I Love You Too Much Page 4

  The taxi driver blinked and swallowed. She can do that to you, Maman; she can make you think she is in love with you. She does it all the time to all kinds of people, to the valet at Le Bon Marché when he parks her car, to the guy at the ski lift when he lets her jump the queue, to the black guy who cleans her car in the underground car park on avenue Marceau. “What would I do without you, Marcel?” she says to him when he hands her back her keys.

  She has a deep voice and dark brown eyes and skin that is olive like my dad’s and long hair and long legs and a large diamond engagement ring that shines like a lightbulb and that she wears even though they aren’t together anymore. She gets a table in restaurants where they say it is fully booked and she gets people to give her great rooms in hotels, and she gets on flights when there are no more seats.

  The driver turned into the gold-and-white gates of the hotel. It was a big cream-colored building with a dark gray slate roof and balustrades painted brick red.

  “You are not alone,” he said.

  There were cars double-parked all around the sweep of the drive, Jaguars, Porsches, Mercedes, and Range Rovers; rich guys’ cars with Paris number plates. A doorman rushed out with a large umbrella. He led us through the revolving doors past about twenty strollers lined up against a wall.

  “This is our other car park,” he said, wheeling Lou’s pram into position. A young woman at reception checked us in. She was pretty like an air hostess, with red lipstick and a red neckerchief and her hair held up in a fat bun on top of her head. Her name was Gwénaëlle; it said so on her badge.

  “Are you going to kids’ club?” she asked me. She could smile and keep her eyes wide open at the same time. “You will love kids’ club. We have so many fun Halloween activities to do!” Only someone who has never done kids’ club would say that. “Any dinner reservations, madame?” she asked. She couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I’ll dine with my son tonight. My husband is arriving late from Paris.”

  I checked out the lounge area while Maman registered. There were heavy glass chandeliers and big black statues of fat women parked around the lounge. Steam was coming off the outdoor pool. “This way.” The porter showed us up to our rooms on the fifth floor. Piped music was coming out of the television when we went into our suite, and it said WELCOME, MONSIEUR ET MADAME LEMAIRE on the screen. I wondered why my mother kept telling everyone she was married. I switched to MTV.

  “You’re in here with Lou and Cindy. Our bedroom is just down the corridor,” Maman said. “Cindy, I’m going down for a treatment. Paul, if you’re going to snack, make it fruit. We’ll go for supper when I get back.”

  “I thought it started tomorrow,” I said.

  “That’s the thalasso; this is a treatment. I need to have some treatments before I can have the thalassotherapy.”

  She went off downstairs and I lay on my bed and watched TV. Cindy unpacked the bags. Then she opened the door. She had Lou in her arms.

  “I go down the hall for your mother’s clothes,” she said.

  I got up and went to stand by the window. It had stopped raining. It was low tide. The beach was vast and long, and the sea was far away. There were no waves, just parallel lines of sky and sea and beach. It looked like you could punch your fist through the gray sky at the back of the horizon.

  The hotel had left a deflated beach ball on one of the beds as a welcome gift, like I was five. I blew it up and threw it around the room for a bit. I remembered a ball like that, only it was green. I remembered jumping into a hotel pool and shouting, “Watch me,” to my dad, who was sitting by the pool reading a pink newspaper.

  I had a poke around the minibar. I ate a mini-box of Pringles. I sucked my fingers and shoved them down to the bottom of the tube to get up all the green and white dust. I ate a Toblerone. It didn’t taste too good after the Pringles. I gamed. I waited.

  I must have fallen asleep because next thing I knew, Maman walked back through the door.

  “Where’s Cindy?” she asked. She’d had her hair done so that it swung from side to side when she walked.

  “She went to unpack,” I said.

  “You’ve got to get up, they finish serving in five minutes.”

  There were photos all along the corridor, black-and-white photos of white people having thalassotherapy treatments, a guy with water crashing down on his shoulders, a woman with black pebbles running down her back, then the same man and woman wrapped in white towels lying side by side on beds with their eyes closed looking like they never said “Fuck you, I’m leaving.” There were photos of boys and girls on the beach fishing in rock pools with fishing nets on a stick and wearing Petit Bateau yellow oilskins. You never catch any fish with nets like those. It’s just the kind of lame activity they make you do at kids’ club.

