“Fire and ice?”
“As you said. Precisely.”
Their eyes met for a moment, and held. Edouard felt his mind loosen and spin, had the sensation for a second that he was falling from a great height, a long fearsome free fall, heady, exhilarating, and also terrifying. King of cups; queen of diamonds…the memory of Pauline Simonescu’s card readings flickered into his mind and then was gone.
She also experienced something; he could see that. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, she drew in a little quick breath, as if in surprise. For an instant she looked startled, then wary. Slowly, Edouard reached across the table and rested his hand lightly over hers. It was the first time he had touched her, and it unleashed in him a violent perturbation of feeling, more intense than anything he had experienced since he was a boy. He had wanted her from the moment he saw her; now he felt his body surge with a desire so intense he trembled.
He had a good instinct for self-preservation, honed to perfection over the years. Now, quickly, he withdrew his hand and stood up.
“It’s late. I must take you home.”
She looked up, apparently unmoved by his abruptness, and then slowly rose to her feet. Calm in the corolla of her beauty, she followed him from the restaurant, and climbed into the soft leather seat of the Aston-Martin. During the drive back, she did not speak once, but sat there quietly, apparently relaxed, gazing out at the streets and boulevards. Edouard, a powerful man used to recognizing power in others, usually in men, sensed it now in her. He could feel its emanations: these were as discernible to him as a perfume in the air. He glanced toward her and felt his flesh harden and leap; the wide lips, the high full breasts, the long slender line of hips and thighs. Her slightest movement spoke of sexual promise, infinite delight. And yet her eyes seemed to him both mocking and disdainful, as if she knew the power of her own beauty, and half-despised the immediate response it awoke.
He slowed as they approached the brightly lit café where she had said she worked, and she straightened.
“Would you drop me off here?”
“Let me take you back to your house.”
“No, here would be better. I have a very bad-tempered concièrge.” She smiled. “It’s only a couple of streets. I’ll walk it later. I need to see the owner anyway—to check my schedule tomorrow.”
She turned to him, and held out a long slender hand. “Thank you. It was a lovely dinner. I enjoyed myself very much.”
She shook his hand solemnly, and Edouard cursed the heavens and his own apparent inability to say one coherent word. He felt as if he wanted to ask her to marry him. Or go home with him. Or go away with him. Or something. Anything.
“Do you work here every day?” he finally managed as he helped her from the car.
She looked at him with a slow smile. “Oh, yes. I finish work around six. Good-bye.”
She turned without another glance, threaded her way through the tables outside, and disappeared into the café.
Edouard stared after her, wondering if he had the strength to drive away from that place and never go back, and knowing he had not. He turned back toward his car. He was aware, dimly, of faces and voices and laughter from the crowded tables on the terrasse, of an ordinary world going on somewhere else. A pretty girl glanced in his direction, but Edouard did not see her. On the far side of the terrasse a small plump and ugly man, sitting alone, also looked up, and watched him attentively. Edouard did not see him either. He was thinking that this woman was eighteen years old. Where had she learned that absolute assurance, that apparently calm knowledge of her own sexual sovereignty? Had some man taught it to her—and if so, what man, where, and under what circumstances?
He groaned aloud, climbed back into the Aston-Martin, drove at high speed back to St. Cloud, and there attempted to drown her memory in a bottle of Armagnac, and a night without sleep.
In the morning he sent to Hermès, and bought the pair of gray kid gloves. Around the finger of one of them, he slipped a solitaire diamond ring. The diamond was a fifteen-carat stone, graded “D,” the highest classification, for purity of color, and “IF,” internally flawless, for clarity. It had been cut by a master; it burned with a blue-white fire; it was the perfect marriage between nature and art.
He put gloves and ring back in their box and closed the lid. Then he waited, in feverish anxiety, for six o’clock to come.
The second night, he took her to dinner at the Coupole. Her manner was unchanged. She accepted his arrival outside the crowded café without question. She was calm and polite. As before, she answered his questions, but volunteered little. She asked only the most neutral questions in return. None of the usual woman’s subterfuge, to which he was accustomed: no questions subtly designed to elicit information about his private life; no attempt to discover whether he was married, or whether any other woman held sway. She spoke to him about his work and his professional life; she asked him questions about Paris, about France and the French. She gave no sign that she was aware of the sexual magnetism Edouard felt, and he—reeling from the waves of it—desperately tried to make himself as calm and detached as she was.
He forced himself to look at her coolly, as he might have a potential employee. She was wearing a plain cotton shift that evening, of a gray-blue color close to that of her eyes. No jewelry, just a very ordinary cheap watch, which she shook occasionally, because, she said, it sometimes stopped. She had very lovely hands, with long slender fingers, the oval nails cut short and unpolished, like a schoolgirl’s. She sat very straight, and there was an exceptional stillness about her, an absence of vivacity that could have been dull, but which in her case was powerfully mesmeric.
