Gorgeous East Read online

  A long silence followed this ungenerous threat. But Phillipe could see her point: Suicide was still a crime in France; anyone who attempted it might be legally incarcerated, either in a mental hospital or a jail. Really, he ought to call the police. The rain had picked up in the last hour and the dull sound of it drumming against the diamond-paned windows echoed in the little parlor.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Phillipe said at last, keeping his voice calm, affable. “But my family name is de Noyer”—literally of drown—“don’t you think that’s an odd coincidence?”

  “No.”

  Phillipe tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. He had dealt with many recruits like this—sullen, aimless young men who had joined the Legion as the result of a drinking binge or because they’d run out of money to buy hash or cocaine, or because they’d never heard of any world where promises were kept; each bunch worse than the last as the years went by. They were cynical beyond all reason to be so, had no respect for tradition, no ambition, no faith, no real desire for anything except reckless sensation. No honor. His own adjutant Caporal-chef Pinard had been one of these; now he was a Legionnaire. But there existed an antidote to pointless nihilism, as simple as it was unexpected: high standards and extremely harsh discipline, impartially applied.

  “You know I could have killed myself pulling your ass out of the drink?” He sat forward suddenly, an edge in his voice. “As it is, I lost my new boots and cut my cheek”—he touched the swollen place beneath his eye—“not to mention the price of that steak. Why did you do such a stupid thing?”

  “That’s my affair!” Louise spit out. “Fiche-moi la paix!”

  At this, Phillipe reached over and without warning slapped her hard across the mouth. She gasped and fell against the wingbacked chair.

  “Canaille!” she cried, outraged. “Espèce de merde!” Tears began rolling down her cheeks. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands and began to sob. Phillipe watched impassively for a while. Then, he got up and wet his handkerchief in the water jug and handed it to her. She pressed the cool fabric against her eyes, against her cheeks, and her tears gradually subsided.

  “I was in a new club last night, in Paris,” she said, still gasping a little. “We waited a long time to get in, we were all pretty high. Ecstasy, some cocaine. I was there with my lover and his girlfriend—mine too, I guess, since we were both sleeping with the cheap little whore—then more of my friends came and . . .”

  “Go on,” Phillipe said gently.

  “Suddenly everything and everyone seemed horrible. Just horrible. I can’t explain it . . .”

  “An attack of misanthropy,” Phillipe suggested. “Depression. Disgust with life, with all the sordidness. Or perhaps just the drugs.”

  “I don’t know. But I fought with everyone, viciously. I fought with my lover; I slapped Chantal and she pulled my hair and I slapped her again very hard and she cried, then I couldn’t take it anymore, I just turned around and walked out. I left my purse on the bar, with everything, my papers, my keys, my coke, my money. I realized this outside when I got into a taxi—but I couldn’t go back. Mais jamais! So I told myself if I could get all the way to the coast like just that, with nothing, then I’d drown myself in the sea, and then the horribleness would be completely finished. I took the métro to the gare d’Austerlitz without a ticket and I got on the TGV without a ticket and the conductor just walked by me. It was like I was invisible, already dead. I rode all the way up to Rennes on the train, then I got on a tour bus with some Americans and no one asked me anything. No one said a word. So I reached Mont-Saint-Michel and well”—she paused—“it seemed stupid not to go through with it . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Then I found you”—Phillipe couldn’t keep a proprietary note out of his voice—“and I stopped you. Thank God.”

  “Alors, c’est ça!” Louise jerked her head up, sharply angry again. “You saved my life and that means I’m yours. Et maintenant tu veux sans doute me baiser—now you want to fuck me! Well, stand in line, asshole. They all want to fuck me, every man I ever meet and half the women! It’s the afterwards they don’t know what to do with.”

  “The thought of making love to you has occurred to me,” Phillipe admitted, amused. “For obvious reasons. Very well, I’ll say this—only if you want to. And I can assure you that I’ll know what to do afterwards.”

