“That’s what I really want to know.” Ingrid leaned toward her. “What was it like for you? The first time?”
The beauty of Ingrid’s innocence struck Liz hard where she hadn’t been hit before, in a protected place between her head and her heart and she felt a kind of lurch inside. A seventeen-year-old virgin. A maiden. Why doesn’t anyone tell girls to pause and pay attention. Why are we all so eager to be broken?
“He was a sculptor in Brittany. Young like me and very stormy-minded.” Willy.
A bullet to the brain. If he had not died she would never have met Gerard. And gotten pregnant. Couldn’t she forget for five minutes?
“I don’t want to disappoint you, Ingrid, but not all Frenchmen are great lovers. Sex with Willy wasn’t very good. He was learning just as I was, and we weren’t either of us any good at it. I think he enjoyed himself, he appeared to; but I basically felt let down about the whole business.”
“You didn’t love him.”
“Oh, I did. Madly.”
“Then how could it be . . . a letdown?”
“Because sometimes it is.” Liz shrugged. “Sex is a big deal, I’m not saying otherwise. And sometimes love can help make it a really big deal. But sex, the basic in and out, it can be tedious.”
She watched Ingrid’s face as she tried to make sense of this.
“What happened to him?”
“Life, I guess.” She shrugged the truth away. “I don’t quite remember.”
Liar.
She remembered everything about Willy and about Guy who took her from him to Paris. “My next lover was older. He came to Brittany looking for new artists for his gallery. Sex was better with him, but I didn’t love him. I loved Willy. Bad sex and all.”
Liz felt jaded and parched. “Word of advice, Ingrid: don’t settle for less than love.”
“You love Gerard, right?”
Liz nodded.
“Then why don’t you get married? Mom says—” The blush again.
“Yes?”
“She says you don’t think you’re lovable, which is totally not true because—”
Liz rested her index finger on Ingrid’s lips. “She didn’t say I wasn’t lovable, honey. She said I don’t think I am. For some people it’s easier to give love than to take it. I think that’s what Hannah means.” Gerard sang the same tune. Lately it was his favorite ditty. “I’m not saying it’s true, Ingrid, but if it is then I’ve come to the right place, haven’t I? Like all those poor dogs and cats and that horse down at the barn? Isn’t this the place we all come to feel loved?”
“We all love you. Not just her.”
“Well, thank goodness for that or I’d have to stay at the Holiday Inn.”
“Rinconada doesn’t have one. They won’t let you build a motel or hotel in the city limits.”
“Now I’m doubly grateful.” Time to end this before Ingrid saw how she had gotten to Liz. “Let me get out of this bed before I grow roots. We’d see how lovable I’d be with roots growing out of my butt.”
Ingrid laughed uncertainly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Aunt Liz. Honest.”
Damn. The girl saw things.
“You didn’t hurt them. Not a bit.” Liz waved her off. “Now, scoot. Tell your mom I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Liz lay back and pulled the bedcovers up to her chin. A crowd of images and memories filled the room and she ducked her head under the blanket to escape them. Silly girl—there in the darkness was Willy, reaching for her with calloused hands smelling of clay. He had adored her in his young clumsy way and had expected her to wrap his love around her and wear it like a Dior. No wonder she’d left him. Guy made love with the hands and body of a man attuned to female chemistry; and when he touched her, she flew into a thousand vibrating pieces. He had understood what Hannah did, what Ingrid could not believe; Liz didn’t think she had love coming to her. Guy knew she would give whatever he asked of her; and the pittance return she would accept with gratitude and surprise. They parted after a year and she did not really care. There were other men, other buses up and down the avenues of Paris, London, Rome. After a long time there was Gerard.
