‘Jesus Christ, Alexandra!’ He smacked himself hard in the forehead. ‘All women do this! You take something beautiful – especially yourselves – and look for something to be wrong. Nothing’s ever right as it is.’ Neither of us was happy any more. Bridge-like lines appeared between his eyebrows when he was thinking: two vertical, one across the top, so serious, like the day he’d made me face my fear to the sound of squealing trains on tracks. When he went to speak, they disappeared. ‘I like that you are bien dans ta peau, probably more than if you were younger. You like this body you have, I can tell. You’re not hung up on appearances. There’s more to you.’
The French have that expression too about being comfortable in your own skin. It’s not literally about liking or accepting your body but as I lay there on my side, with Jean-Luc running a finger from the hollow at the centre of my chest, down over the soft roll of my belly and slipping between my legs, I realised he was right. My medical problems had always made me feel unfeminine, emphasizing my deficiencies as a woman. I hadn’t been to the beauty salon since my latest hospital visit and had let the hair grow back naturally. I’d heard young men didn’t like that but it didn’t bother him.
‘So I don’t seem old to you?’
He made a faint tutting sound. ‘After so long in Paris you are still so Anglo-Saxon about this! A woman can be beautiful at any age. Just relax.’
‘But there must come a point where—’
He could just have laughed it off but he pulled away, reaching for his shirt. ‘What turns me on is up to me. Don’t try to tell me my fantasies. Would you like it if I did that to you?’
A giant surge of alarm rose up my chest and into my throat. ‘No,’ was the only sound I could make.
‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this. What do you want me to say?’
I made some pathetic gesture of helplessness, pressing back tears.
‘Tu me plais et c’est tout.’ There’s something so direct, so unmistakably sexual about the French way of expressing attraction – it has pleasure rolled in before anything has even happened. I pleased Jean-Luc even when he was furious with me, just as everything about him aroused me, even his anger. Especially his anger. It made me feel powerful that I could provoke such passion and intensity of feeling. It frightened me, and just as he’d said, it made me feel gloriously alive.
He wasn’t going to let it drop. ‘I don’t care about your age, my age – do you realise there are parts of the ocean floor that are one hundred and twenty-five million years old? Maybe I should care that your husband is my father’s best friend, but I don’t. Fuck it! Life is complicated, so what?’
He hadn’t seen enough of it to know what an understatement that was. I envied him the confidence of youth, of thinking it will only increase, when often it’s not like that at all. The more I’ve experienced, the harder it is to make sense of anything. I’ll never know how much of that’s the same for everyone and how much is just me. Not that I’m special, I’ve just never met anyone who’s been through all the things I have.
We were both fully dressed when he came back to me, staying at an unnatural distance. He wasn’t just insulted by my downgrading us to some clichéd rite of passage; he was wounded, and I was shaken by the fragility beneath the skin. My insinuations were unjustified, offensive, when we took such pleasure in each other’s private shapes and sounds: his soft gasp of anticipation when I started to touch him, mine at the stroke of his tongue. My ankles crossed behind his back; the momentary loss of symmetry in his face, reconfiguring in that afterward smile. This was intimate knowledge – and so was knowing how easily he hurt.
‘You know, we’re not as different as you think,’ he said. I wasn’t brave enough to ask what he meant.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m still getting used to this. Next time we’ll talk first. I mean, really talk, about anything you want.’ Because nobody says they want to unless they have something to say.
He hesitated and I figured there was at least a 50:50 chance he’d say Actually, you know what…
For good and ill, what he said instead will be the last memory to leave me. There’ve been times I wished I could forget it, still more when I risked dying a physical death if I lost sight of why it started, what it became, the way it engulfed us; if I stopped believing it meant something, verging on everything when we were alone in a small room. No clocks, no years, no nothing. Just us and the sea and the sky.
‘If you’d turned me down that first time I would have left Paris the same day. Because it would destroy me to be near you and not have you.’
