If I occasionally stumble on my way to you, please be kind. This terrifying frenzy of the heart is new to me. I am, after all, just a clumsy stable boy who dreams of one day riding bareback. Have patience. I adore you. Everything we do after the beginning determines the end.
Gaston sent flowers, first in bouquets and then in wicker baskets, crowding the narrow hallway at the foot of the stairs, where Madame Luberon left them in a conspicuous display, inciting Lavinia’s neighbors to speculate, whisper and steal. By the time the forsythia began to bloom in the Jardin des Plantes, luxuries were sufficiently rare that many women in Paris were using strands of their own hair to stitch up runs in their stockings. None of her neighbors had the temerity to take a whole bouquet, but few could resist the temptation to thin the abundance by a blossom or two.
Darling Lavinia,
I was crushed when Jean-Marc returned with no word from you—not even an angry phrase scratched on the back of a torn receipt. He said you were dressed for the evening. Are you trying to make me jealous? Isn’t your silence enough for me to suffer? If you won’t go back to the hotel at least meet me in a café or on a street corner. Give me just a few minutes to hold you, even in your coat. Please give Jean-Marc the answer I am so anxious to hear. Let me see you.
Often Lavinia was only waiting for an opportunity to relent, an excuse for reunion that allowed her to save face. Depending on the reason for the breach or the duration of the hiatus, she would make lists of reasons to resume the affair or reasons to resist. She might call to mind his toenails, yellowed and cracked like claws, or the wart on his elbow, or the way his lips tightened in anger, thin as blades and just as cruel.
She catalogued his failings, his vanities and arrogance. She thought about the way he puffed out his lips when he was thinking, and how he always ordered chicken à l’ancienne at Bistro Danton, with the predictability of a metronome. She thought of the way his hair smelled after he smoked a cigar and the clicking sound he made in his sleep or the way his eyelids drooped if he’d had too much to drink.
Nevertheless, Lavinia almost always weakened in a matter of days.
Dear Monsieur Lesseur,
How I hate you for having stolen my peace of mind. You have stolen my purpose and my pride and yet I love you without proportion. I should add that you have stolen my will power as well. I’ll be waiting for you at seven at the Bistro Danton.
Darling Monsieur Lesseur,
Yes, I will see you tomorrow. These last few days have been torture. I haven’t slept for more than two hours at a time. Boswell’s got a cough and I can’t get you out of my blood. Just tell me when. I am wretched without you.
I am undone by the smallest memory. I have only to remember your words: I adore you. They surge through my blood like grain alcohol and intoxicate me. Those words beat in my chest and fill me with an echo I am compelled to repeat: I adore you. I adore you. I adore you. Come to me as soon as you can. Tell me where to meet you.
Dearest Gaston,
It has just started to snow. I can deny you nothing when it snows. It’s so beautiful right now I can almost forget all the ways I will regret this later. I accept your invitation but you must promise to never ever correct my French grammar again, especially irregular verbs. Especially when I am naked. Stick to pronunciation if you feel compelled to improve the way I use your language. I’m sorry I threw the gold bangle bracelets at you but don’t ever call me a noisy woman again because I’m not. I hate this fighting.
They fought about petty particulars, the tone of a question or a change of plan or a hand dropped too abruptly. They fought in French and they fought in English, about recipes and philosophy and who loved whom more. Always the question of their future hung between them unasked but obvious. It was with them, in the air no matter where they were, like a perpetually arched eyebrow.
It was especially painful to Lavinia that the adulterous nature of her relationship precluded one of the pleasures for which she had so long waited, and which would have made the time without Gaston pass more easily. She resented the silence adultery imposed, and the cruel irony that having finally found a love that inspired expression, she could speak about it with no one but its object.
