Authors: Christine Sneed
Laurent gave her a blank look. “My ex-wife? Anne-Claire? I don’t remember Jeanne-Lucie saying anything about that.”
“She said it to me earlier, before you got to the gallery. Is your ex-wife really planning to come by?”
He grimaced. “That is ridiculous. No, no, I doubt it.”
“She told me that Anne-Claire likes to introduce herself to all your girlfriends.” They made their way through the hushed courtyard that smelled of damp soil into the tiny elevator designed to accommodate at most two adults and a small child, though three adults sometimes tried to squeeze into it. Twice since Jayne’s arrival the strain of three grown bodies had caused an alarm to sound in the elevator’s narrow glass box, a high-pitched, angry beeping that had summoned her from the apartment to check on the cause of the noise, one of the passengers chuckling and cursing as he got out of the elevator to take the stairs the rest of the way up to his own floor.
Laurent laughed as he jabbed the button for the third floor with his middle finger. On it he wore a gold signet ring that had initially seemed like a dandy’s affectation, but she had grown used to it, and now his finger looked naked and vulnerable when he didn’t wear it. “I don’t know why Jeanne-Lucie would have said that. You’re my only girlfriend, and I don’t think you will meet Anne-Claire anytime soon, though maybe she said something to make Jeanne-Lucie think so. I really don’t think that my daughter is trying to cause problems.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her toward him. On his breath she could smell the wine he’d had with dinner, and the garlic from his roast chicken. She’d had a salade Niçoise and had noticed that Jeanne-Lucie gave her a peculiar look as the waiter took her order. Perhaps she wasn’t supposed to order a salad for dinner, but why did it matter? Sometimes her ignorance exhausted her. It would get easier, she hoped, and it wouldn’t have mattered at all if Jeanne-Lucie hadn’t been there to give her a disapproving look. The only time Laurent had commented on something she ordered was on one of their first dates. She had asked the waiter for a Coke, not a glass of wine, to go with her salmon filet. That he could not condone. (“You are an adult woman,” he’d scolded, a little incredulous. “A Coke is a child’s drink!” “I don’t drink that much wine, she said.” “I never really have.” He raised his eyebrows and said, “Probably because you have not had enough good wine.”)
“I hope you’re right about Jeanne-Lucie,” said Jayne. “I’m not expecting us to be best friends, but I do hope we can be friendly.”
He pressed his nose to her hair, pulling her closer as the elevator labored up to their floor. “We may not tell you our life stories and invite you to our birthday party the day after meeting you, but the French are not as unfriendly as some people think we are,” he said. “Jeanne-Lucie will probably ask you to lunch soon.” A moment later, he looked over his shoulder at Jayne as he unlocked the door, his key a blunt, blocky object much sturdier than the thin, notched keys she still had from home, stashed in the back of a drawer with the lace bras and underwear she had picked out and Laurent had paid for at Galeries Lafayette a few days after her arrival, along with two dresses, one black, the other mauve. Both fit as if they’d been tailored for her, and their fine-spun cotton and silk fabric was so light against her skin she would have been happy to wear them every day.
“Do you really think she will ask me?” she asked now.
“Yes, of course.”
She didn’t reply. What a long day it had been, first André accusing her of using Laurent to get a show at their gallery, and then an impromptu meeting and dinner with Laurent’s aloof daughter, who apparently wanted her to come over for lunch.
Laurent locked the door behind them and bent down to take off his shoes, arranging them on the coarse wool mat where she sometimes left her shoes too. He stood up and took both of her hands in his. “What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Don’t look so sad,” he said. “Everything is wonderful, no? Je t’aime, chérie.” He put his arms around her and drew her against his chest. He was strong and slim; she liked that he did not carry weight around the belly that so many other men his age did.
She was conscious of her breathing, of his breathing too. “Moi aussi, Laurent,” she said softly, both reassured and buoyed by his tenderness. “Je t’aime.”
