AS A CHILD I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT SMOKING. Like getting divorced, it was just something most grown-ups did. My mother and Freddie did it, just about all their friends did it, and I assumed I’d do it when the time came. Newspapers, coffee, and cigarettes were what my mother had for breakfast; Martin followed a similar diet, as did Tom, Anna Haycraft, Peter, his mother, Nick, Emma Soames, Francette—all of them my favored breakfast companions at one time or another. Since I was a bit slow on the uptake, my smoking only really got going in my early twenties, but I was a quick study and soon caught up. Every now and then I would contemplate quitting, until one day a profligate boyfriend gave me a gold Dunhill lighter with GW engraved on the top. Reassuringly heavy, perfectly proportioned, like a miniature Seagram Building, it was an object of great beauty that nestled in my handbag, following me wherever I went. Now you couldn’t just abandon a lovely thing like that, could you?
By nature defiant, by choice delinquent, my mother had been a precocious smoker, starting around thirteen. It suited her. It’s what bad girls did. Of course she knew it screwed up your health. But since when had she ever played it safe? She despised goody-two-shoes behavior on principle. Regular brisk exercise/plenty of leafy greens/no more than one glass of wine/and forget about anything and everything you might enjoy putting in your mouth, which of course would include cigarettes. Imagine actually living like that. I couldn’t, and neither could she.
Forty years after my mother had shared a cigarette with her brother Jackie in that drugstore in New Bedford where they used to hang out, she wrote to Hylan. She was frightened:
Lovely Hylan, I haven’t written before now because I am so desperately trying to stop smoking and I can’t type without smoking so therefore I can’t type. So this is an experiment: can I get all the way through a letter without smoking? I never have. But I’m so truly worried about what the smoking is doing to me that I’d do almost anything to stop … yesterday I thought I’d call the miracle acupuncturist in Marseille … but then I made up 27 convincing reasons why he wouldn’t be there on a Saturday in July, so I didn’t call. (And now I’ve just lit the cigarette, I really have.… I don’t want to die before Nick’s about … well, 25, in my more bleak moments but to be truthful 45 would suit me better. Now—and how about this for feeble—I’m trying to see how long I can just let it lie in the ashtray without me touching it.)
Late in 1985 Peter’s mother, Katherine, lay dying of lung cancer in a London hospital, and one night I went to see her on my way back from dinner. The nurse showed me into her room where she lay in bed, her eyes closed. She had given up on eating, watching television, listening to the radio, or reading—what would have been the point? She had lost her hair, she could barely speak, the chemo made her nauseated, she was so thin her body hardly seemed to exist, but there was still one thing we could do together to distract us from the horror. We could share a cigarette. Too weak to lift her own arm, I held it up to her lips as she inhaled, took a puff myself, and held it up for her again. After that I sat with her while she drifted off to sleep, kissed her good-bye, and tiptoed out of the room. She died later that night.
You might have thought that her son’s grief would have inspired him to quit—it certainly had that effect on her daughter-in-law—and Peter did for a few months. After that he smoked in secret, or so he thought. (Cigarettes, like mistresses, never stay hidden for long.) And after that he smoked anywhere he damn well pleased, and his wife stopped nagging him about it. Naturally there was no point in nagging my mother about anything, least of all her smoking. As far as I know she never succeeded in stopping for more than an hour or two, and by the time she had her first heart attack, she must have been at it for fifty years.
It wasn’t a drop-dead kind of heart attack, it was more a dizzy feeling that took her to the hospital where they did some tests and by the time I got there, she was sitting up, eating ice cream, and making the nurses laugh. The doctors did an angioplasty, propped her arteries open with stents, gave her blood-thinning drugs, and sent her home a few days later with a list of goody-two-shoes instructions of the brisk exercise/leafy green vegetables/one glass of wine/lose weight variety. And for almost a year she behaved extremely well. Hylan helped her keep on the straight and narrow, watched her diet, made tempting salads, and encouraged her when she started writing again.
