Evelyn is quite certain this is untrue. But even his lies have the ring of greater truth; in this case, that her body has more importance as an instrument of the Cause than of comfort.
‘I doubt it’ll come to that,’ she assures him softly. ‘Do you want Frida or Terra first?’
‘Frida,’ he says, with a wistfulness she doesn’t like but doesn’t question. She is about to put the phone down when he speaks up: ‘Happy birthday, Little Mother.’
Evelyn looks at the bathroom door. ‘I’ll get Frida.’
They’re kneeling barefoot on the tiles, quiet under the roar of the bathroom fan, counting their assets one Tampax box at a time. Evelyn looks at the old slash marks on Frida’s arms as she waits for her to finish her current roll, lock it back inside the tampon applicator, return the applicator to the box. ‘I’ll take over, Frida. Father wants you.’
Frida’s eyes flicker with pride, satisfaction, something. She stands and pulls her sleeves over her scars. ‘Twenty-four,’ she tells Evelyn. She isn’t talking about her age, but she could be.
Evelyn closes the door behind Frida, observes Terra’s spaniel-gold head, then crouches to assist. Ten hundred-dollar bills per tampon applicator. Thirty-six tampons per box. Three boxes apiece. Perhaps ten minutes later, Frida takes Terra’s place, face bashful and eyes bright. They are counting their ‘bodily assets’ when Terra returns, tear-stained but triumphant, bearing her blue velvet jacket and her sewing kit. She sits on the lid of the toilet and starts unpicking the lining of her jacket. Evelyn stacks her last ten thousand dollars on the counter.
‘The shoulders and the pockets,’ she tells Terra, with a nod at the jacket and the cash on the counter. Then she steps out.
The room seems luxuriously large compared with the cramped bathroom. She looks to the window and, despite the drawn curtains, feels watched. She sits on the striped bed. She picks up the phone where Jim’s voice was just minutes ago; checks again for wiretapping. She checks the time: eleven-thirty. She checks the bible-thick book borrowed from reception and finds the name. The name is not common. The name might’ve been hers, in another life.
‘Allô? ’ the man growls after five dring-drings. ‘Allô? ’ She listens as he exhales with a hiss, scuffles with the receiver, mutters impatiently, and hangs up.
She lies back on the bed, heart beating. Smiles to herself, just for a moment.
4.
On the striped couch, she sleeps four hours, at most. Curled on her left side, the position she’s come to favor. One of the girls is snoring. Evelyn traverses the darkness and uses the bathroom quietly as she can: toilet, bidet, toothbrush. She sheds her nightgown, which fits like a sack but is well-made, with convenient buttons. Cocoa Butter for the pale, lightning-like marks on her breasts and stomach. Earth-toned underwear, blouse, and midi skirt. Hair, thinner than it once was, scraped off her face. Behind her ears and at her wrists, a dab of Guerlain.
She wakes the girls as she used to wake her sisters for school, years ago. Gets them organized in much the same way.
‘Beware of friendly strangers. Flirt with officials, if necessary, but if anyone else approaches you, remember: you’re married women.’ They glance at their rings. ‘You’ll be using your aliases at the new lodgings. Scarlett, Natasha.’
‘Yes, Isabelle,’ the girls chorus obediently.
She leaves them waiting for a cab outside the hotel: Terra wearing her blue velvet jacket and clutching her suitcase; Frida with a piece of luggage in each hand. Takes the Métro west once more. On Avenue Émile Zola, she finds a tabac and purchases a newspaper and a pack of Gauloises. Stations herself on a bench around the corner from his apartment and watches the sky lighten, the little dogs take their morning shits.
Sometime after eight, he appears, dressed in blue plaid, smoking, completely self-absorbed. By the light of day, she can see that he has grown a moustache. She wishes it didn’t suit him; that the morning light didn’t flatter him; that she could end it here.
She folds up her newspaper and follows him underground.
She follows him east, as far as Grenelle. Changes to a northbound train when he does. They cross the Seine together, get off together at Madeleine Station. The streets seem wider, more sterile than those they came from. She follows him up Rue Tronchet, away from the Napoleonic temple. Past storefronts, hotels, cafés. He ducks inside one, and, though she would like a coffee herself, she remains across the street, smoking. Later, he stalks out, blazer flying up around his midsection, which isn’t as trim as when she knew him, but it’s too late to care. Further up the street, he pushes through the green door of an entirely unremarkable building.
