The Destiny of Nathalie X

The Dream Lover

NONE OF THESE girls is French, right?”

“No. But they’re European.”

“Not the same thing, man. French is crucial.”

“Of course …” I don’t know what he is talking about but it seems politic to agree.

“You know any French girls?”

“Of course,” I say again. This is almost a lie, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.

“But well? I mean well enough to ask out?”

“I don’t see why not.” Now this time we are well into mendacity, but I am unconcerned. I feel good, adult, quite confident today. This lie can germinate and grow for a while.

I am standing in a pale parallelogram of March sunshine, leaning against a wall, talking to my American friend, Preston. The wall belongs to the Centre Universitaire Mediterranéen, a large stuccoed villa on the front at Nice. In front of us is a small cobbled courtyard bounded by a balustrade. Beyond is the Promenade des Anglais, its four lanes busy with Nice’s traffic. Over the burnished roofs of the cars I can see the Mediterranean. The Baie des Anges looks gray and grim in this season: old, tired water — ashy, cindery.

“We got to do something …” Preston says, a hint of petulant desperation in his voice. I like the “we.” Preston scratches his short hard hair noisily. “What with the new apartment and all.”

“You moved out of the hotel?”

“Yeah. Want to come by tonight?” He shifts his big frame as if troubled by a fugitive itch, and pats his pockets — breast, hip, thigh — looking for his cigarettes. “We got a bar on the roof.”

I am intrigued, but I explain that the invitation has to be turned down as it is a Monday, and every Monday night I have a dinner appointment with a French family — friends of friends of my mother’s.

Preston shrugs, then finds and sets fire to a cigarette. He smokes an American brand called “Merit.” When he came to France he brought a hundred packs with him. He has never smoked anything else since he was fourteen, he insists.

We watch our fellow students saunter into the building. They are nearly all strangers to me, these bright boys and girls, as I have been in Nice only a few weeks, and so far, Preston is the only friend I have made. Slightly envious of their easy conviviality, I watch the others chatter and mingle — Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Tunisians, Nigerians … We are all foreigners, trying hard to learn French and win our diplomas … Except for Preston, who makes no effort at all and seems quite content to remain monoglot.

A young guy with long hair rides his motorbike into the courtyard. He is wearing no shirt. He is English and, apart from me, the only other English person in the place. He revs his motorbike unnecessarily a few times before parking it and switching it off. He takes a T-shirt out of a saddlebag and nonchalantly pulls it on. I think how I too would like to own a motorbike and do exactly what he has done … His name is Tim. One day, I imagine, we might be friends. We’ll see.

Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality. He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.

“Ne bouge pas. C’est l’habitué!”

That’s what he calls me—l’habitué. L’habitué de lundi, to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail. He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find this perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful. “Salut, l’habitué,” “Bien mangé, l’habitué?” “Encore du vin, l’habitué?” and so on. But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.

Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with neat spry figures. Both of them are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice. A significant portion of my affection for them is owing to the fact that they have three daughters — Delphine, Stéphane and Annique — all older than me and all possessed of — to my fogged and blurry eyes — an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty. Stéphane and Annique still live with their parents; Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home. These are the French girls that I claimed to know, though “know” is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them. I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them. I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.

I am humbled further when I consider the family’s disarming, disinterested kindness. When I arrived in Nice they were the only contacts I had in the city, and at my mother’s urging, I duly wrote to them citing our tenuous connection via my mother’s friends. To my surprise I was promptly invited to dinner and then invited back every Monday night. What shamed me was that I knew I myself could never be so hospitable so quickly, not even to a close friend, and what was more, I knew no one else who would be, either. So I cross the Cambrai threshold each Monday with a rich cocktail of emotions gurgling inside me: shame, guilt, gratitude, admiration and — it goes without saying — lust.

Preston’s new address is on the Promenade des Anglais itself — the “Résidence Les Anges.” I stand outside the building, looking up, impressed. I have passed it many times before, a distressing and vulgar edifice on this celebrated boulevard, an unadorned rectangle of coppery, smoked glass with stacked ranks of gilded aluminum balconies.

I press a buzzer in a slim, freestanding concrete post and speak into a crackling wire grille. When I mention the name “Mr. Fairchild,” glass doors part softly and I am admitted to a bare granite lobby where a taciturn man in a tight suit shows me to the lift.

