“He didn’t offer, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t think to ask. What happened?” He blinked as if his vision was blurry. “He did not tell me it was important, Jayne. At least I don’t think he did.”
“You don’t think he did,” she repeated.
“I don’t remember. I am sorry. It was a very busy day.”
“I guess so.”
He paused. “Yes, it was, Jayne.”
She looked down at his feet. He was wearing the shoes he’d had on the night they met, Florentine-made loafers, very soft black leather. “How was your dinner?”
He put a hand beneath her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. “It was fine,” he said. The whites of his eyes were pink- tinged.
She held his gaze. Someone on the street honked twice, the second time long and irate.
“You remember that you should not worry about me when we are not together,” he said.
“Yes, I know, and you aren’t going to worry about me either,” she said, failing to keep her voice from rising.
He ignored her exasperation. “No, I am not. I do not see the point. I cannot control you or anyone else, nor do I want to.”
“I guess you didn’t see my text either,” she said. “I called because Pauline needs her paycheck, and your daughter asked me to lunch today. She said that your ex-wife is also going to be there.”
He made a disgruntled sound. “Anne-Claire is—” He shook his head.
“She’s what?” she said.
“She is funny.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Elle est un peu bizarre,” he said. “Strange is how you would say it, I think.” He bent down to slip off his shoes.
She wondered if he would want to have sex tonight. She wanted to be left in peace but had only ever refused him once, on a night when she had an upset stomach from the clams she’d had at dinner. He’d had steak and later joked that she really should eat more red meat.
“Your wife is strange,” she said. “That’s all?”
“Ex-wife,” he said, putting his arms around her again. “You are in such a foul mood tonight, Jayne. I am sorry, but I did not expect my phone to die at dinner.”
She knew she should say, “That’s all right.” How many arguments, how many backs turned coldly away, would be avoided if these three words were said instead of some furious alternative?
“You still haven’t told me why you have so few books by women either,” she said. “Did your wife take them with her when you got divorced?”
“She did take some of them,” he said. “Ex-femme, s’il te plaît.”
“The ex-femme who I’ll be meeting on Saturday.”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“No, I’m going. I already told Jeanne-Lucie that I would.”
“Anne-Claire will be nice to you,” he said, reaching for her again. “And Pauline’s check is at the gallery, where I keep forgetting it.”
“Why is it there?” she asked, surprised.
“Because, nosy girl—” He paused. “That is the expression, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Our accountant does some of my personal bookkeeping too.”
“That’s nice of him.”
Laurent shook his head. “I pay him for it.”
“I was kidding,” she said.
She stood in his arms, halfheartedly hugging him back. There was nothing wrong, not really. If she were to lay everything out—her fears, the possible problems and self-doubts—if she were to arrange and inspect them like laundry on the line, with its wrinkles and small indelible stains, she would find little more than the occasional inconveniences and minor indignities of being alive. And what were they when compared to the impossible good fortune of a gallery show, of a generous, indulgent lover in Paris?
If she wanted to continue to live with Laurent, she knew that she’d have to trust him. The lunch with Sofia had probably been nothing more than two friends, business associates, really, meeting up after a long time apart, and maybe his phone really had run out of power. She did not know why she was always so willing to assume the worst. Being with Laurent in Paris, working more purposefully as an artist, did feel like the beginning of a new life, the one she had hoped to step into since she’d left home at eighteen and started college.
“Come to bed, Jayne,” Laurent was murmuring now into her ear. “Don’t be cross with me.”
She fidgeted against him, his beard tickling her. “Cross,” she said. “You sound so British.”
“Blame my son-in-law,” he said. “You might meet him on Saturday if he has the courage to stay home for the luncheon.”
