The Destiny of Nathalie X

Alpes-Maritimes

ANNELIESE, ULRICKE AND I go into Steve’s sitting room. Steve is sitting at a table writing a letter. “Hi,” he says, not looking up. “Won’t be a second.” He scribbles his name and seals the letter in an envelope as the three of us watch him, wordlessly. He stands up and turns to face us. His long clean hair, brushed straight back from his forehead, falls to his shoulders. Perhaps it’s something to do with the dimness of the room but, against the pale ghost of his swimming trunks, his cock seems oddly pigmented — almost brown.

“Make yourselves at home,” he says. “I’ll just go put some clothes on.”

I have a girl now — Ulricke — and so everything should be all right. And it is, I suppose, except that I want Anneliese, her twin sister. I look closely at Anneliese to see her reaction to Steve’s nakedness (Steve wants Anneliese too). She and Ulricke smile at each other. They both press their lips together with a hand, their eyes thin with delighted amusement at Steve’s eccentricity. Automatically I smile too, but in fact I am covered in a hot shawl of irritation as I recall Steve’s long-stride saunter from the room, his calmness, his unconcern.

Bent comes in. He is Steve’s flat-mate, a ruddy Swede, bespectacled, with a square bulging face and unfortunate frizzy hair.

“Does he always do that?” Anneliese asks.

“I’m afraid so,” Bent says, ruefully. “He comes in — he removes his clothes.”

The girls surrender themselves to their laughter. I ask for a soft drink.

It wasn’t easy to meet Ulricke. She and Anneliese were doing a more advanced course than me at the Centre and so our classes seldom coincided. I remember being struck by rare glimpses of this rather strong-looking fashionable girl. I think it was Anneliese that I saw first, but I can’t be sure. But the fact is that the one I met was Ulricke. How was I meant to know they were twins? By the time I discovered that those glimpses were not of one and the same person it was too late.

One lunchtime I was walking up to the university restaurant by the Faculté de Droit (the restauru by the fac, as the French have it) when I heard my name called.

“Edward!” I turned.

It was Henni, a Finnish girl I knew, with Anneliese. At least I thought it was Anneliese but it turned out to be Ulricke. Until you know them both it’s very hard to spot the difference.

We had lunch together. Then Ulricke and I went for coffee to a bar called Le Pub Latin. We spoke French, I with some difficulty. There was no mention of a twin sister that first day, no Anneliese. I talked about my father; I lied modestly about my age, with more élan about my ambitions. Soon Ulricke interrupted to tell me that she spoke very good English. After that it was much easier.

Ulricke: tall, broad-shouldered, with a round, good-complexioned face — though her cheeks and nose tend to develop a shine as the day wears on — thick straight peanut-colored hair parted in the middle … She and Anneliese are not-quite-identical twins. To be candid, Anneliese is prettier, though in compensation Ulricke has the sweeter temperament, as they say. Recently, Anneliese has streaked her hair blond, which, as well as distinguishing her from her sister (too late, too late), adds, in my opinion, dramatically to her attractiveness. In Bremen, where they live (father a police inspector), they were both prizewinning gymnasts as youngsters. Ulricke told me that they ceased entering competitions “after our bosoms grew,” but the strenuous training has left them with the legacy of sturdy well-developed frames. They are thin-hipped and broad-shouldered, with abnormally powerful deltoid muscles that give their figures a tapered manly look.

