by Maile Meloy
“I keep it for T.J., for later.”
“You mean like the trust account, at the bank?”
“Yes.”
“So why not put it there?”
She hesitated. “Maybe banks are not so safe.”
“And where did it come from?”
“It is a gift for him.”
“Katya, I’m not stupid.”
“I am not stupid, also!” she said. “I was reading this book of Abby. I am slow to read English maybe, but I am not stupid .”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You are not police here. I have some small money. The boy has this chocolate. And you are no one to say this is wrong.”
“I don’t want my kid stealing,” Jamie said, “and I don’t want my wife turning tricks. I think those are pretty basic requests.”
“What do you know, tricks ? You know nothing. But I know you fuck this niece.”
“It’s a novel!”
“This means what? Nothing is real? I know a little bit, Jamie. I was doing many things in my life, but nothing so fucked like this.”
Jamie felt as if she had slapped him, and he tried to find words to defend himself, and then he saw T.J. standing against the wall in the hallway, watching them. He didn’t know how long the boy had been there. He wished he could disappear, and sink down into the floor, and everything would be over.
Katya shoved past him, into the kitchen, while he stood there, and T.J. watched with those big eyes. She took down a box of cereal and pulled a stack of cash from between the plastic liner bag and the cardboard. She folded the money and put it in her jeans pocket. Then she pulled out the drawer under the oven, lifted the old cookie sheets the last owners had left behind, and produced another stack of bills, held together with a rubber band. She put that in the other pocket, went back to the bedroom, and closed the door.
62
FAUCHET WALKED HOME from lunch at his club in Paris one afternoon—a good lunch, but he had drunk too much wine. His doctor had forbidden wine at lunch, but at his club he thought he should be able to have this small pleasure without remorse. And it was not even really remorse he felt: it was a little pain in his chest. Not a heart attack, just a tightness, a reminder that he would die. Because he had—what, ten years left? Maybe not so many. Ten years, this was nothing, and the best years were gone.
There was a girls’ school on his way home, where the students loitered outside in their fetching uniforms: the navy blue sweaters, the long socks, the short gray pleated skirts. Even old as he was, there were one or two who would deliberately catch his eye, bold little thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Each year there were new ones.
He’d had an affair once, with a woman who had come out of this school fifteen years earlier, and she told him how they had talked about the men who walked by in their long coats and Burberry scarves, with their furtive glances. She said the girls had a game, to see who was looked at the most. One couldn’t try to bring attention, or it didn’t count. It was meant to be entirely on merit, on innate desirability. There was a bold jolie laide who won the contest again and again, without seeming to do anything but lean sulkily against the brick wall, until she finally disappeared to a school in Switzerland. His lover was thrilled to discover that he had been one of those men. He thought it was her favorite thing about him, and kept her interested much longer than she might have been.
He had always seen a few of the girls smoking: sneaking cigarettes when they were out of sight of the building. Now they talked on tiny silver mobiles instead. They had a new way to look grownup and sophisticated—a thing to do with their restless hands and mouths. Not one of them looked at him; they were all engrossed in telephone conversations about nothing: “Qu’est-ce que tu fais? Moi non plus. Je suis à l’ecole.” They would all now get brain cancer from the little telephones instead of dying from the cigarettes.
His wife was gone for the day, and the house was empty when Fauchet let himself in. He thought he would put his feet up and close his eyes, and the pain in his chest would go. On the table in the hall was a little stack of invitations, opened by his wife and left for him. He flipped through the white cards: a dinner, a vernissage. He put them down. Next to the cards was a long white envelope for him. His wife always disappeared with the bills before he saw them, and many of his old friends were dead, so he rarely got mail at home. It was airmail from the United States, postmarked in San Francisco. He found the letter opener in the dish of change on the hall table.
“Hello, my old freind,” the letter said.
I am practicing Englisch now more than French, so you will forgive me because I write in it, and I am so bad. But I onderstand the fast Englisch on the radio now. Once I thout I will never onderstand it.
I want to thank you for helping Jamie to adopt the boy. He is a good father, I think. You will be plesed. And the boy is good, and hapy.
I am not so happy, I will say it quickly. I think I am not rite for this life. The city is very interesting. Some pepole are very nice. The little boy is beutifull. There is plan to visit Jamies parent’s for Thanks Giving. But I am not Thankfull. I am thinking all the time that I am going crazy. I am not for the good, safe life, and the rich stores, and the people who no nothing. I should be Thankfull, but I cannot change the way I am.
I am so un happy everyday, and I make fights. Somtimes I have reson and sometimes no. I want to go back to my contry, where I know life is dificult. Or to Paris where are people from my contry. I have to leve this place.
This is one small part of what I feel. There are so many things I wish to say in my own languege. I can say none of them here. I seem so stupid.