Preston rents a small studio apartment with a bathroom and kitchenette. It is a neat, pastel-colored and efficient module. On the wall are a series of prints of exotic birds: a toucan, a bateleur eagle, something called a blue shrike. As I stand there looking around I think of my own temporary home, my thin room in Madame d’Amico’s ancient, dim apartment, and the inefficient and bathless bathroom I have to share with her other lodgers, and a sudden hot envy rinses through me. I half hear Preston enumerating various financial consequences of his tenancy: how much this studio costs a month; the outrageous supplement he had to pay even to rent it in the first place; and how he had been obliged to cash in his return fare to the States (first-class) in order to meet it. He says he has called his father for more money.

We ride up to the roof, six stories above the Promenade. To my vague alarm there is a small swimming pool up here and a large glassed-in cabana — furnished with a bamboo bar and some rattan seats — labeled Club Les Anges in neon copperplate. A barman in a short cerise jacket runs this place, a portly, pale-faced fellow with a poor mustache whose name is Serge. Although Preston jokes patronizingly with him it is immediately quite clear to me both that Serge loathes Preston and that Preston is completely unaware of this powerful animus directed against him.

I order a large gin and tonic from Serge and for a shrill palpitating minute I loathe Preston too. I know there are many better examples on offer, of course, but for the time being this shiny building and its accoutrements will do nicely as an approximation of The Good Life for me. And as I sip my sour drink a sour sense of the world’s huge unfairness crowds ruthlessly in. Why should this guileless, big American, barely older than me, with his two thousand cigarettes and his cashable first-class air tickets have all this … while I live in a narrow frowsty room in an old woman’s decrepit apartment? My straitened circumstances are caused by a seemingly interminable postal strike in Britain which means money cannot be transferred to my Nice account and I have to husband my financial resources like a neurotic peasant conscious of a hard winter lowering ahead. Where is my money, I want to know, my exotic bird prints, my club, my pool? How long will I have to wait before these artifacts become the commonplace of my life?… I allow this unpleasant voice to whine and whinge on in my head as we stand on the terrace and admire the view of the bay. One habit I have already learned, even at my age, is not to resist these fervent grudges — give them a loose rein, let them run themselves out, it is always better in the long run.

In fact I am drawn to Preston and want him to be my friend. He is tall and powerfully built — the word “rangy” comes to mind — affable and not particularly intelligent. To my eyes his clothes are so parodically American as to be beyond caricature: pale blue baggy shirts with button-down collars, old khaki trousers short enough to reveal his white-socked ankles and big brown loafers. He has fair, short hair and even, unexceptionable features. He has a gold watch, a Zippo lighter and an ugly ring with a red stone set in it. He told me once, in all candor, in all modesty, that he “played tennis to Davis Cup standard.”

I always wondered what he was doing in Nice, studying at the Centre. At first I thought he might be a draftee avoiding the war in Vietnam but I now suspect — based on some hints he has dropped — that he has been sent off to France as an obscure punishment of some sort. His family doesn’t want him at home: he has done something wrong and these months in Nice are his penance.

But hardly an onerous one, that’s for sure: he has no interest in his classes — those he can be bothered to take — or in the language and culture of France. He simply has to endure this exile and he will be allowed to go back home, where, I imagine, he will resume his soft life of casual privilege and unreflecting ease once more. He talks a good deal about his eventual return to the States, where he plans to impose his own particular punishment, or extract his own special reward. He says he will force his father to buy him an Aston Martin. His father will have no say in the matter, he remarks with untypical vehemence and determination. He will have his Aston Martin, and it is the bright promise of this glossy English car that really seems to sustain him through these dog days on the Mediterranean littoral.

Soon I find I am a regular visitor at the Résidence Les Anges, where I go most afternoons after my classes are over. Preston and I sit in the club, or by the pool if it is sunny, and drink. We consume substantial amounts (it all goes on his tab) and consequently I am usually fairly drunk by sunset. Our conversation ranges far and wide, but at some point in every discussion Preston reiterates his desire to meet French girls. If I do indeed know some French girls, he says, why don’t I ask them to the club? I reply that I am working on it, and coolly change the subject.

