THE SUMMER BEFORE I WENT UP to Oxford my mother rented Francette’s vertical shed to the chancellor of the exchequer. The shed was even more primitive than our house, and a great deal smaller, with a grand total of three rooms and a bathroom the size of a coffin. Why Roy Jenkins would wish to spend his vacation there—along with his wife and two teenage children—was something of a mystery. Admittedly Roy was an old friend and, as home secretary, had been Freddie’s ally in the campaign for homosexual law reform and the repeal of the death penalty, but he was also famously partial to the finer things in life, like very good claret, very grand houses, and very pretty duchesses. Francette’s shed seemed unlikely to offer him any of these pleasures.
I suppose it never occurred to my mother, with her wonderful American enthusiasm, her uncontrollable appetite for mixing people up, her scorn for convention, and her New England disapproval of luxe et volupté, that the shed and Roy might not be an ideal coupling. She just thought it would be fun to have her friends next door. Then again, maybe they were short of money. But how could a man who was in charge of the entire British economy be quite so hard up? It wasn’t terribly reassuring. But whatever the origin of this ill-fated plan, the chancellor did not last long at La Migoua. About two days after they arrived, an urgent message from the prime minister’s office summoned him back to London. Or that’s what he said. I’ve always suspected it might have been an urgent invitation from Marietta Tree in Tuscany or the duchesse de Douceur in Deauville that snatched him so cruelly from his dear friends and the cozy bosom of his family. At any rate he took off—with a far-from-enigmatic smile on his face—in a slick, black chauffeur-driven car early one morning, leaving behind his wife, Jennifer (who was immune to the siren song of dukes and Haut-Brion), and their children, Cynthia and Edward.
Shortly after the chancellor’s departure I, too, received an urgent invitation. Actually, it wasn’t especially urgent and had come about through one of Freddie’s innumerable old girlfriends. During the war he had taken up with a particularly attractive American correspondent named Polly Peabody. (Why had the war been quite so much fun for the lucky few? I would often hear Englishmen of that generation say, with admiration and just a twinge of envy, “George had an incredibly good war.” Freddie even said it of himself.) It turned out that Polly now had a daughter my age who also happened to be going up to Oxford that fall. Of course we had to meet. Serena was even prettier than her mother, tall and slim, with robin’s egg blue eyes, ludicrously long legs, and satiny blond hair. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was also clever, funny, and extraordinarily sweet. What could she do? I knew it wasn’t her fault, and flattered myself that with my natural sensitivity and deep psychological insight I was able to see through the exquisite wrapping paper into … her equally delectable interior. We became close friends immediately. Which is how I found myself, in early August, staggering down a swaying gangplank into the blazing noonday sun of Ibiza’s harbor.
Life at Polly’s finca was altogether different from the scene at La Migoua. From the moment she woke in the morning—around ten, when the maid brought her breakfast in bed—to the moment she laid her weary but still amazingly lovely head on her downy Frette pillow at night, Polly devoted all her strength and energy—often exhausting herself—to the pursuit of pleasure. Her project was neither selfish nor solitary, so you could say she lived for others, since everyone around her was invited to join in the task she had set herself. Like Prince Azamat, she made it all seem effortless, as if her only desire in life was to make sure that her guests enjoyed themselves just as much as she always did. At the beginning of each day Serena and I would sit out on the terrace, in the shade of the grape arbor, drinking our café con leche and eating churros—deep-fried sausage-shaped pieces of dough oozing grease and sugar—with nothing more demanding to do than discuss which sublime beach we might want to visit later on. A picnic lunch would be prepared by the cook, and around noon the four of us would set off: Serena, her boyfriend, a good-looking young Englishman named Ed, myself, and Sean, the other houseguest, whose complexion, I noted with evil satisfaction, was possibly even worse than my own. Some beaches were so remote that they could be reached only after abandoning the car and following a narrow, scraggly goat track through the scrub—the boys lugging the picnic baskets, Serena and I mincing on ahead—until we finally arrived at a secret deserted crescent of sand. It was a long way from Monsieur Maurice and Bikini Beach. Tired but happy, we would return home in the late afternoon for a well-deserved siesta in our cool, darkened rooms and then awake, fully restored, in time to get dressed up for the long night ahead. It was a routine I adapted to with terrifying ease.