I write to you beaucose you have always helped me. Also I wish Jamie to keep the boy, so he can grow up not so unhappy here like me. I wish him to have the American things and the safetey, in hapiness. With out me, they can be O.K. You have been my freind always, and I think may be you can onderstand me.
Your Katya.
(P.S. Did you read this book the neice was writing abuot Jamie?)
Fauchet folded the letter back up. He hadn’t read the book, though his agent friend had described it to him on the phone, and sent him a copy when it was finished. He felt pleased to have noticed the closeness between the girl and her young uncle; he still had the eye. He guessed it had given Katya another reason for leaving.
He did not forgive himself for seizing the chance to pack the boy off to America. It had solved so many of his problems at the time: it pleased Katya, it helped Saffron, and it avoided a scandal. He had reasoned that it was good to give the boy a father and mother, but in truth he had been skeptical of Katya’s ability to become, just like this, an American wife. Jamie was an appealing young man, but he was not the one to take Katya in hand.
He went into the library, as he had planned to do, and sat on his old leather couch with his legs up. He pulled a small blanket over himself, feeling chilled. Through the windows the yellow Paris autumn light was beautiful but did nothing to warm him. He thought about what he could do for Katya.
The key turned in the front door lock, and his wife’s shoes clicked across the floor and onto the rug in the foyer. She stopped to look at the hall table—he could track her movements even though he could not see her—and then she went to hang up her coat. She must have seen that he had picked up the envelope. Heels off, she padded to the kitchen for a glass of something, then appeared at the library door. It was a glass of wine she had gone for, a small tumbler of red.
“Ciao, bellissima,”he said. “Come stai?” It was one of their ways around each other, to speak in Italian. It allowed them not to face each other head-on.
“Why do you have a blanket?” she asked him in French.
“I was cold.”
“You opened the letter?” she asked.
He said he had.
She waited. She was his second wife, and she looked like a second wife, still very beautiful in a hard, Parisian way. The city did something to women, made them
part stone: hard and lovely and less physically corruptible than the women of flesh who lived elsewhere in France. She wore a thin black sweater and diamond earrings. Her dark hair curved smoothly toward her chin.
“It’s from my friend in America,” he said.
“Which friend?”
“A lover of Gilbert’s.”
“Your lover, too?”
“No,” he said. It was true now. And Gilbert was dead of a heart attack the winter before, in his sleep.
“Does she want money?”
“She has a little.”
“What does she want?”
“Why are you so curious?”
“You rarely get letters here,” she said. “And you’re acting strange.”
“I am acting perfectly normal.”
She tilted her head, and the curve of hair sought its plumb. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”
He sighed. “She has a child in the United States, and she wishes to leave him there and return to Europe,” he said. “She is unhappy.”
“Is it Gilbert’s child?”
“I suppose. Now the boy is about six, but he was raised by others. Her American husband has adopted him.”
“Is this the foreign girl who used to telephone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Is she a prostitute?”
“In the past.”
“Is the American husband a homosexual?”
Fauchet shook his head. “No.”
His wife took a sip of her wine, thinking the matter through. “Then the child is better in America than with this mother,” she decided finally. “I wouldn’t normally think so. But what kind of mother is this?”
“She’s not a bad girl,” he said. “A little bit damaged.”
His wife frowned and studied him. “Will she come to Paris?”
“I don’t know. Come sit with me.”
She crossed the carpet in her stocking feet and set her glass on the low table, her wrist cocked at an elegant angle as if she could do nothing inelegantly. Then she lowered herself to the couch and tucked her ankles up sideways, all in one motion. She tugged an end of the blanket out from between them and pulled it over her.
“So?” she said. “I am here.”
Under the blanket, he put an arm across her knees. “This is good,” he said. “Like the kids in the park.”
“Not much like that,” she said.
“Exactly like that.” He was about to tell her about the pain in his chest, but he couldn’t. He told himself it wasn’t an important pain.
“If this damaged girl comes to Paris,” his wife said, “you won’t sleep with her.”
Fauchet put his head on her shoulder. “At seventy-one,” he said, “you expect so much from me? You are a transparent little flatterer.”
“I’m very serious,” she said.
“My love,” he said. “My little one. You are too kind.”
63
WHEN MARGOT WALKED into Dominick Jay’s small law office in Santa Barbara, the receptionist’s desk was deserted, piled with papers and manila folders, so she went to the open door beyond the desk. Inside was another cluttered office, where Dominick stood looking out the window with his hands behind his back. She saw no wedding band, and she felt a flood of old desire. She knocked on the open door, and he turned and looked at her. There was a long moment before he spoke.
“Margot,” he finally said.
She thought she saw pain in his eyes, or bafflement and irritation, but then he came out from behind the desk and grasped her shoulders and kissed her cheek.
“My God,” he said. “Sit down.”
There was a little couch, and she sat in one corner of it and he sat in the other. His legs were long and their knees were close. There were no pictures of a wife.
“Is this how you sit with all your clients?” Margot asked.
