Nick

Nick

Second floor

I’m on my third cigarette of the evening. I only took up smoking when I came back here; the taste disgusts me but I need the steadying hit of the nicotine. All those years of clean living and now look at me: sucking on a Marlboro like a drowning man taking his last breaths. I look down from my window as I smoke, watch the kids streaming into the courtyard. I almost kissed her this evening, up on the terrace. That moment, stretching out between the two of us. Until it seemed like the only thing that made sense.

Christ. If the lights hadn’t gone off and shocked me out of my trance, I would have done. And where would I be now?

His sister. His sister.

What was I thinking?

I wander into the bathroom. Stub out the cigarette in the sink where it fizzles wetly. Look in the mirror.

Who do you think you are? my reflection asks me, silently. More importantly, who does she think you are?

The good guy. Eager to help. Concerned about his mate.

That’s what she sees, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve let her believe.

You know, I read somewhere that sixty percent of us can’t go more than ten minutes without lying. Little slippages: to make ourselves sound better, more attractive, to others. White lies to avoid causing offense. So it’s not like I’ve done anything out of the ordinary. It’s only human. But, really, the important thing to stress is I haven’t actually lied to her. Not outright. I just haven’t told her the whole truth.

It’s not my fault she assumed I was British. Makes sense. I’ve honed my accent and my fluency pretty well over the years; made a big effort to do so when I was at Cambridge and didn’t want to be known as “that French guy”. Flattening my vowels. Hardening my consonants. Perfecting a kind of London drawl. It’s always been a point of pride for me, a little thrill when Brits have mistaken me for one of them—just like she did.

The second thing she assumed was that the people in this building are nothing more than neighbors to one another. That was all her, honestly. I just didn’t stand in the way of her believing it. To tell the truth, I liked her believing in him: Nick Miller. A normal guy, nothing to do with this place beyond the rent he paid on it.

Look. Can anyone say they’ve really never wished their family were less embarrassing, or different in some way? That they’ve never wondered what it might be like to be free of all those familial hang-ups? That baggage. And this family has rather more baggage than most.

I’ve heard from Papa this evening, incidentally. Everything OK, son? Remember I’m trusting you to take care of things there. The “son” was affectionate for him. He must really want me to do his bidding. But then my father excels at getting others to do his bidding. The second part is classic Papa, of course. Ne merdes pas. Do not mess this up.

I think of that dinner, during the heat wave. All of us summoned up to the roof terrace. The light purplish, the lanterns glowing among the fig trees, the warm scent of their leaves. The streetlamps coming on below us. The air thick as soup, like you had to swallow it rather than inhale.

Papa at one end of the table, my stepmother beside him in eau-de-nil silk and diamonds, cool as the night was hot, profile turned toward the skyline as though she were somewhere else entirely—or wished she were. I remember the first time Papa introduced us to Sophie. I must have been about nine. How glamorous she seemed, how mysterious.

At the other end of the table sat Ben: both guest of honor and fatted calf. Papa had invited him personally. He had made quite an impression at the drinks party.

“Now Ben,” my father said, walking over with a new bottle of wine. “You must tell me what you think of this. It’s clear you have an excellent palate. It’s one of those things that cannot be learned, no matter how much of the stuff you drink.”

I looked over at Antoine, well into his second bottle by now and wondered: had he caught the barb? Our father never says anything accidentally. Antoine is his supposed protégé: the one who’s worked for him since he left school. But he’s also Papa’s whipping boy, even more so than I am—especially because he’s had to take all the flak in the years I’ve been absent.

“Thank you, Jacques.” Ben smiled, held out his glass.

As Papa poured a crimson stream into one of my mother’s Lalique glasses he put a paternal hand on Ben’s shoulder. Together they represented an ease that Papa and I had never had, and looking at them I felt a kind of ridiculous envy. Antoine had noticed, too. I saw his scowl.

But maybe this could work to my advantage. If my father liked Ben this much, someone I had invited into this house, into our family, perhaps there was some way he would finally accept me, his own son. A pathetic thing to hope, but there you have it. I’ve always had to hunt for scraps where paternal affection’s concerned.

“I see that peevish expression of yours, Nicolas,” my father said—using the French word, maussade—turning to me suddenly in that unnerving way of his. Caught out, I swallowed my wine too fast, coughed and felt the bitterness sting my throat. I don’t even particularly like wine. Maybe the odd biodynamic variety—not the heavy, old-world stuff. “Quite incredible,” he went on. “Same look exactly as your sainted dead mother. Nothing ever good enough for her.”

Beside me I felt Antoine twitch. “That’s her fucking wine you’re pouring,” he muttered, under his breath. My mother’s was an old family: old blood, old wine from a grand estate: Château Blondin-Lavigne. The cellar with its thousands of bottles was part of her inheritance, left to my father on her death. And since her death, my brother, who has never forgiven her for leaving us, has been working his way through as many of them as possible.

