Secrets of Paris (10 page)

“Wonderful?” Patrice raised her eyebrows. “Both of them are in love with new men, but they refuse to get married because they don’t want to lose Didier’s alimony.”

“It’s true,” Didier said sadly. “I am supporting four adults. Not to mention my children.”

“Oh, you have children?” Lydie asked.

“A boy and a girl,” Didier said. “One with each wife.”

“Make that
six
adults you’re supporting,” Patrice said. “I mean,
we’re not talking toddlers. Would you call people of college age ‘children’?”

Didier patted her hand, and they smiled at each other, as if they had agreed to turn this bad situation into a private joke. The moment was intimate and excluded Michael and Lydie. Lydie tried to catch Michael’s eye, but he was looking away.

Kelly entered the room, placed a crystal dish of small black olives on the tray table. Kelly’s head was bowed, and Lydie ducked her own to smile at her. “Thank you, Kelly,” Patrice said.

“Now, I am very interested to see what you Americans do about these olives,” Didier said.

“I plan to eat one,” Michael said, popping one into his mouth. He made a fist, held it to his lips like a microphone, and spit the pit into it: exactly the way he had seen French people do it.

“Very good technique!” Didier said. “Most Americans think olives are disgusting, and the ones who eat them make a mess of the pits. I was all ready to give you a lesson, but you don’t need it.”

Why would a man want to set himself up as a master of olive eating? Lydie wondered. She saw it as a way for Didier to establish himself as the oldest person, the only father, the only Frenchman in the room. Her father had behaved similarly about his own fatherhood, his Irishness. Whenever Lydie would mix him a half-and-half—the half beer/half stout concoction he remembered from Dublin pubs—he would sip it with an expression of amused tolerance on his face: letting her know it was well-enough made for an American girl.

“Now,” Didier said. “Tell me how you plan to desecrate the Louvre.”

“We’re going to build a great glass column and fill it with the fish of France,” Michael said, deadpan. From previous experience with other French people, Lydie knew why he had said it and what was coming next.

“You joke, my friend,” Didier said, “but it is no joke to me. Not after what has been done—that glass pyramid. Imagine! A glass pyramid rising out of the courtyard of the Louvre. It is a monstrosity. It is a fucking scandal. No, it is worse than a scandal. I am not religious, but I believe it is a sin. To ruin our ancient and beautiful Louvre with that vulgarity.”

Lydie, who had heard tirades about I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid before, was shocked by Didier’s vehemence. Since arriving in Paris, she had found two camps: those who loved the pyramid and those who hated it. What shocked her was the change in Didier, now too moved to continue speaking. He ate one olive after another. The fist into which he spit his olive pits looked charged, ready to strike. She believed that this was the real Didier, full of passion for La Belle France; his earlier manner, polite and refined, had been a smokescreen.

“I agree with you,” Michael said. “That pyramid doesn’t belong there.”

“I assumed you would like it,” Didier said. “After all, you have been brought from America to work on the Louvre. I assumed your work would be consistent with the recent changes.”

“Michael’s a preservationist,” Lydie said, feeling protective of him. Didier’s attack made her bristle in Michael’s defense, but what struck her at that instant was how far apart she and Michael were these days, that Didier’s nationalistic barbs could make her feel closer to Michael than she had in a long time.

And Michael hadn’t even noticed her help. He stared straight at Didier. “My ideas are conservative,” he said. “I’m designing an information center in the Salle des Quatre Saisons, and my objective is to remain faithful to the original architecture.”

“Don’t you love the
main
information center?” Patrice asked, laughing, obviously relieved the tension had been defused. “With that big sign telling you how to get from A to B, where to find the
toilets, where to find the gift shop, where to find the
Mona Lisa
? As if those are the only things people come to see.”

“In a way they are,” Michael said. “According to what officials tell me, most people visit the Louvre to see two things: the
Mona Lisa
and the
Venus de Milo.
”

“Neither of which is French,” Didier said. “Italian and Greek.”

