Secrets of Paris (7 page)

“Why did he do it?” she asked Julia.

“The guilt …” Julia said.

“No,” Lydie said. “Why did he do it?”

The line was silent, except for static that might have been the Atlantic Ocean rolling over the wires. “I don’t know,” Julia said helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” Lydie said. “I know you wanted to hear happy memories.”

Then, with marked cheeriness, Julia laughed a little. “Oh, honey. I
thank
you. You’re the only one I can talk to.”

“Anytime,” Lydie said.

“That’s the spirit,” Julia said. “How’s Michael?”

“He’s fine.”

“Of course he is—he’s wonderful. He’s one in a million. Give him my love, will you?”

“Okay. I miss you, Mom,” Lydie said. Back in New York they had talked all the time—sometimes every day.

“And I miss you, sweetheart,” Julia replied.

M
ICHAEL
M
C
B
RIDE LOVED
someone new, and she didn’t know it. She was French; she worked at the Louvre. Every morning, walking along the Seine from his apartment to the Louvre, he had fantasies about her. When he actually saw her, however, they barely spoke. Her project was entirely different from his. Her name was Anne.

Tonight he walked the route with Lydie, on their way to a performance of Molière at the Comèdie Française, and it felt strange; all the familiar sights reminded him of his feelings for Anne.

“Don’t you want to take a cab?” he asked. “It’s a long way.”

Lydie looked down at her new open-toed shoes. Her feet blistered easily; to accommodate her love of walking Michael kept a supply of Band-Aids in his wallet.

“Let’s walk,” Lydie said. “My feet will be fine.”

But twenty minutes after leaving the apartment, she was limping,
barefoot, carrying her shoes. They walked along the quai, and Michael watched the way she stepped carefully from cobble to cobble, as if they were stepping-stones across a stream. Gentle waves lapped barges moored to the bank; bicycles and pots of spring flowers covered the deck of one, a striped umbrella shaded the table on the deck of another, but the boats were deserted. Many mornings Michael had imagined himself and Anne leaving Paris on one of those barges.

“Would you ever want to take a barge trip?” he asked Lydie.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t they usually stay on the rivers?”

The answer made Michael sad. He knew Lydie loved the beach, hated taking vacations inland. Now that he had begun facing the flaws in his marriage, it seemed he could see only Lydie’s faults. As if he had been blind to them for so long, blindly in love with her, her small faults seemed major. For example, that she couldn’t see the romance of taking a barge through Burgundy in the fall. Of bicycling through vineyards each day.

So he brought Anne into the vivid daydream: chilly air, the spicy scent of ripe grapes, crimson leaves and gold grasses, strenuous exercise that would make them feel they deserved the fine dinners those barges were reputed to serve every night. He imagined tasting wines with dinner: wines produced by the vineyards they had visited that day. He could see the wine, its color somewhere between orange and ruby, served in a ballon—a glass as big as a crystal ball. Walking along the quai he felt himself get hard, and he knew why: a dinner like that on one of these barges with Anne would make him feel like loving her all night long.

Michael took Lydie’s hand, as if that could make up for the way he felt about Anne. He knew that his marriage would probably end in Paris. He had wanted the Paris year to be special for him and Lydie; he had thought that coming might spark him to love
her the way he once had. Instead, it had left him excited, churned up, with no one to share it with. He had loved Lydie so much, and she had loved him back. But now she loved her family’s drama more than she loved him; sometimes he considered her attitude overvigilant. Lately, he’d begun to consider it ghoulish.

As a teenager he had thought girls cared more about love than boys did. He had understood that certain trappings were important to them: Valentine presents, birthday presents that could be shown off for their intimacy, a willingness to talk and hug before sex and sometimes instead of it. But Michael cared about those things, wanted to do them. Even before Neil’s death Lydie had been more pragmatic than he was, cared less about passion than he did. For him marriage should be romantic, even thrilling and dangerous.

And was it guilt for that thought that made Michael remember Lydie’s loyalty? The pride she felt at having him work on the Louvre? She never missed the chance to put his work into historical perspective; the idea made him feel excited and daunted. She would invoke all the artists and architects over the ages who had been commissioned by kings and ministers to work on the Louvre, and say that now he was one of them. He ran the phrase “over the ages” through his mind again. If his ideas were accepted, the Ministry of Culture would direct builders to place stones and glass and information booths according to the specifications of Michael McBride. He had left his mark on museums in New York, Dallas, Cleveland, and Hartford, but to leave it on the Louvre would, for Lydie, ensure real and certain immortality.

“There it is,” Lydie said.

The Louvre. They had reached the ramp that would take them up to street level. Regarding the museum, its walls long and massive as a fort’s, its niches filled with great, noble statues, Michael was envisioning its blueprint. From the air, its outline was bold
and majestic, yet as simple, as symmetrical as a letter of the alphabet.

Michael and Lydie walked past in silence, but something about the way she gazed up the walls let Michael know she was thinking about him and his work. The sun, much higher in the sky than it would be in the States at this time of evening in late spring, threw shadows on the stones.

A barge slid along the Seine, its frothy wake golden in the declining light. Lydie stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked Michael straight in the eye. Her expression startled him. She might have been about to set him straight about a major fact of life.

