Lavinia declined his offer and though it was repeated twice more, each time with increasing urgency, she insisted she was home and she did feel safe, and she had just had her floors sanded.
She was enormously moved by Harold’s concern; he was so clearly agitated. All the signs, the way he tugged on his earlobe and chewed on the inside of his cheek, the way he fingered his Phi Beta Kappa key, they were all familiar to her. She had joined Alice from time to time in finding amusement in his habits and tics.
“Just watch. I’ll bet I can get him to stutter if I really try,” Alice had from time to time boasted, at functions that bored her, or if she felt Harold had ignored her in favor of some inconsequential second-tier diplomat or if he had denied Alice a small pleasure or a bauble for which she hankered. Now, watching him suffer on her behalf, stirred by his sense of duty and affection, Lavinia was sorry she had ever enjoyed a laugh at his expense, or avoided him at the cocktail hour in favor of someone whose conversation had more verve.
Harold waited for her reply. She wanted not to disappoint him. He had been disappointed enough; she could see it in his weary eyes, his puffy hands with his perfectly manicured fingernails. He lit their cigarettes, signaled for the check, and cleared his throat, which was another of his habits about which Alice liked to tease him.
“Well then,” he said.
“Harold,” Lavinia started, but the words she had formulated evaporated in her mouth and in their place there was only a dryness she could not swallow away. He had risen and was holding her coat for her. His whole body seemed weighted with resignation, as if he had already added her to the list of people he could not save, gestures that were, in the end, sterile.
On the street, in front of his car, Harold put out his hand in parting and she clasped it in both of hers in a display of affection that startled both of them. Lavinia brought his gloved hand to her lips, and gave it a quick kiss, just lightly grazing the calf’s skin, which seemed as soft and warm as the lips for which it was a proxy.
“I can’t leave,” she said, still holding his hand in hers. “I’m in love.”
“Poor dear,” was his reply. Lavinia let go of his hand and he used it to pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, for suddenly tears were streaking her face, glinting in the headlights of passing traffic.
“I don’t suppose I should ask,” he said.
“Ever the diplomat,” Lavinia admired, wiping her nose with the handkerchief he proffered. There was something so comforting about the smell of his cologne on the starched cotton that she almost felt sleepy and confessional.
“Does Alice know?”
“No one knows.”
“Then I’ll guard your secret with my life,” Harold said theatrically.
“No,” Lavinia replied, giving her nose a blow, “that’s much too high a price for my honor. But I do appreciate your discretion.”
“All in a day’s work.” Harold beamed. He had once complained to her that his was the only profession, besides perhaps undertaking and the clergy, that required such a high degree of reserve and because such was the nature of gratitude, the cost of that reserve was rarely acknowledged. Lavinia smiled at him. His satisfaction was so pure it was charming and contagious. He was puffed up like a pigeon; his overcoat strained to accommodate his rare indulgence in professional pride.
Lavinia refused Harold’s offer to be dropped off in the Daimler. She was only a few blocks from home and she wanted to part quickly, cleanly, in front of the restaurant rather than at her door, because the few minutes in the car would have felt interminable, would have muddied the lovely moment she had shared with Harold, which she wanted to save as their last note. In the winter sky, clouds hung low over the roof tops in painterly clusters, their undersides purples and inky blue, and the air smelled of snow. Black slivers of church spires pierced the clotting sky, as if cracking it open to reveal the pentimento of an even darker night. Paris had never been so breathtaking.
As the Daimler drove Harold away, receding down the narrow cobblestones of the Rue Varenne, Lavinia waved once, a formal, perfunctory gesture, but she kept her hand raised and did not bring it down to her side until the car was gone and her fingers were numb. Her coat felt flimsy against the wind coming off the Seine and her shoes hurt and she felt for the first time since she’d left home a frisson of real fear.