The thrill of pursuit over, Evelyn stares into the abyss of that bright Paris morning.
She crosses the road. Examines the placard on the green door: DCP Audit et Conseil. She feels the burn of contempt for him: his unexciting profession; the small, capitalistic life that would’ve been hers if she’d tied herself to him for eternity. Yet her desire isn’t dulled by this contempt; if anything, it’s like a picked scab, prickling with new blood.
She allows, at last, a thought she’s been blocking since last night to slip through. Married? Of course, he must be. Children, too.
At his café, she orders coffee, a pastry. Takes out her little black book and examines his phone number, like it’s a code she might crack. After breakfast, she finds a telephone booth. Calls the number. A woman answers.
She wants to hang up, violently. Instead: ‘Pourrais-je parler à Madame Chaudouet? ’
‘C’est moi,’ the woman answers, affably bored. ‘Marie Chaudouet.’
Evelyn gives her the French version of a spiel she’s often used to screen members prior to healing services in San Francisco: telephone survey, pharmaceuticals company, five minutes for the chance to win a year’s worth of products.
Within five minutes, Evelyn has learned that there are three individuals within the Chaudouet household. Madame, who favors Embryolisse moisturizer. Monsieur, who treats his hayfever with Lomusol. Their little boy, who prefers the cough syrup that tastes of oranges. She doesn’t know what to do with this information, except run her mind over it like a blunt knife.
She asks about contraception.
‘Non, nous ne l’utilisons pas,’ the woman responds calmly. ‘Nous voulons un deuxième.’
After hanging up, Evelyn buys a ticket for the next morning’s train to Zurich. Buys another newspaper. Takes it to a bench in the Tuileries but cannot read; just keeps sharpening the hurt. He is married to a woman called Marie. They have one child. They are trying for a second …
By midday, she is waiting for him to leave his building again.
A bustling café. He sits at an outside table, with an omelet and a glass of something clear and fizzy. He never ordered fizzy water back when they were students, but Evelyn supposes many things have changed. She opts for wine at the cramped bar. In the mirror above the bar, she tries to make sense of the reflected confusion: rattan chairs, umbrellas, suit jackets. Blue plaid like a piece of sky glimpsed from a dungeon.
Her mind has a tipsy film to it, when he comes through the door with a sound like a cat’s bell. He waves his wallet at the waiter. ‘Dépêchez-vous, j’ai un rendez-vous! ’
Entitled, but good-natured about it. He was always like that with waitstaff.
She arches her back, plays her fingers over the stem of her wineglass. His fingers drum the countertop in time with her blood’s beat. But I know you? Is that really you? Ève—?
Without a glance in her direction, he pockets his wallet. The bell rings again.
‘Madame? ’ the waiter says, looking at her with concern.
5.
In the four-star hotel, Evelyn lies atop the silk brocade covers. Stiff pillows piled around her head. Ceilings high enough to give her vertigo. One hand on her stomach, confirming its renewed flatness through the fab
ric of her blouse. Brain like a rat in a maze.
The lives she could’ve lived are amputated limbs, abortions: Evie, Evelyn Chaudouet, Ève.
She lies her cheek on the sun-striped pillow and surveys the phone on the nightstand. It is five a.m. in California: too late to call Jim at his apartment above the Temple on Geary Boulevard; too early to call her parents at the Craftsman-style house across the bay in Berkeley. This calms her, for she doesn’t truly wish to speak with any of them. She looks from the phone to her tote, then her sandals, waiting at the foot of the bed like faithful dogs.
She has traveled light.
Sinking her feet into the plush carpet, Evelyn thinks of the girls, crossing the border to Switzerland. Of Jim’s love for them, no more important to her than a ripple on the surface of an alpine lake. The bathroom, when she slips inside, is cool and smooth as a mausoleum, scented with white flowers. Around the sink, like votive offerings, tissue-wrapped soaps and dainty creams in bottles. Evelyn runs the bright gold taps and chooses a cream that smells of gardenias, washes her hands and dries them off with a soft white towel. She looks at herself, her skin and eyes made radiant by the expensive lighting. She tells herself, Ève.
