Afterward they lay still, and neither spoke. When his mind grew calmer, and he eased himself from her body, Edouard felt a certain fear. He waited, tensing, for the self-hatred to come back, for the countersurge of disgust that always followed desire. It did not come; he felt only a great quietude, and—after a while—the tension left his body and dissolved.
Hélène spoke first. She reached for his hand and pressed it. Her voice was a little broken still.
“Edouard. You took the past away…”
He could hear the wonder in her voice, and—since he felt it, too, and how many years since that had happened?—he smiled from pure delight.
“The past, yes,” he said.
They fell asleep together.
The next day, much later the next day, he suddenly remembered the present from Hermès. Carefully wrapped, tied with the distinctive Hermès ribbon, it was still in his study, forgotten from the night before. He fetched it, and brought it back to her. Hélène was sitting up in bed, leaning against a pile of lace pillows. He rested it carefully in her hands.
“It’s a present. For you. I meant to give it to you yesterday but…”
“A present? For me?” For a moment she looked touchingly young, like a child at Christmas; then her eyes dropped, and he saw a strange hesitancy, a wariness, come into her face.
She looked down at the box, afraid to open it. For an instant, she heard Ned Calvert’s voice, that slow seductive southern drawl. You’re my sweet little girl; I like to give my little girl presents…
Then she looked up and saw Edouard’s face. On it there was an expression of such gentleness, of such excitement—masked by an attempt to appear nonchalant—that she felt instantly ashamed of the memory, of connecting those two events and those two men. The image of Ned Calvert disappeared, and for an instant new images came, of the long night and the long morning, pulsing in her body; then, eagerly, she pulled at the ribbon and opened the box.
A pair of gloves—the gloves. Her heart lifted that he should have remembered. A diamond ring; a most beautiful ring. She stared down into the blue-white fire of the stone, and then looked up at Edouard uncertainly.
He moved to the bed and sat down beside her, taking her hand in his.
“When I was a boy…” he spoke awkwardly, as if he had rehearsed this speech in his mind, and now that he came to say it, the words eluded him. “When I was a boy—fifteen, sixteen years of age—a little younger than you are now, I fell in love with a much older woman. It was during the war. I was living in London—she was my first love affair, my first mistress, if you like. My brother introduced us…” He paused. “It was an infatuation, I suppose. My brother thought so then—but I’ve never been able to think of it like that, even now. It was perfectly real to me. I was very young, and very obsessed, and after a while—a year, a little longer, it ended. Her name was Célestine.”
He broke off, and Hélène watched him silently.
“She was a kind woman, I see that now. She was always very patient with me, and very generous. There were things she said to me that I will always remember—but one in particular…” He hesitated. “I hadn’t learned to be wary of words then, I was too young and too inexperienced. I was given to making the most passionate declarations—I had convinced myself we had a future, you see. When I did that, whenever I did that, she would always stop me. She said I shouldn’t squander words; that one day I would meet the woman I loved, and I should save the words until then. Use, careless use, devalued them; they became common currency…When she said that, I was very angry. But I came to realize that she was right. Since then, whatever else I’ve done, and whatever else I’ve been, I’ve never lied to a woman. I’ve never pretended an emotion I did not feel.” He gave a quick impatient shrug. “I’m aware that’s not much of an achievement.”
He stopped then. Hélène looked at him quietly.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you will hear things about me, if you haven’t heard them already, and I want you to know the truth. I have given women presents, you see, in the past—there was a time when I was quite famous for it. Jewelry from my company—rubies, pearls, you can imagine the sort of thing. When an affair ended.”
He spoke quite casually, almost impatiently, and Hélène felt a cold dull ache settle around her heart.
“When it ended?” She looked down at the ring. “Oh, I see.”
“No, you don’t.” He reached forward and gripped her hand more tightly. “I have never given any woman diamonds, until now. Never. They are the stone I think the most beautiful, the stone my father loved the best. I kept them back, just as I kept the words back. I wanted to have something, something that was not tainted, something I could give with a free heart, with my love. When the moment came.”
