Laughter comes from behind him. His nephews to summon him have launched into the ribald student song from the other night. When Elizabeth reaches him he doesn’t look anymore but takes her arm firmly, draws her inside, and shuts the door.
The Prior’s Room
This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.
What next? I thought. Now, this is something like. This is great.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, “Youth”
Anna Meehan, an American girl seated at lunch with a French father and son, is basking in this common but blissful discovery: what happens sometimes, when you disobey your mother, is that the world turns inside out. She hasn’t specifically disobeyed—her mother, still asleep across the Atlantic in Rose Tree, Pennsylvania, never forbade her to take off from her summer language program with five minutes’ notice to join a Parisian boy she’s barely met at an Alpine resort—yet she knows that every parent on the planet would be opposed to the idea, including the Swiss surrogates who patrol her dormitory at the Cours d’Été of the University of Lausanne.
Anna is a recent high school graduate with honors, bound in September for a college with a renowned department of Romance languages. She is also the youngest of three pretty sisters, each of whom displays a different striking conjunction of the traits of their mother’s part-Filipino family and their father’s Irish-and-Polish clan. So pretty is Anna and so ingenuous does she seem that her Rosales grandparents shied away from giving her a post-graduation summer in Paris and, instead, sent her to polish her French in tamer surroundings. She’s been bored silly in Switzerland, and now that she has kicked over the traces she wonders what took her so long. It was shockingly easy: she accepted a telephone invitation, and now she sits on the other side of the French border, the cynosure of a table glittering with crystal and heavy silver, with a galaxy of waiters hovering and a pair of well-dressed foreign men offering her highly detailed compliments as if they were choice hors d’oeuvres. Revelation has followed revelation: her freckles, for instance, which her hosts say they find seductive. Who would have guessed that the commonplace inscription in brown spots over the bridge of her nose could be subtitled as the gorgeously sibilant, the rich and strange taches de rousseur? Taches, she knows, means “stains”—a vague flavor of Lady Macbeth that only makes the translation more delectable.
Another revelation is the restaurant around her: a three-star shrine on the shores of the Lac d’Annecy. It is about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon at the end of August, and outside the panoramic windows a merciless late-summer sun illuminates the double blue of lake and sky around the bare peaks and pastures of the Savoy region; by contrast, the smoky air in the paneled, upholstered dining room filled with vacationing Europeans is like a bouillon of civilization, a concentrated essence. She will recall it, much later in her life, as Paradise—a standard by which sensual well-being will be measured forever afterward, stamped indelibly in her heart as she sips a house cocktail called Le Lac, a blue curaçao confection that through some casual triumph of artifice exactly reproduces the dominant color of the scene outside.
Anna is no bumpkin: she and her sisters have been dragged thriftily around the capitals of Europe by their parents, a pair of academics who have always displayed the proper American reverence for garlic and old stones, and occasionally even sprung for a fancy meal. And she recognizes the setting from the half-dozen films that have formed part of the prolonged and expensive process of establishing in her soul a small outpost of French culture. She recalls one film in particular: a summer resort, cherry trees, bored men, beautiful neurasthenic women, a tantalizing hint of obsession. Now, suddenly, it is as if she had stepped into the film, as if all those years of conjugating irregular verbs within the excellent Rose Tree Media School District had been preparation for this moment—yes, this very moment, as she holds her blue drink and lifts her eighteen-year-old face to the older Frenchman, whose experienced eye and extravagant praise suggest a wealthy amateur horticulturalist admiring a prize bloom.
Only her clothes, Anna knows, are wrong. She is wearing a pair of heavy tights she uses for ballet, a denim skirt, a tank top, and a pair of sensible Bass sandals that her mother insisted she buy at Campus Corner before she left home. It is the late nineteen seventies, and the other girls and women in the restaurant are all exquisitely dressed in sweeping flowered skirts or elegant tight pants, and sandals or even summer boots with towering heels. When she got out of the taxi this morning, there was a perceptible wince on the part of father and son as they caught sight of her outfit. They are both wearing immaculate jeans and sports jackets, with pale cashmere sweaters thrown over their shoulders. The older man, whose name is Olivier, is at the age that to Anna is simply how old parents and teachers are. He is small and paunchy but strangely emphatic, with a round flat face, a pointed nose, bright green-brown eyes, and wispy colorless hair cut in a precise fringe across his forehead. The son, nineteen years old and much taller, is called Étienne, and he is flat-faced like his father but with a protruding Adam’s apple and blue eyes and a sheeplike tangle of fair curls that she found unattractive when they first met, a few weeks ago, on the flight from Newark to Geneva. At the back of the plane, near the toilets, they talked for twenty minutes in unoccupied seats, and
