Anio Szado (20 page)

“You don’t want me to break with Antoine.”

“What I want is for your heart to be glad. You tell me what that would take.”

“Make Consuelo go away.”

“Your biggest client?”

I groaned.

Yannick pushed my coffee cup closer to me. “How on earth did you end up designing for her?”

“I don’t know. I think it was Antoine’s doing.”

“Then he can help us fix at least one angle in this mess.” He waved him over. “Listen, Saint-Ex. In a few days, we’re going to have dinner together at Le Pavillon, the four of us, my treat.”

“Four?” said Antoine.

“You and Consuelo, Mignonne and me.”

I snorted.

Antoine said, “And this is intended to accomplish what?”

Yannick spread his arms. “Just a friendly dinner. A dinner between friends.”

“I owe my wife neither explanation nor charade, and she is hardly in a position to expect either.”

“My niece has a position to consider, too. She has persuaded Consuelo to commission some fashion work.”

“You really are her
couturière
?” asked Antoine.

“I went to her apartment, like you asked. No more meeting her at the Alliance, just like you said.”

Antoine brought his hand to his chest. “Thank you. This means much to me.”

“What it means,” said Yannick, “is a tenuous position for Mignonne. How will it look if she is seen with her client’s husband, and at other times with his wife, but never with the two together? You know how the ladies here gossip. I know you don’t want Mignonne to lose all chance of building a clientele. We’ll take a prominent table. If you still think it’s a bad idea when the time comes, I’ll cancel the reservation at the last minute. I have that privilege. In the meantime, check with Consuelo and give me a call.”

Leo had gone missing at some point. Now I noticed him again on his perch at the bar. He was watching.

I drained my cup. “I have to go. Have to get to the studio in the morning.”

“You will be there late tomorrow, as well?” asked Antoine.

“Early, late. All or nothing, all day long.”

The next day’s work stretched on into twilight as I planned the construction of another dress of my own design. Dusky light lit the windows, lending a pink tint to the bricks of the wall and door, then faded as I continued to draw.

I had folded the silk chiffon and placed it within reach on my table where I could consider it as I sat with my book. I had long since turned on the table lamp; my eyes stung as I bent into its glow.

I was hunched over, worrying a detail—the exact spacing of gathers at a neckband—when footsteps sounded from the hall. The footfalls ceased, but their rhythm continued in a folk song I recalled from my childhood. Papa had sung it in upbeat tones. This voice—the middle timbre, the tinge of melancholy—it had to be Antoine’s.

I set down my pencil and sighed in relief.

The door opened; the singing stopped. The yellowish light from the hall cast him in silhouette.

He said, “You look so peaceful sitting there in your island of light, as though time does not exist.”

“It exists, believe me. I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

When Antoine closed the door, the studio seemed to plunge into greater darkness than before, despite the constancy of the desk lamp. Unlit above us hung row after row of dangling green metal light shades. I said, “The switch for the overheads is on the wall to your right, where the keys are hanging.”

He ignored the suggestion and crossed the shadowy room
with an unhurried gait. “The solution is not to turn on the lights, but to extinguish your lamp.” He switched it off. “It is not so dark now. You see?”

It was true: the sky’s cool, blue glow filled the studio as my eyesight adjusted. Outside, the skyscraper towers were only black silhouettes, but across the street, in low-rise buildings here and there, candlelight and gaslight glimmered against glass and swayed on walls, and incandescent lights burned with a tireless, steady smolder.

Antoine was looking beyond the rooflines, at the sky. He spoke quietly. “I went to Montreal for only a few days—and returned after five weeks. Did you not wonder what had become of me?”

“I thought that you made up your mind you never wanted to see me again.”

“I was a hostage in your old land of refuge, Mignonne. First the Americans told me I had not the paperwork to return, then my body turned on me. I was ill, so drugged that I could only sleep. I wish I could leave this old crock of a body. Since my crash in the Sahara, it only betrays me. Even yesterday, for perhaps an hour or two, I was again like a man on his deathbed. One minute nothing, the next, a fever of thirty-three.” He glanced at me. “I don’t know what it is in your Fahrenheit. This strange pain I have, this thing that comes and goes as fast as a rabbit in its hole, that has plagued me for years, I thought at last it would be the end of me. God’s hand has crushed me into the ground many times and I did not fear. But then, a sudden fever, a sharp pain …”

“You should sit down.”

“Death doesn’t frighten me. I only felt sad that I might die with so little achieved and with no purpose ahead.”

“Oh, Antoine, don’t be ludicrous. Regardless of what happens with the Air Force, you still have your writing to do.”

“I do have writing to do, in fact.” His tone lifted. “And not
just the unfinished manuscript I lug around. I have been working on an idea for something completely different: a sort of children’s tale about a pilot and a boy, a young prince who appears from out of nowhere.”

“Kind of how you like to show up at my door?”

“Perhaps—if I came from another planet and not just from uptown.”

“Tell me about this prince.”

“Come, let’s sit where it’s comfortable. If we’re going to talk about a boy who lives on an asteroid, we should be looking at the stars.”

“There are no stars tonight.”

“Stars often require imagination.” He took my hand and led me across the studio. As we settled on the sofa, he said, “When I fly, I imagine the stars as lights shining up from the earth, one for each person who waits for me.”

