Book II - Chapter 4. A Coincidence of Fate

Itxassou Commune in Southern France nearby
the Fournier Estate on the River Nive 

Adrienne met Nick Baker in Santa Barbara while her father was still alive during one of her earlier, more serious, attempts at sobriety. Marcel knew of Harry Baker’s affair with Iniga, the birth of Nicholas, and Harry’s efforts to free her from La Venta, but he knew nothing of Nick’s record in Charleston. He was cautious of past dealings with Harry Baker and curious about the coincidence of Nick and Adrienne meeting each other. But he resigned to the feeling that fate brought them together and went along with it after consulting with Alesandro. Alesandro affirmed that there were stranger alliances and, though he too was reluctant, he gave his blessing to the affair while secretly hoping it wouldn’t go as far as it did.

Some say there are no coincidences, but Adrienne preferred to believe it to be blind luck… the serendipity of natural selection. She was agnostic about it. Who knows, the fact that they were in the same town might have been fate. She was in a women’s recovery home and he was in a men’s sober living one. Her lesbian friend, Jane, introduced them. He was Jane’s date, but they found that they had some things in common…. besides Jane. She couldn’t have imagined at the time how much history they shared.

Jane and Adrienne were roomies in the graduate house at Casa Pacifica and were both from well-to-do families. This gave them the feeling, founded or not, of being estranged from the rest of the girls there from the beginning. It was while they were cloistered the first few months in Casa Pacifica that Jane seduced her: as if Adrienne needed seducing. Adrienne wasn’t exactly Gay but she would later say, “Any port in a storm will do.”

Nick came with Jane to a social meeting of the two houses. Adrienne knew he was only her “Beard” and as far as she was concerned that made him fair game. Nick was attracted to Jane’s affluence, but Adrienne was blind to his intentions. Nick was impressed when Jane told him that her father was a pauper compared to Adrienne’s. Almost instantly, upon hearing this, he sat down on the couch next to Adrienne. From her perspective, Jane lost out in that instant… Jane lost both a lover, and a “Beard”, before the night was over.

Adrienne fell, as the cliché says, head over heels for Nick and couldn’t care less how Jane felt about it. Jane exchanged sobriety for bitterness and left the sanctuary of the recovery home. Nick and Adrienne escaped from their respective recovery facilities and rushed off to Las Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator. Nick then insisted on Papa’s blessing right away. She did that, without knowing why Papa made so much of a fuss about it. For him it was a reunion in a very real sense, as in a family reunited after a long diaspora. He didn't tell her of the connection with Nick, and his mother, whose self-imposed estrangement for so long from the intimate circle of the estate at Itxassou. At first she thought the reason for this oversight was because Papa wasn't sure that she would ever marry because he didn't reveal the deeper reasons. Those reasons had to do with a distaste for Nick's father, and his sorrow for Iniga's self-imposed severance of the bond betwen Alesandro and himself. He had promised himself he would tell her all about it at a more convenient time.

Marcel insisted on a formal wedding, but Adrienne would've never put a foot in a church. Ever so perceptive of Adrienne's feelings, Johanna suggested a garden wedding and reception at the estate. It was this soon that the blinds of love were lifted, and Adrienne realized Nick’s attraction to the pretenses of wealth over any real affection towards her; wealth she had been born into, and frankly, was sometimes embarrassed about. Embarrassed by people’s reaction to it more than the wealth itself. That could have been because Papa’s was “new money” and she had rejected the usual affectations of the so-called aristocracy of France. She had taken on the bohemian appearance of a struggling artist and was almost ashamed of the privileges bestowed upon her by those who knew of her true resources. She never felt she fit-in anywhere. Her classmates looked down their French pseudo-aristocratic noses at her. They had all came from, as they say in America, old money. The rest were either jealous of her privilege or wanted a piece of it.

