Secrets of Paris (40 page)

“A roll, at least,” Patrice said. “Wouldn’t you say, Clothilde?”

Michael tensed. Lydie could feel it even though her back was to him. Then she heard Anne’s voice. “ ‘Because out of modesty and lack of interest in his appearance he had omitted to put ribbons on the bottom of his breeches, so that he looked quite naked …’ ” she said.

“Anne!” Michael said sharply.

Perhaps she didn’t quite recognize him. She tilted her head from side to side. “ ‘There was some muddle about his wig, which made him wear the side at the back for quite a time, so that his cheek was quite uncovered.’ ” Her voice rose until she nearly screeched: “ ‘He went on pulling, but what was wrong refused to come right. It was a minor disaster.’ ” At that she yanked Clothilde’s gold mask from her face and clutched it to her bosom.

Clothilde gasped and touched her cheek, which Anne had scratched. Fulbert leapt forward to grab the mask, but Anne kicked him in the groin. He fell to the ground moaning. Michael stepped toward her; Anne stepped back. Her eyes on his, she said, “ ‘But in the same line Monsieur de Montchevreuil and Monsieur de Villars got caught up in each other so furiously—swords, ribbons, lace, all the tinsel, everything got so mixed up, tangled, involved, all the little hooks were so perfectly hooked up with each other that no human hand could separate them …’ ”

“ ‘But what
completely
upset the gravity of the ceremony,’ ” Patrice said, seeming to quote from the same text as Anne, “ ‘was the negligence of old d’Hocquincourt …’ ”

Anne focused on her. Her eyes were no longer dreamy, but suspicious, as if she was not quite sure of where she was. She looked from Patrice to Michael to Lydie to the mask she held in her hands. Lydie could imagine her balling it up like a sheet of tinfoil. Anne stared down at it for a moment, then looked up at Patrice. She handed the mask to Clothilde, who accepted it, stunned. Fulbert sat on the ground, holding his crotch.

“It’s not so lovely, is it?” Anne asked.

“The mask?” Patrice said, slipping her arm around Anne’s shoulder. “No. I’m sure you-know-who would have considered it pretty gaudy.”

“She had the most exquisite taste,” Anne said.

“You remind me of her,” Patrice said. “Really. Where did you have that wig made?”

Anne dimpled, patted her hair. “At Monsieur Antoine’s,
bien sûr
. He is old and doesn’t take many new clients, but if you are interested, I shall introduce you.”

“How kind you are to share him with me,” Patrice said. She glanced quickly at Lydie, then led Anne away.

“What a shocking woman,” Clothilde said, examining her mask for damage. “I think we should call the police.”

“I don’t think Didier would like his ball spoiled by the police,” Lydie said, though she took a certain pleasure in imagining Anne hauled off to the big house.

The orchestra started playing a waltz. Clothilde and Fulbert strolled toward the dance floor, leaving Lydie and Michael alone under the trees.

I
T WAS NEARLY
dawn before Michael and Lydie reached Paris. With Michael driving, Lydie slept. She, who could never sleep in a moving vehicle, slept through that entire trip, the dreamless sleep of someone at peace. Only the sound of lorries, rumbling down the slow lane from the Rungis market, wakened her. A golden, cloudless sunrise shimmered over the city.

“Good morning,” Michael said, glancing over as she stretched.

“We’re already here?” she asked, smiling. “Are you exhausted?”

“I’m not tired at all,” he said. Instead of driving into Paris through the Port d’Italie, Michael continued along the Périphérique.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as they left the Eiffel Tower behind.

“Let’s not go home,” he said. “Let’s keep driving.”

“To where?” Lydie asked.

“Normandy.”

He replied so fast, Lydie wondered whether he had been there with Anne, found the perfect romantic hideaway. Was that where he had gotten tan? But, after last night, what would it matter? Her skin tingled with the memory of what she had viewed down the gun barrel. “Why Normandy?” she asked.

“Because we can drive there and back in one day. Because it’s on the sea, and you love the sea.”

“Oh,” she said, still half-asleep, not quite ready to fully waken. She longed to dream, as if further answers could be found deep in her unconscious. While she dozed again, Michael stopped at a
boulangerie
and brought croissants and café au lait out to the car.

They drove north in silence. At one point, Michael reached across the seat, covered Lydie’s hand with his. The sun rode low in the sky. Every field seemed full of cows. The flatlands around Paris gave way to rolling hills crowned with poplars. Every so often they drove through tiny towns, blinks of civilization that resembled each other: church, butcher, baker,
café-tabac
. On the open road old men rode bicycles. Workers hoed fields. Laundry flapped on clotheslines outside farmhouses. In every town, stout women and small children walked home with
baguettes
.

“The ball was beautiful,” Michael said after a few miles. “You did a great job.”

“I think Didier was pleased,” Lydie said. Didier hadn’t even known about Anne until it was over. Michael had tracked down an aunt, who had called Anne’s doctor, who had booked her into a clinic in Anjou. “Didn’t Patrice save the day with Anne Dumas?”

“Two people who can quote Madame de Sévigné at the same party,” Michael said. “It’s bizarre.”

“Well, Patrice has read Anne’s book about a hundred times,” Lydie said. “But why did her quotation snap Anne out of it?”

Michael shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the shock of hearing someone else speak her language.” Then, so obviously wanting to change the subject he didn’t even bother to pause, he asked, “Where should we have lunch? Which town?”

“There’s always Honfleur …” Lydie remembered the little port rimmed by crooked half-timber houses, the bar they had visited on their first trip outside Paris.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Michael said.

The smell of apples came through the open windows as they neared the coast; the orchards were thick with them, and with pears. Lydie felt the breeze turn chilly. “We’ll need sweaters,” she said.