“What was that, my boy?” Papa said, turning to Antoine. “Something you’d care to share with the rest of us?”

A silence expanded, dangerously. But Ben spoke into it with the exquisite timing of a first violin entering into his solo: “This is delicious, Sophie.” We were eating my father’s favorite (of course): rare fillet, cold, sautéed potatoes, a cucumber salad. “This beef might be the best I’ve ever tasted.”

“I didn’t cook it,” Sophie said. “It came from the restaurant.” No fillet for her, just cucumber salad. And I noticed that she didn’t look at him, but at a point just beyond his right shoulder. Ben hadn’t won her over, it seemed. Not yet. But I noticed how Mimi snatched furtive glances at him when she thought no one was looking at her, almost missing her mouth with her fork. How Dominique, Antoine’s wife, gazed at him with a half-smile on her face, as though she’d prefer him to the meal before her. And all the while Antoine gripped his steak knife like he was planning to ram it between someone’s ribs.

“Now, of course you’ve known Nicolas since you were boys,” my father said to Ben. “Did he ever do any work at that ridiculous place?”

That ridiculous place meaning: Cambridge, one of the top universities in the world. But the great Jacques Meunier hadn’t needed a college education, and look where he’d got himself. A self-made man.

“Or did he just piss away my hard-earned cash?” Papa asked. He turned to me. “You’re pretty good at doing that, aren’t you, my boy?”

That stung. A short while ago I invested some of that “hard-earned cash” in a health start-up in Palo Alto. Anyone who knew anything was buzzed about it: a pin-prick of blood, the future of healthcare. I used most of the money Papa had settled on me when I turned eighteen. Here was a chance to prove my mettle to him; prove my judgment in my own field was just as good as his . . .

“I can’t speak for how hard he worked at uni,” Ben said, with a wry grin in my direction—and it was a relief to have him cut the tension. “We took different courses. But we pretty much ran the student paper together—and a group of us traveled all over one summer. Didn’t we, Nick?”

I nodded. Tried to match his easy smile but I had the feeling, suddenly, of sighting a predator in the long grass.

Ben went on: “Prague, Barcelona. Amsterdam—” I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but our eyes met at that moment. His expression was impossible to read. Suddenly I wanted him to shut the fuck up. With a look I tried to convey this. Stop. That’s enough.This was not the time to be talking about Amsterdam. My father could never find out.

Ben glanced away, breaking eye contact. And that was when I realized how reckless I had been, inviting him here.

Then there was a sound so loud it felt like the building itself might be collapsing under us. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was thunder, and immediately afterward a streak of lightning lit the sky violet. Papa looked furious. He might control everything that happens in this place, but even he couldn’t order the weather what to do. The first fat drops began to fall. The dinner was over.

Thank Christ.

I remembered to breathe again. But something had shifted.

Later that night, Antoine stormed into my room. “Papa and your English pal. Thick as thieves, aren’t they? You know it would be just like him, right? Disinherit us and leave it all to some random fucking stranger?”

“That’s insane,” I said. It was. But even as I said it I could feel the idea taking root. It would be just like Papa. Always telling us, his own sons, how useless we were. How much of a disappointment to him. But would it be like Ben?

What had always made my mate intriguing was his very unknowability. You could spend hours, days, in his company—you could travel across Europe with him—and never be sure you’d got to the real Benjamin Daniels. He was a chameleon, an enigma. I had no idea, really, who I had invited under this roof, into the bosom of my family.

I reach into the cabinet under the sink and grab the bottle of mouthwash, pour it into the little cup. I want to wash away the rank taste of the tobacco. The cabinet door is still open. There are the little pots of pills in their neat row. It would be so easy. So much more effective than the cigarettes. So helpful to feel a little less . . . present right now.

The fact of the matter is that while I’ve been pretending to Jess, I could almost pretend to myself: that I was a normal adult, living on his own, surrounded by the trappings of his own success. An apartment he paid the rent on. Stuff he’d bought with his own hard-earned cash. Because I want to be that guy, I really do. I’ve tried to be that guy. Not a thirty-something loser forced back to his father’s house because he lost the shirt off his back.

Trust me—as much as I’ve tried to kid myself, it doesn’t make a difference having a lock on the front door and a buzzer of your own. I’m still under his roof; I’m still infected by this place. And I regress, being here. It’s why I escaped for a decade to the other side of the world. It’s why I was so happy in Cambridge. It’s why I went straight to meet Ben in that bar when he got in touch, despite Amsterdam. Why I invited him to live here. I thought his presence might make my sentence here more bearable. That his company would help me return to a different time.

So that’s all it was, when I let her think I was someone and something else. A little harmless make-believe, nothing more sinister than that.

Honest.