I Love You Too Much Read online

  “What about your dad?” I asked.

  “What about him?” She took a massive slurp of Coke through a pink straw.

  “What does he say?”

  “He says, ‘Scarlett, there is no mystery to life. You work hard and you succeed. You muck around and you fail. And then you fail for life.’” She ate a fry. “Only César loves me,” she said.

  “Who’s César?”

  “He’s my dog, only he’s more than a dog, he’s super-intelligent and he knows all my feelings, all my secrets. He understands me.” She pulled out her phone and showed me about forty photos of César. He was a really furry golden retriever, pale cream with sad black eyes and a black nose. She showed me photos of them lying together on a sheepskin rug. Just looking at him made me feel asthmatic.

  “He’s my baby,” she said in a girlish voice. “César loves his mommy.” A message came in on her phone. She said it was from Stéphane and that they’d been going out for six weeks now. “He’s okay,” she said, “but he’s super-arrogant.” She messaged him back. “He’s on vacation in Dubai and he keeps telling me all the girls are really hot, trying to make me jealous.”

  Her eyelashes were thick with black mascara, and a little ball of it had collected in the corner of her left eye. She had loads of dangly Japanese things on her phone and she played with them all the time. She couldn’t keep her fingers off her phone, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. She kept putting the phone down on the table, flicking her hair, and then checking the phone again straightaway to see if anyone had texted or messaged her.

  We ate fries for a bit without saying anything. They’d gone cold, but the salt made them good. She held up her phone and used it as a mirror; she looked at herself for a long time, but I wasn’t sure she was happy with what she saw. She wiped away the clog ball of mascara; she put on some more lip gloss.

  Then she said, “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Your parents, what are they like? You know, do they put you under pressure?”

  “They used to, when I was in elementary school.” I told her how they’d wanted me to go to the school where Estelle’s son goes. It was easy talking to Scarlett; it was like she understood. So I told her everything. I told her that’s why we bought an apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg in the first place, to be near the school I didn’t get into. I told her I tried three times to get in. I told her about the tutoring twice a week and my parents organizing dinners to try to get me accepted.

  “They were obsessed, that’s all they ever talked about, the application, the exam, the interview, who else was taking the exam, who else was waiting to hear. I remember when we got the letter from the school, Maman ripped it open and her face went white. ‘Oh my God, Paul. It can’t be true.’ Then she rang my dad and she shouted down the phone at him: ‘He wasn’t taken. Do you hear me? He wasn’t taken. What are we going to do? What the hell are we going to do?’”

  I looked up. Scarlett was watching me, waiting. So I went on.

  “My dad called the school, he sent e-mails, he called his friends, he got them to call the school, he tried all this pressure, but they just kept saying no, there was no place for me. After that, it was like someone had died. They walked around without speaking or I’d come into a room and they would stop talking. Sometimes Maman would call Estelle and I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I knew what she was saying. My dad could hardly bring himself to speak to me. Maman has her own production business and she puts together advertising shoots with models and photographers and hundreds of people in Tokyo and Milan, places like that, and my dad does one-billion-euro deals and he earns loads. I guess they couldn’t believe they couldn’t get their son into the school they wanted him to go to. Either that or they couldn’t believe I couldn’t get myself into the school they wanted me to go to. They just couldn’t handle it. It was like me being a failure made them a failure too.”

  “I get that all the time,” Scarlett said. “Like you are letting them down because you’re not the big success they think they are. My parents spend their life saying, ‘I despair of you. You need to work harder. Success comes only through striving. Look at Jean-Benoît, look how hard he works to succeed.’”

  “Who’s Jean-Benoît?” I said.

  Her face sucked in like a sea anemone does when you touch it.

  “My brother,” she said.

  I wondered how it was that she was called Scarlett, which is the kind of name a singer in a band or a waitress at the Hôtel Costes has, and her brother had a super-classic French name. I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare; she looked as if she’d smack me one if I said the wrong thing.

  “I changed my name,” she said, “if that’s what you are thinking.”

  “That’s cool.” I took a slurp of Coke so I didn’t have to say anything.

  “Not like officially, on paper and stuff. I just did it when I got chucked out of school. I’d had enough and I wanted to be free. Free from that shit.”

  “What did your parents do when you changed it?”

  “They think it’s ridiculous and they refuse to call me Scarlett. But they can’t do anything about it. When I started at our school they gave me papers to fill in and there’s a bit where you put the name you want to be known by. It’s supposed to be for people who want to be called by their middle names, but I put down Scarlett, and the admin woman, Madame Lebrun, said that was okay.”

  “She’s nice,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s one of the reasons I like our school.”

  I wanted to ask Scarlett what her real name was, but her face was still sucked in.

  “Victoire,” she said. “And if you tell anyone at school, I’ll break your legs.”

