The Destiny of Nathalie X (11 page)

“Why should I?” he argues reasonably. “They’ve got more than enough money for me too. Why should I bust my ass working trying to earn more?”

“But isn’t it … What do you do all day?”

“All kinds of shit … But mostly I like to play tennis a lot. And I like to fuck, of course.”

“So why did you come to Nice?”

He grins. “I was a bad boy.” He slaps his wrist and laughs. “Naughty, naughty Preston.”

He won’t tell me what he did.

It is Spring in Nice. Each day we start to enjoy a little more sunshine, and whenever it appears, within ten minutes there is a particular girl, lying on the
plage publique
in front of the
Centre, sunbathing. Often I stand and watch her spread out there, still, supine, on the cool pebbles—the only sunbather along the entire bay. It turns out she is well known, that this is a phenomenon that occurs every year. By early summer her tan is solidly established and she is very brown indeed. By August she is virtually black, with that kind of dense, matte tan, the life burned out of the skin, her pores brimming with melanin. Her ambition each year, they say, is to be the brownest girl on the Côte d’Azur …

I watch her lying there, immobile beneath the iridescent rain of ultraviolet. It is definitely not warm—even in my jacket and scarf I shiver slightly in the fresh breeze. How can she be bothered? I wonder, but at the same time I have to admit there is something admirable in such single-mindedness, such ludicrous dedication.

Eventually I take my first girl to the Club to meet Preston. Her name is Ingrid, she is in my class, a Norwegian, but with dark auburn hair. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly, uncomplicated soul. She speaks perfect English and German.

“Are you French?” Preston asks, almost immediately.

Ingrid is very amused by this. “I’m Norwegian,” she explains. “Is it important?”

I apologize to Preston when Ingrid goes off to change into her swimming costume, but he waves it away, not to worry, he says, she’s cute. Ingrid returns and we sit in the sun and order the first of our many drinks. Ingrid, after some prompting, smokes one of Preston’s Merit cigarettes. The small flaw that emerges to mar our pleasant afternoon is that the more Ingrid drinks, the more her conversation becomes increasingly dominated by references to a French boy she is seeing called Jean-Jacques. Preston hides his disappointment; he is the acme of good manners.

Later we play poker using cheese biscuits as chips. Ingrid sits opposite me in her multicolored swimsuit. She is plumper than I had imagined, and I decide that if I had to sum her up in one word it would be “homely.” Except for one detail: she has very hairy armpits. On one occasion she sits back in her chair, studying her cards for a full minute, her free hand idly scratching a bite on the back of her neck. Both Preston’s and my eyes are drawn to the thick divot of auburn hair that is revealed by this gesture: we stare at it, fascinated, as Ingrid deliberates whether to call or raise.

After she has gone Preston confesses that he found her unshavenness quite erotic. I am not so sure.

That night we sit in the Club long into the night, as usual the place’s sole customers, with Serge unsmilingly replenishing our drinks as Preston calls for them. Ingrid’s presence, the unwitting erotic charge that she has detonated in our normally tranquil, bibulous afternoons, seems to have unsettled and troubled Preston somewhat, and without any serious prompting on my part he tells me why he has come to Nice. He informs me that the man his mother remarried was a widower, an older man, with four children already in their twenties. When Preston dropped out of college he went to stay with his mother and new stepfather.

He exhales, he eats several olives, his face goes serious and solemn for a moment.

“This man, Michael, had three daughters—and a son, who was already married—and, man, you should have seen those girls.” He grins, a stupid, gormless grin. “I was eighteen years old and I got three beautiful girls sleeping down the corridor from me. What am I supposed to do?”

The answer, unvoiced, seemed to slip into the Club like a draft of air. I felt my spine tauten.

“You mean—?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I didn’t want to speak, so I think through this. I imagine a
big silent house, night, long dark corridors, closed doors. Three bored blond tanned stepsisters. Suddenly there’s a tall young man in the house, a virtual stranger, who plays tennis to Davis Cup standard.

“What went wrong?” I manage.

“Oldest one, Janie, got pregnant, didn’t she? Last year.”

“Abortion?”

“Are you kidding? She just married her fiancé real fast.”

“You mean she was engaged when—”

“He doesn’t know a thing. But she told my mother.”

“The, the child was—”

“Haven’t seen him yet.” He turns and calls for Serge. “No one knows for sure, no one suspects …” He grins again. “Let’s hope the kid doesn’t start smoking Merits.” He reflects on his life a moment, and turns his big mild face to me. “That’s why I’m here. Keeping my head down. Not exactly flavor-of-the-month back home.”

The next girl I take to the Club is also a Scandinavian—we have eight in our class—but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blond hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unself-conscious about her disability.

“Hi,” Preston says. “Are you French?”

Danni hides her incredulity.
“Mais oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.”
Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake and makes light of his disappointment.

Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.)
Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.

“Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.”

This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do, as there is no one else in the Club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious, and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston,
“Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.”

“Fuck you, Serge,” he says amiably, and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is overt, almost a challenge.

