A Paris Apartment (33 page)

Five days ago Paris held its annual
Bazar de la Charité
. As Robert and I departed my flat an intense feeling of déjà vu overtook me. Hadn’t we just done this? Hadn’t we just left for the
Bazar
? A year had passed, but so little changed. The thought bathed me in an almost crippling sense of immobilization and it took forty-five minutes for Montesquiou to coax me from my home. In many ways it would’ve been better had we stayed. Then again, I would not have been there for the events that transpired. I needed it all to happen to get where I am now.

This year’s
Bazar
was not on the Champs-Elyseés but instead held near the Place des Vosges on the rue Jean-Goujon. As Robert and I walked up to the booming canvas-and-plywood structures something coagulated inside me. One might assume I say this in hindsight, but I felt so out of sorts that Montesquiou asked after my well-being.
Le Comte
concerned with another? It was a first. He once found a man stabbed and bleeding at his feet and turned to me to query whether I liked his suit.

I was not stabbed or bleeding, but one does not speak candidly to Robert, and so I lied and said everything was fine.

Stomach spinning, I followed Robert through the turnstile and out onto the Norwegian pine floors, an upgrade from the prior year’s hay and sticks. The decorations were also different. To access the main area each person was required to walk through a maze of badly painted faux-scenery: hills too green, cows resembling spotted hippos, flowers painted colors found only in
Le Comte’s
special-breed gardens. The maze was unavoidable; one had to use it both to enter and to exit the
Bazar
. The point was to amuse and divert, and to control the movement of the crowds. I found it cumbersome. Then it got worse.

Once through the maze, guests were herded like swine into various lanes, which in turn shuttled visitors through a low, narrow doorway and out into the exhibit hall. Finally the escape! Thirty booths lined the room. Though the attendance matched the previous year, the main floor did not seem as congested because the majority of guests were crowded into one particular corner: a motion picture exhibit.

The famous George Méliès was there to present his latest film,
The Conjuring of a Lady at Robert-Houdin’s Theater
. As expected,
Le Comte
bunched up with the rest of the viewers to snare a closer look. Anything new or different is a magnet to the man. I stood back and inspected the trinkets of a Gypsy lady somewhere near the maze’s exit. I was interested in the film, but the ether required to keep the picture machine running made me light-headed. That is, I suppose, why some people stood near it in the first place.

Shortly after two o’clock, Robert walked over and announced his boredom, right on time. He planned to head to Maxim’s. I was busy negotiating a black-pearl acquisition with an old mustachioed woman so told him to go on ahead. I watched him leave. I watched him walk into the maze. I saw him do this! No one believes me. Isn’t that how it always is? People want to believe the stories they create themselves.

After approximately ten minutes of haggling, the hirsute woman refusing to budge, the movie machine emitted a loud, clacking sputter. Necklace twisted around my hand and wrist, I looked to where the projector continued to grind.

“And that is why motion pictures will never take off,” I said to the woman. “Who can concentrate on the film while being subjected to that ruckus?”

Suddenly a spark flew off the machine and landed on the ether lamp. The lamp exploded off the table and shot across the room. Before anyone could grasp what was happening, the fireball hit one side of the tent and ignited the canvas. Not a single thought passed through my mind. I merely looked down to find my feet already running away from the fire.

I was halfway through the maze by the time the smoke caught up with me. Behind me people screamed. Young men trampled over old ladies. People shoved their way through the narrow passage, gasping for air, pushing for life. I clung to the back of one man’s coat, and soon we were released out onto the street, everyone still screaming, everyone running wild like a bunch of
Apaches
. Though not everyone was running. Most were still inside.

All in all, 140 perished, many from the most renowned families in Paris, including the Duchesse d’Alençon. Several people I know died, though no one I hold dear. Still, it feels as though I’ve lost something.

When I found Montesquiou at Maxim’s later that day, tears and soot lined my face. He ridiculed my appearance and asked if I was trying to impersonate an Arab. Even after I told him what had transpired, he continued to make fun. Furious, I left
Le Comte
to his own devices and returned to my flat, where I spent the rest of the night weeping into a pillow.

