Lakeshore Christmas

by Susan Wiggs

  There were almost no visitors at the museum, a white plaster wonderland of a house in a quiet neighborhood, tucked away from the hectic boulevards of the city. Maureen had been completely taken by Rodin’s work. Unlike the polished precision of the Renaissance sculptures, Rodin’s power was in his portrayal of raw emotion, be it in the collective pain of the Burghers of Calais, or The Thinker, lost in concentration. Her favorite, of course, was The Kiss, the most romantic piece of art she’d ever seen. She was spellbound by the deep, oblivious passion of the entwined lovers.

  Gazing at the larger-than-life bronze, she wondered if she would ever be loved like that, with such complete abandon. Could two people truly be so absorbed in one another? And—this was the part that was such a cliché, the part that should have warned her off—that was the moment Jean-Luc had stepped into her life.

  “You have found my favorite place,” he said, his English shaded by only a hint of an accent. “This is where I come to escape the world.”

  “Why do you need to escape the world?” she asked, immediately intrigued by him.

  “It will take me a long time to explain,” he’d said, and that was the moment she had known they’d be together.

  The affair began the way it ended, with a shocking body-slam of emotion. She was swept away, a willing victim, desperate for the very newness of him. He was every fantasy come to life for her. Paris donned its autumn finery and they rushed out to embrace it, racing along in the dry leaves that littered the city’s boulevards and jardins and collected on the sidewalks where they sat sipping cold Ricard at out-of-the-way zinc bars in Montmartre. They took long walks together, stopping on street corners to kiss, lost in each other in the way only new lovers could be. They stood on the Pont Neuf and rode the Bateaux Mouches, and each kiss was like a postcard snapshot. Except Maureen didn’t feel as though she were acting. This was life, this was passion, and she was grasping it with both hands.

  Looking back, she realized she’d been a goner from the very start. He had incredible looks and charm. He was dark-eyed and slender, with an amazing ageless face that reminded her of a cologne ad in a high-end magazine. He was the most glorious man she’d ever met. There was no question that she would fall in love with him.

  The question was, why would he fall in love with her?

  She dared to ask him one day, after they’d been lovers for about two weeks. They were in her tiny studio in the 17th arrondissement, a bohemian neighborhood of students and artists. She had a walk-up in an old stone building that used to house monks. To counter the ascetic chill of the building, the room was furnished with overstuffed furniture, including a bed with an eiderdown comforter they used to luxuriate on when he stole time from his lunch hour at work.

  She had never been in love before, and she was unprepared for the crush of emotion she felt for Jean-Luc. It was wonderful in the way of rainbows and shooting stars, comets and heat lightning—a natural phenomenon she could not control but could only sit back and wonder at.

  Hunched over a computer in a little Internet café in her neighborhood, she’d tried to compose an e-mail to her sister: Dear Renée, I’m in love.

  She deleted that and every other attempt to explain what was happening. There were simply no words to explain what it was like, living a fantasy—she was swept away, over the moon. Her classes—conversational French, aspects of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, and the world of Collette—barely registered with her. Not a single word or concept penetrated the rainbow-glazed bubble of her happiness, the result being that her heretofore perfect grade point average plummeted.

  She didn’t care. There was no way to care about something as mundane as grades when faced with a monumental, once-in-a-lifetime love like the one she had found with Jean-Luc.

  In fact, they used to talk about such things while lying naked in one another’s arms. It was invariably afternoon and they always went to her place because it was just one metro stop from the bank where he worked.

  Yes, he worked at a bank but he had an artist’s soul. Every once in a while he would attend one of her readings or performances. He declared that she made him the proudest of men.

  They used to lie together with the afternoon sun slanting across the floor, their bodies sweetly drowsy from lovemaking. They would talk in true earnest fashion about the miracle of their love and the kindly fate that had led them to find one another. Every time she gazed into his eyes, she could see for ever. There was no question of where they would live. Right here in Paris, where a single afternoon at a museum garden had blossomed into the love of a lifetime.

  Though she hadn’t told her family, she knew they would understand. She had a wonderful family, loving and supportive of everything she did. She could already picture them coming to visit her. In her mind, she mapped all the places she would take them—to the Tuileries and the Jeu de Paume, the Musée de Cluny and the Beaux Arts.

  Jean-Luc had transformed her from a mere student of life to someone who lived every moment with gusto. She learned to eat raw oysters and drink pastis and say things like “You are my everything” with a straight face.

  In the dizzying whirlwind of those early weeks, she forgot everything. She forgot, for example, to question him about his family. She told him everything about her parents and siblings. He told her nothing about his, and it didn’t occur to her to wonder why. She didn’t question why he never brought her home and why their trysts were always in the afternoon.

  None of that was important. Only Jean-Luc, and loving him, and Paris in the autumn, mattered.

  Even when she chanced to see him on the street one day, with a pleasant-looking woman and two small children, Maureen did not immediately absorb the situation. She thought they might be relatives, or customers of the bank where he worked.

  It wasn’t until he kissed the pleasant-looking woman on the lips and was told, “Adieu, Papa,” by the older child that Maureen finally forced herself to see the obvious.

