“Are you done? Shall we sit outside for a moment? The sun’s come out. I’ll get us a cool drink.”
She was suddenly exploding with heat. “Okay. It’s baking in here.”
Mark took the ice-tea pitcher from the fridge. She sat in a director’s chair outside and watched as he poured and then paced, and then sipped, apparently preparing himself, gearing up. “How to start? I’m very relieved to see you’re taking a different tack—I think we can agree that we got off on the wrong foot yesterday—but yes, we need to talk…”
It seemed he was going to remain standing. In case he needed to run away in a hurry, Jean thought.
“Of course I’ve been waiting for this to come up,” he continued, still hesitant, “ever since you saw that e-mail.”
So that’s it, she thought. Giovana. It’s never going to go away. He knows—he knows everything. Her vain hope of a swift and painless reprieve vanished. She tried not to think, instead she drew her legs under her, gluing herself to the seat. In the distance, she heard the whine of a drill or a mower, the revving of a motorcycle down the road.
Mark took a deep breath. “You know who she is, of course. What you don’t know is that…incredible though it may sound, Sophie has got the idea…Sophie has for many years clung to the idea…that I am her father.”
“What are you talking about?” She was making a visor with her hand, peering up at him.
“If you would let me speak. I met her around the time Victoria was born, and she made a connection. Since then…let me try to explain, what I understand of it anyway. As you know, her father was killed before, possibly even as, she was born.” Jean was puzzled, borderline annoyed. This old story again? Mark was running both his hands through his hair, squinting at the tiled patio floor as if his unlearned lines were written out there in chalk. “Well, seemingly because of that tragic and central event surrounding her own birth, she somehow attached herself to the birth of Victoria, our central event if you will, and she, I don’t know, I suppose she wanted to be that new person, with a fresh start—as much as that much-wanted, much-loved daughter—our Victoria.”
She held her breath. What was coming here? She distrusted Mark’s invoking “our Victoria,” in what seemed to her a general bid for connection and forgiveness. She didn’t move and she didn’t interrupt.
“I swear to you, the woman is mad. It’s a nightmare—it has been a nightmare. She has plagued me. She would just appear in the office. Ask Noleen—ask Dan. The one living female even Dan has the sense to avoid. She’d be waiting outside the house when I’d leave for work and there she’d still be when I got home. Why do you think I never wanted to go out? Why do you think I was so keen to come here? I became convinced, not without reason, I assure you, that Sophie would be waiting on every corner. I tell you she is a terrorist.”
Jean was finding it hard to take in—not just the amplification of Sophie, but the diminution of Mark as she’d always understood him. Was it really possible that she’d misunderstood their glorious self-sufficiency, her definition of marriage, one restored to her only the day before by Dan? Mark, her twin in reluctance, her retiring reflection, her secret sharer—where was her husband now? By her side, or merely in hiding? It was as if her own dear man was, after all, aligned with Giovana: unreliable and unreal, other. As if the whole Giovana excursion had been grotesque prep for this bigger, bolder disillusionment…and all just because he’d maybe fathered a child before she even met him? Look, she wanted to shout, I’m already adapting—that was before my time. But why believe Sophie? He said himself she was crazy. And she was—she was a fantasist, a stalker; for this Jean had seen evidence. One thing was clear: he didn’t believe Jean could be trusted to know anything at all. Had he ever really belonged to her? Well, it seemed she was going to find out.
Mark was too busy unpacking his long-rehearsed story to register his wife’s dismay. “You remember that time in the south of France at Les Oiseaux, where we went that Easter with baby Vic. That’s when it started. She just appeared, do you remember? I tried to be nice to her. We were all nice to her. You were a darling. Obviously a mistake—mine, I mean, but I thought, After all she did lose her father, and her mother in a way. Sandrine was by then off in Canada, rebuilding her life. Sophie did go out there and I don’t know what happened. It didn’t work out. She didn’t get on with Sandrine’s new bloke; the school was a disaster, apparently she took a lot of drugs, LSD, I don’t know what. Needless to say, my communication with Sandrine such as it is, or was, has not been much use in all of this. Nothing worked out for Sophie. Nothing ever has. I tried to be kind, supportive—quite honestly I thought if I wasn’t kind she’d be even more trouble. I tell you she’s a nutter. In and out of institutions her entire life.” Mark was circling the terrace, pacing.