Steve returns, in pale jeans, sandals and a cheesecloth smock-shirt he brought back from his last trip to Morocco. He pours wine for everyone. Steve is a New Zealander, somewhat older than the rest of us — late twenties, possibly even thirty. He is very clean, almost obsessive about his cleanliness, always showering, always attending to the edges of his body — the calluses on his toes, his teeth, his cuticles. He has a mustache, a neat blond General Custer affair that curls up at the ends. It’s a similarity — to General Custer — which is amplified by his wavy shoulder-length brown hair. He has spent several years traveling the Mediterranean — Rhodes, Turkey, Ibiza, Hammamet. It’s quite likely that he sells drugs to support himself. He’s not rich, but he’s not poor either. None of us knows where he gets his money. On his return from his last Moroccan trip he had also purchased a mid-calf, butter-colored Afghan coat that I covet. I’ve known him vaguely since I arrived in Nice, but lately, because of his interest in Anneliese, I tend to see him rather more often than I would wish. Whenever I get the chance I criticize Steve for Anneliese’s benefit, but subtly, as if my reservations were merely the result of a disinterested study of human nature. Just before we arrived at the flat I managed to get Anneliese to admit that there was something unappealingly sinister about Steve. Now, when he’s out of earshot, we exchange remarks about his nudism. I don’t believe the girls find it as offensive as I do.

“I think it’s the height of selfishness,” I say. “I didn’t ask to see his penis.”

The girls and Bent laugh.

“I think he’s strange,” Anneliese says, with a curious expression on her face. I can’t tell if she finds this alluring or not.

Ulricke and I continued to see each other. Soon I learned about the existence of Anneliese, duly met her and realized my mistake. But by then I was “associated” with Ulricke. To switch attention to Anneliese would have hurt and offended her sister, and with Ulricke hurt and offended, Anneliese would be bound to take her side. I found myself trapped; both irked and tantalized. I came to see Anneliese almost as often as I saw Ulricke. She appeared to like me — to my deep chagrin we became “friends.”

I forced myself to concentrate on Ulricke — to whom I was genuinely attracted — but she was only the shadow on the cave wall, so to speak. Of course I was discreet and tactful: Ulricke — and Anneliese at first — knew nothing of my real desires. But as the bonds between the three of us developed I came to think of other solutions. I realized I could never “possess” Anneliese in the way I did her twin; I could never colonize or settle my real affections in her person with her approval … And so I resolved to make her instead a sphere of influence — unilaterally, and without permission, to extend my stewardship and protection over her. If I couldn’t have her, then no one else should.

“When ought we to go to Cherry’s, do you think?” Bent asks in his precise grammar. We discuss the matter. Cherry is an American girl of iridescent, unreal — and therefore perfectly inert — beauty. She lives in a villa high above the coast at Villefranche which she shares with some other girl students from a college in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They stick closely and rather chastely together, these American girls, as their guileless amiability landed them in trouble when they first arrived in Nice. The Tunisian boys at the Centre would ask them back to their rooms for a cup of coffee, and the girls, being friendly, intrigued to meet foreigners and welcoming the opportunity to practice their execrable French, happily accepted. And then when the Tunisian boys tried to fuck them they were outraged. The baffled Tunisians couldn’t understand the tears, the slaps, the threats. Surely, they reasoned, if a girl agrees to have a cup of coffee in your room there is only one thing on her mind? As a result, the girls moved out of Nice to their high villa in Villefranche, where — apart from their classes at the Centre — they spent most of their time, and their French deteriorated beyond redemption. Soon they could only associate with Anglophones and all yearned to return to the USA. They were strange gloomy exiles, these girls, like passengers permanently in transit. The present moment — always the most important — held nothing for them. Their tenses were either past or future; their moods nostalgia or anticipation. And now one of their number — Cherry — was breaking out, her experiences in Nice having confirmed her in her desire to be a wife. She was returning to marry her bemused beau, and tonight was her farewell party.

We decided to go along, to make our way to Villefranche. Mild Bent has a car — a VW — but he says he has to detour to pick up his girlfriend. Ulricke announces that she and I will hitchhike. Steve and Anneliese can go with Bent, she says. I want to protest, but say nothing.

Ulricke and Anneliese live in a large converted villa, prewar, up by the Fac de Lettres at Magnan. They rent a large room in a ground-floor flat that belongs to an Uruguayan poet (he teaches Spanish literature at the university) called César.