But, as she had said in that letter to him—“I can’t type without smoking, therefore I can’t type”—and it was the writing that did her in. Try following up on a wildly successful first novel—it sold two million copies worldwide—when you know that it wasn’t a novel at all. She liked to pretend, disingenuously, that Jane was a work of fiction but she understood better than anyone that the heroine—an American journalist in London with an evil sense of humor, three boyfriends, and an outsider’s take on the bizarre ways of the English—was her. I imagine—because she never liked to talk about it, at least not to me—that she felt she wasn’t a real novelist, she didn’t know how to make things up, create characters, and place them in situations that she herself had never experienced. So what was she supposed to write about? I tried to persuade her to start a memoir, but I don’t think she could face going back to the misery of a childhood that she had spent her entire life trying to escape. And so she sat there alone in the apartment worrying, staring at the blank sheet in the typewriter, until one day she reached for a cigarette.
She worried about not working, she worried about money, she worried about Nick, she worried about growing old, she worried about Hylan (with good reason), she worried about my disastrous choice of husband (unnecessarily—her daughter was happier than she had ever been), and I am sure she was haunted by the realization (if she could bear to face it) that the move to New York seven years before had been a huge irrevocable mistake. It was enough to drive anybody back to the comfort of nicotine.
Hylan was horrified: “When she started smoking again, I knew she had chosen slow suicide. She didn’t care. She had given up the fight.” Which didn’t mean she had given up fighting. Oh no. She was full of energy and would stomp around in her favorite T-shirt, black, with “DIE YUPPIE SCUM” printed across the front in big white letters, her ire usually directed at the idiocy of the people who thought they were in charge of running the world, but sometimes the gun turret swiveled around and caught one of us in its sights. Frustrated, angry, frightened, and depressed—this wasn’t how her life was supposed to turn out. She had gambled and lost, first with New York and now, far more heartbreakingly, with Hylan. That was the terrible truth.
The man she had loved for sixteen years had decided to leave her. That summer, 1987, she went to the house in France alone, and by the time she returned in September, he would be gone. They both agreed it would be less painful that way. So why, I have always wondered, did he have to wait until the day she came back from JFK to start moving? Nick remembers turning onto Twenty-second Street and seeing, halfway up the block, Hylan and his friend going in and out of the house, lugging cardboard boxes, suitcases, bulging trash bags, and dumping them in the back of a van. This was a horror show he wanted no part of, so quite sensibly he hid around the corner until it was all over. Nick wasn’t deserting his mother, he just needed to gather his strength for the night ahead.
The only time she ever saw Hylan again was for a brief drink a few months later. After which she wrote him a letter:
What a star-crossed pity it all is. You left here the other evening so relieved at having handled the unwelcome and dangerous encounter so deftly and with such virtuoso charm and grace. A recklessly extravagant hour had been squandered on me.… I had so hoped that we’d at last be able to talk to each other … it never seemed possible you’d still choose to evade it all and just dart from trivia to banality and back again.
But since that’s what he had done, she was going to say all the things he had not hung around long enough to hear:
See Gully if you must. I would much rather you didn’t but Gully is free to be friends with whomever she chooses … but please make your orbit from now on one that does not include Rebecca. She is a trusting, delightful generous little creature and I think it would be sad were she to grow up believing you to be a family friend … now that there’s been such an irreparable rift in the family we once shared, it shouldn’t be any more difficult to vanish from her life than it was to vanish from mine.
And then there was Nick. The man who had been his de facto stepfather for sixteen years had vanished from his life, too. Apparently Hylan was going to write to him.
In some way it might be best to leave things as they are, and not send this letter or whatever it is you have not quite yet come up with. It caused him such pain to see the home-core dissolve again (and then seemingly not to have been given another minute’s thought by you—which may not have been how it was, but was certainly how it appeared … and one can only go by the evidence) that if it has healed over by now, there’s no point opening it up again. Except I know it hasn’t.
