Spring Collection (32 page)

“Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Bellini, Van Dyck, don’t look, don’t stop whatever you do or we’re finished … have they no pity? Don’t they know that some
people have better things to do than look at pictures? Damn the French, once they’ve got you where they want you, they never let you go.”

“Cranach, Holbein, Guardi, Tiepolo, Goya …” I panted, as we went so fast we were almost running.

“You don’t suppose we’ve missed the exit?” I asked, after a long while, as the absence of other people suddenly registered and made me pull up suddenly.

We looked at each other in horror and disbelief. We found ourselves alone, without even a museum guard in sight, at the end of the gallery that now stretched back, way, way back into the dim rich areas we’d already covered, a distance you almost needed a telescope to see to the end of. Ahead of us was only a room full of El Grecos and, unbelievably, the end of the building itself, where windows looked out on the Tuileries gardens. There were two staircases, marked “vers Sculptures” and “vers Galerie d’Etude.”

“We must have passed it somehow. Or else it’s all part of a plot, I bet there never was an exit,” Mike said grimly.

“Which staircase do you want to take?”

“Neither one of them is safe. We could be wandering around here all day. The only thing to do is to retrace the way we came. I learned that in Boy Scout camp.”

I burst into tears.

“Baby, my poor baby, I’ll carry you, I promise,” he said, holding me against him and rocking me comfortingly.

“No … no … it’s not that, my feet are fine.… It’s the idea of you in a Boy Scout uniform … you must have been so adorable …” I sobbed.

“You’re overtired, that’s what it is.”

“Admit you were adorable,” I demanded through my tears.

“I guess so, yeah. I’ll give you some old photos of me in my uniform if you’ll stop crying.”

“Do we really have to go all the way back?” I asked piteously.

“That or spend the night. Look, I have an idea, if you really won’t let me carry you, it’ll be easier if you look straight down at the floor and let me guide you. You’re suffering from seeing all those pictures out of the corner of your eye. It’s a case of sensory overload. But the floor has a repetitive pattern and it won’t seem so far if that’s all you see, without other distractions.”

“All right. I’ll put my hand over my eyes—it’ll look as if I’ve been struck by a headache from absorbing too much beauty. The Stendhal Syndrome I think they call it.”

Mike was absolutely right, the safari was much easier with visual monotony and just his big, warm hands to concentrate on. I
had
managed to get a look at the miraculous Botticellis and the glorious wall of Tiepolos … and a lot more—it seemed a crime not to peek. Since we were here.

“There’s the exit sign!” Mike exploded after we’d covered about half a mile.

“Can I look at it, at least?”

“No, it’ll break your heart. We could have taken a right after Fragonard and gone down those stairs next to the buffet and tea room. Damn sign’s facing sideways, that’s where we went wrong.”

“BUFFET?” I stopped dead, incredulous. “Were you going to pass up a buffet?”

“Now you know why I never made Eagle Scout,” he said sheepishly.

We devoured two huge ham and cheese sandwiches each, the kind the French make that are mostly divine bread and butter, drank two cups of milky coffee apiece and bounded down the stairs, which were a short distance from a door to the outside world I’d almost given up hope of seeing again.

As we stood there, revitalized, breathing in the fresh air, I realized that I felt deeply shy. I looked up at Mike and I could tell he’d been seized by the same emotion. “What next?” was what we were both asking ourselves, now that we didn’t have the Louvre to go to or escape from.

“Is this still a date?” I asked finally, sounding as challenging as possible, “because if it is, it’s up to the guy to decide what to do next. That’s the way it works in Brooklyn and we’re on Brooklyn regulations here.”

He brightened and pushed me in the direction of a taxi stand where there were actually a couple of cabs waiting, probably because it was the lunch hour.

“Du Louvre” I thought I heard him say.

“Haven’t you had enough for one day?” I objected incredulously.

“This is a different Louvre, on the Left Bank. It’s our Louvre day, all day long. I thought Brooklyn girls let the man decide.”

“They have a right of consultation.”

“If you don’t like it, Red, we won’t go in.”

“ ‘Red’?”

“Did you think I hadn’t noticed?”

“I totally forgot!”

“Your mind has been otherwise occupied.”

“I can’t
believe
I forgot. What do you think? Do you like it?”

