An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  “Très bien, Ray.”

  We go to the next word, then the next. I try to keep focused, but I can’t stop thinking about Simon.

  When I look up from the worksheet, I find Ray regarding me closely. “You remind me of a portrait I saw in the Orsay,” he says. “The one of Madame de Loynes. Do you know it?”

  In fact I know this painting very well. While at the Sorbonne, I wrote an essay about it.

  Madame de Loynes was a courtesan who later married a count. She’s dressed elegantly in black, with long dark hair that hangs below her shoulders. Her skin is very pale and her features are delicate. She seems at home in herself. Peaceful. Secure. Nothing like me.

  I tell Ray about my paper and how, as a young student, I’d been fascinated both by the portrait and by the woman.

  “But I don’t see any resemblance between Madame de Loynes and myself,” I add.

  “Not physically, no,” Ray says. “But a critic who saw her portrait said she had both the world and the demimonde in her eyes. Sometimes you have that look. Your demimonde shows through.”

  “Frankly, I’d like to get rid of my demimonde.”

  “Me, too. I’d like to forget an unfaithful wife.”

  He waits for me to tell him a matching story, but for me, opening up is not an option. In fact, I hate it.

  I reveal nothing about my life. After all, I am only his French teacher.

  Instead I mention the girl in the water. He remembers hearing about her on television but hasn’t followed the case.

  I tell him that I have a few of her paintings.

  “Did she have any talent?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  This seems more than an idle remark.

  “Why?”

  “I have a little room in my gallery that I use to exhibit works that might otherwise go unnoticed. If she had some talent, I could give her work a little . . . show.”

  This strikes me as a very generous offer.

  “Where are the paintings now?” Ray asks.

  “At my house.”

  “Would you mind if I swung by and took a look?”

  His interest in these paintings surprises me.

  “Or you could bring them to my gallery if you prefer,” he adds.

  I wonder if I have given off some flicker of caution and distrust that makes him think I am hesitant to have him come to my house.

  I don’t want him to have this feeling, so I act quickly to ease his mind. “No, my house is fine.”

  Ray smiles. “Okay, when can I come over?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Sure.”

  I give him the address, then immediately resume my role as French teacher.

  “All right,” I say. “Let’s work a little with verbs.”

  I hand him a page that contains the present indicative conjugation for chanter, to sing.

  “This is a regular verb,” I tell him.

  We go through the present tense of the verb.

  Ray’s recitation is halting at first, but eventually he speaks more fluidly and his pronunciation improves.

  “Okay, now let’s try an irregular verb,” I say. “Etre. To be.”

  We go through the present-tense conjugation: Je suis. Vous êtes. Il est.

  As Ray repeats after me, I find myself drawn to him, though I give no indication of this.

  Instead I bring my attention back to the lesson.

  And yet each time I look at him, I feel an odd charge.

  The process of falling in love has always begun this way for me. Not as a tidal wave but as a soft rippling. In the past I greeted this feeling with pleasure and excitement. Now it’s like a gift, beautifully wrapped, with a large bow, but which I can no longer accept.

  4.

  Ava is waiting at our usual table when I meet her for lunch. She is peering at me quizzically.

  “Do I detect a little glow, Claire?” she asks.

  “Maybe a tiny one,” I admit.

  She goes gossipy. “Let me guess. Ray Patrick?”

  She’s right. Still, I feel no need to rush into things. I play it down.

  “We’ve only met three times. And just for lessons.”

  “When do you move to dinner and dancing?”

  “I’m not sure we will.”

  “Why so hesitant?”

  “My history.”

  “Which you have to put behind you, Claire.”

  I look at her determinedly. “I will. At some point.”

  Ava’s expression is full of warning.

  “Remember after that whole business with the hospital? I came to get you the day you were released. You should have seen yourself, Claire. You were half dead. You’d lost so much weight. You didn’t laugh. You barely talked.”

  I pick up the menu.

  “What are you going to have?” I ask.

  “It’s a salad for me,” Ava answers. “I’ve declared war on my love handles.”

  The waiter appears. We order.

  “Tell me something interesting,” Ava says when he leaves.

  I tell her the story of meeting Julie Cooper on the pier, then about Destiny’s interview.

  Ava focuses on what she considers the most relevant detail.

  “Why were you at the pier?”

  “To pay my respects.”

  “To what, that big Ferris wheel?”

  “No. The drowned girl.”

  Ava is aghast.

  “Why are you sticking your nose into something like this, Claire?”

  “I’m not sticking my nose into anything. I just stopped by the pier and ran into this reporter. When it turned out she was writing an article about girls who’d managed to get off the street, I told her about Destiny. I liked her. We had a little talk as I was leaving. I think we have something important in common.”

  “Like what?”

  “A feeling that you have to act. That you can’t sit by and just let bad things happen. Not if you can prevent them.”

  Ava looks disturbed.

  “You’re talking about Simon, aren’t you? About . . . stopping him.”

