The Reunion, Page 2

  I let the atmosphere of the café wash over me. Maxime hadn’t been the only person I came here with after school. My most vivid memories were of Vinca Rockwell, the girl I was in love with back then, the girl every boy was in love with back then. It was only yesterday. It was a lifetime ago.

  As I walked up to the counter, I felt the hair on my arms bristle as snapshots came into focus in my mind: Vinca’s bright laugh, the gap between her front teeth, her floaty dresses, her paradoxical beauty, the detached gaze she affected. At Dino’s place, she drank Cherry Cokes in summer and mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows in winter.

  “What can I get you?”

  I couldn’t quite believe it; the café was still run by the same Polish-Italian couple, Dino (obviously) and Hannah Valentini. Dino had gained weight and gone bald, and Hannah’s blond hair had faded and her face was lined. But with age, they seemed somehow better suited to each other. This is the leveling effect of time: dazzling beauty fades while more banal features acquire a luster and a patina.

  “Coffee, please. A double espresso.”

  I let the words hang in the air for a moment, then stirred up the past, conjuring Vinca’s ghost: “Oh, and a Cherry Coke—ice and a straw.”

  For a second I thought that one of the Valentinis might recognize me. Both my father and mother had been deans of the faculty at Saint-Exupéry from 1990 to 1998. He managed the lycée and she ran the preparatory classes for the Grandes Écoles, which meant they were entitled to campus housing, so I was often to be found holed up in Dino’s. For a couple of free rounds of Street Fighter, I’d help Dino clean up the stockroom or make the famous frozen custard recipe he’d gotten from his father. But when the elderly Italian took my money and handed me the drinks, there was no spark of recognition in his weary eyes.

  The place was three-quarters empty, which, even for a Saturday morning, was surprising. Back in my day, there were a lot of boarders at Saint-Ex, some of whom stayed through the weekend. I made the most of the empty room and sat at the table Vinca and I had always preferred, the one at the end of the terrace, under the sweet-scented pines. Just as celestial bodies are drawn to each other, so Vinca had always taken the chair facing the sun. Now, tray in hand, I sat down in my usual spot, facing away from the trees. I took my cup of coffee and set the Cherry Coke in front of the empty chair.

  The PA system was playing an old REM hit, “Losing My Religion.” Most people think it’s a song about faith; actually, it’s about the pain of unrequited love. The helplessness of a boy saying to the girl he loves, Hey, look, I’m here! Why can’t you see me? A neat summary of my own life story.

  A light wind made the branches quiver; sunlight glittered on the deck. For a few seconds I was magically transported back to the early nineties. In the sun’s rays filtering through branches, I saw Vinca’s ghost appear before me, heard the echo of our heated conversations. I could hear her talking to me eagerly about The Lover and Dangerous Liaisons. I would respond with Martin Eden and Belle du Seigneur. This was the table where we would discuss for hours the movies we watched on Wednesday afternoons at the Star in Cannes or the Casino in Antibes. She was obsessed with The Piano and Thelma and Louise. I liked A Heart in Winter and The Double Life of Véronique.

  The song began to fade. The ghostly Vinca put on her Ray-Bans and sipped Cherry Coke through a straw; from behind the tinted lenses, she gave me a wink. Her image dissolved and vanished completely, bringing our enchanted interlude to an end.

  Gone was the heat of the carefree summer of ’92. I was alone, sad and breathless from chasing the dreams of my lost youth. It had been twenty-five years since I had seen Vinca. Twenty-five years, in fact, since anyone had seen her.

  3.

  On Sunday, December 20, 1992, nineteen-year-old Vinca Rockwell ran off to Paris with her twenty-seven-year-old philosophy teacher, Alexis Clément, with whom she was having a secret affair. They were last seen the following day in a hotel in the seventh arrondissement near the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde. After that, all trace of their presence in Paris was lost. They never reappeared, never contacted friends or family. They quite literally vanished.

  That, at least, was the official version.

  From my pocket, I took out the crumpled copy of the article from Nice-Matin I had read a hundred times. Although on the face of it, it seemed banal, it nonetheless contained a piece of information that would upend everything that people knew about the story. These days, everyone talks about truth, about transparency, but truth is rarely what it seems, and in this specific case, it would bring no comfort, no closure, no real justice. Truth would leave in its wake only calamity, a manhunt, and slander.

  “Oops! Sorry, m’sieur!”

  A loutish teenager running between the tables had just knocked over the Cherry Coke with his backpack. I managed to catch the glass before it hit the ground and shattered. I wiped down the table with a wad of paper napkins, but my pants were spattered. I walked through the café to the bathrooms. It took me a good five minutes to get rid of the stains and five more to get my pants dry. Best not to show up at a school reunion looking like I’d pissed myself.

  I went back to the table to pick up my jacket, which was hanging on the chair. When I saw the table, I felt my heart race. In my absence, somebody had carefully folded the printout of the article and set a pair of sunglasses on top of it. Ray-Ban Clubmasters with tinted lenses. Who could have played such a horrible trick? I looked around. Dino was talking to someone next to the gas pumps; Hannah was watering the geraniums on the far side of the terrace. A few garbage collectors were taking a coffee break at the counter, and the handful of other customers were all students working on MacBooks or chatting on their phones.

