Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  I never want to experience the next ten minutes again. Ten minutes during which Michelle directed at me all the hurt, all the pain she must have been suffering, damning me for letting her down, for destroying, in one fell swoop, her good opinion of me, castigating me for forsaking my maternal role. Félix was right. A mistral had sprung up: the treacherous wind which appeared from nowhere to disrupt the heat of the summer day. Le grand drawback de Provençe had sneaked up on us while we were in the bedroom. Already it was whipping up the waves and blowing the sand along the terrace as Michelle told her mother what she thought of her, but the names that she called me were as nothing compared with the names I called myself.

  There are some situations that cannot be retrieved, watches that cannot be put back. There was nothing I could say to redeem myself, nothing I could do to assuage the hurt Michelle was enduring. I stood by the sliding glass doors looking out at the flapping blinds, the grey-green sea, the bobbing sails as the wind, with its threat of violence, gusted in over the Garden of the Hesperides which so short a while ago had blossomed beneath a clear sky.

  When Michelle had quietened I turned to talk to her, to try to explain that I had been possessed by forces beyond my control, to attempt to get her to understand the nature of my obsession, that I had not done, would never do, anything deliberately to harm her.

  She was gathering up her rucksack, inserting her feet, with the fluorescent purple toenails that tugged on my heartstrings, clumsily into her flip-flops, drying her swollen eyes. I put out a hand to stay her but she looked right through me as if I did not exist, as if her gaze was fixed on the blue and white striped cushions which had been blown from the loungers and which were scudding along the terrace.

  ‘Michelle…!’

  ‘Don’t speak to me…’ Hiking her rucksack up on to her shoulders, she made for the door. ‘Don’t ever speak to me again.’

  Knowing that it was useless, that there was nothing I could do, nothing I could say to alleviate the hurt, to mitigate the damage, I pulled my robe around me and let her go. For a brief moment I wished that I were dead.

  I knew that it was not because she had been going out with Félix – Félix had told me they had never slept together – but because I had demolished her basic good opinion of me and deceived her father whom she loved and admired. It was a state of affairs which could not be rectified, a glass which had been shattered into a thousand pieces. I was aware of Félix standing beside me and was grateful that he did not touch me, did not try to tell me that everything was going to be all right.

  The drive back to Paris was overshadowed by the turn that events had taken, a sombre finale to the joyful anticipation of the journey down. Félix had wanted to stay, to make the best we could of our last week, but I was frightened. I had to get back to Paris, to redeem what I could from the holocaust before, like the forest fires which, according to the latest reports, were sweeping through the Var and destroying everything in their paths, Michelle got back to Paris and the situation got irretrievably out of hand.

  Félix did not really understand. Yes, it was embarrassing. Yes, he wished it hadn’t happened, that Michelle had stayed away, but why deny ourselves what remained of our idyll? I put his obtuseness down to his youth and the fact that at twenty-eight the web that he weaved around himself was relatively untangled.

  With the mistral still blowing, seeping under the doors and in through the window frames, leaving a yellow dust on the wicker chairs and the blue and white tiles, we stripped the bed of the sheets and our passion, closed the shutters, zapped the electricity and turned off the water supply. Shutting the door of Notre Rêve – which in the event had turned out to be a nightmare rather than a dream – behind us, we picked up our suitcases and made for the car.

  They were the same sunflowers, the same avenues of limes when we left the autoroute, hissing their disapproval as we passed them by, the same perched villages on either side of us, little changed since the Middle Ages, the same motorway cafés with their melamine tables and ubiquitous frites, the same Routiers where we stopped for lunch among the HGV drivers and which I could not eat, but I saw none of it with the same eyes.

  What if Michelle had already telephoned Jordan? Would I find my belongings already packed? Would Jordan, to whom the world, like that of his mother, was either black or white and whose morals were unassailable, throw me out? Had I, carried away by a coup de foudre, destroyed my family and everything I had invested in my marriage?

  The diesel fumes which hung like a pall over Paris assaulted our noses and the night-time Péripherique, still gridlocked with traffic and dazzling with headlights, seemed to be never-ending.

