Authors: Christine Sneed
The next morning, she saw that Liesel had sent her an e-mail overnight:
Dear Paris,
Where are your coffee and donut guys? Why are there only crepes guys everywhere? How am I supposed to get a decent sesame bagel? God help me.
Love, Jayne.
P.S. I have better tits than Liesel does.
Jayne replied,
Dear New York,
If you’d put in some alleys instead of forcing people to put their rancid trash on the streets, maybe you’d be a world-class city like Paris.
Yrs, Liesel.
P.S. Don’t believe a word Jayne says about me. She’s on heavy meds.
Liesel wrote back with a question and a retort:
Paris doesn’t have any alleys either, does it? And quit talking smack about New York and my tits.
Paris is more beautiful than New York, with or without alleys
, Jayne insisted.
And FYI, I don’t need heavy meds, not since I moved to France. You can have all my prescriptions.
It was a humid afternoon, and Jayne was sweating as she walked across the center of the city to rue Montorgueil. She would buy a sandwich for lunch and drop by Vie Bohème to ask Laurent about the check for Pauline. In the shop windows she glanced at as she drifted southeast across the eighth arrondissement in the direction of the Palais de l’Elysée, she saw many of the accoutrements of privileged lives, the quarter filled with the wealthy and well-dressed: men’s and women’s highly polished leather shoes, onyx and silver fountain pens, theatrically lush potted orchids, leather satchels, fine porcelain and crystal vases. At a notions store, she stopped to study a half dozen skeins of lavender wool yarn and a row of silver thimbles arrayed beneath a rainbow display of cotton thread, the spools a faithful reflection of the ROY G BIV acronym she had learned in grade school. In Paris no acquisitive whim seemed too trivial.
A few art galleries lived in between the boutiques too, ones with such discreet signage they were easy to miss. Laurent scoffed at his eighth-arrondissement competition, though she suspected that his dismissal was fueled by envy, he the competitor with a less desirable address. The block of rue du Louvre where Vie Bohème was situated was respectable, the rent high, she imagined, as it doubtless was for most storefronts in the better arrondissements, but the area was less fashionable than the quarter where they lived.
To be on her own, to have the license and means to roam a city like this one—she still had trouble believing it when she awoke next to Laurent and looked up at the ceiling on some mornings, a ceiling above which no one stomped with exuberant rudeness in the deadest hours of night. Her new happiness felt vibrant but precarious, as if she had been recruited without qualifications to care for a delicate, priceless object—a fragile glass cup that would shatter if she didn’t learn how to hold it with precise amounts of gentleness and tenacity.
Aside from Melissa, who seemed sincere in her happiness, if not also sometimes flattened by the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, Jayne could think of no woman she was close to who claimed to be happy. Her sister Stephanie? No, brave jokes notwithstanding. Their mother? No, definitely not, despite her attempts to disguise her midlife anomie. Her former boss at the shoe boutique? Taking care of a father dying of throat cancer. Liesel? Lonely and frustrated by her bad luck with men. Her old boss at the accounting firm? College-age daughter struggling with anorexia. Daphne and Kirstie? Both were so nervous about their impending motherhood that Daphne, who wasn’t carrying the baby, had started smoking pot after work most days, something that infuriated Kirstie. Jayne was curious about Pauline too; what would this practical woman have said if questioned about her state of mind? She might have laughed and shaken her head. She might have said, “Don’t worry about it. Just be. Happiness isn’t a right. It’s a privilege.”
The city, steamy with sun and noonday commerce, with droves of helmeted men on motorcycles—so many more than Jayne remembered from nine years ago. She made her way to rue Montorgeuil, where she bought a can of Orangina and a falafel sandwich and ate it while perched on a curb with other people-watchers near the Saint-Eustache entrance to Les Halles. The area was under construction, and benches were hard to find, the few not obstructed by construction barricades occupied by tourists wilting in the day’s humidity. From behind her sunglasses Jayne watched a couple’s exchange move from friendly to heated, the miniskirted strawberry-blond woman turning away and stalking off; the man, his light blue shirt open at the neck, lavender tie loosened, staying where he was, a stunned half smile on his dark face. The woman did not look back at him; after a moment, the man, trying hard to arrange his face in an attitude of indifference, went in the other direction, toward rue du Louvre. Jayne soon followed his trajectory down the block to the south, where Vie Bohème and its beach-scene paintings awaited her, and, she hoped, Laurent did too.
