Chapter XXV. Before the Fall.
XXV.
BEFORE THE FALL.
LOS ANGELES.
September comes quickly.
When production for Azimuth Rising moves to the Sony lot in Culver City, we settle into a new pattern around Francois’s schedule.
Julien and Lucie return to Bancroft and their regular activities.
Soccer for him, ballet for her—including the highly anticipated Nutcracker auditions.
I find a sizable studio to let, in the Palms area, not far from Sony, containing a small office, makeshift dressing room, and kitchenette.
I spend a few weeks filling it with the necessary equipment and a few amenities: a desk, a sofa, an espresso machine.
The kids and I have dinner together most nights, with Fran joining us on the rare occasions he wraps shooting early.
And on the days when I’m not working on any projects—when the kids are in school and Fran on the Sony soundstage for twelve-hour stretches—I indulge in time with Anouk.
Hikes in Temescal Canyon, guided tours at LACMA, bike rides on the beach.
A trampoline class, a course in aerial silks, yoga.
Activities that pass the smell test with my husband.
We pick up where we left off at the beginning of the summer—I don’t bring up the thing with Minnie, she doesn’t bring up class with Lorry—and our connection is again intimate and easy. For the most part.
Anouk had returned from France with her seventeen-year-old son in tow.
He was completing his senior year at Windwood, where he’d been since middle school.
According to Anouk, the transition had been near seamless.
He had fallen in with his old friends, warmed to his empathetic American teachers, and the house was once again filled with the sounds of his piano playing.
She talked about him often, thrilled to have her “petit chouchou” back.
But I hadn’t met him until that Wednesday in mid-September.
Following a trampoline class in Playa del Rey, Anouk and I returned to her place to luxuriate in the sauna and lie out by the pool.
Ames bringing us platters of fruit, crudités, and freshly baked kale chips, courtesy of Freja, the Longmores’ personal chef from Copenhagen.
Apparently, Danish chefs were having a moment.
“Tell Freja ‘Mange tak,’ Ames,” Anouk requested upon their arrival, before turning to me. “She is magnificent. She was a sous-chef at Noma, you know. I can never go back to eating store-bought kale chips.”
I’d never given much thought to kale chips, store-bought or otherwise.
Sometime in the early afternoon, well before I had to pick up the kids, Anouk headed inside to get on a conference call about a fundraiser she was cohosting for the Hammer Museum, and I dozed off. Face down on the chaise.
“Hi.”
I startle at the voice. Male, youthful. Definitely not her husband. He is standing beside me in jeans and a T-shirt. Fair skin, dark hair. Long, lean, elegant. Like his mother. Sacha.
What is he doing here? How long have I been sleeping?
“Hi,” I say, raising a hand to shield my eyes from the sun and squeezing my arms to my torso. I untied my bikini top earlier, an attempt to avoid tan lines. “You must be Sacha.”
“I am.” He reaches out a hand to shake mine and waits, knowing I can’t properly do so in my current state. It feels calculated. “And you are?”
“Cecilia.” I take his hand. Fuck it, he’s French. He’s seen breasts before.
“Cecilia,” he repeats.
He takes me in. Cocks his head in one direction, and then the other, a smile forming on his ripe lips. His cheeks flush pink. “Are you the new Delphine?”
“I’m sorry. The what? Who?”
“Are you my mother’s new obsessive friend?”
His words are unsettling.
“It’s always someone. She pulls them in and bewitches them and becomes the center of their world, and when she gets bored, she lets them go.”
I am still for a moment, stunned at his audacity.
“No,” I say, when I have found my voice. “I’m Cecilia.”
He smiles then ever so slightly, conceding. “Nice to meet you, then. Cecilia.”
I watch him grab a plum off a tray Ames set up for us, and bite into it, juice dripping down his forearm. He strolls back toward the house. As he approaches the patio, he stops and turns back to me. “You’re not American.”
His accent is continental, indeterminate.
“No, not really.”
He nods, smiles again. “Yes, an American would have been weirder about the topless thing.”
It takes me a moment to regroup. I have yet to meet any members of Anouk’s family.
And she has not met mine. It was a tacit understanding, not to introduce our spouses or kids.
Better to avoid any unnecessary awkwardness.
I’d managed to escape directly encountering Frederick, other than once when he was turning out of their driveway just as I was pulling up the far side of the median.
