Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

We leave for Paris down an unpaved road which, I realize with a sudden start, is the same highway that ran alongside the train tracks for much of my trip to Saint Antoine. I struggle not to bounce in my seat, like a child headed to the circus. Here I was, merely hoping to see pre-war Saint Antoine and now I’m getting Paris in its place, with almost no begging or wheedling. I’m still a little shocked by the ease with which it’s all happened.

  "What would you like to see today?" he asks.

  "Everything. I came straight to Saint Antoine from the airport so I still haven’t set foot in Paris. And I do need to get a few things."

  He snorts. "You get the chance to see the most beautiful city in the world and you want to shop while you're there."

  "If you had to wear a bra that’s several sizes too small, you would too," I reply. The tiniest hint of color grazes the top of his cheekbones. "Oh my God. Have I made the impenetrable Henri Durand blush?"

  "In my time, a lady does not discuss her undergarments in mixed company."

  I roll my eyes. "You're very hung up on this whole being a lady business."

  He gives me one of those smirks that makes me want to laugh and punch him at the same time. "You might benefit by becoming acquainted with it."

  "Being a lady is just one of many ways you subjugate women,” I reply. “It's an unequal paradigm for behavior.”

  "Unequal paradigm for behavior?" he repeats with a small laugh. "Where did you come up with this theory?"

  "I learned it in a women's studies class last semester," I admit.

  "Women's studies?" he asks incredulously. "It must have been a very short class. Marie Curie, Mary Cassatt, Mary Shelley. There, I've provided you a nearly comprehensive list of women who've made any kind of contribution to the world, if you really want to consider Frankenstein a contribution."

  I lean my head against the window. "God, you're such a dick.”

  "Dick?"

  I cast him a withering look. "It means penis. And before you start in again about my unladylike mouth, let me ask you: Why should I be held to a different standard of behavior than you? Why is it okay for you to go to a bar and tell dirty jokes with your friends, while the women must stay home, making sure their voices are hushed and all their words are appropriate?"

  He shrugs. "Because it’s how we were created. A woman’s gentler nature is what inspires man to move beyond his basest instincts, makes him want to protect and care for something other than himself. It’s an exchange, beneficial for both genders.”

  There’s a certain sweetness to the idea, but mostly it just strikes me as naïve, and I don’t love the implication that a woman would also need a man to care for her like a child. "In the future, life is safer. A woman no longer needs a cave man to protect her from wild animals and war."

  "No?" he asks, smirking again. "Is that not the appeal of your rich boyfriend—the protection he offers?”

  “Of course not,” I snap.

  “I’ve just never heard you provide a single other reason you’re with him,” he says.

  Before I can react to this, he changes the topic. “What would you like to see first?”

  I’m so irritated by his last comment about Mark I can barely focus on his question. All I know is that the things I’m dying to see—the Louvre, the Orsay—I don’t want to experience with him. Not when he’s there nattering on about my relationship and other things about which he knows absolutely nothing. I’ll wait until I’m back in my own time so I can truly focus on them. I’d rather see them with Mark anyway.

  “I don’t know. The Eiffel Tower?”

  He actually sneers. "With all the amazing architecture in this city, it's a monstrosity that excites you?"

  "It's kind of...the emblem of Paris. Maybe even the whole country. In my time."

  "Dieu," he says with an unhappy laugh. "Keep your television and your microwaves. I don't care to live in any world where the Eiffel Tower is the emblem of Paris and women's studies is actually a course at university."

  “Fine,” I sigh. “You decide.”

  He weaves through the city while I gawk at pedestrians. Everyone is so nicely dressed, and the roads are not clogged with cars the way they would be in my time, but it doesn’t feel entirely real. I can’t shake the sensation that I’m in some kind of 1930’s-themed Disney attraction instead of a real place.

  Eventually he parks in a neighborhood just off the Seine. “Put on the gloves,” he says. “And the hat.”