  She shakes her head with exasperation, abruptly changes the subject to a property she is showing later this afternoon. It has a heated pool and a bowling alley and once belonged to a film star of the forties.

  I recognize the actress’s name.

  She was in a several noir films.

  Blond.

  Always smoking a cigarette.

  With a sly look in her eyes.

  I ask myself what such a woman would do in my place.

  How far would she go to stop Simon?

  Would she write another letter?

  Make another call?

  And if nothing worked and she remained convinced that he would do it again?

  What then would she do?

  The answer that comes to me is chilling.

  She would kill him.

  5.

  I am heading to my last client of the day when my phone rings.

  It’s Mehdi.

  “Claire, did you get my flowers?”

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “But Claire, I want you to know how I feel about you.”

  “Please don’t do anything like that again.”

  “But it was out of love, Claire. You must learn how to accept it. It’s because you are stressed. I know you are stressed.”

  “Mehdi, I have to go.”

  “But Claire, just tell me yes to one thing. That we can have another class.”

  I am only an image in his head. As unreal as an actress on the screen. Soon his ardency will be focused on someone else. A customer in one of his shops, perhaps. Someone he meets on the street. She could be anyone, because she cannot be real. He can’t imagine her growing old, falling ill, requiring all the forms of care that have nothing to do with his romantic fantasy.

  “I have to go,” I repeat.

  I hang up.

  I a
m almost at my client’s door when my phone rings.

  It’s Destiny.

  “Hi, Claire.”

  “Hi. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Just wondered how you were doing.”

  This is the first time Destiny has ever called simply to chat.

  “Fine. You?”

  “Okay. Doing okay.”

  But is she?

  I hear something strained in her voice.

  “I was wondering if you’d heard anything from that reporter,” Destiny says.

  “In terms of what?”

  “She’d tell you if she found out some stuff about me, right?”

  This is an odd question, and as she poses it, Destiny’s tone becomes more urgent.

  “Stuff about you?” I ask. “Like what?”

  “You know, like about when I was on the street.”

  I feel Destiny’s mind working. She is still worried about her talk with Julie Cooper. It’s obvious that she’s trying to escape a trap she thinks she’s foolishly walked herself into. It strikes me that this is typical of her life, a tendency to charge ahead impulsively, then regret it and beat a swift retreat.

  “Julie’s not a cop, Destiny,” I remind her. “She’s a writer, and the story she’s writing isn’t about what girls did while living on the street. It’s about how they got off the street. How they made better lives. Which you’ve done, remember? Anything she wrote about you would be complimentary.”

  Destiny’s anxiety appears to lessen somewhat.

  She switches to another subject.

  “I’ve been thinking of that dead girl,” she says. “I feel bad about her.”

  “Bad in what way?” I ask.

  “Sorry for her. Because she, like, never talked. I mean . . . never.”

  When she doesn’t elaborate, I try to draw her out.

  “How often did you see her?” I ask.

  “Just now and again. She’d show up on the beach. Paint. Then she’d just . . . disappear.”

  “She didn’t sleep on the street?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I ask a few more questions but fail to get more information out of Destiny. I sense that she’s holding back, that this entire business of “feeling bad” for the girl at the pier is a screen for some deeper and less kindly motive for talking to me.

  “If you know something more about this girl, you need to tell the police.”

  “The police?” Destiny yelps. “No way. Cops make stuff up. They might put it on me somehow.”

  “Put what on you?”

  “What happened to her. Like maybe I had something to do with it.”

  This is preposterous. I want to dismiss it out of hand but stop myself, because Destiny’s fear of being lied about, of no one believing her, is the same as my own.

  I can’t tell her that truth will win out in the end. Because there is no guarantee it will.

  I can’t assure her that innocence is enough. Because it isn’t.

  As I acknowledge the sheer bleakness of this truth, I realize that despite all the evidence to the contrary, I have harbored the absurd hope that something will protect Emma even if I don’t.

  Now I accept the awful fact that I alone stand in Simon’s way.

  He surely knows this, too.

  •

  My text pings as I’m headed home in the evening.

  It’s from Mehdi. One word: Claire?

  The fact that he can reach me through the distance of digital space both disgusts and troubles me.

  I delete his text.

  Once at home, I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with Destiny. It brings back the girl at the pier. I imagine her swimming toward me. I am the boat she is trying to reach. I watch helplessly as something pulls her beneath the waves. She surfaces, her white arms flaying in the air. Then she goes under again. This time she doesn’t rise.

  To restore some part of her life, I take the paintings Destiny gave me and place them wherever I can find space.

  There are pictures of various landscapes. The mountains. The desert. The sea. Houses. These paintings are far more detailed than her drawing on the wall at Venice Beach. I see the shimmer of her nascent talent, her struggle to communicate her feelings, the eloquence of her untrained eyes.

  A great wave of emotion sweeps through me. I’m carried away by it, picked up and brought down in the same eternal motion, like a body in the sea.

