The Destiny of Nathalie X (13 page)

On the hard small divan I lie awake in the dark, Ulricke and Anneliese sleeping in their beds a few feet away. I feel warm, content, secure—like a member of a close and happy family, as if Ulricke and Anneliese were my sisters and beyond the door in the quiet house lay our tender parents …

In the morning I meet César. He is thin and febrile, with tousled dry hair. He speaks fast but badly flawed English. We talk about London, where he lived for two years before coming to Nice. Ulricke tells me that as a poet he is really quite famous in Uruguay. Also she tells me that he had an affair with Anneliese when the girls first moved in—but now they’re just friends. Unfortunately, this forces a change in my attitude toward César: I like him, but resentment will always distance us now. Whenever he and Anneliese talk I find myself searching for vestiges of their former intimacy—but there seems nothing there anymore.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn. We all own and forge an image of others in our minds which is inviolable and private. We make those private images public at our peril. Revelation is an audacious move to be long pondered. Unfortunately, this impulse
occurs when we are least able to control it, when we’re distracted by love—or hate …

But we can possess others without their ever being truly aware of it. For example, I possess Steve and Anneliese in ways they could never imagine.

I often wonder what Anneliese thinks about while Ulricke and I are fucking across the room from her. Is she irritated? Curious? Happy? The intimacy of our domestic setup causes me some embarrassment at first, but the girls seem quite unperturbed. I affect a similar insouciance. But although we live in such proximity we maintain a bizarrely prim decorum. We don’t wander around naked. Ulricke and I undress while Anneliese is in the bathroom, or else with the lights out. I have yet to see Anneliese naked. And she’s always with us too—Ulricke and I have never spent a night alone. Since her affair with César she has had no boyfriend. My vague embarrassment swiftly departs and I begin to enjoy Anneliese’s presence during the night—like some mute and unbelievably lax chaperone. One day, to my regret, she tells me how happy she is that Ulricke “has” me; how pleased she is that we are together. The twin sisters are typically close; Anneliese is the more self-composed and confident and she feels protective toward Ulricke, who’s more vulnerable and easily hurt. I reassure her of my sincerity and try not to let the strain show on my face.

With some dismay I watch Steve—an exotic figure in his Afghan coat and flowing hair—join Anneliese in the back of Bent’s VW. Ulricke and I wave them on their way, then we walk down the road from the apartment block toward the Promenade des Anglais. Although it is after nine o’clock the
night air is not unpleasantly cool. For the first time the spring chill has left the air—a presage of the bright summer to come. We walk down rue de la Buffa and cut over to the rue de France. The whores in the boutique doorways seem pleased at the clemency of the weather. They call across the street to each other in clear voices; some of them even wear hot pants.

It’s not that warm. Ulricke wears a white PVC raincoat and a scarf. I put my arm around her shoulders and hear the crackle of the plastic material. The glow from the streetlamps sets highlights in the shine on her nose and cheeks … I worry about Steve and Anneliese in the back of Bent’s car.

I begin to spend more and more nights at Ulricke’s. Madame d’Amico, my landlady, makes no comment on my prolonged absences. I visit my small room in her flat regularly to change my clothes but I find myself increasingly loath to spend nights alone there. Its fusty smell, its dismal view of the interior courtyard, the dull conversations with my fellow lodgers, depress me. I am happy to have exchanged lonely independence for the hugger-mugger intimacy of the villa. Indeed, for a week or so life there becomes even more cramped. The twins are joined by a girlfriend from Bremen, called Clara—twenty-two, sharp-faced, candid—in disgrace with her parents and spending a month or two visiting friends while waiting for tempers back home to cool. I ask her what she has done. She says she had an affair with her father’s business partner and oldest friend. This was discovered, and the ramifications of the scandal spread to the boardroom: suits are being filed, resignations demanded, takeover bids plotted. Clara seems quite calm about it all, her only regret being that her lover’s daughter—who hitherto had been her constant companion since childhood—now refuses to see or speak to her. Whole lives are irreparably askew.

