While Lavinia understood the dilemma, she had no idea how to resolve it. She had never before considered the role of seductress. It had been enough in the past just to have been pursued on a few occasions, by a few worthy men. In a city full of women who seduced with finesse, Lavinia couldn’t imagine how to do such a thing without embarrassment, without risking an awkwardness from which they might not recover.
It was a stalemate that kept her up at night, pacing her apartment barefoot, wings of panic beating in her chest. She felt as if she were sixteen again, when everything having to do with love seemed impossible and therefore urgent. She was wishing for a deus ex machina so fervently she almost missed the opportunity when it presented itself. She had written to Gaston:
Monsieur Lesseur,
Next Thursday is my birthday and I would like to take the day off. The last of the books will be picked up on Monday and there is nothing else currently scheduled for the week. Does your vacation policy include birthdays?
The reply was immediate, arriving the same afternoon. Jean-Marc was splotchy and wheezing from the exertion of having run most of the way. At least, he clarified, as he caught his ragged breath, he’d run all the way from the Pont Neuf. As he handed her the envelope, Jean-Marc beamed. “I ran because he said it was important.”
Mademoiselle Gibbs,
It all depends on what your plans are, naturally. If you wanted to go to the zoo, for instance, I’d have to say no. On the other hand, if you were going to be dancing, I’d say yes of course. But then you would need, no doubt, a new dress. Consider it a cadeau from Uncle Marcel. He was a generous man, so splurge. In fact, be squanderous. He would have liked that.
Like a chess move that suddenly becomes obvious, Lavinia understood that if she accepted the gift, albeit one proffered ever so delicately by a dead man, she had all but acquiesced. If she were going to do this, she knew she would need the resolve of a warrior. There was no room for half measures of the heart anymore. Her response raised the ante:
Monsieur Lesseur,
What do you advise? Indigo velvet or claret-colored silk?
All the war metaphors that had always been so odd and alien to her when they appeared in the love poetry she read at Miss Dillwater’s for her advanced English class now made sense. The thrill of seduction was in the strategy—and it was more complex and satisfying for some than the pleasure of conquest. Conquest limited its focus on a single moment rather than the elaborate weave of moments in which it was suspended. In seduction, all conversation became a part of the courtship, coloring what would follow. The better the players, the more compelling and subtle the struggle for the lead. Gaston, however, was an expert.
Mademoiselle Gibbs,
The obvious answer is both.
At the club, in a ballroom depressingly underlit and almost empty, Gaston held her, through all the various dances in the band’s repertoire, never changing his step, and never loosening his hold. One arm clutched her waist and the other her neck, a hand rising up through her hair to cup her head to his chest. There was no question from the way they held each other that they were lovers or would be soon, their bodies took such obvious relief from the contact.
This was clear even to the busboy who watched them dance from behind the steamy portal in the kitchen door, where uneaten tea sandwiches wilted on polished trays and the Spanish waiters argued about Franco. But it was also clear that they were dancing as if it were the end of a very long evening. There is always a certain resignation or surrender implicit in a conquest, bestowing poignancy in direct proportion to the exertion of the struggle. Even the way they fit their bodies together on the dance floor suggested that the sweetness of fulfillment was tempered by the weariness of a long labor.
This, and the dimness of the light, eroding any distinguishing features of the room, and the diminished numbers of those who had braved the rain to get there, only furthered Lavinia’s sense that she had indeed entered a perpetual twilight. It didn’t matter though. It was her favorite time of day, and the only one that seemed at all magical. Even as a little girl she had loved its hushed descent, transforming the world into a fleeting dream of beauty and blue shadows, full with unnamed possibility. Verlaine had called it l’heure exquise. The exquisite hour. Perhaps, Lavinia reflected, a note of sadness was a necessary component to twilight, the flaw that compromised its beauty, but in doing so gave it a more haunting resonance. She had already learned how longing distorted the very desire it echoed, creating an imaginary distance that no amount of travel could cross.
It had begun to snow by the time he took her to bed. She watched the flakes fall on the skylight overhead, gathering first at the metal edges, and accumulating over the warped glass like the pupil of an eye contracting, until the world elsewhere was shut out, until it was just a pale and distant glow.
Lavinia didn’t immediately notice how agitated Madame Luberon had become, that the mail was frequently missorted, and neighbors would tiptoe down the marble stairs at night to slide envelopes under the apartment doors that paired on each landing, rather than brave Madame Luberon about the mix-up. The brass doorknobs and name plates went unpolished and Madame Luberon was no longer waiting until evening to drink.
Olivier, the voluble waiter at the corner café, was talking about Mussolini to any patron who did not actively discourage him. But now Lavinia rarely stopped at the Bacchus for a coffee, except to meet Jean-Marc, to give or receive a letter, and Jean-Marc was equally oblivious. She would go for days without reading a newspaper or listening to the radio, which was full of increasingly alarming BBC broadcasts.
