The Cousins (17 page)

“How strange,” Olivia said.

“It’s not strange really when you see how the stories reflected what society demanded of its children and its adults during each period. A bedtime story is basically written as a learning tool for a malleable little child. Some of them can make you very angry.”

“That’s so interesting.”

“I was originally going to write the book with my girlfriend. She was going to do the girls’ stories and I was going to do the boys’ stories. But we weren’t getting along and then we broke up, and she didn’t want to write it at all. By then I’d gotten interested in her side of it too, so I decided to research and write the whole thing.”

“I’m impressed,” Olivia said. She wondered why he and his girlfriend hadn’t gotten along. He was so unusually attractive, and so bright, and had such a sweet way about him, that if she were his age, which she guessed to be no more than thirty, she would have had a tremendous crush on him. Maybe he was hard to live with. Maybe the girlfriend was difficult. Maybe he cheated. Certainly he would have opportunities. You never knew about people’s private lives. No one would suspect what hers was like.

“Would you like a croissant?” Marc asked. “They’re good here.”

“I’ll share one with you.”

“And another coffee?”

“My head will fly off. French coffee . . .”

“Put hot water in it,” Marc said. “A lot of people do.” He ordered the croissant and coffee and hot water.

What a very nice body he had, she thought; the hard, smooth muscles under his T-shirt, the slim waist. She wondered if he worked out or was just lucky. He probably liked sports—maybe skiing in winter, rollerblades in the park in spring. Here in the sunlight he was not as pale as he had always seemed indoors; his skin had a fresh, fair color to it.

He put some hot water into her coffee for her and cut their croissant neatly in half. “I’m so glad we met here,” he said. “I always wanted to know you better. You fascinated me every time I came to your office.”

“I did?”

“The beautiful doctor in the white coat. It’s your domain.”

“And rightly so,” she said lightly.

“Exactly.”

“Well, here I am,” Olivia said. “What do you want to know?”

“Tell me a story your mother or your father told you or read to you as a child that influenced your life.” He fixed her with his beautiful moonstone gray eyes and a mischievous expression. “Inspired you or warped you, either one.”

“You’re bad.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, my mother read to me a lot.”

“What sticks in your mind?”

“I don’t know,” Olivia said. “Let me think. Meanwhile, tell me what got you interested in these stories in the first place.”

“You’re evading.”

“I thought you would find it flattering,” she said teasingly. “Most men like to talk about themselves and their work.” I’m flirting with him, she thought, surprised. But also she was reluctant to reveal too much about herself. After all, she was the authority figure back in New York. What he was asking her to remember and share could turn out to be very visceral.

“I’ll tell you how I got interested,” Marc said. “Two years ago when I came to Paris with my parents to visit my grandmother, my mother began reminiscing about the books her mother had read to her as a child. There was one that had always upset and frightened her, and she said it still upset her to think about it. It was the story of a little girl who accidentally knocked over a vase that belonged to her parents, and broke it. When her mother asked her if she had broken the vase she was afraid of being punished, which she knew she would be, and she denied it. So every day her mother asked her again to confess, and when she wouldn’t, her mother gave away one of the little girl’s dolls.

“Day after day her dolls were taken away, until finally the only one that was left was the little girl’s very favorite one, a humble and ragged and much-loved doll she had owned since she was a baby. No punishment could be as bad as losing that one last doll. So she confessed to having broken the vase.

“My mother couldn’t remember how it ended. She thought that since the little girl had already been given her punishment, for breaking the vase, and for lying, and all her other dolls were gone, the ending was that she got to keep the one. She said it also might have ended where the mother returned the dolls to the little girl, but she couldn’t remember. To me that sounds more logical, since cautionary tales had so-called happy endings. But all she did remember was that the book made her miserable, and that her mother read it to her often, and that for the rest of her life she always told the truth.”

“What an awful story,” Olivia said. She was upset for the little girl in the book and for the child who had been his mother. She thought of her own mother, and of Grady and Taylor and Big Earl. “Children are so helpless,” she murmured.

