Hotel Vendome

Miriam was wearing a see-through lace dress with nothing under it when she came to the door, and she was as beautiful as ever, at forty-two. Several major rock stars were there with assorted women. Greg waved hello to her from a set of drums he was playing, and Miriam showed her to her room with a glass in her hand. And when she opened the door, there was a couple making passionate love on the bed.

“Oops, wrong room!” she said, tittering. “Silly of me. We have so many houseguests here, I don’t know who’s where. I think this is your room,” she said, moving on to the next one. It was a small, pretty room decorated in white lace and blue ribbons with a four-poster bed. No one was in it, and Heloise was rattled by the time she was alone and shut the door, while Miriam went back to their guests. It looked like a wild night. It was a beautiful house with an ocean view, and a pool where everyone swam naked. And when Heloise went to join the others, they were drinking heavily and doing drugs. A lot of coke seemed to be in evidence, and they were all passing joints around and doing lines. Heloise looked uncomfortable and turned all of it down and finally slipped away to her room, wishing she were back in Bordeaux with her friends there. This was a heavy scene with her mother and Greg’s friends and more than she wanted to deal with. Her mother’s world in St. Tropez scared her, but she wanted to try and stick it out. She saw so little of her, she wanted to give it a chance, and hoped things would settle down.

Heloise called her father in New York the next day. He hadn’t had a vacation in two years and said he envied her a month in St. Tropez, although it wasn’t his kind of place either. Most of Miriam and Greg’s guests were English and from the music world, and sex and drugs seemed to be their main activities, which she didn’t tell her father. She didn’t want to upset him. By lunchtime everyone was drinking heavily again.

When her father asked her about it on the phone, he tried to sound casual and not concerned, and Heloise sounded equally so, to reassure him. He didn’t want to keep her away from her mother; she saw little enough of her. But he also knew that Miriam’s lifestyle was not entirely wholesome.

“It’s a little weird,” Heloise admitted, but she didn’t want to tell him that just about everyone except the kids was doing drugs. She had seen her mother snort a line of coke the night before. “It’s pretty loosey-goosey here.” It was who Miriam had become over the years, and maybe who she always had been.

“Are you okay? No one’s bothering you?” He didn’t want one of Greg’s rock star friends coming on to her, although he trusted Heloise to handle it. But he was concerned that no one would protect her there. She led a very sheltered life at home. She had a hotel full of hotel employees to keep an eye on her.

“I’m fine. It’s just the whole music rock star scene.” She had tried to talk to Arielle and Joey that morning, but she couldn’t seem to connect with them either, although she made an effort. But they were so disjointed and used to such a different life than hers. She was very square compared to all of them.

“Are they doing drugs?” Hugues sounded worried. He didn’t trust his ex-wife or her husband.

“I don’t know,” Heloise lied to him. “It’s okay. I just haven’t seen them in a while, and it’s kind of a shock after Bordeaux.” It had been so easy and so much fun for her there, even more than she’d hoped.

“Well, if it gets too strange, just leave. You can tell your mother we had an emergency here and you had to come home. You can fly out from Nice.”

“Don’t worry, Papa. I’m a big girl,” she reassured him. “I’ll see how it goes. I can always stay in Paris for a couple of days on the way home.” Two of her friends from school were there that summer, staying with relatives.

“I don’t want you going to Paris alone. Maybe it’ll be okay in St. Tropez. Give it a chance,” he said fairly, with no idea what was going on around her, and Heloise didn’t tell him since she didn’t want him to worry, and he would have.

By that night Heloise was more uncomfortable than ever. Everyone was drunk, doing coke, and having sex in every room available, including Greg and her mother with another couple, which they announced to everyone before the foursome went upstairs. It was more than she wanted to deal with, or know about her mother, and she was embarrassed to be there. She felt like she was in way over her head, although no one was trying to seduce her. Some of Greg’s friends had come on to her, but they had realized she was too square. And she felt no connection with her half-brother and -sister, who were bratty and badly behaved, and sadly, she felt even less connection with her mother, who was a creature from another world. She was even less mature than Heloise, and the only person she seemed to care about was Greg. She appeared to have lost interest in her other children too and paid no attention to them.