The Last Time I Saw Paris (10 page)

When at last he was inside her, she knew nothing but the senses, the trembling nerve endings, the mingling sweat of love. And she wanted nothing more than to be in Dan Holland's arms.

“H
e's going with her,” Vannie said to Susie over the telephone the next day.

“Bill is?” Susie asked, confused.

“Of course not, you idiot. The beautiful handyman. Dan Holland.”

“Jeez, she's taking him with her? To Paris?”

“No, to Des Moines!” Vannie was impatient when she was rattled. “She called this morning, said not to come and see her off at the airport, she has company.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“I was hoping you would know.” Vannie sighed. “I'm gonna call Delia. I'll get right back to you.”

“Well, well, well,”
Delia said when she spoke to her, and Vannie could tell there was a big grin on her face. She might have guessed which way Delia would vote.

“So what are we going to do about it?” she demanded worriedly.

“Do about it? Honey, we are just going to wish our girlfriend well and hope that she has a hell of a time in gay Paree, to say nothing of the rest of France.” Delia was thrilled. “Surely you remember the original bleak scenario? The Second Honeymoon, the faithless Bill? Lara retracing their steps alone, cafe by cafe, hotel room by hotel room. At least now we won't have to worry about her jumping out of the window when the memories get too much for her. Remember,
she always said her honeymoon was the happiest time of her life. That everything had gone like clockwork. Perfect hotels, perfect locations, perfect weather. Perfect husband.”

“Well, I guess now she'll have something to compare it with.”

“Now she has Dan Holland to
share
it with,” Delia corrected her. “I wonder if he knows what he's getting into,” she added thoughtfully. “I mean, do you suppose Lara told him about the Second Honeymoon? And does the man realize he has a lot of perfection to live up to on this trip?” She laughed. “It promises to be interesting, Vannie. The truth about the past emerging from those oh-so-perfect memories. And also the truth about the present with the oh-so-wonderful Dan. And in the end,” she added softly, “will Lara finally have found the woman she was meant to be?”

S
an Francisco International Airport was crowded and noisy, full of tired, yelling children and anxious parents. Lara and Dan waited patiently at the counter for their boarding passes.

“The Paris flight is overbooked.” The Delta check-in clerk peered morosely at her computer. “We've put you on a flight to Cincinnati.”

Lara's horrified eyes met Dan's. Cincinnati seemed an awfully long way from Paris.

“Your flight will board in two hours, at ten forty-five, gate thirty-eight.”

“But how
could
you overbook us?” Lara demanded, irate. “I've had these tickets for six months.”

Dan raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Better just roll with it, babe. You're getting nowhere.”

The clerk slapped stickers impatiently onto their three bags. “I have no control over ticketing, ma'am.” She looked at Lara for the first time. “I assume you do want to take the Cincinnati flight.”

What choice did she have? And anyhow, why was it, Lara wondered, stuffing documents back into her bag as they walked from the desk with two hours to kill, that somehow the desk clerk had made her feel grateful just to be on a flight that would take her to Cincinnati and not Paris?

“Ohio,” Dan said, squeezing her arm cheerfully. “That'll be a first.”

“For me too,” Lara said with a regretful little sigh as he guided her toward Starbucks.

“Let's buy a newspaper, have coffee, talk about Paris, and all those other wonderful places we plan on visiting,” he added.

“And let's pretend we're not still in an airport,” she commented wistfully, an hour and three cups of coffee, plus one very solid blueberry muffin, later. They should have been on that Paris flight by now, holding hands, maybe drinking champagne, winging their way to her land of dreams. And memories. The sneaky thought occurred to her that they would never have dared bump Bill from the flight.

She was half asleep, her head on Dan's shoulder when the announcement came that their Cincinnati flight was delayed. At the same moment Lara remembered that because she had used Bill's air miles, they were flying business class and could have taken advantage of the comforts of the club lounge. What an idiot she was. The truth was, she had never flown alone before. In fact, she had hardly flown at all. Her travel had always been vicarious, through Bill.