  “I like Victoire,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  She was on her phone forever after that. I ordered tiramisu. I gamed a bit. I ate my dessert. The waitress came over and gave us the check in a little metal pot, then later she came back again and said she wanted to settle up because she was finishing her shift, so I paid for the Cokes and the burgers and fries and the tiramisu. The waitress gave us each a strawberry-flavored Chupa Chup lollipop. The wrappers were faded and stuck to the candy; they must have been left over from the summer.

  We went back out on the beach. The afternoon light was draining out of the sky. The kids’ club kids had gone in. There were seagulls standing on one leg in pools of water, looking out to sea.

  “Why did your parents break up?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I knew, but I don’t.”

  “Probably an affair; most people in the sixième break up because of affairs. Most people in Paris break up because of affairs.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I watched a TV program about it—you know, one of those programs where real people tell you about their affairs and what went wrong and how they got found out. They said if couples break up it’s normally not just one affair, it’s lots of them. But, I mean, everyone is doing it, so I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. But I guess if everyone is doing it, that’s why everyone is breaking up.”

  “I don’t know if it was an affair,” I said. “I don’t know what it was. My dad is massively into training, you know, triathlons and stuff.”

  “Ah, yeah,” she said and she looked excited about that. “That is classic, that is, the guy goes nuts about training and his body. He spends so long training and obsessing about his abs that he forgets he has a wife.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read about it in Elle. I’m always reading about relationships. I want to be a psychologist when I’m older.”

  I thought she could help me. I mean, she seemed to know so much about divorce that maybe she could help me figure it out.

  “But my mom’s obsessed with her body too,” I said. “So I don’t see why she would have minded him being obsessed with his body. She’s always working out, Pilates and kickboxing, she
has a personal trainer who comes to the house three times a week, she does all this detox fasting, you know, and she does all these injections.”

  “Botox?”

  “Yeah, she does that, but she does some new thing as well, some kind of vitamin acid that they stick in your cheeks to make them look like apples. She does it when she goes to New York. It’s some French guy who lives in New York.”

  “Oh my God,” Scarlett said and her eyes were open wide. “I know about him, I read about him. I can’t believe your mom goes to him—she really goes to him?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “she really does.”

  “Respect,” she said.

  “So what I mean is, it wasn’t just one of them and not the other getting obsessed. They are both obsessed with their bodies. My dad does it for fitness, to be hard and win, and my mom does it to be beautiful, to be thin and win. And I think they liked being beautiful together, winning by their beauty.”

  Terriblement beau. That’s what the guy who used to look after the plants on the balcony said about my parents once. He said it with a funny look on his face, so I wasn’t sure it was a compliment. He had long gray hair and was a bit of a hippie, and he was always smoking pot out on the balcony as he watered the plants.

  “Maybe they got off on the fact the other was beautiful,” Scarlett said.

  “Yeah, they definitely did. They met on a plane coming back from New York, sitting next to each other in business class. My dad used to say it was love at first sight.”

  We stood for a bit saying nothing, both of us looking out to sea, and then I said: “You know what I think? I think I am why they broke up. I mean, I didn’t get into the school they wanted me to go to. That was in May and three months later they broke up.”

  “They are not going to break up over your school.”

  “You don’t know my parents. Maman was obsessed with that school, all she wanted was for me to go there so she could tell all her friends and go for coffee with the other cool moms. And my dad just wanted me to be a winner. He wanted to tell his parents, to tell his brother. It’s not just that I didn’t get into the school, it’s math—I’m bad at math and I can’t play good tennis and my dad loves tennis. I am not what they wanted me to be. I don’t live up to them.”

  I remembered that final Sunday lunch when they fought about the macaroons all the way to my grandparents’ house, and when we finally got there, my dad parked the car and I opened the car door and there was a welt of mauve gasoline on the tarmac right by my feet. I didn’t want to step in the gasoline in my brand-new sneakers, so I took my time getting out of the car to avoid it.

  “For God’s sake, hurry up, will you?” my dad had said. Something about his voice made me look up. I looked straight into his eyes. There was hate there, hate for me. He turned away, but I had seen it.

  “You know what?” Scarlett said. “Fucking parents, it’s all about them, their hang-ups. Your dad is worried you can’t play tennis because he’s worried it makes him look bad. That’s his problem. You’re his child, not his car. He can get over it. He can go run another fucking marathon. You’re not here to make him look good. Allez, Paul.” She grabbed my arm and she ran holding my hand, dragging me with her, down to the swings. When we got there, there were two little kids playing on them. Scarlett told them to get lost and they jumped off without a word. They ran crying back up the beach to find their parents. Scarlett took the yellow swing and I took the red and we swung back and forth, back and forth. She could go really high; she kept kicking her legs out and snatching them back and she got higher and higher.

  “Watch me,” she said, “watch how I do it.”

  And so I watched her and after a while I started going higher and she kept laughing and shouting.

  “Encore, Paul, more, more, more.”