She has one last question for him:
Why was it not possible to give me just time enough to make an exit? Just time to figure out what to do. Where to go.… You say I knew it was coming. Must have/should have. I didn’t though.… Why did I suddenly have to be Carthage? To be some mysterious symbolic obstacle that must be smashed to smithereens and dust and rubble?
It is hard to believe I’m likely never to see or talk to you again. And it seems so sad now that I really had believed we could win in the jungle where pretty nearly everybody loses. Still, I did believe it.
She never did see him again. But she did write to him one more time to apologize for her previous letter:
The letter was the monster child of anger.… And if anger can be seen as a horse, this one was descended from Bleak Sorrow … Small Hope … Dashed Hope … and Anguish. On its mother’s side anyhow; I can’t speak for its sire. In any case, Monster Child was the product. (It will never race again. We took him out in back of the barn and shot him.)
She wonders how she could have been such a fool to believe in what they had together:
Oh so much I believed in it. After truth, compassion, Justice and dogs (as Mrs. Wharton said) it was just about all I did believe in.… All I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry and that I apologize for whatever it was I did to you that made me Carthage.… But now I feel you have so trivialized me into cheap currency and reduced me to nothing but an annoying, still-rattling skeleton in your closet, that there is nothing left to salvage. It is a star-crossed pity.
REBECCA MISSED HER GRANNY, I missed my mother, and the Condé Nast Traveler readers, their appetites no doubt aroused by Peter Mayle’s never-ending variations on the theme, had fallen in love with Provence. And thank God and Mr. Mayle for that. (My mother, however, was not the least bit grateful. When he hit the big time with his first Provence book, I remember her banging down a pan on the kitchen counter in La Migoua: “The little fucker, that’s the book I was supposed to write!” Boiling with indignation, she busied herself instead with composing a poisonous, and incredibly funny, review of A Year in Provence for the magazine, which sadly never ran.) Early each spring I would scrabble around inside my head, come up with a few plausible ideas, and then attempt to persuade my long-suffering editor that he couldn’t live without just one more story from that fabled, pastis-soaked, sun-kissed, lavender-scented, aioli-guzzling country now known as Mayleland. If I was lucky I would leave his office with a commission and a round-trip ticket to Marseille.
One summer the magazine was lucky enough to acquire the exclusive world rights to a rather exciting story on Les Calanques. Take a miniature Norwegian fjord, fill it full of warm Mediterranean water, dump some white sand at the tip, replace the Christmas trees with scrubby oaks and umbrella pines, sprinkle the beach with leathery overtanned topless women and men in embarrassingly small bathing suits—and there you have a rough idea of these inlets along the coast between Marseille and Cassis. My friend Alain, a cabdriver in Le Beausset, who was also a rabid sailor, had told me about Les Calanques years before. Apparently you could reach them only à pied or en bateau, and never having been much of a walker, I naturally chose the boat. On the drive to La Migoua from the airport, Alain offered to take me in his bateau, but it was so petit that we would have to wait for that mercurial trickster, Monsieur Mistral, to calm down if we didn’t want to end up at the bottom of the sea. He had been blowing for three days, and since he was known to favor odd numbers, we might well be able to set out the day after tomorrow.
About a week later Alain called (yes, we finally had a telephone!) and told me to be ready to leave at dawn the following day, since Monsieur Mistral was not a morning person, but you never knew what nonsense he might get up to in the afternoon. The boat was indeed extremely petit, and possibly to compensate for its size, Alain treated it like a racing car, driving at terrifying speed across the bay toward the jagged rocks of La Ciotat, before heading straight for Cap de l’Aigle. As soon as we rounded the cape the sea became rougher, and enormous cliffs, contorted by the wind and waves into what looked like the slender pipes of some gigantic church organ, dropped straight down into the sea. Up ahead, at the entrance to Calanque d’en Vau, a stone steeple called le Doigt de Dieu pointed an accusatory finger toward heaven, while a man, no bigger than a fly, dangled from a thread as he slowly inched his way up the rock face toward the summit.
