“How are things with Annique?” he asks, almost at once, as casually as he can manage. He has to ask, I know it.
I look at him. “Good.” I let the pause develop, pregnant with innuendo. “No, they’re good.”
His nostrils flare and he shakes his head.
“God, you’re one lucky—”
Lois comes in from the bathroom in a dressing gown, toweling her thick hair dry.
“Hi, Edward,” she says, “what’s new?” Then she sits down on the bed and begins to weep.
We stand and look at her as she sobs quietly.
“It’s nothing,” Preston says. “She just wants to go home.” He tells me that neither of them has left the building for eight days. They are completely, literally, penniless. Lois’s parents have canceled her credit cards, and collect calls home have failed to produce any response. Preston has been unable to locate his father and now his stepfather refuses to speak to him (a worrying sign), and although his mother would like to help she is powerless for the moment, given Preston’s fall from grace. Preston and Lois have been living on a diet of olives, peanuts and cheese biscuits served up in the bar and, of course, copious alcohol.
“Yeah, but now we’re even banned from there,” Lois says, with an unfamiliar edge to her voice.
“Last night I beat up on that fuckwit, Serge,” Preston explains with a shrug. “Something I had to do.”
He goes on to enumerate their other problems: their bar bill stands at over three hundred dollars; Serge is threatening to go to the police unless he is compensated; the management has grown hostile and suspicious.
“We got to get out of here,” Lois says miserably. “I hate it here, I hate it.”
Preston turns to me. “Can you help us out?” he says. I feel laughter erupt within me.
I stand in Nice station and hand Preston two train tickets to Luxembourg and two one-way Iceland Air tickets to New York. Lois reaches out to touch them as if they were sacred relics.
“You’ve got a six-hour wait in Reykjavik for your connection,” I tell him, “but, believe me, there is no cheaper way to fly.”
I bask in their voluble gratitude for a while. They have no luggage with them, as they could not be seen to be quitting the Résidence. Preston says his father is now in New York and assures me I will be reimbursed the day they arrive. I have spent almost everything I possess on these tickets, but I don’t care — I am intoxicated with my own generosity and the strange power it has conferred on me. Lois leaves us to go in search of a toilet and Preston embraces me in a clumsy hug. “I won’t forget this, man,” he says many times. We celebrate our short but intense friendship and affirm its continuance, but all the while I am waiting for him to ask me — I can feel the question growing in his head like a tumor. Through the crowds of passengers we see Lois making her way back. He doesn’t have much time left.
“Listen,” he begins, his voice low, “did you and Annique …? I mean, are you—”
“We’ve been looking for an apartment. That’s why you haven’t seen much of me.”
“Jesus …”
Lois calls out something about the train timetable, but we are not listening. Preston seems to be trembling, he turns away, and when he turns back I see the pale fires of impotent resentment light his eyes.
I look at him in that way men look at each other. And then I say, “Are you fucking her?”
“Why else would we be looking for an apartment?” Lois arrives and immediately notices Preston’s taut face, oddly pinched. “What’s going on?” Lois asks. “Are you OK?”
Preston gestures at me, as if he can’t pronounce my name. “Annique … They’re moving in together.”
Lois squeals. She’s so pleased, she really is, she really really likes Annique.
By the time I see them onto the train Preston has calmed down and our final farewells are sincere. He looks around the modest station intently as if trying to record its essence, as if now he wished to preserve something of this city he inhabited so complacently, with such an absence of curiosity.
“God, it’s too bad,” he says with an exquisite fervor. “I know I could have liked Nice. I know. I really could.”
I back off, wordless, this is too good, this is too generous of him. This is perfect.
“Give my love to Annique,” Preston says quietly, as Lois calls loud goodbyes.
“Don’t worry,” I say, looking at Preston. “I will.”
Alpes-Maritimes
ANNELIESE, ULRICKE AND I go into Steve’s sitting room. Steve is sitting at a table writing a letter. “Hi,” he says, not looking up. “Won’t be a second.” He scribbles his name and seals the letter in an envelope as the three of us watch him, wordlessly. He stands up and turns to face us. His long clean hair, brushed straight back from his forehead, falls to his shoulders. Perhaps it’s something to do with the dimness of the room but, against the pale ghost of his swimming trunks, his cock seems oddly pigmented — almost brown.
“Make yourselves at home,” he says. “I’ll just go put some clothes on.”
I have a girl now — Ulricke — and so everything should be all right. And it is, I suppose, except that I want Anneliese, her twin sister. I look closely at Anneliese to see her reaction to Steve’s nakedness (Steve wants Anneliese too). She and Ulricke smile at each other. They both press their lips together with a hand, their eyes thin with delighted amusement at Steve’s eccentricity. Automatically I smile too, but in fact I am covered in a hot shawl of irritation as I recall Steve’s long-stride saunter from the room, his calmness, his unconcern.
Bent comes in. He is Steve’s flat-mate, a ruddy Swede, bespectacled, with a square bulging face and unfortunate frizzy hair.
“Does he always do that?” Anneliese asks.
“I’m afraid so,” Bent says, ruefully. “He comes in — he removes his clothes.”
The girls surrender themselves to their laughter. I ask for a soft drink.
It wasn’t easy to meet Ulricke. She and Anneliese were doing a more advanced course than me at the Centre and so our classes seldom coincided. I remember being struck by rare glimpses of this rather strong-looking fashionable girl. I think it was Anneliese that I saw first, but I can’t be sure. But the fact is that the one I met was Ulricke. How was I meant to know they were twins? By the time I discovered that those glimpses were not of one and the same person it was too late.
One lunchtime I was walking up to the university restaurant by the Faculté de Droit (the restauru by the fac, as the French have it) when I heard my name called.
“Edward!” I turned.
It was Henni, a Finnish girl I knew, with Anneliese. At least I thought it was Anneliese but it turned out to be Ulricke. Until you know them both it’s very hard to spot the difference.
We had lunch together. Then Ulricke and I went for coffee to a bar called Le Pub Latin. We spoke French, I with some difficulty. There was no mention of a twin sister that first day, no Anneliese. I talked about my father; I lied modestly about my age, with more élan about my ambitions. Soon Ulricke interrupted to tell me that she spoke very good English. After that it was much easier.
Ulricke: tall, broad-shouldered, with a round, good-complexioned face — though her cheeks and nose tend to develop a shine as the day wears on — thick straight peanut-colored hair parted in the middle … She and Anneliese are not-quite-identical twins. To be candid, Anneliese is prettier, though in compensation Ulricke has the sweeter temperament, as they say. Recently, Anneliese has streaked her hair blond, which, as well as distinguishing her from her sister (too late, too late), adds, in my opinion, dramatically to her attractiveness. In Bremen, where they live (father a police inspector), they were both prizewinning gymnasts as youngsters. Ulricke told me that they ceased entering competitions “after our bosoms grew,” but the strenuous training has left them with the legacy of sturdy well-developed frames. They are thin-hipped and broad-shouldered, with abnormally powerful deltoid muscles that give their figures a tapered manly look.