Secrets of Paris (16 page)

A guard came around the partitions. His navy blue uniform looked vaguely military, with its insignia and silver buttons, and it reminded Michael of what Charles Legendre had said, that the Louvre was not only an art museum but an institution of the French government. He knew, also, that the guard would never
wear his uniform on the street. No one did in France. Nurses, sanitation workers, gendarmes, waiters all wore street clothes to work, changing into their uniforms upon arrival. Thus, on the Métro, it was impossible to tell doctors from street sweepers, bourgeois matrons from waitresses. Perhaps that was why the French set such stock in distinguishing marks: Légions d’honneur rosettes, school ties, Orders of Merit, all signs indicating that the wearer belonged to a certain class.

“Monsieur d’Origny wishes to see you,” the guard said.

“Show him in,” Michael said.

Didier entered a moment later, grinning, shaking Michael’s hand warmly. “Hello, my friend,” he said.

“What’s a busy guy like yourself doing at the museum on a Wednesday morning?” Michael asked.

“You know I’m the
patron
,” Didier said with an exaggerated patrician accent. “I do whatever I please. I want a backstage tour before I leave for the Midi. My wife and your wife keep telling me how splendid this place is going to be.”

Michael cocked his eyebrows. He waved his arm in a half-circle. “What do you think so far?”

Two walls had been torn out and makeshift partitions erected; the floor had been taken up. A pile of slate rested in one corner. Cartons holding tiny mosaic squares were stacked at Michael’s feet. A dropcloth covered a nondescript oak desk. Plaster dust was everywhere.

“Well, it’s not splendid yet,” Didier said. “I hope you don’t mind honesty.”

“Actually, it’s a relief to hear some,” Michael said. “So far I’ve been impressed by how much the French can bullshit. They are great smilers. I’ve been promised things you wouldn’t believe that never materialize—I have the feeling the Minister’s main function is to say ‘yes’ to your face while saying ‘no’ behind your back.”

“Yes, that is true,” Didier said. “We are extremely diplomatic, aren’t we?”

“Extremely,” Michael said.

“What problems are you having?”

“Name it. Finding contractors everyone agrees on. For example, I interviewed a carpenter who seemed fine. He’s worked in museums before—the Marmottan and the old Jeu de Paume. He had good references. I submitted his name to the ministry for review, and Charles Legendre takes a walk down to tell me the guy is a bum, a neighbor of some deputy minister’s cousin. His wife divorced him, and he never sends her alimony.”

“So, they forbid you to hire him?” Didier asked.

“No, but the message is there. I’ll make an enemy of the deputy minister if I do,” Michael said.

“I see,” Didier said.

“Another thing is the infighting that goes on here,” Michael said. “It’s more complicated than the U.N. Do I answer to Charles Legendre or Pierre Dauphin …”

“I know Pierre,” Didier said. “What’s your problem with him?”

“He’s curator of the Salle Hubert, and he has control of a painting by Poussin that I’d like to hang in here. Legendre supposedly wants me to have it, Dauphin wants to hang on to it. They’re playing Capture the Flag. Do you know that game?”

“No, but it sounds simple,” Didier said. “I was a boy when the Germans occupied France, remember. Possession is power. Yes, I can see Pierre playing the game.”

“That’s just one example,” Michael said. “I want two major paintings for the Salle; also a tapestry and several less important works. No one will part with anything. The easiest thing I’ve done is commission a cabinetmaker to build a table. He lives a quiet life in Burgundy, so no one here knows him or has a bone to pick with him.”

“To you, this business with the Poussin symbolizes the troubles you are having,” Didier said. “I am a peace-loving man, but to achieve peace, you must think like a general. The Poussin is France. Legendre is DeGaulle. Pierre is Hitler. You, my friend, are Eisenhower. I, of course, am Churchill.”

“How do we get the Poussin, Winston?”

“You must ask yourself one question,” Didier said, leaving no doubt that he was about to present a brilliant strategy. “Who will be curator of the Salle des Quatre Saisons?”

