Secrets of Paris (4 page)

At the summit she and her father had picnicked on salmon they had caught fishing with her uncle in Sligo the day before. After lunch they had prayed together. Lydie remembered saying
the rosary out loud. It was then that Lydie started feeling terrified. The prayers had given her the idea she might fall off the mountain. After all, wasn’t the purpose of prayers to shorten your time in Purgatory? To speed you into heaven? But to get to heaven, didn’t you have to die first? It was late in the day; they began to descend. She remembered walking through clouds, down the jagged, precipitous trail. Thousands of feet below there were green pastures leading to the rocky shore and the glittering bay, the green and blue as true as colors in the spectrum. With every step Lydie had grown dizzier, more breathless. She stumbled, and in her memory she saw one foot step off the mountain’s edge. Her father had hugged her tight, holding her face against his wool coat, damp from clouds and the salt air. “Steady there,” he had said. “Are you scared? You know your mother and I climbed this mountain every year when we were young. Everyone in Ireland does. It’s the safest place on earth to be—the saint will look after you. Especially you.”

Lydie had wanted to believe it was true. Wasn’t her uncle a priest in Dungannon? Hadn’t her mother washed the cardinal’s clothes? But she had a terrible vision of her father falling off the mountain. She saw him hurtling through the air, the father she loved, and not even Saint Patrick could save him.

On that trip, Lydie knew that she wanted to live in a foreign country, but not Ireland: one that was southern, sensual, rich with cathedrals, tapestries, and vineyards. Lydie had wanted to live in a country whose beauty was not rugged and terrible, a country that celebrated its saints’ days with fireworks going off in the little villages instead of pilgrimages up the dangerous holy mountain.

Now here she was in France. She snuggled closer to Michael, who stirred. France satisfied her in every way except that it was far from the heart of her family. In spite of the art, beauty, and romance,
everywhere Lydie went she felt as though she were missing something back home. She wondered how her mother was getting on without her. It made her sick, really ashamed, when she remembered one day last week. She and Michael had met for a glass of wine. They had sat at a café across the Seine from the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuileries. Michael was silent; he seemed to be thinking about something that had happened at work. Sitting there, Lydie just absorbed the scene.

The sun cast gold light on a row of poplars that must have stood there since the time of Napoleon. Holding Michael’s hand, Lydie had gazed at them. She had imagined the great artists who had sat in the same spot. She had pretended to be Monet regarding the poplars; she had just started to see them as an Impressionist would, all light and color, when she had a vision of her home. It was twilight; there was her mother standing alone in the walled garden behind her house. Her mother’s face was sad. Lydie blinked hard, to get rid of the image. She wanted to enjoy the present. But the idea of home was a veil, and there were days Lydie couldn’t lift it to see Paris.

She had squeezed Michael’s hand. “You’re a dear man,” she had said.

“Who am I?” Michael had said. “Monsignor Mangin?”

“Oh, God,” Lydie had said, catching his drift. “I do sound like my mother, don’t I?”

“Give it another try,” Michael had said.

“You make me weak in the knees, baby.”

“Much, much better,” Michael had said.

Lying in bed, Lydie remembered that. Her thoughts returned to her parents. Julia and Cornelius, known as Neil, had sailed from Ireland to New York the same year but separately when Julia was nineteen and Neil was twenty-five. They had met at night
school, where Julia was a student and Neil a janitor. Julia washed the cardinal’s clothes at St. Patrick’s by day. One day the cardinal found her crying. “What is the matter, child?” he had asked. Of course Julia cannot remember his exact words, but that is the phrase distilled from years of retelling: “What is the matter, child?”

“I am homesick, Father,” Julia had said.

“Ah, do you know the poem, by Yeats, ‘Under Saturn’?”

Well, no cardinal would really expect a young Irish washerwoman to know Yeats, but Julia had stood tall, tears running down her cheeks, and recited “ ‘I am thinking of a child’s vow, sworn in vain, never to leave the valley his fathers called their home.’ ”

Then the cardinal had asked where she had learned the poem, and Julia had said “In school, in Ireland, Father.”

“Do you miss school?” the cardinal had asked.

“Oh, yes, Father,” Julia had said.

And so the cardinal had arranged for her to take evening courses in education at Marymount, where Neil Fallon worked a second job as the night janitor, trying to save enough money to start a business. They fell in love and married by the spring semester. Within four years, after two miscarriages, they had Lydie, and within six Julia had her degree. And now, forty years later, Neil had been dead eleven months.

Lydie and Michael went about their morning ritual. In Paris they had separate bathrooms, but only one person could use hot water at a time. Lydie showered first while Michael shaved; when he heard her shower stop, he stepped into his own. Lydie boiled
water for coffee. Since she took longer to dress, Michael went to the
pâtisserie
for croissants. On his way back to the apartment, he bought the
International Herald Tribune
. This early-morning, wordless cooperation was one thing Lydie loved about marriage. They knew each other so well. Lydie knew that Michael liked silence at the breakfast table; he was probably reviewing his schedule for the day.

Their breakfast table overlooked Avenue Montaigne and Montmartre in the distance. The early sun lit the Basilica with white light, and to Lydie it looked holy, the way it might appear in a child’s prayer book. She broke off a piece of croissant, savored the flavor of butter and yeast. She drank her
café crème
slowly; when the cup was empty, she would have to leave for work.

“I should go in a minute,” Lydie said. “I have a shoot at Tolbiac.”

“Tolbiac? Chinatown?”

“Yes. For a young French designer who wants nothing French in the background. He’d love to shoot the ad in Hong Kong, but he can’t afford a location outside Paris.”