At dinner with his daughter the previous night, he had said something that Jayne had not heard him say before. Jeanne-Lucie had asked Jayne what she liked best about living in Paris, and when Jayne replied that there was never any shortage of interesting things to look at, Laurent answered before his daughter could, “Un peu trop, peut-être. But better there is too much than too little. I think that is what a city is, at its heart—a gallery with millions of curators.”
His kind dark eyes had fastened on Jayne’s as he spoke. He raised a hand and swept it toward the window, an elegant, encompassing gesture. She felt an almost ferocious wave of tenderness for him. “I love that,” she said. “That’s such a beautiful way of seeing.”
“It is nice, Papa,” Jeanne-Lucie agreed.
“Paris is always in flux,” said Laurent. “New York too. Any city, I would say.”
“Yes, and maybe that is why people like them so much,” said Jayne.
“Or don’t like them,” said Jeanne-Lucie with a small laugh. She glanced at Marcelle, who was craning her neck to look at a little boy two tables over who had fallen asleep in his chair. “Do-do,” said Marcelle, looking at her mother. “Le petit garçon fait do-do dans le restaurant.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Jeanne-Lucie gently. “He
is
sleeping in the restaurant.”
“I want to,” said Marcelle.
“No, chérie. At home, wait until we get home. Then tu feras do-do.”
Laurent was not at the gallery, but André was. Jayne found him sitting in a half slouch behind the antique trestle table, paging through an office supply catalog, when she arrived a few minutes after two thirty. He looked handsome in his beige summer sweater, matching loafers, and navy blue pants woven from a fine, soft-looking linen. One of her bosses at the accounting office on Fourteenth Street had had a pair that in her memory was almost identical. She wanted to touch the fabric, to confirm that it was linen and not some convincing counterfeit.
After she’d said hello, but before she could ask where Laurent had gone and when he would be back, André gave her an odd look. Through the forgiving filter of recollection, she would later think that the look was more amused than angry.
“You will have your show, Jayne,” he said. “Laurent and I talked this morning and decided that you will be in a spring vernissage with two other artists. No sooner had you and I spoken of it, et alors, Laurent told me that he wanted to schedule it.”
How pronounced his cheekbones are, she thought, gazing at him. In the next second, she wondered if she might not be able to breathe, his words narrowly penetrating the haze of her disorientation.
“Jayne?” he said. “You agree, yes?”
She stared at him. His voice seemed far away.
He hopped off his stool. He was smiling, and for a second her eyes refused to recognize him. He took her by the elbow, shaking her arm softly, aware, it appeared, of her stupefaction.
“Jayne,” he repeated. She could smell his cologne, cut hay and cloves. “Are you awake? Did you hear me?” he asked, raising his voice.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I would love to be in the show. I don’t quite know—I’m—thank you, André.”
“How very nice it is when we get what we want.” He paused. “It is what you want, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Where is Laurent? I want to thank him too.”
“He is with Sofia. They were meeting for lunch, but by now, I am thinking that lunch is over.” His expression was mischievous. She could imagine him as a boy, waiting for the girls in his class to sit down so that he could pull the chair out from under them.
“Sofia?” she said. She could hear a clock ticking. It seemed impossible that it might be André’s wristwatch, but she didn’t know where else it could be coming from. Maybe her ears were ringing in some new, awful way. He wanted to undermine her happiness, she understood absently. “The woman who did the six portraits of the family in our apartment?” she asked.
“Yes, that is Sofia.” André smiled. “You have not met her yet?”
“No, I thought she was in Italy.”
“She was, but she is back now,” he said. “Laurent and I would like you to display four or five paintings in the spring, Jayne, and maybe two or three drawings. Laurent showed me pictures of some of your paintings.” Seeing her look of surprise, he asked, “Did you know he had taken pictures of them?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“They are good paintings, better than I expected, to be honest.” He smiled again.