  “Paul, hurry,” Maman called from the elevator. I stepped inside.

  “Oh my God, what was I thinking?” she said aloud as the doors closed. “What am I doing here?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was expecting me to reply or even if she was speaking to me. The two frown lines between her eyes were coming back. She has injections to paralyze them, but after a while they come back, a track in the forest, stronger than her. She was looking at me strangely. She leaned forward a little.

  “Have you been eating Pringles?”

  “No.”

  “Liar,” she said. The elevator doors opened.

  The corridor to the dining room was pale gray and the carpet was the color of red wine and we could hear children shouting from inside the dining room and I thought, She’s not going to like this. We walked into a massive room with all these kids screaming and big round tables with white tablecloths and really young waiters looking like they’d lost control and parents sitting at the table looking like they were waiting for someone to come and make everything all right. And then I heard Maman breathe a sigh of relief, and she said: “Oh, thank God for that.”

  She waved to someone on the other side of the room and said, “Carla’s sister’s here. Over there, sitting at the table with the baby.” There were loads of women sitting at tables with babies.

  “Over there,” Maman said, trying not to point. “Valérie, see her? The blonde. That’s Carla’s sister.”

  I looked around the room at all the people. It was weird how many I recognized. It was as if everyone who hangs out at the Jardin du Luxembourg had decided to leave Paris and move to this dining room in La Baule. All the Rive Gauche beautiful people were there. The woman who jogs around the jardin all day doing tiny steps like she’s a geisha, whose kids go to my school, she was sitting at a table, dressed in black and fluorescent-pink running clothes. There was an actress whose kids go to the rue Madame. She’s always hanging out by the playground at the jardin; she wears thin cotton dresses that lap at her body, and all the dads at my old school tried to hit on her even though she must be forty.

  And there was Scarlett. Scarlett from school. Scarlett Lacasse. Here in La Baule. She’d just joined our school in September. I remember her first day. She walked into chemistry with a savage smile on her face, like we were a bunch of losers and she was our queen. She sat looking at her phone until the teacher shouted at her to put it away and then she tossed it in her bag with a shrug. I’d never spoken to her.

  She started going out with Stéphane in her first week and all the girls hated her because they wanted him. I remember I was in the jardin with Guillaume and Pierre when Scarlett and Stéphane stepped through a gap in the hedgerow where we were sitting. They walked hand in hand, not talking, just looking cool together. They didn’t look at us. Stéphane had on his red Nike high-tops and a black hoodie. His hair was long and dark and curly and his high-tops were undone so the laces trailed in the dust. Scarlett was wearing tight black-and-red leopard-print jeans and a gray hoodie that said BROOKLYN. She didn’t look like the other girls in our year. She had wild hair that flew around her face. Stéphane pulled her to him and they started kissing, right there in front of us, openin
g their mouths wide, shoving their tongues back and forth, in and out, like they were digging for gold.

  We watched as Stéphane moved his right hand up under Scarlett’s top and pushed at her breasts.

  “He’s too lucky,” Pierre said.

  “Anyone could have her,” Guillaume said with bitterness.

  But none of us had.

  And now here she was, in the same dining room as me in La Baule. She was sitting opposite a man and a woman. I guessed they were her parents. But they were not the parents Scarlett Lacasse should have had. She should have had rock-star parents, a skinny dad who wore black jeans and black sunglasses and made movies and a mom who was a TV anchorwoman and drove a jeep. There was no way the old guy sitting opposite Scarlett was a film director. He wore reading glasses that had no frames, just a metal bridge over his thin nose and metal arms through his thin gray hair. He kept pressing his fingers together when he spoke, like he was the pope. And the woman didn’t look 6ème arrondissement at all, not rock chick like Maman or Estelle; she looked like she went to Mass where my grandparents go to Mass in Neuilly. She was wearing a navy-blue polo-neck sweater. I bet she had one of those nylon handbags Maman hates. I bet she drove a great big Peugeot minivan. Maybe Scarlett was adopted.

