The Other Story (4 page)

Later that night, after a never-ending event at the Institut français on Kurfürstendamm with a fastidious journalist who asked only the most obvious questions, the ones he could no longer face answering but knew he had to (“How much of the book is taken from your own life?” “Did you ever find a letter like that for real?” “Is Margaux Dansor modeled after your mother?” “How did your family react when it was published?” “Did Toby Bramfield buy the rights the week the book came out?” “Is it true you have a cameo in the movie?” “What is your second book about?”), he got back at last, very late, to the refined privacy of his junior suite at the Ritz-Carlton on Potsdamer Platz. He kicked off his shoes, turned on the TV, zapped through the late-night news and porn channels, delved into the minibar for champagne, and sprawled out on the sofa, shoving aside boxes of chocolates, welcome cards, baskets of goodies, books to sign for the sales reps. It was too late to call Malvina. He’d do that in the morning. He took the scrap of paper from his pocket and stared at it for a while. On the TV screen, a frenzied threesome was going at it with gusto. He turned the sound down, had a gulp of champagne, watched them for a while. Then he typed the BBM PIN code into his phone.

He should not be doing this, he knew. That catlike green-eyed woman spelled trouble.

J
OURNALISTS APPEARED TO BE
fascinated, almost morbidly so, by his father’s death in 1993, as if that episode represented the core of his inner self, his essence. They craved each detail of the day his father died, or, rather, the awfulness of the precise moment when his father disappeared, when it was understood that he was not coming back, and how, as an eleven-year-old boy, Nicolas had undergone such trauma. Before Hurricane Margaux, Nicolas had not talked about Théodore Duhamel’s death to anyone, not even to his ex, Delphine. It had been difficult choosing the right words, strange feeling them roll around his mouth for the first time like a foreign dish his palate balked at. But then he discovered, with a sort of secret pleasure, that the more interviews he gave, the more Théodore Duhamel took on a new, virtual existence, an unexpected renaissance. His words resuscitated his father, fleshed him out, dusting away the forlorn mantle of stiffness that had settled with the passing of time, brandishing the triumphant and true image of what Théodore Duhamel used to be. “My father was my Gatsby,” he once confided in an early interview, and Lord knows how many times that line had been quoted, copied, Tweeted. When asked to describe Théodore Duhamel, Nicolas was discouraged. How? Listing his height, the blaze of his blue eyes, his square chin, his long, gangly arms and legs wasn’t enough. Even photographs of Théodore Duhamel posing with Nicolas, age six, in front of the battered but elegant silver Jaguar E-Type, a cigar emerging from the white of his smile, or standing astride his black Hobie Cat at the Miramar beach in Biarritz, did not suffice. How to describe the way women would look at his father, all women, young and mature, staring at him? Nicolas suspected the journalists would never grasp the complexity of Théodore Duhamel’s seemingly sunny personality, simply because no one had, not even his wife or his son. Théodore Duhamel was a scintillating comet that seared through the fragile canvas of his son’s boyhood, an alpha and an omega of interrogation and perplexity, an alluring realm of uncertainty, a no-man’s-land of chiaroscuro where legend and reality intertwined. “Is it true your father has no grave?” was one of the favorite questions. And Nicolas invariably replied, “Well, his name is on my grandparents’ tombstone at Père-Lachaise, but as his body was never found, technically, yes, my father has no burial place.”

The earliest memory Nicolas had of his father was his voice. A nasal voice, loud, sometimes irritating, that rang in one’s ear like the rich toll of a bell. And the laugh! High-pitched, sensual, at times reduced to a short howl or a snort. It took people by surprise. Théodore Duhamel used it like a weapon. He wielded it artfully, Nicolas discovered, in delicate situations—with uptight teachers, ungracious shop assistants, frosty bankers. Most of the time, it worked. But that ploy infuriated his mother, his grandmother. They saw through it. When Théodore Duhamel winked at his son over the dinner table, flaunting a down-turned mouth as if to convey, Those women! Nicolas shivered with pride; yes, he was part of the team, just the two of them, the secret team he formed with his father, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
his father’s favorite movie. He was Sundance; his dad was Cassidy.

