Secrets of Paris (14 page)

M
ICHAEL SWAM THREE
times before he saw Anne Dumas at the Piscine Deligny. On his fourth visit he sat in a folding chair reading
Le Monde;
the sun, startlingly hot for such an early hour, warmed his thighs. His bathing suit was baggy, a red tartan bought by Lydie at the Tog Shop one summer on Nantucket. The other men at the nearly deserted pool wore tight spandex suits in glittery colors: lavender, orange, red. The suits left nothing to the imagination, and Michael wondered whether his cock would look so impressive in a suit like that. Michael thought them vulgar, too obvious, like the mating plumage on peacocks or the scarlet rumps of great apes. Did women find the style attractive? Only two women were at the pool so far this morning, both wearing
scanty bikinis. The narrow strips of fabric were a tease, but alluring, not like the men’s suits.

Michael stared at one of the women. She was tan, a little plump, so pretty. She smiled at him, and he looked away. God, when had he started ogling sunbathers? His head spun, as if from heatstroke, but Michael knew it was from desire. He felt dirty, as though he were doing something illicit. And wasn’t he? He had told Lydie about his plans to swim, much the way a businessman tells his wife the clean details of a business trip: the hotel where he will stay, the meetings he will attend, the presentation he will deliver. Omitting, the way Michael omitted his real reason for coming to the pool, any mention of the female colleague who will be taking the same trip.

Last night, lying beside his sleeping wife, Michael had imagined swimming alongside Anne, reaching for her underwater, kissing her as they sank to the bottom of the pool. He had imagined her breasts, so round and full under the light summer dresses she wore; in the pool the tips would harden to points. He had imagined his erect penis magnified underwater, entering her as she lay on the cool tile. All this action was happening at the bottom of the pool, and Michael found it interesting that the fantasy made him feel so guilty that he was drowning himself and Anne in it.

Yet here he was, back at the pool. And there was Anne, real, in the corner of his eye. His heart raced. He squinted, concentrating on an article about the political right in Lyon.

“Hey, there,” she said. “You came.”

“Hi,” Michael said, trying to sound surprised. He shaded his eyes. She wore a yellow caftan over her bathing suit, green espadrilles on her feet. She grinned; she looked so happy to see him that he rose and kissed her cheek.

“Come on, let’s swim,” she said. The caftan dropped to the
floor, revealing a turquoise maillot. Michael thought of his fantasies about bikinis and skintight swim trunks, and he laughed. Anne tilted her head, inquisitive, but Michael just smiled. She dove into the pool.

What had seemed so sexual, so unbearably erotic in his fantasy, turned into merely a vigorous workout. Michael swam in the lane beside Anne. Turning his head to take a breath, he glimpsed her legs kicking. A flash of pale thigh, muscular calf; he pulled ahead. He heard his heartbeat echo in his head, unbelievably, slower than it had been when she had first approached on dry land. He was out of shape. He hadn’t the energy or strength to think about what could happen, or to make it happen. Instead, he swam as if his life depended on it. As if his ship had sunk a mile out of the harbor and he was fighting against an ebb tide and an undertow to reach the shore.

He couldn’t swim anymore. He stopped, treading water, gasping for air. His eyes stung from chlorine, but he scanned the pool, looking for her. There she was, halfway to the other end, stroking steadily. She touched the pool’s rim, then kicked off, coming toward him. Easy. Without looking up, she knew exactly where to stop.

“Had enough?” she asked.

He spoke with deliberate smoothness, to give her the idea he had his breath back. “For now.”

“It is good for you to start off slowly,” she said. “Swimming is the best exercise there is.”

“You were right,” Michael said. “This place is practically empty.”

“Isn’t it nice?” Anne said. “Now, let’s get out of the water before you die.”

They dried their faces on towels, then lay side by side on chaise longues. Michael was silent, his eyes closed, enjoying her
closeness. She was right there, the woman he had fallen in love with. He wished the day stretched ahead without appointments. What time was it? Eight-thirty? Nine? He wished that his Louvre project would lead to another, so that he could stay in Paris forever. He felt her take his hand.

He opened his eyes, turned his head to look at her.

“Hi,” she said, watching him. She held his hand lightly, as though she wasn’t quite sure she wanted him to notice.

He said nothing, only looked.

“We could go somewhere,” she said. She smiled, ducked her head. “Oh, it’s embarrassing to ask …”

“No,” Michael said. “It’s not. I want to.”

“Will you come to my house? It is not far …”

Michael wondered whether this was how it felt to be hypnotized. He stood, gathered his towel and newspaper, followed Anne to the bathhouses. If she had told him to bark like a dog, he might have dropped to his knees and howled. She disappeared into one bathhouse, his signal to find his own and get dressed. He moved in slow motion, as though injected with a muscle relaxant. He noticed, with great clarity, the details of his clothes. The waistband of his boxer shorts, his blue boxer shorts, coming apart now, trailing filaments of elastic. His white broadcloth shirt bearing laundry marks from Wong’s in New York and the Blanchisserie Clement Marot here in Paris. The madras tie, a gift from Julia.

