Villa America (17 page)

Gerald looked at Sara, who gave a small shrug. He lay down, wet, in the warm sand and closed his eyes.

“Gerald, don’t you want your robe?” Linda asked.

Sara could tell he was pretending he hadn’t heard her.

“I’ll wear it,” Cole said gaily. “Look. It’s got stripes. How exciting.” He donned Gerald’s robe and then snatched Sara’s parasol out of her hands and twirled it over his shoulder. “Where’s my hat?” he said, then located his white straw hat and placed it jauntily on his head.

Sara reached into her bag and pulled out her Kodak. “Don’t move,” she said, laughing. Cole put his hand on his waist and jutted out his hip. “Don’t move,” she said again before snapping his picture.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Linda stood and turned angrily on Sara. “Perhaps you don’t care how your husband behaves in public, but
I
do. You’re all children.”

“My husband behaves just as he pleases and just how he should, in public and private,” Sara said coldly.

 “Keep telling yourself that, darling,” Linda said before storming off in the direction of the lagoon.

That had been that, as far as Sara was concerned. That evening they’d gone off to yet another party, pretending the incident had never happened. But the next morning Sara told Gerald she was leaving.

And now she was back in Antibes, where there was no yelling and no recriminations, thank God. Just the quiet village and its hills and the sea and the children and Vladimir and the dogs. Where all of them could be just who they were.

He was sketching her on the beach where she lay, the straps of her coffee-colored swimming costume pushed down off her shoulders, her legs wrapped in a bright printed cloth. A long strand of pearls hung down her back. The beach, the sea, was good for them, she’d said, because that’s where they came from.

He squinted under his Stetson and then looked back at his pad. With his pencil, he outlined the curls that fell down around her shoulders, then shaded them, smudging the lead with his thumb. Some days she wore her hair pinned up, and he had a sketch of that too. Also of her wearing a turban. But today he would capture the form of her hair loose, undone. He was already thinking of using it in a composition with two other nudes with her in the center, three Greek muses.

Off to his left, the three Murphy children were raking seaweed, taking over their father’s usual daily job of clearing the small beach inch by inch of the briny carpet. He could hear their voices pealing, call and recall.

Aside from sketches of Sara, his pad was full of studies of the things the Murphys took to the beach every day: two fringed umbrellas, a pink-and-white-striped tent for changing in, cotton cushions of various colors—rose madder, Naples yellow, celadon,
blanc-neige
—that popped against the cerulean blue of the sea, blankets to lie down on, cloths to wrap up in, silk scarfs to wear as turbans, bottles of wine and sherry and tins of biscuits from Paris, serving trays, crystal glasses, and a basketful of clothes to dress up in if the mood struck.

Sara stirred, sat up a little more, and looked over her shoulder like Ingres’s
Odalisque.
His blood quickened. He turned the page and quickly outlined the pose while the image of it was still fresh in his mind.

He squinted again at the pad. His pencil made a crosshatching where the blanket was, creating a grid around her reclining figure. He knew the outlines of her body now, after a long summer spent watching her. Full breasts, curved hips, perfect muscular calves. The heavy, dark honey hair, the upturned nose, the Cupid’s bow of a lip. And those eyes, canted downward, like a lion’s.

As he watched her, she held the sherry bottle out to Olga, who tipped her head forward in a kind of complicity. Then she called out to the children.

Three naked little brown bodies ran to her and sat patiently as she rubbed them all over with cocoa cream, the unctuous jungle smell carrying over to where he was sitting. He watched her strong hands, mother’s hands, knead and smooth it over her little natives’ skin before she released them one by one back into the wild. She lay down again.

Minutes passed. She toyed with her book, not really reading. He thought about how different she was from Olga, marveled at all the ways women could be made; his wife’s lithe body, like a stream of water, and her dark smooth head stood in contrast to Sara’s heavier, rounder, blonder form.

He slept for a while in the afternoon heat. Then the Murphys’ nurse, Rose, gathered up the children and the dogs—a Scottie the color of ink and a small spotted one—and took them all back to the hotel for lunch and a nap. Paulo was at home sick with a summer cold, being tended to by his grandmother and his
nounou.

