A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  “Ghislaine was surprisingly open. I can see why Marc appeals so much to her. Apparently her first husband started having an affair within months of their marriage.”

  Christopher could feel Helen getting irritated with him. But he was troubled by some of the developments at work. Over the past year, Marc had begun acting as a trading agent for large blocks of shares. For a small firm with limited capital, such business could produce a windfall, but it wasn’t business that could be counted on. As long as they remained small, with low overhead, and only acted as agent, there was very little downside to the firm’s financial stability and success. Christopher had reviewed the year-to-date results with Marc. The trading profits, which had increased steadily each month, seemed almost too good, and Christopher had questioned him. He had not liked how defensive and arrogant Marc had become.

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “No, I was waiting for you.”

  “Want to walk to Oliveto?”

  “Sure. Oh, and I forgot to mention the most important thing. Have you ever run across Solange Bolton?”

  “No, but if she’s married to Anthony Bolton, then I know who you mean.”

  “She is. She was at Fiona’s.”

  “I was invited to a shoot at their estate in Norfolk last year—Eastthorpe. It’s well known. I didn’t go. Why?”

  “She told Fiona they were selling it to quote ‘a rich American who has made all his money in less than a decade. He is very short, but his wife is very nice.’ You don’t think it could be Eric and Charlotte, do you?”

  “Who knows, could be. They certainly are rich enough. It’s just the type of place Eric would want to own. Didn’t he tell us in Mexico he had been looking for one?”

  “That’s why I thought it might be him. You’ll never believe this, or maybe you will. Solange knows William Pauling, turns out he bought her family’s villa outside of Tangier. She said she would write to him. When do you want to say, ‘I told you so’?”

  “Never. By the way, Marc and I have to go to Milan next week, so I’ll miss the art opening Ghislaine invited us to, but Marc said Ghislaine is still planning to go. He said she’ll swing by and pick you up.”

  When they returned home from dinner, Christopher stayed up to review documents his office had sent him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  London

  A week later, Ghislaine arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Helen noticed that she was dressed in the latest summer style—a flippy pink-and-green floral printed skirt, pale pink cashmere twin set, pale green mules. Ghislaine told her that the Evening Standard had picked up the opening and was sending a photographer. Helen wondered how she knew this. The driver dropped them off in front of the gallery. People had spilled out from the entrance. Almost everyone was dressed in black, and many were drinking or smoking or both. Inside, a well-known, aged rock star stood in the middle of the room speaking to the gallery owner and the featured artist. A middle-aged man came up and introduced himself to Helen and Ghislaine. He was disappointed they did not recognize him.

  “You must not be familiar with this artist’s work, because if you were, you would know that I am the pink rabbit.” He spoke with a heavy French accent and focused more on Helen than Ghislaine, whose eyes were flitting and flicking around the room.

  “The pink rabbit?” Helen asked.

  “Yes, the pink rabbit.”

  “I don’t understand.” She turned to Ghislaine. “Do you understand?”

  He answered for her. “He”—the man threw his chin toward the artist, who was still standing in the center of the gallery—“did a series of paintings of a dealer as the pink rabbit. I am the pink rabbit. It’s making you see the dealer in a way that he is not. To me that is what new art is all about. Making new relationships, making the familiar look unfamiliar, and he has a lot of humor. Here is the dealer”—he patted his chest—“someone who should be serious—he gives advice—accepts or rejects artists—sells pictures worth millions and millions. But if he is a pink rabbit, well, then, you can’t take him too seriously, can you? And then he did an exhibition called The Girl or the Pink Life.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. What is the pink life?” Helen found his use of pronouns confusing.

  “Haven’t you heard of Edith Piaf?” he asked. “C’est incroyable.”

  “Edith Piaf, of course. I just don’t understand what the pink life is.”

  “La vie en rose.”

  “We would say the rosy life.”

  The owner of the gallery quieted everyone to introduce the artist—“Popular, unpopular, hard, soft, classic, new”—and then he raised a glass of champagne and everyone clapped. Helen leaned toward Ghislaine and asked her if she understood what he was saying. Ghislaine shook her head but kept clapping. The gallery owner came over and kissed Ghislaine and introduced himself to Helen. He invited them to a light supper at his house after the opening. He told Ghislaine that his office had received Marc’s offer and would respond by the end of the week. When he walked away, Ghislaine, elated they had received a personal invitation to the supper, offered more than she might otherwise have. She told Helen that Marc had made an offer on a Jim Dine dressing gown. “He only did four, and Marc said Dine hasn’t moved up like some of the others. He thinks it would look great on the wall. It would really be a statement.”

  On the drive to the gallery owner’s house, Ghislaine said it was plain and surprisingly drab. “His wife not only has no taste, she has no style.” Helen had begun to notice that Ghislaine could finish people off with bold declarative statements. On arrival, Helen was taken aback to hear Ghislaine tell the woman who opened the door that her house was her favorite in London.

  “I love how understated it is. So chic,” she said, adding that she hoped she could get her help when she and Marc eventually bought a house.

