Sherman, cautious at the best of times – he was the counterbalance to Jordan’s perpetual optimism – took Jordan to one side.
‘I’m still a bit uneasy about Lafarge. What if he’s only the mouthpiece? The ministry’s front man.’
Jordan plucked a glass from the silver tray held by a waiter wearing white gloves. Nothing could prick the balloon of elation engendered by his lunch with the man from the ministry.
‘Claude Lafarge is eating out of my hand. I guarantee we’ll be back in Boston in time to see the Red Sox play Oakland.’
‘What I’d like to know is who he has to report to.’
‘I hope to God it’s all over…’ Nadine, in a little white suit, was fanning herself with her little white purse.
‘Jordan thinks so.’ I had every faith in Jordan.
‘What I wouldn’t give for my pool…’
‘Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.’
There was a flash as a photographer separated Jordan from Sherman and took his picture. On instruction, Jordan put his arm around me and we posed together for Vanity Fair. ‘M. et Madame Jordan Flatland à l’Ambassade Américaine.’
Dinner was in the Avenue Foch at the home of the Minister of Trade and went on for ever. Aubergine with crab was followed by médaillons de boeuf which gave rise to a discussion about Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease and the perils of English beef, and was followed by Timbale Orta – an unsuitably hot cherry pudding with a sabayon sauce – which most of the women refused. I was trapped between a tedious agronomist and an éxpert-comptable, whose English was decidedly worse than my French, and as soon as the coffee had been served I tried to catch the eye of Jordan who was being his customary affable self to an inebriated fifty-year-old with a corrugated cleavage.
It was well after midnight by the time the limo, put at our disposal by Offenbach Frères, dropped us at Les Bains. Blinded by the strobe lights and deafened by the noise, which must have been close to causing nerve damage, we hacked our way – me in my Givenchy and Jordan in his black tie – through the jungle of gyrating bodies and entwined couples of various gender combinations, in search of Michelle.
She was at a table piled high with wrapping-paper and presents, scented candles, chocolates and flowers, surrounded by the friends she had accumulated during our short stay in Paris.
‘Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Guys, this is my mom and dad,’ she shrieked. ‘Félix – ’
I recognized the young man with the Kawasaki who was deep in conversation with his moustachioed companion.
‘ – and his copain, Alexandre. Alexandre is my history tutor…’
‘Was!’
I remembered it was the last day of her course.
‘Anything you want to know about Napoleon…’
‘“Napoléon Bonaparte…”’ the chant from the assembled gathering came over the music. ‘“Général at 24, First Consul at 30, Emperor at 34, exiled at 45, dead at 51. The most fascinating ’uman being in ’istory…!”’
‘Press the right button, Alexandre will tell you the story of Napoléon’s wallpaper.’
‘Okay you guys,’ Michelle continued with the introductions as they fell about laughing. ‘Nicolas, Laurent, Natasha, Frédéric, Kiki – Lois you know – Juliette…’
A joint was being passed around. Some of them looked half asleep. One of the boys liberated more chairs and Félix stood up attentively, making more space so that I could sit down beside him. There was champagne on the table, courtesy of Jordan, and the birthday cake I had ordered from Fauchon with its eighteen pink candles. Félix filled my glass. Dressed in black and in his late twenties, his face dark with stubble beneath luxuriant black hair, he looked older than the rest.
‘I’m Michelle’s mother,’ I said superfluously. Looking round the table I felt like her grandmother, trussed, like a chicken, in my shimmering green dress.
‘Félix Dumoulin,’ he held out his hand. ‘You could be her sister.’ His eyes were serious.
‘You speak very good English.’
‘I studied in London. One year at the Slade. Afterwards the Ecole des Beaux Arts.’
‘You’re an artist?’
‘I paint.’