The only thing Serena and I ever competed over was the length of our skirts and the size of our bikinis. And since this was the summer of 1969, the only pressing question was how high and low did we dare go? On one of my marathon walks around Paris I had discovered a boutique on the rue du Cherche-Midi that specialized in the tiniest bikinis known to man. Standing there on the sidewalk, I dared myself to actually open the door, walk into the shop, brave the predatory witch behind the counter, and emerge with one of these creations wrapped in tissue paper inside an appropriately minuscule bag. If I could just do that I knew that my life that summer would be transformed. So I did. And it was. No matter that I had spent a good portion of the rent I owed Monsieur Bretiane on a “garment” that was considerably smaller than the handkerchief he used for blowing his nose and for smearing around soup stains—after he’d spat into it—on his tie. It just had to be done. As soon as I arrived in Ibiza it immediately became clear what a wise investment this had been.
As I was determined to liberate Mademoiselle Barbie once and for all, and to relegate the tiresome Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss to the library where she belonged, the bikini acquired a talismanic importance way beyond anything it deserved. It was after all just a few scraps of gauzy fabric, tied at the sides and back with bits of string, but for me it was pure magic. Whenever I put it on men couldn’t take their eyes off me. Or so I imagined. And since wearing it was the equivalent of going naked, it was probably true. Their gaze may have been entirely confined to my body—I don’t recall any of them bothering to linger too long above the neck—but what did that matter? It had delivered on its side of the bargain. Even Serena, who had her own magical bikini—tiny white triangles joined together by three golden hoops—was impressed enough to ask where it came from. I was thrilled to be able to reply with a bored shrug, “Oh, it’s just something I found in a little shop on the Left Bank.”
Never before had I uttered quite such a dazzlingly sophisticated sentence. Serena barely nodded and went on basting her long bronzed legs with almond oil.
EVERYBODY ELSE WAS still getting dressed for dinner when I walked out onto the terrace just as the sun was setting. The heat from the smooth flagstones seeped through the thin leather soles of my sandals, and the scent of the chamomile plants that somehow survived in the arid chinks of the terrace wall hung in the warm evening air. I stood there wallowing in the peculiar sensation of having absolutely nothing to do—no picking basil or looking after my baby brother or decapitating sardines or setting the table or washing pots or telling Sorgue to fuck off—when I heard Polly’s little geisha footsteps tip-tapping across the living room tiles and turned around to see her standing in the doorway. With her absurdly tiny waist, flouncy skirt, and off-the-shoulder white blouse, she looked exactly like the ballerina that twirled around on top of the musical jewelry box my father had given me for Christmas when I was six.
“Darling, where are those boys, and why on earth haven’t they brought you a drink yet?”
Polly was convinced that all men had been put on this earth to do things for her. It was a concept I had slowly been groping toward myself, but I had never actually met a true believer before. She flirted, she flattered, she charmed, and men responded by making her life even more agreeable than it already was. Maybe she was onto something. Maybe if you didn’t shout at them, tell them what fools they were, and make it clear that anything they could do you could do better, they might be more likely to concentrate on giving you a good time. A novel notion, and one that I was determined to try out just as soon as I could find a man to experiment on. But the instant this heretical thought floated into my head, I heard my mother’s voice snorting in my ear, “Sure, be my guest, go ahead and let me know where it gets you.”
“You just watch me,” I hissed back.
