“The Fourth,” an excerpt from the novel NOTHING KEEPS A FRENCHMAN FROM HIS LUNCH, originally appeared in the anthology: LOVE STORIES: A LITERARY COMPANION TO TENNIS.

                                                                                 

The Fourth

 

            “And what is it you do?” the English woman said.

            “Technically I'm an athlete. A triathlete.” Gayle, an American, was visiting an employment agency run by English people for English speaking people in the South of France. She handed the woman her resume and added, as if it would make a difference: “I’m training for the Hawaii Ironman.”

            “Yes, I see,” the woman said, but she regarded Gayle over the tops of her glasses in a way that suggested that no, she didn't see. This woman was dressed far too seductively in stiletto heels and a shocking pink suit. Her silk blouse was cut so low the lace of the woman’s bra showed—a pink bra, clearly expensive and exotic and French. From the moment the two shook hands Gayle was thrown off by the bra factor—shouldn’t    a career placement administrator be wearing a mannish, corporate suit? In black or navy or grey?

             “And what sort of job is it you're looking for?” the woman said.

            Gayle paused. A brass plaque on the English woman’s desk said, in cursive, Specializing in Domestic Service since 1983.  Gayle had a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and back in the States she had taught Phys Ed, but none of that mattered in the South of France. All they wanted you to do here, it seemed, was show cleavage and speak French. But finally Gayle cleared her throat. “Well, anything really. If I don’t get a job soon I’ll have to go back to the States, and, well, I just don’t want to do that.” Gayle could hear, rising in her voice, a faint screech of desperation, so she bit her lip.

            “I see,” the woman said. The eyeglasses in France were like the equivalent of mini skirts in New York City: flashy, sexy, impossibly expensive, available in a riot of colors, and people over a certain age just shouldn’t wear them. But everyone did. “And you’re how old?”

            “Twenty-three,” Gayle said. “I just graduated from college a year ago, and I came to France to train, because the cycling over here is so good, and, well, I just never left.” The woman stared at her without blinking, so Gayle went on: “I’ve been trying to get a legitimate job for over a month now, because my savings are running out.  I’d like to teach English, for example, but I don't have a working permit. So I thought I might do something under the table—like nannying or watering lawns.”

            “How is your French?”

            “Not very good I'm afraid.”

            “What are you skills then, as an–” the woman scanned Gayle’s resume, as if looking for something useful to say. “Athlete?”

            “Well, I can babysit. Or house sit. I could walk someone's dogs.”

            “Have you worked as a nanny before?”

            “I used to babysit for my younger sister.”

            “Have you cleaned houses?”

            “Not technically. But I clean my own apartment all the time.”

            “I see. And have you waited tables?”

            “Oh, yes. Absolutely. In college, during the summers.”

            There was an intake of breath here that gave Gayle hope, but the woman said: “At a restaurant, I suppose. An American restaurant?”

            “Yes.”

            The woman pursed her lips, and Gayle saw that her lipstick was seeping into the lines around her mouth.

            “Well, let’s see what we might have.” The woman swiveled in her chair to a cabinet behind her and pulled out some files. “House-sitting positions do come up occasionally, though it’s a bit too early in the season for that. Now as far as nannying or gardening, I have to be honest with you and say you’re going to be difficult to place.  Domestic service is a serious profession, Miss Brewster, and most of the applicants we get are trained in their arts.”

            “I see,” Gayle said. She knew that at this very moment she should have defended herself; she should have stressed that was educated and personable and quick to learn. But those would have been the words of a fighter, someone spirited, and Gayle had left her spirit back in New York City. With a man named Dick.

* * *

            “She actually said that domestic service was an art?” Gayle’s friend Clara said later that afternoon in their kitchen.  Clara laughed so hard she sent herself into a Galouise-induced coughing fit, and Gayle had to slap her on the back.

            Clara wiped the tears from her eyes. “She’s full of bullocks, that one. Was she wearing that fucking pink suit?”

            “Oh yes,” Gayle said.

            “And it’s not a bloody fucking art. You just have to be stupid and be able to swallow a lot of bull. Domestic service is very demeaning, you know.” Clara worked as a cook on a motor yacht, and it was she who referred Gayle to this particular employment agency in Antibes.