  “How are you, ma belle?” a woman at the table next to us called out to Maman. It must have been some kind of sign, because all at once all these other women surged from around the room over to our table and kissed Maman and said, Oh my God, I can’t believe you are here, when did you get here, how long are you staying, where’s the baby, which treatment are you doing, you’ve lost weight, you look great, oh my God, Séverine, if you lose any more weight you’ll disappear.

  I went over to the buffet and piled my plate high with everything the hotel had for kids’ supper—really skinny fries covered in salt, ham rolled up into pink tubes, hunks of baguette and a big slab of Breton butter with salt crystals buried in it. I kept looking over at the dessert table. I couldn’t believe it; there were gigantic chocolate and coffee éclairs and great big bowls of sweets, caramel Carambars and Fraises Tagada. I went over and stuffed some in my pockets just in case some of the young kids got in first and took them all.

  When I got back to the table, Maman was revved up to go like it was a party. A fat-cat guy with slicked-back hair and a tan moved in on her straightaway, telling her how great she looked, what a body she had. She must have known him from Paris. I shoved fries in my mouth, trying to get them in fast before Maman noticed and made me stop.

  “So are you here all alone, Séverine?” the man asked as he pulled up a chair and sat down close to her. I could smell his aftershave from where I sat.

  “Of course not, Serge,” Maman said. “I’m here with my son, Paul”—she pointed toward me—“and I’ve got a new baby called Lou.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said without looking my way. He kept chewing on an unlit cigar, chewing as if it were a steak. He had dark brown suede shoes with no socks on; he had black hairs around his ankles, black hairs at his neck and his chest. I bet he had hairs in his ears; he was a hairball. He had a stomach that hung over the crotch of his dark denim jeans. He must look bad without his clothes on. He leaned across the table.

  “Where’s your new boyfriend, Séverine? Don’t tell me he’s left you all on your own.”

  “Gabriel’s got a gig tonight,” Maman said. That was a lie. He was at a rehearsal, not a gig. I knew that for a fact because Maman had spent the whole week telling him he should miss his rehearsal so he could come with us on the train.

  “He’s catching the late train,” Maman said. “He’ll be here tonight.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “So what will you do while you’re waiting?”

  “Oh, you needn’t worry about me, Serge.” Maman lifted her hair, which was loose around her shoulders, and her breasts rose as she tipped her head back a fraction. She let her hair fall down against her shoulders with a bang. “I’m gonna catch up on my beauty sleep,” she said.

  The fat cat laughed out loud; he laughed and laughed and when he stopped he said, “Ah, Séverine, you always were the goddamn tease.”

  I looked over at Scarlett. I wondered if she’d seen me. I wondered if she knew my name. She had on the black denim jacket that she wore to school and she was curled up over the phone in her hands. She was not beautiful, Scarlett, but she wore bras that made her breasts stand high up on her chest and T-shirts that dropped down low and all the boys went after what they thought they could get. She didn’t look my way.

  “Serge.” A woman was standing by our table with a little girl at her side. “Zélie needs the toilet.”

  The girl was frowning at me like I was to blame. Her bottom jaw was too big for her face. It was her father’s jaw.

  “Can’t you take her?” the fat cat said without looking away from Maman.

  “I’m feeding the baby,” the woman said.

  “I’m bursting,” the girl said.

  “I heard you.” The fat cat pushed back his chair and got up, but he kept looking at my mother as he moved off.

  “Who is he?” I asked Maman.

  “Serge? Oh, I’ve known him forever.” She laughed. And then her phone rang.

  “Yes, my love.” Her voice was breathy. “We’re having dinner. Yeah, actually, it’s fun, much better than I thought. It is not like Dinard, thank God. There are loads of people I know. Carla’s sister is here, Valérie, you know? You’re gonna like it.”

  She was laughing as she spoke, taking fries from my plate, looking around at the tables, at the people, little sparks of light flying from her eyes and into the room. Scarlett was staring out of the window and into the darkness.