Michael frowned. His exhaustion made him feel amazed and thick. He realized that he didn’t know the answer. “I have no idea. Its period is the seventeenth century, so I suppose Charles. On the other hand, it adjoins the Salle Hubert …”

“Then consider it unclaimed turf. Come, let us put a bug in Adolf’s ear.”

On the way to Pierre Dauphin’s office they met Anne. She was hurrying down the stairs, her gaze directed at her feet. She banged into Didier.

“
Excusez-moi
,” she said, blushing. Glancing around Didier she caught sight of Michael and beamed. Michael introduced them. Forming a little triangle on the stairs, they made polite small talk.

“My wife admires your work,” Didier said.

“How delightful!” Anne said. “I am so pleased.” Although speaking to Didier, she kept looking at Michael. She stood on the step above him. Even so, she had to tilt her head up to look into his eyes. His longing for her was so great, and hers for him, that it had to be obvious to Didier. Michael didn’t care. He was glad for the secret to be out, proud to have a lover as beautiful and brilliant as Anne.

“I’ll see you later,” Michael said as Didier continued up the stairs. Anne squeezed his hand and stood there, watching Michael go.

“She is lovely,” Didier said.

“Yes,” Michael said, wanting to talk about her but feeling a warning coming from Didier.

“Be careful. I had my head turned more than once in my first two marriages. Lydie is a wonderful girl.”

Michael said nothing. He couldn’t think of Anne and Lydie at the same time. He didn’t want to leave Lydie, but he couldn’t imagine giving up Anne. He felt drunk on her, unable to sleep, never hungry, as if all his needs were sexual and romantic and only Anne could fulfill them.

Michael knocked on Pierre Dauphin’s office door, and was bid to enter.

“Didier!” Pierre exclaimed, coming around his desk to shake Didier’s hand. Pierre, stout and bald, came midway up Didier’s chest. He dressed like an academic in tweed; he wore an ascot instead of a necktie.

“Giselle is well?” Didier inquired. “And your mother?”

“Both are fine,” Pierre replied. “I will be passing the Place Vendôme one of these days with Giselle’s necklace—the sapphire one? The clasp seems to be broken.”

“Be sure to ask for Boris personally, eh? I shall tell him to expect you,” Didier said.

“So good of you, Didier.” Pierre had noticed Michael the second they entered the room; for some reason, however, he pretended not to have seen him until this instant. “Our young American!” he said.

“Hi, Pierre,” Michael said.

“What is this excellent news about your appointment as curator of the Salle des Quatre Saisons?” Didier asked.

Pierre flushed and opened his mouth, gaping like a fish. Michael stared him straight in the eye, to avoid looking at Didier. “But that is not definite, not by any means,” Pierre said. Then, as the idea dawned on him that someone as well-connected as Didier
might have inside information, his eyes lightened. “Where, might I ask, have you heard that?”

“Well, isn’t it a foregone conclusion?” Didier asked.

“You are the Salle’s architect, Michael,” Pierre said. “Was it you?”

“I just do my work and hope someone will give me a Poussin,” Michael said. “I keep out of politics.”

“Was it Jacques de Vauvrey?” Pierre asked Didier fervently, naming the Minister of Culture. “I know he is a member of your club …”

Didier held up his hand. “I’ve said too much, obviously. In any case, I wish you the best.
Au revoir
, Pierre.”

In the hallway Michael laughed, but he also felt irritated at Didier for interfering.

“This will work out perfectly,” Didier said, chuckling. “Pierre will think he is about to be named curator of your Salle, and so he will give you the painting, thinking he is bringing it along with him.”

“Unless he isn’t named,” Michael said. “He’s not going to let that painting go until his appointment is definite.”

“Pierre Dauphin is a pompous little fellow,” Didier said. “His grandfather was a baron with no money. Pierre bought a necklace for his wife for their fifth anniversary, and every spring he comes to have it fixed. It is a very nice piece of jewelry, but he thinks that because he patronized my office twenty years ago, we owe him great fealty.” He shook his head. “I would like to see him give you that painting.”

