Paris, He Said (32 page)

She knew that I worried about my parents’ marriage and having lived through her own parents’ divorce, what she had to say about the subject was reassuring, though mine were not getting a divorce, not yet, anyway. “You have to remember that you have never wanted them to live your life for you,” said Jeanne-Lucie. “You must try to act the same way with their lives.”

“That’s what Laurent told me too, more or less,” I admitted.

“We think we cannot survive certain things if they were to happen,” she said, “but we can. At least, that is what I say when I have dark thoughts.”

“Laurent thinks it’s because I want to stay a child, that I want the world to be what it seemed to be when I was a little girl. If my parents got a divorce, it obviously wouldn’t seem that way anymore. But it’s more that I worry they won’t be able to take care of themselves if they’re on their own. My father, especially.”

“Oh, Jayne,” she said, looking at her phone to check the time. We were having a mid-afternoon coffee, but Marcelle would need to be picked up soon from a friend’s house. “Americans are so dramatic. All your television programs are about nuclear bombs exploding and the people next door making methamphetamines. No wonder you think everything that happens, big or small, is a catastrophe.”

I smiled. “Is that why?”

She nodded, very sure of herself. “Of course it is.”

Of Daniel, Jeanne-Lucie’s husband, I can say this: he is pleasant—not as bland as that word implies, but reliable and even-tempered, from what Jeanne-Lucie has told me, and from what I gathered on the few occasions we’ve met. One afternoon when I stopped by their apartment to meet Jeanne-Lucie before we went out to buy Christmas gifts for Marcelle and Laurent, I saw Daniel smoking the cherrywood pipe I’d spotted on an end table in the room with the unicorn tapestry, months earlier, the day I first had lunch in the apartment. At the sight of him, fair and curly-haired, several years older and more weathered than his pretty, unfaithful wife, with that old-man pipe in his mouth, plumes of smoke rising from its bowl, I felt an unexpected rush of protective tenderness for him. I had to look away, but I think he caught something in my expression before I averted my face. He smiled at me when I met his eyes again, and we had a silent exchange, as if he was acknowledging that I believed him to be vulnerable and undervalued, and was politely dismissing my concern. He could take care of himself when it came to his wife and his marriage. There was no anger there, only what I sensed to be an abiding, calmly tended patience. Perhaps he’d known before he married Jeanne-Lucie that he wouldn’t be able to keep her from other men’s beds. Maybe he had decided that he could live with this, provided that she also lie willingly in his bed each night. I wondered if he and Laurent were, in this one sense, cut from similar cloth.

Sometimes I envy Jeanne-Lucie’s and Laurent’s risk-taking nature, their unapologetic self-interest, but in the next second, I realize that we are not so different, that here I am in Paris, and I have taken a lover too, one, oddly enough—or perhaps it isn’t so odd—from the life I left behind in New York. At some point I will ask Jeanne-Lucie what happened between her and André. It could be there is something still between them, though this would surprise me. Even if since meeting Laurent, many of the things I am learning about myself and other people have surprised me, my instincts are that Jeanne-Lucie was done with André not long after whatever relations they shared began.

And on the whole, he and I now give each other a wide berth at the gallery when we are together there. He goes about his business, such as it is, Laurent allowing him to take money from the gallery accounts as he wishes, and Laurent, I know now, doing the same, though not as much money, from what I can tell. Laurent also moves funds back and forth between his personal accounts and the gallery’s, as needed. These are my
droits de seigneur
, he once said to me, laughing but serious too, I knew. It is none of my business; in both senses of the expression, this is the truth.

