CHAPTER THREE

My father had two faces. One, cheerful, all smiles, always with a friendly word

and a joke at the ready, was reserved for his clients. I met some of those when he called

on hotel managers on the way to our family vacations, to "stoke the fire," as he liked to

say. The other, distant and stern, he saved for his family. When I summon my father's

memory, I see him sitting ramrod-straight in his leather armchair, eerily still, like a wax

museum exhibit, his Figaro open on his lap at the page of domestic politics⎯the Algerian

war, most likely. He's chewing on the tip of his spectacles and stares at the ice cubes in

his glass. The glass in question is made of finely-chiseled crystal and engraved with the

coat of arms of the Ritz hotel, a memento from his first professional success. It's the only

one from which he drinks his daily scotch on the rocks. Nobody else is allowed to use it,

and it must be hand-washed by his wife. Such is the law.

My mother never confided in me, but I spent enough hours watching her to know

that she cried frequently. I remember her one day having criticized one of Lucie's friends

for leaving the parental nest to live with a jazz pianist who "couldn't even offer her a

decent lifestyle." I heard my sister snap back, "A decent lifestyle! That's what you

married Dad for, isn't it? So why don't you let other people take a shot at happiness

instead?" From the shadow of the corridor where I was standing, I expected another of
my mother's angry outbursts, but when I saw her bow her head silently and bury her face

in her hands, I wanted to run and hold her in my arms. I was too afraid of her, though.

My father was commercial director of a company that leased television sets to

hotels and hospitals. When my mother complained about his silence, he'd answer that he

had just been smiling for a living on the roads of France. He expected the family he was

working so hard to feed to show some degree of understanding. Was peace at home too

much to ask?

Powerless against her husband's lack of interest and utterly frustrated, my mother

sometimes fought back. I had the misfortune of being a witness one evening when she

went on the attack and insisted on knowing what my father could possibly see in his

glass. "I'm lost in my thoughts," he answered without looking up.

"One wonders how you can get lost," my mother snickered. I couldn't refrain from

laughing and was sent to bed without dinner.

When it came to Lucie, his daughter from a first marriage, my father was ready to

forgive anything. In his eyes she was nothing short of perfect and he shared the credit

with his saintly late wife. "You only find a woman like her once in your life," he'd say.

Such statements were the matrimonial equivalent of billiards; they allowed him to hit my

mother while turning his back to her.

For his son, he showed nothing but contempt. When he wasn't ignoring me

altogether, he was calling me a no-gooder, telling me that I would never amount to

anything. To him I was a wanker, an epithet I admittedly deserved to the fullest extent.

What my father meant, though, was that I was a totally worthless individual.
 And yet, there must have been happy times. In an attempt to convince myself of

it, I spent hours poring through the photos in our family albums. Pictures can lie, I know,

but those images sometimes bring back memories of laughter and even tenderness. There

were few such moments, to be sure, but I want to believe they existed. They remind me

of a time when my mother allowed me to sleep in her bed when I had nightmares and my

father was away on business. I was eleven, twelve perhaps, thirteen maybe⎯those years

are somehow lumped together in my memory. We didn't cuddle, that wasn't my mother's

style, but I'd inch toward her as soon as she started to snore softly and I felt loved. Those

romantic interludes came to an abrupt end when, one night, I undertook to explore the

warm body lying next to me. With infinite caution, I lifted my mother's nightgown,

millimeter by millimeter, until I finally reached the top of her thighs. My heart was

pounding; I was in a state of apnea. When I finally put my fingers on the soft and curly

tuft, several thousand volts went through me and I jumped so violently that my mother

woke up and switched on the lamp at her side. She never suspected my misdeed, but after

wondering why I was feverish and damp with sweat, she noticed the wet stain on my

pajamas and started screaming, "It's disgusting! You had one of those filthy dreams

again. That's really all you have on your dirty mind, isn't it? I don't want you in my bed

ever again."

There's also a picture showing me on my father's lap. Since computerized trickery

wasn't available at the time, I must accept this aberration. In another photo I stand next to

Lucie. My sister who usually ignored me and referred to me as "him" when she really had

to include me has her hand on my shoulder. Go figure!

 Page after page, I was struck by the fact that those mementos of family happiness

have all vacation locations as backgrounds. And, in fact, it was in St. Briac one summer

that I met Mireille. As the expression goes, she could easily have been my mother and in

a way she was, for she too brought me into the world.

Mireille was spending a gloomy month of August at the Hôtel du Promontoire

where we were vacationing like every other summer. Her husband was a massive bear of

a man whose back was covered with a fur so thick that when he went into the ocean, he

looked like he had forgotten to undress. An officer at the Caen air base, he spent every

weekend with his wife.

Mireille always sat on the same spot in an aluminum folding chair just above the

few square feet of sand my parents claimed as their own. Covered with sunscreen, my

mother waited for an unlikely ray of sun while my father read detective stories. Lucie was

somewhere with her friends. As for me, I was bored to death.

The water was gray and cold, the weather dull, distractions were few. I had a

companion in my misery, a boy from Lyons named Jeannot with whom I sometimes

played ping-pong and swapped comic books, but he wasn't around much because his

parents liked to take him for drives around the countryside. He didn't seem to have much

fun either.

