21 Steps to Happiness (17 page)

When we arrive upstairs, it sounds unexpectedly quiet. The living room is empty.

“They're gone,” I say.

Maybe I dreamed the whole thing. The friendly Jodie was just a mirage.

Clap, clap, clap! Jodie's stilettos beat the wooden floor. She's back!

“Where's Muriel?” she asks as she enters the room. She wears a light coat and her hat, and looks as if she's on her way somewhere.

“You're not staying?” I hear myself ask.

“Francis is taking me to Cannes. We don't want to be in your way.”

“Are you ready to party?” Francis reappears in a white summer suit. “Ah! Lynn. Tell Muriel we'll be out for the night.”

Dammit!

“It would have been great to get your input on our collection,” Nicolas says to Jodie.

“My input,” Jodie repeats, amused by the word.

She's so keen on him. Jodie loves beautiful people, no matter what. “Another time.”

“It was great meeting you,” he says sadly.

She smiles at him. “You take care of my…girl.”

“You're not coming back?” I'm surprised at the surprise in my own voice. I should be used to being abandoned by Jodie by now.

“We'll stay at the Martinez for the night, and then…” She shrugs.

I feel like telling her,
Oh fuck this work seminar, I want to stay with you and come to Saint Paul Something,
but she doesn't leave me the opportunity.

“The show on the street,” she says vaguely.

Oh, yes, the proof that I have a spark of her own flair in me.

“Be careful,” she tells me. “It's been done before. You need to do more thinking.”

 

“Is he gone? Really gone? Gone
gone?
”

“They'll be sleeping at the Martinez,” Nicolas confirms.

Her face opens up. She breaks into an earnest smile. “So let's move, then.”

Muriel's not disappointed to lose them to Cannes.
Au contraire
. It's like someone put the batteries back into her. She's done hiding in the kitchen. She wants to show us around so we get a good feel of our working environment before getting down to business.

We leave the caterers to their cooking and head toward the beach, following a lovely little path in the woods.

Night is setting in slowly, but I can still hear children running, screaming, calling each other names. Female voices are hurrying them to stop drowning their little sisters, or leave the dog's ears alone, or stop playing with the sprinklers because it's dinnertime. Things that mothers normally say to their kids, instead of
Sit here and by God don't touch anything and be quiet while I finish working on this piece
.

“Do you know any of the people who live around here?” I ask Muriel.

“Oh, this one,” she says, pointing to a villa, “it used to belong to President Mitterrand, before he died, of course. Galliano lives nearby. Everybody that's somebody has a villa here.”

We don't make it to the beach. Muriel is ready for another drink and she knows exactly the place. We turn into what looks like the entrance to a villa, but it's not. It's a campground packed with tents and people coming back from the beach or playing cards. There are little kids chewing on chicken drumsticks from dinner picnics and rinsing sand off their feet. A sign reads, Camping de la Pinède.

She keeps surprising me, this girl. When she said, “Let's get a drink,” I pictured us in a trendy bar in the middle of Saint-Tropez, looking the part. But, no, we're making our way to the Buvette de la Plage, the epicenter of the campers, surrounded by a crowd of young people very happy to see three new faces and wondering to which tent we belong.

“Qu'est-ce que vous buvez?”
the barman asks, though he doesn't look like a barman, but like the janitor, corraled into pouring drinks for the night.

“Un Bloody Mary,”
I try.

No luck. No tomato juice. Orange juice and vodka, he proposes. I say why not, but I'm out of luck again, he's out of orange juice until tomorrow morning, when he'll find five minutes to go to the supermarket. Oh, to hell with it. I do exactly as Muriel and Nicolas and order a glass of chilled rosé.

The Buvette de la Plage is just a wooden shed with a few tables and a dance floor. It's illuminated by hundreds of colorful lightbulbs. Red, green, yellow.

It's packed.

Noisy.

I turn to Muriel. “This doesn't strike me as your kind of place or your kind of crowd.”

“See that guy, there?” She points at a twenty-something blond guy engaged in a flirtatious conversation with two laughing blondes. “That's Vincent de la Pinotière, son of Marcellus de la Pinotière. One of the richest families in the country. Real estate. Movies.”

“Telecommunications,” Nicolas adds.

“Their villa is just next door to ours. And there—” now she points at a group of teenagers drinking and smoking at one of the tables “—those are the Pouik kids…and friends.”

“The Pouiks are famous industrialists,” Nicolas explains. “They're filthy rich.
Nouveau riche
.
Très m'as-tu vu
.”

“And who's that?” I ask, pointing at a middle-aged man drinking beer and balancing one of his flip-flops on the tip of his toes. “Prince Albert of Monaco?”

“Nah. The rest of them are…you know…
campers
.”

We move to a table.

“You like it here?” she asks Nicolas.

He shrugs. “It doesn't have that exotic charm it has for you.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“This is exactly the type of place I used to go to every year with my parents. As campers, of course. Only, we preferred Bretagne over the Riviera.”

“Bretagne is so…” Muriel just hisses, not finding the proper word to defame Bretagne.

“It's less pretentious than down here,” Nicolas tells me.

“Boring!” she finally decides.

“It depends what you're after.”

“I'm after more of this,” she says, tilting her still-full glass of rosé. “Go buy a whole bottle, Bretagne Boy.”

