Epilogue #2
To make matters worse, my mom was an only child.
In the email, my grandmother told us she was throwing us a little fête, and we honestly haven’t known what to expect.
So it’s wonderful to discover, when we show up at the address my grandmother has sent us, that she has many other relatives and friends.
Sylvie and I are a little worried about how our French will hold up.
We spoke it to Maman all her life, but this is a lot of people, all talking over each other and all very excited.
I’m hoping smiling and nodding will go a long way for us.
Dad has a few phrases, but he’s always been better at understanding it than speaking it.
And Sinclair, of course, remembers enough of it from prep school to have had French panties melting off left, right, and center during our travels.
Our mémé’s front door opens right onto a narrow street, but the house is larger inside. Even so, it is crammed full of people. People who’ve gathered here to meet us. Oh, God. I’m not going to last five minutes without bursting into tears.
“Mémé,” Sylvie says, her voice catching as our grandmother embraces her.
Mémé looks even older than last time we saw her, her tan face crisscrossed with a million lines, but today, she is positively glowing with happiness.
She hugs Sylvie so tightly, and then me, and the moment she puts her frail arms around me, I lose my shit.
This is my mom’s mom, the woman who gave birth to her, who shaped her, who braided her hair and bought her her first pair of ballet shoes.
Who knew her better than anyone for a long, long time.
This is the woman who buried her husband and then her only child and has remained standing, something I’m not sure I could find the strength to do.
Sinclair was right: we may have lost Maman, but these ties that bind us to our past, to a culture we’ve only experienced through our mother’s memories and customs and rituals, are so strong.
They’re strong enough to stretch across oceans. Across generations.
They’re strong enough that, when I look into Mémé’s face, I see my mom’s eyes.
Thank God for Sinclair, who is by my side throughout it all, quietly thrilled for us, hanging out with Dad when it all gets too much, even though he’s honestly a bit of a mess, too.
What can I say? It’s a seriously emotional occasion.
Fleur, who speaks almost no French apart from words and phrases—Sylvie has been far too busy surviving single, working parenthood to teach her daughter a second language—is the center of attention, celebrated and adored and cooed over.
She quickly makes friends with all of the kids, children of Maman’s cousins’ kids, and they play a whole load of games in the small, leafy yard where the language barrier is a total non-issue.
And my sister? Sylvie gets a lot of attention from a distant cousin who’s so insanely, revoltingly hot that some ad agency should immediately put him on billboards, shirtless and sipping from a sweating bottle of Kronenbourg 1664.
“Remind me what the French take is on fucking a cousin?” she asks Sinclair and me when the hot dude—Luc—has trotted off to refill her wineglass.
My fiancé spits his beer back into its bottle and misses, while I laugh.
“Cousin-fucking is not okay,” I tell her sternly when I’ve recovered. I pause. “Unless they look like that. Then you can probably find a loophole.”
“He’s not really a cousin, though,” she whispers urgently. “He’s, what, Jean-Jacques’s son? And Jean-Jacques was Maman’s… second cousin!”
Sinclair sighs. “Let’s run the math, shall we?” He starts typing into the search engine on his phone. “Okay, so his dad and your mom were second cousins… Let’s see.”
We try not to laugh as he runs his “math”. Finally, he looks up.
“According to Google, you can officially fuck your third cousin in any country. Congratulations, and go forth and copulate.”
Over my shoulder, Luc is making his way back over here, his long, tan fingers closed carefully over the drink he’s bringing back for my sister. His face is open. Hopeful. Even adoring, I’d say. I’m not surprised. She looks particularly smoking this afternoon in her sexy sundress.
Sylvie holds out a hand for a high five, and Sinclair hits it.
“His English isn’t great,” she says, as if trying to talk herself out of it.
“Girl,” I say. “You’re not doing this for the conversation. All you need to know is that the French for condom is préservatif. Go fuck the hot French cousin.”
Sinclair frowns. “It’s extremely disturbing that you know that.”
I give my fiancé a little smile and a happy shrug, and his face lightens. “I’m full of surprises.”
Luc returns with Sylvie’s wine and what I’d call a hot cousin-fucker grin, and we melt away. I have a suspicion Fleurie may get to have a sleepover in Grandpa’s suite tonight.
