Girl in the Moonlight (20 page)

I hesitated. It should have been so easy to say yes. Any man would have considered himself fortunate to have Selene, to share her bed, to hear her little jokes. The adorable way she snorted when she laughed. And yet I said nothing. When I compared how I felt about Cesca to how I felt about Selene, it was like holding a bright flame next to a shimmering one. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel elements of love for Selene. I just didn’t love her as much. To claim otherwise would have been a lie.

“I’m not sure” was my gutless response. Such an admission was, in my mind at least, a bigger betrayal than sleeping with Cesca.

Cesca smiled. “Well, then . . .”

“What?”

“Does that mean you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said and reached over to kiss me. She was all I had ever really wanted, even though she gave me nothing. Yet she gave me everything.

The next day I broke it off with Selene. I called her at work, saying it was important we have lunch. She asked if it could wait until that night. She was very busy, but I was insistent.

We met at a little café near her office where we had occasionally lunched. She was waiting when I got there.

“What is it? You’re scaring me,” she said, sitting down.

“I’m sorry, Selene . . .” I began, but she could tell immediately what I was going to say and buried her face in her hands.

“Why?
Pourquoi?
”

“I just don’t think it’s going to work out. It’s better to end it now.”

“But that’s not a reason. I thought you loved me. You know I love you. I don’t understand. It just makes no sense.
C’est pas possible
.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. It was all I could think to say.

“Non, non, non, non, non,”
she said, shaking her head, tears running down her face. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?”

I looked away. I was not going to tell her about Cesca. What would I say? Yes, I’ve been in love with another woman my entire life. I never know where she is or when I will see her. I don’t even know how she feels about me, but I can’t help myself.

“It is.
Bâtard!
”

“Selene . . .”

“Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me.
Menteur!”
she screamed at me. People were staring at us.
“Je vous déteste! Con!”
She stood up. “Oh my God.”

I stood up too. “Please. Sit.”

“Va te faire foutre!
Fuck you! I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Wiping tears away, she ran off down the block, leaving me there alone getting dirty looks from the other customers. As I watched her recede into the crowd, I wondered if I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my life.

All afternoon I wrestled with the idea of calling Selene, telling
her that I had made a terrible mistake, throwing myself at her mercy. It was still not too late, I reasoned. I had a narrowing window. But each time I reached for the phone I also thought of Cesca. I had made my choice. I had to live with it.

That night Cesca and I were in bed. “I broke it off with that girl,” I told her.

She was lying flat on her front, her head resting on her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure she was a very nice girl. I hope she didn’t take it too badly.”

“I felt terribly. She was very upset. I really hurt her.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t?”

“No,” I said, kissing her silken back.

The next three months passed in a haze. Every night we were together. And not just at my apartment but at hers as well. She was renting a high-ceilinged flat on the Boulevard Malesherbes, which was around the corner from her offices. There were dishes in the sink. Cigarette burns in the cushions. A maid came in once a week. It was the only time the bed was made.

Some nights I would meet Cesca after work, and we would go out to parties, sometimes several in the same evening. Other nights she would attend functions and meet me after. But every morning, we woke up next to each other. I no longer had to worry whether I would be seeing her that night. It was understood. I felt she was slowly letting me in. When I left for the office, she now said, “See you tonight.” On the weekends, we had no other plans. She had somehow obtained a membership at the Tennis Club de Paris in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, where we would play, and invariably she would beat me.

We explored the city, the long boulevards, the parks, Richelieu’s tomb, Roman ruins, the Musée Delacroix, discovering little restaurants and markets, bringing back cheese and vegetables. Cases of wine. Art Deco chairs. Antique hats. Dog-eared first editions. Money meant nothing to her. It flowed through her
fingers. In her apartment were unopened boxes from Chanel, Hermès. She signed bills without looking at them. We did eventually go to Charvet, where, to my embarrassment, she insisted on buying me a dozen shirts of every hue. Blues, lavenders, magenta, yellows. Stripes, checks. I was taken to the fitting room on the second floor, an Aladdin’s cave of fabric, shown a chart with different collar patterns. Monsieur is tall, said the tailor. May I suggest this one? What thickness of wristwatch did I prefer? It was important that the cuff hung just so.