The snow kept falling, and then the rain, muffling the world, curtaining it off with a gauzy scrim, distancing everything that did not pertain to love. Lavinia’s mail had winnowed with time to just a few staunch correspondents: Dora Fell and Eliza Hatch, “dropping a line” now and then with news of their growing families, or a must-read book, sporadic reports trumpeting a financial triumph, or bemoaning a setback. Grace sent the bits of gossip she deemed juicy enough to justify the effort of a letter. Her brothers, if they wrote, described victories: last year, Joe Lewis and War Admiral, this year the World Series and Don Budge’s Grand Slam, and Howard Hughes circling the world in three days and nineteen hours.
Lavinia now began to let the mail accumulate, leaving it unopened for weeks at a time. The airmail letters, in their thin onion-skin envelopes, were from a world even more remote than the one from which she was now withdrawing. The pages, delicate as tissue, were giddy with cocktails at the Stork Club and matinees at the Barrymore, lives on another continent, in a different universe. In one of Grace’s letters that Lavinia never finished, she had written:
We saw Orson Welles at El Morocco, and you’ll never guess who was at his table, wearing a silver sequined gown and looking just like a polished candlestick—Martha Tubman! And she still looks confused, even all grown up. Even when all she has to do is smile. The Sterlings were at Mrs. Drummond’s holiday party, and Shelby’s put on weight. It doesn’t look bad—it makes him look very substantial. A big girth is all right in a man if there’s a big enough fortune to back it up and now he has that too, thanks to us…
The news from the States seemed especially viscous, like a syrup: slow to arrive, lacking transparency, and sticky with implication. The roster of births and deaths, grievances and gossip had never been much of a tether to her past but now the letters might as well have been written in a language she remembered only fleetingly, in a dialect that seemed familiar but used a different alphabet. The letters made her feel more detached from the world they invoked, not less. Even Gordon’s letter discussing his wife’s death, months after the event, seemed opaque. He noted that while 1937 had seen the passing of his dear wife Constance, it had also taken in its grasp John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon and the race-horse, Blazing Blue.
It was Gaston’s letters for which she paced. Lifting the wing of the engraved blue envelope was like raising the lid of a magician’s box. She
was enchanted; the letters caused a fever only they could relieve. She would read the words over and over again, letting them transport her. Certain phrases rushed through her the way his kisses did, filling her with longing, making her stomach quiver with a nervous exhilaration she recalled from childhood: the titillation of having taken a dare, or tipping her head back when the swing reached its peak, losing gravity in a moment’s flight. It was a kind of delirium. She knew that, of course, but it made the sensation no less satisfying. Lavinia wondered if this was what morphine addicts felt, before they had to be shut away or cured.
At first she carried the notes with her, carefully folded back into the envelope on which her name sprawled in his untidy, ragged penmanship. He made even her name look beautiful, slanting in black strokes across the blue stationery, like startled birds filling a patch of sky. Lavinia pressed his words against her skin, tucking them under her garter belt or in her brassiere. It didn’t matter if an edge was sharp or a corner rubbed. It was as if Gaston were saying her name, as if his words were speaking directly to her body, as if she could absorb them more completely that way. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense; neither did what she felt.
Dear Mademoiselle Gibbs,
I’m lost. I’m speaking in tongues and all they want to do is kiss you. I think of nothing but when I can see you next. Everything reminds me of you. I am adrift, surrounded by water but dying of thirst.
Last Sunday I went to church, but all I could think about during the sermon was watching your face as you slept. I lit a handful of candles on the way out but didn’t say any prayers. I was afraid to mix God up with us, partly because I know you would scoff and partly because I felt too superstitious.
I need to smell your neck, brush your hair, feel your skin against my skin. I need to kiss you. Can you feel my longing crossing Paris to vibrate in the air around you? I am in the wind embracing you. I am kissing you even now.
Once, Lavinia was all the way to the Odéon Métro station before she realized she had left Gaston’s note on her dresser, next to a pair of pearl earrings she had decided not to wear. Even knowing she would be late for the violin recital at Madame Aubretton’s home in Neuilly, Lavinia couldn’t help herself. She ran back down the narrow streets to her apartment, her heart racing with panic as if she had suddenly remembered something left simmering on the stove.
Dearest Mademoiselle Gibbs,
This is ridiculous. I yearn for you like a trembling schoolboy. I tried to read Voltaire and then Sartre as a cure. No luck, alas. I am now wallowing in Rimbaud, a beautiful edition bound in red leather.
Throughout the recital, Lavinia found herself touching her sleeve to feel that the blue notepaper was still there, quickening her pulse under her lizard watchband, occupying the place Miss Kaye had reserved for a sachet of smelling salts or a handkerchief ready for tears.
Within the first few weeks of their affair, the Feydeau apartment finally sold. They met only a few more times as lovers at 34, Rue Vaneau, before the locks were changed. Now that her job assisting the estate of Marcel Feydeau had concluded, Lavinia realized how much less access to Gaston she had as his mistress than as his employee. They had squandered half a year pining and then no sooner had they become lovers, it seemed, than they were suddenly without a pretext or place to meet. This only fueled their determination, replacing one obstacle with another, adding to the sense of urgency in which desire and destiny seem interchangeable.