Instead of the bedroom, he led her by one hand to the canapé, their steps silent on the plush rugs. She had given in, she recognized, accepted his evasions, but she could feel a kernel of resentment in her chest, something that might not go away. The bitter heart of the matter, she knew, was jealousy. It bothered her badly that he might be attracted to Sofia and to Chantal, the painter that he and André had met for dinner, though when Jayne had looked up Chantal online after the call with André, she’d found only two photos, both showing a pale, severe-looking woman with thick black eyeliner and a confrontational look—not Laurent’s type, as far as Jayne could tell. She had looked up Sofia too, having finally managed to decipher her last name from her signature on one of the six portraits in the hall. Sofia looked beautiful in the pictures that Jayne found of her—a Sophie Marceau lookalike—and this had done nothing to improve Jayne’s mood.
She knew that she couldn’t expect Laurent never to find other women attractive simply because she was living with him. She herself had not stopped noticing other men, and considering what had happened with André earlier that day, she was hardly blameless. She had been in touch with Colin too, and perhaps even more of a transgression was the fact that she’d begun drawing him in her sketchbook.
Laurent spread the purple throw over the sofa, and Jayne lay down on her back, shivering as he settled on top of her and parted her legs with his knee. She could not resist his lust or the inevitable upwell of her own when she saw its determined, exhilarating glint in his half-closed eyes. They had done this so many times now, almost every day since she’d started seeing him. She wondered when their desire for each other would wane—a year from now, two years? But right now he was kissing her neck, the whole fragrant, sinewy length of him pressing her into the soft blanket beneath her naked back. She did not want to do this with anyone else, but when the image of Colin’s face arrived, she felt a confused stab of desire. A moment later, André’s face replaced Colin’s, and she could again feel his hands on her shoulders, pulling her toward him in the back office. But in the final hectic seconds before orgasm, she saw no one’s face, only the dark violet wash of pleasure that emptied her mind of all its ungovernable impressions and complaints.
• • •
After they’d gone to bed, the purple throw folded and smoothed over one arm of the canapé, teeth brushed, bodies showered and dried off, Laurent answered a question that she hadn’t asked. “She’s a lesbian, Jayne.”
She was drowsing next to him, but hearing his words, she awakened as if pinched. “Who? Sofia?”
He rolled his head from side to side until she heard his neck crack. “Chantal is a lesbian,” he said. “The woman André and I met tonight for dinner. In case you would like to know.”
“Oh,” she said, laughing a little. “Thanks.”
“I like her and her work very much. So does André.”
“Then I’m sure you’re both very happy that she’s interested in working with you.”
“Yes, we are.” He yawned and covered most of his face with his hand. “Chantal is three years younger than you are, but she has already been painting seriously for twelve years. You and she will be in the same show, Jayne, along with one other artist. It might be my daughter, but I don’t know yet.”
She was so surprised that she laughed in a choked bu
rst. “Jeanne-Lucie?”
“Yes.”
“What does André say?”
“He doesn’t know yet.”
“What do you think he’ll say?” she asked.
He moved his head to meet her eyes, his own eyes dark hollows in the faint light filtering in from behind the curtains. “My daughter is very talented. It would not be an embarrassment for us to sell her work at Vie Bohème. André admires her and her work. A little too much, I think sometimes. He is the one who in the past has suggested that we put her in a show.”
“You didn’t agree?”
“No, I wanted her to find her own way.”
“You could say that about me too.”
“I could, yes, but our relationship is different from the one I have with my daughter.”
“Obviously.”
One of his hands, large and paw-like in the dark, smoothed the sheet over his chest. “I should tell you that you are not the only artist I help, Jayne,” he murmured.
She felt a hollowing in her ears. “Are there other artists you’re helping right now?” she asked.
“Yes.” He took her hand in his. “I am, I guess you could say, a patron of the arts in a way that is different from how I am a patron of certain artists at the gallery. Those relationships are not the same because I earn money from them. I might earn money from the others, with time, but that is not my only concern.” He paused. “We can talk about this when I am not so tired. I need to sleep now.” He turned onto his side, ignoring or else not seeing her look of alarm.
