Nicolas likes the fact she doesn’t talk much. She wouldn’t be here with him now had she been a chatterbox. As Malvina pours herself another coffee, he reflects on what he is supposed to be doing here at the Gallo Nero. Writing the new book, of course, but also taking a break, a well-deserved one after the hectic year he’s had. How many trips? He cannot count them. He’d have to check his calendar to make sure. Short trips around the country for book fairs, book signings, meeting classes, students, presiding at literary award ceremonies, and then the same schedule abroad, in a dozen different countries, for the international publications of The Envelope, and finally the added and recent excitement with the movie release, Robin Wright’s Oscar, the press junkets in the United States, in Europe, and the movie tie-in editions, which had gone high on the best-seller lists. He had indulged in a series of whims his French publisher and agent, Alice Dor, had not approved of. Those glossy ads for a men’s fragrance, shot off the coast of Naxos, where, half-naked, he languorously reclines in a yacht. The black-and-white commercial for a watch, which seemed to grace every magazine he opened. “Was that necessary?” barked Alice Dor. “Don’t tell me you need more money.” No, with thirty million copies sold around the world and an Oscar-winning movie, he did not need more money. In fact, Corinne Beyer, his financial adviser, was working on that. If the money kept rolling in as such, she announced, he’d have to think about living somewhere other than France, because of the taxes.
Malvina and he slip back to the room. She is a tender and sweet lover. So fervent, it sometimes brings tears to his eyes, although he fully knows he does not love her. At least not the way he loved Delphine. Malvina lies back on the bed and opens her tanned knees to him. Later, as they take a shower, Malvina’s fragile shoulder blades bring him back to another shower, Delphine’s milky skin, his hands on her hips, in the bathroom on the rue Pernety, and he wonders with dismay whether he will ever love another woman the way he loved Delphine. It has been two years. When will her name sound like any other woman’s? When will he stop wondering if she takes showers with other guys, and who has been stroking that white skin? Coming to the Gallo Nero is also a way of keeping Delphine out of his mind. So what is he doing? “Come on, Malve, let’s go have a swim,” he says, shutting out Delphine and showers with Delphine.
They go down to the private beach, using the James Bond elevator. All the staff here wears black. A waiter says Nicolas’s name and room number; then they are ushered over to another, who proffers deck chairs—“Signor Kolt, a parasol, a towel, in the shade, no shade, near the sea, up by the cliff?”—and lo and behold, yet another one appears—“Would you like a drink, something cold, maybe, a newspaper, an ashtray?” They choose near the sea, with one parasol, a Coke for Malvina, iced tea and Libération (yesterday’s issue) for him.
This beach is not really a beach. No sand. It is a thick slab of concrete lining the bottom of the cliff, studded with parasols, deck chairs, pool ladders, and a diving board. More and more guests emerge from the elevator as the sun climbs into the clear July sky. Nicolas hears them talk and guesses where they are from. A Swiss couple, particularly fascinating. Impossible to determine their age. Anywhere between forty and sixty. He is as bald as a kneecap, tall, stooped, bony yet fit. She is even taller, firm flesh, wide shoulders, flat breasts, a true daddy longlegs. Short silver hair. He watches them as they meticulously arrange their clothes, towels, magazines, sun cream. They don’t speak to each other, but he senses great companionship. The man has tight-fitting swim shorts; she, an Olympic-style bathing suit. Suddenly, they get up, like two large, skinny birds taking off. She squeezes a swimming cap onto her head; he adjusts plastic goggles over his eyes. They both slip flippers onto their feet and hobble to the edge of the concrete slab with a peculiar elegance, in perfect harmony, and Nicolas guesses this has been repeated over and over again for many years. They dive into the sea and break into an effortless crawl stroke. They swim without a pause, reaching the brown reef that must be half a mile away. When they return, they shower in the nearby changing cabins and reappear wearing dry bathing suits. As they pass near him, he notices the man’s Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk. They see Nicolas looking their way and they smile. They spend the next ten minutes rubbing sun cream over themselves and each other with precise movements and grim concentration.