The word calanque is derived from calenco, meaning “steep” in Provençal, and originally these stark white cliffs, as well as the land behind them, were covered in oak forests so dense that François I used to hunt wild boar here in the early sixteenth century. The wood from these same forests had built the ships for the Crusades, but by the time of the Revolution most of the trees had been chopped down, and the few that survived are regularly destroyed in the forest fires that rage across this part of the country every summer.
And it isn’t just the topography that has changed. The sea was once so thick with tuna that the calanques were used for la madrague, the Provençal version of the Sicilian mattanza—that ritualistic slaughter of fish that still continues in the southern Mediterranean today. When Louis XIII visited Marseille in the fall of 1622, his host, the marquis d’Ornano, invited him to Morgiou, where the king was presented with a vermeil trident, which he used to murder the hordes of luckless tuna that had been driven deep into the calanque for his entertainment. Over the centuries la madrague became nothing more than a dim atavistic memory, and probably the only madrague that anyone remembers now is the house of the same name in Saint-Tropez, where God—or was it Vadim?—created Bardot.
I didn’t like to ask, and anyway couldn’t on account of the noise of the engine, but I did wonder about Alain’s lunch plans. Ever since we had roared past Cassis, where I’d looked longingly if fleetingly at the restaurants along the port, the coastline had become steadily wilder and more deserted, with nothing more than a few rickety little cabins scattered across the barren hillsides. It got to the point, around two thirty, when I would happily have settled for an ice cream and a bottle of Pschitt, always assuming we could find a shack, like the one on Bikini Beach, at the end of the next calanque.
Suddenly Alain’s rocket swerved to the right and headed full speed toward the Calanque de Sormiou, where he slammed on the brakes and pointed, with a big smile on his face, to some tables set up on a terrace beneath a magical sign that spelled out “LE LUNCH” in huge red letters painted on the side of a wall. A French flag snapped in the wind, and I couldn’t resist humming under my breath, “Allons enfants de la patrie, l’heure du lunch est arrivée.” Alain waved at a man standing at the entrance—“Mon beau-frère, Marius!”—and we waded ashore, looking like the survivors of a shipwreck, and sat down under a parasol, where a bottle of local blanc de blancs was waiting for us. Alain laughed—“J’ai telephoné en avance!”—thrilled to have fooled me, while Marius disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a plate of grilled sardines and an earthenware dish of baby octopus stewed with tomatoes and wild thyme. After lunch Marius sat down with us to chat—we were his only guests—until Alain glanced up at the increasingly agitated flag and said we should head back before the mistral got any fancy ideas into his head.
When Alain dropped me at home, Rebecca and her grandmother were busy bringing the wasps their evening cocktail: “Poor little things, they get so thirsty in this dreadful hot weather.” Rebecca had filled a large shallow bowl with water, carried it carefully, without spilling a drop, placed it on the windowsill, and then stood back waiting for her customers to arrive. Word got around fast, and they soon started to fly in, hovering just above the surface, decorously sipping their sundowners before heading home for dinner. I suppose all children love animals, but in Rebecca’s case my mother helped nurture her natural affection for living creatures into something deeper that was as much intellectual as it was emotional. Rebecca eventually studied biology at Oxford, got a graduate degree in environmental science at Imperial College in London, and now works for a splendid organization called Fauna and Flora International in Cambridge. Impossible to fault her career choice, especially if you happen to work for a glossy magazine, and I have nothing but admiration for what she does, but how about doing it in New York is all I can say—and do say all too frequently, so now I will shut up.