‘Félix is brilliant,’ Michelle shouted. ‘He’s had a whole bunch of exhibitions. He won’t tell you himself.’ Gazing at him with adoration she picked up the matches to light the candles on her birthday cake and I wondered how involved she was and if she was sleeping with him or if, on the other hand, Félix and Alexandre…
‘“Happy Birthday to you.”’ It was Jordan, flanked by two of Michelle’s girlfriends, juicy as ripe peaches and patently hitting on him, who started the singing. The chorus was taken up first by the table and later by the band, augmented by the enthusiastic voices of everyone in the room, who neither knew who Michelle was nor cared, and carried on dancing or snogging or whatever it was they were doing. More champagne was poured and Michelle, her face flushed and her pupils dilated, raised her glass.
‘Thank you all for coming to my party,’ her voice was hoarse. ‘And thank you for your wonderful presents…’
Going round the table she embraced everyone in turn. When she came to Félix, she kissed him long and hard on the mouth to the accompaniment of slow handclaps and catcalls. I already had them walking down the aisle before I remembered this was the twenty-first century and got a grip on myself.
When order was restored and Michelle had resumed her seat, she indicated the cake with its eighteen flickering candles and the unseemly number of empty champagne bottles – Jordan never did things by halves – and put a hand to the pearls around her neck.
‘I’d like to thank my parents – quiet everybody – for everything…and…for-putting-up-with-me-for-eighteen-years!’
This time they fell about laughing. The girls, like so many floral moths with white faces and scarlet lips, were crying melodramatically on each other’s necks and kissing one another and getting up to hug Michelle who with fat tears rolling down her face was attempting to blow out the joke candles (Joey’s idea) which sprang to life again each time they were extinguished.
When the flames had died away from all but one of them, I leaned across the table – typical mother – and reached out to extinguish the flame. As it scorched my fingers I recoiled in pain and Félix, who was the only one to have noticed, reached for my hand and turned over my palm to ascertain the extent of the damage. Our eyes locked for the briefest of moments, activating a network I’d thought dormant in my brain. The glance which passed between us was gone so quickly I thought that I must have imagined it, and that the music and the champagne – on top of all the wine I had imbibed earlier – must have gone to my head.
To cover my confusion I got up and prised a reluctant Jordan from between his two admirers, snapping my fingers in time to the Salsa and pulling him to his feet. Michelle looked mortified, and once we had staked our claim to a few square inches of available space amongst the flailing arms and scantily dressed bodies, I understood why. Given the eighty-seven years we clocked up between us and Jordan’s lack of co-ordination on the dance floor, we were well past our sell-by date as far as the Salsa was concerned. It was Michelle who prevented us from making complete fools of ourselves. Jumping up and down, like a little rubber ball, with Félix who towered heavily above her, she grabbed Jordan’s arm and yelled, ‘You’re supposed to dance with the birthday girl!’ and we changed partners in the middle of the heaving, thumping floor.
Making no attempt to dance with me, a decision which at the time I made no effort to interpret, Félix led the way back to the table, holding my chair, with a maturity which belied his years, until I was seated.
‘Superbe!’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The dress.’ He was admiring the Givenchy.
‘Thank you.’ I raised my voice above the music.
‘Jade…’ The ‘J’ was soft. ‘Comme vos yeux.’
When novelists mention eyes, the colour usually has banal implications: blue, innocence a
nd honesty; black, passion and depth; and brown, reliability and common-sense. Flaubert, on one page gives Emma Bovary brown eyes, on another deep black eyes, and on yet another, blue.
‘You’ve read Madame Bovary?’
Startled out of my wits, I wondered had I been thinking aloud and was about to ask him when we were interrupted by Jordan who had left the dance floor and was looking anxiously at his Rolex.
I turned to Félix. ‘We have to go. My husband has a busy day tomorrow.’
We embraced Michelle who thanked us for the party all over again, said goodbye to her friends, and weaved our way through the cauldron of bodies to the door.
In the back of the limo, I was again conscious of the tight band round my head as I reran the events of the night. We were glad to get home until we saw that the elevator was still en panne – I don’t know what we had expected – and there were no cold drinks in the fridge.
Sitting on the carved stool in the bedroom, I kicked off my shoes and massaged my aching feet. Jordan was examining the sticky patch on his sleeve where the champagne had been spilled.
‘I’ll leave it here.’
