‘Friday is perfect,’ I said.
‘So the Romanians are in town?’ Philippe said. I couldn’t even recall who I’d said might need to call on us at Editions Gallici. But whatever I’d told him, it wasn’t what had just happened.
‘It’s way better than that, Philippe! That was someone from an art foundation in the US who’s interested in the English translation rights,’ I said. ‘He’s in France on vacation. Of course he was hoping to meet with Bernard too but he seems happy enough to make do with me for now.’
None of our titles had ever been translated.
Philippe came over and wrapped his arms around me, his body leaning into mine as he breathed the scent of my hair. It felt good – clearly not just to me – and I saw there could be more to this dimension of us, more than there’d ever been. It may have taken a man to unleash my sexuality but it was mine to keep. Philippe would be surprised now I knew what I wanted. He’d like it a lot.
‘That’s fantastic! That firm would have sunk by now without you – I don’t think Alain has a clue. Your instinct about this book was spot on: it has meaning for believers and a spiritual feel for art lovers who want that without religion. There’s something very “of the moment” about icons.’ I sensed that Philippe was getting one of his ideas. ‘I wonder if Nasim Asradi has ever considered…’
I moved away so he couldn’t feel me bristle – this was my turf. Another positive development for Icons that I hadn’t been able to savour properly. But I was counting down the minutes until he left now and steeled myself to keep everything on the level. He was waiting for the morning rush to die down before doing battle with the Autoroute du Soleil.
‘Thank you for saying that but please don’t go putting ideas in Asradi’s head. It wouldn’t work anyway. His pieces aren’t representational.’
Philippe loved controversy – contemporary art thrived on it. But what worked in his world could be lethal to mine. I dreaded to think what a creator of blasphemous sado-masochistic wall hangings might be moved to produce on the theme of icons. But the whole notion was ridiculous – from what I’d heard of Nasim Asradi he didn’t tolerate interference from anyone, not even his gallerist.
Philippe pulled his Bof! face as if the loss were all mine.
‘So you’ll be able to join us by the weekend, if you’re seeing this guy on Friday?’ he said, closing his suitcase and pressing hard on the lid. He probably meant nothing by it but I felt myself redden as if this business meeting with a random male was the forbidden pleasure I had planned. Philippe looked at me expectantly when I failed to reply and it hit me then, that this genuine appointment had superseded the fictitious one that I could have postponed to suit my purposes. I’d squandered my only excuse.
I nodded and attempted a smile although I’m sure it didn’t look like one. Questions would be asked if I didn’t show my face at the Darrousier residence by Sunday at the latest. Philippe knew the Baudelaire manuscript had been delivered in relatively good shape and anyway, I could just as easily work on that in Nice as in Paris. Knowing how depressing he’d found it returning to his family alone after his first marriage ended, I didn’t want to put him through that again. The feeling or the fact.
On the surface, Philippe and I would be the ideal candidates for a clean break: no kids together, both economically independent in our own way. In theory there was no reason I couldn’t go back to blowing a large proportion of my take-home on a rented shoebox. I never wanted it to be over between us but I had the sudden feeling we might not make it through.
I wished there really could be two of me so I didn’t have to choose: one a loyal friend and good wife to Philippe – the woman he thought he’d married; one who was content with her lot, which was a lot better than it had been before he showed up.
The other was a very different me: mercurial, spontaneous, uninhibited. Free to savour every last drop of my aventure with Jean-Luc and our selfish pursuit of gratification with never a thought for how I’d go back to the outrageous ordinariness of life before him.
As I said, we never worry about the right things.
‘We’ll talk every day,’ Philippe said, when he was finally ready to head out, but there was a lack of conviction in his goodbye kiss, our lips barely making contact. I remembered the night we met, how sweet it was that he’d asked if he could kiss me and how long and hungry and wonderful it was when he did. When I asked him later why he waited to take it further he’d told me he was desperate to make love to me, fou d’envie, but wasn’t sure I was the kind of woman who would do it so soon. He laughed when I told him I would have with him.
