Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  ‘Robot-chefs, plastic bags, detergents… Can’t you think of anything, Judith?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to join in?’

  I wondered if there was anything that could dispel the guilt and remorse with which I was consumed.

  ‘Viagra,’ Walter said. I looked at him sharply.

  ‘I asked Judith, Walter.’

  ‘Disposable diapers.’ It was all I could think of.

  While my mother explained to Joey how in her day babies’ diapers, which were made of terry-towelling, had to be boiled in a wash-boiler before putting them through a mangle – a word with which Joey was unfamiliar – and hanging them on a line in the backyard, I was thinking about Félix. I could not get him out of my mind.

  ‘Penny for them, Judith.’ My mother’s voice broke into my reverie. She turned to Jordan. ‘Judith’s looking very pale. She’s not herself. Why don’t you take her down to that villa in the South of France you were telling us about? Just the two of you. While Joey’s away.’

  With the contracts for Rochelle Eléctronique as yet unsigned, a vacation was the last thing on Jordan’s mind.

  Next morning, while my mother and Walter slept off their jet lag, I finished packing Joey’s case, not forgetting his one-eyed teddy-bear – he was still a baby really – then took him with his new skateboard, dodging the traffic and skirting the rows of parked cars, across the road to the Parc Monceau. He couldn’t wait to try out his grandmother’s present.

  Inside the iron gates, letting go of my hand, Joey raced ahead, leaving me to stroll among the young mothers with their baby buggies, the chic Embassy children with their chic minders, the babies in the swing enclosure, the oblivious lovers obstructing the paths as they stopped to kiss, to a cool seat beneath the tropical palms, where, amid the families making the most of the long hot summer, I could keep an eye on him.

  Having been brought up with a minimalist one of my own – my father’s early death; my mother’s siblings in England – I was a strong believer in the family unit which despite all attempts to destroy it had somehow managed to survive. Not merely a human phenomenon nor an artificial social construct, the family went deeper than reason and was part of nature itself. Although many people were able to manage perfectly well on their own, and often preferred to do so, there was something within the human spirit that seemed to crave the ties of kinship. Current trends were ephemeral, instinct was not. Watching Joey with his new skateboard which had attracted a posse of similarly aged admirers, I thought of the male bird bringing food to his fledgelings, the lioness scavenging for her cubs. Both were obeying an atavistic imperative.

  While propagation of the species was a basic need and offspring often a central part of the configuration, the family was not defined by it. Sex and procreation existed independently, and while the family certainly contained these elements it also went beyond them. Many societies had tried to disrupt, or at least weaken, the power of the family. They trotted out any number of reasons, one of which was that the emotional and practical restraints within the group hampered individual growth. There was little doubt that taking care of children, providing for them and having to pay attention to a spouse, while emotionally satisfying, consumed vast quantities of time and energy. If the family did not endorse these occupations, it was hard to be a great writer, a round the world yachtswoman or a dedicated breeder of rare orchids, while cooking three meals a day, teaching children to read, supervising homework, shopping for groceries, feeding a dog, picking up the kids from school and attending parent-teacher meetings.

  There were many different images of ‘the family’, some of them downright sentimental. The most romantic notion, perpetuated by Hollywood, pulp fiction, and some womens’ magazines, insisted that kinship was synonymous with affection and the family synonymous with love. Nothing was further from the truth. Family members often heartily disliked each other and the home was by no means always the haven it was cracked up to be. Extreme closeness was not a blueprint for happiness – sometimes it was just the opposite – but it did at least ensure the creation of a unique relationship. Knowing someone from infancy established a bond that could never be broken. An alliance existed among family members which marked their obligations to each other and endorsed an unwritten contract that was based on trust.

  The entwined couples enjoying the sunshine in the Allée de la Comtesse de Ségur, were concerned not so much with family ties as with sex, a compelling drive which did not necessarily encompass feelings. Male and female fish, as I had observed from watching Joey’s guppies, had an elaborate courtship ritual and strange reproductive habits; they did not so much as touch each other and fertilization occurred outside their bodies. Their enjoyment of the sex act, if it existed, came from fulfilling the compulsion and not from tactile pleasure.