            “I hope that’s the only thing I have to swallow,” Gayle said. She was trying to be cheerful and witty, like Clara, but she truthfully sounded sad.

            “If you want to rise up the ladder,” Clara said with a wink. “As any proper girl should.”

            Clara and Gayle were roommates, but not for much longer. Clara’s ship was about to set sail, literally, as in less than three weeks the owner of the yacht was flying in from Saudi Arabia, and wanted to embark on a three-month summer cruise of the Mediterranean, starting in Corfu.

            “I think I botched the interview,” Gayle said.

            “Why do you say that?”

            “She wished me luck when we shook hands to say goodbye,” Gayle said. “Wasn’t she supposed to say, ‘I look forward to speaking with you soon’?”

            “Did you lie to her?”

            “Of course I didn’t.”

            “Well, Gayle, you were supposed to. Don’t tell me you went and told her the truth.”

            “Not all of it. Just some of it. I did indeed tell her I was low on money, but I didn’t elaborate on my predicament—that not only can I not afford to stay in France, I can’t afford to leave either.”

            “Ah. Fuck her,” Clara said.

            Clara had lied her way into her current job. When she moved to Antibes from London two years earlier she knew she wanted to work on a yacht—that was it. She wanted the travel, the glamour, and the year-round tan, so when a spot opened up on the Mohammed—the largest boat in the Antibes marina, and the third largest private boat in the world—for a sous chef, Clara marched right down to the employment agency and said she had been cooking all her life.

            “And had you?” Gayle had asked when she first heard the story.

            “Fuck no! Never cooked a lick. My mum never cooked either—we grew up on canned Spam sandwiches and takeaway. But that’s not the point. The point is I knew I was capable of cooking, and took the necessary steps to get that job. Bullshitting!  Now there’s an art!” Clara went on to convince the ship’s Saudi head steward that she had apprenticed at some of the finest restaurants in Paris, and then in Lyon, and she listed, in perfect unaccented French, all the dishes she herself had created, and the Saudi head steward, all the while hypnotically nodding his head, inevitably made her an offer, because Clara's dishes did sound delicious, and she had big round tits.

            “You see, Gayle,” Clara now said. She opened the utensil drawer and pulled out a bottle of orange nail polish. “The trick to getting anywhere in life is that you have to project yourself into the future a little bit.  You’re stuck in the past.”

            It was Clara, for the record, who had insisted on calling her Gayle’s ex-boyfriend “Dick,” even though his name was actually Peter.

            “And let me remind you, Gayle, that you could get a job anywhere.  You’ve got blonde hair and long legs and a nice arse.”  Clara began to paint her nails. “You should have no problems at all.”

            “I see,” Gayle said. But the thing was, Clara was brash and ballsy. Whereas Gayle was just plain scared.

            Clara gestured to a bowl of candy on the counter. “Hand me one of them Hershey’s kisses will you, Gayle? And be a love and peel it for me? My nails are wet.”

            Gayle peeled the chocolate and placed it in Clara’s open mouth.

            “Wear a tight t-shirt next time you go on an interview,” Clara said. “Show them the goods.”

            “That just seems wrong to me,” Gayle said. “I mean, are people here really that shallow?”

            Clara looked thoughtful for a moment. Then she broke into a chocolate-coated grin. “Yesh,” she said. “Absho-fucking-lutely.”

* * *

            Gayle had been living and training in France for nine months now, and yet she could still not get used to the blatant sexism. There were breasts on billboards and breasts on the currency and breasts on daytime TV. She once saw, on Clara’s friend Mark’s giant satellite-powered television, an Italian game show in which a blindfolded man had to feel up a long row of smiling, topless women. The object of the game was to pick out which set belonged to his wife. Formidable!  And the laughter coming from the audience was not the canned, pre-recorded stuff of American sitcoms, but rather the raucous, bawdy shouts of the men—and women!—in the audience who truly thought this was funny.  All this bothered Gayle, or at best confused her, yet if she tried to talk about it with any of her English friends—the only kind of friends she had made in France—they called her a Puritan or a prude. “It’s just tits!” Clara would say with a wave of her cigarette. “Get over it.”