But that was then. I wondered what would fill his head on the long drive south, stopping at a friend’s in Lyon overnight, and hoped he’d be looking forward to the sea and the company of his noisy demonstrative family, not wasting his energy missing me. The distance had already opened up between us even as we stood only inches apart.
I pressed the button to call the elevator, impatient for him to be gone before I could open my mouth and tell him I was coming with him after all. His face would break into a genuine smile, the first in days, if not weeks. There’d be that fracture in his reply that he can’t help when emotion gets the better of him. And despite the leisurely weeks ahead, we’d rewind to where we were five minutes ago and the kind of kiss that really can’t stop there, rushing back to the bedroom though I’d already pulled the sheets off the bed and left them in a heap in the corner. It would be passionate and intense, as if we were brand new people, bringing us both to the brink of tears.
But only if I said I was going with him and didn’t come out with something else, like the truth. Since the confrontation with Geneviève and the things I’d said to my mother I didn’t trust myself any more. Some people are banned from driving, some are barred from owning pets or practising law. By rights, somebody should have taken a long red thread and sewn my mouth shut. For the longest time it felt as though they had. Talking only caused pain to others or trouble for myself.
It’s just occurred to me why you sit behind me during our sessions. It’s not just to give me this unbroken view of the sea that gives me the strength to keep going. It’s so I can’t see the look on your face. And I’ve completely changed my mind about talking, you know that. It has saved me. You’ve helped me pull out the stitches so I can scream.
Philippe’s good linen jacket was slung over his shoulder, the hanging loop cutting off the circulation to the tip of his finger, which was turning white. We didn’t touch again before he stepped into the elevator and the mood that washed over me was a diluted form of grief.
‘I’ll make sure Vanessa gets the train okay,’ I told him. Nothing more was said about me joining them in Nice. It was as if we both knew I never would. I never even bought a ticket.
Chapter Forty Eight
That afternoon is a time I return to often. Sometimes it is solace, sometimes torture, but it contained every element of what there was between Jean-Luc and me. The windows in the studio were wide open, heat and sunlight streaming in around us, bedcovers long since kicked to the floor. The exertions of sex seemed to invigorate him. He barely took his eyes off mine, the mutations in his gaze like the changing patterns of a kaleidoscope: desire, release, tenderness. In the languor that followed I liked to close my eyes for a while, knowing that he didn’t. It exhausted me, in the best possible way. My heart sprinted on under his trailing hand.
‘How is it you never fall asleep afterward?’ I said, spiking his hair up, pushing it back and then onto his forehead.
‘You’ve given me a new reason not to,’ he said, and when he kissed me, I could taste us both. It was effortless, no need to give directions. He had a map of me; I’d learned to lose myself in him. And those lost moments held the most astounding discoveries. In French, sexual climax is sometimes referred to as la petite mort, the little death, an instant of almost spiritual revelation. With Jean-Luc it was a revelation every time, an ecstatic sensation of being alive. I think, I know it was the sam
e for him, being with me. I’ve stood on bridges telling myself that, fixing my eyes on some cloud or building, an airplane light, anything but the river or the railroad below.
A train was pulling into the Gare de l’Est, the wheels screeching the same four notes over and over. ‘Sounds like a bird call, doesn’t it?’ I said.
Jean-Luc got up and looked out of the small high window, standing there perfectly naked. ‘I recognise some of the trains by the sounds they make.’ Seeing me smile as he turned back, he added, ‘Only since staying here! It’s not a hobby of mine. I always preferred boats. When I was a kid both sets of cousins taught me to sail, in Normandy and in Nice. That’s where it all began.’
