The Other Story (2 page)

Malvina makes an unexpected appearance at the breakfast table. Her face is puffy with sleep; she has sheet marks across her cheeks, creases in her skin that make her look older. She is strangely pale.

“Happy birthday,” he says. “Twenty-two!”

She grins at him; he ruffles her hair. He asks her if she wants orange juice, tea, a muffin. She nods. He goes back to the buffet. The hairy man is still on the phone, making jabbing motions with a pudgy index finger. The short-legged brunette has disappeared. Nicolas and Malvina have their first breakfast at the Gallo Nero quietly. They do not talk, but they hold hands. Nicolas likes the way Malvina’s eyes are the same color as the sea behind her. Her skin is soft under his. Fragile. The protective tenderness he feels for her makes him squeeze her wrist, grasping it the way acrobats clasp each other in midair.

Malvina’s birthday present is up in the room, in his luggage. He will give it to her tonight, during dinner. A watch. It was tricky tracking down the one he wanted. He found it online, and met the vendor, a slick Serb, in the bar of the Grand Hotel Intercontinental, rue Scribe. “Why do you love watches?” He was now asked that question in nearly every interview. Yet it had been amusing answering it for the first time, two years ago. The journalist was a voluptuous blonde with a shrewd eye. In the Ambassade Hotel in Amsterdam, on Herengracht, he had an afternoon of interviews lined up one after the other:
De Telegraaf, Alegemeen Dagblad, de Volkskrant.
Marije, his publisher, opened the door to the private salon from time to time to check on how he was bearing up.
The Envelope
had scored unexpectedly high sale figures in the Netherlands, even before the movie had been released. The press was eager to find out more about the young French writer who had taken the publishing world by storm with a first novel about a taboo family secret.

“In all of your photographs, you wear a different watch,” said the blonde. “And sometimes you wear one on each wrist. Why is this?” And so he had explained. His first watch, a Hamilton Khaki, had been offered by his father for his tenth birthday. It had a black face with dual dial markings, large Arabic numerals, one through twelve, and an inner ring of smaller numerals, one through twenty-four, a small date window at three o’clock, a dark leather band, a stainless-steel case, and an austere, no-nonsense military style. “Soldiers wore that watch in Vietnam,” said his father as Nicolas opened the box with awe. His first watch. “You don’t ever forget your first watch,” he told the journalist. His father died soon after. The Hamilton Khaki became a relic. A talisman. Nicolas did not wear it, but he never let it out of his sight. When he traveled, he took it with him. He looked at it often, and just by staring at it, or cradling it in his palm, he could conjure, Aladdin-like, the image of Théodore Duhamel in his last year, thirty-three and glorious, standing tall by the fireplace on the rue Rollin, a customary cigar clamped between his long, thin fingers. His father had had an orange-faced Doxa Sub, which never left his wrist. Nicolas often thought about that watch, which was not found after Théodore Duhamel’s death. “Sometimes I wear two because I can’t choose. Every watch tells a story,” Nicolas said to the blonde. “Who gave it to you, on what occasion, when. Or, if you bought it yourself, where and how. I’m not interested in fashionable models, although I admire them.” (He thought of the Rolex he’d given his mother for her fiftieth birthday, a 1971 Oyster Perpetual, marked
Tiffany & Co.
, which he’d bought on the rue de Sèvres, from one of his favorite shops. But he did not mention it, as he had learned to be careful with the word
Rolex,
especially in front of a journalist wearing a Swatch.) “I prefer a rarer kind, one that is hard to find, one that has a little wear and tear, one that doesn’t glitter, as if things have happened to it.”

The blonde nodded. “I see,” she said. “Like your heroine, Margaux Dansor? A woman who has been around, seen a lot, but still has something to discover?” Clever move, he noted, her linking his passion for vintage watches to his middle-aged heroine, Margaux. A twenty-six-year-old man creating a forty-eight-year-old housewife, and pulling it off. Making her credible. Shaping her into one of those quaint, serious yet zany, irresistible heroines. A daughter, a spouse, a sister, a mother, a girl next door. A fictional character who made him famous around the world, later brought to life on-screen by Robin Wright in Toby Bramfield’s film adaptation, a performance that earned her an Oscar in 2010.

Will Malvina like her present? He studies her as she eats her muffin. Malvina is sallow-skinned, slender, perfectly proportioned. She has a mixed background: a Polish mother and a Welsh dad. She is not talkative. All her gestures are intense. They have been together for nine months. He met her in London, when he was there for an event at the French embassy in Knightsbridge. She was a promising student at the Royal College of Arts. She had attended his conference, and came to get her book signed. There was something serene, gentle, about her face, her smile. Nicolas was still dealing with the choppy aftermath of the end of his five-year relationship with Delphine. After a succession of faceless women, one fling after the other, this quiet, dark, blue-eyed creature entranced him. He persuaded her to have dinner with him, in a Chinese restaurant on Brompton Road. During the meal, she revealed a tongue-in-cheek humor he relished. He laughed outright, nearly choking on his spring rolls, and for the first time since Delphine, he felt a glimmer of hope, that somehow this lovely girl might be the one to help him forget Delphine, or at least to help him turn that page at last. He took her back to the Langham hotel on Regent Street. She hugged him so hard during sex, it moved him deeply. When she fell asleep in his arms, he had felt unexpectedly safe with her, safer than he had ever been with any woman since Delphine.