“My mother asked my grandmother about it, and she didn’t know what the fuss was about. She told my mother: ‘But you always loved that book.’ ”

And Grady never fought back when his mother hit him, Olivia thought. “How did the book end?”

“We don’t know. Their copy is long gone, and they don’t remember the name of it. It’s probably out of print—this happened over fifty years ago. If I decide later that I really need to know, I’ll go dig it up somehow. But my book will be written with anecdotes and case histories as well as actual text, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is how it affected her as an adult. She always remembered the fear and the lesson. You understand my grandmother didn’t mean to torment her. My grandmother was probably a little crazy, but so were all the mothers who read that book to their children and expected them to learn from it how to be good little girls. In my grandmother’s house you didn’t break the rules. You still don’t.”

“I’ll tell you mine,” Olivia said.

He leaned forward. “Good or bad?”

“Bad. My mother made this story up. She said it was my favorite, and I remember asking her to tell it to me. I couldn’t have been older than four. It was the story of Spindle Legs the cow.”

“Spindle Legs?”

“Well, you know cows have skinny legs.” As she started to tell it she could picture herself again as a four-year-old in her pajamas, her mother a comforting presence in the lamplight, explaining to her what life was about.

“Spindle Legs was the best milk cow on the farm. She gave more milk than any other cow there. From time to time she would see the boy cows, and the girl cows who didn’t give any more milk, being put on a cattle car to go away to see the world. ‘I want to go, too,’ she told the farmer, ‘I want to go away to see the world,’ but the farmer wouldn’t let her. Then she noticed that the cows who were allowed to go away to the city were the ones who couldn’t give milk anymore. So Spindle Legs stopped giving milk. Just stopped. And finally, sure enough, she was put on a cattle car to go to the city. How exciting! But when she got there she discovered that they had all been taken to a slaughterhouse, where they were going to be killed.

“When she realized they were going to kill her she was very frightened and she begged: ‘Please, don’t kill me, I promise I’ll give milk again. Lots of milk!’ So her life was spared, and Spindle Legs went back to the farm, where she gave more milk than any other cow for the rest of her life.”

Marc looked aghast. “Who wrote that story, Ilse Koch?”

“No, my mother.”

“Wow.” There was a pause while he looked at her with renewed interest and sympathy. “I can see how it must have affected you.”

“In more ways than I can imagine,” Olivia said.

“What was your mother like?”

“Afraid of everything.”

“Conventional?”

“Very.”

“Wanted you to take your preordained place in society and be an overachiever at it?”

“Exactly,” Olivia said. “She never dreamed I’d become a vet.”

“She didn’t like that?”

“Not much. She didn’t like animals.”

“She didn’t seem to like people much either,” Marc said.

“I never thought of that,” she said. She realized that she hadn’t ever told Roger the story, it just hadn’t occurred to her. “How did you get to speak English with such an American accent?” she asked.

“I’ve been in New York ten years.”

“Still . . .”

“In the summers, when I was a teenager, my parents sent me to stay with a family in Iowa. They felt it was typically American. Plus, I have a good ear.”

“Ah. And can you actually support yourself as a writer?”

“Miraculously, yes. I write for magazines. And I have simple tastes at the moment.”

“I should read more magazines,” she said apologetically.

“You haven’t missed very much. I’ll send you some tear sheets of my better pieces.”

“I’d love to read them.” She glanced at her watch. She hadn’t realized it was so late. “Uh-oh, I have to get Roger for lunch.”

He put some money on top of the bill in the saucer. “Thank you for spending some time with me. It was interesting and fun.”

“It was for me, too.” They looked at each other. It had been so long since she’d had an exciting conversation with a new person—a new man—that she didn’t want to leave. She felt different: more alive. “I wish I could stay longer,” she said reluctantly.

“I wish you could, too. Maybe we can meet in New York sometime. Have coffee. Talk some more.”