A Belgian family now. Nicolas picks Belgians out easily, because of his mother. Father and son are stocky, ginger-haired, red-skinned. The son is Malvina’s age and already running to fat. His nose is sunburned and freckled. He is wearing a fashionable French-brand bathing suit. Dad is an older version—same bathing suit (red) and a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms on his wrist. The mother is one of those lithe muscular types, with a green bikini she looks good in. She is reading a paperback. Nicolas strains his eyes, but he already knows. De Envelop, Flemish movie-tie-in edition, with Robin Wright on the cover. He is also getting used to that, being confronted with his readers wherever he goes. The daughter is pear-shaped but appealing. Earbuds clamped into her ears. Reading a magazine. Nails bitten to the quick. Not half as high-maintenance as her mom. The father dishes out twenty-euro bills to the waiters in black. His gestures are smooth and blasé. “Grazie, prego.” Waves of a plump pink palm.
Nicolas lies back on his deck chair, his face turned up to the sky like an avid sunflower sucking in the golden light, flaring nostrils catching the particular scent of the wind, hot and dry, sprinkled with the perfume of cypress and pine trees, the tang of lemon and salt. Summer of 2003 is the last time he reveled in that fragrance, during his trip to Liguria with François. Nicolas has been back to Italy (Milan, Rome, Florence) since Hurricane Margaux overturned his life in 2008 (that was how he described the book to journalists). But he had never been back to the Italian shore. He remembers the dusty night train from Paris to Milan, then the smaller train from Milan to Camogli. They stayed at an unpretentious bed-and-breakfast run by a jovial Canadian couple in their fifties, Nancy and Bob. When they got to San Rocco, they discovered they had to walk to the house (no taxi, no car) and drag their suitcases along tiny paved paths.
Camogli was also where a disheveled Margaux Dansor, his heroine, arrived one morning, hot on the trail of her quest for the family secret that was about to disrupt her life. Margaux had also dragged her suitcase—bump, bump, bump—all the way to the white stone house. Nicolas smiles, thinking about how “tickled pink” Nancy and Bob were when they found out he had put them in The Envelope. He had changed their names to Sally and Jake, but they were easily recognizable, Bob with his jaunty ponytail and eye patch that gave him a Captain Jack Sparrow attitude, and Nancy’s Hottentot Venus bottom, which sparked lewd sotto voce exchanges between François and him. In the book, Nicolas described Bob and Nancy’s abode exactly as it was. The patchy walls, the tiled crooked terrace, where every evening he would knock back limoncello until mind-blasting migraines took over, transforming his brain to putty, blurring the astounding view of the bay. The small, high-ceilinged, cool bedrooms, painted blue and green, the faltering plumbing system, the kitchen and its aromas: fresh pasta, glistening pesto, mozzarella and tomatoes on a bed of arugula. The other guests were a beautician from L.A., emaciated and tanned like crisp toast, and her shy, overweight daughter, who read Emily Dickinson in the shade. In Toby Bramfield’s movie, they all ended up looking exactly like how Nicolas had imagined them.
