by Alix Nichols
“How do you—”
“Someone’s calling for you. They’ve been hollering your name a good five minutes now.”
With an effort, I focused on my surroundings. Someone—more specifically, Delphine—was, indeed, calling my name.
“I should go to her,” I said.
He nodded and pulled the door open.
As I tumbled into the room, I collided with Delphine, who was about to venture onto the terrace and look for me.
“There you are!” She grinned with relief. “Ready to go home?”
“What about Alberto?”
She shrugged with an exaggerated nonchalance. “Turns out he’s married.”
“Aww. I’m so sorry.” I gave her arm a sympathetic squeeze.
“It’s OK.” Delphine pulled out her phone and began to scroll. “How long have you been out there freezing your reindeer ass off?”
I glanced at my watch. More than an hour. It had seemed like fifteen minutes to me.
Delphine narrowed her eyes. “And what exactly were you doing alone with a snowman?”
I looked around only to discover Olly was gone.
Luckily, Delphine found what she was looking for on her phone. She tapped, brought it to her ear, and then gave the cab service operator our details.
By the time she hung up, I’d come up with a reply. “What do you think a reindeer and a snowman do when they find themselves alone?”
“No idea.”
I smiled triumphantly. “Bitch about their boss, Santa, of course.”
Delphine rolled her eyes but didn’t press further.
Five minutes later, we climbed into our cab. As we rode home, both of us lost in our thoughts, I realized Olly hadn’t given me his real name. Maybe our chemistry had been one-sided and he hadn’t enjoyed our kiss like I had.
Getting involved with a coworker isn’t a good idea, I remember telling myself as a consolation.
How I wish I’d recognized him back then!
If I had, I wouldn’t have ended up with acute lustium irresistiblum for Raphael d’Arcy four months later. My Alsatian common sense would’ve warned me that getting involved with my company’s womanizing CEO wasn’t just a bad idea.
It was the mother of all bad ideas.
Chapter 4
“How did we, as a nation, come to this?”
Màma’s green gaze sweeps the room, touching every single person in the congregation with a mixture of fondness and authority only this woman is capable of.
She drinks from the tall glass on her pulpit and lets her question sink in and foment in our minds. Whenever my mother pauses her sermons to do this, I have the impression everyone can feel her firm hand on their shoulder.
I, for one, always do.
When I manage to get to Estheim early enough, or stay long enough, I do my best to attend Màma’s Sunday sermon. “You know you don’t have to,” she always says to Pàpa, Eva, and me. But we insist. Pàpa, because he’s a devout Christian who supports his pastor wife in everything she does. Eva, because she actually enjoys Màma’s sermons. And me… To be honest, I’m not sure why I come along.
I’m not really a Protestant, like the rest of the family.
I’m not a Catholic, either, or any other denomination, for that matter.
I’m a Darwinist.
Considering how close humans are to monkeys—especially on the métro during rush hour—how can anyone believe in anything other than survival of the fittest?
“What twisted path,” Màma continues, “led us to believe we must use images of naked women to sell chocolate ice cream? And why has it become our new normal to have sexual relationships and even babies out of sacred matrimony?”
Today’s sermon is called On Purity. It’s a recurrent theme with my mother.
Eva and I have debated hundreds of times if Màma thinks her grown daughters—I’m twenty-six and Eva twenty-eight—are still virgins. Our conclusion is that she does. Because that’s what she expects of us. And because we have yet to muster the courage to tell her the truth.
“For this is the will of God, that ye should abstain from fornication,” Màma reads from her Bible.
Pàpa nods.
Eva and I focus on our feet.
Màma ends the sermon with Jesus’s forgiving a fallen woman, followed by a passionate appeal to all lost souls to repent and keep their bodies clean of immoral sex.
It’s all very sweet of her to promise Jesus will forgive me, but the question is will she forgive me? Will Pàpa forgive me? Not just for fornicating with Raphael, but for the bigger, dirtier sin I committed five years ago?
Judging by what I know of their past actions, I’d wager they won’t. Because actions, as my parents like to say, speak louder than words.
“If you could miraculously have your virginity back, hymen and all,” I whisper in Eva’s ear as we leave the church, “would you do it?”
“No way.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you were a believer.”
“I am. But not in physical abstinence.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d assume you were getting laid.”
Eva lets out a sigh. “I wish.”
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, I give her a tiny squeeze. I know about her hopeless crush on Adam.
“And you?” she asks. “A new boyfriend, maybe?”
I look away.
Eva puts her hand over mine and gives me a gentle pat. She knows about my doomed affair with Raphael.
Last time she came over to Paris to spend a weekend with me, I swore to her I’d pull myself out of it. I promised myself the same thing at least three times already since January.
It’s April.
I stopped promising.
Eva nudges me with her elbow. “Did you at least try to break up?”
I shake my head.
“Has he changed?” she asks hopefully. “Is there a chance he has feelings for you? Would it help if you quit your job?”