Evenings chez Polly started out with cocktails and tapas on the terrace, followed by several more drinks, and then it was time for the boys to drive us—yet another novel notion, make men do the driving!—to some quaint, seaside restaurant where a toothless old fisherman’s wife made the “best camarones a la plancha in the whole of Ibiza.” Polly’s world was populated with wonderful little men and women whose lot in life was to supply her with goods and services for a fraction of what they should have cost. The “little” lady around the corner who would run up curtains/transform an old Dior dress/copy a new one, all for a pittance, or the “little” man who would fix the lawn mower/dishwasher/car, for practically nothing: an army of happy, busy midgets whistling while they worked. Politics was not necessarily a subject you wanted to explore with my hostess. Franco—who really was little—had saved Spain from the Communists and was, thank God, still firmly entrenched in power in 1969, and the Guardia Civil, his enforcers, were those “handsome gentlemen with patent-leather typewriters on their heads.” She was actually quite right: Their hats did look like shiny black typewriters, and some of them were kind of cute, in a thuggish sort of way. Polly’s views of El Jefe and his fascist regime may have seemed a bit outlandish to a well-brought-up, radical-chic girl like myself—how could I ever forget that peasant costume and the “Abajo Franco” sign?—but I knew that only boring prigs allowed things like that to interfere with friendship. So I never did.
After we had stuffed ourselves with the charred tentacles of an extended octopus family, an entire nursery of baby squid, the gigantic grilled camarones, and way too many bottles of vino tinto (known as vino tonto because tonto was what it surely made you), we all knew that there was no choice about what had to happen next: dancing. Dancing at a terrifyingly noisy discothèque with seizure-inducing strobe lights. That was what we needed. My recollections of the rest of the evening—and all the other evenings, because they tended to follow a similar pattern—are a bit hazy after forty years, but I do remember what happened when we staggered back to the house a few hours before dawn. Polly went to bed and the four of us settled down to play strip poker.
Cards—along with jigsaw puzzles, backgammon, charades, dominoes, and every “bored” game ever invented, as well as all sports, from hopscotch to hockey—have always been a mystery to me. Not unlike Freddie’s attitude to fidelity, I’ve just never been able to grasp what the point is. The consequence was that I had absolutely no idea how to play anything, least of all poker, which I’d never even encountered before. Patiently, through a miasma of vino tonto, with quite a bit of repetition, rambling segues, and several conflicting interpretations, the rules were explained to me and I nodded obediently, pretending to understand. Was I ready to start playing now? “Oh yes.” I smiled, horrified. It soon became clear that Serena had no more idea of what was going on than I did, because within half an hour we had both lost most of our clothes, and shortly after that our little group had been transformed into some tacky, twentieth-century version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. How could this have happened? Were Sean and Ed secretly professional poker players? Could they have fiddled about with the cards? Unable to figure it out, I sat there in silence, mesmerized by the astonishing shape and size of Serena’s breasts—softly rounded, gravity-defying torpedoes that projected straight out from her slim torso—and by her total insouciance at being stark naked. Contemplating my own poached eggs along with my pathetic embarrassment, I had an epiphany. If I didn’t get on with doing that thing that people do, I would be a sad, lost soul forever more. And more specifically—whether I liked it or not—the job had to be done before I went up to Oxford. There was only a month left.
THE DAY AFTER I arrived back from Ibiza, my mother announced that we were going on our annual pilgrimage to Saint-Tropez. Which sounds a great deal more glamorous than it was. This outing had very little to do with lounging about at Senequier sipping pastis in the company of Bardot’s discarded lovers, or shopping for see-through crocheted mini-dresses, or even revisiting the scene of Freddie’s wartime exploits, when he had liberated the tiny fishing village: It was all about having lunch with their friends, the Kaldors, who lived in La Garde-Freinet about twenty miles from the coast. Born in Budapest, Nicky Kaldor was a brilliant Cambridge economist who was now one of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s advisers on how best to revive the wheezing British economy. Who knows what fantastical schemes he came up with, but Freddie had once told me that Nicky was the genius behind the “famous cobweb theory” of economics—he had even made a futile attempt to explain it to me—so whenever I saw the Kaldors, all I could think of was spiders.
The journey to La Garde-Freinet was the usual farce of upside-down maps and swearing, but we finally arrived at their rather grim house, on a snaky backstreet of the medieval village, just in time for lunch. There was nothing remotely spidery about our host, who was bald as a melon, fatter than the Michelin man, and sweeter than a baby. My mother and Nicky had met through Robert Neild (her boyfriend before she ran off with Freddie the menace), and they adored each other. (I’m not at all sure Mrs. Kaldor shared her husband’s enthusiasm.) Inside their hot dark kitchen, set out in the middle of the dining table, was a large, brown platter of braised meat encased in a jiggling mountain of urine-colored jelly. Which is all I remember about our meal apart from the startling sight of Professor Kaldor falling asleep and snoring, sitting upright in his chair, fork halfway to his mouth, just as he was about to start on his second helping of this disgusting dish. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention.
