Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  Whether or not to accept Félix Dumoulin’s invitation was hardly something I could discuss with Jordan. The debate, like the Thanksgiving one, was with myself. The issue was simple. Was I going to turn up at the brasserie or was I not? At one point I thought of involving Lauren and one evening, while Jordan, in a brief moment of reprieve from Rochelle Eléctronique, played Red Sox Monopoly on the floor with Joey, I crossed the corridor and rang her bell. She answered the door with the mobile at her ear – like Jordan, Lauren was forever on the phone – and motioning me to enter indicated that she would not be long. Whilst our rented apartment was seemingly untouched by the march of time, Lauren’s, which was paid for by a long-time lover – a wealthy but impotent French aristocrat who in return for her life-enhancing company kept her in style and asked no questions – had been modernized over the years. Looking at myself in one of the many mirrors in which were reflected the white sofas, the oversize flower arrangements, the Miro above the chimney-piece, the glass table littered with sketches and colour-swatches, the copies of Vogue and the bottle of red wine which was never far from Lauren’s side, I examined my face, as if the secret of Félix Dumoulin’s interest in me was hidden in my countenance. All I could see in the oval contours, the green eyes, the idiosyncratic indentation between nose and lip and the upswept hair, was a mature version of Michelle to whom I had bequeathed the first flush of my youth.

  Lauren was haranguing one of her suppliers, this time in German. Although languages were not her forte, she spoke several of them fluently and with the contempt she considered any attention to grammar deserved. Marching round the room she poured herself a drink and raised a questioning eyebrow at me, which I answered in the negative, without interrupting her guttural flow. I wondered what Lauren would make of my invitation to Wepler and what her advice would be, but the moment she had finished with Germany, her mobile, with its Overture from William Tell, rang again. Chickening out – there was nothing after all to tell Lauren, and I had to make up my own mind about Wepler – I blew her a kiss and was gone.

  In the end it was curiosity, although I knew that this was not strictly honest, which won the day.

  chapter eight

  I dared not risk finding somewhere to park in the Place de Clichy, and there had been problems getting a taxi. Unlike Jordan, Félix Dumoulin seemed not to be agitated by my tardiness and did not even appear to be wearing a watch beneath his unbuttoned cuffs. Standing up at my approach, he kissed me politely on both cheeks. I apologized for being late and explained about the taxi.

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t come?’

  ‘I’m happy that you did.’

  There was a bottle of Mersault on the table into which he had made inroads. He filled my glass, and I took advantage of the moment to look around me at the noisy lunch-time crowd, anxious lest I should bump into anyone I knew. To conceal my agitation I filled him in with the minutiae of my days since our last meeting, a blow-by-blow account of the progress of Jordan’s deal and Joey’s exploits and Michelle’s current whereabouts – there had been a postcard from Bruges, at which he nodded gravely as if my nervous soliloquy was a matter of consequence. By the time we picked up the menus I was surprised to find that we had finished the Mersault and that more than half an hour had passed.

  It wasn’t like that with Jordan for whom time was of the essence and who did not like to linger over a meal or to be kept waiting for his food.

  ‘One comes here for the fruits de mer.’

  Jordan was not keen on seafood. He liked his fish more easily accessible and, although he did his best to hide it, grew impatient while I picked at winkles, opened moules or entered the lobster jousts.

  Over the vast crustacean still life on its glacier of ice which was brought ceremoniously to the table along with triangles of brown bread and butter, lemon halves, glossy pots of mayonnaise and the tools of icthyoid torture, we left Jordan and Joey and the whereabouts of Michelle. Assisted by a second bottle of wine, I held forth about my life in Boston and my job at the Museum of Fine Arts which I had touched upon in the Bois de Boulogne. Félix was not impressed. Looking at paintings, he said, was a skill that must be learned. Art could not be appreciated on the trot, and hurrying visitors through crowded galleries was inimical to developing a proper rapport with any particular work.

  ‘You have to fall in love with a painting, Madame Flatland…’

  ‘Judith.’

  ‘You have to fall in love with a painting, Judith.’

  I liked the way he said my name.

