A Paris Apartment

by Michelle Gable

  “Well, should we get the bill?” April said, reaching down for her purse.

  “Again, I’m sorry about your mother. It must’ve been hard.”

  “It still is,” she admitted.

  Luc leaned back in his chair, flagged down the waiter, and asked for an espresso and the check. When April glanced around she noticed they were the only two left in the restaurant.

  “Thank you for telling me about her,” Luc said. “Your mom. You’re an interesting conversationalist when you stop tap-dancing around all my queries.”

  “Tap-dancing? I’m not sure about that, or about the interesting part. I’m okay, I guess, but I’m no Marthe de Florian.”

  April had told Luc the bare minimum about her mother, but it was not even close to full disclosure. Marthe probably would’ve revealed every last sordid detail and twist, with interesting sidebars about contortionists or enemas thrown in.

  “Few people could be that fearless,” April added.

  “One only needs to try.” Luc got his credit card back from the waiter.

  “By the way, you said I could get this one.”

  “Next one. Shall we? It’s past closing.”

  “We shall. Thanks for the meal. And the champagne. Both were delicious.”

  April popped off the chair and hooked her purse over one shoulder while fidgeting with her hair, which was somehow lodged beneath the straps. It was getting too long, out of control, now nearly reaching her bra. It always grew faster in France.

  “Shall I walk you to your flat?” Luc asked. “This area is safe, but what kind of gentleman would I be if I did not?”

  “Actually,” April said quickly. “I’m going to do some browsing in the Galeries. Try to find a few gifts for my stepdaughters.…”

  Though Chelsea’s gift request specifically excluded the Galeries, April found herself suddenly anxious to leave Luc’s company, to step out from his prying glare. She’d had a bit to drink and was getting overly forthright, the words (and other things) loosening in her chest. What was the phrase Troy always used when negotiating a deal? Right. She’d opened her robe too wide; given Luc too long a stare.

  Plus April could feel her brain and good sense winding away from her. A voice chirped in her head, wondering if Luc’s offer to walk her home had an ulterior motive. Something else—not a voice but something deeper, more instinctual—hoped that the motive was not altogether pure. The degree of this want terrified her.

  “I can wait,” Luc said with a shrug. “Until you are done with your shopping.”

  “No! No! That’s okay. I might be a while,” April said, then added hastily, “Thanks though. Very sweet.”

  “All right then.”

  Luc leaned toward her and kissed both cheeks, Parisian-style, needing no gimmick to get there this time.

  “Au ’voir, Luc,” April said, biting the inside of her bottom lip so she would not blurt out something she might regret. “Okay. Bye. Bye.”

  April floundered off in the opposite direction, her cheeks still burning from the scrape of his stubble. She was gone before he could say good-bye.

  Chapitre XXXVI

  Paris, 20 July 1892

  The heat Paris summer brings! I quite miss the dampness of the convent at times, even if it settled as a low, wet cough at the bottom of my lungs most months of the year. At least in the summertime it was cool.

  Though the streets of Paris have emptied out, the privileged absconding to their ancestral homes, the Folies is busy as ever, which for me is a good thing. I need the funds. Pierre remains in South America, sending me ever-decreasing funds and forever threatening to come home for good. And they do feel like threats. He heard from some unnamed source (Hello, Émilie!) that Robert de Montesquiou occupies my stool most nights of the week. Pierre is not pleased. His sources are not incorrect.

  Ah, Le Comte de Montesquiou, the dandiest of the dandies with his girlish giggles and floral adornments. The pretty little man claims to be a poet, but his real occupation is having been born into wealth. It’s true he spends a lot of time at my station, but M. Le Comte does not view me as a romantic interest. I am a sounding board off which he bounces his more outlandish exploits. It’s not that my jaw on the floor means he will hold back. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The bigger my reaction, the more likely he’ll trot the tale out for public consumption.

