That night he tells Johnny once again the story of the Penguin King. Then he and Maddy make love. At first she resists, claiming she is too tired and full. Over the years, they had made love with less and less frequency. I find this out from Maddy later. Theirs had become a working relationship, and had long ceased being a passionate one. They were a team, she explained to me. After twenty years, some things change.
It would be overly simplistic to say this was the reason Harry did what he did, but it may have had something to do with it. My sex life has never been what one could call satisfactory, but I think that, like a muscle or a foreign language, it can be diminished if not practiced regularly. I had fewer expectations from sex, so I set my bar lower and found other pleasures of the flesh, namely food and drink. And, as with food, a person is less likely to patronize another restaurant if the cooking at the one he visits all the time continues to stimulate his appetite.
I have often thought about Maddy at this time of her life. How trusting she was. How ignorant. She made a vow and kept it. There had never been any question she wouldn’t. But despite her beauty, she was not a very sexual person. Not that she was indifferent to sex, but she regarded it the way someone else might consider chocolate or physical exercise. It had its benefits, even its pleasures, but it paled in comparison with what was truly important to her, which was love and family.
Like those born without money, those born without love want it all the more. It becomes the great solution, the answer to all problems. When Madeleine was just six months old, her mother left. Before her marriage her mother had been very beautiful, a highly paid fashion model from a humble background, but she didn’t leave to run off with another man. She was forced out by her mother-in-law, a wealthy and powerful woman who disapproved of her son’s choice in a wife. And he did not put up much of a fight. For him, it came down to a choice of love or money, a decision made easier for him because I honestly question whether he ever loved anyone. He never told Maddy the truth either, saying instead that her mother was crazy, a drug fiend.
It was easily handled. People were able to do things like that back then. There was one rule for the rich and another for everyone else. A telephone call to a lawyer was all it took. Threats were made, papers signed. Maddy lived with her grandmother for the next several years, until her father remarried, this time to someone deemed more suitable. Her older brother, Johnny, had stayed with their father, and together they left the country for a few years, living in St. Croix. But her mother, beaten by a system she never really understood, vanished from their lives. There had been one or two attempts at phone calls, usually on Maddy’s birthday or Christmas, but the calls had always been intercepted by her father, who simply hung up.
One time, when Maddy was seven or eight, still wearing her party dress, she came into the room just as her father was replacing the receiver. Who was that, Daddy? she had asked. Wrong number, he told her. She hadn’t learned yet not to trust him.
It wasn’t until Maddy was a freshman in college that she saw her mother again. She was living outside of Boston, near where she had grown up. For days Maddy debated contacting her, wondering if there was any point, if any good could come of it, but knowing in her heart that she had never been told the full story. Finally Maddy called her mother on the phone, arranging a meeting, unsure of what to expect. What kind of woman doesn’t fight for her own child? Maddy was then at an age where she still expected answers.
Her mother lived in a poor neighborhood of an old industrial town. Multifamily houses with plastic siding, children playing in the street, shuttered stores, cracked sidewalks, pit bulls barking behind chain-link fences. I still don’t know how Maddy located her. She doesn’t lie, but she can be selective in what she chooses to reveal.
When she arrived, her mother greeted her. The apartment was sparsely furnished. The paint on the walls was chipped, and it smelled of cat. I am sure Maddy had never been in a house like this before. She moves in a different world completely. A man sat in one of the only chairs watching television. He didn’t even look up. In the background, a pretty little girl with long blond hair peered out shyly, half-hidden by the kitchen door.
In the same way that we form an image of a character in a book, Madeleine had always had a picture in her mind of what her mother looked like. She had been too young to remember her mother, and her father had destroyed all photographs of her. Was her imagined mother drawn from a vague half memory, the dim recollection of a face above her, lifting her from a crib, holding her to her breast? Would seeing her mother be like looking in a mirror, and seeing an older version of herself?
