Private affairs : a novel (55 page)

"Wonderful woman," he murmured when they came back to the hotel early on their third day in Paris and lay on the silk coverlet, in too much of a hurry even to pull it aside. "You're a man's dream. My dream." He

lay on Elizabeth, sliding into her, and she held his hips with her hands, eyes closed, listening to the deep velvet of his voice, feeling him move inside her. "I need you at work, I need you in bed, I need you over croissants . . . beautiful, adored Elizabeth. . . ."He brought his mouth to hers, their tongues thrusting together as their bodies did, and a small moan of pure pleasure escaped Elizabeth's lips beneath his. "Perfect," Tony said.

But the next morning he frowned when she said she wanted to see Colette's apartment on the Palais Royale. They were at breakfast, sitting on a striped silk loveseat in the French windows of their sitting room. The table was set with a single rose and thin Limoges china; steam rose from the coffee cups, making the wrought-iron balcony waver in the morning sun. Tony shook his head. "No time for sightseeing, my love. Bo thinks we're here to work."

"You don't care about sightseeing," Elizabeth pointed out.

"True enough. I've been here too often. And I never could pump up enthusiasm for museums or buildings smelling of the past; I want only the best restaurants and front-row-center theater tickets. Anyway, why do you care about a dead writer's apartment? She's not even there to talk to."

"It's all right, Tony," Elizabeth said coolly. "You go to your interview without me; I'll go to Colette's apartment alone."

"You really want to do it? Well, but we'll meet for lunch; you don't want to miss Jamin."

"Don't count on me. I'm going to browse in bookstores on the Left Bank, and I'm going to do some writing this afternoon."

"But dinner! You do plan to join me for dinner?"

She laughed. "Of course I'm joining you for dinner. And anything you want to do afterward. We don't have to be together every minute, Tony. I'd like some time to myself."

"And you shall have it." He left his chair and sat on the arm of hers, holding her against him. "You shall have anything you want. Have I told you how I feel about your being here?"

"Yes," she said. "But that's no reason not to tell me again."

"You make me feel I can do anything. You make the days bright and the nights even brighter, you are my warm, delicious, most lovely Elizabeth and I adore every moment with you. Didn't you notice that the rain stopped the day after we arrived? You make Paris beautiful."

Elizabeth laughed again. "Paris manages to look beautiful without me. But thank you, Tony; I love the kind words."

"Is that all you love?"

Instead of answering, she said, "Isn't your appointment in forty minutes?"

"Oh, my God, it is. And on the other side of town. Damn Bo; he said he'd call to remind me. What the hell happened to him?"

"Wouldn't he be calling you at the Ritz?"

"No. I told him I'm here."

There was a silence. "I see," Elizabeth said quietly.

"I was going to tell you. He's known from the first day, Elizabeth; he has to be able to reach me."

"You've been calling him every morning."

"You were so uptight, it was easier to pretend he didn't know. But it was clumsy, and we decided it was ridiculous to keep pretending. I understand that you're worried about people knowing, but I'm officially at the Ritz as far as everyone else is concerned. It's just that Bo is different."

"And how many people does Bo confide in?"

"His boyfriend. No one else, as far as I know. But my God, Elizabeth, we're not doing anything the rest of the world isn't doing. Why do we have to be secret?"

"Because it's important to me. Do we have to go public to please you?"

"We have to be together to please me. I'll do whatever you say." He ran a comb through his silver hair. "How do I look?"

"Sleek and satisfied."

"Because of you." He kissed her again. "I'm off. If Bo calls, I'll be at the Musee Rodin."

"Tony Rourke at a museum?"

"Columbia's filming a chase scene there for their latest Parisian thriller: two people trying to skewer each other in the shadow of The Thinker.' I interview them when they take a break from lurching through the garden. Don't blame me; it's Bo's brainstorm. Goodbye, my sweet, see you at dinner."

Elizabeth took an hour for sightseeing that morning, and an hour the next, finding Colette's apartment and the house where Edith Wharton had lived in St. Germain des Pres, and then Gertrude Stein's house on the Rue Christine and the one Picasso shared with Fernande Olivier in Montmartre. And then, abruptly, she stopped. She had been happily wandering an ancient street, map in hand, when she began to feel uneasy, and by the time she stood in a small chapel in the church of St. Sulpice, gazing at the Delacroix fresco of "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel," her heart was racing and she knew she couldn't go on. I'm the one who's wrestling with something, she thought, looking at the fresco. I just wish I knew what it is.

