He returned his gaze to Nanée, clenching and unclenching his hands in that way he did. “And in Europe? Were you a good girl in Europe?”
Nanée ran a finger around the rim of her empty wineglass.
André lifted the bottle and poured the last of it for her.
“Were you a good girl in Europe?” he repeated.
She adjusted her sweater on her shoulders, feeling the chill of the night mist as she looked out to the long stretch of darkness. Was that sound a car? She peered out to the limestone-capped posts near the main road and the train and trolley tracks. Was that the dimmest glow of light peeking through blue-painted headlights? Was it her car? Hers was rarely used on account of the gas shortages, but Varian had asked her to loan it to Danny just after dinner, although neither would tell her why. Surely it was Danny. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was someone the commandant had sent to arrest her? No one bringing good news came this late at night.
“Nothing I did here would embarrass Daddy,” she said to André, “because no one he knew would know.”
“So you were a bad girl in Europe?”
I said I want you to beg. Had it really been a game for the commandant, or had he seen in her expression that she might have laughed at him?
“In Italy?” André pressed. “That’s where you first lived, yes?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, I lived in Italy. But . . . I was a good girl there. I thought I was being . . . daring.” She slipped her arms into the sleeves of the sweater. Fingered her scarf, still in place. “The first time I bought a condom in Italy, I didn’t know the Italian word for it, so I asked for qualcosa per fermare la concezione, something to stop conception.” Offering to André the kind of little anecdote that might distract him, might allow her to spin this conversation in another direction. “The condom was for a friend, part of a complicated plan to convince a man she was quite in love with that her previously squandered virginity was intact. She’d told him she had never been with a man but rather ‘did it herself,’ with ‘a sort of thingamajiggy.’”
André laughed.
“A thingamajiggy?” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, remembering the shock she’d felt at her friend’s willingness to acknowledge such a thing as loss of virginity, and to suggest aloud a self-pleasuring alternative. “So we had to make a thingamajiggy to show the fellow. Hence the need for the condom.”
André again laughed. Most of the table did.
“And this amour of your friend,” he said, “he fell for your ploy?”
“He proposed that night.”
The marriage hadn’t lasted two years, but at the time they’d felt triumphant.
“And yet this ‘daring’ was for your friend.”
Nanée met his gaze. “Yes, that’s right.”
“When did you become a ‘bad girl,’ then? Bad by Evanston Rules, which I gather means a girl has taken a lover?”
Taken a lover. It was what the European girls at the contessa’s school had called it, too. So much more sophisticated than “gone the limit,” and yet less true.
“When did you become such a terrific bad boy, André?” she responded.
“Ah, see, she tries to duck the question,” he said, “and so we know there is something hiding here.”
“In Switzerland,” Nanée said, surprising herself at the ease with which the admission came. It had been after Daddy died, after Mother came to Paris and took up with Misha, after her brothers and Mother and Misha left to go back to the United States while she stayed to ski. She wondered why she was embarrassed by those details, unwilling to admit them. She wondered if André could read them on her face or hear them in her voice.
“And this first man, was he a good lover?”
“He was a bit of a scoundrel, André. I seem to be drawn to scoundrels.”
T and Jacqueline and Miriam laughed. Lord, Nanée was going to miss Miriam’s too-loud laughter.
“Again she avoids the question,” André said to the table. He turned back to Nanée and repeated, “Was he a good lover?”
Was he? She’d imagined herself in love with him to justify going the limit, then dated one scoundrel after another as if to punish herself for being such a fool as to squander her virginity on a man to whom it meant precisely nothing. “At the time I had nothing to compare him to.”
“But now you do.”