When they’d gone, Sara filled a tray with a small bottle of chianti, a large slice of pâté and hunks of baguette, a bowl of olives, three colored plates, and a garland of ivy.

“Lunch is served,” she said. “Oh, wait.” She rummaged around, produced a small vase filled with flowers picked from the succulents outside the hotel, and placed it in the center. “Now lunch is served.”

He liked that detail. It was feminine, gay. He admired that in her.

The three of them ate and then bathed. Olga went into the tent to change into a dry costume and then lay down and fell asleep in the shade of one of the umbrellas. Sara was reading a novel sent to her, she’d said, by Gerald’s sister, who was a friend of the author.

She’d held the cover up to him when he’d asked about it earlier.

“
The Beautiful and the Damned,”
she’d said. “
The Disorganized and the Drunk
would be more apt. I do wonder at Esther’s taste sometimes.”

She seemed absorbed in it now, though. He moved closer to her.

“Perhaps you can take me to see this house you and Gerald have bought,” he said.

Sara looked up. “Oh, yes.”

“This evening?” He cocked his Stetson over his eyes, shading them.

“If you’d like.”

He would like. He wanted a chance to be alone with her. He had nothing against Gerald Murphy, whom he found quite original, but he was drawn to Sara. Perhaps it was her Americanism. It was true that he’d never been exposed to this kind of American woman before—married, rich, a mother but also a muse. He knew the young stupid ones and the old ones and the Sapphic ones. None of those appealed. This one was sensual in a way that was unself-conscious.

He wouldn’t go too far; perhaps a hand on the small of her back, leaning close. Just to run his hand over her figure, to feel what until now he’d only drawn. He thought about the moment just before something begins, just before the hourglass is tipped and time starts to run out. He loved that moment, and once it passed, it felt like a death.

He was thinking of this and of what might happen when Olga opened her eyes and stretched. Sara put her book down again and asked her: “Would you like to see our house this evening? We were thinking of going for a viewing.”

“Oh, that sounds nice,” Olga said lazily, and she looked at him. “That’s a good idea, isn’t it?”

Owen sat at one of the rickety tables at the Café des Pêcheurs, overlooking the Port d’Antibes, drinking a Remplaçant. He’d acquired a taste for anise, liked watching the liquid cloud over when he added water from the little carafe on the side.

There were only a few other people at the café: some fishermen relaxing after a haul, a group of those bohemian artists who seemed to flock to the region in the summer, and a drunk war invalid—the Riviera used to be full of men like that, but they were becoming less and less visible. It was six o’clock in the evening, but it wouldn’t get more crowded than this.

The village was too small to attract fun seekers, who had Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, and Juan-les-Pins, with its new casino and smarter restaurants, to choose from. Here there was nothing except a couple of cafés, a movie theater that was open once a week—if the piano player could be located—and some fine beaches.

It was a good hour’s drive, at least, from Owen’s rooms near Saint-Raphaël, but he liked to come here to escape. Just to be quiet. He rented space for his plane at the Fréjus air base and from there ran his business of flying in goods from London, Paris, and farther-flung places across Europe for the rich, who couldn’t be without their caviar or silk handkerchiefs during the winter season. He sometimes took tourists on pleasure trips along the coast to supplement his income.

Because he was always at the base, he’d come to know the young aviators stationed there, and they, along with the proprietor of the café below his rooms, made up his circle of friends. But there were evenings, like this one, when the joviality and youth of the French pilots depressed him. None of them had served in the war and they looked upon his experiences as the pinnacle of glory. Yet Owen had started to become frightened of relating his stories; it felt like they no longer belonged to him, like they had happened to someone else, in a book, perhaps.

After Chaudun, he’d been sent to Cannes, to a convalescent hospital, where he’d stayed while his leg healed. It had been broken in three places, and after five months, one operation, and a few metal screws, the war was basically over and he’d been discharged. He’d been in no hurry to leave; he was ruined for combat flying, and it had been beautiful there—the Croisette and beaches, the palm trees, the converted hotel with its big turrets.