  “Why not?” Maman asked. She stopped taking my fries. “You told me it finished early.”

  There was a pause as Gabriel said something. Then Maman said: “What do you mean?”

  I imagined Gabriel, pink lips close to the phone, tail between his legs, talking his way out of the situation. But whatever he was saying wasn’t working. She gave him four seconds before she cut him off.

  “You know what, Gabriel, you better be on that train tomorrow morning. I am not sitting in La Baule with your child without you. Get your ass down here. Understood?” She pressed End.

  “Connard,” she said. A message flew in immediately. She picked up the phone to read it.

  “Connard,” she said again and slammed the phone back down on the table.

  “He’s still at the studio,” Maman said. “He’s not even at the station.” She pushed the phone away from her. “I don’t believe that guy.” She ran her hands through her hair. She looked around the room; she watched to see who Valérie was talking to. She checked her phone again. I saw Serge walking back to his table, looking over at Maman.

  I imagined Gabriel with his band, sharing a couple of beers with the guys at the end of the rehearsal. And then I imagined him kick-starting his scooter and heading over to the boulevard Saint-Germain, parking up on the rue Saint-Benoît, and strolling down the road to the Flore with that smile on his lips. He’d check out the tables in the front, share a joke with the waiter standing at the door, take a seat out on the terrasse, light up his cigar, and order a beer, still in his Moncler padded jacket with the cream scarf tied around his neck. He’d send a bleeding-heart text to Maman while he watched the girls go by on the boulevard Saint-Germain, one by one, and he’d drink his beer, sucking the froth from the bristle above his lip. That is what he does.

  He’d be here tomorrow. I was sure of it. He’s like a dog, Gabriel, racing around the park, pissing against tree trunks, sniffing at all the girls, and looking up their skirts until my mother yanks the leash tight, jerks the collar with her wrist, and he comes flying back to her side.

  Chapter Four

  They broke up at the dead end of August when I was eleven years old. My parents had sent me away to my grandparents for the week. My cousins were there too, my father’s elder brother Xavier’s three sons. They are
great at tennis and they are great at math; they are everything you are supposed to be.

  My grandmother signed us up for a tennis camp in the mornings and I got put in the bottom group. It was full of girls who screamed every time a ball came their way. I had this fat woman coach who stood at the baseline and fired balls around the court from a machine and told me to move my butt when she had obviously never moved hers.

  In the afternoons we went to the beach and I lay out in my clothes on the sand with my headphones on while my cousins swam and played soccer barefoot. My grandmother kept seeing people she knew on the beach and introducing us as “my grandchildren.” She said it like she owned us or like we were some kind of trophy, except when she introduced me, then I saw her eyelids flicker. At night my cousins played cards or told stories about their school in the 16ème where you get taught by Jesuits and everyone needs glasses from working too hard. That’s where my dad and his brother went to school. I had nothing to say. I sat in the living room and gamed.

  By the end of the week my grandmother had had enough of me; she kept saying I needed to do something about my eating, that it wasn’t normal for a boy of my age. I hid the packets of sweets behind my bed, but she found two empty boxes of barbecue Pringles in my tennis bag and she told me I had no self-control.

  The night before I was due to go home, she got a call from her friend Diane asking her to play in a golf competition the next morning. Diane was the social queen of Dinard. She was some kind of countess and her villa was older and chicer than everyone else’s. I heard my grandmother using her grand-piano voice to talk to her on the phone. It was the same voice she used when she spoke to the butcher.

  The next morning at eight she came rushing into my bedroom wearing all her Lacoste golfing clothes. She was in a fluster. She told me I had to get up and get dressed straightaway, as plans had changed and she was putting me on an earlier train back to Paris. She drove fast out of the drive, bashing the pink hydrangea heads, to get me to the station. We went past the beach. The little blue-and-white-striped tents were lined up for the day. There were waves breaking on the empty sand, seagulls sorting out their feathers in the morning breeze, and I could smell the sea. I had that feeling you get in the morning on the beach when no one has arrived and the waves are bright and the sand is smooth and damp, untouched. It made me sad to go, leaving all that sky.