I Love You Too Much Page 8

  I went and lay out on a lounger by the pool. The cream canvas was damp beneath me where someone else had lain. I watched the steam rising up off the water. Someone had left a bowl of pretzels and nuts on the side table. The evening air had turned the pretzels soft, but I ate them anyway. And then I ate the nuts. I wished she hadn’t told him she wanted to go to the casino. Why did he have to ruin everything by turning up? I covered myself in one of the pool towels to stay warm.

  The light was fading all around me. The pool was lit up and the underwater lights made the water shimmer and the bodies inside the pool glow in the steam and the oncoming night.

  A boy and a girl were screaming in the pool, a girl with a sexy tanned stomach and a white-fringed bikini chasing a guy around in the shallow end, fake fighting when all they really wanted to do was make out. You could hear it in their voices, in the girl’s high-pitched screams. The white fringes of her bikini swayed with her every move. I closed my eyes and licked the last of the peanut salt from my lips. I listened to them splashing and squealing. I lay there with my eyes closed and imagined it was me in the pool, that it was me being chased around in the steam by Scarlett wearing only a white-fringed bikini.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I got it out. There was a message from Scarlett.

  You’re right, she said, he’s an asshole.

  Chapter Seven

  My dad came by the Sunday after we got back from La Baule to take me to Neuilly to have lunch with my grandparents. He texted me to say he was downstairs. Maman and Gabriel were still in bed. I found Cindy in the kitchen bent over Lou, singing to her as she fed her a bottle.

  “I’m going, Cindy,” I said. She gave a little start and Lou broke off from her bottle; she swiveled her eyes to look at me. She had a froth of yellowish milk seeping out of the corner of her mouth. She didn’t smile. I wondered if she even knew who I was. She looked in my direction for a couple of seconds with her mouth open and then she turned back to her bottle and sucked furiously, as if someone had tried to take it away. All the warm milk that she had guzzled since she was born had gone straight to her cheeks; they were bulging like a chipmunk’s. She had a bald patch on the back of her head. Cindy told me it was where her head rubbed against the mattress. Cindy massaged it with almond oil every day to get the hair to grow back. I touched her head once when no one was looking; it was rough where the hair was matted and broken.

  My dad was downstairs with the engine running. He kissed me when I got in the car. “How was La Baule?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Did you play some tennis?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  “What about kids’ club, did you do kids’ club?” He turned onto the rue d’Assas.

  “Maman says I don’t have to do that anymore.”

  We sat in silence. We drove past school.

  “So what did you do?” he said.

  “I hung out with a friend.” He looked across at me when I said the word friend.

  “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “No,” I said.

  His phone went then. He answered it and said, “Yeah, I’m going to Neuilly. I’ll be back later on. I’m with Paul. I’ll text you when I’m leaving. Not late.”

  “Who was that?” I asked as he put the phone down.

  “A girl.”

  “Who?”

  “Irinka,” he said.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “She’s Russian.”

  I imagined a girl in a movie, a Russian blonde who has sex with you, then shoots you with a silencer and leaves with the stolen encoder. Irinka. How come Irinka knew my name before I knew hers?

  “Is she nice?” I said.

  My dad made a shape with his lips, like he was tasting a first mouthful of soup.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “She needs a lot of attention.” Then he smiled to himself. “More than I can give.”

  We headed out of Paris, going west. La Défense was a dark gateway on the horizon. We sat with all the other Sunday drivers on the Champs-Élysées, queuing to get through the lights, watching the tourists milling in and out of the shops. The traffic freed up after the Arc de Triomphe and my dad accelerated down the avenue de la Grande Armée. The Porsche reared up and we burned past the rest of the cars. He allowed himself another smile then.

  We drove fast through the Bois de Boulogne. It was misty and damp among the trees; the leaves were burned red and yellow and they fell onto the windscreen as we passed. I watched the people getting onto the little white train that takes you to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. It’s a kind of permanent carnival in the middle of the woods and there are rides and a carousel with seats that hang from chains and fly up as it turns around. There are ponies too and sheep kept in a pen and a puppet show.