What did his father do? From early on, Nicolas slowly grasped to what extent his job was shrouded in mystery. His father did not leave every morning wearing a suit and a tie, carrying a briefcase, like François’s father, kissing his wife good-bye on the doorstep. It was his mother, Emma, who took off when it was still dark, a chunk of croissant crumbling from her fingers, rushing in order not to be late for her students. Théodore Duhamel did not make an appearance till ten, and the puffy-eyed look he harbored in the mornings was another of Nicolas’s earliest memories. “What does Papa do?” he asked his mother when he was eight or nine, as he never knew what to write in the school forms that asked for his father’s profession. “Hmm,” reflected his mother, “why don’t you ask Papa?” (Nicolas could have been imagining things, but wasn’t there a smile hovering on her lips?) So Nicolas obediently asked his father outright while Théodore was watching the news, a glass of whiskey in hand, and his father had replied, eyes glued to the screen, “I can’t describe what I do. It doesn’t boil down to one word.” Nicolas felt a lump in his throat. What was he going to tell his school? Couldn’t he leave that entry out? Only write Mother’s profession: Teacher. Did they really have to know what his father did for a living? Théodore Duhamel finally glanced over at his son, took note of his distress, and gulped his whiskey down with relish. “Just write ‘entrepreneur,’ Sundance. That will do the trick.” Nicolas nodded. “How do you spell it?” His father spelled it out slowly. Nicolas had no idea what it meant. He asked tentatively, “What is an entrepreneur?” His father poured out another whiskey and ignored that question. Then after a moment of silence, he added, “If anyone asks you, just say you can’t give any details because it’s too dangerous.” He’d lowered his voice to a whisper. Nicolas felt the thrill run up and down his spine, and he nodded. Later, he looked up the word
entrepreneur
in the dictionary. “A person who organizes and manages a commercial undertaking, especially one including a commercial risk,” he read. The definition made Nicolas feel even more puzzled. His father had no office. The dining room was his lair; he would sit in there for ages, staring at the television even if it was turned off, puffing away at a cigar.

The bitter smell invariably brought his father back in a flash. Théodore Duhamel was fussy about cigars. He refused to buy them anywhere but at the Davidoff shop on the avenue Victor Hugo, where he spent hours choosing between a Monte Cristo N°2 (obus), an Upmann Sir Winston, and a Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur Legend Crusader. Théodore Duhamel did not like being interrupted when he chose them, except by the vendor or a pretty woman. Nicolas noticed that pretty women often came to the shop. They waited, bored and beautiful, as the usually short, bald, and ugly men they accompanied also took their time. Nicolas had often watched his father chat up the ladies. Most ingenuously, he would hand a Havana to the lady, and sometimes the lady would stroke it in a slow and strange manner. Often, he would slip his card to the smiling lady behind the fat, bald man’s back. His father’s card was dashing. In bold red lettering, it said
Théodore Duhamel, International Entrepreneur.
Nicolas often heard him on the phone while Emma was out, using a suave, low voice, and expressions like “my beauty,” “my lovely,” and he had seen how his father looked at women in the streets, his eyes raking over them, that smile on his lips. Did his mother know about this? Did she mind?

Théodore Duhamel had a business acolyte, a guy Nicolas had seen around the house since childhood. His name was Albert Brisabois, but his father only ever called him Brisabois. He was a short, sturdy fellow with a fleecy ginger beard and a paunch. When Nicolas got home from school, Brisabois and his father were usually locked up in the dining room. Smoke wafted from under the closed door. His father’s loud snort was heard from time to time above the low murmur of voices. When his mother arrived, she would glance at the closed door, raise her eyebrows, and say, “Hmm … your father is working. Don’t make any noise.” (Nicolas could have been imagining things yet again, but wasn’t that another discreet smile?) He would share a quiet dinner with his mother in the kitchen, just the two of them, which he rather liked, while Théodore Duhamel and Brisabois pursued their conversation. “What are they talking about?” he once asked his mother as his father’s shout of a laugh echoed down the corridor. “Business,” she replied matter-of-factly over the leek and potato soup. And Nicolas was left to muse about what “business” really meant.

