Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  I knew that whom one meets, and when, and where, lay largely in the juggling hands of chance, that our eye contact at Michelle’s birthday celebration had activated a network in my brain which made an instant decision as to the desirability of such contact, and that ‘falling in love’ was no way of getting to know someone. No one could take away from us, however, the tall blue days of the past few weeks, nothing could obliterate them. Despite the fact that, according to Lauren, our relationship glittered with illusion, provided no accurate map of reality, no authentic guide to the future, I was certain that, whatever defeats or failures we encountered, it was destined to succeed.

  On the corner of the rue de Buci there is a plaque which reads:

  ICI À ÉTÉ TUÉ

  FRED PALACIO

  CORPS FRANC VICTOIRE

  CDLR.

  POUR LA LIBERATION DE PARIS

  LE 19 AOUT 1944

  A L’GE DE 21 ANS.

  It made me shiver. Félix put his arm around me. When we opened the heavy door and climbed up to the studio, the Boulevard Courcelles with its bourgeois face and its prissy wrought iron balconies retreated into the distance. It was as if I had come home.

  Félix was arranging the metal tubes he had bought neatly into his wooden, paint-stained box.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t do what?’

  ‘I can’t tell Jordan.’

  ‘Send him a fax.’

  ‘Honestly, Félix, I’ve tried.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘He’s in big trouble with the Foreign Office.’

  ‘You want me to tell him?’

  ‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’d swim the Hellespont… Are you crying, Judith?’

  ‘I’m not crying. I’m weeping.’

  Félix looked bewildered.

  ‘There is a difference?’

  ‘Weeping is a private affair.’

  Drying my eyes with his handkerchief, Félix led me to the sofa.

  ‘Nothing is private between us.’

  ‘I can’t bear to hurt him.’

  ‘Jordan will get over it. Je te promets…’

  He smoothed the hair back from my forehead, kissed my damp face until his lips were damp, pulled down the zip of my summer dress.

  ‘Even when I look like the back end of a bus you make me feel like Madonna…’

  ‘You’ll tell him tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow is Wednesday. By midday he has to hear from Claude Lafarge.’

  I knew that whether the Rochelle Eléctronique deal was on or off, time was running out. If the deal was on, Jordan would be busy signing contracts, then it would be straight into packing up the Boulevard Courcelles as Jordan was needed in Boston. If the deal collapsed, Jordan would be devastated and I doubted if I would have the strength to add fuel to the fire of his defeat.

  I dismissed the alternatives from my head and concentrated on my lover, clinging desperately to my new life. I was not disappointed. With Félix I was never disappointed, as every act of love revealed new strata in the unworked seams of our passion.

  Happy, in what seemed the perpetual sunlight that came through the open windows, in the separate world that we inhabited, we lay in each other’s arms.

  ‘Better?’

  I kissed his forehead.

  ‘Doctor Dumoulin, with a cure for everything.’

  ‘I do my best.’

  But he could not tell Jordan, could not surmount the obstacles that stood in the way of our love, highlighting its attractions, as if they did not exist. Would Romeo and Juliet, if not constrained by parental opposition, have been compelled to invent it? But if Félix was Romeo, Judith Flatland – while possessed of equal determination, equal consuming ardour and desire – was not, by any stretch of the imagination, Juliet. How could I explain to my lover that while the very essence of him had permeated my soul, being with him entailed wounding someone I loved and who loved me, hurting my children, throwing a lighted match on to the bonfire of my former life.

  ‘It’s simple enough, Judith.’ Félix held me very close. ‘The drawbridge is down.’ Sometimes his youth betrayed him. ‘All you have to do is walk.’

  chapter twenty

  All you have to do is walk…

  Félix was right, but it was like talking to a crawling infant, instructing it to stand up and put one foot in front of the other, as if it were that simple, as if there were not muscles to be strengthened, balance to be attended to, brain cells to be developed, the necessary maturity to be achieved.

