Chapter XXIV. This Side of Paradise.
XXIV.
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.
HAWAII.
In August, after two months in the Mojave Desert and two months in Canada, Azimuth Rising goes on hiatus and Francois comes home to us. Tense, sleep-deprived, wired. Director mode.
I call it the reentry. The beat it takes for him to fall back into his usual patterns.
He alternates between sleeping and exercising incessantly.
He barks orders and is mildly antisocial, and in turn I find myself slipping into my old habits.
Searching for signs of infidelity. On his face, in his speech, his behavior.
I wait for him to slip up and call me by the wrong pet name, or answer his phone too quickly, or not answer it at all.
I scrutinize how he greets me, how he makes love, his smile.
Anticipating something, anything off. But I can detect nil, and I wonder for how much longer will I be the suspicious wife.
I don’t stop to wonder if I am behaving suspiciously to him.
And then he surprises us all with a two-week trip to Hawaii. “An American vacation,” he calls it. None of us have ever been.
We spend the first few days in Maui at the Four Seasons, which is overrun with Angelenos. Julien and Lucie run into kids they know from Bancroft, ballet, and surf camp, making Wailea feel like a balmier extension of the Westside. Complete with the occasional mislabeling.
“My friends here are all jealous that I tan so quickly,” Lucie informs us during dinner on the second evening. We are seated on the patio at Duo, one of a handful of restaurants on the property. It is the tail end of sunset. The sky shades of a ripe nectarine.
“Which friends?”
“Daisy from Miss Margaret’s class. And her twin sister, Camellia. They think I’m superlucky to be this color. They’ve been here for five days and are just red,” she adds, a mouth full of huli huli chicken.
Fran and I exchange looks across the table.
“They thought I was Mexican.”
“Mexican?” Julien looks up from his wagyu truffle burger.
“Because I’m kinda brown and have an accent.” She laughs.
“I hope you corrected them and told them you were Black, Luce,” I say, sipping from my margarita.
“Umm…” She lowers her eyes.
“Seriously?” Julien shakes his head. “Ugh.”
Our visit to Maui is followed by a week in Kauai at a new resort, in a detached four-bedroom villa with a private dipping pool that feels like paradise. We rent bikes, we hike, we swim in the sea. We charter a boat to snorkel, we paddleboard, we laugh, and all is well with the world.
And being there, away from Los Angeles and the Westside and labels and expectation, gives me clarity.
“I think I’ve figured out my project,” I say one afternoon when Francois and I are lolling in our garden hammock while the kids wander the resort grounds, Lucie in search of shaved ice, Julien as chaperone.
I’ve been taking photos of the sky. Each day, at various times. From this same perch. I’ve been playing with depths of field and focus. Each capture atmospheric, ephemeral, fleeting. Perhaps the start of something new.
Beneath me, Francois drifts off to sleep and returns again, his body occasionally jerking.
We have been like this for the better part of an hour.
“On Beauty?” he asks me, his hand in my hair. His arm cradling my shoulders. Vacation brings out the soft side of my husband. The playful, adoring, dreamy romantic.
“Yes. Originally, I’d visualized it as a series of photos that were in conversation with each other. Or compiled as a short film with commentary. But I don’t think it’s that.”
“No?”
“No, I think it’s an installation. An interactive, multimedia experience with the viewer not just witnessing a conversation but becoming a part of it.
I think it’s two parts: an anteroom, with white walls and a series of images—like portraits and still lifes, deconstructed and distorted—that kind of works as a portal into a black-box gallery, a womb, if you will, where the work completely envelops the viewer, with images of faces and body parts and voice recordings.
Various subjects sharing their thoughts on beauty in surround sound.
So that the viewer feels as if she’s part of the art.
She’s in the headspace of someone consuming and being consumed. ”
“Mmm,” he says, nuzzling my neck.
“Are you paying attention?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m serious, Fran. This is important to me.”
“I know, Cile. I’m listening. You want to create two separate physical and mental spaces that work collectively to affect your viewer. So they experience the dichotomy of the consumption viscerally. Yes?”
I’m quiet for a second, cradling my Nikon in my lap.
I forget that we speak the same language even when we don’t speak the same language.
That it was this process of analyzing and critiquing and conceiving art that brought us together in the first place.
Over countless glasses of pastis and Lillet at the café near Philippe’s studio.
Over bottles of Bordeaux and watching à bout de souffle on repeat in Francois’s six-story walk-up.
Over winter afternoons strolling through the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, relishing exhibitions like Herb Ritts’s sculptural portraits and the groundbreaking installation Everything That Rises Must Converge by the artist Sarah Sze, whom I’d known briefly in college.
And then returning to my apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg, to camp beneath the covers with Leelou at our feet and discuss what we had seen, what pieces moved us, and why.
This was how we fell in love.
“Yes,” I say eventually. “That is what I want to do.”
“I think it sounds great, Cile. I love the idea of you doing something more conceptual than traditional.”
He pauses for a second, inhaling deeply. The scent of frangipani surrounds us. Soft, sweet, sexy. Green.
“I think you should shoot Anouk,” he says, taking me by surprise.
I had somehow managed not to tell him. Since élodie, I no longer told him everything.
For a moment, I pause, weighing the repercussions, and then, “I have. I did.”
He stills beneath me, his hand ceasing to move in my hair. “You did? When? You weren’t going to tell me? How did it go?”
“Good. We did it a couple of months ago. At her place. Black and whites. Natural light. Very intimate, vulnerable.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You’ve been a little busy, Francois.”
“I talk to you every day. You shoot an icon, your former crush, and you forget to mention it?”