Willy’s mother had written to Liz in Avignon to say that Willy was dead. A bullet to the brain. The funeral was scheduled for the next Saturday. Come if you can, Elizabeth. He would be pleased. Liz doubted this but she knew it would please Madame with whom she had maintained a Christmastime correspondence since leaving Rennes. Still, she did not decide to go at once. Her life in Avignon was comfortably settled in those days. She had sufficient translating work to earn a decent living. Income from her parents’ estate gave her luxuries like a condominium with a view of the Rhone and a late model BMW, which at the time Willy died was in the garage having its brakes replaced. Not that she would ever have chosen to drive to Brittany. Despite her years in France, she had never learned to drive ninety kilometers an hour rain or shine, day or night.
Instead she traveled to Rennes by bus and train and arrived exhausted only to learn there had been a mix-up in her hotel reservations. The best the management could do was shrug and offer a small room at the back, second floor. Liz might have hunted around for somewhere better if it had not been February and threatening snow. She had forgotten how bitter cold it could be in Rennes in wintertime and the old stone hotel, so cheery in its ad with brass polished and fireplaces blazing, was frigid. What’s more, the management appeared outraged when she complained. In the hotel dining room she ate too much that night, hoping pâté and cassoulet and an apple tart with cream might warm her up. Instead she felt fat and guilty. In the sitting room to which she retreated after dinner clutching a cognac, two men occupied the chairs nearest the fire. She saw a resemblance between them. The same heavy, slightly baggy eyes, the long nose and sensual mouth. Father and son, she thought. Attractive.
The father, serene and dignified in a gray suit patterned in herringbone and perfectly fitted to his slim frame, leaped to his feet and offered his place in a deep easy chair. Another time she would have deferred to his age, but that night she thanked him and sank in gratefully.
“I prefer a straight chair,” he said. “My back.” He carried a wooden chair from the writing table across the room and placed it precisely between Liz and his son. “You do not mind?”
“Of course not.”
“I am Etienne Robin and this is my son, Gerard.”
“I’m Liz Shepherd.”
“American? I would not have guessed it. Your French is perfect.”
Gerard said in English, “I thought I could always tell an American.”
“Well,” Liz said with a little smile, “there you are.”
Gerard Robin and his father were also in Rennes for Willy’s funeral.
“My father has a large collection of folk art.”
“Yes, and Willy’s work in the last few years has been quite marvelous. Astonishing garden pieces. Such subtlety of color and glaze and the droll way he had of working in the Breton material. Not in the least . . .” Etienne Robin thought a moment and then grinned. “Not at all kitschy. That is the American word, I think?”
“Yiddish,” Liz said.
“I wish I had room for more. In our garden—”
“My parents live in Paris,” Gerard said. “They have a weekend house a little north of here, on the coast. He encountered Willy’s work in a gallery here in Rennes.”
The old man sighed. “He was a troubled man but then, so many artists are.”
“Troubled people are my father’s specialty. He is a psychiatrist.”
Liz remembered that she had read his name in articles debating the relevance of Freudian theory.
Gerard asked Liz how she knew Willy and she told him, an abbreviated and expurgated version. Gerard was a man, he was French, he could read between the lines if he wanted to. He bought her another cognac and when Liz checked her watch she was surprised to see it was almost midnight.
Liz slept poorly that night, clutching a hot wa
ter bottle first to her feet and then to her thighs and never really getting warm. In the morning she resumed her place before the fire and drank a cup of milky coffee, wishing she had stayed at home in Avignon. It wasn’t just the damp and the cold and the lumpy mattress that had her down. It was being in Rennes again. It was the thought of Willy’s brains splattered across his studio.
“May we offer you a ride to the church, Mlle. Shepherd?” Etienne Robin stood in the doorway. “You said last night you do not have an automobile.”
Perhaps the day would be easier to bear if she were not alone.
In the years since her departure from Brittany she had not followed Willy’s career and had only a vague idea that he enjoyed some success using Breton themes and materials. The crowd in the cold stone church surprised her and the little anxiety she had that she would be conspicuous vanished immediately. There were prayers and testimonials. A choir of children in ruffed vestments sang folk songs in Breton, a language Liz had never heard. Bundled and dumpy as an Eskimo, she sat and stood and knelt between Etienne and Gerard Robin, all the while conscious of the cold and of the flower-decked box in the front of the church. She recalled Willy’s boyishness, the way he stroked her head as if she were one of his spaniels. When she chided him for this he did not understand. “But I love them,” he said. “And I love you too.” She put her hands on the pew in front of her, rested her forehead on them, and wept.
