The Reunion Page 14

  Jean-Christophe Graff had committed suicide in 2002. Fifteen years ago now. To me, he was another victim of the curse of the nice guys—that cruel destiny that crushes people who are a little fragile and whose only mistake is to treat others with kindness. I couldn’t remember who it was who’d claimed that fate metes out to a man only what he can bear, but it’s not true; more often than not, fate is a cruel, twisted fucker that gets off on ruining the lives of the weak and leaves arrogant assholes to lead long and happy lives.

  I had been devastated by the news of Graff’s suicide. Before jumping to his death from the balcony of his apartment, he had written to me; the letter arrived in New York a week later. I had never talked about it with anyone. He told me that he felt ill-equipped to deal with life’s cruelties and confessed that loneliness was killing him. He wrote of his distress on discovering that books, which had so often helped him survive the darkest times, no longer seemed enough to keep his head above water. He discreetly mentioned an unrequited love that had broken his heart. In the closing lines, he wished me good luck with my life and told me that he felt sure that I would succeed where he had failed: I would find a soul mate with whom to confront life’s sea of troubles. But he was wrong about me, and often now, in my darkest moments, I thought that it was not inconceivable that I might end my days as he had.

  I shook off these depressing thoughts as I entered the pine forest. This time, I did not stop off at Dino’s but drove on to the main gate of the lycée. From the look of him, the young guard was Pavel Fabianski’s son. He was watching an episode of Seinfeld on his cell phone. I didn’t have a pass, but I pretended I was here to help with preparations for the Alumni Prom, and he raised the barrier and then went back to staring at his screen. I drove onto the campus and, since I was flouting the rules, decided to park in the plaza right outside the Agora.

  I walked into the library, hopped over the turnstile, and made my way to the main reading room. Good news: Zélie was nowhere to be seen. A notice pinned to a corkboard by the desk announced that the drama club—of which she was the high priestess—met every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon.

  In her place behind the reception desk, a young woman with glasses was sitting cross-legged on the office chair reading Bukowski’s On Writing in English. She had soft features and was wearing a sailor’s top, tweed shorts, embroidered tights, and two-tone lace-up oxfords.

  “Hello. Do you work with Eline Bookmans?”

  She looked up from her book and smiled.

  I instantly took a liking to her. I liked the way her severe chignon contrasted with her diamond nose piercing; I liked the tattoo that swirled down from behind her ear and disappeared under the collar of her top; I liked the READING IS SEXY mug from which she was drinking tea. It was something that rarely happened to me. It was nothing like love at first sight, simply an immediate sense that the person I was dealing with was on my side rather than in the enemy camp or in the vast no-man’s-land of people with whom I had nothing in common.

  “I’m Pauline Delatour,” she said. “Are you one of the new teachers?”

  “Not really, I’m—”

  “Just kidding; I know who you are, Thomas Degalais. Everyone saw you on the place des Marronniers this morning.”

  “I used to go to school here, a long time ago,” I said. “Probably before you were born.”

  “I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, and if you’re attempting to pay me a compliment, you’ll have to try harder.” Pauline Delatour laughed, pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, uncrossed her legs, and stood up. I realized what it was about her that I found attractive—she was confident in her sexuality without being in the least conceited; she had a real joie de vivre and a sort of natural grace.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.

  “Around here?”

  “The south, the Côte d’Azur.”

  “No, I’m from Paris. I came here six months ago when the position was created.”

  “Maybe you can help me, Pauline. Back when I was here, there was a school paper called Courrier Sud.”

  “There still is.”

  “I’d like to consult some old issues.”

  “I’ll get them for you. What year are you interested in?”

  “Let’s say 1992 to ’93. And if you could bring me the yearbook too, that would be great.”

  “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  “I’m looking for information about a former student, Vinca Rockwell.”

  “Of course, the famous Vinca Rockwell. Everyone here has heard about her.”

  “Is that because of Stéphane Pianelli’s book, the one Zélie is trying to ban?”

  “It’s because of the spoiled rich girls who claim to be feminists because they’ve read the first three chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale.”

  “The Heterodites…”

  “They’re appropriating the memory of this girl and trying to turn her into some sort of symbolic figure she never was.”

  Pauline Delatour tapped at her computer and copied out the reference numbers for the issues I had asked for on a Post-it.

  “Take a seat. I’ll bring you the issues as soon as I find them.”

  4.

  I sat where I always used to sit, at the far end of the room in a little alcove next to the window that looked out onto a completely anachronistic courtyard. With its flagstones, its ivy-covered fountain, and a colonnade in pink limestone, it had always reminded me of a cloister. All that was missing were the Gregorian chants.

  I placed the blue Eastpak backpack I’d retrieved from my parents’ basement on the desk and took out my pens and books as though I were about to write an essay. I felt content. Whenever I was surrounded with books or in an academic environment, I would feel a calmness flow through me, feel my worries physically ebb—it was as effective as Valium, but not as portable.