  Truth be told, every so often I do contemplate Montesquiou as a romantic partner. He is silly with cash. Gold coins literally fall out of his pockets as he walks. But while Robert could provide a lady with the best adornments and the finest apartment, there is something so depressingly unselective about the man. He will have sex with anything, and have sex with anything he does.

  It’s funny that Pierre is so suspicious of Robert de Montesquiou yet never says a word about Boldini, the one person who should concern him. If I had a way to accurately assess Giovanni’s earning potential, it might be out with M. Merde altogether! Though, I suppose, it is not that simple. Like his wealth, Boldini’s disposition is utterly unpredictable.

  He is such a little tempest of a man. Sometimes Boldini is the storm. Other times he is the calm before. He makes me nervous. He catches me unawares. He is impossible! More than once I’ve sworn him off entirely, so infuriating is he. Yet when we’re apart all I can think of is the next time I’ll see him, the next time we’ll dine together.

  Our favorite is Tortoni’s, the place where the smart and literary gather. We often sit with Émile Zola. Sometimes Dumas fils joins us. All the good boulevardiers are there too, always at the ready with a clever comment, the perfect mot juste.

  We sip beer or cassis with sparkling water or absinthe. We talk of politics and literature. We mock various Republican officials, unless they are with us, in which case we praise their efforts. I leave these meals feeling cultured and quite unlike the convent girl who came to Paris eighteen months ago. Whenever I grow glum, thinking too little has happened, I stop and remember the woman-child who watched Jeanne Hugo’s marital procession. How very far I’ve come. Alas, for every grand and enlightening meal with Boldini, there are three more that conclude with me vowing to end relations forever!

  Two days ago I arrived unannounced at his studio. I never know in what state I might find him when I arrive. This particular afternoon Boldini answered the door in nothing but a nightshirt, seven different colors of paint streaked through his thin and wiry hair.

  “Hello, Giovanni,” I said and tried to swing past.

  He blocked the doorway, eyes unblinking, staring as though he’d never once gazed upon my face.

  “Well, are you going to let me in?” I asked. “I walked all this way.”

  “You cannot come in,” he replied gruffly.

  It occurred to me that perhaps I’d hit the four-to-five a little too closely. He had another woman in the studio. I hadn’t known him to entertain others and had somehow convinced myself I was the only one who could tolerate his moods. Alas he is a man, and men have their needs, not the least of these variety.

  “Oh,” I said, biting my tongue to stop from sobbing. “I suppose you are occupied. Well, then, tell whoever it is I say hello.”

  I turned to go, sniffling.

  “The world is ending!” he shouted. “I am a fraud!”

  I stopped walking but did not turn back to face him.

  “What do you mean, ‘a fraud’?”

  Was there a wife? A family? A stable of young men? God, the thoughts that assaulted me in those seconds! I should’ve known better. I should’ve known it was all about Boldini.

  “I can’t believe anyone would pay me to paint a portrait,” he cried. “I am a hack, a sham, a novelty painter. I do not deserve to work in Sargent’s hallowed studio! It is all too much! Are there any barman openings at the Folies? You must get me a position!”

  Sighing, I turned back to face him.

  “And what is wrong this time?” I asked.

  “The Count. He wants me to attempt his portrait again. I
cannot do it! I cannot get it right! He hates every version!”

  “Le Comte? Montesquiou? Good lord, Boldini, that man will never be happy with a portrait of himself because it will never be as beautiful as the vision he has in his mind!”

  “No, the problem is not the Count’s. It is mine,” he moaned, refusing to listen to an ounce of logic, as usual. “It is over, this painting folly. I will become a bad poet! A drunkard! Maybe both!”

  “Well, then,” I said, never one to participate in his storms of self-doubt. “Let me know if you wish to unload your paints and blank canvases. I’d like to take up portraiture myself. Seems an easy enough hobby.”