  The hat with the small veil in front, pressed into my hands by Marie just before I left. "Is this really necessary?" I ask. "I feel like a widow."

  His eyes flicker over my face for the space of a heartbeat. "Yes, time traveler. It is.”

  With a sigh, I open the door, slapping the hat on my head as I do it.

  "Amelie, for God's sake," he says, rolling his eyes, jumping from the driver’s seat. "Wait. You’re not supposed to get your own door."

  I ignore him. I’m not going to sit here like a child waiting for her father’s permission to exit the car. "Why can’t I?" I ask, climbing out and shutting the door with a satisfying thud.

  He looks appalled, rather than amused. "It’s not that you can’t. It’s that you shouldn't have to.”

  He gets the crutches from the trunk and hands them to me. "You certainly don't treat me like a fragile little flower when you're criticizing me, or when you were watching me sweat my ass off doing laundry last week, so let's not pretend you suddenly believe I need you to open my door.”

  He releases a small groan. "Do all women where you're from object to everything the way you do? It's quite tedious."

  "Not at all,” I reply. “I just didn't realize I needed so much protection. I hope this means you’ll be escorting me every time I go out to milk the cows?”

  His mouth edges up. "I probably should, given how poorly you do it.”

  Before I can reply, I see the awning on the corner and stumble to a halt. We’re standing feet from Les Deux Magots, one of the most famous restaurants in history. "Oh my God.” The words emerge wispy and high.

  His brow furrows. "You've heard of it?"

  "Of course!" I say with an excited little jump on the crutches. He fixes my hat, knocked slightly askew by the jumping. "It's where Hemingway wrote! And Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir! Everyone was here."

  He's looking at me blankly.

  "You must have heard of them?" I ask. But even as I pose the question, it occurs to me they might not have become famous until later. Maybe these were the glory days they’d only recall with fondness years hence, glossing over poverty and hunger and nights without heat.

  He scratches his neck. "Hemingway. I just read a book by him not long ago. It was garbage."

  "He's one of the most famous writers of all time," I reply. "What book did you read?"

  "A Farewell to Arms. Romantic drivel,” he says, his lip turning up into a sneer. “Please tell me you don’t associate Hemingway with Paris too. He’s not even French."

  I laugh. "Sorry, mon ami. He’s one of your most famous former citizens.”

  "Dieu," he mutters. “I’ve never been so grateful to live in my own time.”

  We turn a corner and Notre Dame rises in the distance, just a short walk away. Henri nods at it. “I hope our cathedral is at least as well known as the Eiffel Tower,” he says.

  Something perverse in me demands I provide the answer that will bother him most. “They made the book into an animated children’s movie, so that helped get the name out.”

  “A children’s movie?” he says. “Everyone dies in the end!”

  “Not in our version,” I reply. “It’s super cute.”

  He likes my answer about as much as I’d have predicted, but his irritation disappears once we get close. He points to the arching wood at its front. “This was one of the first places in the world to use flying buttresses. They were added after the fact when the upper walls started to crack. The gargoyles and chimeras as well.”

  I glance up towar
d the gutters. “I thought the gargoyles were just some medieval bullshit about protection from demons.”

  He laughs begrudgingly. “There’s a little medieval bullshit, as you so charmingly phrase it. I still can’t believe they made The Hunchback of Notre Dame a children’s movie. You know Hugo wrote the entire book to call attention to the cathedral’s gothic architecture? He was disturbed by the way it was being destroyed.”

  “And did it work?”

  He turns his head back to the flying buttresses. “Those still stand, so I suppose it did, to some extent.”

  As we enter the cathedral, Henri begins pointing out things I would not have recognized on my own—all the structural changes they made to free up the space for stained glass, the Romanesque architecture of the tower and nave versus the Gothic elements, the arches and rib vaulting. He is unguarded and enthralled, two adjectives I’d never have used to describe him until now. But he suddenly stops himself.

