Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  Had I not needed to use the bathroom I might have run away. As it was, when I came out, having looked at my face in the mirror above the wash-basin for a long time as if I would find the answer in my pale reflection, Félix was leaning against the table, his dark eyes fixed on the doorway through which I would emerge. Drawn, as by a magnet and freed of inhibition by the alcohol, I moved deliberately towards him until there was no space between us and I could feel the pressure of his firm body, then the warmth of his mouth and the unmistakeable essence of him inviting me, as in the best novels, the finest plays, to abandon the security of my life and deceive my husband, my best friend, the person with whom I shared my confidences, and make a mockery of our marriage. The trouble was that although it was neither a novel nor a play, I managed, throwing caution to the winds and without too much trouble, to overcome my reservations, to give up everything, including myself, and to suspend disbelief.

  Any attempt to describe the act of love is like trying to convey the flavour of a particular food to one who has never tasted it. Only those concerned know how love was, how it is, how it will be; the sensations, even the sequence of events, have never been satisfactorily communicated. Not even by a film maker. Particularly not by a film maker, who disregards awkwardness, and odours, and bodily fluids, and cheats on takes, on camera angles and on anatomical truth.

  I was aware of my body, divested slowly of its summer dress, its scanty undergarments, and compared its contours, scored with the stretch marks of child-bearing, with the youthful voluptuousness of the girl in the painting as she lay on the sofa with her milk-white breasts. Abandoned, on the same chaise longue – we drifted later towards the bedroom where a reprise brought sharply home the youth of my lover – I was hard put to say whether the joyful orchestrations which followed the andante and the allegretto, the scherzo and the ode to joy, came from my own lips or through the open shutters from the street below. There was no need to testify on oath about the whispered confidences and tender endearments that passed between us, nor would they be required to stand the test of time. It was not until it was over that I realized I had for once been listening to the music we were making rather than concentrating on a metaphorical chandelier.

  It was Carl Jung who said, ‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there’s any reaction, both are transformed.’ We lay amongst the twisted sheets, bathed in the afternoon sun. Félix’s arm, carpeted with the curls that overflowed from his deep chest, was around me, his firm shoulder smelled sweet. Jordan and Joey and the fact that the engineer was due shortly with the long-awaited part for the refrigerator had receded into the distance. My lover – I had a lover – was kissing my eyes and my nose, vindicating Jung, as I contemplated my altered state.

  I sat up on my elbow and ran my fingers through his lustrous hair. ‘What exactly is this all about?’

  Looking into his eyes, I waited for his protestation, if not of love, of desire.

  Rising from the bed with the agility of youth, he moved to the window, light and shade dappling his back. For a long time he was silent, then he turned to face me.

  ‘It was a wager…’ he said. ‘Alexandre made it at Michelle’s birthday party. It was a bet.’

  ‘A bet! What kind of a bet?’ So much for Jung. I covered myself with the sheet. Whereas a moment ago I had felt extremely pleased with myself, as if I had passed some sort of test, I now felt cheap, ravaged, manipulated, used.

  ‘At Michelle’s party. We had too much to drink. You were dancing with your husband. Alexandre said…’

  I waited. Félix looked uncomfortable.

  ‘What did Alexandre say?’

  ‘“I bet you can’t pull the mother instead of the daughter.”’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘“What do you bet?”’

  ‘And Alexandre said?’

  ‘“A case of champagne.”’

  A case of champagne! I could not speak. Not looking at him, I got out of his bed and into my trembling dress. He tried to put his arms around me. I pushed him away.

  ‘You’re despicable!’

  ‘I come from a long line of gamblers…’

  ‘Spare me the excuses.’ I picked up my purse. My eyes blinded with tears of humiliation I made for the front door.

  ‘Wait! Judith! There’s something I want to say to you…’

  ‘Haven’t you said enough?’

  Félix was pulling on his chinos.

  I slammed the front door behind me.

  ‘Enjoy your champagne!’

  Rushing blindly up the five flights of stairs in the Boulevard Courcelles, it did not sink in that the en panne notice had disappeared and that the elevator had been mended. In the bath, the taps full on, wiping away my hot tears and letting the tepid water run over my breasts to expunge my shame, I felt used, soiled, disgusted with myself. In the space of a few short hours, I had sullied my marriage and all that I had invested in it.

  When Jordan came back from Monte Carlo with a Pokedex electronic notebook for Joey and an outsize bottle of Boucheron for me which compounded my guilt, he was full of his encounter with Lafarge’s financial advisor.

  ‘If you want to know something, darling,’ he said as he unpacked his bag, stowing away his belongings with his customary precision, ‘Lafarge’s financial adviser is an out and out shit.’

  He was not the only one.

  ‘He tried to tell us that we were buying him out on a prospective PE ratio of 20 when it should be 21 at the very least. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was a bit late in the day to challenge the price and that one hell of a lot of money would need to be spent on research and development which would be an enormous strain on the cash flow. In the end – ’ I was having difficulty in following the sequence of events ‘ – they agreed to do a few more sums but I refused to hang around. I said I had to get back to Paris. I left the ball in his court.’ He closed the zipper triumphantly. ‘He’s going to come back to me as soon as he can. What have you been up to, darling?’