One night — not long after our first meetings — I’m walking Ulricke home. It’s quite late. I promise myself that if we get to the villa after midnight I’ll ask if I can stay, as it’s a long walk back to my room in the rue Dante down in the city. Dependable Ulricke invites me in for a cup of coffee. At the back of the flat the windows are at ground level and overlook a garden. Ulricke and Anneliese use them as doors to avoid passing through the communal hall. We clamber through the window and into the room. It is big, bare and clean. There are two beds, a bright divan and some wooden chairs that have recently been painted a shiny new red. A few cute drawings have been pinned on the wall and there is a single houseplant, flourishing almost indecently from all the attention it receives — the leaves always dark green and glossy, the earth in the pot moist and leveled. The rest of the flat is composed of César’s bedroom, his study, a kitchen and bathroom.

We drink our coffee, we talk — idly, amicably. Anneliese is late, out at the cinema with friends. I look at my watch: it is after midnight. I make my request and Ulricke offers me the divan. There is a moment, after we have stripped off the coverlet and tucked in an extra blanket, when we both stand quite close to each other. I lean in her direction, a hand weakly touches her shoulder, we kiss. We sit down on the bed. It is all pleasantly uncomplicated and straightforward.

When Anneliese returns she seems pleased to see me. After more coffee and conversation, the girls change discreetly into their pajamas in the bathroom. While they’re gone I undress to my underpants and socks and slide into bed. The girls come back, the lights go out and we exchange cheery bonsoirs.

On the hard small divan I lie awake in the dark, Ulricke and Anneliese sleeping in their beds a few feet away. I feel warm, content, secure — like a member of a close and happy family, as if Ulricke and Anneliese were my sisters and beyond the door in the quiet house lay our tender parents …

In the morning I meet César. He is thin and febrile, with tousled dry hair. He speaks fast but badly flawed English. We talk about London, where he lived for two years before coming to Nice. Ulricke tells me that as a poet he is really quite famous in Uruguay. Also she tells me that he had an affair with Anneliese when the girls first moved in — but now they’re just friends. Unfortunately, this forces a change in my attitude toward César: I like him, but resentment will always distance us now. Whenever he and Anneliese talk I find myself searching for vestiges of their former intimacy — but there seems nothing there anymore.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn. We all own and forge an image of others in our minds which is inviolable and private. We make those private images public at our peril. Revelation is an audacious move to be long pondered. Unfortunately, this impulse occurs when we are least able to control it, when we’re distracted by love — or hate …

But we can possess others without their ever being truly aware of it. For example, I possess Steve and Anneliese in ways they could never imagine.

I often wonder what Anneliese thinks about while Ulricke and I are fucking across the room from her. Is she irritated? Curious? Happy? The intimacy of our domestic setup causes me some embarrassment at first, but the girls seem quite unperturbed. I affect a similar insouciance. But although we live in such proximity we maintain a bizarrely prim decorum. We don’t wander around naked. Ulricke and I undress while Anneliese is in the bathroom, or else with the lights out. I have yet to see Anneliese naked. And she’s always with us too — Ulricke and I have never spent a night alone. Since her affair with César she has had no boyfriend. My vague embarrassment swiftly departs and I begin to enjoy Anneliese’s presence during the night — like some mute and unbelievably lax chaperone. One day, to my regret, she tells me how happy she is that Ulricke “has” me; how pleased she is that we are together. The twin sisters are typically close; Anneliese is the more self-composed and confident and she feels protective toward Ulricke, who’s more vulnerable and easily hurt. I reassure her of my sincerity and try not to let the strain show on my face.

With some dismay I watch Steve — an exotic figure in his Afghan coat and flowing hair — join Anneliese in the back of Bent’s VW. Ulricke and I wave them on their way, then we walk down the road from the apartment block toward the Promenade des Anglais. Although it is after nine o’clock the night air is not unpleasantly cool. For the first time the spring chill has left the air — a presage of the bright summer to come. We walk down rue de la Buffa and cut over to the rue de France. The whores in the boutique doorways seem pleased at the clemency of the weather. They call across the street to each other in clear voices; some of them even wear hot pants.

