The Runaway Wife (15 page)

Jim was about to turn around and leave when he heard something so familiar, he wondered if he'd imagined it. It was Calliope's cough. He looked up and saw her leaning out the window, her hair falling on either side of her pale, gaunt face.

“Jim,” she called. “Don't leave.” Her voice was high-pitched and strained.

And then she was no longer at the window. Had she been pulled back into the room? He rang the doorbell. The butler appeared.

“Madame Castellane has asked for me,” he said.

The butler motioned for Jim to wait at the door. He spoke with someone inside.

“Madame is busy now,” he said, “but she says she would like to see you later, this afternoon.”

“I have a flight to catch. Would you please tell her that I can only see her now?”

The butler turned back into the interior once again. This time the volley was faster. “Madame Castellane cannot see you now, but she would like to see you this afternoon.”

His flight was at 2 p.m. He would communicate with her by phone, by e-mail. He could not miss a second flight. He returned to Ambrose's apartment to pick up his few things and headed to the station to catch the RER train to Charles de Gaulle Airport. “Don't leave,” she'd said.

On the train, as the distance between Jim and Paris increased, so did a strange tension that made him feel as if he was being pulled in the wrong direction. He could return to Paris next week, maybe next month, within the year. Who was he kidding? At Wolfe, Taylor the chances of a free weekend were dim at best. For the next six months, his primary job would be demonstrating his loyalty by resisting life.

He caught himself wishing the RER train would derail, that his flight would be delayed or, better yet, canceled. When he arrived at the airport, Jim saw the train for Paris on the opposite track. Hadn't he felt this same sensation when he and Calliope parted ways in the Alps and he'd heard her cough? Without thinking, he ran across the platform and jumped onto the train only moments before the doors glided shut. Heart beating. Next stop: Paris.

BACK AT THE RESIDENCE, THE BUTLER EYED JIM
with irritation.

“Madame is not available,” he said in heavily accented English, his white glove closing the door.

“She asked to see me this afternoon.”

“She is not here.”

The door closed. From the street, Jim looked up at the window above the door.

“Calliope,” he called. “Are you there?”

The window was closed. Jim found a pebble on the street and tossed it at the window. Calliope's aim would have been better.

M
INUTES LATER, THE BEGRUDGING BUTLER
opened the large oak door. In quick succession, a man dressed in black greeted Jim and showed him into the drawing room to the right of the entrance hall, where he was to wait for madame. A second man in black entered the room to ask whether Jim wanted a
café
or a glass of water. The two men, both handsome, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and wearing black shirts and black pants, could have been interchangeable:
trè
s
businesslike,
très
cool,
très
streamlined. Jim was glad he'd paid a good sum in Lauenen for his dark gray suit.

The pastel-blue paneled drawing room hosted the biggest crystal chandelier he'd ever seen. In the corner, mounted on a pedestal, stood a life-size bronze statue of a falcon. He was
in the right place. From his seat on the gray velvet sofa, he had a full view of the sweeping white marble staircase with its black wrought-iron banister of whirls and arabesques.

Would she float down the staircase to greet him, or pop in from one of the three doors in the drawing room? Door number one, two, or three? As he looked above at the sparkling crystals of the chandelier and the diamond-shaped coffering in the wooden ceiling, a question popped into his mind: Had he been just a plaything for the rich and famous? An amuse-bouche before the main course?

Jim had read stories about the desires of powerful people being met at the expense of others. Was he the disposable American, a companion for a few weeks in an Alpine wilderness—only to be dropped, as a child would discard a toy?

Voices and the thud of moving furniture resounded in the next room. Jim rose from the sofa and opened one of the three closed doors. In a ballroom of huge proportions, flanked on one side by four floor-to-ceiling French windows, he counted a staff of eight, all dressed in the same black on black, setting up tables, spreading tablecloths, and unfolding chairs.

Jim guessed the ceiling height to be at least twenty feet. Ornate scrolls decorated the tops of the columns at the four corners of the room, and wavelike molding ran along the top of the interior walls. The French windows were dressed with salmon-colored curtains, drawn to the sides with similar-colored sashes and tassels. The floor was shiny parquet. The
row of three chandeliers caught the afternoon sunlight as if they were hung in such a way to capture every glistening ray. A forest-green marble fireplace occupied the length of the far wall. On the other side of the French windows Jim glimpsed a formal topiary garden, the trees shaped into triangles and balls.