“Laurent,” she said. “Please don’t spring this on me and then go right to sleep. Who are they?”
He reached for the glass of water on his night table and drained it before looking at her again. “There are two women and one man, but please, let’s go to sleep now, Jayne. Je suis crevé. Toi aussi, tu dois dormir. Maintenant il est très tard.”
He wanted her to go to sleep too, despite a moment ago having done the emotional equivalent of setting off a string of firecrackers in their bedroom. She stared disconsolately at the curve of his back before she got out of bed and went into the living room. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling besides jealousy and disorientation, and that she’d somehow been duped. He was helping two other female artists. And one man, he claimed. What did they give him in return? And what did he expect from her, Jayne wondered, that he hadn’t already asked for?
From behind the dark, rippling curtain of her unease, she felt a deep weariness with herself. Who was it that had said the problem with being alive, being a person, was that wherever you went, there you were? You never had time away from your petty, roiling sackful of insecurities, your sagging body, your covetous, senseless ego. Before she’d left for college, Jayne remembered overhearing her parents arguing in the kitchen about how busy they always were, how tired her father felt after a frustrating day at work, he returning home long after the dinner hour. “What’s the point of all this?” he’d asked Jayne’s mother sharply. “I don’t know, Lloyd,” she’d replied, exasperated and exhausted too. Jayne had always thought that the point was, for better or worse, to be a success, to be able to support yourself, and to help other people when possible. Every tool she needed had been handed to her. The price was that she ignore some of the more immediate demands of her hungering ego.
Your self-respect, you mean, she could hear her sister saying. Abase yourself for now, and you’ll get what you want.
Put in those terms, it sounded a little like Dr. Faustus’s deal with Mephistopheles, but as was the case for Dr. Faustus, the immediate rewards were all but irresistible.
Hi Jayne,
Thanks so much for writing back. It’s okay that you didn’t tell me you were moving before you left. I’m guessing that you had a million things to do.
It looks like I’ll be coming to Paris later this summer, probably sometime in August. As soon as I know for sure, I’ll email you. Or text you? Can you get texts without being charged an arm and a leg? It’d be great to see you and maybe you could show me a couple of your favorite places.
Yours, Colin
CHAPTER 14
Rue Merlin
On the way to Jeanne-Lucie’s apartment on Saturday, Jayne stopped at a sidewalk vendor to buy a bouquet of sunset-orange and pink roses near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where she caught the Metro, which would whisk her across the city to the eleventh arrondissement in about a quarter of an hour. From there, she would walk the short distance to meet her cagey lover’s ex-wife Anne-Claire and their second-born child. The other luncheon attendees she wasn’t sure about—Jeanne-Lucie’s husband, Daniel, Marcelle, and one or two more Frenchwomen close to Jeanne-Lucie’s age, which was Jayne’s age too, more or less?
Laurent had not wanted to say much more about his role as patron of the arts, but he did tell Jayne that he gave monthly stipends to the artists he helped support, and had been doing so for a number of years, though he had not been supporting the same artists all along. A few had stopped making art, and another had gotten married, and her husband had not wanted her to accept Laurent’s money, which had caused both marital friction and financial hardship, but the husband had prevailed, and the last Laurent had heard, the couple was still married.
“What if the artist had been a man?” Jayne asked. “Would his wife also have insisted that you stop giving him money?”
Laurent was eating bread with raspberry jam in the kitchen while he read the paper at the table. She sat across from him, her own bread and jam untouched. “No, I am guessing not, but I think you understand why,” he said.
“Yes, because a wife is property. A husband is not.”
He took a bite and chewed for a few seconds. “That is one way to say it, I suppose. But what if you were married to a man who was being given money by a female patron? Would you accept this arrangement?”
“I don’t know. Probably not,” she admitted. “But it would depend in part on how well we were doing without the patron’s money. How do you know that your artists are actually working? Do you go to their studios?”