The old man with the crutches, did he make it out? What about the two precious girls in blue bonnets and silk sashes? The Gypsy woman could not have. She ran toward the flames instead of away from them. When I woke up the next morning, head thick from crying, her pearls were still wrapped around my hand.

Unfortunately for Robert, “the affair of the cane” continues to haunt him, now to a much more damaging degree. The papers are frenzied with accounts of folks behaving badly as the
Bazar
fire roared, each day a new tragedy to tell. As the tales go, it was every man for himself, every woman and child blanketing the way. And no one has suffered more injurious reports than Montesquiou himself.

The reports state that Robert was in the tent when the fire broke out, and that he caned people out of the way so he could get to safety. They say he used the famous cane as a “cudgel for living women and as tongs for dead women,” among a dozen other atrocities. The gutter journalist Jean Lorrain started the rumor, he so perpetually bitter at being called “a poor man’s Montesquiou” multiple times in the press. The man refers to Montesquiou as “Grotesquiou” in public and in print, lest there be any question of his jealousy.

I’ve tried to come to
Le Comte’s
defense, but no matter how many times I’ve said he was not there, that he’d departed some time before and didn’t even have the cane that day, my protests are viewed as nothing more than a concealment.

Alas the fool did not help his case when he popped by the Palais de l’Industrie to see the bodies, most of which were charred beyond recognition. He lurched and leaped over the corpses, lifting sheets (with his cane!) to peer at the faces of the dead.

What if I had died in the fire? What if I had wasted the last three years of my life with a dandy who doesn’t care that all of Paris thinks he is willing to beat cripples and children to save himself? The worst part is that I understand how people could believe the rumor. The assumption is fitting! It is something he would’ve done. He didn’t, but he could have.

Three years with
Le Comte
! Three years with a man newspapers dub “the world’s most laborious sayer of nothing.” He is extraordinarily generous. Indeed, he’s given me an apartment and enough jewels to adorn every member of the French aristocracy. I was able to leave my post at the Folies thanks to him. Nonetheless I feel as though Giovanni gave me more despite never giving me anything at all.

Some say the fire was deserved, a divine wrath being foisted upon the rich. A well-known priest sermonized that the very cause was God’s ire at the scientific and social ideas of the new generation. He called the fire an “exterminating angel”—said almost hopefully—and assured everyone that the victims of the fire died in expiation of the nation’s sins. I do not subscribe to this line of thought, the deceased children had not a crime to atone for, but the idea of the fire as means to expiate one’s sins has somehow stayed with me.

When Montesquiou came to see me this morning, I announced my intent to formally disengage from our most informal contract. There would be no more dinners at Maxim’s or nights in my bed. It was a dangerous assertion. Everything I had was his first.

“I understand,” Robert said. “I’m surprised we lasted this long.”

“I will not relocate,” I told him, my voice shaky. I did not want to ask what might happen to the apartment. I did not want to ask what might happen to me.

“Then don’t.” He shrugged.

“I will try to pay the rent, I—”

“Shush.” He placed a finger over my lips. It tasted funny, like burnt salt. I could only hope those particular rumors were true; that he used
only
his cane to poke around the charred corpses. “You shall stay. I have no use for this apartment. We can work out an arrangement suitable to us both.”

“But I said no more—”

“I don’t mean that kind of arrangement.”

“I will try to get my job back with the Folies. Maybe they’ll even let me on the stage this time! I’ve developed a reputation for myself. People might actually pay to see me lift my skirts.”

“Only if you want to,” he said. “Do not worry about the apartment.”

“I have to—”

“Ma chérie,” he said and kissed me on the nose. “Don’t fret. It is only money, and there is always more of it.”

With that, he grabbed his cane, tapped it against the ground two times, and skipped out of my apartment. If I expected disagreement or fight, he gave me neither. Perhaps this was Robert’s way. Or perhaps the rumors were true, the rumors of an American heiress coaxing him across the ocean. She wants to get married, they say. And I say good luck to the both of them.

