While Colin was eating carryout Thai at his desk and staring at his computer screen, she intended to stay in to finish an overdue library book and call her parents. Her mother’s tone in her last message had been more aggressive than usual: “I won’t take up much of your time, Jayne. Ten minutes, maybe twelve. Can you spare that for your mother?” Jayne’s sister, Stephanie, two years younger and her only sibling, had told Jayne that their parents were having trouble—Mrs. Marks was sleeping in the guest room, and she had stopped cooking for their father, saying that he could eat frozen dinners and peanut butter sandwiches until he started doing more of the dishes and picking up after himself. Yet when Jayne had last called home, her attempts to get her mother to talk about any of this had been sidestepped. Mrs. Marks would only say that she and Mr. Marks were fine, tired but fine.
“You and Stephanie don’t need to worry about us,” her mother said. “Everything’s the same, I suppose, except that he wants to get a new dog, and I don’t.”
“Why don’t you want to?” asked Jayne. “It’s been six years since Clemmie died.”
“I know, Jayne. As if I could ever forget. Your father reminds me almost every day.”
Jayne’s sister lived in Los Angeles, down the bottlenecked 405 freeway from their parents in Pasadena, but Stephanie saw them infrequently—only a few times more than the two visits Jayne tried to make each year. Stephanie called home a little more often than Jayne did, and also kept closer track of their parents’ health, schedules, and grievances. The year after Stephanie started college, their mother had left their father, though she only stayed away for five days, and neither Jayne nor her sister heard anything about this rift until a couple of years later, when their father let it slip over the Christmas holiday. It was only the four of them at home, no gossipy relatives to worry about, but her mother had not wanted to discuss her short-lived defection. Jayne and Stephanie looked on with apprehension, feeling wronged to have been told nothing of the situation until their father saw fit to spoil that year’s Christmas, as their mother accused him, fuming.
Before Jayne had returned her mother’s call on the evening of the Vie Bohème opening, Liesel texted and begged Jayne to go with her. She had a crush on one of the three featured artists and was desperate to attend.
Jayne had read about the opening, but there were dozens of artists, playwrights, and musicians debuting their work in New York every week. Within a year after moving north from D.C. she had stopped going to galleries most weekends, feeling herself excluded from Manhattan’s art world in a way that seemed impossible to breach. The desire for recognition, the fear of being ignored, the barely suppressed competitive urges—all these undercurrents in almost every gallery crowd—now enervated her more often than not. Liesel had never been an artist and so did not feel the same way.
The eight or nine group shows Jayne had been a part of before meeting Laurent, most of them taking place while she was still an undergraduate, had attracted few people other than the artists’ parents and roommates and the people the artists were having sex with. At twenty-two, then at twenty-three and twenty-four, her college diploma still in its envelope and buried in a desk drawer, how she spent the bulk of her days had less and less to do with boar’s-hair brushes or charcoal pencils or tubes of acrylic or the more precious, eternal oils. Her bedroom was hardly bigger than a hall closet; there was no space for her easel, and she had to resort to taping unstretched canvases to the wall. Or else she painted on heavy butcher paper, also taping it to the wall next to her room’s one drafty window.
Since college, she had winnowed down the contents of her heavy, paint-encrusted metal chest of art supplies, everything inside once as important and intimate to her as the contents of her wallet. Some of her brushes and cheaper paints, the acrylics and watercolors, she sent to her parents’ house in southern California or sold to former classmates, but she held on to the best brushes, her charcoals and oil paints, and a few of her smaller sketchbooks, keeping them in a tiered red plastic case beneath her desk. During the weeks when she did less work than she expected to, she could still hear the smug voice of a star classmate, a guy nicknamed Pepper who had gotten into Yale’s M.F.A. program in painting on his first try: “If you have time to make excuses, you have time to do your work.”
