Paris Mon Amour

by Isabel Costello

  Paris Mon Amour

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  After and Before

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Chapter Sixty Three

  After and Before

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Paris Mon Amour

  Isabel Costello

  For JC, my love

  As a child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

  Tout enfant, j’ai senti dans mon cœur deux sentiments contradictoires, l’horreur de la vie et l’extase de la vie.

  Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare (Mon cœur mis à nu)

  After and Before

  The first time I caused terrible harm to those I love it was an accident. The second is the reason I’m here.

  Not just here in this place with the paint box aquamarine sky, the gulls wheeling overhead, the warm salt air on my skin. I mean here, right now, on my way to our first session. I say ‘first’, but it’s hard to imagine lasting one, let alone many. It’s good that you’re up on the hill, near the fine art museum with these dusty exotic gardens. I can come here afterward to pull myself together.

  And before. This is going to hurt.

  I pause in the gardens to reapply my lipstick, checking in my compact mirror, not that I need to. I learned the outline of my mouth from his finger mapping it, just like every other inch of me. Eyes closed, I can trick myself into believing he is still with me, up against me; I see his smile, the way he used to look at me. I remember the heat of my hands on his body, him in mine. What began as everything would be almost the least of it, in the end. And when I reach the end, as I always will, it’s to find he’s left me all over again.

  I smooth my hair and my dress in one sweep, fingertips skimming my breasts as the heels of my hands trace my new shape. A man catches my eye and smiles. Younger than me. Handsome. I turn away.

  Continuing up the street, I look for the building you described with the mosaic over the entrance. You sounded kind when I called, as if you understood when I said I needed to talk to someone and really didn’t want to at all. I’m not exactly at my best right now but I guess you’re used to that. For now it’s this or nothing. And nothing really isn’t working.

  You said that your room has a view of the bay and on warm days you leave the balcony door open. The ocean has always been part of this story even when it was miles away. There is no shutting it out, not ever.

  Chapter One

  Both parts of my story involve my mother and things she should never have said. Thirty years ago, she told me never to call her Mom again. But I can’t go there yet. Since you said it was up to me, I’m going to begin with last summer, when she’d just arrived in Paris.

  You do realise he has another woman?

  That’s how it all started, with those few words, not telling me anything that wasn’t already known to me in the place we hide what we can’t bear to look at. Or speak of. Yet here I am.

  It was the first night of Mom’s visit (of course I never stopped calling her that in my head) and I was holding off dinner, trying to judge the point at which it would no longer be worth eating. As I fixed her another drink, she lit a slim French cigarette, pausing to stare at the lighter flame before taking a deep drag as if her survival depended on it. When she went home to California, it would be back to Marlboro Lights and business as usual.

  Philippe hadn’t called. I checked again for a text message I knew wouldn’t be there; the alert was too irritating to miss and I’d never worked out how to change it. Maybe his phone was out of charge. Or maybe he’d forgotten my mother was arriving. Lately there had been a lot of maybes. Our last long walk by the river was months ago, before my surgery. Nothing had been in kilter since.

  I handed the cocktail to Mom, who always called it a martini although she liked it heavier on vodka. At the rate she knocked them back I was tempted to switch to a bigger glass. I gravitated toward the open window, which was one of three. On a corner, our living-room looked both across and down the street and those views still affected me after five years. It divided further along, leading to the Théâtre de l’Odéon on the left, the Sénat on the right and beyond that the Jardin du Luxembourg, where I now ran almost every morning, trying to get back in shape after a stint of ill-health and inactivity. Before last summer French food was my greatest temptation.

  Opposite there were elegant buildings, close relatives of ours, with iron balconies and double windows that gave way to mansards higher up with rotting frames no painter could reach. In summer the glazed squares and rectangles held their secrets for longer with the light evenings. After dark, less imagination was required. Not that I’m a voyeur, you understand; I did more wondering than watching. And I had to wonder what anyone would make of me standing there as I often did, unsure what to make of myself.

  I turned back to my mother who was bristling with boredom. Without Philippe the part of me that believed the evening could be a success had gone missing. His kindness and solicitude toward my mother compensated for my deficiencies; he made her feel good and sadly I couldn’t say the same, but it never stopped me trying. Forty years old and still I craved her approval. We all want things that are never going to happen.

  ‘Would you be more comfortable on the sofa?’ I asked.