Nick was smooth… he seemed to be educated, and mannered, with polite airs that came with only a hint of a rough side… a bad boy unimpressed, she thought, by her wealth. That was what attracted her to him. But, from their Las Vegas wedding day on, he switched… or her perception of his persona did.  Nick took to the chimera of power and prestige in Biarritz like a hound to a fox. He was impressed that Papa had their friends and Nick's adopted mother, Marylyn, flown over from New York to Orly by SST. Nick boasted afterwards, to anyone who would listen, that Papa had not only provided cars for them, but purchased the cars, so that they could drive around the countryside at leisure. He went on about how the guest houses for Marylyn and close family were well stocked with champagne and fine wines… always mentioning the price of everything.

At the reception Nick repeatedly declared, to their American guests, as he grabbed the bottle from the server and poured everyone another glass, “Did you know that the price on each bottle of this champagne is worth over a thousand American bucks!”

Annoyed, Adrienne had never seen him drunk, she taunted, “What do you think they would be in, Canadian Dollars.”

That meant, of course that, even though they were both in recovery, the newlyweds had to join in with all the toasts with a glass… just one glass… one glass for each toast. Before the reception was over, and Nick and Adrienne were sent away to honeymoon on Capris, she was so wasted that she staggered about the room, telling each guest, “I married a bastard.”

Nick’s dad, Harry Baker, arrived at the reception after the toasts, just as Adrienne was approaching that state of conscious right before a black-out. She had never met him before so she watched closely his movements as he navigated his way towards her. He paused to exchange pleasantries with her father and shook hands with Alesandro. His mannerisms were restrained and dignified and she thought of him as a gentleman: the opposite of Nick’s callousness. She did notice that Alesandro’s easy smile turned flat… slightly contemptuous. Marcel’s demeanor was polite but also hard to discern. It was obvious to her that the three had a history she knew so little about.

Harry made his way to Adrienne and, after apologizing for his tardiness, he asked her for a dance. She had nearly forgotten her lessons in ballroom dancing that she’d learned at that clumsy age when most girls are all knees and feet. He was an adept dancer making it easy for her to follow his lead. He was slightly taller than Nick, with a still broad and firm frame for his age, she giggled in his arms like a teen about to swoon, “My hand is but that of a child in yours.”

“I am so very proud to be your father in-law,” he responded to that.

Adrienne felt an uncustomary nervousness, but realized she no longer felt drunk, “I'm pleased to finally meet Nick’s father. I had no idea you would be so handsome.” She flirted… immediately feeling embarrassment at doing so with her father in-law.

No longer drunk, she excused herself, and crossed the dance floor to where Nick was slurring something to a couple of middle-aged women and Marylyn, who had been ignoring Harry’s entrance. She took the glass of champagne from Nick’s hand and set it on a nearby table, saying, "Are you gonna drink, or will you dance with your bride?"

“Enjoy the party, Adrienne,” Marylyn reacted defensively, “Why don’t you two loosen up and have some fun.”

“Yes, we might as well, eh? I will get drunk today, and then what?” and that was the last Adrienne could recall of the wedding reception.

The marriage was on the rocks from that time on. The bad boy she fell in love with, and swept her off her feet to be married in Vegas, was just another greedy boy. She became but one of his prestigious toys, like his Ferrari, once he had a taste of luxury. He even adopted a French accent and put on the airs of sophistication when he drank.

Adrienne knew he was nothing more than a hustler from that first wedding toast on, to landing in Santa Barbara two years later, recouping from another bout of addiction. Like far too many women try to do, she had attempted in vain to refine him… “He just needs some polishing,” she told herself. “He’s a diamond in the rough.” She even went along with him when he insisted they acquire a more luxurious house than the modest one she was quite happy with in town on Victoria Street, a short walk from Pascual’s bar and restaurant. She managed to talk him down to a proud but modest Spanish Revival house on the Santa Barbara Riviera. It was prestigious enough, but a typically small, George Washington Smith villa. It wasn’t as ostentatious as the McMansions plopped on proportionately small lots all over Montecito that he would have preferred.