Sinclair, one month later
If you assumed that my parents would hate every part of my proposing to Elyse, you’d be right.
And if you assumed that my mom would create a press-friendly version of events that felt glamorized and shallow while being technically true, then you would also be right.
Her version goes something like this: My new fiancée is half French and a successful model who is well on her way to becoming a household face and name. She is the daughter of a classical ballerina who once trained in Paris. She and I met at a super-exclusive members club.
See what she did there?
True, but also… creepy. I think my issue is that it implies that I set my sights on Elyse because of all those things, that I went out there in true Voss style and thought, Ooh, that successful, half-French model would make a suitable wife, when obviously I fell for Elyse regardless.
That is not our story, but no matter. She and I will set the record straight with the people who count (except for the Alchemy part, obviously), and the rest of the world can believe what it wants.
If my mother requires some Disney-fied version of our love story in order to tolerate Elyse, then I’ll happily let her have that—not because I care what she or Dad or any of their friends think, but because we plan on spending a ton of time at The Lindens, and I can’t bear the idea that my parents might give her a hard time for being exactly who she is.
That Elyse and her family are better human beings than my parents will ever be just adds insult to injury.
Honestly, it works in our favor that my folks like to preserve appearances at all costs. It means that they can brush their misgivings under the carpet and we can blithely ignore them.
My mom knows how to read the political, cultural, and social temperature of any room (appearances as levers, remember?), and her sources are all telling her the same thing: the press fucking loves that I’m marrying Elyse. Don’t underestimate how far that dictates my mom’s public endorsement of us.
Regarding the press, I suspect it’s partly the novelty factor—Elyse is not part of that closed circle of women from which I might have eventually and reluctantly been expected to make my choice—and partly that she’s a fresh new face in the cosmetics industry in her own right.
They particularly like that she’s the new face of LANE, and there’s a lot of speculation about how I’m handling my fiancée working for Voss’s biggest rival.
The answer, as you well know, is that it’s called karma, bitch, and I deserve nothing less.
Also that I’m so fucking proud of her that I might burst with it.
Fairwater in late June is the perfect time and place to throw an engagement party. After all, it personifies Marion Voss’s entire MO, which is showing off without appearing to try. You might even say it embodies her entire MO (you’re welcome, Elizabeth).
The peonies may be over, but the roses are in full bloom, and the gardens resemble a David Austin brochure.
The lawns are a perfect green velvet, and the obligatory banks of hydrangeas are exploding against the rear wall of the house: masses of Annabelle turning white and the tasteful blue-to-periwinkle excess of the bigleafs.
But, most perfectly, the linden trees that flank my house are at their best right now, in full bloom, their yellow-white blossoms throwing off the loveliest scent.
Forgive a poor, lovesick fool for finding it auspicious that they are here to welcome the Bayonne contingent: Kurt, Sylvie, Fleur, Gloria, Reggie, and, of course, Jambon, who are my and Elyse’s guests at The Lindens this weekend.
The other surprise guest?
Luc.
a.k.a. the cousin-fucker, who will be bunking up with Sylvie. Elyse’s agent, Olivia, has introduced him to a buddy of hers at Vantage. They’re going to do some test shots of him while he’s here, so he may be switching up his career and his location in grand style. Watch this space.
Speaking of Sylvie, I may have had to revert to my old, dastardly ways in recent months, by which I mean I meddled.
I ramped up Sylvie’s PT to four times a week, which meant that, by late January, she was in good enough shape that I could move Elyse out of her twin bed in Bayonne and into my bed in Manhattan.
I may also have pulled a few strings at work.
You only have to spend five minutes with Sylvie to realize that she’s smart as fuck, and less than five minutes more to understand that it’s better if she channels all that snark and intelligence into her job and not into crushing her future brother-in-law’s ego on a regular basis.
So I hooked her up with our HR department with the promise that I wouldn’t interfere (I’m not stupid enough to meddle in the Ward sisters’ careers a second time).
What do you know? She got a job in our digital marketing department based fully on her own merits.
It only requires one day a week in the office…
and it comes with an excellent healthcare package.