  Love fell away in broken shards as she crossed the street to confront him. At first he didn’t see Maureen as he helped his family into a waiting Peugeot station wagon, then waved while his wife and children lurched away through the traffic. Maureen felt each moment as distinctly as a physical blow.

  By the time she stood before him, there on the sidewalk in front of the Crédit Lyonnais, she was as exposed and raw as an accident victim.

  Jean-Luc was impassive. He had the sangfroid of a robot. He briefly studied her face, then offered a charming smile. “Maureen. What a surprise.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “a surprise.”

  He showed not a hint of remorse when he said, “I take it you saw them.”

  For a wild moment, she imagined him falling to pieces, sinking to his knees, declaring that he couldn’t bear to be without Maureen, that he would walk away from everything in order to be with her. She imagined him telling her that their love was too powerful to be denied.

  But instead, he said, “I want to keep seeing you.”

  She was filled with revulsion—at him, at herself for even considering the ruination of his children’s lives. But a part of herself—and no small part of herself—yearned to carry on, as he was suggesting. Though it filled her with shame, she cried, and cried. And, to her eternal shame, she made one last pathetic attempt to rescue the fantasy. “Does that mean you’ll leave her?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was written all over his face.

  He turned and started to walk away.

  “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”

  He stopped, turned back.

  She held up her hand so he wouldn’t say anything more. Then she walked away, leaving him standing on the rain-wet sidewalk. It was a small thing, insignificant. But she wanted to be the one to walk away, not him.

  She thought she’d hit the very bedrock of heartbreak that day. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

  She was wrong. The true bottom, the deepest hurt of all, came later.

  A
week after leaving him, she dragged herself out of bed on an unseasonably hot, muggy morning to panic. She’d missed her period.

  A frenzied count of the weeks sent her rushing to a drug store. A home pregnancy test confirmed her worst fear. They’d been careful, she thought. They’d used protection. But some how, they’d made a mistake.

  She called home—her sisters, her stepmother—but always hung up before the phone rang. She couldn’t figure out a way to tell them what had happened. She could barely explain to herself. Spoken aloud, the story sounded so monumentally lurid and pathetic: I had an affair with a man I didn’t know was married. And now I’m pregnant.

  She started to cry and didn’t know how to make herself stop. Perhaps that had triggered what happened next. Maybe the gallons of bitter tears instigated what the doctor later called an incomplete embedment—a common cause of miscarriage. Still crying—it seemed she hadn’t stopped for days—she went to a clinic with bleeding and cramps. The new life, scarcely more than a secret division of cells, had flowed away on a current of bitter tears, gone before she could even make sense of what had happened.

  Several hours later a doctor gave her something for the bleeding and pain, and a shot of antibiotic. He regarded her not unkindly, and said, “Il n’était pas destiné.”

  No, she agreed. It wasn’t meant to be.

  After that, she was a dead woman, haunting the streets of Paris. Here she was, in the most beautiful, most vibrant city on earth, and she was nothing but a wreck. She couldn’t bear to go near the places she’d gone with Jean-Luc. And they’d gone everywhere together. She couldn’t bear to do anything.

  She felt herself detaching from reality. It was probably some kind of psychotic break. And so, leaving word with the program’s registrar, she packed up her things and went home. She had spent her life savings to go to Paris to study. She left with scarcely a penny to her name, but that was not her greatest loss. Not by a long shot.

  She never told her family. All she said to them was, “Paris wasn’t what I thought it would be. This is where I belong.” Renée had guessed that there had been a failed love affair. Maureen told her as little as possible; it was simply too painful to talk about.

  Back at school, she changed her major and she changed her dreams. She had to find a dream that fit into the shape of her life—not the life she used to envision for herself, but the new life of a mature person whose youthful illusions had been shattered. This new life was one that gave Maureen control, in which her validation didn’t depend on others. She no longer wanted to perform and be judged—heavens, what had she been thinking? She wasn’t an actor. Why would she ever want a profession that required her to strip herself bare in front of an audience? Acting was all about making yourself feel things—love, rage, euphoria, agony. She had to unlearn those things now. She had to teach herself not to feel. Refusing to feel hurt also meant she numbed herself to joy, but the sacrifice was worth it.

  Dreams could change, she told herself. They had to change as she gained the wisdom of painful experience. Her love of books and stories turned out to be a perfect match for the new Maureen. A story that unfolded in the mind was less emotionally risky than one acted out on a stage. Once she realized that, the decision was easy. She never looked back.

  In the darkest depths of despair, she never thought she would smile again. She never thought she would reclaim her heart.

  And then Christmas came. She faced the holiday with dread that year, bracing herself for relatives who would ask her about the trip to Paris. She had no idea what she would say to them.

  Then Stella Romano, the church choir director, asked Maureen if she’d sing with the choir at Christmas.

  No, Maureen wanted to say. No, I’ll never sing again. But for some strange reason she was compelled to agree.

  “Sure,” she’d said. “I’m flattered to be asked.”