  If she were to act on my suggestion, either I would end up on one of the upright, thinly upholstered chairs that looked straight out of Versailles or we’d find ourselves awkwardly close together on the squashy blue sofa where Philippe and I sat to watch TV. A memory caught me between the ribs, of a tiny me with Mom on the swing seat on the porch. J
ust us – maybe my little brother Christopher was sleeping. We’re reading The Velveteen Rabbit and she is hugging me. We can hear the Pacific Ocean, the soundtrack of my early childhood, a half block away. What’s hardest is knowing that we were happy. I couldn’t share this with her now because it didn’t last. Over time the two of us had been reduced to a single memory, the chapters that came before torn out and borne away on the wind.

  Mom said she was fine where she was with her cocktail and cigarette: blood and oxygen, life’s essentials. As our habitual loaded silence descended she looked around the room, following its progress into every corner. I took another sip of the excellent flinty Chablis, which I’d brought up from Philippe’s cellar in the basement the day before, the effect fortifying and agreeably numbing. I was overcome with weariness trying to come up with a safe topic of conversation. We had a tendency to fall into the same old grooves; I guess it must be like that for everyone. In any case, she spoke next.

  ‘I’m disappointed you can’t take time off, Alexandra, when I’ve travelled five and a half thousand miles to be with you.’

  Five and a half thousand? She must have looked it up. Ocean plus continent.

  If I’m going to be frank – and there really isn’t any point doing this otherwise – that was the distance which worked best for us. Her visit was shorter than usual, only four days, and having spent two weeks on a painting trip in the south of France for once she wasn’t jet lagged. She was primed, with red-painted claws, always making an effort when in Paris. Same with the Sobranie cigarettes in their candied pastel colours, too pretty to burn. Whether this was a treat or a coping mechanism, something to sweeten the ordeal, I couldn’t be sure. It was a miracle that Mom and I had a relationship of any kind. We both have a good side the other rarely gets to see.

  ‘Sorry, it’s just the timing,’ I said. ‘Things are always frantic when we have a new book coming out. It’s too bad you won’t be here for the launch.’

  ‘I suppose Philippe will at least turn up for that?’

  I breathed in through my nose. As I felt my mouth tighten, my mother’s did the opposite, relaxing with amusement. She liked to see if she could push me into lashing back. I doubt that she intended to hurt me and, in any case, I was complicit by never telling her she did. Once you’re assigned a role, be it victim, fall guy or guilty party, it’s hard to imagine things any other way.

  The launch was to be held at Philippe’s gallery in rue Mazarine in two weeks’ time. When the day came I would be grateful for every one of those five and a half thousand miles between Mom and me. And yes, I had the decency to feel bad about that. It went with the territory.

  ‘We’re hoping this volume will attract a lot of attention,’ I said, although the situation was considerably more urgent than I let on. ‘It’s about some rare Romanian icons very few people have ever seen. It took the author years to persuade the monastery to allow a photographer in, but the pictures are absolutely stunning.’

  Although my mother had heard me mention it before, I didn’t expect her to remember. ‘Who on earth is interested in Romanian icons?’ Mom ground her cigarette butt into the ashtray as if defacing one then and there.

  I went to defend them then thought better of it. The icons weren’t in the same league as the Turin Shroud or the Terracotta Warriors but they had something special. It was unlikely, but if there were to be huge interest the monastery might relent and allow an exhibition. Editions Gallici, the small fine art publisher I worked for, would have been there first.

  My mother painted seascapes, selling to tourists through a gallery in Mendocino County which gouged her on commission. I was the one with the degrees in art history, an acute eye for colour ever since I was a child, fascinated not only by new shades but the exotic words that went with them: cerulean, magenta, burnt sienna. But Mom was the one with the actual talent, the ability to create. She conveyed things which defied capture: the immensity of the Pacific, the wild beauty of the shore in all weathers, its mutable skies. I had to hang her canvas of Cannon Beach, Oregon, in the guest room because I couldn’t pass it without stopping, as if I could entreat the ocean to give back what it had stolen from us.

  For an artist, my mom could be quite the philistine. She gave a polite show of respect toward Philippe’s gallery but my career was granted no such favours. ‘Coffee table books,’ she called them. ‘Nobody wants them anymore.’

  Needless to say, it was about other things than that. After sending me to boarding school in England at the age of twelve, she’d acted surprised when I decided to settle in Europe. She never understood why I had decided to pursue my career here when I could have done so in San Francisco or New York.

