A Small Indiscretion (17 page)

“If we were on a sailboat,” he said now, “we could head out the Channel and around the tip of England into the Irish Sea. We could be in Howth by Christmas Eve.”

“You’ll be missed this Christmas, won’t you?” I said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss Christmas. I’m flying to Dublin Christmas Eve.”

This was news to me. Awful news. I would be alone in Paris with Louise and Malcolm and their daughter.

“You’d love Christmas Eve at Hill House,” he said. “Dad would take a shine to you. He likes pretty girls. Can you cook at all? He likes pretty girls to help him in the kitchen. He stomps around, since Mum died, can’t find the baking pan, can’t find the baster. It’s amusing. And of course there’s always plenty to drink.”

“I can’t cook much.”

“Ah, well, not to worry.”

Did he really mean that I should come? It was what I thought I wanted. To be claimed by him. To be taken into his family and his life. And yet the idea terrified me. I would have to work so hard to please him. I would be worried all the time about my clothes, as I was now.

Patrick began to speak of a pub in Howth he and his sisters visited every Christmas Eve, after dinner. The pub was called the Bloody Stream, so named because a vicious battle against the Danes in the twelfth century was said to have turned the stream beneath it red with blood. As he spoke, he grabbed the two ends of my pink scarf and pulled me toward him. I thought he was going to tell me he would book me a flight from Paris to Dublin. That he would not abandon me to Malcolm and Louise. I thought he was going to kiss me. He did kiss me, long and hard, then he let go of one end of the pink scarf and pulled it free and flung it over the railing of the boat.

I never knew, afterward, whether he’d meant to do it from the start. Whether he’d intended, all along, to be the one to cast it off and cancel out my efforts at reinvention. Or whether it had been a whim. I only know that one instant it was around my neck and in the next it was gone. I watched it fall. It did not get caught in a gust of wind. It did not whip itself upward over the bow of the ferry and hang suspended in a sliver of sunlight, brilliant against the gray clouds. It simply mashed itself against the side of the boat, a pink smudge, a stubborn remnant of the progress I’d hoped to make. A little wave came up and sucked it under and it disappeared.

I
T RAINED HARD
during the drive from Calais into Paris. Patrick and I sat in back. Louise sat in front because of her motion sickness.

“Malcolm!” she said over and over as he drifted toward the center lane. She always hated taking the car to the Continent, she explained to Patrick and me, what with the confusion over the steering wheels, especially in the terrible rain.

I took my shoes off during the journey and tucked my feet under me. Patrick removed his own shoes and extended his leg across the seat and nudged one of my feet free and tickled the sole with his toe. I didn’t smile. I didn’t even look at him. I was afraid Malcolm would see me and we would be exposed. Exposure would be the worst possible thing, or would it? What would happen if it was revealed to Malcolm that all this time I’d been resisting his advances, I’d secretly been sleeping with the man who had seduced his wife?

We did not go directly to the penthouse, but parked the car in an underground garage, then walked to the base of the Champs-Élysées. The idea was to eat a late lunch, enjoy the holiday decorations as we walked up the grand avenue, then visit the Arc de Triomphe. Afterward, we’d take the métro to the Musée de
l’Orangerie before collecting the car again to drive to the penthouse in time to clean up before dinner.

The holiday décor on the Champs-Élysées was meant to have involved the affixing of electric lights to the trees lining the avenue, then wrapping them in colored gauze. Louise had read about it in the travel section of the paper. But when we reached the avenue, holding our coats closed against the driving wind and rain, the trees were bare. Apparently it had been an exceptionally long, warm autumn in which the trees had not lost all their leaves. The gauze had lumped and bulged and, with the onset of unusually heavy rains the week before, the decorations had been deemed unsuitable and removed.