Chapter Thirty Three
Packing up an exhibition was Suzanne’s least favourite part of the job at Galerie Darrousier. For a start, she didn’t get to dress up – most of her clothes were designed to be seen in, or through, not for any practical purpose. Knowing she’d be fed up, I took a detour via rue Mazarine on my way to work. The gallery was officially closed on Mondays and there would not be another exhibition until the fall now – like much of Paris, it was about to enter summer shutdown. Suzanne was wearing Converses, leggings and a figure-hugging tank top and looked like a teenager without the usual flamboyant make-up.
‘Look at you,’ I said. ‘When you’re not even trying!’
I made us coffee. Philippe complained about Suzanne’s caffeine habit; within days of being hired she’d rejected the crappy jug and filter in the kitchenette and insisted she couldn’t function without a Nespresso machine. She got through at least ten capsules a day.
The floor was covered with crates full of packaging materials. ‘You arrived at just the right moment to help me take this down,’ she said, referring to the now infamous wall hanging. ‘I had him on the phone earlier giving precise instructions.’ Hands full, she cocked her head at the photo of artist Nasim Asradi on the wall. ‘He was threatening to come and do it himself.’
‘Perhaps you should have let him. He’s very good-looking, don’t you think?’
‘Not as much as he thinks,’ she said. ‘That’s a deceptive photo. Catch him in profile and his nose is twice the size.’
‘Not everybody can be blessed with your perfect proportions, Suzanne!’
She paused for a moment, scrutinising me. Surely she wouldn’t actually say it?
‘Your eyes are a tiny bit close together, Alex.’ She slid her thumb and index finger back and forth in front of my face. ‘A centimetre, tops. It’s not a big issue. You look good.’
I laughed because the usual rules of tact didn’t exist for Suzanne. I was flattered that she’d ever given my attractiveness a thought, although according to an American magazine article my mother had shown me, women do this in female company whether they realise it or not, constantly reevaluating their place in the hierarchy. Whenever Suzanne bent down her tank top scooped to reveal a fuchsia satin bra that barely covered her nipples. Without a shred of self-consciousness yet deeply self-aware, she wore her sexuality like an outrageous dress that nobody could fail to notice.
We carefully lifted the vinyl hanging off its moorings and pleated it as per Asradi’s instructions to retain the exact folds. Of all the exhibits it had the shortest distance to travel and would be at the Longuevilles’ house by lunchtime, although I strongly doubted it would ever grace any wall there.
‘Tell you who is super hot,’ Suzanne said.
I smiled inwardly: did she think Dédé was going to be news to me after the night of the launch?
‘Jean-Luc Malavoine!’ She gave a seductive growl. ‘So moody and mysterious. I wouldn’t say no to some of that!’
Dread must have turned my face blank. If I’d looked down I swear I would have seen my heart thumping through my blouse.
‘You know him, don’t you? I saw you talking.’
‘Barely,’ I replied, examining the chain links between the handcuffs. ‘He’s been away at college for most of the time I’ve been with Philippe. But Philippe’s known Jean-Luc all his life, obviously. He and Henri go way b
ack.’
Our task completed, I straightened up and busied myself removing some polystyrene packing peanuts which had attached themselves to my trousers by static, my gaze now directed firmly toward the floor. I did all of this ve-ry slow-ly. One at a time. Trying to breathe so neither of us could hear it.
Gradually my heart rate stabilised. Reminding Suzanne that the connection was my husband’s and conjuring up images of Jean-Luc’s childhood was a smart move, which left me out of it. I’d averted trouble once before just inches from where we stood when Geneviève had brought Jean-Luc over to talk to me at the party. Just as well I seemed to have an aptitude for thinking on my feet, because if he and I were going to keep seeing each other, I was going to need it.
If. Days had passed without me hearing from him.
Suzanne was watching me. For her, nothing I’d said exempted me from commenting on Jean-Luc’s appearance. Usually I found her assessments of men as objects (or if they were honoured, works of art) wickedly amusing but that kind of badinage required me to join in. So I went for another deflection.