Refreshed by his little nap, Nicky woke up about half an hour later, finished off the remains of his congealed lunch, and, smiling brightly, said, “Now, who wants to come with me in the boat to Saint-Tropez?”
I thought he’d never ask. An alarming drive on a narrow zigzagging road down through the hills followed, with the roly-poly professor pinioned behind the wheel of their ancient Mercedes—would he have another one of his narcoleptic spells?—and the next time I dared look out the window we were in the suburbs of Saint-Raphaël. From there it took us about the same amount of time to crawl through the tourist-clogged streets until we reached the marina where the boat was docked. A quick change into our bathing suits, and we were all lined up and ready to go—Nicky in his “grape smugglers,” me in the magical bikini, Freddie in his billowing “shorts,” my mother in an innocuous black number, and Mrs. Kaldor in something she must have spotted while window-shopping in Zagreb. The boat turned out to be—appropriately enough—a luminous orange floating version of a Michelin man, with just enough space for Nicky and one other person to squeeze into the cavity, and an outboard motor the size of a hairdryer glued onto the back.
“So, I am the taxi driver. First I’ll take Gully, and then I’ll come back and fetch the rest of you.” A strategy worthy of the brain behind the famous cobweb theory. Dangerously low in the water after the chauffeur got on board, the hairdryer spluttering, we set off—waving merrily to our friends on shore—for Saint-Tropez, just visible through the shimmering afternoon haze on the other side of the bay. The boat swerved and bounced around, I held on tight, and Nicky swore loudly in Hungarian at assorted Frenchmen who—unable to understand our wildly erratic course—were in constant danger of crashing into us.
“Et voilà, on est arrivé.”
The relief of actually making it across the water must have inspired Nicky to launch into his rather shaky French as he steered the boat into the harbor and tied it up.
“Et maintenant nous allons à la plage.”
Walking along the boardwalk all I could think of, in my shameful narcissistic way, was what we must look like together. I needn’t have worried. Why would anybody even bother to glance at us, when all they would see was a mirror image of themselves? The entire place was a seething mass of overtanned girls in practically nonexistent bikinis and their fat, old, bald companions. They all seemed perfectly content in each other’s company, so I told myself, quite sharply, to snap out of it.
After about ten minutes Nicky suddenly stopped and pointed at a crudely painted sign—palm trees, parrots, turquoise water, yellow sand, and the words “Bora Bora”—nailed to the side of a wooden hut.
“That’s our place. Follow me.”
It was a replica of Bikini Beach: the same blue-and-white striped parasols, the neat rows of canvas-covered mattresses, the deck chairs, the cabanas, and the same shack selling Pschitt and slices of stale cake in cellophane wrappers. The only thing missing was Monsieur Maurice. Instead of an ancient hunchbacked queen with a yellow plastic nose guard and literary pretensions, “Bora Bora” was ruled by a sullen decidedly unbookish prince who looked like a young—very young—Alain Delon. Busy smoking and entertaining his harem of giggling girls with a filthy convoluted joke involving several sheep and a saucisson, he wasn’t about to forgo the punch line, and so he ignored us.
“Excusez-moi, monsieur.”
Nicky repeated his greeting in a slightly louder voice, and the prince swiveled around and sauntered toward us.
“Oui, monsieur?”
“Bonjour. C’est très simple.” Nicky smiled, the prince didn’t.
“Je voudrais une maîtresse. Mais seulement pour l’après-midi.”
It certainly was very simple: All poor Nicky wanted was a nice, comfy, canvas-covered mattress for the afternoon. Not a mistress. Because he clearly already had one of those. Which the baby-faced smirking Alain Delon look-alike was quick to point out.