  We used to go there after we had lunch with my grandparents, just Maman and me. We would go as soon as lunch was over, before my grandmother had a chance to serve coffee. “Quick, let’s get out of here,” Maman used to say as she rushed me out of my grandparents’ apartment building. She kept her hand on the small of my back, pushing me forward, glancing over her shoulder as if they might be following us.

  I loved the electric-racehorse ride the most. I always chose the black-painted horse with flared red nostrils. I would climb up and Maman would sit behind me, holding me tight around the waist.

  “Faster,” she would whisper in my ear, “faster, Paul.”

  But the black horse couldn’t go any faster—all of the horses went at the same fixed speed—and I was glad, because it meant the ride lasted longer. We bobbed up and down between the trees and hedgerows, through long grasses and past little ponds. It was silent away from the crowds. I had Maman all to myself.

  I stared out at the big white machinery of the carnival rides. There was something sad about the Jardin d’Acclimatation, even back then when I was little; all those people with their kids in strollers trying to escape apartments, paying to go on rides, hoping they would last forever. And there was the feeling that Sunday was already halfway over; I knew that school was tomorrow, I saw the grown-ups check their watches, I heard Maman sigh and say, “We should go back.”

  I wished someone had told me then it wouldn’t last forever.

  I pressed the button to lower the passenger window. I could smell the piss from the mangy sheep that were kept on the other side of the fencing. A bunch of Mylar helium balloons were caught up in a tree: a pink pony, a red metallic heart, and a silvery white unicorn, all swaying above the branches. And I thought, I am no longer a child.

  A woman and her Irish setter went running by. She had her music player strapped around her bare arm and she was pounding along as fast as her dog. I thought of Scarlett and César. She told me they had a Portuguese housekeeper who looked after César. I wouldn’t really want a dog like César because they leave hair everywhere. But she says she loves his silky hair. I hadn’t seen Scarlett since La Baule. She’d messaged me, but we weren’t yet back at school.

  There were vans parked up all along the road doing Sunday-morning business in the gray mist. I knew what those women were waiting for, the ones standing around the back of the vans, that white woman with straight yellow hair wearing cutoff jean shorts and black thigh-high boots, flicking the rotten leaves off her heels. She looked a bit like Pierre’s old babysitter from Romania. She was waiting for a car to stop. The tops of her thighs were purple and mottled. She stared into our car to see if we would slow. Her eyes were gaping like a dead fish’s.

  The other side of the Bois de Boulogne, near the Porte Dauphine, is where the transvestites hang out. I’ve seen them standing at the rotary swinging their handbags. Brazilian boys; they wear hot pants and fake eyelashes and they pace up and down the side of the road, hoisting their asses up against car windows, shouting, Come and get it if you dare.

  If you think about it, it’s pretty funny, all the sex that’s for sale around here.
This is where rich old people live, people like my grandparents and their friends, women who play bridge and wear Chanel, men who have the red silken threads of the Légion d’Honneur embroidered on their suit lapels. Every time they walk out of their apartments, they see it: van doors open to dirty mattresses, pimps counting money under the trees, women on benches plucking their eyebrows while they wait.

  Once when I was in elementary school, my grandmother and I were walking down the avenue where she lived and a black woman came out of the bushes. It was nine o’clock in the morning and she was naked except for these weird black straps pulled tight around her breasts and her ass. She stumbled as she came out of the undergrowth, catching her foot on a branch, and everything wobbled. A man was right behind her. He was a young white guy wearing a T-shirt and doing up his jeans. I remember he had his hand on his zip.

  I pulled my grandmother’s arm to get her attention. “What’s she doing?” I said.

  The woman was right there in front of us, about five meters away. I could see the sweat on her upper lip. I could see the marks where the leather straps bit into her flesh.