He spoke so sadly of the beginning that it sounded like an ending. He talked of the sea less and less, and since Honfleur I couldn’t stop wondering why. Fearing to know. He’d taken me inland to a wood that morning we went out on the bike, picking leaves from each other’s hair before he dropped me back at the end of the road to the beach so I could say I’d been for a walk. It was my first (my only) experience of open-air sex and I loved it. Even if I live to be old, the sight of ferns will always take me back there. I hope I’ll remember that always.
‘We should go out,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’
We’d never risked being seen together but I raised no objections, recalling my intention to abandon myself for a few short days. Philippe would be halfway to Lyon by now and Paris was half empty, its citizens colonising the Var, the Ile de Ré and every other inch of French coastline.
I reached under the bed for my clothes and my hand made contact with a book. ‘What’s this you’re reading?’ I pulled it out. ‘Baudelaire! I guess that’s not a coincidence?’
‘No. When you were telling me about your next project it reminded me of reading Les Fleurs du Mal in high school, and well, László has a good library…’
He did indeed. And it said everything about Jean-Luc that I had never once taken the time to examine the shelves.
‘I only discovered Mon cœur mis à nu working on this book,’ I said, seeing that the journaux intimes were in the same volume. My Heart Laid Bare, such a perfect description of what had happened to mine. ‘You see another side to Baudelaire in each type of writing. He can be quite funny.’
Jean-Luc nodded. ‘Like when he says that love’s a crime you can’t commit without an accomplice. You’re the perfect accomplice, Alexandra.’
I returned his smile, not wanting to tell him that it really wasn’t as cute as he made it sound. What Baudelaire actually said was, the trouble with love... By love he likely meant sex, like a lot of people. But it was crime that jumped out at me.
‘One of my all-time favourite poems is from Les Fleurs du Mal,’ I said, dismissing it immediately because it was so wrong for an idyllic summer day, with its talk of anguish and ennui. But then Jean-Luc began to recite it: ‘Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle…’ (When the sky bears down low and heavy as a lid.) ‘Not today, true, but there are many days like that.’
‘And he wrote so many poems! How on earth did you guess which one I meant?’
‘The same things speak to us,’ he said, and then, seriously, ‘That one stayed with me. I read it again yesterday. Interesting man, Baudelaire.’
‘Wasn’t he? Such a sad life, losing his father so young and hating the man his mother married. But fascinating – I love the story of him being packed off on an ocean voyage for squandering his inheritance and jumping ship before the final destination. He got so much inspiration on that journey. Just think, he would never have written L’albatros. The casual cruelty in that poem makes me want to cry.’
I could see that Jean-Luc knew that one too. I felt the dread on his face. The truth was gaining on us like a tidal wave and it wasn’t about broken hearts.
‘Look at the page I turned down,’ he said, choked. ‘Read it to me.’
My skin turned to goose flesh and not because it felt like I was about to be sent out on stage completely unprepared. I looked at him, my mouth buckling on one side. It seemed a small thing to ask; I knew it wasn’t.
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
(Free man, you’ll always love the ocean
The mirror where you see your soul)
That’s as far as I got before the panic took hold of him. Even when I held him as tight as I could, my arms bound across his back, I felt his shaking through my body.
‘Breathe! Copy me,’ I said, grabbing his face, trying to make him look at me as I took exaggerated breaths in and out, though his eyes were blind with terror. It took a long time for him to fall into my rhythm and for the gulping and spluttering to end. It was like witnessing someone drown all over again.
Someone who knew how that felt.
So fucking dark, he’d said that time, like being trapped underwater.
No, hindsight is not a wonderful thing – it’s a curse. I know I’m not a mind-reader. Perhaps I am being unreasonably hard on myself but isn’t that what everyone does, scrolling back, saying if this, if that, if everything had been different? I don’t know if I can keep doing this.
I tried, but I didn’t push him that afternoon because I know you have to want to talk. To be able to find the words. ‘Something terrible happened to you in California, didn’t it? Something that’s made you afraid of the ocean?’ I said. ‘You have to let somebody help you. It’s not going to go away.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Everything makes it worse except being with you. As long as I have you, I’ll be all right.’
