Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

the English movie star. Birkin had the swayback and flat buttocks of a little girl, and she spoke a squeaky, half-hysterical, English-accented French. Henri, Alain, and Roger rolled on the floor in fits of insane laughter whenever I imitated Jane Birkin. I had a pair of cigarette jeans, too; they left a mesh of welts on my belly and thighs. Sometimes in the rainy afternoons when I walked in the Bois, I could hear TiTi’s song playing somewhere deep in the dripping yellow leaves. Occasionally a wet leaf would come sailing out of the woods and affix itself squarely to my cheek or forehead like an airmail stamp, and I would think of all the letters I hadn’t written home.

In October we went to England three times, on weekend excursions in Henri’s plastic jeep. We took the ferry to Dover, then drove up to London, where Roger thought it was fun to play slot machines late at night in a penny arcade in Piccadilly Circus. Each time, we put up at the Cadogan Hotel, charging a suite to Henri’s uncle’s credit card. The respectable English and Continental travelers eyed us surreptitiously, and we determined that if questioned we would say we were a rock-and-roll band. “Josephine Baker et les Trois Bananes,” suggested Alain.

Some chemistry of air, soil, and civilization filled me with unwilling nostalgia, and I kept a sharp lookout in London for certain types of tourists: prosperous black Americans, a little overdressed and a bit uneasy in hotel lobbies, who could instantly identify where I came from, and who might know my family. During the day we would drive into the country and rent horses, prodding them into clattering gallops with Comanche yells. I was the official interpreter on these expeditions, and the times when I failed to understand a broad country accent, the three boys jeered at me. “What’s the matter, don’t you speak English?” they’d say.

Later that fall we tried to take the ferry from Normandy to the island of Jersey but were prevented from doing so by bad weather. We spent the night in Granville, in a tall, chill stone hotel where the shutters banged all night in a gale off the Channel. The next morning Alain got up, looking very skinny and white in a pair of sagging blue underpants, and ran shivering to the window. “We’ll have to forget the island,” he said, peering through the shutters. The waves were slate-colored, huge, with an oily roll to them and with shifting crests of yellowish foam.

Alain was in a bad mood because Henri and I had made love the night before in the twin bed next to his. “That was a charming thing to do,” he said to Henri, who was pulling on his jeans. “To torture a poor adolescent. I couldn’t get to sleep for hours!”

He tossed a pillow at Henri, who batted it away. Henri and I were in foul moods ourselves, mainly because the mutual fascination that had joined us suddenly and profoundly three months before had begun to break down into boredom and suspicion.

Still in his underpants, Alain jumped up onto one of the beds and began to yodel and beat his chest like Tarzan. “Aaah!” he yelled, rolling his eyes maniacally; then he leaped upon Henri, who had bent to tie his sneaker.

“Idiot! T’es dingue, toi!” shouted Henri, and the two of them began to wrestle, Henri easily gaining the upper hand over the bony Alain. Alain groaned in pretended anguish when Henri sat on his chest; it was clear that this attack and defeat were part of a ritual whose rules had been set in childhood. They were far closer to each other, I thought, than I would ever be to either of them.

When Roger appeared, he was in as bad a mood as the rest of us, his back aching because he had had to spend the night on a cot in a tiny chambre de bonne two floors above ours. “What a room!” he said, grabbing my comb and stroking his flat brown hair still flatter. “Good for a midget or a paraplegic!”

We gave up on the island of Jersey and drove inland toward Paris, past fields that were bright green beneath October mists, and through spare Norman villages, and then past brown copses and woodlands, all under a sky where a single white channel was opening between two dark fronts of autumn storm. Raindrops broke and ran upward on the windshield of the jeep, and I shivered in Henri’s aviator jacket, which he had bought in Texas. To keep warm we sang, though the number of songs all four of us knew the words to was small: “Auprès de Ma Blonde,” “Chevalier de la Table Ronde,” “Dixie,” “Home on the Range,” and endlessly, endlessly, John Denver. “Country roads, take me home!” Henri, Alain, and Roger would warble, throwing their heads back with a gusto that was only partly satirical: they thought Denver’s music was the greatest thing America had exported since blue jeans.

In between songs we talked about Roger’s sister Sabine, who was engaged in a battle with her parents because she wanted to marry a Jew. “Sabine is a fool,” said Henri. “The thing for her to do is to leave home and do exactly as she pleases.”

There was silence for a minute, as in the back seat Alain glanced at Roger. All of us had heard how Henri had left his small family—his pretty, weak-chinned mother and his grandmother, a meddlesome farmer’s widow from Berry. The story went that when Henri’s rich uncle—whom the family discreetly described as “misogyne”—visited Nancy he had taken a chaste interest in the fifteen-year-old Henri and had given him twenty minutes to decide whether to leave the town forever and come to live in Paris. Henri claimed he had decided in five minutes and had never looked back.

Alain looked out the plastic window of the jeep. “It’s not like that in my family,” he said, his irregular face solemn