The Last Life by The Last Life (retail) (epub)

Author:The Last Life (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

3

Christmas, a few weeks later, was subdued. My grandmother spent it with us, staying overnight in the room my grandfather had used. We watched the pope on television, rather than going to mass, and the service seemed to last forever. My mother sat forward on her chair as though the television’s rays could grant salvation; but my father, like Etienne, fell asleep with his mouth open and emitted little bubbling snores.

Etienne’s fête, too, the following day, was hushed and private, although it was an event usually celebrated with particular verve, so that my brother, if he could indeed reason in some secret part of himself (we lived our lives as if he could, a sort of Pascalian gamble), would not think himself stinted. His presents—which we took turns opening for him—were modest and practical: a couple of shirts, a new plaid rug for his knees. Only my grandmother, who gave him a fine felt hat with a blue and green feather in it (“he’s a young man, after all”) and an Italian glass lamp that lit up like a swirling mauve jewel (“to go to sleep with, for pleasant dreams”), tried to counter the austerity of the day. And my father, switching the little lamp on and off, said, in an attempt at lightheartedness, “I always think it’s better not to dream at all. I imagine that’s Etienne’s privilege.”

As for the new year—ringing in a new decade, which ought, I thought, to have been filled with fireworks and dancing—my parents, having declined all invitations, remained at home, watching the clock as if it were doomsday, and, after pouring each of us (including Etienne) a thimbleful of Veuve Cliquot in honor of the coming hour, sent both son and daughter to bed. I saw in the new year on my window ledge, observing the distant twinkle of lights in town and imagining that I could distinguish the whoops of crowds at the edge of my hearing.

The year before there had been a party at the Bellevue, in the restaurant (such festivities were my father’s province), and Marie-Jo and I had waltzed together, she in a grown-up sequined dress and I in girlish velvet, and we had run streamers around Etienne until he was bound by strings of gay color, which he loved. Days later, we were still plucking odd snatches of ribbon from the spokes and seams of his chair.

“Next year,” Marie-Jo had said, “we’ll get my brother to invite us to a bash at the Fac”—her brother was five years older and away studying economics in Marseilles—“it’ll be wild.” I wondered if that was where she was, in a dress even shorter and skimpier than last year’s, or whether she was in her pink bedroom, all alone like me. I wondered whether she remembered her promise, and was sorry.

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