  And I started laughing too, because it was funny to be doing this, to be swinging high on the beach in La Baule in October. I had never done this before; I had never felt this freedom.

  As she got lower, she shouted out, “I’m gonna jump!” She waited until the swing was coming through and she jumped far out so the swing wouldn’t hit her, far, far out, and she landed on her feet and then she fell forward into the sand and she lay there laughing and writhing. Then she turned to me and, lying on her back, she shouted: “Do it, Paul!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Do it,” she said again. “Do it. Wait till I say go.”

  I swung back up and I looked out at the sea and I shouted, “I am here. I am here!” I don’t know why I shouted that and then I went down and then I went up again and as I came down, Scarlett shouted, “Now, Paul, now!” And I flew forward through the air. “Jump!” she was shouting. “Vas-y, jump, do it, do it, do it.” I remember that jump. I’d never felt like that before, like my mouth was flying through the air, like I was free and Scarlett was flying with me. I felt this lightness that was Scarlett and me. Scarlett and me. Scarlett and me.

  My feet landed and I fell forward into the damp sand. It didn’t hurt. I laughed out loud.

  “Too good,” I said, “it was too good.”

  She lay down beside me and we laughed. We laughed and lay on our backs and we held hands as we kept laughing.

  “Your face,” she said, “your face, it was too funny to see your face.”

  We watched as all the blues on the horizon and the white of the clouds merged into a band of steel gray and we lay together in the cold sand.

  After a while she got a message on her phone.

  “Merde,” she said. “I have to go.”

  My jeans were wet and my back was cold when I stood up. We brushed off the damp sand.

  “I’ve left my bag up there with all my stuff. Come with me?”

  She ran on ahead and I jogged behind her. It took us a while to find where she’d left her stuff. She picked up the vodka and took a big gulp of it, then she looked inside the plastic bag and pulled out a small bright blue and silver breath freshener and she sprayed it three times into her mouth.

  “They’ll never know,” she said and she smiled at me.

  People were leaving the thalasso. It was the end of the day. We watched the line of white-robed bodies file along the promenade back toward the hotel and then I saw a red glow bobbing toward us; it was the burning tip of a cigar. I put my hand on Scarlett’s arm.

  “Wait,” I said. We stopped. We were at the bottom of the steps that led up to the promenade. Gabriel was jogging toward us, not jogging for exercise, but jogging because he was late. He had his jeans on and his leather jacket and every so often his cigar flared red and then faded.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “It’s him.”

  “Who?”

  “My mother’s boyfriend.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  Gabriel looked down at where we stood as if he’d just heard what I said.

  “Hey, Paul,” he shouted. “What’s up?”

  He stopped jogging and walked to the edge of the promenade so that he was standing above us.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Paul?” he said.

  “Scarlett, this is Gabriel,” I said.

  “Hey, Scarlett,” he said.

  We walked slowly up the steps toward him.

  “Great name you have, very rock and roll.”

  Scarlett said nothing; she just stared up at him.

  “So, what have you guys been up to? You look a little damp, like you’ve been rolling around in the sand.” He smiled suggestively as he said that.

  “Hanging out,” I said.

  “Well, while you’ve been hanging out, I just won myself a quick three hundred and forty euros at the casino, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. His lips were stained dark red. “Lady Luck on my first day, how about that?”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to the casino,” Scarlett said.

  “I’ll take you sometime.” Gabriel smi
led at her.

  “She’s not old enough,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure I could find a way to get her in.” He raised one eyebrow like he was James Bond. “What do you say, Scarlett?”

  “I’m going back to Paris tonight,” she said.

  “Well, that’s too bad, maybe next time.”

  We all headed back to the hotel and Gabriel talked nonstop about blackjack and how he’d won. Scarlett and I walked in silence. I didn’t want her to go. She hadn’t told me she was leaving. We turned into the back entrance of the hotel. The chandeliers were lit up in the lobby.

  “It was cool hanging out,” she said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t think of what else to say and Gabriel was standing right there listening to every word.

  “See you at school, then,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “see you at school.”

  “Don’t tell me you guys are at the same school,” Gabriel said, letting his mouth hang open. “Man, you’re too lucky to be young.”

  Scarlett fixed him with her yellow-green eyes.

  “How old are you?” she said.

  He looked embarrassed.

  “Thirty-five.”

  She whistled through her teeth.

  “You’re pretty old. Not like dying-old, but, I mean, you’re not young, are you?”

  “Well, thanks,” Gabriel said. He looked sad then.

  Scarlett leaned forward and kissed my cheeks.

  “So long, Paul,” she said.

  She walked away toward the lobby, swaying her butt as she went, knowing that we were watching her, then she disappeared behind the people and the potted palms.

  Gabriel slapped my shoulder.

  “Hey, I like your taste, Paul. Her style’s a little destroy. She’s cute, though,” he said. “I’m going up to take a shower before your mother gets back.”