It’s not that warm. Ulricke wears a white PVC raincoat and a scarf. I put my arm around her shoulders and hear the crackle of the plastic material. The glow from the streetlamps sets highlights in the shine on her nose and cheeks … I worry about Steve and Anneliese in the back of Bent’s car.

I begin to spend more and more nights at Ulricke’s. Madame d’Amico, my landlady, makes no comment on my prolonged absences. I visit my small room in her flat regularly to change my clothes but I find myself increasingly loath to spend nights alone there. Its fusty smell, its dismal view of the interior courtyard, the dull conversations with my fellow lodgers, depress me. I am happy to have exchanged lonely independence for the hugger-mugger intimacy of the villa. Indeed, for a week or so life there becomes even more cramped. The twins are joined by a girlfriend from Bremen, called Clara — twenty-two, sharp-faced, candid — in disgrace with her parents and spending a month or two visiting friends while waiting for tempers back home to cool. I ask her what she has done. She says she had an affair with her father’s business partner and oldest friend. This was discovered, and the ramifications of the scandal spread to the boardroom: suits are being filed, resignations demanded, takeover bids plotted. Clara seems quite calm about it all, her only regret being that her lover’s daughter — who hitherto had been her constant companion since childhood — now refuses to see or speak to her. Whole lives are irreparably askew.

Clara occupies the divan. She sleeps naked and is less concerned with privacy than the other girls. I find I relish the dormitory-like aspect of our living arrangements even more. At night I lie docilely beside Ulricke, listening to the three girls talking in German. I can’t understand a word — they could be talking about me, for all I know. Clara smokes French cigarettes and their pleasant sour smell lingers in the air after the lights are switched out. Ulricke and I wait for a diplomatic five minutes or so before making love. That fragrance of Gauloises or Gitanes is forever associated with those tense palpitating moments of darkness: Ulricke’s warm strong body, the carnal anticipation, the sounds of Clara and Anneliese settling themselves in their beds, their fake yawns.

On the Promenade des Anglais the shiny cars sweep by. Ulricke and I stick out our thumbs, goosing the air. We always get lifts immediately and have freely hitched, usually with Anneliese, the length of the Côte d’Azur, from Saint-Raphaël to Menton, at all hours of the day or night. One warmish evening, near Aix-en-Provence, the three of us decided spontaneously to sleep out in a wood. We huddled up in blankets and awoke at dawn to find ourselves quite soaked with dew.

A car stops. The driver — a man — is going to Monte Carlo. We ask him to take the haute corniche. Cherry’s villa is perched so high above the town that the walk up from the coast road is exhausting. Ulricke sits in the front — the sex of the driver determines our position. To our surprise we have found that very often single women will stop for the three of us. They are much more generous than the men as a rule: in our travels the women frequently buy us drinks and meals, and once we were given a hundred francs. Something about the three of us prompts this largesse. There is, I feel, something charmed about us as a trio, Ulricke, Anneliese and me. This is why — quite apart from his rebarbative personal habits — I so resent Steve. He is an interloper, an intruder: his presence, his interest in Anneliese, threatens me, us. The trio becomes a banal foursome, or — even worse — two couples.

From the small terrace at Cherry’s villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbor lights and the headlamps of cars on the coast road. The dim noise of traffic, the sonic rip of some lout’s motorbike, drift upward to the villa, competing with the thump and chords of music from inside. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — Live, The Yes Album, Hunky Dory … curious how these LPs pin and fix humdrum moments of our lives — precise as almanacs. An ars brevis for the quotidian.

