Paris, He Said (6 page)

At dinner, her bag of art supplies hidden beneath the white-cloth-cloaked table, Jayne ordered the poached sole, but when their food arrived, she realized that she didn’t have much of an appetite; jet lag had descended, her earlier giddiness flattened by fatigue. Laurent was hungry, however, and while she nibbled at her fish, he ate all of his steamed mussels and French fries, the café’s signature
plat principal
, and drank a beer served in a gleaming Pilsner glass.

He watched her fight to keep her eyes open. The café was loud; they had to raise their voices to be heard across the table, but she still had trouble staying alert. Among the tourists and middle-aged couples, four men in dark gray and midnight-blue suits pointed at each other and laughed aggressively at a nearby table, their faces shining with prosperity and confidence.

As he excavated a mussel from its shell, Laurent said, “You have changed your life, Jayne.”

She looked at him, her heart pounding. “Yes, I guess I have.”

“If you work hard, you will have everything you want,” he murmured. “And then we will see who you will become.”

“Do you mean if I work hard at my art?”

He nodded. “Yes, of course that is what I mean.”

She glanced down at her napkin and was surprised to find herself twisting it in both hands. “You mean you’re going to put me in a show?” she blurted.

He nodded. A tiny french fry crumb dotted his chin. She fixated on it, not sure if she should tell him or brush it away herself, but with his unwavering gaze pinning her, she was reluctant to do either.

“Yes, of course,” he finally said. “You knew that I would put you in a show before you decided to move here with me.”

“I actually didn’t know that, Laurent,” she said, taken aback. Was he serious? She supposed he was. “I didn’t come to Paris because I thought—” She stared at him.

He batted away her words with a dismissive hand. “You had to know, Jayne,” he said. “You were counting on it. Some part of you was, and that is just fine.” He gestured to the waiter for the check, which arrived on a small black platter instead of inside a leatherette case. Laurent took a few bills from his wallet and settled them on top of the paper.

“I really wasn’t,” she insisted, her body tense with nervous joy.

“I can see that you are very excited,” he said. “But I know you must be very tired too. We will take a taxi home instead of walking back.”

She nodded, still stunned.

On the ride back to her new home, she held Laurent’s hand tightly and rested her cheek against his shoulder. He smelled so good, even after the cigarette he’d smoked outside the restaurant before summoning a cab; she was used to the harsh smoke now and had grown almost to crave the scent on his clothes and hair. She was so tired, luxuriously at peace for the first time in weeks; she wanted to keep her eyes open, to feel everything that was happening to her, to stare at the golden light reflecting off the ancient stone buildings along the Seine. The Eiffel Tower was glittering in the distance as if fairy dust had been tossed onto it, its lights an undulating cape of gilded, winking flecks. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again the taxi had pulled up in front of their building on rue du Général-Foy, the street emptied of all its daytime occupants; its nocturnal lighting, soft and a little spooky, reminded Jayne of a set where a vampire film might be shot.

Laurent was gently shaking her awake. “Chérie,” he whispered. “You’re home now.”

Laurent’s words from the previous night still dominated Jayne’s thoughts as she moved through the crowded, noisy streets to Sacré Coeur, a walk she had planned since long before she stepped off the plane. She peered into the boutique and department store windows on boulevard Haussmann, its sidewalks clogged with tourists, the bulky shopping bags at their sides making it difficult for anyone to pass.

She had not sent an e-mail bursting with the news of Laurent’s offer to Liesel or Melissa or to the one art instructor she still kept in touch with, Susan Kraut, whom Jayne had worked with eight years earlier, and had seen again four years after that summer when she passed through Chicago on her way home to Los Angeles from New York. During the long layover she’d arranged between flights, she had taken the train into the city and gone to the gallery on Wells Street where her former instructor was exhibiting new paintings—moody, unpopulated interiors of homes that looked haunted by benevolent ghosts. Jayne had taken an intensive painting class with Susan, having begged her parents for the money to enroll in the three-week summer course. During those rainy, hot June days at the school that sat like a sullen gray fortress on the western periphery of Grant Park, Susan taught her to work with light and focused more on composition than any of Jayne’s previous instructors. The portraits Jayne first began to paint in the class, most in color, the somber interiors, the more chromatically vibrant exterior landscapes, formed the core of her portfolio. She had been working with these subjects and the themes of absence, longing, and dream-like loneliness ever since.