  So this is how she operates, Helen thought, and she began to look backward at many of the statements Ghislaine had made.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Saint-Tropez

  They flew into Nice at the beginning of August. Helen had convinced Christopher to rent a car so they could drive along the coast to Saint-Tropez. He had wanted to take a helicopter and have a car delivered. He and Marc judged things not by how much they cost but how much time they took. What should have been an hour-and-a-half car drive took four hours, and Christopher was irritated, more impatient than she had ever seen him. When it started to rain, she thought of their being in a slow mudslide of cars, but she dared not share the image with him because she was fearful his irritation would thicken into anger.

  His impatience evaporated once they passed through the gates of the private enclave where La Mandala was located. They ascended as they had with Édouard—zigzagging back and forth on a road lined with tall cypress trees. Danny, the Irish house manager, was waiting for them. La Mandala appeared larger without Édouard. All the bedrooms had names; theirs was called Isola Bella because of the hand-blocked wallpaper of a garden and views through French doors of the Mediterranean Sea. The bed, sofa, and chaise were all upholstered in a pale blue silk chosen to match the color of the sky.

  On the peak next to La Mandala was the citadel, the medieval fortress, hexagonal in shape, with walls two feet thick. Below the citadel was the town cemetery. The nightclubbers, who journeyed to Saint-Tropez in the dark hours of night and left just before sunrise, parked their cars along the cemetery wall.

  Saint-Tropez hadn’t changed much since the seventeenth century—narrow streets lined with two-story buildings stuccoed in sunbaked colors. The only things that ever fluctuated were the line of the sea and the crowd of tourists who descended upon the quaint harbor town suddenly in June like a net of birds and left just as suddenly at the end of August.

  In the morning they would stand on the terrace and watch boats racing away, and in the evening they would watch the same boats racing back. Parallel lines of white all pointing toward the horizon. They could have spent all day on the terrac
e of La Mandala without ever having to leave. Perhaps it was curiosity or the feeling of missing something or just the desire for change that would cause them to leave the grounds. Or maybe it was all just a little too perfect. Every afternoon of the first week, Christopher and Helen would walk down the steep hill and follow the shoreline into town, and Christopher would buy all the English papers and a Herald Tribune, and they would sit at a café and order citron pressés or sometimes espressos to fortify themselves for the walk back.

  Friends came and went during August. Some came for lunch and some came for dinner, others for long weekends. When Helen looked back on that summer, she realized that in the first year of their marriage, Christopher was always adding people, and she was always taking them away.

  A table had been placed on the east side of the house overlooking the bay of Saint-Tropez. Large teak dining chairs with pale, stone-colored cushions stood at attention. For breakfast, large jewel-colored carafes of coffee and fresh orange juice arrived, followed by fresh bread and croissants and pains au chocolat. Guests would slowly meander to the table. Helen always arrived first in those quiet early mornings. The sun had not risen enough to have full strength. There was always a stillness in those mornings that made Helen think the earth had paused in its slow orbit. Lunches of melons and prosciutto, grilled fish, and crudités served on pieces of cork bark were served at one.

  After lunch, everyone drifted to the pool with books and magazines. Later, guests would wander into town to pick up a newspaper, or window-shop, or have a drink at one of the bars in the port and watch the parade of people and boats. Le Gorille was the oldest café and had the best seats. Its black-and-blue-striped awning reached deep into the crowd. People sat down at the cafés as if they were taking their seat at the theater. As a yacht edged around the concrete wall of the harbor, makeup would be freshly applied, windblown hair swept back, poses assumed, as if a curtain were about to rise. Athletic young men in white polo shirts with the names of the boats on their pockets adjusted towels and mats with the owners’ insignias. The names always reminded Helen of racehorses on fourth-rate tracks—Lucky Lady, Lovely Lassie, Pretty Woman, Fortune’s Girl.

  In the late afternoon, Christopher and Helen would lie on their bed and read before dinner. Sometimes she felt as if they were between acts in a play. She lost him during the day, but in the evening he would return to her. As if everything were reset. She could always find him at night.

  On many evenings the table was set for twelve. Friends and acquaintances who spent August in the South of France would come for dinner and finally leave in the early hours of the morning—several hours later than they had planned, because there was something about La Mandala that made everyone feel as if they were meant to stay. After dinner, they would meander over to the terrace in front of the house and talk against the candlelight. It was quiet except for the sounds of the Byblos disco, which pulsed from the town below. Guests would stay until the river of cars that snaked into Sainte-Maxime had disappeared.

  Many people came and went that August, but the one Helen would remember was Willie, who was the best man at their wedding. After university, Willie had early success as a playwright for a triptych of plays about a decadent, decaying Scottish family. Hailed by the Evening Standard as an original voice, he had surprised none of his close friends when he had not followed with others. His three plays were about his family. He had run out of material. He settled into a position teaching playwriting and acting at a university in England, and then, a number of years later, was offered a visiting professorship at a small university in New York City. A year later, he was surprised to be offered a permanent position. He was even more surprised when he accepted.

