Chapter Fourteen
Jean-Luc dressed quickly. Before leaving he bent down to kiss me on the mouth but it felt like a classy sign-off, perhaps a rather sweet attempt at gallantry. Maybe he thought I did this all the time – I’d offered no resistance. The door was once again unlocked and still there I lay, unpleasantly warm and sticky now the rush had worn off, crashing to earth from an unprecedented height, arousal dissolving into body fluids. Scrunched up tissues snatched from a box on the reception desk lay on the floor and after picking them up I dabbed between my legs with wet toilet paper, longing for a shower. The sofa would need a thorough wipe-down.
I was going to be late home now even if I took a cab. I had no idea what Philippe was doing but lately that was often the case. For all I knew my husband could have been screwing the mysterious Nico next door while I’d been going at it with the son of his oldest friend. I made myself focus on this excruciating detail.
Shit. It wasn’t going to be easy to draw a line under this. Philippe and I had both turned into lesser versions of our true selves lately but I had outdone him by some margin. Whoever Nico was, I didn’t know her and it was undoubtedly better that way. And this lurking awareness that our transgressions weren’t like for like would surface every time I resorted to if he’s doing it, why can’t I?
I searched in the mirror for signs of what I’d become in the space of a single half-hour but of course there were none. Where did I go from here, invent an excuse? If I needed one it wouldn’t be hard to make something up on the day the book had come in. Taking it home would make for a good diversion. Would I tell barefaced lies or say nothing at all (which seemed to be Philippe’s favoured option), hoping that he didn’t notice anything untoward, or he didn’t actually care?
I was surprised how much this last thought upset me. We’d turned each other’s lives around, only for it to come to this?
The ride home was scenic, along the Quai de la Tournelle with a view across the Seine to Notre-Dame but right then it could have been any road, anywhere. I rarely took cabs, never having adjusted to the improvement in my material circumstances that came with marrying Philippe. Part of me was still living next door to Christine in that walk-up off République, buying a few groceries from the Franprix on Boulevard Magenta going towards the Gare du Nord. I often used to see the homeless man whose entire life revolved around one bench and two of those huge IKEA bags. One time I realised he was masturbating under cover of the blue plastic and I was disgusted, even though you couldn’t see anything. Others passed by without noticing.
Whatever my former position on the morality scale, I had shifted a few degrees. What Jean-Luc and I had done was inappropriate in more ways than I cared to think of but it was between two consenting adults, I reasoned, trying to allay the panic tightening my ribs. It was not premeditated on my part – I’d had uncensored daydreams about him, sure, but completely without intent. The idea of anything physically happening between us would have made me laugh out loud. Now it had, I tried to convince my upright American self to view my lapse in context. In this city infidelity was not universally regarded as wrong, no matter that I’d never gone native until it suited me. The cab driver kept sneaking glances in the rear view mirror. In my reflection in the glass, my silent beratings gave me the stony, concentrated look of someone plotting a terrible crime, when in fact I’d taken the first step on a dark path where I was in danger. But it wasn’t too late to turn back. As long as nobody found out, nobody would get hurt.
I told the driver to let me out in rue Saint-Sulpice – it’s silly but I don’t like them to know where I live. I shoved a fifty at him and he muttered at having to give me change. ‘Your bag,’ he reminded me wearily. Through the open door of an upmarket travel agency came the buzz of a cocktail reception in full flow with trays of work-of-art canapés laid out and a group of tanned bobos swigging at flutes of Prosecco surrounded by posters of faraway destinations.
On the landing outside our apartment, I fumbled in my bag for the keys like a doppelgänger who hasn’t quite got the hang of their parallel life. So I looked like the same person as ever, but if I could do something so out of character, what else might I do? My encounter with Jean-Luc seemed unreal, as if it had all been in my imagination, although my previous sexual fantasies now seemed rather tame. I could do better in real life! What I’d just experienced was comparable to only one other revelation that I could recall: my first ever orgasm made my body feel like a house of miracles to which I’d held the key all along.
I dumped my bags in the hallway with a deep sigh and straightened my clothes as best I could. There was no sign of Philippe, nor of his daughter, though she had certainly left her mark. Our cleaning lady, Majoula, came on Fridays so the place would be nice for the weekend. The money I’d left for her was gone from the mantelpiece but there was no way she’d been in: the sofa cushions had been disturbed and replaced the wrong way round and the smaller striped silk ones lay all over the floor. As I bent down to rescue them a collection of soda cans and beer bottles came into view, several of them tipped on their sides, liquid oozing onto the parquet and into the rug.
My lower back twinged, informing me how it felt about being subjected to an energetic sex session with a man seventeen years my junior. I began to examine this from every angle to see which looked the worst.
The age difference between Jean-Luc and me was equivalent to the whole of Vanessa’s life, not that she had anything to do with it, I just happened to be cleaning up her mess at that moment. Or to put it another way, I was her age when he was born, so technically old enough to be his mother, though that made me feel bad for my prudish seventeen-year-old self, still a virgin and teased at boarding school for being so uptight. That poor girl would rather have died than spread her legs for some guy who’d just walked in the door, no matter how hot he was. The generation gap (give or take) felt like the most damning detail but I found it surprisingly easy to dismiss because I was so much younger than Jean-Luc’s mother. When an image of Geneviève popped up in my head I groaned. For Christ’s sake, who was I trying to kid? (Myself, and it wasn’t working). I doubted there was anywhere it would be considered acceptable to sleep with the child of a friend, not even done with college, let alone the son of your husband’s best friend.