She would often, in the following years, think of that image: the pink dot of baldness on the back of Harold’s head, framed by the rear window, receding like a pale oval in darkness, an open mouth calling out a message she couldn’t hear and wouldn’t heed anyway.
TWO
Gaston Lesseur was an unlikely lothario, permanently rumpled, and prematurely jowled, with a slight limp in his left leg which he exaggerated when expedient. The injury was from an accident in his boyhood at a British public school, in a rugby skirmish, but the provenance of the limp was rarely discussed. If the wrong assumptions were made and the injury was ascribed a more heroic origin, Gaston Lesseur made no effort to correct it.
Those two years in England with his mother were rarely spoken of, and then only in a thin and telegraphic way, as if time could be compressed into the compact elegance of a haiku, discouraging further questions. Since he had returned to France as a teenager and graduated from French schools, the only evidence he’d ever lived among the British was the flawless accent with which he spoke his occasionally flawed English.
Gaston Lesseur kept his brown curls always a little too long and unruly, as if deliberately invoking Byron, and he flaunted a sensuality which experience had taught him was an even greater asset with women than the handsome face and additional height he had yearned for as an adolescent, when even the name Gaston was an embarrassment to him, a reminder of his grandfather’s peasant origins. As his confidence grew, so had his vanity, but he had managed to disguise this failing by misdirection, like a prestidigitator at a country fair, directing attention elsewhere while his tongue worked its wiles.
Gaston Lesseur had the kind of charisma that made him popular with men, too, and this he found even more flattering to his ego than his successes with women. Although he wasn’t sporty himself, he was a favorite among men who were. His clubhouse sparkle secured his welcome as surely as a distinguished performance on the field or green might have, and his humor was just irreverent enough to be admired without actually being daring enough to offend.
In his early twenties he had married a volatile Italian girl with whom he fought constantly and to whom he was repeatedly unfaithful. She had sullen lips that were the particular pink he associated with erect nipples, making her already voluptuous beauty seem almost obscene and obsessing him in a way he found vaguely humiliating.
Her family owned vineyards in Umbria and treated Gaston with contempt, suspecting he was more interested in their money than in their daughter. They felt his mixed parentage, French father and English mother, had produced in him the worst of both nationalities, and it suggested that he was not well born.
“It never speaks well of a man to raise himself on his wife’s back. You would be wasted on him. One doesn’t use a thoroughbred to pull a cart,” her father said, leaving it to her mother to amplify and embroider the theme at length. If they hadn’t tried so strenuously to prevent the union, Carolina Ruffio would never have eloped with a man she had not known long enough to watch a single season’s change.
Nevertheless, when Carolina hemorrhaged to death delivering a stillborn son two years into the marriage, Gaston’s grief was so obviously authentic her family was both moved and embarrassed. Even the oldest of Carolina’s brothers, the one who had, upon meeting, embraced Gaston, hugging him in close only to bite his ear, quick and sharp, like a bird, drawing blood but not attention, even Alessandro Ruffio had come to pity Gaston for the way the loss unmanned him.
Only the cook’s fifteen-year-old nephew with the funny eye, who ran errands and raked the gravel walks, remained untouched by the extravagance of his mourning.
“This way
, you’ll never see her get fat or grow a moustache and you still have something to cry over,” he had said to Gaston in exchange for a swig from his flask. “Think how many tears you’d shed when you came to hate her all the time, instead of just some of the time.” The comment was wounding and memorable not because it was cruel or blunt, but because Gaston knew it was true.
When Gaston Lesseur finally returned to Paris, it was a day before his twenty-sixth birthday. Instead of a bride, he brought back from Italy a case of particularly fine vintage wine, Carolina’s silver rosary beads that had been kissed by the Pope, and just enough of the Ruffio family money to pretend that he was wealthy. None of it, however, gave him much pleasure, not even the unexpected allure the word widower conferred, making available to him women who would otherwise have dismissed him as the scoundrel that he was.
