Adriane Remembers

Adriane stayed clean on the flight back to L.A. and had begun to feel so much better, drinking only orange juice and coffee… lots of coffee. She had been happy to spend a few months in the big house outside of Biarritz where; besides Gotson, the cook and a house maid, she had the whole property to her self. She rode in the hills above the estate and she basked on the beach of her childhood… the almost private beach below the property of the beach house a couple of miles away from the estate near Biarritz. 

Robert and Mère returned to the house after spending most of that time in Paris taking care of the rest of Pères estate. Much to Robert’s chagrin; Mama eventually stepped in and wrangled control from him, taking over where Papa rarely allowed her to venture since the early years of their marriage. She put all of it in order and made sure Adriane’s stipend was generous enough to live well but held back the rest of her inheritance in a trust of some sort. Mère turned out to be as financially astute as Père. Robert had treated his mother as though she was a financial dolt but now, after all, she assumed the role of the matrone of the estate that Marcel had left to his beloved Annika.

Unknown until then to Robert was that his step-mother, Annika, had been a close associate with Wallraven van Hall, the banker of the Dutch resistance who was only 39 when arrested by the Gestapo and shot in 1945. His personal assistant, Hanneke Lippisch, was an acquaintance but became somewhat of an associate of hers. Their whole purpose during the Occupation was to finance the resistance by bilking whatever could be pilfered from the Nederlandsche Bank. The other more legitimate part of the financing of resistance groups was to borrow money from wealthy Dutch in exile. This experience gave her an astounding capability to come up with funding through old connections. It was these connections that led her to meet with the young journalist in hiding, Fournier. It was she who mentored Marcel on European underground financial maneuvers that brought him his fortune when the war ended. She never talked about her activities in the Dutch Resistance and Fournier never spoke of his. Their mutual self-censorship was attributable to their deep respect for those who had lost their lives in the cause and not at all out of shame or fear of being found out. After she was sufficiently recovered from grieving she’d assumed her long dormant talents for handling money.

Even with Mère now in charge, Adriane couldn’t bear Robert’s scrutiny and sarcasm much more than a few days before getting back to Nick and California. Once she returned to her home in Santa Barbara, she found the sink full of dishes and newspapers spread over the kitchen table or stacked on the floor: six weeks worth. The other rooms, besides the bedroom, were untouched except for the music room couch. The evidence of bottles and full ashtrays, no more than an arms reach from the couch covered every surface bore witness to his presence. Still, she felt it was good to be home although she had begun to despise Nick long before their separation or her trip to France for the funeral. He was supposed to be watching the house while she was gone. Wondering where he was and, oddly enough, missing him, she decided to call Mickey instead.

Mickey was her cab-driving drinking buddy before he caught sobriety.  Yes, caught sobriety. Sobriety, was like a virus… everybody ended up getting sober back then… it was spreading, celebrities and people like Mickey: sober, dead, or in prison. She got his answering machine… “Hello, I won’t pick up the phone…. Leave a message.” …beep.

He hated getting phone calls and screened them bitterly. Anyone who knew him well enough could get through while he listened to the answering machine. Everybody else could leave a message that he would most likely promptly erase, “Hello, Mickey? I am back… it is Saturday afternoon… what… it is noon or so… Oh, you bad boy… you are at Mel’s? Or are you at an AA meeting? Pick up the phone… okay.”

Shit, he wasn’t home. She thought… a stream of conscience flooded her mind, “If I go to Mel’s… I can’t sit there without having something to drink. I drink and I want something better… to relieve the hang-over… or whatever.”

 “Maybe I’ll go to his house and crawl into his bed… surprise him? When he comes home he will get a present from me. No, we’ve only made love once. We flirt, but Mickey is too much like Gotson to me… even more than a dear friend.”

Arriving at his place she sees Homer on the screened-in porch, she greets him as he goes before her… the door is unlocked. “No one is home, Homer?”

Mickey’s room, with all his books and his old typewriter, brought back still vivid memories of it … of when she was young, the summer Gotson took the picture of her in the surf…Gotson was younger then, middle aged… a handsome man. Remembering that one day, “He protected me, Homer,” she purred, “from my asshole brother.”

She had been basking nude on a chase lounge, as was customary at her family’s pool.  It was a beautiful day. A world of hormonal surges was opening up to her and, as her fingers probed the moisture of her flowering nest, suddenly Robert was there before her. He had been watching from a distance and had become aroused. Kneeling between her knees, he put his hand on her inner-thigh. Before she realized what was going on he was on top of her. The eroticism of the previous moment reversed itself to become a terror. She struggled at first but he persisted, forcing her thighs apart.

“He was my older brother… what was I to do?” He was already a young man… bigger, with a powerful physique. Ma-Mère was visiting her family in Amsterdam and Père was in Paris. She hoped Gotson would show himself but he was nowhere around… She knew what sex was but this was not sex. She’d seen their horses mate… it was very much like that… violent. It hurt and she cried out at him to stop but he did not.

Gotson finally showed up with Eder at his side so that Robert could hear them on the graveled path leading down to the pool house. Robert lurched away as though Adriane was a bed of hot coals. He stood; standing unashamed, even defiant, before Gotson.

“Ah, Roberto, we need to have a discussion,” but without saying another word he put an arm around Robert and took him to the other side of the cabana.

She wasn’t sure whether Gotson saw all of what happened. The confusion in her mind muffled their voices, but, she heard a slap and Gotson’s voice repeating, Roberto… oh, Roberto as she gathered her clothes and walked with Eder, dazed, up the path to the house. Robert’s head was hung down as he passed them hurriedly but she could see, when he turned to glare at her and Eder. Eder glared back at him but they could see that Robert had a blackened eye under his Gucci’s. On the way up the steep path Eder comforted her, “He did the same to me when I was ten.”

Gotson sat by the pool with his head in his hands as they left.

To say it was more than awkward the rest of that afternoon is an understatement. Robert sped away in his Ferrari back to Paris before dinner and never tried to mess with her again.

“That was how I lost my virginity…” she said out loud to Homer.

Robert didn’t talk with her after that incident on the beach for several years. She could never forgive him and, whenever she thought of him… his smug face, the bile of disgust rose from in her gut.

That one time; when she was making-out with Mickey, she’d gotten a sudden flash… a memory of a feeling… like now… she couldn’t help it and she stopped him in the middle… when he penetrated.... she felt the betrayal, the shame and she just wanted to shower and cry. It seems as if making love would sully the affection she had for him. She never cared what happened with Nicky or the other men she’d have casual sex with. But, as always, when the sex was over, she just wanted to get home and shower; or, if it was her house, send the poor fool away.