  On the corner of the Boulevard Courcelles, where I insisted Félix drop me, he followed me out of the car. The silent manège with its shrouded cars and miniature speedboats was bereft of children. We stood outside the illuminated window of the flower shop mocked by the grinning orange faces of the raffia pumpkins predicating Halloween. Félix took my hand.

  ‘When will I see you?’

  I wondered was he mad.

  ‘I love you Judith.’

  He loved my mature body, my maternal caring.

  ‘It’s over, Félix.’

  ‘Not until the fat lady sings.’

  Even now he could make me laugh. I picked up my suitcase.

  ‘Call me. You will call me?’

  His eyes were dark with passion. I yearned for him and knew that although a drastic operation, in the person of Michelle, had been carried out to relieve me of my sickness, I had not been cured.

  I shook my head, glad that he could not see my tears. Had my suitcase not been so heavy I would have run, although I could not run away. Feeling like the criminal which I was – I had killed my marriage – I punched the keypad outside my building as the Merc disappeared into the distance.

  Reluctant to face what might lie behind my own front door, I went first to Lauren’s praying that she would be at home. Wearing a baby-doll nightdress and with the oily slick of night-cream on her surprised face she let me in.

  ‘Do you know what the time is?’

  ‘I need to talk.’

  She stifled a yawn.

  ‘If a girl needs to talk, a girl needs to talk.’

  Leading the way into the mirrored sitting-room, she poured a glass of wine for each of us and, appraising my petrified face, curled up on one of the white sofas, awaiting my confession.

  chapter sixteen

  ‘When does Michelle get back?’ Lauren said when I’d finished my story.

  ‘The end of the week. What if she’s already called Jordan?’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘Possible.’

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ Lauren shook her head. ‘One indiscretion. Bof! Don’t worry about it. Your husband is pure gold.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘You asked me to keep an eye on him. I invited him to dinner…’

  ‘Dinner, you?’ Lauren couldn’t cook.

  ‘I ordered a Chinese. Jordan brought his laptop, he worked most of the way through the Singapore noodles. Muttered about having to fix Monsieur le Viscomte…’

  ‘He’s run into problems with his deal.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for explanations. I’ve enough problems of my own. He did apologize. When he was through and I’d murdered an entire bottle of St Emilion, I said it had been a scintillating evening.’

  ‘Jordan doesn’t do sarcasm.’

  ‘I told him he was the best looking man I knew. I may have been a little drunk by that time.’

  ‘And he said?’

  ‘“Coming from you, Lauren, that’s a compliment.” And I said, “I wouldn’t leave my husband in Paris on his own.” And he said, “I didn’t think you had a husband, Lauren.” And I said, “Not for want of trying…”’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You really want me to? OK, I went to sit on the sofa beside him. And then I said – so help me God – “if Judith wasn’t my best friend, Jo
rdan Flatland, I would take you into the bedroom and fuck you.”’

  ‘And what did Jordan say?’

  ‘Need you ask? He picked up his laptop, gave me a big hug, thanked me for the Singapore noodles, said he had an early start and kissed me goodnight. That’s Jordan for you.’

  ‘What am I going to do, Lauren?’

  ‘For starters I suggest you kip down on that sofa. It’s not a bit of use walking in on Jordan this time of night.’

  ‘I mean what am I going to do?’

  ‘Take one step at a time. Play it by ear.’

  ‘What about the children. I don’t want to lose the children.’

  ‘Have you thought of the possibility that Michelle will keep this to herself and that it will all blow over?’

  ‘How can I be sure?’

  ‘You’ve got three days before she gets home. You’ll work something out. It’s two a.m., Judith. Some of us have to earn a living. Everything will look better in the morning.’

  Lauren kissed me tenderly and lent me a toothbrush. To my surprise – I must have been exhausted by the rollercoaster of my emotions and from the journey – I slept.

