The Suitors - By Cecile David-Weill Page 0,6

how we could prevent that.”

“Listen. Your father’s a true gem, but he’s always had trouble reading other people and the effect he has on them. Is this because he’s so modest? So preoccupied with his own concerns? So self-involved? I don’t know. In any case, he probably couldn’t begin to imagine how attached you are to the house, just as he doesn’t have any idea how much you girls love him.”

“And?”

“And so you have to show him how you feel, because you know how useless it would be to argue with him in the hope that he’ll change his mind.”

“Fine, but how do we do that?”

Frédéric’s idea was outrageous: he suggested that Marie and I look for a sugar daddy willing to foot the bills for L’Agapanthe and the lifestyle it deserved!

“And your next step would be to pitch the deal to your father.”

“Deal? What deal?”

“Well, ‘Either you leave us the house, or we’ll each marry a Mr. Moneybags who will buy it for us.’ I’ll bet you anything your father will be furious and humiliated that you’d been driven to behave like common gold diggers. So: he’ll be furious—but convinced that you mean business. And he’ll keep the house for you.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you’ll just have to marry those Mr. Moneybags. So be careful to pick nice ones.”

I was laughing hysterically. “This is some sort of joke,” I said at last and then nervously ate up the petits fours, one after the other.

“Simply organize some tryouts. Invite a few candidates to L’Agapanthe this summer for an audition. Say, one per weekend. Just like those people I knew who used to do this in August. During the week, it was the family, period. They only had guests on the weekend. They always planned separate weekends for golfing, poker, and the crème de la crème. Why don’t you do the same with a CEO, a film star, an heir to a fortune …?”

“But I don’t know any.”

“Oh, please. As if that were a problem.”

Frédéric was right. There was no need to know a person to invite him or her to L’Agapanthe. All I needed was to know someone who knew that person.

“Think of Laszlo and the Démazures,” he added, referring to Laszlo Schwartz, who’d been introduced to my parents by a couple who were now regular guests at L’Agapanthe.

Henri Démazure was an insipid international lawyer, Polyséna Démazure a dull Italian who mangled every language she spoke, and they bored the pants off my poor father. Yet they came to L’Agapanthe every summer because they had introduced my parents to Laszlo Schwartz, a gallery icon whom my mother admired and whose paintings, acquired by museums throughout the world, were worth a fortune. The Démazures, however, were total pills, and now my mother was stuck with them.

“Well, thanks a bunch, but I’d rather not! They came to dinner and never left!”

The problem was that my mother had had to invite the Démazures to L’Agapanthe in order to ask the artist to come: it was a question of manners, as elementary as not seating engaged couples and newlyweds separately at a dinner party. The Démazures accepted eagerly, but without bringing along Laszlo Schwartz, who was busy in Japan with a show. My mother persevered and renewed her invitation the following year, when Laszlo did come along with the Démazures. The third year, relieved of her obligations toward this couple, whose vapid personalities were now only too obvious, my mother tried to think of a way to keep inviting Schwartz but without the Démazures. This was risky, because she didn’t want to offend either them or Laszlo, who might decide to stop coming. But when Henri Démazure lost his job that year, it became impossible for my mother to drop him after such a blow. And so the Démazures notched up another summer. Then, when it was finally acceptable to get rid of them, they called my mother to whine about their straitened circumstances, beating around the bush before finally saying what a joy it would be for them to return to L’Agapanthe. Embarrassed, my mother let them have their way. This had been going on for years now, and I’d eventually realized that unless they committed some unforgivable faux pas, the Démazures could count on their heavenly holiday for the next twenty summers.

“No, no,” Frédéric said with a laugh, “it doesn’t have to be that complicated. You can even invite your candidates sight unseen, without knowing them. I’m sure they would come.”

Frédéric