The place had three swimming pools, but we chose the sea, where members lay on towels or canvas deck chairs on the jetty, or bobbed in the waves, tan as coconuts.
One lady, skeleton thin but with large, artificial breasts stationary on her chest, was dark brown, although by racial status white, like most everyone at this private club.
Despite its tight security and homogeneous clientele, the club’s ambiance was slightly beat-up and ad-hoc, like everything in Marseille. The true power of the place, Vito and I agreed, the reason all these people were here, was not luxury amenities but the club’s proximity to Tear Gas Beach next door, its exclusion of the kind of people who frequented that beach. Enhancing the facilities of the swim club was the visual reminder of how much worse things could be, right there at the other beach, the one we did not have to go to, where people were packed towel to towel on the sand, and body to body in the water, so many people it looked impossible to swim.
All day long, ambulances and CRS vans pulled up in front of the public beach, sirens blaring, either to intervene in violent altercations or to cause them.
Meanwhile, we left our valuables in our beach bags for long stretches of swimming and didn’t think once about theft. We went back and forth to the café, which offered complimentary beverages and Häagen-Dazs bars. At happy hour, a waiter came around with beer and wine.
“This club is like the business-class lounge of an international airport terminal,” I said, as we licked our ice cream. It was luxury offerings to a homogenous class stratum, people who were not going to steal your stuff.
“Serge only flies business class, by the way,” Vito replied, as he picked the thin chocolate sheathing off his ice cream bar. “He’s furious about the snobbery of rich Parisians but he refuses to empty a recycling hamper. Our housekeeper has to come every day, so that Serge won’t have to touch bottles and cans. He’s full of contradictions. I find that incredibly sexy.”
Amélie joined us one afternoon, having completed most of her work securing locations. The woman who out-thinned and out-tanned the rest was there, as she had been every day, lying on her towel when we arrived, still there when we left, her skin the dark oily sheen of roasted hazelnuts.
“Like a nun marries God,” Vito said, “she has married Apollo.”
“Is that the name of her plastic surgeon?” Amélie asked.
I laughed, my own implants barely contained in the triangles of my white bikini. Mine were expensively done. But it could be on account of something more subtle—an assumption Amélie made about me, and about herself, that we were both too clever and naturally pretty to stoop to paying for shortcuts—that she would not suspect my breasts aren’t real.
“She reminds me of someone,” Amélie said. “A woman I once knew who was addicted to tanning, and always on some starvation diet. She was very tortured. She died from drinking too much water.”
“What do you suppose got into her?” Vito asked.
“I think she mistook water for selfhood. Like those people who get into yoga and think you can just breathe and it will solve all your problems. Life is more than water and air.”
“There’s beer,” I said, as I opened a fresh one a waiter had just delivered.
“If your tortured friend had chosen beer,” Vito said, holding his up to mine, “she might still be alive.”
My last day there a mistral came up, a cold and violent wind that ripped through Marseille with no consideration for anything not bolted down. Filming was put on hold. Lucien and Serge worked on scene blocking in our room.
I had private correspondence to deal with. I said I was going to the pharmacy and went out to find a quiet place to sit.
Plastic bags and other trash whirled at face level. Grit-laden gusts pushed at me as I walked. The restaurants had brought in their outdoor tables. Businesses were closed, their metal shutters rolled down. There were few people on the street, which felt dangerous with the possibility that the wind could knock me down or send a garbage can barreling into me.
The Plage des Catalans was empty, no one on the beach. The water was dark. There were no boats out.
I walked over to the private swim club. It was open. I flashed my temporary pass, went to the café, and ordered a Coca-Cola. It was just me and the bartender in his white waiter’s jacket. The place was otherwise deserted. I took my drink to a table along the fishbowl windows facing the sea.
Below the windows the water churned. Waves hurled over the jetty, slapped the concrete, and burst upward. Trash pushed into a thick floating barrier, was sucked out into the bay, and slopped forward again toward land.
The jetty, usually crowded with families, was empty save for a single person, a lone sunbather: the roasted-nut woman.
I poured my Coke into a tumbler of ice and watched her.
She lay face-up on the decking, her fake breasts glistening in the cold light like twin copper vaults. Her body fell into shadow as explosions of surf burst over the seawall and onto the jetty. Her eyes were shut tight against the wind, her hands anchoring the corners of her towel as if to prevent it from carrying her away, or as if that had already happened, and she was mid-flight.