Over the days, steadily I learn more about my American friend. He is an only child. His father (who has not responded to his requests for money) is a millionaire — real estate. His mother divorced him recently to marry another, richer millionaire. Between his two sets of millionaire parents Preston has a choice of eight homes to visit in and around the USA: in Miami, New York, Palm Springs and a ranch in Montana. Preston dropped out of college after two semesters and does not work.

“Why should I?” he argues reasonably. “They’ve got more than enough money for me too. Why should I bust my ass working trying to earn more?”

“But isn’t it … What do you do all day?”

“All kinds of shit … But mostly I like to play tennis a lot. And I like to fuck, of course.”

“So why did you come to Nice?”

He grins. “I was a bad boy.” He slaps his wrist and laughs. “Naughty, naughty Preston.”

He won’t tell me what he did.

It is Spring in Nice. Each day we start to enjoy a little more sunshine, and whenever it appears, within ten minutes there is a particular girl, lying on the plage publique in front of the Centre, sunbathing. Often I stand and watch her spread out there, still, supine, on the cool pebbles — the only sunbather along the entire bay. It turns out she is well known, that this is a phenomenon that occurs every year. By early summer her tan is solidly established and she is very brown indeed. By August she is virtually black, with that kind of dense, matte tan, the life burned out of the skin, her pores brimming with melanin. Her ambition each year, they say, is to be the brownest girl on the Côte d’Azur …

I watch her lying there, immobile beneath the iridescent rain of ultraviolet. It is definitely not warm — even in my jacket and scarf I shiver slightly in the fresh breeze. How can she be bothered? I wonder, but at the same time I have to admit there is something admirable in such single-mindedness, such ludicrous dedication.

Eventually I take my first girl to the Club to meet Preston. Her name is Ingrid, she is in my class, a Norwegian, but with dark auburn hair. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly, uncomplicated soul. She speaks perfect English and German.

“Are you French?” Preston asks, almost immediately.

Ingrid is very amused by this. “I’m Norwegian,” she explains. “Is it important?”

I apologize to Preston when Ingrid goes off to change into her swimming costume, but he waves it away, not to worry, he says, she’s cute. Ingrid returns and we sit in the sun and order the first of our many drinks. Ingrid, after some prompting, smokes one of Preston’s Merit cigarettes. The small flaw that emerges to mar our pleasant afternoon is that the more Ingrid drinks, the more her conversation becomes increasingly dominated by references to a French boy she is seeing called Jean-Jacques. Preston hides his disappointment; he is the acme of good manners.

Later we play poker using cheese biscuits as chips. Ingrid sits opposite me in her multicolored swimsuit. She is plumper than I had imagined, and I decide that if I had to sum her up in one word it would be “homely.” Except for one detail: she has very hairy armpits. On one occasion she sits back in her chair, studying her cards for a full minute, her free hand idly scratching a bite on the back of her neck. Both Preston’s and my eyes are drawn to the thick divot of auburn hair that is revealed by this gesture: we stare at it, fascinated, as Ingrid deliberates whether to call or raise.

After she has gone Preston confesses that he found her unshavenness quite erotic. I am not so sure.

That night we sit in the Club long into the night, as usual the place’s sole customers, with Serge unsmilingly replenishing our drinks as Preston calls for them. Ingrid’s presence, the unwitting erotic charge that she has detonated in our normally tranquil, bibulous afternoons, seems to have unsettled and troubled Preston somewhat, and without any serious prompting on my part he tells me why he has come to Nice. He informs me that the man his mother remarried was a widower, an older man, with four children already in their twenties. When Preston dropped out of college he went to stay with his mother and new stepfather.

He exhales, he eats several olives, his face goes serious and solemn for a moment.

“This man, Michael, had three daughters — and a son, who was already married — and, man, you should have seen those girls.” He grins, a stupid, gormless grin. “I was eighteen years old and I got three beautiful girls sleeping down the corridor from me. What am I supposed to do?”

The answer, unvoiced, seemed to slip into the Club like a draft of air. I felt my spine tauten.

“You mean—?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I didn’t want to speak, so I think through this. I imagine a big silent house, night, long dark corridors, closed doors. Three bored blond tanned stepsisters. Suddenly there’s a tall young man in the house, a virtual stranger, who plays tennis to Davis Cup standard.

“What went wrong?” I manage.