She had envied the way the other women of her circle, when they gathered for bridge or at luncheons that lingered until cocktail hour, proffered tidbits of their love lives, pulling out details for analysis and advice like shiny baubles to be passed around the table and admired, scraps of an argument discarded like tattered ribbon or a loose button. Lavinia had seen them glow when they were talking about a lover, as if the half-life of love were extended by the secondary experience of recounting it. It was also a bond between the women, tangling them together in an intricate web of confidences.
It had astonished Lavinia that even women who maintained an otherwise impenetrable froideur would reveal such intimate things but there seemed to exist an unspoken understanding as binding as a Masonic vow which assured confidentiality. Even Mrs. Frobisher, whose first name Lavinia never knew and would have been uncomfortable using, even Frozen Frobisher, as Alice Baker dubbed her, had anted up. Lorraine Tyson had told them that she knew her husband was having an affair when he started undressing like a prisoner going to the guillotine, meticulously folding his pants over the chair, carefully preserving the crease and flattening the cuff before hanging them over the back of his chair, consumed with concentration she said.
“As if a ball of lint was more fascinating than the prospect of our marital bed.”
Jacqueline Linnott, whom Lavinia barely knew, told an attentive cluster of ladies at one of Anne Aubretton’s luncheons that she had just gotten engaged to a Romanian count. Jacqueline was somehow related to Madame Aubretton’s husband, who was a colonel, or to his cousin, who was a nun. Jaqueline had arrived in Paris the previous season with a reputation for being difficult but without the face or fortune that a high spirit usually requires. There had been some gossip among the Embassy circle about Jacqueline because she liked to drink and flirt. Everyone, except the men with whom she flirted, agreed she needed to settle down.
“Emil has a useless title and impeccable manners but no money. And I don’t like moustaches. I never have. They’re too distracting when you kiss and often they retain the odor of food,” Jacqueline said.
Mrs. Frobisher’s husband had a moustache but she was silent in his defense. Anne signaled for another bottle of wine to be brought to the table.
“It’s funny, because I wasn’t even taking his proposal seriously. I thought he was too foreign and too serious. And much too old.” Jacqueline’s manner, even with women was flirtatious, and her laugh was throaty and suggestive and made everyone feel as if they were having fun. “I told him so and he kissed my hands. Right here in the center of each palm,” Jacqueline said, raising up her hands as if his kisses would be apparent, like love’s stigmata.
“He told me he would pursue me relentlessly. I just love that word, relentless,” Jacqueline elaborated, almost girlishly.
By then her audience was leaning on elbows over the table drawn into a tight knot of attention. They were all half in love with Emil by the time Jacqueline revealed that in the cloakroom at the American Arts Club, behind the last rack of coats, he had given her an orgasm. “Not really! Not in the cloakroom!” Lorraine sputtered.
“Just like that!” Jacqueline said, snapping her fingers in the air. For a moment no one said anything while she took a drag on her cigarette, enjoying her own bravura. As the smoke streamed out of her tiny nostrils, she added, “Just imagine when we actually take our clothes off.” Jacqueline smiled wickedly, adding, “and that’s not an asset you lose when the market crashes.”
Lavinia often felt a pang of envy, not for the particulars recounted but for the privilege of recounting them. She longed to be able to personalize songs and places, to have, however briefly, a kingdom of two.
Mrs. Frobisher once divulged the astonishing fact that her husband’s penis was crooked, which made
everyone gasp except Alice, who matter-of-factly asked, “How crooked?” which made the table laugh and tap their wineglasses with their butter knives. But more commonly the material was not sensational, amusing or shocking; its allure was not the lurid. It was the simple and dependable pleasure of romance, almost as satisfying second hand, that made them giddy with questions, eager to savor another taste of love, even vicariously.
Lavinia had often wondered if her friends thought her peculiar for having nothing, ever, to offer. She worried that perhaps they pitied her. The suitors she might have discussed prior to Gaston were by and large men who did not especially interest her so she could not imagine how she would make them of interest to her friends. Moreover the courtships almost never advanced to the point of complication, and seemed to resist anecdote. That there was nothing to say about them was precisely the problem.