So he’d taken some of the money he had left from the sale of the farm and bought one of the army’s surplus planes, going cheap, and an old Citroën, which he’d fixed up. He’d struck a deal with the commander at the Fréjus air base for hangar space and eventually taken rooms in Agay on a perfect little bay surrounded by the Esterel Mountains. There, the cliffs were pink instead of golden. Along with the one café, there were a few villas, some smaller houses, and a handful of fishing shacks. It was eight miles from the base, but the calm was worth the price of the petrol.

The
patron
of the café, a squat brown man with shoulders like planks, came to refill his glass. Owen’d been there often enough for the man to know he took two refills before leaving.

The sun was changing the color of the sea from light to dark as it made its way west. He looked over at the artists talking, his attention drawn by the mix of English and French he heard.

They were a group of three: a stocky man with a big nose and dark hair parted deeply from the right, a black Stetson on his lap; a taller, slender man in a striped fisherman’s shirt whom he recognized as a Russian he’d spoken with one evening; and a woman in a flowing gown like some Greek goddess. She was older than himself, he thought, but beautiful. And seemed very still. She had sloping kind of eyes. She was staring at him.

He looked at the port and then back at her to see if she was still looking. She was. It gave him a sort of funny feeling, like he was being memorized the way he’d memorized arithmetic problems in school. Her gaze was very frank for a woman, and he had the impression—one long forgotten and only vaguely and anxiously remembered—of something about to happen.

The sherry at the café was very bad, Sara decided. But after they’d all gone to see the house she and Gerald had bought, Vladimir had suggested an
apéro
there; he’d apparently become very fond of it in their absence. Picasso had come along, but Olga had begged off in order to change for supper.

It had cheered Sara to see the villa again; every time, she fell in love a little more. It was a place that people could be happy in, she decided. Perfectly nestled in the hills of Cap d’Antibes, a bit below the old lighthouse, it sat on seven acres of sloping terraced gardens looking out over the Golfe-Juan, west towards Cannes. It had been owned by some military attaché or other who’d brought back what seemed like an entire botanical garden from the Far East. Gerald knew all the plants’ names. When they’d started on renovation plans, they’d agreed that the gardens must remain intact.

The villa had been purchased on something of a whim, but it hadn’t cost very much. Her father had decided to dole out proportionate amounts of his capital to Sara and her two sisters before his death, an effort to circumvent inheritance tax. The funds, along with a strong dollar against the franc, had made the price tag seem a pittance. (At least to Sara and Gerald, who, granted, weren’t very clear about money.)

It had been especially beautiful that evening, with the hills below them the color of elephant skin, and the gulf turning from turquoise to jade as it spread towards Corsica. And it had pleased her to win Pablo’s approval.

He’d found the garden
très belle
and the view perfect for a painter, he’d said. Of course she’d known the real reason he’d wanted to go up there, and in fact she was flattered. He was charismatic, there was no doubt, and had such a physical presence, and she liked being around him. But what he had in mind was out of the question. So she’d invited Olga and even roped in Vladimir as an extra precaution.

Now, at the café, Vladimir and Pablo were carrying on a long discussion about the different types of boats moored in the port. Vladimir, who’d been studying to be a naval architect before his flight from St. Petersburg, was very interested in that sort of thing. Sara was not.

Instead, she watched as a drunk war veteran got drunker and eventually went to sleep. Then she fixed her gaze on a young man, perhaps ten or fifteen years her junior, sitting by himself and sipping from his drink. He was built like a classical statue, his torso an inverted triangle, his long legs stretched out on either side of the table, the muscles in his arms faintly visible beneath his cotton shirt. He was tan and quite blond. He didn’t look local, or even French, but neither was he dressed like a wealthy Englishman or even an American. Couldn’t be a German.

She stared at him awhile before he noticed. He looked back at her as if he expected something from her.

She turned to the two men. “Who is that man over there, do you think?”

Vladimir looked over.
“Un pilote américain.”