“We got to do something …” Preston says, a hint of petulant desperation in his voice. I like the “we.” Preston scratches his short hard hair noisily. “What with the new apartment and all.”
“You moved out of the hotel?”
“Yeah. Want to come by tonight?” He shifts his big frame as if troubled by a fugitive itch, and pats his pockets — breast, hip, thigh — looking for his cigarettes. “We got a bar on the roof.”
I am intrigued, but I explain that the invitation has to be turned down as it is a Monday, and every Monday night I have a dinner appointment with a French family — friends of friends of my mother’s.
Preston shrugs, then finds and sets fire to a cigarette. He smokes an American brand called “Merit.” When he came to France he brought a hundred packs with him. He has never smoked anything else since he was fourteen, he insists.
We watch our fellow students saunter into the building. They are nearly all strangers to me, these bright boys and girls, as I have been in Nice only a few weeks, and so far, Preston is the only friend I have made. Slightly envious of their easy conviviality, I watch the others chatter and mingle — Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Tunisians, Nigerians … We are all foreigners, trying hard to learn French and win our diplomas … Except for Preston, who makes no effort at all and seems quite content to remain monoglot.
A young guy with long hair rides his motorbike into the courtyard. He is wearing no shirt. He is English and, apart from me, the only other English person in the place. He revs his motorbike unnecessarily a few times before parking it and switching it off. He takes a T-shirt out of a saddlebag and nonchalantly pulls it on. I think how I too would like to own a motorbike and do exactly what he has done … His name is Tim. One day, I imagine, we might be friends. We’ll see.
Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality. He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.
“Ne bouge pas. C’est l’habitué!”
That’s what he calls me—l’habitué. L’habitué de lundi, to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail. He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find this perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful. “Salut, l’habitué,” “Bien mangé, l’habitué?” “Encore du vin, l’habitué?” and so on. But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.
Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with neat spry figures. Both of them are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice. A significant portion of my affection for them is owing to the fact that they have three daughters — Delphine, Stéphane and Annique — all older than me and all possessed of — to my fogged and blurry eyes — an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty. Stéphane and Annique still live with their parents; Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home. These are the French girls that I claimed to know, though “know” is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them. I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them. I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.
I am humbled further when I consider the family’s disarming, disinterested kindness. When I arrived in Nice they were the only contacts I had in the city, and at my mother’s urging, I duly wrote to them citing our tenuous connection via my mother’s friends. To my surprise I was promptly invited to dinner and then invited back every Monday night. What shamed me was that I knew I myself could never be so hospitable so quickly, not even to a close friend, and what was more, I knew no one else who would be, either. So I cross the Cambrai threshold each Monday with a rich cocktail of emotions gurgling inside me: shame, guilt, gratitude, admiration and — it goes without saying — lust.
Preston’s new address is on the Promenade des Anglais itself — the “Résidence Les Anges.” I stand outside the building, looking up, impressed. I have passed it many times before, a distressing and vulgar edifice on this celebrated boulevard, an unadorned rectangle of coppery, smoked glass with stacked ranks of gilded aluminum balconies.
I press a buzzer in a slim, freestanding concrete post and speak into a crackling wire grille. When I mention the name “Mr. Fairchild,” glass doors part softly and I am admitted to a bare granite lobby where a taciturn man in a tight suit shows me to the lift.
Preston rents a small studio apartment with a bathroom and kitchenette. It is a neat, pastel-colored and efficient module. On the wall are a series of prints of exotic birds: a toucan, a bateleur eagle, something called a blue shrike. As I stand there looking around I think of my own temporary home, my thin room in Madame d’Amico’s ancient, dim apartment, and the inefficient and bathless bathroom I have to share with her other lodgers, and a sudden hot envy rinses through me. I half hear Preston enumerating various financial consequences of his tenancy: how much this studio costs a month; the outrageous supplement he had to pay even to rent it in the first place; and how he had been obliged to cash in his return fare to the States (first-class) in order to meet it. He says he has called his father for more money.
We ride up to the roof, six stories above the Promenade. To my vague alarm there is a small swimming pool up here and a large glassed-in cabana — furnished with a bamboo bar and some rattan seats — labeled Club Les Anges in neon copperplate. A barman in a short cerise jacket runs this place, a portly, pale-faced fellow with a poor mustache whose name is Serge. Although Preston jokes patronizingly with him it is immediately quite clear to me both that Serge loathes Preston and that Preston is completely unaware of this powerful animus directed against him.
I order a large gin and tonic from Serge and for a shrill palpitating minute I loathe Preston too. I know there are many better examples on offer, of course, but for the time being this shiny building and its accoutrements will do nicely as an approximation of The Good Life for me. And as I sip my sour drink a sour sense of the world’s huge unfairness crowds ruthlessly in. Why should this guileless, big American, barely older than me, with his two thousand cigarettes and his cashable first-class air tickets have all this … while I live in a narrow frowsty room in an old woman’s decrepit apartment? My straitened circumstances are caused by a seemingly interminable postal strike in Britain which means money cannot be transferred to my Nice account and I have to husband my financial resources like a neurotic peasant conscious of a hard winter lowering ahead. Where is my money, I want to know, my exotic bird prints, my club, my pool? How long will I have to wait before these artifacts become the commonplace of my life?… I allow this unpleasant voice to whine and whinge on in my head as we stand on the terrace and admire the view of the bay. One habit I have already learned, even at my age, is not to resist these fervent grudges — give them a loose rein, let them run themselves out, it is always better in the long run.
In fact I am drawn to Preston and want him to be my friend. He is tall and powerfully built — the word “rangy” comes to mind — affable and not particularly intelligent. To my eyes his clothes are so parodically American as to be beyond caricature: pale blue baggy shirts with button-down collars, old khaki trousers short enough to reveal his white-socked ankles and big brown loafers. He has fair, short hair and even, unexceptionable features. He has a gold watch, a Zippo lighter and an ugly ring with a red stone set in it. He told me once, in all candor, in all modesty, that he “played tennis to Davis Cup standard.”