            But it was not, to Gayle, just tits. It was something she could not put her finger on. All her life she had been raised to believe that being female meant, well, just being another person with hopes and dreams and aspirations. No distinction was ever made between her and her brother Tom in terms of what they could or could not do. Gayle, finding herself to be a gifted swimmer and runner, went in the athletic direction. Tom, good with numbers, went into finance. Who would they have been had they been raised in France, or in England, where the daily paper featured a topless girl every morning on Page Three?

            Oh, but there was no time to ponder this all now. The matter at hand was not the bare-breasted women on Gayle’s franc notes, or the giant poster of a teenage girl’s ass (otherwise known as an advertisement for cellulite) Gayle had to pass every morning as she set out for her morning run, but her dire financial situation. She had hoped, when she first arrived in France, to make some money placing in some of the triathlons she had entered, but so far Gayle had not placed.  In any area of her life. And Peter had given her a certain amount of money when she left New York, as kind of a kiss-off present (that Gayle was too bitter to refuse), but that supply was disappearing quickly. Faster than you could hang up the phone and say Dick! 

            “Come down to the marina with me,” Clara said in the morning. “And try to talk your way onto one of the boats.”

            “But I keep telling you I can’t work on a boat,” Gayle said. Clara, with her perma-tan and hard drinking and her sleeping-with-the-new-crew-members on every trip to sea, looked about eighty.  And Gayle needed to train.  “I have to stay here, on dry land. Where I can ride my bike.”

            “Most of these yachts don’t go anywhere, though. You know that. They’re all for show. For a bunch of filthy rich fucking Arabs. You can work as a deck nigger, cleaning toilets and polishing brass. It’s a man’s job, really, but once they get a look at you they’ll realize they’d rather enjoy having you on your hands and knees scrubbing the decks in your tight white shorts.”

            Gayle frowned. “You really say ‘Deck nigger’?”

            “Ugh. Don’t be such an American,” Clara said. “Come along, then. And make sure to wear those tight white shorts.”

            But before Gayle could even contemplate the horror of showing up for an interview in tennis shorts, the phone rang, and it was the English employment agent, telling Gayle she just may have found her the perfect job.

            “You’re not going to believe it,” the woman said. 

            “What?” Gayle said.

 “I’ve just been speaking with Lord Rosscommon, the Marques of Hardcastle for those of us in the know, and he’s looking for someone to play tennis!”

            Gayle was confused. “Today?”

            “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” the woman said musically. “Let me explain. Lord Rosscommon is very rich. Let me repeat: Very. Rich. He has a villa in St. Tropez where he spends his summers, and he keeps quite a large staff, and he’s just phoned me to tell me he’ll be needing someone to come live on his property and be available to play tennis, should any of his guests require a fourth.”

            “I don’t understand,” Gayle said. She suddenly had visions of Page Three, and being made to play topless and bounce around in a skirt.

            “Darling. It’s a dream job. I haven’t seen the estate but of course I’ve heard about it. You will live there,” she said. “He will pay you. Generously, I’m sure. You do play tennis, don’t you?”

            “Well, yes, but—”

            “Good. I’ll arrange an interview with him, shall I? He’s in St. Tropez now and is going back to England in three days to tend to some business before the summer season begins. He wants to have this position filled before he departs.”

* * *

            And thus it was that, less than twenty-four hours later, Gayle found herself rendezvousing with Lord Rosscommon at the train station in St. Tropez. They had arranged to meet underneath a certain clock near the ticket counter, and Gayle recognized him at once. He was an older, pleasant-looking man, in his fifties perhaps, with sandy hair and a slight build. And his very way of standing—with his hands resting leisurely in his suit pockets, a startling gold watch peeking out from beneath a cuff—smacked of aristocracy and wealth. Yet there was something about him that almost seemed uncertain.  Gayle saw it in his eyes, and in the way he scanned the crowd nervously and kept straightening his already crisp tie. Perhaps he was one of those men what had grown up so rich and privileged he knew he could afford to buy whatever he wanted: yet who hadn’t quite figured out how to acquire the more abstract, elusive things such as Wisdom and Happiness and Love.