  She did what her father had raised her to do—found solace in helping others. At holiday time, this was easy to do. It seemed self-indulgent in the extreme to moon about a heartache when she was helping a family whose house had been foreclosed, or when she met a woman escaping an abusive relationship, or encountered a teen struggling to overcome addiction. Helping others with their troubles put her own problems into perspective.

  For her, salvation was not some dramatic, musical-comedy moment. She didn’t wake up one day and decide she was over him. It was the cumulative effect of stepping outside herself and her pain, and giving to others. Simple as that. Although it had seemed impossible at the time, the pain eventually faded, bit by bit. She made the biggest strides at Christmas, when she threw herself into focusing on others.

  She learned to be grateful for the profound yet simple things in her life. Her family, which rallied around her, understood that something had happened to her in Paris but didn’t press her to tell them anything she didn’t want to.

  Her father always said, “Be part of something bigger than you.” And finally, that year, Maureen discovered how right he was. It was impossible to dwell on some failed love affair when you were serving coffee to a woman whose child was being treated for cancer.

  And that, then, was the true gift of the season. That was why Maureen loved it and why she believed so deeply in its power. If the annual pageant could convey even some of that, she would be satisfied.

  This was how the miracle occurred. It was a silent, secret miracle. No one could see or hear it, but Maureen felt it in her heart, a deep sense of healing and peace.

  The light came back into her life, flickering on like an ember fanned by the smallest breath.

  Christmas truly was a season of miracles. And each year, she only grew to love the holiday more.

  Sixteen

  “Hey, Moe.” Eddie snapped his fingers in front of Maureen’s face. “Wake up and smell the hot chocolate.”

  He handed her a cup of frothy cocoa. “Thanks,” she said, trying to shake off the old, aching memories.

  He didn’t say anything more, just waited.

  Could she tell him? He had been so open about everything—his own past, the accident, going to AA. And he was none the worse for it. Maureen had a need to tell someone, finally. Why not him? He’d given up a huge secret about himself. If she did the same, they’d have mutually assured destruction. No, she corrected herself. Mutual trust.

  She took a tiny sip of hot chocolate, then said, “I’m trying to figure out if there’s any possible way to explain what happened and not seem like a complete moron.”

  “You have to not care about looking like a moron,” he pointed out.

  “It’s just so…predictable.”

  “Nothing about you is predictable,” he said. “You’re constantly surprising me.”

  “Really?” She thought about this while sipping her hot chocolate. He seemed to be in no hurry to get anywhere; he sat there with the engine running and the warm breath of the heater wafting from the vents. She felt pleasantly exhausted from the exertion of snowshoeing, and strangely relaxed under the circumstances.

  In the yard across the way, Invisible Fence flags sprouted from the snow, warning that a dog was in training. Or, dogs, as she soon saw. Two mutts. One resembled a large poodle, its coat natural rather than groomed. The other was a giant shepherd mix, scary-looking. The only thing standing between him and a busy road was this unseen force field of radio waves, which would deliver a buzz of shock to the poor creature’s neck if he ventured too close to the boundary. The shepherd patrolled up and down the perimeter of the yard, and each time a car went past, he gave a little yip as he ventured too close to the fence. The dog kept testing, as though it might get a different result with each new attempt.

  The poodle, on the other hand, was nobody’s fool. Maureen could tell the caramel-colored dog knew exactly where the boundaries lay and was not about to stray beyond them. Even when the shepherd charged a pair of joggers with a sleek Doberman on a leash, the poodle felt the sting only once, then held back. Maureen could tell the dog was
tempted almost beyond bearing; it pranced and feinted behind the invisible boundary. Once the joggers with their dog passed by, the shepherd settled down, content to sniff and sprinkle the snow in its yard. The poodle meandered away. Disaster averted.

  She realized Eddie was still sitting there, patiently waiting. “Believe me,” she said, “I’m very predictable. Pathetically so.” And then, almost against her will, she talked, and he listened. It was remarkably easy to level with him. She wondered why that was so. His good opinion of her mattered, yet he was so nonjudgmental and relaxed that she found herself trusting him. She told him about her girlhood dreams of being in the theater, and spending her life savings to study in Paris. She thought her explanation of meeting Jean-Luc and falling in love with him would seem trite to Eddie, but if it did, he gave no indication.

  It felt remarkably good to unburden herself of something old and hurtful. She explained about Jean-Luc, and what an idiot she’d been, and how much the betrayal had hurt.

  “So that’s it?” Eddie asked, polishing off his hot chocolate. The shepherd dog was on patrol again, jogging up and down the length of the invisible fence.

  “Essentially, yes.” She didn’t mention the miscarriage. She might, one day, but that was for another time, if that time ever came for her and Eddie. “I still feel horrible about it,” she said. “I never want to feel that way again.”

  “I hate that you were hurt by some jerk. But honestly, you think you’re the first person to have a failed romance?” asked Eddie. “People cheat on their lovers all the time. You’re in good company. I mean, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, Major Scobie. Or hell, Yuri Zhivago. Literature is full of examples, and so is life.”