Gaston returned to the bank just off the Place Vendôme where he had worked before the detour of his marriage and he was given a position with more prestige and less work than the one he’d left. For a while he had contented himself with women he didn’t bother courting and indulgent lunches and purchases that bordered on foppish. He went out for the occasional raucous dinner with male friends who had remained single and could be persuaded to stay out late or play cards for stakes or just get drunk enough to regret it the next day. There were a few obligatory romantic dalliances with suitable women, but Gaston found the pleasure he took from them was never worth the effort required to extricate himself later.
When morale flagged, and the thinness of his social fabric became depressingly evident, Gaston joined a few exclusive clubs to reassure himself that he could, and to take refuge in a sense of community that made no demands but the annual membership fee. He cultivated his appreciation of small but dependable distractions like cigars and backgammon, and subscribed to journals devoted to the minutiae of his various and sometimes obscure interests. By the time Gaston proposed to Céleste Feydeau, he had put on a few kilos and begun to collect the toy soldiers he had loved as a boy and which had been discarded by his mother when he went off to boarding school.
His second marriage, to a petite Frenchwoman who was pale and shy and stuttered when she was nervous, was so obviously the antithesis of his first that Gaston found himself making preemptive remarks about it to his friends. But the tone was never quite right and always sounded more defensive than protective, which he recognized unhappily furthered the assumptions he wished to dispel.
Céleste came from the lesser branch of an almost grand family who liked to trace themselves to the periphery of the Valois line of the throne, but because of her upbringing in the Dordogne, there always clung to her a whiff of the provinces, no matter how fine her clothes and hair. What she lacked in sophistication, however, she replaced with an earnest desire to please. She adored Gaston with dog-like devotion, always following him with her eyes, like a concerned spaniel. She laughed at all his jokes equally, and thought even his most banal remarks were brilliant. She mirrored his opinions unquestioningly, content to follow wherever he led her. He had never been loved like that before and initially Gaston found it irresistible. He had been married to Céleste for seventeen years when he met Lavinia in 1937.
He was on the floor, on his knees, when Lavinia first saw him, crawling across an Aubusson carpet in a navy silk suit, dragging from his mouth a length of yellow ribbon. Behind him, stalking the ribbon and making occasional swats at it, was an enormous gray cat, missing an eye and the tip of an ear, but obviously retired from combat long enough to have become obese. Through his clenched teeth, Gaston Lesseur was issuing directives to the cat, like a coach managing a boxer, balancing encouragement with criticism.
“Mais vraiment,” he concluded with exasperation, “il faut faire un petit effort….” It was a phrase she’d often heard her French teacher say to the underachievers. “You must make a little effort,” was the more literal translation, but for Lavinia it was the Gallic equivalent of Miss Kaye’s admonishment: Bestir yourself! The cat had turned the attention of its one good eye to the close grooming of a paw, splaying its claws like a hand of cards needing to be rearranged.
Lavinia liked Gaston right away; she liked the disorder of his smile, his lower teeth crowding the first one out of line, giving him an unexpected boyishness. She liked the way he had continued his rebuke to the cat even after he had realized she was standing in the room, and she liked that he’d made no effort to explain or apologize for his behavior.
She liked his tie, the hush of elegance in the pattern, and the lazy way it had been knotted. Lavinia had a momentary urge to adjust it where a fold of silk turned awkwardly, revealing its pale underside like a tongue.
“Would you like something to drink? An apéritif? A cigarette perhaps?” he asked, advancing across the room to greet her. The yellow ribbon was bunched in one hand and the other was extended in cordial confusion.
“Do I know you?” was his second question, and “Can I take your coat?” was his third.
“I was told you needed an assistant,” Lavinia answered, hastily introducing herself. Even as she said it, it seemed preposterous. It had been months since she’d been given the address by Monsieur Druette and when she found it again in her icebox behind an ancient jar of cornichons, she’d decided to look up the address more out of curiosity and a sense of adventure than the expectation of finding employment.
