When Edwina and I wheeled up in front of the Abbey gates my mother and Glenn Elliott were standing in the middle of the street looking confused.
“We’re here!” I shouted out the window to them. They were both in white. Glenn Elliott was wearing white jeans and a T-shirt, which would have looked too young on any man who didn’t have his body. It was still there. Very beautiful. My mother was wearing white cotton pants and what she always liked to call a “gym shirt.” Just a plain little short-sleeved white cotton shirt. That probably cost hundreds of dollars somewhere in the Bal Harbor Mall in Miami Beach. They both looked swell. As if they had just stepped off a yacht in Portofino. Which is exactly the look they wanted to project, I’m sure.
“These are my parents,” I said, introducing Edwina to them. “This is the fabulous Edwina Grey.”
She shook their hands and said, “I knew it had to come from somewhere,” nodding toward me. “At my age, perhaps more fabled than fabulous. And who knows what those fables might be?”
I could see this was going to be a charm contest as to who could out-nice each other.
My mother hugged me to her and held me very tightly. I probably do love her more than anyone else in the world, Steve included. Listen, this is the person who would crawl across the Sahara on her hands and knees for me, and would do this every day, couture sports shirt or no. No one has many of those people in their lifetime. She’d do the same for Glenn Elliott, too. What Glenn would do for us, I’m not sure. I do know he thinks he’s very, very lucky to have wound up with us as a family. The fact that he used to fuck me doesn’t count. That was before we were family.
“You’re both so dark, and Hugo is so blond. But Italian blond. That’s true.” Edwina was standing with both hands on her hips and her legs in a firm stance looking at us. As though she were considering buying us.
Glenn Elliott said, “I’m not his birth father. I’m his stepfather.”
“My real father is dark, too,” I said. “Let us look no further. My grandmother was blonde, I think.”
“Very blond. She was from the Swiss border. Way up north,” my mother said. And that subject was closed.
I looked up and Nina was in the window of her bedroom. “Would you like to come in and have tea?” she called down. “I’m Nina de Rochement. Nina Grant, really.” She disappeared from the window.
We heard the big locks turning in a few moments, and the door swung open. Nina was there with Theo on her hip. He was smiling, which wasn’t that usual. “Come in, come in, come in,” she said, kissing Edwina and me both on the cheeks as we passed into the sitting room. “How very nice to meet you. We talk about you all the time.
“What a beautiful gym shirt,” she said to my mother.
“Do you call it that, too?” I said from the living room. “Where does that name come from?”
“We wore those little white shirts for gym in school. We had dark green shorts that went with them,” Nina said.
“We had dark blue,” my mother said. “Do you suppose this is some kind of international fashion phenomenon that we just haven’t noticed yet?”
My mother and Glenn Elliott came into the lavender living room and sat down as though they had been there dozens of times and knew everyone very well. Here I was with this group of people who didn’t know what the words “ill at ease” meant. The school for charm.
It was the same at dinner. Nina had planned to prepare dinner for us, knowing my parents were arriving. Graham was out shopping when we had arrived and soon came in the door with his shopping basket full. The stores were closed, it being Sunday, but he had been at the market in Amboise. In France, there’s always a market open somewhere when all the others are closed.
Glenn Elliott and Graham were very jolly with each other, as professional male beauties often are. They recognized each other’s type. It was like a club members’ meeting. When my mother and Glenn Elliott left with Edwina to go back to the hotel to change for dinner, Nina said to me, “Before you go upstairs, why don’t you run over and see if Steve would like to come to dinner, too? He should join us. We’re going to eat in the green dining room, and I can manage to squeeze seven people around the table. I’d like to have him.” My dear Nina. She never needed explanations. She probably understood exactly where I stood with Steve and was pitching in to help. And thought my parents should meet him. Check.
Graham had prepared dinner. He was quite a good cook. I actually preferred Nina’s cooking. Which wasn’t real cooking. As Graham said, Nina was the only person he knew who could prepare lunch by going to the bakery. But in France, the boulangerie has those delicious chicken a la crème in a pastry shell, and that piping hot with a big salad and a cherry or apple or pear or raspberry tart for dessert is my ideal lunch. With iced tea. In the garden. Yum-yum. The French probably don’t even think that kind of meal is very French, but it’s top of the line for me.
We were eating lemon sole and fresh green beans. Kind of stiff and crunchy. We had paté de foie gras to start. “I thought I’d splurge,” Graham said. “And our guests have just arrived in France so I thought we’d do a very French thing.” We drank red Gamay straight through the meal. Having white wine with fish isn’t done by many people in France because they think that white wine creates acid in your digestive system. And even if you’re drinking six bottles of wine a day, certainly it shouldn’t give you acid indigestion.
We drank quite a lot of wine and were very lively there in the candlelight. Nina’s green dining room is actually white with a kind of grayish-green paint on the woodwork. Perhaps something like avocado. I don’t know. It’s used a lot in France, but I don’t know of anything in nature to equate it to. The art deco statue of racing dogs on the mantel was exactly the same color green and much of the china was, too. Let’s just call it French Green and be done with it. Like French Blue. Kind of like a gray-blue that they make uniforms of a lot here. Again, I’m not sure what there is in nature that’s similar. Maybe the sky from time to time. Even the blue of the sky is different here. Often it’s hard to love the French people, but it is easy to love France.