We received this information from an American tourist. Louise, in her disappointment, suggested we sit down to lunch right away. Her feet hurt, she said, and she was cold. Impatience shot through me, and for a minute, I wished I hadn’t come. This was not how I’d dreamt of experiencing Paris. This was not the picture that had formed in me during the endless French classes in high school and community college. I watched the American walk away. He did not have an umbrella. He was young and bareheaded and unconcerned. I wished I could walk away with him—a countryman, a free spirit—but if I did that, I would miss my chance with Patrick.

“This one will do, won’t it?” Malcolm said, stopping at the window of a restaurant with red-and-white-checked tablecloths.

“Oh, I don’t know. It looks awfully touristy, doesn’t it?” Louise replied.

“It is the Champs,” Malcolm said. “We’re not going to find anything especially authentic.”

“You wanted to come to the Champs,” Louise replied.

“I’m just saying, as far as restaurants go, we may have to compromise.”

We walked on. We were halfway to the top of the avenue by the time a suitable compromise had been reached, and we gratefully stepped out of the rain into a little bistro and hung up our wet coats.

“The wine list isn’t anything special, is it?” Louise said when she picked up the menu, and for a moment I was afraid we would not be able to eat after all, or worse, that wine would not be ordered. But Malcolm grunted and said it was fine and ordered a bottle of Beaujolais.

“Why don’t you order something we can share to start?” Malcolm said to Louise. He looked at me, then at Patrick. “Louise is quite fluent in French. She did her A levels and studied French literature at university.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Louise said. “I don’t think I’ll bother. All the waiters speak English on the Champs, anyway.”

“Go on, my dear—you should give it a try.”

“I don’t want to, Malcolm. Stop making a fuss.”

It was clearly an exchange they’d been anticipating and in some way gearing up for.

“C’mon, Lou,” Malcolm said. “You shouldn’t be shy, you know?”

“I said no, Malcolm.”

Patrick changed the subject. He had picked up the
Herald Tribune
and began to read the weather forecast.

“There’s some kind of system building offshore,” he said. “Winds increasing through the afternoon and evening. Hard, steady rain predicted for the rest of today and tomorrow.”

“It’s so unusual for Paris,” Louise said. “I’ve never known it to rain like this without letting up.”

“Never know,” Malcolm said. “Might clear up.”

“If the paper says it’s going to rain,” Louise replied impatiently, “then it’s not likely to just clear up, dear, is it?”

Malcolm said nothing. The waiter came and we ordered in English.

As we ate and drank, Malcolm laid out the itinerary for the weekend. Dinner would be nothing fancy tonight, since we were eating such a late lunch; we’d dine at the restaurant below the penthouse.

“Not very adventurous, I’m afraid, but it’s really very good,” Louise said. “We can bring our own wine. And I should think we’ll all be exhausted by then, anyway.”

The next day we were to take a tour of the Seine on a riverboat. In the afternoon we could do a little last-minute holiday shopping at Trocadéro, and if I liked, Malcolm would take me up the Eiffel Tower.

“After all, Annie being here gives us an excuse to be tourists, doesn’t it?” he said with determined enthusiasm.

After that, we would head to Montmartre and climb the hill to Sacré-Coeur. Dinner reservations tomorrow night were at La Tour d’Argent.

“La Tour d’Argent,” Patrick said, impressed. “It must have taken some doing to get in this time of year.”

Louise smiled, triumphant. “We made the reservation months ago,” she said. “As soon as we knew we’d have the penthouse for Christmas. Of course we thought it would be Daisy coming along. We thought she might bring a friend for the holidays. We didn’t know she’d abandon us for Saint-Moritz.”

“She’ll be here for Christmas, any event,” Malcolm said. “We’ll collect her Christmas Eve morning. You’ll miss her, Patrick, if we can’t persuade you to stay on. There’s plenty of room, you know. Daisy’s quite comfortable sleeping on the daybed in the morning room.”

“I’m afraid I’d never be forgiven if I’m not home to cook the turkey,” Patrick said heartily.

“Very happy you’ll both be able to enjoy La Tour d’Argent, at any rate,” Malcolm said.

