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Joe had known this moment would come for so long it half seemed as if he’d lived it already. Even so, a great,

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rowning sorrow flooded through him. With every fiber >f his being he wished that he could convey somehow to ,aurel how desperately he loved her, needed her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Dad. I was going o-” He broke off with a shrug. “But I guess that’s not eally what this is about, is it?”

“No.”

The look on her face told him what she was thinking, md before Joe could stop himself he was saying it: ‘Annie?”

Laurel looked straight at him. “Yes.”

Christ, she had it all wrong. He had to convince her . . somehow. He couldn’t deny what he felt for Annie.

3ut what was the truth? There were no lines marking off lis feelings, only the dismal knowledge that he loved two vomen, two sisters, who were as different from one another as night and day … and that the two halves of his livided heart could never equal a whole.

“Laurey, I-“

“Joe, will you just go.” She gave him a hot, furious ook … then abruptly she put out a hand to stop him. ‘Wait-your father … does he know yet what you’re planning to do?”

“Even if I told him, he wouldn’t understand. He’s >vay past that. You remember when we visited him last week, and he told us Hitler had just invaded Poland? Well, yesterday he didn’t even know who I was. But then, I guess that’s nothing new.” He smiled thinly. “That’s what makes this so damn hard. All my life, I’ve been wanting more from the old guy than he was willing … or able … to give me. And now it’s too late.”

“He loves you, Joe. Maybe he didn’t always let it show, but I know it’s true.”

Even if it wasn’t entirely true, he felt grateful to her for saying it. “Maybe. All I know right now is that I hate what I have to do. He may not have been the world’s greatest father, but he had grit and style. Have you ever watched one of those five-hundred-yearold sequoias being felled? That’s what it feels like to me, watching the old

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man go downhill.” And Joe felt as if he, too, were losing his bearings, and might soon be crashing down.

He didn’t want to go away. If he insisted on hashing it out right here and now, Laurel, he knew, would probably give in. Things would be smoothed over, for a few days, anyway.

But in the end, nothing would change. Maybe in some way she was being wise. And didn’t he owe her this, honoring her wish? And who knew … maybe doing this would somehow help them.

God, but if this was the right thing, why did it have to hurt so damn much?

“I’ll pack a few things,” he said, his words thudding dully in his ears.

“Will you be staying at the apartment?” She cast him a forlorn glance, then quickly added, “Adam will want to know.”

“Yeah, sure.” Apartment? For a second he had to think, to clear the fuzziness in his brain. Then he remembered, the old place on Twenty-first Street, he’d hung onto it because his rent was so cheap, and he could crash there when, after a rough night, he was too bushed to drive home. But to live there again? Have Adam visit him there as if he were some nice uncle instead of the daddy who was supposed to tuck him in at night?

Joe felt a pressure in the bridge of his nose, and behind his eyes. No, he wouldn’t think about Adam now. Later, when his heart wasn’t racing like an overheated engine, he’d let himself think about Adam. “I’ll call him sometime tomorrow,” he told her.

“What do you want me to tell him at breakfast?”

Joe hesitated. It occurred to him that much more than Adam’s security might be at stake. Maybe his and Laurel’s whole future.

Christ, they had so much. Not just Adam, but years of sharing. Some of it great, and some of it funny-like that party they’d thrown for a book Laurel had illustrated, The Boy Who Hated Baths, while at the same time sewage was backing up in the basement. And some of it sad, like each time she’d lost a baby. There were jokes that only

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^aurel would know to laugh at. Memories. Albums full of napshots that would bore anyone but them.

No, he did not want to lose all that. Not even one )it of it.

An image crystallized in Joe’s mind: Laurel in a jretty flowered dress, getting ready for a Carnegie Hall )iano recital they had tickets for. She was sitting at her Iressing table, her head cocked to one side as she fastened i pearl earring, and he could see her reflection in the nirror; she seemed to be smiling at him, her eyebrows slightly raised. And without a word passing between them, ic’d known that she needed help fitting the tiny clasp over :he stud of her earring.

Why was he thinking of that now? Such a little thing. But maybe, he thought, that was the true essence of marriage, not wild passion, but the simple unspoken language shared by husbands and wives. Not the great highs and lows, but the small quiet moments that, strung together, were like the molecules that form a universe.