  Suffused with the smell of wax and melted candles, this area of the library—pompously named the Literary Chamber—had retained its charm. I felt as though I were in a sanctuary. Old Lagarde et Michard grammar manuals were gathering dust on the shelves. On the wall behind me, a Vidal Lablache school map—hopelessly outdated even when I was a student—showed the world as it had been in the 1950s, with countries that had long since disappeared: the USSR, the GDR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia…

  Like Proust with his madeleine, I felt memories flooding back. This was the desk where I had done my homework and my studying. This was where I had written my first short story. I remembered something my father had said: You live in this romantic, literary world, but real life is nothing like that. Real life is brutal…“All existence is a battle.” And my mother’s comment: You didn’t have any friends, Thomas. The only friends you had were your books.

  It was true, and I was proud of it. I had always been convinced that books had saved me, but could they really keep doing that for the rest of my life? Probably not. Reading between the lines, I thought that surely this was what Jean-Christophe Graff was trying to say in his letter: there had come a point when books had let him down and he had jumped to his death. To solve the Vinca Rockwell case, perhaps I had to abandon the sheltered world of books and grapple with the dark, brutal world my father talked about.

  Go into battle, whispered a voice inside me.

  “These are the issues you wanted, and the yearbook.”

  The confident voice of Pauline Delatour brought me back to reality.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said, setting down several issues of the Courrier Sud.

  “You don’t seem to be someone who waits for permission.”

  “Why did you never write anything about the Vinca Rockwell affair?”

  Whatever I did, whatever I said, there was always someone to steer me back to books.

  “I’m a novelist, not a journalist.”

  “You know what I mean,” she insisted. “Why did you never tell Vinca’s story?”

  “Because it’s a tr
agic story and I’ve had enough of tragedy.”

  It would take more than this to put off Pauline Delatour.

  “But surely that’s the gift of the novelist, isn’t it? To write fiction in order to confront reality. Not simply to put it right, but to fight it on its own ground. To analyze it, the better to refute it. To understand it so that, in good conscience, you can present a different world.”

  “Did you come up with that little speech?”

  “No, of course not—you did. You come out with it in interviews all the time. But I suppose it’s more difficult to apply it in real life, isn’t it?”

  And with these words, she turned and left, satisfied with the effect they had had.

  12

  The Girls with

  Flame-Red Hair

  1.

  I spread the copies of Courrier Sud out in front of me and immediately picked up the January 1993 issue, the one that had an article about the winter dance. I hoped there would be a lot of photographs, but unfortunately there were only a couple of official school pictures of the dance, and the blurred figure I was looking for was not in either of them.

  Disappointed, I leafed through other issues to immerse myself in the atmosphere of the time. Courrier Sud was a perfect window onto school life in the early 1990s. Every possible activity was covered in detail. I flicked through the pages at random, dipping into the events that punctuated the monotony of school life: the sports results, the fifth-year class trip to San Francisco, the listings for the film club (Hitchcock, Cassavetes, Pollack), behind the scenes of the school radio station, poems and prose by students taking the writers’ workshop. Jean-Christophe Graff had published my first short story in the spring of 1992. In September, the drama club announced its program for the coming year. Among the plays was a loose adaptation—probably by my mother, who was running the club at the time—of scenes from Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, with Vinca as “the girl from the rue des Marais” and Fanny as Laure Richis. Two redheads with pale blue eyes, pure, seductive, and—if my memory of the novel serves—both murdered by Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. I had no memory of seeing the play or of what the response to it was. I opened Pianelli’s book to see whether the play had cropped up during his investigation, but he made no mention of it. But as I scanned the book, I came across copies of the letters Alexis Clément had sent to Vinca.

  As I reread the letters for the hundredth time, a shiver ran through me. I felt that same frustration I had experienced at Dalanegra’s house, of being within a hairbreadth of the truth only to have it slip through my fingers. There was some connection between the contents of these letters and Clément’s personality, but, try as I might, I came up against a mental block, as though my conscious mind feared these “repressed memories.” The problem was me—my guilt, my long-standing belief that I was to blame for the tragedy, that, consumed by my own pain, my own destructive passion, I had been too blind to realize that Vinca was going off the rails.

  On a hunch, I picked up my cell phone and called my father.

  “Could you do me a favor, Dad?”

  “What is it?” he grumbled.

  “I left some papers on the table in the kitchen.”

  “I noticed. It’s a mess.”

  “Among them are some of my old philosophy essays. Do you see them?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad, make an effort. Or put Mom on.”

  “She’s not back yet. Okay, hang on, I’ll need my glasses.”

  I explained that I needed him to use his phone to take photos of the notes Alexis Clément had scribbled in the margins of my essays and text the pictures to me. It was a two-minute job for most people, but it took my father at least fifteen, punctuated by caustic comments. He was so furious by the time he finished that he ended the conversation by saying, “You’re forty-two years old, for God’s sake. Don’t you have anything better to do than trawl through memories of your school days? Is that the sum total of your life? Stirring up the past and annoying the shit out of the rest of us?”

  “Thanks, Dad. See you later.”

  I opened up the pictures of Alexis Clément’s notes. Like many pretentious writers, he liked nothing more than his own words, but it was not his philosophical musings I was interested in; it was his handwriting. I zoomed in. It was sloppy—not a spidery scrawl, more like a doctor’s writing on a prescription. You had to pause every now and then over a word or phrase.

