The Runaway Wife (16 page)

J
IM SIPPED CHAMPAGNE AND LOOKED AROUND
the pale-blue interior of the Skyroom at the French Institute. The room was dominated by a large plate-glass window overlooking Park Avenue. There were more women than men in the room, all different ages, most in colorful dresses, not the typical New York City black. Jim towered over the men, who were slimmer and shorter than he, and, he guessed, mostly French. He walked to the window and stood, mesmerized by the view across the ravine of Park Avenue, which was shrouded by a thick mist this evening.

“Et voilà. You must be Ambrose's friend.” An elderly woman wearing a light-blue dress that echoed the color of the walls approached Jim with open arms, as if he were an
old friend. Ambrose must have forwarded an image of him to the institute's president.

She rattled off a few sentences in French that Jim didn't understand and then administered the French version of a kiss on each cheek.

“Ambrose mentioned that you're more accomplished as an Alpine hiker than you are in the French language,” she said in English. She winked and nodded at Jim, which made him wonder what Ambrose had really told her.

“About the hiking—Ambrose has a tendency to overstate the truth. But I suppose I learned a few things about the Alps this summer.”

“We're about to start our program,” she said, taking his arm and walking with him to the front of the room, to the first of six rows of white folding chairs.

“Sit here, in this chair next to mine, while I gather the crowds.”

From the lectern, Marie-Monique beckoned the cocktailers. Jim checked his phone to find many texts from Ambrose, the last “Will you PLEASE call your parents?”

He hadn't yet told them that he'd quit the job he'd never begun, and he wasn't in the mood to listen to his mother's hectoring. Since Jim hadn't responded to their calls, they'd turned to Ambrose.

“S'il vous plaît, mesdames et messieurs.” Marie-Monique adjusted the microphone and waited as the small crowd settled into their seats.

“I am delighted to have the honor of introducing our
guests this evening, Charlotte Goncourt of Flammarion and Helene Castellane of Éditions Gallimard . . .”

Jim's heart skipped a beat. Helene Castellane?

Their eyes met as she walked to the lectern.

“Helene?” he said.

As Helene registered his presence, he noticed a rush of blush color her cheeks. He was reminded of Calliope's face in the warm sun, when color clung to the lower part of her cheek, near her jawline.

She stopped and leaned toward him. “How
fonny
! What are you doing here?” Her breath tickled.

“I have no idea,” he whispered back and shook his head.

“Apollinaire brought you here, didn't he?” she whispered.

“All the way from the Wildhorn.”

“I must . . .” She nodded to the podium.

Jim watched her compose herself as she took her place next to Marie-Monique.

“Helene Castellane will be discussing the recently published new editions of the surrealist poets, original texts complete with English translations—in particular
Alcools
by Guillaume Apollinaire. As a scholar, Helene has written several important papers on the surrealists.”

Helene paused at the podium as if she had forgotten what she was going to say. She held up the book, the book that contained one verse that he knew by heart. She spoke in French.

Her voice was Calliope's, the Calliope of the Wildhorn,
a voice that sailed in the wind without a tether. The arm that held up the book was slender and white: Calliope lifting the heavy pot of fish stew over the fire. How strong that slender arm was. The shiny black paperback cover was different from that of the white covered edition he'd carried down the Alps. This one featured a starlit night, but the stars were bees!

Jim understood only a few words. He was thinking of the Wildhorn, of the meadows of flowers, of the lakes, of the snowcapped mountains, of the snow, the cold, wet snow.

Was she smiling at him, and only him? She was lovelier than she'd been at their first meeting. Perhaps because she was alone, without the backdrop of her two sisters, she looked more mature. He recognized Calliope's elongated nose, the way she raised her hand to her chin, the way she held herself still, as Calliope did, as if waiting for the right moment to spring forth to surprise.

The audience began applauding before Jim realized that Helene had finished. She took a seat in the empty chair on the other side of Marie-Monique.

Jim listened patiently to the next speaker. Madame Goncourt was chicken-bone skinny; her shoulder bones poked from the top of her red dress. She rambled on in a throaty voice about André Breton and the surrealist movement; again, Jim understood little of what she said.

The new editions of the surrealist French poetry were available for sale at the back of the room. Jim made sure he was the last in line. While he waited, he removed a book
from the pile and flipped through the pages to find the poem that Helene had marked for him back in the Cabane des Audannes.

His turn in line.

“This book of poetry . . .” he began.

She looked up at him, her hazel eyes large and luminous.

