The Destiny of Nathalie X (16 page)

We honeymooned at my little house on the island. I had had its clapboard exterior repainted a lemony cream the better to offset the regulation bottle green demanded by the mayor’s office. Big cloudy blue blossoms of hydrangea lined the sandy path down to the beach. Across the silver bay I could see the dark stripe of the mainland. A lone yacht slowly edged its way east. In a minute the composition would be perfect. I ached for my sketch pad.

Image. Golo sitting on the lavatory, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, her ankles footcuffed by her impossibly sheer panties. Her long pale thighs angled upward, knees meeting, her satin evening shoes just clinging to her heels as she sits on tiptoes, like a jockey straddling a thoroughbred. Except this jockey is simultaneously painting her lips vermilion without the aid of a mirror. She purses her lips, pouts and turns to offer me her best false smile.

“Mmm?”

“Perfect. I don’t know how you do it.”

She tears off a square of lavatory paper and prints her lips on it. Neatly folded once, it does the work it was intended for down below, before the panties are hoicked to the knee, and then Golo rises in a swoop and rustle of crêpe. There is a millisecond of buttock-cleft on view before the dressing is complete and the chrome knob is pressed and the cistern voids itself.

“Why did you quit medical school?” she asks, apropos of nothing, checking her impassive face in the mirror. Her little finger lightly touches each corner of her mouth.

“What? Because I wanted to be a painter.”

“Can’t you be a doctor and a painter at the same time?”

“I can’t.”

“What about your friend? He’s a doctor and other things.”

“Max? But Max is Renaissance Man. I can’t compete with Max, for heaven’s sake.”

“Can we get a yacht?”

“Of course. But why on earth?”

“I think I want to learn to sail. Where are we going tonight?”

“The maharani’s.”

“How dreary.”

I watched Max dicing the garlic cloves. Each clove was peeled, halved lengthways and then laid flat and held with a fingertip on the chopping board, where, with a small fine knife, the clove was sliced vertically into a fan, turned 90 degrees and sliced across again, tiny neat cubes resulting. The residue left under the finger was discarded.

“Why don’t you use a press?”

“It doesn’t taste the same.”

We were in his garden flat in Kensington, not far from one of the hospitals where he had consulting rooms. He was cooking me supper—scallops. In oil and tomatoes. His kitchen was both efficient and picturesque. Big cleared areas for working, many pan-crowded shelves and racks and, hung here and there, hams and sausage, pimentos, chiles and garlic. Needless to say, Max was a highly accomplished cook and he liked his cuisine flavorsome.

“Thank you for my picture,” he said.

“It’s the view from the sitting room.”

“I know.” He wandered over to peer at the picture, which he had placed on a pine dresser. “You’ve changed the hydrangeas, or is that artistic license?”

“Well remembered. When were we there?”

“Thanks. Two summers ago. Is that the
Heliotrope?”

“What’s that?”

“The yacht I used to sail at university. You remember, you met us once at Juan-les-Pins. Something about the spinnaker. That’s a nice thought. Thank you.”

“It’s just a yacht, I’m afraid. Isn’t that enough garlic?”

He slid the garlic off the board into a pan where it spat and sizzled in the hot oil.

“How’s Golo?” he said.

“Wonderful.”

Later, over the cheese, he said: “Don’t mind me saying this, old friend, but don’t leave a woman on her own for long.”

“God, I’m only away for one night. I had to see the trustees.”

“I’m not talking about now. Women get bored much faster than men.”

“Says who?”

“It’s a well-known medical fact. Try some of this quince jelly with the cheese. Just something an old lothario told me once.”

Golo is lying on her side, on the bed, naked. I stand in the doorway of the bathroom, showered, spent, happy. Propped on one elbow, she is reading a trashy Sunday paper and laughing to herself at its idiocies. At her elbow, on a faience plate I bought at Saint-Martin, is a triangle of honeyed toast. Through the window I see the sun on the bay and that obliging yacht attended by two or three seagulls. Without looking up Golo searches the bed with her right foot for the square of sunshine that was warming her flank a moment ago. She finds it and allows her foot a sunbath while she reads, reaches for her toast and bites.

“Why do you buy this rubbish? The stuff they say.”

“I only get it for the funnies.” I think I must be the happiest fellow in the world.

“A likely story.”

We traveled that first year. I let the house in Carlyle Square to a Brazilian diplomat and we went east to India, Ceylon, Thailand. We saw out the winter with Golo’s school chum Charlotte and her husband Didier Van Breuer in Sydney, Australia. Spring found us in a little house in Sausalito on another, larger bay. The exhibition of my Indian gouaches in a Broome Street gallery was a modest success. Golo developed a surprisingly effective, kicking second serve. We were never a night apart.

I felt a physical presence in my gut, like a stone lodged between my liver and my pancreas. I looked out over the dark trees of Carlyle Square and made all sorts of bargains with any number of deities.

