* * *
“We should go.” Christopher stood up when his mother and Helen walked into the house. He tilted his watch toward him. “Our flight leaves in three hours.”
“Oh, Christopher, I do wish you would stay.”
“We can’t. I have to fly to Edinburgh first thing in the morning.”
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me you were such a good rider?” Helen asked as they drove back to Orly.
“I wasn’t that good. My mother only remembers the highlights. Laure was the real talent, but she doesn’t ride anymore. I had a sort of go-for-broke style. When you’re fourteen, with nothing to lose, you can get away with that.”
“But she said you won an international—”
“I had a really good horse.” He cut her off and checked his rearview mirror. He switched lanes to pass a lorry.
“Why did you stop?”
“Oh, I don’t know, other things I wanted to do, I guess.”
“Your mother is sweet.”
“She is, but she’s complicated.”
“She seems lonely.”
“Maybe, but everything has to be on her terms. Her friends are always people she collects or feels sorry for. She finds talented working students and gives them good horses to ride, and that works for a while until she feels they have been disloyal or unappreciative, and then that relationship falters. I’ve learned over the years to stay out of it.”
As they were boarding their flight, Édouard called Christopher to discuss a few more points about the sale of his company. He also made it clear he only wanted to deal with Christopher and not the junior vice president assigned to his company. It was just as well. Trying to get Édouard to understand that his high-end textile company was not worth as much as he thought would take time. Christopher knew that no matter how talented his junior associate was, his opinion would never be accepted by Édouard. Christopher mulled over in his mind the best way to structure the sale. He had a small list of high-quality buyers. An auction with buyers bidding against each other would be ideal. He would have to give more thought to whether such a process was realistic.
Helen looked out the window and thought about what they did and didn’t know about each other. Why was Christopher holding things back? Was he holding things back? She couldn’t answer either question. When they reached home, he asked her what was bothering her. He had learned to read her moods.
“Nothing. Nothing’s bothering me.”
“Come on, you’re going to be like this until you tell me, so let’s get it over with.”
“You’re being so patronizing.”
“Practical. Come on, tell me.”
“It’s just that you make me feel unsettled.”
“I make you feel unsettled? How?” He laughed.
“Christopher, don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that I find your comment silly. Okay”—he softened his voice and looked directly at her—“how do I make you feel unsettled?”
“I feel we’re speaking on this level.” She moved her hands across an imaginary horizontal line. “But there’s this whole other world going on below that’s unreachable, inaccessible.”
“You know you’re suggesting an alternative universe.”
“Christopher, stop, please. We’ve known each other for just over six months. It’s been intense. But as close as you and I have become, there are parts of your life—your family, for example—that I know nothing about. You never told me you were a good rider. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“No. It just didn’t come up.”
“Oh, come on, Christopher. You know what I’m saying.”
“I didn’t tell you because it’s not important to me. That’s all. Listen, I have to leave tomorrow at four A.M. I can’t get into this conversation now. Let’s have it when I get back.”
“Is it always going to be like this?”
“Like what?”
“Are you always going to have to work so hard?”
“Helen, I don’t know what to say. I committed to starting a firm. I have people working for me who are depending on me. They have mortgages and families. Once you’re in the river, you’re in the river. You can’t get out and take a break. Right now I know it’s hard on you. It’s not always going to be like this, but it is for a while. When a client asks me to come see him, I don’t have the luxury of saying no. We need every piece of business we can get.”
“It just feels like you’re trying to run a three-ring circus sometimes.”
“I understand. It feels like that to me, too, but I have only one option, and that is to keep the rings going and the clients happy. At some point my firm will get to a point where I can turn over more of the business to others. But we’re not there yet.”
Christopher called the following day. His meeting had gone well, and he had been asked to give his thoughts on the preliminary valuation of a subsidiary that the company was considering selling. He was going to stay in Edinburgh to do the necessary due diligence. He would be home late Friday evening. In his absence, Helen met up with friends for dinner, friends like Peregrine, who had started at the paper the same time she had but who had left his position as a junior member of the obituary department to write a biography of an obscure, but distinguished, ancestor. And Zara, who worked at the Royal Society of Literature and wrote book reviews on the side. Helen and her friends had always noticed when a boyfriend or girlfriend took one of their group away. It happened when Peregrine’s twin sister, Flora, began seeing a much older writer or when another friend started seeing a young woman who had never finished university and was, by anyone’s description, spoiled and not very bright. These attachments meant they weren’t coming back because their partners were incompatible with the group. In the months she had been seeing Christopher, Helen had rarely thought about including him with her friends. If anything, she avoided them until he was away. She told herself it was because he wouldn’t understand any of the inside jokes and the gossip. He wouldn’t know any of the history knitting them together. But she also knew she behaved a little differently when she was with him. And she knew her friends would notice, too.
