The Third Grace (16 page)

Jealousy digs at her and she reprimands herself; they're just old statues, after all.

François inclines backward on the desktop to rest on his elbows, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “You like the Graces, my little Mary Grace?”

She nods. “But why do you?”

François takes the card from her hands and examines the photo, smiling to himself. “I first saw them with my classmates when I was a boy. We studied ancient Greek poetry about them.” And he looks deeply into her eyes as he recites words that she vows never to forget: “ ‘Then Eurynome, Ocean's fair daughter, bore to Zeus the Three Graces, all fair-cheeked, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and shapely Thalia; their alluring eyes glance from under their brows, and from their eyelids drips desire that unstrings the limbs.' ”

Her breathing has become ragged. There's a mania in the way his pupils dilate, but if it's madness that makes François so irresistible, she wants to be mad, as well.

“They're my ideal,” he says to her. He grins crookedly at her, but she thinks his meditation upon the Greek goddesses is not such a stupid idea; the guys in Tiege are all talking about Sharon Stone as if
she
were a goddess. At least somebody wrote real poetry about the Graces. “Together they represent total happiness,” François continues, “the three of them serving the gods with their gifts. Which one of them are you?” He points to the middle statue. “Maybe you're like this one. Aglaia was the youngest and most beautiful of all.”

Most beautiful? Mary Grace can't help herself then; she slams her body into his and kisses him with ferocious jubilation, and he says, “You unstring my limbs.”

The nighttime rain of Paris didn't present itself with ear-splitting acclaim. Aglaia grew aware of its presence through the shroud of her awakening, through an odor cheesy like the sourness of her brother's bedroom in the morning, clothes strewn on the floor. As a girl, she welcomed rain, even during harvest—especially during harvest, though her dad would gripe that the crops should be in the bins by now, out of the weather. Rain on a weekday after school had begun was no fun because she and Joel had to slog through the mud up the road, and the driver would be foul about their mucking up her bus. But on rainy Saturday mornings, the day they'd normally be roused by Dad's voice from the bottom of the stairs—“Kids, the chores won't get done by themselves!”—she'd be allowed to stay in bed a bit longer with nothing urgent to do but listen for a while to the music of the rain. Mom loved rainy days best for baking bread, the humidity giving the dough a wonderful elasticity, and so the household cleaning waited until after a midmorning spread of crusty
Bulkje
sliced thick with gooseberry or wild plum jam. It was like a holiday when Aglaia awoke to the rain pounding against the farmhouse window.

The rain of Paris, on the other hand, made only a soft pattering on the panes of the half-opened French window. So, after noting that the second bed in the hotel room was still vacant and that her alarm wouldn't go off for another hour, Aglaia fought back into an uneasy somnolence like the burrowing beetle in her childhood sandbox kicking the grains out from behind its rear legs into a soft pile of bedclothes.

E
b MacAdam steeped himself in the writings of the Reformation by such giants as Luther and Knox and Calvin. In fact, he kept a stack of their books beside his bed on the floor—piled up so that his dear wife complained whenever she vacuumed—and he would read some nights as he dipped into his stash of butterscotch candy after Iona had drifted off to sleep.

Eb was doing just that late on Tuesday night, working his way through a bag of the sweets and the pages of
Institutes of the Christian Religion
. It would be Wednesday morning in France, he thought, and Aglaia must be preparing to deliver the costume to the museum about now. Maybe that was why he couldn't sleep tonight.

His study in theology was an ongoing affair because he found such immediate application to everything he read by the great figures of the church. Take the section he was perusing right now, entitled “Scripture, to Correct All Superstition, Has Set the True God Alone Over Against All the Gods of the Heathen.” Here he'd just been thinking about the swarm of gods that inhabited the chaos of imagination found in the pagan stories of ancient peoples, and which were being revived in current publications.

Not that he read much of the drivel written today.

Eb reprimanded himself for his pride. He had his own superstitions that needed correcting, he supposed. The idea that he couldn't live without sugar might be one, and at the thought Eb resolutely tied a knot in the top of the plastic bag of confectionary and hid it again under some old letters inside the drawer, where Iona never dusted.

Eb had been thinking about the subject of paganism lately because of Aglaia. Of course, he'd never heard her use the word and she likely didn't think of herself as a pagan at all—perhaps not even as a spiritual being.
But Eb suspected a religious influence somewhere under her defensiveness.

Just last week, for example, using busy-ness as her excuse, she'd relegated the biblical research for costumes of the three Magi—commissioned by one of Denver's large churches—to the student volunteer, as if reading the story of the nativity might trigger dangerous emotions.