“You shouldn't be so mean to him,” I say while Nicolas is away talking to the barman, probably about the rest of tomorrow's shopping list.

“What?”

“Treating him like some sort of servant.”

“You really say whatever pops into your mind, don't you? Sometimes it's cute, sometimes it's just plain dull.”

“Nicolas is the best thing you have going for you. Be careful with him. That's all I'm saying.”

“Listen to you. The best
thing
. The best thing I have going for me is
me
. Oh, quit playing the offended
mistress
and get into the mood.”

Mistress?

“What? Do you think I don't see what's going on between you two? And who doesn't, really!”

Oh, look, the room turned bright red again—must be one of those lousy bulbs.

“Who's…
who?
”

“That's the only thing the boys are talking about in the workshop. You broke their hearts, you know. Nicolas was something of an item for them.” She laughs. “What did you call him again? Ah yes, yes,
hot! Fizzza,
like a blaze! Ha ha ha!”

Marc, damned Marc!

“Nothing's happening between us.”

“Lynn, what the two of you do in the privacy of his office is your business. Close the door, that's all we ask. Actually, the boys would love the door to be slightly open to catch a glimpse.” She laughs again. “His poor Catherine. She used to be madly in love with him, you know, like PAs usually are. Ha ha ha!”

I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she understands that there is
nothing, nichts, niente
going on in Nicolas's office or anywhere else. But a thin young man pops out of a group of other thin young men and is delicately caressing his suntanned six-pack under a light, open shirt as he says, “You are lovely. Are you English?” with a tasty Italian accent.

“She's American,” Nicolas says as he sits down with a bottle of rosé.

“I'm English,” Muriel says with an inviting smile. That's all he needs to sit with us, introduce himself as Giorgio and ask in which section we've planted our tent and if we want to go for a swim with him and his friends later tonight.

“I
lo-ove
your piercing,” he tells Muriel. “I have piercing, too.” He pulls his tongue out and there, smack in the middle, there's a gigantic stud. “It's very, very nice. For se-ex.” He laughs.

“I have tattoos like you, too,” he continues. This time, he needs to stand, and pulls down his shorts and there, just above his crotch two little teddy bears, a blue one and a pink one, are hugging each other.

“Very cute,” Muriel says. “I bet you show it to all the girls.”

“No, not to all the girls. Only to the be-eautiful ones, like you.”

“Do you have a tattoo?” I ask Nicolas, hoping and smiling.

“Never got the time to arrange one,” he says and looks tense because the rest of Giorgio's gang is slowly invading our table, about seven or eight lively young boys, all of them ready to display their secret tattoos to the two new girls. The rest of the girls at the Buvette de la Plage, the German, the Dutch and the Swedish ones, have already seen all their teddy bears and other brandings many times around.

“I want to bring you to a very special pla-ace,” one of the boys says to me. “It's very be-eautiful, like you.”

“Hey, don't mind me,” Nicolas tells him.

“Okay,” he agrees. If it's so kindly proposed, he will just ignore Nicolas. “You like Italy?”

“I don't know, I've never been.” I laugh.

“I could take you to Italy, after.”

After what?

“That's nice but…hey, listen, I'm with him,” I say and put my hand on Nicolas's knee.

“I'm not jealous.”

“I am,” Nicolas says, and now that I have my hand on his knee, he takes this Italian invasion more lightly and smiles earnestly.

After all, if the entire workshop at Muriel B is commenting on our sexual
prouesse,
we might as well get to it.

I look around.

I know why all the rich kids are coming down here even if the toilets never work.

They get the kind of spice that has been cleansed from their existence since birth.

The dirty spice.

The one of life.

“Can you dance?” I ask Nicolas.

“Like a brick.”

“Oh, who cares? Come on!” We go and dance like two happy bricks.

 

We found Muriel, finally.

She's lying on the beach with Giorgio. He smiles bitterly at us. The poor thing looks exhausted.

He must have been trying all his tricks for the last two hours, but what works on eurocamper girls doesn't necessarily work on Muriel. No matter how many times he tells her how beautiful she is, she keeps her own tricks for the ladies.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” he says suddenly. She has badly dented his self-confidence.

“Yeah, and then, you'll take me to Italy, right?
Ciao, bello,
” Muriel calls to him as she gets up and walks away with us, laughing.

“What we need now…Oops.” She trips, Nicolas catches her. She looks up at him. “Yeah, we're getting naked and—” she mimes an expert diver with her hand “—we jump in the swimming pool.”

She's perfectly toasted.

“Naked!” she repeats.

Naked! I don't think so.

I don't do naked.

Ask the Hub.

Lights out.

“Nicolas,” she continues, “I've always wondered how you look in the nude. I'd like to see that. On Monday, the boys will kill me to get all the details.”

“Sure,” he says. His flat tone tells me he is not amused by Muriel's antics.

“Oho! Nico! I hope I didn't hurt your feelings again. You sensitive thing. Lynn asked me to be oh
so
careful with your feelings, poor darling. Don't hurt his feelings. He is the best fucking man in the entire world.”

“I didn't say that,” I protest. “I said…oh, who cares what I said. And I'm not getting naked.”

“What?”

“I have a lovely swimsuit and I intend to wear it.”