Paris, He Said (25 page)

“Are you enjoying Paris?” he asked Jayne.

I couldn’t tell if he wanted to know or if he was trying to make amends. He was not one for conversational hot air, for
How are you?
and
Nice weather today
and
Tell me what’s new
. We might go months without speaking and a year or more without seeing each other, and he will show up on my doorstep and announce that he is tired of socialism but isn’t sure if there is anything more humane, or that he has decided he wants his ashes scattered at the base of Mount Fuji.

“Yes,” said Jayne. “This is my favorite place on earth.”

“You need to see more of the planet then, I think,” he said with a flirtatious smile. “Come with me to Japan next time. I will show you some beautiful places too.”

She laughed but said nothing. She looked down at her hands and seemed to notice then how tightly she’d been holding her knees.

“How did you and Laurent meet?” he asked, glancing at me, maybe to see if I was upset with him. I wasn’t, but I was ready for him to leave.

She answered the question, and I listened closely, not sure what I would find in her tone. “I wasn’t planning to go out the night I met Laurent,” she said. “It was a Friday, and I was tired from work, but my friend had a crush on one of the artists who was in the very first show at Laurent’s gallery in New York.” She went on to describe the suit I was wearing, how she’d been keeping track of me across the room, how before long I came over to her and tried to get her drunk.

“That is not what I was doing,” I said, laughing.

“Oh, of course you were, Laurent,” said Paul.

“I don’t need to get a woman drunk to make her talk to me,” I said.

“No, that’s true. He just has to open his wallet,” he said, winking at Jayne. “That will do the trick faster, and no drunk woman to worry about stuffing into a taxi later either.”

“He has taught me well,” I said to Jayne. “He opens his wallet, and any woman he wants will be going home with him in no time.”

“Well, if it works …” he said, winking again at Jayne.

When he finally left, an hour and a half later, having consumed an entire bottle of grand cru from our collective as he ate our leftovers, including the chocolate torte I’d picked up on the way home from the gallery and was looking forward to having a piece of for breakfast, Jayne said that she liked him, that he had helped her get to know me better. “I wouldn’t have expected someone like him to be your closest friend,” she said.

“Oldest friend, not my closest,” I said. “Not after tonight.”

She laughed. “He’s a flirt, that’s for sure.”

I smiled. “Yes, he is.”

She regarded me, perhaps not sure what to think. I was speaking so noncommitally, in part because I was tired, it was almost midnight, and Paul has always had the irritating habit of showing up without warning and expecting to be welcomed with open arms—even now, after his Buddhist training, which I think is supposed to make a person more mindful, but it appears that nine years of study can’t preempt the habits of the forty-four preceding years.

After Jayne and I went to bed that night, she asked why I hadn’t invited him to stay over. Maybe he’d been expecting it?

I shook my head. “He has his own apartment,” I said.

As her fingers played lightly with the hair on my chest, she asked, “Doesn’t he live on his family’s vineyard? I thought you said he works down there.”

“He does live there, but he has an apartment here too.” I remembered that she did not have the habits of mind of someone who has grown up with money. She had not been poor or deprived, but she had not, I knew for certain, been brought up in a home with acquisitive parents. If anything, they seemed to have taught her and her sister to regard material pleasures with suspicion or maybe, more likely, with dispassion. Jayne had lived in a middle-class Chicago suburb until her parents moved her and her sister to California, to a sunnier middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, the year she turned fourteen and began high school. I had not understood why she later left L.A. for the gloomier East Coast and, eventually, crowded, expensive Manhattan, where, as it turned out, her shy knocks on the art world’s locked doors were not answered. She tried to explain that she was waiting until she had more work she felt confident about, that she wondered if she needed to apply to M.F.A. programs and make more contacts, but I reminded her that she needed only to make art to be an artist. And she had a mentor in Chicago, her Art Institute summer studio teacher Susan Kraut, whose work Jayne introduced me to, and which impressed me: her oil paintings of interiors (as if recently vacated by a quiet man and his quiet wife—elderly, childless, their dinners prepared and eaten, the dishes washed and put away by six o’clock every night) and a series of serene pears and persimmons on window ledges that looked out upon muted blue or gray skies.

