Looking back in hindsight, Lavinia was amazed that she’d ever been jealous of Céleste, ever wished for what she had. Once when Gaston was getting dressed, Lavinia had noticed his sock had been darned clumsily at the heel and she’d felt a searing pang that it was not the work of her hand. Alone at night she had tormented herself cataloguing things Céleste took for granted that Lavinia would never have. No matter where the list began, it always ended with his name, and privileges it accorded.
At the Hôtel Trois Etoiles, Lavinia and Gaston had registered as Monsieur and Madame Verdurin, borrowing the name from a particularly unlikable pair in Proust’s long opus. It had been an amusing nom d’affaire, but even so Lavinia had felt a frisson of pleasure when the desk clerk addressed her as Madame Verdurin because it conferred the only recognition of their couplehood she had known. It did not convey the respect she would have had, however, as Madame Lesseur, a fact made obvious every time she endured the desk clerk’s snickering “Enjoy your stay,” when they checked in or the prurient titters of the porter when they checked out, “Come again, do come again.”
Gaston justified his infidelity by blaming it on Céleste: “The nuns ruined her. Only two years with the Carmelites and she’s incapable of having an orgasm. The girls had to shower in their slips. They were forbidden to look at their own naked bodies. It’s not a surprise Céleste has no interest in sex.” He shrugged and lit a cigarette as he continued his rationale. “I understand. I sympathize, but what about me? Our marriage would have suffered far worse had I not made my own arrangements.”
“So you’re doing her a favor by being with me?” Lavinia asked angrily.
“Damn it, Lavinia, if I wanted you any more I’d spontaneously combust. This is why I shouldn’t tell you anything at all. It only upsets you and you use it against me. You’re angry if I don’t tell you about Céleste and you are angry if I do. It’s a stalemate from which there is no escape.” Gaston suddenly started laughing.
Lavinia looked at him quizzically, finding no humor in his sophistry.
“Stalemate, don’t you get it?” he repeated, reaching for the ashtray to stub out his cigarette. “The pun is in English no less.”
When she got home from that encounter she was still angry. She had raged at behavior that was beneath the man she loved. It made her think less of Gaston when he spoke of his wife with condescension or contempt, but it infuriated her that even so, he still put Céleste’s comfort before her own. She wrote to him that night, letting her words pile up into drifts of outrage and supplication that obscured the original shape of her thought and distorted the message. She hated him for disappointing her and she hated herself for wanting him no less even as he diminished in her eyes.
Lavinia wrote to him as if somehow finding the right words would change things; like a magic formula, like the name Rumplestiltskin or olly olly oxen free. She wrote with a desperation that was new and then she stopped abruptly. Lavinia refused to see Gaston and maintained a long and painful silence. It was like fasting, requiring more and more resolve with each additional day. It was a different kind of starvation but it had the same withering effect. Her silence lasted almost a month during which his letters came in sporadic bursts, like the shouts of a swimmer caught in an undertow and losing wind.
Lavinia Ma Belle,
If you are going to end this won’t you at least do it to my face? Don’t you owe me at least that? I have things to tell you that can only be whispered. Let me kiss you with words. Let me at least cover you with phrases of desire and regret.
Dear Lavinia,
If only you could think of someone besides yourself. Do you have any idea what it was like to have to go back to the Prefecture for another interview? And without a complete set of the documents for my military exemption in my portfolio? Without your love in my breast? You make it hard to be a stableboy much less a hero.
Chère Lavinia,
Tonight the streets of Paris are empty and the mist has swallowed everything, like a world evaporating as I watch. I too, might evaporate if I were not so swollen with grief. Why must you be so cruel? Do you take pleasure in making me suffer? Why did you leave my gift unopened? You might as well have left an ice pick in my back and a corkscrew in my heart.
