on under my dress.

“Then go—go! The night is soft and the ocean has been heating all day.”

“Are you sure you don't mind waiting?” I asked.

“If I'm suggesting it, it's because I would do it myself if I were younger,” she said. She took a book from her bag. I went back to the car to get a towel and a beach chair from the trunk. I set it up on the sand in front of the terrace.

“What's that for?” Josée asked.

“For you, so . . . so you can sit and watch me,” I said, stumbling.

“Watch you?” she said, perplexed. “No, I'll be fine inside by the stove. Fold that thing up and go off to the side so that you don't provide entertainment for the whole restaurant.”

I shed my dress and walked down the deserted beach, the sound of the restaurant receding behind me. The water was nearly as warm as the air. I swam hard along the shoreline, my body stretching out
impossibly long, until I reached one of the cliffs that bordered the bay. I swam back until I was in front of the glittering lights of the restaurant, far from the shore, and floated flat on my back. The Mediterranean rocked me gently, the salt catching my body like a cushion. I tried to count the times I had lain in the ocean on the last day of summer. Each time, I stored away all the physical sensations, the feeling of water tickling around my face, and the memories were so clear and so similar that this moment became all the moments, like a thread pulled tight through gathered fabric, as if I had never done anything but bob in the ocean.

Underwater I could hear thousands of shells clicking together, as if I were eavesdropping on the ocean's private thoughts. Then I listened more carefully. Deep, black water. I was seized by an ancestral terror. I sputtered upright, gasping, adrenaline flooding my veins. I was very far from the shore. My grandmother was indoors by the fire. I was engulfed by darkness and all alone. I made myself breathe deeply. There was no danger here. I swam back to shore, my heart still pounding.

I walked up the sand toward the restaurant with my back self-consciously straight, aware that many of the diners had turned to stare at me.

“
Elle est bonne
?” a round man in his midfifties called to me from his table.

“
Délicieuse,”
I answered softly, my head down, as I toweled off.

“
Alors, ma bichette,”
my grandmother said, and I whipped around in surprise. She was still at our table. She'd put away her book, and her chair was turned toward the ocean.

I walked over to her and she gathered herself to leave. Right outside the door to the restaurant, we paused. We were under a streetlamp and the air was cool on my wet skin.

“As you were swimming this way,” she said, “there was someone else swimming the other way—you crossed each other. It was very beautiful to see.”

I hadn't seen anyone else in the water. Perhaps she'd just seen me twice. Still, I understood what she was telling me: she'd watched me. I put my hand gently on her arm. Without a word, she took her sweater from her bag and reached up to tie it around my shoulders, draping it over me with a few absentminded pats. It was soft, a beige cashmere, and it smelled like her. I rolled my shoulders against it in joy.

—

O
N OUR WAY
BACK
UP
to Paris, we spent a few nights at Josée's friend Renée's house outside of Frejus. She and Josée had known each other since 1952. I admired the worn, comfortable closeness of their relationship and considered Renée among my favorites of my grandmother's friends. Her elegant reserve gave way to profound kindness when she let down her guard. I had the sense that once she'd decided to love someone, she never changed her mind. I had been to this house with my parents one summer when I was three or four years old. My mother often told the story of how, a day after she'd enrolled me in the local school, I'd come back speaking French with the regional twang. My grandmother told me that my class had been caught near a giant vineyard fire, black smoke obscuring the rolling hills, and I had never mentioned it, even then. I had no memory of either of these things. But Renée remembered my visit vividly, and remarked several times on how delightful it was to see me in this same swimming pool, all grown up.

The days at her house were peaceful. After lunch, the hours
slipped by with nothing more to show for them than a flip from stomach to back on the lounge chair. I worried about the ease with which I fell into this rhythm. My wrist dangled beneath me, the back of it pressed up against a glass of iced tea that my grandmother had brought me unbidden. I had become so tan I was nearly orange, and the blond streaks by my temples had gone white. We spread out like cats, occupying territory in our sleep. Time passed quick-slow, waterfalls and dams, and I tried to will myself to get up, but the sun held me down like a weight on my chest.