There was a silence. He spoke calmly, but Hélène could see the struggle in his face. She looked from him to the ring, and then back to his eyes. She felt a little light-headed, caught up in a sudden and unreasoning sweep of joy; her mind sang with it. For a moment she stood again outside a small church, heard a child’s cry, saw a flash of color in the air, and then his face. Was that how it felt, to see the future?
“I knew,” she said.
“I knew too.”
His hand tightened around hers, then released it. Carefully, Hélène disengaged the ring from the Hermès glove. She slipped it on her finger; cold, hard, bright. She lifted her hand, and the diamond struck the light.
Later, Edouard said, “You must stay. You must. We shall fetch your things.”
“I have a suitcase.” Hélène smiled. “That’s all. One suitcase. Everything I own in the world.”
“Then we must fetch it. We’ll go together.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It won’t take long. I must do it myself.”
Edouard argued, and when he failed to persuade her to change her mind, gave in.
She took a taxi into Paris, left it on the Right Bank, crossed the Seine, and then ran all the way to the roominghouse where she had been staying. To her relief, she met no one; even the old dragon of a concièrge was not at her usual place by the door.
Hélène ran up the stairs, and half-fell into the little room in which she had been sleeping. It took a moment to find her suitcase, a moment to unlock it and thrust into it the few clothes she had brought with her.
She went to shut it, and then paused. Kneeling back on her heels, pushing aside a crumpled skirt and a blouse, she looked at the bundle of papers and photographs; she looked at Orangeburg and her mother and the past.
She stared at them silently, feeling time fracture. Orangeburg, Billy, her mother, Ned Calvert, Cassie Wyatt, Priscilla-Anne; lying in a narrow bed at night, with the thin curtains flapping in the breeze, and the smell of the mud drifting up from the river. It felt unreal, remote, a sequence from a film once seen. Three days had obscured sixteen years.
She picked up one of the photographs of Violet, and hugged it tight against her heart. She closed her eyes, and fragments of the past moved jerkily through her mind, like flotsam carried by a river. Her mother, and Billy’s mother, blaming her for Billy’s death. She saw Mrs. Tanner bend over Billy and fasten the button on his shirt; she saw her spread her fingers, and the rain begin to fall.
She had dreamed that image night after night, in the weeks since she had left Orangeburg. It made her afraid to sleep, and when it came, she would jerk herself awake and sit up in bed, the sweat cooling on her forehead, her eyes staring into the dark, telling Mrs. Tanner and telling herself that it was not her fault Billy died the way he did.
She opened her eyes again, Violet gazed back at her sweetly from the photograph, her lips curved in a cupid’s bow. She was wearing a frivolous little hat.
Hélène gave a shiver. She pushed the photograph back in the suitcase and closed it. She felt, obscurely, that she owed them something—all of them, Violet and Billy and Mrs. Tanner—and that she did not have the right to be happy yet. She had no sooner framed
the thought in her own mind than she rebelled against it. Billy would have understood; her mother would have understood. Her mother would have done precisely the same thing. All for love…
Yet that idea, too, was chilling. Was she turning into her mother after all? She stood up and lifted the suitcase onto the narrow single bed. She did not have to return to Edouard, she told herself. She could send the ring back. She need not see him again. She could begin to do all the things she had planned to do. She could. Surely she could?
She stood, frowning obstinately at the suitcase. Then, quickly, clumsily, she grabbed it, pushed open the door, and ran down the stairs and into the street. She ran all the way from the lodginghouse to the Seine, and there, by the Pont Notre Dame, she stopped. The water glinted, flowing fast; the pinnacles of Notre Dame soared against the light; beside the river, in the sunshine, lovers strolled, their arms around each other. She hailed a taxi.
When she reached St. Cloud, Edouard was waiting for her outside. He was pacing the gravel in front of the house, and when he saw the cab, and saw her start to run toward him, he held out his arms.