  My mind plays its dirty trick. I see Melody. She looks to be around eighteen. She is standing in an artist’s studio, shrouded in a white sheet.

  A male voice: Come to me.

  Melody walks across the room. The walls are hung with a great variety of paintings. She drifts past the Old Masters, then the Impressionists, the Expressionists. She is strolling through the history of art. At last she reaches a large metal tub filled with water. She lowers herself into it, still covered in the sheet. But it is wet now, and, wrapped in it, Melody is shivering.

  Lower, the voice commands her.

  I want to cry out. Plead with her not to sink further.

  But she’s beyond my call. She can’t hear me. She does as she’s told. Sinks further and further down until her face descends below the water, growing younger, the hair lightening, the features rearranging themselves until it is no longer Melody’s face.

  It is Emma’s.

  I must rescue her, but I know that any further contact with Simon will be useless.

  That leaves only Charlotte.

  Sloan

  I’D JUST SAT down to dinner when Miller called.

  “It’s Simon,” he said. “And by the way, please call me by my first name.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just wanted to say thank you again for taking the time to watch those videos.”

  We talked a little longer. I told him that I’d made contact with Claire.

  He was surprised.

  “How did you manage that?” he asked.

  “The tracking system got me within range of her,” I explained. “After that, I looked around the area until I spotted her. When I did, I engaged her.”

  “Engaged?”

  “I struck up a conversation with her. I found out that she’s mentoring a girl off the street. That gave me an idea. I told her I was a reporter working on a story about girls who’d gotten off the street. She arranged for the three of us to meet, and after that Claire and I had a little chat.”

  “A little chat?”

  From the tone of his voice, I couldn’t determine whether Simon understood that by having a more intimate connection to Claire I could keep a closer eye on her, and perhaps even find a way to change her course.

  “Friendly persuasion,” I said, to make my strategy clearer. “I always try it first.”

  There was a pause before he asked, “How old is the girl? The one Claire’s mentoring.”

  “She’s a teenager.”

  “A teenager,” Miller repeated thoughtfully. “That explains Claire’s interest. She’s trying to replace Melody.”

  When I offered nothing in response, Simon changed the subject. “Last night I did a little research on what happened to your father,” he said. “The charges your mother made. They were very unfair.”

  “And never substantiated,” I added quickly. “Because my mother took a quick exit.”

  “But her allegations were enough to stop your father from being commissioner,” Miller said pointedly.

  “Which is what she wanted.”

  “Of course, there’s no real way to make it up to him now, but I was thinking that maybe something could be done to honor him. A scholarship in his name. What do you think?”

  “I think he’d like that very much.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  I went through my father’s long struggle, the odds against his success. I talked about his years in uniform, the torturous road he’d taken up the ranks to where commissioner of police had finally been within his grasp.

  “Except for
her,” I said.

  I thought of my mother, how utterly irresponsible she’d been, the evil accusations she’d made, the irreparable damage she’d done, the fact that she had denied my father the one job he’d worked for all his life.

  “Someone should have stopped her before she destroyed your dad,” Simon said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  There was a pause before Simon added, “How will you stop Claire if ‘friendly persuasion’ doesn’t work?”

  “I’ll go to Plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  My answer was as dark as the trajectory of my mind at that critical moment. “Whatever it takes,” I said.

  Claire

  I KNOW I can’t write to Charlotte, or email or text her.

  She would not reply.

  I can’t call her on the phone either.

  She wouldn’t take the call.

  Only one avenue is available to me.

  Charlotte works at a jewelry store on Rodeo Drive. This is probably where Simon met her. I can easily recreate the scene: Simon gazing at a bracelet or a pair of earrings, asking which ones Charlotte admires. Later he will buy them for her. She will be amazed by his thoughtfulness, his memory. Simon is a master of this sort of thing. A magician at manipulation and deceit.

  I have seen Charlotte only in the photograph that appeared with the announcement of her engagement to Simon. She is tall, slender, dressed elegantly. She will not be hard to recognize.

  I arrive at the shop an hour before it opens and wait for her, half hidden by a marble column.

  There is a surveillance camera at the entrance to the shop, along with others placed here and there along the corridor of high-end stores. Cameras have already recorded my approach, the way I have secreted myself, how I have stood and waited, waited, waited. I know how this can be seen by others.

  Crazy Claire stalking Charlotte.

  But I have no choice, since I don’t know when her workday begins.

  A few minutes later, I see her as she strides up the wide pedestrian boulevard. I expect her to go directly to work, but she veers to the right, where there is a pastry shop. Through its window, I watch as she sits down at a small table. She appears calm, almost pensive, sipping coffee.

  I will never have a better opportunity.

  All right, I tell myself. Go.

  I move quickly toward the pastry shop, then down the narrow aisle to Charlotte’s table.

  She doesn’t notice me until I sweep into the chair across from her.