  “Who?” my grandmother said.

  “That woman right there.” I pointed at her, tried to make my grandmother see.

  But she just kept her eyes straight ahead.

  “She must be looking for her dog,” she said and she grabbed my wrist—she held me so tightly I had red marks after—and we started to cross the road right there, even though there was no crosswalk. She put her hand up, commanding the traffic to stop, and then she pulled me out in front of the cars.

  They were all there in the living room, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, my cousins. They were waiting for me and my dad when we walked in. They rose as one.

  “We thought you’d never come,” my grandfather said.

  There were red and cream flowers in a pot on the shiny black grand piano. My grandmother was wearing a red skirt and a cream blouse, as if she’d dressed to match her flowers. She had large pearl earrings and a strand of pearls around her neck. Her hair was a shimmering blond puff. “The blow-dry from hell,” Maman used to call it. My grandmother gets up early to look like that.

  “How are you, my little Paul?” She leaned forward to kiss me.

  My grandfather’s silver hair was brushed smooth. His face was tanned from their vacation in Vietnam and he was wearing a pale blue cashmere V-neck that made his tan stand out even more. He smelled of lemons. “Now that you are here, Philippe, we can celebrate,” he said to my father.

  “What are we celebrating?” my father said as he kissed my aunt Catherine hello.

  “We have your brother’s promotion to celebrate.”

  “We do?” My father turned to look at Xavier, who sat back down on the sofa next to Catherine, both of them smiling, knees pinched together, my aunt’s face tilted up toward her husband’s, like she was a sunflower and he was her sun. She’s thin, my aunt; not thin like Maman, but thin and bony, and she wears trousers that don’t stick to her ass. She was wearing a dress that day, a plain navy-blue dress that stopped at her knees and had a round collar that gave nothing away.

  “So what is it, Xavier? What’s your promotion?” my father asked.

  “I’ve been made managing director,” Xavier said. He grinned and I saw what he must have looked like when he was a boy, when he was my father’s big brother.

  “I had no idea,” my father said as we all sat down. “When did this happen?”

  “We’ve been in negotiation for months, but we finally signed this week.”

  “You know, Xavier, I was having lunch with Gérard this week and he said it really is remarkable for someone so young,” my grandfather said as he eased the cork from a bottle of champagne.

  There was a second of silence. The air in the living room seemed to hover and vibrate. The windows were all shut tight. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly. There was the release of the cork as it burst from the bottle and my father said:

  “You’re already boasting to your friends, Papa?”

  “Not boasting, Philippe, expressing my pride. Your mother and I are very proud.” My grandfather began pouring the champagne into glasses and then Manuela passed among us with a silver tray, handing them out.

  “When will it be announced?” My father’s hand was shaking slightly as he put the glass to his lips.

  “Next week,” Xavier said. “At least, it should be. The contract is signed; they are deliberating on the date of the announcement. They want to get the timing right for the press in terms of the end-of-year results.”

  “Of course,” my father said and he reached over to take one of the green olives that were in a glass bowl on the coffee table.

  “It’s going to shake up the industry, the fact that you are so young,” my grandfather said.

  “Oh, Papa,” Xavier said, “you exaggerate. I’m not so young anymore, and besides, there are others my age.”

  “Perhaps it’s me that’s growing old,” my grandfather said and he smiled at the idea.

  There was a gap in the conversation. The cousins sat quietly, looking down at the carpet. They only ever spoke when spoken to. Catherine crossed her legs. She had fine hairs that lay flat beneath her beige tights, long brown hairs; they hugged her calf, and I wondered what it would be like to touch them. I wished Maman were there. She would say something and detonate the tension, make it explode so we wouldn’t just be sitting in this room of strangled silence.

  “Nice olives,” my father said.

  “Aren’t they good?” my grandmother said. “I get them from the little Arab on the boulevard, he brings them back from Algeria when he goes.”