“I don’t want to talk about Raphael,” I say, still avoiding Eva’s eyes.
He hasn’t changed.
And I very much doubt sacrificing my job would help.
Eva shrugs and catches up with our parents.
“I loved your sermon,” she says to Màma.
She always tells her that, and most of the time, she means it. But this time, her fingers are crossed behind her back. I guess the disconnect between this sermon’s high standards and the reality of our lives was too big even for Eva’s indulgent heart.
At home, Pàpa sets out to cook lunch while Màma takes care of administrative stuff. Pàpa is a retired policeman with a passion for cooking, which is fortunate, seeing as Màma couldn’t fry an egg to save her life.
Neither can I, by the way. My single culinary competence is pasta, which is not so bad since I happen to love it, as I do all Italian food. To vary my dinners, I stock up on Bolognese, pesto and whatever pasta sauce I find at my local supermarket, and then I rotate them.
Works fine for me.
When Eva visits me in Paris, she arrives with a huge tub of homemade pesto sauce, which she then portions out into small containers and sticks them in my freezer. My sister has inherited Pàpa’s talent. Man, she can cook. The dinners she used to whip up for us as teenagers were better than the three or four Michelin-starred restaurant meals my parents offered us on special occasions.
Eva studied at Le Cordon Bleu, one of the best culinary schools in the country, and worked as an undercook with some hotshot chef whose name I forget.
Two years later she quit, trained as a secretary, and after a year of temping, landed a “well-paying and stable” admin assistant job at the European Space Agency.
Màma was very proud of her.
Pàpa was very upset.
I was both, but mostly perplexed. Eva didn’t comment on her radical change of career except for a casual remark that cooking wasn’t her thing, after all. Màma took it at face value. With no love lost between
her and the stove, she could easily relate to that justification. My theory is that Eva was pushed a little too hard by her celebrity boss or bullied by her fellow undercooks. A less sensitive person would’ve grown a thicker skin and carried on. But Eva, as usual, took the path of least resistance and convinced herself the career of a chef wasn’t for her.
All of this goes through my mind as Eva and I stretch out in our favorite hammocks under Pàpa’s gorgeous apple trees. My life may be screwed up beyond redemption, but Eva has options.
It’s a crime to turn her back on them.
“Remind me again how a promising chef ends up as admin assistant?” I ask.
She fake-yawns. “Please, not again!”
“Humor me. I just want to understand.”
“Your fixation with what I do for a living is unhealthy. Do you realize that?”
“You’re skirting my question,” I say.
“What’s wrong with being an admin assistant?”
“Nothing.” I hesitate and then shake my head. “Everything.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“My current job is just a temporary means to an end, while you seem bent on ignoring your true vocation.”
She shrugs. “I’m perfectly happy where I am.”
“That’s because you’re crazy about Adam.”
She glares at me.
I glare back. “You’ve been pining for him for how long? A year?”
Eva says nothing.
“He’s never asked you out.”
Silence.
“Has he ever done anything to suggest he likes you?”
She shakes her head.
“He’s had a girlfriend during this time, right?”
She nods.
“You haven’t.”
“I’m not into women.”
“Very funny.” I give her a sympathetic look. “Let me rephrase my question: Have you had a boyfriend or even a one-night stand ever since you laid eyes on Adam?”
She sighs and shakes her head.
“On top of it all, he’s your boss,” I say. “Don’t repeat my mistakes, Evie.”
She pushes her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “Adam is my hierarchical superior, but he’s not my direct boss.”
“To-may-to, to-mah-to.”
“And he isn’t a womanizer like yours.”
I feel a sharp pang somewhere in the upper left quadrant of my chest. Must be the truth hurting.
“Let’s change the topic,” Eva says, giving me an apologetic look.
“Good idea.”
I stare at the delicate blooms over my head, then shut my eyes, and spend the next half hour pretending to nap before Pàpa summons us inside.
Chapter 5
“Since we rarely get to see both of you at the same time,” Pàpa says, handing Eva and me plates with huge slices of onion pie, “I thought I’d make something traditional.”
“Yay!” Eva digs into her slice. “Love flammkuche.”
“I know.” Pàpa watches her chew her first bite. “Verdict?”
Eva swallows and raises her wine glass. “Three yummy stars.”
Pàpa grins, mighty pleased.
“The Riesling could’ve been better, though,” my sister declares with her nose in her glass.
“Really?” Pàpa takes a sip from his own glass and nods. “Next time you’ll pick it, OK?”
Eva bows theatrically. “It’ll be an honor, sir.”
Those two have always had a special bond, cemented by their positivity and love of good food. Màma and I have a less cheerful disposition. Which doesn’t automatically mean we enjoy the same bond Eva and Pàpa do.
Come to think of it, I don’t really enjoy a “bond” with anyone.
Once, when we were in our teens, Eva made a remark that stayed with me.
“Why are you so aloof all the time?” she asked.
I disagreed with that characterization, of course, but I did wonder—why, indeed? And it was only a couple of years ago that I figured out, after many an hour of soul-searching, what keeps me from confiding in Màma and Pàpa the way Eva does.
