Anio Szado (29 page)

As Consuelo took her seat on the banquette, I glanced with trepidation across the restaurant. Yannick raised his eyebrows and his drink to me.

I waited, standing at the open windows of the unlit studio with my heart high in my throat. The bands of silk that encircled my body felt insignificant and weightless, so aware was I of the bare spans between the fabric, of the heavy summer breezes that passed over my skin without wicking away its dampness or its heat.

The door opened. In four long strides he was on me, his mouth on mine, his hands in the silk. The hot breeze stole across my belly as he unbound my dress. I grappled with his belt until my hands felt the strength of his legs.

The windowpane was cold against my shoulder blades, the concrete ledge rough. I pressed myself to it, willing Antoine to be as unyielding, tempting him with parted thighs. But he seemed to retreat into himself, and his expression grew pained. His fingers on my back and ribs grew gentle—the touch of a watercolorist, a writer, not of a war pilot whose survival was in the reckless confidence of his hands.

His forehead was damp. His eyes shone wetly in the moonlight. He drew long, uneasy breaths.

Not now. His old unforgiving illness couldn’t hit him now. My own fever was strong and would not wait.

I kissed him and closed my teeth on his lip. My nipples grazed the wool of his suit, and I muffled a cry. He moved against me then, his hands tough and alive, rocking me, my spine scraping on the window’s metal frame.

I wept on his shoulder. I had only wanted to give myself to him. Instead, he had shamed me with the crudeness of my desire.

When Antoine’s pain passed, we went outside and sat by a fountain in Bryant Park. Light danced on the pulsating droplets and falling spray. People of all ages had escaped their stifling apartments for the less oppressive heat of the summer night. Children who would have been long in bed last week were milling about, splashing in the water, giddy with the arrival of school holidays. No one gave me a second glance, though I had hitched my dress up to my knees to catch any current of air.

Before leaving the studio, I had handed Antoine a key. Now he weighed it in his hand. “You know what this will lead to.”

“I’m offering you the use of the studio any night you want; you can write to your heart’s content. Consuelo’s parlor would give me a chance to succeed at my work, too.”

“Consuelo will insist on moving in with me. I will not be able to write. My publishers will lose faith in me. I won’t finish the children’s book, or the long work I have been writing for years. I will die useless and forgotten.”

“Oh, Antoine. Don’t be so all-or-nothing. Put yourself in my shoes. If I don’t do something drastic, the studio will fail. Do you want me to go back to waitressing?”

“You could become a translator for the Intelligence Department.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Very soon the Americans will be in France and across the Continent. They will need all the help they can get. I know people who would take you on in an instant.”

“I’m a fashion designer.”

“And you are proud of this?”

I wiped a trickle of sweat from my face and felt the heat of my breath on my wrist. “No less than you’re proud of being a writer. Or are you shocked that I would compare the two?”

“I do not put one creative form over another.”

“You have no respect for what I do.”

“Designing a story and designing a dress are not so different.”

“No? Then why is it all right for you to take what I do and write it into a story, but it isn’t acceptable for me to take from your stories to create my designs?”

“Who said it is not?”

“I drew that coat for the Little Prince.”

“It was a fine coat.”

“You were angry. You joked, but underneath you were irritated. I’d degraded your creation by bringing it into the world of fashion.”

“Should I thank you for your interpretation? The world over, people take what I write and they read into it whatever they want to see.”

“So my design was just one more example of people abusing your work.”

“You are putting words into my mouth. It is you who are insecure about your career choice. How do you expect anyone to believe in you if you don’t believe in yourself?”

“There are people who believe in me. Consuelo believes in me, more than you ever have. She respects my vision and my skills.” I pushed away an uneasy sense that somehow—though it would have been impossible—Consuelo had engineered this confrontation in which I would hold her up to her husband as an ideal.

“Far be it for me to contradict Consuelo. God knows she is always right.”

His sarcasm took my breath away. I hung my head to obscure his view of my face, but he reached out and tucked my hair behind my ears.

“I believe in you,” he said. “And you have the prerogative to create what you must—no less so than I do if I write of a little girl whose eyes, filled with tears, are as deep as the Mediterranean Sea and make my heart ache.” He put his arms around me. “Just don’t cry. I need you to show me the good in life. When
I look up from your studio floor and see you listening to me read, with that look of wonder you have … when you allow me to kiss you and part the opening of your dress … I feel sunshine. The softness of your skin heals me. You are my peace and my pleasure. Let’s not poison what we have with accusations we don’t mean.”

I didn’t know what Antoine meant sincerely and what he said only to calm me. All I knew was that, after kissing me good night outside Leo’s, he went home with the key in his pocket—so the salon at Consuelo’s was all but clinched.