His eyes registered a flicker of surprise and then he nodded.
“It’s very true,” he answered in English as he shrugged his shoulders genially and added, “Everyone needs an assistant, n’est-ce pas?”
Lavinia looked around the room at the stodgy Empire furniture, a whisper of dust lacing the outdated grandeur, thin as veiling.
“It looks like you need more than an assistant.”
“Indeed,” he agreed, “but one must begin somewhere.”
“What sort of work would your assistant do?” she asked, handing him her coat and then her hat. Lavinia had already decided that she wanted the job before she knew what it was. The apartment was overheated and there hung in the curtains the slightly bitter smell of ancient tobacco smoke. Even so, the place had a forlorn beauty she understood.
“No doubt things like hire a housekeeper,” Gaston answered. “I don’t come here regularly, as you can see. I suppose an assistant would also keep women trimmed in fox fur from appearing unannounced in the library.”
Gaston kept talking while he left the room with her coat and wandered down a hallway, and Lavinia wondered if she were supposed to follow him. In his absence, she straightened the seams of her stockings and refreshed her lipstick. When he returned with two glasses of port, she was leaning against the Directoire desk, trying to look relaxed. Her hands, as she reached for the delicate cordial glass, seemed huge and ungainly, and she regretted the alligator shoes she was wearing. They were not comfortable, and the heels, scuffed from getting caught between cobblestones, made her almost as tall as Gaston.
“My wife’s uncle,” Gaston said, indicating with his head a large portrait behind the desk. “He left us this apartment when he died. I plan to sell it, but first, as his executor, I need to have everything inventoried; Hachette or Drouot will take most of it for auction. And there’s more in storage in the bowels of the building. Mostly junk; token offerings Marcel Feydeau, one of the most expensive lawyers in Paris, accepted from clients in lieu of payment. His charity cases were always artists of one brand or another. He must have harbored his own secret ambitions in that direction to have indulged so many drunken deadbeats with oil paint in their hair or clay under their nails. Poor fool was still writing letters to landlords and prefectures on their behalf long after he retired from practice. The previous concierge used to complain about the bums trudging through the courtyard claiming to have business with Feydeau, deuxième étage.
“How long ago did he die?” Lavinia asked. It was clear that Gaston had been in no rush to probate the estate; the appeal of having a secret hideout was obvious.
Gaston was smiling as he tipped back his glass to punctuate his narrative, draining the last amber sip from the tiny well at the bottom of the fluted glass. Lavinia downed hers as well and when it was empty she held it up to the light to examine it. It was exquisite, the rim of the glass so thin it looked too delicate for use, like the petals it mimicked, the stem no thicker than a stalk of columbine.
“They were Josephine’s,” Gaston confided. “Or at least that’s the family lore. But then all the aristocratic families claim to have something Napoleonic, some keepsake won or earned or stolen, depending on who is telling the story, just as any cathedral worth a pilgrimage has to have a relic. My mother used to say that if all the bones, the fingers and toes and teeth, all the holy relics of the Church were gathered together and assembled, you would have an army.”
Lavinia said nothing but held out the diminutive cordial glass, that had once been Josephine’s, and let Gaston refill it.
“A believer would say that was just an expression of the miraculous,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips, happy to imagine that its gold rim, rubbed over time down to just the memory of splendor, had once been touched by the lips of a woman who had helped shape an empire. It was like kissing history, Lavinia thought tipsily.
“Like the fishes and the loaves?” Gaston laughed, offering her a corner of the sofa he cleared by sweeping all the mail that had been piled there onto the floor. He pulled over a small cane-bottom chair and straddled it backwards, leaning his chin on the top of the back rest.
“I suppose you are very expensive for an assistant,” he posited, swirling the port in the glass.
“Yes,” Lavinia said.
“Do you have any credentials?” he asked, looking at her crossed legs from the corner of his eye.
Twilight Page 9