“Il semblerait que vous avez déjà trouvé une.”
And he winked at me.
“Mais si vous en avez besoin de deux, suivez-moi.”
Nicky’s French wasn’t quite as shaky as I had thought. He had caught the drift of this exchange and started to laugh, delighted at the thought of having two mistresses and by his own sudden burst of fluency in this perplexing foreign language.
“Oui, tout à fait. J’ai besoin de deux maîtresses.”
Nicky left me lying down on top of his other mistress while he went back to the boat. My love affair with the sun started before the age of consent and has, I’m vaguely ashamed to admit, outlasted all the others. Exhausted by the boat trip, still reeling from the boeuf en gelée, and blurry from the wine at lunch, I positioned my body so that it was in the direct gaze of my lover, turned over onto my stomach, discarded my bikini top, closed my eyes, and sank into the sounds of the beach. Baby waves slurping against the sand, a child’s indignant shriek as her mother tried to put a sun hat on her head, the hoarse baritone of a man hawking roasted nuts and France Dimanche, the lazy put-put of a small airplane high above, the murmuring of two women exchanging secrets, the barely audible laughter of the prince’s harem—they all slid together as I was gently lulled toward sleep.
It sounded as if the couple beside me were making love, except every now and then they would interrupt their sighing and moaning and start singing to each other. Her voice was high and delicate, tinged with an English accent; his was smoky and deep and oh-so French. “Je t’aime, oui je t’aime, oh mon amour,” she began, which was understandable enough; however his reply, “Moi, non plus [Me neither],” was a little confusing. But then again what did I know about the sensual, enigmatic vocabulary of the French male in love? Rien du tout. Sadly.
This was followed by lots more moaning as he told her, “Je vais et je viens entre tes reins,” which sounded sexy except that I happened to know that reins were kidneys, which are not, in England at least, the most obviously alluring part of a woman’s body. Must be another French thing. Finally I gave up and stopped listening to the words and just lay there in the sun, mesmerized by the pure unadulterated pornography of this intoxicating song. As it turned out, “Je t’aime, moi non plus” was the song of the summer of 1969, and everywhere I went I was tortured by the sound of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin breathlessly coming and going between each other’s kidneys, reminding me that I had only three weeks left.
IN ADDITION TO THE ÉMIGRÉS from England and America, my mother and Freddie did actually have some French friends, mostly neighbors and people they had met through Francette. The closest, at least in terms of geography, were the Tricons, who lived two houses down, at the other end of the tiny hamlet of La Migoua. But however often we saw them—which would be several times a day—and however friendly we all were—which would be very—the relationship necessarily always retained its quite proper element of French formality. It must have taken at least ten years to progress beyond Monsieur and Madame to Marcel and Jeannine, and in all the forty years we knew them, we would never have dreamed of switching from vous to tu.
Conversation revolved in cozy, concentric circles around the business of La Migoua (septic tanks, the scourge of hornets, the lack of rain), sometimes stretching as far as Le Beausset (the iniquities of the mayor, a well-known espèce de collaborateur during the war, the new fountain in the place, the opening of an American-style supermarché), and always included a quick résumé of important events that had happened during the past year (Georges was doing his military service, Madame Tricon’s mother had died, Monsieur Tricon had expanded his business into canned snails). Jeannine was a good if not great cook, and knew how to make all the Provençal classics like bouillabaisse, pistou (a Niçoise vegetable soup, which my mother naturally called “piss stew”), and aioli, but her true talent was as a winemaker. The recipe had come from her grandmother and called for white wine, Seville oranges, eau-de-vie, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla, all combined in what proportions I never discovered, bottled, and left for a month or so, to transform itself into a nectar called vin d’orange.
The nectar was always served at the annual Ayer-Tricon pétanque tournament, played on the dirt road that ran in front of both our houses. Freddie, who was the most competitive man I have ever known (the galaxy of girls must have been about more than mere love or lust), never met a game he didn’t need to win, whether it was a debate on television, decimating my boyfriends at chess, or beating poor Marcel Tricon on his home turf. It’s just what he did. And he usually did it in such a guileless, childish way, taking such obvious delight in his victories, that it was hard to hold it against him. In some curious way he never stopped being the precocious little boy he once was, and I suspect that the origin of his absolute determination to succeed in life, whether it was socially, in his work, with women, or in games, lay in his lonely and rather bleak childhood and in his feeling that he was an outsider.