“I’m proud of you,” she said, surprising him, standing on her bare toes to kiss him. His eyes were closed, and he heard the voices of people passing by. Many of them spoke English; this was, after all, the heart of the tourist district. And beyond the simple pleasure of kissing her, Michael liked joining the ranks of lovers he had seen around Paris, kissing with abandon, caring more for the moment of passion than for decorum. Not caring who was watching.

Lydie believed in the process of change. She believed that a cataclysmic or benevolent event could effect a change, of course, send you veering in a direction you might not normally have taken, and just as her father’s death was one such event, that kiss on the quai was another. She believed it signified healing—of her own spirit. She could envision the moment in her mind the way someone passing in a tour bus might have seen it: in a romantic, photogenic haze. The urge to kiss Michael had come upon her suddenly, raised her up on her toes, made her close her eyes and tilt back her head to meet his lips.

Several evenings later they sat in a noisy bistro in the Seventh, just across the Pont de l’Alma from their building. Trays bearing platters of steak
frites
clattered by, and the patrons were happy drinking cheap red wine bottled in Touraine by the owner’s brother-in-law. Lydie watched Michael, who seemed restless. He tapped the pepper mill on the paper cloth, staring at the spilled pepper flecks as if they were tea leaves. Where their dinner hours had once been filled with conversation, for the last eleven months they had been quiet, with Lydie closed off and Michael tired of trying to draw her out.

“What are you working on?” Michael asked when he saw her watching him. He spoke in a loud voice, to be heard.

“My linen project. For that catalogue—remember I told you about it?”

Michael nodded, and Lydie realized that he wasn’t paying attention. He was looking over her head, across the crowded room. She followed his gaze to the doorway where a couple stood talking to the waiter.

“Do you know them?” Lydie asked.

“I know her from the Louvre,” Michael said.

Lydie looked again. The woman had close-cropped dark hair and eyes black as a raccoon’s, and she was so small she had to stand on her toes to whisper something to her escort.

“Should we ask them to join us?” Lydie asked in one of those quick and urgent moments of marital consultation. The table to her right was just being vacated by an elderly man and a small blond boy.

“No, let’s not,” Michael said. But the woman had seen them and was making her way toward their table.

“Michael,” the woman said, shaking his hand. Her French accent made the name sound like “Michel.”

“What happened to your eyes?” Michael asked.

“I fell down some stairs,” she said. A waiter hurrying past bumped her, making her grab the back of Michael’s chair to steady herself. A different waiter, also hurrying, told them to take the empty table beside the McBrides’.

“But we don’t want to intrude,” the woman said to Michael.

“Please,” Lydie said. “You won’t be intruding.”

Introductions were made. The woman was Anne Dumas. The man was Jean Tavanier. Lydie regarded Anne Dumas and guessed her age at thirty-three. The raccoon eyes were no illusion; not the product of kohl and mascara, they were bruised.

“I haven’t seen you around the Louvre for a while,” Michael said. “Were you badly hurt?”

“No, not too badly. I was visiting the cathedral at Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Sauveur, and I wanted to examine the baptistry. It’s ancient, you know, dating back to the Romans, and the steps are crumbling a little. So my foot went down wrong, and—pow!”

“She has a bruise of the brain,” said Jean.

“A concussion,” Anne said. “But not serious. However, no wine for me tonight.”

“A concussion!” Michael said. “How high were the steps?”

“Oh, just over a meter, which is the part that makes it so embarrassing.”

“You fell four feet?” Lydie asked.

“Concussions can be really dangerous,” Michael said. Lydie stared at him across the table and felt annoyed by his furrowed brow, which seemed to express excessive concern.

“I’m sure you’ve seen a doctor,” Lydie said.

“Naturally. There was a doctor two streets away. My guide knew him well.” She laughed. “We had to bump through a crowd of monks on a pilgrimage from Greece, with my head bleeding
like mad. You think working at the Louvre with all the tourists is bad. I’m telling you, it’s nothing compared to working in a dry temple bath full of monks.”

“What work were you doing there?” Lydie asked. “I’ve always wanted to go to Aix-en-Provence.”

“Aix is very lovely,” Anne said. “Of course the south of France is hot this time of year, but the cathedral was cool.”

“Did your research take you there?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” she said. Anne smiled, and her eyes crinkled. She raised one delicate hand to her bruised cheek and her mouth made an “O.”

“Hurts?” Lydie said. Anne nodded. She smiled at Lydie again. “I am not an expert on structures,” she said. “Not the way your husband is. I am interested in the cultural story, you know? And my interest happens to lie in the past. Mainly in the person.”

“She is a historian,” Jean said slowly, enunciating each word carefully.

Lydie and Michael had finished their meal, but they waited for Anne and Jean to eat before ordering coffee. Lydie had to marvel that a woman as dainty and bruised as Anne could eat with such gusto, using her bread to wipe her plate, the knife and fork working constantly. Every so often she would glance at Lydie, give her a wonderful smile. Anne was not precisely beautiful, but she had a quality that made Lydie unable to look away from her. Everything about her was smaller than usual. Her stature, her nose, her mouth, her hands. Only her eyes were enormous, black, at once spirited and sad.