  ‘It’s like falling in love with a woman…’

  He held my gaze, and as the avuncular waiters and the boisterous party of young people at the next table faded from view, I thought that I was going to have another of my dizzy spells.

  ‘A painting needs to be looked at single-mindedly, for its own sake. How many people look at a picture honestly? How many people allow the image to speak for itself?’

  He was right, of course. Increasingly the galleries had a habit of advertising when they had acquired a particular exhibit and how much it had cost. While many of the observers saw not the colours on the canvas but the colour of money, others were interested only if the artist – or the work itself – was famous, in which case they would admire it or reject it on principle.

  We had finished the fruits de mer down to the last bigorneau, and were discussing the current obsession with the past which sometimes made the work of new artists seem out of synch.

  ‘If you love a Velazquez you can love a Bacon,’ Félix said. ‘If you really love a Velazquez. Do you like my city, Judith?’

  ‘I love your city – ’ I loved the teeming streets, the vibrancy ‘ – but I miss my friends. And my utility room.’

  ‘Utility room?’

  ‘Where you do the washing…and the ironing…and keep things: tools…and muddy boots…’

  ‘A fairy princess. Shut away in her castle. And what about Prince Charming?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘When did he last see his princess?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘See her? Or look at her, like his Rolex?’

  If a loved one is well known enough there is no need to look at him. It was an axiom of married life. I felt the need to defend Jordan.

  ‘It wasn’t always like that.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘I have to collect Joey from karate.’

  ‘Jordan. Joey. What about Judith?’

  ‘I promised to take him to the cinema. Toy Story 2…’

  ‘Toys which come alive when human beings are not around?’

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘It’s a kid’s movie!’

  ‘It taps into primal emotions. Emotions which everyone can relate to.’

  ‘Toys being outgrown?’

  ‘If you’re a child and you’re lost, someone will find you. If you’re broken, you can be fixed. Being outgrown is the worst thing that can happen to a toy. It isn’t really about toys…’

  I imagined having this conversation with Jordan.

  ‘What is it about?’

  ‘About the fear of growing up, about the fear of getting older…’ He looked straight at me. ‘About the fear of your children leaving home.’ He broke off as a flower seller who was working the restaurant approached our table. Plucking a red, cellophane-wrapped rose from her basket, he laid it on my plate.

  ‘For the Empress Josephine…’

  ‘The Empress Josephine?’ It was hard to keep up with him.

  ‘She consoled herself with roses, at Malmaison. After her divorce from Napoleon.’

  Picking up the rose, I felt its broad-based thorns through the paper. Not for the first time, I wondered what he wanted with me.

  ‘J’ai envie de coucher avec toi.’

  I should of course have got up and left the restaurant there and then. That I did not do so was due not so much to the fact that once again he had read my thoughts nor that he wanted to sleep with me, but the shock that the statement engendered. Autr
es temps, autres moeurs. I was aware, who could not be, that times had changed and that the young people of today fell into bed at will, women as well as men, with no commitment.

  ‘I have a husband…’ Meeting Félix’s gaze, I was aware from the difficulty I had with the sibilant, that the Mersault was having its effect. ‘This deal is important to Jordan. If he pulls it off he gets a seat on the board. If he doesn’t…’

  ‘If he doesn’t?’

  ‘It will destroy him. I also have two children and I am old enough…’ Hoping he would not finish the sentence for me, I let the words hang in the air.

  Rendered soporific by the wine which I was unused to drinking in the middle of the day, I fell asleep in the cinema although Joey, fascinated by the antics of Buzz Lightyear and Woody seemed not to notice.

  I didn’t hear from Felix for a week. Every time the telephone rang and Jordan picked it up I thought it might be him and spent the next few moments in a paroxysm of anxiety. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be Félix or not. My rational self told me not to be so idiotic, then I’d remember the kiss he had imprinted on my mouth as he held my face between his hands outside the restaurant. There had been nothing funny about that.

  On Sunday, Jordan, in a rare moment of leisure, volunteered to take Joey and Andy to the Cité des Sciences while I went to the marché aux puces with Lauren whose previous night’s date had admitted to having a wife and three children, unless it was three wives and two children, she couldn’t be quite sure.