Sometimes I went alone for long walks along the beach, jumping from rock to

rock. My favorite pastime consisted of imagining myself changing the world through

extraordinary discoveries. Among them, a powder that, sprayed over the clouds, would

dissolve them. Brittany would have been my first customer. I also thought of a remote-

controlled device which, aimed at my Saint Jean-Baptiste schoolmates, would erase their
memories; I would immediately jump to the top of the class. My favorite invention was a

special kind of lenses for sunglasses allowing one to see through women's bathing suits.

For some complicated technical reason, this optical breakthrough had no effect on men's

trunks which are made of a completely different fabric⎯everybody knows that.

I was lying on my stomach, one gray Monday afternoon, on a towel representing a

Paris subway ticket when, raising my eyes, I saw that Mireille was looking at me. She

was seated in her usual chair, her hands flat on her knees, wearing a yellow cardigan and

a white skirt with a flowery design. She was drawing circles in the sand with the tip of

her toe. Did she see lust in my eyes? Did she notice how they were trying to make their

way under her skirt, or was it my imagination? Did I read an invitation in her smile, I

don't remember. Be that as it may, we allowed our eyes to meet, disengage, and then

meet again, not unlike fencers in their initial exchanges. Finally our eyes locked. My

heart pounded; I was short of breath. Nothing in the world mattered, except for the

narrow corridor of space between us. Then, after an unbearably long moment, her smile

changed in a very subtle way, becoming deliciously mischievous. A strange light came

on in her eyes. Without moving her hands, she put her fingers to work⎯they moved like

the legs of a spider⎯pulling her skirt up a few millimeters at a time until its hem finally

reached her knees. I was petrified. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she then opened her

legs, revealing first the inner side of her knees, then her thighs, until she finally let me see

her panties. I don't know if she was still smiling, for my eyes were glued to this narrow

white strip at the end of an enchanted tunnel. My sex ached under my stomach; it was as

if each heartbeat reverberated through it. Common sense tells me today that this episode

cannot have lasted more than one or two minutes. Patrons of the hotel, heroic bathers
coming out of the ocean, must have walked by, and she certainly did not remain with her

legs wide apart in front of a crimson-faced boy for long, but that moment of total

fascination burned itself so deeply into my memory that I don't recall it having ended. In

a way it never did.

From that day on, and until the end of the week, Mireille and I became

inseparable. I still didn't know her name, and we hadn't exchanged a word, but each time

I raised my eyes from my plate in the dining room, I could see her smile in the mirrors

covering the kitchen doors. We were then the actors of a psychedelic show for our

reflections kept swinging to the kicks of the tray-carrying waiters. I would catch a

glimpse of her smiling lips, then hear a foot kick the door and was immediately

confronted with my own burning face.

Our ocular flirtation went on at the beach as well. When it became too much to

bear, I would sigh heavily and rise, yawn loudly, stretch my arms, hamming it up, before

going on a walk, looking as cool as I possibly could. My hands in my shorts pockets, I

whistled a tune and kicked shells by the water's edge. I hoped she would follow me and

that we would meet behind a rock or somewhere in the dunes, but she never did. When I

came back, she would be there in her chair with the same maddening smile on her lips. I

felt humiliated.

On the following Friday afternoon, the airman's arrival gave me my pride back.

When Mireille walked by me, her hand in her husband's without so much as a glance in

my direction, I decided to expel her from my thoughts. By the following Monday, I had

almost succeeded until a ridiculous incident reunited us.

 We were finishing our breakfast on the hotel deck. My father had rented a fishing

boat complete with equipment and captain for the day and was waiting for the lunch

basket he had ordered when I ventured a question which had been on my mind since the

previous evening.

"Tell me, Papa, what's a premature ejaculator?"

First, there was a moment of silence, then my sister burst into laughter. She was

quickly interrupted by the sound of my father's fist on the table. Cups and saucers flew

crashing to the floor.

"Where did you learn those disgusting words?"

"Lucie left a book open on her bed. It was in capital letters."

"And you, Yvonne, don't you have anything to say?" my father barked at my

mother.

"I don't know what to do about him," she sighed, "Boarding school, that's the only

solution."

They had been discussing my deportation lately.

"Well, I'll tell you what," the head of the family declared. "These two won't come

with us to day. Lucie, how many times have I told you not to let your brother read your

medical books? And you, little swine, that'll teach you to keep your mouth clean."

Having spoken, my father stood up, signaled for my mother to take the basket that

had just arrived, and headed for the harbor, unconcerned by the fact that they were taking

our lunches with them.

"I really don't care," my sister said as she pushed back her chair. "I don't like

sailing anyway and besides, I'd rather spend the day with my friends. Tell you one thing
though, this is the last summer I spend in this shithole." I watched her walk away and

went down the stairs leading to the beach where, seated on the sand, I contemplated the

rest of the day. I wasn't any more frustrated than my sister about the loss of the maritime

expedition, but still, it was going to be a long day. Not that my parents provided much

distraction, but their presence and routines marked the passage of time like a Swiss

cuckoo clock. My boredom had taken a new dimension. I was pondering my situation

when a voice behind me made me start.