One Saturday, Nicolas and his father were walking down the Champs-Elysées on their way to lunch at the Pizza Pino. Théodore Duhamel suddenly gasped, turning a horrid shade of white. He pushed his son to one side and ducked. “Sundance, I’ve spotted an enemy. We need to go undercover.” At first, Nicolas thought his father was joking, but his face was ghastly, so pale that Nicolas felt frightened. He was shoved into the nearest shop. His father pretended to examine an array of silk scarves with marked interest. He did the same. His father waved off an obsequious saleslady. “Whatever you do, don’t turn around.” His father’s voice was normal, a trifle subdued, but the livid hue of his face was terrifying. Nicolas stared at the scarves (years later, he can still remember their design: pink and purple, rather hideous, nothing his mother would ever wear), and it seemed to him that they stood there for ages, petrified. Finally, after an eternity, his father muttered, “All clear. Let’s get the hell out of here.” They fled the shop, hand in hand, faces down, the collar of his father’s coat raised around his neck like a shield. Théodore Duhamel’s complexion had gone back to normal, and Nicolas felt relieved. His father dashed into Fouquet’s, dragged Nicolas down a flight of stairs, and plonked his son onto a chair. “Wait for me here. Won’t be long.” His father disappeared into a phone booth. Nicolas could hear his voice quite clearly. “Brisabois. It’s me. I saw him on the Champs-Elysées.” A long silence. “What the fuck are you going to do about it? Have you thought about the consequences? Have you really? Do you have any idea—” Another long silence. “I pray to God that you are right.” Then his father replaced the receiver as loudly as possible, as if to convey the enormity of his irritation to Brisabois at the other end of the line. After their ritual Regina pizza, on their way home in the metro (Théodore Duhamel rarely drove the battered but elegant E-Type in town, only out of it), Nicolas timidly asked his father who it was he had seen. His father grinned down at him and said, “All is under control. No worries.” But Nicolas did worry. When he got home, he did not breathe a word of what had happened to his mother, although he longed to.

Another mystery was his father’s relationship with his mother. After her husband’s death, Emma Duhamel had stated (and Nicolas had heard her say it) that Théodore Duhamel was the love of her life. But during the eleven years that Nicolas had shared of his father’s existence, there were few memories of a loving and passionate marriage. He eventually understood that his father had had affairs and that his mother had ignored them. Had she suffered? Had she had affairs, as well, more discreetly? When they met, in 1980, Emma was twenty-one, a brilliant philosophy student, and Théo was twenty, working in the photo department at
Paris Match
magazine. They met in a nightclub, Castel, on the rue Princesse and fell promptly in love (even though Emma was going out with a Belgian guy she’d met at the Lycée-le-Grand, and even though Théo was dating a Norwegian model named Janicke, who had graced the cover of
Elle
). They married because he, Nicolas, was on the way. It seemed to Nicolas that his mother put up with his father, that she treated him like a child prone to tantrums. Emma was only thirty-four when her husband disappeared. There were other men, but no one important enough for Emma ever to consider another marriage.

