The server reappeared with his long, mournful face. “And how was everything today?” he asked.
“We’ll just take the check,” said Frank.
“Can I interest you in any dessert?”
“No!” said Frank, practically shoving him away from the table.
“Well, congratulations are in order!” said Miriam, turning to them with a bright smile that did not reach her eyes.
Peter’s face was a deep, stormy red. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.
“No, darling,” said Miriam, in the tone of a mother scolding a petulant child. “It’s not good for Cleo to bottle all of this up. Talking is healing—”
“My mom never talked to me about anything real,” said Frank. “Including who my dad was!”
Miriam gave him a perturbed look. She clearly hated to be interrupted.
“Well, Cleo’s mother,” she said, “as she probably told you, Frank, was a deeply troubled woman. Unwell in mind and spirit.”
Cleo, in fact, had never spoken to him about her mother in any depth. She had told him the first night they met that she died when she was in her last year of college, and that was the most he ever got out of her.
“Don’t talk about my mother,” said Cleo.
“It was upsetting for all of us,” said Miriam.
“Don’t talk about my mother,” repeated Cleo.
“Suicide,” said Miriam, sucking in her breath as though the word was something sour she had bitten into, “is a family disease.”
Cleo could feel her entire face vibrating. She wanted to leave, but she knew she wouldn’t. Soon the blackness would come, and she would feel nothing.
Frank looked at Cleo, whose face was blanched except for a single high red dot on each cheekbone. He could sense, beneath the still surface of her, a great roiling of feeling. But she did not move, did not even flinch. She reminded him of some great, noble boxer standing dazed after what should have been a knockout blow. He sprang up from his chair.
“I’m sorry, but this is bullshit,” he said. “Cleo, you don’t deserve this shit.”
“This language!” said Miriam. “Americans can be so coarse.”
Peter stayed silent, his head hanging heavily between his thick shoulders. Frank turned to Cleo and offered his hand. Slowly, with great dignity, she rose to stand beside him.
“We’re leaving,” she said.
She walked out of the restaurant with Frank following behind her. Suddenly, he turned back and took out his wallet. He strode back to the table and placed two $100 bills on its surface in front of Peter.
“The best thing you ever did,” he said, “was Cleo.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Late September
It had been the perfect honeymoon, until Frank decided to take the bet. He was balanced barefoot on the hotel balcony, preparing to jump from its height into the pool below, while Cleo watched the silhouette of his back and seethed. The night had turned cool, but Frank had stripped to only his linen suit trousers, held at the waist with the brown alligator belt she had bought him earlier that week from the market in Nice. He hovered on the bottom rung of the railing and stretched out his arms like a tightrope walker readying himself for a trick.
“How much did we say?” he yelled.
“One grand!” a man’s voice answered from below.
Frank laughed.
“That it?”
“Two if she dives with you!”
Cleo shifted in the wicker armchair. Behind her she could hear the low hum of the last diners on the restaurant’s terrace below, and beyond that the cicadas in the lavender banks sloping down to Cannes, and beyond that the vineyard dogs barking in their nighttime cages, and beyond that the sea, where every animal was free.
“She wouldn’t,” said Frank.
But when he turned to face her, she knew his expression even in the shadows, the look that was half question, half dare. Cleo looked at the ashtray she’d been turning in her hands. Gold and scalloped, it was at odds with the spartan look of the room. Frank liked to joke that this hotel charged a king’s ransom to live like a monk, but it was he who’d suggested they stay here. Cleo loved the simplicity of the room, as he knew she would, the stone floors that stayed cold underfoot all day, the low wooden bed and sun-bleached mosquito net knotted above the bed like a beehive.
Europe’s most celebrated artists had stayed in this hotel, paying for their pleasures with their work. A large Calder mobile swung in the breeze at the head of the swimming pool. There was a Fernand Léger mural on one side of the restaurant courtyard, and a César Baldaccini sculpture standing guard at its entrance. In Cleo and Frank’s bedroom, a pencil sketch of the Virgin Mary by Matisse hung unassumingly above the bed.
“One and a half grand!” called the voice downstairs. “But you’ve got to bull’s-eye through the swan. Last offer.”
“The swan?” Frank shouted. “You’re kidding! It’s child-sized!”
The swan was Cleo’s ride of choice. Frank had returned from the tabac that morning with a shopping bag of pool toys that included a grinning dolphin, a crocodile bed, a flotation ring with a swan’s head and wings, and a surrealistic giant lobster claw. Cleo and Frank had made a game of racing them while the other guests lay sunning themselves like lizards around the pool.
“Frank, please,” said Cleo quietly to his back.
“Cleo has an objection!” Frank said, laughing, to the voice below.
“Don’t wimp out now, brother!” The voice was taunting. “It’s only one floor. Well, two … You can make it.”
“Please don’t,” said Cleo. “For me.”
Frank looked back at Cleo. She held his gaze. He smiled.
“Fuck it!” he yelled and turned back to the voice below. He clambered over the railings and held himself steady with two hands behind him. “One and a half grand! A down payment on my head surgery!”
“We’re in Europe!” the voice yelled. “It’s free!”
It took Cleo less than ten seconds to walk to the door and slam it behind her. It took her another thirty to realize he was not coming after her. She stood in the hallway, still holding the ashtray, and listened for the splash, but she heard nothing. She would not turn back now. Carefully, she carried herself down the stairs and through the courtyard below. She paused again in front of the wooden door that led outside. Suddenly it opened, revealing one of the pair of retired headmistresses who had introduced themselves to Cleo and Frank a few days earlier by the pool.
“Hello, dear. Heading out?”
It was the beginning of the off-season, and the handful of remaining guests at the hotel had formed a temporary community, chatting to each other over their cantaloupe and coffee in the mornings, taking up the same positions around the pool each day. Cleo and Frank suspected that the headmistresses were covertly a couple and enjoyed watching them sit under the shade of the Cyprus trees, playing cards. They both adored Frank, who flirted with them shamelessly and always offered them a glass from the bottles of chilled white wine he ordered a steady supply of by the pool.