Fourteen hours later, when they landed, her thoughts were going in circles. It was almost a relief to discover they barely had time to stop at their hotels to change before plunging into work.
It was morning in Paris, and they were met at the airport by Bo Boyle, who had been there for three days with a television crew, filming background shots and confirming interviews. "Your schedule for today," Boyle said as they walked through the terminal. "Tony interviews Sidney Kidd, world-famous author of novels of terror, in Paris to study ancient torture chambers for his next book. The interview is in a dungeon; if his descriptions get too gory, cut him off and ask him about scenes with sex and beautiful people. Lizz—Elizabeth—has a young man from Vermont who came here to be the world's greatest painter; works instead in a meat market on the Rue de Buci. I know you like to choose your own people, Elizabeth, but we have so much to do and so little time that I risked choosing one for you. I have names for the rest of the time in Paris, and then for Rome; you can select from them after today. Now, as far as Kidd and the Vermont meat cutter, I have background notes for both of you; I have photos, I have lists of suggested questions—"
"But no heart in that sunken chest," Tony said. "Elizabeth and I have spent fourteen cramped hours aloft. When do we take a nap, wash our weary bodies, comb our rumpled hair, and drink gallons of restorative coffee?"
"You weren't cramped; you lounged in first-class comfort. You have an hour for combing your hair and downing gallons of coffee; you can take a nap before dinner. But when have you ever needed a nap?"
He never did, Elizabeth thought. In Paris even more than Los Angeles, Tony Rourke exuded an inexhaustible nervous energy. Even when he rebelled against Boyle's schedule, after the taping of his dungeon interview and Elizabeth's with the young man from Vermont, he did it light-heartedly, as if nothing could spoil his mood. "Enough for today," he
said, watching Boyle drive off in one car while he and Elizabeth sat back in their limousine. "It's raining and we've done our duty. We are now going to transform ourselves from working people to civilized citizens of Paris. I wangled a reservation at Taillevent for dinner and though you don't know what a miracle that is, I expect to be admired, nonetheless. The Plaza," he said to their driver, and they drove through the steady gray downpour to the glowing warmth of the hotel where Tony escorted Elizabeth to the reception desk.
"If Madame will follow me," the official said, and led them through the lobby, past palm trees and vases of bright gladioli that seemed to blend into the murals of the walls, to an elevator, and then along a hushed corridor. "Madame's suite," he said.
"Madame's suite," Tony repeated when they were alone. "And what of monsieur? Of course the Ritz is quite pleasant—I have nothing against it —and my room there will certainly help keep the rumors down, but I thought we would—"
"So did I," Elizabeth said. The day of work, the atmosphere so far from home, Tony's closeness, and the recurring memory of Matt's voice had wiped away her confusion and reluctance. She was barely aware of the beauty of the rooms, with their cut-velvet wall panels and silk taffeta drapes and, in the bedroom, flowered silk drapes and bedcovering and two enormous armoires awaiting her clothes; far more powerful was an inner voice saying, Damn it, why not? Her fingers shook as she unbuckled her raincoat. Then Tony's hands were on her shoulders, removing the coat, and as quickly as it began the shaking stopped.
"Let me look at you," he said. "My damned producer has kept us so busy I haven't had a minute to gaze at you in private." She wore a burgundy suit and amethyst silk blouse—warm colors and simple lines chosen for television, but also perfect for the warmth of her golden beauty. "Exquisite. A little paler than usual, but that only makes your loveliness more bewitching. Dearest Elizabeth, I have waited for you so long."
He slipped her suit jacket back from her shoulders and Elizabeth let it fall to the floor as she moved into his arms. She felt a brief shock of surprise as she put her arms around him—the shoulders were not as broad as she was used to, the muscles of the upper arms not as strong, the mouth pressing on hers not as firm—but then it was gone. Of course everything was different, but it wasn't important; she was so hungry for the warmth of arms holding her close, of urgent lips on hers and the murmured endearments that made her feel young and desirable that nothing could interfere, nothing else mattered.