A woman in black sped through the room carrying bunches of red and orange flowers in her arms. She ran so fast, it looked like she was carrying fire. Everything in the room had the effect of fullness, a lushness that overflowed.

HE HADN'T SEEN HER ENTER THROUGH THE FRENCH
doors, but she was standing like a statue at the edge of the room. She wore a white satin suit. The skirt, which fell to her knees, looked as if it had been sculpted around her thin hips. Her eyes were blank, like a day without sun or rain, a day without weather.

For a moment it seemed as if she would speak, but then she closed her lips and turned her face away. Her hair was in a tight chignon; with her long neck, she was the sculpture of Queen Nefertiti that Jim had seen as a child in books about Egyptian history. A princess from a distant land. She pressed a finger against the glass pane as if she wanted to touch what was outside it. He remembered that finger on his arm as he'd carried her for miles. He had known her every breath, her every cough. After all that, would she refuse to speak to him?

“Calliope,” he began, approaching her.

She continued to gaze out the window. A caged bird of paradise. He had returned her to this.

Her blue-green eyes. His eyes her target.

“I could not risk your health, your life . . .” he said.

“You did.” Her voice was hollow; all the creamy richness had been extracted. “This is my life.” She looked away.

The light from the windows touched her lips.

“Madame,” said a slim man dressed in the black uniform, entering the drawing room from the door to the ballroom.

“Yes,” she said, her voice dull. She did not turn.

“Les traiteurs sont ici.”

Jim the Traitor
, he thought. It occurred to him that
traiteur
was the French word for
caterer
.

“Les traiteurs sont ici,” Calliope repeated, her eyes still on Jim. “S'il vous plaît, veuillez leur montrer la cuisine.” Please show them to the kitchen. The man left.

“As you may have guessed,” she said, “we're hosting a dinner this evening.”

She took a deep breath. How different she was from the woman with loose, wild hair, laughing on the rose-petaled threshold of her Alpine chalet.

“Where are you?” He knew she would understand. “Calliope with the rose petals in her hair?”

She smiled at him, a social smile, one he knew she flashed at the hundreds who filed in to
ooh
and
ah
at the green marble fireplace, and the crystal chandeliers, and her.

“The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere is to be nowhere,” she said. “Michel de Montaigne.”

Another woman in black with a blond chignon, a pale imitation of the mistress of the house, popped her head into the room from door number two with an air of urgency. Jim guessed she was the head of staff. She asked madame a question, something about
les traiteurs
.

“
Oui
,” Calliope responded. “
Un moment
.”

He followed her into the drawing room where he had waited for her. She took a seat on the gray velvet sofa, and he sat beside her. The woman who had dashed through the ballroom with the flowers now stood at door number three. She spoke quickly, gesturing with her hands, about the flower arrangements, he presumed.

“
J
'
arrive
, I'm coming,” Calliope answered in a smooth voice, as if pouring out a measured batter. She was the commander in chief of decisions in this, her castle.

“I have things to take care of . . .” she said, moving to the edge of the sofa, a white egret about to take flight.

“Madame?”

The sun had gone out of the room. The Calliope impostor popped her head through door number two. Jim understood from the next exchange that more people were attending the event than had been expected. They would have to add another table or squeeze more people at the ones they had.

Calliope quickly—
clip, clip
—instructed the woman to add another table.

Jim could smell her: roses, miles of rose bushes, and bees buzzing in them.

He stood. “Leave here,” he whispered. “Now. You are
free
. . .” The image of the owlet popped into his head. He hoped she would not ask about Hamlet.

She turned to look at him, and finally, once again, he was the recipient of the warm smile amid the fluttering petals under the trellis of roses at the entrance to the Chalet of Owls.

“I don't blame you, Jim,” she said, sighing and spreading her arms wide. “That is why I called you in from the window the first time. Yves demanded my attention so I could not see you at that time. This is my life. Despite my bitterness about what happened at the Cabane, I chose this life once and I choose it again—to keep the family together, to help my husband reach the success he desires, to play the part of hostess with all that I have been given.” The blue tint under her eyes reminded him of the hue under the surface of ice, the frigid conditions they had endured on the Wildhorn. “All I can hope is that my daughters, at least one daughter—”

Calliope and Jim saw him at the same time that he saw them. He entered from the foyer—door number three. It was as if they were onstage, but it was a breach of the script that the third actor should appear now. He strode in like a military commander; a crop would have completed the picture.

