“Mmmmmm,” I said, looking at her gratefully.
“So good, right?” Sophie said. “And Alex got croissants!”
“Hello, chérie,” he said, coming around to kiss my cheek. Véronique whipped out a plate and he pulled a croissant from the white paper bag.
“Merci.”
The croissant was so flaky and perfect that it came apart in my hands and my stomach growled. I snuck a look at Alex as he poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked disheveled. Had he not come home last night? I didn’t want to ask.
The day was bright and warm and cheerful, and I soon forgot my uneasiness, forgot my tense conversation with Sophie, forgot that Alex had been gone all night, forgot that I ever had to go back home. We took it easy on the sightseeing, blowing off the Louvre at the sight of the long line and opting instead for a ride on the carousel and sandwiches on the steps of Sacré-Cœur. I found myself looking up into windows as we walked around Montmartre, past brightly colored shutters, in through gauzy curtains to the lives within, allowing myself for the briefest moment to imagine them as my own.
“I will show you my favorite place to observe the Eiffel Tower,” Alex said. “It is just far enough away to see the whole thing but close enough to really appreciate the lights.”
We exited the Trocadéro metro station just as the sun was getting low in the sky. Sophie and I stood there, unabashedly awed by the tower looming in front of us. Véronique and Alex stayed back, and Alex took some pictures. I had become so accustomed to his lens that I barely noticed anymore when he pulled his camera out.
“Wow, there’s a reason this thing is world famous,” I said. The grass stretching between the tower and us was manicured and brilliant green; people lay right on it or had arranged themselves on picnic blankets.
“No kidding.” Sophie reached out and took my hand, “I’m glad we’re here together.” Click. Click.
Alex gave us a little tour on the way home of his favorite wine store, his favorite fromagerie, his favorite boulangerie, and we picked up supplies for the party that evening.
Sometime after nine o’clock Alex’s friends began to arrive. I tried not to be intimidated but found it challenging. The girls were, without exception, beautiful and gamine as though they were off-duty ballerinas and models, which, it turned out, some of them actually were. They were standoffish for the most part, and though I caught them occasionally peering at me with what appeared to be great interest, they didn’t seem especially keen on talking to me. I escaped several times to the kitchen to refill my wineglass, which resulted in my drinking much faster than I meant to.
Later I went out on the balcony for fresh air. Just as I was feeling a bit of peace, Alex stepped out to join me. At last I was alone with him. He had come to find me.
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Of course! Your friends seem nice,” I said, lying through my teeth and feeling a little woozy.
Alex laughed. “No, they don’t, because they’re not. And most of them aren’t really my friends.” He didn’t even bother to lower his voice much, which I found both audacious and admirable.
“Then why are they here?”
“I wanted you to see what my life is like, and sadly it is full of these people.”
“And who are they? These people.” My head was spinning from the wine; I wished I hadn’t drunk so much. Before, all I’d wanted was for my senses to be dulled, but now I wanted them sharp again.
“Models, some other photographers, some musicians, those two old guys talking to Sophie own a magazine and a fashion label.” I followed his gaze to two men in the corner, both well built with graying hair. It felt strange to be at a party where real adults were in the mix, adults who were closer to my parents’ age than mine. Sophie was flirting with them, her head tilted back in laughter, her hand coming to rest on one of the men’s arms. They were enraptured. It was like a sport for her.
“Why are they in your life if you don’t like them?”
“Because they are necessary. You will understand someday.” He reached out and traced a finger across my cheek. “And because in truth I like to be with people, even people I don’t like. You see? You can learn so much by watching them.”
“That I think I understand, and if you don’t care, they can’t hurt you.”
Alex turned his head slowly—or perhaps it was only my vision, my responses, that were slow—and gave me a wide, languid smile. He would kiss me again, I felt certain.
“Can you see how afraid they are?” He leaned in. “Look closely. They’re afraid because they know they’re beautiful now but they’re losing it even as we speak. It’s just seeping out of them, evaporating and floating up into the night.”
“I think you give them too much credit.” I fixed my slightly unsteady gaze on a blond girl with a green silk scarf wrapped several times around her neck. She was also standing with the two older men, twisting a glass of champagne between her fingers and staring off into space. “I don’t think they know anything.”
“They couldn’t articulate it, but they know. Trust me, I work with these people. Behind the self-assured exterior there’s nothing but panic. What I really do is bottle time, intercept beauty as it’s leaving the world.”
Alex suddenly leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. I started but then let myself ease into it. Just as quickly, he pulled away.
“There you are!” Véronique said, appearing suddenly in front of me. “Come, come back to the party!”
I giggled and followed her, sneaking a look over my shoulder at Alex as I went. He was smiling at me, feet planted, his eyes full of something I couldn’t quite read.
Many of the guests were headed to another party after our get-together. To my relief, Alex declined to join them, and we stayed back drinking wine among the picked-over cheese plates and party debris.
“Who was the one with the green eyes, Alex?” Véronique said, draping her leg lazily over the arm of the chair she was sitting in. “Frederique maybe?”