            With that thought, Gayle approached Lord Rosscommon and introduced herself.  “Ah, Miss Brewster,” he said, “How delightful! So good of you to come all this way.”  Up close he was tan and tone and well-preserved, which suggested time spent at gyms, salons, and cosmetic surgeons.  And as he took her hand and shook it, Gayle thought she could feel, in his handshake, a certain decency and gentleness, and she felt she should take this job, were it offered her. But then she began to wonder if maybe his hands were so soft from all those manicures and shea butter treatments. For at this point Lord Rosscommon had begun the not-so-subtle eye crawl, which started with her feet, lingered on her ankles and muscular thighs, followed the hem of her skirt to the outline of her hips, up the waist and then arret! His eyes widened when he got to her breasts.

            “So, my dear, you are a player of tennis?” he said.  His aristocratic accent somehow made the word sound tennis sinister and lascivious, and Gayle instinctively crossed her arms.

            “Yes,” Gayle said. “These days I'm actually more of a triathlete, but I used to play tennis when I was young.” She heard Clara's voice saying: remember to lie through your pretty teeth and smile while you're doing it. So Gayle stopped talking and smiled.

            “Good,” Lord Rosscommon said. “Very good. Have you had lunch?”

            Gayle shook her head cautiously.

            “Very good. I thought we could dine here, in town, at the Vieux Port, and then drive out to my villa so that you can inspect the courts.”

            He took her elbow and led her outside the station, where a white-gloved driver held open the door of a Lamborghini and motioned for Gayle to get in. She sank into a creamy leather seat as soft as an atrophied muscle, and marveled at the flat-screen television and the miniature bar.  Then Lord Rosscommon moved in noiselessly beside her, and the car eased off.

“So what is it a triathlete does?” he said as they drove alongside the turquoise Mediterranean. “I must admit I am wholly ignorant on the subject of American sport.”          Gayle went into her how-I-became-an-athlete-schpeil: how she had won state track and swimming titles in high school and got a scholarship to B.U. “For track, but I kept up swimming on my own.” There, she placed twice in the nationals, once for the 5000 meter, once for the relay, but she didn't start doing triathlons until two years ago, where she entered a small sprint-distance race in Louisiana for the hell of it. “And I won!” she told him. “I was just there for spring break, it was something to do on a Saturday while my friends nursed their hangovers, so winning like that took me and everyone else totally by surprise. It was the run that did it. They told me later I was about twelve minutes behind the first place female after the bike leg, and I made up that time and more on the run. I beat Lizzie Reilly. The pro!”

            “How delightful!” Lord Rosscommon said. “And what happened next?” He had a weird smile on his face—a wry smile, as if Gayle were the subject of some unknown joke.

            Gayle blinked. The then was that she met Peter, and found herself consumed with her first real love. And then they lived together for two years, and then he cheated on her—in a callous, blatant way that should have told her something—and then he convinced a mutual friend to tell Gayle that he, Peter, had been cheating on her, using the “logic” that he’d rather see Gayle be mad than sad, and then Gayle, having been flattened by the news, decided the only way she could get over this was to put a large ocean between herself and the culprit, and then she moved to France. And then she embarked on six months of serious athletic training, which left no room for romance or self pity or thought. And then she began to enter races but hadn’t won any yet, and then she met club-hopping Clara, who taught Gayle how to elevate the habits of eating and drinking into a higher art, and then she ran out of money. And then she had to scalp her return ticket to New York City to a young Algerian man, who was probably a hijacker—but hey, he had fresh francs—and then she found herself sitting in a car with an English nobleman, whose knee was about two inches from hers and gaining, and then she said, “I realized I could really be a contender as a professional triathlete, and you can make more money doing that in Europe than you can in the States. So here I am,” she said. “A professional athlete.” She turned her body fully toward the window and pretended to be transfixed by the yachts rocking complacently in the water and said: “It’s so beautiful here.” Europeans—they had a different sense of personal space than Americans had.

            The car turned up a narrow cobblestoned street, past boutiques and boulangeries, and into a town square with an old Roman fountain and a magnificent pink church. “Ah, here we are,” Lord Rosscommon said, clapping his hands. “This restaurant, the Palm D’Or, counts, along with the rose gardens at Hardcastle and the views at Big Sur, as one of my favorite places in the world.” He took Gayle’s elbow and led her toward an outdoor cafe with pink tablecloths and advantageous views of the yachts.  “The Bellinis here are heavenly. You must try one.” He looked at Gayle with raised eyebrows. “Or two.”