  When I let myself into my own apartment, Jordan was having breakfast as I knew he would be. He was a creature of precise habit and, by checking the time, I knew that he had already been for his jog. The Allgemeine Zeitung was on the kitchen table; he always stopped at the kiosk and picked up a newspaper for Helga.

  I stood in the doorway of the time-expired kitchen as he poured milk on to his Granola. My heart was gyrating to an unfamiliar rhythm and I was uncertain of my reception.

  ‘Judith!’

  Why didn’t he say ‘darling’? Was he trying to tell me something? I need not have worried. He took me in his arms and whirled me around affectionately. I felt like Judas.

  ‘Am I pleased to see you…’

  ‘You missed me then?’ I was still feeling my way.

  ‘It’s not so much that. I’m up to here – ’ he indicated his chin ‘ – with wiener schnitzel!’

  He poured me coffee, strong, as I liked it, and listened, wanting to know every detail while I filled him in on Antibes. Separating the wheat of the vacation from the chaff of Félix, I did my best to pick out the highlights: the sea, the weather, the food, the sights. I could have been reciting the merits of the Côte d’Azur verbatim from a travel guide. Jordan seemed not to notice. He told me about his trip to Boston where he had visited his mother on Beacon Hill and Maurice, our Weimeraner, in the boarding kennels. It wasn’t hard to see from which one of them he had received the most rapturous welcome.

  Kissing me again, he collected up his gear and glancing at his trusty Rolex made for the front door which I held open for him. ‘By the way,’ he pressed the button on the headstrong elevator, ‘Michelle came home early. She didn’t want to go to Juan without Lois. She’s in her room.’

  I tried to read his face but he was already in the elevator, disappearing inch by slow inch down to the ground floor. Did Jordan know? Was he playing games with me? I went into the apartment and closed the door.

  ‘How’s everything?’ I asked Helga when she emerged, bleary eyed from her bedroom. I was trying to sound her out.

  ‘Hans-Dieter is fine…’

  ‘I meant with Mr Flatland?’

  ‘Very gut!’ A smile enveloped her face. ‘He likes my wiener schnitzel.’

  ‘How about Michelle?’

  ‘Very sleeping. She say not to waken her up.’

  Not falling over myself to ‘waken Michelle up’, I went into the bedroom where only Jordan’s side of the bed was disturbed – he slept as tidily as he did everything else – and my Calvin Klein teeshirt, stained with suntan oil, lay where Michelle had apparently hurled it, contemptuously on my pristine pillow. I took a shower as leisurely as the erratic plumbing would allow and washed the salt water out of my hair. More than anything else I wanted to call Félix but it was, of course, out of the question. Feeling like an intruder in my own home, I set about clearing up the chaos that had accrued in the two weeks I had been away. I looked at the plate of anaemic veal escalopes in the otherwise empty fridge, cleaned the grease from where it had accumulated on the wall behind the cooker, and sorted through my mail. There was a postcard from Joey with a picture of a handsome leaping salmon on the front: ‘Walter caught this ginormous salmon. He’s going to have it smoaked.’ There was a postscript from my mother to say that it was still raining but that everything was fine. I did not touch Michelle’s rucksack which lay abandoned in the hall.

  The day, which was languid and torrid – no mistral in Paris – passed languidly and torridly. Not knowing what to do with myself I listened outside Michelle’s door for signs that she was stirring and waited with trepidation for Jordan to come home.

  In the middle of the afternoon, after Helga had left for her English class, a wave of panic overtook me and I wondered whether Michelle was really asleep or if, tipped overboard by her discovery in Antibes, she had overdosed on something nasty. Opening her door quietly I looked into the bedroom where she was lying with her thumb in her mouth and breathing steadily. At five o’clock, because there was no food in the house and there was no way I was going to feed Jordan wiener schnitzel again, I went to the supermarket where my guilty conscience led me to spend a small fortune on baby artichokes and melons from Cavaillon and the finest quality filet. When I came out with my loaded trolley I looked in vain for the rose on my car.