“We’ll be ordering from a list of nearly fifteen thousand wines,” Louise said.

“Speaking of wine,” Malcolm said. “Shall we order a third bottle?”

“Oh, let’s don’t,” Louise said. “It’ll only spoil us for dinner.”

We were obliged, after coffee, to leave the warm restaurant and enter the wet street again. It took us another half hour to reach the top of the avenue, then we walked through the tunnel to the Arc de Triomphe. We stood under the arch, out of the rain, and surveyed a plaque affixed to the stone, the transcript of a famous radio speech given by Charles de Gaulle.

“Why not read it out loud, my dear?” Malcolm said to Louise.

“Oh, I don’t want to, Malcolm. Not now.”

“I’ll read it,” I said, the wine having made me careless.

“Cette guerre n’est pas limitée au territoire malheureux de notre pays—”
I read, and so on. I read sentence after sentence with only a vague idea of the meaning of the words.

Patrick looked at me. “You read French?” he said.

“She studied French at school,” Malcolm informed him.

Patrick grinned at me, amused that Malcolm knew something about me that he did not. There were many things Malcolm knew about me that Patrick didn’t. This was not because I had not tried to tell Patrick who I was, but because he did not often listen when I talked, so I ended up telling him things more than once, after a while not bothering to tell him much at all.

“You have an excellent accent,” Patrick said.

“Yes, you do,” Louise said, looking not at me but directly at Malcolm.

Watching Louise’s face, I was all at once ashamed. This was the
formula that ruled the weekend’s moral calculations—shame when I might have felt pride, greed when I ought to have been sensible, euphoria when I ought to have felt remorse, indifference when I ought to have been deeply concerned.

We took the métro and endured, again, the gusts of wind and the relentless rain as we made our way from the underground through the Tuileries Gardens toward the Musée de l’Orangerie. We walked on wide, orderly, paved paths between square lawns, and in spite of the day, I was moved. I was moved by the grand scale of it, and by the trees set in straight lines, uniformly bare of leaves, their branches ravaged by wind and rain, the whole scene blown and wet with trauma.

At l’Orangerie, we entered the vast room that housed Monet’s Water Lilies. The walls and the ceiling were curved and white, slick as an ice cave, the only ornaments the enormous canvases sweeping the walls. I tried to take in the paintings, but I found them overwhelming, and I failed to be moved.

Louise wandered off to stand before a canvas, and Patrick joined her. Both of them appeared swept up. They walked slowly around the room, turning toward each other from time to time and murmuring. I wondered what they were saying. I wondered what it was the art was supposed to be telling me. I had been interested in art, growing up. I had at least been interested in drawing. But the sketches I made when I was young were driven by an opposite impulse. I had not been interpreting, or creating. I had been attempting only to replicate what I saw. I had been operating within clear limits. Lighting was not so different. Lighting had a function that limited its form, and that gave it a meaning and purpose abstract painting seemed to me to lack.

Malcolm appeared beside me. He took me by the elbow and sat us both down on a white bench in the middle of the room.

“I’m very much hoping you’ll like the penthouse,” he said.

“I’m sure I will.”

“I’m very much looking forward to tonight.”

“You mean dinner?”

“Dinner,” he said decisively, “and the night together afterward.”

Dread shot through me. Would I have to subject myself to a repeat of that mortification so soon after we’d arrived?

I didn’t pose the question, and he said nothing more. He only sat beside me, his body an enormous burden in the white-walled room.

T
HE PENTHOUSE TOOK
up the top floor of an old building on a side street set back from La Place du Châtelet. It had belonged to Louise’s great-grandfather, then been passed down in trust, ultimately to be shared by Louise’s mother and aunts and bachelor uncle. It was made available one week a year for each of their children, and Louise had been determined this would be the year she would secure the Christmas week; she’d wanted that for Daisy. Then Daisy had insisted on traipsing off to ski.