Gaston left shortly after Jean-Marc arrived, and made no reference to a return. Lavinia was so distracted she put aside the folders and the appraisal reports and flung herself on to the couch that had only just embraced her employer.
For the rest of the day she watched the sky absorb the cold blue of the slate roofs, until only the palest color was left, leaving the world a dull gray interrupted only by the black gleam of chimney pots glossed by a light rain. Boswell settled at her feet and she listened to his sibilant snore as he recovered from his earlier gorge, his swollen belly rising and falling with the slow precision of a bellows. In another apartment somewhere above her and muted by several walls, Lavinia could hear a violin and the same scrap of music practiced over and over again with an urgency that spoke to her agitation, to feeling both replete and full of yearning.
On her way home that evening, under the yellow halo of street lamps, and dodging between puddles gleaming with a moiré of motor oil, Lavinia crossed the river to the Right Bank and wandered into the Galéries Lafayette. For almost an hour she paced the floors absently fingering merchandise until she settled on the purchase of a silk slip in a pale shade of peach and a pair of three-button-length evening gloves, black with a jazzy red cuff. By the time she entered the passage way to her building and passed Madame Luberon’s checkpoint, the open window where her bundled bulk glowered in even the worst weather, Lavinia already doubted her selections.
The slip was too girlish: it would only accentuate the flaws evident in her body when she examined it critically before the standing mirror that dominated her small bathroom. The gloves, removed from the display vitrine in which their vivid glamour had been as arresting as a hothouse orchid, suddenly seemed like a cheap clamor for attention. The red cuff was too bright, too insistent; garish even.
“Fashion is for shopgirls,” her mother had said when Lavinia was young. “Those with good breeding don’t insist on the newness of their clothing, or seek to distinguish themselves by their wardrobe. It is taken for granted among the upper class that one will be well dressed, therefore no one genteel needs to crow about it.”
The gloves were stuffed in the bottom of a drawer in which Lavinia kept things she almost never used, like the old blanket exhumed only for picnics because it was scratchy, or the flannel leggings she had worn on a ski trip to Austria with Julian Davanne, a beau she’d had briefly the previous year, before she realized she didn’t particularly like skiing or Julian either. He had been more sophisticated than Sven and less serious; it had taken only a few months to realize that while he was very entertaining, he was shallow and his words were insubstantial. She had not bothered to save his letters.
The silk slip was put in Boswell’s basket and within a day it was stained by a small puddle of yellow vomit that heralded yet another of Boswell’s frequent stomach complaints. Lavinia threw the slip away rather than bother to wash it; it had become an unnerving reminder of the disparity between the life she imagined for herself and the one she felt comfortable inhabiting.
Three days later, Gaston Lesseur showed up again at the apartment on the Rue Vaneau, and after that he began turning up once or twice a week. Often he came late in the afternoon, when the light was beginning to fade and the courtyard slowly filled with the blue weight of evening. By then Jean-Marc was usually gone, though he invariably left behind something as a marker to hold his place against the encroaching night; a tower of books or a piece of half-eaten fruit on the mantel, or a bar of soap cinched at its waist by a red rubber band, or shoes from one of the closets that had not been cleared, staggered across an empty room in drunken steps.
Jean-Marc didn’t like to be out in the dark. As soon as the scrim of twilight began to obscure the features on the weathered faces that lined the cornice of the building across the way, he would begin to fret, rocking in increasing agitation and whimpering with a fear for which he had no words and Lavinia had no comfort. The best she could do for him was to make sure he left well before the shadow of night began its blue advance.
Some days, Jean-Marc could feel the press of night well before it was visible and he would hardly stay long enough to take his coat off. His projects were littered around the apartment, always underfoot and waiting for the cat to upset, like anxiety scattered wordlessly throughout the apartment. On overcast days, when the sky was the same leaden gray as the stones of Nôtre-Dame and the waters of the Seine were a dull black, Jean-Marc didn’t come at all; the day was not bright enough to lift his self-imposed curfew.