Eb recalled the days of his own youth, when he wondered whether the Bible itself was just a superstitious myth, whether its writers had simply borrowed themes from civilizations pre-existing the Jews. After all, oral folklore from every tradition included stories that sounded similar to what was written by the “people of the book”—stories of creation and of a great flood and of propitiation through a savior coming down from the skies.

Eventually, Eb found that argument weak. Mythological literature tried to explain origins using symbolism (much like costume making tried to illustrate personality using caricature). Mythological religion based its rituals on sympathetic magic—if the crops withered, the pagans believed their god was dying and so offered sacrifices to ensure their bellies would be filled—but those stories said nothing about life's spiritual, transcendent meaning or mankind's purpose on earth. Those stories expressed a
desiderium,
a longing for something lost, that only biblical truth could satisfy.

Eb believed that back in Abraham's day Jehovah called His people out from the blind worship of nature to a relationship with a living and personal and holy God. And he believed that God was still calling—calling
him
, Eb MacAdam, not to some mythic record of so-called “sacred history” that revered the mysteries of world religions, but to the supernatural events recorded in the Bible and taking place within the framework of real-life history.

That is to say, Eb believed in miracles but didn't trust in magic. He believed in a Book written by a loving Being but didn't trust books full of imaginary beings. The Bible might be a story, he thought, but it was a true story; it might be a philosophy, but it reconciled daily life with Holy Spirit. He reached down beside his bed and picked up his own worn copy of that living Word and entered it, expecting to find God in its pages.

Aglaia sat by herself in the hotel's small breakfast room, her suit already constricting because of the clamminess. Last night's rain hadn't broken the heat and the morning sky again threatened precipitation. She tore off chunks of baguette to dunk in her
chocolat chaud
, as the French couple by the fireplace was doing, then quaffed the rest of the cocoa in spite of the crumbs.

The neighborhood outside her window was rousing itself for a day of commerce. The tradesman across the street clattered wide his shutters and, one by one, the other shop windows blinked open to reveal their wares—sausages or souvenirs or cigarettes. The crumbling brick wall of the upper stories above the shops was graphed with miniscule apartment balconies, pots of scarlet blooming behind wrought iron railing.

The cab pulled up for Aglaia—using the Métro today was out of the question for her after all, she'd decided—and she gathered her purse and the costume box and documentation. The drive to the museum didn't take as long as she'd anticipated. She hardly had time to reapply her lip gloss and review the French terminology she'd underlined in preparation for the meeting:
la livraison
, delivery;
la réplique
, replica;
le jupon
, petticoat.

But when she arrived at the museum, a Neo-Renaissance palace, she found that the officials there spoke polite English after all. The receptionist awaiting her introduced herself, with a genuine smile, as Christelle, and then ushered her through massive pillars into a conference room.

Three committee members welcomed Aglaia with a handshake; they hung the dress, offered gratifying accolades about her fine handiwork, examined the papers, and signed notification of delivery.

A long-haired journalist with a flashing camera peppered her with questions and informed her that the article would be printed in tomorrow's
Le Parisien
. The curator, on exiting with his associates, handed her his business card and advised her to call if she needed anything else.

The whirl of activity—its formality and in particular its brevity—threw Aglaia off, the whole affair taking less than an hour. It wasn't that she liked to be in the limelight, but she'd expected more ostentation somehow, more hoopla, perhaps even a luncheon. The meeting hardly justified the expense of the trip over to France, she thought as she picked up her handbag and glanced around the emptied room, wondering what to do next. But the receptionist stood by a tray of pastries behind her, and held out a steaming cup as if she read Aglaia's mind.

Christelle shrugged. “They are industrious businessmen,
non
?”

“It's the same at home.” Aglaia laughed, relieved that she hadn't been left totally on her own. She deliberated over an
éclair
dusted with chocolate and a caramelized
palmier
, and chose the former. Christelle didn't take a pastry until Aglaia urged her to help herself and said she didn't want to eat alone, and then the woman picked out a buttery
brioche
.

“
Bon appétit,
” Christelle said
.

While Aglaia finished her coffee, the receptionist explained that arrangements had been made for her to view a segment of the museum's archived costumes. She led her through the stately halls of buff-colored stone, over intricate mosaic floors, beneath arched windows tinted gold, and alongside an exterior colonnade through which Aglaia spotted the Eiffel Tower in the distance, poking like a thick darning needle up into the fabric of the sky.

The exhibition they skimmed along the way showed mannequins dressed in suede fringes and miniskirts, celebrating the attire of the 1960s. Although the facility housed tens of thousands of garments and fashion accessories, only a small section of the palace was dedicated to the rotating showcase of costumes. Aglaia's expectation of spectacular variety was a bit blighted, but at the end of a long hall they entered a chamber with high ceilings and carved columns where the next show was being organized for the floor. No one else was among the racks now, and Christelle left Aglaia unaccompanied to view the eighteenth-century clothing at her leisure.

