The Last Life (26 page)

"Maybe you are."

"It's just that he talks about all this as if prison were a certainty. Not to your grandparents—I don't mean with them. But when we talk, the two of us."

"He's probably trying to prepare for the worst, don't you think? I do that—like I imagine that I've failed a test, even when I'm pretty sure I haven't, so that—"

"I don't think so. He talks about being free, free to run the hotel as he wishes, that kind of thing. Free, when it's over."

"Don't you think we'll all feel free when it's over?"

"But when it's over and his father is in prison. Don't you see the difference?"

"You're imagining it, Maman. I've got a grudge against the guy—he's made me into a social leper and I lost my best friend—and I don't want him to go to jail."

"Don't you?"

"Maybe I did. But I don't anymore. I swear."

My mother patted my cheek, in an oddly paternal gesture. "Glad to hear it. Now, what have you and Etienne been up to today?"

Perhaps my mother, I have since thought, was right about my father's wishes, and perhaps my father had found some convincing means to convey those wishes to the powers of the law. Because at the beginning of the following week, when everyone reconvened for sentencing, my grandfather was condemned to seven months in a minimum security prison. My grandmother made a show of swooning in the courtroom, so that my father had to hold her up, but my grandfather just hung his head and folded his hands together and waited to be led away. I learned these details from the newspaper, not at home but at school, where Lahou slipped me a copy before math class, with a sisterly hug. Now that I so clearly needed to be protected, she was full of smiles for me, her last doubts quelled by my public disgrace.

The newspaper had used again the photo of my grandfather taken on the courthouse steps, but they had cropped out my grandmother altogether. He hunched and squinted, as I had seen him in the dock, small, frail and alone.

"What will happen now?" 1 asked my father that evening. Our house was imbued with a strange tenderness, our regard for my grandfather manifest in our lowered voices and in our eagerness to please and appease one another.

He put his arms out towards me, spread wide as if to envelop. He said, as they had been saying for months, and as I had learned not to believe, "Don't worry, my angel. Everything will be fine."

"Grand'-mère says it might kill him."

"Nonsense. I've seen the place. It's like a rest home, almost. He'll be away, as if he were on a trip, for such a little time you'll hardly notice he was gone. He'll be home before school is out."

"But the hotel—"

"I'm running the Bellevue, and have been for months. I would've been running it regardless. He's getting on, your grandfather—he's over seventy, you know. About time he retired. He deserves a rest. None of this would've happened if he'd learned a little sooner to take it easy. He was just overtired. Think of it as a cure."

"Prison isn't a rest. Is it, Maman?"

My mother tried to smile. "It doesn't help anything or anybody to wish things were different," she said. "We have to ask what to do next, what God would want."

"And what's that?"

"We must try to help your grandmother, for one thing. This is hardest for her."

"She's a strong woman. A remarkable woman," said my father. "She'll be fine. You'll probably find she's busy helping us. She's always been the one who keeps everyone together."

My mother gave my father a strange look as if he were telling a secret I wasn't meant to hear. I thought about it, later, in my room, and remembered that it was my grandmother who told the stories, who wove a narrative out of the lives of the LaBasses, and that in this sense, at least, my father was right. And it was my mother who had more often than not unravelled those stories at her leisure, and put them together again, another way, with a different, darker meaning. It seemed, though, that in these months between crime and punishment, my mother had changed, had joined forces with her mother-in-law, and that she would now be engaged in weaving my grandmother's stories even tighter In this way the women would strive, together, extra hard, to keep the family whole.

The fulcrum, though, around which our little family revolved, was shifting. My grandfather had long been made mythic—in his brilliance, his difficulty, his determination—and now, with this final judgment, had evaporated into myth. (To my father, seven months might have seemed the blink of an eye, but to me, then, they were still an interminable round of days not least because I had been made to understand that I was not to visit my grandfather during this time: he did not wish me to see him in prison.) There remained, in his stead, the fleshy, flawed presence of my father, around whom the women's spinning would have to begin. Like a caterpillar encased in its pupa, he, too, would disappear beneath their silky threads, to emerge transformed: no longer my hapless, infuriating father, he would become the scion and patriarch of the House of LaBasse, master of its tiny difftop kingdom, the Bellevue. His sleek fattening, in this light, made sense: he had been preparing for the transition, so long awaited, and although he would assist in it only passively, he had had to will its onset. What is a hero if not a man about whom stories are told? Till now, my father had not known heroism; but my grandmother and mother would change that. Stories are made up, after all, as much of what is left out.