“Yes, usually.”
“They live in Paris?”
“Two of them do. One is in Marseille, but we are in contact from time to time.”
“How did you find them?” she asked.
“Different ways,” he said. “A few have come into the gallery to see if we would represent them. If they are not yet ready but I like their portfolio, I sometimes offer to help them for a little while.”
How much do you give them? she wanted to ask but held her tongue, realizing that the conversation had become more of an interrogation than a dialogue. She didn’t have the right to know what he did with his money, and to make matters more complicated, she depended on him financially herself. Even so, the existence of these other artists bothered her, as if he’d admitted to having a second lover somewhere in Paris. A second and a third, with a fourth down in Marseille.
On the Metro now, as she rode across the city to Jeanne-Lucie’s apartment, Jayne wondered if she or her mother knew that Laurent gave money to poor artists. Were these artists-in-waiting really that good? Another question she wished she had asked: How many of them did become good enough for Vie Bohème to represent them? It was like baseball—Laurent with his triple-A team of artists, all of them presumably hoping to be called up.
On the train she glanced furtively at the other riders: fast-talking, cackling teenage boys in ersatz vintage Who and U2 T-shirts, hair greasy and uncombed; ponytailed, hunched girls in earbuds who tapped on their phones; dispirited-looking men in button-down shirts, some North or West African, some white, who tried to hide behind newspapers or else stared blankly at their reflections in the grimy windows; elderly men and women clutching net bags filled with leeks and peaches and raw meat tied up in clear plastic; tourists in their shorts, knees bald or hairy, speaking German, Japanese, English: “Why do we have to do so much walking, Steve? I thought you said we could take a taxi if I got tired.”
“I
thought that woman was a prostitute.”
“I’m never going back to that restaurant.”
She met the gaze of a lone unshaven man with a guitar case and a frizzy nimbus of hair that reminded her of Bob Dylan’s. He smiled at her, chapped lips parting to show a crooked front tooth. Who knew where they were all going. If she asked each of them, said she was researching human happiness, what would they say they had done so far to sabotage their own?
Emerging into the glare of the midday sun from the Metro at Père-Lachaise, she oriented herself toward rue Merlin and almost stepped on a tiny pyramid of dog droppings. This would have been the second time since her arrival in Paris. A wiry, unshaven man in blue coveralls near the Metro exit saw her narrow miss and yelled “Merde!” as he chuckled at his cleverness and her distress. She had on her favorite sandals, silver and dainty, and looked down at her still-pristine feet to hide her angry blush. “Tais-toi,” she said, too quietly for her tormentor to hear. “Tête de merde.”
Laurent had given her the code to the front door of Jeanne-Lucie’s building, which was five stories tall and looked like innumerable other apartment buildings on Paris’s quieter streets: its facade of blond stone, the windows fitted with elaborate black-enameled iron grills. The windows above street level had narrow ledges onto which flowering plants might be placed, but none of the residents had done so. The building was blocky and wide and looked expressionless, as if withholding judgment from the people who glanced at it on their passage down the street. Two blocks east was the cemetery with its famous dead and hordes of tourists trudging the paths that led to Jim Morrison’s, Gertrude Stein’s, and Colette’s graves. She wondered if this was where Laurent wanted to be buried. Or maybe he planned to be cremated. There was undoubtedly some skillful politicking required for the acquisition of a plot at Père-Lachaise.
Unlike the area surrounding rue du Général-Foy, with its busy train station a few blocks away and the innumerable cars and harried pedestrians, rue Merlin was almost peaceful, with its uncrowded sidewalks and the small park where dog owners exercised their energetic Labs and collies. Jayne could feel her body tensing as she pressed the bell for Jeanne-Lucie’s apartment. An engraved brass plate read McELROY/MOLLER. She hadn’t been brave enough to punch in the code Laurent had given her and walk into the stairwell as if she were a privileged regular visitor.
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