Lavinia my sweet,
Did you see the full moon hanging over Paris last night? It seemed to balance for a while on the spire of Saint Eustace, as if it had been snagged there. I thought of you and hoped you were also looking up. It was too beautiful not to share. I ached for you then and I ache still. Don’t you have any words left? Aucun mots? Même pas un seul?
When Jean-Marc rang her bell with an envelope in hand he was more and more often drunk. Madame Luberon complained to Lavinia about it, and Lavinia agreed that in future, if Jean-Marc was visibly drunk, Madame Luberon would not admit him to the courtyard. Lavinia didn’t bother to argue, even though she knew Jean-Marc would not understand why he was no longer being admitted at the door and it would certainly hurt his feelings.
Lavinia might have argued with Madame Luberon, whose own inebriation was increasingly frequent, but Lavinia had noticed that coincident with his drinking, Jean-Marc’s hygiene had deteriorated to an alarming degree, making the sharp bite of pastis on his breath almost welcome. He no longer shifted from foot to foot, probably because his balance was impaired by alcohol. Instead, he hunched forward and rocked while he counted, but it was clearly joyless and without comfort.
Now, without his childlike charm, Jean-Marc seemed threatening in his lurching movements, and unsavory. His eyes were vacant and rimmed in red and it gave his face a haunted look, as if he had just done something unspeakable. It was only a matter of time until there would be a problem with the neighbors. The Germans had made everyone edgy.
Lavinia had seen a man get his jaw broken in front of one of the market stalls at Les Halles over whether Bois Roussel, the French upstart winner of the previous year’s Derby, could outrun the lead cyclist of the Tour de France. She missed Alice, and Boswell had developed a tremor in one of his back legs. The papers talked about stolen coupon books, bribery and the black market. No one, it seemed, was at his best and resentments ran like static electricity between people having even the slightest interactions.
Madame Braun had spat at Madame de la Falaise as the final punctuation of a loud and ugly exchange, amplified by the acoustics of the courtyard so that everyone with windows on the interior was scalded by it. It was wearying, like unrelenting rain, or the oppression of great heat. Jean-Marc was not a battle she wanted to add to a landscape already fraught with skirmishes and filled with mines.
Dear Monsieur Lesseur,
Share your sensitive observations of nature with your wife next time you feel a spasm of conscience. I am exhausted by a happiness predicated on my ability to pretend either you are not married or I don’t care. I am thin from living on the scraps from Céleste’s table.
After she sent that note to Gaston, she stopped responding to his missives for several days. When Jean-Marc returned at the end of the week with instructions “to collect an envelope for Monsieur Lesseur,” his jacket was seasoned with sawdust and smelled of vomit. Lavinia was reminded angrily of Gaston’s rude remarks about Boswell’s nervous stomach. “Just a minute,” she said to Jean-Marc as he stood in the doorway. When she returned, she gave Jean-Marc an envelope enclosing a blank sheet of paper. It was a cruel gesture and she knew it, and it gave her a sickening satisfaction.
During the days in which her contact with Gaston was suspended, Lavinia wandered the streets without aim or pleasure. Like a kite released into the air, she felt untethered from the world, but it brought no sense of freedom; she had never felt so restless or trapped. Her walks were too much for Boswell, who tired easily and panted even when at rest, so she stopped bringing him with her. Lavinia walked a random course through Paris until she was exhausted and her feet were cramping.
It occurred to her once, as she sat in the back of a café and wiped the blood from her
heel, where a blister had broken, that she was behaving like a penitent. And I didn’t even spend an hour with the Carmelites, she thought, with bitter amusement. When the waiter came for her order she asked for a cognac, drinking for the first time by herself in public.
The heavy smoke of cheap black tobacco hung across the room in layers mapping the currents of air. It was a depressing room that someone had tried to brighten with orange curtains. The panels of cloth were hemmed unevenly and seemed to tilt toward the bar, as if imitating the disheveled clientele standing in the front room. A street musician wandered in and began to play a song on his out-of-tune accordion but the waiter waved him off before he had completed the first chord change.