‘I was convinced you meant Dédé! There was some strong chemistry between you two that night,’ I said, in a teasing, gossipy tone that sounded quite unlike me. Suzanne grinned suggestively. ‘Dédé and I are just friends…’
I interrupted before I could hear the French for friends with benefits. ‘Sorry, Suzanne, I really need to get to work. I’ve got tons to do while it’s quiet.’
Maybe it was for the best that I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on backstage in my life. Any confidante would have had to tolerate me twisting every single situation or remark to be about the object of my desire, like a besotted teenage girl oversharing every new experience. But this actually was about Jean-Luc and all I could do was feign indifference. I took the coffee cups back to the kitchen where he and I had embraced like tragic lovers about to be torn apart by war or sickness. Or prior commitments. Everything made me think of him, simply everything. Since the first mention of his name it was as if he were right with me in the room. I was washing the coffee cups on autopilot but there was something else I didn’t fully register at the time: if it became more than sex, I was breaking my own ground rule.
If it wasn’t already over.
I made it to the door of the gallery, keenly anticipating the freedom of walking up the street toward the Seine, unaccountable to anyone for my innermost desires. ‘You still haven’t said what you think of Jean-Luc,’ Suzanne said, making me feel I was under observation. This girl didn’t give up easily. It was knowing that, in addition to the strong suspicion that she could have any man she wanted, which made me say it, looking her right in the eye without smiling.
‘He’s nothing but a spoiled momma’s boy. I mean, if you think that’s hot…’
As I stooped lower, her pretty face fell.
Chapter Thirty Four
I mined Jean-Luc’s words for comfort, wishing I could rewind to that moment: It would destroy me to be near you and not have you. If I never saw him again, it was something to have made someone feel that way. Emotions reared up inside me like coiled beasts fighting: a sense of culpability, of loss. It took a long time to arrive at the only logical conclusion for his silence. With my shallowness I’d sown doubts about what he was doing with me where previously there were none. He’d left Paris: for the south, for the States, anywhere I was not.
As it turned out, he hadn’t gone anywhere. Back at the studio a week later, we fell into a long and wordless clinch. There was something tentative about the way he touched my face all over, right down to the arch of my eyelids, as if we were new to each other. I couldn’t fully grasp what was going on between me and Jean-Luc but I couldn’t seem to go without it.
‘Can you believe I was halfway through a text to you when I got yours,’ I told him.
‘You were? What did it say?’
‘Well, two-thirds, to be precise. It said I miss—’
He planted his face in his hands and when he looked up, he was shaking his head and smiling, signs of the same elation and relief I felt.
‘You just said the same as usual…’ I said.
‘Well, it’s true,’ he replied. ‘I do spend a lot of time thinking. And especially about you. I kind of lost it last time. I thought I’d scared you off.’
‘Funny, because that’s exactly what I thought I’d done. What I said… it wasn’t about you.’
‘Anyway, it was worth it,’ he said. ‘Now we know we are not scared.’
I was still terrified but it was absolutely worth it. I lay back on the bed with my eyes closed, arms up by my head as the tension unspooled, my breasts lifting and spreading across my rib cage. ‘Want one?’ I heard him say, and before I saw what he was offering Jean-Luc handed me a beer, his fingers dripping with condensation that he wiped on his jeans. I don’t drink beer but the concept of things I didn’t do had ceased to mean very much. My mouth was dry and it was refreshing and lemony, more pleasant than I’d anticipated. I watched Jean-Luc drink from the bottle, the sheen on his lips transferring to the back of his hand. We hadn’t even kissed.
He lay down beside me, leaning on one elbow.
‘You look exhausted,’ I said. ‘You’re not sick, are you?’
That prompted a pained expression. ‘I work nights at a gas station up by the Porte de la Villette. It suits me. I never sleep much anyway.’
