Chanel Bonfire (9 page)

“Leave us here; it’s only two days,” we said before one early-fall weekend. There was going to be a big party that weekend with hot boys we did not want to miss. We had even bought new hip-huggers to wear.

“It may not be two days this time. I have to go on business,” Mother replied.

Business?
I thought.
Like working? For money?
Mother had once sold a few poems when we were small, but
business
was not a word anyone would associate with anything Mother did.

“Pack for a week. We leave in an hour,” she said.

The next morning we were checked into the Hôtel Sydney Opéra, a stuffy little box of a hotel, not at all Mother’s usual style, and she was leaving us for her “business” meeting, which, it turned out, was at the Hôtel Ritz bar. I wondered about her choice of a clingy, fuchsia, Pucci print dress and an excessive amount of Chanel No. 19, but said nothing.

Paris was having a heat wave and the Hôtel Sydney Opéra wasn’t air-conditioned, so Robbie and I lay around our room in our underwear. Unlike me, and much to my dismay, Robbie had started wearing a bra, having recently developed boobs. I was a little jealous.

We dug into some cold roast chicken and chunks of Doux de Montagne from the restaurant downstairs.

“Wait a minute,” she said, “why don’t we pretend that we’re Henry VIII and eat with our hands like they did back then?” Robbie was learning about the Tudors in her history class.

“Yeah!” It sounded like fun. We stretched out on the bed, semi-naked, and chewed on chicken bones and bread, pretending to be English royalty. But what to do with the bones? Robbie informed me that in the great dining hall of Hampton Court, Henry simply tossed the bones over his shoulder onto the floor.

“Really?”

“Yeah, like this.” Robin expertly flung her chicken bone over her shoulder out the open window.

“Well done!” We both laughed and rolled on the bed, nibbling at the bones and then throwing them out the window with Tudoresque flourish.

My sister’s fast track to puberty, and her rebellious nature, seemed to diminish the difference in our ages. While we had left New York very much the older and younger sisters, we were now becoming more of a unit—the dynamic duo, laughing and tossing our bones at the world.

We were just finishing the last of the cheese, giggling and licking our fingers, when loud stomping and angry French voices came down the hall, followed by pounding on our door.

“Ouvrez cette porte tout de suite, mesdemoiselles!”

Thinking that a mob with torches and pitchforks was about to break in and see us naked—a fate worse than death—we screamed and threw on our clothes.

A look through the peephole revealed the mob to be the concierge, manager, and room-service waiter. Despite that our school French hadn’t included so much cursing, we were able to decipher that our window opened onto the air shaft where the hotel dried its clean linen. We ran to the window and looked down to see white sheets stained with grease and strewn with chicken bones. Mortified and a little terrified, we slumped to the floor with our backs against the door, afraid to open it.

The shouting continued until I heard a familiar voice arguing in French with the hotel staff. As the staff’s anger was checked and their grumbling voices moved away, the voice
switched to English. “Jesus, Georgann, this place is a shithole! You’re damn lucky I’m here.”

We opened the door to find Pop, our now ex-stepfather, standing there with Mother’s suitcase. “Hello, dearies, we’re getting you out of here,” he said happily, playing the knight in shining armor ready to whisk us all away from the dangers of a second-class hotel.

We had heard that, after a brief shot at reconciling with his first wife, Pop had married that old girlfriend of Mother’s and they had had a child, so we were a little mystified by his arm around mother’s waist after a five-year hiatus. Being relatively young, and at times on the wrong side of her angry rages, I couldn’t fully appreciate Mother’s appeal to men or her ability to wield it. She may not have been much of a businessperson in the usual sense, but clearly she had struck quite a deal at the bar at the Ritz. So a half hour later, Robbie and I were in a spacious, sunlit room at the InterContinental, looking out at the Tuileries from our balcony window, and drinking Coca-Colas we’d ordered from room service.

Pop took us to Cartier on the swanky rue de la Paix and bought both of us gold charm bracelets with little French flags on them. He also bought Mother a grape-size sapphire ring that was surrounded by diamonds.

The next morning, we were eating croissants slathered in jam and trashy American cereal at the rolling table from room service when the door flew open and Mother entered dramatically. She was wearing a luxurious hotel terry-cloth robe, her makeup slightly smudged, her hair pillow-rumpled.

“Girls?” She seemed to be in speech mode.

We sipped our orange juice and waited for her to begin.

“Are you happy to see Pop?”

It was a silly question. Although he had been in our lives briefly, we loved Pop because he was the only stepfather we knew. He laughed at all our jokes and was fun to be around, and he bought us stuff. So we nodded and continued eating.

“He still loves me and can’t live without me.” Mother paced and smiled, tugging at her cigarette. “So, we’re going to try to work it out.” She turned to us and opened her arms, looking wildly happy. On cue, my sister and I got up from the breakfast table and ran to her embrace. We were a little confused, but if she was happy, what the hell, we went with it.

So after a five-year absence from our lives, Pop had rematerialized as our fairy ex-stepfather. Suddenly it became not unusual for us to come home from school to find Pop sitting in our living room in London, with a lit Gitanes and a Tanqueray martini nearby. After he’d left, Mother would say, “You know he loves you two so much.”

“We know, Mother,” we dutifully replied. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t just Pop’s love for me and Robin that kept him hanging around. There had to be another reason he continued to pay for our private school and summer camp in Switzerland. Even if Mother was seeing several men simultaneously, and she always was, she managed to keep Pop on the back burner—just in case she needed him.

It was quite a juggling act. They seemed to fight as much as they didn’t but always ended up in each other’s
arms. It seemed they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be apart. And so they entered a phase of being together some of the time, and then apart some of the time. Pop would go away—and then he would come back. The Atlantic Ocean seemed to make the relationship possible. Where others might see an unfathomable obstacle, they found convenience. I think she loved him for changing her life and showing her the world outside of her small town in the Midwest; but I couldn’t be sure. There was a strong connection between them that was beyond my girlish understanding. Maybe he was the only person who understood her. I would never know.