Once or twice, looking at her closely, Edouard wondered if she had lied about her age. She could sometimes look much younger than eighteen, like a solemn child unaware of her own eroticism, a child in a Victorian photograph. At other times, she looked older than she said, like a woman in her twenties, in the prime of her beauty. Often, especially when she looked at him directly, the two impressions—of innocence and of sensuality—overlapped. Then, he found himself looking into the grave and lovely face of a well-brought-up young woman, a young woman who might have attended a convent school, who had led a sheltered life, and whose pure and steady gaze aroused in him sensations and thoughts and imaginings that were anything but pure.
Then, the immediate response of his own body and mind shocked him deeply; the strain of puritanism in his nature battled with his own strong sensuality; he imagined making love to her, and hated himself for the seduction of the images that ricocheted through his mind. To his own dismay, he found the male and female roles to which he was accustomed were reversing themselves. It was he, despising himself as he did so, who heard himself asking questions designed to prompt personal revelations. It was she who gracefully but firmly turned all those probing questions aside.
It was impossible to look at her dispassionately, he thought. His mind attempted to make judgments, but the judgments of his mind were drowned out by the clamor of his senses. She was not even wearing scent—she smelled of soap, of freshly washed skin and hair, of herself. To Edouard it was the most intoxicating perfume he had ever known.
Eventually, when he was in a state of turmoil that those who knew him or worked with him would have imagined impossible, he abruptly suggested they should leave.
“Very well.”
Their eyes met; neither of them moved; Edouard’s mind blurred.
“I could take you home. Or—if you preferred—we could go back to my house at St. Cloud. It’s just outside Paris.”
His voice trailed away. The gray-blue eyes regarded him levelly. Edouard felt a whole series of idiotic and embarrassing disclaimers surge through his mind. He wanted her to understand—this was not a calculated lead-up, not a routine move in a routine seduction, he had no ulterior motives: quite simply he could not bear to think of another evening without her presence.
“Thank you. I would like that.”
H
e drove them back very fast, with music playing, and as he did so, he felt a rising exhilaration. The speed and the triumphant music of the Mozart quartet seemed to him to bridge the silence between them, so he felt a sense of perfect communion. She knows; she understands, he thought incoherently and triumphantly.
He never brought women back to St. Cloud. The only exception to that rule had been his wife. Now, just as he had done with Isobel, he walked first through the gardens, fragrant with lilies, and stood at the edge of the parterre, looking across the silver sky to the red glow of the city in the distance. He did so deliberately, in a frantic last-ditch attempt to save himself, thinking that comparisons and memories would then come to him, and sever the fine strong thread with which this magical woman bound him.
No comparisons occurred to him; no memories came back. He, who had always felt he could never escape from the past, now found that the past had relinquished its hold; it had gone; he was free of it. Standing there in the garden, he was aware of nothing but the woman beside him. Without speaking a word—and she was totally silent—she obliterated everything but the present.
After a while, Edouard took her hand, and held it in his. Then, slowly, they walked back to the house together. He took her up to the study in which, in another life, another man had proposed to Isobel. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he poured drinks. She moved slowly around the room as he did so. She lightly touched the needlepoint cover of one of the chairs; the Spitalfields silk of another; she looked at the Turner watercolors. Edouard put down the drinks, forgetting their existence, and moved to her side. She turned to look up at him, and quite suddenly he found it easy to speak.
“Do you know what is happening? Do you understand?” he said gently.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She hesitated. “It frightens me a little.”
“It frightens me too.” Edouard smiled.
“I could leave…” She glanced toward the door, then back at him. “Perhaps, if I left now…”
“Do you want to do that?”
“No.” Two wings of color mounted in her cheeks.
“It’s just that—I hadn’t expected…I hadn’t planned—”
She broke off, and Edouard reached across and took her hand in his. He let it rest there gently, and looked down into her face. He was touched, and a little amused, that a woman so young should speak so earnestly of plans, and perhaps she sensed that, because she frowned slightly, as if even the gentlest mockery made her unsure.
“You think that’s foolish?”
“No, I don’t.” Edouard’s face grew serious. “I live my whole life by plans. Everything ordered and scheduled and precise. I have lived that way for years, ever since—” He hesitated. “For a long time.”
“And now?”
“I know they don’t matter in the least. I always knew that, anyway.” He gave a shrug, half-turned away. “Plans. Schedules. Strategies. They pass time. They order it—they enable one to forget how empty it is.”
He still held her hand lightly, but his face was averted. Hélène stood very still, looking at him. Light danced in her mind; she felt a dreamlike calm, and through the calm, a hectic certainty. It had been there from the moment she first saw him, and all evening she had been trying to argue it away. All evening, while she sat there opposite him in the Coupole, pretending to be calm, her mind had been filled with argument. This is not happening, it said at first; then—it is happening, but it is not too late, it can still be stopped.
Then, when they first reached St. Cloud, and she saw this house in all its magnificence, other ugly voices began, with other ugly refrains. They spoke with her mother’s voice; they spoke with Priscilla-Anne’s; they reminded her that men lied to women, especially when they wanted them; they lied the way Ned Calvert had lied.
Those warnings had been whispering away in her head until she came into this room, and until Edouard began to speak. Now they were still chattering away somewhere at the back of her mind, but their messages seemed not just mean, but also absurd. It occurred to her, as she looked carefully at Edouard, that even a man like this could be vulnerable.