Confident that like a good little Stepford wife I would once more ferry his tux to the dry-cleaner, he arranged the midnight-blue jacket carefully over the back of a chair before going across the hallway to the bathroom to clean his teeth.
‘Who was the young man?’
‘Which young man?’ I made an attempt to sound casual.
‘Michelle’s…’ Sounds of swishing and spitting. Jordan was an obsessional teeth cleaner. ‘The black hairy one. What was his name?’
‘Félix.’
‘We may have to keep an eye on him.’
‘Don’t worry about it…’ Relieved of my shoes, slipping out of my dress and waving my arms above my head, I salsaed round the lit-bateau free of the restraints of the Givenchy. ‘Michelle’s going away soon.’
‘What are you doing, honey?’ I hadn’t heard Jordan come in. He looked at me in amusement. ‘Aren’t you tired?’
Strangely enough I was not, and by the time I was ready for bed I felt an urgent desire to make love but, although it was two-fifteen and Jordan had to be up in a few hours, he was working away on his laptop.
chapter five
The lugubrious repairman who wore pristine white overalls, had dismantled the refrigerator and distributed its components all over the kitchen floor, Joey was attending to his tropical fish – cleaning out the tank with a messily leaking hose attached to the tap, Helga was painstakingly ironing a many ruffled blouse in preparation for a party, and I was snatching a quick cup of coffee before going to meet Lauren for our weekly Pilates session at Le Studio, when Jordan called from Offenbach Frères to say that he had invited Monsieur and Madame Lafarge for dinner.
‘Tell Jordan…nobody in Paris…entertains at home.’ Pursing her lips, Lauren exhaled noisily as, squeezing a rubber ball between her ankles, she slid back and forth purposefully on the plié machine in the interests of her inner thighs.
‘I tried to tell him…’ Lying on the exercise bed next to her, I manoeuvred a one-and-a-half-kilo weight slowly over my head. ‘I called him straight back when it had sunk in. Spoke to his PA. “In a meeting. All day.”’
Eunice had been sympathetic. A woman of a certain age, she had been Jordan’s right hand for many years and was deeply in love with him. Accepting, pragmatically, that her devotion for her employer was unrequited and always would be, she took a vicarious interest in his family, involving herself in his domestic life.
‘It’s August. He probably thought that most of the best restaurants would be closed…’ Lauren sprang immediately to Jordan’s defence.
‘He didn’t think!’
‘You like to cook…’
It was true. Although by inclination a feminist, I was at the same time a dinner-on-the-table wife. The dichotomy was one of my problems.
‘At home! With my own batterie de cuisine…’
Lauren had no idea what I was talking about.
‘Fauchon do a Vichysoisse to die for…’
I told her about the fridge, the bottom line of which was that it needed a new condenser, and that the factory was closed and it looked as if it was going to be out of action for some time. Warm Vichysoisse was a definite non-starter (if you’ll excuse the pun), particularly if Jordan was hoping to impress the Lafarges. Lauren wasn’t listening; still working her legs, she was speaking to one of her suppliers on her mobile, which was strictly forbidden in the health club.
‘Oui! Oui! J’écoute.’ She sounded angry. ‘Numéro 3240. Marron foncé. Foncé. Non… Je ne peux pas le croire! Brown. Dark brown. I faxed it to you on… Sorry, I don’t have my briefcase right here. Numéro 3240. I’ll call you back! That’s all I need after last night…’ I realized she was addressing me and remembered that she had been out with a new date.
‘Boring, boring, boring. Three hours in Castel banging on about his ex-wife. You can keep your Latin lovers. Eat too much. Smoke too much. And keep their socks on in bed! Give me a Harvard man any day of the week. You don’t know how lucky you are, Judith.’ She returned to her telephone. ‘Veuillez me passer Madame Clothilde, s’il vous plaît, de la part de Madame Robinson… “Le monde de la mode!”’ She gesticulated with the phone. ‘It’s still summer, Judith. “Think light: think linen.” And here am I kicking ass for mohair mufflers and puffy jackets… Allo? Madame Clothilde?’
