•
One Sunday, one of Mary’s friends came by, a young Spaniard their age named Jordan. He was looking for cabaret work with his drag-queen number. On Mary’s suggestion, he had introduced himself to the manager of the Auteuil nightclub and been hired for a trial period.
He would be starting there in a few days, and he wanted a stage dress like the one the heroine wore in an illustrated edition of Louÿs’s The Woman and the Puppet that he had found at one of the used-book stalls on the quais. Mary and Odile decided to make him one, and spent days cutting and stitching in Mary’s room while Louis read a mystery novel. At each fitting, Jordan asked Louis for his opinion. The dress looked good on him, and with his soft features, under his mantilla, the illusion was very convincing.
The evening of his debut, Louis and Odile went to the nightclub. Jordan was on after Mary. The balalaikas fell silent and, in the darkness, a deep voice announced: “La Cigarrera!”
The first notes of Hummel’s Bolero sounded, which Jordan was going to dance to; he had brought the tape himself. When the lights came on, Jordan was standing in the middle of the stage, pale and paralyzed in his dress.
The castanets fell from his hand like dead fruit. He stood there unmoving for several seconds, then collapsed on the floor. He had fainted from stage fright — or hunger, since he had eaten almost nothing for two weeks, afraid of losing his “figure” and not being able to fit into his dress for the act.
He was fired on the spot, and Odile, Louis, and Mary had to console him.
~ ~ ~
ON THE first day of spring, Bejardy invited Odile and Louis out to lunch, and the two of them decided to take advantage of the sun by walking the whole way to Quai Louis-Blériot.
Brossier opened the door and brought them into the living room, where a table had been set for five. Bejardy was with a young brunette, the one whose photograph Louis had noticed on the mantelpiece the first day.
“Nicole Haas, a friend… Mr. and Mrs. Memling… You remember, Coco, it’s Mrs. Memling, who sings ‘La Chanson des rues’ so beautifully.”
He always called them that, in a ceremonious tone, because he’d thought it was funny when he read “Mr. and Mrs. Memling” on the list of tenants in their apartment building.
“Good idea,” he’d told Louis. “That looks more serious. Now you need to get married. I’ll be your best man if you want.”
Nicole Haas had an elegant face but severe features. She was tall, almost Bejardy’s height, and Louis was struck by her boyish looks, especially her way of smoking and of sitting with her legs outstretched, high heels resting on the low table.
“Dinner is served, monsieur,” Brossier said formally.
“Louis, sit on Coco’s right. Mrs. Memling on my right…”
No one spoke much during lunch. Nicole Haas, at the head of the table, seemed to be in a bad mood. Bejardy gazed lovingly at her. She was younger than him — barely thirty.
“Are you going riding this afternoon, Coco?” Bejardy asked.
“No. I have to go to Equistable. I need a saddle.”
She pouted and, with a nonchalant gesture, poured herself a large glass of water.
“Equistable is a good place to buy one, I think,” Brossier said.
She shrugged. “Yes, but I usually go to Ramaget.”
She seemed annoyed at Bejardy and Brossier, but curious about and friendly toward Odile and Louis.
“Do you ride?”
“No,” Odile said.
“Why haven’t you ever invited them to Vertbois?” she asked Bejardy.
“We’ll invite them this summer, Nicole.”
She turned back to Odile and Louis and smiled at them.
“If he brings you to Vertbois, I’ll teach you how to ride a horse.”
“Vertbois is a… family property, in Sologne,” Bejardy said. “You’ll have to see it sometime.”
“Vertbois is the cradle of the Counts of Bejardy,” Nicole Haas said ironically. “Second Empire ‘nobility.’ Roland added the ‘de’ himself.”
This time, Bejardy lost his temper, and the subservient look he had been giving Nicole Haas grew hard.
“Nonsense, Coco. Louis, my boy, you have before you a textbook case of snobbery. Nicole here is obsessed with the aristocracy.”
Nicole Haas burst out laughing and lit a cigarette.
“Stop, you fool.” Loving contempt for Bejardy shone through her words.
A tray with coffee was waiting on the desk on the other side of the room. In the hall, Nicole Haas opened a window and the wind billowed the gauze curtains. Bejardy served the coffee himself.
Nicole Haas, Odile, and Louis were sitting on the velvet sofa. Bejardy and Brossier, leaning on the desk, kept silent, perhaps afraid to provoke a bad-tempered word from Nicole Haas. But she was ignoring them.
She took a leather cigarette case out of her bag and held it out to Odile, then to Louis. She lit their cigarettes herself, with a lighter that had a high flame. Louis was surprised to see it in her hand: It was one of the Zippo lighters from the American army that they had tried to get ahold of at all costs when he was in boarding school.
“Coco, do you want me to come with you to Equistable?”
But she turned to Louis: “You have a nice name, Monsieur de Memling.”
“His name is just Memling, no ‘de,’ ” Bejardy said.
She didn’t listen to him. She smoked her cigarette and watched the gauze curtains, bathed in sunlight, that the wind was waving back and forth like a fluttering scarf.
•
Nicole Haas suddenly stood up and went over to the ashtray on Bejardy’s desk to put out her cigarette.
“I have to go.”
“Do you need the car?” Bejardy asked.
“No.”
She shook hands with Odile and Louis.
“I hope to see you again.”
And, without paying the least attention to Bejardy, she headed for the door.
“See you tonight, Coco,” Bejardy said. “Be good.”
She did not even take the trouble to turn around, and shut the door behind her. Brossier gave a little nervous smile. Bejardy sat down on the sofa, next to Odile and Louis, and sighed.
“She’s not a bad girl, despite how it looks. Louis, I have to talk to you… Let’s go to the next room for a minute.”
“Tell me, Madame Memling, would you care to play a game of chess while they’re talking?” Brossier suggested.
“Why not?” Odile said, keeping her eye on Louis as Bejardy led him into the next room with a hand on his shoulder, a gesture meant to be protective and friendly.
•
They walked into the room where Odile and Louis had spent the night. The bright Citroën factory building on the other side of the Seine looked like it belonged in an airfield.
“Nice view, hmm?” Bejardy said. “When I started out, I had a garage in that neighborhood there, across the river. Rue Balard. Back when I would go see your father race… I saw him race for the first time in 1938, at the Vel’ d’Hiv. I was sixteen.”
“Did you know him?” Louis asked.
“No. I knew Aerts, and Charles Pélissier, but I spent more time with automobile people.”
Was it the mention of his father, or the term Bejardy used, “automobile people,” which sounded a bit like “captains of industry” or “gentleman rider”? Whatever the reason, Louis suddenly saw himself in a large, chilly, unused garage. Rays of sunlight were falling through a glass roof. The branches outside traced shadows on the floor like the shadows of leaves on the surface of a lake.