‘Sounds like we’ve all had quite a day,’ I said, careful to change my tone. ‘But whatever the problem is, vodka isn’t going to help. Is drinking the reason your mother’s mad at you?’
Vanessa flipped again. ‘If you really want to know, I got in a fight with this stuck-up girl for fucking her boyfriend.’ I internally replayed what she’d said and attempted a go on face. ‘She was spreading lies about me at a party at the weekend, so I gave her a black eye. Nobody gives a shit what she did to me.’ She lifted up her hair to show me long red scratches down the side of her neck and a nasty deep one on her shoulder, practically a cut, that had started to heal in a bumpy scab with several millimetres missing.
‘That’s not good,’ I said, inadequately, given that my thought was How dare they do that to you?
‘She’s only the Chief of Police’s daughter,’ Vanessa went on. ‘My mother knows him through work. She wouldn’t have gone so ballistic over it otherwise. But I’m glad she kicked me out.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Why do you think? So I don’t have to see any of them! I thought it was over between Boris and that petite connasse. I thought he liked me.’ She shook her head. ‘Turns out he only did it to make her jealous. Before this, everyone at school just thought I was fat and ugly. Now I’m a fat ugly slut who doesn’t wax.’
Vanessa didn’t defend herself against their verdict. It was so easy to picture the beautiful, smug faces of the other players in this sorry tale, laughing at her expense. She probably wasn’t even sober when it happened.
‘Is anyone calling the boy a slut?’ I asked. Do they ever?
I went to sit next to Vanessa but when I tried to take her hand she snatched it away, glaring. ‘Why am I telling you this? Like you care.’
I don’t know which of us was more surprised at the intimate turn of the conversation. We had taken the first few steps to being something to each other, never mind that I’d never applied for the position of stepmother. The first time Vanessa brushed me off it felt like insolence. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, it stung.
Hunger won out and after eating the pasta we flopped down in front of a mediocre movie about a man threatening to throw himself off the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. The vodka remained unopened and the red wine was still breathing on the kitchen counter. Neither of us would take refuge in alcohol. It really was the most unlikely day for me to start setting an example to the younger generation.
On the TV screen, police officers scurried about on Madison Avenue with a huge inflatable mattress that I bet never saved anyone in that situation.
‘God, don’t you wish he’d get it over with?’ Vanessa said. It was such an awful thing to say that I couldn’t help laughing. I felt the same about Philippe walking through the door, even though I dreaded seeing him after what I’d done. I was in for a long wait. He’d texted to say he was having a drink with a friend of ours who ran a bistro in Montparnasse. Translated, this meant dinner and a late night. He didn’t ask after his daughter despite having abandoned us to each other’s company when we were no more than strangers with strings, and yet by recent standards it was something that he’d told me anything.
Vanessa and I both kept dozing off until I finally nudged her, turned off the TV and announced that we should go to bed. The day that would change the course of my life was over.
Chapter Seventeen
It did occur to me that Philippe and I were now quits.
He was in bed when I woke, facing away from me. I watched his ribcage expand and contract as he breathed slowly, peacefully, unaware that our marriage was heading for the rocks. For the first time in weeks it was raining heavily and my plan to go out running was ruined. Being at home wasn’t making me feel warm and safe. What I needed was a place to be alone with my thoughts. A place that wasn’t home.
Like many residential buildings in Paris, the top floor apartments in ours had a chambre de bonne, a tiny maid’s room, in the attic. From the street the minuscule mansard windows looked like old-fashioned matchboxes perched crookedly on the roof. It was a sign of times past that these rooms could not be accessed from within the apartments they belonged to, nor from the residents’ stairwell containing the elevator. The person who used to spend the most time on their feet was also the one who had to trudge up and down five flights at the start and end of every day.