The man was the same height as Calliope and puffed
his chest out like a character in an eighteenth-century cartoon of wealthy men boasting watches that barely fit into their vest pockets. He had a chiseled chin, a wide, shiny forehead, and dark hair mixed with silver, more than the Internet photographs had shown; his sideburns were a little too long. Something about him reminded Jim of Clio, perhaps the wide forehead, the pronounced cheekbones. His intensity was like a magnet. His quick brown eyes darted at the couple, then to the doors to the right, where the three could hear the staff.

Jim stepped away from the sofa. Calliope remained as still as if she had been turned to stone.

“Calliope,” said the Commander, glaring at Jim. He paused and waited. “We need to go over a few things,” he continued. “The seating chart . . .”

“Fine,” she said coolly, looking at him, then back at Jim. She was singing a ballad as
this
Odysseus's muse, singing to his accomplishments, to his political power and his delight.

Now would be the time for an introduction.

“I hope you'll excuse me,” she said in English to Jim, her face emptied and wan.

As if as an afterthought, she added, “Yves, please meet Jim Olsen.”

The flash of recognition was immediate. The words were hardly out of her mouth than her husband boomed, “
L'Américain!
” He followed the exclamation with a quick laugh.

Jim waited.

For a moment, Calliope looked disoriented.

In the tense pause that followed, Jim watched the Commander change course like a man on a ship turning the wheel abruptly starboard. The boom swung around, but Calliope did not duck.

“Women,” said Yves Castellane in French-accented English, his impatience visible in his twitching eyebrows. He placed an arm around Jim's shoulder and steered him to the doorway. “We know how they can be, don't we, monsieur? They can be up in the mountains one moment and then down in the valley the next. My wife, she came running down the mountain to me, begging her way back.”

Jim tried to steal a glance at Calliope, but the minister of the interior held his shoulder in a lock.

“I would like to say good-bye to her,” Jim said, breaking free.

“I'm afraid my wife is very busy. We have several visiting dignitaries,” he began. “Running for office, you see—it's not easy to keep it all together, the wife, the daughters, the whole world beckoning . . .”

When Jim turned back to her, she looked as if she were in a trance. A wisp of her hair had come free from the chignon and fell over her eye. She brushed past her husband to approach Jim. She kissed him on both cheeks, small, withheld pecks that barely grazed his face.

For a moment, before the butler closed the door, he caught a glimpse of Calliope facing her husband, the silhou
ette of her curved lips smiling up at the politician to calm the furrow on his brow, to please him with the plans for the political reception, to tell him which important head of state she planned to seat next to him. So the muse could fulfill her mission: that
he
would appear the most brilliant of all.

A
MBROSE WAS LATE, AS USUAL. FIVE MINUTES
early was on time for Jim Olsen, the punctual Midwesterner. From the table at the far corner of the room—“Monsieur Ambrose Vincelles's table”—Jim observed the midtown New York City lunch crowd, the glossy lips moving, the stilettos prancing, the suits leaning in and the suits leaning back in chairs. He noticed the shirts straining across the bellies of middle-aged men as they unbuttoned their suit jackets.
Would someone please turn down the volume?
Jim caught flirtatious glances from the two women at the adjacent table. About his age, both wore short skirts, and their long legs were crossed, crossing, about to cross again, within his view. And this was lunchtime.

“How great it is to see you!” Ambrose's voice broke
through the drone of lunchtime voices. Jim embraced his friend heartily.

The sommelier appeared with a bottle of red wine. He bowed knowingly to Ambrose, pointed at the vintage and the vineyard, and poured a taste. Ambrose swirled the dark-red liquid in the glass, tipped it to his lips, inhaled and sipped, and then nodded.

“How is your new post, my friend?” Ambrose began.

“You make it sound as if I have a job in a sub-Saharan colony.”

“Well, it certainly isn't that, is it? You're gainfully employed by one of the most established investment firms in the country. Bravo, my friend!”

“Before you continue, you should know that I quit the job before I began.”

“What?”

“I was a week late to my start date,” Jim said. “When I showed up and my superiors interrogated me about the reasons for my delay, I decided to tell them the truth—that I'd been stranded in the Alps, where I was trying to help a woman escape from her husband. I didn't mention that said husband was a candidate for the presidency of France. They looked at each other as if I'd lost my mind. They didn't believe me. It was at that moment that I walked.”

