Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  It was impossible to talk to Jordan at the moment. He was interested in nothing other than rescuing his deal.

  ‘He will have to be told sooner or later.’

  Sooner or later Jordan would have to be told.

  On the way back to the rue Mazarine where I had parked my car, we passed a boutique with a notice in the window: ‘recrute vendeuse’, beside a flounced, flame-red dress on a supercilious model with a chalk-white face. Félix had his arm around my shoulders. Drawn by the dramatic impact of the presentation, we stopped to stare.

  ‘I’d like to buy it for you.’

  Jordan had never so much as entered a dress shop.

  I told him that according to Lauren, black was the new black.

  ‘Then you will stand out like a cardinal among a flock of priests.’

  In the shop, whose bell tinkled as we entered summoning the vendeuse who wore a diamond ring on her engagement finger, I tried on the scarlet dress while Félix sat patiently on a chair.

  ‘It’s not my colour.’

  I felt like the Scarlet Woman, like Scarlet O’Hara, the Woman in Red.

  It fitted me perfectly: voluptuous, bare backed, the flounces undulating as I moved. Women who wore red were perceived to be bad news. Holding my head high I confronted the new Judith Flatland who regarded me from the mirror.

  Straightening a seam here, a flounce there, the vendeuse signified her approval. As if we were alone in the shop, Félix kissed my exposed flesh, his mouth lingering on my back, and indicated that we would take it.

  ‘Que tu es belle, Judith. Que tu es belle.’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Judith,’ Lauren’s face was serious. ‘I speak to you as a friend.’

  Wondering what was coming I put my fork down on my smoked-salmon blinis.

  ‘You have to eat,’ Lauren said. ‘You’re making yourself ill.’

  I was ill, sick with love. I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘How old are you Judith?’

  ‘You know perfectly well how old I am. I’m forty-two. I’m the same age as you.’

  ‘And how old is your…’ she caught my eye, ‘Félix.’

  ‘Félix is twenty-eight. Our birthdays are in February. We are both Aquarians.’

  Lauren snorted.

  ‘Big deal. Have you thought what things are going to be like in twenty years time when you are sixty-eight; when you are old and Félix is in his prime?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ I refused to think about it. I had fallen in love with Félix and it was the best thing and the worst thing I had ever done.

  ‘Have you thought about Jordan?’

  ‘Jordan’s married to the bank.’

  ‘Jordan would never take you back.’

  Lauren was probably right. Like a broken friendship, a betrayed trust, my relationship with Jordan, once severed, could never be reinstated.

  ‘Have you thought about your children?’

  ‘Michelle no longer needs me. She no longer talks to me.’

  ‘Joey is nine years old.’

  ‘Joey is a survivor.’

  It was true. He was dependent on nobody and was already planning the trip he was going to take round the world when he left school.

  ‘How will he manage without you?’

  ‘It’s only Paris, Lauren. I’m still his mother.’

  ‘You’re in a bubble, Judith. Someday that bubble is going to burst…’

  I would have to take that chance. Although somewhere I knew that Lauren was talking sense, that she had my interests at heart, I could not endow her words with any sort of meaning.

  ‘Take anyone out of their usual environment and madness will ensue. What is it with this young man, Judith?’ Lauren was getting desperate. ‘Don’t give me that crap about sex. Sex doesn’t last – take it from Momma – we’d all die from exhaustion if it lasted forever.’

  ‘It’s how he makes me feel.’

  It was true. When I was with Félix I no longer felt chronically undervalued. I was worthy of consideration, someone in her own right.

  ‘You got married too young.’

  I remembered my wedding day. I had married Jordan not only because I loved him but because he made me feel safe. He was the one for me and I had let him persuade me that I was the one for him. Neither of us saw any reason why we shouldn’t make it official straight away. Looking round the congregation in the church and seeing my friends grinning at me in their new hats and hired morning coats, I did wonder how it was that I had reached this pivotal moment in my life so soon.

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything, Judith. You have tunnel vision. I might as well save my breath.’