The light was muted to protect the outfits but still allowed Aglaia to make out the tidy stitching around the cuff of a lace-ruffled blouse and the worked buttonholes in a striped jacket. She was enthralled with the protective cloak and headgear donned by a physician to protect himself from the miasmas of the Plague, and stockings worn by the Montgolfier brothers when their invention—the hot air balloon—first ascended to the skies above Paris. But the dresses were what captivated her most.

Aglaia was tempted to dash off a few sketches for future reproduction in her own studio but was afraid she'd be breaking some code and be embarrassed if anyone walked in. She gave herself over to the clothing, and her sensual enjoyment went beyond sight. Not spying any security cameras, and even though she wasn't wearing cotton curatorial gloves, she allowed herself to stroke the rich textures of satin jacquard and felted wool and hand-loomed linen worn thin at the seams, and she picked up a lawn handkerchief and inhaled the mellowness of three hundred years.

She wished Eb could be here with her; he'd find such joy in the workmanship.

At the mental picture of Eb, Aglaia pulled herself away from examining a pair of hunting breeches—maybe sported by some aristocrat chasing a fox through the royal forests of the king. Perhaps “joy” wasn't at all the word Eb would use in this situation, particular as he was about his vocabulary.

She recalled, years ago, admitting to him how happy she was at Incognito, what
joy
the job gave her. Eb took that as an invitation to discuss her inner life, and he made a point of distinguishing between joy and aesthetic pleasure. Artistic endeavor would never fill her void, he prophesied, quoting another of his author-heroes who'd said that joy must have “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” mere happiness didn't bring.

She comprehended his meaning on the spot, though she didn't admit it to Eb, and the phrase had embedded itself. She knew only one source for that stab, pang, and longing—and it didn't have anything to do with sewing or even with François Vivier.

Aglaia abolished those thoughts and concentrated on a flounced
panier
and
robe volante
—a hoop skirt beneath a “flying gown” that had graced a lady-in-waiting attending a duchess in the royal courts. Her hour with the costumes passed swiftly into noon.

“
Excusez-moi.
”

At the sound of Christelle's voice, Aglaia looked up from a shelf of footwear—beribboned dancing slippers and crude wooden
sabots
and embroidered cloth mules with silver buckles. The receptionist was at the open door and standing behind her was Lou, appearing miffed.

“Why didn't you wait for me this morning?” she barked. “I got back to the hotel to find you gone, and I was worried about you. Come along, the
maitre d'
down the street is holding a spot for us.” Lou ignored Christelle's farewell and hustled Aglaia past the curator's closed office door without giving her the chance to thank him.

“You say you were worried about me?” Aglaia picked up the challenge when they were seated at the bistro. “That wasn't evident when you ditched last night, leaving me to wait for a ride until even the musicians were gone. And as far as worrying goes, what in the world you were you thinking by going off with total strangers like that?” She marveled at her own offensive; it had been a while in coming.

“You have abandonment issues, Aglaia.”

That was just like Lou—deflecting the point to her advantage.

“This has nothing to do with my feeling abandoned.” Had it?

“Don't raise your voice,” Lou instructed. She shook her napkin open on her lap and addressed the waitress: “
Une bouteille d'eau
.” Lou's insistence on using French was becoming supercilious. She couldn't even ask for a bottle of water without sounding as though she were instructing Aglaia.

“But why didn't you come back to the hotel last night?” Aglaia pressed her complaint. “What would keep you from at least calling and letting me know you weren't dead or something?”

Lou cocked her head and asked in a snide tone, “You're serious? You want the lurid details of my nighttime activities with Philippe and Emmanuelle?”

Aglaia turned her face away, mortification dousing her anger.

“I thought not,” Lou said. “Let's get on with our day then, shall we?”

And that was that. Repelled by Lou's reference to her lasciviousness, Aglaia didn't know what else to do but ignore it and resign herself for the afternoon to the pace the other woman set.

Lou escorted her along the grand avenues—Saint Germain, Haussman, and Montaigne—pointing out the
haute couture
houses and even stopping in at one to actually purchase a gown for herself at extravagant cost. It was made of deep magenta organza and
peau de soie
, the bodice encrusted with crystals. She said it was for the university function next weekend and suggested Aglaia try on an outfit that would have been completely out of range for her pocketbook, though it was on sale. Her own little black dress Naomi so admired couldn't approach Lou's in pizzazz, even if it did show off her
décolletage
, but it would have to do for the society dinner.