I have not yet said much about Sofia Baude, a gifted painter who also happens to speak four languages, a fact Laurent revealed after I pestered him for more information about her. He told me too that her Italian mother is a poet, her French father a distinguished linguistics professor. Sofia came to the opening, but she didn’t stay long, no more than thirty or forty minutes. While she was there, I could feel other people looking at her too, and although he would have denied it, I knew Laurent was keeping track of her graceful movements around the gallery, as if she were a rare and wild creature not to be let out of his sight. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress, its hemline just above her shapely knees and bare legs, despite the cold night, winter still in the air on this first day of spring. Her necklace of interlocking silver discs, matching earrings, and two thick cuff bracelets were heavy and expensive-looking and gleamed like polished armor. She was clearly used to people staring at her and she moved within their capacious attention with queenly poise, her toned arms bent slightly at the elbows, her dark hair pinned up in a lush, disorderly bun to expose her long, elegant neck. I instantly felt a queasy fascination with her beauty and self-possession. She was someone I could learn from, someone who like my college quasi-nemesis Pepper embodied many of the qualities I wanted so badly to claim for myself.

This was my show, these were my paintings on the wall that night, but of course she knew that six of her own paintings were hanging in the home I shared with the man who I could see still desired her. Her understanding of light and color, her meticulous brushstrokes, her sympathetic, intuitive eye: how long had it taken her to master these talents?

Without knowing it, Susan gave me the reserves I needed to withstand my jealous feelings that evening. Susan and I were standing together near one of her paintings,
Central Park West Window
(oil on linen), waiting for a server to reappear with two glasses of cold water, when she glanced from me to Sofia, who was standing several yards away, flirting with André and François. “Is that your sister?” she asked, nodding toward Sofia. “You two resemble each other.”

I laughed, too loudly. Susan’s benign expression wavered; she knew instantly that something was going on, but didn’t press me.

“No, no,” I said. “That’s Laurent’s ex-girlfriend.”

Whatever Susan really thought of this, and by association, of Laurent and me, she managed to keep it hidden. “Well,” she murmured, “don’t tell her, but you’re the prettier sister.”

I laughed again, more softly than before, and glanced at her painting, feeling a little better. Whether or not she believed her remark was true, I could have said then in all sincerity that I loved her. That I needed and appreciated her and wanted desperately, for the rest of my life, to be her friend, to be able to call her on any day that I had the urge to, but I couldn’t string the words together. She might have sensed how I felt; she squeezed my shoulder and smiled and shook her head, glancing toward Laurent, who stood talking to several people I didn’t know near the table where emptied wineglasses were being placed by the caterers until they could be carried into the back. Susan looked at me expectantly, but instead of unloading my romantic insecurities on her I looked again at her paintings, which were, almost paradoxically, both mysterious and very personal. I asked how long had it taken her to complete
Central Park West Window
. Did she work on several canvases at once? What was her studio space like?

Soon Colin walked through the gallery doors, looking like an anxious, excited boy sneaking downstairs to the grown-ups’ party. I can only guess what Susan thought, seeing me turn toward him with such abrupt focus, my whole body alert in a way it hadn’t been before he came in off the street and looked apprehensively around the noisy room, his brown hair, which needed cutting—it had grown past his ears about half an inch—springing up when he pulled off his gray wool hat.

Before he spotted me in the crowd, I noticed his eyes landing on Sofia—only for a second or two, but long enough for me to know that he had registered her presence. I knew he was there to see me, but I still felt a tremor of jealousy. I wanted unequivocally at that moment for Sofia to disappear from my life and Laurent’s, for her to retreat to some remote island with her perfect paintings and artfully messy bun and glamorous silver adornments, for her to grow fat and uncertain. Yet I knew it wouldn’t matter how far away she went if she retained her place in Laurent’s erotic imagination. What had happened between them, and what continued to happen between them? I could recognize the irony here; I had no right to feel injured when I was playing both sides too.

It was then that André brought Sofia over to where Susan and I stood, his hand at the small of her back as they walked toward us. Colin was lingering in front of Chantal’s paintings, not yet having come over to say hello. Laurent was still with the group by the empty wineglasses. If I had a picture of this scene and had decided to do a detail instead of painting the whole, I would have chosen Laurent’s face: the watchful expression, the dark, fathomless eyes. I saw him looking over at us at one point, pretending to listen to what a man in a burnt-orange sweater was saying, his hands gesturing as he spoke. Laurent might have noticed that Colin was there, but he would not have made a scene, even if he had a right to. We rarely spoke about Colin, and in January, I finished the painting I’d started of him last fall. He now sits with some other canvases, his face against the wall, though I look at him sometimes, trying to decide what to do with him. I knew that Laurent wasn’t thrilled when he first saw that I was painting my ex-boyfriend, but he had not really protested. “The muse,” he’d said, his voice laced with irony. “How wicked she is, Jayne, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my heartbeat very loud in my ears at that moment. “I guess it’s rude of me to be painting an ex-boyfriend.”

