The Last Life (9 page)

Now, examining his face in the bureau's speckled mirror, he wondered. He was dark, but remembered his elder sister's curls as fair, the color of the seashore. He recalled her sudden laugh, the way she used to swing him in the air when he was small, the lacy edges of her two front teeth.

Although tall for a girl, Estelle, like Jacques, had inherited their grandmother's small bones, and she would stand in the kitchen, chopping knife or wooden spoon held aloft, and examine her extended wrists or ankles. "You wouldn't know me for a peasant, would you?" she'd ask, with mock extravagance. To which Paulette, solid in every joint as their father had been solid, smiled indulgently and replied, "You're like a queen,
chérie.
A queen. Born for palaces and gentlemen."

Little Jacques buzzed in and out of these exchanges, caught up in his games of knights and war. Estelle sometimes grabbed him as he passed, a slender brown arm flung around his waist, or a hand upon his shoulder. She would spin him around to face Paulette saying, "He's like me. We're the changelings, don't you see?"

Then, as sudden as her laughter, she was gone. After school—it was early summer, and already fiercely hot—he had gone to play with his friend Didier. They ventured to the glade of mulberries and olive trees, not far from the shrine of the marabout, where they were not supposed to go, and passed the afternoon digging trenches in a patch of open ground, constructing elaborate fortresses for their imaginary armies and tracing in the dirt, with sticks, the invasion strategies of Arab hordes. This work smeared their skin and shoes and hands with filth; but it was only after the boys decided to enact their battle, and had taken up the sticks as swords, that Jacques—either snagged by one of the silvery thorn bushes among which they played, or felled by a shrewd parry from Didier—discovered a rent in the seat of his shorts, a large, two-sided tear that left a flap of fabric dangling like a dog's tongue, revealing his white underpants. He trailed home, at dusk, to disgrace: his
maman
spanked his stripped behind with the flat of her callused hand, denied him his share of the evening meal, and banished him to the attic room he shared with Yves. There Jacques cried himself to an early, and hungry, sleep.

In the commotion of Jacques's wrongdoing, he did not notice that Estelle was not there. Still overstuffed—at that time their Tata Christine lived with them, a crinkled creature of over eighty who shared Maman's marriage bed—the house did not feel emptier without her. And he attributed the raised voices he heard from beneath the covers to his mother's, and brother's, frustration with his naughtiness. But waking the next morning before dawn, he noticed that Yves, who snored ferociously, was not in his narrow bed under the window, and that the rooms beneath him were peculiarly still. A chill took him, a childish terror of abandonment: he ran naked down the narrow stairs two at a time, moaning, imagining that in the night his family had escaped to another life without him. His father's recent disappearance had, after all, been as sudden: a broad, squat bear of a man, Monsieur LaBasse had sauntered down the street at sunrise one morning, the same as every day but Sunday, his apron over his arm, only to come home in a box, on a cart, his stubby hands crossed on his breast and his features fixed forever in a stony glare.

Yves was slumped in a chair by the kitchen hearth, his whiskered skin as grey as the dead embers at his feet, his eyes stuck shut. He did not snore. The little boy shook his brother, without speaking, afraid to break the odd silence, and it seemed a long time before the older boy started, kicking out a foot in reflex along the tiled floor.

"Is she here?" is what he said.

"Maman? Where's Maman? Where is everyone? What?"

Yves rubbed his filmy eyes and squinted at little Jacques, who hopped and shivered in his nakedness. "You're up," he said.

"It's morning. Can't you see? Where
is
everyone? What's wrong?"

"What isn't,
mon petit?
"

"Is Maman sick? Has she died, like Papa? Where is she?"

"She's sleeping now. Don't worry."

"But—we must wake her, we must—" Jacques stuttered. Even when his father had died, there had not been this overwhelming air of disorder: the next day had gone ahead, the coffee made, Jacques's hair combed by his mother, if anything, more tenderly. "Why are you sleeping here?"

Yves was standing now, hiking up his sleeves, adjusting his trousers, turning into himself. "It was a long night,
petit.
I didn't get home until a couple of hours ago. We were hoping there'd be some news, at least."