Later that night, I heard my parents talking in the front hall downstairs. Their voices resonated against the marble. My mother was telling my father that he should fire Marie-Jo's mother, and Thierry's father in the bargain.

"You can't imagine what it's like for your mother. And now—they'll be positively gloating. Honestly, Alex—"

My father would have none of it. "This is a business, Carol. A business, not a popularity contest." He was parrotting his own father. "Maman will get over it. She trusts my judgments—why can't you?"

"Maybe because I live with you. I know you too well."

My father's voice got deeper and quieter, the voice he used when he was angry and trying not to show it; the voice they both used when they were arguing and didn't want the substance of their altercation to reach their children's ears. (Who knew, after all, what Etienne could understand? Displays of rage made him shriek—when they didn't make him laugh instead.) They moved back towards the living room, so that all I could catch were their alternating rhythms. I returned to my bed, where I lay on my stomach and put my head under the pillow.

Christmas, a few weeks later, was subdued. My grandmother spent it with us, staying overnight in the room my grandfather had used. We watched the pope on television, rather than going to mass, and the service seemed to last forever. My mother sat forward on her chair as though the television's rays could grant salvation; but my father, like Etienne, fell asleep with his mouth open and emitted little bubbling snores.

Etienne's fête, too, the following day, was hushed and private, although it was an event usually celebrated with particular verve, so that my brother, if he could indeed reason in some secret part of himself (we lived our lives as if he could, a sort of Pascalian gamble), would not think himself stinted. His presents—which we took turns opening for him—were modest and practical: a couple of shirts, a new plaid rug for his knees. Only my grandmother, who gave him a fine felt hat with a blue and green feather in it ("he's a young man, after all") and an Italian glass lamp that lit up like a swirling mauve jewel ("to go to sleep with, for pleasant dreams"), tried to counter the austerity of the day. And my father, switching the little lamp on and off, said, in an attempt at lightheadedness, "I always think it's better not to dream at all. I imagine that's Etienne's privilege."

As for the new year—ringing in a new decade, which ought, I thought, to have been filled with fireworks and dancing—my parents, having declined all invitations, remained at home, watching the clock as if it were doomsday, and, after pouring each of us (including Etienne) a thimbleful of Veuve Cliquot in honor of the coming hour, sent both son and daughter to bed. I saw in the new year on my window ledge, observing the distant twinkle of lights in town and imagining that I could distinguish the whoops of crowds at the edge of my hearing.

The year before there had been a party at the Bellevue, in the restaurant (such festivities were my father's province), and Marie-Jo and I had waltzed together, she in a grown-up sequined dress and I in girlish velvet, and we had run streamers around Etienne until he was bound by strings of gay color, which he loved. Days later, we were still plucking odd snatches of ribbon from the spokes and seams of his chair.

"Next year," Marie-Jo had said, "we'll get my brother to invite us to a bash at the Fac"—her brother was five years older and away studying economics in Marseilles—"it'll be wild." I wondered if that was where she was, in a dress even shorter and skimpier than last year's, or whether she was in her pink bedroom, all alone like me. I wondered whether she remembered her promise, and was sorry.

Far away in Paris, Thibaud, at least, was thinking of me: a letter arrived, in his jagged handwriting, enclosed in a card. The card unfolded into three panels, each displaying a set of obscenely full airbrushed lips. In the center panel, a lewd pink tongue protruded, and rested, pointed and shiny as if actually wet, upon the lower bulb of flesh. Thibaud's letter was not correspondingly intimate; indeed, it was almost formal, somehow old-fashioned. He had been glad to hear from me, he often thought of me, he was pleased that I was doing so well in spite of my grandfather's trouble.

