Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

nasal English. The father asks about Anna’s family and laughs as she describes her sisters: Barb the saint, who is playing the guitar on a Catholic youth tour this summer; Becca the slut, with her secret tattoo, whose boyfriends always end up going after Anna. Described in French they sound somehow fascinating, not boring or sleazy at all. Three beautiful sisters, the father laughs. Like something out of the Brothers Grimm.

The restaurant is a short walk from the hotel, and they stroll back in the dazzling sunlight as speedboats drone far out on the water. The hotel is a low ivy-covered building that wraps around the courtyard where the taxi arrived. It has small arched windows set deep in stone, and palm trees in pots, and an air of fitting the spot where it sits between the village and the lake promenade as a diamond fits the setting of a ring. It is called the Clos Saint Barthélemy and was once, the father says, a Benedictine abbey, built by the monks expelled from Geneva during the Reformation. Anna pays little attention to this, because as they walk the son is squeezing her hand. She feels tipsy and reckless, her head swelled like a balloon by all the homage. She is drawn to this boy, whom she had judged dull and strange-looking earlier, but who now seems like one of the lords of the earth.

It is unclear what is going to happen. Three in the afternoon after an epic meal: obviously time for a rest. They talk of this in the hotel lobby, another oasis of polished wood and mandarin-faced servitors. The father—Anna has begun to call him Olivier, though she continues to address him with a formal vous—proposes with some hesitancy that she spend the rest of the day and the night there at the lake, and that the next day he and his son will make a detour from their drive to Paris and take her back to Lausanne. The hesitancy, she realizes, in one of her few accurate feats of perception all day, is because Olivier is suddenly faced with an ironclad obligation: he must treat her as the proper young girl he has, despite all her efforts, understood her to be. An image she wants to toss aside completely. From a very early age, for all her angelic looks, Anna has on occasion displayed a calm, almost casual inclination to step far outside the usual limits, a trait that has alarmed her sisters—even Becca the slut—and boyfriends alike. It’s at work now: at this point she would agree to anything, from more wine and compliments to stripping naked and celebrating a Black Mass.

Of course, she says impatiently, she will stay. At this the son, with his sheep’s face and curls, puts his arm around her and kisses her cheek with a ceremonious air, as if she were a cherished young bride. And the father spreads his arms in a delicate sketch of an embrace that includes them both, and says, in a magnanimous paternal tone, So, children. You would like a room; cela saute aux yeux. You can have the special one I reserved. It is such a rarity that it even has a name—La Chambre du Prieur—and I do hope you will appreciate it. He asks for Anna’s passport and goes to the desk to reserve another room for himself and inform them that mademoiselle will be staying.

In the elevator, Anna kisses the son, Étienne. It’s not as glorious a kiss as it should be: his lips and tongue feel oddly wooden. But none of that matters when he leads her down a hall to a door with a gold handle—the key swings from a fat silk tassel—which opens to reveal a wonderful room, a room that is like a chapel, a cave whose walls and ceilings are covered with a swarm of painted figures. Amber, red, blue, green, both somber and resplendent. Frescoes of saints and angels and Biblical throngs, curling vines and dim gilded fruit running in and out of the hollows of a coffered ceiling. Deep red rugs, a bed with a velvet canopy and cover, old paneling shining with wax. This is the room where the prior—a rather sybaritic prior—ran the affairs of the old abbey hundreds of years ago. The sumptuous apparition takes Anna by surprise, and for a second she is unable to speak. It is the first time that she has been in a room of such splendor without a museum rope to keep her from touching things. This is the first time, actually, that she has even been in a hotel room not paid for by her parents. But she quickly rises to the occasion, as she has been doing all day. She feels, in fact, that she was born to rise to such occasions.

She and Étienne stand by the window; they kiss, they kiss more, and then they undress clumsily and make love in haste, yanking back the velvet cover on the bed and flinging themselves on heavy linen sheets knobby with embroidery. Anna doesn’t enjoy it much, except as an appropriate element of the intoxication of the day, the frantic sense of life converging at the place where she is. She liked the pastries at lunch more. She thinks briefly about her boyfriend and the other boys back home, about wilder times in places that were sometimes awful and uncomfortable. But one thing she enjoys: how beautiful the two of them are, naked, in the beautiful room, how they complete it. The French boy has hairless pink skin more delicate than her own. After each orgasm his chest remains mottled for a long time with a bright-red flush. His penis is pink and large, though it seems somehow childish to her, a novelty because it is uncircumcised. In bed, he gives up the stilted English he is so proud of and talks to her in French. Away from his father, he is more commanding: he comments