“I was afraid,” he said as he held her. “I don’t know why, but I thought you might not come back…” Hélène dropped the suitcase she was holding, and buried her face against his chest.
“I had to come back,” she said—to Edouard, to her mother, to Billy, to all of them. “I had to.”
“What made you come to Paris?”
It was a question Edouard had not asked her before, and he asked it suddenly, out of a long contented silence. It was early evening, a perfect warm Paris evening, and they were sitting on the terrasse, outside the Deux Magots, two glasses of Pernod on the small round table in front of them. Edouard had added water to the clear liquid, and Hélène watched it turn milky; she liked the cool taste of anise, the lulling warmth when the drink hit the stomach. She felt like a cat curled in the sun, at peace with the world.
“Be careful,” Edouard had said with a smile, “It’s quite strong, Hélène.”
Hélène had smiled. She liked to hear him use her name. She liked to hear him pronounce it in the French manner, just as her mother had always done. It made her guilty sometimes, for Edouard still thought that her real name was Helen Hartland; but it was curiously comforting—as if he knew her truly, despite her lies.
Now she felt as if she wanted just to stay here in this spot forever, watching the constant procession of people, trying to understand the bursts of conversation from the neighboring tables. His question made her jump.
“My mother loved Paris. She often spoke of it. I’d never been here…” She hoped he would ask her nothing more, because she hated to evade his questions now. Now she regretted that odd secretive instinct which had made her lie to him the day they first met. Every morning she would wake in his arms and tell herself that today would be different, today she would tell him the truth. I didn’t grow up in England, Edouard. I lied to you. I grew up in America. In the South. In Alabama.
She rehearsed the words often enough. But when she came to speak them, she always lost courage and held back. Her lies had trapped her: Edouard would be hurt by them, or angered. She would have to explain why she lied, and once she began, she would have to tell him everything: about her mother and the abortion, and Billy and Ned Calvert…Shame at the memory made her blush; she felt the heat sweep up over her neck and burn in her cheeks. Would he change toward her if he knew? She looked away; it seemed to her then that he might.
Edouard saw the blush and misinterpreted it; he smiled, and leaned back in his chair.
“If you hadn’t stopped to look at the church, just then…if I had driven a different route…if my work schedule had been different…if your mother hadn’t talked to you about Paris…” He gave a shrug. “So many ‘ifs.’ I like that. It reminds me the gods are kind—occasionally.”
Hélène looked up at him. His dark blue eyes met hers, slightly mockingly; then his gaze grew steady and intent. The clamor around them stilled; Hélène felt the world tilt and perspective alter. No café, no Paris, no Alabama, no past: just the two of them. Such pure delight, from one glance! She felt so elated, suddenly so insane with happiness, that she wanted to do something mad—sing, dance, shout—turn around to the people at the next table and tell them that she was in love, and she understood it now—all the stories, all the poems, all the songs. Her mind sang, it felt so alive, and so sure. She leaned across the table and held out her hand, palm upward.
Edouard reached across and laid his hand in hers. As soon as he touched her, she wanted him; expectation arced through her body; her mind clouded over with a now familiar lassitude.
She had read about desire in books, and the girls at school had talked about it, but none of the things she had read, or they had said, had prepared her for this feeling, for the urgency of it, and its peculiar blinding quality. It was sharp and sweet, pleasurable and painful—and Edouard felt it too. She had learned to recognize it in his eyes, and he in hers, and that secret bond intoxicated her. It filled her with exhilarating recklessness; it made her feel both drugged and excited at once. She looked at Edouard, who was gesturing with sudden impatience to the waiter; she knew that he felt the same thing, exactly the same thing—but no one else would have known. To the waiter, to the other people in the café, he must have appeared unmoved, formal, impassive. None of them could hear these secret communications between them, none of them could see Edouard as she saw him now. They saw only a man; she saw a lover—her lover—and the urgency and the secrecy made her exultant.
