It was the thirtieth anniversary of that blizzardy day she had crept into a storefront clinic, already at fifteen weeks, near the deadline for a no-questions-asked D&C second-trimester abortion. Afterward she had taken the bus home. The bus stop was a half-mile from her rental, two spartan rooms in a decrepit Edwardian mansion in Champaign, Illinois that had been carved up into units. The short walk exhausted her further. Shivering from the cold, she fumbled with the door-lock, and once inside, collapsed onto the sagging single bed. For the better part of two days she lay in a stupor, curled up and alone. She had told no one. Not her mother, not her sister, not her Aunt Alice, certainly not the father, a finance graduate student she had slept with on two occasions, who had stopped calling her, and whom she had never seen again.
About that time, she abruptly stopped attending Mass, and had never approached a priest to confess the sin. She had kept the secret even from Phil. Every year, on the anniversary date, she found herself slipping into a Catholic church in the early afternoon, praying to whom she knew not, for what she knew not.
And now, she stood at the meat counter in Whole Foods. The clerk was a young man, younger than her son or daughter would have been. A thirty-year-old grainy sonogram of a human fetus, light gray tissue against a black background, was tucked in a yellowing envelope inside a Stuart Weitzman shoebox high on her side of the walk-in cedar closet. The young man picked up three rosy-red medallions, and displayed them to her, proud of their quality.
“They are perfect, thank you, I’ll take them.”
The young man weighed them, wrapped them in white paper, and handed them to her.
“Have a good day,” he said as she walked away from the counter. She wandered to the deli section. It took her a good twenty minutes to pick out several side dishes, fashionable carbs of yams and quinoa and bulgur.
She drove the two miles to their home, a Georgian style mansion north of Montana, graceful pines and eucalyptus lining the street, Architectural Digest perfect. She walked into the kitchen, Caesarstone and copper gleaming even in the gray gloom filtering through the skylights, and placed the medallions and the sides in the built-in SubZero fridge. Absentmindedly, she wandered down the hallway and turned into Phil’s home office, where there was a view of a flagstone patio hedged by azalea and camellia bushes. The azaleas, wintry plants, had begun to bloom, and for a week she had been contemplating the gradual amassment of white and pink blossoms.
On Phil’s immense walnut-burl desk was a display of professional photos of the happy couple, taken at their Ritz-Carlton wedding fifteen years ago. At that time they had agreed that children would complicate their affairs too much. After all, Phil was forty-five and she was thirty-nine. He had two teenage daughters from an unhappy first marriage. Sometimes she wondered if this had been the correct reasoning, if it was why her abortion at twenty-four was still such a vivid memory. It wasn’t simply the guilt. It was more than that, a feeling that she had foregone her one opportunity to become a mother. The announcement that Phil was to become a grandfather—his elder daughter was pregnant—had only reminded Sally of her own discarded fertility.
Phil was an outstanding husband, in many ways a perfect husband, a respected attorney and a good provider, a kind and thoughtful man. Her friends often remarked on how lucky she was. And yet. Something essential was missing from her life. It had to do with her core, her center, those early memories of candles lit for the Latin Mass, of caressing her blue-glass rosary beads, of memorizing the Baltimore catechism. This sophisticated persona she had assumed—a Pilates-toned body, hair blonde-highlighted and cut in cascading layers—in some mysterious way it did not represent who she really was. The scared child inside her was curled up in a freezing attic corner, hugging herself and crying.
It was past time to pull herself together. Mechanically she dressed in a sleeveless, floral, silk shirtwaist and gold wedge sandals, touched up her hair with a curling wand, and applied makeup. Phil approved this sleek, yet modest look, the glammed-up hausfrau who didn’t embarrass him with tarty cleavage or Cleopatra eyeliner.
Two automobiles pulled into the driveway. Car doors slamming, baritone voices. She walked through the foyer and opened the front door.
Phil stood there, grinning. He stepped forward and kissed her full on the mouth.
“Sweetheart, you remember Richard.”
