The Reunion Page 5

  From my bedroom window, I looked out at the campus glazed with frost. It was surreal. Snow had shrouded the scrubland, transforming it into a vast white expanse. The olives and the citrus trees were bowed by the weight of the snow, and the stone pines looked as though they had been transplanted into a scene from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

  Fortunately, most boarders had left the night before. Christmas vacation was the one time of year when Saint-Ex was deserted. The only people still on campus were a few students who had requested permission to stay for the holidays and study because they were applying to the Grandes Écoles and had difficult exams ahead and three or four teachers who had missed their flights or their morning trains.

  I had been sitting at my desk for half an hour, my vision blurring, staring at a convoluted algebra problem. I was eighteen and taking a foundation course for a science degree. Since this term had started, my life had been a living hell. I felt like I was drowning, and I was barely getting four hours of sleep a night. The grueling coursework left me exhausted and demoralized. Of the original forty students in my class, fifteen had already dropped out. I was desperately trying to cling on, but it was no use. I loathed math and physics, but given the course I had chosen, I found myself spending most of my days studying them. I was drawn to literature and the arts, but as far as my parents were concerned, there were only two worthwhile careers, medicine and engineering.

  But if my classes were excruciating, they were far from being the only source of my suffering. What was really killing me, what had reduced my heart to ashes, was my unrequited love for a girl.

  2.

  Morning and night, I thought about Vinca Rockwell. We’d known each other for three years, ever since her grandfather Alastair had sent her to school in France to get her away from Boston after her parents’ death. Vinca was not your average teenage girl; she was sophisticated, vibrant, witty. She had a shock of red hair, eyes that were of two different colors, delicate features. She was not the most beautiful girl at Saint-Ex, but she had a magnetic charm, a mysterious allure that drew you in and drove you insane. An indefinable quality that made you think that if you could just have Vinca, you would have the whole world.

  For a long time, we were partners in crime, completely inseparable. I introduced her to the places I most loved—the botanic gardens in Menton, the Villa Kerylos, the Maeght Foundation, the winding lanes of Tourrettes-sur-Loup. We roamed the area, talking for hours on end. We hiked the Via Ferrata at La Colmiane, munched socca flatbread in the Antibes market, set the world to rights while sitting at the foot of the Genoese tower at Cap d’Antibes.

  We could almost read each other’s minds. I was constantly amazed by the connection between us. Vinca was the person I’d been desperately longing to meet ever since I was old enough to desperately long for anything.

  As far back as I could remember, I had always felt alone, somehow disconnected from the world, from its bustle, from a mediocrity as infectious as a disease. At one time, I convinced myself that books might cure me of this feeling of ennui, but it is foolish to ask too much of books. Books tell us stories, they allow us to vicariously live out snippets of other lives, but they cannot take you in their arms and comfort you when you’re scared.

  Vinca had strewn my life with stars, but she had also instilled in me a fear: the fear of losing her. Which is what had just happened on that snowy day.

  Although we were both preparing for the Grandes Écoles, we had barely seen each other since the beginning of the term. She was studying humanities, and I was taking advanced math, but it was more than that; I felt as though she was avoiding me. She no longer answered my calls and letters, and she ignored my suggestions for things we could do together. A few of her classmates warned me that she was infatuated with Alexis Clément, a young philosophy teacher. There was even a rumor that their flirtation had blossomed into a full-blown affair. At first, I refused to believe it, but I was being slowly eaten up by jealousy. I needed to know the truth.

  3.

  One Wednesday about ten days earlier, while the humanities students were taking a mock exam, I’d blown off study period to go see the school caretaker, Pavel Fabianski. Pavel liked me. I came by every week to give him my copy of France Football after I’d read it. That afternoon, while he was getting a can of Coke from his fridge to thank me, I pocketed a bunch of keys to the student dorm rooms.

  Then, clutching the master keys, I raced over to the blue Nicolas de Staël building where Vinca lived and searched her room.