“Edouard.” It was the first time she had used his name, and he swung around to her at once. “Do you think you know—do you think one knows, when something is so right that there aren’t any choices anymore?”
“Yes. I do.”
“So do I.” She looked at him solemnly, and then, before Edouard could speak again, she drew in her breath as if to steady herself, and took a small step forward.
“I want to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to go at all. I never did, really. There—I’ve said it.” She hesitated then, her chin lifted, and her face took on a slightly defiant expression.
“Women aren’t supposed to say things like that, are they? But it seems stupid to lie about that. I don’t see the point. I do want to stay. I would have stayed with you last night if you had asked me. Probably when I first met you. We could have gotten into your car and driven straight back here, and I would have—stayed. Just like that. Not knowing you at all. Except I do feel as if I know you. I like you. Do you think that’s wrong? Are you shocked?”
Edouard was amused, and also touched. The quaint and serious way in which she spoke, the odd combination of directness and shyness, the innocent assumption that what she was saying was somehow forward, when he was used to women who expressed their desires casually—all these things affected him deeply. He felt curiously rebuked by that innocence, and he knew that if he let her see the amusement he felt, she would be deeply mortified. He stepped forward and took her hand gently.
“No,” he said seriously. “I’m not shocked. And I certainly don’t think it’s wrong. I want you to stay. I want it more than anything in the world. Now—do you find that shocking?” Her lips curved in a slow smile. “No.”
“When I left my office the night we met—” Edouard hesitated. He wondered if he should go on, and almost broke off. She lifted her eyes to his face, and he felt suddenly that he owed it to her to be truthful. “That night—I was looking for a woman. Any woman. There were reasons for that—there’s no point in saying what they were, not now, they’d sound like excuses, and I don’t want that. I was looking for a woman—which is something I’ve done often in the past, and I met the woman. That was what I felt. You have to know that. I want you to know that. I’m aware of how that must sound. There’s no reason why you should believe me—but I swear to you, it’s the truth.”
He stopped abruptly, and let his hand fall. Deep color had washed up over her face. Edouard turned away, furious with himself for having spoken. She was too young to understand; he had no right to introduce complexities of that kind…He must have sounded like the most hackneyed of seducers.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was very formal. “I should not have said that. You’ll want to go now…”
He started to move away from her, his face averted. Hélène looked at him, frowning slightly. She knew how it felt, to invite rejection, to anticipate pain and thus prevent others from inflicting it: she had learned that technique in Orangeburg, year by year. She had assumed, naively, that it was one peculiar to herself, and yet now she recognized it in someone else.
She stepped forward, and he turned. “Edouard, that makes no difference. I’m glad you said it. I still want to stay.”
The light came back into his eyes then. She reached out, took his hand, and pressed it against the swell of her breast.
They looked at each other. Beneath his fingertips, Edouard felt the beating of her heart.
In his bedroom, she stood at a little distance from him, and unfastened her dress. When she was naked, she stood perfectly still, her hands by her sides, only the rapidity of her breathing, the rise and fall of her breasts, revealing her emotion.
Her breasts were the color of ivory, their aureoles wide, the nipples already hard. Edouard looked at the long perfect curve from thighs to hips to narrow waist, at the grave child’s face and the woman’s voluptuo
usness. Hélène bit her lip; she stood quite still, watching him as he undressed.
When he was naked, she stepped forward and sank to her knees. She pressed her face against his stomach, and then, with a quick animal directness, she gently kissed the dark hair that ran in a line from chest to navel, and then down.
Across his bed there was a length of embroidered Chinese silk, cream silk embroidered with butterflies and birds of paradise, and flowers. She looked at the silk and, just for an instant, she saw Mrs. Calvert’s room again. She saw Ned drape the silk cover with that square of white sheeting; she saw that confident smile spread across his face. The image was there; she shivered, and it was gone. Edouard lifted his arms and drew her down onto the cover beside him. She felt the warmth of his skin; his body brushed against hers, and she heard herself give one small startled sigh; then she lay still.
They lay quietly side by side for a long while, hardly moving. Then, very gently, Edouard turned her face to his; he looked into her eyes, and she looked back at him.
She felt his breath brush her skin, then the touch of his lips, then his hands. She closed her eyes; there was no sound, only a touching that washed her mind clear. He entered her very gently, and she felt a little pain, then a great peace. She felt, as she moved under him, as if he took her down under the sea, fathom upon fathom, into the emerald dark, a place where the tides moved and shifted in her blood.
“Wait,” Edouard said once, when her climax was very close, and he could sense that because she was inexperienced she was struggling too frantically to reach it.
“Hélène. Wait. With me, not against me.”
He said her name in the French manner, instinctively; she opened her eyes, and was still for a moment. Then her eyes fluttered shut, and she began to move with a new rhythm, so attuned to his, so powerful and so sweet that he almost lost control.
She came suddenly, arching beneath him; Edouard felt the control, the expertise acquired in years of meaningless lovemaking began to slip, to desert him, and with relief he let it go. There was a hot dark star in his mind, a source he must reach; Hélène said his name at the moment he possessed it, and he felt his body shudder in the violence of the release.
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