"After all," he wrote, "it's not as though you did anything wrong. We weren't even there (haha). But seriously, his problems aren't your problem, and I'm glad you've understood that. I'm sorry that we haven't been in touch sooner. I don't know what can have happened to your American letter (maybe their postal system is as bad as Italy's?)—but now we are." He didn't say whether he still felt the same about me, but he said he couldn't wait for the summer, that he was working hard ("Only one more year to the
bac
!") and that he was considering preparing for a
grande ecole
if all went well, and possibly aiming, in the long term, for l'ENA. He wanted to hear about the trial, he said. I sniffed the letter to see if I could smell him.

I wrote back at once, and lied some more, saying that my grandfather's sentence was basically like a cure, and that we all felt fine. I pressed for confessions of desire, not knowing whether I felt it for him but knowing that I wanted him to feel it for me. I wrote that I missed his fingertips on my stomach ("et cetera"), that I could still taste his kisses, and that I wondered what he might remember of me—"of my body," I wrote, which seemed explicit enough. I no longer worried about his eggplant-haired mother, or even about Thibaud himself, and whether he might laugh at my nakedness. I was playing a role—vixen, vamp—and he, like a convict (in the States, many women write love letters to convicts, I have since learned; an impulse which makes perfect sense to me, as long as the convicts' sentences are lifelong), was safely distant, as distant as if he existed only in my imagination.

In mid-January, Sami was suspended from school for a week. His crime was not drug dealing, although it might have been; it was insubordination. He had menaced a math teacher—a woman teacher—with his fists, and had threatened to find her house and "straighten her out," after she announced to him after class one day that unless he changed his attitude he would not only fail but be in serious trouble with the principal. This threat, in the wake of his, was immediately borne out, and although he claimed not to care, I could see—even his beloved Lahou could see—that he was afraid. The principal, a burly, bearded man, had rolled up his sleeves and had propped his bulk upon his desk, so that he loomed over scrawny Sami in his pink plastic chair, and had said, "Get this, you little jerk: any trouble you think you can make in this school is a fraction of the trouble we can make for you. Hell, I, all by myself, can make enough trouble for you that you'll be mired in shit for years to come. Don't think we don't know you, because we do. And don't think I won't act on my word, because I will."

Sami was apparently unaware that threatening a woman teacher might have been construed as cowardice. I said this later to Lahou, who tossed her chevelure and snorted haughtily that "Sami is not a coward."

"I didn't say he was," I said, although I thought so. "I just said that's what it could look like."

"He's right, you know. What happened to him is racism, pure and simple." She glared at me. "And don't say anything. Because you don't know the first thing about it."

"I guess I don't," I said, which was true. But I kept seeing in my mind the twitching of Sami's jaw when he had told us, in the cafe, what had happened, and the twitching of his knee in its denim folds. It seemed like cowardice to me. "Is he going to stop dealing, then?"

"I don't know. He'll cool it for a while."

"What about you guys?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if your mother finds out that Sami's been suspended—"

"Which she probably will."

"Won't there be problems?"

"Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, probably." Lahou seemed to shrink, to stop shining. Even her hair seemed to droop. "You don't know the first thing about it."

And although this was not a reason or an excuse, it was the reason that I found, later, when I tried to understand my mistake, the reason why they came to my house. Lahou, if not Sami, had been kind to me, and was my friend; and I thought I might compensate for the gulf between us, for my inability to understand, by revealing myself.

It was a Thursday, a couple of days into Sami's suspension. At lunchtime, he hovered outside the café, looking suspicious and hollow-cheeked in the unsparing winter sun. Jacquot hopped up and down in his shadow, a skanky little jester, hands in pockets. Frédéric, Lahou and I came out of the schoolyard together: Frédéric was busy being solicitous of Lahou, cracking jokes, repeatedly reaching out as if to touch her arm, or her shoulder, then thinking better of it and withdrawing. Lahou flirted back, cautiously, with her body and her eyes but not her voice, and less as we approached the other two, her light turning, heliotropic, to her lover.