  There were women I knew who could have left the Boulevard Courcelles with their suitcases without turning a hair, without a backward glance. I was not one of them.

  On Tuesday night, twelve hours before the Viscomte de Loisy’s option ran out on the Rochelle Eléctronique deal, it should by rights have been Jordan who was unable to get any rest. While I lay wide awake in the heat in the lit bateau covered only by a sheet – the temperature had not dropped all day – he slept, stripped to the waist, like the proverbial log.

  In the morning, waiting for the Viscomte’s call that would surely tell him the government had retracted and the deal could go ahead, he did not go for his customary jog. Strained in every nerve and sinew by the phantasmagoria of the night which had been filled with distorted and grotesque images, I hovered in the kitchen while Jordan had breakfast, unsure whether to make one more attempt to tell him. It was not the time, not the moment. I felt like an assassin with his knife.

  When the telephone rang he almost spilled his coffee. It was Nadine with a query about the celebration dinner which, Jordan was convinced, would not have to be cancelled. I told her I would call her back.

  ‘If you don’t hear from the Viscomte by midday,’ I could not meet Jordan’s eyes, ‘will there really be an “accident”? Will you really let the invitations to the press conference fall into the wrong hands?’

  I was making conversation with a man to whom I had been married long enough to read the answer in his eyes. I knew that he would stop at nothing in the face of perceived injustice. If necessary he would see the Bourse crash. He would bring the French Government down. I could not but admire his unfaltering courage and determination and wished that mine could match it.

  I followed him about nervously as he made his determined preparations to leave for the bank where the invitations to the Pilcher Bain press conference, the top one addressed to the financial editor of Le Monde, lay on his desk, ready to be delivered.

  For the last time I watched my husband of eighteen years, my lover, my companion, my friend, brush his blond hair before the bathroom mirror, take his coat from its hanger in the inadequate armoire, tie the statutory tie loosely round his neck, put a clean handkerchief in his pocket, collect his laptop and his organizer and his diary and his gold pen and pencil and his two mobile telephones and walk toward the door of our apartment, towards one of the most significant days of his forty-five-year-old life.

  ‘Jordan…’

  He looked at his gold Rolex.

  ‘Not now, darling. If it’s about the dinner tonight, I leave it entirely to you.’

  At the door he turned and kissed me, more tenderly than usual.

  ‘Love you. I’ll always love you…’

  I wondered if he knew.

  ‘Call you from the office.’

  Nadine wanted to go over the final arrangements for the dinner, which might, or might not go ahead as planned. I was in no mood to hear about iced soup and gigot and Grand Marnier soufflé for a celebration in which I would not be participating. I spent half the morning composing a letter to Jordan. The second half I spent tearing it up. When the telephone rang at one minute to twelve, I ran into the hall.

  ‘Judith?’

  It was Félix.

  ‘Que je t’aime…’

  I cradled the receiver to my cheek.

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘I have to wait for the caterer. I’ll be ther
e by six.’

  At one o’clock I called the office. In the background I could hear excited laughter and the popping of champagne corks.

  ‘The Viscomte has backed down!’ Eunice sounded drunk with excitement although I knew she did not drink. I heard her in muffled conversation. ‘Jordan will be home at six.’

  What did one wear to walk out on one’s marriage? I searched the cupboard for a dress to suit the occasion and hung it, black – for mourning – and virginal white, on the mahogany cheval-glass while I packed, smiling because I was going to Félix and I could not wait to feel his arms around me, and crying because it was so hard. The teeshirts and the skirts and the shorts and the jeans blurred before me and Jordan would not have approved of the way I flung them higgledy-piggledy into the case. I didn’t really care. If they were not the clothes I needed I would buy others, tailoring them to my new life. Fortunately, I did not need to worry about money – Jordan had seen to that. There were bonds and shares in my name and I had enough to live on without being dependent upon Félix. Later, although I knew that Parisians did not care for Americans in general, I would get a job at the Musée d’Orsay or the Jeu de Paume where I guessed I would be in demand, walk home with my baguette, and make cheating cassoulet for dinner.

