“In Italy?” André pressed. “That’s where you first lived, yes?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, I lived in Italy. But . . . I was a good girl there. I thought I was being . . . daring.” She slipped her arms into the sleeves of the sweater. Fingered her scarf, still in place. “The first time I bought a condom in Italy, I didn’t know the Italian word for it, so I asked for qualcosa per fermare la concezione, something to stop conception.” Offering to André the kind of little anecdote that might distract him, might allow her to spin this conversation in another direction. “The condom was for a friend, part of a complicated plan to convince a man she was quite in love with that her previously squandered virginity was intact. She’d told him she had never been with a man but rather ‘did it herself,’ with ‘a sort of thingamajiggy.’”
André laughed.
“A thingamajiggy?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, remembering the shock she’d felt at her friend’s willingness to acknowledge such a thing as loss of virginity, and to suggest aloud a self-pleasuring alternative. “So we had to make a thingamajiggy to show the fellow. Hence the need for the condom.”
André again laughed. Most of the table did.
“And this amour of your friend,” he said, “he fell for your ploy?”
“He proposed that night.”
The marriage hadn’t lasted two years, but at the time they’d felt triumphant.
“And yet this ‘daring’ was for your friend.”
Nanée met his gaze. “Yes, that’s right.”
“When did you become a ‘bad girl,’ then? Bad by Evanston Rules, which I gather means a girl has taken a lover?”
Taken a lover. It was what the European girls at the contessa’s school had called it, too. So much more sophisticated than “gone the limit,” and yet less true.
“When did you become such a terrific bad boy, André?” she responded.
“Ah, see, she tries to duck the question,” he said, “and so we know there is something hiding here.”
“In Switzerland,” Nanée said, surprising herself at the ease with which the admission came. It had been after Daddy died, after Mother came to Paris and took up with Misha, after her brothers and Mother and Misha left to go back to the United States while she stayed to ski. She wondered why she was embarrassed by those details, unwilling to admit them. She wondered if André could read them on her face or hear them in her voice.
“And this first man, was he a good lover?”
“He was a bit of a scoundrel, André. I seem to be drawn to scoundrels.”
T and Jacqueline and Miriam laughed. Lord, Nanée was going to miss Miriam’s too-loud laughter.
“Again she avoids the question,” André said to the table. He turned back to Nanée and repeated, “Was he a good lover?”
Was he? She’d imagined herself in love with him to justify going the limit, then dated one scoundrel after another as if to punish herself for being such a fool as to squander her virginity on a man to whom it meant precisely nothing. “At the time I had nothing to compare him to.”
“But now you do.”
Kind, understanding Tony in Barcelona had showed her how sex was meant to feel. She must have stumbled on him by mistake; he was a good bit more decent than her usual choices. But unlike the other men she’d dated, he wasn’t “her class.” He wasn’t a man she could take home.
“Was Switzerland a good lover? I guess not, but then surprisingly few men are,” she said, with a look that suggested perhaps André, too, was less satisfying than he might think.
Again, the women at the table laughed. But André simply clasped and unclasped his hands again, pleased with this confession, with the notion of a younger Nanée lying in that bed in Switzerland, not understanding what she was missing.
“And since then, you’ve had better lovers?”
Nanée looked again to the drive. Surely that was the dim glow of headlights? Danny, whose return would distract Varian, and with him André. But nobody else was looking.
“Perhaps even men you’ve loved?” André prodded.
“I’ve thought so,” she said. Again fliply. Again the truth.
“Thought they were better in bed, or that they loved you?”
“That wasn’t your question,” she said. “Your question was whether I loved them.”
They all looked to the drive; yes, everyone now heard. They followed the slow progress of a shadow topping the hill.
“Your latest lover,” André said, “was he better or worse than that first man?”
She lifted her glass and took a sip. She was glad of the darkness. She had imagined she could control the commandant, when there was nothing about the situation that she controlled. She had imagined she would rescue Edouard Moss, when she’d been putting him in more danger rather than less.
“I’m beat,” T said. “You must be beat, Nan. Shall we head in together?”
Nanée focused on the car headlights, their dim glow swinging toward them now as the car approached the gate. She stared, hoping to make out the car, but it was impossible to see anything with the headlights still on, even dimmed.
“Better or worse?” André repeated.
“He wasn’t a lover,” Nanée managed.
“I think that’s enough, André,” Jacqueline said.
“How long ago was he?” André pressed.
“Leave it, André!” T said. “Bloody leave it alone!”
They all turned to T, startled. T didn’t rise to anger, ever.
Her friend meant to help her, but it would be easier if she might just give some answer, some small truth that hid the rest.
“I . . . ,” Nanée started.
The car stopped just beyond the gate. Doors opened. At the crunch of footsteps on gravel, Jacqueline was standing, saying with alarm, “Varian?”
Good god, it was someone sent from the camp. That fool of a guard hadn’t kept quiet.
“It’s okay,” Varian said, rising as the gate creaked open and they heard the low murmur of voices—Danny’s voice, thank goodness. Two sets of feet coming up the steps, not more. Two shadows crossing the belvedere in the spill of the light from the French doors.
Danny said, “Hey, you’re all still out here?”
“Edouard,” Varian said. “Welcome.”
“Edouard Moss!” André said. “Good god, man, you gave us a fright. Danny, you might have let us know you were returning with company. We’d have opened the good stuff.”
They were all standing now. Somehow, Nanée too was standing.
“Mr. Fry,” Edouard was saying, declining to shake Varian’s hand on account of his own filthy hands and clothes, his shoes and his pants looking and smelling as if he’d waded through sewage.
“Varian,” Varian insisted, already pouring Edouard a glass of wine, insisting he take it. “I’m so glad we’ve got you here. Why don’t you sit and have something to eat? I asked Madame Nouget to set something aside.”
“André,” Edouard said in greeting. “Jacqueline.”
He kept his distance, embarrassed.
“You remember T,” Danny said. “And Nanée.”