She had not applied to M.F.A. programs, doubting that she was ready to compete with applicants as good as Pepper, and if she had gotten in, she’d have had to take on more student loans. Instead, she found what turned out to be an exhausting job as a paralegal near the same campus where she had so recently been a student greedy for the pleasures of adulthood. Some of her classmates had to take temping jobs after graduation, but those positions seemed almost enviable after the paralegal position took over her life. She worked overtime nearly every week, and one of the lawyers thought nothing of calling her after hours and bombarding her with requests and complaints.
After two years of sixty-hour weeks, she moved to New York to try to find a job as a gallery assistant and to live with Liesel, who had begun her third year of law school. By then Jayne had trouble imagining her work hanging on the walls of some acquisitive stranger’s home, or in the galleries all over Manhattan where for a year she’d fruitlessly applied for jobs. Imagining her work on someone else’s walls had once been almost as effortless as putting on her shoes. Her one real commitment after college was to getting by, to sending out, even in the leanest months, the payment due on her student loans; this made her feel respectable when other facts of her life did not: the wretched frustration over a lost subway card recently reloaded; the muffins and fresh fruit stolen from hotel conference rooms where she was meeting an out-of-town friend; the neighbor’s Halloween card with ten dollars inside, sent by an Aunt Ginny in Salt Lake City and mistakenly put in Jayne’s mailbox, which she had kept.
An hour after Liesel’s call, Jayne dutifully appeared at Vie Bohème, her friend already there, looking very pretty but anxious in a black-and-white sleeveless dress she had bought especially for the opening. If Liesel’s new crush, Bernard Ferriss, a painter from Boston who had moved to Brooklyn a year earlier, ignored her, Jayne would be surprised, though he might tease her too—the gallery’s binary decor matched her dress exactly, something he couldn’t fail to notice. Jayne could see this ruining the night for Liesel, who was very sensitive, especially around men she was attracted to. The walls were white, the cement floors lacquered to a hard, bright sheen, and black ceramic vases of stark, velvety calla lilies had been arranged on tables stationed throughout the long, narrow space. Light fixtures that wouldn’t have been out of place in an oil-spattered garage dangled from the ceiling. Also on display was the compulsory crop of unfriendly red-lipsticked women and skinny men with nicotine-stained teeth, their laughter erupting every minute or two in jittery gales.
Some of the paintings were so good that Jayne wondered, as she almost never did, whether she would have bought one if she’d had the money. The four paintings she liked most were photorealist oils of handsome college-age boys, each canvas three by three feet. The portraits turned out to be Bernard’s, a new series she hadn’t seen when she’d searched online for his work after Liesel mentioned meeting him through Bernard’s cousin, who was one of her law school friends. But it was Laurent who ended up being the most memorable sight in the gallery. She knew as soon as she saw him that he had to be one of the owners. He looked relaxed and calm among the people who stood near him, a few glancing at the paintings mounted at even intervals before them. His face did not shine; his shoes didn’t pinch; his soft gray suit and loose cotton shirt, its mint green the same color as the ice cream Jayne had liked most as a girl, had likely been tailored precisely to his measurements. It seemed as if he believed he had nothing to prove to anyone, though of course he did—it was his taste, after all, that he was selling, his idea of what good, possibly great, art was.
She kept an eye on him, tracking his movements across the half-filled room; after her third or fourth furtive glance
, she found him staring back at her. It was November and rainy, but his skin glowed as if he had recently returned from a beach vacation. He was beautiful to her shy, starved gaze. She glanced behind her to see if he was looking at someone else, but his eyes were still on her when she turned around again.
A week later, after their first night together, he spoke the words coup de foudre, his breath warm against her ear.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. Love at first sight was a fantasy she had tried to stop believing in during college, when the boys she thought might like her too were as likely as not to be more interested in her roommates or each other or their professors. “You’re being silly,” she said softly.