Nicolas suddenly wonders how François is. When was the last time they talked, sat down for a meal? He cannot even recall it. That is what comes with living this way, always on a train, on a plane, hours in waiting rooms, too many messages to respond to, too many e-mails piling up, too many invitations, propositions, solicitations. Not enough time to see friends, family, those who count. Again the pang of guilt. He should call François. They have been friends since their teens, when he was still Nicolas Duhamel, attending the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then the grueling hypokhâgne and khâgne classes, specializing in humanities. Nicolas ended up being held back his second ye
ar, dubbed a “khûbe,” as student jargon would have it. While François soared upward and onward, Nicolas fumbled and stumbled, to his mother’s despair. Although he was aware of what he was letting himself in for, he had been overpowered from the start by the workload, the permanent stress level, the sarcasm of the teachers. This was part and parcel of the demanding legend of the prestigious literary preparatory courses his mother had brilliantly succeeded in during her youth. In addition to class time and homework, Nicolas spent several hours each week laboriously completing exams and colles (spelled khôlles to look like a Greek word, another “khâgneux” insider joke). But there was nothing remotely funny about the khôlles, which soon became a nightmare for Nicolas. One hour to prepare a short dissertation on a given topic. Then, in twenty excruciating minutes, he had to present his work orally to a scathing teacher. François excelled at the dreaded khôlles, and even the harshest teacher, with the keenest expectations, begrudgingly bowed down to such supremacy. François never showed any signs of discouragement or apathy, contrary to Nicolas, who lost weight, lost sleep, lost his spirits. Like a fighter pilot dodging missiles, François triumphantly angled toward the highly competitive national exam that awaited them, the holy grail of a concours that a tiny elite would pass. Nicolas knew, from early on, that he did not have that ambition within him. François did, and he was aware of being the nugget those schools hungered for, the breed that formed professors, teachers, future Nobel Prize winners. The first time Nicolas flubbed the final exam, not even scraping through to the no-man’s-land of the sous-admissible category, the second-chance gang, François was already embarked on the firmament of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, nicknamed “Ulm,” for its address on the street that bore the same name.
The trip to Italy had been their way of patching up, of getting their friendship back on track after the strain of the khâgne and Nicolas’s failure. François earned a salary as a proud normalien, while Nicolas went on struggling halfheartedly, still living at his mother’s place, barely making ends meet by giving philosophy lessons to reluctant students. François remained the one who had succeeded, the one for whom it all seemed easy. But that changed when Hurricane Margaux blew along five years later. Except for François and Lara, the only ones from the past who have remained part of his life, Nicolas’s new friends are from the publishing world—writers, journalists, editors, publicists, booksellers. He sees them at literary events, on TV or radio shows, at cocktail parties, book launches, nightclubs. He has their e-mail addresses, their mobile-phone numbers; he is their friend on Facebook, their follower on Twitter. He hugs them, slaps them on the back, ruffles their hair, but very few of them are truly close. He gets drunk or high with them, occasionally has sex with one or two of the women, but what do they know about him, apart from what they may glean in the papers, or on Twitter? They know nothing. And he knows nothing about them, in return. He is fleetingly aware of the emptiness of his life, of the cruel fact that the entire world has learned his name but that he is, in truth, alone.
Every time Nicolas thinks of François, like at this very moment, as his eyes roam over the splendid sea, the guests basking in the sun, the servers bringing drinks and fruits, he is confronted with his own inadequacies as a friend. Did he not let François down? Did he not stop calling, meaning to call, always leaving it until the next day, and then simply forgetting to do it in the end? Yet François had been the brother he’d never had, the one he went to judo classes and tennis lessons with, the one he could confide in when girls became an obsession, the one who gave him support when his father died. François had a long, serious, bespectacled face, even as a kid, and adults trusted him. This had proved useful when they were children, indulging in devilish pranks. The “cheese incident,” for example. Nicolas had been punished by their principal, the odious Monsieur Roqueton, for not handing his homework in yet again. During a lunch break, on a stifling summer day, François innocently found his way into Monsieur Roqueton’s office, armed with a stinking Camembert. He deftly unscrewed the mouthpiece of the man’s old-fashioned telephone and squashed bits of cheese into it before replacing the top. A few days later, the stench became unbearable. One could not use the telephone without retching. Nicolas grins, and nearly laughs out loud, remembering. They were never caught. It had been a triumph.
