The next girl I take to the Club is also a Scandinavian — we have eight in our class — but this time a Swede, called Danni. Danni is very attractive and vivacious, in my opinion, with straight white-blond hair. She’s a tall girl, and she would be perfect but for the fact that she has one slightly withered leg, noticeably thinner than the other, which causes her to limp. She is admirably unself-conscious about her disability.
“Hi,” Preston says. “Are you French?”
Danni hides her incredulity. “Mais oui, monsieur. Bien sûr.” Like Ingrid, she finds this presumption highly amusing. Preston soon realizes his mistake and makes light of his disappointment.
Danni wears a small cobalt bikini and even swims in the pool, which is freezing. (Serge says there is something wrong with the heating mechanism but we don’t believe him.) Danni’s fortitude impresses Preston: I can see it in his eyes as he watches her dry herself. He asks her what happened to her leg and she tells him she had polio as a child.
“Shit, you were lucky you don’t need a caliper.”
This breaks the ice and we soon get noisily drunk, much to Serge’s irritation. But there is little he can do, as there is no one else in the Club who might complain. Danni produces some grass and we blatantly smoke a joint. Typically, apart from faint nausea, the drug has not the slightest effect on me, but it affords Serge a chance to be officious, and as he clears away a round of empty glasses he says to Preston, “Ça va pas, monsieur, non, non, ça va pas.”
“Fuck you, Serge,” he says amiably, and Danni’s unstoppable blurt of laughter sets us all off. I sense Serge’s humiliation and realize the relationship with Preston is changing fast: the truculent deference has gone; the dislike is overt, almost a challenge.
After Danni has left, Preston tells me about his latest money problems. His bar bill at the Club now stands at over four hundred dollars and the management is insisting it be settled. His father won’t return his calls or acknowledge telegrams and Preston has no credit cards. He is contemplating pawning his watch in order to pay something into the account and defer suspicion. I buy it off him for five hundred francs.
I look around my class counting the girls I know. I know most of them by now, well enough to talk to. Both Ingrid and Danni have been back to the Club and have enthused about their afternoons there, and I realize that to my fellow students I have become an object of some curiosity as a result of my unexpected ability to dispense these small doses of luxury and decadence: the exclusive address, the privacy of the Club, the pool on the roof, the endless flow of free drinks …
Preston decided to abandon his French classes a while ago and I am now his sole link with the Centre. It is with some mixed emotions — I feel vaguely pimplike, oddly smirched — that I realize how simple it is to attract girls to the Club Les Anges.
Annique Cambrai is the youngest of the Cambrai daughters and the closest to me in age. She is only two years older than me but seems considerably more than that. I was, I confess, oddly daunted by her mature good looks, dark with a lean attractive face, and because of this at first I think she found me rather aloof, but now, after many Monday dinners, we have become more relaxed and friendly. She is studying law at the University of Nice and speaks good English with a marked American accent. When I comment on this she explains that most French universities now offer you a choice of accents when you study English and, like 90 percent of students, she has chosen American.
I see my opportunity and take it immediately: would she, I diffidently inquire, like to come to the Résidence Les Anges to meet an American friend of mine and perhaps try her new accent out on him?
The next morning, on my way down the rue de France to the Centre, I see Preston standing outside a pharmacy reading the Herald Tribune. I call his name and cross the road to tell him the excellent news about Annique.
“You won’t believe this,” I say, “but I finally got a real French girl.”
Preston’s face looks odd: half a smile, half a morose grimace of disappointment.
“That’s great,” he says dully, “wonderful.”
A tall, slim girl steps out of the pharmacy and hands him a plastic bag.
“This is Lois,” he says. We shake hands.
I know who Lois is, Preston has often spoken of her: my damn-near fiancée, he calls her. It transpires that Lois has flown over spontaneously and unannounced to visit him.
“And, boy, are my mom and dad mad as hell,” she says, laughing.
Lois is a pretty girl, with a round, innocent face quite free of makeup. She is tall — even in her sneakers she is as tall as me — with a head of incredibly thick, dense brown hair which, for some reason, I associate particularly with American girls. I feel sure also, though as yet I have no evidence, that she is a very clean person — physically clean, I mean to say — someone who showers and washes regularly, smelling of soap and the lingering farinaceous odor of talcum powder.
I stroll back with them to the Résidence. Lois’s arrival has temporarily solved Preston’s money problems: they have cashed in her return ticket and paid off the bar bill and the next quarter’s rent that had come due. Preston feels rich enough to buy back his watch from me.
Annique looks less mature and daunting in her swimsuit, I’m pleased to say, though I was disappointed that she favored a demure apple-green one-piece. The pool’s heater has been “fixed” and for the first time we all swim in the small azure rectangle — Preston and Lois, Annique and me. It is both strange and exciting for me to see Annique so comparatively unclothed and even stranger to lie side by side, thigh by thigh, inches apart, sunbathing.
Lois obviously assumes Annique and I are a couple — a quite natural assumption under the circumstances, I suppose — she would never imagine I had brought her for Preston. I keep catching him gazing at Annique, and a mood of frustration and intense sadness seems to emanate from him — a mood of which only I am aware. And in turn a peculiar exhilaration builds inside me, not just because of Lois’s innocent assumption about my relation to Annique, but also because I know now that I have succeeded. I have brought Preston the perfect French girclass="underline" Annique, by his standards, represents the paradigm, the Platonic ideal for this American male. Here she is, unclothed, lying by his pool, in his club, drinking his drinks, but he can do nothing — and what makes my own excitement grow is the realization that for the first time in our friendship — perhaps for the first time in his life — Preston envies another person. Me.
As this knowledge dawns, so too does my impossible love for Annique. Impossible, because nothing will ever happen. I know that — but Preston doesn’t, and somehow that ghostly love affair, our love affair, Annique and me, that will carry on in Preston’s head, in his hot and tormented imagination, embellished and elaborated by his disappointment and sense of lost opportunity, will be more than enough, more than I could ever have hoped for.
Now that Lois has arrived I stay away from the Résidence Les Anges. It won’t be the same again and, despite my secret delight, I don’t want to taunt Preston with the spectre of Annique. But I find that without the spur of his envy the tender fantasy inevitably dims; in order for my dream life, my dream love, to flourish, I need to share it with Preston. I decide to pay a visit. Preston opens the door of his studio.
“Hi, stranger,” he says with some enthusiasm. “Am I glad to see you.” He seems sincere. I follow him into the apartment. The small room is untidy, the bed unmade, the floor strewn with female clothes. I hear the noise of the shower from the bathroom: Lois may be a clean person but it is clear she is also something of a slut.