Smiling, she gave the obligatory Hollywood hug and air-cheek-kiss to their guest. The arc of her arms was polished, perfect. But in fact this far too casual physicality dismayed the demure Catholic girl inside her.
“Welcome, come in. I’m afraid dinner will be hodgepodge pot-luck.”
“Oh, my favorite kind. How generous of you to take pity on a poor unhappy bachelor.”
There was a slightly inappropriate leer in Richard’s manner. Maybe a few glasses of pinot noir would help her sleepwalk through the evening.
A Day at Versailles
“SWEETHEART, LOOK IN HERE.”
George pointed through the bottom panes of a pair of casement windows twelve feet high. The two Americans stood in the overgrown moss at the back of the Petit Trianon, the chateau of Marie Antoinette in the park at Versailles. Although the façade of the Greek revival building and its formal gardens presented a postcard-perfect public view, on this hidden side the walls were crumbling and the foliage had grown wild and entangled. Strangely, the glass panes were clear, as if recently cleaned.
Karen shaded her eyes with her hand and peered inside. The room sparkled. Gold inlay glistened on fresh-painted ecru walls and the polish of the parquet floor gleamed. A young woman clasping a leather book reclined on a velvet cushioned Louis XV settee. The flounces of her Robe à la Polonaise cascaded to the floor in waves of pastel green silk. Her chestnut hair fell in ringlets over her shoulders, almost touching the mounds of her breasts, which were pushed up by a tight corset.
It seemed the sophisticated French were taking a page from the corny Yanks, using a student to act the part of a historical figure. Karen giggled, remembering her high school stint as a tour guide at a landmark Victorian house. The museum board required guides to dress in character. Her assigned garment was a purple silk bustle gown, on loan from the local light-opera company. How she had loved playing the role of a fashionable lady whose monied family had built the mansion a century ago.
“Isn’t that model exquisite, George?” She touched his arm. “She looks just like the Lebrun portraits of the queen we saw this morning.”
“The French do things in style, don’t they?”
“They certainly do. The ensemble is true down to every detail. But the hairstyle is wrong. Too many ringlets.”
“It’s odd that they would assign her to sit in a building closed to the public. Maybe she’s practicing. Or perhaps this is a break room.”
Turning back to the path, Karen noticed a marble lion head set into a collapsing stone wall, above a cracked basin meant to catch the water that dribbled out of its jaws. Peculiar, she thought. Lions were not the usual motif in this park. The unkempt brush gave way again to neat gravel as they rounded the building and came out at the front. They sat down on a stone bench near the entrance. The autumn weather was cool and sunny, perfect for dawdling.
The couple had stolen away from Chicago to Paris five months into their love affair. George was fifty-five, a seven-figure partner in the estate administration practice of a LaSalle Street law firm. Four years ago he and his wife had divorced, a surprise to the wider world, which glimpsed only Photo-Shopped monogamy. The actuality was different: he had dabbled in several back-street affairs, always breaking off when a woman became demanding. His wife had never discovered these infidelities, though she surmised that his long and irregular hours were not taken up solely with billable time. She had been preoccupied by the upkeep on their Evanston colonial mansion with its manicured lawn and expanse of gardens, and by jockeying for admission to elite schools for their two sons, both now grown and doing well in Silicon Valley. He was enjoying his n
ew role as a desirable bachelor, photographed often with women at charity events, posing with this one, a bejeweled beauty or that one, a wealthy divorcee.
The never-married Karen was forty-five, and worked as an assistant curator at the Art Institute. The job seemed glamorous, but the reality was gritty for those like herself who had no trust fund to augment the meager salary. For the past two years, she had dipped into her scant savings for sessions with Dr. Ira Sand, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, who saw patients in a book-lined consulting room in an Edwardian row house near the Lake. In that hushed dimly lit room, its high ceilings softened by acanthus moldings, a Persian carpet covering the center of its polished wood floor, she sank into reverie. If only. If only she had grown up in a house with a room like this, and her father had been bearded and erudite and soft-spoken. Her own father, who had died a decade ago from a massive heart attack, had been a clean-shaven and hard-drinking Marine sergeant-major, barking orders to her mother, his second wife, some twenty years younger than he, and to her, their only child. He considered reading a waste of time, as so much navel-gazing, when there was real work always to do, to maintain a rigid structure and attend to every detail.