“Don’t worry,” Gaston had reassured Lavinia. “He’s always like this in the dead of winter. There’s nothing to do about it. He worries his way to spring. We are all animals at heart,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “And from time to time we also pace like tigers in a zoo. The only difference,” and here Gaston paused to light a cigarette, “is that we build our own cages. Jean-Marc’s cage, le pauvre, is invisible but defined by what is visible. It’s very poetic, n’est-ce pas? That he is imprisoned not by bars of light but by their absence?”
Gaston exhaled and the tobacco smoke, like the swirl of his thoughts taking shape, floated lazily along the band of light that divided him from Lavinia on the other side of the room.
“It would be easier on Delphine,” he continued, “if he could just hibernate until spring instead of measuring out the winter like a prisoner waiting for a reprieve.”
Lavinia hardly noticed the seamless transition by which Gaston’s presence began to replace Jean-Marc’s. She did notice, however, the way her pulse raced when Gaston was near her, and how if he leaned over her shoulder when she was typing, her fingers became flustered, and how when she was falling asleep at night listening to Boswell’s nasal buzz, her thoughts returned to Gaston with the surety of metal to a magnet.
It was not something she generally talked about with her friends. Alice Baker, Anne Aubretton and Lorraine Tyson, the women she was closest to, knew she’d taken a job three days a week, something to do with artworks and inventories. The particulars Lavinia had kept obscure. Work, she’d noticed, whether volunteer or salaried, whether their own or their husbands’, was a topic that was generally not pursued by the circle of women with whom she socialized.
“It’s work just hearing about work,” Mrs. Frobisher said once, complaining of her husband. Lorraine Tyson had pretended to yawn in an exaggerated, silly way and Lavinia had nodded in agreement. At the time she had been assisting Mrs. Aiken with the typing and proofreading for the Americans Abroad newsletter, a dull weekly of modest circulation, mimeographed in a tiny office of the Ambassadors Club whose members did not include any diplomats whatsoever, English-speaking or otherwise.
At first, the work at the Feydeau apartment had been just an adventure, something to be savored privately. Later, when Lavinia realized that it was giving her life new shape, igniting an interest in more than just the evolution of modern art or the curves in a Biedermeier chair, she had wanted to tell Alice Baker. Alice was the only one in Paris to whom Lavinia had ever talked in detail about home or matters of the heart. She had told Alice about her broken engagement and about her affair with Sven Larskan. When Sven’s letter came that first Christmas, wishing her happy New Year and promising 1937 would be the year Franco was defeated, she’d shown the letter to Alice, who said, “He’s obviously still in love,” and asked if she could have the stamp.
Alice Baker was also the only friend to see Lavinia cry, when Elsie Donner wrote in May, saying Sven had been killed in Barcelona. Alice had given back the stamp, pressed between the pages of a book by Lorca.
“It’s unbearably romantic, I don’t care what you say.”
“No, what was tragic was that it wasn’t unbearably romantic.”
“Still,” Alice said wistfully, “it was for him.”
“Yes, that’s why I had to end it. Even though I liked him very much.”
“But now he’s dead,” Alice whispered, and they had both burst into tears.
The first time that Lav
inia had mentioned Gaston to Alice in an animated fashion, sharing some of his quips, imitating a gesture, Alice had clapped her hands and said, “I’m so glad he’s not stodgy. I had automatically assumed he’d be stodgy, because the work sounded so tedious, despite your enthusiasm for it.” Alice laughed and picked up one of her little dogs. “The way you describe him now he sounds sort of dreamy. I’m imagining a cross between Jean Gabin and Cary Grant, only shorter, naturally, because he’s French. What’s his name again? Marcel Feydeau? Shall I make inquiries? Is he someone Harold might know?”
“No,” Lavinia said, suddenly realizing the awkwardness, “it’s not at all likely and really, you mustn’t exaggerate. He’s no more Jean Gabin than I am Greta Garbo.”
If Lavinia was afraid her employer might kiss her, she was more afraid he wouldn’t. The irony of this was not lost on her. Gaston Lesseur was the embodiment of all the compromise her mother had dreaded would be forced on her by the Great War. He was Catholic, for starters: he’d been an acolyte as a boy. If she gave any credence to the limp, he was a cripple, at least some of the time. And those were nothing compared to the compromises her mother hadn’t anticipated: he was French, and he was married.