  I had arranged with Helga to take Joey swimming; I told her it was to leave the way clear for the caterers who would be taking over the kitchen.

  When it was time for them to go, Joey was still in his room with his face in a comic.

  ‘Helga’s waiting to take you to the pool.’

  ‘OK.’ He put down his comic.

  ‘Are you looking forward to going home?’ I sat down on the bed beside him.

  ‘You know the first thing I’m gonna do when I get back to Boston?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I’m gonna have a chocolate chip ice-cream with hot butterscotch sauce. Helga’s gonna have a Bananafanna Sundae. She can’t even say Bananafanna Sundae!’

  The innocence of small boys… I stroked his hair, blond like Jordan’s.

  ‘I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me to practice the César Franck – ’

  His face fell. ‘You said I could go swimming, Mom.’

  ‘ – when you get back to Boston.’

  He didn’t notice – Joey wouldn’t – the tears in my eyes.

  When they were ready to leave, I said:

  ‘Look after Joey, Helga.’

  She thought I meant at the piscine.

  ‘Of course. We have a gut time, ja Joey!’

  ‘Goodbye Joey…’

  ‘Bye Mom.’ He was halfway to the elevator with his Dalek backpack.

  ‘I love you.’

  I saw Joey roll his eyes up the ceiling as he got into the elevator and pressed the button which carried him slowly away.

  The catering team, surly but polite, comprised a fierce-looking chef in checked trousers with a fine balcon of a bosom, a young assistant with a ring through his nose clomping around in Doc Martens, and a diminutive oriental. At five o’clock they swept into the kitchen bearing plastic crates of goodies concealed beneath pristine white cloths. I showed them the buffet in the dining-room with the baize-lined drawers of monogrammed silver, the musty-smelling cupboards of neatly ranged crystal – a glass for every wine – explained the idiosyncrasies of the cast-iron range, for which I got a condescending smile and a rapid salvo of ‘Oui madames’ for my pains.

  I was still worrying about leaving a note for Jordan, when I noticed that in his agitation about the Viscomte – and I read it as a pointer to his true state of mind beneath his deceptively calm exterior – he had left his memo-recorder by his bed.

  Switching it on I heard his familiar voice:

  ‘…Undertake never to force them into any deal that could be construed to threaten the security of France. Any disagreement to go to arbitration…’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Jordan, it’s me, Judith. I’m not coming back to Boston. I’ve tried to talk to you about Félix but you wouldn’t listen. Félix is the one you met at Michelle’s birthday party, the one with the Kawasaki…’

  The one who had taken the life of Judith Flatland and turned it on its head. The one with whom I am insanely, hopelessly, rapturously, shamelessly, agonizingly in love. The one without whom I am unable to contemplate life. The one without whom I cannot live.

  ‘Strangely enough, Jordan, this has nothing whatever to do with you. I don’t blame you. You have done nothing wrong. You have always been a good husband, a good father, and you have to believe I still love you, but not in the same way that I love Félix, to the very depths of my being, to the very limits of my soul. I won’t go on about him because I know that by the time you get this far you will be angry, very angry. You’ve never been afraid of confrontation – you weren’t afraid of the Viscomte – and you’ll probably want to kill Félix. Or me. Or both of us. I don’t know. But I implore you to forgive me. To forgive us. I wouldn’t do the least thing to hurt you if I could help myself but at the risk of sounding maudlin I have to say that I cannot – believe me Jordan, I’ve tried and I cannot – help myself. You don’t need me in the same way that Félix needs me. Michelle is disgusted with me; I think you’d better ask her why, I’m sure she’ll tell you. And Joey…my darling Joey… Leaving Joey is the hardest part but Joey is a survivor.