Francette’s arrival for dinner was, as usual, announced by her filthy companion bounding into the kitchen, hungry for his amuse-bouche of freshly fricasseed lamb’s heart, which he quickly spotted in the cat’s dish on the floor. “Fuck off, Éloi! You know I didn’t make that for you.” Age had done Éloi no favors. His halitosis was more pungent than ever, he had put on weight, lost several quite crucial teeth, and his coat was covered in hideous bald patches, but oblivious to his defects, like many old geezers, he suffered from the delusion that people actually enjoyed his company. My mother had always welcomed him into our house with the same warm greeting, “Fuck off, Éloi!” and reassuringly that hadn’t changed, so was it any wonder that the fat old fool continued to assume that his fans were as enthusiastic as ever?
I handed Francette a glass of pastis, she lit a cigarette, and before she could even sit down, my mother got going on the sujet du jour, which was their shared custody of la fosse septique. Fearsome handwritten warnings were Scotch-taped to the wall in both bathrooms in our house—“Do NOT even THINK of EVER putting anything STRANGE down this toilet. No tampons, bleach, sanitary napkins, paper towels, condoms, Kleenex etc. NOTHING can be flushed except the TWO things that come out of your BODY.” (Being a pedant, I was never quite sure where that left vomit, but had always assumed it must be included in the TWO.) We lived in constant fear of the septic tank’s temperamental nature. Like a fretful baby, it could digest only its TWO favorite foods, and any upset or peculiar addition to its diet might make it regurgitate the contents of its sensitive stomach. Quite naturally neither of the baby’s divorced parents was ever willing to admit that the upset might have originated in their house.
Alerted by the foul smell that had been drifting up the hill for the past few days, my mother sent Nick down to investigate. Overgrown with ominously luxuriant brambles and bushes, the septic tank was hard to get close to, and I seriously doubted that Nick had bothered to climb over them, but when he returned from his expedition, just as we were about to sit down to dinner, he claimed to have spotted signs of seepage and oozing around its edges. Oh come off it, Nick. I knew he had just gone down there, had a fag and, hoping to enliven the rather dull evening ahead, had decided to wind up our mother and Francette.
Our neighbor, believing the best defense to be a vigorous offense, pointed out with impeccable Cartesian logic that our house was much bigger, we were more numerous, we had many guests to stay, donc it had to be our fault. Francette presented herself as une vieille femme who lived toute seule and had long ago forsworn les garnitures périodiques, donc she was innocent. Not so fast, lady. Did you or did you not have your godchild, Dominique, to stay only a week ago? And did she not have a baby with her named Nicolas, who several witnesses saw wearing disposable diapers? In addition your daughter, Christine, has been to visit this summer. It was highly unlikely that at the age of forty-three, she had been through the menopause, donc she could well have been stuffing tampons down the toilet. The jury was still out when Francette and Éloi got up to leave, a bit earlier than usual, pretending they had an important appointment at la mairie first thing in the morning, donc they needed to go to bed tout de suite.
Disappointed by her failure to secure a guilty verdict in the fosse septique case, my mother was casting about for some other entertaining disagreement as we moved out to the terrace after dinner. An argument with Nick about the garbage unfortunately didn’t go anywhere (he promised to take it out), so she went into the kitchen and consoled herself by putting on a Frank Sinatra cassette and finishing off the rest of the tarte au citron.
“Hey, there’s a picture of your old boyfriend, Gary Hart, in the Herald-Trib. He seems to be losing some of his hair, but he’s still pretty enough.”
She was leaning out the window, flapping a newspaper about, her mouth full of tarte.
“Mum, I have never met Gary Hart, so how could he possibly be my boyfriend?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Surely you remember the seventy-six election when we watched the BBC coverage together? Gary Hart and Mayor Lindsay were being interviewed by some English fool who knew piss-all about American politics, and we played ‘Who Would You Rather?’ And then you met him the next night. You told me all about it. How could you have forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten, but it was Lindsay I met, not Hart.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was Hart.”
“No, you’re wrong, it was Lindsay.”
“Well, you said it was Hart.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did too.”
