“Oh no,” Valère replied, staring at the scarf, “I don’t think it did.”
The front door knocker sounded, but before anyone could move, a voice bellowed from the front hall. “You have no idea how expensive a taxicab is from the TGV station to Puyloubier!” Hélène, Bruno, and Marine swung their heads toward the voice, and Valère and the girls instinctively jumped up. Sandrine set down the tray and put her hands on her hips.
The visitor walked into the salon, a woman somewhere between sixty and seventy-five years of age, tall, and heavyset. She had short jet-black hair and wore bright-red glasses. Her lipstick matched the glasses. She said, “Valère, thank you for the welcoming committee. Did you not get my text messages? I was lucky and got a taxi driver who lives here, in the village, but when I gave him the address he quickly made a sign of the cross. What’s going on here?” She laughed and looked around at the group. “And, Valère,” she went on, “what on earth is that child doing wearing my Hermès scarf?”
Chapter Eight
New York City,
September 22, 2010
Of course I had seen Michèle’s text message. I thought if I ignored it she wouldn’t come,” Valère said. “But that was very stupid of me. She never listens to a word anyone says.”
“So who is this Michèle?” Justin asked.
“Michèle Baudouin, my archrival. She sells more books than I do. In fact, I think she may be one of the best-selling authors in the world.”
Justin shrugged. “I imagine I would know the name if she’s that well known. What’s her pen name?”
“Rosalie di Santi.” Valère waited and watched Justin. “Ah! I see from your amazed expression that even a millennial like you knows the name of Rosalie di Santi.”
“Hey, millennials are cultured!” Justin almost added “more than you lucky-to-be-born-in-the-fifties baby boomers,” but he kept silent.
“I’m not making a judgment against every kid born in your decade, so stop complaining or I won’t let you choose the next wine.”
Justin smiled and picked up the wine list, turning many pages until he got to the reds. He looked up and said, “Go on. I’m all ears. And I already don’t trust her.”
I’ve always hated her pen name; di Santi sounds like a cross between an Italian countess and a flamenco dancer, and Rosalie sounds like a made-up Disney name. But she’s stuck with it. Michèle and I go back, way back. We grew up together, on the same street in Paris. We were rivals all through school and then at university—just like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were—albeit Michèle and I had much lower intellectual ambitions, and, unlike the philosophers I mentioned, neither of us has a political bone in our body.
The French press love writing about us, given that we’ve known each other since we were kids and we both ended up being famous writers. They even tried to link us romantically, which was terrible for me and especially for Agathe. Now, I’m not saying I was never physically attracted to Michèle; that would be a lie. She is a handsome woman, though her beauty has faded as the years have passed. When she was young, she was tall like Agathe, but rounder, not as skinny and frail looking. Michèle had olive skin and big eyes and big lips and big . . . Cut it out, Justin. I was going to say big hair. It was thick and jet black, with a white streak that ran down the front. She drank and smoked like my buddies from the newspaper; in fact, she’s a cigar smoker, and a mutual friend just told me that she recently married a Cuban man thirty years her junior, all in order to be able to buy a house in Havana.
When you’re writing, a little devil sits on your shoulder, always nagging you about how really shitty your first draft is. The devil may be one of your parents or your favorite writer or an old teacher. But mine is Michèle. Despite all our drunken arguments—once we were both thrown out of the Café de Flore for yelling too much—she’s my conscience. She’s the little critic in my head who urges me to be a good writer. And when Agathe died, Michèle was there almost immediately. In fact, I always wondered how she got to the sea so quickly. But she’s a superwoman. Her books have been translated into over forty languages—okay, so have mine—but Michèle has been on the New York Times best-seller list for over twenty years, without a break! She writes two books a year, on average, and takes a one-day break between each. One day! Sometimes I don’t write for months. And besides her romances, she’s now a best-selling cookbook writer and appears on all those horrible competitive chef shows on television. Poor Agathe couldn’t even fry an egg.
And so there was Michèle, like a ghost, standing in my newly organized living room. I jumped up and introduced her by her real name, not as Rosalie. Sandrine was on the ball and brought Michèle a glass of chilled rosé, then ran upstairs with her suitcase. Michèle was in a good mood, and Charlotte recognized her from television. Michèle brushed it off with a wave of the hand and told everyone that she wrote cookbooks; no one asked any questions. They must have recognized her as Rosalie di Santi, but perhaps not. My new neighbors—my new friends—don’t seem to be interested in fame or fortune, or who knows whom, like so many chic Left Bank Parisians are. We got back to talking about Maria Callas, and then Aix in general, with Michèle asking lots of questions—totally out of character, by the way—and then she had everyone in hysterics with a story about a recent trip to Scotland she made for a cooking show, where she threw