“I think he loves you as if you were his own children,” she said to us one day after he’d left. As if to further this feeling, Mother sent a letter to our school and had our last names changed to his, Rea. She talked about his formally adopting us, which never happened, and I didn’t know if it was even true or something she’d made up. I strongly suspected this idea had a financial aspect: we would legally be tied to him, even though she no longer was. And as she was always in survival mode, that would be a boon to her.

We didn’t have a father in our lives, so it was fun to have Pop, though he was more like a stand-in for the real thing. Like a jolly uncle or an old family friend, he was the guy who would show up to take you to the circus, or out to your favorite restaurant on your birthday. Our image of our own father was starting to fade away. We had no photos of him, and trying to conjure his face in our minds was becoming
more and more difficult. Pop seemed to enjoy his paternal role with us when he was around, and we had to take what we could get.

Like all fairy tales in which Mother was a player, this latest with Pop would be brief and cautionary. At our next spring break, he appeared with tickets to Morocco. He said he was scouting for land there to build a resort and we could come along for the ride. The plane stopped in Gibraltar to refuel, and Pop took us out on the tarmac to see the Barbary apes. We stood on the airport’s only runway, surrounded by the ocean on three sides. Pop pointed at the Rock of Gibraltar, and at first Robin and I couldn’t see them. Then little brown dots appeared to be scuttling all over the giant rock in a kind of figure-eight pattern, continuously swooping over the rock the way birds do in the air. We were amazed, having only seen wild animals in the zoo. Pop seemed happy to have shown us something new. He put his arms around us, sharing our delighted wonder.

We reboarded and a few hours later arrived in the Moroccan coastal town of Agadir, on the Atlantic Ocean, where we spent a week at Club Med, which at that time was considered more cosmopolitan and exclusive than it is now. In the morning Pop would hand us ropes of plastic pop-it beads, which was the currency of the club, so we could buy lunch, drinks, trapeze lessons—whatever we wanted. Then he and Mother went off in a car Pop had rented that was the
size of a washing machine, searching for the perfect piece of land.

Our first day, Robbie and I met some cute American boys a little older than we were who started talking to us in the pool. Their names were Nat and Tommy Ellenoff. They were tall and skinny and lived in New York.

“So where are you guys from?” asked Nat. He was the older one. I never knew how to answer this question. Which of the four cities we had already lived in was the one we were from? I decided to keep it simple.

“Well, we’re actually from New York, too.” We all got out of the pool.

“Wow, that’s weird. Where do you go to school?” Tommy was rubbing his chest with a towel. Water dripped from the ends of his curly, dark hair.

“Town,” I said.

“But actually we live in London now,” added Robin as she fidgeted with her bikini bottom. I flipped my wet hair behind my shoulder and twisted the water out of it.

“That’s cool,” said Nat. He snatched the towel away from Tommy, the younger one, who was kind of nerdy looking. They both wore braces.

“We go to Dalton,” said Nat. “Jeez, Tommy, this towel is soaked.”

“Hey, man, get your own.” Tommy shrugged at his brother.

“So is that gray-haired guy with your mom your grandfather or your dad?”

“He’s our stepdad—I mean, our ex-stepdad,” I said.

The boys looked confused and I couldn’t blame them.

“Our real dad is dead,” Robbie pitched in. I nodded.

We had decided after a few weeks at ASL, since we honestly had no idea where Daddy was or if we’d ever see him again, to cut off such discussions rather than try to deal with the series of confusing questions that would always follow statements like “We don’t know where our dad is.” The truth was that we had no real answers anyway and no place to go for them. Our dad was MIA, that was all we knew. I felt bad lying and sometimes worried that by lying it would come true to punish me—but it just seemed easier for everyone. Including me.

The boys nodded solemnly.

“You want to come to lunch? We’ve got a ton of beads.” Tommy pointed at the outdoor restaurant at one end of the pool. Nat nodded in agreement.

“Sure,” we said. After lunch, Robbie and I agreed to meet them for surfing lessons at the beach the next morning. None of us ended up being that good at it. The boys said the waves were puny anyway. We laughed and joked about being city kids.

“Nat and I were thinking maybe we could meet you down at the beach tonight when it’s dark, you know, after dinner.” Tommy shook his wet head.

I looked at Robin and we nodded. “Sure, see you then.” We wouldn’t have any trouble sneaking out.

That night after dinner in the hotel restaurant, Mother
and Pop went off on a rented scooter to experience Moroccan nightlife. I thought they looked comical with their helmets on, Mother clinging to Pop’s bearish midsection, looking panicked in her safari suit and white Gucci pumps. Pop, decked out in Levi’s and a denim jacket, revved the engine to scare her. As I looked at them, the difference in their ages seemed more pronounced to me now. He had gone all gray and wore a woolly Ernest Hemingway beard. She was the same, her beautiful self. Off they went, Mother shrieking as Pop peeled out of the club driveway.

Robbie and I walked down to the beach, looking around in the dark. There was a flashlight beam under a palm tree.

“Nat? Tommy? Is it you?” The ocean drowned out the sound of our voices.

Then Nat put the flashlight under his chin so that it lit up his face in a creepy way. “Ooooooo,” he said, making a ghoul face.

Tommy grabbed the flashlight and they started fighting over it. “Give it!” Tommy said. We ran over to them and fell down onto the sand under the tree.

“What do you want to do?”

“I brought an empty 7UP bottle.” Nat held it up. “We could play spin the bottle.”

“Oh, yeah,” Robbie said. I giggled.