Oh Jesus. You’d think I would have learned by that stage in my life not to contradict my mother, and I had—mostly. Instead of continuing with this edifying conversation, I shouted through the window and asked her to turn up the volume on her tin-and-plastic cassette player, and “Strangers in the Night” came blaring out onto the terrace. Oh, Mr. Sinatra, the perfect song, how did you know?
My mother had gotten the first part of the story right. We had been watching television together that night, and did get a little overexcited when the two gentlemen in question lit up the screen.
“You know Lindsay roomed with Archie at Yale, but I’ve never heard of that other one, have you?” (Archie Albright had been her boyfriend when she was seventeen, and they had been friends ever since.) No, I hadn’t heard of Gary Hart either, but we both approved of the casting director’s choices, and settled down with our drinks, cigarettes, and bags of crisps on Freddie’s collapsed bed to enjoy the movie.
The day after the election an American friend who happened to be in London called up and wondered if I was free that night—some friends of his were putting together a small dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea, and perhaps I’d like to join them? Without a boyfriend, with no food in my fridge, and nothing better to do, I graciously accepted.
My memory of the first part of the evening is kind of hazy, but there must have been about eight of us. I was placed between the host and my friend, and the conversation revolved mainly around the election, the makeup of the new Congress, and what kind of a president Jimmy Carter might turn out to be. Laughably handsome, ludicrously charming, unfairly blessed with his insider’s knowledge and experience of politics, no wonder every person around the table listened when Mayor Lindsay talked. And no wonder Senator Hart had been the loser in that silly game my mother and I had played the night before.
Somehow or other in the chaotic scramble for taxis after dinner I found myself sharing a ride with three other people who happened to be going in my direction. Two were deposited home along the way, so now, by some miracle of geography and mathematics, Mayor Lindsay and I found ourselves in the cab.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with the BBC,” he said. “I told them I’d be happy to fly to London and do their program, and I asked them to put me in the Connaught, but they said I had to stay in some Hilton in a place I’ve never heard of called Shepherds Bush. I just can’t understand it. It’s a truly terrible hotel, but if you’d like to, why don’t we have a drink in the bar anyway.”
How could I have said no?
The black silk moiré pantsuit—a Saint Laurent take on a man’s tuxedo—and the slippery white satin shirt with the sparkly cuff links may have looked quite fetching at night, but I had to admit it wasn’t quite the right outfit for lunch the next day at an Italian restaurant in Soho with my future husband. Far too polite to comment on the strange clothes sense of a lady he had only just met, Peter talked instead about the American election and told me all about the BBC coverage. “We flew over John Lindsay, who used to be the mayor of New York, and some senator I’ve never heard of called Hart; it was actually quite interesting.” I could not have agreed more.
After we moved to New York, I saw him a few times across a crowded room at big parties, and once he was sitting at a nearby table at a funny little place around the corner from our house in the Village. Wiping pasta sauce off Rebecca’s face, I glanced up and noticed him looking at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face—perhaps he was wondering what kind of a crazy mother would take a five-year-old out to dinner in a restaurant at that hour of the night.
A few years later, on one of those perfect sunny but cool New York spring days, when the popcorn trees are in full bloom along on the sidewalks, I was getting out of a cab outside the Café des Artistes, feeling stupidly happy, and saw him coming out of the door. Now, why shouldn’t I just smile and say, “Isn’t this the most beautiful day, Mr. Mayor, and what a pleasure it is to see you again.” No, on second thought, the “again” probably wasn’t such a great idea. I definitely would not say “again.” But as I reached out my hand to him, he suddenly grabbed hold of my arm to steady himself, and losing his balance, almost knocked me over. Christ, something was very wrong. He didn’t respond when I asked if he was okay, just kept flapping his free arm at some parked limousines, so we shuffled toward them until I eventually found his driver, who helped me get him into the car. Then, with the beautiful mayor slumped in the backseat, he drove off and disappeared into the rush-hour traffic.