How many waited for him—girls going through the motions of their business, keeping their hands busy, wrestling with their worries as they worked, the pinpricks of their lamps spread across the earth like storm lanterns placed on docks and doorsteps for the lost and the late?

This time he had been ill; another time he might be on a mission, or crashed, or traveling, or simply disappeared into the sitting room or the bedroom of some other patient girl. Did he really see all those burning hearts as coolly twinkling, infinitely distant stars? Had he never waited himself, never felt the ember flare and sting when prodded by the smallest thought? Waiting was tiring; it was taxing trying always to keep the pain at bay. Had he never learned this? Not even in the year I had been in Montreal?

I asked, “Who is it that waits for you?”

“There is always someone waiting.”

As there was always someone in love with him. “Do they ever give up on you?”

His gaze went again to the window.

I asked, “Do they ever fly with you?”

“Do you know how long it has been since I have flown?”

He knew I did. I refused to soften to his ache. “You have told me, yes.”

“Did I also tell you how I fell in love in the sky?”

“With the sky?”

“How I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife. Soon after I met Consuelo, I took her up for a ride. The plane was shaking as it clawed its way off the ground. I was crammed into the seat, my forehead almost glued to the window, the yoke close to my chest and the harness strapping me to the seat back that felt as though it could be snapped by the pressure of my spine as we lifted off—and when I looked over, there was Consuelo sitting as tiny as a sparrow perched on man’s palm, her eyes wide, her body trembling from head to toe. As soon as we were at altitude, I said something with a great show of bravado, about having her life in my hands. I pulled back on the stick and threw the plane into loops.”

“But that’s awful!” Just the thought made me feel sick.

“The engine stalled.”

“Oh my God.”

“We started hurtling out of the sky.”

I clutched his arm as though to stop him falling. I would never fly. I vowed I would never, ever fly.

Antoine covered my hand with his. “I had cut the engine on purpose.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I stalled it, and told Consuelo I would save us both if she would grant me a kiss. We were falling to our deaths—imagine—when I leaned in to her and—”

I stood up. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I have nothing to give you, Mignonne. I cannot give you commitment or children. I won’t abandon my wife. I cannot
live with her, I cannot spend any length of time with her, but I worry for her; I cannot entirely abandon my post. I cannot think when she’s near me, but neither can I leave her to struggle on her own.”

“No one’s asking you to leave Consuelo.”

“Don’t get angry.” He too stood. He smoothed back my hair. He said, “I know how it is. You wonder why I married her, why I stay married to her still.”

“You torture yourself.”

“I cannot undo a holy sacrament.”

“Sacrament or sacrifice? You’re like a man who is offered a knife but insists on staying tied to his stake.”

“And you are as free as a river.” His eyes grew moist. “And as pure. Oh, Mignonne. You cannot know how I suffocate. You can’t imagine how heavy I feel. I am drowning in uselessness. The Air Force doesn’t want me. I fail at love. I cannot write or fly. For half my life, I was like a farmer with the clouds as my fields. I saw the true face of the earth. Am I to forget all this, and join the masses that spend their lives on meaningless tasks, driven by the tyranny of petty things, for no reason except that it is expected of them?” His forehead furrowed sharply, eyelids closing on a fleeting pain.

I saw then why he couldn’t move forward with me. His whole life had stalled.

So I kissed him. I kissed his lips. I kissed his eyelids, his earlobe, his neck. I could save us both. I would take away every pain.

“I ought to leave,” he said.

“Stay.” I took his hand and slid it around me. I pulled the ribbon that cinched my waist. “Open my dress.”

Antoine’s chest was broad and solid, his arms muscular. His scars and imperfectly mended bones told of survival beyond the realm of hope. I had unbuttoned his shirt to feel his heart beat against mine. As his hands moved over my skin, as his fingertips
slid under my corset to my breasts, my breath quickened and deepened, and I reached for his belt—but he captured my wrist and urged me to the floor.

I sat on the rug while Antoine propped himself on his elbow beside me. He caressed my ankles and calves, then nudged my arms away from my legs, his bracelet’s engraved letters catching and holding the moonlight.

A minute ago I had felt so sure of myself, so unguarded, and now—

My breath caught. Antoine had licked my leg.

He arched over me, pushing my dress up, and his tongue grazed my knee. I started to tremble. His mouth mounted higher. I reached down, and his moist lips closed on my fingertips. His hand now moved between my thighs. A rivulet of sound unfurled in my throat.

Antoine raised his head to watch my face. Sweat gleamed on the hair of his chest. I tried to speak. The stars in the ceiling were shifting. How could this be wrong, this slide into emptiness and peace? For a long moment, everything seemed to suspend in a balance so perfect that it could only come from God himself.

Some long moments later, I inhaled.

I lay on my back on the rug, the breeze from the open windows stealing the dampness from my skin.

“There is something more you want, Mignonne?”

“Water.”

Antoine groaned.

I climbed onto the sofa to watch him pad away.

“Don’t fall asleep,” he said. “I will take you to your home.”

“No,” I murmured. “Can’t.”

Leo would throw a fit if he thought I’d been out alone so late, in the darkness of the emptying streets. Better to be in the locked studio, safe. Leo expected me to work all night; he had said so himself.