  It was Nadine, little Nadine with her chic little clothes and her gamine hair – on Beacon Hill it was said that if Nadine fell down a drain she would come up smelling of violets – when she came to discuss the menu for the farewell dinner, who told me about Rochelle Eléctronique, who put me in the picture about Jordan’s Machiavellian scheme.

  Kicking off her size three shoes and making herself as comfortable as she could on the unyielding Genoese cut-velvet sofa in the salon with its walls hung with yellow silk and its lacklustre eighteenth-century paintings of Frenchmen of good family leaving home to join the army, she said:

  ‘You’re not going to believe this, Judith, but your husband is holding the French Government to ransom!’

  ‘Nothing that Jordan does would surprise me.’

  ‘Wait till you hear this. Jordan has given the Viscomte one week to back down. To reconsider his proposal concerning the golden share. If Jordan doesn’t hear directly from the Foreign Office before noon next Wednesday, that they are prepared to go ahead with Rochelle Eléctronique on the basis originally agreed, he’s going to take the matter into his own hands.’

  ‘What did the Viscomte say to that?’

  ‘“That is entirely up to you Mr Flatland.”’

  At this point the Viscomte had apparently got up from his chair and indicated that the meeting was at an end. Jordan had insisted that he not only sit down again and listen, but listen extremely carefully to what he was about to say.

  If Nadine had got the story right – and there was no reason to suppose that she had not – if there was no word from the Foreign Office by the time Jordan’s deadline had expired, he intended to put the plan he had devised into motion, to hit them where it hurt. On Wednesday morning, sealed envelopes containing invitations to a press conference at Offenbach Frères at 6 p.m., would be delivered by courier to the principal financial journalists in Paris. The Viscomte had refused to be intimidated. ‘Ze Foreign Office has nossing to fear from ze press.’

  ‘Wait till you hear this, Judith. Jordan will mark the envelopes, “Not to be opened until 3.30 p.m.” – after the stock exchange has closed. At the press conference, Jordan will tell the reporters how Pilcher Bain has been treated in Paris and will make it clear to them that as a direct consequence of the French Government’s outrageous and unacceptable last minute demands, his client will be pulling out of the Rochelle Eléctronique deal!’

  I could not believe that Jordan, who had worked so hard for so long, was prepared to walk away from the deal.

  ‘What was the response?’

  ‘Zilch. It was the next bit that wiped the smile off the Viscomte’s face.’

  While the invitations were being delivered, Nadine said, some of them could ‘accidentally’ be dropped and fall into the wrong hands while the Bourse was still open.

  I was getting confused.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Rochelle Eléctronique is a blue-chip company. If it gets out that Pilcher Bain has called a press conference because the French Government is blocking a bid, the value of the shares would drop sharply. The Bourse could get jittery about the government’s behaviour and institutional investors might well decide to switch their funds out of French markets. The last thing Monsieur le Viscomte wants to do is to jeopardize the p
osition of Paris in the financial league table. Sherman thinks Jordan has gone bananas.

  ‘The Viscomte is beside himself. He’s accused Jordan of blackmail, told him that the government is not prepared to be put under pressure and, in addition, has threatened to make a formal complaint, not only to Pilcher Bain in Boston, but to the United States treasury department…’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘That’s not all. He’s going to make a strong recommendation to his government that Jordan, Sherman, and the bank be barred from ever doing business in France again. I knew Jordan was tough, Judith, but even Sherman is worried and he knows him pretty well. Who was it said that we die without really knowing what the person closest to us is capable of?’

  When Nadine had finished her story I realized why Jordan, who usually kept me informed of what was going on at the bank, had this time not confided in me. At least I presumed that was the reason. All he had told me was that he was putting the screws on the Viscomte and that if Claude Lafarge called and wanted to speak to him – no matter how urgently – at any time of the day or night before next Wednesday, he was out.

  ‘About the menu,’ Nadine said.

  ‘The menu?’

  ‘For the celebration dinner. I’ve found the most divine caterer…’

  ‘Is there going to be a celebration dinner?’