This woman standing in the doorway was certainly not the mental image Madeleine had held for so long, and there was little of the beauty she had supposedly once possessed. It was a face worn down by poverty. Her teeth were bad. Her hair hung limply. For a moment, Maddy wondered if she was even in the right house.
“I’m Madeleine,” she said. She didn’t kiss her mother. She didn’t even know what to call her. “Mother” seemed wrong. It had been too long. They were total strangers.
“Hello, dear,” answered her mother, her accent pure Boston. “Come in.”
There are two sides to every story. The two women sat in the kitchen, sipping the coffee Maddy had brought from paper cups. There were no accusations, no remonstrations, no tears. On either side. How do you get back almost two decades? You cannot. But it was obvious to Maddy that her mother had suffered during that time. Awkwardly they chatted about what Maddy was studying; her brother, Johnny; even, delicately, her father. “He was such a good-looking man,” said her mother. “No one could resist him.” Why had she left? It wasn’t my fault, her mother answered. They held all the cards. What could I do? The old woman smiled humorlessly. The smile of a prisoner serving a life sentence. It was a long time ago, she said.
It was too much. After an hour Maddy found an excuse to go. When they parted, the two women embraced. There was no talk of a future meeting.
When Maddy returned to her room that night, I asked her what she had expected to find. Did she think it would be a tearful reunion? Did she expect them to fall into each other’s arms after being separated for nineteen years?
“It was awful,” she said. “You have no idea.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t just that she was so poor. It was that all my life I had felt so sorry for myself. That she must have been some kind of monster for not wanting me. But that wasn’t the case at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t come out and say it, but I could tell she was the real victim here, not me. It made me realize how horrible I have been to think these things about her all these years. I had always hated her for abandoning me, for making me the girl who didn’t have a mother. But they made
her
leave. They threatened her. What choice did she have? They had the money, the lawyers, the police if necessary. She had nothing. We destroyed her life.”
“We? You had nothing to do with it.”
She thought for a moment. “I didn’t, but I still did. It was about me. My grandmother didn’t want me raised by her. She was from the wrong side of the tracks. They told me she was crazy. That she had to be committed. That’s why she had gone. But that wasn’t true. They told her she would be arrested if she ever tried to find me. They would ruin her brothers. They lied to her. They lied to me.”
She was in tears now. I had seldom seen her cry. It was unnerving. I remembered the grandmother. A formidable dowager who had terrified me as a child but who had never been anything but loving to Maddy. The father, charming and monstrous, a wonderful athlete who had smashed nearly every club record, was still alive at that point, having divorced his third wife. He was the only parent she ever had. She would hear nothing bad said against him, even when he had been at his worst, wanting to believe in him, feeling that a false god was better than none at all.
Soon after that, she met Harry and never looked back. He was her family now. It would all be better. They waited to have Johnny. She wasn’t ready to share Harry with anyone. Then, she was. I was there the day Johnny was born. Everything was a movement away from what she had known to something better, something positive. I was, I am, so proud of her.
Why am I recounting all of this? Isn’t it obvious? For years people have thought I was sexless, or gay. Neither was true. I have never married because I was already in love, of course. Maddy was the first and the only woman I ever loved. I have tried others, but no one had her goodness, her sense of honor, her strength. I was ruined from an early age. But you have to understand that it wasn’t a selfish love. When she first met Harry, I understood. They were perfect together. I was old enough then and aware enough of my shortcomings to know that she needed someone like him. Someone strong. Someone true. Someone who could lift her in his arms and protect her. I was a confidant, a companion, and I resigned myself to that role because it was best for her.
There was one time when I tried. We were teenagers, maybe fifteen, and one night on one of our nocturnal outings, I tried to kiss her. But she laughed. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I love you,” I said, the epitome of adolescent angst. We were on the beach. We had snuck out on one of our moonlight sprees. I had brought marshmallows and a bottle of wine I had stolen from my parents’ cellar. I had been working up my courage all week. No, my whole life.