  I know, love doesn’t give someone carte blanche, and I know I’m a scumbag, probably worse than that. But, like most people consumed by their first love, I was convinced I’d never feel this deeply about anyone ever again. And that, unfortunately, would prove true.

  The other mitigating circumstance was my thinking that I knew all there was to know about love because I’d read novels when, in fact, the only thing that truly teaches us about life is a punch in the face. By December 1992, I had long since drifted from the shores of romantic love and entered the turbulent waters of passion. And passion has little if anything to do with love. Passion is a no-man’s-land, a bombed-out war zone situated somewhere at the intersection of sorrow, madness, and death.

  Searching for proof of a relationship between Vinca and Alexis Clément, I flicked through every book on my friend’s shelf. From between the pages of a Henry James novel, two neatly folded sheets fluttered to the floor. Hands trembling, I picked them up and was struck by the lingering scent, at once fresh, woody, and spicy. I unfolded the paper. They were letters from Clément. I had been looking for proof, and what I had found was irrefutable.

  December 5

  Vinca, my love,

  What a glorious surprise you gave me in taking the risk of coming to spend last night with me!

  When I opened the door of my apartment and saw your beautiful face, I thought I might die of happiness.

  Those few scant hours we spent together were the most passionate I have ever experienced, my love. The whole night, my heart was racing—our mouths, our bodies, were one. My blood trilled in my veins.

  When I woke this morning, the sea-scent of your kisses still lingered on my skin, the sheets still exhaled the vanilla of your perfume, but you were gone. I could have wept. I had wanted to wake up in your arms, to fuse my body with yours once more, to feel our breath mingle, to hear the passion in your voice. I wanted your soft tongue to once again explore every inch of my body.

  I wish that it would never end, that I could forever remain drunk on your desire, your kisses, your caresses.

  I love you,

  Alexis

  December 8

  My darling Vinca,

  Today, you have held sway over my every thought. Today, everything I have done has been a pretense: teaching classes, talking to colleagues, feigning interest in a play performed by my students…I went through the motions, but my mind was utterly consumed by tender, febrile memories of our last night together.

  By noon, I could not bear it any longer. I had to sneak off between classes to smoke a cigarette on the staff-room terrace, and it was here that I saw you from afar, sitting on a bench, chatting to your friends. When you noticed me, the little wave you gave me warmed my poor heart. Whenever I see you, my whole being quivers and the world around you melts away. At one point, I almost threw caution to the wind and walked over to take you in my arms so everyone might see my love blaze. But we must keep our secret a little longer. Fortunately, freedom is at hand. Soon we will be able to break these bonds. You have chased away the shadows that loomed over me, Vinca. You have given me faith in a radiant future. My every kiss is eternal. My tongue, when it touches your skin, brands you with my incandescent love and marks out the borders of a new world, a lush, fertile land of freedom where soon we will raise our own family. Our child will seal our twin fates forever. Our child will be blessed with your angelic smile, your silvery eyes.

  I love you,

  Alex
is

  4.

  Discovering the letters left me traumatized. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was broken, overwhelmed by an anguish that drove me mad. My teachers and my family were concerned by my plummeting grades. When my mother grilled me about it, I had no choice but to tell her why I was so crushed—I confessed my feelings for Vinca and told her about the letters I’d found. She coldly responded that no girl was worth ruining my education over and told me to pull myself together.

  I sensed that I would never really crawl from the abyss into which I had fallen. At the time I couldn’t possibly have known that the real nightmare lay ahead.

  To be honest, I could see why Vinca was attracted to Clément. He’d taught me the year before, and although I personally found him shallow, I had to admit he looked the part of a lover. It was hardly a fair fight, given my age. In the blue corner, Alexis Clément, twenty-seven, devilishly handsome, tennis pro, driving an Alpine A310 and quoting Schopenhauer in the original German; in the red corner, Thomas Degalais, eighteen, slogging away at a math course, all of seventy francs in pocket money a week, riding a Peugeot 103 moped (without even a souped-up engine), and spending his scant free time playing Kick Off on his Atari ST.