By the time she had finished shouting at everyone, Lauren had used up so much energy that we decided to call it a day. When we came out of the showers, a young girl, slim as a reed, was towelling her hair. Lauren, who was five-foot nothing and fought an ongoing battle with her weight, confronted her body in the uncompromising mirror.
‘Inside every fat woman is…a fat woman.’ She removed her locker key from her wrist.
Outside Le Studio we went our separate ways. Lauren to her office, me to the dry-cleaner for the second time in two days.
Lauren kissed me on both cheeks then gave me an extra one for Jordan.
‘Bonne chance for tonight.’
I watched her bustle into the distance with her Louis Vuitton briefcase before I went to find my yellow Renault which I had parked in the rue du Temple and which was like a sauna. Preoccupied with my irritation at Jordan’s cavalier behaviour and the hundred and one menus which were fast-forwarding through my head, it was not until I had fastened my seat belt, turned on the ignition and grasped the molten steering-wheel that I noticed the red rose on my windscreen. I presumed it had been dropped in the gutter from which a passerby had retrieved it and tucked it beneath the wiper.
In the end I settled on an hors d’oeuvre of the finest smoked salmon, with which you could never go wrong, and Poulet de Bresse roasted with brandy and tarragon. Fortunately the French were not into puddings and I reckoned that a Chaumière, served on the house cheese plates which bore the legend Bleu d’Auvergne, Fromage de Chèvre Doux and Coeur de Neufchâtel, followed by a bowl of rosy-hued apricots, would go down well.
From the moment they’d arrived, Lafarge, formal, in a formal suit in which he must have been sweltering (particularly after his climb up the stairs), and elegant Madame, fresh from the coiffeuse and bearing heliotropes, decked out in taupe peau de soie garnished with glittery buttons, I’d known that not only were we in for a long and serious haul, but that the success of the evening was of paramount importance to Jordan.
Despite the heat and the fact that I had been slaving over a hot and antiquated stove in my tip of a kitchen, the dinner itself went more smoothly than the conversation which, impeded by Madame Lafarge’s lack of English and only slightly helped by the Château Cos d’Estournel that Jordan opened, never really got off the ground. Dragging a reluctant Joey away from Polywig and Polywhirl, I used him as an ice-breaker but the Lafarges, who apparently had none of their own, whether by accident or design, were not particularly interested in children. While Madame – I never did discover her first name – nod
ded distantly at the sight of a small boy, a Jordan clone in striped pyjamas, Lafarge enquired with as much gravitas as if he were addressing an ambassador, what Joey missed most about leaving Boston. The reply, ‘strawberry-mousse-cup-from-Bildeners-and-pancakes-with-maple-syrup’, gave rise to an attempt at translation for the benefit of Madame Lafarge who smiled with more enthusiasm than comprehension. After dinner, Jordan got down to business with Lafarge over balloons of his finest brandy, leaving me to slog it out with Madame, face to face on the unyielding sofas in the uncomfortable salon.
It was as if the evening had been choreographed by French protocol with Jordan as the conductor and myself as the metteur en scène. Even with the doors on to the balcony wide open, the temperature, which was still in the eighties with not a trace of a breeze, was not on my side. Juggling my roles of chief cook and bottle-washer, master of ceremonies and waitress – Jordan could not leave the table – I had done my best with Lafarge, who was decidedly challenged in the small-talk department. Engaging him in conversation was like wading through treacle, and I’d waited patiently while he decoded my every remark for the benefit of an increasingly moist-faced Madame.
By the time they were ready to leave I was a gibbering idiot and convinced that I had clobbered Jordan’s chances, as far as Rochelle Eléctronique was concerned, with the Ministry of Defence. When the kissing and the hand-shaking formalities were completed and Jordan had accompanied the Lafarges to the street so that he could attend to the lights on the stairs, I closed the door firmly on the battlefield that was the dining-room, flung myself wearily on the bed and waited for the inevitable post-mortem.
‘Lafarge thought you were formidable!’ Jordan, who in the interests of decorum had had to keep his jacket on all through dinner, could not wait to strip off. ‘I thought you were pretty formidable myself. You did a great job. You know how much Rochelle Eléctronique means to me.’
Paris Summer Page 4