Adrienne made no secret of her drug addiction
and stayed at the Itxassou estate only when she wanted to dry out a few months.
She usually tired of Rémy’s scrutiny, and his demeaning sarcasm, and then she’d
return to her studio in Paris or, after the marriage, to the house in Santa
Barbara, her dogs, and her shitty husband. This time, she came home to a sink
full of dishes and newspapers spread over the kitchen table. The other rooms,
besides the bedroom, were untouched except for the music room. The evidence of
bottles and full ashtrays, no more than an arm’s reach from the couch covering
every surface, bore witness to his presence. Still, she felt it was good to be
home even though she despised Nick by this time. He was supposed to be watching
her place while she was gone.
Wondering where her Nicky was, and oddly
enough, missing him, she decided to call Max instead, her old drinking buddy
before he caught sobriety. Yes, caught
sobriety. Sobriety, it was like a virus… everybody in their age bracket ended
up getting sober back then… it was spreading, celebrities and people like Max:
sober, dead, or in prison. She got his answering machine… “Hello, I screen my
calls, so leave a message.” …beep.
He was a grouch and hated getting phone calls.
Anyone who knew him well enough could get through while he screened calls
aloofly listening to his old micro-tape answering machine. Everybody else could
leave a message that he would promptly erase, “Hello, Max? it is Saturday
afternoon… what… it is noon or so… Oh, you bad boy… you are at Pal’s? Or are
you at an AA meeting? Pick up the phone…
okay.”
He wasn’t home… a stream of consciousness
flooded her mind, “If I go to Pal’s… Shit, I know I can’t sit there without
having something to drink. If I have one drink I will want another, if I have
another, there is no turning back, and then I'll need something better… to
relieve the hang-over. Maybe I’ll go to his house and crawl into his bed…
surprise him? When he comes home he will get a present from me.” They weren't
ever lovers... not in any realistic sense. They’d only made-it with each other
once that she could remember. She would flirt, but Max was like Alesandro to
her. She needed a friend; someone more than a dear friend.
Upon arriving at Max's place, Homer led her to
the door from his perch inside the screened in porch. The door was unlocked,
“No one is home, Homer?”
A picture Max had taken was pinned on the
corkboard above his desk. They had been body surfing at night. It was Arroyo
Burro Beach… her hair was wet and longer then. The picture tacked on the
corkboard had strings on it to other pictures; like a story being plotted out.
The frame of her body was white and skeletal from the flash. It reminded her,
by contrast, of the one Alesandro had taken of her in the surf when she was a tanned
adolescent. She thought, “Vanity… my breasts, at almost forty years, look much
the same as they did then: still perky and firm.”
Max’s room, with all his books and his old
typewriter, brought back still vivid memories of … of Alesandro’s den… when she
was young, the summer he took the picture of her in the surf. Alesandro was
middle aged then… maybe even fifty… a handsome man. In a flash, she remembered
that one day he had to protect her from her brother, Rémy.
The fond memory of youth was overtaken and
brought her mind back to that day in Biarritz when she had been basking nude on
a chase lounge, as was customary at the family’s pool. She’d been raised to be
unashamed of her body and no one was embarrassed or shy about nudity at home.
It was a beautiful day. A world of hormonal surges was opening up to her as she
let her fingers probe the moisture of what she and her mother affectionately
called her Fous Fouse Nette. Suddenly Rémy was there before her. He had been
watching from a distance and had become aroused; he stood before her; he
grasped her thighs; he forced her knees apart. Before she realized what was
going on he was on top of her. Arousal reversed itself to become a terror. She
struggled at first but he persisted, forcing her thighs apart.
She’d told Max about it once, when they were
laying in his bed, drunk, “He was my older brother… bigger, with a powerful
physique, what was I to do? Ma-Mère was visiting her family in Amsterdam and
Papa was in Paris. I hoped Alesandro would show himself but he was nowhere
around… I knew what sex was but this was not sex. I’d seen horses mate… it was
very much like that… violent."
She still remembered his brow and eyes
clinched. They were shut as he grimaced towards ejaculation. It hurt and she’d
cried out at him to stop but he did not ‘til he was done.
She heard feet kicking and crunching the
graveled path that led to the pool house. It was Alesandro, with Eder at his
side. Rémy heard it too and lurched away as though she was a bed of hot coals.
She couldn’t burn the memory of it out... the image of how he stood unashamed,
even defiant, before Alesandro.
“Ah, Rémy, we need to have a discussion,” and
without saying another word he put an arm around Rémy and took him to the other
side of the cabana as though he was going to tell Rémy a secret.
She wasn’t so sure whether Alesandro saw all of
what happened. The confusion in her mind muffled their voices, but, she did
hear Rémy shout, "No, I didn't!" several times and then a slap and
Alesandro’s voice trembling, “Rémy… Oh, damn it Rémy…” as she gathered her
clothes while Eder held her… took her, dazed, up the path to the house. She
tried to make eye contact but Rémy’s head was hung down as he hurriedly passed
them but she could see that his eyes were turning swollen and blackened under
his Gucci’s.
On the way up the steep path Eder confided,
“Rémy did the same to me when I was ten.”
Alesandro sat on the diving board with his head
in his hands as they left.
Rémy sped away in his Ferrari back to Paris
before dinner and never tried to mess with her directly again. He didn’t talk
with her after that incident at the pool for several years. “I can’t ever
forgive him… he never apologized to me nor did he to Eder and, whenever I think
of him… his smug face, the bile of disgust rises from my gut. That was how I
lost… no, how my virginity… how it was taken from me…” She said to Homer.
That was one of the times when Max had… She’d
gotten a sudden flash… a memory of a feeling… like now… She couldn’t help it…
She stopped him in the middle… when he penetrated.... She felt dirty… the
betrayal… the shame… He told her he loved her and all she wanted to do was to
shower and cry. Her brother had raped her mind as well as her body and rape
isn’t easily erased with time. She was grateful that Max let her go without a
complaint… he never insisted. But it seemed to her that making love would sully
the affection she had for him. She never cared what happened with Nicky, or the
other men she had casual sex with; but, as always, when the passion subsided,
she wanted to go home and shower; or, if it was her bed, she’d send the poor
fool away. With Max something was different, but she couldn’t have sex with
him... it had something to do with the purity of something else... something
else like a feeling of love. He understood.
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