  I never thought of Vinca as mine. But Vinca was made for me, just as I was made for her. I was convinced that I was the right person for her, even if this was not the right time. I felt that the day would come when I would have my revenge on guys like Alexis Clément, though it might be years before the tables were turned. And while I waited for that day, my mind was flooded with images of her sleeping with this man. It was unbearable.

  When the phone rang that Saturday afternoon in December, I was home alone. The day before, the official start of the vacation, my father had flown to Papeete with my sister and brother. My paternal grandparents had been living in Tahiti for about ten years and we visited them every other Christmas. This year, I had decided to stay home to tackle my falling grades. My mother had decided to spend Christmas in the Landes with her sister Giovanna, who was slowly recovering from major surgery. She was planning to go the next day, and right now she was overseeing the whole campus, manning the tiller of the storm-tossed ship.

  Our phone had been ringing all morning because of the snowstorm. In those days, there were no salt spreaders or snowplows to clear the roads of Sophia Antipolis. My mother had been called in to deal with an emergency—a delivery truck had skidded on the icy road and was blocking the gate next to the caretaker’s lodge. In despair, she had turned for help to Maxime’s father, Francis Biancardini, and he had promised to come as quickly as possible.

  I picked up the ringing phone, assuming it was another emergency or maybe Maxime calling to cancel our plans. We usually met up at Dino’s on Saturday afternoons to play foosball, watch videos, and swap CDs, or sometimes we’d hang around outside McDonald’s in the Carrefour parking lot on our mopeds before heading home to watch the soccer highlights on Jour de Foot.

  “Thomas, can you come over, please?”

  I felt a pang in my heart. It was not Maxime—it was Vinca, sounding slightly choked. I had assumed she’d flown back to Boston to be with her family, but she said that she was still at Saint-Ex, that she wasn’t feeling well, and that she wanted to see me.

  I was all too conscious of the fact that, when it came to Vinca, I was completely pathetic. Every time she called, every time she spoke to me, hope surged anew and I rushed off to be with her. Which was what I did then, cursing my weakness and my nonexistent self-respect, wishing I had the moral courage to pretend not to care.

  5.

  The predicted late-afternoon thaw was taking its time to arrive. It was bitterly cold, and the mistral whipped the powdery snow into eddies. In my haste, I’d forgotten to wear boots, and my Air Maxes sank into the snow. Wrapped up in my fleece jacket and hunched against the wind, I looked like Jeremiah Johnson in pursuit of a ghostly grizzly bear. Despite my best efforts, and though the student dorms were only a stone’s throw from my parents’ apartment, it took me almost ten minutes to reach the Nicolas de Staël building, its blue faded to a gray spectral mass in the iridescent mist.

  The building was cold and deserted. The sliding doors leading to the students’ common room had been closed off. I kicked the snow from my shoes and took the stairs four at a time. I knocked on Vinca’s door several times. When there was no answer, I pushed it open and stepped into a room that smelled of vanilla and benzoin, the characteristic perfume of Armenian paper incense.

  Her eyes tightly shut, Vinca huddled in her bed, her long red hair almost invisible beneath the white quilt that reflected the snowy sky. I walked over, brushed her cheek, and laid a hand on her forehead. She was feverish. Without opening her eyes, she mumbled a few words. I decided to let her sleep while I rummaged in the bathroom for something to reduce the fever. The medicine cabinet was stuffed with sleeping pills, tranquilizers, powerful painkillers, and an assortment of other pills, but I couldn’t see any paracetamol.

  I had stepped out of her room, intending to knock on the door at the end of the corridor, when Fanny Brahimi’s face appeared.

  “Hey, Thomas,” she said, taking off her glasses.

  She was wearing ripped jeans, a battered pair of Converse sneakers, and a baggy mohair sweater. Thick mascara blotted out the pale beauty of her eyes. The goth makeup went well with the Cure album on her record player.