Ambrose was incredulous. “Jim, I don't understand. This is so unlike you!”

“I told them in a very calm way that I appreciated the opportunity to work with them, but I had decided that life was too short to work with assholes.”

“You didn't.”

“Now that I think of it, Jay Wolfe looked at me as if I were some kind of prophet, as if by my seeing the light, he was beginning to see it, too.”

“I might agree with your now ex-bosses—Jim, you
have
lost your mind! This is not the same hardworking Jim who refused all my vacation invitations these last eight years!”

The waiter brought menus.

“And the hermitess, I've been wanting to ask for the longest time—did you ever find her?”

“We did. Sadly, she'd died by the time we arrived. But now that I've had time to think about it, by watching Calliope embrace her death even as I was repulsed by it, I think somehow, in that moment, I learned how to live.”

Ambrose sat back in his chair.

“You see how dangerous your invitation to the Alps has proven? If it wasn't for you, I'd be able to return to the habitual life, pay my bills, and settle quite comfortably into a ten-year oblivion at Wolfe, Taylor.”

The waiter was back at their table.

“The
steak au poivre
with
frites
,” said Ambrose. “You?”

Jim held up two fingers.

“Speaking of paying bills, what
will
you do with yourself?”

“I've decided to save glacial melt on mountaintops. Got any suggestions?”

“One adventure in the Wildhorn and you're a changed man! Our earth will be the better for it. Last night I dined
with a friend, Margaret Paul. She runs the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their mission is right up your alley, or, um, mountain.”

Ambrose removed his phone from his inside jacket pocket and tapped out a message. “I've just introduced you. Now for the fun. I'm sending you a link to today's cover story in a French tabloid about this young American and a certain presidential candidate's wife. I'm guessing the rescue team leaked some sensitive information along with photographs. I don't believe a word of it.”

“You know me too well, Ambrose, to believe . . . Calliope was mesmerizing, intriguing, but the relationship was platonic. The whole thing is hard to believe now as I sit among skyscrapers that are high-rise buildings instead of Wildhorn peaks. While I was up there in the high elevation, I had this funny feeling that Calliope had a vision of my future from the moment she met me.” He thought of her knowing about his arrival, the questions she asked him.

“Was she feeding you any strange-looking mushrooms?”

“Very funny!” In his head he heard the word as Calliope would pronounce it—
fonny
. “But she
was
serving me century-old wine bottled by Benedictine monks.”

“I joke, but I've felt it, too, especially in the Alps,” said Ambrose. “It's a kind of clairvoyance, a telepathy with others and with nature. It's one of the things that makes being on the Wildhorn or any high mountain regions so addictive. With your newfound insight, do you think she was saving you for the actress?”

“That's what I thought at first. But Thalia's engaged to be married. I saw her ring.”

The waiter brought over an amuse-bouche of potatoes and caviar, a sprig of mint gracing the tops.

“Remember the book of poetry I thought Thalia had inscribed and left for me before our departure?”

Ambrose nodded.

“It was from Helene, actually.”

“What?” Ambrose paused to sip his wine. “Now that I think about it, I remember her looking at you in a strange way. She was probably the one who urged Thalia to join our table. She seemed so shy. What a strange evening! Thalia was flirting; Helene was in love; Clio was scheming; and you and I were bewitched. I suppose all's well that ends well. Madame Castellane is back to health and to her family, and—”

“She's not back to health. She's like something out of
The Walking Dead
!”

“The press says she's out of the hospital.”

“She's physically better, but emotionally she's a ghost. I remember her telling me in those days when we were lost together that the thing she feared most in the world was apathy. I remember how she spaced the syllables, pronouncing it in French:
A Pa Thy
. Et voilà, when I saw her in Paris? She had eaten Apathy for breakfast, Apathy for lunch, and Apathy for dinner, and then she served a generous portion to me. When you're living the life she's chosen, the fast-paced life, like the one I lived before my Alpine journey, there's
not enough time for the other
pathies
—empathy and sympathy. In that life, if your heartstrings pulled you to experience pathos you'd have to put it off for a time when you were less busy, but by then . . .”

The waiter appeared at the table and poured more wine. “I'm willing to postpone pathos to taste this,” said Ambrose, popping the amuse-bouche into his mouth.

“The helicopter was always overhead,” said Jim. “She probably had it on remote control and planned its arrivals and departures. But, Ambrose, why would she go back to such a life? When I left her in the arms of the pilot to be delivered to her husband, she told me that I had betrayed her.”