As Lavinia sipped her drink, she smoked the last two cigarettes in the cigarette case Gaston had given her. It was one of the only presents he had given her that she liked; it was simple and there was nothing about it that suggested “mistress” the way the red satin mules with marabou did or the silk peignoir. Often his presents had embarrassed her. The undergarments were tarty and the mules pinched at the toe.
Even watered down by the establishment to a pale amber, the alcohol had a rapid effect. A poem suddenly began to bloom in her as the heat of the liquor spread through her in a tingling rush. Lavinia took Gaston’s most recent letter out of her handbag and on the back of the pale blue paper she began to compose the first and only sonnet she had ever written. It took several drafts to complete, and another cognac.
While she wrote, a man with wavy auburn hair and bad skin sat down next to her and rolled two cigarettes. He was almost good-looking, and Lavinia could see in the sudden brightness of his match that his hair was a source of vanity, and from the way he shook the match to extinguish it, he clearly fancied himself a ladies’ man. He was drunk and he was complimentary, marveling at her with a smoothness that was practiced and yet stirring.
Over the course of an hour she accepted his cigarettes but otherwise ignored his attentions. She was revising the poem, still astonished to have found it swelling in her, like an unsuspected pregnancy.
Sometimes in these words I find
A peace that elsewhere
Flees a fevered mind,
And lifts the shadow of despair:
He loved me well for a brief while
And taught my body how to smile.
No matter that it couldn’t last
Or left me wounded all alone
Caught between the pretty past
And a future full of sand and stone.
Send him back now to his wife,
And let him live his other life.
I will learn to love again—
The only question just is when.
The man murmured something Lavinia didn’t hear and then he put his hand on her knee. He had moved closer and she became aware of the warmth of his body; his hand felt like it was radiating heat. When at last Lavinia looked up she saw instantly his flaw. His features were pleasant if bland, but his eyes were little, much too little for his face, giving it a porcine quality despite his slender frame. He looked particularly pink and piggy when he smiled.
Lavinia turned quickly away from his leer and from the corner of her eye she saw herself in the mirror behind the bar as a stranger might. It was a reflection that was brutally unflattering and it sobered her. This is just what my family feared I would come to, Lavinia thought.
“What you have in mind is simply not possible,” Lavinia said firmly, removing the man’s hand. Now, as she stood above him, pulling on her astrakhan jacket she felt a surge of tenderness replace disgust. A lock of his beautiful auburn hair had fallen across his brow and he was looking up with hurt confusion, a finger nervously playing with the St. Patrick’s medal dangling on his chest. She took a last drag on the cigarette and rubbed it out on the corner of an ashtray they had filled during his brief courtship.
She had smoked four of his cigarettes, rolled in one hand and licked closed with a suggestive flick of his tongue. Lavinia understood now that the cigarettes were a kind of kiss by proxy, allowing him to place his saliva on her lips while establishing his entitlement to considerations. Disgust rose up again like bile in her throat. His mouth was weak, and there was something cringing about the set of his shoulders, as if all his swagger could not conceal a crippling cowardice. She was struck by how much she preferred the cruelty of Gaston’s lips.
Lavinia thought of Gaston again, and his kisses. For a moment she faltered, her legs wobbling slightly under her as she considered the possibility that she might never kiss Gaston again. As she reached out to a greasy table to steady herself, soiling her glove in the act, she felt the weight of eyes on her back and thought: those men at the bar think I’m drunk. They think it’s the alcohol that has made me lose my balance. But it’s much worse: it’s the memory of a kiss.
Lavinia took a taxi home and reviewed in her mind the poem. The rhyme of while and smile was clumsy and she decided the use of the sonnet form was schoolgirlish. All of it was embarrassing, even the impulse behind it. As soon as she was home, even before she took Boswell out for his last walk, she put Gaston’s letters in the sink and burned them. It was harder to get the envelopes to light than she had imagined it would be but she kept striking matches until the smoke yielded to flame. The paper edged itself in the thin scalloped line of flame, curling up the corners, fluttering as if the words were trying to escape.