He’d done a double take—a glimmer of recognition crossing his face—and he’d waved.
But he hadn’t stopped to make conversation.
He knew I existed. Although what his wife had told him about us, I could not be sure.
Anouk has never come by our house in the canyon when the kids or Francois are there. So seeing and speaking to Sacha in the flesh threw me. But the fact that he took one look at me and summed up my relationship with his mother, dismissing me as something both predictable and temporary, stung.
I am still sitting there, slightly agog, when Anouk saunters out some ten minutes later. “Call done. Sorry it ran over.”
“No problem,” I say. Although indeed there is a problem.
“I have an idea,” she starts, grabbing the final plum from the tray. And then as if she’s just remembered something grand: “Oh, Sacha’s here!”
“Yes. I met him.”
“Did you?”
I nod, sitting upright, my top now securely fastened. “I did.”
“Ahh.” She takes a bite of the red fruit. Savors it. “I hope he was polite.”
“He was … intriguing. He said something interesting—”
“So I have an idea that could be really cool, I think,” she cuts me off, plopping herself on the adjacent lounge before leaning into me, almost conspiratorially. I am not used to this youthful energy from her.
“What do you think about exhibiting On Beauty at the Hammer?”
“Museum?”
“Yes. You know I’m on the board?”
I did know. And I knew she was currently working on a fundraiser.
But we had never discussed their collections, and I had certainly never broached the idea of exhibiting there.
On Beauty was tentatively scheduled to be my first solo show at Cherry and Martin.
There were so many moving pieces, and their schedule was booked so far in advance, we’d put it down on the calendar for October of 2016.
In the meantime, I would be contributing a few pieces to Things Fall Apart, a group show at the gallery.
And a series of photos for an exhibit on art in nature at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; I was prepping my captures of the parakeets in Kauai for it.
Balletic, enchanting. I titled it Things Beautiful and Temporary.
I’d given Anouk a rough breakdown of the theme and goals for On Beauty, but we had not discussed it in detail. And so for her to raise it even casually as a possibility was momentous.
“You’re still working on it, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Don’t look so surprised, Cecilia.”
“I am. That’s a substantial thing to put out there. Thank you.”
“Well, I haven’t raised it yet. So no pressure or anything. But think about it, and if it’s something you want to do, talk to your gallery and see how they feel, and I’ll see how we can make it happen.” She pops what’s left of the plum into her pretty French mouth and then stares out into the yard.
“I don’t know why they call these fruits ‘stones,’” she says, eventually. “When they are so soft, and feminine. And see…” She produces the pit in the palm of her hand and holds it up for me. “Life. Alors … What was it you were saying about Sacha…?”
“Can’t recall,” I say. “It must not have been important.”
That night over dinner I am distracted by the prospect of doing a show at the Hammer, the idea that I had likely become Anouk’s “new obsessive friend,” and the uncomfortable realization that one was contingent upon the other. Which naturally complicated things.
I am so lost in my own thoughts, I almost miss it when Julien casually mentions a lockdown drill at Bancroft.
“You had a what?”
“A lockdown drill,” he repeats, heaping chicken masala onto his plate, courtesy of our favorite Indian delivery. “This morning. For the whole school.”
“Yep,” Lucie chimes in. “I was in theater, so there were cool places to hide, like underneath the stage and in the wings. But they said in the classrooms you should probably go under your desk.”
Lucie’s speech pattern throws me. Hints of Southern California upspeak. She was beginning to sound American.
“Out of view from the doors and windows,” Julien adds. “Or in a closet, if you have one.”
“And turn out the lights.”
“And turn out the lights.”
My head swivels from one child to the other, confounded by their nonchalance.
“Bancroft has a main switch that can lock all the classroom doors automatically, which is pretty cool. Like one big panic room,” Julien informs us, his mouth full.
“Did you know in the lower school instead of desks they have shared tables, so the kids hide in the supply closets?” Lucie’s eyes widen. “They have to sit still and not talk. Can you imagine that? Twenty-five six-year-olds in a closet? Margot told me. She’s a lifer. Can you pass the naan?”
I am livid.
Back in Paris, the kids’ schools had fire drills. And here in California, I expected there would be some sort of earthquake prep. But the idea that my children are being trained in how to respond to an active shooter infuriates me.