Capturing Paris (2 page)

“I've been waiting all afternoon.” He picked up the mail from the kitchen counter and sat down at the table. “All we get are bills.”

“Wesley, I'm sure that Hal will call.”

“Well, I'm glad you're so sure. I wish I were.” He thumbed through the stack of envelopes and said in a louder voice, “Annie, getting this business really is important.”

“I know that. Just think positively.”

“Think positively. Now, that's helpful.”

Annie turned toward her husband. At fifty-one he still had boyish looks despite deep wrinkles in his face and the graying blond hair, which now fell across his forehead. His gold wire-rimmed glasses gave him the appearance of a kindly intellectual. He was as thin as he had been in college, but he moved with more purpose and economy of gesture. She thought he'd grown more handsome through the years, his regular features more interesting. It was as if the city itself, the Paris they both loved, had cast a glow on them that had woven them inextricably together. However, now their life seemed tinged in a different light, and Wesley's uncertainty was beginning to unravel both of them.

She leaned against the sink. Wesley's lips were set firmly in a straight, closed line. “If Hal can't offer you the project, something else will come along.”

“I still can't believe the firm closed the office here,” he said, leaning back, balancing on the back legs of his chair.

“It wasn't your fault. I just wish they'd given you more time to turn things around.” They'd had this conversation before. The Paris office hadn't been generating enough business.

“Yeah, right. Time is money. That's the old saying. I keep thinking I should have gone back to New York.”

“Let's not talk about it anymore. It doesn't do any good. Besides, if you went back, you'd really be starting over completely. You always said you wanted to practice on your own.”

“Yeah, but it's harder than I thought. My clients seem to be evaporating.”

“You're a great lawyer, sweetie. I'm sure you'll get other clients.”

Wesley shook his head and lowered his chair. “When? They're not exactly lined up at the door. I'm amazed that you still believe in me.”

Annie still remembered when Wesley, in the summer before his final year of law school, got the offer from Wilson & James. The name had sounded loyal and steadfast, suggesting a place with mahogany desks, Persian rugs, leather-bound books, a sea of dark suits, silk ties, and polished shoes. The firm stood for excellence and tradition. Annie and Wesley had spent their entire week's grocery money on champagne to celebrate the start of his career at the auspicious law firm.

“Of course I believe in you. I love you, for heaven's sake. Come on, let's have a nice evening. Are you hungry? I bought a roast chicken.”

“So I see. It smells good.” He gave her a weak smile and went back to the mail. “By the way, no e-mails from Sophie.”

Wesley seemed to miss Sophie even more than she did. Sophie was so much like her father: industrious, diligent, taking pleasure in her work. As a small child in a French school, she had delighted in showing her father her
cahiers
, the thin blue notebooks of lined paper, filled with her small tidy script. Wesley coached her on her spelling words and praised her for her excellent memory. When she was twelve, Annie took her out of the French primary school and moved her to a big international school, hoping she would have a more creative experience. Instead, she took all the prizes in mathematics and went back to the United States for college, where she majored in economics. “Numbers are creative too, Mom. We don't all want to spend our time playing around with words.”

“She'll probably call this weekend. Why don't you pour us some wine?”

Wesley went over to the tall pine cupboard on the far wall and got out two glasses. He pulled the cork out of a bottle of red wine that they had started the previous night. The purple liquid had trickled down the bottle, staining the label. He handed her a glass, sat down at the kitchen table, and opened the
Herald Tribune
.

The Reeds' kitchen, large for a Paris apartment, had been Annie's favorite room when they moved in during their first year in Paris. The table, covered in a faded pink provincial print, sat in front of the window overlooking the courtyard. When they had guests, they ate at an old French farm table at one end of the living room. Tonight Annie decided to use their good dishes, pottery plates from Quimper. They had purchased them when they rented a cottage in Brittany one August. She took a long sip of wine. The rich Burgundy tasted of warm, mellow afternoons far from rue des Archives. She thought of that little house in Brittany, with its thick stone walls, solid and unyielding to the relentless winds that battered that wild coastline even in summer. She pictured the three of them wearing sweaters and long pants as they hiked
along the beach, Wesley's arm around her and Sophie chasing gulls, her laughter sailing off with the clouds. At night they would burrow under a fluffy eiderdown quilt, while Sophie slept on a tiny cot at the foot of the bed. Annie captured those idyllic days in the poems she wrote that summer, poems that contrasted the dramatic weather with the tender love inside the cottage.