            A great fuss was made as they entered the restaurant.  The maitre d’ greeted Lord Rosscommon with a flurry of kisses; then the chef came out, then a woman who appeared to be the chef’s mother or wife, then each of the four waiters. Gayle still could not get used to the fact that in France it took large parties at least twenty minutes to greet each other, because each person had to deliver and be delivered of a kiss on each cheek. The maitre d, out of respect to her Americanism, simply shook her hand. “A pleasure, Mademoiselle,” he said, without smiling, and as he led them to their table and held Gayle’s chair, she sense a touch of disdain in his demeanor, and she realized he must look down on her. He probably thought she was a prostitute! Gayle had worn, at Clara’s insistence, a short white cotton dress that showed off her legs and gave, at Clara’s insistence, “the suggestion of tennis,” but suddenly Gayle felt cheap and tawdry. The other women at the restaurant wore silks and suits of the caliber worn by Gayle’s employment agent. They all had deep, even tans and professionally coiffed hair and jewels and gigantic gold belt buckles and nails that could scratch the skin off their young lovers’ backs.

            “Lovely, isn’t it?” Lord Rosscommon said.

            And Gayle had to admit that yes, it was. She just wasn’t sure how she fit into the picture.  For she suddenly realized that all of St. Tropez had the improbable good looks of a movie set, with everything matching, everything just right.  The pastel-colored buildings matched the boats, which matched the women's handbags—large, elaborate handbags with patterned logos and diamond clasps—which of course matched the women’s shoes. Lord Rosscommon’s calm, benign eyes matched the color of the water in the marina, which matched the shutters on the pastel-colored bank across the street. The only thing that didn’t match this landscape was Gayle herself.

            “Shall I order for you?” Lord Rosscommon said. “I thought we might have something light, like a green salad and a vichyssoise, followed by the roasted sea bass en croutes.” He snapped open his menu. “How arrogant of them to print this entirely in French.”

            Gayle nodded and smiled. He was funny, this Ross, but she just couldn’t tell if he was trying or not.

            Soon the food came, along with giant goblets of blush-colored wine, and slowly but surely Gayle was lulled into that curious, hazy state of mind of Southern France, in which all of life becomes a tribute to the senses. The mushrooms in her crepe tasted richly of earth and forest. The sea beyond them glowed as brightly as a jewel. Sounds rose around Gayle like quadraphonic music: the gilded laughter of the well-coiffed women, the click and tinkle of sails against masts, the honey smoothness of Lord Rosscommon’s voice as he talked to her about Provence. His words ebbed and flowed toward the edge of but not quite into her consciousness, French words that sounded so poetic and other-worldly they required no response. Lavande. Marche aux fleurs. Chateau Barbeyrolles. Les chevres. As Gayle lifted her wine glass to her lips (a glass that was always full, with wine that was always cold) she realized that rosé smelled like roses, and she was struck by the tantamount beauty of their existence.  She suddenly wanted to see the gardens at Hardcastle, in the summertime, when the flowers were in full bloom.

            “What’s it like?” she said. “Where you live? In England?”

            And Lord Rosscommon went on to describe a house much like the one she had seen on the television series Brideshead Revisited, only without Sebastian and Charles. “It’s your average English country house. Large, drafty, uninviting, made of stone. We’ve got a lovely Baroque fountain on the south side of the property and some wonderful wooded trails. I like it. It’s been in the family for years—more years, I’m afraid, than any American can fathom. And I must say there’s something to be said for that. All that—continuity.  My son, however, finds it heinous. All of it—the house, the grounds, the seat—all dismissed with one curious word: heinous.”

            “How old is he?” Gayle said.

            “Nineteen.”

            “Ah.”

            “He’ll probably turn Hardcastle into condominiums when he gets his hands on it. Or one of those tedious conference centers. Now, that, my dear, is what I would call heinous.”        

They smiled at one another, and a certain understanding seemed to pass between them, ‘though Gayle wasn’t one-hundred percent certain what it was. It had something to do with the son, and how little he needed to be tolerated, or perhaps it concerned all teenagers in general, which thereby put Gayle into the category of Adult.