  Shit…

  I had to pick up the glasses to make sure that this was not a hallucination. As I did so, I noticed that someone had written on the newspaper article a single word in meticulous cursive:

  Revenge.

  2

  Top of the Class

  and the “Bad Boys”

  1.

  “Paint It Black,” “No Surprises,” “One”…

  At the gates to the grounds, the school band was welcoming guests with cover versions of Rolling Stones, Radiohead, and U2 songs. The music—as horrendous as it was jaunty—could be heard as far as the place des Marronniers, where the morning’s celebrations were scheduled to take place.

  Straddling the borders of several districts (including Antibes and Valbonne) and often dubbed the French Silicon Valley, the Sophia Antipolis technology park was a lush green oasis amid the concrete jungle of the Côte d’Azur. Thousands of start-ups and major corporations specializing in cutting-edge technologies had chosen to base their headquarters in these five thousand acres of pine forest. The area had many benefits that attracted executives from all over the world: the glorious weather (sunshine three-quarters of every year), the proximity to the blue Mediterranean and the ski resorts of Mercantour, the first-class sporting facilities, and the top-flight international schools, of which the Lycée Saint-Exupéry was the exemplar, the pinnacle of academic institutions in Alpes-Maritimes. This was where all parents hoped they might one day send their offspring, trusting in the future pledged by the school’s motto, Scientia potestas est—Knowledge Is Power.

  Having passed the gatekeeper’s lodge, I walked by the administration offices and the staff quarters. Constructed in the mid-sixties, the school buildings were beginning to show their age, but the campus as a whole was still exceptional. The architect had wisely taken advantage of the unique natural setting of the Valbonne plateau. On that Saturday morning, the air was mild, the sky a deep turquoise. Set between scrubland and forest, amid rocky crags and uneven terrain, the concrete, glass, and steel structures merged with the undulating landscape. Farther down, set near the large lake, half hidden by trees, were the small two-story buildings that housed the boarding students, each one painted a different color and bearing the name of an artist associated with the Côte d’Azur
: Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Nicolas de Staël, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sidney Bechet, Graham Greene…

  Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, I’d lived here with my parents in the staff quarters. My memories of my time here were still vivid, particularly the joy of waking every morning to the sight of the pine forest. From my bedroom, I could see the same spectacular view that I was now admiring again: the shimmering lake, the pontoon bridge, and the boathouses. Having spent two decades living in New York, I’d managed to convince myself that I preferred the electric-blue sky over Manhattan to the drone of the mistral and the cicadas, preferred the bustle of Brooklyn and Harlem to the scent of eucalyptus and lavender. But is that still true? I wondered as I rounded the Agora, an early 1990s glass building next to the library that housed a number of lecture halls and a movie theater.

  I came to the “historic” red-brick Gothic buildings that evoked an American university. Architecturally, they were anachronistic and entirely out of keeping with the otherwise coherent style of the campus, but they had always been the pride of Saint-Ex, since they gave the school an Ivy League luster and made the parents feel like they were sending their brats to the local Harvard.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Thomas Degalais…looking for inspiration for your next novel, are you?”

  2.

  The voice startled me. When I spun around, I saw the smiling face of Stéphane Pianelli; with his long hair, his goatee, his round John Lennon glasses, and the bag slung across his chest, the journalist from Nice-Matin looked exactly as he had as a student. His sole concession to the present day was that the T-shirt beneath his sleeveless jacket was emblazoned with the φ logo of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist left-wing party, La France Insoumise.

  “Hey, Stéphane,” I said, shaking his hand.

  We walked a little way together. Pianelli was my age, and, like me, a local boy. We’d been in the same class right up to our final year. I remembered him as a loudmouth, a brilliant debater with a keen sense of logic who often unsettled our teachers. He was one of the few students in the school who had a political conscience. After taking the baccalauréat, although his grades had been good enough to get him a place in the Saint-Ex preparatory course for Sciences Po, he decided to study arts at the Nice Faculté des Lettres, a university my father dismissed as an “unemployment factory” and my mother scorned as being filled with a “bunch of leftist slackers.” But Pianelli had always wanted to be seen as a rebel. At Carlone, the arts college there, he walked a delicate line between the National Students’ Union and the Young Socialist Movement. He had his first moment of glory one spring evening in 1994 during an episode of Demain les Jeunes, a youth-culture program that gave dozens of students a platform to rail against proposals by the government to slash student grants. I’d recently rewatched the program online and was struck by Pianelli’s self-assurance. When he was called on to speak, he used his time to heckle and humiliate seasoned political pundits twice his age. He was hardheaded and not cowed by anyone.

  “What did you think about Macron getting elected?” he asked suddenly. He was clearly still obsessed with politics. “It’s good news for guys like you, huh?”

  “Writers?”