“Oldest one, Janie, got pregnant, didn’t she? Last year.”

“Abortion?”

“Are you kidding? She just married her fiancé real fast.”

“You mean she was engaged when—”

“He doesn’t know a thing. But she told my mother.”

“The, the child was—”

“Haven’t seen him yet.” He turns and calls for Serge. “No one knows for sure, no one suspects …” He grins again. “Let’s hope the kid doesn’t start smoking Merits.” He reflects on his life a moment, and turns his big mild face to me. “That’s why I’m here. Keeping my head down. Not exactly flavor-of-the-month back home.”

The next girl I take to the Club is also a Scandinavian — we have eight in our class — but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blond hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unself-conscious about her disability.

“Hi,” Preston says. “Are you French?”

Danni hides her incredulity. “Mais oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.” Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake and makes light of his disappointment.

Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.) Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.

“Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.”

This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do, as there is no one else in the Club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious, and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston, “Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.”

“Fuck you, Serge,” he says amiably, and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is overt, almost a challenge.

After Danni has left, Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the Club now stands at over four hundred dollars and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for five hundred francs.

I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the Club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses of luxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the Club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks …

Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions — I feel vaguely pimplike, oddly smirched — that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.

Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like 90 percent of students, she has chosen American.

I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently inquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?

The next morning, on my way down the rue de France to the Centre, I see Preston standing outside a pharmacy reading the Herald Tribune. I call his name and cross the road to tell him the excellent news about Annique.

“You won’t believe this,” I say, “but I finally got a real French girl.”

Preston’s face looks odd: half a smile, half a morose grimace of disappointment.

“That’s great,” he says dully, “wonderful.”

A tall, slim girl steps out of the pharmacy and hands him a plastic bag.

“This is Lois,” he says. We shake hands.

I know who Lois is, Preston has often spoken of her: my damn-near fiancée, he calls her. It transpires that Lois has flown over spontaneously and unannounced to visit him.

“And, boy, are my mom and dad mad as hell,” she says, laughing.

Lois is a pretty girl, with a round, innocent face quite free of makeup. She is tall — even in her sneakers she is as tall as me — with a head of incredibly thick, dense brown hair which, for some reason, I associate particularly with American girls. I feel sure also, though as yet I have no evidence, that she is a very clean person — physically clean, I mean to say — someone who showers and washes regularly, smelling of soap and the lingering farinaceous odor of talcum powder.

I stroll back with them to the Résidence. Lois’s arrival has temporarily solved Preston’s money problems: they have cashed in her return ticket and paid off the bar bill and the next quarter’s rent that had come due. Preston feels rich enough to buy back his watch from me.

Annique looks less mature and daunting in her swimsuit, I’m pleased to say, though I was disappointed that she favored a demure apple-green one-piece. The pool’s heater has been “fixed” and for the first time we all swim in the small azure rectangle — Preston and Lois, Annique and me. It is both strange and exciting for me to see Annique so comparatively unclothed and even stranger to lie side by side, thigh by thigh, inches apart, sunbathing.

Lois obviously assumes Annique and I are a couple — a quite natural assumption under the circumstances, I suppose — she would never imagine I had brought her for Preston. I keep catching him gazing at Annique, and a mood of frustration and intense sadness seems to emanate from him — a mood of which only I am aware. And in turn a peculiar exhilaration builds inside me, not just because of Lois’s innocent assumption about my relation to Annique, but also because I know now that I have succeeded. I have brought Preston the perfect French girl: Annique, by his standards, represents the paradigm, the Platonic ideal for this American male. Here she is, unclothed, lying by his pool, in his club, drinking his drinks, but he can do nothing — and what makes my own excitement grow is the realization that for the first time in our friendship — perhaps for the first time in his life — Preston envies another person. Me.

As this knowledge dawns, so too does my impossible love for Annique. Impossible, because nothing will ever happen. I know that — but Preston doesn’t, and somehow that ghostly love affair, our love affair, Annique and me, that will carry on in Preston’s head, in his hot and tormented imagination, embellished and elaborated by his disappointment and sense of lost opportunity, will be more than enough, more than I could ever have hoped for.