  “Sorry,” he says, with a faltering smile. “I’m telling you far more than you’re interested in hearing, I’m sure.”

  "I’m an art history major," I reply. "Architectural history isn’t so different. Why would you think I wouldn’t want to hear it?”

  He looks at me for a long moment, before he glances away. “I suppose because the women I know aren’t like you.”

  “Right, because I’m unladylike.”

  “No,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting forward without me, “because you’re interesting.”

  When we leave Notre Dame, we take a circular path through town, cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens on the way. People stroll, children play, and there are painters everywhere I turn.

  "You keep staring at those painters like you know them from home," he quips.

  "Because they could be anyone!" I whisper. "I know some of the great artists came here to paint—Picasso, Matisse, Monet—and some of them could actually be here. Right this minute. Some of them not even known yet."

  He laughs. "They are all quite famous here. And Monet is quite dead."

  I groan. "I know that, but you’re missing the point," I reply. "Imagine you went back 52 years from now? So..."

  "1886," he says, before I can do the subtraction.

  "You're better at math than I am. Don't get too cocky. A child of five is better at math than I am."

  "And speaks better French," he returns. "But yes, I see your point. I saw it long before you made it. Unlike you, I’ve always thought the ability to travel back in time would be an amazing gift to possess.”

  We turn back toward the Seine, and once we find ourselves in the center of everything again, I push to eat at Les Deux Magots and he ignores me, insisting it’s not appropriate, and instead takes me to a small restaurant nearby, the kind with silver and white linen and waiters in tuxedos. Even Mark’s parents don’t dine like this, at least not that I’ve seen.

  "This doesn't seem like the dining establishment of poor farmers,” I say once we are seated.

  A smile plays at the corners of his mouth. "You're forgetting I don't have to pretend to be a poor farmer when I’m here."

  He orders what sounds to me like a stunning amount of food, but it comes out in small courses, each served with tiny glasses of wine. And as the meal winds on, Henri grows warmer, less guarded. We talk about art and architecture and school. He asks what I would do if I were forced to remain in 1938 and I laugh.

  “You mean the way I’m being forced right now?”

  “Even worse,” he says, raising a brow. “I mean permanently. If something happened—if you stayed for so long you couldn’t go home again—what would you do?”

  I take a sip of my wine, considering the question. “I think I could do here what I hope to do at home anyway—find struggling artists and help promote their work.”

  He grins. “You mean discover someone who’s famous in your day before they are discovered by someone else and profit from their work?”

  I make a face at him. “Of course not. That would be cheating, first of all. Secondly, it’s not about the money, obviously. I could have plenty of that if I needed it. It’s just about helping people who deserve to be helped, though I’d have plenty of staff to make my life easier while I did it.”

  He gazes at me over the rim of his glass. “That sounds almost altruistic, little thief.”

  “Despite what you think,” I retort, “I’m not evil.”

  He takes a sip of his wine and shakes his head. “I’m not the one of the two of us who believed that anyway.”

  Our meal continues in this way—some teasing, some arguing, a great deal of laughter—until the bell rings four o’clock and my jaw drops. "We've been here for two hours?"

  He laughs. "Perhaps my company is not as terrible as you previously believed. But we should go to your shops before they close so you can get your, um, things," he says.

  I grin. "You mean the bra? For my breasts?" I'm not sure why I love baiting him as much as I do.

  He closes his eyes as if praying for patience. "My God, you never stop. But yes, that. And get yourself some dresses too," he adds. "Since you’ll be staying a while."

  For the first time, he doesn’t sound like he’s sorry that’s the case.

  The ride home is quiet, but it’s a companionable silence. I think about the tentative plans Mark and I made for our meeting in Paris—he’d mentioned Saint-Germain-des-Pres specifically. And I’m sure if we do wind up there, it will be great. Just not the same kind of great.