  Feigning a headache, for which he offered to get me a couple of Tylanol, I avoided his outstretched arms.

  I had promised to take Joey to the Luxembourg Gardens. He reminded me at breakfast where he was reading a postcard from his grandmother in Florida.

  ‘Grandma’s going to bring me a new skateboard – ’

  My mother and Walter were due at the weekend.

  ‘ – with Santa Cruz wheels and a Powell Peralta deck.’

  There was another postcard. From Michelle in Florence. The naked image on the front was Michelangelo’s triumphant and analytical recreation of the male human body; David, in his muscular and sensuous prime, carved with three chisels from a single piece of marble. It was as if she knew.

  The grass in the Luxembourg was yellowed and dry. If we didn’t get some rain soon everything would perish. I was sitting on a green chair by the Bassin watching a fascinated Joey urging on his hired boat with his stick, when a red rose landed on my lap. It was unbelievable. I picked it up, pricking my finger on its thorns, and ground it into the gravel as hard as I could with my sandaled foot. I did not look round. I did not need to. I knew that Félix was there.

  ‘How can you have the effrontery…’ Passers-by would think I was talking to myself. Standing up, I signalled to Joey. Intent on getting boat number three to the other side of the pond – he had Jordan’s determination, an insatiable desire to succeed – he did not see me.

  ‘Judith…’

  Félix’s voice, with its trace of accent, was sonorous and sad. Coming round to where I stood he put a restraining hand on my arm. I pulled it away.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘There is something I have to say.’

  I put my hands over my ears.

  ‘About the champagne…’

  ‘You won your bet. Now leave me alone.’

  I looked straight ahead at the foreign visitors, at the Japanese with their cameras, at the fathers carrying
toddlers on their shoulders, at the groups of excited children liberated from school, at Joey who was racing round the stone perimeter of the pond.

  ‘Look, Mom!’ Boat number three had reached the other side.

  ‘Fantastic! We have to go now Joey.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep…’

  ‘Tough.’

  ‘I wanted to explain about the wager…’

  ‘I really don’t want to know.’

  Making my way towards a triumphant Joey who, flushed with pride, was hauling his boat out of the water, I resisted the temptation, as if I were at risk of being transformed into a pillar of salt, to glance behind me. When I did look round, Félix had gone.

  Had it not been for Claude Lafarge and the fact that Jordan became totally immersed in Rochelle Eléctronique, had my mother and Walter not come at the opportune moment to whisk Joey away to Scotland, had it not been for the intolerable heat sending me slightly stir-crazy, that might have been that. I would have to live with my perfidy: everyone is entitled to one indiscretion. Looked at with hindsight and in the light of contemporary mores, my afternoon with Félix was not such a big deal.

  On the day my mother was due, as he was about to leave the apartment for his office at Offenbach Frères, Jordan received a call from Monte Carlo. From the satisfied look on his face I could tell – and learned later that my assumption was correct – that his negotiations with Lafarge’s financial advisor had been successful and that as far as the extra 5 per cent was concerned the Ministry of Defence had backed down.

  My mother was one of the many thousands of GI brides who had, despite parental opposition, left the school in the Devon village to which she had been evacuated during World War Two and sailed away to New York with the good-looking medical corps sergeant, who later became a popular and caring physician and ultimately, almost after they had given up hope of having a baby, my father. At the age of seventy-four, all traces of her English upbringing had been eradicated and you would have been forgiven for mistaking her for a native American. Contrary to expectations, the marriage had succeeded, due largely, I suspect, to my mother’s grit and perseverance and her determination to work in order to put my father through medical school.

  Unqualified for anything, she had taken a job as a cosmetics salesman with a start-up firm that had no visible retail presence but was later to become a multimillion dollar company operating in more than a hundred countries and quoted on the New York stock exchange. Travelling more than 500 miles a week, she sold hair care, skin care and toiletries to lonely housewives who regarded her as a friend – she knew every cat and dog by name – and looked forward to her visits as much as they did the foundations and fragrances, the lotions and nail enamel, in their distinctive purple packaging which she produced from her bag. Although life on the road was hard and the rewards derisory, one of them had to earn the bread-and-butter and my mother was quite content to do so. When questioned now, she would protest that the products sold themselves. Sometimes however, despite her best efforts and enthusiasm, the customers ordered nothing at all, or at best a stick of deodorant or a single eyeshadow, and she invented her own little ploys to increase sales and combat rejection. Faced with a client who seemed reluctant to put her hand in her purse for a new product, she would ask if there was an eggcup in the house and cunningly leave a free sample of bubble bath or shower gel to be tried out at leisure. As the firm prospered so did my mother. She rose from sales rep to area manager and later to general manager with shares in the company. Once my father had qualified she could of course have retired but by that time she was so hooked on the cosmetics that it had become a way of life and she a valued member of the organization.

