by Corine Gantz
“It’s just a silly idea,” she said, powerless.
Her father waved his hands impatiently, the piece of paper still between his fingers. “You can’t keep coming here week after week to watch us watch TV. You’ve got to stop spending your weekends walking your mom around town, sweetheart. Our life is what it is,” he chuckled unhappily. “We sure messed that up real good. But yours....”
“Oh, Dad, don’t.”
He gave her a stern look and handed her the piece of paper. Althea unfolded it with great difficulty, which had nothing to do with her hands or her brain function and everything to do with the chance she might suddenly become unable to hide her despair. It was a check for one hundred and fifty dollars.
“That should cover the airplane, no?” he asked anxiously.
She couldn’t look at him. When she finally did, she saw his eyes were as wet as hers. She gave him a hug and only said, “Thanks, Dad, I think I’ll do that.”
“Now, go pack. Don’t look back, she might catch you!” Henry added with a nervous laugh.
Althea put the check into her wallet, arranged her clean and folded clothes into her bag, and said goodbye. She walked home for an hour in the frigid night, but she did not feel the cold this time as thoughts of Paris buzzed through her mind.
Lola’s heart was pounding. She locked her bedroom door even though Mark would be in Atlanta for several more days. She dug deep into the drawer, tossing lingerie to the side and removed a large brown envelope. She sat on her bed trying to calm the shaking of her hands; I’m breathing in, and spread out the contents on the white silk comforter. The sound of her heartbeat seemed to resonate against the cathedral ceiling of the all-white bedroom. She inspected the contents of the envelope for a long time, trying to absorb its meaning, incredulous for having gone this far. Had she tried to stand, her knees wouldn’t have supported her. Three tickets. Three passports.
She had given the nanny and the housekeeper the day off so she could pack. Tomorrow, the taxi would be here to pick them up at 6:00 AM. In the cab, she’d tell Simon and Lia that they were going on a surprise vacation. On a school day? She had to lie to Lia. She couldn’t take a chance. She was being duplicitous, lying to her own daughter, stealing her. But is taking what is yours stealing?
Three weeks ago, Lola didn’t question her life, like the worm not questioning being stuck at the end of a fishing hook. Nor did she really question the validity of Mark’s criticism of everything she did. Three weeks ago, she had only ached to become who Mark needed her to be. And then, almost overnight, she stopped being able to tolerate any of it.
She had to keep her momentum because she had a tendency to forgive, to see the good side of people over the bad. For the last few days, every bit of Lola’s energy had been spent pretending everything was as usual and planning the trip. The stars were aligning nicely. The end of January was the time for traveling abroad. Her astrologer assured her that she would not get such a perfect planet alignment again until 2022. Things were all pointing in the same direction. It didn’t even feel like she was actually making decisions. But all the while it didn’t seem quite real either. She was going through the motions, accomplishing a little more towards her unfathomable goal every day.
The passports were still good since their trip to Mexico. Mexico. That was in August, five months ago. She and the children had been so sick amidst the coconut trees and the warm ocean breeze. They’d suffered from terrible stomach problems, except for Mark, who was never sick and who’d had a wonderful time going deep sea fishing every day. She took care of the kids while her own sickness had sent her to the bathroom every hour for days. She’d lost weight to the point of being emaciated. Mark came back with a glorious tan.
Going to France couldn’t possibly be any more difficult. In fact, without Mark sending everyone into a panic in preparation for the trip, it all seemed to go remarkably smoothly. The pull that small ad in the paper had had on her was confounding. Whenever her resolve weakened, she’d merely go back to the envelope, retrieve the cut-up page of the Los Angeles Times, and read the ad again. Each time, she’d feel joyous like a small child. She always loved surprises, and secrets! She knew none of this was properly examined, was not without consequences, and was wrong in a way. But she was doing it.