  As I studied the pictures, my heart began to race. I compared them with the letters Vinca had received and the dedication in the book of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. Before long, there was no doubt in my mind. While the letters and the dedication were written by the same hand, they were absolutely nothing like Alexis Clément’s notes on my philosophy essays.

  2.

  I could feel my whole body trembling. Vinca’s lover had not been Alexis Clément. There was another man, another Alexis. Probably the blurred figure with his back to the camera in the photographs; that was the man she ran away with that Sunday morning in December. Alexis forced me. I didn’t want to sleep with him! Vinca’s words were right, but my interpretation had been wrong. Because of a cropped photograph and some rumors spread by classmates, everyone had assumed that Vinca had had an affair with a man who had never been her lover.

  My ears were thrumming. The discovery had so many implications that I was having trouble getting my head around them. The first was also the most tragic: Maxime and I had killed an innocent man. I could still hear Alexis Clément’s screams as I shattered his ribs and his knee. The whole scene came back to me in flashes that were crystal clear. His vacant expression as I lashed out with the crowbar. How dare you touch her, you fucking creep? His face had been a mask of surprise and incomprehension. He had not defended himself simply because he didn’t know what he was being accused of. Seeing his bewilderment at the time, I had heard a small voice inside my head, felt a force that made me drop my weapon. And it was at this point that Maxime arrived on the scene.

  Tears in my eyes, I buried my face in my hands. It was my fault that Alexis Clément was dead. There was nothing I could do to bring him back. I spent ten minutes utterly distraught before I could even begin to think about what came next. I thought about my misunderstanding. Vinca had clearly had a lover named Alexis, but it had not been my philosophy teacher. It was scarcely believable. Too bizarre to be true. And yet it was the only possible explanation.

  So who was he? After racking my brain, I dimly remembered a student named Alexis Stephanopoulos or something like that. A caricature of a rich Greek kid; the son of a shipowner who, during summer vacations, invited his friends on cruises around the Cyclades. Needless to say, I was never invited.

  I picked up the 1992–1993 yearbook. It was very American in style, with photographs of all the students and teachers at Saint-Ex that year. Feverishly, I thumbed the pages. People were listed in alphabetical order, so I quickly came across the Greek boy: Antonopoulos, Alexis, born April 26, 1974, in Thessaloniki. In the photo, he was just as I remembered him; he had curly, shoulder-length hair and was wearing a white shirt and a polo sweater with an embroidered crest. The picture kindled other memories.

  I remembered that he was one of the few boys studying humanities. He was an athlete of some sort, a champion rower or fencer. Not terribly intelligent but capable of reciting passages by Sappho or Theocritus. Beneath the veneer of sophistication, however, Alexis Antonopoulos was a dumb wannabe Latin lover. I had trouble imagining Vinca falling head over heels for such a moron. Of course, I was hardly the best person to hold forth on that subject.

  But what if, for some reason I couldn’t begin to image, Antonopoulos did have it in for Maxime and me? I rummaged through my bag for my iPad then remembered I had left it in the rental car my mother had borrowed. I had to make do with my phone. I Googled the name, and the first mention of Alexis Antonopoulos I found was in a Point de Vue article about the marriage of Prince Carl Philip of Sweden in 2015. Antonopoulos, accompanied
by his third wife, was among the happy few invited to the ceremony. As I continued clicking, I developed a sense of the man. Part-time businessman, part-time philanthropist, he lived a jet-setting life, dividing his time between California and the Cyclades. Vanity Fair mentioned that he regularly attended the annual amfAR Gala at Cannes, held during the Cannes Film Festival at the celebrated Eden-Roc hotel, which raised money for AIDS research. So Antonopoulos still had ties to the Côte d’Azur, but I could find nothing to link him directly to us.

  Since I was making little headway, I decided to change tack. The fundamental cause of our fears was the forthcoming demolition of the old gym. This in turn was only a small part of the pharaonic project to completely remodel the campus, a mission that included the construction of a glass-and-steel tower, a state-of-the-art sports facility with an Olympic-size pool, and a landscaped garden.

  This vast project was a recurring topic—people had been talking about it for the past twenty-five years—but before this, work had not begun because the lycée simply could not raise the necessary funds. From what I knew, the funding for the school had changed radically over its history. When it was founded, Saint-Exupéry had been a private institution, but later it had been brought into France’s national education system and was awarded regional grants. However, in recent years, the winds of revolution had swept through Saint-Ex, accompanied by the administrators’ firm desire to free the lycée from red tape and bureaucracy. Things accelerated after the election of François Hollande, and the battle between the lycée and the government had ended in a sort of secession. Saint-Ex had regained its autonomy, but in the process it had lost any right to public funds. The school fees rose sharply, but by my calculations, this new influx of cash would be a drop in the ocean compared to the money needed for the project. In order to break ground, the lycée’s administrators must have received a substantial private donation. I remembered what the headmistress had said this morning at the laying of the foundation stone. She had thanked the generous donors who had made it possible to embark on “the most ambitious building project in the history of this institution,” but she had been careful not to name names. It was a lead worth investigating.