Jean couldn’t help feeling that, for all she didn’t know, she’d have heard if Sophie de Vilmorin had been committed. And LSD? The young girl Jean remembered was not the druggy type. She was innocent—unusually innocent, Jean always thought, and lovely, her lost-waif qualities having not yet reached clinical dimensions. And Sophie now? That wilting vegan in the dry cleaner’s? Hardly an enfant terrible. It suddenly struck her that Mark wasn’t telling her the truth, or that he was at least deflecting her from the main point. She could feel her skin searing in the late sun and she didn’t move to cover herself.
“I thought she’d been in a convent for a while,” she said. “Is that what you mean by institutionalized?”
“Well yes, far as I understood. In France the convent does for the loony bin.”
Jean, half listening, thought about that Easter in Provence. She could see the place perfectly—up in the hills near St. Paul de Vence, a small inn with richly decorated rooms, the ancient walled garden, the famous food. Vic had taken her first steps on the paved patio of Les Oiseaux; in fact Sophie had cheered her on right along with Mark and Jean. This young woman, no more than seventeen, had appeared unexplained and alone. She could see the moment they realized who she was, the hugs and the toasts, the patronne herself setting Sophie a place at their table. They got on well, and even wary baby Vic loved her. The last night she’d offered to babysit, giving them their first evening off in a year—brilliant! Naturally they’d invited her to come and stay.
Maybe it wasn’t a chance meeting—how incredible that this had never occurred to her.
“When you say you first met Sophie around the time of Victoria’s birth…”
“Yes.”
“Well, then it wasn’t at Les Oiseaux, was it? Vic was a year old when we went there.”
“That’s right.” Mark sat down. He looked exhausted, resigned.
“So where’d you meet her?”
“In Paris.”
Mark had gone to Paris so often throughout their marriage, he could’ve met her at any time.
“Paris when?” But even as she said this, Jean knew exactly when. That strike, when he’d missed his flight. “When Victoria was born you were with Sophie, weren’t you?”
“Yes, yes I was.”
“You were in Paris with Sophie de Vilmorin.” Mark hung his head, waiting for whatever came next. Finally Jean understood. Sophie wasn’t his daughter. She was his lover. Rage ripped through her like a brush fire slow to catch but now consuming. “Wait—so first you fuck her and then you slander her? Was that before or after the convent slash loony bin? Or maybe you just borrowed her for the weekend and sent her back to the sisters when you were done. Or perhaps you weren’t done, not so fast. Just taking a break to meet your brand-new baby girl. Was there even an air controllers’ strike or baggage handlers’ or whatever the hell it was that supposedly kept you in Paris?”
“Yes of course there was a strike.” Mark stood up, protesting. “That’s how I found myself hanging around the hotel bar in the first place, waiting to get out. I ran into her in the street.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It is not a lie.”
“The hotel bar—or the str
eet? Which is it?”
“I ran into her coming out of the metro in St. Germain and she walked with me back to the hotel where I’d gone to collect my bags, basically. I was told about the strike, and so we talked in the bar…”
“And?”
“And yes, I was with her that night, that one night and only that one night, and believe me, you must believe me, she is insane. Not that it makes any difference, I realize. Not that it makes any difference that she completely threw herself at me, insisted I take her to bed, and then stalked me—still does stalk me twenty years on—she didn’t think I was her father then—no, that was a later addition, a subsequent horrific nutter’s ‘revelation.’ Yes, I made a mistake,” Mark said, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other and squeezing it there. “And Jean, I assure you, I have paid for it. I have paid and paid and paid.”
She could hardly believe what he was saying. How old was Sophie then? Sixteen? Fifteen? When she “insisted” he take her to bed—and what, dragged him into the elevator? “Just how much have you paid? No, please don’t answer. In fact, it would be great if you just shut up. Please.” Mark walked over to the garden hose and doused his entire head.