As I did, with my own burden. To reach our attic room I had to let myself out of the apartment, go down to the entrance hall, past the elevator shaft and through the door leading to a tiny light well and the little-used staircase, its bare treads worn into crescents and covered in thick dust; the hefty service charge didn’t run to keeping this area clean. I started to sneeze and by the time I was halfway up my eyes were streaming and I could hardly breathe. Disorientated by the endless spiralling, by the time I reached the top it wasn’t clear whether I was facing the street or the courtyard. It was so long since I had been up here that I hesitated over which room was ours. There were two others, plus a truly horrible bathroom I never wished to see again. The cost of living in Paris had created a market for these cramped spaces that many owners were keen to exploit but these particular garrets remained unloved, forgotten and not a little creepy.
I picked the wrong door and although I got the key into the lock, it wouldn’t turn and required several minutes of frantic jiggling to work free. Finally I got into our room, which was pokier than I recalled even although it only contained a few storage boxes from my single years between Jonathan and Philippe. After Jonathan dumped me I moved to Paris, hoping that because everything would feel so different, I’d feel different too. I’d swapped first continents then countries to get to this point and now the one good chapter of my life risked being cut, torn up, screwed into a ball and tossed in the wastepaper basket. Or radically amended on the grounds of plausibility, because a woman like me would never do something like that. Jonathan was a writer, so I know about this stuff.
Philippe liked a lie-in on weekends. On a normal Saturday I would go running, shower, take him coffee and then we’d have sex because we were mostly too exhausted on weekdays. There had to be a reason for us not to on weekend mornings and me hiding up here was not going to work.
I’d slept indecently well, all things considered. My body was still thrumming with the intense satisfaction of the day before, a good kind of ache. If there were only a way to disconnect that pleasure from all the strictures and structures that said it was wrong: marriage, respectability, that boxed-in feeling the middle years can bring: Is this it? Surely this can’t be it?
Evidently it didn’t have to be.
I’d come out wearing a long cardigan over my summer pyjamas: I’d heard French friends laugh pityingly at adults who wear anything in bed but Philippe and I always had. I had never wondered before if he slept naked with Brigitte. It was a reasonable assumption they had a more exciting sex life than he and I had of late; it appeared to have been an attraction of opposites and if the number of rows he’d hinted at were any indication there must have been a lot of making up. They were together for twelve years. Plus he was younger then, of course – I’d never had any previous cause to reflect on the difference that could make.
Scuffing the dirt off a space on the floorboards with my flip-flop, I sat down in one of the few parts of the room with a straight wall, hugging my knees in toward me, finding the hammering rain on the roof right above me sensual and stirring as I thought of Jean-Luc, mon amant. He really knew what he was doing for someone so young – I couldn’t decide which part of him I’d most enjoyed where. My nipples hardened, my mind fooling my body into thinking it was about to happen again. Nobody had ever made me come that hard.
I told you I was going to be frank.
It felt like an aberration, something that should take years of practice. And maybe that’s all everything had been up to now. My right hand dipped into my pyjama bottoms but I pulled it back as if I’d been caught stealing.
I could torment my
self and make Philippe suspicious by making some excuse not to sleep with him. He was understanding when pain or bleeding prevented it, as it frequently did in the run-up to my surgery, but I couldn’t use that as an excuse now. His daughter staying with us wouldn’t work either; he’d scoffed at me that time during my mother’s visit. Families do live in close quarters.
Or I could take this mood, this longing, back to our bedroom and see if it could be put to use. One theory about infidelity is that it can reignite the pilot light of marriage. Honestly, the things we tell ourselves.
I went down from the maid’s room and took the elevator up to our apartment, not wanting to tire myself out. There was no sound from Vanessa’s room and when I looked through the keyhole – I was losing my grip on acceptable behaviour – her large shape occupied the bed like a rock.
I entered our bedroom with a big mug of coffee in each hand, mine full almost to the top with steamed milk. Before Philippe had the chance to finish his, I’d undressed and was rubbing myself against him, grasping at the erection that soon resulted. He looked pleased and rather taken aback – he usually made the first move. I never used to be the slightest bit forward with men. As I was writhing around, I asked myself what the hell I was doing – trying to be a better fuck than his lover? I felt like an actress playing a whore – not one step removed, but two.