Once, because she wanted to have a turn at the table Lavinia had described Monsieur Daumney’s attempt to woo her on Bastille Day in the middle of a heat wave her second summer in Paris. He had seated her with great ceremony on the sofa in his aunt’s parlor and recited verse of his own composition. It was embarrassingly bad and he was sweating. His bald head glistened with tiny beads which eventually ran down the slope of his forehead and dripped down his face like tears.
Boswell’s hacking cough was audible from the corner of the room and it distracted Olivier Daumney. Every time he made a mistake, Olivier would start at the beginning again, each time his voice a little more earnest. The fingers of one hand twitched as if accompanying him on an invisible instrument. At one point, a bead of sweat hung from the tip of his nose but Monsieur Daumney ignored it, and continued his recitation like a long-distance runner making a heartbreaking rush for the last few meters.
It was excruciating to watch. Lavinia dreaded the end of the poem for fear of what would follow but she also dreaded having to hear it yet another time. Across the taut drum of heat that stretched over the city, Lavinia could hear the church bells of Saint-Germain des Prés announcing the elongated hour. Just as the poem came to its ardent conclusion, Boswell wandered across the room. He sniffed the floor and sneezed, made a beeline for Monsieur Daumney and immediately vomited on his highly polished brown shoes.
The story had gotten a big laugh, but telling it had left Lavinia with a hollow feeling, and after that, she kept quiet about the occasional men in her life whose advances she generally deterred with impenetrable politeness. Those were not the tales she longed to tell. It was the act of loving that was spellbinding, not the act of deflecting it. Without the possibility of fulfillment they were just tedious tales. The stories that always had an audience were the ones that included the word relentless.
But even with all the camaraderie and confession that went back and forth between the women, Lavinia knew better than to bring up Gaston. She had not been able to tell even Alice, who left Paris without an inkling of Lavinia’s double life. Adultery was a line in the sand that was not crossed. It was a taboo that ran deep, “like cannibalism,” Mavis had noted.
If the French were more tolerant, it only made the American and British women less so. They had adopted in France a siege mentality, circling the wagons even closer than usual against raiders. Their condemnation of adultery was so severe it was not even the subject of gossip. It was too awful to mention, like rape, or incest, and shameful in a worse way because it was voluntary, and both parties were implicated.
The only person Lavinia had told of her love before her farewell confession to Harold had been a stranger. Eight months into her affair, Lavinia had accidentally jostled an old woman in the crowded aisle of an open-air market.
“You must be in love or on fire,” the old woman said irritably, “to rush through the street like such a fool.” It was intended as an insult, but that was not how Lavinia heard it.
“Yes,” Lavinia said, turning around. “I’m in love.”
The old woman was oblivious, inspecting a clump of beets, so Lavinia said it louder, almost angrily.
“I’m in love. His name is Gaston and you are the only person I’ve told.”
You know sooner or later someone will see us,” Lavinia said. They were standing in front of a doorway at 18, Rue du Cherche-Midi, admiring the portal with its rococo cartouche. The architect, Claude Bonnet, had built the Hôtel de Marsilly for himself, in 1738, Gaston informed her. Around the corner, on the Rue de Sèvres, Gaston had pointed out the Société Générale’s stone façade which had been reconstructed at the turn of the century. Above the entrance, he showed her the ceramic frieze in which there were five medallions of women’s heads, and the continents, named in Latin.
He had wanted to be an architect once, he told her. It was on their walks that he showed her Paris, and because he had studied architecture for three years in his youth, he showed the city to her building by building, occasionally walking her to another arrondissement just to point out a pediment or cornice. They rarely walked together through a garden or the gallery of a museum. When they were in public it was usually only in transit, never at a destination that might have a whiff of assignation.