“You said her husband was there, that a staff of hundreds was in your midst, including the stalwart butler. According to online gossip, the presidential candidate has forsaken his extracurricular activities and entreated his wife to forgive him. His mistress has reconciled with her own husband and they will be raising the child, and, although muddied, the wheels of life and politics roll onward.”

“That doesn't—”

“Jim, he could very well be the next president of France. Not exactly what you wish to hear, I know, but he's the only one they've got who has a chance against the Socialist party candidate. After the success of the Socialists in the last election, half the wealth of France departed the country. They're hoping that Castellane will win, lower taxes, welcome investment back, and restore France's economy.”

THE STEAK WAS SERVED, THE PEPPER ADMINISTERED.
One of the two women of the crossing legs glanced in Jim's direction. Why would anyone wear such high heels?

“Enough of French politics. Come to dinner with me tonight with Ann and Ned Lamont. They're selling a thirteen-inch painting by the school of Giorgione, only just now authenticated, and seen by only a chosen few. They bought it many years ago for a song at an auction. It's titled
Mountain Landscape with a Hermitess by a Pool
. When I think of us searching in caves in the remote reaches of the Alps—and now the hermitess shows up in my life again! I couldn't wait to tell you about it, but I wanted to see your reaction in person.”

“Hermitess?” asked Jim.

“You won't be surprised when I tell you whom I'm thinking of as the prospective buyer—”

Jim stopped his fork in midair. “No!”

“Clio Castellane has been in touch with me several times since our night in the hutte. Along with checking in to see whether I knew anything about your whereabouts—my God, you had us petrified—she told me that her mother was interested in expanding her private collection. How could I not think of the Lamonts' Giorgione, remembering madame's predilection for female hermits?”

“You'd think that in an election year, the Castellanes would not be expanding their private collection.”

“You'd think . . .”

“What does the hermitess look like . . . in the painting?”

“Pale face, long gray-white hair. She's wearing a long gray frock. She's the color of the mist that drops inside the Alps. It's amazing. One moment.” Ambrose dipped his fingers into his interior jacket pocket.

“Et voilà,” he said, inspecting the image on his phone screen. “This doesn't do her justice. Come tonight and see for yourself.”

Jim expanded the photograph with his fingers to zoom in on the face of the hermitess. She had a long nose; gray-blue, almond-shaped eyes; and long, slender arms. Was that a laugh she was suppressing? She held something in her fingers at her abdomen. It was hard to make out. It looked like the small skull of an animal.

“‘The Mona Lisa of the Alps,'” said Ambrose.

It had become loud in the restaurant. Jim returned the phone to Ambrose.

“If getting a peek at a hermitess with skull in hand is not enough,” began Ambrose, “I have another diversionary proposition for you. And, Jim, you'd actually be doing me a favor if you did this. I'm on the board of the French Institute Alliance Française. Tonight there's an event that its president, Marie-Monique Steckel, has asked me to attend. Would you go as my emissary?”

“Thanks but no, thanks, Ambrose. Not in the mood.” The painting of the hermitess had made Jim feel gloomy.

“It's a celebration of French poetry, something I think you've become more familiar with over the past few weeks. Say yes.”

“Ambrose! You're looking at me as if my saying yes will save your, or my, life.”

“Marie-Monique would appreciate the gesture. For me, stop by for a drink, nothing more.”

“You're in the right business,
and
you're worse than all the Castellanes put together.”

Ambrose laughed over his glass of red wine.

“That's saying a lot. Introduce yourself to Marie-Monique, one of my favorite people on earth. She'll take care of you. It's midtown, Sixtieth Street.” Ambrose peered into his phone once again. “I'm forwarding you the Evite as we speak—et voilà. You need only stay for one drink.”

It was a relief for Jim to finish off their lunch by listening to stories about Ambrose's family and about new clients on the brink of buying a rare collection of medieval Japanese warrior figures. By the time the bill arrived, he and Ambrose had emptied the bottle of wine.

“On me,” said Ambrose, swiping the bill away from Jim's hand. “Especially for taking my place tonight at the Alliance. My flight for Paris is tomorrow midday, but call me if you want to grab a coffee in the morning.”

“Will you vote for him?”

Ambrose signed his name, placed the receipt in his wallet, and stood. “Castellane?” He nodded slowly. “Probably.”