"News? Of what?"

Yves put his hands on his little brother's shoulders. "Estelle has gone away," he said quietly, fixing Jacques full in the face.

"You mean she has died?"

"No ... I mean she has gone away. But she'll be back. Soon, I promise."

"Where has she gone?" Jacques's tone was truculent. He felt annoyed, although he was not sure at what, or at whom: his world was not a game to be trifled with in this way.

"We don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know? Where has she gone?"

"She'll be back soon, I promise."

That was all his brother said to him, except to tell him not to speak of it to their
maman.
Paulette emerged from the girls' room not long after, her cheeks puffed by tears, her lips swollen, and she prepared their breakfast in silence. His
maman
Jacques did not see until after school that day, when he clattered into the kitchen, swinging his bookbag, to find her squarely planted in the stiff chair by the hearth, in her widow's black, her eyes strangely small and expressionless. She wept, over the next weeks, at odd times: not just at mass, but in the market, at the sight of oranges, and once when she stood watching the neighborhood children play soccer in the street. She did not speak her daughter's name again, or not in front of Jacques: she referred to Estelle only once within his hearing: "The girl is dead," she said. "To this life, she is dead, and I grieve as if she had died."

Departure and death became forever mixed up in little Jacques's mind. Just as he forgot the smoky sweat smell of his father's shirts, he forgot his sister's elegant wrists and ankles, and the way she pinned him on his bed and tickled him till he wept with laughter. He had Didier to play with, and discoveries to make: he did not brood over what was gone.

From Paulette he gathered a little: he knew that Estelle had not run away alone, and that therein, for some reason, lay the greater shame for his mother. She had followed a soldier, a brush-haired youth from the
métropole.
They paused, for a time, in Algiers: it was from there that Paulette received her first, thin letter. It struck Jacques only all those years later, in Paris, that Estelle had discovered Algiers as he had, in the early-summer flurry of love, that she had tripped along the Rue Michelet and drunk wine in the cafés just as he had, and that she had probably, like him, felt she and her
jules
were the first to do so. She had doubtless strolled with her lover along the beaches, swum at the Bains Padovani and danced at night in the casino on the clifftop (an indulgence which he, in his time, never attempted), and had chased after trams, giggling breathlessly, as he had, more recently, with his beloved. Some months after—he did not know how many—she had followed her lover to France, and there, in a country then unimaginable to her younger brother, she had been truly lost.

At eight o'clock precisely, Jacques presented himself at the entrance to the hotel. He had never been in so grand a lobby (perhaps he had never been in any hotel lobby). And it changed his life forever. The light from its chandeliers spilled out onto the square, where women in furs and men in evening dress milled about and long black cars pulled up on the shimmering cobbles. A uniformed brotherhood guarded the doors, unsmiling, their hands encased in leather gloves that Jacques—his fingers raw from the long walk—coveted silently. He felt awkward, his hat soggy, its shape distorted from the earlier rain, his shoes squelching. He kept his eyes down, and slipped in behind three mink-wrapped ladies, whose trailing cloud of scent seemed to offer some protection. When he stood at the marbled reception desk and waited to be spoken to, the wall of room keys in front of him appeared like treasures in themselves, weighty and bright. The oriental carpet beneath his feet, the rich waft of cigar smoke from his neighbor, the stern glance of the fastidious clerk, all announced to Jacques that he was not worthy of this place. He had never felt this way, was accustomed to the pride of intellect and hard work rewarded: humbly born perhaps, he had nevertheless believed that his origins had fallen away in the face of his brilliant future. He wished, for the first time, that he had a visible value in the moneyed world.

But after phoning through to room 426, the clerk smiled, or almost, as he directed him to the elevator. Jacques took the smile to be friendly, not considering until much later that it might have been maliciously offered, a comment upon his sister's virtue. The elevator operator swung the cage shut with his monkey arm and called Jacques "
m'sieur.
" On the fourth floor, a chambermaid in a pristine pinafore bobbed at him in hasty approximation of a curtsey.