  “Hey, Fanny, I need a hand.”

  I explained the situation and asked if she had any paracetamol. While Fanny went to look, I lit her little gas stove and put some water on to boil.

  “I found some Doliprane,” she said when she reappeared.

  “Thanks. Could you make Vinca some tea?”

  “Yeah, lots of sugar so she doesn’t get too dehydrated. I’m on it.”

  I went back to Vinca’s room. She opened her eyes and propped herself up on her pillow.

  “Take these,” I said, handing her two tablets, “you’re burning up.”

  Though she wasn’t delirious, she was in a bad way. When I asked her why she had phoned, she burst into tears. Even feverish, haggard, and bathed in tears, Vinca was powerfully attractive; she had an ineffable dreamlike aura. Like the pure, crystalline sound of a celesta in a 1970s folk song.

  “T…Thomas…” she stammered.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m a terrible person.”

  “Come on. Why would you say that?”

  She leaned over to the bedside table and picked up something I thought at first was a pen and then realized was a pregnancy test.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  As I looked at the little blue bar indicating a positive result, I remembered fragments of Alexis’s letter that had revolted me: Soon we will raise our own family. Our child will seal our twin fates forever. Our child will be blessed with your angelic smile, your silvery eyes.

  “You’ve got to help me, Thomas.”

  I was too shocked to realize what she was asking me to do.

  “I didn’t want to, you know…I never wanted to,” she stuttered.

  I sat next to her on the bed, and between ragged sobs, she whispered, “It’s not my fault! Alexis forced me.”

  Stunned, I asked her to repeat what she’d said.

  “Alexis forced me. I didn’t want to sleep with him!”

  This is what she said. Word for word. I didn’t want to sleep with him. That bastard Alexis Clément had forced himself on her.

  I jumped up from the bed, determined to do something. “I’ll fix this,” I said, heading for the door. “I’ll come back and see you later.” As I left, I almost bumped into Fanny arriving with the tea tray.

  Though I did not know it then, I had just told two lies. I would not “fix this”; I would make things much worse. And I would not go back and see Vinca. Or, rather, by the time I came back, she would be gone for good.

  6.

  Outside, the snow had stopped, but steel-gray clouds lowered over the scene. The sky was dark
, oppressive, a foretaste of the gathering night.

  I had raced out of Vinca’s room furious and sickened by what she had told me, determined to rescue her. At last, everything made sense. Alexis was a fraud and a rapist. Vinca still cared about me, and she had turned to me when she needed help.

  The teachers’ residence was close by. As an on-campus teacher at Saint-Ex, Alexis Clément was entitled to housing in the small building that overlooked the lake. To get there, I had to cut through the construction site where the new gym was being built. The foundations, the cement mixers, the half-finished walls were all but buried by a thick layer of pristine snow.

  I deliberated over my choice of weapon and eventually picked up a crowbar a builder had left in a wheelbarrow next to a pile of sand. I can’t pretend that what I did was not premeditated. Something was stirring in me, an ancient, primal violence that spurred me on. It is something I have felt only once in my life.

  To this day, I still remember the intoxicating air that trilled through me. I was no longer an asthmatic student grumbling about a math problem—I was a warrior, a soldier marching to the front lines. By the time I reached the teachers’ building, night had almost fallen. Far off, the dark waters of the lake shimmered with the reflected sky.

  In the daytime—even on weekends—it was possible to access the building without a key. Like the student dorms, the building was cold, silent, lifeless. Doggedly, I climbed the stairs. I knew I would find Alexis Clément there because I had heard my mother take a call from him earlier saying that his flight home to Munich had been canceled.

  I pounded on the door of his room. Inside, a radio was playing. When Alexis opened the door, he suspected nothing.

  “Oh—hey, Thomas!”

  He looked like Cédric Pioline, a hulking French tennis pro with long, dark, curly hair. Alexis had a good four inches on me, and he was much brawnier, but in that moment, I was not intimidated by him.