If my mother had been here, she would have been on the phone to New York by now. She'd have set her laptop up on the desk in the hall. She'd have been running final edits through a book or correcting proofs for a cover. She was hard and tight as a metal coil, and I was shapelessness and mush. I had done nothing to deserve this vacation. I had work to do. But I did not open my laptop once.

At six p.m., a murmur rippled across the porch—“Time for the aperitif”—and I pulled myself up to shower and change into a flower-patterned dress. Renée was very traditional, and there were formal rules to obey, even in this summer home among close friends and family. We dressed for dinner and put on shoes. No elbows on the table, no eating until everyone had been served. Cheese after the meal, liquor before it. I was charmed by these rules, as only someone who'd grown up without them could be. We took the aperitif on the table by the pool. We drank pastis, the rich yellow licorice-flavored liquor that clouds as you dilute it with water. I was trying to like it, because a café waiter in Paris had told me that only French people ordered it.

After the aperitif, we set the table for dinner. I could not remember to keep my elbows off the table, and my grandmother kept raising her eyebrows at me and knocking her own elbow on
the table meaningfully. I drank my first glass of rosé quickly, trying to ease the tension that had filled my body.

“Nadja drinks a lot,” Josée remarked, “and you notice it when you count the bottles later.” There were polite nods around the table in response.

“But she holds her liquor very well,” she continued, her voice filling now with pride. “I've never seen her drunk.”

“I started early,” I said with a wry smile.

“Oh really?” Renée asked with courteous interest.

“In America, we can't drink legally until we're twenty-one, so we down whole bottles of tequila at sixteen just to prove that we can,” I said, hoping that my use of the royal “we” would preserve their opinion of me.

I was met with tongue clicks at the sorry state of things in America.

“My mother once told me,” I continued, “that when Josée came to New York right after I was born, she gave me whiskey to stop my crying.”

“She told you that?” Josée said. “Where did she go find such an idea! I would never have done that.”

“Well, yes,” I said, hesitant, “I cried a lot. Perhaps you didn't give it to me but just suggested it? But it's not so strange. I'm sure it works well.”

“Where would I even have gotten whiskey?” Josée said, QED.

“It could have been some other hard alcohol, I suppose. But it's not such a terrible thing, just a drop of liquor,” I said. “Isn't it just a cultural difference?”

“I would never have given alcohol of any sort to an infant. What an idea! What other stories did your mother go and invent?”
Josée gestured toward me. “You need to watch out for this one. She's writing. You have to correct the record.”

I let it drop, wondering if I'd somehow invented it all.

And then, as the attention passed from me, Josée laughingly told us a story about how she'd given her daughters cough syrup in childhood to help them fall asleep. One evening, when Andrée was four or five, she'd drunk the whole bottle.

“I wasn't a very good mother,” Josée said to the table. “But I've always been a very good grandmother.”

—

T
HE FOLLOWING SPRING
, back in Paris, Josée agreed to host my twenty-seventh-birthday party on the roof of her houseboat. I was grateful, though I had not been prepared for the work this would entail. In the week leading up to the event, she and I cleaned the hinges of her refrigerator with a Q-tip and scrubbed the stairs. Sylvie came in my absence and balanced on a beam over the water in order to plant new flowers. I had imagined a few hours of casual cocktails, but Josée organized a six-course meal for my twenty guests, scrambling to find ways to seat them all. My mother was in Paris that weekend, a stopover on her way to Holland on business. She arrived the morning of the event and, both tired and shy, ate quietly and smiled politely at my friends when they tried to speak to her. Tiki torches and rosebushes in full bloom lined the roof of the boat where we dined. At the end of the meal, the dessert rose from the kitchen on the dumbwaiter, an enormous pyramidal
pièce montée
with small fireworks that shot sparks into the air.