  “No, filthy-rich fuckers!” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  Pianelli was a joker and he could be malicious, but I liked him. He was the only guy from Saint-Ex I was still regularly in touch with, although that was because he interviewed me for Nice-Matin whenever I published a new novel. He’d never aspired to a career in the national media, as far as I knew. He preferred being a jack-of-all-trades, the “Swiss army knife of journalism,” he called it. At Nice-Matin he was given free rein to write about whatever he liked—politics, the arts, city life—and it was this freedom that he really appreciated. Being a hack armed with a pen always in search of a scoop didn’t keep him from maintaining a certain objectivity. I read his reviews of my books because he could read between the lines. They weren’t always positive, but even when he had reservations, Pianelli never forgot that a novel—or a film or a play—was the result of years of hard work, of doubts, of rewrites. He might be critical, but he believed it would be cruel and arrogant to dismiss a novel in a few lines. “The average piece of bad writing is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so,” he once told me, freely adapting the line by Anton Ego, the food critic in Ratatouille.

  “Joking apart, what the hell are you doing here, Mr. Potboiler?” he asked.

  Though pretending not to be interested, he was a journalist sniffing out the territory, putting out feelers, drawing me out. He knew bits and pieces about my past. Maybe he could tell I was nervous from the way I was fumbling in my pocket, toying with the scribbled threat I had received fifteen minutes earlier and the pair of sunglasses that were just like the ones that Vinca used to wear.

  “Doesn’t hurt to go back to your roots, does it? As we get older, we—”

  “Cut the shit.” He sniggered. “This alumni reunion is exactly the kind of thing you loathe, Thomas. Look at you, with your Charvet shirt and your Patek Philippe watch. D’you really expect me to believe that you flew here from New York to bond over nineties TV shows and shoot the shit with guys you despise?”

  “You’re wrong—I don’t look down on anyone.” That much was true.

  Pianelli regarded me suspiciously. Then something in his eyes shifted imperceptibly. They began to shine as though the penny had just dropped.

  “Oh, I get it,” he said, nodding. “You came because you read my article!”

  The remark left me as winded as a punch in the stomach. How did he know? “What article?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”

  I affected an offhand tone: “Listen, I live in Tribeca—I read the New York Times over my morning coffee, not your local rag. What article? You mean the one about the fiftieth anniversary?”

  From his puzzled look, I could tell we weren’t talking about the same article. But my relief was short-lived.

  “I meant the article about Vinca Rockwell.”

  This time, I was so shocked that I froze.

  “So you really haven’t heard?” he said.

  “Heard what, for fuck’s sake?”

  Pianelli shook his head and took a notepad from his bag. “I’ve gotta go do some work,” he said as we reached the main square. “I’ve got an article to write for my local rag.”

  “Stéphane! Wait!”

  Satisfied with the effect he had produced, Pianelli stalked off. “Let’s talk later,” he said with a little wave.

  3.

  The place des Marronniers was humming with the music of the school band and the murmur of small groups engaged in lively conversations. If there had ever been chestnut trees on the square, they had long since been killed off by some parasite, and although it was still called the place des Marronniers, it was now adorned with date palms, their graceful silhouettes conjuring images of exotic holidays and idleness. Buffet tables had been set up in the huge marquees hung with garlands of flowers and furnished with rows of chairs. Outside in the crowded square, waiters in straw hats and striped shirts performed an intricate ballet as they moved around refilling glasses.

  I grabbed a glass from a passing tray, took a sip, and immediately tipped the rest into a flowerpot. Clearly the school’s idea of a welcome cocktail did not stretch beyond ginger iced tea made with foul-tasting coconut water. I wandered over to the buffet. Here, too, administrators had evidently opted for a sort of low-calorie feast. It felt like being back in America, specifically in California or in certain areas of Brooklyn where the cult of healthy living reigned supreme. There were no stuffed vegetables niçoise, no courgette-flower beignets, no Provençal pizzas. Nothing but miserable carrot and cucumber crudités, shot glasses filled with low-fat desserts, and cheese on certified gluten-free toast.

  I walked away from the buffet tables and went to sit at the top of the huge polished-concrete steps that circled part of the square like
the seats in an amphitheater. I put on my sunglasses and, hidden from prying eyes, observed my former schoolmates with interest.

  They were making toasts, slapping each other on the back, showing off cute photos of their toddlers or their teenage children, swapping e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers, friending each other on social media. Pianelli had been right—I was an outsider in this world; there was no point pretending otherwise. I didn’t feel nostalgic about my school years and I was essentially a loner, always walking around with a book in my pocket, and with no Facebook presence, I was a square ill-suited to an era of Like buttons. And I had never worried about the passing of time. I hadn’t freaked out when I turned forty, when I started to go gray at the temples. To be honest, I was eager to be old, because it meant distancing myself from a past that, far from being a lost paradise, was the setting of a tragedy I had been running from ever since.

  4.

  My first observation about my classmates was that most of those who had bothered to show up were from the sort of wealthy backgrounds where people are determined not to put on weight. The main scourge of the men was baldness. Nicolas Dubois’s hair transplant wasn’t exactly convincing; Alexandre Musca was trying to hide his bald patch with a comb-over; Romain Roussel had opted to shave his head completely.