Chapter III. Portrait d’une Femme. #3
For a second, I’m stuck on our reflections.
Hers bright and delicate. Mine less so. Her vibrant kimono, her chicly coiffed bob.
My messy bun, my face devoid of makeup, my monochrome uniform: charcoal sweater, charcoal slacks.
She is a ray of light, and I am stern and serious. The opposite of California.
My eyes drift around the room then, committing little details to memory.
I want to drink in every bit of her. Her furniture, her fragrance, her art.
There’s a sepia-tinted photo on the far wall of a young Black woman laughing, a towheaded toddler squirming in her lap.
The woman wears a silk kerchief tied around her head, a halter top, large hoop earrings, a stack of bangles on her arm, to which the baby clings.
She feels so much like my own mother it takes me by surprise.
Self-possessed, regal. Even the veranda on which they are seated feels familiar.
It is easy to forget that Anouk is Black.
She is French, first of all, and the French don’t officially categorize people in such a way.
Something about liberté, égalité, fraternité, and not including race on the census since the Second World War, which did not go so well for them.
Additionally, her father is white, and that kind of mixture makes her métisse by French standards, not noire.
Furthermore, she is fair with Gallic features.
Her skin a warm eggshell, her eyes a deep green.
At most, she is racially ambiguous. But what trumps all, perhaps, is her celebrity, which has the uncanny ability to eclipse race, or at least obfuscate it.
But maybe that is only in her home country. Maybe here she is Black like me.
“Is that you and your mother?” I ask.
Her eyes flit up to the photo in question. She smiles, bright. She has a French overbite. “Oui. In Martinique. A very long time ago. She was beautiful, non? My mother was this exquisite woman. She died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was time,” she says.
I’m not certain how to respond to that. She doesn’t give me the chance.
“And your parents? They are where? France?”
“Florida. We’re from Jamaica, originally. We migrated to New York when I was little. And after I moved to Paris, they retired to Florida.”
“Are you the only child?”
“I have a brother. Andrew. He’s in London.”
“Ah, la Jama?que.” She smiles, and then returns to her makeup.
“You feel like an island girl,” she says, eventually.
The comment throws me.
“Your features are this beautiful mélange I always associate with les Antillaises,” she continues, using the French word for Caribbean. “But there’s complexity underneath, like strength with a délicatesse.” She catches my eye in the mirror then. “It’s sexy.”
I am still for a second, uncertain how to respond. Questioning what it was she saw in me that perhaps I could not see in myself. That any strength I once had was now faded.
She returns to the task at hand then, completing her mascara, swiping on a neutral lip, the faintest trace of blush. Her eyes fly up and catch mine again in the mirror. I am staring at her, transfixed. Still clutching my sweaty Pellegrino.
“I know you,” she says.
I nod.
“The shoot in Cabo. With Didier. What was it for? Bazaar?”
“No. It wasn’t editorial.…” I pause, allowing her to piece it together. Wondering what moments of that loaded trip she now remembers, what she has blocked.
I have spent the past week trying to recall the details, but some are foggy, faint. I imagine they are scribbled somewhere in a journal stashed in the back of my bedroom closet. In Paris. Which does me little good now.
But what I have not forgotten—what I will never forget—are those who were there. Those who were witness to multiple indiscretions and maintained their silence.
“It was the Carlo di Varenna campaign,” I say, finally. “In 1996. You, and Katrine ?stergaard. Jaya Clark. Bas van den Broeck. And Elliot Lyons-Thorpe.”
“Oh,” she says, and I think I see her almost falter. Almost. “That shoot.”
Something shifts in the room then. I imagined it would. An inconvenient silence. She busies herself with closing containers, tweaking her lips, avoiding my eyes. Eventually, she pushes herself back from the table and stands to face me.
“I’m going to be late. For my lunch. But … you put your number in the card, yes?”
“I did.” I stand, awkward. Her robe is gaping, her perfume is bewitching, and we are in this intimate space.
“Ah, bon, comme ca, je peux te téléphoner.”
I follow Anouk then, through the maze of rooms and out into the sunlit foyer.
Her husband is still swimming laps in the distance.
A picture of determination. She leads me down the stairs, her kimono billowing at her ankles, like a paper kite in the wind, and I am reminded of an old photo spread.
Ethereal, diaphanous; Kate Moss, a sprite in the sand.
Enrique Badulescu. Harper’s Bazaar. 1994.
“Merci encore. For the gift. And for not killing me.” She smiles and takes my glass, kisses both my cheeks, and then eases me out the door.
It is not until I reach Sunset that I realize I can still smell her on me. Cloves and rose and cinnamon and sandalwood. Anouk.