“And you can meet Joie.”
I nodded. “That’d be great. As soon as we can arrange it.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I am so glad you will.”
I wondered if she felt like a shut-in now with Joie, though I was sure that she wouldn’t admit such a thing to me. Nonetheless, I think she had sensed that day last summer when I went with Laurent to her and Stefan’s apartment that I could be an ally. I hadn’t gone again because Laurent hadn’t welcomed it. It was easier for him if he stopped by alone when he was out doing other errands. No need, in his view, to make such an occasion of it.
Aside from Jeanne-Lucie and my camaraderie with Nathalie from Vie Bohème, which had led to a few movies and a couple of meals with two or three of her own friends, I didn’t have any girlfriends in Paris, but I’d been so busy with my work the last several months, I hadn’t had much time to try to cultivate any other new friendships.
I was curious about the other two artists whose bills Laurent was helping to pay. I hadn’t met them yet, and they didn’t attend the opening. The female artist lived in Marseilles, and the man was in Paris, but apparently he’d been attending to a sick mother in Bordeaux for the past few months, and so he wasn’t here either, if in fact Laurent had bothered to tell him about Intérieurs intimes.
4.
Liesel and Melissa have a hard time with the fact that Jeanne-Lucie and I have become friends, and they wonder what kind of daughter would willingly make room in her life for the girlfriend of her father, a girlfriend who happens to be only a couple of years older than the daughter. What I have tried to explain to them, and to myself, I suppose, is that Jeanne-Lucie is attracted to controversy. She is complicated, sometimes contradictory, but I think most people are. She loves her husband and her daughter, but keeps a lover she has no plan to give up. I know this through Laurent; she has not spoken to me of her affair with Martin at any length. But she knows that I am aware of it, and mentioned once that she wished her father hadn’t told me—not because she expected me to gossip or judge her harshly—just that the fewer people who knew about it the better. Beyond this, we haven’t discussed it.
The only way it will end, Laurent has said, is if either she or Martin meets someone else—and it would probably be Jeanne-Lucie, not Martin, because he has been in love with her since they met several years ago, and Laurent thinks he is biding his time until she leaves Daniel and agrees to move in with him. I wonder if he sees other women, casually, perhaps to keep himself distracted from thoughts of her lying next to her husband every night. Laurent says he doesn’t know, but he suspects that Martin does go out with other women from time to time. Why should he sleep alone when Jeanne-Lucie doesn’t have to?
“Because he loves her and doesn’t want to be with anyone else,” I said. “That’s why.”
He smirked over this. “Those thoughts do not keep him warm,” he said.
I talked a little bit about Jeanne-Lucie’s love triangle with Liesel and Melissa over Christmas when I was in Pasadena and we were online together; the two of them were at Melissa and Joe’s apartment making sugar cookies. Liesel thought it was reprehensible. Melissa, ironically, the married woman in our midst, wasn’t as judgmental.
“Why are French people so fucked up?” asked Liesel. “Do they all cheat on each other? Is it written into their marriage contracts or something?”
“I’m sure they don’t all cheat,” I said.
“Right,” said Liesel.
“Even if they don’t, maybe they still have the option to,” said Melissa. She was speaking softly because Joe was in the next room. “That might not be so bad,” she whispered.
“I wouldn’t stand for it,” said Liesel.
“Wait until you’re married for a little while,” said Melissa. “Then tell me how you feel about it.”
Liesel glared her. “Do you want to cheat on Joe?”
“Sssh,” she hissed. “No, I don’t, but I can see how it could happen if the conditions were right.”
“Jesus, you too?” said Liesel. “You guys are crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said.
She widened her eyes. “You cheated on Laurent with Colin!”
“That doesn’t make me crazy,” I said. I had only told Liesel and Melissa that I’d slept with Colin one time. I’d decided to keep our meetings to myself after that first confession because I didn’t want to deal with their disappointment or censure. “Laurent and I have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” I said. Finally, this fact, if little else, I was sharing with them.
“What?” Liesel cried. “You do?”
“Yes.”
Melissa said nothing, but she looked at me closely, her eyes wide with surprise and what might have been approbation.
“Well, let me know in a few more months how that’s working out for you guys,” said Liesel.
I have said nothing to Jeanne-Lucie about Colin, and cannot imagine myself ever doing so. In my most honest moments, I cannot see our friendship continuing for long if I were to leave France. Other times I think that this feeling is probably a reflection of my own insecurities more than anything she has implied in her behavior toward me. Sometimes I worry that she considers me little more than an amusing oddity, and perhaps she goes off after seeing me and laughs with her real friends about missteps I have made without realizing it.
Nonetheless, in her defense, she has never been petty or rude to me. If she were, I don’t think I’m so desperate for female companionship that I’d continue to meet her for lunch or go to the little parks near her apartment with her and Marcelle, to the little stores where Jeanne-Lucie knows the slender, brisk saleswomen, where we shopped for leather boots and jeans and thick wool stockings when the weather grew cold. I thought that I might adore her forever too one afternoon, when we were buying fruit at an outdoor market and Sofia’s name came up and Jeanne-Lucie gave me a wry look and said, “She’s so vain and annoying. I know I can be vain too, but not that vain, I hope.”