Chapter Ten
Bermeja
For Christmas, Christopher gave Helen a necklace—a thin gold strand with a faceted aquamarine in the shape of a teardrop. He told her to pack enough clothes for ten days under a hot sun. He would not tell her where they were going, but the watery light blue color of the stone was a clue. Helen was thrilled with the idea of going away for Christmas week. She had very little pressing work, and the dreary darkness of December days and rain-sogged evenings were just setting in. Her brothers and their families alternated Christmas between the sets of grandparents, and this year Louis and Theo had planned to spend Christmas at Willow Brook. Christopher seemed to operate on an understanding that families required only the minimum of commitments, but Helen did wonder if she would be missed.
The journey to Bermeja was long. They flew from London to Los Angeles and took a connecting flight to Puerto Vallarta. From there Christopher chartered a small prop plane to take them the two hundred miles south to Bermeja. He offered Helen the seat next to the pilot, but when she saw the pedals, she decided to sit in the back. She would have been happier driving. She liked to drive distances, especially if they were long, but he was always impatient to get where he was going as quickly as possible. The pilot explained it was faster to fly straight south across the peninsula of land, but she asked if they could fly along the coast. He shrugged acquiescence but told her there was nothing to see but miles and miles of uninhabited beaches. Christopher wondered if he were the same pilot he had seen the day he first met Helen.
The sun was shining and the wind was strong. The small plane slipped and bounced and slapped across pockets of air, and Helen thought there was no way the wings would not break off. The pilot hunched his shoulders and leaned forward, as if by doing so he would be able to see the rough
patches of wind. There was a reason they had not seen any fishing boats that day.
When they stepped off the plane, the unyielding solidness of the ground felt almost foreign. Alfonso was waiting in a jeep in the shade of the coconut grove that separated the landing strip from the polo field. They drove along the coast and up the cliff to Casa Tortuga.
“This place makes you see things differently,” Christopher said.
They stood on the terrace and watched the wind chasing archipelagos of clouds across the sky. Shadows of cobalt blue were sliding along the surface of the turquoise sea. It was as if all the bright colors had run away and now were found. She watched a bright green iguana pause on cocked elbows before disappearing under a bush of pink bougainvillea. They could hear the waves breaking on the rocks below.
“I remember the first time I came here. My mother brought us for Christmas the year my father died. She wanted to be as far away from the Alps as possible. The first night I couldn’t sleep—probably some combination of missing my father and jet lag. My mother told me to listen for the moment each wave paused before pulling back from the shore.”
“Did it work?”
“Eventually.”
“I’m not sure I can tell,” she said. “It almost sounds like a plane that doesn’t get any closer.”
“If you listen long enough you’ll be able to hear it.”
They unpacked and sat outside and watched the day disappear.
“I have a theory,” she said, remembering everything about her first encounter with Christopher a year ago. “I think that emotions experienced in a place stay where they are, and when you come back you encounter them, you find them again. It’s why coming back here feels so strong. It’s not memory, but feeling.” She tried hard to persuade him of her theory, but he laughed, and she could tell he would not allow himself to believe such things.
“You are aware that your theories about invisible things are not supported by any laws of physics.”
“No, really, Christopher, I’m serious. I think at some point scientists will discover that there are waves of energy between all of us. And that we know more than we allow ourselves to know.”
Even though he didn’t believe her theories about emotions being left in a place and currents connecting people—no matter where they were—he liked being with someone who did.
* * *
The following day, their plans for a long walk dissipated into reading by the pool. Through the parallel wooden slats of a pergola, the sun sliced shadows across Christopher’s back.
“You might end up looking like a keyboard or a convict if you stay where you are,” she said as she shook his arm to awaken him from an afternoon nap. He picked up his book from where it had fallen.
“That would only be good if the dinner tonight were a costume party,” he said as he moved his chaise close to hers.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, Bermeja was in full swing, with most of the owners of the houses in residence. A number of handwritten invitations from people they had vaguely heard of but had never met were dropped off by staff.
“How did anyone know we were coming?” she asked. “Does Philippe spend Christmas here with his father?”
“Marc said he was going skiing with him in Courchevel. I don’t think Philippe comes here that often.” Helen was not surprised that Marc was going skiing—it was just the type of Christmas holiday she would expect him to take—but she was surprised he was going with Philippe, and she was surprised Christopher had not told her. She was not aware that Marc and Philippe knew each other.
The first dinner party they attended was given by Henri and Penelope Lartigue, a French businessman and his artist wife. Henri was the CEO of his family’s chemical company, one of the largest privately held companies in Europe. The Lartigues’ saffron-colored house was perched on top of a cliff with an infinity pool wrapped so tightly around it that their house appeared to be floating. A six-foot-wide wooden bridge gave access to the house. Christopher and Helen arrived just as the evening turned indigo. They joined the other guests on the terrace overlooking the pool to the Pacific Ocean. Penelope introduced them to a very tall woman with gray hair pulled back tight in a chignon. Helen recognized the woman’s surname as one of the most influential families in Germany.
They were soon called to dinner in the large circular space covered by a soaring palapa. They found their names painted on shells around a table that seated sixteen. They were asked to join hands, and the hostess gave a simple blessing. Both Helen and Christopher, independent of one another, tried to remember the last time they had been to church.