Dan edged his way through the crowd toward the desk, stepping carefully around a child playing on the floor. He wanted to ask how long the delay would be and explain the urgency of their connecting flight to Paris.

He came back ten minutes later with the gloomy news that the flight should be boarding in half an hour, which would leave them only forty minutes to catch the Paris flight.

He sank into the hard metal seat next to her and stretched his long legs. “They said no problem, this happens all the time.” Lara threw him a skeptical
glance and he took her hand reassuringly in his. “It'll be okay, sweetheart,” he promised. “We'll get to Paris, all right.”

Another half hour passed. It was noon and they were still in San Francisco International. Lara slumped deeper in the hard chair, contemplating the end of her romantic vacation, then finally,
at last,
the flight was called, and they filed aboard like grateful sheep, herded by ticket takers and flight attendants. “We're connecting with the Paris flight,” Lara told the pretty blond flight attendant who came to offer her a glass of champagne. “But we're so late we're afraid we'll miss it.”

“Don't worry, this always happens,” the attendant told her. “You'll make it.”

As the aircraft doors were closed and they taxied out onto the runway and finally took off for Cincinnati, Lara hoped she was right.

 

The flight grew bumpy as they approached Cincinnati. Fierce thunderstorms were plaguing the area and they were descending, tightly buckled, through a mass of dense gray cloud, lurching their way through to a faultless landing. Dan grabbed Lara's hand, already on his feet as the flight attendant made an announcement.

“For those passengers with connecting flights, please see our red-coated representatives, who will meet you at the gate.” The blond attendant threw them a tired smile as they ran past her, through the jetway into the terminal.

There was only one red-jacketed assistant and he was surrounded by anxious passengers. “Paris,” Lara called out, frantic. “Please …”

He caught her eye. “Paris has already departed.”

“Departed?”
They stared at him, horrified.

“Go to the information desk; they might be able to reroute you through London or Frankfurt.”

“Frankfurt?”
Lara's vocabulary had been reduced to single words, thankfully not yet the four-letter kind, but they were already running through the terminal in search of the information desk.

“You don't understand,” she said plaintively to the indifferent assistant, who had obviously heard it all before, and too often. “I made these reservations six months ago. I should be on the flight to Paris
now.”

“Lady, I have no control over the weather,” the man said coldly. “We might be able to get you out on a flight to Frankfurt tonight, at eleven forty-five. You can connect with the Lufthansa Paris flight there. It'll get you into Paris at one-fifteen tomorrow.”

Lara glanced despairingly at Dan. “But that means we lose a whole day in Paris.”

The clerk shrugged, indifferent. “If you want, you can wait until tomorrow evening, see if we can get you on that flight.”

“What do you mean,
see
if you can get us on it?” Dan demanded.

The clerk tapped at his computer. “All flights for the next week are fully booked, sir. We would have to put you on standby. Meanwhile, we have two seats on the Frankfurt flight at eleven forty-five tonight, one in coach, one in business. Take it or leave it. And I might as well tell you, so many flights have been delayed or canceled because of the weather, there are no hotel rooms left in Cincinnati.”

They stared silently at each other. It was a ten-hour
flight to Frankfurt and they couldn't even travel together. “We'll take it.” Dan sighed.

He put a comforting arm around Lara as they made their way up to the Crown Lounge with another six hours to kill before their flight. “I'm sorry, honey. We'll soon be in Paris, though, you'll see.”

 

They sat in the lounge, nibbling on unwanted sandwiches, drinking yet another cup of coffee, watching lightning stabbing through the ominous sky. I'm exhausted, Lara thought, and, darn it, I'm still only in
Cincinnati.

It was hardly a great start to a romantic adventure. She stole a glance at Dan, immersed in a baseball game on TV. This was surely God's punishment for an adulterous woman, she thought, especially one who's taking her lover on her Second Honeymoon. I should never have left Carmel, never have asked him to come with me. And besides, she just
knew
this would never have happened to Bill.