“Do I need to worry about her? I think Laurent still sees her.”
Jeanne-Lucie shook her head. “No, don’t waste your time thinking about her.”
I said nothing and adjusted my scarf, my heart beating hard.
“You don’t need to worry, Jayne. My father respects her work but he knows she’s very calculating and selfish. He wants to be with you, not her,” she assured me.
Without knowing it, Jeanne-Lucie has also taught me to stop apologizing so often for my Americanness and occasional homesickness, for my doubts about my talent, and for the fact that her father is doing so much for me. Hearing me speak about these feelings a couple of times, she finally said, “Do you think most other people would think twice about taking what he has offered you? Why should they? Do you think I feel bad that I was born into a family with money? Because I do not, and these two things don’t seem so much different to me. You are lucky, and so am I.”
We were walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg a few weeks before Intérieurs intimes opened. It was cold, but the sun was out, and we were bundled in scarves and warm coats. Marcelle was riding in her stroller, which she doesn’t really need anymore, but Jeanne-Lucie still uses it on long walks because Marcelle always gets tired and is ready to go home before her mother and I are.
“People said I shouldn’t have married Daniel because I was too young and not ready to settle down. They thought we would get a divorce within a year, but we didn’t. When we had Marcelle, they said it was too soon, and I was going to be miserable and maybe I was, and still am sometimes, but it isn’t her fault or Daniel’s, and we are all fine most of the time. And who knows, I might want to have another baby someday. Daniel would like this, but I’m not ready yet.”
“I don’t think I want any kids,” I said, “but most women I know do.” I glanced at her in her red wool coat and black knit cap, the ends of her hair framing her cold-pinkened face. Marcelle was asleep in the stroller, her head tilted down, her chin buried in a la
vender-and-white scarf that matched her hooded lavender coat.
“It’s good to know this about yourself. It would be hard if you had a baby and then wished you hadn’t. I think some women feel this way but would never say it.”
Your mother? I wondered, but didn’t ask.
“Men feel that way too,” she added. “Maybe more of them than women.”
Later that day, Jeanne-Lucie said something else that I have probably thought about too often since. “My brother was disappointed when you were not here for Christmas, when he and Léa visited,” she said. As she spoke, I remember watching her bend down to check on Marcelle, who was awake now but still looked drowsy. I wondered how much of our conversation the little girl understood. “He likes you,” said Jeanne-Lucie. “He hasn’t liked the other women my father goes out with, the few he’s met before you, anyway. Maybe my father has told you this. Or maybe Frédéric has?”
“No, neither of them has,” I said, flattered but wondering now why Laurent had never said anything to me about it. I liked Frédéric too. He was funny and good-looking and full of energy—the kind of man women generally respond to. I suppose that if I were single and he were too, I’d probably want to get to know him better. He looks like his father—even their voices sound similar—but until Jeanne-Lucie told me this, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about Frédéric. I knew that André coming on to me was one thing, but Laurent would not have been able to overlook anything of the same nature between his son and me. “I like your brother and Léa too,” I said. “And their daughter’s so cute.” Élodie was three months older than Marcelle; the two cousins got along well, Jeanne-Lucie had told me. “Much better than her father and I used to when we were little.”
“Frédéric likes to flirt,” she said now. “His wife puts up with a lot. I know that I wouldn’t be as easygoing if I were married to someone like him.” She made a silly face. “But who am I to talk, considering my friendship with Martin.”
We rarely confided in each other this way when we were together. We talked about New York and food, our artmaking, and a little about the French political landscape, along with American politics, about which she knew almost as much as I did, and sometimes we discussed her father, though she did not say much about his past girlfriends, or her mother, and I didn’t ask about them very much either. I didn’t want her to feel as if I were taking advantage of our friendship. She had done so many things to make me feel welcome in Paris, and I was grateful.
I wondered that afternoon what had happened to summon all the conversation about her brother and Laurent and the mention of Martin. Although she never said it, it seemed to me that she was probably in love with Martin too. I wondered what her mother thought of the affair—surely she didn’t approve, despite the fact she liked Martin and was friendly with his parents too, when they came to Paris a couple of times a year. Laurent told me that Jeanne-Lucie did not confide in Anne-Claire about her feelings for Martin. She and her mother had grown apart in the last few years, something Laurent attributed to Jeanne-Lucie’s increasing awareness of her mother’s innate coldness. These were his words, of course, not Jeanne-Lucie’s, and I wondered if whatever bothered her about her mother was more complicated than Laurent made it seem. If I stayed in Paris long enough, I hoped that she would eventually talk about it with me.
She knew that I worried about my parents’ marriage and having lived through her own parents’ divorce, what she had to say about the subject was reassuring, though mine were not getting a divorce, not yet, anyway. “You have to remember that you have never wanted them to live your life for you,” said Jeanne-Lucie. “You must try to act the same way with their lives.”
“That’s what Laurent told me too, more or less,” I admitted.
“We think we cannot survive certain things if they were to happen,” she said, “but we can. At least, that is what I say when I have dark thoughts.”