His father was descended from Swiss Calvinists and his mother from Dutch Jews, and even Freddie, the Aspergian snail, recognized it was not a happy marriage. An only child, he was packed off to prep school at six, followed by Eton at twelve—all bankrolled by his maternal grandfather, after his father’s catastrophic bankruptcy. For a physically small, wildly intelligent (he had won a scholarship) Jewish boy with a funny last name who didn’t excel at sports and had very few friends, life among the ferociously snobby boys at Eton must have been pretty good hell. But he always had his brains. And, like my mother, he used them to escape the dreary, constricted world of his family and fly away to the sunlit uplands of Oxford, pretty ladies, and intellectual and social triumph.
My mother told me she felt he looked at the world with “big desiring eyes,” and even after he had succeeded in achieving so much of what his eyes had desired, that underlying insecurity still lurked in the shadows of his psyche. Anthony Grayling, who was his last graduate student at Oxford, told Ben Rogers, Freddie’s biographer, that after a few drinks Freddie had once confessed, “You know, I always think that one day someone is going to point a finger at me and say: ‘You are a fraud. You got into Eton and to Christ Church, you were an officer in the Welsh Guards, you became Wykeham Professor at Oxford and you secured a knighthood. But underneath you are just a dirty little Jew-boy.’ ”
Which may go some way toward explaining why the “little Jew-boy” had to beat the shit out of the mild-mannered flan salesman from Toulon at pétanque. Of course he didn’t always win, but when he did a beatific smile would spread across his face, his big, desiring Coca-Cola eyes would light up, and we would all gather on the Tricons’ terrace to celebrate with yet another round of Jeannine’s celestial vin d’orange.
About halfway up the hill between Le Beausset and La Migoua lived some very different French neighbors. Unlike the Tricons, André and Nicole Padula were not locals, they were not bourgeois in the least, and it was tutoyer from the day we first met them. They seemed more American than French with their openness, warmth, and easy informality, which must have been what drew my mother to them in the first place. In addition to their many other charms, they also had an adopted son, Frédéric, who was exactly Nick’s age, and the two boys were told by their respective mothers that they loved playing together, and did so frequently, whether they wanted to or not. (But forty years later, with all the parents long gone, they still have regular playdates, so maybe there is something to be said for arranged friendships after all.) André, who was an architect, had decided to build his dream house on an idyllic stretch of hillside, where, if you stood in exactly the right place and squinted a bit, you could actually see a glittering patch of the Mediterranean in the distance. The long driveway was guarded by cypress-tree soldiers lined up on either side, and the house itself, with its sliding plate-glass windows, open-plan kitchen (with a dishwasher!), and exposed stone wall and fireplace, also felt curiously American. Ranch style, it had a huge living room (with speakers hidden in the roof beams!), an avocado bathroom (with a sunken tub!) and looked just like something from a House Beautiful feature, circa 1964. It was the perfect house for parties.
I HAD BOUGHT THE DRESS on another one of my marathon walks around Paris, and in its way it was every bit as magical as the bikini. Floor length, made of the same blue-and-white stripey cotton jersey as Coco Chanel’s little sweater, cut like a bathing suit, it had a deep décolleté back with crisscross straps, and pulled off the sly trick of being both childish and sexy at the same time. Of course I had never actually dared wear it. But what had been the point of bankrupting myself, just to have it sitting there in the closet, reproaching me for my extravagance and, far worse, for my timidity? “Take a chance,” my mother always said, and so that night I did. Standing in front of the bathroom window, looking out at the sunset—one of the many oddities of the house was the fact that this was the only room with any real light or view—I propped up a mirror and set to work on my face. Six weeks in the sun had incinerated the top layer of skin and with it all the acne, so that was good. All I needed to do now was pile on the makeup: deep copper foundation, blue mascara, shimmering peach blush, sparkly silver highlighter, lots of kohl around the eyes, mint green shadow, brown lip liner, sticky pale pink gloss. Had I gotten carried away? Maybe piled it on a bit too thick? Mixed too many colors in one palette? I studied my face in the mirror again—dispassionately, objectively, disinterestedly—and was forced to admit the truth, there was just no way around it. How could I tell a lie? I looked gorgeous. Several strategic blasts of Miss Dior—didn’t the magazines tell you to put perfume where you expect to be kissed?—some savage back combing of the bleached straw on my head, and I was ready to slip into the magical dress. With a back like that, a bra was clearly out of the question, and with the clingy fabric, the panties had to go too, but who wears underwear with a bathing suit anyway? My mother shouted up the stairs in her best New York accent: “Okay, Gloria, enough already with the bubble bath and the potions. Put on your rhinestones and let’s go.”