  Knowing Jordan, knowing his capacity for taking risks, for taking everything to the very edge, his absolute integrity, his abhorrence of being double-crossed or of double-crossing, I thought that there was every chance there might be.

  chapter nineteen

  In the end we settled on an iced soup in consideration of the weather, followed by gigot d’agneau, and a Grand Marnier soufflé for which the caterer Nadine had found was famed.

  While Nadine, wearing her Anyoccasion.com hat and writing everything down in a spiral notebook, waxed lyrical about the dinner – did I think canapés to start and what about the champagne? – I was wondering how I was going to tell Jordan of my decision, and if the Rochelle Eléctronique deal were to fall through, would I be strong enough to deliver the coup de grâce, and my thoughts were elsewhere.

  It is one thing deciding to leave your husband and quite another thing to do it. Since I had made my mind up I had made several abortive attempts to discuss the matter with Jordan whom I knew would not only be disbelieving, but would be profoundly shocked. How did you tell someone who loved you, who was the father of your children, with whom you were intimate and had shared everything for eighteen years, that it was all over? Had there been a book I would have taken it out of the library; had there been a manual on how to leave your husband after eighteen years of marriage in which the treacherous bends and stretches of white water had largely been weathered, I would have consulted it. I begged Lauren to advise me but since she thoroughly disapproved of the action I was contemplating she refused to help.

  ‘It’s not as if you don’t love Jordan, Judith.’

  ‘There are many kinds of love.’

  ‘What you and Jordan have going for you is the ongoing kind. From where I’m standing it’s been a pretty sensational journey.’

  ‘People who set out together are not necessarily the same after ten years, let alone eighteen.’

  ‘I wish I could make you see sense.’

  I knew that it was commonplace to love one person and be ‘in love’ with another, and that once the heart is set, the lover will listen to no warnings, no advice.

  ‘Perhaps eighteen years is too long to be sensible. There’s no fun in being sensible. Perhaps I’m bored.’

  ‘Bored is no reason to ditch a marriage.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘You don’t have to be a chef to judge an omelette.’

  Lauren always had an answer.

  ‘Bored is nothing. Lonely is something. Ask all the lonely people. Lonely is the worst scenario.’

  ‘I’m not going to be lonely.’

  ‘Without Michelle? Oh I know she’s not talking to you at the moment, she’ll get over it. Without Joey? Without your dried up stick of a mother-in-law, without your job in the museum and your colleagues, without the gym, without the tennis club, without Jordan, even if he has he got takeovers for eyes, without your life on Beacon Hill?’

  I let Lauren talk. It was like a chimera. All I could see was Félix and Beacon Hill seemed far away.

  Plucking up my courage – it was not an easy thing to do – I tried, on more than one occasion, to broach the subject with Jordan. I thought it only fair. Each time we were interrupted and I finally gave up, putting off the evil I was about to do until the day thereof.

  On the first two occasions, as if it were part of a conspiracy to silence me, we were interrupted by the telephone which I had instructions to answer in case it was Claude Lafarge.

  I waited until Jordan seemed a little less tense than he had been of late as he waited for word from the Viscomte. Guessing what he must be going through, with his career, with everything he had worked so hard for on the line, I made him sit down in the salon after Joey had gone to bed.

  ‘I need to call a meeting…’

  It was a joke between us. I’d schedule a meeting so that I could be sure of his full attention whenever I had some domestic matter – fixing to have the house redecorated or Joey’s school report or Michelle’s unacceptable behaviour – to discuss.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’ I ignored my heart which was thumping away.

  ‘OK, what’s on the agenda?’ His amused smile belying the anxiety in his eyes, his permanently drawn face, he joined in the game.

  I got as far as taking a deep breath and saying:

  ‘There’s something we have to talk about. Something extremely important. You’re not going to – ’

  I was about to say, ‘You’re not going to like it’, when the telephone rang.

  It was Charles Whittaker from the treasury department in Boston. Jordan grabbed the receiver. I heard him say, ‘Yes sir… Yes sir, he said he would… No sir… No sir, it’s the oldest trick in the book and I have no intention of letting them pull it… I’m glad I have your support and will proceed as planned… Yes sir…of course I will, sir… Accidents however do happen… Let’s hope they won’t be necessary.’