“Oh,
chéri
,” Patrice said. “Don’t be a poophead.”

“I apologize to you, Michael, and to you, Lydie,” Didier said. “But every time I think of that pyramid, I want to kill people. It spoils the Louvre for me—I may never visit it again. Imagine how you would feel if a great American monument—the U.S. Capitol, for instance—were to be changed irrevocably. By the whims of some politician! An American Mitterand! Imagine how you would feel if they built towers rising from the tips of the Capitol’s east and west wings. Wouldn’t that make you sick?”

“It would,” Michael said.

Washington: it was where Lydie and Michael had fallen in love. Lydie had to look away from him. He sounded so eager to please Didier: a supplicant. Finding fault with him seemed the only way to stop taking all the blame herself. Things had started going wrong after her father’s death, when she had felt too shocked and hurt to let Michael help her. But now she wondered: why hadn’t he tried harder? Now they were stuck in a holding pattern of silences and misunderstandings. She didn’t want to think it, but was this how it felt to fall out of love?

“You know, I am very glad to talk to you about this,” Didier said. “I am very happy we agree.” He shook Michael’s hand, then reached for Lydie’s and held it for a minute.

“Secretly Didier thinks all Americans are a little tacky,” Patrice said. “Even me.”

Did she mean it? Lydie wondered. She couldn’t tell; everyone was smiling.

“I was so happy to bring Patrice to France,” Didier said. “Did she tell you we fell in love very fast?”

“She did,” Lydie said, full of her own memories.

“So did they,” Patrice said.

“After we grew up,” Michael said, not looking at Lydie. “She hardly noticed me in high school.”

“Because you loved the hoop,” Didier said.

Dinner was perfect. First they ate oysters, oysters that surprised Lydie by their tangy freshness, considering it was June, a month without an “R,” when oysters were supposedly out of season. But Didier assured them that the “R” business was an invention of Brittany oystermen who wanted to make the shellfish seem scarce, thus driving up the price. He had bought these oysters himself from a man who brought them to Paris twice weekly from Arcachon.

Next they ate leg of lamb. “
Pré-salé
”—lamb that had grazed on the salt marshes of Normandy. Didier stood at the head of the table. He clamped a sterling silver instrument to the shin bone and, gripping its handle, held the leg in place for carving.

“What a wonderful thing!” Michael said. He admired the art of carving. His father had always carved the Thanksgiving turkey at the table, unlike Lydie’s father, who had preferred to sit at the table’s head telling stories while her mother carved in the kitchen.

“Do you like this?” Didier asked when the meat had been neatly sliced onto a china platter. He began unscrewing the instrument.

“It’s great. What is it?”

“It is a
gigot
-holder. I will give it to you.” Wiping the holder on his napkin, Didier handed it to Michael.

“Thank you,” Michael said. He grinned at Didier, who grinned back, and Lydie had to admit that her husband really knew how to accept a gift. Lydie herself would have demurred, going on about how she couldn’t possibly accept such a thing. She might have even said “expensive thing.”

“Patrice told me you’re the stylist who arranged those photos of our pearl choker,” Didier said to Lydie.

“Yes, I did.” Lydie laid down her fork.

“I liked them very much,” Didier said. “Where did you learn so much about jewelry? We have stylists we’ve used for years who never get it right.”

“I really don’t know anything about jewelry,” Lydie said. “But I’m glad you liked the layout.”

“Lydie’s family thinks she went through a postadolescent transformation,” Michael said. “They claim she loved the outdoors and cars, never cared a thing about clothes or jewelry.”

“Why can’t a woman care about all of those things?” Didier asked, frowning. “Great women do, all the time. They are passionate about the issues that interest them, they know how to shoot and fish …”

“Or sail,” Patrice said. “Or drive cars …”

Didier nodded. “And they know how to come indoors and make themselves and their homes beautiful.”