Sex with Jean-Luc felt more natural than this. It even felt less wrong because I really wanted him and I really didn’t want this. Philippe’s eyes were closed as I moved up and down on him – if he had been watching surely even he would have guessed there was a problem. As it was, I’d have to put up a billboard in our bedroom saying something is wrong with our marriage for him to realise.
Philippe sometimes found it difficult to finish with me on top, where gravity was not in his favour. He rolled me over and with a groan more pained than ecstatic, he shuddered and collapsed heavily onto me, sending a blast of hot breath down my neck. I’d known from the start I was going to have to fake my orgasm and in the end I didn’t even get to do that. That there had been nothing in it for me didn’t seem to be a consideration. I nudged Philippe off of me and we both just lay there, staring at the ceiling.
I hadn’t only gained a taste for something I couldn’t have. Any desire for what I did had gone. My entire body was prickling with discomfort and as I felt him leaking out of me onto the sheets, freshly changed the night before as if my indiscretion had taken place right there, I had never felt so utterly empty inside. I had made this bed.
Chapter Eighteen
Some things you can predict. Almost everything that matters, you can’t. When Alain and I decided to hold the launch of Icons at the gallery owned by my husband and established with the Malavoines’ backing I didn’t foresee that I would have recently cheated on Philippe with their son.
Any other venue would have been a great excuse to spend time away from the office, where I constantly relived the scenes with Jean-Luc, especially when passing through the reception area. Instead I had to visit the gallery with Lisette to finalise all the details and risk Philippe hovering around. It was Lisette’s job to order the sparkling wine and canapés but there were always fiddly logistical issues to overcome. That was the price for an interesting venue and we always aimed to match the location to the theme of the volume. Icons had been tricky in that regard – naturally no Orthodox church would have admitted alcohol-infused culture vultures, half of them revealing vast expanses of cleavage, arm and leg.
My reservations were of another kind.
Philippe adopted the white cube format favoured by small private galleries – nothing to compete with the artefacts, easily painted another colour when the need arose, then back to white again. The current exhibition was of abstract work by Nasim Asradi, a Muslim artist inspired by unrest in the banlieues, and consisted of steel and vinyl wall hangings and metalwork displayed on movable plinths. It was a bold move on Philippe’s part to represent someone whose output was this challenging and politically motivated; to his frustration its success had been more critical than commercial and several of the key exhibits remained unsold. The people who could afford them didn’t want to think about that world.
When Lisette and I arrived, Philippe was nowhere to be seen. His assistant Suzanne was taking a call so we wandered around sizing up the space. The exhibit to my right looked like a torture instrument with glinting razor blades along the edge of each spike that you could easily miss if the light didn’t catch them. I looked at the label: Incineration, 2014 – €9,800. Next to it was the red dot that meant SOLD.
Suzanne wobbled her head as the person on the end of the line droned on. She ran a purple talon down a list of export duty figures and gabbled a few in a manner that suggested the discussion was at an end, then purred a few multilingual pleasantries before hanging up.
‘Russians!’ she said. ‘He’s the broker for the guy who just bought that,’ she pointed to the knuckleduster I’d been looking at. ‘They shell out for this stuff and think it will rock up at their mansions the next day as if by magic.’
‘Well, I hope you feel differently about Romanians,’ I said, keen to get the meeting underway and get out.
‘So, a visit from Madame le Patron,’ Suzanne said to me. ‘Quel honneur!’
‘Oh, would you stop it!’ I said, laughing. ‘It’s a good thing I’m not your boss. I don’t envy Philippe the job of keeping you in line!’
Suzanne liked this and treated me to one of her killer smiles. She was twenty-nine and so sexy she could even turn a woman’s head. Her hair was cut in a short asymmetric style which always looked like she’d just left a salon. Half-French, half-Vietnamese, she’d got the best of both with a slim, firm body and generously sized breasts that were, as far as could be judged, perfect. And it wasn’t hard to form an opinion as they were on permanent display in a transparent black top. She had a closetful, not to mention an enticing collection of lingerie.