When she showed some of these early paintings to Laurent, the few she’d hung on the walls of her apartment in New York, he looked at them closely for what felt like a long time. Her stomach tensed as she watched his face for some hint of his thoughts. Finally he said, “You were twenty-one when you painted these, Jayne? Why have these not already been sold? Because they would sell.”

Nothing anyone had ever said to her had given her more pleasure than those words. Now, her legs moving her toward the domed Parisian cathedral a couple of miles from her new home, she realized that she should have felt more confident that Laurent intended to release her work into the world.

But on that evening, as they stood peering at her paintings together, she hadn’t believed him. “I don’t know,” she’d said. “There’s a lot of competition. You know what New York’s like.”

“There are galleries in other places, Jayne. You don’t have to start here.”

“I didn’t. I started in D.C.”

He gave her a droll look. “Do not say you are like me, Jayne, that you do not have enough talent. It is clear to me that you do. But you need to keep working and seeing what comes to you. Paris will have a good effect, I am sure. In France we like to think we have the answers to all the most important questions.”

She laughed. “Such as?”

“Such as, what is nineteen o’clock? Such as, why do tourists stop suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk?”

She laughed again. “I already know the answers to those questions.”

“So tell me why tourists stop in the middle of the sidewalk.”

“Because they’ve just realized that they’ve been pickpocketed.”

He was laughing now too. “Yes, very good. Exactly.”

The streets around the Anvers and Barbès-Rochechouart Metro stops were almost impassable. Throngs of slow-moving women and impatient men rummaged through piles of cheap shirts and plastic-wrapped cosmetics and toiletries on the tables in front of Tati and the other bargain stores that populated the quarter. The massive dome of the sun-bleached stone church loomed above the commercial melée. On the winding gray staircases and terraced lawns, bedraggled parents and young couples huddled together, drinking soda and bottled water bought from North African men who fished the drinks from scuffed blue plastic coolers filled with melting ice.

Sacré Coeur and the merchant-lined streets looked very much as Jayne remembered them when she and her friends had visited nine years earlier. She stood on the plaza in front of the cathedral, watching the curious or the devout disappear through the entrance into the cool, hushed gloom; a sound halfway between a gasp and a sob escaped her throat. A few feet away a middle-aged couple, the man in a Lakers T-shirt, the woman in a baggy green sundress, glanced over at her before quickly averting their eyes.

It was all still there, an immense quilt of bold, fantastical human will: the faded tawny golds and grays of the descending rooftops and scorched chimney pots, the cold steel-blue river with its fabled Left and Right Banks, the towers and steeples and crooked cobblestone streets, bisected by wide, brutish boulevards. As seductive as a mirage, but every slab of stone, every silent or uproarious inch of it, real. She had not returned triumphant as a brilliant painter or a self-made woman whose only worry about money was how to spend it. She was eight years out of college and past her dewiest youth, living off the largesse of a man she had known less than a year, but she had come back to Paris anyway. It was hard to imagine being unhappy here.

Mornings in her new home, even four stories above the street, were full of bleating horns and people calling to each other in strident voices, laughter erupting from deliverymen on motorbikes or from students on their way to the nearby lycée, their giggling flirtatious, their cries of feigned adolescent indignation.

“Why does there always have to be so much noise in the morning? It’s not as bad as New York, but it’s louder than I expected,” Jayne complained groggily while Laurent put on the gray pants and the blue pullover he kept on a hook on the back of the bedroom door; he always managed somehow to look well dressed, even in his casual clothes. Each morning around eight he dressed and disappeared for a half hour to buy a copy of
Le Figaro
and drink an espresso at the
tabac
he favored on rue du Rocher. “It’s always men shouting too,” she said. “Never women.”