“No,” he said. “Are you a client? Do you have a legal problem?”
She shook her head.
“So it’s different,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
Margot took a deep breath. “My niece, Abby,” she said, “you might have met her when she was little, wrote a book.”
“Congratulations,” he said.
She laughed. “Well,” she said. “It’s not that simple. I know this sounds crazy, but before I read it, I found out it was about a Catholic family keeping secrets from each other. So I got it into my head that Abby knew. About us. Because she was there that summer, the summer I knew you. I was sure our affair was what the book was about. It had me in a panic.”
“Oh, Margot.”
“But the book isn’t about that at all,” she said. “It’s about crazy, made-up secrets. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I wondered where you’d gone, and what had happened to you, and if you’d married.” Here she paused to let him interrupt, but he didn’t, so she went on. “I looked you up on the Internet,” she said. “I’ve never done that before. I’m a very moderate person. Now I’ve said too much.”
He considered her. “So you came all the way here, from Louisiana?”
“I was visiting my parents in L.A., and I drove up.”
“Do they know you’re here?”
“No one does,” she said, and she felt her heart start to race. When was the last time no one had known where she was? She couldn’t remember.
“You’re still married?”
She nodded. “Are you?”
“Divorced.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, but she felt a leap of joy.
“Never marry for the wrong reasons in a community property state,” he said. His jaw tightened, and then he seemed to make himself relax and shrug.
She looked around the office. “Do you do family law?”
“No,” he said. “The hymn to the prenup is just a little song and dance I do when I’m nervous. You can understand me being nervous.”
“Where’s your receptionist?”
“She found fault with the working conditions here and left.”
“Do you have help?”
“I had a paralegal.”
“And?”
“She’s gone, too. I used to think about you walking through my office door,” he said. “I wondered if you could find me, I wondered if you would. Then I stopped thinking about it. I thought: This is healthy. I’m moving on with my life, like a man. And then you walk in. Jesus. In my version you didn’t still have a wedding ring on your finger.”
Margot covered her hand, ashamed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to see you, I was going crazy.”
“Well, here I am,” he said.
Margot nodded. “I didn’t have any plans past getting here.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I can tell you how my version went.”
“Okay.”
“First you agreed to sit on the couch with me,” he said. “Then I told you about my tragic marriage—briefly. You told me about the breakup of yours. I was very sympathetic. We didn’t spend much time on the disappearance of my legal staff. Then there was an awkward silence, and you leaned forward and kissed me.”
Margot looked up at him, wondering what she had done, by coming here.
The moment passed, and he sighed. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
She managed to nod.
“Good,” he said. In the process of swinging his long body up, he leaned over and kissed her temple. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
Margot called her parents from the receptionist’s desk to say she was too tired to drive back safely and was getting a motel room.
“Of course, honey,” her mother said. “Do the safest thing.”
Margot suffered a moment of aching guilt, then drove Dominick to a restaurant with a table by a big brick fireplace.
“This was in my version, too,” he said, reading the wine list. “But it happened later. Other things happened first.”
The wine was very good, and Dominick made her laugh over
dinner. When he left the table to pay, Margot realized she was drunk, and her lips were a little bit numb. He was gone from the table a long time.
“Well, the third credit card worked,” he said when he returned.
They went out to her car, and the cool sea air felt wonderful on her face—she had forgotten how wonderful the night air could be, after so many years in muggy, air-conditioned Louisiana. She followed his directions home, still pleasantly tipsy and thinking it seemed like a roundabout route, and finally she parked where he told her to stop. She felt faint when he kissed her. Then she must have agreed to go in, because they were walking together up some steps, and he was unlocking the door, and they were inside.
64
JIMMY VAUGHAN WAS in Santa Barbara, meeting with a lawyer named O’Brian, when he saw, sitting across the restaurant by the brick fireplace, his high school sweetheart’s older sister, Margot Santerre. Jimmy hadn’t seen Margot since her wedding, but he would have known her anywhere. No one sat up straighter. The way she leaned toward the man she was with, and touched his arm, made Jimmy say nothing. It wasn’t the guy she had married, and Jimmy would have known from his mother if Margot had divorced. He read the menu and kept his face turned away from that side of the room.
When the waiter had gone, Jimmy asked the lawyer casually, “So who’s here tonight? Anyone you know?”
O’Brian looked around the room. “Well, that’s my dentist, there in the black dress,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said. “This always feels like a small town. I just wondered.”
“That’s the owner of the restaurant, standing by the door, but that’s obvious,” O’Brian said, scanning. “Oh, here we go. Over by the fireplace, with the blonde, that’s a lawyer we used to work with called Dominick Jay. Someone told me he used to be a Jebbie.”
Jimmy glanced over and saw that Margot was laughing. There was something of Clarissa in the way she laughed, something more free and easy than he’d ever seen before in the older sister, and he felt a nostalgic pang.
O’Brian said, “I mean a Jesuit—sorry.”