It isn’t a lack of affection.
God knows, I love them. Together with Eva, they’re my favorite people in the world, and my most ardent wish is that they be as healthy and happy as humanly possible.
What holds me back is fear. I’m scared that if I let them closer, they’ll see me for who I really am and they won’t like it.
I tune out of Eva and Pàpa’s lively chat while an old memory returns as vivid as ever.
I’m thirteen.
I wake up in the middle of the night to my parents’ unusually loud voices coming from the kitchen. They’re engaged in an animated conversation with a third person, a woman I can’t identify. My curiosity piqued, I tiptoe down the hallway, sit down at the top of the staircase, and listen.
“So, if you could lend me the five grand,” the strange woman says, “I’ll be able to repay my debt in full.”
“And you’re sure your pimp will let you go?” Pàpa asks.
I clap my hand to my mouth in shock. I’ve seen enough forbidden movies to know exactly what a pimp is.
“Oh, he will,” the woman says. “I’m not some helpless Eastern girl who doesn’t know her rights and is scared shitless. I’m a French national, and I’ve covered my back.”
“Smart girl,” Màma says.
“His only leverage is the money I owe him,” the woman says.
There is a moment of silence, and then the woman speaks again. “I asked my family, and I asked my banker, but those were dead ends. Believe me, I wouldn’t have come to you if I had other options.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” Màma says.
“I heard your sermon last Sunday when you talked about fresh starts.” The woman pauses before adding, “It inspired me.”
“Give us a couple of days to reflect and look into our finances, OK?” Pàpa says.
I have no doubt what the outcome of their thinking will be. They’ll help her. On top of being professional helpers—a pastor and a policeman—my parents send monthly checks to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International. They also sponsor four little girls on different continents by paying their school fees. When they receive handwritten letters from those girls, they take the time to read them and to write long, thoughtful replies.
In short, helping people is what my parents do, both for a living and for fun.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” the woman says, emotion palpable in her voice.
I hear chairs move and scramble away from the staircase.
“We’ll call you before the weekend,” Màma says, opening the door. “And remember, you’re not alone, Suzelle.”
Suzelle.
For the next two days all I can think of is Suzelle the Repentant Sinner. How I wish I’d caught a glimpse of her! I’m filled with a mix of fascination and awe for the fallen woman determined to walk away from her unholy life. In the hopes to see her if she returns—when she returns—I keep myself awake reading with a flashlight under my blanket.
And then, on Friday night, I hear my parents discuss the subject in the kitchen—only without Suzelle this time.
“I’ll report it to the Commissaire,” Pàpa says, his voice devoid of its usual warmth. “It’s my duty.”
“We promised we’d call her,” Màma says.
“We’re not bound by that promise, Petra. We owe her nothing.”
There’s a long pause, then Màma says, “You’re right.”
They turn off the light in the kitchen after that, so I pad to my bed and crawl under the covers, taking care not to wake Eva up.
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.
Rather than quietly helping Suzelle, my parents were going to set the police on her pimp. They’d opted to do what was right rather than what was kind. Even if it put Suzelle at risk.
Maybe their charity had its limits, after all.
> And it didn’t extend to fallen women.
Chapter 6
Everyone barring Eva does stupid things in college.
Some of us are stupider than others—real doddele, as we say in Alsace. A select few make sure the stupid thing they do in college is of the time bomb variety set to go off years later.
I’m among the latter group.
On the desk in front of me is a letter that arrived by snail mail this morning in a simple envelope stamped Sydney, Australia. How different it is from the naughty missives Raphael sometimes sends me from his business trips. The letter I’m staring at doesn’t open with a hello or end with a good-bye. No name, date, or signature anywhere. Not much text, either. Just three short words written in large block letters.
I HAVE PROOF.
My hands shake as I crumple up the note into a tight ball and shove it in my pocket. This is the second compactly ominous message I’ve received from Australia in six months. The first one had even fewer words. It said, I KNOW.
“You OK?” Delphine asks, peeking from behind her computer. “You’re super pale this morning.”
“I noticed it, too.” My second office mate, Barbara, chimes in without shifting her eyes from her screen.
I shrug. “No makeup. Coupled with too little coffee.”
“And too little sleep?” Delphine gives me a meaningful wink.
“That, too.”
“When will you tell us who your mystery lover is?”
“Never.”
Delphine narrows her eyes. “I bet he works at DCA.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Then why the secrecy?” Suddenly, Delphine’s expression softens. “Is he married? Is that why you sometimes sneak out at five and return around seven?”
“He isn’t married,” I say.
Delphine doesn’t look convinced. Neither does Barbara. And I can totally see why. An affair with a married man is exactly what my fling—or whatever it is I’m having with Raphael—must look like.
The infamous cinq à sept.
It stands to reason that the man I’m seeing is married. That’s what I’d figured, too, when I showed up for our second rendezvous out on the terrace.