How wide the door was, on which the number 426 was painted in delicate scrolls. How wide all the doors were, along the broad and quiet corridor. The paint was the color of fresh cream, its borders gold. Gold borders. How could their
maman
shun such deliciousness? How could Jacques not give in to it, even before the door to his sister's life—on which he knocked, three times, with a mixture of hesitation and willed authority—had opened?

The woman who greeted him was, at first, unfamiliar: she looked like any one of the hotel guests, tall, slender and expensive, her body swayed in the stoop that was considered fashionable at the time. Her throat was laced with emeralds, her blond curls were oiled against her brow, her heart-shaped face powdered and rouged. Her lips were a glistening crimson, her green eyes cold as glass. But when she smiled, Jacques knew her by her teeth.

She took his hand, her smooth, ringless fingers cool upon his wrist, and led him into the room. "Let me look at you, my darling boy." She turned dramatically, the yellow gauze of her dress billowing, its intricate beading glittering in the light. "I'd know you anywhere."

"Would you?"

She held his chin, turned his face this way and that. "Certainly. You look like Grand'-mère. You look—like me. Dark, of course; but we are twins. Would you not have recognized me?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps."

Estelle laughed. "Well," she said, twirling again, "what do you think? Not bad, for a runaway from Blida?"

"Born for palaces and gentlemen. And this."

"And this."

The room was indeed magnificent, a salon of robin's-egg sofas and bowlegged antique dressers, lit by soft lamps. Through a half-open door he could glimpse her bed, a plump, shadowy mushroom of eiderdowns and pillows. The air was drenched in the smell of hothouse lilies—they clustered, in profusion, in a vase atop the marble mandepiece, yellow pistils peering wetly from their lolling white heads.

"Champagne?" She took his coat. "Will you sit?"

Jacques perched on one of the sofas, and looked around. At anything but his sister, whose chattering beauty unsettled him. He had not known women like this, women of grace but not of breeding, elegant but somehow not entirely genuine. The slight flutter of her lashes, the abrupt sentences, he took for nerves at his presence; she had a way of fingering the emeralds in the dip of her collarbone, and even that charmed him. He was afraid that if he looked too long at her, he might fall in love.

"So, you are well." He could not think where else to begin, and Estelle, still standing in the middle of the room, seemed content merely to eye him, coquettishly, then to part her lips in a knowing titter.

"Need you ask? Can't you see?" She broke into a graceful little dance, her flute of golden champagne her partner, and she sang in English as she swirled around the sofas: "I'm sitting on top of ze world, just rolling along, just rolling along..." She stopped, and laughed, and drank. Jacques observed her long, pale neck surreptitiously. "That's how I am. You can tell them all. I'm going to America. I'm going to marry an American."

She emptied her glass and came to sit beside him. She took his tingling hands in hers, and leaned close to him: like the room, she smelled of lilies. "But how are you?" she asked. "And Paulette? Is she in love' How does she wear her hair? Does she still work in the dress shop—it's been how long? Three years? And Yves—he's married, yes? Is he fat, like papa? And his wife? He has a child? And how—" she looked at his ruined shoes—"and Maman?"

Jacques stayed an hour: Estelle had only an hour before her fiancé—the American—was to return and take her to dinner. As the time for Jacques's departure drew nearer, Estelle grew agitated, pacing the room and pausing in front of the mirror to adjust her hair, the neckline of her dress. When the clock on the mantel struck nine, she held out his coat, and kissed him, and when recounting the event, the word he used to describe her smile was "brave."

Jacques slipped out of the hotel and into the chill November air, and walked back to his rooms without supper, tipsy on the taste of champagne and his sister's perfume. By the time he came home from mass the next morning, that evening had already taken on the quality of the imagined. Later he would not remember what they talked about, what he learned then and what he learned afterwards of how her life had been and would be. He would remember only that she moved in beauty, that her melodious, nervous voice was still given to sudden laughter, and that her lacy teeth still gave her the look of an elfin child when she smiled. He would recall always the delicate wave of her wrists—practiced in youth in the kitchen in Blida, but perfected in the elegant suite at the Ritz—and her insistent, almost desperate joy at the prospect of America.