What would that be, she thought, a date? No, it’s not possible. He knows I’m taken, and he’s so much younger than I am. He’d probably like to become friends. I wouldn’t mind that at all. There’s something about him that’s like fresh air. And I do love looking at him. “Maybe we can,” she said.

She and Roger had lunch at the Relais Plaza in their hotel, watching the chic and elegant people. “So what did you do while I was sleeping off my excesses?” he asked pleasantly.

“Bought your present. And I ran into a client of mine in the antiques store, so we went for coffee.”

“Who?”

“Marc Delon. The dalmatian.”

He thought for a moment. “Oh, the French kid.”

He’s not so French and he’s not such a kid, Olivia thought. “Yes.”

“That’s nice,” Roger said. There was something in his tone that was almost condescending, and it annoyed her.

He said I fascinated him, that I’m beautiful, that he wanted to know me better, she thought. He’s writing a book. And he knows something about me that you don’t know. “Yes,” she said, “it was,” and her tone was as casual as his.

In the afternoon they walked, stopped for an apéritif at Ma Bourgogne in the Place des Vosges, a cafe they had always liked, overlooking the little square park and the picturesque old houses that were now apartments, and came back to the hotel to get ready for dinner.

Olivia put on a sand-colored linen dress that looked wrinkled because it was supposed to. “I wonder what Aunt Myra would have to say about this,” she said.

“Didn’t you bring a travel iron?” Roger said, mimicking Aunt Myra’s voice. “Don’t they have pressing at your hotel?”

“Oh, is that the new look?”

He had ordered a bottle of champagne sent to their room, and Olivia gave him his present. She had wondered what to write on the card, and finally settled for a very banal
All my love, Olivia
. He was pleased with his gift and kissed her fondly, not passionately. They drank a toast to future birthdays, to be spent together in interesting places, put the rest of the champagne into their small refrigerator to drink later and took a taxi to the Tour d’Argent.

Looking at Roger across the table in the golden light, and out at the view of Notre Dame’s illuminated stone gargoyles, and at the Seine moonlit below, Olivia thought how lucky they were. They had enough money and they were healthy, they could go where they wanted and do whatever they wanted to. They cared about the work that made it possible for them to do these things, and she had funds of her own besides. They had loved each other so much. Why couldn’t he have left well enough alone?

“What are you thinking?” Roger asked.

“That we’ll never have to worry about winning the lottery,” Olivia said.

They had a lovely wine with the famous duck, and a bottle of champagne with dessert. Their dinner was very expensive, but Roger insisted on paying for it himself even though it was his birthday. At the next table there was a man a little older than Roger, with a woman Wendy’s age and obviously not his daughter. They were looking at each other seductively, the young woman’s long fingers playing with the stem of her wineglass in a way that seemed erotic. Olivia looked away.

Would things always remind her of his betrayal, even when they were trying to get close?

They went back to their hotel, and got ready for sleep, although neither of them was sleepy. They were both a little nervous. The night maid had closed the drapes, turned down their two beds and made the room lighting soft. Roger opened the bottle of champagne they had started before they left. “You looked very beautiful tonight,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He came close and put his arms around her, but this time it was not as a cuddly bear. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you.”

He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the table, and then he began to kiss her. They hadn’t kissed like this for such a long time, and so much had happened, that there was something about it both familiar and strange. He slipped her robe off her shoulders, dropped his and, still kissing her, led her into her bed.

My bed, not his, Olivia thought. There must be some symbolism to this. But then, he always liked to do it on my side.

How long I’ve wanted this, and now . . .

Roger was kissing and stroking her, ready; and she caressed him, but not so ready; and then unexpectedly the image of Marc Delon slid into her mind. The body in her arms was Marc’s, taut, slim and strong, and the face she saw behind her closed eyelids was his, fresh and young, his long black hair hanging down over his forehead and touching her breasts like gentle feathers. She was suddenly, instantly, aroused. The fingers exploring her were Marc’s, and the tongue, and when he entered her she was wet and throbbing, trying to pull him further into her body, straining against him, wanting more, more. . . .