Joe did then what he’d wanted to do the minute he saw her. He crossed the room in two long strides, catching her in a hard embrace. Her perfume, like wildflowers crushed under a careless boot, enveloped him with a sudden, dizzying sweetness.

“Tell him I’ll be back,” he murmured, then quickly let go.

Henri, seated in the somber rue St-Lazare law office of Amadou et Fourcheville, felt as if he were trapped inside a stifling attic full of musty antiques. He noted the wormy wainscoting, and saw that around the fan-shaped cosse d’orange window that overlooked the rue de Caumartin, the ancient flocked wallpaper was peeling. In the anemic morning light that seeped in through the

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ratty swagged-velvet drapes, the room’s massive brassmounted Empire furniture seemed funereal. And, mon Dieu, when was the last time old Amadou had opened a window? The room stank of dust and stale pipe smoke. And the hoary advocate himself, seated behind a Louis Quinze bureau plat clumsily tamping his pipe, seemed almost more ancient than the furniture. And yet he fit the occasion. Old Girod had outlived all his friends; why shouldn’t his last will and testament be read by a fellow ghost?

Henri caught Francine’s eye. She was sitting with military erectness in a gilt-wood fauteuil, half facing him, her black hair drawn back in a seamless chignon that emphasized the sharp angles of her features. Elegantly dressed in an off-white wool crepe suit trimmed in navy grosgrain, she sat with one silk-stockinged leg draped casually over the other, a black patent-leather high heel carving little circles in the sluggish air. That smug look … he knew it well. The same expression she’d worn after she’d gotten JeanPaul’s last lover discharged from his teaching position and sent back to Algeria. Francine, of course, would never admit their son was a homosexual, but she spared nothing to sabotage his amours.

Could she know something about Papa Girod’s testament that he did not? Henri felt a tickle of anxiety, like a feather brushing against the inner walls of his stomach.

It’s only a pose, he told himself. Once Girod’s is mine, officially, legally, she’ll have no further power over me and she knows it. At last, finally, the divorce. No more strutting her false piety before the old man. I’ll be free… .

Free to marry again if he so wished. But whom? Dolly? No, no, he was foolish to indulge in such a hope.

Dolly of course has put me into her past, and that is as it should be. Six years is a long time.

But simply thinking about her lifted his spirits. In two days he would be in New York at the chocolate fair. He would see her, and then he would know if still he had a chance.

Looking over at his children, seated next to him on

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a carved-wood sofa beneath a framed photograph of Wilson and Clemenceau, Henri wondered how his son and daughter would react to Dolly. JeanPaul, with his prematurely receding hairline, buried in his books all the time, probably wouldn’t notice her unless Dolly sat right on top of him. And dear, plump, distracted Gabrielle, wearing that hideous brown suit that made her seem part of the furniture; so busy with her little ones she probably had given not a bit of attention to how she had let herself go. He imagined Dolly taking Gaby shopping, to Cacharel or Kenzo, buying her a closetful of bright, flowered dresses, rainbow-colored scarves, wildly impractical shoes …

He stopped. No. Too much still was unsettled. But he couldn’t turn off the surge of blood to his head.

Henri shifted in his chair, making a small creaking noise that sounded loud as fireworks in the stifling silence. Get on with it, he silently urged the fumbling old lawyer.

He’d waited an eternity for this-finally, to be able to call Girod’s his own-yet, oddly, he missed the old man. Henri imagined him enthroned on the straight-backed chair next to Amadou’s desk, bird-claw hands folded over the top of his cane as he leaned forward, head cocked, eyes bright with glee. How he would have smiled to see me now, squirming in my seat like a four-year-old who feels the call of nature.

Yet why should he be nervous? Girod had kept his promise, and signed the document right in front of him. He even had a copy at home. Though Augustin might well have changed his testament more than once in the last six years, the part concerning the firm would of course remain untouched. Augustin, despite his pigheadedness, was a man of honor.

So why are you are so nervous?