  Christopher was pleased that Willie and Helen got along so well. In the evenings, he would often seat them next to each other, and she would ask him about his work. Willie told her stories about Christopher and himself. Christopher was one of the cool boys, clever at school and good at sport—even the bullies behaved better when he was around. “I would never have passed my O levels in maths if it had not been for him. In fact, I think he tutored half the boys in our house in maths. I’m not surprised he ended up in finance, he always seemed to find a sense of peace and order in numbers. And he always had a sixth sense for when one of the boys in our house was going to get in trouble and managed to steer him toward safety and cover. Some of the boys, including me, had some pretty dysfunctional families and didn’t have anyone looking out for them. I, for one”—and Willie said raising his hand—“could have been kicked out at least twice had it not been for Christopher. He’ll make a good father.”

  After five days, Willie began to consider the sun. He couldn’t understand its position. Looking across the harbor at the Mediterranean, the sun rose on the right. Why did the sun seem to rise in the west and set in the east? Optical illusion? Saint-Tropez must face north? Various theories were floated. “Maybe we have been wrong all these years,” Willie said. He let his words drift into the air like lazy smoke. He smiled and confirmed his judgment. “Yes, we have—it’s all so simple now.” He liked to think that such luxurious living could overturn the world of science. They argued about it again at lunch. Willie organized a mock expedition into town to buy a map to settle the question once and for all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Saint-Tropez

  At the end of the second week, Marc arrived with Ghislaine. Within an hour of their appearance, Ghislaine, who had never been to Saint-Tropez, asked Helen to take her on a tour of the town. Marc stayed behind to discuss a few business matters with Christopher. Helen and Ghislaine walked down Avenue Paul Signac, and when they passed the painter’s house, Helen told her about the musée de l’Annonciade with rooms devoted to Signac, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Denis. She assumed Ghislaine would be delighted to go, but she only wanted to shop. She had Marc’s credit card and she needed to find a dress for dinner. The small boutiques with summery Provençal clothes were of no interest to her. She asked about a shop a girlfriend had mentioned. While she was trying on dresses, Helen wandered down to the port and bought a collection of newspapers. She returned to find Ghislaine with a pile of clothes at the cash register. She told Helen they would have to take a taxi back because the bags would be too heavy.

  When Christopher asked Helen how the afternoon went, she said how different women looked once you got to know them. He didn’t follow up, and she could tell he didn’t want her to have a negative view of Marc’s girlfriend. She didn’t tell him that when she had asked Ghislaine about her jewelry designs, she had said she didn’t design jewelry. The next day, Ghislaine left in the late morning to meet a friend for lunch at Club 55 and did not return until late afternoon.

  The day before Marc and Ghislaine left, Danny, the house manager, came out to the pool and told Christopher there was a phone call for Marc. A wealthy Asian entrepreneur, Anthony Wu, was calling Marc about selling his block of shares in a large media company. Mr. Wu did not want to speak on cell phones. Danny returned with a phone that he plugged into a jack in the pool cabana. Willie, who was struggling with a book on the postmodern theater, put it down to listen to the conversation.

  Marc told Anthony he had to make a few phone calls. He would call him back.

  Everyone watched as Marc called a trader and laid out the opportunities and risks of the transaction. A pause. “Fifty thousand shares at six twenty-nine. Okay.” He clicked the phone off.

  After he had calculated the sum to be in excess of three hundred million pounds, Willie asked Marc, “Were you just working?”

  “Yes. A wealthy Chinese entrepreneur just asked us to buy his block of shares. I called a trading partner at Credit Suisse and asked if he wanted to buy the block, and he said he’d get back to me on price.”

  “The whole amount?”

  “The whole block.”

  To all who watched, it was obvious Marc had done this kind of trade many times before. He knew he had about thirty minutes before the trading partner
would call back.

  He put the phone down and jumped in the pool.

  Willie had now disengaged himself from his reclining position and was sitting with his feet over the side, elbows bent, with his hands on his knees.

  “But what if you miss the call?”

  “They’ll call back.” Marc slapped the air with the back of his hand.

  Willie resumed his recline but did not return to his book. Helen saw that Willie couldn’t accept that this was the way business was conducted, that it was, in fact, much simpler than he had imagined.

  The telephone rang just about the time Marc was getting out of the pool and drying himself off.

  “Hello,” he said. “Okay, fine.” He tapped another telephone number.

  “Anthony. Fine, they’ll do the deal at six twenty-nine. For all fifty thousand shares. Okay. Fine. You’re done.” Marc began punching in another number.

  Willie asked Christopher what was happening. Christopher smiled and held up a finger to indicate that the answer would come from Marc’s conversation.

  “Philippe, agreed. Six twenty-nine, all fifty thousand shares. Your show now,” Marc said.

  As they were getting dressed for dinner, Helen brought up the subject of Marc’s poolside trade. She thought he was showing off in front of Ghislaine, but Christopher defended him. “I wouldn’t make too much of it. Of course he did it for effect, but more for amusement than anything else. And Willie was clearly enjoying the spectacle.”

  “When did you start dealing with Credit Suisse? I thought you always dealt with Morgan Stanley?”

  “Philippe Pavesi works for Credit Suisse.”

  “Are you and Marc trading?”

  “No, just acting as agents—not principals—on selected deals—”

  “You can do that?”

  “Marc has a brokerage license in Italy.”