Nicolas likes the fact she doesn’t talk much. She wouldn’t be here with him now had she been a chatterbox. As Malvina pours herself another coffee, he reflects on what he is supposed to be doing here at the Gallo Nero. Writing the new book, of course, but also taking a break, a well-deserved one after the hectic year he’s had. How many trips? He cannot count them. He’d have to check his calendar to make sure. Short trips around the country for book fairs, book signings, meeting classes, students, presiding at literary award ceremonies, and then the same schedule abroad, in a dozen different countries, for the international publications of
The Envelope,
and finally the added and recent excitement with the movie release, Robin Wright’s Oscar, the press junkets in the United States, in Europe, and the movie tie-in editions, which had gone high on the best-seller lists. He had indulged in a series of whims his French publisher and agent, Alice Dor, had not approved of. Those glossy ads for a men’s fragrance, shot off the coast of Naxos, where, half-naked, he languorously reclines in a yacht. The black-and-white commercial for a watch, which seemed to grace every magazine he opened. “Was that necessary?” barked Alice Dor. “Don’t tell me you need more money.” No, with thirty million copies sold around the world and an Oscar-winning movie, he did not need more money. In fact, Corinne Beyer, his financial adviser, was working on that. If the money kept rolling in as such, she announced, he’d have to think about living somewhere other than France, because of the taxes.

Malvina and he slip back to the room. She is a tender and sweet lover. So fervent, it sometimes brings tears to his eyes, although he fully knows he does not love her. At least not the way he loved Delphine. Malvina lies back on the bed and opens her tanned knees to him. Later, as they take a shower, Malvina’s fragile shoulder blades bring him back to another shower, Delphine’s milky skin, his hands on her hips, in the bathroom on the rue Pernety, and he wonders with dismay whether he will ever love another woman the way he loved Delphine. It has been two years. When will her name sound like any other woman’s? When will he stop wondering if she takes showers with other guys, and who has been stroking that white skin? Coming to the Gallo Nero is also a way of keeping Delphine out of his mind. So what is he doing? “Come on, Malve, let’s go have a swim,” he says, shutting out Delphine and showers with Delphine.

They go down to the private beach, using the James Bond elevator. All the staff here wears black. A waiter says Nicolas’s name and room number; then they are ushered over to another, who proffers deck chairs—“Signor Kolt, a parasol, a towel, in the shade, no shade, near the sea, up by the cliff?”—and lo and behold, yet another one appears—“Would you like a drink, something cold, maybe, a newspaper, an ashtray?” They choose near the sea, with one parasol, a Coke for Malvina, iced tea and
Libération
(yesterday’s issue) for him.

This beach is not really a beach. No sand. It is a thick slab of concrete lining the bottom of the cliff, studded with parasols, deck chairs, pool ladders, and a diving board. More and more guests emerge from the elevator as the sun climbs into the clear July sky. Nicolas hears them talk and guesses where they are from. A Swiss couple, particularly fascinating. Impossible to determine their age. Anywhere between forty and sixty. He is as bald as a kneecap, tall, stooped, bony yet fit. She is even taller, firm flesh, wide shoulders, flat breasts, a true daddy longlegs. Short silver hair. He watches them as they meticulously arrange their clothes, towels, magazines, sun cream. They don’t speak to each other, but he senses great companionship. The man has tight-fitting swim shorts; she, an Olympic-style bathing suit. Suddenly, they get up, like two large, skinny birds taking off. She squeezes a swimming cap onto her head; he adjusts plastic goggles over his eyes. They both slip flippers onto their feet and hobble to the edge of the concrete slab with a peculiar elegance, in perfect harmony, and Nicolas guesses this has been repeated over and over again for many years. They dive into the sea and break into an effortless crawl stroke. They swim without a pause, reaching the brown reef that must be half a mile away. When they return, they shower in the nearby changing cabins and reappear wearing dry bathing suits. As they pass near him, he notices the man’s Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk. They see Nicolas looking their way and they smile. They spend the next ten minutes rubbing sun cream over themselves and each other with precise movements and grim concentration.