Lola folded the page of the paper and placed the stack of Euros, the three passports, and the three airplane tickets back into the manila envelope. In her modeling days, Paris had always been her favorite city. To Mark, the world outside of the U.S. was narrowed down to Mexico and the Bahamas. He would never find her there.
Février
Chapter 7
Annie’s stomach cramps had not eased since the night before. Going three miles per hour on the périférique while Lucas moaned about the wheels of her minivan, made her feel even more sick to her stomach. She did not want to talk and was thankful for Lucas’s silence. Through the rain on the van’s window, she was suddenly taking a sobering look at France through what she figured to be a Bel Air resident’s eyes. Gone were the charming cafés, the flower shops, the statues, the parks, the architecture. All she noticed now was the dismal weather, the pollution, and the endless string of rotted cars filled with people with rotted teeth. Paris was nothing but a dump and soon it would be all in the open.
What struck her was how little movement there had been in her life in the last two years, how very still things had been. For one, since Johnny died she had stopped driving. It had not been a conscious decision, but a profound, inexplicable aversion. This was the first time the van was out of the garage since. She reasoned that she had been traumatized by his car crash. It was only natural. But then why did she not even want to see the van. If she needed something from the garage she’d send Maxence or Lucas to fetch it. Lucas periodically insisted she needed to work on the issue, but she dismissed it. In the rare instances when she needed to get out of her neighborhood, she simply took buses. The day before, she had surprised herself by insisting that Lucas pick up Lola at the airport using the van. Lucas had raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
“I can’t very well ask her to take a cab, can I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I want things to go smoothly. I want them to feel welcome and at ease.”
“What about me being at ease?”
She pushed Lucas with both hands toward the garage and she let him lift the metal curtain. “Let’s air out the monster, see if it can still roar.” Lucas turned toward her looking offended. “I hope you are not referring to my private anatomy.”
In a few minutes, they would be at the international gate where Annie had come off the plane as a newlywed. Had she really once been the kind of person who flew over oceans, drove in unknown cities, moved to new countries?
“I am missing work for this?” Lucas said. “I just don’t see why you could not drive on your own.”
“I don’t feel capable of driving, I told you a million times that I’m not ready.”
“You are capable,” he said. “And you’re ready.”
“When I’m ready to drive, you’ll be the first one informed.”
Later on, as she stood in the dense crowd that faced the international gate at Charles De Gaulle Airport where Lola and her children should have appeared a long time ago, she was back to feeling more anticipation than fear. There were people everywhere, people doing things, going places and she was right in the thick of the action. She was waiting for an unknown woman to become part of her life. She could not help but feel proud of herself for breaking that spell with the van, and for making this tremendous plunge towards the unknown.
But an hour after the airplane was shown to have landed, there was still no sign of Lola. The colorful pageant of people and families from every country, race, nationality and social stratum had stopped being interesting a long time ago and she was back to being tormented by stomach upset and cold sweats. She scrutinized the crowd till her eyes hurt. What did they look like? Could she
possibly have missed them? There must have been dozens of mothers traveling with children. Had she not seen her sign? Annie no longer had the gumption to hold up the cute little homemade sign she had coerced Paul and Laurent into constructing. Children’s letters and coloring. Cute as a button. The idea behind the sign was to give a warmer, more friendly reception than the one she felt capable of voicing.
She turned to Lucas. “Could they have missed their connection?” Lucas, still busy feeling sorry for himself, only shrugged. “Shit, this is not normal. Maybe this is the wrong airport! Lucas, please, make sure we’re in the right place. This could be a disaster. And I’m begging you to stop giving me the cold shoulder! This is stressful enough.” Dragging his feet, Lucas went to ask. She wanted to wring his neck.
She now had to push and shove to remain in the front row because the crowd had grown for the arrival of international travelers who were making their way slowly up the ramp. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the stench of sweat, perfume, and cigarette smoke that engulfed them all.