In the boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré, Evelyn lets herself be stripped by an obnoxiously young assistant with over-plucked eyebrows. At their feet, like dead butterflies, a half-dozen dresses. ‘Mais le robe rouge! ’ the assistant insists, waving a red dress like a matador’s flag. Evelyn is close to tears. Her face is burning. Clothes have never fitted so poorly. Yet submitting, with a humiliation so deep it thrills her, to the rough hands on her body, the red straps binding her neck. As though fixing a crooked picture frame, the assistant sticks a lacquered talon between her breasts, centers the plunging neckline. ‘Et voilà.’
A black curtain opens.
Evelyn steps out. She looks and looks. She doesn’t look like herself, but who is she, really? The assistant stands behind her, holds her waist like a lover, murmurs things; silk georgette, very nice, you’re a woman, you have a woman’s breasts, better to show it. Evelyn looks from her décolletage to her face, and the two don’t seem to match, let alone to express anything of her mind.
‘Je voudrais acheter cette robe,’ Evelyn says quietly. She turns to view her back, notes the price tag; they have fed whole communes for a week on less. ‘Je voudrais la porter tout de suite.’
In answer, the assistant jerks a brow, pulls out a pair of scissors, snips the tag.
Evelyn will wear the dress immediately.
It is late afternoon when Evelyn steps out of the hair salon and onto the street: fresh blow-waves catching the light, windows catching her reflection. She feels her reflection walking alongside her like an emissary from a more beautiful world, drawing stares from men, turning their heads. Entering the café of that morning, she heads straight for the bathroom. Returns to the bar several long minutes later, feeling so unbearably stoppered-up, tense, she can’t decide whether to sit or stand.
She lights a cigarette. Orders a cocktail, heavy on the anise. It helps.
The evening sky is a romantic sepia, the air heady and floral. Evelyn strolls in the direction of his office, chest warm with alcohol, mouth spicy. Passing a table of men, she hears a jeering miaow. She is conscious of the little rubber dome fitted against her cervix, a need to urinate again, yet also an obscure pride, to be attractive in spite of these discomforts.
A collection of parts is simpler than a whole. At the stationery shop window, a few doors down from his work, Evelyn concentrates on the parts that compose her: hair, dress, legs. Simple; it should be simple.
He comes from the building with the green door. Dressed in his blue plaid, tallest man on the block. A sense of wholeness swallows her parts, and just as quickly, a void. Twenty again. Alone in the apartment in Bordeaux, smiling down at her engagement ring, at her own bright emptiness. She hasn’t changed. It was stupid to think she could; stupid, stupid.
‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur,’ she murmurs, scuttling past him before he can see her clearly.
If Jean-Claude says anything, she doesn’t hear it. If he looks at her, she doesn’t look back. Say something. Look. Something, anything. She doesn’t look anywhere, in fact, until she’s turned the corner and is drawing the Gauloises from her purse, chafing her thumb. The lighter won’t work. A flame appears from another source.
‘Vous êtes perdu? ’ the stranger asks.
‘Oui,’ Evelyn concedes, accepting the light. ‘Je suis perdu.’ Yes, I am lost.
She sips in smoke, feels it furring her front teeth, vows to brush well that night. The hotel bathroom with its altar of flowers, tiny bottles. She doesn’t look at the stranger until she has uttered the next part, in the same tone of resignation:
‘Ramenez-moi à mon hôtel, s’il vous plaît.’
He isn’t tall or handsome. He blinks quickly, as though he might’ve misheard her. Falters to accept, then blushes to the roots of his receding hairline. Balding yet boyish. Bright blue eyes that make him seem more American than French, and that make her oddly nostalgic. She doesn’t know him, though. He doesn’t know her. This is better. Better not to be known, not to be named, not to be remembered.
This is the man who takes her back to her hotel.
He spends a long time on her neck, her breasts. The inevitable happens; her milk lets down. An unambiguous jet that makes him look up in horrified fascination, before renewing his efforts.
