The Last Time I Saw Paris (25 page)

Dan shoved his hands in his pockets, staring down at her. “I can't handle this, Lara. I don't know what to do. I need to clear my head.”

Her eyes tracked him as he walked to the door. “Where are you going?”

“A walk, a drink … oh, God, I don't know.…”

He was gone, closing the door quietly behind him as he left, and Lara thought, agonized, that a part of
her soul went with him.
That part that doesn't belong to those twenty-five years with Bill,
her conscience added nastily.

 

Lara asked herself a lot of questions in that hour after Dan had gone, standing under the shower, letting the cool water run over her aching head, over her closed lids, over the body that had borne Bill's two children, the body he no longer wanted.

It's your pride that's hurt, stupid,
the voice inside said, surprising her.
When did you last make love with Bill? When did he last look at you the way Dan does? When did he last consider your feelings before his? When did he last show up for an event that was important to you but not to him? Ask yourself these questions and you'll soon see how those twenty-five years shrink, honey. Maybe all the way back to a total of six or seven when you thought you were happy
—
or at least thought you were going to be happy someday. And now you are prepared to give up Dan's love, your happiness, for selfish Bill, who doesn't give a goddamn about you, anyway? And maybe never did. Fool … fool … fool that you are, Lara Lewis …

 

Dan was sitting at a sidewalk cafe table with his third or maybe fourth glass of Pastis when he saw her.

She had changed into the white skirt and shirt she had worn the first night when they had made love on the beach. She wore the gold sandals and the gold hoops in her ears and she had pulled back her hair, still damp from the shower, into a knot at the nape of her neck.

She looked, Dan thought morosely, like a Spanish
noblewoman in one of the Goya court paintings he had seen in the Louvre. Cool, untroubled, her brow clear.

“Thank God I found you,” she said.

He pulled out a chair for her, waited icily polite until she was seated. “Can I get you something?”

“A glass of red wine, please.”

He signaled the waiter, ordered the wine, sat in silence studying her long feet in the strappy gold sandals and her glossy dark-red-polished nails.

“I'm sorry, Dan.” She was staring at him in that Audrey Hepburn way she had of looking, all big topaz eyes.

She said quietly, “I was wrong to say what I did.”

“Not if you meant it, you weren't.” He took another slug of the Pastis.

The waiter arrived with the glass of the Côtes du Rhône for madame. He placed it in front of her and added another slip to the mounting pile in the saucer for
l'addition.

“It's not easy to leave half a lifetime behind, Dan, please understand that.” She gazed pleadingly at him.

“I understand.”

He was impenetrable behind his barricade of hurt and pride. “I've hurt you and I don't know why I did it. I don't know how to ask you to forgive me. All I can say is I'm sorry. I asked myself the questions you were asking me, and you're right. I have to come to terms with the past, know the truth instead of deluding myself that my marriage was all one golden stretch of time playing happy families. I always thought my honeymoon was so wonderful, but now I know—” She stopped herself just in time.

“Now you know
what
about your honeymoon?”

Lara crossed her fingers as she lied. “Now I know
that honeymoons should be like this. Like what we have.” She stared into the glass of red wine as though it fascinated her. Tears glittered in her eyes.

“Don't ever do that to me again, Lara,” Dan said quietly. “You'll never know what these past few hours have cost me.”

She no longer cared who saw her tears, and now they ran down her cheeks and plopped off her chin. “I promise.”

He lifted her hand to his lips. “It's you and me, Lara,” he said. “That's where it's at. Just you and me.”

Lara remembered the woman in the Paris brasserie, the chic, older Frenchwoman with her young lover, how her face had lighted up when she saw him. She felt that same glow in her own face now and finally understood. That woman had not cared who saw, who noticed. She was in love and that was all that mattered.

Arms around each other's waists, they walked back to the Mirande, where they fell into the big soft comfortable bed and into each other's arms. Too exhausted to make love, they slept like the dead.

A
vignon and the terrible fight were behind them. They were on a dusty road, swirling around the town of Cavaillon, looking for the N100, the road leading to the Luberon, one of the most beautiful parts of Provence.