  Boldini emitted a long, low growl, grabbed his coat and hat, and announced he was off to the morgue to set his mind straight. Indeed it was the only place that could cheer him up. I thought to remind him he was still in a nightshirt, but decided it was unlikely the dead bodies would mind. Then again, there has been a rash of grisly deaths of late. The lines at the morgue’s entrance often extend three blocks or more. Sometimes I wonder if that particular show gets more visitors than the Folies.

  Giovanni Boldini. That funny, crazy man. Just writing his name makes me long to see him, to one-better our prior meeting. Perhaps he will stop in at the Folies tonight. Maybe he will saunter cheerily up to my bar, uplifted by the corpses, and announce a congress at Tortoni’s. Dead bodies plus a hit of absinthe are really the best cure for that insane little man.

  Chapitre XXXVII

  April stumbled up the rue de Clichy, her half-crocked gait further compromised by burying her nose in Marthe’s writing. Normally she’d reserve all provenance gathering (she was sticking to that story, it seemed) to an office or otherwise professional location. But she was in Paris. You stepped over history and walked past provenance at every turn. Also, she was a teensy bit drunk.

  It was a miracle she heard the phone ring, her mind fully occupied by Marthe when it wasn’t part of the way asleep, an even further miracle that she hadn’t considered the caller.

  “Troy?” April said, staring dumbly at the screen.

  She’d forgotten that he was a possibility, that Troy was supposed to call and had not. Meet me in Paris. A suggestion to which he’d not replied. April felt the anger and hurt rebuild inside her.

  “Troy Edward Vogt the third!” she called into the phone. “Well, well, well, as I live and breathe. It’s lovely to hear from you!”

  “Hello, I’m trying to reach April Vogt?”

  Whether he was going for serious or funny April could not tell, though Troy was not particularly known for his humor or pranks. Birdie once called him the “antifrat guy,” and April’s mother-in-law said that at the onset of puberty he’d immediately morphed into a forty-three-year-old man.

  “Hilarious!” April chirped. “My husband is hilarious. You are my husband, aren’t you? I can’t really be sure.”

  April turned a corner and wound around three couples who all looked as though they’d not fought a minute in their lives. Maybe they didn’t have to. Maybe they all agreed on the four-to-five, giving one another the latitude to philander but only during prescribed times. If you agreed to misbehave, at least everyone remained on equal footing.

  “April? Is that you?” Her husband’s voice sounded genuinely concerned, not at all teasing, which confused April for a moment until she remembered this was Troy she was dealing with, not Luc.

  “What? Are you expecting one of your o-o-other wives?” she asked, drawing out the vowels in an attempt at a British accent, but falling several glasses of champagne short of anything Masterpiece Theatre–worthy.

  “What is wrong with you?” Troy said. “I’ve called seven times in the last five hours. You seem to be irritated, but I’m the one whose calls aren’t getting returned.”

  “Well, I’ve been busy, you see,” April said. She bumped into a streetlight, circled around it, and bumped into the next one. Somewhere behind her a group of men tittered.

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, is my work not important enough for le grand m’sieu?”

  “Please speak English,” Troy said.

  “Well, you caught me. I was at the morgue. Looking at dead bodies. Some people find it relaxing.”

  “‘Dead bodies’? Are you threatening me?”

  “It’s quite a popular hobby in Paris. You see, ‘There has been a rash of grisly deaths of late,’” April said, using Marthe’s words, a direct quote. “Corpse viewing is more popular than ever!”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Non!” April said just as she realized she’d passed her apartment. She made a U-turn.

  “Should I call back? After you sleep this off? Because you’re not making sense at all.”

  “Mais que tu es bête!” April slipped through the front door of her building just as a flock of twenty-somethings stepped out. “No sleep for this girl. Tell me, what have you been up to this fine day? Working hard? No errands of mischief, I presume?”

  “Well, no. On both accounts, I guess. I spent all day at a landfill,” he said and chuckled. “I guess it was work, technically, though at a dump—”

  “I can see why you find this all so amusing.” April could not get her key into the lock. Was this even her apartment? She checked the number, then tried a fifth and sixth time. “Nothing like a site visit to a place perfectly well-suited to its visitors. Ha! Bankers, lawyers—and Willow. All standing in a landfill. Perfect. This is just too good. You have to be making it up.”