I ran a bath, the water no more than warm as the afternoon’s blazing temperatures had barely dropped. There was no reason for me to tidy up after Vanessa – so what if Philippe saw what she’d done? In the short time since she’d arrived I’d found a reason to be glad of our uninvited guest: as a distraction.
I balled up my work clothes and shoved them in the laundry hamper: the dry-clean-only skirt, the delicate silk blouse which had lost a button, right on the chest, wouldn’t you guess, letting the fabric gape open. Quite an eyeful – no wonder the taxi driver had been staring, though that wasn’t the only possible explanation.
The smell of sex had followed me home, clinging to my skin, an elixir equal parts me and him. I sank into the water before I could change my mind about washing it off, plunging my head under and letting my hair stream out around me. The day I took the lilies to Geneviève I’d had that strange out of body experience where I pictured myself freaking out and felt liberated by it. As I contemplated the gulf between my afternoon and reality, it was the exact opposite, like I was in prison.
I scooped up the foam in my hands, soaping my aching limbs. I pressed my palms into the arch of my back and under the curve of my bottom but made sure not to touch myself there, letting the water swirl around. It was a little sore but I didn’t mind. I knew I’d have to forget but for now my body remembered. Forty was late to discover there were layers to sex that I hadn’t known existed. The water was cold by the time I got out of the tub. I dragged a comb through my hair and brushed my teeth. There. Clean and fresh all over.
But it was only skin deep. I couldn’t shake the impression of new vistas rolling out in front of me, an altered state of being. The first fix is usually fre
e, the one that gets you hooked. The rest you pay for.
Chapter Fifteen
I put on a light summer dress and was about to lie down when there was a simultaneous trilling of the theme to American Beauty from my phone and tablet, both in the living room. I never ignored my mother’s attempts to reach me, feeling that if I did she would be able to witness my decision to reject her. There would have been a certain symmetry to that but still I couldn’t do it. I pressed to accept the Skype call, pausing for the time it took to conjure a smile onto my face. As her only child I owed her that much; I’d be devastated if my daughter ever felt that way about me.
Her pixelated image hung on the screen for a few seconds, her voice slow and dragged out, and then there she was, in all clarity. I positioned the screen at a distance on my dressing table and sat down on the bed.
‘Look at you, all wet! Did I get you out of the shower?’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, rubbing the ends of my hair with a towel. ‘How’s it going?’
It used to be bad enough that we didn’t have much to say to each other on the phone but it was harder than ever since Mom had discovered Skyping was free. First she gave me the lowdown on her disrupted sleep patterns and lack of appetite and then she carried the tablet to the back porch to show me the broken catch on the rabbit hutch, as if I could do anything about it at five and a half thousand miles.
‘Ask Lenny if he can fix it,’ I suggested. The neighbour we’d had growing up still lived next door, though I always wished he’d move away, just like I wished we would have. Lenny was the one who’d nearly drowned himself in the search for Christopher and the one who’d carried him home, putting an end to my behind-the-sofa hope that if they couldn’t find him, the worst (which nobody would say in front of me) could not have happened. I’ll never forget the wrongness of my brother lying there, gone. The stench of the ocean in our living room, the runnels of seawater across the wooden floor. My mother howling as my father paced up and down, up and down, two people who belonged together instantly split in two.
I could never stop thinking how different things might have been between Mom and me if not for that day. She’d given up on her Parisian alter ego since returning home and without the red nails and the posh cigarettes, she looked tired and older than when I had her here in the room with me. Despite everything, I missed her. One way and another I’d been missing her most of my life. I read that by the time you hit twenty-five you should stop blaming your parents for anything. They didn’t mention it the other way around.
‘Are you okay, Alexandra? Something seems a little off with you today.’
I averted my gaze from the screen, frantically blinking back tears. The towel would be a giveaway.
I was desperate to talk to someone and there was nobody I could dream of telling. Not only did Philippe and I share most of our friends in Paris but they also knew the Malavoines, or knew of them. My best friend Emily lived in England and was married with three children, belonging to another world entirely. The same was true of my expat tennis partners, whom I’d seen only twice since my operation – one was the daughter of a Baptist preacher but the others would be just as horrified at what I’d done.
It was bad enough when it was just Philippe behaving badly. If only I’d had you to talk to back then. If only. I could say that about so much of this.
That afternoon I had done something shocking that I didn’t understand and knew was wrong and wished I hadn’t. It felt like nothing would ever be the same.
Or, Jean-Luc and I had done something crazy and passionate and incredible that I didn’t regret at all.
I find myself doing this sometimes, cleaning up my account, although it doesn’t help anyone. The second voice was always louder; truer, as if I’d accidentally uncovered the secret to being fully alive. I wasn’t sure I could survive without experiencing that feeling again. I’d gorged on it but was left feeling famished.