“Those poor lost souls,” her mother had called the women who had affairs with married men, “condemned to live in perpetual twilight.” The tone of her mother’s voice conveyed as much pity as contempt for women who would consign themselves to such a limbo. On top of that thorny problem, there was the distasteful fact that he was her employer. Lavinia reflected on this at length in the bathtub, where she spent a large part of her evenings at home, now that the expat community was trickling away, driven home by the falling value of the dollar and by the increasingly unpleasant presence of fascism throughout Europe. Most of the grand hotels on the Côte d’Azur had closed. There were tobacco shortages and the days of walking borzoi in the Bois de Boulogne were over. If 1937 had failed to be the year that Sven had promised, 1938 was worse. Mrs. Frobisher had been the first to comment on their thinning ranks. “It’s hardly worth throwing a party anymore; you can scarely fill a room with interesting people these days.”
Lavinia didn’t miss the dinner parties though, the hired clairvoyants and the Hungarian pianists, and everybody wanting to have fun in a desperate way that invariably ensured that no one would. It was hard to go dancing at Maxim’s or drinking at the Ritz when Paris Soir was full of factories closing and pensions being cut. Unemployment was high and strikes and shortages demoralizing: when it wasn’t convulsed in protest, the country felt as if it were in mourning.
“It’s too bad you weren’t here in the twenties,” Lavinia was told. “What they say is true: there’s still scads of bad behavior now but it’s just not as much fun.”
It was a relief to Lavinia, not a hardship, to have fewer engagements that took her away from home now that she found herself craving solitude for the first time. As her social world contracted, her secret world expanded. Sometimes Lavinia would stay in the bath long after the water had grown cold, lingering on a phrase Gaston had used, repeating it over and over to herself, or she would remember a look he had given her, charged with meaning, and it would make her stomach skip.
Often she didn’t even bother to bring a book into the bath with her. She’d just lie with her head tilted back against the curved rim of the tub, eyes closed, while steam rose from the water. Alice had given her a stack of records for her Magnavox and Lavinia listened to them one after another, wearing out and replacing the record player’s needle every few days.
“They’re all scratched and Harold left a few on the radiator so those are scratched and warped. I was just going to throw them out since giving anything to the staff only encourages stealing.”
Lavinia had taken the records gratefully; she didn’t mind the scratches. They added a warmth that was comforting, like a fireplace burning green wood, snapping and hissing in the background. If the de la Falaise family who lived above her were away, she would play the records loud enough so that the music seem to vibrate through her flesh down to the bones, where it was absorbed as a temporary anodyne for her ailment. She could no longer deny that she was lovesick. Lavinia conjured Gaston Lesseur in her mind with such constant focus it felt masturbatory whether she touched herself or not.
They continued to exchange notes, which went entirely unacknowledged in each other’s presence. He wrote:
Dear Mademoiselle Gibbs,
Do you think Stendhal was right to use ice as a metaphor for love? The way the café awnings were fringed in icicles this morning it was so magical I was ready to believe anything.
She replied:
Monsieur Lesseur,
Isn’t love already a metaphor?
But there was nothing in their expression or conversation that in any way alluded to the increasingly amorous exchange that traveled back and forth across Paris in the yeasty pocket of Jean-Marc’s winter jacket or, increasingly frequently, through the mail. While Lavinia spent the afternoon sorting through bills or organizing the correspondence with the probate court or measuring the legs on a lyre-back chair for inventory, Gaston would read in another room or write letters, or play with the gray cat, making no effort to speak, contriving no excuse to approach her. She wrote:
Monsieur Lesseur,
Can one die from desire?
He replied:
Mademoiselle Gibbs,
It is not possible. Otherwise I would have perished long ago. It is responsible, however, for insomnia, confusion and gray hair.
Occasionally she would look up from her work and catch him standing in a doorway watching her. He usually spoke immediately, as if he had only been waiting to have her attention.
