“It’s a terrible cliché, coming here, you know,” he told her as they sat on a bench and tore their bread into chunks. “Perhaps the most clichéd picnic venue in Paris.”
“I don’t care. It’s close to the river. I don’t know what it is about the Seine, but it makes me feel good whenever I see it,” she said. She raised her face to the sun and closed her eyes, savoring the weak warmth.
“Are you homesick?” he asked quietly. “Winter in Sydney’s nothing like this.”
Maddy considered the question as she smeared Camembert on her bread.
“I miss the light from home, if that makes sense. It’s so bright and clear in Australia. I can see why the Impressionists went crazy with all that hazy, dazy light in their paintings over here in Europe. Everything is much softer, gentler.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I have photographs from when I was living in Sydney. They’re so bright they almost hurt my eyes.”
She smiled, then saw he had bread crumbs caught in his scarf. For some reason, seeing him sitting there wearing his so-phisticated scarf and superbly tailored coat and Italian shoes with crumbs down his front made her heart squeeze in her chest. How could a man be so devastatingly attractive yet so boyishly appealing at the same time? Suddenly she remembered something one of Max’s girlfriends from long ago had once said to her. “It’s not his good looks or his body or how smart he is that really gets me. It’s those gray eyes of his. They always look as though they’re about to laugh at me.”
Maddy realized she was staring and forced herself to look away.
This is a fling, Maddy. Don’t go getting ideas. Remember your track record with men.
But Max wasn’t like any of the other men she’d slept with. He understood her. He knew her. They knew each other. And she no longer had to share her time between dance and the man in her life. Max could have her night and day, week in, week out. If he wanted her.
Maddy gazed out at the river. She knew what a psychologist would say she was doing—using this thing with Max to divert herself from the hole dancing had left in her life. Max distracted her with sightseeing and gastronomic indulgences, and she rounded the job off by fixating on what was happening between them, building it up into something it probably wasn’t, and probably never should be.
It wasn’t fair to Max that she latch onto him to stop herself from going under. He deserved a hell of a lot more than that.
Beside her, Max crumpled the empty bread wrapper into a ball.
“Come on. Art awaits,” he said, standing and holding out a hand.
She let him pull her to her feet. He was an amazing man. The best. And she had to be careful not to abuse his generosity and kindness by overstaying her welcome. She had to make sure she left before the sex palled and she became a burden instead of a friend in need.
Max tucked her arm through his and led her off the island and onto the left bank. As they walked, he pointed out his favorite buildings and told her a little about their histories. Being Paris, the stories were all colorful and drenched in blood and revolution.
She let herself be wrapped in his warm charm. It was wrong to lean on him so much, but right now she wasn’t quite sure how to stand on her own two feet. Soon, she would find a way to be strong again.
The Musée Rodin was in a stately old mansion with spacious, highly manicured grounds. Like so much of Paris, it was beautiful and elegant and Maddy looked around admiringly as Max bought their tickets.
He grew quiet as they walked into the first room. He stopped in front of each sculpture, no matter how small, his eyes caressing the curves and planes Rodin had created.
“This is like a church for you, isn’t it?” she said quietly after they’d toured the ground floor and were climbing the stairs to the second level.
“He changed the world,” he said simply. “Breathed life into sculpture again.”
Finally they wound up out in the gardens, standing in front of two enormous cast bronze doors; the entire surface of them was writhing with figures, animal and beast, bursting from the surface into three dimensions. Torsos twisted, arms lifted beseechingly, legs flailed in torment. Appropriate, given the piece was titled The Gates of Hell.
Maddy’s eyes were wide with awe as she cataloged the detail, the sheer breadth and scope of the work.
“This is…amazing,” she said.
“Yes.”
He turned on his heel and started up the gravel path leading deeper into the garden. She knew from consulting the map that there were no more sculptures in that direction, but she followed him anyway. At the far end was a fountain, dry at present, and he sat on its rim and stared at his loosely clasped hands.
She sat beside him, tucking her own hands into her pockets for warmth. After a few minutes, Max started talking.
“The first time I came here was with my grandfather. I bitched and moaned all the way because I wanted to ride my bike with my friends instead. But my grandfather was determined to introduce me to a bit of culture. Then I walked in the door and saw the first sculpture and I stopped dead in my tracks.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “My heart was pounding. I wanted to close my eyes. The sculptures seemed so dynamic and powerful they scared me. My grandfather didn’t say a word. He took one look at my face, then led me from room to room. I think we were here for over three hours, that first visit.”
Maddy watched Max’s face as he went on to talk about the art they’d seen, smiling now and then at his passion, the way he gesticulated so energetically as he tried to evoke an image or underscore his meaning.
“I’m probably boring you into a coma,” he said after a while. “Blink for me. Prove to me that you’re not catatonic.”
She laughed. “You’re not boring me. I’m learning a lot. I’m basically ignorant about almost everything in the world except for dance, you know. I didn’t even know how a bronze was made until you explained it to me. I love listening to you talk about art.”
He rolled his eyes and she nudged him with her elbow.
“I do! You get all French and you get this light in your eyes.”
“Like a crazy man.”
“Like a man who’s found his passion,” she said.
He shrugged self-consciously.
“I’d give anything to be like you. To have something else I loved as much as dancing,” she said.
The words were out before she could edit them, and she bit her lip.
“That sounds so greedy, doesn’t it? I’ve had all these years of dancing at the top of my game, and you didn’t even get to really explore your dancing career. Now you’ve got a second chance to do something you love and I’m sitting here grouching about how jealous I am.”
“Stop giving yourself such a hard time for being a human being, Maddy,” he said.
“I just wish there was something—anything—that I wanted to do,” she said.
The despair that crept up on her in the dead of the night threatened, and she curled her hands into fists inside her pockets. All her life she’d lived through her body, but now her most evocative, finely honed tool of self-expression, therapy, exercise and solace had been taken away from her.
“Come here,” Max said.
He tugged on her arm until she allowed him to pull her into his lap so that she sat straddling him.
“Something will come up,” he said, as he had said so many times over the past few weeks. That, and variations of give