There is another memory Nicolas is fond of. Granville, Normandy, summer of 1999. Nicolas and François were seventeen. François’s parents owned a half-timbered white-and-brown house, with a sloping garden giving on to the beach. Every summer, Nicolas went to spend two weeks in August with the Morin family. He felt like he was one of them. François had two younger sisters, Constance and Emmanuelle, and an older brother, Victor. His parents, Michel and Odile, gave a summer party each year while Nicolas was there. About a hundred people came. The girls wore their prettiest summer frocks. Odile went to the hairdresser. Michel showed off his tan in his favorite white jeans and a denim shirt opened to his navel. Victor, Nicolas, and François wore clean T-shirts and shorts. It poured one summer, and the party was held inside, an amusing squash. But that summer, the summer that Nicolas and François would never forget, Odile invited a new couple in town, Gérard and Véronique, who came with a Parisian friend of theirs, Nathalie. The women were in their early thirties; the husband was older. Véronique was plump and blond. Nathalie was tall, slender, and dark-haired, with the longest legs Nicolas had ever seen. They were wearing the same tight dress, but in different colors: black for Véronique and white for Nathalie. Gérard mingled with the older crowd, but Véronique and Nathalie took their drinks and crossed the garden, going out to the beach, daintily kicking off their high-heeled sandals. The sun was setting, staining the sea red. There was no one on the beach. The two young women waved, gesturing for Nicolas and François to join them. For a while, the four of them sat on the sand and chatted. When their glasses were empty, Nicolas rushed back to the house and smuggled a bottle of champagne under his T-shirt. The sun disappeared and the darkness drew inviting shadows around them. Nathalie, the long-legged brunette, puffed away on a cigarette, held delicately between two slim golden fingers. From where they were sitting, they could hear the music and laughter of the nearby party. Nathalie wanted to know if they had any girlfriends. This embarrassed François, who was less successful than Nicolas with girls. Véronique, the blonde, then asked, in a low, intimate voice, what they had already done with a girl sexually. Nicolas noticed how close the two women were, how Nathalie’s tanned thigh brushed against his naked calf every time she moved. In the soft blue light, Véronique’s cleavage was a deep, milky cleft. He told them, frankly, that all his girlfriends had been from the lycée, girls of his age. He had had sex with six of them so far, at parties, in a drunken stupor, in the bathroom or in someone’s bed. Only one of them had been a pleasant surprise, willing to try everything with the fierce energy of a Stakhanovite. Once the novelty wore off, Nicolas found her exhausting. The two women on the beach with them that night were in another league. They exuded a mysterious, languorous sensuality. “Does your girlfriend kiss you like this?” murmured Véronique, and before François could respond, she glued her lips to his, while Nathalie’s silken arm found its way around Nicolas’s neck. Then she kissed him in a way that Nicolas had never been kissed before in his life. Could they be seen from the house? he wondered fleetingly, stroking the soft skin under her dress, enraptured. Suddenly, Véronique was in his arms, and Nathalie moved to kiss François. Nicolas gave in to the new mouth on his. He could not resist touching her breasts, and when she pulled his lips down to their fullness, he thought he was going to pass out from ecstasy. What would have happened, he often wondered, if Véronique’s husband had not started to call her name from the garden? Had he seen them? They all got up quickly, brushing the sand off their clothes. The women patted their hair, giggling. Nicolas felt dizzy and nearly stumbled. François’s face was white, his lips swollen and red. He seemed about to faint. The women nonchalantly picked up their glasses a
nd their shoes and strolled back to the house arm in arm, shouting out gaily to Gérard that they were coming. François and Nicolas waited a while before joining the party. When they turned up, nervous and blushing, Gérard, Véronique, and Nathalie had already left. Nicolas never saw them again. But he knew he would never forget that night. For years, he had only to whisper “Granville” to François with a knowing smile, and the memories of that evening would flood back, intact.
Nicolas gets up now for his first swim. He will text François later. He glances down at Malvina, curled up under her parasol like a little animal, fast asleep. Her face still seems pale. He dives into the sea, and when he comes up for air, he finds himself gasping with a mixture of pleasure and joy, the pleasure of the velvety caress on his skin, the joy of coming back to the exact sensation he had missed since Camogli. The water here is deep immediately. It is absolutely transparent. Nicolas can stare all the way down to the seabed, paved with pale oval stones, and watch silvery fish flit past. He flings his arms and legs out like a starfish and floats on the surface. Underwater, his ears make out the tranquil putter of a nearby boat.