I didn’t get why the Malavoines’ son, whose masters in the States must be costing a fortune and who loved the sea, would come all the way back from California to work in a gas station in Paris. ‘But surely you have other plans for the summer?’
He looked toward the window and sighed before turning back to me. ‘There’s no point. Nothing ever goes the way you plan.’
For all Suzanne’s lustful designs on Jean-Luc, she wasn’t wrong about him being moody. He looked and sounded profoundly gloomy, in a way that was also touching and sexy. That is not easy.
‘Are you about to start quoting John Lennon?’ I paused when he didn’t react to my attempt to be chirpy. ‘You do know what he said…?’
‘Yes. I can quote lots of people who died before I was born. I expect you can too.’
‘Sorry.’ I was always saying the wrong thing. ‘I didn’t mean to make light of…’ I didn’t know what, but something was eating at him.
‘It’s okay. It’s not anything you said.’
‘Your days must be a bit strange. What time do you start work?’
‘Sometimes ten, usually midnight.’
‘So you can still go out in the evening if you want. Do you have friends in the neighbourhood?’
‘Sure, there are people I can see,’ he said, with complete indifference. ‘But that’s not why I came back.’ I briefly thought he was going to satisfy my curiosity. ‘I watch László’s place,’ he said, looking around the studio as if entrusted with guarding a château. ‘My boss pays good money. It is enough.’ He reached for my shoulder. ‘With you, it is more than enough.’
Now we kissed, slowly, gently, without the frenzy. There was a delectable indolence to drawing it out, switching to a slower setting. My body’s urgent demands abated, for now.
As so often when a horizon opens in my head, I thought of the ocean. ‘Tell me about your west coast trip. You must have seen so much more of it than I have. I was sent to boarding school in England after my parents split up.’
I would not be who I am if I’d stayed in California. I had a vision of a carefree teenage me taking the bends of the coast road in a convertible, hair flowing out on the wind. Rather unlike my Coldwater years. Then it was superseded by an image of Jean-Luc and some impossibly pretty girl on a beach and I wished I hadn’t asked.
Too late. A light came on in his eyes and the colour came to me in a flash: viridian. Without realising, I’d been trying to identify it since the first time I saw him in daylight. Between green and cyan on the wheel, often known as teal. But there are no uniform hues in nature and the warm blue around the
pupil gradually blended with green, bronze filaments radiating from the black. For a few seconds Jean-Luc remained still as if he knew I must not be interrupted, then we both blinked back to where we were.
‘Such a great trip it’s hard to know where to start,’ he said.
‘Bet you met some characters hitch-hiking.’
‘Oh, yeah. The first bit was boring as hell. Three hours on the interstate with an insurance salesman I got talking to in a sports bar in Seattle. I mean, nice guy, but all he talked about was an… anoo… I can’t even say it!’
‘Annuities?’
‘That’s it. An-ou-ité. I still don’t know what it means. Anyway, it was better when I got on the 101. Nobody travels that road in a hurry. Getting a ride was never a problem.’
‘Did you seriously think it would be?’
He shrugged. ‘You never know. There’s something unpredictable about travelling with a stranger. It’s kind of intense when you both know you’ll never meet again.’
‘I can imagine.’ Right then I wondered what I’d tell a stranger on the road. All of this, I suppose.
‘One man told me he’d been stealing from his employer for fifteen years and every day he goes to work he thinks he’s going to be found out.’
‘How could anyone live like that?’
‘Actually, I think the thrill was keeping him going. Can’t remember what he did. Some boring job.’
I didn’t dare ask what oceanography students end up doing.
‘Then there was this other time,’ he said, blushing deeply, ‘when I was picked up by two really tall Russian girls who wanted, what do you call it?’
‘A threesome?’ I was trying not to laugh. ‘Not sure I want to know how this ended.’
‘We stopped at a motel. I was going to go back to the highway and keep going but they asked me to bring their bags to the room. And then one of them grabbed me here,’ he said, replicating the action, ‘and they started making out in front of me.’
Paris Mon Amour Page 15