  The possibility of sex suddenly hung in the air between them. A ludicrous impulse—and yet somehow the perfect answer to the watery death that had nearly engulfed them both.

  Louise studied him frankly, heat rising in her indigo eyes.

  “You’re not too bad-looking for an old bastard,” she said softly.

  “Merci, ma petite,” Phillipe said, and he smiled.

  3.

  They went up the narrow stairs to Phillipe’s room on the top floor. It was very small, taken up almost entirely by a double bed, a small sink, and a large, old-fashioned armoire. Louise stepped into the armoire and closed the door, a whimsical gesture—though for an alarming second, Phillipe thought she might be busy hanging herself in there—then the the door creaked open and she emerged completely naked, having peeled out of his tailored shirt and the concierge’s son’s Asterix pajamas, and her own midnight blue underwear. She paused there so he could admire her body, her arms resting casually on the clothes bar, her profile reflected in the long, tarnished mirror on the inside of the door.

  “You reeled me in from the bottom of the sea,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Like a dead fish. There’s nothing left of me now. T’as raison—you’re right—I’m entirely yours. Anything you want . . .” And she lowered her eyes, a charming and unexpected flush reddening her pale cheeks.

  Such an offer does not come twice in a lifetime. There were all sorts of reasons—psychological, moral, religious—not to have sex with a young woman who had just attempted suicide, but just then none of them mattered to Phillipe and he reached out for her and drew her down on the bed. There was no artifice to what then transpired between them. What’s the point of subterfuge if you’ve been swept together to the gates of death and back again?

  Outside the round window over the sink, seabirds wheeled, even at this late hour. Slate gray clouds slid across the sky. Mont-Saint-Michel loomed over the tidal flats and salt meadows, an ambivalent deity. The stone corridors of the ancient abbey stood empty now, utterly silent; they hadn’t rung with the footsteps of the Benedectine monks who built the place in more than two hundred years. Phillipe and Louise lay side by side atop the sheets in the chill, small hours, a false light glimmering over the sea, toward England, and she sought to explain herself to him, to describe more accurately the frigid sense of absence she’d felt in Paris the night before.

  “It seemed there was nothing left in my life but an icy loneliness,” she said. “My head filled with emptiness, my heart with sorrow.”

  This statement sent an odd little frisson dancing up Phillipe’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold in the chilly room. He leaned down and pulled the bedspread over their bare flesh. Satie had written almost the same phrase in his diary a hundred years ago after being dropped by the only woman he ever loved, the tempestuous painter Suzanne Valadon.

  “You know Satie!” Phillipe said. “Those are his words.”

  “Satie?” Louise said, confused. “You mean the composer—Erik Satie? I believe he lived in Arceuil. Isn’t there a statue of him near the Hôtel de Ville?”

  “So you don’t know this phrase?”

  “Not as a phrase,” she said. “I know it because it’s written here.” She touched her breast. “But I am ashamed to admit I don’t know French culture, my own culture, as well as I should. My father sent me to an international boarding school in Switzerland and then university in the U.S.A. He wanted to get me as far away from France as possible.”

  “The U.S.A.!” Phillipe said, aghast. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  Louise sighed. “He was�
�—she struggled with the words—“an unusual man, a difficult man. A celebrity. He did not marry my mother, so for a long time, my existence was kept secret. . . .”

  “But who was this person? François Mitterrand?”

  Louise told him and Phillipe couldn’t help being impressed: Everyone in France knew her father, Hector Vilhardouin—the famous singer, the bad boy of the chanson français, and one of its greatest practitioners. Hector was an icon—like Aznavour or Piaf or Jacques Brel—but more combative than these, loved and reviled until his death from a heroin overdose at age fifty-eight. During the sixties he scandalized France by reinventing himself, trading in his Gauloises Bleus cigarette, Sinatra-style Borsalino hat, and Bob le Flambeur trenchcoat for Nehru jacket, love beads, and marijuana. He then became a spokesman for a variety of radical causes, crossed the line to sing jazz and rock, hobnobbed with Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, Hendrix and Miles. It was a brilliant defection, shocking at first, that made him even more famous in the end. After his death from the overdose in the bed of one of his mistresses—the gory details covered for weeks in literally every organ of the French media—it came out that he’d fathered several illegitimate children with a variety of women kept quietly in separate establishments in Paris, like some kind of Oriental potentate or Picasso. His only legitimate daughter, Alphonsine Vilhardouin, a film actress well known in France—she’d been twice nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes—was just starting to get work in Hollywood.