After Danni has left, Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the Club now stands at over four hundred dollars and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for five hundred francs.

I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the Club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses of luxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the Club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks …

Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions—I feel vaguely pimplike, oddly smirched—that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.

Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like 90 percent of students, she has chosen American.

I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently inquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?

The next morning, on my way down the rue de France to the Centre, I see Preston standing outside a pharmacy reading the
Herald Tribune
. I call his name and cross the road to tell him the excellent news about Annique.

“You won’t believe this,” I say, “but I finally got a real French girl.”

Preston’s face looks odd: half a smile, half a morose grimace of disappointment.

“That’s great,” he says dully, “wonderful.”

A tall, slim girl steps out of the pharmacy and hands him a plastic bag.

“This is Lois,” he says. We shake hands.

I know who Lois is, Preston has often spoken of her: my damn-near fiancée, he calls her. It transpires that Lois has flown over spontaneously and unannounced to visit him.

“And, boy, are my mom and dad mad as hell,” she says, laughing.

Lois is a pretty girl, with a round, innocent face quite free of makeup. She is tall—even in her sneakers she is as tall as me—with a head of incredibly thick, dense brown hair which, for some reason, I associate particularly with American girls. I feel sure also, though as yet I have no evidence, that she is a very clean person—physically clean, I mean to say—someone who showers and washes regularly, smelling of soap and the lingering farinaceous odor of talcum powder.

I stroll back with them to the Résidence. Lois’s arrival has temporarily solved Preston’s money problems: they have cashed in her return ticket and paid off the bar bill and the next quarter’s rent that had come due. Preston feels rich enough to buy back his watch from me.

Annique looks less mature and daunting in her swimsuit, I’m pleased to say, though I was disappointed that she favored a demure apple-green one-piece. The pool’s heater has been “fixed” and for the first time we all swim in the small azure rectangle—Preston and Lois, Annique and me. It is both strange and exciting for me to see Annique so comparatively unclothed and even stranger to lie side by side, thigh by thigh, inches apart, sunbathing.

Lois obviously assumes Annique and I are a couple—a quite natural assumption under the circumstances, I suppose—she would never imagine I had brought her for Preston. I keep catching him gazing at Annique, and a mood of frustration and intense sadness seems to emanate from him—
a mood of which only I am aware. And in turn a peculiar exhilaration builds inside me, not just because of Lois’s innocent assumption about my relation to Annique, but also because I know now that I have succeeded. I have brought Preston the perfect French girl: Annique, by his standards, represents the paradigm, the Platonic ideal for this American male. Here she is, unclothed, lying by his pool, in his club, drinking his drinks, but he can do nothing—and what makes my own excitement grow is the realization that for the first time in our friendship—perhaps for the first time in his life—Preston envies another person. Me.

As this knowledge dawns, so too does my impossible love for Annique. Impossible, because nothing will ever happen. I know that—but Preston doesn’t, and somehow that ghostly love affair, our love affair, Annique and me, that will carry on in Preston’s head, in his hot and tormented imagination, embellished and elaborated by his disappointment and sense of lost opportunity, will be more than enough, more than I could ever have hoped for.

Now that Lois has arrived I stay away from the Résidence Les Anges. It won’t be the same again and, despite my secret delight, I don’t want to taunt Preston with the spectre of Annique. But I find that without the spur of his envy the tender fantasy inevitably dims; in order for my dream life, my dream love, to flourish, I need to share it with Preston. I decide to pay a visit. Preston opens the door of his studio.

“Hi, stranger,” he says with some enthusiasm. “Am I glad to see you.” He seems sincere. I follow him into the apartment. The small room is untidy, the bed unmade, the floor strewn with female clothes. I hear the noise of the shower from the bathroom: Lois may be a clean person but it is clear she is also something of a slut.

“How are things with Annique?” he asks, almost at once, as casually as he can manage. He has to ask, I know it.

I look at him. “Good.” I let the pause develop, pregnant with innuendo. “No, they’re good.”

His nostrils flare and he shakes his head.

“God, you’re one lucky—”

Lois comes in from the bathroom in a dressing gown, toweling her thick hair dry.

“Hi, Edward,” she says, “what’s new?” Then she sits down on the bed and begins to weep.

We stand and look at her as she sobs quietly.

“It’s nothing,” Preston says. “She just wants to go home.” He tells me that neither of them has left the building for eight days. They are completely, literally, penniless. Lois’s parents have canceled her credit cards, and collect calls home have failed to produce any response. Preston has been unable to locate his father and now his stepfather refuses to speak to him (a worrying sign), and although his mother would like to help she is powerless for the moment, given Preston’s fall from grace. Preston and Lois have been living on a diet of olives, peanuts and cheese biscuits served up in the bar and, of course, copious alcohol.

“Yeah, but now we’re even banned from there,” Lois says, with an unfamiliar edge to her voice.

“Last night I beat up on that fuckwit, Serge,” Preston explains with a shrug. “Something I had to do.”