In April Karen had manned a booth at a charity auction of nineteenth-century British watercolors in the Gold Coast Room at the Drake Hotel. George attended because a client had donated a painting, and he took the opportunity to size up the women as well as the art. Pleasantries were exchanged and a flirtation ensued. She scribbled her personal cell phone number on the back of her business card and gave it to him.
They had arrived in Paris on a Sunday afternoon in September. George was paying for everything for this week-long getaway, his treat in lieu of an opal ring she had pointed out to him in a Magnificent Mile shop window. He agreed the ring was lovely, but had immediately changed the subject, nuzzling her ear and whispering, sweetheart, let’s go to Paris together.
Karen had lodged briefly in a shabby Balzacian pension in Paris many years ago when she was traveling solo, Eurail pass and passport tucked into a neck security pouch, guidebooks and extra panties stowed in a backpack. George had been some half-dozen times on family vacations, staying in an apartment in the Trocadero owned by his former father-in-law. The first two days they lazed about, taking late breakfasts of baguettes and café au lait in the Hotel Saint Germain-des-Pres dining room, lolling abed during the afternoons, strolling in the boulevards at dusk.
On Tuesday evening, however, Karen, who in spite of Dr. Sand’s calming influence, was jittery over the waste of even one minute, announced they should be on a proper tourist schedule. Versailles was first on her list. George replied that while he was happy to oblige her sightseeing whims, he would prefer another quiet day at the hotel. But he agreed it would be an easy trip, very little time or trouble. And so, early that morning, they had walked a block to the Metro. George took charge of the complex map illustrating the transfers for Versailles. During the forty-five minute ride on the RER train, Karen studied her Blue Guide. He rested his hand on her thigh, his fingers absentmindedly caressing her while he stared out the window.
The morning had been taken up with exploring the palace. After a light lunch of quiche and salad and a carafe of the red vin de table in the palace’s mediocre café, they had idled in the park, and wandered over to the Petit Trianon to take a cursory look.
Now, settled on the stone bench in front of the locked building, she nestled against his shoulder. They were examining the neoclassical façade.
“It’s wonderful, really, the elegant simplicity of this chateau. Rather a treat after the over-the-top gilt of the palace,” she said.
He nodded in agreement. “The mob did not see Marie Antoinette’s virtues. We see them now, two centuries later. She seems the sanest of the lot.”
“She was a liberated woman, one of those brainy Habsburgs. Much smarter than her dolt of a husband, the sixteenth Louis.”
Smirking, he said, “We Americans refuse to sympathize with the plight of any queen, no matter how brainy. We always cheer for revolution. Of course, they went a little overboard with the guillotine.”
A tour group approached. Well-heeled Americans, Karen guessed, anorexic-looking women in skinny jeans and rhinestone-trimmed cashmere sweaters, their men in British-style travel vests over tailored shirts. The guide was a tall, slender woman wearing a gray sweater dress with a patterned red silk scarf draped around her shoulders. She stopped near the entrance. Scowling, she checked the gold watch on her wrist several times, while waiting for stragglers. After a few minutes, all two dozen people were gathered around her in a ragged circle.
“As a special surprise for you alone, our most distinguished guests, follow me inside, si’l vous plait.” Her English diction was formal, with a thick French accent.
She opened the front door with a brass skeleton key, and led the group inside. Karen and George stood up from the bench, whispering to one another whether they could join in, and holding hands, latched on to the tail end, following them through the door. No one objected.
