The Suitors (13 page)

I have a few simple precepts. I talk about what interests the other person. And since people like to talk about themselves, I ask them questions, avoiding as much as possible anything concerning their professions. I would rather ask them if they are afraid of flying, if they’ve ever talked to a stranger on a train, if they think women should
ever make the first move, or if they’re men, I ask if they’re attracted to women who are clinging and needy. Or I toss out something trivial: Do you like baths or showers? Tea or coffee? Monet or Manet? The sillier the question, the more interested I am in the answer. But no matter what people say, I make sure to seem fascinated by their observations and impressed by their wit, without seeking to impress them myself. Or discreetly, in a very low-key manner (just in case my audience has nothing to bring to the table), I announce, let’s say, that I have never been to Venice. Then I sit back and enjoy the
oh
s and
ah
s my admission invariably provokes. Or I put their kindness to the test by pretending to be shy. In short, I follow to the letter the old adage advising us to speak frivolously of serious things and seriously of frivolous ones—even if that doesn’t suit everybody, in particular the crashing bores who join a discussion only to show off their knowledge of history, politics, or philosophy, and who like nothing better than to trip you up over some mistake.

And conversation at our table was languishing, so I turned to Laszlo, who was serving himself seconds of the risotto and morels.

“I’m bored,” I whispered. “Tell me again about the time you mistook Ungaro, the couturier, for Trichet, the governor of the Banque de France.”

“But you know that story by heart!”

Instead, my father revealed his own worst blunder.

“Last December, I gave one of those end-of-the-year speeches I deliver at my company’s Christmas party, when I convey my best wishes for a happy holiday to the personnel, with respectful mention of the year’s deaths and retirements. So, after the jolly bits, and armed with a list of the deceased’s virtues (drawn up by my secretary), I assume a dignified expression and solemnly intone, ‘I would now like to invoke the memory of Monsieur Puchet, and to pay tribute to a man whom we all knew and appreciated, who died this year.’ I pause for breath, and out of the audience comes a voice, loud and clear:
Oh no, I didn’t!
”

Laetitia, Gay, and Jean-Michel crack up. Pleased with his success, my father forges ahead.

“Dreadfully embarrassed, I try to smooth over my blunder by saying cheerily, ‘This is excellent news indeed, and we all fondly hope you will remain with us for a good long time.’ ”

Laszlo leaned forward eagerly. “And then?”

“And then—just imagine!—the voice pipes up, very cordially:
Oh no, I won’t. I’m looking forward to retiring at the end of this week!”

Our screams of laughter plunged my mother’s table into an envious and admiring silence. I, however, had
achieved my goal: Jean-Michel, feeling more relaxed, found the courage to speak to me.

“And what is it you do in life?”

Too bad he picked that to start with, I thought.

“I’m a psychoanalyst.”

I knew that this confession would stop our budding relationship cold. And even though Jean-Michel wasn’t attractive enough for me to regret this, I was irritated to have hit another wall in my efforts to loosen him up. My profession provokes two reactions. People sometimes flee as if I were an X-ray machine intent on snooping around in their dark corners, like my dinner companion last week, a charming guy in advertising, who made me laugh and laugh and with whom I’d gone out on a balcony for a smoke. Upon learning my profession, he’d replied, “Never, ever, say that. Tell people instead that you’re in communications.” Then, without another word, he turned his back on me and stole away like a thief. The other thing men do is dredge up intimate details about their relationships with their sisters, mothers, or wives in an effort to extract as much information as possible from me without having to go into therapy.

As for Jean-Michel, he asked, “Are you going to analyze everything I say?”

“Only if you pay me.” I laughed.

“But could you?”

“Could I what?”

“Interpret what I say, what I do.”

“Let’s say that I’ll be making suppositions. If I’m dealing with someone extremely talkative, driven by distress, I’m not going to say to myself, this person’s mother must be dead, or this person has been raped. I would have to determine some contours. For example, instead of seeing gaiety in someone who laughs all the time, the way most people would think, I’ll see suffering, but I wouldn’t be able to describe its source. I’m not Madame Irma the Mind Reader. We don’t invent, we don’t guess, we need something to work with.”