  Normally I loved wandering round the flea market, keeping my eye open for bargains and trying to picture how my purchases were going to look once I got back to Boston, which now seemed imminent. Pottering amongst the trestle-tables of furniture, bric-à-brac, china, and second-hand clothes I feigned interest in an antique plate but found myself unable to concentrate on it. I enquired as to the price from the hard-faced young stall-holder who had a dragonfly etched on her breast and a cigarette suspended from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Your Joey is older than this plate.’ Lauren removed it gently from my hand.

  I pointed to a miniature gramaphone. The girl wound it up for me and we listened to the tinny tune.

  ‘Mille neuf cent vingt quatre.’

  I told her it was too expensive.

  ‘That’s the year,’ Lauren said. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  I wondered should I tell her about Félix but the words stuck in my throat.

  My concentration did not improve over the next few days. I took Joey swimming and forgot his trunks and went out without my keys. Staring idly at the bargains in a ‘soldes’ window in the Place Sulpice, I heard the approaching noise of a motor-bike and caught sight of a Kawasaki reflected in the glass. I spun round eagerly to see a pimply faced black-clad courier retrieve a package from his box. I searched high and low for Jordan’s memo-machine which I had inadvertently tidied away, put salt instead of sugar on my raspberries and glanced involuntarily at the empty windscreen when I approached my car.

  I spent a day in the airy galleries of the Musée d’Orsay. A museum should not be like an encyclopaedia, giving an objective and impersonal account of itself, but should reflect the tastes and choices as well as the blind spots and oversights of the collectors and curators who have built up the corpus over the years. The identity of the Musée d’Orsay was not yet fully established but the excitement of its infancy – the fact that many major artists were unrepresented and entire schools were dealt with inadequately, notwithstanding – never failed to please me.

  Looking at paintings with Jordan, on the rare occasions I managed to persuade him into a gallery, was like running after a bus. Art for him was the making of an acquisition or the creation of a new company. The humanities did not exist. In the early days of our marriage he had made a genuine effort. Standing him before a landscape I would attempt to get him to see the effects of light on water, the symbolism of objects, the finesse of a palette, to hear the music the artist was trying to convey. Try as he would to make some sense of what I was on about, I had eventually to give his artistic education up as a bad job. It was a hopeless task. Similarly he would talk to me for hours about fees and mergers and the state of the Dow Jones. No sooner had he started than my mind would seize up and the words would bounce off me. Although his expertise paid for our lifestyle and his business acumen shored us up against privation, I could not tune into it and he could have been speaking Chinese. This diversity of interests did not mean that we did not love each other. Our various preoccupations added richness and spice to our marriage and whilst we did not understand them, we took vicarious pride in each other’s achievements.

  I got home from the museum to find an agitated Jordan putting shirts and ties into a bag on the bed. Before I had a chance to ask it he answered my unspoken question.

  ‘Lafarge is playing silly buggers! He has been advised that what we are offering for Rochelle is not enough…’

  ‘I thought you’d already come to an agreement with Lafarge?’

  ‘Exactly. His financial advisor has had the temerity to demand an extra five per cent! I’m going to Monte Carlo to find out what he’s up to.’

  ‘Why can’t his financial advisor come here?’ I had the feeling that just at this moment I needed Jordan at home.

  ‘Refuses point blank.’ I could see that he was angry. ‘I shouldn’t be gone more than a couple of days. Sorry darling…’ He took me briefly in his arms looking at his watch over my shoulder. ‘Be an angel and call a taxi.’

  Two days later I was in the rue de Buci, trying to concentrate on the aubergines and bell-peppers, and visiting the oil emporium for Lauren; I had promised to buy her a cake of her favourite soap.

  I was about to put a melon in my basket when I heard the roar of a Kawasaki but did not look round. The bike came to a halt behind me and Félix appeared, blotting out the sun, by my side. He kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘I owe you an apology, Judith. I’ve been in Alsace. My grandmother was taken ill.’ He nodded towards an empty table at the crowded bar on the opposite corner. ‘Un café?’