  “Well, well!” Phillipe said. “Hector Vilhardouin! Is it true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.” Louise sniffed. “You can see this has made things difficult for me.”

  “Of course.” Phillipe stroked her hair.

  “They brought me a paper to sign when he died,” Louise continued. “I was to renounce the name of Vilhardouin for a certain sum of money. I refused. I threw that paper back in their face.”

  “Good for you.” Phillipe ran his hands over her breasts, along the curve of her hip. He was getting hard again.

  “Easy to say, but now there is no money at all, and I must work. But I can’t find anything I really like to do. I’ve been fired from four—no, five—jobs in the last two years. I’m not stupid, you know, I’m really quite intelligent.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “My problem is I don’t care about working. What’s the point of working just to get money? You work, you come home, you eat, shit, sleep, get up again to go to work and come home again and so on and so on and maybe you go to clubs on the weekend, and the cinema every now and then and maybe the beach in August and the years pass like that and then—voilà—you’re dead.”

  “That sounds about right.” Phillipe suppressed a smile. “You’ve definitely hit it on the head.”

  “But what I really want to do is learn, understand. Take Satie—tell me, why do I not know his music? Because there hasn’t been enough time for me to read all the books I want to read, to listen to all the music. To live.”

  Phillipe pulled her close and they made love again. Then, it became too late for sleep, or too early, and they put on their clothes—Louise wrapped herself in the American tourist’s enormous Chicago Bulls sweatshirt—and they went out arm in arm along the ancient battlements of the Mont. The sun rose to the east, over France, sparkling yellow off the receding tides. Phillipe spoke to her in a low voice, utterly assured, his mouth close to her ear, his hand on the small of her back. He told her what would happen next, tomorrow, in five years, in ten, and she listened, twitching faintly from time to time, like a moth stuck to a screen door.

  First, they would get married. He would install her in his château, which was not far from Honfleur up the coast. She would have all the time she needed to read, to listen, to learn, to garden, to raise dogs, to do whatever the hell she wanted to do. They might even have children, but at her age, she would have years to decide about that. He also had an address in Paris, a house, actually, near the Sixteenth Arrondissement; an apartment in the south, in Béziers, which was not as fashionable as Nice or Cap d’Antibes, but still a fine little town, and the weather was very nice and you wouldn’t believe it, they had bullfights and a fiesta there twice a year, just like in Madrid. . . .

  Louise listened, astonished. After he stopped talking, she stared at him, wild-eyed, the fresh morning light in her face.

  “Mais, t’es fou!” she cried, nearly shouting.

  “Not at all,” Phillipe said, a faint smile on his lips. “Or at least not at the moment. I’m afraid some of my ancestors were definitely crazy. I might as well let you know that now—it’s a calculated risk. Tends to skip a generation or two, but when it comes, it hits hard and usually later in life. So there’s always the chance I’ll go crazy someday. But at this moment, I’m completely sane.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes wide and sea blue in this fresh light. Suddenly, she didn’t feel tired at all.

  “You really have a château?”

  “Modest in size, but yes. The de Noyers have been part of the landscape around here for at least seven hundred years. There’s the ruins of a twelfth-century keep on the grounds. I have my car in the car park, I can take you right now if you like. It’s not so far.”

  She threw up her hands, exasperated. “This is ridiculous!”

  “Of course.” Phillipe smiled. “But not more ridiculous than suicide.”

  “I can’t marry you! Absolutely not!”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, your age.”

  “I’m forty-four—how old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  And it wasn’t, in France. For the French, such an age discrepancy was entirely acceptable. But Louise, who had perhaps spent too many years in the United States, wouldn’t answer him.

