by Meg Wolfe
coarseness.” She learned of the nouvelle roman writers and New Wave filmmakers “back home,” but hesitated to leave her job and growing professional profile. When she learned of Henri’s failing health, however, she dropped everything to return to Paris and help out.
This was when she became re-acquainted with Seamus O’Dair, whose group of friends and fellow writers—every last one of them involved in the Resistance efforts—often met at Sibylline. After the odd and self-indulgent literary world in America, this group, by contrast, were heroes. Olivia wrote that, in retrospect, they were probably no less full of themselves than the Beatniks—or herself—but at the time they could do no wrong in her romantic eyes. Her teenage crush on O’Dair in the 1930’s renewed itself with the power and conviction of a woman determined to have what she wanted—and she wanted O’Dair, body and soul.
But he only noticed her when he was made aware that she’d written Faux Silence, and the person who brought it to his attention was under the impression that it was autobiographical. She wanted O’Dair’s attention so deeply, she did not dissuade him of the notion that she was a Resistance courier based in Marseilles.
We loved, we wrote, we drank, we acted. You called me your muse, I called you my demon.
When Henriette passed away, Olivia continued the book store and the Sibylline Press, although it became more and more difficult as time went on, as Henriette had accumulated bills. An American made an offer for it to Henriette’s attorney, who made the arrangements. There was only a small amount of money left after the bills were settled, but it went to Olivia, by way of Henriette’s will. Olivia then gave the money to O’Dair’s group, to enable them to purchase an old theater that was burned out during the war. In fact, it was O’Dair’s Resistance team that had sabotaged it in the first place, when it was occupied by the Nazis. They wanted to restore it, and use it for their theatrical productions, calling it a phoenix that would rise from the literal ashes. The money Olivia brought helped to make it possible, and raised her esteem in their eyes.
All went well until one day a fellow Resistance fighter from Marseilles came to pay his respects to his hero O’Dair and the troupe rebuilding the theater. The passage of time and hardship of the war had changed his appearance, so that Olivia did not recognize him as one of what she referred to as “local tutors” and “poor insipid boys” from her days in Monte Carlo—but he recognized her. In this way it was revealed that far from being a Resistance fighter, she had escaped with her family to America, in the entourage of the millionaire Beauregard Lamont.
At first, Olivia was not concerned, convinced that she would be forgiven for her way of memorializing her Aunt Sasha, and that any of that group of friends would have been grateful to be memorialized in such a manner.
What she didn’t expect was the vitriol and contempt she received for her deception. O’Dair himself was the worst. And then she realized, shortly after, she was pregnant. By then, his rejection of her was so complete, he refused to believe her. After a few weeks, she realized he would never forgive her, nor would anyone else. She was a pariah. She was so full of her own connection to Sasha, that she had completely underestimated the depth of their Resistance convictions, and could not see what their objections were.
Her poetry and fiction were her manifestation of Sasha, as well. But O’Dair and everyone in her whole world in Paris now claimed her work was fraudulent, insulting to the Resistance effort. They swore they would expose her for the liar she was and condemn every word she had published, would ever publish. They took every copy of her books and every issue of Sibylline in which she had an entry, and burned them in a pile on the street. She could have handled all the contempt, all the rejection, in time, but it was O’Dair’s look of utter disgust when she told him she was carrying his child that destroyed her. She wanted, quite sincerely, to die.
Friendless, homeless, and pregnant, she spent her time going from church to church, praying and sleeping during the day, and nightclub to nightclub in the evenings, making superficial friendships along the way and finding solace in music and alcohol. One night a group she fell in with drove to a club in Orleans, where there was an American military base. Tired of dancing, she remained at her table with a drink, brooding over the wreck of her life, of the meaninglessness of her art, her love, her home.