I did not think about Selene. I know I should have felt a pang of remorse, guilt that I had irrevocably hurt a girl who had given me so much of herself. A girl who I could have spent my life with under different circumstances. Like an aborted fetus, our future life together had already begun to take shape, here a nose, there a heart, until it was cruelly terminated. If I had for a moment reflected, I might have realized how shabbily I had treated her, could only imagine the angry reaction of her father, the disappointment of her mother. They had all been so good to me, and I just took and shattered it as though it were nothing more than a clay pot. But I did not think about anything else except Cesca. Like a junkie, I thought only of my next fix and the euphoria that came with it.

There is a monstrous selfishness about love, especially in its primal stages, when nothing else matters, when lovers create an artificial world which only they inhabit. The language, the customs, the currency, are known to them alone, and no one else is permitted inside. It is a form of bliss but also a kind of corruption. Everything else is forgotten. Food, friends, work, responsibilities, all become subsumed by obsession.

When I look back over my life to decide when I was happiest, I would unhesitatingly pick those months in Paris with Cesca. I was a prospector who had finally struck gold. The seam was rich beyond imagining. Not only was Cesca beautiful, and more
beautiful to me every day, but she was also wonderfully intelligent and funny. Aspects of her personality that I had never had the chance to experience before were now revealed to me; it was like learning that someone you already like is rich or can play the piano. It is more than a pleasant surprise. It makes them more interesting, more nuanced. If you love them already, it makes you love them more.

She could grasp the essence of an idea immediately, describe it perfectly, put people at their ease, make them laugh, make them think. We would go to dinners in restaurants with people in the fashion industry, sitting at long tables in golden light, and, always side by side, our hips or feet always touching, I would listen to her tell stories, imitate people. Like Cosmo, she was a natural mimic, a talent I had never seen in her before. The others at the table would be bent double with laughter. When she left, it was as though someone had dimmed the lights.

At the end of those evenings I had the pride of taking her home, of escorting her out the door, my hand on the small of her back, helping her into a waiting taxi, of receiving her kisses, while every man in the room envied me, and imagined what it would be like if they were me.

But of course everyone has their demons. It is impossible to be intimate with someone for any extended period of time without coming across them. It is like the first time you intrude on them when they are on the toilet: There is the initial embarrassment, a mumbled apology, but then a gradual acceptance of something perfectly natural, if not necessarily pleasant.

It was the end of December, and Cesca’s time in Paris was nearly up. In January she would have to return to New York. “Let’s stay in France for Christmas,” she had said. Instantly, I had agreed. Not only would it save me the cost of a round-trip plane ticket to the States but also it would allow me to spend a few more precious days with her.

American friends of hers had invited us to spend Christmas in the Dordogne. We borrowed a car and drove down to a lovely medieval town called Sarlat. There was a light snow, and the air was clear and crisp. The French, like many Europeans, make a particular celebration of Christmas Eve. It is more than just a time to hang the stockings and sing a few carols. There was to be a midnight mass followed by
le réveillon,
a traditional feast of oysters and brandied roast goose, back at the château. We were told that those of us who wanted to attend the mass should be in the main hall by eleven, and then we’d all go together.

“Shall we go?” I asked Cesca, when we were up in our room.

She laughed. “Why?”

“Why? I thought it might be interesting. I’ve never been to a Catholic Christmas mass before.”

“Nor have I.”

This surprised me. Religion was something we had never discussed. My own religious upbringing had been slight. There had been mandatory chapel at school, and my family went to church on Christmas, Easter, and for the occasional wedding, but, at that time, I had little interest in or practical use for faith.

“But I thought you were raised Catholic?”

“Well, that’s just it. I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t?”