Faces—hundreds of faces, strange faces—lit up when they recognized someone familiar. Saris, suits, turbans, shorts, and flip-flops. People pushing carts covered in mountains of mismatched parcels and luggage. Everyone looked so strange. One woman caught Annie’s attention. She was quite an incongruity, a stunning woman with high cheekbones, a pale face and dark glasses. She could have been six feet tall or appeared to be amid this rather low-rising crowd of French, Asian, and Arabic men and women. She wore her black hair closely cropped, her face was chiseled, her lips very full, and her skin like porcelain seemed to glow from the inside. Annie wasn’t the only one to gawk. The oversized sunglasses and the floor-length, mocha-colored cashmere coat, mocha cashmere turtleneck, and mocha cashmere boots made her look like she might have been a model in the midst of a photo shoot. Annie racked her brain for a clue and forgot all about what she was here for. Surely this was someone famous, maybe a French actrice. Not Chiara Mastroianni, not Carla Bruni...the woman continued walking up the ramp and pushing a cart piled high with Vuitton bags.
It was only when she passed right by that Annie noticed that a toddler and a girl of about nine were at her side, both children beautiful and as blond as the woman was dark-haired. And suddenly it hit her. Lola? The shock of this realization hit her at the same instant as the enormity of the disaster struck her. Quick! Toss the sign into the crowd! Sprint out of the airport, and run, run, across fields and across towns all the way home? There was still time. “Down to earth” she had told Lucas to describe Lola. Not from this earth was more like it. But Lola had sounded so normal over the phone.
She looked anything but normal. It was as if Wonder Woman had landed in the airport with her skin-tight American flag outfit and her golden lasso. This was impossible. Impossible! This woman, this creature would find a hotel, she’d find another home, she’d find another place in which to start over or whatever hellish reason she was here for. She needed to turn around and go right back into the pages of Vogue from which she came. She’d be absolutely fine. She’d be absolutely better off. This woman did not belong in her world, in her life and she sure as hell didn’t belong in her house.
But instead, Annie found herself elbowing, pushing, and shoving to make her way toward Lola, and lifting her homemade rickety little sign high, wriggling it pathetically and wailing “excuse me, excuse me.” Terrible humiliation ensued. Lola kept staring right above the sign. There she was, plump and barely over five-feet tall on her tiptoes right next to a goddess who could not see her! Finally, Annie practically shoved the sign in the woman’s face, cleared her throat. Her voice came out, high on helium, “Lola?”
Lola looked down, the African gazelle to the aardvark, recognized her name on the sign. She looked at her through her impenetrable sunglasses. “Annie?” The crowd moved in slow motion. “Welcome to France!” Annie said in one hysterical breath, and the world resumed normal speed. “I was worried sick about you. What happened?”
Lola took off her glasses. She had beautiful pale green eyes and looked like she had been crying. She bent down slightly to speak closer to Annie’s ear. “They held us up at immigration,” she whispered. “We looked suspect to them, I guess, a single mom with two kids. They were rude and...”
Her little boy wailed “Mom, up me, up me!” He was pulling on her arm. She looked at Annie and her eyes filled with tears. “For a moment there, I thought they wanted to send us back. Then, suddenly, for no reason, they let us go. I don’t get it.”
Annie was entirely confused by Lola’s vulnerability. “There is nothing to get, honey,” she said, patting Lola on the sleeve of her soft coat. “Welcome to the best France has to offer, starting with abuse of power and arbitrary decisions. You’re going to love it!”
“Right now, all I am is terrified,” Lola whispered even lower. “I’m so thankful to see a friendly face.”
“Me?” Annie said.
Six feet tall women in cashmere have nothing to fear, she thought. But Lola did look terrified. “Your worries are over now,” Annie said, believing herself. “I’m going to take care of you and your adorable children.” She turned to Lola’s children and gave them a wide smile destined to convey warmth and motherly self-confidence. The girl’s face was scrunched up and closed and she did not make eye contact. The boy was hanging on to his mother’s coat with both hands now and looked like he was going to climb up the coat like a monkey. Lola lifted him into her arms and the boy buried his face in her neck. “I bet you can’t wait to get to your new home!” Annie said with all the jolliness she could muster.
