The Suitors (28 page)

“We’ll talk later?” asked Marie before she left for the airport.

“Of course, but will you be all right?”

“Yes, don’t worry. You know, what you said is true: I had a close call with Béno, he’s the sort to be avoided at all costs, even if it’s rather flattering to have slept with him. But I’ve thought things over and what really puzzles me is what we can possibly think we’re doing with our flop of a plan to find a husband. Anyway, in that department I feel I’ve done my bit. Share and share alike! So it’s your turn next weekend, don’t you agree?”

On Fridays the house hummed with a kind of industrious tension like the buzzing of a beehive. It was flower day. And if our head butler hadn’t been chafing in a rest home, he would have been as busy as a bee. Roberto, a florist by training, customarily returned from the market with a van full of flowers of different scents and sizes intended for the various rooms in the house. He usually selected dahlias, thistles, lavender, cosmos, or amaranths for the loggia; branches of mulberry, wild angelica, or hawthorn for the entrance hall; and a selection of sweet peas and heirloom roses mixed with lady’s mantle, snowball bush, or astrantia for the table centerpieces. As for the room bouquets, they tended to include hydrangeas, dahlias, poppies, or phalaenopsis orchids. After unloading the van, Roberto would
swiftly closet himself in a room equipped with copper sinks, next to the pantry, where he spent a good part of the morning creating bouquets he then placed throughout the house.

Fridays were also filled with the comings and goings of departing guests and new arrivals, so that day saw the Démazures leave for Italy as the Giraults arrived for a stay at L’Agapanthe, as they always did toward the end of July. Well-bred without being pedants or socialites, the Giraults were considered dream guests by their friends, who invited them for visits the length and breadth of France all summer long. Jean-Claude was known as a man of “exquisite” taste—a vague but pertinent term for his many qualities of refinement. To begin with, he was soigné, elegant in the English style but without ostentation, a personable man who always made a good impression. Judiciously modest and discreet with regard to his success in the field of furnishing fabrics, he was a good sport and a man of fair play in hunting, tennis, golf, and cards who appealed to men as well as to women, whom he charmed with seductive but lighthearted compliments. Astrid, on the other hand, was usually described as “a good sort,” for she was a touch provincial and completely maladroit,
quite capable of saying to me, for example, “You see, Laure, you and me, we’re alike: frumpy in our youth, we get better as we get older.”

But she liked to be of service, was very practical, knew the addresses of such places as a good lampshade shop, and had pull at the most sought after schools in Paris. None of us would ever have held her gaffes against her, since it warmed our hearts to forgive her so benevolently.

Hearing the enthusiastic level of decibels resounding from the loggia as we rang the front doorbell at L’Agapanthe, Marie and I knew right away that the Giraults had arrived. Every year, the opening of their present was a welcome ritual: “Is it what I hope, what I think it is?” my father would cry, gazing at a wicker tray wrapped in opaque cellophane, which he would feverishly tear open to make sure that he really would find candied fruit. Then, after asking a butler to bring him a dessert knife and fork, he would make their silver gilt gleam against the flesh of the fruit as he sliced it in delight, while comparing
its colors to the ochers of the Nabis and the vermilions of still lifes painted by Chardin or Zurbarán.

“Right, shall we go on in?” I asked Marie, in a voice tinged with stage fright, like an acrobat about to go before an audience.

It was clear that this weekend would be decisive for our future and that it was my turn to play the lead part. I owed it to Marie, who hadn’t completely recovered from her heartrending disappointment of the previous week. And I’d have only myself to blame if I got nowhere, because I was the one who’d chosen our last guests—well, Nicolas Courtry, in any case, who’d been my first love. I still spoke to him regularly on the phone, even though I hadn’t seen him since three years earlier, when he’d moved to New York. And when I asked him for help, he had suggested Alvin Fishbein, a professional acquaintance.

“But I’m not sure if he’s your type.”

“Doesn’t matter!”

“Even if I don’t know him well enough to guarantee that he likes women?”

“Why do you say that?”

“His plane … is pink.”

“Aha! That is interesting!”

“Listen, you want a rich guy, single, and available for the last weekend of July, you can’t be picky, come on!
Anyway, the pink plane might well be explained by the fact that he’s a toy manufacturer …”

“You’re right, he’ll be just perfect,” I’d said that day.

For I’d expected that the sale of L’Aganpanthe would no longer be a problem by the time I met Alvin, about whom I’d completely forgotten in the meantime.

“Well, don’t get your knickers in a twist!” said Marie, slipping her arm through mine as she warbled “Frédéric’s song,” which we hummed together as we headed for the loggia.

Flanked by Gay, Frédéric, Odon, Laszlo, and the Giraults, my parents formed a picture that I recognized
as soon as I entered the room, because it hung permanently in the museum of my memory, with landscapes and scenes of domestic life at L’Agapanthe.

It was a group portrait.

And yet, like all the tableaux in that imaginary gallery, the portrait was composed by the superposition of my memories, in this case those of my parents and their guests, seated year after year in the same room, on the same sofas, around the same tea service. Until that moment, I had thought that L’Agapanthe was the frame and sometimes the subject of these images, but I suddenly understood that the house was closer to a material base (like a painting under glass) on which the images were made and without which they would not exist. Would they vanish with the sale of L’Agapanthe? I wondered, and I felt a cold wave of anguish, because I could not imagine myself without such moments, such touchstones, such landmarks, for they gave my life a permanence and continuity on which my equilibrium depended. I was thus particularly attached to the immutable character of the house and quite attentive to every detail susceptible to change.

Trop bien élevé
[Too well brought up], 2007, by Jean-Denis Bredin
^*

… Bourgeoisie, wretched bourgeoisie, dear bourgeoisie! On my mother’s side, good taste reigned supreme. One loved fine furniture, rare books, great writers, music, pretty women: not from pleasure, but to satisfy the requirement for refinement. Virtue, intelligence, and social success were prized, of course, but these were secondary values when compared to good manners. Only distinguished people with “elegant” occupations mattered. Neither things nor animals escaped this rigorous selection. As a child, I didn’t dare bring home my little comrades for fear they would be judged inferior. Money revealed many things: this family claimed to use it with distinction and to good ends, while others, with stinginess or ostentation, put their money to mediocre use. And it was in order to behave
“with distinction” under all circumstances that the adults in my mother’s family always smiled and, even at funerals, concealed the slightest sign of emotion. It was vulgar to cry, plebeian to complain, banal to laugh out loud. And so I have kept the memory of impassive faces, barely touched by chilly smiles, that all look alike. Few gestures. An almost uniform tone of voice. Neither imagination nor disorder ever disturbed that harmony. Everything was sacrificed to appearances. I knew this. And suffered, envisioning what might happen when they closed the doors of their bedrooms, removed their masks and, in the darkness, took off their clothes
.