It was painful to watch and twice she was tempted to reach into the flames to rescue what was left. Her eyes were tearing from the sharp bite of the smoke but she was undeterred. Lavinia added her poem to the fire and watched her handwriting erased a few lines at a time. When Lavinia had been a child, Miss Kaye had told her about the Spanish conquistadors wading ashore to the New World while their ships burned behind them.
“Why would they burn their own ships?” she’d asked Miss Kaye incredulously. Miss Kaye was sitting in the kitchen eating toast slathered with marmite sent to her in monthly packages from Ireland. “So there’s no going back,” Miss Kaye said, looking down at the toast. “Nothing fortifies one’s commitment to the future as much as eliminating the past.”
Lavinia opened the kitchen window to let the room air out. A few black flakes of ash stirred and tried to rise. Even Miss Kaye had been wrong, Lavinia realized. There was no way to eliminate the past. The best you could do was eliminate its souvenirs.
Two days later when Lavinia saw Gaston, it was by happenstance. He was dining in the restaurant where Anne Aubretton was celebrating her saint’s day with a handful of friends. It was his laugh Lavinia first recognized. It pierced her like an invisible arrow, drawing in her breath and making her drop her napkin. When she spotted him, he was at a table in the corner with four men in tailcoats. They had come from something formal or were going on to it. It didn’t matter; either way there was suddenly no air in the room. She looked away immediately but she could feel his eyes searing her.
Lavinia excused herself and as she left the table, she was so pale Madame Aubretton whispered to her niece to stop eating the mussels. Lavinia was almost at the door to the ladies’ room when she felt the hand at her back pushing her on past the washrooms, his breath at her neck. At the swinging door to the kitchen he stepped in front of her and led her roughly through the kitchen, like a gendarme making an arrest. The kitchen crew looked away, busied themselves with tasks, not wanting to know what they might be witness to at a time when nothing was innocent anymore. Into the alley, clattering through tins emptied of olive oil and duck fat, waiting for the metal collection, Gaston pushed Lavinia in the direction of the deepest shadows.
There he kissed her, wrapping himself around her, pulling her underwear down, his hands everywhere on her skin. The way they kissed was like divers coming up for air, gasping for each other as if the only way to breathe was through the other’s mouth. Then his fly was open and he bent her back against a wooden barrel without saying a word, making her moan.
Before he let go of her, he tipped Lavinia�
��s head back and kissed her again, but it was tinged by the sadness of what went unsaid between them, by the irrefutable eloquence of their unbroken silence.
As she hurried through the kitchen, careful to meet no eyes, she could feel him leaking out of her and she tightened her thighs instinctively. From the start of the affair, Lavinia had not worried about pregnancy. It had seemed beside the point, like worrying about seating on a lifeboat. Don’t play at the high-stakes table, Gordon had told her, unless you are prepared to bet the bank. Lavinia couldn’t remember what Gordon had been referring to, since no one in her family liked gaming, but her love was important enough, she reasoned, that she could hang her future on it. Sometimes she saw it with an almost religious clarity: she could put everything on red 21 and not lose either way.
“Goodness gracious,” Madame Aubretton said, when Lavinia returned to the table. “We have to get you home right away—I just knew there was something wrong with the mussels. You look feverish, my dear, so no need to pretend you haven’t taken sick. I’ve already called for the car.”
By the time Lavinia saw the surprise of bruises on her back and thighs she was too tired to be shocked. She stared at herself as she turned sideways to the mirror, astonished that the night had written such an alarming message in her flesh and she had been oblivious. Each of her vertebrae had been rubbed bright where it had pressed against the rim of the wooden barrel. There was something beautiful about it as well as disconcerting; her spine had become a string of rubies glowing against the white of her skin, highlighting her backbone, exclaiming both its strength and its frailty.
Twilight Page 16
