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

Olivier says. But you have to be at least forty, and you have to know certain things, to be beautiful like that. His eyes cross Anna’s and offer a momentary bland challenge, which for the first time that day gives her the sensation of danger.

The atmosphere has shifted now that the soldier is there. Anna did not expect to step into Paradise when she took the taxi across the mountains, but she quickly got used to it. These people were complete strangers, but they offered her instant worship. Greedily, she expected it to continue. But the focus has changed, and not because of Étienne but because of his father. As at lunch, Olivier sits at the table offering a constant stream of sophisticated compliments—but they are all for the round-faced, jug-eared, red-cheeked soldier. Paul, it seems, is a handsome boy, an extraordinary boy, an intelligent boy, even a brilliant boy. All this is observed in the older man’s cool voice, as he smokes cigarette after cigarette. He pauses once to eye his son and Anna benevolently. Ah, one can tell that the children had a very good time this afternoon. There is that slight flush, that delicate, weary bloom. Did you like La Chambre du Prieur, my dears?

All through dinner, which they eat at the hotel—in another grand restaurant, filled with rich weekenders and foie gras and syrupy golden light—it is the same thing, the almost suffocating string of compliments directed at the soldier, who continues to blush and duck his head. Anna knows from books and films that men make love to other men, but this is more like a complicated game whose rules she doesn’t understand. Words like “innuendo” drift through her mind, though the older man is quite straightforward about what he is doing. She studies Olivier, who seems ageless in his jeans and soft sweater and jacket; the skin of his face full and radiant, his nose as pointed as Pinocchio’s, his moss-green eyes somehow sad and querulous, even when his voice is at its most caressing. The flattery intensifies, becomes almost Baroque, and it is as if the older man were amusing himself at the expense of the three young people sitting around him, even though he keeps his gaze fixed, with precise intent, on the soldier. As for his son, Étienne, he has fallen by the wayside: he continues to talk charmingly to Anna both in English and in French, to gaze at her, to caress her knees under the table, but at the same time she can feel a careful blankness in his manner, a deliberate unseeing aimed in his father’s direction. Anna orders curried soup and guinea hen cooked with wild mushrooms; she eats caramelized pineapple and drinks verbena tea. For this last she is praised by father and son—We think a girl who drinks a tisane after dinner is very refined—but it is clear that no clever thing she does will make her the star of the show again.

She and Étienne excuse themselves finally, but Olivier says jovially that he thinks he’ll stay downstairs in the bar to chat with his new soldier friend. He rises and gives his son and Anna a warm kiss on each cheek, and Anna for an instant has an urge to slap his face. Only much later in her life will she ask herself whether she had expected him to make love to her, too. Right now she feels toward Olivier the kind of furious disappointment that up to this moment she has felt only when very angry at her parents. As for the interloping soldier, Paul, she can’t even look at him; he might give her a familiar smirk or a wink of complicity, and that would be unbearable.

Upstairs, in the Prior’s Room, the curtains have been drawn and the bed turned down for the night. And once more between the linen sheets she and Étienne hold each other like fretful children. Anna feels stuffed and queasy from all the eating and drinking, and sore from making love too much. Also, she is suddenly sick of Étienne, of his blond smell that is infantile and a little off, like week-old milk, of the fact that he is the only reason she has for being here in this magnificent room. She can’t see her watch, but she knows it is too early or too late to leave. The windows are shuttered tight in the European way, the way they do it back at her dormitory. She is a prisoner here for the night, in a luxury cell. She thinks with nostalgia of her roommates in Lausanne, who have no doubt spent the weekend visiting the public pool, sipping bad beer in the tourist bars down at Ouchy, dancing with South Americans at the horrible student discothèque, Le Treizième Siècle. She is having the adventure that all those daydreaming American girls long for, and it has consumed her, left behind only this small point of alien consciousness, alight in a vigil amid the mountains, the past, the Old Country.

It is probable that Ètienne feels sick of her, too. They have made love in every possible position. He has described to her what hard work it was, back in Paris, introducing his ex-girlfriend to oral sex; confided that he thinks he got a Spanish girl pregnant on a vacation in the Balearics, and that he has to perform a ritual act of masturbation every night before going to sleep. With the air of passing on great chunks of wisdom, he has even entrusted to her several crackpot theories about America—that the wrong side won the Civil War, for one—and he has praised bad American movies and horrendous rock and roll that nobody Anna knows would be caught dead listening to. And Anna, instead of bursting out laughing and telling him that he is full of shit, as she would have done with any boy back home, has listened with solemn attention.

Now they lie in a halfhearted