“Laurent thinks it’s because I want to stay a child, that I want the world to be what it seemed to be when I was a little girl. If my parents got a divorce, it obviously wouldn’t seem that way anymore. But it’s more that I worry they won’t be able to take care of themselves if they’re on their own. My father, especially.”
“Oh, Jayne,” she said, looking at her phone to check the time. We were having a mid-afternoon coffee, but Marcelle would need to be picked up soon from a friend’s house. “Americans are so dramatic. All your television programs are about nuclear bombs exploding and the people next door making methamphetamines. No wonder you think everything that happens, big or small, is a catastrophe.”
I smiled. “Is that why?”
She nodded, very sure of herself. “Of course it is.”
Of Daniel, Jeanne-Lucie’s husband, I can say this: he is pleasant—not as bland as that word implies, but reliable and even-tempered, from what Jeanne-Lucie has told me, and from what I gathered on the few occasions we’ve met. One afternoon when I stopped by their apartment to meet Jeanne-Lucie before we went out to buy Christmas gifts for Marcelle and Laurent, I saw Daniel smoking the cherrywood pipe I’d spotted on an end table in the room with the unicorn tapestry, months earlier, the day I first had lunch in the apartment. At the sight of him, fair and curly-haired, several years older and more weathered than his pretty, unfaithful wife, with that old-man pipe in his mouth, plumes of smoke rising from its bowl, I felt an unexpected rush of protective tenderness for him. I had to look away, but I think he caught something in my expression before I averted my face. He smiled at me when I met his eyes again, and we had a silent exchange, as if he was acknowledging that I believed him to be vulnerable and undervalued, and was politely dismissing my concern. He could take care of himself when it came to his wife and his marriage. There was no anger there, only what I sensed to be an abiding, calmly tended patience. Perhaps he’d known before he married Jeanne-Lucie that he wouldn’t be able to keep her from other men’s beds. Maybe he had decided that he could live with this, provided that she also lie willingly in his bed each night. I wondered if he and Laurent were, in this one sense, cut from similar cloth.
Sometimes I envy Jeanne-Lucie’s and Laurent’s risk-taking nature, their unapologetic self-interest, but in the next second, I realize that we are not so different, that here I am in Paris, and I have taken a lover too, one, oddly enough—or perhaps it isn’t so odd—from the life I left behind in New York. At some point I will ask Jeanne-Lucie what happened between her and André. It could be there is something still between them, though this would surprise me. Even if since meeting Laurent, many of the things I am learning about myself and other people have surprised me, my instincts are that Jeanne-Lucie was done with André not long after whatever relations they shared began.
And on the whole, he and I now give each other a wide berth at the gallery when we are together there. He goes about his business, such as it is, Laurent allowing him to take money from the gallery accounts as he wishes, and Laurent, I know now, doing the same, though not as much money, from what I can tell. Laurent also moves funds back and forth between his personal accounts and the gallery’s, as needed. These are my droits de seigneur, he once said to me, laughing but serious too, I knew. It is none of my business; in both senses of the expression, this is the truth.
5.
I have not yet said much about Sofia Baude, a gifted painter who also happens to speak four languages, a fact Laurent revealed after I pestered him for more information about her. He told me too that her Italian mother is a poet, her French father a distinguished linguistics professor. Sofia came to the opening, but she didn’t stay long, no more than thirty or forty minutes. While she was there, I could feel other people looking at her too, and although he would have denied it, I knew Laurent was keeping track of her graceful movements around the gallery, as if she were a rare and wild creature not to be let out of his sight. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress, its hemline just above her shapely knees and bare legs, despite the cold night, winter still in the air
on this first day of spring. Her necklace of interlocking silver discs, matching earrings, and two thick cuff bracelets were heavy and expensive-looking and gleamed like polished armor. She was clearly used to people staring at her and she moved within their capacious attention with queenly poise, her toned arms bent slightly at the elbows, her dark hair pinned up in a lush, disorderly bun to expose her long, elegant neck. I instantly felt a queasy fascination with her beauty and self-possession. She was someone I could learn from, someone who like my college quasi-nemesis Pepper embodied many of the qualities I wanted so badly to claim for myself.
This was my show, these were my paintings on the wall that night, but of course she knew that six of her own paintings were hanging in the home I shared with the man who I could see still desired her. Her understanding of light and color, her meticulous brushstrokes, her sympathetic, intuitive eye: how long had it taken her to master these talents?
Without knowing it, Susan gave me the reserves I needed to withstand my jealous feelings that evening. Susan and I were standing together near one of her paintings, Central Park West Window (oil on linen), waiting for a server to reappear with two glasses of cold water, when she glanced from me to Sofia, who was standing several yards away, flirting with André and François. “Is that your sister?” she asked, nodding toward Sofia. “You two resemble each other.”
I laughed, too loudly. Susan’s benign expression wavered; she knew instantly that something was going on, but didn’t press me.
“No, no,” I said. “That’s Laurent’s ex-girlfriend.”
Whatever Susan really thought of this, and by association, of Laurent and me, she managed to keep it hidden. “Well,” she murmured, “don’t tell her, but you’re the prettier sister.”
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