Chapter XXVIII. En Cas d’Urgence.
XXVIII.
EN CAS D’URGENCE.
SRI LANKA.
We get away for her birthday.
In mid-November, when the kids are consumed with school and soccer and Nutcracker rehearsal, and Francois is still shooting interiors on the soundstages at Sony, Anouk and I jet off to the other side of the world. Seven days, six nights at the Amanwella resort in Sri Lanka.
We are celebrating. Not just Anouk turning thirty-nine, but the fact that following studio visits from a curator and members of the Hammer’s board of advisors, exhibiting On Beauty in one of their galleries was a go. My team at Cherry and Martin were thrilled.
I told the kids that I was taking a girls’ trip, and managed not to feel guilty about it.
I told Fran that it would be mostly yoga and meditation.
But really, there is little of that. There are sunrise boat rides across a lagoon and massages en plein air and one-on-one surf lessons and a helicopter tour to the Hill Country, and biking through quaint villages, and picnic breakfasts at a nature reserve with exotic birds and leopards, and a visit to a baby-elephant sanctuary.
And there is fucking. Naturally. Although the locals would likely call our behavior unnatural.
But to anyone outside of our premium ocean-pool suite, it looks like an indulgent girls’ trip. And mostly, it is.
It is early Saturday morning when the first calls come: 3:17 AM, to be exact.
A text first, and then another, and another.
My phone vibrating incessantly on the nightstand.
Anouk’s ringing out loud. After several seconds, she stretches out one languid arm and silences it without looking at the screen.
Half asleep on the other side of the bed.
I swipe mine from the stand, eyes adjusting in the dark.
There were at least a dozen messages. Four from Francois.
Are you okay?
Are you seeing this?
Have you heard from anyone?
Call me.
A sort of subdued panic takes over my brain. It could not have been the kids. Nor my parents. The line of questioning did not add up. And yet his urgency. I quickly slip out of the bed onto the cool tiles, cross through the suite, and out onto the terrace, shutting the glass doors behind me.
“Cile.” He answers at the first ring. “You’re okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay. I was sleeping. It’s the middle of the night here. What’s going on?”
“There’s been an attack in Paris. Multiple attacks. It’s really bad. I don’t know who is safe, who is not.”
“Where? What? A bomb?”
“Bombs. Shooting. Everything. All over. Restaurants, the stadium, people are climbing out of the windows at Bataclan. I had to leave set early. Turn on the TV.”
“I … We…” I was still trying to get my grounding. “There is no TV.”
“I’m on my way to get the kids from school. I want them to be with me when they find out.”
“Okay. Is that necessary?”
He’s quiet for a beat, and then, “What kind of hotel has no TV?”
For a moment, I freeze. I want to tell him the kind of hotel that up until very recently we could have only dreamed of.
Where no expense is spared to provide the utmost in relaxation and privacy.
Where moneyed honeymooners and robber barons and dilettantes idle and come inside to fuck and sleep in the afternoon when it’s too hot to do anything else. That kind of hotel.
“Anouk wanted something quiet for her birthday.”
“I think you should come home.”
“Come home?”
He suggests it so casually, as if we are just up the road in Santa Barbara.
It took well over twenty-four hours to get here, with stops in London and Doha, and a final hour-long helicopter ride across the tip of the island.
We flew commercial, and between the travel time and the jet lag, we lost days.
Anouk plans for us to spend two nights at Claridge’s in London on the way back, so we can see Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in The Winter’s Tale and squeeze in some shopping in Mayfair. I’m hoping to see Andrew.
My focus shifts to the ocean in the near distance.
The soaring coconut palms, fronds dancing in the breeze.
And the superlative night sky, the likes of which I’ve never seen.
Not even in the countryside in Jamaica. Not even in Cabo.
The universe on full display. When we arrived earlier in the week the moon was new, and Anouk and I were so astounded, we covered ourselves in mosquito repellent and spent half the night outside gaping at the Milky Way and the infinite stars.
And now, my husband, a million miles away, is asking me to leave all of it behind.
“Come home now? Why?”
“Because your kids are going to need you, Cile. I need you. We don’t know how bad this is going to be.”
“I only have two more days here, Fran. And then London.”
“Get yourself on a flight tomorrow.”
“Why? What is my coming home going to do?”
“You don’t know what we’re going to find out in the next few days. Please come home, Cecilia.”
I am too frazzled to fight with him. Too discombobulated by the news. A cursory scroll through Twitter reveals fragmented information: amateur cell-phone videos, incomplete news bites, the unconfirmed but escalating number of dead.
Something monstrous has happened in Paris.
I head back inside to alert Anouk. She is positioned so serenely—a cashmere eye mask framing her face, her half-naked body twisted in the sheets—that for a full minute I debate waking her. Sleeping Anouk is one part luxury, two parts wild child, and it’s endearing to witness her vulnerability.
But her ex-husband is in Paris. Her father. Friends. Cousins. She would want me to wake her up. “Anouk,” I whisper, stroking her arm.
She murmurs something unintelligible, turning away from me, displaying the length of her spine.
Her back, newly bronzed, her delicate scapula.
In any other situation, I would grab my Leica from the living room and shoot her in the half-light.
A nod to Ingres’s Grande Odalisque. “Anouk,” I repeat. “I need you to wake up. I’m sorry.”
She rouses, her long neck swiveling toward me. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
“There’s been an attack. In Paris. It’s pretty serious. You need to check your phone. Listen to your messages. Make sure your family is okay.”
“Putain.” She sits up then, pushing up her eye mask and grabbing for her phone on the nightstand. More annoyed, it seems, than worried.
While she listens to voicemails, I busy myself with replying to texts from my mum and dad, Jane, two friends from college—I’m okay.
Not in Paris. Thank you for checking in—before moving on to Facebook and marking myself as Safe.
I shoot a quick WhatsApp to various group threads with my Parisian friends.
Camille, Salima, Aurélie, Geneviève. I message Khalil.
And then I begin searching available flights out.
From the corner of my eye, I see Anouk send off a couple of texts. Both thumbs moving adroitly over the keyboard, in contrast with my single-thumb technique. The luxurious eye mask and the indifferent expression suggest a petulant Holly Golightly. Albeit vaguely ethnic and topless.
After a minute or three, she repositions her mask and settles back into the bed. Not a word spoken.
“You’re going back to sleep?”
“Ben oui.”
“Really? You can sleep?”
“It’s three in the morning. Of course I can sleep.”
I stare at her for a second. And I realize, not for the first time, that I am built differently.
“Francois wants me to come home.”
“What?”
“Now. He wants me to fly out tomorrow.”
She turns to me then, raising her mask again. “You told him no, right? What is going home going to do, Cecilia? It’s done. The damage is already done. If you go to Paris, it will be a mess. Police stops. Road closures. And for what? You are not going to catch the bad guys.”
“He wants me in LA. With the kids.”
She stares at me, attempting to decipher.
“I just … I don’t feel…” I continue. “It just doesn’t feel right being here, at a resort, when they’re all suffering.”
“There is nothing we can do. You know that?”
“I don’t think that’s the point. I think we need to go home.”
“Putain,” she says again, lowering her mask. “You do what you have to do.”
In the end, we compromise. We leave Sri Lanka at our scheduled departure date, but our London leg is altered to no more than a brief layover. By the time we arrive in Los Angeles, we are both drained and depleted. Paradise feels far, far behind us.