A Belgian family now. Nicolas picks Belgians out easily, because of his mother. Father and son are stocky, ginger-haired, red-skinned. The son is Malvina’s age and already running to fat. His nose is sunburned and freckled. He is wearing a fashionable French-brand bathing suit. Dad is an older version—same bathing suit (red) and a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms on his wrist. The mother is one of those lithe muscular types, with a green bikini she looks good in. She is reading a paperback. Nicolas strains his eyes, but he already knows.
De Envelop,
Flemish movie-tie-in edition, with Robin Wright on the cover. He is also getting used to that, being confronted with his readers wherever he goes. The daughter is pear-shaped but appealing. Earbuds clamped into her ears. Reading a magazine. Nails bitten to the quick. Not half as high-maintenance as her mom. The father dishes out twenty-euro bills to the waiters in black. His gestures are smooth and blasé. “
Grazie, prego.
” Waves of a plump pink palm.

Nicolas lies back on his deck chair, his face turned up to the sky like an avid sunflower sucking in the golden light, flaring nostrils catching the particular scent of the wind, hot and dry, sprinkled with the perfume of cypress and pine trees, the tang of lemon and salt. Summer of 2003 is the last time he reveled in that fragrance, during his trip to Liguria with François. Nicolas has been back to Italy (Milan, Rome, Florence) since Hurricane Margaux overturned his life in 2008 (that was how he described the book to journalists). But he had never been back to the Italian shore. He remembers the dusty night train from Paris to Milan, then the smaller train from Milan to Camogli. They stayed at an unpretentious bed-and-breakfast run by a jovial Canadian couple in their fifties, Nancy and Bob. When they got to San Rocco, they discovered they had to walk to the house (no taxi, no car) and drag their suitcases along tiny paved paths.

Camogli was also where a disheveled Margaux Dansor, his heroine, arrived one morning, hot on the trail of her quest for the family secret that was about to disrupt her life. Margaux had also dragged her suitcase—bump, bump, bump—all the way to the white stone house. Nicolas smiles, thinking about how “tickled pink” Nancy and Bob were when they found out he had put them in
The Envelope.
He had changed their names to Sally and Jake, but they were easily recognizable, Bob with his jaunty ponytail and eye patch that gave him a Captain Jack Sparrow attitude, and Nancy’s Hottentot Venus bottom, which sparked lewd sotto voce exchanges between François and him. In the book, Nicolas described Bob and Nancy’s abode exactly as it was. The patchy walls, the tiled crooked terrace, where every evening he would knock back limoncello until mind-blasting migraines took over, transforming his brain to putty, blurring the astounding view of the bay. The small, high-ceilinged, cool bedrooms, painted blue and green, the faltering plumbing system, the kitchen and its aromas: fresh pasta, glistening pesto, mozzarella and tomatoes on a bed of arugula. The other guests were a beautician from L.A., emaciated and tanned like crisp toast, and her shy, overweight daughter, who read Emily Dickinson in the shade. In Toby Bramfield’s movie, they all ended up looking exactly like how Nicolas had imagined them.

Nicolas suddenly wonders how François is. When was the last time they talked, sat down for a meal? He cannot even recall it. That is what comes with living this way, always on a train, on a plane, hours in waiting rooms, too many messages to respond to, too many e-mails piling up, too many invitations, propositions, solicitations. Not enough time to see friends, family, those who count. Again the pang of guilt. He should call François. They have been friends since their teens, when he was still Nicolas Duhamel, attending the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then the grueling hypokhâgne and khâgne classes, specializing in humanities. Nicolas ended up being held back his second year, dubbed a “khûbe,” as student jargon would have it. While François soared upward and onward, Nicolas fumbled and stumbled, to his mother’s despair. Although he was aware of what he was letting himself in for, he had been overpowered from the start by the workload, the permanent stress level, the sarcasm of the teachers. This was part and parcel of the demanding legend of the prestigious literary preparatory courses his mother had brilliantly succeeded in during her youth. In addition to class time and homework, Nicolas spent several hours each week laboriously completing exams and
colles
(spelled khôlles to look like a Greek word, another “khâgneux” insider joke). But there was nothing remotely funny about the khôlles, which soon became a nightmare for Nicolas. One hour to prepare a short dissertation on a given topic. Then, in twenty excruciating minutes, he had to present his work orally to a scathing teacher. François excelled at the dreaded khôlles, and even the harshest teacher, with the keenest expectations, begrudgingly bowed down to such supremacy. François never showed any signs of discouragement or apathy, contrary to Nicolas, who lost weight, lost sleep, lost his spirits. Like a fighter pilot dodging missiles, François triumphantly angled toward the highly competitive national exam that awaited them, the holy grail of a
concours
that a tiny elite would pass. Nicolas knew, from early on, that he did not have that ambition within him. François did, and he was aware of being the nugget those schools hungered for, the breed that formed professors, teachers, future Nobel Prize winners. The first time Nicolas flubbed the final exam, not even scraping through to the no-man’s-land of the
sous-admissible
category, the second-chance gang, François was already embarked on the firmament of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, nicknamed “Ulm,” for its address on the street that bore the same name.