“Where do you come up with your ideas?” Michael asked, laughing. “Chinatown in Paris. I’ll be damned.”

“And this afternoon I meet Patrice,” Lydie said. “I wonder if her husband is d’Origny of d’Origny Bijoutiers. I’m sure it’s family-run.”

“What is it?”

“One of the super-snazzy jewelry houses in the Place Vendôme. I’ve borrowed from them. For a layout on Hungarian royalty I used a d’Origny pearl collar made of two hundred pearls. One hundred ninety-eight were white, but one was black, another pink. Baroque. Very beautiful and odd.” Lydie grew silent, as she often did when recalling an old layout or planning a new one.

“I remember that piece,” Michael said. “I’m glad you’re seeing Patrice, you know.”

“I know,” Lydie said. Michael had never kept watch over Lydie’s friendships before, but now Lydie wondered whether Michael wanted someone to take her off his hands.

“Have I told you George Reed is coming from the United States today?” Michael asked.

“No,” she said, surprised that he had not. George Reed was Michael’s immediate superior at Rothman, Inc., the man who had arranged for Michael to work on the Louvre in exchange for the participation of a French architect on the National Gallery project in Washington, D.C.

“We have a meeting at the Ministry of Culture,” Michael said.

Lydie stood, faced Michael. He slid his arm around her neck and kissed her. His neck smelled like soap and powder. His remark about Patrice stuck with her, made her wonder how far apart they had grown. She couldn’t even ask him if he meant what she thought he meant: would it be a great relief to him if Lydie found a confidante? They stood there for a few seconds, hugging. Lydie didn’t want to let go.

Later, stepping aboard the Métro, she tried to imagine Michael’s meeting with George. Michael’s contacts in France were not being as cooperative as everyone had hoped they would be. The work was not moving swiftly. It seemed that French architects and designers resented the assignment of an American to turn the Louvre’s Salle des Quatre Saisons into an information center. Even Charles Legendre, Michael’s assigned liaison, lagged when it came to introducing Michael around.

Lydie knew that Michael planned to create a seventeenth-century atmosphere in the Salle. In spite of the conservatism of his ideas, he was having trouble convincing curators to find him paintings by Poussin and la Tour. He had located a master artisan from Burgundy to build an information desk similar to tables by A.-C. Boulle, cabinetmaker to Louis XIV, but the Ministry had so
far refused to approve the work order. One terrific plan for repairing the mosaic floor and another for redirecting the flow of tourists existed only on paper. And Michael’s worries were not eased by the knowledge that his French counterpart in the United States had already met the President and First Lady, who admired the new painting gallery he had designed for Washington’s National Gallery.

Lydie had a vision of Michael shaking George’s hand, grinning a little too earnestly perhaps. His mother had once told Lydie that as a child Michael had suffered stomachaches whenever he felt he had disappointed someone—his family, a teacher, his basketball coach—and Lydie knew he still did. She felt a rush of sorrow and love for him, the man she loved more than anyone in the world.

The photographer, the models, and Jean-Claude Verglesses stood on the sidewalk in front of Chinatown’s largest supermarket. Lydie waved, introduced herself to the photographer, and bumped cheeks with Jean-Claude. He wore a blue work shirt and had his blond hair tied back. He’s trying to look like a designer for rock stars, Lydie thought. She surveyed the street. Men were hauling carts of cabbages from a flatbed lorry into the store. Five old Chinese women dressed in black passed by; one spoke angrily to the lorry driver for blocking the sidewalk.

“Remember, Lydie,” Jean-Claude said in French, “the dresses speak for themselves. Nothing elaborate, all right? I want a squalid backdrop for these things.”

Lydie, who rarely did fashion work, nodded. Young designers who could not afford famous fashion stylists would hire her, then try to do the job themselves. “I think we could do something with those cabbages,” she said. Everyone entered the supermarket
through the service entrance, and Lydie spoke to the man who owned the store. She had worked here before; he gave her permission to use his cabbages in Jean-Claude’s advertisement.

The cabbages were round, smooth, cool green and white, and they echoed beautifully the lines of Jean-Claude’s pouf skirts. The models perched on the carts while Lydie and the photographer buried their feet and ankles in cabbages. Jean-Claude stood back and smoked. “Cabbages?” he said. “I don’t know about this. What is more French than cabbage? I said squalid and exotic.”

Street light filtered through the open door. The storeroom had concrete walls; yellowed tape held a faded kung fu poster in place. Lydie smiled at Jean-Claude. “Tell me this isn’t squalid,” she said. He shrugged. A group of workers gathered to watch. The models tried to look detached, as if they weren’t standing in piles of cabbages. The photographer went to work.

Lydie and her entourage moved from the supermarket to the kitchen of Maison de Chine to the warehouse of a Far East importer on Avenue Tolbiac. She had the models squat beside white porcelain statues of the Buddha, a form that, like the cabbages, perfectly echoed the pouf skirts.

“I must wait to see the proof sheets,” Jean-Claude said, “but this might work.”

Lydie knew he wanted the public to believe the pictures had been taken in Hong Kong; she had tried to avoid any background that would give away the Paris location. This was all part of the image, and Lydie understood it. Financial backing would come easier to Jean-Claude if he gave the impression of success. She wondered how old he was. Twenty-five? She had the urge to tell him his ponytail made him look as though he were imitating Karl Lagerfeld, but she did not. She felt fond of him because he was young and because he was desperate to be successful. She considered telling him not to worry. She considered giving him a
sisterly kiss on the forehead. Instead she made her expression serious and shook his hand. “I really hope you like the pictures,” she said.