I decided to contact her to ask if she had representation in Paris; if she did not, I wanted to include her—if she had new work she was ready to share—in the March show that Chantal Schmidt and Jayne had been scheduled for. I had decided not to include Jeanne-Lucie. Some other time, I thought. It seemed wisest to put my daughter and my girlfriend in separate shows, and I did not bother to ask André for his opinion. In general, he approves my decisions because the work I choose sells.

I wondered whether Susan Kraut would ask for a solo show, being an experienced painter and instructor of note at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, but she was accommodating and so flattered by my call, and she spoke very fondly of Jayne and her work. She asked if she might take a look at her newer paintings and get back to me the next day. I suppose she wanted also to look into Vie Bohème to reassure herself that I was not a con man, about to try, by some circuitous means, to bilk her of thousands of dollars—or worse, I have to think—of her sensitive, beautiful paintings.

As we agreed, I called Susan back the following day, and she said yes to my proposal that we show five or six of her paintings with Jayne’s and Chantal’s. I admit to thinking, almost immediately, “How happy this will make Jayne. How good I am to her.”

But how foolish it is to let oneself think these things, even if they are true. Self-congratulatory, self-deprecating, self-effacing, self-obsessed—whatever a person’s proclivities are—I have to believe that they are no small part of what determines our fate.

When he met Jeanne-Lucie, Martin was married to a young woman from Neuilly, one of Paris’s most wealthy suburbs, a place where as its mayor for nearly twenty years, Nicolas Sarkozy had sharpened his skills as a politician before marrying his singer/fashion model third wife and moving into the Palais de l’Elysée. Martin’s father-in-law—a member of the cabinet of the Neuilly mayor who succeeded Sarkozy—was a magistrate by training who oversaw local public works. He did not like his daughter’s choice of a husband, because not only was Martin half American, but he had left medical school in his third year to enroll in art school. It was there that he made friends with one of Jeanne-Lucie’s friends, who before long, introduced Martin to my daughter, but she has told me that she is not the reason for his divorce, only a symptom of it.

I think of Martin, when he was newly smitten by Jeanne-Lucie, trailing behind her into Vie Bohème—he is three years her senior, but I think that she has always had the upper hand. He stared at all of our paintings as if intending to imprint them on his brain and go home to attempt to duplicate them. Jeanne-Lucie soon asked—no, in fact, she demanded—that André and I hire him as our assistant; I owed her that, she said. I was always owing her things, mostly because she saw me as the villain who had tied her innocent mother to the tracks as the divorce hurtled toward her and obliterated her life.

Well, hardly so. Her mother had and still has her own productive life. She also had her own lovers during our marriage. At least two—an older psychologist who mentored her when she was first seeing clients, and Paul Ligault’s younger brother Georges, though of the latter liasion I am not wholly certain. If they did meet, it was infrequent, their affair conducted during holidays and on our rare visits with the children to Bourgogne to see my sister and her husband, and before then, my parents, who died when Anne-Claire and I were in our thirties.

It has been a curious experience to witness my daughter and Jayne’s evolving friendship—my daughter who didn’t speak to me for nearly a year when her mother and I were in the midst of divorcing, who resisted my advice not to marry Daniel or to wait a little longer if she didn’t feel ready to, regardless of her pregnancy. It seems almost spiteful of her to befriend my girlfriend, when before now Jeanne-Lucie rarely took an interest in the women I have dated since her mother and I separated. Yet, Jeanne-Lucie has always been capricious. She appears genuinely to like Jayne; she has commented to me on Jayne’s kindness and lack of artifice, and her talents as a painter. My daughter also, I suspect, likes Jayne’s willingness to adore her.

Without realizing it, Jayne has inspired Jeanne-Lucie to become more restless than she already was—Jayne having no child to worry about and the freedom to explore her talents as a painter, to open herself up to new opportunities in a city celebrated for its long, romantic history of artists and their affairs, both personal and professional. I worry about Jeanne-Lucie’s restlessness because my granddaughter senses her mother’s inattention and must not know what to think of Jeanne-Lucie when she kisses Martin on the mouth as they say good-bye, longer than she should, I am sure, and Marcelle is at the age where she will start to make comparisons between how Maman acts with Martin and how Maman acts with Papa.