The interior consisted of an enormous high-ceilinged salon, empty of furniture. On the left side, was a marble staircase; only three steps were visible before its upward sweep was curtained off with muslin sheets. The group gathered around the Frenchwoman, who briefly expounded on the building’s history and explained that this was the ground floor, relegated to servants and armed guards. She concluded, “In seven months this very beautiful, very important chateau is scheduled for restoration to the luster of 1789, when the magnificent queen Marie Antoinette resided here.”
She then crossed the salon, the heels of her black leather pumps clacking on the marble tiles. On the far right, a door was set into the wall. She unlatched it with another key.
“You now have ten minutes at leisure. Through here is an old billiard room where the guards relaxed when off-duty. You may examine it, if you wish. I remind you that donations to assist in restoration projects are always welcome.” She glanced at her watch, clacked back across the salon to the front door, and disappeared outside.
The Americans milled around. Some of the men took photos with expensive camera equipment. The visitors murmured in soft voices, or else were silent. One loud voice punctured this decorum: that of a woman, her neck and face surgically tucked, with hair dyed the color of orangutan fur and fingers flourishing diamond and emerald rings.
“Hey hon, they oughta dust better in here. Look at that filthy floor. You’d think they coulda hired better help.”
Karen cringed. She imagined herself cheering as the sharp edge of a guillotine silenced those vocal chords forever. She wasn’t sure if George had heard. He had the ability, honed by many years as an attorney, of tuning out obnoxious clients and colleagues.
The billiard room indicated by the guide must be the room with the actress, who even now was probably fluffing her curls, getting ready to primp for the visitors. Curious, Karen walked to the right and stepped through the open door. The air changed abruptly to the cold clamminess of an underground crypt. She stumbled over a bulge in the water-stained parquet floor. Recovering her balance, she felt woozy, and her heart fluttered.
Paint chips were piled up in corners. Mold blackened the ceiling and the bare cracked walls. In the middle of the room, the wood frame of a Louis XV settee lay upside down.
George followed her into the room.
She said, “This is creepy. Isn’t this the same room we saw from outside?”
She walked over to a pair of tall casement windows, their panes covered with green scum. Through the muck, she could barely discern a marble lion head.
Frowning she said, “That looks like the same fountain.”
George put a protective arm around her waist, and guided her outside to the main entrance.
“Let’s go back around again, so we can figure this out.”
“Darling, I’m scared. It’s something to do with the issues I’m sorting out with Dr. Sand. Too many abusive alcoholic ghosts rattl
ing around in my family attic.”
“Ghosts aren’t real. I deal with the dead hands of testators every day. No matter how much the family fights over the will, the dead don’t reappear.”
Together they walked outside, around the side of the chateau. They approached the marble lion head. But now, dimly in view through a scum-encrusted window, was a dilapidated room with an overturned Louis XV settee. They glimpsed the vague figures of tourists through an open door on the far left. Indeed, there was that same woman with the red hair, chattering and gesticulating, her jewels flashing.
“This is impossible. I can’t grasp it,” she said.
“Let’s ask the guide. There has to be a logical explanation.” George squeezed her hand.
The two circled around to the front of the chateau. The Frenchwoman stood smoking a cigarette at the end of the terrace. George approached her.
“Excusez-nous madame. We were surprised earlier to see your living tableau in the billiard room. The model is very true to life.”
She crushed the cigarette stub on the curly head of a putto carved on a stone urn.
“How do you say this? Tableau, to live? I do not understand.”
“The actors who dress up in period costumes to show the tourists. That girl decked out as the queen, in that beautiful eighteenth-century dress, we were very taken with her.”
“Ah, a tableau vivant? Mon dieu, non, c’est ridicule. We would never turn our precious heritage into that kind of Disneyland vulgar display.”
“Has the refurbishing of the chateau started yet?”
“Non, non, monsieur, did you not pay attention to my explanation? The chateau will be closed for restoration in the springtime.”
Karen and George glanced at one another. Karen mumbled a merci, and then bolted, sprinting on a gravel path that wound away from the chateau, toward the park. George followed at a deliberate pace, scrunching his face, working out the puzzle. How could such bizarre data form a logical pattern?
Curious Affairs Page 9