But Jean-Michel, as I expected, turned away from me. I hadn’t expected what came next, though: he committed conversational hara-kiri with my father.

“Have you ever been tempted to sell your house?”

“Uh … no, why?”

“You might have been thinking about buying one somewhere else, I don’t know … in Saint-Tropez, for example.”

How could this apple-polishing arriviste have been so clumsy? Didn’t he understand anything about the very essence of a family house, and people’s attachment to their childhood home? Stunned by his misstep, I saw
in my father’s face how it pained him to realize that his guest was clearly incapable of appreciating the subtle grace of L’Agapanthe, or the old-fashioned splendor of the Cap d’Antibes, so lacking in the glittering tinsel of cheap seduction. Jean-Michel was, quite simply, amazed that an important man like my father would be content here, since our guest considered the easy glamour of Saint-Tropez the very acme of perfection.

My father’s character was rather well reflected in his opinion of Saint-Tropez. He was amused by the kitschy lifestyle of its summer visitors, whom he would never have thought to call vulgar because he was so impressed by their energy. Just think about it! All those young people—popular actors and singers, reality TV stars, gallery owners, artists, fashionistas and jet-setters—dancing like crazy in wee-hours clubbing, fornicating their brains out, then dashing off in boats to drink and screw some more beneath the blazing blue sky. No need to worry about sunburn, stomachaches, doubts, inhibitions. What glorious good health!

But my father was impervious to the attraction of a place where the height of snobbery was to dress like the locals and buy firewood or vin rosé where the garage mechanic does because it’s cheaper and you have to look authentic, just plain folks, in the eyes of the native
Tropezians, so you’ll fit in. Nothing annoyed him more, in fact, than people who went on endlessly about their passion for authenticity. Whatever were they trying to prove? That they were the salt of the earth? Close to the people, to nature? There was something fishy about it. About that whole business of proclaiming one’s conjugal love, fidelity, attachment to family values, whatever. Why should a man on vacation have to dress up in overalls, a straw hat, and espadrilles so he can look relaxed? Especially since these poets of authenticity were stuffed with prejudices, singularly intolerant, and often contemptuous of the common people, because how else would you qualify their condescending efforts to “talk country”: “Hey there, M’sieur Menant, still happy as a pig in a puddle?” And such people were especially dismissive of my father, whom they considered an uptight snob. Accused of being a freak, and called upon to justify himself, he was expected to explain why he’d never worn a pair of jeans in his life,
always
wore a jacket for dinner, and couldn’t imagine entering a capital city without a tie. Marie and I even used to tease him: “Aix, candy capital of the
calisson
! Papa, your tie!” Well, he found it extraordinary that those who preached authenticity to him reproached him for his own natural style!

The dinner was coming to an end. Jean-Michel and Laetitia ate their dessert with spoons without realizing that we considered this a faux pas. Then, barely had we left the table when Gérard, who had made one mistake after another throughout the meal, interrupted us to ask whether we wanted herbal tea, coffee, brandy, or a liqueur.

My father and Jean-Michel: what a difference between these two men, I thought! A stickler for formalities, my father had the humility never to question what “just isn’t done” because he knew that appearance and foundation are frequently in league with each other, and that these codes often support the most elementary rules of morality. But he also employed an exceptional freedom of thought and manner to apprehend or judge the world. Jean-Michel was just the opposite. Presenting a facade of easygoing self-possession, eager to appear young, cool, cutting-edge, he was a self-righteous conformist through and through: an altar boy in predistressed jeans. Hoping to be taken for a politically correct nouveau bourgeois instead of a nouveau riche, he was a dud not only socially but as a human being as well, because he had just wounded my father without even realizing it, so sure was he of himself, certain of knowing what’s good and what’s bad, and of his ability to do well thanks to this crude filter.

The evening ended without any surprises. My father excused himself to bid on his painting on the telephone.

“I got it!” he announced joyfully when he returned. Mother’s “little band” congratulated him on his triumph as if he had scaled Everest, while Frédéric pretended to protest: one shouldn’t pat a fellow on the back for tossing money out the window! Polyséna didn’t appreciate his humor: doesn’t he know that one needs a good eye and cultivated taste to appreciate a work of the quattrocento! But Papa, oblivious of the bickering, simply seemed thrilled with his acquisition. At moments like those, I loved him all the more.