His trance evaporated the instant he stepped from the dark bathhouse into the bright sunlight. Anne stood there, glowing, the sun on her hair. He went to her, held her face between his hands, kissed her. The kiss was white-hot, fire. Then she touched a cool hand to the back of his neck, making him shiver.

She pulled away. Her smile was gentle, forgiving: it gave him one last chance to get away. He thought of Lydie. He thought her name, “Lydie,” and an image of her collarbone, elegant and
delicate, came to him. Then Michael, whose romance with Anne had so far taken place in his dreams and imagination, willed his mind to be empty.

“Is it too far to walk?” he asked.

She lived in an apartment on the second floor of an old, impeccably restored building in the Sixth Arrondissement. It overlooked the rue Jacob, a street so narrow it afforded exquisite intimacy with the building just opposite. Anne walked to the window, to draw the curtain, but Michael stopped her. He stepped onto the balcony, looked up and down the street.

“You must know your neighbors well,” he said, gazing across the street into the boudoir of one, the living room of another. He was stalling for time, and he knew it.

“I know everything about every one of them,” Anne said. “For example, the man who lives there.” She pointed at a window to the left. “Every night at eight o’clock he appears on his balcony in white pajamas. He unwraps a cigar, bites the end off it, and spits it into the street. Then he disappears. And the man who lives there …” She pointed at the window exactly opposite. “He is a doctor. On weekdays he lives with his wife, who is fat and blond, but on weekends, when she goes to visit her mother, his mistress, who is fat and blond, moves in.”

Michael stared at the doctor’s apartment. He kept a red plastic garbage can on the balcony. Also a collection of brooms and mops. Then he noticed the apartment above, which had laundry hanging on a line between two windows. “You’d think the doctor would put a tree or something there instead of cleaning supplies,” he said, thinking “mistress.”

“That building is a slum,” Anne said. “The inhabitants are all
well-to-do, but look: laundry hanging out, mops and garbage cans on every balcony.” She frowned, perhaps assessing the impression the building made on Michael. He noticed the tension in her shoulders, her neck. She probably wondered what they were doing, standing in front of her window, talking about her neighbors. He hated to think of them living so close, looking in at her.

He put his arms around her, felt a thrill that reminded him of the first time he had touched a girl. Her smallness excited him, and why? Because it symbolized the difference between men and women? Because it reminded him of the year he shot up six inches, discovered sex, had to bend nearly double when dancing with girls in the gym? He lowered his head, kissed her deeply. Her lips felt soft; she tasted so delicious. Everything slid away except the kiss, their mouths, his and Anne’s. He wanted the kiss to go on, not stop; exactly the way that other times, during sex, just before coming, he would wish for the feeling to last, or at least recur on demand.

Anne stepped back. She held his forearms, smiled up at him. “I’m glad we are here,” she said.

“Yes,” Michael said. He glanced around, realized he was looking for the door to her bedroom.

“Would you like a tour of the house?” Anne said, teasing him.

“Okay.” He lifted her into his arms. Laughing, she pressed her cheek against his chest. He kissed her hair, which was damp from the pool and smelled of shampoo and chlorine. “Tell me where to go,” he said.

“Let’s start in that room,” she said, pointing to a closed door.

Michael actually held her with one arm as he turned the knob with his other hand; she weighed nothing at all. He felt dizzy, breathless. The room was dark as a cave; heavy curtains blocked the light, and Michael stumbled. Anne clutched his neck; he steadied himself.

“It’s an adventure,” she said. “We go in there.”

“In there?” They stood before what appeared, in the darkness, to be a tent. He brushed the fabric with the back of his hand, found an opening.

“It is my great folly,” Anne said, laughing. She tumbled out of his arms. “My bed, can you believe it?”

“Are we playing ‘Arabian Nights’?” Michael crawled in after her. It was snug, fantastic. He began to unbutton her blouse. She rolled away from him.

“Not ‘Arabian Nights,’ ” she said, “but there is a fantasy, certainly. This is a canopy bed from the seventeenth century.” Anne giggled. “Sometimes I think about it: how many people living at that time could have afforded such a thing? Not many, and one of them was Marie de Sévigné. What if this belonged to her? I don’t dare tell you what I paid for it; you would think I am crazy. The curtains are not old; I had them made.” She sat erect, handling a fold of the silk damask drapery. The stiff fabric rustled between her fingers. She seemed absent, her mind gone back to the court of Louis XIV.

“It’s beautiful,” Michael said, lying back.

He sensed, rather than saw or felt, Anne. And he felt sad, because he knew that, although he was about to make love with her, the great moment of romance had passed. He was wide awake. His own mood had slammed into Anne’s. There she was, upright, conjuring characters who had died centuries ago. He still wanted her, even though she was crazy. She unzipped his pants, lowered her mouth to his erection. Shivering, Michael closed his eyes. He reached for her shoulders; five minutes ago, this would have been exactly what he wanted.

T
HE BALL WOULD
be magnificent, Lydie decided. She had located a château in the Loire Valley, whose owners, a titled though impoverished elderly couple, rented it to paying guests by the day, weekend, or week. The eighteenth-century château stood in a park, surrounded by a moat, at the edge of a forest. It overlooked a swanless lake.

“It’s up to you,” she said over the phone to Didier. “It’s rather expensive, but I think it’s the perfect backdrop for our ball.”