“So would I.” Michael appreciated the sentiment, but he still felt annoyed. Didier had barged in, as if his Frenchness gave him the right to take over. In that sense, he was no different from Charles Legendre or Pierre himself: they figured their nationality gave them a natural superiority within the Louvre.

In the back of his mind, however, was the knowledge that Michael was really angry at Didier for what he had said about Lydie and Anne earlier. Things with Lydie had been going downhill for so long; now that Michael had found Anne, he had stopped caring so much about reversing them. But back there in the stairway for just a moment, Didier had reminded him that he had to put on the brakes, and now an image of Lydie’s sad smile came to him. So Michael walked through the Louvre with Didier, trying to think of neither Lydie nor Anne, overwhelmed by both of them.

P
ATRICE WONDERED HOW
it was possible to be sitting beside her mother in her own house and feel homesick. Or was it loneliness she felt? The feeling was familiar but distant to her; she hadn’t felt it for years, since moving to France. It reminded her of the years before she met Didier, nights when she would eat a pint of ice cream just to fill herself up. She glanced at her mother, the half-spectacles perched at the tip of her nose as she read
Paris-Match
, and knew the empty feeling would go away when her mother returned to Marblehead. Lydie would certainly never feel this way with her mother.

No American had ever adopted France and the French more willingly, more immediately than Patrice had; she felt sure of it. Arriving in Paris with Didier, she felt she had come home. She
remembered that flight from JFK, with Didier at her side. Watching Jamaica Bay give way to the Atlantic, Patrice felt as though someone had untied the ropes that held her down, each rope representing some unlovely aspect of her life and American culture: pointless television, lonely nights with Chinese takeout, her mother’s voice, the silver flatware her parents had bought on the occasion of her birth for the occasion of her wedding. She had imagined that flatware as ballast, and she felt the plane rise as each fish fork, butter knife, gravy ladle was jettisoned. “We don’t
need
that flatware,” Patrice had been thrilled to tell her mother, who for at least six years had despaired of Patrice’s finding a husband. “Didier has the
ancestral
silver.”

“They’re saying Princess Caroline is pregnant again,” her mother said, reading the magazine. “I wonder if she loves her husband. I wonder what Grace would think of him.”

“Did you know Kelly is named for Grace Kelly?” Patrice asked, feeling a mean little thrill, knowing that this would get her mother’s goat.

“Kelly? The maid?”

“Yes. She’s nice, isn’t she?”

“She’s fine.” Eliza Spofford’s thin mouth looked set, as if something was causing her pain.

“Do you think I’m too familiar with my help, mother?” Patrice asked.

“I didn’t say that. But I could do without her chattering about Boston versus New York versus Los Angeles. She’s a regular gazetteer. Has she made the demography of the United States her life’s work?”

“Actually, her life’s work is cleaning toilets,” Patrice said. “And she has a college degree. Without splitting hairs, she is more highly educated than you are.”

“I hate that expression—‘splitting hairs.’ ”

“Well, mincing words, then. I’m trying to work out some way for her to get to America, where she can get a decent job.”

“They all want that. And the trouble is, there aren’t enough jobs to go around—not even for our own citizens.”

“What about America’s origins? It was founded by immigrants, wasn’t it? I think it’s strange that you’re from Massachusetts, just a few miles up the coast from Plymouth Rock, and you have that attitude. I was hoping you might sponsor Kelly. She needs someone who lives in America to petition for her.”

Eliza took off her glasses. She looked pale, a bit tired. For an instant Patrice was struck by her age, and she felt sorry for her. “Patsy, are you baiting me?” Eliza asked. “You know how I feel about this issue—I’ve always said America has left the door open for too long. I think Kelly is nice. I like her well enough, but America can’t keep doling out. Can’t you respect my political views?”