With one hand, Tony unbuttoned her blouse and bent his head to kiss her throat and move his lips in small kisses to the shadow between her breasts. He undressed her slowly, his mouth following his hands, refusing to let her do anything for him. "Let me," he murmured. "I've dreamed of this so often; next time we'll do what you want. . . ."
She lay on the bed, watching him pull off his clothes. "I feel as if I'm seventeen again," she said. "You did the same thing then, undressing me first, only I was afraid to look at you. I'd never seen a naked man."
"Did it frighten you?"
"I didn't look."
He paused, looking down at her. "Didn't you? I'd forgotten that. What did you do?"
"Closed my eyes, of course. Tony, you're taking a very long time."
He smiled. "I'm prolonging it."
"How you've changed."
"Not nearly as much as you." Naked, he bent over her, looking at her pale, faintly shadowed curves and rose nipples and the small patch of golden hair where her thighs met. He drew in his breath. "Exquisite woman . . . unreachable for so long . . . except in my dreams; fresh and lovely and seventeen ..." Kneeling on the bed, he kissed the soles of her feet and spread her legs, caressing the insides of her thighs and around her hips. With his hands spanning her waist, he moved his tongue across the firm silken skin of her stomach, around the golden patch of hair and below it, licking with slow strokes as his hands had stroked her thighs.
Elizabeth's fingers were in his hair. "Tony," she said, her voice husky, almost a whisper.
"Lie still," he murmured. "Let me—"
"No. I want you."
He raised his head and smiled. "Yes, my sweet."
He moved upward, covering her, and Elizabeth pulled him into her, thrusting against him, filling the emptiness inside her. Her arms were around him, her palms against the sharpness of his shoulder blades, her nipples crushed by the thick black curls on his chest. His waist had thickened over the years; lying on her, he felt heavier than— Stop it! Don *t compare . . . don't remember. She repeated it until the words were drowned out by the dark roaring in her ears and at last there was no inner voice to remind her of anything else and she could lose herself in the rhythm of their bodies and the steady drumming of the November rain.
• • •
Bo Boyle had organized every hour of every day. "No way around it," he said. "We have to tape twice as many interviews as we need so we can choose the best, and Elizabeth insisted on being back for Thanksgiving. You cramp my style, I have to cramp yours."
So the days and nights quickly fell into a pattern of sharing work, sharing their evenings, sharing their bed. Each day began with croissants and fresh fruit jam and cafe au lait in their room, as they read Boyle's notes to prepare for the day's interviews. Then Tony would tape his first interview while Elizabeth watched. He was not as sharp with his guests as he had been when his show was new, and though he had always refused to talk about it in Los Angeles, on their second morning in Europe he casually asked her advice about questions he might use in that afternoon's interview. Later, after he used them and the interview went well, he asked more easily, and Elizabeth was more confident in making suggestions. Soon, as she watched his tapings, she heard him using as many of her questions as his own to skewer self-important celebrities. And at the end of each interview, he would look her way, and wink conspiratorially.
He watched her interviews, too, smiling his approval, throwing an admiring kiss as her questions slid beneath the protective masks most people wear in public. Between tapings, they ate lunch together and, much later, dinner, always at intimate restaurants Tony frequented whenever he was
in Paris, where he was known and addressed by name. And after a brief visit to one or another night club, they returned to their dimly-lit room and turned-down bed and came together with the same hunger of their first day in Paris.
Longing for love and comfort, Elizabeth thought she would never have enough of it. And as Tony held and caressed her, murmuring how lovely she was, how he adored the sensuality that was a woman's, the body that was a girl's, she found it easier to close off whole areas of her thoughts, let desire build, and give herself to pleasure.
Her body woke to all the joys she had locked away for five months; she was strung as tightly as a high-wire, responding to the sound of Tony's voice, the lightest brush of his sleeve against her arm, the touch of his hand on her breast when he took off her dress at night. She was young and alive, her senses heightened, her appetite growing as Tony's skilled hands and mouth brought her to a pitch and a fulfillment she had forgotten she'd ever known.