  They walked along now in silence, the tide sparkling below, the seabirds fighting one another for minnows in the surf, and stopped again at a small guard tower. They had reached the end of the public ramparts, as far as they could go without mounting to the walls of the abbey itself, and the way was blocked from here. They stood for a long time staring out over the sea in silence, but were really looking out with breathless trepidation over the uncertain vistas of a shared life.

  “I know nothing about you,” Louise said, her voice hoarse. “You’ve let me talk and talk and you’ve said practically nothing—” She stopped herself. “You see? It’s impossible.”

  “What do you want to know that you didn’t find out in bed last night?” He grinned. “Just marry me and find out the rest later.”

  “So, would I have a title?” she said, trying to sound cynical. “Madame la Duchesse, perhaps?”

  “There was a title,” Phillipe admitted. “Vicomte de la Tour Grise. But the tower is long gone and the title no longer exists, as far as I’m concerned. We haven’t used it since the Revolution.”

  “Merde, un aristo!” Louise very nearly spit.

  “I’m a citizen of the Republic, just like you,” Phillipe replied calmly. “I work, I have a job. I’m in the army. Doesn’t pay enough to live decently; it’s more of a family tradition with us. A vocation. One of my ancestors fought with Turenne at Sinzheim, another with Bonaparte at the Nile. And so on.”

  “Militariste!” Louise jabbed a finger in his direction, belligerence rising in her voice. “Fascist! You’d probably vote for Le Pen! Eh bien, moi, I’m a creature of the Far Left. You might as well say I’m an anarchist, antiglobal, antiwar. So you see, it would never work out with us. I must have someone of my own politics.” She was looking for anything, desperate for any reason to turn and walk away.

  “Good.” Phillipe nodded, refusing to be discouraged. “Because I usually vote Left—Socialist Party. Depending on the candidate, of course—the important thing is character. But . . .” He hesitated. “. . . You should hear the whole story, everything. I went to Saint-Cyr, you see. The top five officer candidates out of every class have the honor of applying for a c
ommission in the Foreign Legion—though very few are accepted, since first you must endure the same harsh basic training as the men who will be under your command. But I applied and so—”

  “Non!” Louise gasped, interrupting. “Putain! You’re not with the Foreign Legion!”

  “I am.”

  “They’re the worst! A bunch of brutes! Criminals! I’ve seen them beating each other in the bars in Pigalle in their ridiculous white hats! Drunk and bloody, just beating people up with their fists! Just for the fun of it!”

  “There are no saints in the Legion,” Phillipe admitted somberly. “Only desperate men from every nation, men with no place else to go, men who need a second chance.”

  “You mean mercenaries, hired assassins . . .”

  “I mean foreigners who have volunteered to serve France to the last drop of their blood. It’s an ancient tradition. Louis Philippe gave the Legion its first standard, which has since been carried to every corner of the earth.”

  “Oh, very nice!” Louise said, disgusted. “Spoken like a true imperialist!”

  “If it makes you feel better, think of me as a musician,” Phillipe offered brightly. “I play the piano, like your father. I’m not famous, of course, but I am second in command of la Musique Principale. We’re very well known, one of the best military marching bands in the world. And there’s le Chorale du Légion, which is my direct responsibility. Singing is one of the great traditions with us. Last year, in the competition at Moscow, we took the silver medal. If we only had a decent top tenor. But good tenors are hard to find—”

  “Enough!” Louise cried suddenly, clutching her head. “Stop!”

  Phillipe stopped himself, abashed. He had already said far too much. The thing that separated Satie from every other composer of his era—from Debussy and Ravel and Saint-Saëns—was his exquisite silences; the long, melancholy pauses between notes. Now, Phillipe played out one of Satie’s somber sarabandes—that courtly, complicated little dance—in his head, leaving plenty of space for the reverberating silences, and when he had finished, he took Louise by the arm again and they went back to the hotel, to the dining room, just open for breakfast.