Gray gulls diving through silver sky
laugh in the wind and pierce the fat clouds as
they soar toward heaven
.

She thought of that line whenever she saw seagulls flying above the Seine.

Now, the beans almost ready, she got the silverware from the drawer and set the table. “Two more weeks until Christmas break,” she said. “Mary's giving me a lot to do at the office. I'll be glad for some time off.”

Wesley poured more wine into his own glass and topped off Annie's.

“Would you mind carving the chicken?” Annie pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Yeah, sure.” Wesley pushed back his chair. It scraped loudly against the tile floor. Annie handed him a knife. The comforting smell of roast chicken cheered her. She thought of Sophie. As a little girl she called her favorite meal “white dinner”: roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and applesauce. It had been quite a long time since the days of her picky eating, when Wesley would take forkfuls of food and make chugging noises like an approaching train. “Uh-oh, here comes the choo-choo. Where's the tunnel?” At the very last minute she would open her bow-tie lips and accept the next bite, her bright eyes riveted to her father's.

“This is a lousy knife,” Wesley said. “Where's the sharpener?”

“I don't know. Do we still have one?”

“Never mind.” He continued slicing, the meat falling easily from the bones. He served the chicken onto the plates. Annie drained the green beans and returned them to the pot with a lump of butter. She
added salt and a grinding of pepper while the beans sizzled in the residual heat of the pan.

“Maybe this weekend you could help me bring up the rest of the winter clothes from the basement storage, I wished I'd had boots on today.” She carried their plates to the table.

“Sure. I want to see what wine I've got stored down there too.” They sat down before their rapidly cooling chicken. “I got another rejection today,” she said. The discouraging thin envelope was still in her briefcase.

“Which poems?”

“I sent the series I did on Paris churches. Remember the one on Saint-Eustache? I can't believe it. It's a really good poem. They didn't take any of them.”

“Why don't you send them to the
Canterbury Review
? Didn't they publish one last year?”

“That was two years ago. Anyway, that magazine folded.”

“Well, try somewhere else. At least you still have your job. Besides, you can't make money writing poetry.”

“That's not the point. You know that.” They finished the rest of their meal in silence. She could see the worry in the lines across his brow, and she didn't want to complain further about her own disappointment.

Annie got up and carried the dishes to the sink. She could feel Wesley watching her as she loaded the dishwasher. Her hair swung forward as she reached for a glass. She knew he liked her thick bangs and simple hair that she usually wore loose, falling a few inches below her chin. Wesley stroked her hair soon after they first met, before he'd even kissed her. “Fawn-colored silk,” he'd called it. It was his first gesture of intimacy. Now, as if reading her mind, he walked over, put his hands around her waist, and kissed the exposed pale skin of her neck. She couldn't remember when he'd last hugged her, when they'd last made love. There had been a gradual decline after the firm closed Wesley's office in the spring. She hadn't worried about it during the first uneasy weeks, but now it hung like a veil between them. She hadn't realized how important their sexual life had been and how keenly the loss of it would affect her.

“I'm sorry. I don't mean to be such a crank. I'm sorry about your poems; I really am.”

His tentative embrace caught her off guard. She put down the plate she had been rinsing and turned to face him. “Oh, Wes, I need you so. I miss you too, in every way.” She reached up, putting her arms around him. She nestled her face into his neck and inhaled his familiar scent. He felt brittle, the muscles across his back tight and unyielding. “I hate to see you worrying so much about your work,” she said, drawing him more tightly against her.

He pulled away, shaking his head. “Do you mind if I go back to the computer and finish a few things? I'll get the phone if it rings.”

“No, go ahead.” She made an effort to smile and turned back to the sink, her arms more empty than ever.