“I love every last hair on your head, I love your forehead, your eyebrows, your eyes, your nose, your lips, particularly your lips, and I love everything else all the way down to the soles of your feet. Brown hair or red, it makes no never mind. You’re gorgeous.”

“That’s a lot of things to love,” I mumbled cautiously. Was he putting me on?

“Barely enough. Less would be too little, more, lots more, would be much better.”

The taxi pulled up at a modest-looking hotel on the busy Quai Voltaire.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The Hôtel du Louvre, so named because of the view.”

“And why are we here?”

“As I said, more to love would be better. But that’s up to you.”

“Mike Aaron, it’s the middle of the afternoon!” I said, surprised into being scandalized.

“Does the time of day bother you?”

“You want to go in and rent a room and …?”

“I’m dying to. It’s the only thing in the world I want to do. Don’t you?”

“But …”

“What?”

“Is this still a date?”

“No, Frankie, this is not a date anymore, not if we go into that hotel room. I don’t know what you’d call it, but I’d call it damn close to a matter of life or death, emotionally speaking.”

“Oh,” I said, blank as a piece of glass with pure dumb happiness.

“Does that mean yes or no?”

“Kiss me first,” I temporized.

“No, I want you to decide without kissing … kissing makes you more impulsive than usual. And every time I kiss you I fall more in love, and if you don’t want to go into that hotel with me, I don’t want to be one bit more in love with you than I am right now.”

“You never said anything about love,” I gasped.

“Can’t you tell?”

“Of course not!” I couldn’t believe how indignant I sounded. “You’re always around the most beautiful girls in the world,” I cried in disbelief, “how could you possibly not be in and out of love with them all the time?”

“It just didn’t happen. Lust, yes, love no. I must have been waiting for a bumptious, opinionated, obstinate, impossible girl from the old neighborhood like you. No, not ‘like you’ … you,
only
you.”

He stopped and seemed to be thinking. I sat there, too astonished to breathe.

“It’s the
personhood
of you that I love, the human
beingness
 … the way your nutty little mind works, what passes for your sense of humor, your strong sense of values even when you’re wrong, your wacky attitude … you know who you are and you
are
who you are. I love the way you make me feel that I’m a completed person. I love the way I want to take care of
you. When I’m with you I feel that I’ve come home—home in the way everyone imagines home should be.”

“But …?” This was happening so fast I still couldn’t believe it.

“But what?”

“When we met, you were so rude, and we had lunch at the Bistroquet only because you couldn’t get hold of the girls that day.…”

“Don’t you know that love is one big, fucking, scary number, Frankie? I was hoping I didn’t feel how I felt. Even way back at the airport, I began to suspect that you were it for me. Aren’t you scared too?”

“Not even one little bit,” I said, looking in his eyes in a way that would tell him that every word I said was true. “I’ve been in love with you since your senior year in high school. I’ve never stopped. I decided it was hopeless but I still carried on.”

“Really? Is that true?”

“Of course. Half the other girls in school had the nerve to think they were too, but I
knew
I was, the real thing. You’re the love of my life.”

“I’d better be,” he said, gathering me up as much as you can in the backseat of a Paris cab. “Forever and ever, now that I’ve found you. Oh, Frankie, my overlooked, rudely treated baby. I don’t want to rush you into anything, but I graduated from high school many years ago. Don’t you think that we should do something to celebrate?”

So we did. With intermissions and catnaps, of course, all afternoon and well into the evening, together in a big bed overlooking the Seine, with street noise that made a rapturous bumble outside the double-glazed windows of our room. We didn’t talk a lot. We were making our first trip together through a landscape too intensely interesting to be interrupted by words. I can’t tell you the details, because I’m modest about things like that, but … never mind. Let’s just say that when Mike and I made love I realized that I’d never truly been with a man before.

Finally, I had to rouse myself and convince Mike
that our absence would be noticed by one and all, sewer trip or no sewer trip. We took a shower together and got dressed, congratulating ourselves on our striking resemblance to the people we’d been in the morning, even though we weren’t them and never would be again. In the taxi going back we sat collapsed against each other in silent delight. If only, I thought vaguely, if only the fourteen-year-old me had known for certain that this day would come, I could have been looking forward to it all these years. But could I have endured the slow passage of time?