"What are you going to do?"

I turned around. Mireille wore, I'll never forget it, a purple and yellow dress and

brown espadrilles. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Dunno!"

"I heard everything, you know. I was having breakfast just behind you.

Personally, I think it's normal to want to understand things. A young man your age is

curious. That's the way it should be."

I nodded in appreciation of her support.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Victor."

"That's a nice name. And how old are you?"

"Seventeen."

Never had a lie been told with more spontaneity. I cannot imagine for one second

that Mireille believed me, but she was kind enough to pretend.

"My name's Mireille," she said. "I, too, am alone. Would you like us to spend the

day together?"

I looked down. Suddenly I had lost my voice. My cheeks and forehead were afire.
 "We could go for a walk."

I kept my eyes glued to the sand and nodded.

"Or if you prefer, I could show you the books I brought here for the holidays. We

might find one that you'd like to read."

I felt like I was trapped in one of those amusement park huge drums that spin at a

zillion rotations per minute. We were gaining speed and the centrifugal force was pushing

me against the wall.

"Would you like to come and have a look at them in my room this afternoon?

Shall we say just after lunch? I am in room 38 on the third floor."

I was stuck against the wall of the infernal machine. My temples were throbbing,

my head was about to explode any moment and my eardrums were going to burst. I didn't

have the strength to raise my eyes or utter a single word. When I finally came to, I was

alone.

It was exactly two o'clock when I knocked at Mireille's door. I had spent the lunch

hour walking along the water's edge, struggling to control the surge of emotions that

overcame me. I knew that I was getting perilously close to the abyss. I was torn between

panic and the call of the unknown, an indescribable exaltation. When the first cosmonauts

neared the moon and looked at the planet earth, a far-away blue ball, when they realized

that mankind's dream was about to come true and that the world would forever be

different, they cannot have been, I am not afraid to say, more overwhelmed that I was

that day.

Mireille had changed into a pink skirt with large tropical flowers and a flimsy

eggshell blouse, under which I could see her breasts sway and their dark brown nipples
jut out. She had made herself up: her eyelids were dark and her mouth red. A fist

squeezed my throat. As I stood paralyzed at the door, she extended her hand, which I

shook feebly, muttering a hardly audible bonjour, and she pulled me inside her room.

"Don't stand there." she said, "We don't need to share our little secret with the

entire hotel population, do we?"

My memory of the ensuing minutes is both vivid and confused. I remember

standing in front of the shelf, on which a number of paperbacks were stacked, pretending

to be interested in their titles⎯they were just a blur of colors and letters⎯while, from the

corner of my eye, I could see Mireille, seated on the corner of the bed.

"Can you find something interesting?"

Before even looking toward Sodom, I had turned into a statue of salt. I shook my

head.

"How about sitting here then? Isn't it time for us to get to know each other?"

I sat down where her red-nailed hand was patting the bed cover. "Your room is

larger than mine," I said, staring ahead. My words sounded like the caw of a crow.

Mireille didn't answer and let the silence hang in the room for what seemed like an

eternity. Then I felt her hand take mine and pull it gently toward one of her breasts where

she let it rest. Never had I imagined such sweetness. The warmth of this breast, its

weight, its soft firmness took me totally by surprise. To feel its hard nipple in the center

of my palm made me feel sick with bliss. Slowly but firmly, Mireille slid my hand under

her blouse. Skin against skin. I was close to fainting. And when her hand left mine to rest

on my penis, which was stretching the front of my shorts, I started shaking like a leaf in
the wind. Never before, in my most torrid dreams, had I imagined such a whirlwind of

sensations.

"Why don't you take off your shirt?" Mireille suggested. "You'll be more

comfortable." I nodded, mute as well as paralyzed. She was standing in front of me now.

Her smile was the same as the first day on the beach. A few buttons later, she brought her

naked breasts a couple of inches from my face. They were heavy, somewhat sagging,

today I know it, but so wonderfully magnificent. Then she let her skirt drop at her feet

and I saw that she was nude. I had seen pubic mounds during hundreds of night watches,

but this one was being offered to me. I only had to raise my hand to touch its shiny curls,

but wasn't sure I had enough strength in me.

"So? What are you waiting for? Won't you undress?"

As I struggled to free my head from my polo shirt, I felt Mireille's nails run on my

chest. When I finally emerged, she unzipped my shorts and pulled my briefs down. Then

she lay down and, spreading her legs, opened her arms. I felt terribly clumsy as I let her

guide me like a dancer on his first night on the ballroom floor. Incapable of any

conscious thought, I shook with a violent spasm as soon as our bellies touched and

collapsed, shaking, on her. I could feel her stomach under mine, wet and sticky. When the

last aftershock waves had finally subsided, I attempted to get up, sad and embarrassed,

aware as I was that I had in some way failed, but Mireille held me down and stroked the

back of my neck with the tip of her fingers. Then she said softly, "Well, at least that's a

question you won't have to ask your dad anymore!"