My mother made it through the days on a diet of booze, smokes and pills. If she’d been here I’d have asked for a Valium to block everything out until I could pull myself together. I used to take pills myself but in the end I always choose pain over feeling nothing. That’s not living.
‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘You know how it is.’ I hoped that was sufficiently vague.
She snorted. ‘Tell me about it.’ It may be a rhetorical expression but I knew she was expecting something more. I faced the screen head-on and made a conscious effort to look her in the eye.
‘You were right about Philippe,’ I said, staying true to the theme of marital problems but not telling her anything she hadn’t already guessed. ‘He is cheating on me.’
My mother gave a melodramatic grimace of sympathy, as if I were a stranger on a bus boring her with a sob story. ‘I know how that feels.’
For fuck’s sake, I wanted to say. Just this one time, could something be about how I feel?
‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ I said, as the image began to break up. A message flashed up on the screen saying ‘poor connection’. And then it was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
There was some tortelloni in the fridge: made in some factory, shrink-wrapped in thick plastic, the sort of food you buy hoping there will always be something better. And usually there was, but not tonight. Philippe would be disappointed – I normally made a special effort on Fridays if we weren’t going out to eat. There were so many good places on the doorstep, his new favourite serving robust dishes from the southwest using every last part of the duck, mine an upmarket Vietnamese which did a delicious and fragrant pho. I put the pasta on the counter and a pan of water on the stove so Philippe would see that I had plans, however unappetising.
I took hold of the corkscrew the wrong way, pinching my fingers hard, but eventually I succeeded in uncorking an excellent Louis Latour. Philippe had visited the vineyard in Burgundy and this wine always put him in a good mood. I raised the cork to my nostrils and breathed in so deeply it made me shudder. My senses were heightened, still.
There was a hammering at the door and as soon as I opened it Vanessa’s eyes fastened onto the bottle in my hand. ‘Oh, cool,’ she said. ‘I could do with a drink after the day I’ve had.’
This just proved how undignified and futile our apprehension and pussyfooting of the night before had been – acting like a doormat with this girl was asking to be trampled.
‘And what sort of day have you had?’ When Vanessa went to speak I wagged my finger at her and she closed her mouth again. ‘Because I’ve had my cleaning lady on the phone in tears. I don’t know what on earth you said to her but she thought she’d been fired. Majoula is a refugee with three children to feed.’ My tirade left me out of breath. Being taken to task was becoming a habit for Vanessa, pissing her mother off and now me in quick succession. She looked hostile and abashed at the same time. ‘It wasn’t hard to guess what you spent the money on. You left this place like a pig sty and by the looks of it you’ve had plenty to drink already.’ I stamped on the pedal of the kitchen bin and the lid sprang open on the bottles and cans, neatly separated for recycling. Of course I’d cleaned up in the end; I couldn’t not.
‘They’re not all mine. Some are Philippe’s,’ she said.
I told her to sit down and pressed my hands together in a supplicating gesture until I realised what I was doing. ‘Why are you here, Vanessa?’
‘Because my mother kicked me out.’
‘I know that. But why here?’
Her mouth twisted. ‘Because Philippe’s my dad and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I know you don’t want me here.’
I winced as she chewed at a nail and tore off a fine strip of skin from the tip of a finger, then spat it out into thin air. I gave a sigh. I didn’t not want her here. As things stood, I would have been downright alarmed if she were to leave. And besides, something about Vanessa got at my heart, however mad she made me. ‘If your dad wants you here I honestly don’t mind, if we can agree on a couple of rules. But
first can I make a request? Do you call your mother by her first name?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That bitch. I call her nothing.’
I did my damndest not to smile. ‘Then don’t call your father Philippe. Call him Papa, like anyone else. That would mean a lot to him.’
She produced a sound halfway between a splutter and a sneer.
‘You said some of these drinks were his. So he’s been home and gone out again?’
‘Dad and I had a row,’ she said. ‘He went for a walk in the… that park down the road.’
It bothered me that Vanessa couldn’t put a name to the Jardin du Luxembourg, to realise that Philippe and I were playing Mom and Dad (because I’m pretty sure we both felt like impostors) to a kid from an affluent suburb who didn’t know her way around the city. Still, the Sixth wasn’t exactly gritty, even if the park was full of people pounding their frustrations into the dust.
This wasn’t a great outcome for the first time father and daughter found themselves alone, although it was crazy to think my presence would have made a difference.
‘When did he leave?’ I asked.
Vanessa had no concept of time – she didn’t even wear a watch. ‘Dunno. Couple of hours ago, maybe.’
Despite the warmth of the evening, I shivered to recall what I was doing a couple of hours ago. Already I was conscious of the line separating my before and after selves, one still attached to a familiar continent, the other totally adrift.
‘Did you go looking for him?’
Vanessa looked down with such dejection that I decided to get off her case. Next to her feet a half-bottle of vodka was poking out of her grotty shoulder bag, one of those cheap ethnic ones with tiny fake mirrors and sweatshop embroidery. I reached to pull it out and placed it on the table.
Paris Mon Amour Page 7