  Over dinner, which went unremarked on, Jordan brought me up to date with Rochelle Eléctronique. The session in Boston had been fruitful and he and Sherman had come back to Paris with a plan which was designed to appease the French Foreign Office so that the deal, with only minor amendments, could go ahead. They had presented their proposals to Monsieur le Viscomte and were waiting, not very patiently, for his response.

  ‘I told him in no uncertain terms,’ Jordan said over the steak which I had cooked almost to oblivion just as he liked it – Félix preferred his bloody and raw, ‘that if they advised Rochelle against what we considered was an extremely fair proposal, more of a compromise than we would have liked, I have an alternative strategy which the French Government may find a good deal less congenial.’

  ‘What alternative strategy?’

  Jordan smiled; he was an ace bluffer.

  ‘I haven’t thought of one yet.’

  I had bought some wine dark cherries, plump and fat, and we were eating them when Michelle appeared, dishevelled in not very clean shorts. Sitting down at the table and pushing aside her melon, she ignored my presence and turned to Jordan.

  ‘Daddy, I need to talk to you.’

  Thinking that the game was up and that she was going to tell Jordan about Félix, I got up to cook her steak and found that I was shaking.

  Jordan took a brace of cherries joined by their stems from his plate and hung them over Michelle’s ear as he had done when she was a child. She was not amused. Removing the earring and returning the cherries to his plate she said:

  ‘I’m not coming back to Boston.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Jordan played for time. He liked to see all the cards on the table.

  ‘I want to stay in Paris.’

  ‘I had the impression you were going to law school in the fall.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  Taking his memo-machine from his pocket Jordan rewound it and switched it to play.

  ‘I suggest you discuss this with your mother,’ he said, over the low volume of the recording from which I was able to distinguish the words Cavendish Holdings and Pilcher Bain.

  ‘I suggest you discuss this with my mother.’ Michelle’s voice was caustic.

  ‘Your father’s very worried at the moment,’ I ventured, ‘about Rochelle Eléctronique…’

  Ignoring me disdainfully, which was no more than I deserved, Michelle addressed Jordan’s back before storming out of the room.

  ‘Maybe you should take your nose out of Rochelle Eléctronique
some time!’

  ‘What’s gotten into her?’ Jordan said later, when we getting ready for bed.

  When I didn’t reply – I didn’t trust myself – he went on:

  ‘I wonder if it’s something to do with that fellow.’

  ‘What fellow?’ I knew perfectly well.

  ‘Félix? Didn’t you say his name was Félix? He looked like a troublemaker. I didn’t care for the look of him at the time.’

  Since Jordan never liked the look of Michelle’s boyfriends on principal, I did not defend him. I did not want to discuss Félix whose presence was never far from my mind.

  ‘I saw Lauren while you were away,’ Jordan said when we were in bed.

  Honest John wanted to be sure that I knew he had done nothing underhand.

  ‘She tried to get me into bed.’

  Putting off the moment when I knew Jordan would want to make love to me, I joined in the conversation.

  ‘She’s been trying to get you into bed for years.’

  ‘Well she didn’t exactly try. She said if you weren’t her best friend…’

  You could always get an accurate picture from Jordan.

  ‘I felt quite sorry for her. Look, I’ve missed you. I don’t want to talk about Lauren.’

  ‘Joey will be back in a few days.’

  ‘And I don’t want to talk about Joey. Did you miss me?’

  I tried to take myself back to the Roman ruins of Provençe, to the elegant hotels and Palladian villas of the belle époque, to the fierce heat and the harsh light of the land of love immortalized by the troubadours and by the poetry of Petrarch, in which I had sojourned with my lover. No matter how poignant, how intense our experiences, like the pain of childbirth, they can never be accurately recalled.

  Analysing it later I supposed that although I was no longer ‘in love’ with Jordan and his body could no longer claim to be a source of erotic delight, what I had with him was happiness and, until I met Félix, had wallowed in the security of living side by side with someone I felt I had known all my life. When I was with Jordan there was a sense of homecoming and the uncanny conviction that what there was between us was not a new experience but that we had met somewhere before. I loved Jordan and was in little doubt that I was wholeheartedly loved in return.