“Ah, no,” Alex said, settling into the corner of the couch, “Franck. Mais fais attention. He’s married to that girl he was with.”
I sat on the floor with my back against the couch; it seemed the closer to the ground I could be at the moment, the better.
Véronique shrugged. “Well, he was not acting married.”
Alex laughed.
“So it’s not really my problem, is it?” she said cheekily, leaning forward to refill her wineglass.
“Oh, no,” I said without thinking, “trust me, Véronique, you don’t want to go there.”
“Vraiment?” she said. “Is there a story here, Brooke?”
I looked up at their expectant faces, then glanced back at Sophie, who sat opposite me on the couch. She raised her eyebrows and smiled as if to say, May as well. My cheeks burned.
“Go on, chérie,” Alex said, leaning forward to run his fingers through my hair, which was pooled on the couch behind me. “Tell us. We’re your friends.”
“Okay. Yes. I do know from personal experience. A professor of mine.”
They squealed with delight, approval.
“But it all went wrong.”
More squealing from Véronique. Mais bien sûr! “Did the wife find out?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“Yes. And then they fired him. And they sent me here.”
“Really?” Alex said. “As punishment?”
“No. What sort of punishment would that be? Just to get me out of the way. So maybe it was a good idea after all, the affair. I don’t know if I’d be here otherwise; the school paid for my trip.”
“I didn’t know that part,” Sophie said to no one in particular.
I looked back up at her and shrugged. “I was embarrassed, I guess.”
“Glad you got over that,” she said, her voice inscrutable.
“And what about you, Sophie, any affairs?” Véronique asked. “Ah, no, of course not. Too pristine.”
“My best friend’s
boyfriend, actually,” she said suddenly, her face turning steely. “My freshman year.”
I looked at her, aghast. Véronique’s smile was wicked, impressed. Alex’s expression was unreadable. Who was this girl? I must know of her; our school was too small for me not to. My mind riffled through the series of interchangeable blondes who’d served as Sophie’s sidekicks.
“She found out. She was furious, but”—Sophie’s shrug was pulled directly from Véronique’s playbook—“I was interested in him first, so it wasn’t really quite that simple.”
“What a scandal!” Véronique said.
I looked at Alex; he was watching Sophie intently.
“Anyway,” Sophie said, “I’m exhausted. It’s been a long day.”
Were we ending the night so soon? But then, Sophie could go to bed without me.
“Yes,” Alex said, finishing his wine, “let’s get to sleep so you can see some more of Paris tomorrow before you have to leave.” I stared up at him, waiting, but he threw me an empty smile before heading to his bedroom.
In the guest room, Sophie seemed to be avoiding eye contact as she prepared for bed.
“So what was that all about?” I finally asked her.
“What was what about?” I’d never seen her like this: quietly seething.
“You told me you’d never slept with anyone, at the pub, you told me that.” I was stumbling over my words, not wanting to blurt out what was threatening to bubble up: You lied to me! How could you? “So that wasn’t true?”
“It was a certain truth.”
I stopped where I stood. She wound an elastic around her hair, which she’d been busily braiding, and perched on the bed, patting the edge for me to sit down beside her. “Look, I’m sorry. We had only just started to get close then. And I thought you would think I was this awful person. It’s not exactly something I’m proud of.”
“I would never think that; people make mistakes. But why tell Alex and Véronique just now then?”
“Because Véronique was making me feel ridiculous. She thinks I’m a joke, I can tell. She loves you, but I always feel like she’s laughing at me behind my back.”
“I’m sorry that you feel like that,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t think it’s true. How could anyone think that about you?”
“Because she’s so knowing, so cool, so, so . . . goddamn French!”
Sophie looked up at me and we both burst out laughing.
“Maybe I’m being too sensitive,” she said, climbing into the bed with me and turning off the light.
“Anything is possible.”
For a moment we were both quiet.
“Still want to stay forever?” I whispered.
“Bien sûr.”
I woke several hours later with a dry throat and an urgent need for the bathroom. Creeping back toward the bedroom, I noticed a soft glow coming from the sitting room. I walked carefully down the hallway and peered around the corner, finding Alex sitting in the corner of the couch. He wore only his pajama pants and his knees were splayed open, an elbow propped against the armrest as he read a novel. Why was he here and not in his bedroom?
He didn’t notice when I came into the room, and for a moment I stood there helplessly, wondering if I should go back to my room but unable to tear my eyes away from him. A moment later, he looked up at me. He didn’t seem startled but I apologized anyway, a nervous laugh squeaking out of me.
He continued to stare up at me as though I hadn’t spoken, as though he weren’t sure I was really there. He put his book down slowly on the end table. And now he smiled, still not speaking. His expression charged me with boldness. It was a standoff and the choice was mine. I let my mind go blank and summoned an otherworldly courage that I knew I had to wrap my hands around before it left me.