The car windows were open, letting in the hot air and dust from the
garrigue,
the dry scrubland dotted with massive limestone rocks that rose on either side of the road. Tacky billboards advertising supermarkets and cafes,
pensions
and pizza joints littered the landscape and Lara was thinking sadly it didn't look like much of anything. And then the French did it again. The same miracle they always pulled off.

There, perched up on top of a sheer rock face, was a medieval stone village complete with church tower and ramparts. Silhouetted against the whitewashed blue sky, it looked like a painted backdrop for the story of the knights of King Arthur.

Dan was busy avoiding the slow tractors as well as the enormous trucks and speeding motorists whose main purpose in life seemed to be to pass him, preferably on the wrong side and with only inches to spare. He swung the Renault left under the wheels of a pickup trailing a wooden cart piled high with the local Cavaillon melons, whose sweet perfume filled the air, then chugged up the winding white road that led to Gordes. Past clusters of pale houses fastened to
the hillside. Past tiny vineyards, and the Village des Bories, with its ancient circular stone shepherds' huts. Past tiny farms with clucking geese. In the distance the green Luberon Mountains loomed and the air was clean as purest springwater. Bees buzzed in the wild iris, lupine, and lavender. Palm fronds rattled in the mistral and overhead the sky was the palest whitewashed blue.

Lara drank it all in, heady as wine. In her bag were two books: M. F. K. Fisher's
Two Towns in Provence,
and Laurence Wylie's
Village in the Vaucluse.
She had intended to read them as they wended their way south but somehow there had not been time. Now, she promised herself she would do that. In fact, she would read them aloud to Dan so they could enjoy them together. Fisher's book told how it was for a young American woman with two small children to uproot herself from the United States and her estranged husband (had Lara bought it because of the similarity in their histories? she wondered) and go to live in Aix-en-Provence in the fifties. She had painted a memorable picture of the people and places—local characters, artists, cafes, churches, and landscapes; told how it felt to be poor in another country and yet gain all the bounty of the beauty and culture that came free. And
Village in the Vaucluse
was a living history of life in the old days, before tourists discovered the delights and pitfalls of life in Provence.

They strolled down Gordes's narrow alleyways, skidding on the slippery cobblestones, peering over low stone walls at the distant valley, and poking around tiny dark shops selling the distinctive sunshine-yellow, cobalt-blue, and dark-red patterned fabrics of Provence. Dan bought her lavender sachets wrapped in
pretty fabric and she said they smelled of summer, and Lara bought him an old sepia photograph of Gordes, the way it used to be before it was restored and people like themselves came to buy souvenirs.

Pleased, they took a seat under a cafe umbrella in the Place du Château and ordered a carafe of the local rosé and salade niçoise.

The pace had definitely slowed. Life was simpler here, out of the fast lane, away from the grand restaurants and the unending motorways. Delighted with each other, they held hands. The sun warmed their pale skin, the tail end of the mistral flapped the fringes of the green umbrella and blew Lara's long hair horizontal, and they breathed the aromas of garlic and rosemary, of baking bread and sweet, juicy melons.

“Are you going to say it or am I?” she asked him with a grin.

“This”
—Dan waved his hands expansively—“is Provence. A whole different world from France, with a soul all its own.”

Lara was glad that he sensed it too. They were united again. Together. A team. Lara and Dan against the world and to hell with Bill Lewis and the bimbo. Remembering Delia's words of wisdom, Lara wondered where she could buy some stilettos around here, the symbol of her newfound independence and, hopefully, of her new confidence in herself as a woman.

They drove on, through silent, windswept country lanes where the hedgerows were filled with the tiniest purple irises, brilliant blue scabious, and wild yellow broom. Little black-and-white birds darted fast as space shuttles in front of their windshield, tiny brown rabbits scuttled from under the wheels, and hawks hovered over the white rocks in search of prey.