He calls her maman, mommy.
Afterward, when he asks her to dinner, she declines, lets him show himself out. She showers, remakes the bed. Sits in her hotel-issue robe and checks the phone for wiretapping.
She calls room service, then her mother. She asks, ‘How is Solomon Tom?’
6.
The meetings with the Swiss banks are over within the next forty-five hours. Hundreds of thousands of Temple dollars counted out, deposited into high-interest and tax-free accounts, the paperwork signed at shining mahogany tables. No questions asked by the neutral gentlemen in their gold-rimmed spectacles and Italian wool suits.
Mona d’Angelo boards the next afternoon train to Milan. She has a different cover story to the rest of them: family in Verona; returning to the US via Rome. Meanwhile, they change out of their businesswear in the station bathroom and purchase tickets back to Paris; buy magazines and Swiss chocolate; pass the hours before their train, weary of each other’s company.
In Paris, they do not linger. They purchase separate flights on separate airlines to separate Canadian cities; wait in separate lounges for stretches of time like mundane crucifixions.
It’s not until the earliest, darkest hours of Monday that Evelyn pulls up in a cab outside her parents’ house in Berkeley. She thanks the driver. She needs no help with her luggage. She has her own keys, slots them quietly. In the hallway, she switches on the lamp just long enough to slip off her shoes and navigate to the back room.
Solomon Tom, to her surprise, is wide awake in his crib. Silently staring as though he’s been expecting her.
‘Soul,’ Evelyn coos, scooping him up.
Evelyn loves her baby. A love as unremarkable as her need to breathe, perhaps, and yet a miracle to her, a startling thing. Of course, she and Jim hadn’t planned him. Of course, her first impulse had been to book an appointment to get rid of him, as she would a troublesome tooth. Now, her body shifts to accommodate his weight; her nose hunts for that sweet, rosy smell at the crown of his head. Soul. Her Soul. Soul-baby.
‘Sleepy baby,’ Evelyn whispers teasingly, though she can already tell he isn’t, really.
Watchful as a painting, Evelyn’s baby follows her with his eyes as she opens her suitcase and puts her soiled clothes in the hamper, finds herself a fresh nightgown. Though she slept little during her flight, during the layover, during the journeys that preceded it, she isn’t tired; anyhow, doesn’t feel like sleeping; her exhaustion so
deep as to seem existential. ‘Not sleepy, baby?’ She smiles over her shoulder, and Solomon Tom smiles back; he’s old enough to do that now. Five months old and his development perfectly in line with the books she’s read; she records it in a soft-bound pastel-blue diary.
‘Not sleepy, huh,’ Evelyn repeats. She notices a dusting of dog hair on the comforter and, annoyed, cracks a window. Checks the clock, then the ceiling.
She puts on a Donovan record, from the pile Sally-Ann left behind when she joined the Temple, moved out of home and into one of the Temple’s student communes.
Solomon Tom likes Donovan.
Evelyn curls up on the bed with her baby in her arms, beneath the wall-sized peace mandala painted by Sally-Ann. With insomniac eyes, she gazes at the silky brown hairs on his head, the barely-there brows, the tiny pug nose. He gazes back, his own eyes inky-blue, bottomless. When, after a century of gazing, he lets out a mewl, paws the front of Evelyn’s nightgown, she acquiesces gently; tugs the gypsy-like ruffle from her shoulder. He latches on. The feeling is strange, borderline shameful, borderline painful, until he finds his rhythm and that tingling sense of familiarity takes over.
It occurs to Evelyn, even as her mind numbs, her body relaxes, that she would like to put an end to this nursing business as soon as possible.
Once Solomon Tom has had his fill, his inky eyes begin to flutter shut. She tickles him with her fingertips, prods him as she would a warm loaf of bread. She murmurs things, brainless and sing-song. He slides into unconsciousness, just the same; grows heavier in her arms, and her eyelids heavier with him. There are some files in the closet, reports to be read on the Temple’s Agricultural Project in South America, better known as ‘the Promised Land’. She feels a grip of hopelessness, commingled with satisfaction, at her inability to move. She closes her eyes. Fragments of song crawl into her mind.
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