“You must not sleep another night in that dreadful hotel,” Gerard said and his father agreed.
“We are leaving for Paris in a few moments. Come with us and stay in our apartment. Tomorrow or the next day you can take the train back to Avignon.”
To be invited to stay in a French home on such short and superficial acquaintance was astonishing. She must have looked surprised because Etienne laughed.
It had begun to sleet and the cold froze her bones and made her feel brittle and vulnerable. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to stare into the rain and think about Willy and try to understand why his death made her feel that nothing she had ever done mattered. Her accomplishments, her competences . . . nothing.
“I would not be good company, I’m afraid.”
But the thought of the cold hotel, the lumpy bed . . .
Gerard drove his father’s big Mercedes, Liz sat up front beside him and Etienne quickly fell asleep in the back. At the first wide spot in the road Gerard stopped the car and got out. In the rain he opened the trunk and took out an alpaca throw, opened the back door and gently tucked the blanket across his father’s lap and legs.
The tender gesture touched Liz and she looked more closely at Gerard Robin.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked when they were back on the highway. “Turn up the heat if you like.”
She said she was fine and waited. For the inevitable questions. Why did she live in France and for how long? Was she married? How did she earn her living? But Gerard surprised her. He selected a tape—classical guitar—and set the volume low. For a long time they drove in silence and gradually Liz began to relax. She leaned back and slept a while.
She woke when the car turned off the busy highway near Le Mans and bumped down a provincial road.
“Sorry to wake you but I need something to eat and a cup of coffee,” Gerard said. “Will you join me?”
“Your father? . . .”
“He’s fine. He took a pill to help him sleep.”
The lights of a little bistro brightened the road ahead. Gerard tucked the Mercedes into a parking place between a Renault and an old Citroën and they went in. When Gerard opened the door and the heat and smoke hit them, they looked at each other and burst into laughter. It was a dreadful place and they both knew it before they tasted the bitter coffee and stale bread. But the break refreshed them. Gerard amused her with a running commentary on the clientele and when they returned to the highway and he asked the expected questions, Liz felt like answering them and asking some of her own.
In the middle of the night, thirty minutes out of Paris, traffic stopped for emergency road repairs brought about by the heavy rain and complicated by wet snow. For two hours while they waited for the road to clear, Liz and Gerard sat in the Mercedes and talked about themselves and their families, what they liked and what they loathed; and somewhere before dawn, Liz let down her guard. She had always believed in love at first sight. But after so many instant passions lost their heat in a few weeks or months, burned out like incandescent bulbs, Liz had learned that the love that came on hot and fast could not be trusted. Nor could the men who engendered it. Men who, she had decided, usually knew exactly what they were doing. Experience had taught her to protect herself, but by the time traffic cleared and Gerard was navigating the streets of the Sixth Arrondissement the atmosphere in the car had thickened and grown heavy and sweet with anticipation.
When they reached the Robins’ apartment in an ornate old stone building overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, Gerard helped his father upstairs and told a sleepy-eyed maid to settle Liz in the guest room. He left for his own apartment, promising to see her the next day. In a daze of fatigue and confused feelings Liz stripped off her clothes and climbed into the high bed naked. For an hour she slipped in and out of consciousness, aware of Gerard somewhere in the Sixth in his own bed, and both of them savoring the pull of attraction like a change in gravity.
Liz met Madame Robin the next morning in the front room of the apartment where she sat in a small feminine chair opening mail, facing the windows with her back to a lamp—the only one lighted in the cavernous room. She was a slender woman with an animated heart-shaped face and a precise way of speaking.