I didn’t kid myself for one moment that this had escaped Philippe’s notice when he hired her but Suzanne flirted with anyone she pleased, even me on occasion. Where her intentions lay was a matter for speculation but from the occasional comment she let slip I suspected she was keener on wealthy Russians than she cared to admit. It must be fun to get up every morning and be her.
‘It’s a shame, this would have been the best wall to project the images,’ she said. Suspended between a pair of handcuffs joined by an unfeasibly long chain was a swathe of pleated light grey vinyl that reminded me of those folding bathroom doors in RVs and motel rooms too cheap to have a real one. It even had the same nasty smell as when I was a kid. I looked at the label: Fuck your Jesus, 2013 – €15,000. No SOLD dot.
This was not good, not good at all. In fact, it was positively indecent to hold an event celebrating images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in a space that was also home to this object. I’d missed the vernissage because I was convalescing when the exhibition opened and Philippe’s offer to host our launch had come as a huge weight off my mind. It was too late to do anything about it – we’d just have to hope that nobody noticed.
‘The other wall will be fine and we’ll do the speeches over there too,’ I said, not least because it would encourage the guests to face the other way. Lisette handed the USB stick to Suzanne, who disappeared into the office. Within moments the room was all aglow. The three of us stood transfixed – luckily you didn’t need to believe in God to be moved by the beauty of the icons.
Lisette and Suzanne were discussing where to set up the bar and the book display but I had other things on my mind. As usual, we had no idea how many guests to expect: the way it normally worked was that some succumbed to a better offer and plenty who had declined or failed to reply turned up because they found themselves in the area and decided to grab a few drinks for free.
As it was summer and icons were ‘not sexy’, as Suzanne put it (it’s a miracle she was capable of saying those words), we had gone overboard and invited far more tha
n we could comfortably accommodate if most of them showed up. Plus there was the author to contend with – Professor Bernard Ioanescu’s ego ideally needed a room of its own. He would be furious if it was unpleasantly crowded so nobody could see him and twice as piqued if hardly anyone showed up.
‘What the heck is that noise?’ I said, looking around me.
‘Isn’t this the music you wanted?’ Suzanne’s attempt to pull a hideous face made her look like Audrey Hepburn. Lisette and I exchanged glances. When we decided to play a soundtrack of the monks chanting as mood music, we didn’t know they sounded like this.
‘Doesn’t really say party, does it?’ said Suzanne.
‘Well it is called Lamentations,’ Lisette said, examining the original CD, which had been lent to us by Bernard.
‘You’re right, it’s not the mood we’re aiming for,’ I said. ‘Some of the Romanian chants I’ve heard are beautiful and a little more… uplifting. I’m sure we can come up with something else.’
The silence that filled the gallery when the dirge was turned off was heavenly in its own right. Raising the music issue with Bernard Ioanescu was just inviting him to be difficult. This is what YouTube was for.
Within minutes an otherworldly set of voices filled the space like the colour from the images: light, melodic, hypnotic. My eyes closed and for the first time in weeks I felt a sense of peace. Within seconds it was interrupted by the loud ringing of my phone.
It was Geneviève. Jean-Luc had left without the book.
Chapter Nineteen
Philippe patted his face with a towel and the spots of blood brought him back to the mirror. He always took ages over a wet shave and must have cut himself when I yelled at him for occupying the bathroom when I wanted to get ready for the launch. As if that was a crime in his own home.
He caught me gently by the shoulders and dipped his head to catch my eye. He’d seen me like this before; not this agitated, fortunately, but sometimes I was so tense and unreasonable I even annoyed myself. Maybe it was in my favour that he used to be married to a fiery woman like Brigitte. He was generous enough to put it all down to my hormones rather than a fundamental flaw in my personality. Right now he put it down to big-night nerves.
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