            Then the desserts came—three tiny pots of crème caramel—chocolate, cognac, and vanilla—and Gayle ate hers with a demitasse spoon and let each small bit dissolve with impossible flavor on her tongue. The custard tasted both wholesome and decadent; it tasted of Southern France itself, and suddenly Gayle felt giddy.  How large her life was! How adventurous her gestures! How resourceful of the French drink so much wine! And all at once, she saw a life of wealth and luxury rise up before her; she saw two paths diverged in a wood, and she wanted this tennis job and wanted it badly, with a determination and a focus that she hadn’t felt for months.

            “And now I think it’s time we talked tennis,” Lord Rosscommon said, setting his spoon down. “I am fanatical about the game, and many of my friends are, too.” He sipped his coffee delicately. “Not that any of us are any good, mind you. But I have spectacular courts.  Tell me, do you play on clay?”

            “I have played on clay,” Gayle said. “But mostly I play on asphalt.” Lie! Clara’s voice said. “I do like playing on clay though. I like the way it slows your game down. It makes you more conscious of your strokes.”  Lord Rosscommon seemed to perk up at the mention of strokes, so Gayle added quickly:  “My whole family plays tennis, so I basically grew up on the courts. And in high school I was on the tennis team.”

            “Yes, yes,” Lord Rosscommon said. “Now, tell me. Would you say you are an A player? Or a B player?” Again he sounded lascivious.

            “Honestly,” Gayle said. “I’m a B player. But I have–” and here she tried to match his mysterious tone. “A lot of stamina.” Then, she uncrossed her legs in order to stretch them out and re-crossed them the other way. It wasn't quite a Sharon Stone, but it seemed to have the same effect.

            “Good, good.”  Lord Rosscommon signaled to the waiter.  “Now, shall we drive out and have a look at the courts?”

* * *

            Lord Rosscommon's villa, called La Jolie, was situated on a tiny, penis-shaped peninsula lush with palm trees and squat Riviera pines. They passed through an elaborate electronic gate, then up a long white driveway lined with plane trees and flowers. Then the villa itself came into view—peach colored, multi-leveled, with green shutters and paler green window-boxes, each of which was spilling over with bright yellow flowers. The sun, at that hour, was at such an angle as to light up the whole front of the house with that soft Mediterranean crispness (the same kind of light they try to reproduce in Hollywood with eight-thousand dollar mega-wattage lamps), and beyond the house was the sea. Trees near the house rocked gently, as if to music, and cast blush-colored shadows on the walls. As they pulled into a circular driveway Gayle realized she was no longer just the clueless American, but a sexy tennis chick sitting next to a Lord in a Lamborghini.  He took her hand to help her out of the car, and her face grew flush.

            A handsome, tan, blonde man in an apron came to the door with one hand on his hip, as if he were prepared to scold them, and Lord Rosscommon said, with humor, “Ah, here’s Whitmore. He is my left hand and he’ll show you around this afternoon. Please do not call him Whitless; he doesn’t like it.  Now, I must tend to some other business. Thank you, my dear, for a most pleasant luncheon.” He said a few words to the driver, who nodded his head, and then handed Gayle over to Whitmore.  “Please show Miss Brewster the cottage and the courts.”

            “Avec plaisir,” Whitmore said with an exaggerated bow, and his voice was so high and his attitude so camp that Gayle realized, avec plaisir, that this man was probably gay. (It was Whitmore who later pointed out to Gayle that the peninsula was shaped like a penis, thus confirming her suspicions.) “Come along, Luv,” he now said. Let’s get you out of this sun before you self-combust. Would you prefer to walk or drive down to the courts?”

            “Let’s walk,” she said.  She had realized the driveway was made of white shells.