“The apartment will fetch a better price if I have it painted before it goes on the market. Please find out from the concierge whom he would recommend and make the necessary arrangements.” In his voice was an unexpressed but unmistakable longing that seeped into the directives he issued, investing them with a sense of urgency and fatigue that gave his words an emotional resonance disconsonant with their meaning. Other times, he would simply look away.
Lavinia fought, not always successfully, the urge to find reasons to address him or simply be in his presence, sharpening a pencil if he were in the study or flushing a clogged fountain pen under the kitchen tap if the dark aroma of coffee brewing located Gaston’s presence there. When he helped her on with her overcoat he let his hands rest on her shoulders just a moment or two longer than necessary.
It was at these very moments, though, when Lavinia was close enough to smell the citrus in his cologne, moments when in passing a folder or a coffee cup their skin would accidentally graze and she would feel a surge of desire so intoxicating it seemed worth whatever she might lose if she surrendered to it and entered the shadow world of adultery. It was then that she would invoke the name she least wanted in the room.
“And how is your wife, Monsieur Lesseur? Is she enjoying her stay in the country?”
“It’s beautiful there. It would take an act of will not to enjoy it, Mademoiselle Gibbs.” He looked up at her, his eyes unflinching.
“Perhaps someday you will see La Rêveline,” Gaston continued without pause. “It’s been in her family forever but no one uses it much except Céleste, who never seems to get bored there. Everyone else finds the eighteenth-century charm mitigated by the eighteenth-century plumbing. A weekend in hunting season is one thing. A winter there is another entirely.”
Shortly thereafter, Lavinia wrote to him:
Monsieur Lesseur,
Is your position at the bank so important or so unimportant that it allows you to spend your afternoons reading Balzac with Grisette?
He replied:
Mademoiselle Gibbs,
I am a man singularly untainted by ambition. That is either my chiefest virtue or my most severe failing. What do you think?
She answered:
Monsieur Lesseur,
I think it is a worthy enough am
bition to read Balzac’s oeuvre. I imagine it must be a more fulfilling way to pass the afternoon than tidying the temples of Mammon.
Days passed before Lavinia got her reply because a chest cold had incapacited Jean-Marc even more severely than winter’s dark undertow. As soon as she had sent her letter, she had worried that she had offended Monsieur Lesseur and that was what accounted for the extended silence that protracted time.
Dear Mademoiselle Gibbs,
How fortunate I am in having an assistant who not only understands me perfectly but is always beautifully attired in the couture of Worth and Molyneux. I am sure you would rather have a raise, but I am giving you a rose instead.
It’s a hybrid the almost-blind gardener at La Rêveline has been working on for years, in a hothouse he almost never leaves. One tends to forget he’s even there until he suddenly appears with a blossom like this in his hideously clawed hands, ruined by arthritis and Armagnac.
I am counting on its taking your breath away. This strain has a sweet tooth I was told; add a little sugar to the water and it should bloom for more than a handful of days.
Lavinia was so relieved to see Jean-Marc when he returned at the end of the week with the note from Gaston that at first she did not take in how beautiful the rose actually was. When it slowly registered on Lavinia that it was more than just a pretty flower, that it was, indeed, breathtaking, she was grateful that Monsieur Lesseur was not present to see her unravel. She was grateful too that Jean-Marc had hurried off, anxious to beat the retreating light home.
She was able, therefore, to lean over the sink in the kitchen with both faucets blasting water full force into the basin to drown out her sobs. It was the first time in her life she had ever cried from happiness, and she was ashamed by how undone she was.
When she saw Gaston next and he made no allusion to the note, or the rose, or the feelings for which it had been the proxy, Lavinia realized that she would have to make the opening gambit if they were going to have an affair instead of a flirtation. She understood, finally, that his hesitation did not indicate a lack of desire or wavering resolve, or even a moral qualm. Had she not been his employee, or had she not been of his social standing, he might have been more daring. That she was both, however, multiplied the obstacles past the point where he could reasonably assume the inconvenience of his marriage would be surmounted or even temporarily overlooked. It heightened the risk of losing even the circumscribed contact with her that he currently enjoyed.
Twilight Page 11