I descended the staircase slowly, careful not to trip on my long dress, and stood in the doorway of the brightly lit kitchen.
“Jesus, you look like Tricia Nixon! If Tricia Nixon had graduated summa cum laude from hooker school.”
“Darling, don’t listen to your mother. You look lovely.”
We got into the car and headed down the hill to the Padulas’ party.
Tiny white lights twinkled on the terrace, Johnny Hallyday—France’s peroxide-blond approximation of Elvis—was on the sound system, smoky torches illuminated the cactus garden, the swimming pool glowed like a gigantic turquoise kidney, and a battalion of wine bottles was lined up on the sideboard beside a mystery dip encircled by a multicolored necklace of crudités. My mother put on her party face, Freddie looked appalled, and I knew instantly that this was the night. Noisy, hot, and crowded, it wasn’t the kind of social occasion where Freddie’s famous wit and intellect could sparkle quite as brightly as he would have liked, so he decided to fall back on his skills as a francophone Don Juan. He claimed that he was constantly being mistaken for a Frenchman, so brilliant was his command of the language (it may even have been true), and his special way with the ladies was such a self-evident fact that even he had given up boasting about it. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him patrol the room and pick out a pretty woman in a slightly too-tight black dress and then settle down happily beside her. Maybe this wasn’t quite such a bad party as he had first thought. My mother’s French was a much more haphazard affair, but so what? She just barreled on, throwing in as many English words as she needed, entertaining everybody with her faultless franglais. It never failed, and I could see her on the other side of the kitchen, with André Padula, waving a cigarette around and laughing out loud, probably at one of her own jokes. I wandered about, chatting with old friends, complimented Nicole on her onion-and-sour-cream dip—“It tastes so American.” “Vraiment?” She beamed—and made frequent trips to the avocado bathroom to reapply my lip gloss and back comb the straw.
It was just like the movies. That enchanted evening I—finally—saw a stranger across a crowded room. Handsome in a French B movie kind of way, charming (or at least eager to charm me), older (probably twice my age), he handed me a glass of wine and smiled. Would I perhaps care to sit down? Mais oui, of course I would, how did he know? Sensitive, perceptive, intuitive—he had read my mind and, pointing to a daybed in a particularly dark corner of the terrace—he led the way through the crowd and I followed.
The plot of this particular movie may have been utterly predictable—I never doubted for a moment how it would end—but it was no less thrilling for being so. He knew his lines (could he perhaps have played this role before?), and yet after all these years the only words of his I can recall are “Que tes pieds sont jolis.” Looking down at my feet—stuffed into high-heeled sandals, tightly trussed up with silver laces, the nails polished a lurid pink called Kiss and Tell—I whispered, “Merci.” Maybe I would like another glass of wine? Or three? He made a foraging sortie into the house and returned with an amphora-shaped bottle of Ott rosé, some cold pizza, and a bowl of olives, and—just as we were going to continue our conversation about my “jolis pieds”—I spotted my mother making her way toward us. Oh please, no. Snappy wisecracks in franglais were not part of this script at all.
“Pardonnez-moi, Gloria, for interrupting your intime tête-à-tête, but il est très tard and we gotta go chez nous immédiatement.”