I shrug. Saying more, I fear, will give it all away. And in the moment, I am relieved that in our current position—his body half beneath mine, my face turned up to the sky—he is unable to read my expression.
“Did she bring up the assault?”
It throws me. That he remembers.
“What? No. Why—? Why would she bring it up?”
“Because. This idea of beauty consuming you. I thought maybe she brought it up. In her line of work, it’s more common than you think. It probably happens a lot.”
His words are jarring. Not because I’d never considered the inherent risk of sexual assault in the modeling profession, but because when Anouk first alluded to the possibility of one’s beauty being the cause of consumption, I never imagined that’s what she was referencing.
That first afternoon in her dressing room—when I’d showed up unannounced with a thank-you card and a yoga towel—I’d explained I was wrestling with beauty and our consumption of it, and she’d said, with little hesitation, “Or maybe its consumption of us.”
I’d interpreted her meaning as something abstract.
The idea that we as a civilization could be destroyed in our quest for beauty.
Jane’s revelation had intimated that the destruction was more personal.
But maybe that hadn’t been Anouk’s take all along.
Maybe the very thing that had made her revered made her prey.
“She hasn’t brought it up,” I say.
“Maybe she’s blocked it.”
“Maybe.”
“Have you shot any other subjects yet?” His hand begins playing in my hair again and I feel myself relax.
“No other subjects. But still lifes, reportage. The portraits of Camille and Salima I did before we left,” I say, referencing shots I’d taken of two close friends in Paris.
The former an African American expat, the latter French Moroccan.
Both striking, unique. “I’m still assembling my list of subjects. ”
“What about Tamsin Desai?”
“From Azimuth?”
“Tamsin would be great.”
Tamsin was a young British actress, of South Asian ethnicity. She was new to the business, but at twenty-six, she’d landed a plum part in Francois’s trilogy, and consequently her star was on the rise.
“She’s an interesting girl, superintelligent, and as a woman of color, I’m sure she’d have a lot to say about beauty—especially the traditional ideas of beauty in this industry—and where she sees herself fitting in … or not.”
I mull it over. Reflecting on the shift in scale and what I am attempting to do.
“I think I’m going to need a studio, Fran. For as intricate as I want to make this. I need a space to shoot, to construct my images, to work on the recordings. To spread out and create and breathe.”
“You mean the bedroom floor isn’t enough?” He laughs. “Let’s look into renting one when we get back. It’s not like we can’t afford it.”
A breeze stirs above, and seemingly from nowhere a flock of parakeets materialize overhead.
Vibrant green and vocal. Dipping and darting and rising in unison.
Our eyes track them on their whimsical dance—and I grab my camera to capture their capricious choreography—until they sail up and over the villa, inland toward the hills.
“Wow. C’était cool! I could get used to this,” he says, after a moment.
“Lying in hammocks in the tropics?”
“No. This American life.”
“Ha,” I say. “It’s a ruse. Don’t believe the lies.”
“Is this not real?”
“This is vacation in paradise. This isn’t America.”
He rolls into me then, repositions himself, his hand cradling the side of my face. “Are you not happy here, Cile?”
“I’m very happy here. In Hawaii. But this isn’t real life, Fran.”
“Are you not happy in LA?”
“LA is … different. Extreme. I’m still adjusting.”
He’s quiet for a minute, his eyes prodding mine. Blue, then brown. Then blue again. “I really like it, Cile. I really like this new life.”
I strain to sit upright and fail, outmaneuvered by the hammock. “In LA? You like living in LA?”
He nods, says nothing.
“You’re always away, Fran. In LA, it’s just me and the kids.”
“We have so much more space. We can get a house with a view.”
“You forget all the reasons I left?”
“Yes, but some of that was the struggle. Of being young. Trying to establish yourself. Not having lots of money. The ex-boyfriend. The pressure from your parents. We don’t have any of those issues now.”
I take him in for a second. A week’s worth of razor stubble, sun-kissed cheeks, brown curls overdue for a cut. His faded T-shirt and Vilebrequin trunks. His long, tan feet. Fifteen million dollars in play.
He’d made it.
I was starting to resent him.
“We … still have this American sense of superiority, entitlement, and consumption, Francois. We still have the ‘live to work’ mentality, as opposed to ‘work to live.’ We still have no universal healthcare.”
He sighs at that. The studio was able to get some coverage for my car accident, but we were obligated to pay six thousand dollars out of pocket. An amount that would be unheard of in France.
“We still have structural racism,” I continue.
“We have a Black president.…”
“Not for much longer.”
“And then we’ll have a woman.”
“If we’re lucky. Nothing is guaranteed. We still have guns. We have school shootings.”
“Not at a place like Bancroft we don’t. We would save so much on taxes, Cile. We restructure everything. Keep the apartment but make Los Angeles our primary residence. I spoke to a tax lawyer.”
I sit up then, successfully. “You’re serious? You really want to stay?”
He’s quiet for a second, his eyes penetrating. “I’m thinking about it, yes.”
“Fuck, Francois.”
“I’m just thinking about it. Are you crying? Don’t cry, Cile.”
“I’m not crying,” I say, my voice quaking. “I just … LA is a nice vacation, Fran, but I don’t want to live there. I don’t belong there. I can’t create. I mean, I can, but something is missing. I’m biding time. I’m not living my life.”
“You still have your life.”
“Fran.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. It was just an idea. We don’t have to decide anything right away.”
“That was never the plan.”
“Okay, Cecilia,” he repeats. “Okay.”
But I can’t help but think that for him, it likely was.