Now that Lois has arrived I stay away from the Résidence Les Anges. It won’t be the same again and, despite my secret delight, I don’t want to taunt Preston with the spectre of Annique. But I find that without the spur of his envy the tender fantasy inevitably dims; in order for my dream life, my dream love, to flourish, I need to share it with Preston. I decide to pay a visit. Preston opens the door of his studio.

“Hi, stranger,” he says with some enthusiasm. “Am I glad to see you.” He seems sincere. I follow him into the apartment. The small room is untidy, the bed unmade, the floor strewn with female clothes. I hear the noise of the shower from the bathroom: Lois may be a clean person but it is clear she is also something of a slut.

“How are things with Annique?” he asks, almost at once, as casually as he can manage. He has to ask, I know it.

I look at him. “Good.” I let the pause develop, pregnant with innuendo. “No, they’re good.”

His nostrils flare and he shakes his head.

“God, you’re one lucky—”

Lois comes in from the bathroom in a dressing gown, toweling her thick hair dry.

“Hi, Edward,” she says, “what’s new?” Then she sits down on the bed and begins to weep.

We stand and look at her as she sobs quietly.

“It’s nothing,” Preston says. “She just wants to go home.” He tells me that neither of them has left the building for eight days. They are completely, literally, penniless. Lois’s parents have canceled her credit cards, and collect calls home have failed to produce any response. Preston has been unable to locate his father and now his stepfather refuses to speak to him (a worrying sign), and although his mother would like to help she is powerless for the moment, given Preston’s fall from grace. Preston and Lois have been living on a diet of olives, peanuts and cheese biscuits served up in the bar and, of course, copious alcohol.

“Yeah, but now we’re even banned from there,” Lois says, with an unfamiliar edge to her voice.

“Last night I beat up on that fuckwit, Serge,” Preston explains with a shrug. “Something I had to do.”

He goes on to enumerate their other problems: their bar bill stands at over three hundred dollars; Serge is threatening to go to the police unless he is compensated; the management has grown hostile and suspicious.

“We got to get out of here,” Lois says miserably. “I hate it here, I hate it.”

Preston turns to me. “Can you help us out?” he says. I feel laughter erupt within me.

I stand in Nice station and hand Preston two train tickets to Luxembourg and two one-way Iceland Air tickets to New York. Lois reaches out to touch them as if they were sacred relics.

“You’ve got a six-hour wait in Reykjavik for your connection,” I tell him, “but, believe me, there is no cheaper way to fly.”

I bask in their voluble gratitude for a while. They have no luggage with them, as they could not be seen to be quitting the Résidence. Preston says his father is now in New York and assures me I will be reimbursed the day they arrive. I have spent almost everything I possess on these tickets, but I don’t care — I am intoxicated with my own generosity and the strange power it has conferred on me. Lois leaves us to go in search of a toilet and Preston embraces me in a clumsy hug. “I won’t forget this, man,” he says many times. We celebrate our short but intense friendship and affirm its continuance, but all the while I am waiting for him to ask me — I can feel the question growing in his head like a tumor. Through the crowds of passengers we see Lois making her way back. He doesn’t have much time left.

“Listen,” he begins, his voice low, “did you and Annique …? I mean, are you—”

“We’ve been looking for an apartment. That’s why you haven’t seen much of me.”

“Jesus …”

Lois calls out something about the train timetable, but we are not listening. Preston seems to be trembling, he turns away, and when he turns back I see the pale fires of impotent resentment light his eyes.

I look at him in that way men look at each other. And then I say, “Are you fucking her?”

“Why else would we be looking for an apartment?” Lois arrives and immediately notices Preston’s taut face, oddly pinched. “What’s going on?” Lois asks. “Are you OK?”

Preston gestures at me, as if he can’t pronounce my name. “Annique … They’re moving in together.”

Lois squeals. She’s so pleased, she really is, she really really likes Annique.

By the time I see them onto the train Preston has calmed down and our final farewells are sincere. He looks around the modest station intently as if trying to record its essence, as if now he wished to preserve something of this city he inhabited so complacently, with such an absence of curiosity.

“God, it’s too bad,” he says with an exquisite fervor. “I know I could have liked Nice. I know. I really could.”

I back off, wordless, this is too good, this is too generous of him. This is perfect.

“Give my love to Annique,” Preston says quietly, as Lois calls loud goodbyes.

“Don’t worry,” I say, looking at Preston. “I will.”