“Our vacation home,” Lola whispered and looked at Annie worriedly.
“Your nice vacation home, of course,” Annie said. “Do you know I have a boy your age? I have three boys, in fact.”
“I hate boys,” Lia shrugged, “They’re stupid.”
“Not mine. They’re grade-A boys, I promise you that.” Annie took mental note to brief the boys about potential fires of hell if they acted out.
Like the sighting of a buoy in the middle of a rough sea, Annie spotted Lucas cutting through the crowd and advancing toward them. When he saw Lola, Lucas opened his eyes wide and, for Annie’s benefit, simulated what seemed to be a miniature heart attack by covering his chest with both hands in a very French gesture signifying that he was love struck. He shook Lola’s hand, introduced himself and began to speak to her and the children in English without the slightest hesitation or intimidation, and Annie breathed an immense sigh of relief. Lucas was going to save her ass and make this whole thing possible.
In the car, Annie decided she was going to pretend that she was fine. She wasn’t going to show anything to anyone, not even to Lucas. But she suspected Lucas knew all too well what was going through her brain, that old rascal. For one, she could not come up with anything clever to say and the van had fallen into an uncomfortable silence where all Annie could hear was the sound of her thoughts furiously galloping through her head. The van was beat up. A disgrace. There were crumbs and toys. Why had she not noticed before? Why didn’t she listen to Lucas and let them take a damned cab? That way, the first thing Lola would have seen of her life was the house. She had never felt more intimidated.
Then the van was caught in a bad traffic jam and they were hopelessly stuck past a run down industrial suburb. Lia and Simon fell asleep in the back seat. Lola was still wearing her sunglasses and she stared in silence at the suburb, which had never looked more sinister. In the cars surrounding them, lower human life forms chain-smoked and honked their horns. Annie suddenly hated Parisians and all things French. The rain, as on cue began to fall hard. Lucas turned on the windshield wipers, which stuttered and creaked and began to go up and down, trailing with them a puzzling black substance.
“How interesting,” Lucas said dispassionately. “The rubber of the blades appears to be crumbling.”
“Of course not.”
“The windshield wipers have lost their elasticity, I be
lieve.”
Sure enough, the wiper blades were rapidly disintegrating into tar-looking residue that mixed with the rain on the windshield into nauseating muddy streaks. Lucas scooted down to see the road in the lower ten inches of windshield where the wipers halfway worked and began driving in that position. Did he have to do that?
She picked at her nails, removed dried dough, and rummaged her brain unsuccessfully for something to say, careful to avoid Lucas’s side glances. Oh, she knew precisely what he was thinking. Lola had to be the most beautiful woman either of them had ever seen outside television. And Lola would never, ever, fit in her house.
Lucas scooted back up finally and looked at Lola in the rear view mirror. His voice breaking the silence like a giant fart. “Is this your first time in France?” he asked. Shut up, Annie thought. Shut up!
Lola tuned her face away from the window. “I’ve come here for work, but never more than a couple days at a time.”
“What kind of work?” Annie asked, bravely turning around and looking at Lola.
“Modeling,” she said. Annie’s spirit dropped down to her ankles. Of course modeling! “I was much younger,” Lola added. “I love Paris,” she said, and removed the sunglasses she had put back on. Her eyes were red and swollen. “Sorry about the glasses,” Lola said. “I didn’t want the kids to see me all emotional. I was fine in the airplane, but now, after the immigration and everything...”
Annie had never considered whether her children should or shouldn’t see her emotional. Heck, if they saw her only when she wasn’t emotional, they’d hardly get to see her at all. She thought of something to say. “Please don’t look around; it’s the Périphérique, the suburb! That will depress you even more. Wait till we get to my house. Everybody loves my house!”
“I’ll do a scenic detour,” Lucas declared.
“Lucas, they’re exhausted,” Annie protested weakly.