“No, Mare’s Jewish. In Judaism it’s the mother’s religion that dictates the children’s. Except that Mare doesn’t have a religious bone in her body. We never did any of the things that Jewish kids do. I’ve never even been inside a synagogue. None of us had a bar mitzvah or celebrated Hanukkah. For some reason we did have a Christmas tree, though. Probably Mare thought they were pretty.” She laughed.

“What about your father?”

“My father had been schooled by priests in Catalonia, and so naturally he became a rabid atheist. To him all religions are
lies designed to keep superstitious peasants docile.” She shook her head and laughed again. “In our family, the only religion was art. That’s what we worshipped. Who knows?” she said with a shrug. “Maybe one day I’ll feel differently.”

In the end I went, and she stayed. “While you’re off sitting in some uncomfortable pew, I’ll be here drinking champagne. Tell me, which of those two sounds more fun?”

The next day we exchanged presents. Cesca gave me a handsome set of onyx cuff links. It had been difficult for me to shop for Cesca. Like so many people who are rich, she already had everything she needed and most things she wanted. And such people tend to have expensive tastes. Using all my savings, I had bought her an antique Cartier wristwatch in rose gold at the marché aux puces in Clignancourt. As she slipped it over her hand, she said, “Ooh, Wylie. I love it,” and leaned over and gave me a kiss.

I had never been happier to spend my money on anything. It gave her joy, which is all anybody wants. And she had accepted something of mine. It would now be part of her life, a physical presence in her life that would always connect us.

We returned to Paris, the days slipping away too fast. What had been months turned into weeks, then days, then hours. I was trying to slow time, to memorize every moment. This was the place where she took my hand and showed me Victor Hugo’s house on the Place des Vosges, the expensive Bordeaux we drank one night in our favorite bistro, the way she touched her toes twenty times every morning. She was leaving, but I had to stay. I had my job, my career. It would have been impossible for me to leave with her, but that didn’t stop me from seriously considering it. In my head, it was like the end of a movie when the hero runs after the heroine just as her train is about to depart, pushing past the guards, sacrificing everything for love.

Our last night. It was late. A sumptuous meal had been consumed.
Then bed, where we made love with a shared urgency bordering on desperation. We were like warriors on the eve of battle; everything tasted better, life was sweeter in the knowledge that it might not last. Leave nothing back.

It was the moment. The next step was oblivion. “Cesca,” I said, as she lay there panting, staring at the ceiling.

It took her several seconds to respond, as though she were returning from far away. “Yes.”

“I think we should get married.”

There was no immediate answer. “Do you mean that?”

“Yes.”

She thought about that. “I’ve been married before, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m not very good at it.”

“You remember, I asked you years ago? Before you married Gavin.”

“I’ve never forgotten.”

“And I’m not Gavin.”

“No.”

“So what do you say?”

She continued to stare at the ceiling, and then turned her face toward me. For several minutes, we both looked into each other’s eyes, questioning, wondering, before she smiled and said, “All right, Tricky Wylie. I’ll marry you.”

The next day I went with her to the airport. She was traveling first class on Air France. She looked lovely as always. Chic. A woman of means traveling by herself. Even though I was stricken by her leaving, the blow was softened by the knowledge that we would one day be husband and wife. I felt an enormous pride as well. This woman whose existence had so profoundly shaped mine for so many years had finally accepted me.

I looked at her face as we strode through Charles de Gaulle.
She was thirty now and I was not far behind. There were moments when I would catch her staring at her face in the mirror, stretching the skin back, or holding her breasts up to judge if they had incrementally drooped. True, there were faint lines on her face, but, in my opinion, they only enhanced her beauty.

Her mood had been somber all morning, which I took as sadness that we were going to be separated. It was not the time to talk of wedding planning. Lonely weeks stretched out before us. It had been months since either of us had slept apart. In the taxi I had begun a sentence “When we’re married . . .” But she’d interrupted me by kissing me.