What Nicolas missed about his father was his boyish audacity, his endearing craziness. “Your father was as mad as a hatter,” Emma admitted more than once. “Thank God you are the serious type, like me.” His father could not resist a practical joke. Some were downright foolish. Others commanded the utmost respect. Like pouring gallons of bubble bath in the place Victor Hugo fountain just as an “enemy” was walking out of the church with his new bride. The entire place was soon invaded with mountains of foam, like in the Peter Sellers movie
The Party.
Like letting fifty white mice out of their cages at a famous socialite’s cocktail party (to which he had not been invited). But what Nicolas was the most nostalgic about were the bedtime stories. Nicolas said in a TV interview, “I believe that my father’s fertile imagination, the outlandish stories he used to whisper to me before I turned the light off, somehow shaped the writer I later became.” Nicolas liked to think back to those moments with his father in his bedroom at rue Rollin, the room he grew up in, lined with his Tintin, Astérix, and Picsou books and his posters of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Han Solo. His mother rarely put him to bed. She left that job to his father, who took it seriously. Nicolas lay tucked up under the sheets, his head propped on his father’s chest, taking in whiffs of Eau Sauvage and the scent of cigar smoke that seemed to drape itself around Théodore Duhamel’s person, even if the Monte Cristo had been extinguished hours ago.

Nicolas’s favorite story was the one about Lord McRashley. (Where did Théodore Duhamel get that name? No doubt from an old Louis de Funès movie called
Fantômas contre Scotland Yard,
which Nicolas had watched time and time again with his father.) It was morbid and frightening, like a tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Lord McRashley lived alone in a freezing castle, far away, where the north wind would blow, sounding like the howl of ghouls in the deep of the night. Lord McRashley had dinner served by his faithful butler, Jarvis, every evening. Holding a flickering candle in a heavy silver candlestick, followed by an army of black bats, Lord McRashley would then totter up to his rooms, situated at the top of the highest tower of his castle. Up and up the twisting stone steps he went, very slowly, bent over with the weight of years, heaving and wheezing, and every night it took a little longer, as he wasn’t getting any younger. The stern portrait of the late Lady McRashley—all angles and bones—glared down at him as he made his way up. There was a narrow landing with a chair between two flights of stairs, and he always paused to rest there for a moment. There he sat, gasping for air, until he felt strong enough to resume his ascent. The long and narrow landing, as ill-lit as the rest of the stairs, was lined with ancient spotted mirrors, and Lord McRashley could see himself from the back, reflected dozens of times, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. One evening, he happened to notice a black speck at the back of the last reflection. He dismissed it as a blotch on the mirror. But evening after evening, to his growing dismay, the dark blemish seemed to become steadily larger, drawing closer with each mirrored layer, creeping up on him, and he became afraid to go up the stairs, dreading to see the black form looming bigger and bigger each night. Consumed with anguish, he asked Jarvis to come up with him one night, and he nearly fainted when Jarvis vouched he saw nothing, nothing at all, and all the while the hideous silhouette (or whatever it was, and how Nicolas shivered at those very words) had glided even closer. There were no other stairs that led to his bedroom at the top tower, and it was with fear in his heart that Lord McRashley tremulously climbed them, until one fateful evening he saw that the loathsome horror was only one reflection away. He could see it all too clearly now, a vision of abomination, a skulking nonentity, a grimacing and sinister mummy like form, draped in a black cloak. Was it a man? A woman? At that point, his mother usually barged into the room, scoffing. “Théo, is this a proper bedtime story for a six-year-old?” Théodore Duhamel waited till she closed the door again, flashing his down-turned mouth (Those women!) and rolling his eyes at his son, saying, “Well, Nicolas, do you want the end of the story?” Nicolas would clutch his plush rabbit, Thumper (from
Bambi
), jump up and down on the bed, and yell, “Well, of course. What do you think!” Even if Nicolas knew the story by heart, even if he had heard it dozens of times, he still begged for it. And so Lord McRashley crept up the stairs ever so slowly, candle wax dripping onto his shaking wrist, and even the silent army of black bats did not dare go up with him this time, as if they knew. When Lord McRashley got to the landing, he found he did not have the courage to look up at the mirror. His old knees quaked and nearly gave way, his old heart fluttered painfully, and drops of sweat trickled down his weathered forehead. He finally mustered the strength to raise his face toward the mirror, whimpering like a child, and he hardly had time to utter a strangled moan, because—
whoosh!
—a black shadow pounced out of the mirror and gobbled the old chap up in one go (while his father’s lean hand grabbed Nicolas by the collar of his pajama top). And that was the end of Lord McRashley.