Adrienne left her last visit to Biarritz after a spat with Papa two years after the wedding… it was over Nick’s irresponsible extravagances.  She’d also been disturbed at what was becoming apparent about unspoken mysterious past relationships between Nick’s father, Marcel, and Alesandro. She’d blown up because she knew he was right and was embarrassed that he’d poked his nose into family business in front of strangers. His was an uncustomary indiscretion. Hers was not.  Marcel’s excuse was that he was light-headed from the wine during a very boring soiree with his banking associates. She had no excuse, nor did she think she needed one.

“You have never said a word... you could have said at the very least a few words about Nick’s dad. Why he was such a pariah... how you and Alesandro avoided him at the reception?” she spilled a glass pounding her fist on the table while demanding an answer.

To think of how much sorrow she’d caused him was a source of shame for her after he passed. She felt warmth mixed with regret to remember how she had always known she was the light of his life. God, how she rued all the times she’d reciprocated his love with the resentment of a spoiled brat. She saw her Papa the last time that evening when he came to her room to apologize after the guests left. Marcel sat at the end of her bed. “You were right, I’m sorry. I have tried to protect you from... it was so unexpected.” He sighed, “When you brought Nick home to us I saw his father in his bearing and something about his mother in his demeanor.”

“What do you mean?” she searched his eyes and thought she saw them wince. “Tell me now. It’s not so tender a subject now that I know Nick is a colossal asshole.”

“He is the same size as his father... intimidating. They were in Spain with us.”

“Who? His mother too?”

“His mother too. I would have told you about her. Alesandro was in love with her.”

“And she was too dangerous to tell me about?”

“She passed away a long time ago. She was one of the last hold-outs of the Spanish Civil War,” Marcel tried to explain. He felt like he had opened up the contents of Pandora’s Box.

“And his father too? He was there?”

“We were all there. Sometimes we were all on the same side too,” he smiled to what seemed to him to be an inside joke and then grew ever so serious. “Harry tried to get her to come to America with him but she hadn’t given up yet and hated him for what we did to her for Alesandro’s sake.”

“This is so complicated. Damn, you can’t make this shit up. Enough... Enough. It is too much for me to digest. Perhaps when we’re not so tipsy,” she let him off the hook.

“I understand, Adrienne… even the heroin addiction… I am more like you than not, Ma fifille,” he confided as he tried to mend their heated argument. “You are not like Nick or Rémy. I haven’t told you this before but I admire the courage to paint… not as a hobby. You could have married into the best families but you chose art... then you fell in love with Nick.”

“You know nothing of Nick and me.” She angrily responded to his awkward attempt at affection even though she detested Nick more than she let on to Marcel or to anybody.

“I confess that I know little of your love life,” he admitted, “but I do know Nick and I know your spirit.”

Adrienne had boasted in a complaint to Max, “You know, even though my papa was filthy rich, he used his wealth and power for something I had no knowledge of. I barely suspected. I didn’t know… except that there was always someone… an amputee or some disabled friend staying in one of the guest houses… to me, they were just funny men, drinking wine and telling stories. I was barely conscious of these things. Alesandro told me most of it on our rides. So much of what Papa and Johanna had done, for disabled veterans… you know, the Resistance… refugees from Spain. It was hidden from me. I knew nothing more of his activities than I could see… he had a statue… an abstracted granite sculpture of a Basque Resistance fighter in a beret that lorded over the view from the lawn down the hillside towards the river. I thought it naïve and unsophisticated then, and would blush if a friend made mention of it.”

Marcel had tried, when she was young, to set her up with his connections. After Eder died she would have nothing to do with these snobs, or their eager sons who hovered around hoping to have a piece of her. She resisted any helping hand except for her trust fund. She hadn’t let him see what she was doing in her studio in Paris and he had only visited once. At that time heroin was new to Adrienne then and she’d just cooked up a spoon with a junkie friend. She ushered Papa away, still hoping he hadn’t noticed how fucked up she was.