After Montesquiou left, and before I could think better of it, I locked the flat and proceeded to Boldini’s. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I might say. I only knew I had to go. As long as he wasn’t with another woman I could figure out the right thing to do.

Pausing at the door of his studio, I inhaled deeply, raised my fist, and knocked three times sharply. Footsteps moved across the floor. They were loping, irritated footsteps, and my heart swelled at the sound of Boldini.

He opened the door.

“Giovanni!” I cried. “Please don’t lock me out. I cannot bear to be apart from you any longer. I don’t know how this all went awry, if it was because of Montesquiou or Pujol. I can’t take back what happened with the farting show, but regarding Montesquiou it is over. I’m probably too late by three years, more than a thousand days. But know that all the time I spent gazing at diamonds and furs I was trying not to think of you!”

Boldini did not answer. I sank down to my knees and locked my arms around his calves, sobbing into his trousers. He jostled his legs, trying to rid himself of me. I clung tighter. Finally he pushed down on my head and wrenched himself free. He turned and walked inside.

But he left the door open.

Stunned, I glanced up from my pathetic place on the ground. Boldini went to his canvas. He held tight to his silence. He did not speak as he picked up his brush. He did not offer solace or guarantees. But he let me inside.

Slowly I rose to my feet. I crept across the floor, worried that the open door was an oversight and not an invitation. Boldini was known to leave stoves on, paints dripping, his clothes at the tailors’ for twelve months straight.

However, as I glided across the room Giovanni glanced up ever so slightly. I detected the smallest of nods. After planting myself on a settee, I crossed my legs and smoothed my now-crumpled skirt. Boldini continued to paint. He said nothing. I watched, grateful for what felt like a fresh start.

Chapitre LII

When April woke Luc was gone, but there was no confusion. He had been there. There was a note (“Ma chérie, a beautiful time”) and a rumpled other side of the bed, not that April needed any evidence of what happened.

She wasn’t sure how to feel. April had slept with someone who wasn’t Troy. Always unfavorable to betray your marriage vows, but what was their marriage at that point other than a piece of paper? A stack of paper if you counted the prenup, and god knew how much paper after that if they ended up divorcing.

“If they ended up divorcing.” She was surprised the word “if” still had a place at the table. More than that, April was surprised she was thinking of it as “divorcing,” as a verb instead of the noun she usually pictured.

Legal documents notwithstanding, Troy could say very little about April’s Fête Nationale dalliance. He’d cheated before, on her, and on his previous wife, and, no doubt, on whomever he’d dated before Susannah, and further back still.

But that wasn’t it, exactly, payback or sexual one-upmanship. There was something more with Luc. April would not call it feelings or even a crush. But her wanting him was at least a little separate from her problems with Troy. Last night didn’t happen because Luc was the only person around and sporting the correct sexual organs. She may have been drunk, but it was deliberate. It was Marthe going to Boldini’s studio after the fire.

April smiled. “Marthe’s back with Boldini,” she wanted to text the handsome attorney who’d seen her naked, the very man who’d—oh god!—lived up to every expectation April hadn’t known she’d set for him. The only problem was if April told Luc about Boldini she’d have to come up with something to say afterward, and she wasn’t quite ready to face that conversational hurdle. So April intentionally left her phone and computer untouched until such a time as she could figure out a smooth
rentrée
into their regularly scheduled relationship, if that even still existed.

Instead April spent most of the next day in bed, reading and working, but mostly sleeping. Whenever she summoned the strength to rise, she pattered about the apartment in bare feet and lingerie, the humid July air blowing through the curtains and chilling her still-warm skin.

Fête Nationale celebrations continued on, the parades and fireworks and throngs of citizens booming throughout Paris. The ruckus made concentration difficult, though whatever noise clogged April’s brain was not merely a result of the holiday.

Setting auction estimates, scribbling out last-minute descriptions, none of it got a fair shake with sneaky pieces of Luc popping up and derailing April’s good intentions. From his initial eager kisses, gentle at first, then persistent, him muttering, “Putain, c’est pas trop tôt!” as he tried to catch his breath. Literal translation: “Damn, it’s not too early!” The French equivalent of “It’s about fucking time!”