Was she insane? I glared at her, but maybe she couldn’t see my eyes through the gloom, so I stood up, took hold of her arm, and propelled her firmly back into the house, where Freddie was saying goodnight to André and Nicole.
“Pas de problème,” Nicole reassured my mother. “We will make sure she gets home safely.”
“Okay, but just keep her out of the clutches of that rapist friend of yours out on the terrace.”
“Je t’aime, oui je t’aime, oh mon amour.” It was that song from Bora Bora beach, and the rapist and I danced all alone on the terrace. Just as I had imagined we would when Nicky had left me dozing in the sun on top of his other mistress a week before. All the other guests had finally left, and even our party-loving hosts seemed quite relieved when he—I still hadn’t quite caught his name, Jean-Marie, Jean-Pierre, Jean-Something—announced he would be more than happy to drive me home. Home? I didn’t think so. And nor did he.
I had never been to the beach at night. Cool, dark, and deserted it was a completely different place, vaguely menacing, smelling of the sea, with only the sound of the waves breaking on the sand. He ran ahead of me, naked, and plunged into the water. What had possessed me to abandon my underwear on the bathroom floor? How could I possibly take my clothes off in front of a man whose name I didn’t know? And so I went swimming in my long blue-and-white striped magical dress. The first streaks of light had appeared in the sky as we drove back on the familiar road from Les Lecques to Le Beausset, headed up the hill toward La Migoua, past our house (everybody asleep in their nice cozy beds. I must be mad. What was I doing?), and up a bumpy track I didn’t even know existed. Not so much a house as a plywood cabin—slightly smaller than Madame Carrère’s shack, slightly bigger than the double bed it contained—I stood there shivering and allowed a man whose name I didn’t know to undress me.
Was that it? I suppose it must have been because about half an hour later I was back in my sodden dress and being driven, very fast, down the track, to find myself deposited in front of the lime tree on our terrace. The sun was shining, Monsieur Tricon waved at me, Sorgue started barking, and I could hear Freddie’s voice in the kitchen reading to Nick, “Faster than his own shadow, Lucky Luke rode into town.…”
Neither of them even bothered to look up as I came clattering through the wooden beads and ran up the stairs. Thank God, my mother was still in bed. But no, there she was in her nightdress, coming out of the bathroom with an evil smile on her face,
“Well, Gloria, you sure look BEDraggled. Where’ve you been?”
BIKINI BEACH WAS just the same as ever. Monsieur Maurice was trolling around for candy wrappers and cigarette butts with his rake, Teddy St. Aubyn was taunting Nick, Sylvia lay on her mattress smoking a cheroot, Freddie was in his deck chair doing The Timescrossword, Prince Azamat was building a sand castle with his son, Sagat, and Madame Carrère was dispensing overpriced bottles of Pschitt from her shack, which was only slightly larger than the cabin up the hill behind our house. I, on the other hand, had been transformed. How odd that nobody noticed. Surely they could tell just by looking at me? Even my mother seemed to have forgotten all about our encounter on the stairs. I lay down on a towel and began replaying scenes from my recent adventure inside my head, amazed and thrilled by my own chutzpah. I’d taken a chance and met my deadline. Now I wouldn’t be a sad and lonesome creature forever more. Leaving my bikini top on the sand, I slowly walked into the sea.
Francette was the concierge of La Migoua. She knew everybody and she knew what everybody was doing. That evening, as the sun was going down, I wandered around to the vertical shed and found Francette and my mother sitting at her kitchen table cackling away like two old tricoteuses. Did I know that my new boyfriend was married, that his wife was pregnant, that he was my mother’s hairdresser—“Yeah, I thought he looked familiar when I saw him sitting there”—and that he was a rabid supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascist Front National? No, I certainly did not. As best as I could recall there had been no mention of “ma femme enceinte” nor of “le coiffeur de ta mère” nor any rousing call for “France pour les Français!” But so what? It wasn’t as if I was ever going to see him again. Which wasn’t strictly true, because one day many, many years later a bandy-legged, wizened, thieving old man in a rusty truck stole my parking spot in the village. “Fuck you,” I said, before realizing that I already had.