Max came through the bedroom, running his hands through his hair, which was graying remarkably fast, I noticed, for some odd reason. He looks more tired than me, I thought.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not a gynecologist, but I would say your wife is pregnant.”

I have a son. His name is Dominic. He bellows with rage, he screams, he howls. Odette, his nurse, takes him to his room. I touch Golo’s face with my knuckles.

“Welcome home,” I say, and from my pocket remove the ring I have had made from an emerald I bought in Bangkok. Golo slips it on her finger.

“She manages to say ‘I love you,’ before she dissolves in tears,” I gently mock her.

She hugs me to her. “You’re so sweet,” she says. “And I do love you.”

Didier Van Breuer to dinner at Carlyle Square. He tells us he is divorcing Charlotte. I leave the room when a messenger comes to the front door, and when I return Van Breuer is sitting hunched over his food, sobbing. It is all too terribly sad.

Summer came around again and we open up the house on the island. The new annex for Odette and Dominic blended perfectly with the rest of the house. Odette—a strong raw-boned girl, with many moles—proved to be a capable cook as well as a capable nurse. In one week we were served bouillabaisse, oursins à la provençale, marinated veal chops with ratatouille, poulet stuffed with roast garlic, pied de porc lyonnais, liver and onions. It was delicious, but too rich for me. I found myself feeling overstuffed and bilious, my throat salty and my sinal passages pungent and herby even the next morning. I fasted for twenty-four hours, drinking only distilled water, and endured a night sweat that drove Golo from the bed.

“We must smell like a tinker’s camp,” I said to her the day I began to feel better. “Tell Odette it’s salads for the rest of the summer.” By and large she complied, though from time to time a reeking stew or casserole would arrive at the table and the place would smell like a Neapolitan trattoria once again.

I found it hard to paint in the house now that its routines revolved around Dominic’s noisy needs rather than my own. I was trying to complete enough work for an exhibition that a friend, who owned a little gallery in the rue Jacob, was kindly arranging for me, and so, most days I would load the panniers on my bicycle with my paints and brushes and set off for various parts of the island that were not pestered with tourists or summer residents, returning home as evening began to
approach. I found a place overlooking the salt pans which promised great refulgent expanses of sky and water. I loved the salt pans with their strange poetry of dessication, though the series of watercolors I produced there, well enough done, had a lonely simplicity that seemed a little repetitive.

So it was in search of some contrasting bustle and busyness that I reluctantly ventured into one of the little ports and set up my easel by the marina. But after the serenity of the salt pans I found the presence of curious sightseers peering over my shoulder off-putting and, to be frank, my technique was found wanting when I came to render the bobbing mass of yachts and powerboats, dinghies and cruisers, that were crowded in among the piers and the jetties.

I was sitting there one midmorning, having torn up my first attempt, wondering vaguely if it would be worth looking at some Dufys that I knew hung in a provincial gallery not more than half a day’s drive away, when my peripheral attention was caught by a half-glimpsed figure, male, slim in white khakis and a navy sweater, that I was convinced was familiar. You know the way your instinctive apprehension is often more sure and certain than something studied and sought for: the glance is often more accurate than the stare. I was oddly positive that I had seen someone I knew and, having nothing on the easel to detain me, I sauntered off to find out who it was.

Didier Van Breuer sat in the sunshine of the restaurant terrace with a small glass of brandy and a caffè latte on the table in front of him, shirtless with a navy blue cotton sweater. He had a small red bandanna at his throat. He looked changed since we had last seen him, older and more gaunt. He did not seem too surprised to see me (he knew I summered on the island, he said) but I was glad to discover that my instincts and my eyesight were as sharp and shrewd as they had always been. He was cordial, with none of that reserve I had always associated with him.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

He pointed to the harbor, at a vast gin-palace of a motor yacht with a single tall funnel (yellow with a magenta stripe). Crew members swabbed down bleached teak decks; brown water was being pumped from bilges. He was alone, he told me, on an endless meandering summer cruise trying to forget Charlotte and her grotesque betrayal (she was living with Didier’s estranged son). I asked him to dinner that night (I had seen Odette empty almost an entire tin of cumin into a lobster stew) but he declined, saying they were setting sail for the Azores later. He finished his drink and we wandered around the quay to his boat (his trousers were pale blue, I noticed with a private smile; however vigilant, the corner of your eye cannot achieve 20/20 vision). He had changed the name from
Charlotte III
to
Clymene
, who, he told me, with harsh irony, was the mistress of the sun. He invited me on board and we strolled through the empty staterooms smoking cigars, the warm buttock of a brandy goblet cupped in my tight palm. I felt sad for him, with his pointless wealth and the cheerless luxury of his life, and felt sad myself as the boat reminded me of Pappi’s old schooner, the
Vergissmeinnicht
, and my lost childhood. He had a rather fine Dufy in the dining room and I took the opportunity to make a few quick notes and sketches while he went upstairs to make a telephone call.