“I'll tell you one day,” she said.

“How long are you in the city?”

“I'm not sure.”

Jim waited.

“Possibly for a long time. I've had enough of the hubbub my father is stirring up in Paris,” she said. “My mother and sisters cater to his every wish, and it makes me sick. I can't do it. I just can't do it.”

Jim thought of Calliope, her hair in a tight chignon, her constricting white skirt. She had slipped into an icy crevasse, with no hope of sunlight. How long could she last?

“I don't know you very well, but somehow I would expect no less from you,” Jim said.

“Also,” said Helene, “I don't have a job anymore. This event is my last responsibility at Gallimard. I'll be like you when we first met. I remember you said you had spent time in the doldrums in between jobs.”

Jim laughed.

“But you seemed happy with your job as an editor.”

“When I refused to go to his political events, my father told me that the job he'd secured for me a year ago through connections would be in jeopardy. Naturally, I quit.”

“That took courage.”

“Impetuousness is often confused with courage,” she said, standing.

“But your mother?”

“She has resigned herself to—” She looked down at her shoes. “You have to understand: with his veil of charm and vulnerability, my father behaves nicely some of the time, but all the while he's intravenously feeding her a regular diet of his poison. He demeans her to the point that she thinks she has nothing worthy to say, that his voice is the only one that matters.”

“But her own voice is so strong,” he said.

“In the Alps, it's always that way. When she's been away from him for enough time. Now that she's back in his stronghold, she's abdicated again. I refuse to watch.

“I'm sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist and shaking her head. She turned away from him and raised both hands to her eyes.

Was she crying there, in front of him? If only he had the courage to take her into his arms.

“I saw her briefly in Paris,” he said.

“She told me. She said it was her fault that you overstayed your visit.”

“What about your sisters? Clio?”

She turned to him, wiped her eyes again, and took a deep breath. “They say they need my father for practical reasons, for their jobs, their connections; he helps them pay for country houses, Clio's children's education . . . In return,
he and the party need his daughters to publicly support his campaign. They confuse
need
with
use
! He's using them like he uses my mother, seducing them, bribing them, and making them compromise who they are . . .”

She looked over Jim's shoulder.

“I see you've sold almost all the books!” Marie-Monique said, approaching them. When she saw Helene's face, she retreated. “I must check on the ambassador.”

“How about you? Your new job?” Helene had regained her composure. The sun was out again.

“I quit before I began.”

“What?” There was something giddy about her expression. “You, too?” Her wide-open eyes were not unlike those of a small child for whom everything in the world is possible, and who still believes that someone is capable of bringing it.

“I'll tell you about it over dinner,” he said.

“I can't tonight,” she said. “I have—” She nodded her head in the direction of Marie-Monique.

“She'll understand. I think she'll even like it.”

Helene smiled, then laughed. “You're right. She
will
like it.”

Hers was unlike her mother's smile, unlike her sisters'. It was quieter, more modest, the promise of a small flower bud in early spring. It knew not the trampling wind or the heavy snows. That night he would ask her about the gift of the book and the inscribed poem, and the line that had kept him walking along the endless Alpine crests: “Remember, I wait for you forever.”

Hadn't that little line of six words emboldened him at the outset of the Alpine journey, strengthened him as he trod heavily through the snow, given him the patience to wait out the whiteout and the courage to quit his job and change his life? Now it inspired Jim to look into Helene's large, direct brown-green eyes and gently take her hand.

Did he really need to ask her about the book she had given him after knowing him for only a few hours as he set off on his Alpine journey?

Like Ocean Olsen on the brink of his voyage to the Great New World, he already knew the answer.

Finis

I would like to thank Anthony Nahas for inspiring the Alpine hike in the Wildhorn and for embracing the idea that we might actually find the female hermit. Thank you to Emma Sweeney, my agent, for believing in me; to Jennifer Barth, for saving me from myself and for her intimate and devoted relationship with words and important fiction, and to Wendy Weil, who will always be in my heart.

ELIZABETH BIRKELUND
is the author of one other French-inspired novel,
The Dressmaker.
As a freelance magazine journalist, Elizabeth was the personal finance columnist for
Cosmopolitan
and wrote for more than fifteen years for
Working Woman
,
Self
, and
Glamour
, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

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The Dressmaker
(
under the name
Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck)

Cover design and illustration by Robin Bilardello

THE RUNAWAY WIFE.
Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Birkelund. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-243175-2

EPub Edition July 2016 ISBN 9780062431776

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