Edouard looked up. “Yes?”
She nodded, and he stood up, his face set. He took her arm, hesitated only a moment, and just when Hélène was thinking—oh, quickly, somewhere, it doesn’t matter where—he began to lead her swiftly away from the café into the maze of narrow streets that lay behind the church of St. Germain-des-Prés. He walked fast, and Hélène stumbled to keep up with him.
A small street; a little square shaded by a tree; a cluster of modest hotels, with tall narrow façades, and shutters closed against the evening sun. Notes tossed across the surface of an old polished mahogany counter; a signature scrawled; a heavy iron key, and a proprietor, a fat man smoking a cigar. He hardly bothered to look up.
The room was on the first floor, and Edouard was reaching for her before he opened the door. He pushed her back against it and leaned against her, so she could feel his weight and the hardness of his penis pressing against her belly and her thighs. She moaned, and Edouard unbuttoned her blouse, his hands fumbling a little in his impatience. She felt his mouth against her throat, his tongue against the sharp points of her nipples. She began to tug impatiently at his belt: no time to undress, no time, no time, no time.
The small lace panties she wore were wet. Edouard slipped them down over her thighs; he parted the lips of her sex, and she cried out, pressing herself down against his palm and fingers, rubbing against him like a little animal. She wanted to hold his penis in her hand, and fumbled to free it from his clothes. But the moment she touched him, it was not enough. She wanted him inside her; she wanted to feel him fill her. Edouard grasped her hips, pulling her down on him as he thrust up; mouth to mouth, sex to sex.
“Open your eyes,” Edouard said, drawing back from her a little. She opened her eyes and looked down. She watched it, this magical, infinitely pleasurable joining. It was very arousing to her, to watch and to feel; it was wonderful and unbearable, the suspense when he withdrew a little, and she saw him glistening and strong before he pushed again.
He always knew exactly when she was about to come. Today their arousal was very violent, and it was very quick. She pressed against him feverishly, was suddenly still for one moment, as she always was the second before climax. He loved her as she always looked then, for she looked as blind as he felt. One last long push. They shuddered against each other. It was less than ten minutes since they had left Deux Magots.
Afterward, Edouard said untruthfully, “We c
ould have waited, I suppose, until we got back to St. Cloud.”
“Could we?” Hélène smiled.
She moved away from him then, and looked at the room for the first time. It had one tall shuttered window, an enormous and magisterial bed covered in crimson satin, and a huge battered armoire. There was one small rug, and a bidet in the corner, with a curtain.
“What is this place?”
“A hotel. Of a kind. Not respectable in the least. It rents rooms by the hour to people in need. I most certainly shouldn’t have brought you here.”
“I’m glad you did. I like it.” Hélène turned to him defiantly. “I like the ridiculous cupboard and the ridiculous bed. I like everything. It has no secrets. It’s made for lovers, and it’s proud of it.”
“The wallpaper could perhaps be improved,” Edouard murmured.
“You’re not to criticize it.” Hélène rounded on him. “It’s perfect, and I love it.”
“We could always stay…” Edouard began to smile. “I imagine it is possible to rent a room an entire night as well as an hour.” He moved in a purposeful way toward the bed. “Since you like the decor so much…” he murmured, drawing Hélène down onto the crimson satin.
They made love more slowly this time, to the companionable creaking of bedsprings. When it was dark, they went out and had dinner in a small local restaurant filled with solemn Frenchmen eating dinner alone, their napkins tucked under their chins as they ate with great seriousness. No one recognized Edouard; the elderly waiters in their long white aprons served them with solicitude, with sidelong glances and occasional smiles, as if it pleased them, on a summer’s night, to serve two people who were so splendidly oblivious to everything except each other. Then they walked back through the quiet streets, and back to the room with its crimson bed. In the morning, quite early, they took croissants and café au lait in thick china bowls; it was brought to them in their room, and they ate at a small table with the shutters thrown back, and a view across the square with its central tree.
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