“Shall we do the fridge tonight?” Marie whispered to me, under cover of the general chatter.

Like our midnight swim, this was one of the rituals we performed religiously at least once every summer, a way for us to revive the blessed intimacy of our childhood. We observed these rites with pleasure, just as we seized on the slightest opportunity to repeat to each other the gems once periodically produced by our kindest but least educated governess. “The sky is befuddled with stars,” she would say with a sigh. Something elegant was “of a great refinery.” Once she huffed—instead of “onus”—“The anus is on him!” and such slapstick delights formed the repertoire of our complicity, like the
languages invented by certain real twins to communicate secretly through shared references, which we recited fervently, like incantations.

As for the fridge, it wasn’t hunger that drove us, of course, but the tantalizing prospect of snooping in the pantry and kitchen deserted by the staff. What would we find there? Instructions as mysterious as hieroglyphs jotted down on scraps of paper left by the pantry phone? Or would we come face-to-face with a headachy guest searching for aspirin? On the alert, our senses heightened by misbehavior, we felt wonderfully alive. Happy and relieved at being just the two of us, sans parents, sans staff, enjoying a well-being like that achieved by taking off a girdle, which might seem mystifying to anyone unfamiliar with the way we lived in thrall to codes and constraints.

Our behavior was in fact inevitably affected by the presence of servants, which demanded a formality that pervaded our lives. How could we slump and slop at a meal served by gentlemen wearing white jackets and ties? Impossible, even if our parents were away, and Marie and I were alone in the house! Just try to act super-casual in front of someone who is addressing you in the third person: “Would Madame Laure and Mademoiselle Marie prefer to dine in the loggia or out by the water lily
pond?” Such an idea would never even have occurred to us, in part because the disapproving staff, silent witness to our transgressions, might have subtly betrayed us to our parents, but chiefly because it was more difficult for the servants to perform their duties “informally” instead of waiting on us at the table.

Which ruled out, for example, the incongruous idea of a picnic on the beach. “At what time?” would have been their first concern, in complete contradiction with the very principle of an impromptu supper. And never mind trying to fob them off with the likes of, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything,” because they would have felt obliged to leave the picnic spot spick-and-span and wash our dirty dishes before going to bed. Not to mention that having to lug down to the beach all the items indispensable in their eyes to a proper meal—the silver salt cellars, water tumblers, wine and champagne glasses, finger bowls, and other impedimenta—would have taken them forever and proved much more exhausting than serving us at the table, even from heavy platters while bundled up in the most uncomfortable outfits in the world. Besides which, the caretaker would have had to wait until it was all over before turning on the outside alarm.

So Marie and I had taken to giving the staff the evening off on those occasions, pretending that we were
dining out at a restaurant or in the home of some friends. We’d hide somewhere in the house until everyone went off duty, and as soon as they sat down to supper in their dining room, we’d sneak off somewhere to quietly eat the sandwiches or pizza we’d discreetly bought in town (since we couldn’t raid the kitchen), taking care afterward to dispose secretly of the wrappers that might have betrayed us the next day.

We censored our conversation as well, hesitating, for example, to discuss homosexuality in front of a butler with a preference for men, and avoiding any talk of money save through allusions, so as not to shock or wound employees whose income was in no way comparable to ours. When describing a millionaire, we’d simply say, “He has a lot of money,” and leave it at that. Whenever possible we minimized the attributes of wealth, so if someone said, “He had a lovely house” or “It’s a handsome picture,” you could be sure the item in question was a castle, a palace, or a priceless masterpiece.

In the same way, we found it unimaginable, living as we did under the constant observation of our staff, to squabble
en famille
, gobble our food, or get drunk. Asking for a second go-round of the cheese platter or another drop of wine was actually so awkward that we only rarely indulged such whims—even if it meant waiting,
when the wine was exceptional, for the servants to head back to the kitchen so we could jump up and quickly serve ourselves on the sly from the bottle sitting on the dining room sideboard.