  The call lifted his mood, he looked happier than he had done for days. Before I knew it he was on his mobile to Sherman, reporting his conversation with the treasury department, tearing it apart, and the moment was lost.

  The second time I tried to bring up the subject of Félix, it was Claude Lafarge insisting that he speak to Jordan on a matter of extreme urgency. Aware of my instructions, I put my hand over the receiver.

  ‘He says it’s extremely urgent.’

  Jordan shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Lafarge, my husband is out.’

  I put my hand over the receiver again.

  ‘He wants to know when it will be convenient to talk to you.’

  This time Jordan left the room and I relied on my own ingenuity to spin a tale about him having to leave Paris for a few days, having to go to Mulhouse, although of course that was Félix.

  In the end it was Félix who helped me to nullify my marriage, to cut the ties that bound me inextricably to my life.

  Time was rapidly running out and Jordan still had not heard from the Viscomte. The muscles in his cheek were twitching, and recognizing the danger signal I was careful not to cross him. He was sharp with Joey which was unusual, and the sound of the telephone, which put him on full alert, made him jump. It was not an easy time for either of us.

  Hot as it was in the rue de Buci, the quartier which I knew by sight, by sound, by smell, and of which I already felt part, grew more beautiful. In the mysterious de Chirico shadows, pierced by tumbling urns of busy lizzies, and the vanishing points of the cul-de-sac, could be seen the architectural follies, the intricate intimacies of the buildings, the clochards slumped motionless in the doorways, the urine trickling from behind builde
rs’ skips – there were not enough pissoirs – which mingled with the animal scent left by cats and coiffured poodles and ran in rivulets into the road.

  Félix needed some paints to finish his portrait. The Lady with a Glove was almost completed. The filligree of the dress which spanned her narrow waist was as black as the original in the Musée d’Orsay; like her prototype she seductively removed her remaining glove, the little finger extended; this time, however, the tilted face unmistakeably bore my features and the rose in her hat was red.

  Although I had not sat for the portrait, I knew, from watching Félix, a painter obsessed by the fundamental eccentricities of his subjects, that the pigment had been vigorously handled, as if the canvas were a battleground, and that the strength of the likeness testified both to his feelings towards me and to the inner struggle which informed the completion of the work.

  Sennelier, on the Quai Voltaire across the river from the Louvre, was an ancient mecca for artists’ materials. In the windows were unsullied easels, boxes of acrylics, watercolour papers and mannequins articulés gesticulating to the passers-by with their stiff wooden limbs, while inside, in ordered chaos, were varnished wood cabinets, brass-handled drawers with illegible labels, coloured inks and pigments and plaster casts of classical heads illuminating the gloom. While Félix made his selection from the violets, ochres, magentas and ivory blacks of the couleurs à l’huile in pristine tubes, discussing his needs with the knowledgeable assistants in their white cotton coats, I fingered the brushes, ‘Raphaels’ and ‘Manets’ in all sizes and substances, from the finest sable to the coarsest bristle, touched the fans of creamy paper, the sketch pads and albums and the rolled toiles écrues. A case of hand-moulded pastels laid end to end in tempting sticks of ethereal colours – lemons and umbres for landscapes, pinks and browns for portraits, rose and crimson for flowers – conjured up Boucher, Degas and Pascin, their delicate strokes as fragile as gossamer.

  Carrying our purchases we crossed the road to where the bouquinistes were laying out their stalls with crude facsimiles of the Sacré Coeur and paperback translations of Henry Miller. Descending the steps of the Escale Malaquais and, as if we had all the time in the world, we melded with the other lovers walking arm-in-arm beneath the poplar trees, skirting the joggers and the silent pony-tailed fishermen in their battle fatigues standing guard over hopeful rods. The slopping water and the intricate patterns of the Louvre were picked out by the sunlight, and the mournful siren of a passing barge festooned with geraniums and washing-lines was drowned by the raucous commentary that came from the bows of a swiftly moving sightseeing boat.