For weeks these words had only inhabited her thoughts; it was both unsettling and thrilling to hear them spoken aloud now. He pulled her closer and kissed her before stepping back a little to press his forehead to hers. She leaned into him. Before Laurent, she had told three other men that she loved them—Henry, her one serious boyfriend in high school, and a college boyfriend, Nick, who eventually hurt her badly by cheating on her with one of her former dormmates during the spring semester that Jayne had studied in Strasbourg. The third man, Sebastian, was someone she had dated after college, although they had known each other since high school. He’d lived in Chicago the whole time they dated; by then, she had moved from Washington to New York. Their relationship ended after thirteen months, in part because she had trouble affording the frequent trips they took back and forth to see each other, and he wasn’t ready to move in together. She believed that she was, and his reluctance and the breakup had taken a while to recover from. She had never told Colin that she loved him, though at times she had thought she did.
Laurent was holding her against his warm, familiar body, one, like her own, that had only a finite number of years in the world to make an impression, to do good or harm or nothing at all other than sleep and eat and spend many hours each week at a job that wore it down and emptied it out. And what had her life been so far? What had she done other than sleep and eat and plod to work after she left behind college and her adolescent longings to be someone who positively influenced the way other people thought about and moved through the world?
“Come to bed,” Laurent whispered.
She followed him down the hall, past the portraits of the family that stared out at them noncommittally, into the bedroom, where they undressed and he touched her almost reverently before lowering himself onto her, his heat blanketing her body as he moved inside her. She closed her eyes, and the person she imagined was him, but as a younger man, as he looked in a photo taken with a boyhood friend in Switzerland, where they’d been hiking on a summer trip with their girlfriends, Laurent a year and a half from marrying and another year from fatherhood. He had told Jayne that he and his wife had been faithful to each other for more than ten years, but then suddenly they were not. She’d wanted to know more, but when she asked who had strayed first, he shook his head and said that neither of them had been blameless. “But who cheated first?” she had asked again.
He’d looked at her, weariness registering in his expression. Do we really need to go over this again? Jayne could almost hear him thinking, even though she had never before asked what had happened. “I suppose that I did,” he’d said. “But Anne-Claire and I didn’t exactly compare notes.”
Later he had added, “It was going to end. That is what matters. Not who did what first.”
He was close to drifting off when she settled her head against his shoulder and whispered, “I’m very happy.” She thought she could feel him smiling in reply.
But instead he said, “You will get used to it, Jayne. People always do, no matter how happy their lives are. They get used to it and don’t feel so happy anymore.”
“Why do you think that? That’s so depressing,” she said, raising herself up on one elbow to peer down at him. He was smiling, but she didn’t think he was joking.
He shook his head. “No, not really. It is good to know this because then it will not be so surprising when it happens.” His silver hair stood up in small peaks along his forehead. Women everywhere, even brisk, businesslike Parisian women, found him striking. Jayne had noticed them eyeing him on the street and in the shops and restaurants he took her to. The women also looked her over, trying to decide if she was pretty and put together well enough to be a real rival. Or maybe they were trying to figure out if she was his daughter.
“You invited me to live here with you so that I would be happier than I was in New York, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course I did. I’m not saying that you won’t be happy here, on the whole, but I suspect at times you will feel some restlessness.”
For a second, she thought about bringing up André’s withdrawals from the gallery account in retaliation for Laurent having taken a pin to her bubble of contentment, but she was tired and knew he too would be asleep within seconds if he closed his eyes. She felt sure that he had some idea André had written checks out to himself; he’d made no apparent attempt to disguise them in the ledger.
“Good night,” she finally said.
“Bonne nuit, chérie,” murmured Laurent, reaching for her hand and squeezing it once before he closed his eyes for the night.
She awoke a few hours later, Laurent asleep next to her, his chest rising and falling lightly under the fragrant cotton sheet. She lay there groggily wondering how much malignancy, if any, the invisible force field she had stepped into at the gallery contained. She wasn’t interested in driving a wedge between André and Laurent. She wanted to paint and enjoy her life, as Laurent expected her to do. After all, for the first time since childhood, she was freed from real concerns about money. It was foolish, possibly even ruinous, to scavenge for problems.