  Rooted to the spot, I did not reply.

  ‘I suppose Jordan wants dinner early?’

  ‘Jordan’s in Monte Carlo.’

  ‘What brings you to the rue de Buci?’

  ‘I told you, I always come on Friday.’

  Taking the melon from my hand, Felix replaced it with another which he held to his nose before placing it gently in my basket.

  ‘Today is Thursday.’

  chapter nine

  I am forty-two years old and knew exactly what I was doing when I went back with Félix to his apartment which looked out on to the terracotta chimney-pots and flower-filled balconies of the rue Dauphine and the rue St André des Arts. There were a lot of things I could have put it down to: the city and its heat, Dr Katz’s reference to my age – lumping me together with a whole bunch of neurotic women and isolating me from the human race – Jordan’s preoccupation with Rochelle Eléctronique, the fact that I missed my friends and my colleagues at the Museum of Fine Arts. Perhaps the main reason was to do with my feelings vis-à-vis Michelle. It was not so much that I envied her – although of course I did – her youth, her looks, the insouciance with which she appeared to face the world (although I’d been there myself and knew it was a lie), but the fact that she was starting out on a road which as far as I was concerned was well travelled and that her life, no matter what its vicissitudes, unlike mine which was mapped out, had yet to come.

  I had been expecting an attic, louche and bohemian, strewn with canvases and daubed with paint. In nineteenth-century Paris, artists who lived on a few francs a day had congregated in the cafés where they formed an alliance against the world. Later, of course, attracted by the wine, women and hallucinogenic drugs of la vie de bohème, cubists, fauvists, Dadaists, surrealists and others (many of whom were to suffer for their art) gravitated towards the twenty-four seven city and settled in Montmartre where they practised f
ree love with their models, smoked opium and drank themselves stupid. Consorting with gangsters and brothel-keepers, and unable to differentiate between freedom and licence, they were quick to pick fights with anyone who crossed their paths, and satisfied their sexual cravings in the knocking-shops of Pigalle. Among the influx of itinerant painters lured to the Citadel of Pleasure from Spain, Italy, Russia and Mexico, Picasso – who together with his mistresses abused all manner of substances in his mice-infested studio – could lay claim to being the most unruly. Never without his revolver, he was well-known for his tendency to fire it over the heads of anyone who annoyed him.

  Félix’s apartment, beyond a heavy door which opened at the touch of a punched code, was reached by a waxed parquet staircase with decorative iron banisters. With its scrubbed wooden table, its simple vase of white arum lilies, its plan-chest bearing pots of sharpened pencils, old cigar boxes of pastels, containers of linseed oil and fixative, and neatly stacked canvases, it was tranquil and ordered.

  While Félix disappeared into the kitchen, I circumvented the studio with its well-used furniture, its overflowing bookshelves, and its sepia prints of erstwhile Paris. I could see no signs of a woman’s presence, not even in the bedroom which was visible through the open door. On an easel, which stood near the window, a painting was half-completed. A girl with flaxen hair and virginal breasts lay serenely on a sofa – Félix’s sofa with its Indian throw – bathed in gold light.

  Returning with a bottle of champagne and following my gaze, Félix answered my unspoken question.

  ‘Olympe…’

  Olympe. The fragile image of classical beauty shone from the canvas with clarity and tenderness.

  ‘She was my girlfriend.’

  ‘Was?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘We split up.’

  While he took two glasses from a cupboard and set them on the table beside the arum lilies, he filled me in about his visit to Alsace where his grandmother, who was making a good recovery, had survived her crise de coeur. Only partly listening and drinking as slowly as possible, I used the hiatus to access my thoughts, which as usual were a jumble of contradiction, and decide whether or not I was going to make my escape while the going was good or whether I was going to cross the line that separated fantasy from reality. What could I get from this young man with his black shirt and black hair that I did not get from my tall and handsome husband? Why should I compromise my life, my marriage, for a moment of distraction? Should I sacrifice my good name to satisfy the callous appetites of youth? If I did, was it, in today’s climate, such a big deal?