  ‘Judith…’

  The voice of my lover, low-pitched and resonant, broke into my wandering thoughts. Taken by surprise and aware of my burning cheeks I called to Joey who turned towards me for a moment then went back to his skateboard. He never came the first time.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Please go away.’

  ‘It’s about the wager…’

  ‘Joey!’

  ‘I would like to explain.’

  ‘Stop pestering me.’ Getting up I walked towards the gated enclosure where two little girls in a double swing, watched by their long-suffering mother, were soaring into the air and laughing.

  ‘It started long before the wager.’

  I looked involuntarily at my hand to where the candle had burned my finger.

  ‘When you walked into Wepler… It had nothing to do with cases of champagne, nothing to do with Alexandre.’

  ‘Regarde, Maman! Regarde!’

  The swing was going higher and higher.

  ‘Doucement, chérie, doucement.’

  ‘You’ve done something to me Judith. I think of you, dream of you. I’m not making a very good job of this…’

  ‘Joey!’

  Joey looked round bemusedly.

  ‘Pick up your skateboard. We’re going home.’

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘I’m sorry about the wager and I’d really like to see you again.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Look Mom!’

  Joey was executing an ‘Ollie Airwalk’, jumping off his new skateboard and, doing a half-turn, landing on it with his feet facing in the opposite direction. Taking advantage of the fact that I was watching Joey, Félix took my face in his hands as he had outside the restaurant and kissed me on the mouth. Before I could protest, he was gone, leaving me with stinging lips and a slip of paper on which was a drawing of a Floribunda rose. I put it in the bin.

  Because it was Sunday and Jordan was on a break now that Rochelle Eléctronique had got to the contract stage, he came with us to the airport. Although I was the better driver and spent my life in the car – years of shuttling back and forth to the museum and doing the school run, and in Paris circumventing the narrow streets like a cab driver – I sat in the back between my mother and Walter and let him drive.

  I had been driving since I was seventeen and had never had an accident (although once my foot had slipped and I had accelerated into the wall of an underground parking lot, which Jordan never let me forget), but every time I took the wheel, if Jordan was in the passenger seat, I felt as if I was taking my drivers’ test. My automatic pilot, in which mode I could drive and plan dinner, drive and make notes on the memo pad I kept beside me in the car, drive and consult my diary, drive and tune the radio, drive and select a track on a favourite CD, deserted me. It was not that he said anything, except the occasional ‘take it easy honey’ or ‘careful’ or ‘didn’t you notice that guy turning right?’ but the fact that his face became more alert than if he were behind the wheel himself, and I could sense him looking right and left at crossroads and glancing in the mirror and even putting his foot on an imaginary brake.

  My moth
er was taking everything out of her purse and checking the passports and tickets for the umpteenth time – she always got nervous when she travelled – when turning round from the front seat where he was sitting next to Jordan, Joey said, ‘Who was that man in the park, Mom?’

  If Jordan had not been hooting at a dilatory driver and my mother not enquiring of Walter if he was sure that he had all his pills, I might have been in trouble. As it was, Joey, who was tense with excitement at the thought of the flies he was going to tie and the salmon he was going to land, did not wait for an answer.

  ‘Did you pack my Game Boy?’

  Wondering if Joey had actually seen Félix kissing me as he executed his Ollie Airwalk, I breathed a sigh of relief and assured him that the Game Boy was in his backpack.

  Saying goodbye to Joey, even though it was only for three weeks, did something to my inner being. While my bond with Michelle was undeniable, my feelings for Joey, a mother’s for her son, went deeper and were unfathomable. Watching his eager face as, wearing his Red Sox jersey, he clutched his skateboard with its Santa Cruz wheels and jumped up and down like a yoyo between my mother and Walter aiming imaginary karate-chops at some make-believe opponent, I knew I was going to miss him.