The gilded frame of the big mirror over the mantel shone in the glow of the candles and in the mirror you could see us. Four heads of blond hair. Three of brown. Smiling, laughing animated faces. Wine glittering in the glasses being raised. Silverware throwing off edges of light as it was raised to mouths, placed on plate edges. I was truly happy. If evenings like this are possible, then certainly life is worth living. Even with long periods of grumbling in between. I thought of Freya Stark, the woman who wandered around the Near East by herself in the 1920s. Her books were good, but her diaries were great. She wrote that she found happiness was often condensed into short periods of time and there were long periods of duty and dullness in between. Bearable because you knew more happiness was coming.
As the peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream was placed before us for dessert, this was my question. Not about the cobbler, which Graham had made and which was extremely delicious, but about the kind of relationships that I could see around the table. Weren’t they all rather similar?
The women . . . my mother, Nina, Edwina . . . were all very attractive women but none of them a type to be supported by or pampered by men. They were beautiful in their own very individual ways, but to a large part because of the thought and care they had given to their clothing, their appearance, their . . . what can you call it . . . their manner? Their inner beings had created their outer being, and they had chosen beautiful men for their lovers.
The men . . . Graham, Glenn Elliott, Steve . . . were truly beautiful. Beautiful as nature rolled them out. Of course they take care of their bodies and their skin, but they make no attempt to dress in a fashionable way or to be especially witty or entertaining, although they frequently are. They are simply there. And these are the kind of men these women have selected, because surely it is the women who have selected the men. The men have waited for someone to come for them.
And is my relationship with men more similar to the women in these situations? I think so. People admire my appearance, but I can never be vain about it because it is very much an expression of me, and I don’t think words like “beautiful” and “ugly” apply to the manifestation of personality. Perhaps I am beautiful, but I do not perceive it in that way, and it is my perception of it that counts. That can be the only reality for me.
So why didn’t these women select men who were successful in business, or medicine, or politics? Men who sought power? Men who were similar in personality or goals? Although one has to admit that men like Malcolm Forbes or Rupert Murdoch are not exactly sexual turn-ons. I had to ask my mother.
Which I did as we walked back to the hotel, through the small winding streets of Cornichons. Edwina walked ahead with Glenn Elliott and Steve on either side of her. I could see there was a certain amount of electricity between Glenn and Steve but also knew it would come to nothing. But it made me wonder if Glenn Elliott was still fooling around on the side or not. Dangerous to do with AIDS and all. If he gave my mother AIDS, I would kill him.
“Mom, I was looking at all of us sitting around the table at dinner having such a good time and I wondered why women like you and Nina and Edwina, before she became a lesbian, chose handsome men who very much need you. Rather than some great tycoon of business,” I said.
My mother looked at me as we passed under a streetlight. She was wearing a pink linen dress, a color she usually never wore as I remember. Very Jackie Kennedy. “Edwina’s a lesbian?” she said. “What next? I mean, what are lesbians coming to? They used to all look like professional wrestlers who could beat you to a pulp with one hand and wore lumberjack shirts. Look at that. Ultrachic. I like her. But that is something like saying you like Mount Hood. Or Niagara Falls. As though she cares.”
“There was Coco Chanel. She was a chic lesbian. Though I think Edwina’s much nicer. So why did you never want to fall in love with a great tycoon?” I said.
“Honey,” she pulled my arm closer to herself, “you don’t decide to fall in love with someone in the first place. You either do or you don’t. And as to why women like myself are fools for beauty? I guess we want to run our own lives. So we are not attracted to someone who will take care of us. You pay a high price for that. Always having to cajole and coerce. It has a big effect on your sexual relationship. The feeling that you should never say ‘no.’ I would hate to ask someone for the money to buy a new dress. And to have all your jewelry be someone else’s choice? I don’t think I could handle that.
“And I don’t think I fell in love with Glenn because of the prestige of having a handsome lover. Husband. I fell in love with his physical presence. I want to be with that beautiful presence all the time. It is curious. And I think my love for him is kind of an aura he wants to be in. Our love for each other is quite different, I think. But it is truly love. Here we are at the hotel. I love him for who he is not for what he can do for me. I think that wraps it up. I don’t need him. I love him. In his entirety. Just as he is right now. I think I will go in and sleep with him. You’ve caused me to think very seriously about him. My good-looking husband.”
We all kissed good night. I kissed Glenn Elliott on both cheeks. He shook hands with Steve. He was wearing a blue blazer and open white shirt. Definitely a looker.
“You should ask Glenn,” my mother said. “And Edwina. I’d like to know myself what they would have to say. And, of course, Nina.”
Edwina said, “What does Hugo want to ask us?”
“He’s doing research on the nature of love,” my mother said.
“Well, there’s a question. I’m still doing research myself,” Edwina said. She looked at me. “We’ll talk.”
I went back to Steve’s room with him. As soon as we entered the room before he could turn on the lights I pushed him down on the floor and started taking off his clothes. He didn’t resist. He seemed to understand I really needed him that night.