Whatever it was, she stopped sightseeing. It's all right, she told herself, taking a taxi back to the hotel. I have too much to do to waste time sightseeing. Four hundred papers—so many new readers—and I want to do some magazine articles, too. I have to work harder than ever. If I don't put everything I have into succeeding now, when I have the chance, I never will.

From that moment, Elizabeth buried herself in work and the warmth of Tony's companionship. They shared the television crew, but because Tony taped two interviews a day and Elizabeth only one, she had time to cram in all the work she wanted, taping her television interview, writing to Peter and Holly and her parents, and spending four to five hours a day on her columns, interviewing Americans from Boyle's list and meeting others they recommended.

She had worked out a system of taking notes in longhand, then writing the story on an antique desk in her hotel room, using a portable computer she had brought with her to Europe that stored the text on small disks. She sent one disk to Markham Features in New York where a printout was made and distributed to their four hundred subscribing papers and the Rourke papers with whom they had worked out an agreement, and the other disk to Saul, who did the same for the Chieftain and the Alameda Sun.

"We just got the first one," Saul told Elizabeth on the telephone as she and Tony sat at breakfast on their sixth morning in Paris. "The Vermont painter whose palette is a side of beef. I like the way you caught the feeling of somebody in transition—not sure where he belongs or what he'll do next. We'll run it next week. You've got more coming?"

"Three a week, as usual. Did you think I was loafing?"

"I hoped you were at least sightseeing."

"Oh. Well, I was, but I've been busy. Have you seen Holly?"

"Last night. She's fine and she's going to call you in five minutes, so I'm going to hang up."

"She's going to call me? Do you know why?"

"I'll let her tell you. Talk to you soon."

Tony put his arms around Elizabeth as she hung up. "He liked the story and wants you to stay in Europe for six months with your current companion and keep writing. Yes?"

She smiled. "He likes the story."

He cupped her breasts with his hands. "I like the lady who writes them."

The telephone rang again and she picked it up. "Mother!" Holly cried. "Isabel won!"

"Won?" Elizabeth pulled away from Tony's hands, closing her robe about her as if Holly could see through the telephone. "The election," she said. "I lost track of the date. How wonderful, Holly. But we never really doubted it, did we?"

"No, but it was so exciting—you should have been here! We were all at La Fonda and people were running in and out, shouting numbers and cheering, and then Tom Ortiz called and said he was conceding because it looked like Isabel was getting seventy percent of the vote—actually she got seventy-four—Mother, are you all right?"

"Yes, of course. Don't I sound all right?"

"You sounded odd. Your voice is different."

"It's probably the five thousand miles between us. I'm fine, Holly. Tell me about you."

Holly talked about the final days of the campaign, after Elizabeth left: hundreds of volunteers handing out brochures on street corners and plazas, and ringing doorbells to ask people to vote for Isabel. "And they did! Isabel thinks they were mostly disgusted with old Tom Ortiz, who never did anything; she says everybody's still divided on the dam and she doesn't know what she'll do in January when the legislature meets."

"We'll talk about it when I get back; I told her I had some ideas. Give her a kiss and a hug for me, Holly; I'm so proud of her. Did you have a big celebration?"

"Until four in the morning! Grandpa fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about sanding a rocking chair, and I sang ten songs, and Maya and Luz and I had two margaritas each and got headaches, and Saul and Heather looked deep into each other's eyes. They're changing; they used to just love each other; now they like each other, too. It was the most wonderful party! We missed you and Peter."

"I miss you, too. And I'm sorry I missed the party. You still haven't told me much about you."

"There's nothing new, Mother; you've only been gone a week."

"A week? I can't believe ... it seems like more."

"Because everything you're doing is new. Everything I do is the same, except for the election, and a week feels like a month. I wish I was with you. Are you doing lots of new things?"

I'm sleeping with a man who isn't my husband and that is certainly new, and I'm enjoying it, which is something I never thought I could do. . . . "There are lots of things I don't have time for. Next time you'll come with me and we'll do all the sightseeing I'm not doing now; we'll go around the whole city—"

"Aren't you doing that with Tony?"