  I hugged my mother, who with the perception that had stood her in good stead throughout her years as a sales rep told me I was not to worry about Joey, kissed Walter whose smooth cheek smelled of pungent aftershave, and watched Joey hurl himself into his father’s arms. When it was my turn I shed a little tear, which I hoped he wouldn’t notice as he flung his firm arms round my neck, and watched as he shuffled backwards into the departures, and towards the X-ray machine.

  When we got home there was a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of long-stemmed red roses on the console in the hallway. Helga had taken it in.

  ‘They must be for Michelle.’ Jordan picked up the bouquet, the scarlet ribbons trailing. ‘A secret admirer. There’s no card.’

  chapter eleven

  If I hadn’t gone back to the Musée d’Orsay, that might have been that, but with Michelle and Joey away, Lauren preoccupied with her next collection – autumn was going to see black as the new black – and Jordan, who was busy nailing the deal to the wall, more preoccupied than ever, I was at a loose end.

  When I got to the museum I found Félix, who had parked his Kawasaki, sitting on the parapet by the river waiting for me, and I guessed that he must have followed me from the Boulevard Courcelles.

  ‘There’s something I’d like to show you.’

  When he pursued me into the museum I did not protest. Although my head was doing battle with my heart, I ignored the conflict and part of me even welcomed the company.

  Walking around the cool of the Musée d’Orsay with Félix, I had the feeling that, although I was not alone, I was accompanying myself, and despite the fact that neither of us spoke – I was not going to make it easy for him – a dialogue was actually taking place.

  Dwarfed by the great arches, we mingled with the crowds amongst the plasters and bronzes, veering off into the side rooms and stopping, as if in response to a signal, for long moments at a time before a Delacroix or an Ingres, before resuming our itinerary. Passing quickly through the Opéra room with its exhibition of drawings, engravings and photographs, we rode the escalator to the second floor. Wondering what it could possibly be that Félix wanted to show me, I followed him past the Neo-Impressionists, the Pont-Aven School, and the Bonnards and the Vuillards of the Nabis. He stopped suddenly, a look of adulation on his face, before the portrait of the Lady with a Glove by Madame Carolus-Duran, a fashionable artist of the late 1860s who painted idealized images of the bourgeoisie. The Lady with a Glove was, like Félix, dressed entirely in black – black seemed to hold a fascination for him – from her tiered lace dress with its tiny waist, to the matching black hat, relieved by a yellow rose perched upon black, corkscrew curls. More seductively than any nude, she posed against a background of grey on grey. As she removed her second ivory glove (the first was already flung down, like a gauntlet, on the floor) her eyebrows were arched coquettishly and her dainty little finger was extended. I did not need to ask why he had stopped before the painting. Although the Lady with the Glove could not have been more than eighteen, the configuration of the face, and the expression on it, bore more than a passing resemblance to my own.

  ‘It might have started off as a wager,’ Félix said, looking at the painting, ‘but I would never have gone ahead with it. I’m not a complete shit. I’d like you to understand.’

  He touched my elbow, stroking it, scorching the flesh, and with a final glance at the Lady with a Glove, as if he was reluctant to leave her, led me towards the escalator. As the dust danced in the sunbeams, I ignored the still small voice that warned me that if I went back again to the rue Dauphine I was undone.

  We sat at Félix’s table beneath the open window. He tried to tell me again, clumsily, that while the outrageous idea of seducing me had been Alexandre’s, what started off as a dare, a young man’s challenge, had rebounded.

  ‘The object of a wager!’ I said. ‘How do you think that makes me feel?’

  The fact that I had crossed the Pont Neuf on the back of the Kawasaki gave the lie to my indignation. Félix’s black linen shirt was open at the neck and desire hovered in the torpid air between us as the hubbub rose from the street below.

  ‘It was unforgivable.’

