Читать книгу Lessons in French - Hilary Reyl - Страница 16

I reached the little horseshoe bar at dusk. Olivier was there already, sipping something brown that I guessed was whiskey. As I caught his eye, I could feel my face a confusion of deep blush and the pink chill of the first really cool day of fall. The only coat I had that didn’t embarrass me was too thin for this weather. I had walked fast to stay warm. My whole body was pumping.

There were half a dozen people sprinkled around the old wooden U-shaped bar. When Olivier pulled me in for a kiss in front of all of them, I was stunned. He introduced me to the bartender, Michel, dark and foxishly thin. He said that since it might be tricky for me to get mail from him at the house, he would write to me in care of Michel. He untied the old black and white plaid scarf that had been Daddy’s. Mom had given it to me when I headed to college on the East Coast, saying she had saved it all these years because she always knew it would come in handy.

“I love this,” Olivier said, rubbing it to his cheek. “It’s so soft.”

“Thanks. It was my dad’s.”

“It is your dad’s.”

Michel asked me what I would like to drink and all I could think of was a Kir.

From the bar, Olivier walked me to the Place des Vosges, the sixteenth-century red brick square with geometric grass and black iron benches. Victor Hugo had lived here. It was Olivier’s favorite square in all of Paris. He took me to a bench under a chestnut tree where he made me promise to sit and read his letters. He wanted to picture me there.

He felt me shiver and draped his coat over mine. Then he gave me his hand. He began to massage my palm so that his chevalière pressed and rose, rose and pressed.

“Your ring is like a hint of lost treasure,” I laughed, “like the one thing that was saved from the shipwreck.”

He laughed too. “It’s all very tragicomic, isn’t it? I could have had this whole other life like you could have had a completely different childhood with your dad being some kick-ass movie director. We can’t take anything for granted, can we?”

“And Portia can?” I ventured.

“I told you she’s spoiled. She thinks she has desires, but they’re all just about acquiring more to pile on to what she already has. There’s nothing burning.”

“At least she has good taste.”

“There’s that.”

“Have you actually told her you’re breaking up with her?”

“She’s not stupid. She knows.”

When he kissed me, he whispered, “This is true. We understand one another. On se comprend.”

But I didn’t understand anything except what I felt like doing there and then. Which was so obviously what he felt like doing too.

The old family crest pressed softly into my ear and then into my back, my legs. His hands were running through my hair.

I pulled away so that he could look at me. “Olivier, what are we doing? What about Portia? Are we doing something terrible to her?”

“People are meant to follow their hearts. There’s nothing else.” He gave me another whiskey-sugared kiss.

I succumbed to the magic of selfishness and went with him back to his quirky room on the third floor of his hôtel de charme, steps away from the Picasso Museum.

At six the following morning, after a last kiss and a whispered “See you again tonight? Promise?” I padded down the hotel’s narrow red-carpeted stairs, past the darkened reception desk and out into the cold rose-tinged city. I decided to walk home.

I wound through the Marais back to the Place des Vosges, ran my fingers briefly over our dewy bench, and resolved, as I buried my hands in my coat pocket, to treat myself to a pair of gloves the next time I was paid. I went through the brick archway leading out onto the rue de Rivoli and headed for the small bridge to the Île St-Louis.

While crossing the river, I formed a perverse desire to come clean with Lydia. What better time than today, when she was finally to arrive in Paris? After all, she was a mother and mothers forgave and she obviously didn’t think Olivier was right for Portia and maybe she would be grateful to me for taking him away, or at least understand. I had already lied about having the money to afford this job, and about knowing her work my whole life. Yet there was still time to explain. I did not want to lie any more. You could only do so much to please people. When I saw her, I would tell the truth.

But the shuttered shops and cafés of the tiny island, with the hidden worlds and lives they suggested, filled me with a very different idea: to keep my own life private, to carve out a space for myself in this new Paris I was inhabiting. I was going to see Olivier one more time, tonight. And it would be our time.

Mom’s voice floated to mind. “Separate the personal from the professional, Katie. It’s one of the fundamentals of a healthy life. Never mix. Keeps you straight.”

As I reached the tip of the Île St-Louis, the Île de la Cité came into view. The flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, so imposing in their silence, offered a fresh perspective, the beauty of Olivier’s sleeping face, the perfect stonework of his chest. On principal, I had never drawn from memory, but I thought for the first time I might be able to.

At the cathedral, I faced off with a gargoyle and was struck by the potential ugliness of my actions. But then I heard Olivier: “Please, Kate, I know you would never want to hurt anyone. Believe me that it’s over between Portia and me. I’ve been trying to tell her for months, but she won’t hear it. She’s never not gotten her way, and it’s a shock to her. She’s a casualty of privilege. They’re all casualties, Lydia, Clarence, Josh. It’ll be a shock to all of them for Portia to be left. It might take a little time to sink in. Portia’s unstable. But she’s not your responsibility.”

“I suppose not.”

“I can do this,” he had said across an inch of pillow. “I can get out of this situation. This family is a vortex. But we can’t let them rule our lives. Not after I just spent weeks in Italy thinking about you.” Another kiss. “This is our twist of fate.”

I smiled at the gargoyle and continued on my way toward the Left Bank.

At the base of the boulevard St-Michel, I looked at the sleeping giant, Gibert Jeune, the enormous yellow-awninged bookstore I was coming to love. Like the novels it housed, it filled me with a sense of hope all tangled up with impending tragedy. My chest tightened at the memory of Olivier’s finger scrolling across my breasts.

What if all that playful scribbling on my body vanished, along with our magic spot? What if there were no letters? Or the letters were not warm? Or he went home and found he was in love with Portia after all? What if he tasted the Hédiard goose liver while contemplating one of his perfectly pressed shirts and slipped back into the life he deserved?

A drunk resting against a thick tree told me it couldn’t be that bad. “Allez, mademoiselle!” he grunted. “Give us a smile.”

As soon as his voice had broken the morning silence, I began to hear other noises, small cars coughing into the fog, the rustle of falling leaves, various footsteps. All the way home, the day grew in my ears so that I had to struggle to keep a pocket of silence hidden inside me, a place to return to later on my own.

As I became fully aware of the action of the sky, cloudy and dramatic, I finally came to terms with the fact that Lydia was coming home from Germany today. This was no time to brood.