Laurent had looked at me for several seconds before saying, “No, not really, but I hope that you will choose me as your subject before long too. I would like that.”

I promised him that I would, but so far, I haven’t. I want to paint one of the framed photos of him that he keeps in the apartment, but I haven’t yet been able to decide which one.

About a month after this conversation, on the morning before I flew home to California for Christmas, Laurent asked, strangely, if Colin would be there too. “Of course not,” I said, wary. “He doesn’t live in L.A.”

“He doesn’t have to,” Laurent said. That was all he said, and I didn’t press him to say more. If he’d wanted to pursue it, I thought, he would have. But from then on, I was more on guard, more aware that he probably knew I was keeping something from him, and that my sneakiness, my selfishness, whatever he thought it was, surprised him more than he’d expected.

“I like your paintings,” Sofia said. Her French accent was a little more pronounced than Laurent’s when he spoke English. “The one of the couple standing near the ice cream cart is my favorite, I think. The way you expose the man to us, I can see that he is worried he will lose her.”

“You really see that?” I asked. “I thought I’d made sure he looked happy.”

She shook her head. “It is a very thin happiness that he has.”

“I noticed that too,” said Susan. “I can almost hear ‘Moon River’ playing in the background.”

“The song from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?” asked Sofia.

“Yes, exactly,” said Susan. She glanced from Sofia to me and smiled. I couldn’t remember how the song went; I smiled back at her but said nothing.

“Someone once told me that I look like Audrey Hepburn,” said Sofia. “But he said that to other women too. He was such a terrible flirt.”

Susan studied her for a few seconds. “I can see a resemblance.”

“You are kind to say that, but I don’t see it,” said Sofia.

“Sofia is as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn was,” said André, leering at her before he turned to me, as if challenging me to disagree. God, I disliked him. For a second, I worried that I would say this aloud.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sofia scoffed. She didn’t blush, nor did she seem to be acting coy, which I must admit impressed me. I think she must have seen through André too, through his paper-thin flattery, his mercurial moods, straight through to his insecurities and unflattering competitiveness with other men.

“Jayne here looks like Catherine Deneuve, don’t you agree?” he asked, laughing in a loud burst.

Sofia glanced at him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “She looks more like Audrey Tautou than Deneuve.”

“One of my friends said that once,” I said. “But really, who cares?” I said, trying not to raise my voice. I really did want to yell
Why are we talking about this?

“Do you mind holding my glass for a minute?” I asked, turning to Susan. I needed to use the bathroom but didn’t want to announce it to everyone. “It was nice to meet you, Sofia,” I said, ignoring André, who was now leering at me. “Thank you for coming tonight.”

“I was looking forward to it,” Sofia said, her voice warm. “See you again soon, I hope.”

I paused, taking in her eyebrows raised in inquiry, her right hand at her throat, fingering her gleaming necklace. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Of course,” I said. “See you again.”

When I returned from the back office, I walked straight to where Colin was now standing in front of
Sarah with Cat-Eye Glasses
and put my hand on his sleeve. His arm was so solid under his coat, and I wanted to throw my own arms around him but hesitated, imagining both André’s and Laurent’s eyes on us. Sofia had completed her tour of the show and stood now with Laurent, her coat on. Colin turned and enveloped me in his long, hard-muscled arms. I pressed my cheek to his shoulder for a few seconds, breathing in the cold night air he’d carried in with him, the smell of damp wool. “Your paintings are stunning,” he said. “They really are, Jayne.” In the next second, his mouth very close to my ear, he whispered, “I’ve missed you so much. When are you coming home to New York?” We hadn’t seen each other since before Christmas. More than three months. I had missed him, but we were in touch often; we e-mailed and texted, and I spoke to him on Skype sometimes when Laurent wasn’t home.