  Unfortunately she wasn’t wrong about our books. The way people looked at (or to use that awful word, consumed) art had changed. Even faced with the original in a museum or gallery, many preferred to take photos they’d never look at on their phones. It was easy to kid yourself you were cultured: here, buy a Monet mouse mat, a Hockneyesque silk scarf. Where sophisticated tourists and business travellers once leafed through glossy pages in luxury hotel lobbies and corporate reception areas, now all they cared about was getting a wifi connection.

  The bells of Saint-Sulpice struck nine, the room still pulsing with summer light. There was a timelessness to much of European life that I found immensely comforting. I’m only half American, after all, half British. That might account for my strong sense of having two distinct sides to my nature.

  I bet you hate it when people turn up with their own half-baked theories.

  ‘What a racket!’ Mom said, and not for the first time.

  I took a skewer and prodded the chicken breasts wrapped in Parma ham, now mummified. ‘We should go ahead and eat,’ I said, sliding them onto plates with a serving of green beans that no longer had any bite. Mom had joined me in the small kitchen and was wrestling with a bottle of red wine and a counterintuitive corkscrew which even endangered the misplaced fingers of the stone-cold sober, which she was most emphatically not.

  ‘Give me that.’ I pointed her toward yet another uncomfortable seat, at the dining table. For a contemporary art dealer Philippe had a curious fondness for antique furniture; I don’t think he can have spent much time at home before he met me. The velvet sofa was my idea, although in hindsight French navy wasn’t the best choice. It really shows the dirt.

  I made no further mention of Philippe but for a second my mother and I both stared at the empty place setting, which a tactful waiter would have removed in a restaurant. She unwrapped the Parma ham from the chicken, reached over and dumped it on my plate. Funny how a simple gesture can make a person feel large and small. So what if I’d gained weight since I married and started cooking a good dinner every night? It gave me joy and if I’ve learned anything, it’s to take that wherever you can find it.

  Paris was always an excellent source of small moments of joy. I could have lived there the rest of my days and not taken those things for granted: to me the city was one big gallery, one big theatre. I used to think I’d never leave but I was wrong about a lot of things. One was believing the worst experience of my life was behind me.

  I found myself staring past my mom’s shoulder at a canvas of the Bay of Antibes which hung over the mantelpiece, an original by a minor Impressionist that had been loaned to us by another gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés when I admired it just for something to say. They’d forgotten to ask for it back and in all that time I had barely appreciated the artist’s reproduction of the vivid turquoise and transporting luminosity of a place that held sway over painters, writers, all kinds of dreamers.

  I don’t know how long my daydream lasted but when I zoned back to the dinner table I got the feeling Mom had been scrutinising me. The ticking of the clock seemed abnormally loud; I almost expected her to object to that too. Instead she looked pensive and it was making me nervous. She was not normally quiet at mealtimes, nor when she was the worse for drink.

  ‘You do realise h
e has another woman? Philippe,’ she added, as if I could have thought she meant anyone else. There was a blank interval, probably only seconds, in which my body suspended all functions – my lungs failing to inflate, my blood not pumping, my eyes blurring – before I could gather myself to respond.

  ‘How can you say that? You haven’t laid eyes on him in a year. You don’t know anything of the sort.’

  And nor did I know, not for certain. But something changed the moment her words made it out into the open. As long as I was alone with my suspicions that Philippe was cheating and in ignorance of the details I could just about deal with it, suppress the thoughts I’d been having for a while now. And of course there was the possibility that I was wrong, although suddenly that seemed unlikely. The discomfort of denial was nothing to the hair-pull hurt of being yanked out of it without warning.

  ‘Still, I suppose you must have known what you were signing up for,’ Mom went on, heedless. ‘After leaving it so long. And staying in France.’

  For so long, I heard so late. I heard not coming home. It was safer to keep quiet than to say something I’d really regret, a decision vindicated by the next absurdity she came out with. ‘It’s like your father and me all over again.’

  Behind my hand, my top and bottom teeth clashed together. Even if she was right about Philippe, the situation bore no resemblance to what made my father go. It’s true, there was someone else at one point, but did she seriously think that was why he left us?

  My mother has never understood that you can’t pull someone to you by pushing them away. Even as a child of ten I knew she blamed me for my brother’s death. She’d never found a home for the love that once belonged to Christopher and I had brought no one into the world on whom she could bestow it. Through no lack of longing on my part.

  And now I had something new to add to my collection of losses.

  Chapter Two

  I’ve come back for more and I really didn’t think I would. Last time was so strange, listening to my voice revisiting times I don’t even want to think about. I can tell you want to help me but it’s down to me whether this is going to work. Whether I’ll be brave enough, honest enough, to get anything out of it.