I walked over to him and slid onto his lap and into his arms. He put his hands on my hips but otherwise did not move until I leaned down to kiss him, my hair falling around my face and brushing against his collarbone. Once our tongues touched, it was as if he was alive again and I felt his whole body respond, his mouth and his muscles moving beneath me as he became hard between my legs, his hands digging into my skin. Filled with heady longing, I kissed down his torso, pulling at his pants to take him in my mouth. The solidness of him between my lips was a grounding force, and as I moved my head up and down, I let the rhythm of the movement soothe my fraying nerves. How satisfying to control him, if only for a moment.
Time passed in dizzy circles as I heard him moan above me, felt him tense beneath me, felt the fingers of his right hand twist into my hair. When it was over, I settled onto my heels. His head was leaned back on the couch, his eyes were closed, and he was panting to catch his breath. I felt frozen where I was, as though just as quickly as he’d belonged to me, he’d become untouchable. At last he sighed, then stirred. He got up off the couch, knelt to where I was, tenderly moved the hair off my shoulder and kissed my cheek. Then he left me there, crouched on my knees in the lamplight where I’d found him.
I WAS CERTAIN it would change things. I was still naively entranced by the effect of a blow job, mistaking the fleeting power for something more enduring. But the next day it was as if nothing had happened. As with the previous interlude in the stairwell, it was as though these moments were such an expected part of Alex’s life that they changed nothing. The four of us walked around the city in sleepy, companionable quiet the next day, finding one of the few cafés open on a Sunday to have a late lunch before returning to Nantes.
As I’d predicted, time seemed to go faster and faster until we had only four weeks on the calendar left between us and the date on our return tickets to California. We had one last extended weekend, and we’d taken Alex up on an invitation I had begun to sincerely worry would never come: Cap Ferrat.
Alex left a day early to get the house ready for our three-day visit. I offered to join him but he told me not to miss my classes. I felt a now-familiar pang that I had humiliated myself but tried to push it away. Sophie and I were heading down by train on Thursday night, and the three of us would spend the day together on Friday before Véronique’s arrival first thing Saturday morning.
Waiting for Sophie at the train station, I sat watching commuters heading back and forth, women corralling children toward the trains that were headed for La Baule and Paris, and remembered the first time I had seen the station on that chilly day in September, a lifetime ago. I couldn’t avoid the fact that in a short time I would be passing through this train station on my way back to California. What could life there have to offer me now? I knew the feeling would fade and that made me even sadder still, to know that someday soon I would look back at this time in my life with the nostalgia of the remote, of the impossible to recapture. As harried travelers clicked and clacked by me, scurrying to their platforms, I could suddenly see the rest of my life spinning out before me. And it all seemed horribly mundane: job, better job, husband, kids, dinners in front of the television.
“Bonjour!” Sophie said from beside me. I had been watching in the direction I’d been sure she would come from and so was startled. She was wearing a white linen dress and had a large straw hat on her head.
I hugged her, shocked with the relief I felt to see her, bringing me back to the present. Her skin was warm and just the tiniest bit damp from the heat. “Nice hat!”
“I ran to Galeries Lafayette between my morning classes and bought it. It was too expensive but I’ve always had a fantasy of wearing a hat like this on the French Riviera, and I thought, if not now, then when?” She grinned. It was nearly midday and we were catching the last train to Paris that would get us there in time to catch a same-day train to Nice.
“You mean aside from all of the other times we’re going to be spending long weekends on the Riviera when we move to Paris?”
“Of course! Well, then I’ll already have the hat, won’t I? Oh! Then I’ll have to get a hatbox to carry it in. And some steamer trunks!” She took my arm as we headed for the plat
form.
“Oh, yes, in my previous life as an heiress at the turn of the century, I had a matching set!” I said as we boarded the train. “I think you need servants to have that kind of luggage.”
“Does this mean you aren’t planning for a future where you have a staff? I know I am. Just a modest one, four or five.” She tipped her bag into the overhead compartment and we sat down across from each other by the window.
“Oh, yes,” I said, settling in, “because you know, short-story writing is quite lucrative.”
“You’re going to write a novel that wins the National Book Award and gets a big fat movie deal with a Hollywood ending that is henceforth known as one of the greatest love stories of all time.”
“Wow, future me is a huge sellout.”
“Don’t worry, I am too. It was all those years we struggled living together in Paris and eating cheap croque-monsieurs. It made us hard. It’s okay, though, because we made a pact to sell out and live in adjoining penthouses with our gorgeous husbands.”
“Ooh. Tell me about them.” I lowered my voice a little. The train was pulling out of the station and two people had sat down next to Sophie and me.
“Well, you married the leading man from your movie. He’s much younger than you. We’re in our forties now. In the States everyone would make a big deal about it, but we’re in France, so no one cares.”
“So we became permanent expats?” I smiled. “If I’m a cradle robber, what about you?”
“Married to a Frenchman. We have a very tempestuous love affair. Sometimes Jean-Claude and I even throw plates on the floor.”
I felt an absurd stab of relief to hear the name of her fictional French husband, to hear that it was not Alex that she was imagining herself married to.
“You really like Jean-Claude most of the time, though. He’s very charming and we’ve all known each other for many years. He jokes constantly that you and I should just be married to each other because you always take my side. But really he should be thanking me because you always convince me not to leave him.”
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