"Wonderful woman," he murmured when they came back to the hotel early on their third day in Paris and lay on the silk coverlet, in too much of a hurry even to pull it aside. "You're a man's dream. My dream." He
lay on Elizabeth, sliding into her, and she held his hips with her hands, eyes closed, listening to the deep velvet of his voice, feeling him move inside her. "I need you at work, I need you in bed, I need you over croissants . . . beautiful, adored Elizabeth. . . ."He brought his mouth to hers, their tongues thrusting together as their bodies did, and a small moan of pure pleasure escaped Elizabeth's lips beneath his. "Perfect," Tony said.
But the next morning he frowned when she said she wanted to see Colette's apartment on the Palais Royale. They were at breakfast, sitting on a striped silk loveseat in the French windows of their sitting room. The table was set with a single rose and thin Limoges china; steam rose from the coffee cups, making the wrought-iron balcony waver in the morning sun. Tony shook his head. "No time for sightseeing, my love. Bo thinks we're here to work."
"You don't care about sightseeing," Elizabeth pointed out.
"True enough. I've been here too often. And I never could pump up enthusiasm for museums or buildings smelling of the past; I want only the best restaurants and front-row-center theater tickets. Anyway, why do you care about a dead writer's apartment? She's not even there to talk to."
"It's all right, Tony," Elizabeth said coolly. "You go to your interview without me; I'll go to Colette's apartment alone."
"You really want to do it? Well, but we'll meet for lunch; you don't want to miss Jamin."
"Don't count on me. I'm going to browse in bookstores on the Left Bank, and I'm going to do some writing this afternoon."
"But dinner! You do plan to join me for dinner?"
She laughed. "Of course I'm joining you for dinner. And anything you want to do afterward. We don't have to be together every minute, Tony. I'd like some time to myself."
"And you shall have it." He left his chair and sat on the arm of hers, holding her against him. "You shall have anything you want. Have I told you how I feel about your being here?"
"Yes," she said. "But that's no reason not to tell me again."
"You make me feel I can do anything. You make the days bright and the nights even brighter, you are my warm, delicious, most lovely Elizabeth and I adore every moment with you. Didn't you notice that the rain stopped the day after we arrived? You make Paris beautiful."
Elizabeth laughed again. "Paris manages to look beautiful without me. But thank you, Tony; I love the kind words."
"Is that all you love?"
Instead of answering, she said, "Isn't your appointment in forty minutes?"
"Oh, my God, it is. And on the other side of town. Damn Bo; he said he'd call to remind me. What the hell happened to him?"
"Wouldn't he be calling you at the Ritz?"
"No. I told him I'm here."
There was a silence. "I see," Elizabeth said quietly.
"I was going to tell you. He's known from the first day, Elizabeth; he has to be able to reach me."
"You've been calling him every morning."
"You were so uptight, it was easier to pretend he didn't know. But it was clumsy, and we decided it was ridiculous to keep pretending. I understand that you're worried about people knowing, but I'm officially at the Ritz as far as everyone else is concerned. It's just that Bo is different."
"And how many people does Bo confide in?"
"His boyfriend. No one else, as far as I know. But my God, Elizabeth, we're not doing anything the rest of the world isn't doing. Why do we have to be secret?"
"Because it's important to me. Do we have to go public to please you?"
"We have to be together to please me. I'll do whatever you say." He ran a comb through his silver hair. "How do I look?"
"Sleek and satisfied."
"Because of you." He kissed her again. "I'm off. If Bo calls, I'll be at the Musee Rodin."
"Tony Rourke at a museum?"
"Columbia's filming a chase scene there for their latest Parisian thriller: two people trying to skewer each other in the shadow of The Thinker.' I interview them when they take a break from lurching through the garden. Don't blame me; it's Bo's brainstorm. Goodbye, my sweet, see you at dinner."