By eleven-thirty that night, the phone still had not rung. Wesley had spent most of the evening in his office. Annie had hoped he'd come join her in the living room and finally took refuge in bed, the big down comforter pulled up around her. She leafed through a book on Gustave Courbet. She had studied art history in college and, after reading a recent biography of the nineteenth-century painter, had started a series of poems inspired by his work. She studied the reproduction of
A Young Woman Reading
. Courbet had painted an ordinary-looking woman of no particular beauty, reading in a lush green forest. Her neck and arms are browned from the sun, but her round, plump shoulders, revealed where her summer frock has fallen away, are pale, the skin having never been exposed to sunlight. Annie wondered how she could capture in her poetry the solitude and sensuality of this woman lost in thought. She picked up her pen and began to write whatever words came into her head. Her eyes went back to the picture in her lap, the white shoulders against the deep green of the woods, a woman alone except for the artist, whose eyes had translated the moment with paint.

It was almost midnight when Wesley finally came to bed. “What do you think of this one?” She gestured to the page of her book, still resting in her lap.

“I'm not in the mood to look at art books.”

Annie closed the book. “I'm sorry Hal didn't call.”

“I'm sorry too, but that doesn't change anything.”

She looked over at him. It was as if his good nature had faded like his cotton pajamas. “Maybe Hal thinks it's too late to call here,” she said; “you know, the time difference.”

“Annie, that's enough.” He sat heavily on his side of the bed.

“Why don't you give him a call?”

“That makes me look desperate. I refuse to do that.”

“Wesley …” She reached for him.

“Please, leave me alone. I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

He lay down, drew the comforter up around his shoulders, and rolled over to face the wall. Annie put her book on the skirted table next to the bed, tossed the big extra pillow onto the floor, and turned out the light. She listened, waiting for his breathing to shift into the deep regulated rhythm that indicated sleep. She loved Wesley. She couldn't remember a time when she hadn't. Now, lying still in the darkness, she felt her worries intensify. What did she have to be afraid of?

Pulling her knees toward her in a protective curl, she forced such thoughts aside. She pictured Courbet's woman in the forest and wished for some of that bucolic peace. She remembered the woman in the subway. She could still see the blue cape and the handsome face. She had the same kind of natural beauty as the woman in the painting, the kind of beauty made to be touched. Annie wondered if she lay alone too, listening to the November night. The early-evening drizzle had turned to a hard rain that now beat steadily against the windowpanes.

Le Déjeuner

“Bonjour, mes adorables,” Céleste gushed. She ushered Annie and Wesley into
the hall with its sparkling chandelier and picture-covered walls, a welcome relief from the dimly lit staircase up to their apartment. Céleste wore her usual tailored wool skirt, cashmere sweater, and silk scarf. She had worn the same classic but somewhat matronly outfits when Annie first knew her, and Annie could picture her twenty years from now looking exactly the same, only thicker around the middle, with deeper laugh lines and wrinkles. She gave them their customary kisses on both cheeks, emitting wafts of Shalimar and anointing Wesley's cold face with a touch of lipstick.

Georges, wearing gray flannel pants and a maroon cardigan covering a modest gentlemanly paunch, greeted his guests. His sand-colored hair was combed closely to his almost-bald head. He had a loose, easy laugh, and if he were heavier, he might be described as jolly. Céleste and Georges Vernier were the Reeds' oldest friends.

Wesley shook Georges's hand and with his other arm gave him a congenial squeeze, his expression brightening. “You're so great to have us,” Wesley said. “You're our anchor in this sea of Paris.”

Annie was surprised at Wesley's choice of words, almost like those of a French person speaking excellent English. She was relieved to see him smiling; she didn't want his bleak mood to spoil the Sunday luncheon. He'd barely spoken on their walk over, his mouth drawn in tightly like the winter day around them. He used to enjoy their walks, commenting on the architecture, noticing an unusual doorway or a finely crafted iron hinge, the kinds of details that made Paris unique. Now all he pointed out was the violent graffiti scarring the
façades of buildings and walls or the way the French never cleaned up after their dogs.