Ronson Targman was at the next table over, also alone. Small talk ensued. He asked her to join him for a meal, and, by this time quite hungry, she accepted. She could tell he fancied her. She liked the fact he was an officer, if a low-level one. He was sensible, solid, and had no trouble telling her new friends she was with him now. His quiet confidence calmed her, made her feel protected, a little less like wanting to die. It suited her just fine.
She could tell that the fact that she was French by birth, fluent in English, and with American connections—yet, somehow, a bit hard up and lost, like a refugee—appealed to him. Her survival instinct grew into self-preservation. Once again, she didn’t dissuade the man in her life from what he wanted to believe, and said “yes” the second he proposed. He had no idea who she really was, and that suited her just fine, too, because she had decided she would never write another word as long as she lived.
This bitter vow held fast until shortly after her mother’s death:
I had expected the box, but not my reaction to it. There they were, my mother’s books, and seeing the titles and the authors was a sudden plunge back home, back to who I’d always thought I was, back to my youth in Paris and listening in on these very writers as they talked and argued and pontificated and flirted and swore, back to the days when I was determined to be there with the best of them when I grew up. And the books were in different languages, English, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew. The Hebrew ones I quickly threw in the trash, because Ronson must never know about my mother’s heritage. I didn’t think he would care about the rest, just assume that it was common for a European like my mother to read many languages. But there were three of Seamus’ books in there, all three in English. Two of them I’d read years ago, but the one, the one I tried to ignore when there would be fleeting mentions of it in the newspaper, in the magazines, on television, was the one that came out after I left France. Ronson was on base. I was bored. When Donovan was in school, I would read.
What I read, I could not believe. I could not believe that my story, my life, my love for my aunt could be so twisted, so abused, so tortured. All my sense of betrayal and rage fomented, burst anew in an eruption that I thought would kill me. Six weeks after I read it, they announced his Nobel Prize. It was my story—my story, told with his hatred.
I write this, in secret, for now. I will write until I cannot write anymore. Some day, perhaps, I can tell my story, and tell Sasha’s story, the way it was meant to be told. And as I write, I find the will to go on. I am not Margot, I will not die as Margot. I damn you, Seamus O’Dair. I damn you.
Charlotte was not aware of the passage of time, that she’d read from sunup to long after sundown. The notebook was larger than the others, and written in a very small, strong script, as if Olivia thought she would be able to get everything into a single volume. Page after page, she remained engrossed as Olivia went through a complete and devastating critique of Least Objects, sometimes line by line, showing which parts were not true, which parts were things she’d actually said—and written—herself. She and O’Dair had, after all, collaborated on several projects, including a screenplay based on Sasha’s life that they were working on at the time of their breakup—the original concept for An Uncollected Death. O’Dair’s spiteful treatment of the Margot character as a version of Olivia did not happen until he rewrote An Uncollected Death in English, when it became Least Objects.
Thus, decades later, when Olivia stumbled across the original French novella, which she wrote about in her final notebook, she saw something much closer to the truth, with much more heartbreak than spite, and an element of self-doubt. And she saw that it was published by Sibylline Pres
s, four months before Donovan was born. In the last volume of her notebooks, in the passages that Helene had translated, Olivia speculated that O’Dair had begun to soften his stance toward her—but by that time, she had married Ronson Targman, and no one in Paris knew where to find her. The prima donna O’Dair would have taken her disappearance as an act of contempt—which, in a way, it was, particularly if she did, indeed, have his child. She could see how he would express his fury at her by altering the character and story of Margot when he wrote Least Objects.
Charlotte’s phone rang, startling her back into the present: it was Simon.
“I know this is short notice, but would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
Charlotte’s jaw dropped a little, and she sat up much straighter. “Yes, I would like that very much. When and where?”
“I caught an opening for eight-thirty at Amaretto. It’s a bit posh, but I—”
“I would love it, Simon. I haven’t been there in years.” She looked at the time. It was already a quarter to eight.
He laughed. “I’m glad, then. Shall I call for you and we walk down, or meet at the bar, if you need a little more time to get
