They exchange life stories. She tells him about the taunts she and her sisters endured growing up in a mixed-race family in the suburbs. He tells her about the taunts he endured as a boy, in a provincial town in the Ile-de-France, because his parents had never married. Curiously enough, these confidences don’t make them feel closer; instead, they thicken the peculiar mist between them that might be called “glamour”—the opacity that makes them more attractive to each other. He tells her how his father, who left the provinces and got rich doing something with newspapers and politicians, took him off to Paris at age seventeen to be an apprentice at Le Figaro. He brags about the trips he takes to Dakar and Marrakech, and describes an extravagant and disorderly bachelor life in Paris. Eventually, he tells her that he loves her. She trembles and embraces him tightly at this, not because she is moved but because she wants to shake off the tepidness of her own response, to quash a tiny commonsensical voice in the back of her mind which remarks that he must be slightly feebleminded to blurt it out like that. In a tone whose decisiveness, although she does not know it, exactly resembles that of her mother, the Enforcer, Anna says that she loves him, too. In French, which makes it sound so different, so much more important.
They fall asleep and wake up and then sleep again, and after a while it is like being bound and gagged in silk. She is aware only of a series of isolated flashes: his rough curly head, the sound of a horn from the lake, the mineral water they gulp down, the soreness between her legs when she splashes awkwardly in the bidet, how in the deepening light the figures in the frescoes seem to lean out of the walls.
At six o’clock, Étienne says that they should go and join his father. They dress, and he says, You know, I’d like to buy you some nicer underwear. Like French girls wear. White, blue, with lace. He doesn’t let her put on her clumsy skirt and tights. He says, Here, wear my jeans. I have another pair with me. Now you look gorgeous. Like a French girl. She lets him zip the jeans up, as if he were a lady’s maid. They are heavy denim, completely different from American jeans, and they hang loosely but handsomely on her slender hips. By the way, he says as he opens his bag, My father is a misogynist—do you know what that is? He dislikes women, but he really seems to admire you. Not like most of the girls I introduce to him. Isn’t that lucky?
Anna is studying herself within the tessellated gilt frame of a mirror. Complete, as if in an old portrait, she sees a girl in French jeans, her long hair in place, her taches de rousseur, her mascara-smudged eyes, and she doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t seem to expect a reply.
Then they go downstairs and through the lobby, feeling the hotel staff and the well-dressed loiterers watching, observing with approval because the two of them are young and handsome and have clearly been in bed all afternoon. Anna thinks back to an Elizabethan poem she studied in A.P. English the previous fall, in which the poet describes the circles within circles of creation: Heaven, nature, the newly discovered continents, all of civilization revolving around a pair of lovers on a bed. This was what the painted bedroom, the famous restaurant, the omniscient faces of the concierge and the maître d’, the mountains and the lake were created for—as a setting for the small naked object that she and this boy make when they are joined together.
Étienne is behaving like a proper boyfriend now; he wears a stunned expression of bliss while he strolls with his arm tight around her. The sun is beginning to set as they enter the village and pass into a small square where they find his father sitting in a café. Beside him, smiling, is a swarthy young man in a khaki military uniform, who seems hardly older than Étienne. Both the young man and Olivier are drinking glasses of something cloudy, and they are chatting so merrily and confidingly as Anna and Étienne arrive that Anna supposes the soldier must be a family friend, encountered by chance. But no—Olivier introduces him as Paul, and says that he met him a half hour ago, when Paul’s platoon band gave a Saturday-afternoon concert. Paul played the trombone. And I could see he was a very promising young man, Olivier says, in a teasing voice. Paul the soldier turns red at this. He looks as if he might be part Turkish or Algerian, with a melon-shaped head on which his shaved hair makes a bluish shadow, round olive cheeks, jug ears, and a pair of melting brown eyes with bizarrely long eyelashes.
Anna and Étienne sit down at the table and order two more of the cloudy drinks. It is Anna’s first Pernod: with the ghostly licorice taste in her mouth she feels as if she were living in the pages of her sixth-grade French textbook, where Monsieur LeBrun meets Monsieur LeBlanc pour l’apéritif. Étienne acts satisfyingly infatuated, and keeps staring at her, playing with her hands, praising the way she looks in his jeans. The lake is red in the glow from behind the mountains, and elegant people are walking by and sitting around them. Anna spots a tall woman with gold hair piled in a rigid construction of knobs on the back of her head, and a pink suit trimmed in white leather. The woman is intensely beautiful in an adult way that Anna has never seen back home, and Anna announces that she wants to look like that when she’s older.
You will if you want to,
