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: Chateau 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.