  “Not sure why I’d bother making up something about a landfill, but since you seem interested in the topic, our new acquisition gets its carbon offsets from landfill remodeling, so we had to check it out.”

  “I’m sure you did.” April finally jammed the key into the lock and turned it so hard she thought it might snap in half. “By the by, I heard about the big par-tay at the Beauchamp Club. Was this before or after the landfill confab? I don’t know how you fit it all in. You are a wonder, Troy Vogt.”

  “Uh, before, as a matter of fact. Who told you about the party?”

  “One of my sources.”

  “Lemme guess. Birdie, am I right?”

  “You’ve always been against her.” April bodychecked the door and found herself at once lying in a pile in the middle of her floor.

  “Did you just fall down?”

  “Nope. Dropped a piece of Continental furniture. Twentieth century.” She stood, brushing off the back of her skirt. “But I get it. You don’t like Birdie because she’s onto you. She has your number.”

  “She has nothing. And I don’t not like Birdie. Not that I like her, either. In fact, I have exactly zero feelings or viewpoints on Birdie at all. Though it’s a little disheartening to know you put greater stock in your assistant’s word than in my own.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So what did she tell you? Specifically?”

  “That there was a party, an all-night party. And you were there.”

  “Score one for the bird dog,” Troy said. “Yes there was a party, and I was there. This is a fact. And I now have a Brioni suit that can’t be saved thanks to the odor.”

  “How upsetting for you! So. Curious. Was Willow at this party?”

  “It’s odd. You say to stop bringing up her name yet you keep doing exactly that—”

  “Answer the question, Vogt.”

  “Yep. She was there. And also at the closing dinner beforehand. We were on the same flight as well. Do you need the full itinerary?”

  “Why?” April asked. “Why was she there? You’ve always said due diligence was her deal, but that happens before all the documents are signed.”

  “A closing is 1 percent work and 99 percent celebration,” Troy said. “You know that. All the major contributors and stakeholders were there. It is absolutely meant to be an atta-boy for all involved. Lawyers. Bankers. Everyone. Why do I feel like I’m being grilled when I did nothing?”

  “So the trip to London was, basical
ly, about a dinner.”

  “Mostly. Yes.”

  “And a party.”

  “All right. Sure.”

  “And then you were at the landfill all day?” April said. “Like all day?”

  “Yes. Several of us were. Willow was just one of many—”

  “Please stop saying that godforsaken name.”

  “My colleague,” he said, sighing loudly.

  “I don’t know if that’s any better.”

  “Really? Colleague is your problem? You have them, certainly. Marc, Olivier—”

  “Luc. You cannot forget Luc all of people. Mon dieu!”

  “Who the fuck is Luc?”

  “Here’s my problem,” April said, deflecting. “Since I need to spell it out for you. You spent all night at a party. You spent all day at a landfill. But you couldn’t spare an extra six hours to come visit me in Paris. Nor could you spend the six minutes to explain why not. Or a mere six seconds to reply to my text, saying you could not make it.”

  “I’m sorry, but do you need your hearing checked? I told you this was all part of the closing. Mandatory.”

  “I’m sorry, but am I your wife?”

  “I could pose the same question to you, April,” he said. “Why didn’t you take six hours out of your, what is it, month in Paris to come find me in London?”

  “I have to work,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  April slumped toward her bed. She’d hit a wall, an impasse so big there was no way around it. He had a point. She had a bunch of points before that. So many points made by the both of them. Unless you were playing Wimbledon, points seemed an awfully painful way to get out of or stay in a marriage.

  “You’re running,” he said. “You do this when you’re done with something and don’t want to deal. You ran to New York to get away from your family situation. You ran to Paris when New York was tough. Then you ran back to New York again when Paris didn’t work out.”