I rose early to have coffee with Leo, then headed into the studio, where I wrapped the hemmed velvet skirt in tissue paper and left a note saying I was off to make the delivery. If Consuelo didn’t want to see me, I would leave the parcel at the front desk. Maybe I would sketch in Central Park, or at the shop windows of Fifth Avenue. I had a dress to design for Countess Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, an important commission earned entirely on my own.

Consuelo greeted me with a sleepy yawn—no makeup, in a simple, ice-blue satin house robe, her unbrushed hair curling softly around her face. Whatever their age, people are as cute as lambs when they yawn. She really was like a small child, so vulnerable looking with her big brown eyes.

She said, “You brought me a present.”

“The skirt. This here is just my sketchbook.”

“Oh well. Come in.”

I scanned the parlor. In the alcove on the right, we could put an elegant screen behind which clients could change; we could move the glass table to create an uninterrupted span for modeling; we could place a big, ornate floor mirror beside the window, where the light would be flattering and the view seductive.

I said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Everything wakes me. I hardly sleep. I have a horror of being alone.” Her delicate face looked pinched and wan. Her gaze darted around the room. “There’s a ghost that sits and watches me through the night. I can wake a hundred times, and always his eyes are on me. He doesn’t move at all.”

“Maybe it’s your guardian angel.”

She shook her head. “And another that comes to lie with me. Sometimes he’s a man—with long filthy hair, clothes from a pirate’s grave, and his thing like a stallion’s, as hard and heavy as iron, that presses against my stomach and chest when he lies on top of me, so I can barely breathe. Other times he’s a woman with wide folds of fat that smell like old milk and spread over me slowly. But it’s the same spirit. It has the same hair. Sometimes I dream that I’m trying to get away from it. Its hair hangs in my face and fills my mouth, and I can’t escape.”

A chill crept along my arms. When Consuelo patted the sofa, I left my chair and joined her. Antoine was right: she was fragile. Her imagination was too self-destructive, her fears too close to the surface. It pained me to think of her keening in distress and disgust at night, wracked by the dread of lifeless watchful eyes, half suffocated by the phantoms of her harrowed imagination. I murmured, “You poor thing.”

Consuelo’s lids came down over her anxious eyes, and her expression eased. She exhaled. Her body inclined to mine as though only I, in all the world, could free the demons that lived within. She reached for my hands, lifted one to her cheek, brought it down to her throat, and leaned in to touch her lips to mine.

Even as I jerked back in surprise, a current passed through my spine.

This was nothing I had ever imagined. I could not fathom what was expected of me, or what Consuelo hoped to gain. Had I led her to anticipate something like this—to feel justified in bringing my fingers to her bosom, bare under the cool robe, to her nipple pebbled and firm? Was she already planning to cast it up to Antoine:
Your little tutor girl is quite an easy thing; I’m surprised you haven’t had her yourself
.

And why had he not? Why wouldn’t he? He had kissed me. He had kissed me in ways and in places that even now made me moist and disturbed to recall. But he had never fully taken me as a man could. Never seduced me as Consuelo was doing,
by inches and strokes, fingers slow and sure, tongue tip at my ear, buttons tugged undone. I had had to beg him to come to me last night. It was I who had pulled Antoine’s mouth to mine at Le Bocal, who had untied my own dress at the studio for him, who had stripped to the skin that he might bathe me in silk. While Antoine looked for permission to succumb to his need or to recognize mine, Consuelo was an abductress driven by desire.

I felt a fullness between my legs, and the fear that she would feel me there, too—and then it hardly mattered anymore. If sex was not love, and love not sex—if Antoine would not make love to me, and Consuelo’s lovemaking had the intensity of hate—if I could be made wet and weak and ashamed by the touch of my own beloved’s wife—what could Consuelo possibly say to Antoine that could be worse than this?

It isn’t so much that Mignonne is easy, it’s that you never wanted her enough
.

The sofa was deep. We lay together on our sides, skin to skin. Consuelo drifted in and out of sleep, her lashes falling, then fluttering up. I disentangled myself, retrieved the satin robe from the floor, and covered her. But she pushed it away.

She smiled, one arm resting above her head, one knee bent, her wide hipbones framing the gentle roundness of her belly and the flaring thatch of black hair below it, her collarbones lit in contrast to the sweaty cleavage between her breasts, her nipples dark as bruises. “Draw me.”

I bent to reach for my dress.

“You don’t need that, darling. Just stand as you are and draw me.”

I glanced nervously at the wide span of window, though it was impossible to be seen on the twenty-third floor. “My sketchbook is by the door.”

“Then get it.”

I walked over and picked up the velvet skirt along with my sketchbook.

“I finished the hemming.” I pulled the skirt from the bag. The tissue paper disengaged and rustled to my bare feet. “Would you like to try it on?”

“Do you want to draw me or not?”

“Of course.” I fiddled with the binding of my book. “It’s just that it’s not something I usually do.”