The exquisite Cherry patrols her guests, enveloped in a fug of genial envy from her girlfriends. It’s not her impending marriage that prompts this emotion so much as the prospect of the “real” Coca-Cola, “real” milk and “real” meat she will be able to consume a few days hence. The girls from Ann Arbor reminisce indefatigably about American meals they have known. To them, France, Nice, is a period of abstention, a penance for which they will be rewarded in calories and carbohydrates when they return home.

I stroll back inside to check on Steve and Anneliese. My mistake was to have allowed them to travel together in Bent’s car. It conferred an implicit acknowledgment of their “coupledom” on them without Steve having to do anything about it. Indeed he seems oddly passive with regard to Anneliese, as if content to bide his time. Perhaps he is a little frightened of her? Perhaps it’s his immense vanity: time itself will impress upon her the logic and inevitability of their union …? Now I see him sitting as close to Anneliese as possible, as if adjacency alone were sufficient to possess her.

Ulricke talks to Bent’s girlfriend, Gudrun, another Scandinavian. We are a polyglot crew at the Centre — almost every European country represented. Tonight you can hear six distinct languages … I pour myself a glass of wine from an unlabeled bottle. There is plenty to drink. I had brought a bottle of Martini & Rossi as my farewell present to Cherry but left it in my coat pocket when I saw the quantity of wine on offer.

The wine is cold and rough. Decanted no doubt from some huge barrel in the local cave. It is cheap and not very potent. We were drinking this wine the night of my audacity.

César had a party for some of his students in the Spanish Lit course. After strenuous consumption most people had managed to get very drunk. César sang Uruguayan folk songs — perhaps they were his poems, for all I know — to his own inept accompaniment on the guitar. I saw Anneliese collect some empty bottles and leave the room. Moments later I followed. The kitchen was empty. Then from the hall I saw the bathroom door ajar. I pushed it open. Anneliese was reapplying her lipstick.

“I won’t be long,” she said.

I went up behind her and put my arm around her. The gesture was friendly, fraternal. She leaned back, pursing, pouting and repursing her lips to spread the orange lipstick. We talked at our reflections.

“Good party,” I said.

“César may be a poet but he cannot sing.”

We laughed, I squeezed. It was all good fun. Then I covered her breasts with my hands. I looked at our reflection: our faces side by side, my hands claws on her chest.

“Anneliese …” I began, revealing everything in one word, watching her expression register, interpret, change.

“Hey, tipsy boy,” she laughed, clever girl, reaching around to slap my side. “I’m not Ulricke.”

We broke apart; I heeled a little, drunkenly. We grinned, friends again. But the moment lay between us, like a secret. Now she knew.

The party is breaking up. People drift away. I look at Steve, he seems to have his arm around Anneliese. Ulricke joins me.

“What’s happening?” I ask Steve.

“Cliff’s taking us down to the town. He says they may be at the café tonight.”

I confirm this with Cliff, who, improbably, is French. He’s a dull, inoffensive person who — we have discovered to our surprise — runs drug errands for the many tax-exiled rock musicians who while away their time on the Côte d’Azur. Every now and then these stars and their retinue emerge from the fastnesses of their wired-off villas and patronize a café on the harbor front at Villefranche. People sit around and gawp at the personalities and speculate about the hangers-on — the eerie thugs, the haggard, pale women, the brawling kids.

A dozen of us set off. We stroll down the sloping road as it meanders in a sequence of hairpins down the steep face of the hills to the bright town spangling below. Steve, I notice, is holding hands with Anneliese. I hate the look on his face: king leer. I feel a sudden unbearable anger. What right has he got to do this, to sidle into our lives, to take possession of Anneliesen hand in that way?