“Don’t Americans just love to categorize?” Patrice asked. “Haven’t you realized that since you’ve been here?”

Michael shrugged. “Maybe about some things, but I wasn’t categorizing Lydie. I was just trying to give you an idea of how everyone felt when she went off to college with a backpack and hiking boots and came home with style.”

“Maybe you didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did,” Lydie said, laughing nervously.

Michael gazed at her, a troubled expression in his brown eyes,
but Didier was nodding. “Now I have your point. We know the old story about an ugly little duck who grows up to be a swan. In any case, Lydie, I want to suggest a collaboration with you. Would you come to my office next week?”

“I’d love to,” Lydie said, smiling, staying in her place as long as it took to be polite. Then, rising, she asked to be excused.

“The bathroom is that way,” Patrice said, pointing down the hall. “All the way to the end, on your left. I assume you want the bathroom? Or are you looking for a telephone to call your lover?”

“He lives in New York,” Lydie said. “I’ll reverse the charges.”

“Don’t bother, honey,” Patrice said in her burlesque voice. “We girls have to stick together.”

In the bathroom Lydie leaned against the black marble sink and reflected on Didier’s ideal: a woman complete with compassion, athletic skills, and a sensitivity to beauty. She believed in the accuracy of what Michael had said: that she had been transformed. But Didier’s swan metaphor was so much lovelier than the idea that she, Lydie, had gone off to college one sort of woman and come back another.

All along she had just been trying things out. Born and raised a city girl, Catholic to boot, she didn’t think it strange that as a teenager she would tutor kids in Harlem. Back in the early seventies when the Woodstock legacy had yielded things like Earth Day and Common Cause, Lydie and her friends had cared about working to make things better—praying for special intentions and sending money to children in Bangladesh never felt real, while teaching Miguel Torres, Reggie Davis, and Zenita Hawkins to read did. Half the time they’d sit around talking instead of reading from
Prose and Poetry
, and Father Griffin, the young priest who’d administered the program, never cared.

She’d talk about boys with Zenita, flirt with the boys and impress them with her knowledge of cars, and talk about Father
Griffin with all of them in the lovestruck way of someone whose greatest pleasure comes from contriving to discuss her beloved.

In college she had lost touch with Father Griffin and those kids. But just because she became an art major and started auto racing didn’t mean she had really changed. Standing in Patrice’s bathroom, Lydie considered that she had just broadened her horizons.

Michael’s talking about transformation scared her, because it meant transforming was on his mind. Everything around them was transforming: the language they now spoke most of each day, her family, their marriage. She believed he was falling out of love with her in stages. Unsteadily, she brushed her hair and walked out of the bathroom.

“Well,
here
you are,” Patrice said, coming down the hall, handing Lydie a glass of wine. “I thought you’d hightailed it to New York. To meet
him.
”

“Sorry I took so long,” Lydie said.

“Don’t worry—the boys have adjourned to the salon. We thought we’d take a little rest before dessert.” She paused, looking straight into Lydie’s eyes. “Is something wrong?”

The question was so direct and Patrice looked so concerned, Lydie could imagine actually telling her the truth. Standing there in the d’Orignys’ baronial hall, Patrice would be expecting Lydie to say she had her period, and Lydie would give her an earful about murder and lost love. The drama of it made her smile. “Everything’s fine,” she said.

“I thought maybe Didier had upset you with that spiel about the Louvre.”

“No, not at all,” Lydie said, startled. “And I was really happy to hear he liked my work.”

“Wait’ll you hear about his new project. You’re going to love it. I have to say, though, when he got on his high horse about that pyramid, a structure that I find
enchanting
, by the way, I could
have smashed him. But he did fall for your husband like a ton of bricks. It’s male bonding. They’re in there talking vintages right now. It’s the old port-and-cigar routine. They’d be just as happy if you and I stayed in the kitchen and gossiped.” Patrice touched Lydie’s arm. “You sure you don’t want to tell me what’s bothering you?”