After Jayne’s first luncheon at Jeanne-Lucie and Daniel’s apartment, I asked my daughter why she had permitted her mother to join them. Jeanne-Lucie claimed that she hadn’t invited her, but she admitted to having made the mistake of telling Anne-Claire about the date, and true to her aggressive character, her mother had insisted on attending. Why my ex’s prurient interest in my private life continues, I am not sure, but I suppose it is mostly because she considers it a tasteless spectacle that allows her to continue to feel superior to me, even though on the surface, we are friendly to each other and manage to have an amicable dinner together now and then.

I do not like it at all that she never seems to tire of poking fun at me for my involvement with younger women. “Why are they so young all the time, Laurent? Don’t you get bored?” she asked recently, her sharp eyes laughing at me. “What do you talk about? Which nail polish color to use next?”

“You don’t have to be jealous anymore,” I said. “You’re free to go off and date younger men too.”

She snorted. “Oh, yes, of course I am.”

“You are. What’s stopping you?”

She shook her head, pursing her pretty red lips. We were having dinner two evenings before Jayne was scheduled to arrive from New York. Anne-Claire had heard I’d returned home and had stopped by the gallery to see what new art was on our walls and criticize it, one of her favorite hobbies when we were still married too. “Younger men do not want to date older women, unless they are twenty and the women are thirty,” she said. “But even then.”

“I’m sure you could change a few of their minds,” I said.

She ignored this. “How is that Sophie girl? Are you still with her?”

“Sofia,” I said. “No, we are not together anymore. I told you that I’m seeing an American woman now. Sofia is in Italy, traveling with a friend.”

“A friend,” Anne-Claire repeated. “That girl doesn’t have friends.”

I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but I knew that it couldn’t be very pleasant. “She doesn’t?”

“No, she has slaves.” She turned from the painting of two young black-haired women lying on yolk-colored beach towels, both of them suntanned and naked to the waist. It was a breathtaking painting, and I would sell it within a month to an Austrian collector who paid the sixty-five hundred euros we were asking for it in cash and also bought two other paintings by the same artist, an Italian man named Giulio Pardí who lives much of the year in Nice.

I laughed, but not loud.

“What did you say?” asked Anne-Claire.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I thought I heard you say something under your breath.”

“No, I was laughing. I didn’t say anything.”

She continued to stare at me but said nothing. She had been seeing patients before coming to meet me at Vie Bohème and was dressed in a black skirt and a short-sleeved poppy-red blouse, her arms and legs still sleek and girlish. She was a devoted custodian of her beauty and had told me more than once that she suspected it kept some of her patients from relaxing around her, but she had no interest in downplaying it, and there was also the fact that her patients kept their appointments. I had no idea how much they were actually helped by their visits with her. I couldn’t believe that she became someone else, someone softer and more nurturing, when she closed the door to her office and sat across from her clients, strangers who had come to her for advice on how to cope with a lazy, directionless son or a wife who wanted to invite another man to live in their home.

“You’d be happier if you dated women closer to your own age, Laurent. I know I’ve said it before, but it doesn’t hurt for you to be reminded.” She spoke softly and dabbed her dinner napkin at the corners of her mouth. She had ordered a salad and a small bowl of squash bisque. I had been the gourmand in the marriage, the midnight snacker, the one who used to court heartburn and restless sleep. “I also wish you’d stop chasing girls around and pay more attention to your children,” she said. “Frédéric told me that you didn’t want him to come to Paris when he asked about visiting the other day.”

I could feel anger rising in my chest: that old, perverse comfort, that sense of being wronged and misunderstood by the woman I had been married to for twenty years. I took a quiet, deep breath and reminded myself how happy I was to have escaped twenty more years of her intimate daily scorn. “I did not tell him he shouldn’t visit. What I said was that I thought it would be better if he waited another week or two before coming with Léa and Élodie. I needed some time to settle in after being away for a year.”