Sometimes, though, they were careless or cavalier: once, Gaston kissed her in the bright dazzle of daylight, in the middle of the Pont Neuf, and schoolboys had whistled and laughed. Lavinia had laughed too, giddy with what she later referred to as “sunlight kisses.” In the back of a Félix Potin grocery store, amid shelves of canned goods, Gaston had kissed her in front of the tins of sardines, and twice in the smoky darkness of the cinema they had kissed.
“Shhht,” Gaston said, putting his gloved finger to his lips. “There is nothing noteworthy about stopping here to notice this.” He smiled at her, and for that moment she was utterly happy; charmed, as if nothing else mattered but being within the beam of his crooked smile. She marveled at the way he could in an instant make her feel lucky for his love.
“If we paused together in front of just any building,” he said, gesticulating dismissively at an undistinguished apartment building further down the block, “such as that insult of banality, perhaps then we would excite comment or suspicion.”
“Sometimes I think you want to get caught,” Lavinia said, squinting up again at the ornate cartouche.
“Because I am burdened by guilt?” Gaston asked. “I suppose that could explain the action of any Catholic. Or Jew for that matter. It’s only the Episcopalians who manage to remain unscathed by guilt.”
“Not because you feel guilty, though I’m sure you do,” Lavinia said, ignoring the wisecrack about Episcopalians, “but for the same reason an escaped convict must dream of getting caught: just to have it over with, for the relief of not having to run or hide or worry anymore.”
Gaston would not admit it and it infuriated Lavinia. As they walked against the wind they said nothing, and Gaston pointed out nothing along the way to the Bistro Danton, where in the back room, at a corner table, under a poster of Edith Piaf, she knew he would order, as he always did, chicken à l’ancienne.
“It’s true though,” Lavinia insisted, after the wine had been poured. Her exasperation was tinged with despair and it welled up inside her the way tears might have at another time. Suddenly she wanted to ruin the evening. She pressed on, driven by the weight of her grievances. They were grievances accumulated over time and honed by sacrifice. Looking at the gleam of grease on Gaston’s lower lip, she reminded herself that but for him, she needn’t be in France at all, suffering shortages, erratic electricity and political turmoil. All of the hardship and all of the compromise felt like her burden alone.
My dearest Lavinia,
Please try to understand. I know how difficult the situation is for you but don’t be unduly angry about your birthday. Céleste did not feel well enough to travel. What could I do? I didn’t get back from La Rêveline until Monday. I will make up for it a thousandfold, I promise.
Dear Monsieur Lesseur,
How splendid for you that your wife is giving a party on Wednesday. I though
t you said you never entertained as a couple anymore. What else do you still do as a couple? Your lies are poisonous. Every time I uncover one it sickens me. No wonder your wife is always ill or away at La Rêveline. Don’t waste Jean-Marc’s shoe leather anymore. I don’t want to hear from you. But do have a ripping time on Wednesday.
She thought of invitations she’d declined when Alice was still in Paris, entertaining on the Embassy’s tab, determined to “suck the marrow out of the moment.” It had been awkward for Lavinia to be duplicitous about her life, and she hated the way it made her feel cheapened, and it distanced her from her friends. It was lonely being exiled from activities which required a partner and she especially missed dancing. It was isolating keeping secrets: eventually it was just easier to withdraw from situations that required her to deceive either her friends or the earnest bachelors with whom she was paired.
“I have no world but you,” Lavinia told Gaston in the first months of their affair. She realized now that when the words ceased to be a metaphor they became a reproach. She drank her wine quickly, taking no pleasure in it, although Gaston had chosen it specifically to please her.
Excepting Jean-Marc, and he didn’t count, they had spent time together with no one. There were no witnesses to their relationship, no friends who shared the secret, who could corroborate their love. It left no trace in anyone else’s memory. That was the point—to be unseen, like a spy or a criminal, someone whose secret defines them. Someone, she thought, whose secret erases them.
Twilight Page 14