The four of us and Cliff have dropped back from the others. Cliff, in fractured English, is telling us of his last visit to the rock star’s villa. I’m barely listening — something to do with a man and a chicken … I look back. Anneliese and Steve have stopped. He removes his Afghan coat and places it capelike around Anneliese’s shoulders. He gives a mock-chivalric bow and Anneliese curtsies. These gestures, I recognize with alarm, are the early foundations of a couple’s private language — actions, words and shared memories whose meaning and significance only they can interpret and which exclude the world at large. But at the same time they tell me that nothing intimate — no kiss, no caress — has yet passed between them. I have only moments left to me.

The other members of our party have left the road and entered a narrow gap between houses which is the entrance to a thin defile of steps — some hundred yards long — that cuts down the hill directly to the town below. The steps are steep and dark with many an illogical angle and turn. From below I hear the clatter of descending feet and excited cries. Cliff goes first, Ulricke follows. I crouch to tie a shoelace. Anneliese passes. I jump up and with the slightest of tussles insinuate myself between her and Steve.

In the dark cleft of the steps there is just room for two people to pass. I put my hands on the rough iron handrails and slow my pace. Anneliese skips down behind Ulricke. Steve bumps at my back. Soon I can barely make out Anneliese’s blond hair.

“Can I get by, please?”

I ignore Steve, although he’s treading on my heels. Below me Anneliese turns a bend out of sight.

“Come on, for God’s sake.”

“Bit tricky in the dark.”

Roughly, Steve attempts to wrest my arm from the handrail. He swears. I stop dead, lock my elbows and brace myself against his shoving.

“You English fuck!” He punches me quite hard in the back. I run down the steps to a narrow landing where they make a turn. I face Steve. He is lean and slightly taller than me, but I’m not interested in physical prowess, only delay. Farther down the flights of steps the sound of footfalls grows ever fainter. I hold the bridge. Steve is panting.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he says. “Who do you think you are? Her father? You don’t own these girls, you know.”

He takes a swing at me. I duck my head and his knuckles jar painfully on my skull. Steve lets out a yip of pain. Through photomatic violet light I lunge at him as he massages blood into his numbed fist. With surprising ease I manage to throw him heavily to the ground. At once I turn and spring down the steps. I take them five at a time, my fingertips brushing the handrails like outriggers.

Ulricke and Anneliese are waiting at the bottom. The others have gone on to the harbor front. I seize their hands.

“Quickly,” I say. “This way!”

Astonished, the girls run with me, laughing and questioning. We run down back streets. Eventually we stop.

“What happened?” Anneliese asks.

“Steve attacked me,” I say. “Suddenly — tried to hit me. I don’t know why.”

Our feet crunch on the pebbles as we walk along Villefranche’s plage publique. I pass the Martini bottle to Ulricke, who stops to take a swig. We have discussed Steve and his neuroses for a pleasant hour. At the end of the bay’s curve a small green hut is set on the edge of the coast road. It juts out over the beach, where it is supported by thick wooden piles. We settle down here, sheltered by the overhang, spreading Steve’s Afghan coat on the pebbles. We huddle up for warmth, pass the bottle to and fro and decide to watch the dawn rise over Ventimiglia.

The three of us stretch out, me in the middle, on Steve’s convenient coat. Soon Ulricke falls asleep. Anneliese and I talk on quietly. I pass her the Martini. Carefully she brings it to her mouth. I notice how, like many women, she drinks awkwardly from the bottle. She fits her lips around the opening and tilts head and bottle simultaneously. When you drink from the bottle like this, some of the fluid in your mouth, as you lower your head after your gulp, runs back into the bottle.

“Ow. I think I’m drunk,” she says, handing it back.

I press my lips to the bottle’s warm snout, try to taste her lipstick, raise the bottle, try to hold that first mouthful in my throat, swilling it around my teeth and tongue …

Ulricke gives a little snore, hunches herself into my left side, pressing my right side against Anneliese. Despite what you may think I want nothing more from Anneliese than what I possess now. I look out over the Mediterranean, hear the plash and rattle of the tiny sluggish waves on the pebbles, sense an ephemeral lunar grayness — a lightening — in the air.