Helen sat between an elderly American writer and a titled Austrian whose family owned a sporting gun company. Not being well enough informed about the writer’s reputation as a curmudgeon, she asked him how he had learned to write. “By copying other writers,” he said. “Flaubert in particular.” He told her that when he understood how Flaubert had created the scene in which Emma Bovary is at the dance and decides how unhappy she is with her life, he knew he had become a writer. “If you can figure out how to do that, if you understand that, then you know how to write.” She asked him if he wrote every day. “No, of course not,” he said, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. The Austrian count asked Helen if she had given up skiing. He had—now he sought the sun on holidays. He spoke to her as if he were placing large pieces of luggage on a conveyor belt.
Christopher sat between Penelope and the fourth wife of a Swiss art dealer, a tall young Asian woman. Christopher enjoyed speaking with Penelope. She was a photographer, and while she spent more time on the decoration of her seven houses than on her photography, she had resisted the clichéd hallmarks of the wealthy wife and dressed in a bohemian style. At the end of the evening she balanced a glass of wine on her head and took a picture of everyone. The wife of the art dealer was younger than her husband’s youngest daughter. When Christopher turned to speak to her, she introduced herself by saying, “I know how to say, ‘Are we having fun or what?’ in thirteen different languages.” In rough English, she bragged that she made her soon-to-be-octogenarian husband work out every day with her personal trainer. As she spoke, Christopher thought that if she, instead of Eve, had been in the Garden of Eden, she would have eaten the snake.
The hostess stood up and directed the guests to the jeeps that would take them to Paolo Pavesi’s end-of-year celebration. Helen waited for Christopher to finish his conversation with Henri. She had been around the office enough to know that being able to pick up the phone and reach the owner of Europe’s largest private chemical company was an opportunity he would not let pass. The wind was picking up and the air was cooling. Far away from shore, a small yellow light bobbed frenetically. Fishermen, she thought. She felt safe being where she was. The ocean was rough, with the prophecy of a storm.
They had decided against going to Paolo’s end-of-year party, but when they learned that the party was being held at his inverted temple, they could not resist. They followed the caravan of jeeps the four miles to a strip of land that jutted out into the ocean. On the drive, Helen thought about this collection of people gathered on the last days of the year. There was an exclusivity about this world, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. Assumptions were made, exceptions were granted, a formal intimacy was expected. Maybe over time it would feel more natural, though she doubted it. She suspected she would never see any of these people again. Christopher might. Knowing some of these families could produce deals and advisory work. But it was a world elevated from transactions. Nothing would be mentioned here. Marc was too rough for this world. It demanded an ease, a comfort with nuance, and it required its own form of patience. Sprezzatura? Christopher’s ability to navigate so effortlessly confirmed his ease in a three-ring circus world. Maybe he did not wish to belong exclusively to any of them. Maybe it was his way of creating an anonymity he cherished.
The large concrete bowl, ringed with diamond-shaped windows at three-foot interval
s, was three stories high and almost a third of a football field in diameter. A wooden staircase steadied by X-shaped supports rose to the top of the rim. A few of the guests chose to climb the stairs to walk around the perimeter of the bowl; others followed Paolo through an opening at the bottom of the structure. Christopher, who had climbed to the top before, had never been inside so he steered Helen toward Paolo. Once inside, Paolo asked everyone to lie down and regard the moon. He had asked a poet from France to give a reading. The young women who perpetually orbited Paolo brought pillows for everyone. The night sky was glorious, and everyone was soothed by the pulse of the waves, as if the heartbeat of the world.
Paolo stood in the middle of the circle and spoke in a combination of Italian, Spanish, and French. He switched languages as if skipping stones across water. He introduced the poet, who said he was going to recite Baudelaire’s poem “Tristesses de la lune.” The poet, whom neither Helen nor Christopher had heard of, spoke slowly and deliberately. When he had finished, Paolo asked him to repeat the last stanza. He obliged.
Dans le creux de sa main prend cette larme pâle,
Aux reflets irisés comme un fragment d’opale,
Et la met dans son coeur loin des yeux du soleil.
In a quiet voice, Christopher translated for Helen.
In the hollow of his hand catches this pale tear,
With the iridescent reflections of a fragment of opal,
And hides it in his heart far from the sun’s eyes.
Paolo stood up and spoke. Christopher continued to translate. “He is asking everyone to find any sadness we have buried in our hearts and to offer it to the moon tonight—something about the moon drinking our tears of sadness—and to leave everything behind and to enter the new year with a heart cleansed of unhappiness.”
Paolo ended the evening with a version of a benediction. “Let us praise the colors of the land and the sun and the sky. As Kandinsky said, ‘Color directly influences the soul.’ Without the color-drenched earth, we have only tears that the moon must take away. And let us always return, let our souls always migrate, no matter where we find ourselves, like the sea turtles, to this blessed place.”
A Theory of Love Page 5