BIARRITZ
Making Believe
July 19, 2010
If she stayed, and it had ceased to be a question she considered, this would make her third year living in the two rooms just beneath the well-known writer and his wife. She often heard their light, slippered footsteps, but had glimpsed them only once from behind as they disappeared on a path into the pine forest which shared the beach with the Atlantic. That first year she had begun the scandalous novel that had made him a star, but finding it too tricky for her taste, “forgot it” one afternoon in the sand. Nonetheless, his presence was sited as an example of the “marvelous stimulation” she enjoyed at the Hotel due Palais, when friends urged that she return to Vienna and “work through” her grief. “But he lives just above you know,” she would reply softly into the phone.
This was the same hotel where she had spent her eleventh through fifteenth summers, began puberty, fell in love with a pale blond boy, and experienced the pain that passion and one grain of sand can inflict. Her husband Karl had refused, even when she pleaded “just for old time’s sake”, to consider spending even a single night in the dreary relic as he liked to call it. When Karl collapsed, sighed softly once, and died aboard a Viennese tram, Vivian decamped soon after with luggage and only a small carry-on of grief for the hotel of her adolescence.
She left the note from the concierge (reread twice) on her dressing table amid a vast the array of creams, brushes and pastes. “Madame,” it said, “a gentleman waits for you in the salon, and refuses to leave. He says his name is P------. The messy, wet thumb of the concierge had dissolved the rest.
--------
Playing It Cool
July 19, 2010
Paul fidgeted in the large, maroon chair. He tried to make the rectangle of the old hotel’s lobby, and it’s tall, green draped windows match his memory. It seemed too sparse. There were many more antiques in the pictures he had from that summer. The stairs ascended in the same precise corner, but a silly mezzanine had cruelly abbreviated its grandness. Paul was not alone in the chilly, dust-spiked light of the Biarritz hotel. Several pensioned gentlemen read their morning journals in dark chairs of identical age and fabric. The clack-clip, clack-clip of heels on the marble stair caused him to look up. A shiver of concern traveled along his back.
Of course she would be different after the decades which… He gained control of himself.
The steps became the feet that bore the calves that appeared below the harsh horizontal of the mezzanine. The jelly of the pale thighs, which ended beneath the summer cotton of tan culottes, quivered as each step was carefully considered. Paul leaned forward involuntarily forgetting his oath to be discovered in a pose of indifference and impatience. Now only two treads and a mere three meters from the meeting, Vivian (absent the dark bloom of her 15th summer) paused. She lurched a bit against the dark carved wood of the banister.
‘Which is he?’ she wondered scanning the choice of ghosts scattered about in the low light. ‘Perhaps the one there that seemed about to stand just now.’
Exposed
July 22, 2010
She stepped onto the dark stone of hotel’s salon. She hesitated and adjusted, or appeared to, the mauve and peach scarf swirled in the manner of French women about her throat. Paul didn’t wait to stand although it seemed so because he struggled slightly to get up from the deep chair.
“Vivian,” he said with just a hint of question in case the woman in the short culottes once again in motion was not the Vivian he sought. Her short heels clicked on the stone. She was extending her pale arm and its fingers covered with a variety of rings towards him now. Something uncomfortable spoke to him briefly from the pit of his stomach.
“Ma Cheri,” he woman gushed. “You are of course the same, ah…” It was here that her voice failed, and she averted her face slightly and displayed both palms to him helplessly.
Paul squinted trying to make this woman, who seemed unfortunately about to cry, morph into the image that old photograph he had carried with him from London. That girl, posed before the stripped awning of this hotel, was young, and thin with dark curls framing a pretty face. Before him, in Technicolor was, well… someone considerably larger with wisps of blond escaping from her turban.
“You’ve come back. Come back. You are standing just here once more.” She had recovered her voice and shook her head from side to side. “But please, lets sit again on the terrace. You’ll remember that. Coffee? Oh, let’s do remember everything. Everything.” She was already passing the palm by the doors. He followed obediently behind her behind onto the bright terrace. She sat quickly in a white wicker chair at the edge of the terrace. Behind her the smooth, morning sea was still awakening in colors of grey and blue.
“Now Phillip, my darling Phillip.” Her hands were clasped under her chin. “I can hold nothing back. The memories sweep up me.., no over me,” The hands fluttered, and seemed about to target his hand.
“Vivian.” He was flushed and seemed himself now close to tears. How had this happened he thought? “Vivian, I am not Phillip. My brother,” he was rushing ahead insanely now, “my brother is dead. Phillip is dead. That is what I came for. I am Paul.” He stood up extremely straight, bowed slightly and offered his hand. “In fact we have never met.”
Not What She Expected
July 27, 2010
Vivian did not move for several seconds. Her thin, rouged lips hung slightly apart. Then she slowly pulled the large sunglasses away from her face in the manner one often sees in bad film. She lurched forward, not far, but so suddenly the man opposite jerked back. She squinted at him although the sun was still safely behind the grey silk of the morning.
Inside her head the blood vessels bulged from the terrible pressure of excitement being ravaged by confusion. The images projected on her screens of consciousness ricocheted back and forth with bewildering speed between the still handsome, and familiar – oh dear, yes, so familiar- face across the table, and the blue eyes and soft smile of a sixteen year boy decades before. Behind them both stretched the strand with its thin pines and low dunes where blankets had been spread and skin had experienced for the first time the thrill of nonfamiliar touch.