Elizabeth took an hour for sightseeing that morning, and an hour the next, finding Colette's apartment and the house where Edith Wharton had lived in St. Germain des Pres, and then Gertrude Stein's house on the Rue Christine and the one Picasso shared with Fernande Olivier in Montmartre. And then, abruptly, she stopped. She had been happily wandering an ancient street, map in hand, when she began to feel uneasy, and by the time she stood in a small chapel in the church of St. Sulpice, gazing at the Delacroix fresco of "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel," her heart was racing and she knew she couldn't go on. I'm the one who's wrestling with something, she thought, looking at the fresco. I just wish I knew what it is.
Whatever it was, she stopped sightseeing. It's all right, she told herself, taking a taxi back to the hotel. I have too much to do to waste time sightseeing. Four hundred papers—so many new readers—and I want to do some magazine articles, too. I have to work harder than ever. If I don't put everything I have into succeeding now, when I have the chance, I never will.
From that moment, Elizabeth buried herself in work and the warmth of Tony's companionship. They shared the television crew, but because Tony taped two interviews a day and Elizabeth only one, she had time to cram in all the work she wanted, taping her television interview, writing to Peter and Holly and her parents, and spending four to five hours a day on her columns, interviewing Americans from Boyle's list and meeting others they recommended.
She had worked out a system of taking notes in longhand, then writing the story on an antique desk in her hotel room, using a portable computer she had brought with her to Europe that stored the text on small disks. She sent one disk to Markham Features in New York where a printout was made and distributed to their four hundred subscribing papers and the Rourke papers with whom they had worked out an agreement, and the other disk to Saul, who did the same for the Chieftain and the Alameda Sun.
"We just got the first one," Saul told Elizabeth on the telephone as she and Tony sat at breakfast on their sixth morning in Paris. "The Vermont painter whose palette is a side of beef. I like the way you caught the feeling of somebody in transition—not sure where he belongs or what he'll do next. We'll run it next week. You've got more coming?"
"Three a week, as usual. Did you think I was loafing?"
"I hoped you were at least sightseeing."
"Oh. Well, I was, but I've been busy. Have you seen Holly?"
"Last night. She's fine and she's going to call you in five minutes, so I'm going to hang up."
"She's going to call me? Do you know why?"
"I'll let her tell you. Talk to you soon."
Tony put his arms around Elizabeth as she hung up. "He liked the story and wants you to stay in Europe for six months with your current companion a
nd keep writing. Yes?"
She smiled. "He likes the story."
He cupped her breasts with his hands. "I like the lady who writes them."
The telephone rang again and she picked it up. "Mother!" Holly cried. "Isabel won!"
"Won?" Elizabeth pulled away from Tony's hands, closing her robe about her as if Holly could see through the telephone. "The election," she said. "I lost track of the date. How wonderful, Holly. But we never really doubted it, did we?"
"No, but it was so exciting—you should have been here! We were all at La Fonda and people were running in and out, shouting numbers and cheering, and then Tom Ortiz called and said he was conceding because it looked like Isabel was getting seventy percent of the vote—actually she got seventy-four—Mother, are you all right?"
"Yes, of course. Don't I sound all right?"
"You sounded odd. Your voice is different."
"It's probably the five thousand miles between us. I'm fine, Holly. Tell me about you."
Holly talked about the final days of the campaign, after Elizabeth left: hundreds of volunteers handing out brochures on street corners and plazas, and ringing doorbells to ask people to vote for Isabel. "And they did! Isabel thinks they were mostly disgusted with old Tom Ortiz, who never did anything; she says everybody's still divided on the dam and she doesn't know what she'll do in January when the legislature meets."
"We'll talk about it when I get back; I told her I had some ideas. Give her a kiss and a hug for me, Holly; I'm so proud of her. Did you have a big celebration?"
"Until four in the morning! Grandpa fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about sanding a rocking chair, and I sang ten songs, and Maya and Luz and I had two margaritas each and got headaches, and Saul and Heather looked deep into each other's eyes. They're changing; they used to just love each other; now they like each other, too. It was the most wonderful party! We missed you and Peter."
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