  "Thank you," I say, as we pull up to the house. I think back over our day—lunch, Notre Dame, the gardens—and can’t pick out a favorite moment. Even bra shopping was fun, particularly the moment when I caught Henri—standing just outside the lingerie department—trying to see what I was buying. "Today was...magical. I never in a million years thought I'd get to see Paris in the 1930s and eat in the same restaurant Picasso dined in the night before."

  He considers me for a moment. "You do realize that it was possible because of your gift? That a million other adventures beyond this one are still possible. Even if your ability is not strong enough to go much further back, surely there are things you still want to see?"

  "Why are you constantly on me about this?" I sigh. "Why can't you just respect my decision and let it go?"

  "Because you seem to willfully ignore all the good it can do. All the good it's done. Your gift made today possible—how can you wish that away?”

  I feel emotions spinning inside my chest: confusion and anger and sadness. He isn’t wrong, but he also isn’t right, and I can’t explain that to him.

  "Because," I reply, climbing from the car, "there's no amount of good that can make up for the harm it's already done."

  15

  So,” Marie says to me over dinner, wincing, “Madame Beauvoir has given you a job.”

  My head jerks up. "Me?"

  Henri glares at his sister. “This had better be a joke. She is not taking a job, I can tell you that much right now.”

  Marie ignores him as she turns to me. "Madame Beauvoir heard about your ankle from the doctor. She's decided you should come read to her mother, Madame Perot, until you're back on your feet. Her sight is troubling her, and she thinks reading in French will help you learn the language."

  "Non,” says Henri. “She couldn't care less about the reading. She's just hoping to throw Amelie in the path of her dolt of a son, André."

  Marie’s shoulders sag. “We can’t afford to alienate the Beauvoirs, Henri, especially with a war coming. And reading a book aloud doesn't typically result in marriage.”

  I could assure her it definitely won’t result in marriage, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried. “But what if...I slip up somehow? I've done it here, with you, several times."

  "You're more relaxed with us. It's not necessary to hide who you are when you are here," says Marie. "And if you mess up badly, I can always travel back to warn you so it doesn't occur."

  I groan, letting my
head rest against the back of the chair. "So you'd warn me about a misspoken word, but not about an ankle break that will immobilize me for another five weeks?”

  "Yes," she says, unapologetic as ever. "Things having to do with Madame de Beauvoir are not fate."

  I still don’t think it’s a great idea but at least it will give me an excuse to see Saint Antoine. “I suppose I can just tell him I’m married. It’ll be true soon enough.”

  “So that…that’s actually a plan?” Marie asks. “You’re really getting married when you get home?”

  I shrug. "Not right away, no. Mark wants me to move to New York next year to live with him and finish my degree there. I want to stay where I am, so I'm not sure what's going to happen...but either way, there's no rush. People in my time live together before they get married usually anyway."

  "Live together?" gasps Marie. "As a couple?"

  I laugh. "Yes. It's not a big deal. Things—everything, really—is much...looser. People don't wait for marriage to have sex. They live together. Sometimes they even have kids together before they marry, or they just choose not to marry at all."

  Henri's jaw shifts a little at that. "In my time, there's a name for women who give themselves away before marriage."

  I feel irritation inching upward. "But no name for the men, I assume?" I ask. "It's okay for you to sleep with whoever is agreeable and then look down on her afterward for it, yes?"

  "Not necessarily, but look at it from an evolutionary perspective,” he argues. “Women are driven to find the best provider for their young, and men are driven to procreate. Women must keep the gate closed in order to ensure men hold up their end of the bargain."

  I can’t believe he’s defending this nonsense. I thought he was smarter than that. "Maybe men are just better at keeping promises in my day."

  His jaw grinds. "Maybe women just aren't desperate enough to accept any lie in mine."

  Marie rubs her temples. "The two of you will find anything to argue about, won't you?"

  "She started it,” says Henri, flushed and angrier than the situation calls for.

  "Me? I don't argue with anyone! Mark and I have never argued once. It's you."