Clara occupies the divan. She sleeps naked and is less concerned with privacy than the other girls. I find I relish the dormitory-like aspect of our living arrangements even more. At night I lie docilely beside Ulricke, listening to the three girls talking in German. I can’t understand a word—they could be talking about me, for all I know. Clara smokes French cigarettes and their pleasant sour smell lingers in the air after the lights are switched out. Ulricke and I wait for a diplomatic five minutes or so before making love. That fragrance of Gauloises or Gitanes is forever associated with those tense palpitating moments of darkness: Ulricke’s warm strong body, the carnal anticipation, the sounds of Clara and Anneliese settling themselves in their beds, their fake yawns.

On the Promenade des Anglais the shiny cars sweep by. Ulricke and I stick out our thumbs, goosing the air. We always get lifts immediately and have freely hitched, usually with Anneliese, the length of the Côte d’Azur, from Saint-Raphaël to Menton, at all hours of the day or night. One warmish evening, near Aix-en-Provence, the three of us decided spontaneously to sleep out in a wood. We huddled up in blankets and awoke at dawn to find ourselves quite soaked with dew.

A car stops. The driver—a man—is going to Monte Carlo. We ask him to take the
haute corniche
. Cherry’s villa is perched so high above the town that the walk up from the coast road is exhausting. Ulricke sits in the front—the sex of the driver determines our position. To our surprise we have found that very often single women will stop for the three of us. They are much more generous than the men as a rule: in our travels the women frequently buy us drinks and meals, and once we were given a hundred francs. Something about the three of us prompts this largesse. There is, I feel, something charmed about us as a trio, Ulricke, Anneliese and me. This is why—
quite apart from his rebarbative personal habits—I so resent Steve. He is an interloper, an intruder: his presence, his interest in Anneliese, threatens me, us. The trio becomes a banal foursome, or—even worse—two couples.

From the small terrace at Cherry’s villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbor lights and the headlamps of cars on the coast road. The dim noise of traffic, the sonic rip of some lout’s motorbike, drift upward to the villa, competing with the thump and chords of music from inside.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young—Live, The Yes Album, Hunky Dory
 … curious how these LPs pin and fix humdrum moments of our lives—precise as almanacs. An
ars brevis
for the quotidian.

The exquisite Cherry patrols her guests, enveloped in a fug of genial envy from her girlfriends. It’s not her impending marriage that prompts this emotion so much as the prospect of the “real” Coca-Cola, “real” milk and “real” meat she will be able to consume a few days hence. The girls from Ann Arbor reminisce indefatigably about American meals they have known. To them, France, Nice, is a period of abstention, a penance for which they will be rewarded in calories and carbohydrates when they return home.

I stroll back inside to check on Steve and Anneliese. My mistake was to have allowed them to travel together in Bent’s car. It conferred an implicit acknowledgment of their “coupledom” on them without Steve having to do anything about it. Indeed he seems oddly passive with regard to Anneliese, as if content to bide his time. Perhaps he is a little frightened of her? Perhaps it’s his immense vanity: time itself will impress upon her the logic and inevitability of their union …? Now I see him sitting as close to Anneliese as possible, as if adjacency alone were sufficient to possess her.

Ulricke talks to Bent’s girlfriend, Gudrun, another Scandinavian. We are a polyglot crew at the Centre—almost every European country represented. Tonight you can hear six distinct languages … I pour myself a glass of wine from an unlabeled bottle. There is plenty to drink. I had brought a bottle of Martini & Rossi as my farewell present to Cherry but left it in my coat pocket when I saw the quantity of wine on offer.

The wine is cold and rough. Decanted no doubt from some huge barrel in the local
cave
. It is cheap and not very potent. We were drinking this wine the night of my audacity.

César had a party for some of his students in the Spanish Lit course. After strenuous consumption most people had managed to get very drunk. César sang Uruguayan folk songs—perhaps they were his poems, for all I know—to his own inept accompaniment on the guitar. I saw Anneliese collect some empty bottles and leave the room. Moments later I followed. The kitchen was empty. Then from the hall I saw the bathroom door ajar. I pushed it open. Anneliese was reapplying her lipstick.

“I won’t be long,” she said.