  We were a tight knit and happy little family and when my father died from lung cancer when I was ten – due probably to his wartime smoking – my mother was totally devastated. Showing the same determination as she had when she married him however, she had carried on working to keep us both in relative comfort and, unable to stop, had continued even after I was married. A few years ago she had met Walter who had prevailed upon her to give up what was now more a crusade than a career, and move with him to Florida. While my father had had charisma, and I fully understood why my mother’s seventeen-year-old head had been turned, Walter had none. A neatly dressed short man with a balding head and a grey moustache, he lacked the positive attributes of my father and having never been married, which struck me as suspect, he was interested in very little apart from golf and fishing.

  I understood why my mother had thrown in her lot with Walter. Life as a widow could not have been exactly a whole bunch of laughs, and with her only daughter living so far away, she must have felt increasingly lonely. Whether sex came into the equation I did not know and could hardly ask. If it did I doubt that the earth moved as by all accounts it had with my father, and the only chemistry I could detect between them, if chemistry there was, was my mother’s occasionally reassuring hand with its brown age spots over his, his overwhelming generosity towards her and his touching concern for her well-being.

  Wrapped up in her work and her passionate affair with my father, which by all accounts seemed never to have gone stale, my mother and I, who got on well enough, had never been particularly close. When I married Jordan, we did not see too much of each other although we kept in touch. I think she thought that I had been infected with the Flatland snobbery and kept her distance, even on her rare visits to Boston, which she associated with a milieu to which she could never aspire even had she wanted to, which she did not.

  Unlike Laetitia Flatland, she could not tune into Michelle to whom in her opinion we allowed too much freedom – as if in today’s climate of youth culture we could do anything else – and it was only after Joey was born that she began to take her grandmother role seriously. Perhaps, with his sunny disposition, it was because there was more than a passing resemblance to his maternal grandfather, perhaps because Joey represented the son she had always wanted but had never had, I don’t know. Whatever it was, she was besotted with her only grandson and her feelings were reciprocated. The highlight of Joey’s year was the part of the summer vacation that he spent with Grandma Pam and Walter. The latter had not only infected Joey with a passion for fishing, but had managed to convince him that he would be catching his dream trout with every fly he tied. This year they were taking him to a lodge beside the river Tey in Scotland. You would not think that a boy of ten would relish the prospect of three weeks standing in the water in a pair of thigh-waders, in the company of a couple as old as my mother – still a walking advert for her products with her wrinkle-free skin and ‘President’s Red’ lipstick – and Walter, but Joey could hardly wait.

  chapter ten

  They had arrived an hour late at Charles de Gaulle airport both anxiously pushing a loaded trolley on which, apart from the matching suitcases and Burberry raincoats in anticipation of the rain in Scotland, were two sets of golf sticks – my mother had taken up the game at Walter’s instigation – Walter’s fishing tackle, including a two-handed rod for Joey, and Joey’s skateboard.

  Looking at my mother’s trim figure, her honey-coloured Palm Beach trouser suit matching her honey-coloured shoes and her honey-coloured hair – since marrying Walter she had metamorphosed into Palm Beach woman – I thought that she could easily have been taken for twenty years younger.

  We were in the middle of dinner. My mother was removing every scrap of fat from Walter’s steak in the interests of his cholesterol, and entertaining Joey with stories about what life in England had been like when she was his age. She was telling him how children were unafraid to play in the streets or roam on their own in the fields, and she and Walter were trying to think about all the things everyone takes for granted these days that weren’t around when she was a child, when the telephone rang at the same moment as Jordan’s mobile.

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Excusing myself from the table I ran into the hall as my mother muttered something to the effect that having dinner with the
Flatlands was akin to eating in Grand Central Station.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘I just wanted to hear your voice. I’m outside your apartment. J’ai besoin de t’embrasser.’

  I slammed down the receiver and going back into the dining-room, tried abortively, my hand shaking, to pour myself some mineral water.

  ‘You have to open it, dear!’ Sharp-eyed as ever, my mother indicated the plastic stopper which was still in the bottle as I upended it over my glass. Jordan, anxious to tell me his news, made no comment.

  ‘That was Sherman, honey. The MOD has backed down. They’re ready to sign…’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘P/E ratios. Contingent liabilities. I’ve never heard such crap!’

  I heard the sound of a Kawasaki in the street below and pushed my plate away, the steak half-finished.

  ‘…dishwashers, tumble-driers, electric blankets…’ my mother was saying brightly. She looked at Walter.

  ‘Ballpoint pens, credit cards…’

  ‘Frozen foods, easy-care…’

  ‘Penicillin, polio shots…’

  ‘Scotch tape…’

  ‘Contact lenses…’

  ‘Post-it notes…’

  ‘Artificial hearts…’

  ‘Electricity!’ The voice was Joey’s.

  ‘I’m not that old, dear!’

  ‘Radar, split atoms, laser beams, space travel, microchips, fax machines, automatic transmission, parking meters…’ Always the perfect host, Jordan took his mind off Sherman, Claude, and PE ratios and joined in the game. ‘Mobile phones, Xerox, scanners, the internet, CDs, DVDs, video recorders…’ The words came out in quick succession.