At the ancient Abbeye de Sénanque, silence hung,
tangible as the spiritual presence of the monks who, centuries before, had worshiped there. The buildings were simple and unadorned and they strolled in cool cloisters where the flagstones had been polished to a sheen by the pacing of decades of pious feet. Surrounded by its fields of lavender, the abbey was a step back in time to a quieter, more inward life, and they sat for a while, letting the peace of the place sink into their souls.

Back in Gordes and too tired to go farther, they checked into the Hotel la Bastide.

The hotel was part of the original stone fortress, clinging to the edge of the sheer cliff overlooking the valley and the winding road they had climbed in the puffing little Renault. Coming in from the heat of the afternoon, the cool stone hallways felt calm and refreshing. Their room had lofty beamed ceilings, tiled floors, and
toile dejouey
wallcoverings. Shutters opened onto the wide valley view, where a thousand starlings congregated in the treetops, twittering and singing in the twilight.

Sighing with pleasure, Lara turned from the window, right into Dan's waiting arms. “I'm dusty,” she protested between kisses. “I'm hot, sweaty—”

“I love my women hot and sweaty and I'll forgive the dust.” He was kissing her breasts now and she threw back her head, laughing. Why, oh, why had she always thought lovemaking was such a serious thing? Why had she never known it was joyous, that you could laugh when you were doing it? Laugh at each other while you were loving each other?

The big bed was a treat, no squeaky springs here, just big soft pillows and crisp white sheets and their own heated bodies, though Lara did take a minute out to think worriedly that she must feel plumper under
his hands; she was sure she had gained at least five pounds.

But Dan didn't care, he loved her roundness, her smooth skin, her long limbs, and the satin feel of her as he buried his face in her softness. His hands were under her, lifting her to his mouth, and the faint exotic scent of her was the only element that mattered to his senses right then, right now, forever. . . . She writhed under his tongue, and he gripped her tighter, forcing her into even dizzier heights, until she yelped with pleasure and then cried out
no more, no more, enough . . . I can't bear it.
And then he took her and made her his own. Again.

 

The thought of those extra pounds did not put Lara off dinner that night, though, in the vaulted twelfth-century cellar. Candlelight flickered off the creamy stone walls, and there were bunches of perfumed yellow roses in deep-blue vases on the tables, and tiny
amuses bouches
to tempt the appetite. It was cool and elegant but comfortable, and it was busy. Many of the diners had that glossy Parisian look about them, expensively dressed in clothing they considered suitable for
la campagne,
white or black silk outfits as austere as a Japanese haiku, with the added flash of substantial diamonds. There were a few tourists, like themselves, gazing around with that same bemused look on their faces, as though they had landed in another world and maybe, just maybe, it was paradise.

Tonight, Lara looked a completely different person from the sad, insecure woman in Carmel. She wore her long dark hair loose and flowing, something she hadn't done in years because she'd thought it too young. And there was a special glow about her, a new
confidence. She looked like a woman who had just been made love to.

And so did the young woman at the next table, Lara thought, studying her. Homely was Lara's first impression of her. A strong nose, chin too square, short dark hair, tiny round glasses. But the girl's three male companions seemed completely under her spell. They were hanging on to her every word, and her smile lit up the room.

The girl's looks weren't that important, Lara realized suddenly. Her nose was her nose, her chin, her chin, but her self-confidence and femininity were unquestioned. And her charm was all her own. She watched her enviously.

“See how she has all the men enchanted,” she whispered to Dan. “She has them under her spell.”

“She's a sorceress, like you,” he agreed, kissing her hand, and she smiled because she had never thought of herself as a sorceress before. It wasn't the Lara Lewis she knew—or, at least, the old Lara, the woman she used to be.

Dan ordered a local rosé, and tiny mussels in a tangy sauce, with crusty bread that Lara said was to die for, and they liked the mussels so much they ordered them twice. Then the local lamb from the steep hills of Sisteron, tiny loin chops studded with slivers of garlic, rosy as the sunset and twice as delicate, served with creamy-smooth mashed potatoes rich with sweet butter and cream and far better than anybody's grandmother could make. A tray of local cheeses came next, and with them they drank a glass of spicy, delicious Chateauneuf du Pape, Le Vieux Télégraphe.