“Etienne sees patients down the hall, his office is there. You must not be alarmed if you encounter some wild-haired weeping person. Gerard called. He will see you later today. He must first see about his visa. He is going to Brazil tomorrow night.”
Liz thought he must have told her this when they first began talking at the hotel; but because she did not care about him then, the fact had not registered. Now it broke on her like news of an accident. Her thoughts might have shown in her expression because Anouk Robin asked, “Do you know my son well?”
“We met yesterday. At the funeral.” Liz remembered her manners. “Madame, you are so kind to take me in. A stranger.”
“You are thinking, how ‘un-French’?”
Liz had been.
“My husband and I, when Gerard and his sisters were little, traveled a great deal. We lived in Cambridge for a year when he taught at Harvard, and then at Claremont-McKenna.” Madame Robin sighed. “I found Los Angeles a challenge, but I have learned to like Americans with the result that our home has always been full of students and visitors. Last year we had a very noisy young student from Australia. Etienne assured me he was perfectly brilliant but I was never sure. He had the most appalling eating habits. I could only satisfy him with steak and potatoes.” She looked perplexed, then laughed. “So you see, it is not so strange you are here. Etienne said only that there was an American friend in the guest room, a friend of Gerard’s, a friend of Willy’s. Is that so?”
“I knew Willy when we were young.”
“I liked him so much, though when he came to stay I never knew quite what to expect from him. Gloomy.” Absently Madame Robin tapped a silver letter opener against her palm. “Willy made me grateful my children are blessed with calm and tranquil natures.”
Yes, Liz thought, that would seem to describe Gerard.
The tall narrow windows of the Robins’ apartment faced the Luxembourg Gardens, beautiful even in the midst of winter. Liz stood at the glass watching a woman in yellow tights running in the rain with a pair of Afghan hounds beside her.
“It will be so beautiful in a few months.”
“I prefer the winter,” Madame Robin said. “Tourists exhaust me.”
Liz nodded. “Avignon in August.”
“Don’t misunderstand, I enjoy living at the center of things. When Gerard was a baby we were in
my parents’ apartment in the Sixteenth. Large enough for all of us and more. But it was too somber there, too quiet. I would take Gerard with me when I went to the chemist and there was no one on the streets. Here there is life, always life on the streets and in the shops. And Gerard lives not so far away, a few blocks. We see him often.”
“I used to live off the rue de Buci,” Liz said. “And my publisher’s apartment is somewhere near here.”
“You are a writer?”
“A translator. Nonfiction. Mostly English to French.” Liz mentioned a translation of hers that had recently been a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Madame Robin seemed slightly impressed and vaguely encouraging, and so Liz went on to tell her how she had come to France as a young woman out of college, studied at the Sorbonne and worked in a variety of jobs until she made a small reputation for herself as a careful and sensitive translator. She talked to keep from saying what was really on her mind: When will Gerard be here? How long must I wait?
“And you live in Avignon now? Why is that? It is a pretty little city, of course, but . . .” Madame Robin raised her eyebrows very slightly, “it is not Paris.”
“I find the older I get, the more I need the sun.”
“And how old are you?”
The direct question startled Liz. The French were a correct race, private.
“Forgive me,” Madame Robin said though it was clear she did not really believe she had misspoken. “I should not have asked. But you are an American. I thought you would not mind telling me.”
Liz laughed. “Thirty-eight.”
“Young, I think. But I know what you mean about the cold.” She looked around her. “And this great mausoleum, it is impossible to heat in the winter. Were you warm enough in the guest room?”
“Yes, Madame, thank you.”
The deep colors of the Persian carpets and the red and green and gold tapestry upholstering the chairs and couches warmed the gray light that poured through the windows. Madame Robin kept an electric heater beamed toward them; but the cold harried Liz the moment she moved beyond its shallow circle. After coffee and a roll Madame Robin insisted she go back to bed. She slept through the afternoon until the maid brought her coffee and a slice of unfrosted lemon cake and said drinks would be served in an hour.
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