She felt guilty too; she had not yet told Colin that they were through. On the surface, she knew he seemed a better match for her; Colin was only a year older than she, American, a Manhattan resident. He was a CPA and liked his job most of the time, although some of his firm’s wealthy private clients did get on his nerves, and Jayne’s too, when they interfered with her and Colin’s plans to see each other. He played basketball two nights a week and tennis every other Saturday morning with a college friend who lived off a trust fund, which Colin did not appear to envy. Sometimes she admired this; at other times his broadmindedness about his rich friends irritated her, as did his uncritical love for New York, which seemed at times to verge on idolatry. (“The traffic, the noise, all the crowds,” she’d grumble. “Well, it’s New York,” he’d say. “You have to pay to live here. But everything you need is only a block or two away. How could you not love that?”)
Still, his optimism was also one of the things she found most endearing about him, along with his sweet tooth, bigger than her own, which was a first for a boyfriend; also, the fact that he took stand-up classes at a comedy club near his apartment. He was always trying jokes on her, some of them so awful (Did you hear about the blind horticulturalist? She got arrested at a funeral for trying to deadhead all the bouquets!) she found herself laughing harder at the whoppers than at the good ones. She admired too his habit of visiting used bookstores, where he looked for the scruffy old biographies and novels that he kept in a bookcase in the dusty living room of his apartment on East Twelfth Street, which he shared with another friend from college, this one without a trust fund. A first edition of Catch-22 was the book he valued most, one he kept intending to reread, but it was Jayne who did, on the sly at the shoe boutique when her boss wasn’t there.
After they’d been together for three months, Colin gave her two books that she’d had on her to-read list for years, Anna Karenina and Endless Love. (“Endless Love!” cried Melissa when Jayne told her about the gift. “That book broke my heart. Colin must be in love with you. But what’s he trying to say? It didn’t end so well for David and Jade. Or for Anna.”) One thing he hadn’t said was that he loved her. She hadn’t said it yet either, but the week before she met Laurent, Colin had talked about introducing her to his parents when they would be in town over New Year’s.
Melissa and Liesel thought Colin was good-looking and sweet, and if he made her happy, this was what mattered most, but didn’t it bother her that he wasn’t interested in going to art galleries with her? He might tolerate museums, but wasn’t this true of most of the people she knew?
She didn’t mind very much because she didn’t go to galleries as often as she used to. If she hadn’t met Laurent, she would have continued dating Colin, even if she wasn’t sure he was the man she’d been waiting for. That man seemed to be Laurent.
The sky outside Laurent’s bedroom was cloudless, the west-facing window open a few inches, its dark blue curtains parted to let in a breeze tinged with cold humidity from the nearby river. She would be late for work but didn’t care, her heart buoyed by this defiance of a rule she had always observed without question. They were still in bed, the mattress smaller than she’d expected, but Laurent was subletting an acquaintance’s apartment and had explained unprompted that he hadn’t bought a bigger bed for his brief stay in New York because there was no space to store the owner’s. A queen would also have crowded the room more than it already was. That he worried about this at all touched her.
“I’m not being silly,” he said, kissing her bare shoulder. “Only honest. I must be one of many men who have told you they are crazy about you, un vrai coup de foudre, Jayne.”
She shook her head, lacing her fingers with his. “No, no one I’ve gone out with before you spoke French, at least not very well.”
His laughter was subdued. “Whatever language they spoke, some of them must have said the same thing.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said, smiling. His unshaven cheek scratched her as he kissed her shoulder again. In his hair were the commingled scents of a grassy cologne and smoke from the Gitanes he bought expensively at a tobacconist near Grand Central (“They must be fresh, or I cannot smoke them,” he’d told her. “They are not always so good where I buy them in New York. In Paris, they are never stale.”), an addicting masculine perfume. He already occupied a larger place in her life than she wanted him to, but she wouldn’t tell him this, not even in the languorous tones of postcoital flirtation.
“I haven’t had that many boyfriends,” she said. “Not serious ones, anyway.” Maybe it would be smarter to lie, but Laurent would likely sense it if she did.