  We did not drink the coffee Félix had made. What had started off as wary conversation became a sequence of orchestrated movements as we first touched fingertips, then hands, then mouths, until, abandoning the safety of the table, we moved urgently and in tandem towards Félix’s bed where we reached the point of no return. After the rush of sex, the high of passion was over and I examined my face in the looking-glass in the bathroom to see if I had grown horns, if anyone could tell. Coming up behind me, Felix caressed my neck then, removing the combs which secured my hair, brushed it slowly, as if time had been arrested, and we spent what was left of the morning in an unhurried replay of mutual possession, shamelessly imbibing and assimilating each other’s soul and flesh. Later, as if in gratitude, he kissed my fingers in the place where the candle had burned them and I knew that, like God’s rainbow, it was a sign between us. I was at a loss to comprehend the sexual upheaval that consumed me. What I felt for this young man was so new, so sweet, that it did not bear critical examination. I had no desire to go home.

  When he dropped me off at the Boulevard Courcelles, I felt a sudden resurgence of the energy that had deserted me for the duration of my Paris sojourn and, despite the fact that the sun was at its zenith, an overwhelming sensation of well-being. The self-satisfied smile was wiped off my face when I put my key into the front door and opened it to find Jordan, dressed for golf, and Sherman, standing in the hallway. Their eyes went to my swollen mouth and tumbled hair as, in a gesture of guilt – there was no way Jordan should have been home so early – I fastened the top button of my dress.

  ‘Lafarge has invited us to play a celebratory round at Fontainebleau.’ Jordan’s voice was calm. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  I put a hand to my cheek.

  ‘I’ve been to the dentist.’ It was my first lie.

  I have never used cocaine, never been near a drug and was at a loss to understand what was happening to me, a happily married woman, pierced to the quick by Eros – not Agape or Caritas with their emotions directed towards God or family or friends – whose arrow I could not have pulled from my flesh even had I wanted to. I don’t know if the mysteries of attraction have ever been fully explained, nor did I want them to be. There are chemical forces beyond our knowledge and electrical fields which remain uncharted. No one has explained exactly what it is that passes between two strangers across a crowded room; that stops two people in their tracks and fills them with an iron resolve, no matter what the consequences, to meet again. The only trigger powerful enough to ignite the full blaze is the buried, unconscious experience which lies a
t the heart of each person’s love map. I had no desire to explore mine nor to interpret the complex possibilities of sight, sound, scent, suggestion, and memory which had unhinged the nuts and bolts of reason which – since the night of Michelle’s birthday party – had fallen into rattling disarray.

  With Michelle and Joey away, I had intended to catch up with my reading and correspondence, make plans for returning to Boston, weed out the dross from Joey’s wardrobe (he was growing so fast), spend quality time in the Louvre – which over the years had served as prison, arsenal, mint, granary, telegraph station, fort, hotel for visiting heads of state and shopping arcade – and pick up a few bargains in the sales. As with the best-laid plans I did none of these things, but spent every available moment with my lover, whose youth and ardour invoked not only deep erotic responses, but feelings of exhilaration and excitement, the existence of which I had all but forgotten. The only way to escape them was to run, and the reason I did not was because I appeared to have lost the use of my legs.

  Félix showed me a Paris in which you could have Degas for breakfast, langoustines for dinner, and Descartes round the clock; a city which, even with the help of Lauren and my guidebooks I would never have discovered for myself.

  As, despite the summer egress, car drivers were forced into frayed-tempered immobility, we weaved our way between the stationary traffic on the Kawasaki, or arm-in-arm – I was unlikely to meet anyone I knew – strolled brazenly beneath the plane trees and chestnuts erupting from their metal grates along the August streets. Scattering the pigeons, pausing to read the headlines at the newspaper kiosks, or now and then resting on a bench, our heads close, we left the broad Avenues of Baron Haussmann, the historic monuments to Napoleon, and sought out the exotic quartiers, far removed from the grand hotels and smart restaurants, which multi-ethnic immigrants had made their own.