III
JOAN CRAWFORD’S FACE
BRUNO HAD STRESSED that the Neanderthal’s large face was designed to accommodate giant nasal passages, which were themselves for warming cold air before it entered the lungs. The Thals had large orbital bones and huge eyes, for enhanced night vision. They had weak chins, he conceded, as could be ascertained from skulls in museums, or photographs of skulls, but he had once, as a boy, felt the eroding slope of this weak chin with his own hands, as he inspected the contours of a Neanderthal skull that was part of a display in a natural history museum, a model that visitors could touch and hold and palpate. It had been passed from child to child, as they sat cross-legged on the museum floor.
I pictured Bruno with this skull in his lap like the skull was a baby, his arms cradling its large head and weak chin.
Bruno said he had read about a skull found in a cave in southern Spain from which a stalagmite had formed. Stalagmites are a consequence of subterranean storage, Bruno said, mineral buildup from moisture, from water drips, and in the case of this skull, discovered in a sediment layer dated to thirty thousand years old, the stalagmite was still growing, shooting upward like the horn of that mythical if culturally exhausted creature, the unicorn.
Less explainable, he said, were the properties of a certain skull found in a cave in Croatia, which seemed to map, simultaneously, to two different eras of human time. The face had the broad features and strong jaw, the heavy brow and magnificent nasal passages, of the noble Neanderthal, and some had concluded this skull was Thal. But the skull’s contours, its “occipital bun,” had the angular features of Thal’s earlier ancestor Homo erectus. (I’d read enough of Bruno’s emails at this point to understand that this bun he referred to was not to be confused with any other kind of bun, such as the ballerina bun. The occipital bun was a protrusion at the back of the head with a steep drop-off—the lower rear skull.) The cranium of this skull had the features of Rectus, suggesting the brain it contained should also be Rectus. And yet its face looked entirely Thal. Which era was this individual from? Scientists debated, without drawing clear conclusions. The skull was some kind of hybrid, the coauthors of a journal paper argued, suggesting that developments took place unevenly, and that this individual had possessed a face that was one hundred thousand years more modern than his own brain case and brain.
There is so much we don’t know, Bruno said. But a lesson in this curious hybrid skull, of Thal face and Rectus braincase and brain, seems somewhat obvious to me, he said. The lesson is that you cannot judge a book by its cover.
Because just as this individual looked like a Neanderthal but could have thought like Rectus, there may be modern individuals with similar developmental disjunctures, with modern faces but the mind and instincts of an older ancestor. Even if someone looks like you, they may not think like you.
New and complicating genetic evidence of how we have evolved is being sequenced all the time from bones, teeth, even the tiniest shards and splinters and bits of skeletal grit, Bruno said. New discoveries, such as the species called Denisovan, in Eastern Mongolia, and the Hobbit or Homo floresiensis of Indonesia, are reprising everything we once believed about early man.
This term, “early man,” is itself a misnomer, Bruno said. Early man was Rectus, and before him, Homo habilis, or “handy man.” While the Homo sapiens that some call “early man” in fact strode in two million years after habilis and was actually “late-arriving man,” Homo tardus, or even Homo tardissimus.
If we think of time, of history, as a deep and long spike driving down into the center of the earth, into the earliest hominin life, Homo sapiens is right up near the surface, the mere head of this spike that goes a very, very long ways down.
And how bitterly ironic, Bruno said, that H. tardissimus strolls in at the end of a gaping stretch—unfathomable to the mind, so much time, lived by an enormous variety of people. At the end of an endless saga, H. tardissimus, aka “Tardie,” arrives on the scene, only to destroy everything.
MY FIRST NIGHT at the Dubois country house I slept like a baby. I felt softly held, like that skull Bruno Lacombe had once cradled and palpated.
It helped that I’d taken two milligrams of Xanax and a slow-release Ambien. I’d worried that my long day of drinking and driving, from Marseille to the Guyenne, might interfere with my sleep, and so I’d subdued my cortex from two different directions with teeny pills.
I woke at dawn. I felt good. I felt strong. A zeppelin-shaped cloud hovered over the valley beyond the house, turning pink. It darkened in front of my eyes to fuchsia and then faded to plain old cloud color. For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.