Around five, unable to fall back asleep, she got up to use the bathroom and checked her e-mail on her phone on the way back to bed. Colin’s name was in her in-box, the first time he had written since April. The sight of his waiting e-mail woke her up fully, guilt and nostalgia warring in her chest. Only a couple of days earlier she’d come across a photo of Colin and herself on her computer, one taken at a friend’s farewell-to-summer party the previous Labor Day. He was turned toward her, looking at her with openhearted fondness, but her expression was more subdued, her eyes on someone out of view; she couldn’t now remember who it was. On the old Epson in Laurent’s office, she’d printed the photo in black and white, and later that day she’d begun sketching it.
This was the first time she had chosen Colin as her subject, and she thought that she might eventually paint the photo. Laurent wouldn’t recognize him; he didn’t know what her ex-boyfriend looked like, and as an artist whose subjects chose her as often as—if not more often than—she chose them (this a line she had heard Laurent himself use more than once), it seemed to be within her rights to paint Colin if she was inspired to do so.
With uncanny clarity, she could still see his retreating back on the frigid February morning they had last seen each other, his shoulders hunched in his black overcoat, hair shaggy and in need of a trim. It was months ago now, but she remembered that last meeting in painful detail, one where he had angrily forked pancakes into his mouth at the breakfast place she had suggested in the East Village, Colin complaining about his job and his philandering older brother.
It was foolish to think so, but she almost felt as if the sketch she had just begun had summoned his e-mail, its subject line “Hey.” No greeting, only an immediate leap into the message:
Heard you moved to Paris. I got a new job a few weeks ago and now will probably have to travel there every few months. Might be fun to meet up for a drink, etc. if you have time. I can let you know when I’ll be there.
OK thanks, Colin
His “OK thanks,” its pretense of casual politeness, made her pause. Omitting his name completely or signing off as just “Colin” without “Sincerely” or “Yours” or “Regards” seemed too abrupt, maybe? When they were together, he had signed his e-mails “The One and Only C,” if he was in a jokey mood, or with an assumed name: “Gordon Higgins Poindexter III” or “Jules Whitsunday” or once, her favorite, “Carl P. Sagan (Please do not confuse me with the famous astrophysicist, Carl E. Sagan—I am tired of answering his e-mails!).”
She typed three different replies but didn’t send any of them. She would write to him later, after she had some idea of what she wanted to say. Surely she didn’t owe him an immediate reply?
And what did he mean by the “etc.”? He probably didn’t know himself.
After her unsuccessful attempts to reply to Colin’s e-mail, Jayne went back to bed and tried to fall asleep again but couldn’t descend into anything deeper than fitful dozing. Laurent got up as usual a few minutes before eight, dressed himself in the clothes hanging on the back of the door, and left for the
tabac
to buy the newspaper and drink his first espresso of the day. The second one he liked to have around two or three in the afternoon and often made it himself on the office machine at the gallery, which Jayne was still learning how to use. It was an expensive Italian model that she knew he didn’t like other people to touch unless he had taken the time to oversee their first few attempts at pulling a shot, but typically no one dared, other than André. More than once after André had used it, she had seen Laurent stand frowning before the machine,
tsk
ing over the stray grounds and dried drops of espresso his partner had not wiped off the metal plate beneath the portafilter.
When he left the apartment, calling
au revoir
from the main hall, Jayne heard his heavy key in the lock, then the reassuring click of steel meeting wood. She stayed in bed for a few more minutes and listened to the passing cars and mopeds in the street, the latter’s buzzing engines, especially as they receded, always more plaintive than ornery to her ear. If Laurent had asked what image brought Paris most quickly to her mind, she would have said it was a sound, not a scene—the insect drone of Vespas and the occasional cough or roar of the motorcycles driven by delivery boys and students, sometimes a well-dressed man or woman, bright scarf flying.
Her sister and Liesel had both asked if she felt lonely in Paris, if she minded knowing almost no one. No, because it was all a strange relief, liberation from the small box she sometimes felt that the people she knew in New York had packed her into: college grad but no money, no husband, no kids, artistic pretensions that so far have led to nothing of note. The box’s sides would be marked
THREAT LEVEL LOW
.