"He's not interested and we're really much too busy. It will all be new when you <*nd I do it."

"He's not interested?"

"Only in restaurants and theaters—"

"And an exquisite, exciting, passionate woman," Tony murmured in Elizabeth's ear. He ran his lips across the back of her neck and she shivered and shook her head.

"Tell me about school," she said to Holly.

"It's the same as ever. How long will you be in Paris?"

"Three more days. Don't you have my schedule?"

"Yes, but I like to hear myself say the word. Paris. Paris. Paris. Is it as beautiful as it sounds?"

"It is, and you'll love it. There's music everywhere . . . and grandeur, even in everyday things, that's so different from home. The whole city is like an art book; when you turn a corner it's like turning a page to a new painting. The streets are laid out so you can see down long avenues to a building or monument, as if you're looking through a telescope in a museum. Except of course it's not a museum; it's a place where people live and work and gendarmes direct traffic as if they're conducting an orchestra. ..." She heard Holly sigh. "You'll be here before long, and it will all be waiting for you. For us. We'll discover it together."

Abruptly, she stopped. And that's why I couldn't do any more sightseeing. Because Matt and I always planned to go to Europe and it was all wrong that I was exploring Paris alone,

"Mother?" Holly asked.

Elizabeth cleared her throat. "We'll discover all of it together. We won't put it off; we'll make time. I promise." They talked a few minutes more; then Elizabeth hung up. "Everything seems so far away."

"But I'm right here," Tony said and put his arms around her.

"No, Tony; give me a few minutes. I'm having trouble switching from one person to another."

"From Holly to me?"

"From the old Elizabeth Lovell to the new one."

He shrugged. "We all change, my sweet. It just took you longer, tucked away in the desert, settled in your snug—"

"Tony. I don't want to talk about it."

"Well, then. Let's go over today's schedule. Can you meet me here at five? Tea in the Galerie des Gobelins with some newspaper people from Le Monde and Figaro. And tomorrow I've planned a dinner at L'Arches-trate with a bunch of writers. Does that interest you?"

"You know it does. Tony, how sweet of you."

Private Affairs 353

"I am a very sweet fellow. Keep that in mind." "I will," she said, and smiled.

In Rome, while Tony interviewed a former model who had married into the exiled royal family of Rumania, Elizabeth was introduced to Genghis Gold. That afternoon she wrote a column about him.

Genghis Gold sketches portraits of tourists in the Piazza Navona in Rome, plays the saxophone in London's underground stations, and sings folk songs while playing his guitar near the Opera in Paris. He is tall and gangly and slightly stooped, like a scavenging stork; his blue eyes have a bright, puzzled look in the small clearing between his dark hair and beard; his fingers are slender and quick. He dresses like an international conference: his raincoat a Burberry, his hat Russian sable, his jeans American, his scarf Irish, his pointed shoes Italian. He hasn't been home—a gray-shingled house in Baltimore where his parents still live—in ten years; last month he turned thirty and next month he will have a new name. "Genghis Gold is only for a while," he says. "Every name is only for a while. Last time I was Balfour Brie, and before that Morgan Massive. Sometimes I have trouble remembering the name my parents gave me."

He sits on the edge of the fountain of the four rivers in the Piazza Navona. Behind him, in stepped pools of water, are lifesize horses and cherubs, gods and goddesses, frozen in marble. Genghis Gold shakes his head. "I'll never be like them: always and forever the same. I change my name, I change my face. Some weeks I have a beard, or just a mustache, sometimes black hair or blond or red. And I talk in different ways: loud, soft, tough-guy, British gent, American southerner, cockney, Russian immigrant, Chinese-American. I'm very good at it; nobody can tell it's not really me."

Leaning back, hands in pockets, he looks at the sky. In the protective thicket of his beard, his mouth turns down; his eyes grow more puzzled. "But once in a while . . . once in a while I wonder what it would be like to be the same person all the time. Maybe then somebody would fall in love with me. I'm not sure I could keep it up because I'm so used to pretending, but now that I'm thirty, getting old, I do think about it. Quite a bit." He gets up, stretches until he finds a posture he likes, and