The old family crest pressed softly into my ear and then into my back, my legs. His hands were running through my hair.
I pulled away so that he could look at me. “Olivier, what are we doing? What about Portia? Are we doing something terrible to her?”
“People are meant to follow their hearts. There’s nothing else.” He gave me another whiskey-sugared kiss.
I succumbed to the magic of selfishness and went with him back to his quirky room on the third floor of his hôtel de charme, steps away from the Picasso Museum.
At six the following morning, after a last kiss and a whispered “See you again tonight? Promise?” I padded down the hotel’s narrow red-carpeted stairs, past the darkened reception desk and out into the cold rose-tinged city. I decided to walk home.
I wound through the Marais back to the Place des Vosges, ran my fingers briefly over our dewy bench, and resolved, as I buried my hands in my coat pocket, to treat myself to a pair of gloves the next time I was paid. I went through the brick archway leading out onto the rue de Rivoli and headed for the small bridge to the Île St-Louis.
While crossing the river, I formed a perverse desire to come clean with Lydia. What better time than today, when she was finally to arrive in Paris? After all, she was a mother and mothers forgave and she obviously didn’t think Olivier was right for Portia and maybe she would be grateful to me for taking him away, or at least understand. I had already lied about having the money to afford this job, and about knowing her work my whole life. Yet there was still time to explain. I did not want to lie any more. You could only do so much to please people. When I saw her, I would tell the truth.
But the shuttered shops and cafés of the tiny island, with the hidden worlds and lives they suggested, filled me with a very different idea: to keep my own life private, to carve out a space for myself in this new Paris I was inhabiting. I was going to see Olivier one more time, tonight. And it would be our time.
Mom’s voice floated to mind. “Separate the personal from the professional, Katie. It’s one of the fundamentals of a healthy life. Never mix. Keeps you straight.”
As I reached the tip of the Île St-Louis, the Île de la Cité came into view. The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, so imposing in their silence, offered a fresh perspective, the beauty of Olivier’s sleeping face, the perfect stonework of his chest. On principal, I had never drawn from memory, but I thought for the first time I might be able to.
At the cathedral, I faced off with a gargoyle and was struck by the potential ugliness of my actions. But then I heard Olivier: “Please, Kate, I know you would never want to hurt anyone. Believe me that it’s over between Portia and me. I’ve been trying to tell her for months, but she won’t hear it. She’s never not gotten her way, and it’s a shock to her. She’s a casualty of privilege. They’re all casualties, Lydia, Clarence, Josh. It’ll be a shock to all of them for Portia to be left. It might take a little time to sink in. Portia’s unstable. But she’s not your responsibility.”
“I suppose not.”
“I can do this,” he had said across an inch of pillow. “I can get out of this situation. This family is a vortex. But we can’t let them rule our lives. Not after I just spent weeks in Italy thinking about you.” Another kiss. “This is our twist of fate.”
I smiled at the gargoyle and continued on my way toward the Left Bank.
At the base of the boulevard St-Michel, I looked at the sleeping giant, Gibert Jeune, the enormous yellow-awninged bookstore I was coming to love. Like the novels it housed, it filled me with a sense of hope all tangled up with impending tragedy. My chest tightened at the memory of Olivier’s finger scrolling across my breasts.
What if all that playful scribbling on my body vanished, along with our magic spot? What if there were no letters? Or the letters were not warm? Or he went home and found he was in love with Portia after all? What if he tasted the Hédiard goose liver while contemplating one of his perfectly pressed shirts and slipped back into the life he deserved?
A drunk resting against a thick tree told me it couldn’t be that bad. “Allez, mademoiselle!” he grunted. “Give us a smile.”
As soon as his voice had broken the morning silence, I began to hear other noises, small cars coughing into the fog, the rustle of falling leaves, various footsteps. All the way home, the day grew in my ears so that I had to struggle to keep a pocket of silence hidden inside me, a place to return to later on my own.
As I became fully aware of the action of the sky, cloudy and dramatic, I finally came to terms with the fact that Lydia was coming home from Germany today. This was no time to brood.
thirteen
A few hours later, I set out for the Luxembourg with the ever-sympathetic Orlando. I was afraid. I realized that the paint colors in the house, which had been congealing all around me as in a dream, might be very wrong. Lydia was going to hate the entryway. She was going to say the living room was too pale and the dining room was depressing. She was going to ask why anyone would paint a bedroom pea green. Why hadn’t I been more vigilant? But what could I have done? Maybe I felt guilty because I liked the Moroccan painters so much, loved their music and the way that Claudia spoke Arabic to them, but I knew they probably weren’t up to Lydia’s standards. “Who are those people Clarence has found? Not professionals?”
Would this disaster turn out to be my fault? I had never done the apartment walk-through with Clarence that Lydia had asked for, comparing his vision of the wall colors to mine, giving her a report. But she had mentioned the idea only once and I hadn’t thought it was my place to bring it up again.
I pulled Orlando down chestnut-lined allées, dragged him brutally fast to judge by the cross looks I drew.
Shit, were my German time lines all wrong? Had I hidden the Rushdie photos well enough? Lydia didn’t want Clarence to see them at this juncture, and Clarence, she warned, was always snooping. And what about the envelope of proof sheets, the one labeled “Book Burning in Bradford, January 14, 1989?” with the close-ups of the word “Satanic” as the flames were beginning to lick it, right before it was engulfed? Had I buried those proofs in the right drawer?
Was Marine, the snotty black and white printer, going to tell Lydia that I was a ditz when it came to photography? Would she say that my look was blank when she mentioned Magnum? That I did not know that Picto was the only photo lab in France? That I had no lay of the land? And would Lydia defend me while secretly wishing she had hired someone more with it? Or would she fire me on the spot?
Orlando was miserable. He didn’t like to run. “Your dog is dying of thirst!” snapped a passing businessman.
I stopped. Orlando’s tongue was hanging low and puckered. There was white phlegm webbing the corners of his mouth. Of course he was thirsty. How could I be so blind? I lead him to the closest puddle, which the poor dog began to lap furiously, and where I immediately drew more indignation. “C’est dégoûtant!” “Pauvre bête.” I burrowed my hands into my jacket pocket and fidgeted stupidly with the red note that Olivier had left under my door.
“Hey, you went to Yale, didn’t you?” It was a jogger.
Before I could answer, I realized with blinding certainty that I had to destroy Olivier’s letter before anyone saw it. I started to crumple the paper. I thought I looked like I desperately had to go to the bathroom because a shadow of disgust crossed the jogger’s face. But I quickly saw that she was not watching me squirm but focusing on the passersby.
“The people here can be so rude. That’s nothing but rainwater he’s drinking. It’s fine for a dog.”
I wanted to hug her.
“I totally recognize you,” I said. “You were in Branford, right? I’m Katie.”
“Christie.”
It