The ground felt strange, almost spongy, beneath her feet. On the heels of the news that she would be given a show, she was having trouble understanding the information that Laurent was out somewhere with Sofia. Or had been with her, if he wasn’t anymore. She had been caressed, then slapped. She looked at André but could only say thank you.
He turned and motioned for her to follow him. “Would you help me with the espresso machine?”
“Doesn’t someone need to stay up front?” she asked, still trying to recover her equilibrium.
He glanced back at her, a half smile on his lips. “Do not worry, Jayne. It will only be for a minute. We will hear if someone comes in.”
She trailed after him into the back room. He left the door open but herded her toward the espresso maker, far enough into the office to be out of view of the gallery’s street entrance, she would later realize. The Rancilio machine gleamed reassuringly. Laurent had likely wiped its vented plate and stainless steel sides when he’d opened the gallery earlier that day, using the soft pink cloth that he shook out into the wastebasket under her desk after each use and kept folded neatly in a drawer beneath the machine.
André stopped a foot in front of her, and turned abruptly. He put both of his hands on her shoulders and before she could step away or fully register the warning signals her body was sending out, his mouth was on hers. She did not try to pull back, not fast enough, she dimly recognized. His lips were warm, and when he touched her lower lip with his tongue, she still did not push him away. That evening she would wonder if she’d been too dazed to react angrily, too off balance from the news he had delivered like two subsequent blows to the face: the spring show and Laurent’s long lunch date with the brilliant Sofia. Though it was also possible that she had actually wanted to kiss him.
She was aware that from the beginning, she had been both attracted and repulsed by André and could recall almost every detail of the evening they’d met. He had come into Vie Bohème in New York wearing a gray herringbone overcoat, laughing at something the blond woman on his arm had said, her hair pulled tightly back, her lips so plump Jayne thought that they’d been injected with collagen, both the woman’s and André’s faces pink from the cold night air. Laurent and Jayne had been on their way to dinner, and her own cheeks were burning with pleasure. A moment earlier he had told her how pretty she looked in her green minidress, one she’d bought a year earlier for twenty-two dollars at Uniqlo, though she hadn’t told him this.
André had smiled at her for a long moment before enveloping her hand in both of his. “C’est un vrai plaisir, Jayne. Enchanté
,
” he murmured. “You are as lovely as Laurent has said.” The blond woman, Tiffany van Something, laughed with forced cheer and hardly acknowledged Jayne when they were introduced.
Later, over dinner, Laurent had made fun of his partner. “He is very gallant, isn’t he,” he’d said, his smile inscrutable. “‘Enchanté, chérie. Un vrai plaisir. Mais oui, un vrai plaisir, chérie.’”
André’s hands were now migrating from her shoulders to the back of her neck, his fingers twining in her hair, but a noise from the gallery’s main room made her leap back in alarm. He groaned softly and looked at her, blinking. The kiss had lasted at most five seconds, but if Laurent had witnessed any part of it, Jayne knew that he would have been no less angry or disappointed than if it had gone on for five minutes.
“C’est rien,” he said, his eyes dilated, his lashes coarser than she’d previously noticed. “That was from the street.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. She went to the office doorway and looked into the empty show room. Her breaths were coming in small gulps. She needed to leave before Laurent returned and sensed that something had happened.
“I have to go,” she said, glancing at André. Her throat was constricted. He stared at her, his face unreadable, but he said nothing before she turned again and fled into the bright sunlight of midafternoon, out into the stream of people and cars moving on the street with swift, impervious ignorance.
As she walked back to rue du Général-Foy, half breathless with disbelief at her shameful behavior, she was hardly aware of the red lights that her body, as instinctive as a well-trained dog’s, knew enough to stop for.
Her mind kept reviewing the same three thoughts:
She would have a show in the spring in Paris.
Laurent had been out with Sofia and had not told her that he would be seeing this other woman.
She had kissed his business partner, who both offended and inconveniently appealed to her. And if he tried to kiss her again, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Why didn’t she know for sure that she would shout at him or slap his face?