Men of his pedigree—wealthy, European, sophisticated, quite a bit older but not perversely so, she didn’t think—their paths did not often cross her own, except when they came into the boutique where she and her Florentine boss, a woman close to Laurent’s age, sold Italian shoes marked up by three times their wholesale price. Men like Laurent invariably were accompanied by girlfriends or wives. They might smile and look her over when their wives’ backs were turned, but they did not do more than this. If they had come back later to ask for her number, she would have been suspicious. She did not need a married man in her life with his guilty conscience, or worse, his rich man’s sense of entitlement. She hoped Laurent wasn’t married. He had told her over their first dinner together at a restaurant in Midtown—no prices on the menu and a wine list nearly an inch thick—that he was divorced and had been for years. She’d believed him, but later, riding in a taxi back to her apartment after declining his invitation to go home with him (on their second date a few nights later, she did not refuse), she realized that it would not be difficult for him to lie about his marital status, his wife conveniently in Paris, leaving him free to seduce girls their children’s age in New York.
The night of Vie Bohème’s opening, however, Laurent was not with any woman—wife, mistress, or worshipful, pretty assistant—that she could see, and he eventually made his way over to where she and Liesel stood talking to Bernard, Laurent touching Jayne’s shoulder lightly from behind. She nearly upended her champagne glass when she turned and saw that it was he, the beautiful man from the other side of the gallery, her first flustered thought that he wanted her to make room for him to pass.
“No,” he said, taking her elbow. “Don’t move. I wondered if you would like more champagne.” He nodded toward the half-empty flute in her hand. “Are you enjoying it?”
“It’s so good,” Liesel interrupted. “What kind is it?”
Jayne thought that her friend was already a little drunk. The champagne bottle’s telltale orange label was clearly visible.
“It is Veuve Clicquot,” said Laurent. “I will tell the maître de cave at the vineyard that you like it. We are friends.”
“Really?” said Liesel. “You know him? I hope he gave you a good deal.”
Laurent chuckled. “Oh, no. He doesn’t need to. His champagne sells itself.”
Jayne glanced at Bernard, blond, tall, remote. He did not appear to be listening; he was staring beyond Liesel’s shoulder, a look of studied blankness on his handsome stubbled face.
“I’d better not have any more,” said Jayne to Laurent. “But thank you.” The thought that this man was too old for her arrived and was turned away
. “I get a headache if I have more than one glass.”
“Ah, all right,” said Laurent. “We have Perrier if you would like it instead. No one will notice if you switch.”
(The next morning, when Jayne called to rehash the party with Liesel, her friend would say, a little jealous but also genuinely irritated by Laurent’s presumption, “Why should he or anyone else have cared if you didn’t want to drink? It’s not like we’re in high school.” And in the next breath, “Do you really want to go out with that guy instead of Colin? At least Colin was born in the same decade as you.”)
“No, that’s okay,” said Jayne. “I’ll just stick with this one glass.”
“Stick with this?” he said. “American expressions are so funny. Mind your own, what do you say, beehive? That’s the one I like best.”
“Beeswax,” she said, laughing. “I don’t think I’ve heard that one since third grade.”
“I read it somewhere,” he said. “I had to look it up. In France we say ‘Occupe-toi de tes oignons.’”
“Mind your own onions,” she said.
He nodded. “Alors, vous parlez français.”
“Un peu, c’est tout,” she said.
He smiled, his eyes still pinning her. “Only a little? Vous mentez, c’est mon soupçon.”
She didn’t think she was lying, not exactly, but before she could decide how to reply, he took her hand and at last introduced himself as one of the gallery owners, he and his partner both from Paris. He shook Liesel’s hand, bowing slightly over it, and complimented her on her good taste. Liesel looked uncertain. “These paintings,” said Laurent. He pointed at the college boys on the wall. “Aren’t they astonishing? Bernard is very talented, yes?”
“Oh my god, he’s amazing,” cried Liesel.
At her side, Bernard reddened but looked flattered. “Thanks,” he said. “I think I like them too.”
Paris, He Said Page 2
