I spent hours on the Internet searching for images. I zoomed into Madame Lapierre’s face to see if she had more wrinkles than Anouk, to see if her arms were wide and unformed beneath the jacket. I looked for defects, a reason to find her less beautiful, and I studied the photos as if they contained some kind of truth, evidence of why he stayed with her. Until then I had resisted the temptation to stalk them. Anouk believed if I didn’t look them up, it would be easier to live with the secret. But now that she had walked into our lives, I looked at dozens of photos of her, making up for lost time, and felt an unfamiliar greed overwhelm me. There was so much to discover.
Madame Lapierre had been pretty, with round cheeks and long, straight hair, dark eyebrows over almond-shaped eyes, a beauty mark at the corner of her lips that I hadn’t seen from a distance. Her style had become more severe over the years, jackets with shoulder pads, narrow skirts that stopped at her knees. She came from a prestigious literary family, the daughter of a writer who belonged to the Académie française, whose members were known as les immortels. Alain Robert was an old man with a tanned, wrinkled face and brilliant blue eyes, who appeared on posters in métro stations because he was always writing a new book on the dismal state of French literature and politics. It made sense that she would go on to marry a promising young politician who would become the minister of culture—my father.
When I was younger, I’d had a strange thought. If Anouk died, would Madame Lapierre adopt me? Would she and Father take me in? I projected my own idealized version of a mother onto this woman: maternal, warm, gentle. Anouk had raised me to think of her with disdain and avoid her name around the house, but in private I felt an inexplicable draw. I imagined how she would care for me. Hold my hand, take my temperature when I was sick, accompany me to school in the mornings. I imagined a look of concern on her face, the poor girl has lost her mother, it said.
But if I died, what would happen to Anouk?
The more I learned about Madame Lapierre in the press, the more I felt my intuition had been correct—she was a discreet woman who didn’t flaunt where she came from. Yes, she wore expensive outfits, but she wasn’t the kind to give lengthy interviews that revealed sensational details about her life. When she spoke about her sons, it was with simple affection. She described the apartment that she and Father had lived in since before the boys were born, and the summers spent with her maternal grandparents in Dordogne. One photo showed her embracing the boys, her smile conveying contented bliss.
That night I had the first of a series of recurring dreams. Anouk and I were in a swimming pool. There was no bottom, and she needed to get out of the pool. I have to get out of here, she kept telling me, but she couldn’t pull herself out with the sheer strength of her arms. I offered her my shoulders. She stepped on them, one foot after the other, and pulled herself out of the pool. I drowned.
2
I remember those last weeks of August with surreal precision. The food we ate, the music we listened to, the heat of the pavement seeping through my sandals, the stillness of a city asleep. Everyone we knew had left for the summer.
Paris was more polluted in the heat, the air on the streets dusty and stagnant, making our eyes prickle. I walked around squinting, having always forgotten my sunglasses. Inside our apartment, the fan circulated warm air as we sponged ourselves dry with towels. Not a single breeze when we opened the windows. It made us irritable, being at the limit of our physical comfort. I couldn’t understand how people in tropical countries were so patient with one another.
Our apartment had two floors. The second, where the bedrooms were, was like an attic, with slanted ceilings held by thick beams. A spacious bathroom with black and white tiles separated the two bedrooms. There was a bathtub with clawed feet and an old mirror hanging on the wall. I liked seeing the reflection of my face blurred in the scratched silver. In the colder months when Anouk kept the heat on low, not wanting to waste money, I fantasized that our home was a sanatorium in the Alps and I the tuberculosis patient.
If I stood on her bed and looked through the window, I could see our neighborhood stretching out between the park and Place Monge. We called this our wasteland because the métro stations were all a fifteen-minute walk away. We relied on our feet, whereas Father drove to see us.
An American singer with ropes of long charcoal hair had died very young the previous month, and her deep voice poured from the radio, embracing us even if we didn’t always understand the meaning of her words.
With my best friend, Juliette, gone until September, I spent the summer mostly alone, the weeks bleeding into one another. We spoke on the phone and emailed passionate accounts of our days in long, rococo sentences. She told me about her grandmother who was sick with cancer and her grandfather who escaped the house every morning to call his mistress from the village tabac where he bought the paper. Though she’d never met him, Juliette knew who my father was. But even so, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about our sighting of Madame Lapierre. Instead, I told her about the movies I’d gone to see by myself, the afternoons spent by the fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg, eyeing a boy who was older, a university student with curly hair. I had waited for him to notice me, but I was so much younger than he was.
At the lycée, a social structure had been established years ago, and only a few had the privilege of going out with whomever they wanted. That didn’t include Juliette or me. It had little to do with looks at this point, because even the girls who bloomed overnight stayed in their place, remaining unpopular, as if they hadn’t changed at all. I wondered if I was ugly. I knew I lacked Anouk’s beauty, but I wondered to what extent I was forgettable, or if I had inherited some of her light.
I didn’t wait around for the boy in the Jardin du Luxembourg, as I’d written to Juliette; in fact, I spent almost no time there that summer, despite how quiet it was, the city drained of people. I was afraid of seeing Madame Lapierre again, so I avoided going on the other side of the park in the sixth arrondissement. What if she glanced at me and something in my face revealed me? What if I saw her with Father?
I stayed at home reading, fanning myself with papers, saving photos of Madame Lapierre and her sons in a folder I’d called the others. I waited for Anouk to mention her again, but she behaved as if that afternoon had been consciously erased from her memory. It maddened me that she went about her days ignoring our encounter with Madame Lapierre.
On the morning of my seventeenth birthday, I woke up with a jolt. It had seemed more important than the others, a year closer to adulthood and only one more year of school left. I stretched out under the thin sheet. We had nothing planned and the day opened up to me, as blank and dull as every other summer day.
Anouk and I didn’t celebrate birthdays with great enthusiasm. On her birthday, I would give her a small gift and say the words first thing in the morning, Joyeux anniversaire, to be over and done with it. Celebrations made me uncomfortable, perhaps because she hadn’t taught me how to enjoy them.