of the main house that guests lodged there sometimes felt slighted, but others were flattered, because my parents gave those rooms only to previous visitors whom they were inviting back for another stay.
Colette, a lovely young woman from Normandy with a Louise Brooks bob, was already in Sasha’s Room when Marie and I escorted the Braissants upstairs. Laetitia stiffened with indignation when the smiling chambermaid asked her, “Would Madame like me to unpack her suitcase?”
“No, thank you, I’ll manage by myself,” she replied, with the studied manner of someone who, scandalized, refuses to participate in a degrading ritual from another era.
The dismayed Colette was about to withdraw when Marie returned her smile and asked, “Colette, would you be good enough to unpack mine?”
Friday, 6:30 p.m.
I heard the sound of crunching gravel again. Was it Odon Viel arriving, or Jean-Michel Destret and his chauffeur? (It turned out to be Jean-Michel.) While Marie and I were heading for the front door, I remembered a sidewalk game we used to play when we were younger: you had to pick, from the first ten men who came toward you, the one who would be your husband for life. I always panicked; should I be cautious or optimistic? Take the first one who wasn’t either elderly or repulsive, or wait for a good-looking boy, at the risk of missing the boat and getting stuck with the tenth passerby, who might well be a ghastly old man?
Sex was a topic often and broad-mindedly discussed in our presence by my parents and their friends, who for the sake of appearances would pretend to lower their voices around our innocent ears. They treated sex with the humor and relaxed detachment expected of cultured people, because a light, bantering tone was to them an essential ingredient in any civilized conversation. Artful and amusing, amorous dalliance was thus a required subject, just like literature or the opera. Compared to my friends’ parents, who never broached the subject and certainly not in front of children, my own parents sometimes even struck me as obsessed. Marie and I were privy, as it turned out, to a real education. Whether down-to-earth or laced with literature, those conversations instilled in us the vocabulary and aesthetic nuances of a libertine freedom of thought that never stooped to a vulgar familiarity, ranging from the naughty, spicy, smutty, and just slightly perverse language of a Choderlos de Laclos, to sensual and voluptuous concupiscence, or brazen Rabelaisian ribaldry—and from the grandiose debauchery of a Sade to the crudest, ugliest, most unsettling pornography and all the raunchy, sordid, lubricious, salacious, libidinous depravity drawn along in its wake. Thus educated in indecency by proxy, as we had been in wine and painting, we ended by appreciating this cultural inheritance passed down by parents who were most unusual, to be sure, but who had the merit of being emancipated and nonconformist.
Which by no means meant that in our family sex was allowed, authorized, or approved of. The sexual education my sister and I received from our mother was summed up in a few principles: we were to begin our lives as women only after a visit to the doctor, and only if (she always said if, not when) we were in love—the sine qua non, she said, for making love, thus making the gift of oneself out of what otherwise would be simply an easy lay.
In that department, though, Marie and I have always been different. Marie is romantic and dreams of meeting her soul mate, but that doesn’t stop her from collecting lovers. She has never found it compromising to sleep with whomever she pleases. It gives her pleasure, especially when she comes across a hardy and enthusiastic partner with self-assured moves but no real emotional involvement. In short, nothing to write home about. Sometimes she even has to think twice about her scruples when she turns down men who seem to attach great importance to sex. But she’s too sought after to yield to her admirers just to be considerate, so to rein herself in she has come up with some inhibitions and apprehensions: unseemly, occasionally embarrassing noises made by interlocking bodies, and self-consciousness about her nakedness, or about the folds and bulges created during the choreography of love’s embrace. And these barriers keep her from giving in to just anyone, without preventing her from letting herself go whenever she feels like it. Particularly with her pals in the security details for summit meetings, guys for whom my sister,