As usual, the gang, except for Tinker, was gathered in the Relais Bar, near the window.

“Better not stand too near me,” Mike warned as we got out of the taxi. “We don’t want to advertise.”

“Then you’d better let go of my hand.”

“And just how were the famous sewers?” Jordan asked as we sat down. She laughed in a way I didn’t care for.

“As a matter of fact we went to the Louvre,” Mike told her.

“The Louvre?” Maude Callender inquired snarkily. “You don’t say? The Louvre
again?
Indeed? I suppose you saw the Mona Lisa?”

“No, there were too many tourists around it to get close,” I replied.

“There usually are,” she agreed. “What a clever thing to say.”

“Of course you went to the Louvre,” April snickered. “It’s written all over you. Both of you.”

“Doesn’t the Louvre close much earlier than this?” Jordan asked.

“That’s okay, Jordan,” Maude assured her, “I’ll fill you in later.”

“You can see the effects of looking at great art in their glazed eyes, can’t you Maude?” April drawled.

“We walked the whole length of the Grande Galerie,” Mike said indignantly. “It’s the Stendhal Syndrome.”

“You walked the entire Grande Galerie and lived to
tell the tale? That’s not just rare, it’s unheard of in the annals of art appreciation,” Maude laughed. “Now that was not a clever thing to say, Mike, I expected better of you.”

“We damn well did! Both ways,” Mike insisted.

“Have it your own way,” Maude smirked. “You must have found a fountain of youth in there somewhere. You both look quite … peppy. Refreshed, ten years younger, if such a thing is possible at your ages.”

“Oh, Maude, I don’t agree with you,” Jordan protested. “To me Frankie and Mike both look … wiped out, bushed … almost … 
depleted
 … congratulations, Frankie, you lucky thing, you.”

“I’m not having a drink with you cynical, filthy-minded people,” I snapped. “You’re all just jealous!”

“Ah ha! Gotcha!” Jordan crowed.

“Jesus!” Mike asked, throwing up his arms. “Is nothing sacred?”

He grabbed me and we left through the side door into the lobby. They were all laughing so hard that they were crying. I didn’t give a damn, I realized. I wanted to tell everybody, starting with the concierges, the cashiers, the waiters, the people in the lobby, the bellboys, and then I wanted the word to spread out in ever-widening circles of knowledge all over Paris—out, out, until the whole world knew about Frankie Severino and Mike Aaron and how much in love they were.

T
he last few days had been such an utter and complete shit storm that she might just as well have lunch with Dart Benedict, Justine thought. She was tired of making excuses to put him off and in the state she was in, she welcomed any diversion. She was mildly curious to find out why this man, who ran such an important and long-established agency, had kept after her to make a lunch date. Obviously he wanted something or he wouldn’t be bothering with her, but at least there was no particular agenda of
presumption
involved. Even if there had been, Justine thought grimly, Necker and Aiden had already made her feel so intensely presumed upon that any further presumption would merely fade into the general murk.

How could Necker have dared to send her that outrageously lavish piece of unwanted furniture? It was such an obvious bribe, masquerading as a gift. Everything about the little desk reeked of the kind of largesse she could expect, if she had fallen in with his wishes. It was an utterly unwelcome responsibility. Justine wasn’t at home during the day, so she hadn’t been able to get it picked up and sent back. What’s more, sending it back meant, infuriatingly enough, having it properly repacked and suitably insured since, as Aiden had pointed out, it must be exceedingly valuable.

She didn’t want to owe Necker anything! Justine picked up the light desk and carried the damnably exquisite thing into a little dark room that she never
used and tried to tell herself that it didn’t exist except as a nuisance she’d have to deal with eventually.

But the desk refused to disappear from her mind. It was as if Necker had reached out into her house with a giant hand and placed it there himself. It seemed to exist—to be alive!—in its unlit room, as inescapably radiant in her mind as if there had been a spotlight trained on it night and day. She could clearly see the porcelain plaques on the drawers with their tender, gay bunches of brilliantly painted flowers, framed by a particular shade of apple green with a turquoise tint to it. The central plaque with it coat of arms, three towers with a coronet surmounting them, was unforgettable. If it hadn’t come from Necker, she would at least have found someone to identify its first owner. Natural curiosity would have carried her that far.