I felt a searing in my chest. We were two boats tied together, heading not into harbour but out into treacherous waters. Whatever the problem, I was not the answer and I couldn’t let him believe that I was. ‘You wanted to go out,’ I said. ‘So let’s go. You’ll feel better in the sunshine.’
And he did. We both did. In the light of that perfect afternoon, we strolled along the quais of the canal. We sat on a bench and were one of those couples who kissed without caring who saw. It was the only time.
Chapter Forty Nine
Vanessa had gone home to fetch some things for the beach.
I stuffed the bed sheets into the washing machine and sank to the kitchen floor watching them go round. I was churning with no chance of coming out clean. My reflection in the curved glass door was distorted past recognition against a backdrop of suds. I was not that woman with the shiny hair and the nice tits and the lovely clothes. With my eyes closed I could see myself more clearly, a fuck-up in an agnès b. cardigan. With my foot extended I could probably kick the door and shatter it, along with all my toes. With my back against a kitchen unit and the angular metal handle level with the base of my skull, I could obliterate myself in one slam. Anything to get out of my mind.
Almost. I settled for slapping myself in the face, hard. I don’t suppose many people have tried it – I never had and even without the element of surprise, it worked. This was about damage limitation, which ruled out presenting my stepdaughter with a bloodbath. I needed to be able to think. The countdown was on to extricate myself before anyone got seriously hurt. For a situation that so intrinsically involved two people (not counting Philippe in his ignorance), it felt like I was in it on my own. Even if I could have shared my dilemma there was nothing anyone could have said or done. I wasn’t ready to tell Emily she was right in all her predictions about me and Jean-Luc because the moment I did, it would feel real. It was real, obviously, and already none of the outcomes I could contemplate involved the key figures walking away unscathed. It was never supposed to be a love affair.
I just didn’t know how I was going to do this. First I had to get out in the open. Jean-Luc and I normally texted but with Philippe gone and no one else to overhear there was no reason not to call.
‘Allô?’ I could tell from that one word that he’d snatched up the phone without seeing who it was.
‘Did I wake you?�
��
I heard Jean-Luc yawn and could picture him stretching, naked under the sheets, and rubbing his eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ he said, perking up instantly. ‘I was working until six but it’s okay,’ he said. ‘You know me, I never sleep much.’
Did I know him? In some ways, deeply; in others, hardly at all.
I stepped off the kerb without looking and a scooter narrowly avoided me, its rider leaning on the horn and veering into the middle of the side street where he almost collided with someone else. ‘I’m on my way to the office,’ I told him. It was utter nonsense – in my mind I was en route to his studio. I would end this in the same place it got started, to the sound of railroad tracks, and I would beg him to get the help I couldn’t give him.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Jean-Luc. ‘Come join me in bed. First thing in the morning is always extra good.’
I could have taken issue on both points – for a start it was just past midday and as far as I was concerned when we were together it had never been less than stupendous. This was the wrong time to be thinking about sex. As I walked along with the lunchtime crowds swirling around, how many of those people were physically longing for someone in this precise moment as I now was? The sight of a young couple pawing at each other in a doorway clinched it. I didn’t just want what they had (and the stares of other passers-by told me I wasn’t the only one) – I could have it. A soft breeze on my bare limbs and along the neckline of my dress carried the promise of Jean-Luc’s touch on my skin, my temperature rising at the thought of him in me.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ I said.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’m not at the studio. László turned up last night – he’s brought his new girlfriend to visit Paris, so he needs it back for a few days. I’m in the Seventh.’
He could refer to it as obliquely as he liked but it changed nothing – it was the Malavoines’ place. I stopped abruptly near the entrance to the Odéon Metro station, forcing the people around me to change course. Putain, muttered a man with a dog, glaring. Having heard me speaking English on the phone, he graciously translated. I moved to the edge of the steps. ‘You cannot be serious,’ I said to Jean-Luc.
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