“Let’s drive straight into town and find a place with tables on the quai,” Michael said.

“Okay,” Lydie said. They parked their car on the hill near St. Catherine’s, the wooden fifteenth-century church. A market was in progress, the vendors selling cheeses, milk, live chickens, linens, honey, herbs, apples, cabbages, lobsters, sole. Compared to the ball, it seemed real, earthy; walking through it, Lydie felt something in her had been released. Michael bought a small paper sack full of
crevettes grises
, baby shrimp the size of Lydie’s thumbnail, spiced and cooked live over an open fire. They ate them as they walked down the winding street toward the port.

It was just noon, early for lunch. Café proprietors stood outside their premises, smiling and nodding at passersby. Lydie and Michael stopped at each one, reading the menus set in metal frames by the doors. They chose a restaurant overlooking the old port. Across the boat basin stood the houses, ancient and askew, that Lydie remembered from their previous visit.

They sat side by side at a table near the back of the terrace, against the restaurant’s façade. Lydie smoothed the white paper cloth as Michael ordered the wine: Meursault.

“Meursault?” she asked, smiling. His choice was festive, significant: they always had it with shellfish.

“Let’s have a
plateau de fruits de mer
,” he said. “I feel like cracking shells.”

Lydie sipped the white wine, dry and flinty, understood that Michael was waiting for her to talk.

“A lot happened last night,” Lydie said, wanting to start off slowly.

“I’d like to hear about it,” Michael said.

“I know you would,” Lydie said, bursting to tell him, searching her mind for the words. What had seemed obvious, explainable, in the midst of an eighteenth-century château, could sound absurd in modern surroundings. Yet she believed, more strongly than ever, in the power of what had happened to her.

Michael was silent, watching her. “I was surprised you weren’t more upset to find me talking to Anne,” he finally said.

“I was upset, at first,” Lydie said, looking him straight in the eye. “I aimed a gun at both your heads.”

Michael said nothing, but held her gaze.

“Kelly stopped me. I wouldn’t have shot, but I didn’t want to put down the gun.”

“Why were you holding it at all?” Michael asked.

Lydie shrugged. Her heart pounded as it had last night. She wondered whether he would believe what she was about to tell him. “I had a vision,” she said.

“A vision?” he asked, frowning. “You mean like a religious vision?”

Lydie nodded, trying to keep her hands steady. “Well, I saw you and Anne, and of course I knew she was the one you had been with, and I went a little wild. Then, all of a sudden, I thought of my father. I can’t explain it.”

“What made you pick up the gun?”

“I’m not sure. I thought if I looked through the scope, I’d be able to see more clearly …” She paused, and Michael didn’t seem able to stand it.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I was thinking of how it was for him, how he had picked up that shotgun, pointed it … But Michael—I didn’t
aim
at you … I was looking down the gun barrel … God, this sounds weird.”

“At what?” Michael asked. “You were looking down the gun barrel at what?”

And then Lydie felt as calm as she had last night, at the instant she had lowered the gun. “I was looking into my father’s soul. As soon as I did, I understood him. I’ve kept myself from trying to ever since it happened. I had to see it my mother’s way—that he just went crazy—in order to be loyal to her. She can’t bear to understand that he really loved Margaret Downes. I guess I hate him for that. But he was my father, and I love him. And when I looked through the gun scope, I forgave him.”

“You did, Lydie?”

“Just holding the gun made my body feel different, like I had no control over my heart, my lungs, even my eyes. I realize how he must have felt. That second when he pulled the trigger, he didn’t have a choice.” Lydie heard her voice go up; she could imagine it stopping altogether. “I looked through the scope, and I saw you fighting with Anne. Just seeing you together made me want to kill you for a minute. Even though I could see that you didn’t want her there.”

“I didn’t.” Michael sat perfectly still, hanging on every word.

“My father didn’t know what he wanted,” Lydie said. “He loved us all—me, you, Mom. I know that now. But he loved her, Margaret, too. He couldn’t live without her. My mother will never face that.”

“I’ve always known he loved you, Lydie,” Michael said. “But he was desperate.”

“He was desperate,” Lydie said, her voice breaking. “That’s so different from being crazy. Mom saying he ‘went out of his head’ let him off the hook, but it kept me from understanding him. Now I know it was his only way out.”

“And you’ve forgiven him?”

She nodded her head, waiting for her voice to come back. “Do you know? I really believe it was a vision last night. A clear vision. I believe that God showed me, so I could forgive my father. Do you think that’s too strange?”

“No, I don’t.”

Lydie stared into his eyes, silently thanking him.

“But can you forgive me?” Michael asked.

“I’m trying,” Lydie said. “You hurt me.”

“I know. And I’m so sorry,” Michael said, his eyes filling.

Lydie scrutinized his mouth, his gaze, the small lines around his eyes, looking for clues. For what? she wondered. For a reminder of how much she had once trusted him?

“I love you, Lydie,” he said. He stroked her cheek with one hand. She covered it with her own, held it steady. “I have an idea,” he said tentatively. “What if we didn’t go back to Paris after lunch? What if we took a room at some hotel? Would you be ready for that?”

“The old one,” Lydie said. “The farm overlooking the estuary, where Boudin and Monet painted …”

They sat there for a long time, and then the
plateau
arrived. A battered silver platter piled high with cracked ice and rockweed, it was covered with
belons
and
creuses
, clams,
langoustines, crevettes roses
and
grises
, periwinkles, and
torteaux
. Alongside were lemon slices, brown bread and butter, a half-lemon stuck with pins for
extracting periwinkles and crabmeat. They gazed at it for a moment, appreciating its beauty, and they began to eat.