Gaston’s week still included pockets of time in which he could absent himself from his other life, the work he did at the office, or the work he did at home, which he said was the harder of the two. Without recourse to Marcel Feydeau’s home, however, the logistics of a hotel rendezvous made it harder to catch those pockets of time together. Their new relationship precluded the very thing the previous one had afforded: a routine. Only now did Lavinia come to see how domestic their time together had been, occupying a home together several hours a week, season after season. The last time Lavinia saw the Feydeau apartment, it was cold and Gaston arrived late. He had had trouble discouraging Jean-Marc from coming with him.
“He wanted to say good-bye to Grisette,” Gaston said grimly as he unpacked delicacies from Fauchon and Delbard, laying out the items in a row along the mantel. He was still wearing his coat and he avoided her eyes as he unwrapped cheeses and slices of ham and saucisson from their wax paper.
“I felt like an ogre telling him no. As I was leaving him, he started to weep. I haven’t made him cry since I was twelve. Delphine took him to the kitchen, but he kept pleading. ‘Why won’t you take me with you,’ Jean-Marc kept saying. He said it at least four times before he called me a salaud. What could I do? I couldn’t explain.”
“What did you do?”
“I kept walking.”
Lavinia drew in her breath but said nothing. The room suddenly seemed more empty. Devoid of furniture, it looked smaller, less distinguished, and the stark light from an unshaded ceiling bulb exposed the absence of everything, even the particular quality of happiness she had known in that room.
Gaston produced a flask and the two cordial glasses that had been Empress Josephine’s and poured them each a glass of port. He downed his quickly and poured another right away, filling the glass almost to the rim. He did this before clinking glasses with her, or making a toast, and Lavinia was worried that he might be angry at her. She did not stop worrying until he pushed her up against the wall and she could feel him inside her.
That she didn’t always know when she’d see Gaston again left Lavinia slightly off balance, liable to overreact to small frustrations and to anticipate problems that often never materialized. Then, just as she was adjusting to the loss of 34, Rue Vaneau, the bank required Gaston to make several unexpected trips to Bruxelles.
“I can hardly complain,” he told her, “since I do so little work as it is; it would be ungrateful not to make a small effort on the rare occasions I’m actually required to do my job.”
He had been unbuttoning his shirt while he spoke and Lavinia watched him greedily, marveling that the act of removing his shirt could so stir her, marveling that he could be so sanguine about these impending separations. She wondered if they would have their first fight over it but as soon as his hand was on her waist she forgot how stung she had been by his wording. She remembered only her greed.
My Darling Lavinia,
I’m leaving again for Bruxelles this afternoon, in advance of the directors, who will follow at the end of the week. My only comfort is that I will have several unbroken hours of solitude in a first-class compartment on the train with nothing to do but let my mind ravish you.
For days I have sustained myself on the memory of our visit to Père Lachaise and those last midnight kisses. We should have made love there by the grave of Oscar Wilde with all the stray cats watching; will you ever forgive me?
The letter arrived by mail. Lavinia recognized his blue stationery at once, pale as a robin’s egg, trilling among the pile of white envelopes her neighbor held out to her. Madame Braun apologized for not having dropped off the misdirected mail sooner. “I meant to, every time I went out,” she said wearily, “but then I would forget.”
Lavinia might have rebuked Madame Braun had she not looked so haggard. Under the best of circumstances, Madame Braun was a difficult woman with exacting standards. Too exacting, it was said, for her to ever replace the husband of her youth, lost at the Somme when she was twenty-two. “Spared,” was the word some of her less charitable neighbors used to describe Monsieur Braun’s premature departure from the earthly realms Madame Braun patrolled in her expensive, pointy shoes.
Madame Braun owned a successful hat shop on the Rue de Rivoli and she was almost painfully stylish, but not in a way that made her more attractive. If anything, it made her more forbidding, reinforcing the effect of her pinched mouth and wiry hair. Almost everyone in the building, adults and children alike, had been scolded by Madame Braun and when she was unsure of whom to blam
e she would leave a note at the foot of the stairs addressing the thoughtlessness of a heavy tread late at night or a bicycle left on its side in the courtyard.
Lavinia had heard from the boulanger about Madame Braun’s cousin who had left Austria with her three children and whatever could fit in a steamer trunk. All four of them and the steamer trunk were now occupying Madame Braun’s living room. Madame Luberon had been commenting about the incessant smell of boiled cabbage coming from the apartment, and Lavinia had seen the de la Falaise children pinch their noses as they turned the landing.
“It’s true. It’s true,” one of them said, her laughter rising up the sweep of stairs, “Jews do stink. They really do.”
“No,” the older girl corrected impatiently, “that’s the smell of Gypsy stew. Jews smell much worse.”
Standing wearily at Lavinia’s door, Madame Braun still smelled of perfume sweet with neroli and musk, but there was a damp spot on the shoulder of her blouse where a baby had drooled, adding to the bouquet of scent the vague intimation of sour milk.
Lavinia looked at the Paris postmark and wondered if the letter had been mailed because Jean-Marc was ill again. His ungainly bulk and coarse features distracted from the fact that his health was surprisingly fragile, and frequently troubled by respiratory ailments. Lavinia had been concerned because it was something he had in common with Boswell and it had been an especially hard winter for the pug.
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