            “Oh, good. I can have a cigarette. His Lordship won’t let us smoke anywhere near the house. He doesn’t like the smell, he says.” Whitmore began to lead Gayle down the driveway. “Now, I’m his Lordship’s personal assistant,” he said, exaggerating both titles camply.  “We’re very informal here, as you can undoubtedly tell.  And no, you may not call me Whitless, but you may call me William, my Christian name.  His Lordship is very old-fashioned in many ways, but we tolerate him. He does compensate us rather handsomely. I supervise the housekeeping and the daily staff. Bert serves as chauffeur, as you can see, and inside the house takes on the role of butler. He tends to the door and the drinks and the dining, and supervises any caterers that we bring in for parties and such. We also have a gardener, or so I’m told, who is like a shadow but grows the most divine roses, and a cook, Madame DeFresne, who is excellent, beyond compare, and she does all the shopping. She’s so good that his Lordship hardly dines out when he’s here. Make friends with her,” Whitmore said, “and she’ll pick up anything special you might need at the market. You’re vegetarian, I take it?”

            “How did you know?”

            Whitmore placed his cigarette on the driveway, ground it into the shells with the tip of his shoe, then picked up the butt and placed it in his apron.            

“Darling,” Whitmore said. “A, you’re American. B, the dogs haven’t inserted their snouts into your crotch, and C, you’re skin, if you don’t mind my saying, is sallow. You don’t get enough iron is what I suspect. Talk to Bert about that. He’s an Ayurvedic nutritionist.”

            “Bert the driver?” Gayle realized she hadn't gotten a good look at Bert. Like any hired driver, he slumped down in his seat and kept his cap pulled tightly over his head.

“Yes. He’s Dutch, but he grew up in India—his father was some kind of diplomat.  I should warn you that he hates Americans, and women, but fortunately he rarely talks.”  They were now on a footpath leading through a garden.  “His wife was American.  Yes, he was married.  Sometimes that’s what it takes to make a man realize he truly is gay.  Has two kids as well.  Boys.  Lovely children.  His wife was a real bitch from what I hear, and now he has simply written the whole lot of them off.” 

“Where was she from?”

“Miami.”

“Well, I’m not from Miami,” Gayle said.  And Whitmore said.  “Don’t I know it!  Now, I shall show you your quarters first, and then the tennis courts.”

            “That sounds fine,” Gayle said, but she was thinking: quarters?  Her knowledge of what a servant’s quarter might look like came from English literature, so she began to expect something dank and dark and cobwebbed, located in a basement or an upper floor. In other words, something along the lines of the room where Jane Eyre’s husband stored his crazy first wife. So when Whitmore led her down a stone walkway, underneath a trellis bowed with purple wisteria, through a small grove of apricot trees, and toward a small stone cottage that overlooked the sea, she did not know what to do with herself. Or what to say.

            “This is it?” she said, delighted. “This is where I would live?”

            “This is it, honey. We call it the den of sin.” Then he must have seen the alarm in Gayle’s eyes, because he quickly added: “Oh, it's a darling place. Very peaceful. There’s a blue parrot who lives in the plane tree just outside your back window.” He led her there to show her. “But he hasn’t showed up yet this year. I don’t know why. Our cottage is very similar to yours, though a bit larger, and it's on the exact opposite end of the estate. West Testicle, we call it. You are on the East Testicle. We have the better sunsets, I'm afraid to say, but La Jolie is on the best spot—the head.”

“We’re like bookends,” Gayle said.

Whitmore considered her and smiled. “You think books; I think scrota.  Therein lies all the difference.  Were you an English major?”

“Sociology.”

“Ah.  Well, you’re very sweet.  And I can tell without hesitation that you are a real blonde. Bert hates peroxide.  Come.”

Whitmore opened the heavy oak door of the cottage and motioned for Gayle to go through.  She was met with the smells of lavender and mimosa and her eyes were drawn to a giant bouquet of the latter in a galvanized bucket next to the hearth.  A great stone fireplace with a simple plank mantle was the focus of the ground floor, and its soiled, earthy presence immediately made Gayle feel comforted and somehow safe.  “Lovely isn’t it?” Whitmore said. “I decorated it myself.  Most of the furniture is local.  There are marvelous antiques stores in Cannes.  You should have seen the place when Lord Rosscommon bought it.  Can you say ‘Dark Ages’? Come, I’ll give you the grande tour.”  Whitmore had done all the rooms in various shades of yellow and purple—pale lemon pin stripes on the upholstery on the fainting couch; a faint lavender print on the wallpaper in the halls. “Yellow is a cheerful color,” Whitmore said, as he showed her the kitchen, the bathroom, and the linen closet, filled with embroidered pillowcases and high thread-count sheets.  “Purple is pensive.  Together they make for a rather balanced atmosphere, don’t you think?” 