She was silent. It seemed to last for centuries. Then she spoke and told me I was her best friend, in many ways her only friend. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She wanted a friend. By then her breasts had grown in. They were—how can I put this delicately?—deliciously large. Surprisingly so. I ached to touch them. But she detested them. “I feel like a freak,” she said. She was already astonishingly beautiful, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
Even if I was the one with whom she chose to spend time, other men became part of her life. It was impossible to stop them. They surrounded her, but she wanted little to do with them. There was one Spanish boy she had met in Switzerland, but I think it was more of an experiment. To see what it was like. It didn’t last long. We never spoke in detail about it. I am grateful for that. I hated him, though I never met him. Gonzalo or Felipe. I can’t even remember his name, but he became my enemy when she told me about him and I couldn’t see what she would see in him.
But I understood Harry. He was the sort of man with whom she should have fallen in love, and she did. He was handsome, confident, talented, kind, and loving. He was what she needed, and I, the eternal eunuch, the faithful friend, at least knew she was happy. And while it was cold comfort, it was enough.
I
see them in their hotel room. Harry and Claire. I am not there but I can imagine. The heavy curtains have been drawn. The room is purple in darkness but objects are discernible. Above, an ornate ceiling maybe twenty feet high. Queens and movie stars have slept here. Outside, it is midafternoon, the weather dreary. Cars circle the
place
. Motorcycle messengers race by. Taxis idle, waiting for fares. Diamond necklaces glitter behind bulletproof glass in vitrines lining the hallway, and well-fed bankers return from lunch.
They are on the bed, fucking. Urgently, desperately, like starving men at a banquet. She is still wearing her shoes, her blouse. Their bags where the chasseur left them. The bottle of house champagne is untouched in its sweating ice bucket. The only sounds primal. The slap of flesh on flesh, the grunt of effort, the moan of pleasure. Two halves of a whole joined. An amulet, the key to a kingdom. There is nothing else in the world.
Afterward she tells him it was the best ever. She holds him, her hands cool around the tender flesh.
“Yes,” he smiles, exhausted. “God, yes.”
He lets her sleep, tired from her long flight and the time change. For him, the time is the same. He dresses and slips out, quietly closing the door behind him. Instead of taking the elevator, he walks down the carpeted stairwell. He nods to the clerks at the front desk and the concierge, who smile urbanely back at him. He is unknown to them. He hasn’t been here in years. He has yet to make an impression. They take in his coat, his shoes. Is he a good tipper? They will know him by name, grant him the benefit of their knowledge, their network of contacts, doors will unlock. If he tips poorly, monsieur will find that tables cannot be procured, tickets are regrettably unavailable. It is a simple relationship, the simplest.
For Harry the anonymity is a thrill that he wears like a protective veil. On the street he turns down Rue de Castiglione to Rivoli, heading under the colonnade, past the cafés and shops catering to tourists. On the far side, the trees of the Tuileries are barren, the grass brown, the benches empty. He carefully crosses the Place de la Concorde, heading toward the Seine. This is not the real Paris, the Paris of students, Algerians thin as blades, old women who feed stray cats. Of cheap shops, trade unions, and streets whose names celebrate long-forgotten victories. The France of working people, of eating lunch at home, of market day and bad shoes. This is the Paris of visitors, of the rich, of diplomats, and of those who cater to them. It is a façade, but a pleasing one nevertheless.
Years ago he knew a homosexual
comte
who lived in an apartment nearby. It was a fabulous apartment, on the
grand etage,
decorated like an Egyptian nightclub. Harry and Maddy had been drinking with him all night and had gone everywhere. Ledoyen, Castel’s, Le Baron, and finally, as the birds began to sing, they went back to the
comte
’s for a last drink. It was dawn by that point. The
comte,
who was middle-aged and chubby, told Maddy that Harry was lucky his wife was along. Harry, who was younger and stronger than the
comte,
smiled, unthreatened, amused by the Proustian decadence of it all.