Henri was conscious of Francine’s eyes on him, as hard and sharp as the diamonds in her ears-a present from her lover, no doubt. Strange, the way she kept that part of her life so hidden-mon Dieu, anyone would think he must be an agent of the KGB. Six years since Henri had moved out of their Marais apartment, and the only change she had made was to turn his former study into a

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small chapel. Yet all her additional praying seemed to have done nothing to diminish her resentment of him. Everything was and would always be his fault, from her own headaches and liver pains to JeanPaul’s “bent” nature, and even the miserable death of their spaniel who, shortly after Henri’s moving out, had ambled into the path of a speeding taxi.

She could bend them all, friends, lovers, children, even her stubborn old father, make them do her bidding, all except him, her husband … and that, he realized, had to be the root of her anger, her hatred even.

She would prefer, probably, that he hate her toothat she could understand and make peace with. His pity, he knew, was what cut her most. But how could he help pitying her? As hard and bitter as she’d become, the memory still lingered of the young woman with whom he had once-an aeon ago-strolled along a beach in La Trinit้ sur Mer-a girl, really, not yet nineteen, who had waded waist-deep into the icy water to rescue a pair of spectacles that had slipped off the nose of an elderly woman in a rowboat.

That girl reminded him of the impulsive, generoushearted woman he longed for today. Dolly. Dieu, how he missed her.

Henri fixed his gaze on Amadou, who was lighting his pipe, puffing a cloud of foul-smelling smoke into the already thick air. Now, pipe stem clenched between his teeth, half-moon glasses resting against the hump on his nose, he rattled through the papers on his blotter.

“Now, where were we? … ah yes … here …”

He finished reading aloud the small bequests, to nieces and nephews, a favorite cousin, an elderly sister, and to Augustin’s valet and driver, Mohammed Al-Taib, who for more than twenty years had served the old man faithfully.

“Pardon, Monsieur Amadou,” Francine broke in. “But what my father left to his valet has absolutely no interest to us.” She waved an imperious hand ridged with purple veins. A pity, Henri thought. At fifty, her face was still remarkably smooth, but her hands were those of an

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eighty-year-old. “Please move on to what concerns us.”

Cut to the chase, Henri heard Dolly quip in his mind. Pretending to scratch his chin, he cupped a hand over his mouth to hide his smile.

Amadou broke off, clearly flustered.

“Ah, yes … well, I was only … hmmmm … but of course, Madame Baptiste, if you wish… .”

Amadou began fussing once more with his pipe, tamping it, relighting it, scattering shreds of tobacco over the document before him, until Henri wanted to snatch it out of his liver-spotted hands. Then Amadou cleared his throat and again began to read in a ponderous tone that made Henri think of a provincial actor reciting Racine.

“Ah … here we are … ‘To my grandson, JeanPaul, I bequeath my library of rare books, excluding my first edition of Hugo’s Cromwell, which I … leave to my esteemed friend, Professor Cottard of the Biblioth่que Nationale . .

Books? Perfect. He observed how JeanPaul’s narrow shoulders straightened, how his hooded eyes lit up. He recalled how as a boy, his son had loved to bury himself among those finely bound volumes, not wanting to come out of that library even to eat. And now, too, JeanPaul still preferred books to people, and certainly to the sticky pleasures of Girod’s. Chocolate caused him to break out in nasty hives.

He studied his son, a tweedy, hook-shouldered man with large, damp hands, thinning dark hair, and a forehead as pale and shiny as porcelain. How strange that his loins should have produced such a son. Jean-Paui looked nothing like either him or Francine. And when Gaby introduced him as her brother, people smiled in disbelief. Only JeanPaul’s nose, narrow and straight, its flared nostrils chafed an asthmatic red, was Francine’s. The rest of him seemed to have been assembled from a distant cousin’s ears, an uncle’s mouth, a great-grandmother’s chin.

Yet Henri loved his son, the professor, the entomologist who lived and breathed beetles, who preferred other men to women. Was that why he loved him so, because of his strangeness? He remembered Dolly once

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looking at a truffle and saying, “I like the lumpy ones best, ‘cause they remind me of people, how we oughta care about each other, warts and all.” If only JeanPaul could stand up to his mother, instead of sneaking off to meet with his lovers like a truant schoolboy.