His favorite place to stay in Paris had always been the Hôtel de l’Abbaye in St. Germain. Now she understood Sophie’s e-mail, how she walked by the Abbaye, how it made her want to be a sister, a “nunn.” Oh, that was sweet. And over twenty years he couldn’t find a different favorite hotel—no, l’Abbaye was where he and Jean always went on their romantic weekends in Paris.
But once, long before, he’d gone there by himself. Jean, forty-one weeks pregnant, stayed home, her overnight bag packed and ready by the front door. It was very early on a Sunday morning—hard, she remembered, to get a cab. So when she’d checked into the Lindo Wing at St. Mary’s Paddington, he’d checked into a chambre de bonne at the Hôtel de l’Abbaye, Sophie’s “top window at the last.” When she’d ridden up alone in the hospital elevator clutching her bursting belly, he’d gone up in the hotel elevator, his hands around Sophie’s tiny teen waist. As she’d paced with her contractions, frantically inhaling from the tank of gas and air, he’d devoured this girl. And as Jean entered second-stage labor he’d entered Sophie, both women crying out in pain. And after seven hours of laboring, when she finally pushed Victoria out, and began the second birthing no one had told her about—that giant steak of a placenta—what was Mark doing then? He’d birthed himself, in a pool of virgin’s blood, is that what he’d be telling her next? An event so mesmerizing, so shaping, that he’d spent the next twenty years in preoccupation and repetition, trying to get back to that first time, trying ever after to get back inside, oh Mrs. H., Mrs. H., Mrs. H. She’d heard of men who couldn’t bear the arrival of the competition; she’d had letters from her readers on this particularly noxious form of envy, but she’d never fingered Mark for one. Had Sophie been where he’d gone all those times he went “ashore”? Perhaps she was the shore.
Girls and men and their pregnant wives—cornier, if possible, than sultry blooming Giovana, though she supposed the one paved the way for the other, first the soul and then the flesh, never mind if Giovana wasn’t “real”; she’d still infiltrated their marriage. She couldn’t think anymore. How she’d soiled herself in reply, in echo, in revenge. It was no comfort to realize that, deep down, she’d always known: why else had his missing the birth always weighed on her quite so unaccountably? Mark was back and he was talking to her—his tone was pleading, operatic—and she could hardly take in the words.
“I couldn’t tell you. Should I have, really? To relieve myself of the burden? I knew it would hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt you, can you not see that? You are my life. You and Victoria are my life. If I am to be punished for this one wrongdoing, by God I have been punished, Jean. I have lived with it every day. I have been sorry every day. I didn’t know at the time about her madness; not, I do see, that it makes a jot of a difference. How I have hated Sophie. Hated myself. Just as I have loved you and Victoria, how I have hated that woman.”
Jean didn’t want to speak and it seemed he’d never stop. “The only thing I’ve never been able to work out is how her real father can have known she was a bitch—a witch—before she was even born. His ‘accident’ was an act of incomparable brilliance and foresight. Yes, Jean, I’ve thought more than once of just ending it all. Because I have tried everything. I’ve tried to pay her off. To send her away. I’ve arranged places for her to live, to work. I’ve reasoned with her, begged her, sent her to innumerable psychiatrists, threatened her.”
“Yes, I see you’ve been very busy,” Jean said quietly, thinking Mark was the least suicidal person she knew. Was there nothing he wouldn’t say now? “Except you never told me. Don’t imagine I don’t know how hard that is to do. But you didn’t just fail to mention it. You invited her into our lives. She looked after our baby. You let her in. First you go to bed with this…child, and then you invite her into our world—where she’s clearly made herself at home. In our bed, Mark. And where is she now? Here on St. Jacques, just as I proposed? Stashed in a hotel down by the port? Or in one of those pastel bungalows in Grand Baie?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. What an obscene thought. I honestly believed—at the time I thought it was the best way to manage her—I didn’t realize at first she was so unstable. High-strung, emotional, nervous, yes, but not mad. She was at her best when she was with me, with us. You have no idea. It was weak of me, I grant you that, but it worked, at least for a time. Calmed her down, rooted her. She thought Victoria was her sister, for God’s sake. She still thinks that.”
