The girls were already in the pool.
“Where’s Luca?” Cressida cried when she saw me. “Where’s Luca?” She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: “Where’s Loo-ka?,” just like Audrey Hepburn saying, “Take the pic-ture,” in Funny Face.
He couldn’t come, I explained; his school was doing something that day.
“I’m so sad,” she said, and made a face. “I’m so very sad. I wanted to swim with Luca.” And she swam away, inconsolable. I swam a little myself, and then I slipped away before I could buy hot chocolate for the rich little girls, half expecting to be expelled from the Ritz, a child masher, buying hot chocolate only to serve his son’s romance.
I enjoyed having the Ritz to myself, for once, though, before we had to leave it. I went down to the hammam—that’s what the French call a steam bath—and read the instructions. There were nearly as many prohibitions as those posted on the gates to the public park, although these were more varied. Translated, they read:
1. The shower is obligatory before using the installations.
2. It is forbidden to shave in the sauna.
3. Reading of newspapers is strongly discouraged in the hammam and sauna.
4. Children of less than twelve years are not authorized to use the installations.
“Obligatory,” “forbidden,” “strongly discouraged,” and “not authorized”: four ways of saying “not allowed,” each slightly different, each implying slightly different penalties. Such elegant variations on the theme of No! And these intended for the rich too. You can’t do that here, the French taste for order reaching even into the rich man’s locker room. Who would want to read a newspaper in the steam bath? The ink would get all over your hand. It was like the warnings on the park gates. Who aside from a French functionary would think so encyclopedically about all the things you can’t do in a park? But then only if you can’t, do you want to. If you can, you don’t.
When I got home, I sought Luke out right away. “Hey, you’ve made quite a score with Cressida,” I said. “She was just broken up because you weren’t there today.” “What did she say?” he asked.
“She said, ‘Where’s Luca? I miss Luca, I wish Luca were here to swim.’ Like that. Nothing would cheer her up.” He seemed to take it only half in.
The next Wednesday came, and I stopped work early and went to collect the bathing trunks and towels.
“Hey, come on, let’s hustle up,” I said to Luke when he came home after a half day of school. “We have to go to the pool today to meet Ada and Cressida.”
He shrugged. “Daddy, I don’t really feel like going.”
I was dumbfounded, really struck dumb.
“You don’t?” I said at last. “Why not?”
“I just don’t feel like it,” he said, and went into his room to play.
Fifteen minutes later I tried again. “C’mon,” I said, “the sublime Ada and the divine Cressida are expecting us.”
“I just don’t feel like going,” he repeated. Then he looked up at me, a strange half-smile that I had never seen before on his face. “Daddy,” he said, “what will Cressida say if I’m not there?”
“She’ll say she’s sad,” I said, not sure where we were going.
“No, but what will she say exactly. What exactly will she say?”
Then I got it. “I don’t know. I guess, ‘Where’s Luca? I wish Luca were here? I miss Luca so much.’”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Just like that.”
“No, say exactly what she would say Tell me exactly what she would say.” His face was shining.
“You know.” I groped. “‘I miss Luca. I wish he would come swimming with me.’” I felt vaguely as if I were reciting pornography.
“I’m not going,” he repeated.
The eternal, painful truth of love had struck. Proust wasn’t exaggerating, I realized. Five was fifteen, five slipped into fifteen—or thirty-five, or fifty for that matter, I suppose—seamlessly He was struggling with the oldest romantic-erotic question. Was there more pleasure to be found in sharing Cressida’s company or in feeling the power that he held by making her suffer from his absence? More pleasure to be found in sharing joy or in denying joy, in knowing that he now possessed the power to make her miserable, change her entire emotional state, simply by his absence?
I was already at the door, and was already turning the handle to leave, when he popped out of his room at last.
“OK,” he said, “I’ll go.” I was glad, of course. We went to the pool, and they had a good time, though I noticed that now Cressida, ever so slightly, swam toward him, I bought a lot of hot chocolate, and everybody drank it.
I told Martha the story that night, and she seemed somehow stirred. She wanted to know what Cressida had said, too.
“Well, what exactly did she say?” she said. “What exactly did she say when she saw him?” His absence was alive in her too.
Was it an accident or not that we shared a bottle of champagne, our own chocolat chaud, that night for the first time since she had become big with Olivia, right in the living room, with Tony Bennett singing the English lyrics of our favorite old Michel Legrand song, one of the songs that had gotten us here onto the boulevard Saint-Germain, “You Must Believe in Spring”? Could it have been that her son’s first thrill of sadism with a woman had reawakened her own sense of the fragility of desire, of the urge to renewal that runs through the eternal possibility that Wednesday will come and someone will not be at the pool, no matter how many wet Wednesdays there have been before? I don’t know. There was at least for a moment present again between us the central elements of love: buoyancy, seminudity, and uncertainty, that mixture of imperfect faith and intoxicating drink that is desire.
Our abonnement was running out that next week. From now on, I knew, we would have to cadge invitations to swim on Wednesday from Cressida and Ada and couldn’t just show up as equals. But I didn’t have the heart, the courage to explain to Luke that we were rubes, just visiting, trespassers of a kind. I just told Luke that we wouldn’t be swimming there anymore. It didn’t seem to bother him any more than our going there together had impressed him. In childhood, I suppose, you are always a little lighter than your circumstances and just keep floating. He worried more about getting his pleasures than about keeping them. He would make me promise him things, in precise order: “First we’ll go to the pool, then we’ll have hot chocolate, then we’ll have dinner, then we’ll play a game, then we’ll have the Rookie story….” He knew that if he didn’t get a contract written down in advance, you could lose any part of it, and that worried him. On the other hand, he didn’t worry that the pleasures would ever run out. Life was full of good stuff. The budget of pleasures is tighter in childhood, but the economy of pleasure at least is always in surplus.
We had one last thing to do, of course. We had tried to kiss the mermaid so many times, and we had always failed, because he was too short and I was too scared.
“Let’s just touch the mermaid,” he said wisely, this time, and we held our breaths together, and then we did.