I went up behind her and put my arm around her. The gesture was friendly, fraternal. She leaned back, pursing, pouting and repursing her lips to spread the orange lipstick. We talked at our reflections.

“Good party,” I said.

“César may be a poet but he cannot sing.”

We laughed, I squeezed. It was all good fun. Then I covered her breasts with my hands. I looked at our reflection: our faces side by side, my hands claws on her chest.

“Anneliese …” I began, revealing everything in one word, watching her expression register, interpret, change.

“Hey, tipsy boy,” she laughed, clever girl, reaching around to slap my side. “I’m not Ulricke.”

We broke apart; I heeled a little, drunkenly. We grinned, friends again. But the moment lay between us, like a secret. Now she knew.

The party is breaking up. People drift away. I look at Steve, he seems to have his arm around Anneliese. Ulricke joins me.

“What’s happening?” I ask Steve.

“Cliff’s taking us down to the town. He says they may be at the café tonight.”

I confirm this with Cliff, who, improbably, is French. He’s a dull, inoffensive person who—we have discovered to our surprise—runs drug errands for the many tax-exiled rock musicians who while away their time on the Côte d’Azur. Every now and then these stars and their retinue emerge from the fastnesses of their wired-off villas and patronize a café on the harbor front at Villefranche. People sit around and gawp at the personalities and speculate about the hangers-on—the eerie thugs, the haggard, pale women, the brawling kids.

A dozen of us set off. We stroll down the sloping road as it meanders in a sequence of hairpins down the steep face of the hills to the bright town spangling below. Steve, I notice, is holding hands with Anneliese. I hate the look on his face: king leer. I feel a sudden unbearable anger. What
right
has he got to do this, to sidle into our lives, to take possession of Anneliesen hand in that way?

The four of us and Cliff have dropped back from the others. Cliff, in fractured English, is telling us of his last visit to the rock star’s villa. I’m barely listening—something to do with a man and a chicken … I look back. Anneliese and Steve have stopped. He removes his Afghan coat and places it capelike around Anneliese’s shoulders. He gives a mock-chivalric bow and Anneliese curtsies. These gestures, I recognize with alarm, are the early foundations of a couple’s private language—actions, words and shared memories whose meaning
and significance only they can interpret and which exclude the world at large. But at the same time they tell me that nothing intimate—no kiss, no caress—has yet passed between them. I have only moments left to me.

The other members of our party have left the road and entered a narrow gap between houses which is the entrance to a thin defile of steps—some hundred yards long—that cuts down the hill directly to the town below. The steps are steep and dark with many an illogical angle and turn. From below I hear the clatter of descending feet and excited cries. Cliff goes first, Ulricke follows. I crouch to tie a shoelace. Anneliese passes. I jump up and with the slightest of tussles insinuate myself between her and Steve.

In the dark cleft of the steps there is just room for two people to pass. I put my hands on the rough iron handrails and slow my pace. Anneliese skips down behind Ulricke. Steve bumps at my back. Soon I can barely make out Anneliese’s blond hair.

“Can I get by, please?”

I ignore Steve, although he’s treading on my heels. Below me Anneliese turns a bend out of sight.

“Come
on
, for God’s sake.”

“Bit tricky in the dark.”

Roughly, Steve attempts to wrest my arm from the handrail. He swears. I stop dead, lock my elbows and brace myself against his shoving.

“You English fuck!” He punches me quite hard in the back. I run down the steps to a narrow landing where they make a turn. I face Steve. He is lean and slightly taller than me, but I’m not interested in physical prowess, only delay. Farther down the flights of steps the sound of footfalls grows ever fainter. I hold the bridge. Steve is panting.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he says. “Who do you think you are? Her father? You don’t own these girls, you know.”

He takes a swing at me. I duck my head and his knuckles jar painfully on my skull. Steve lets out a yip of pain. Through photomatic violet light I lunge at him as he massages blood into his numbed fist. With surprising ease I manage to throw him heavily to the ground. At once I turn and spring down the steps. I take them five at a time, my fingertips brushing the handrails like outriggers.

Ulricke and Anneliese are waiting at the bottom. The others have gone on to the harbor front. I seize their hands.

“Quickly,” I say. “This way!”