  ‘I am going to live in Paris. Much as I love Boston, I love the sights, the sounds, the smells, here. Paris is a city in which people matter and already I feel part of the place where Félix has his studio. Later we will divide our time between the quartier and the Pas de Calais. There is no point in going on, Jordan, because you really won’t be listening to the rationale of all this. There is no rationale. Perhaps acting on impulse, on intuition, knowing what you must do but not why you are doing it, is one of the secrets of happiness. You are right to be angry. It’s a dreadful thing to do but there is no other way than to do it. One day perhaps you will understand and forgive me. I don’t expect you to do that now. I can’t talk any more. I have made the decision. Don’t think it’s easy. There is no rewind button. I do love you. But to think that you can love only one person for the whole of your life is like expecting a candle to burn forever. You get married when you’re young, then you find out what it is you really want, what you’ve been looking for, what makes you happy, what you need. Please don’t send the gendarmerie after me… Please…no, nothing. I’ll be in touch.’

  Putting the memo-recorder back by Jordan’s bed, I wondered, irrationally if, now that I was gone, he would make the middle reaches of the lit bateau his own.

  At five-thirty I told the caterers that I was going to the hairdresser, and that Nadine would be along soon. Picking up my heavy suitcase, I put a farewell hand on Jordan’s pillow, I glanced for a moment at the chaos left on her floor by Michelle who was still not speaking to me, and stood for a long time, inhaling the distinctive smell of small boy, in Joey’s bedroom. I was on my way to the front door when there was a crash of glass.

  ‘C’était un accident, madame,’ the little oriental girl was in tears as she brushed the shards from the Turkish rug. I thought the buxom chef was going to kill her and told the girl not to worry, there seemed enough crystal left in the cupboard to furnish a banquet. Leaving them screaming at each other among the mountains of unshelled peas and bunches of baby carrots and uniform marble-sized potatoes, I took a deep breath and walked out of the apartment and away from my life.

  In the yellow Renault, driving on automatic pilot as I made my way across the river to the rue de Buci, I tried to come to terms with the draconian step I was taking. I would no longer go back to the Boulevard Courcelles; I would no longer go back to Boston; I would no longer be the nucleus surrounded by the atoms of my family; I would no longer be Jordan’s wife. I tried to be miserable but could not summon up the necessary emotion and my heart was singing a spontaneous song as I made my way to my young lover.

  My daydream was int
errupted by a second shattering of glass and I had the impression I was back in the apartment as I slammed on the brakes narrowly avoiding the car in front of me. I saw that there had been an accident ahead, causing a pile-up of traffic, and unbuckling the seat belt which had certainly prevented me from hitting my head on the windscreen, I got out of the car to see what had happened.

  A few onlookers had already assembled and were staring silently at something in the road. Pushing my way to the front of the semi-circle, I followed their horrified eyes to the pool of blood in which a boy, the same age as Joey, lay twisted and motionless, still clutching a baguette. A young man kneeled beside him, expert fingers seeking a pulse, searching frantically for signs of life. Impervious to the blood staining his trousers, he removed the bread from the boy’s hand and gently closed his eyes.

  Picking up the Game Boy which no one had noticed and which had scudded into the gutter near me, and vaguely aware of the sound of an approaching ambulance siren, I leaned against a gnarled tree which rose from a weed-filled grating and threw up.

  What seemed a long while later, a bystander asked if she could help me and if I had been hurt. I reassured her that I was all right and enquired, stupidly, after the boy. They were shutting the doors of the ambulance and the crowd was dispersing silently. The woman looked at me sympathetically, and sympathetically shook her head.

  chapter twenty-one

  In the rue de Buci, I sat in the café with Félix where, refusing to go up to the studio, I had insisted he meet me.

  I waited while the familiar waiter set down two Pernods and the check which with the dexterity of a prestidigitateur he secured beneath the ashtray.