“Women do not shout in France,” said Laurent, smiling down at her as he pulled open the shutters that they closed each night at dusk. Their bedroom windows overlooked the street; the windows in the living room faced the courtyard, where it was quieter. She read in there on some afternoons, stretched out on the sage-green
canapé
with its unyielding plum pillows that smelled of cinnamon. (“Couch?” Laurent had said when she’d first used that word. “How strange it sounds. Like someone clearing his throat!
Canapé
, Jayne, use that word instead.”) She sometimes carried her laptop into the living room (“The
salon
!”) and answered e-mails after breakfast, or she wrote in her journal after Laurent had left for his espresso.

“I’m sure that Frenchwomen shout if a man is attacking them,” she said.

“Frenchmen are gentlemen,” he said. “We do not attack our women.”

She raised herself on her elbows, rolling her eyes. “Really? What about Dominique Strauss-Kahn?”

“He is a rare case,” he said. “You must get New York out of your head to live fully in Paris.”

“And Chicago and L.A. too, for that matter.”

“One day we will go to Los Angeles, and you will show me where all the film stars live.”

“I don’t really know where they live,” she said. “You’d have to pay for a tour that would take you to their neighborhoods.”

He did not look convinced. “You couldn’t take me?”

“I really don’t know where their houses are. I told you that my dad’s a lawyer and my mom’s a high school teacher, didn’t I? We don’t hang out with movie industry people.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“My parents live in Pasadena, not Beverly Hills. Their next-door neighbor owns a dry cleaner’s. They have a nice house, but it’s not a glamorous neighborhood.” She hoped they would continue to live in the house far into the future, but if her mother did leave her father, Jayne knew they would likely have to sell it. (When she’d mentioned her worries about her parents’ marriage to Laurent, he had hardly blinked. “It is not easy. I was not a success as a husband. I don’t think that many men are.” “My dad isn’t like you at all,” she said, not realizing until the words were out how offensive they likely sounded. But Laurent had not looked offended. “I have never thought that he is, and to be frank, I would hope we are not at all alike.”)

“I can show you where President Hollande lives,” he said.

“Everyone knows where he lives. It’s not a secret, is it?”

He laughed. “You are supposed to be impressed.”

“You’re being silly, and I’m still tired.” She lobbed a pillow at him. He dodged it and laughed again, tossing it back onto the bed.

It was the beginning of her third week in Paris, the first official day of summer, and she did not feel at all homesick. No longer having to share a 450-square-foot apartment with walls so thin she could sometimes hear her roommate snoring, no longer having to rely on the wan light that filtered in through their unit’s four windows, if the sun was out at all—she did not miss this. She did miss her friends, but even that wasn’t so bad. They had e-mail and Skype and texts; she talked to them almost as much now as she had in New York.

The light in Laurent’s apartment was the most pure of any place she had lived—not as bright as Pasadena’s, but more flattering, softer.
Pure
was his word, but she thought it fitting. “It is a mood,” he had said, “and the most important element of any room, of any work of art too. I knew when I first saw this place that I would buy it. It is not very close to my gallery, but it was too beautiful not to have.”

“You raised your children here?”

He shook his head. “Frédéric was living with a friend from the university when I moved in. It was a year or so after the divorce. Jeanne-Lucie lived with her mother and visited me two nights a week. She was only a year away from university too.”

The light in the morning was the strongest of the day, flooding in from the northeast-facing rooms until it grew more muted and golden in the early afternoon. Even when the sky was overcast, the pearl-gray and ivory walls still seemed to glow gently. Laurent had hung paintings in every room except the bathroom and the kitchen. “Humidity is very bad if you want your art to last,” he said. “And no serious art should ever be hung near the bathtub or the bidet.”

“Of course not,” she said. “Only art that isn’t serious, but in those cases, I suppose you can’t really call it art.”

He laughed. “No, we call it commerce.”

Even if most of the intricate paintings Laurent favored weren’t unforgettable—the landscapes, the still lifes of laden spring and autumn tables—there were six scrupulously detailed family portraits (the artist’s signature not entirely legible,
S. Bau—
), four children and their parents, that hung at eye level in the hallway leading from the bedroom to the salon and her cherished
canapé
, and they were all as good, better, Jayne thought, than any painting of Pepper’s.