Jean leapt up. “Don’t you bring Victoria into this! You let that woman approach Victoria. Then and now, this summer.”
“How could I stop her? Do you not see I have spent the past twenty years trying to stop Sophie? Trying to shield you and Victoria from her?” His face was crumpled, and he was practically crying. Jean thought of his anxious love for Victoria, his protectiveness. Victoria, so sane, so lovably sane.
“I have tried every way I know how to convince her, but she will always insist that I am her father.”
“Well, are you?”
“Jean! Jean.” He looked stung, hurt, radically aged. “Why would you even want to say that? I don’t deny she was young enough to be a daughter—does that in itself make any real difference between you and I?”
“You and me.”
“Yes, Jean, you and me. That’s exactly right. I never imagined this would be the thing that bothered you so much. I’m telling you what happened, a very long time ago, and—”
“Of course, it bothers me, Mark—though I wouldn’t call it a ‘thing.’ How can I explain, since you obviously don’t get it. I have done some very stupid things. Fantastically stupid. Who hasn’t? I guess I can’t help thinking of myself at fifteen.” Or Billy at fifteen, she thought for a moment, his life already over. “But let’s stick with what we can both understand. Victoria at fifteen—a child. You do see when it’s Victoria at fifteen, don’t you? Is that why you freaked over that guy Rick—you saw your own reflection, didn’t you? And Victoria was a good bit older than that too, at least seventeen, maybe more.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I don’t know why I told you. You will never let it go. The permutations are endless, I can see that now. You will never forgive me.”
So no point in asking then, Jean thought. “What do you think this is? Because I’m American, you imagine you’re talking to some self-help group where everyone applauds you at the end, whatever you have to say? Thanks for sharing, Mark, good job? Not to mention that it’s illegal to have sex with a fifteen-year-old—did you ever think of that?”
“Jean! A mistake—I made a terrible mistake. I slept with her. Once. And obviously I’ve thought of that, though it hardly seems the worst of it. I slept with her and I slept with her mother, as much as possible, along with half of St. Malo, Jean, over thirty-five years ago. Though in fact my innings with Sandrine only las
ted a couple of weeks before she moved on. Naturally.”
She could not fathom why he was going over this old ground, except maybe to change the subject. But she said nothing—she was almost curious to see just how far he could go.
“I tell you Sandrine was already with Sophie’s father before I left the family, and I was relegated to the role of family friend. You’ve seen the pictures of their wedding, on that beach at dawn. Typically demanding of Sandrine, I might add, a dawn wedding.” He took a long pull of his drink. She hadn’t noticed when the ice tea became a bottle of beer.
“Why are you going on about that summer a hundred fucking years ago?”
“What I’m trying to say, Jean, is that Sophie is a victim. An orphan, basically. I was nothing to Sandrine. No one was. Not even her own daughter.”
Jean could not take this. “So what? You improve her lot by raping her? Skinny know-nothing little virgin?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—I did no such thing. And she wasn’t a virgin anyway.”
“As if that makes any difference! And how would you know if she was or wasn’t a virgin?”
Mark sat down, infinitely weary. “Jean, I am really trying to tell you what happened, a great many years ago, and you want to go after every alternative version, follow every irrelevant thread. You want to win some kind of feminist argument? Fine! You win! I agree. But what I’m telling you is it’s knowledge she’s wanted, that’s all. Sophie is hungry for any connection to that time of her beginning, before everything went wrong forever, starting with that dreadful accident. Then, much later, I thought—completely wrongly, I know better than anyone—I thought, after what I did, and I don’t deny it, I could at least try to give her that. Connection, solace—some idea that there had been beauty and truth in her tiniest beginnings.”
Jean thought she might throw up—before now she thought that was just an expression, something Maya Stayanovich might say.
“I am so sorry, Jean.”
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