“I hope the bedroom is yellow then,” Gayle said, and Whitmore smiled and told her to go have a look. 

“But watch out for the second to last step,” he called after her. “It always creaks, no matter what we do to fix it.” Creak it did as Gayle went up the stairs, in a way that reminded her of sneaking out of the house in her teenage years, and her veins began to fill with that same sort of nervous excitement.  As if she were doing something illicit, something that held infinite promise as long as she did not get caught. 

Upstairs Gayle found a four-poster bed, with a magnificent eyelet canopy and a coverlet embroidered with tiny yellow flowers. There was also a giant walk-in closet lined in cedar, and another smaller fireplace with a mantle of carved oak.   It was the bedroom of a princess and Gayle felt that here, surrounded by its feminine, floral splendor, she would no longer sleep poorly, or have bad dreams.  She walked out onto a small balcony, to take in the view, and saw below her the jewel-like Mediterranean, its waves kissing her very own shore.  The cottage was perched on a ledge right above the water, and a thin stone path led from her garden down to a private beach.  Gayle’s heart stirred and the wind whipped her hair and again she felt the beginnings of change and promise.  She would live on a ledge on the edge of the world.

“This is more beautiful than any place I’ve ever lived,” Gayle said downstairs to Whitmore. 

“Is it?” Whitmore said proudly.  “I am very pleased to be hear you say that.  It’s always nice to bring a little beauty into another’s life.  Now, let us go have a look at the grounds.”

            They followed a path through a dense grove of umbrella pines and then, after walking for perhaps fifteen minutes, found themselves in a great clearing, with two tennis courts on one end, a large pool at the other, and a Victorian carriage house in between.  Birds chirped, the sky glowed with an opalescent quality that defied words, and the grass seemed an impossible green.  “We're very well equipped here,” Whitmore said, leading her into the equipment rooms.  “Everything is top-of-the-line here; state-of-the-art.”  He showed here where to find the racquets, the practice balls, and the first aid kit.  “This room here,” he said, leading her down a long, narrow hallway, “used to be a bowling alley, but too many people injured themselves.  I once found a man trying to violate a bowling bowl, and I daresay the poor fellow got stuck.”

            “I think that’s all you need to tell me on that subject,” Gayle said. 

            “Let me show you the changing rooms, then, and the bar.”   He led her quickly through the men’s and women’s locker rooms, then into a miniature clubroom, complete with game tables and a carved oak mirror and stained glass. The whole place smelled like unneutered males.  “Can you mix drinks?” Whitmore said.

            “I've never bar-tended if that's what you mean. But I’m sure I could learn.”

            “Of course it's not an official part of your job,” Whitmore said. “And most of Ross's guests would drink straight from the bottle if hard pressed, but Bert, if he can help it, would rather not spend his Saturday nights out here in the tool shed as he calls it, right through 'til Sunday morning. You’d earn points with him if you performed that service, and sometimes the guests, if they are smitten enough, will give you tips.” Whitmore looked her up and down with a smile.  “In fact, they’ll always give you tips. Now did Lord Rosscommon discuss with you your salary?”

            “The woman at the agency did.” The pay being offered was so generous that Gayle felt uncomfortable even saying it.  Basically, she’d be able to afford to leave France in a matter of weeks. Six weeks.

            “And you can stay through the season 'til September at least?”

            “Yes,” Gayle said instantly. This was the first lie she had told.

            “Good. We'll pay you in francs, or pounds if you prefer, and of course it's all under the table. I usually go into town on Tuesdays, and you're welcome to accompany me should you need to go to the bank. Madame DeFresne goes daily and I suppose you could go with her if you don't mind riding with fish in the back seat on the way back.” As Whitmore went on about the details of daily life at La Jolie—when they took their meals, and what kind of hours Gayle could expect to keep—Gayle finally realized he was addressing her as if she were hired already.

            “Wait. Doesn't anyone want to see me actually play tennis? And aren’t you considering anybody else?”

            “Darling, come now,” Whitmore said. “You must know it's not really about the tennis. We don't want a Lindsay Davenport.  We want Anna Kournikova.”