  There was another silence. My cousins sat on the edge of their chairs, all three dressed in blue shirts and chinos, docksiders on their feet. I sat next to my father on the sofa, facing Xavier and Catherine.

  “How were your holidays, Paul?” Catherine said to me. “I hear you were in La Baule.”

  “Isn’t it funny,” my grandmother interjected before I had a chance to reply, “when you think how Séverine hated coming to Dinard when you were married and now she chooses to go to Brittany for her holidays.”

  “La Baule’s not really like Dinard,” I said, and my grandparents, Catherine, and Xavier all laughed out loud.

  “We can be thankful for that,” my grandfather said. He smiled to his audience. My grandmother stood up and clasped her hands in front of her breasts.

  “Shall we go through for lunch?” she said.

  Manuela brought in plates of smoked salmon with small mounds of white mousse on top. The mousse had a hairy green herb in it that got caught in my teeth. I tried to scrape the mousse off the salmon, but then I looked up and saw my grandmother was watching me. My grandfather was talking to Augustin, my eldest cousin, asking about the trip he was going on to see the pope in Rome. Manuela brought in the coquilles Saint-Jacques and everyone raved and my grandmother said they came from La Rochelle. Everything has to come from somewhere with my grandmother.

  My grandfather asked Augustin who would be leading the trip and then they all talked about people they knew from their school—priests and families, I don’t know, just people who they knew and who meant nothing to me. I wasn’t listening anyway; I was trying not to be noticed as I got another piece of bread. There was still some melted salty butter on my plate left over from the coquilles Saint-Jacques and I wanted to mop it up. It had started to harden and the yellow grease broke like a wave over my bread.

  “Paul,” my father said.

  I looked up. I was going to be told off for using my bread to mop up.

  “Your grandfather just asked you a question.”

  “He did?” I said.

  “How is your math?” My grandfather was looking at me. He must have asked my cousins the same question, because I could see by the way they were smiling that they were out of danger.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What is your average?”

  “My
average?” I said. “My average in math?”

  “Yes,” my grandfather said.

  I glanced around the table; everyone was looking at me. Even Manuela was watching me as she cleared away the plates.

  “I got seventeen out of twenty on my last test,” I said.

  “Seventeen?” He looked shocked, which was not surprising, given that he was used to single digits from me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “seventeen.”

  I held his gaze.

  “That’s very good, Paul. You’ve made a lot of progress. That must be all the work you are doing with your new tutor. I am pleased. You have to master math, Paul, if you want to conquer the world. And by ‘the world,’ I mean, of course, engineering.”

  Bastard, I thought. He does it every time, builds up Xavier like he’s Jesus Christ just because he did engineering school. The triangle of flesh at my father’s throat turned red. He jutted out his jaw. His legs were crossed and I saw his left foot bang up and down against his right leg. I wondered if he knew he was doing that.

  “You didn’t tell me you got seventeen.” His voice was strained.

  I bit into my bread so that I wouldn’t have to say anything else.

  “It looks like you’ve got some competition, Thibaut,” my grandfather said to the cousin who was in the same year as me at school. “Paul is catching up to you.” They all laughed then, everyone around the table. Except for my dad; he didn’t laugh. And neither did I.

  After dessert Manuela cleared the plates away. I asked Thibaut what he was getting for Christmas; he said he didn’t know and then he asked me the same thing. I said Maman was buying me a new PlayStation and then I told him every single game I was getting. I did it on purpose. He listened to it all with his mouth wide open, wet with desire. My cousins aren’t allowed any kind of computer game. It was pretty fun, that part of the afternoon.

  Then Catherine told him he should practice his piano, so he sat down at the piano in the living room and started playing like he was Chopin and I went looking for another Coke. Manuela had cleared the glasses away, so I went to find one. Just as I got outside the kitchen, I heard my grandmother say: “When will it be settled?”