A couple of hours passed. Dan went off to check at the desk. After a lengthy conversation with the woman in charge, he returned smiling, with the first miracle of the day. They had seats together in business class.

The second miracle happened when their flight was called, and the third miracle when, despite the weather, they actually took off on time.

They smiled delightedly at each other, as they left Cincinnati behind.
“Finally,”
Lara said, relieved.

The words
at last
and
finally
are becoming regulars in our conversation, she thought.
At last,
twelve hours after we left home, we are
finally
on our way to Europe,
and she pushed the nagging reminder that they should have been in Paris by now to the back of her mind. She was with Dan, and they were on their way to Paris.

Well, not quite, but at least they were en route to Europe. Even if it was only to Frankfurt.

L
ara was wide awake the whole ten-hour flight, suspended in space and time with Dan dozing uneasily in the seat next to her. She glanced lovingly at him. He looked so
young.

She knew she should have told him this was meant to be her Second Honeymoon, but somehow she had thought it better he didn't know, and now it was too late.

She thought about the last time she had flown to Europe, with her brand-new husband.

They had been married the day before with Lara in traditional white—a fluid satin column of a gown with a long train it had taken four little pages to manage. She remembered it had been a size six and thought regretfully there was no way she would have been able to get into it now, though her daughter, Minnie, certainly could have. Lara had worn her glossy dark hair piled up to accommodate a circlet of fragrant gardenias, and with her winged eyebrows and golden brown eyes and the sweet glow of youth, she had looked even more like Audrey Hepburn.

Bill, whom she had only ever seen in a doctor's white coat or jeans and sweaters, had looked like a handsome, boyish stranger in a gray cutaway, his curly dark hair brushed flat and a white rosebud in his buttonhole.

Her mother had insisted on the works: three hundred
guests, the local country club for the reception booked a year in advance, all the little female cousins as flower girls, plus the Girlfriends as bridesmaids. Dinner and dancing, wedding cake and champagne, photographs and speeches. By the time it was all over, she and Bill had been eager to escape to their hotel room, not because they couldn't wait to fall into each other's arms, but because they couldn't wait to fall into bed. They were exhausted from the tension of the weeks leading up to the big wedding, and then the following day Bill had slept on the flight to Paris, just the way Dan was now.

Lara had been too excited, too brimming with happiness to want to miss a minute of it. She had sipped champagne and solemnly eaten every scrap of airline food because she couldn't remember eating a thing at her own wedding and she was starving. She had watched the movie while every other person on the flight slept. She remembered it to this day.
Diary of a Mad Housewife,
it was called.

Perhaps the title had been an omen, she thought now with a wry smile. A prediction of things to come. And if the truth were known, some of those endless weeks when Bill was away and she was left alone with two small children, it had come true. When the kids jammed the faucet and flooded the bathroom and water was pouring down the stairs and she was panicked because she didn't know where the stopcock was to shut it off; and when Minnie hit Josh over the head with a toy train and there was blood everywhere and she had to rush, frantic, to the emergency room to have him stitched up; and when the rent was due and she was counting pennies and buying Hamburger Helper, eking things out.
Those
days she might have qualified for the mad-housewife role.

Then, Bill didn't earn much. He worked all hours and was often away, and her own life was dominated by her young children and the strain of holding their precarious financial life together. But, they had been happy then. Hadn't they? Yet now, recalling the stress and the overwhelming responsibilities that had rested on her young shoulders, Lara couldn't imagine how.

Her eyes lingered on Dan's sleeping face. His head drooped and she moved closer so that he might rest against her shoulder. She saw that everyone else was sleeping or watching the movie and was glad there was no one to observe her infatuation with her lover and to comment on their age difference. Then she reminded herself sternly that she shouldn't give a damn what anybody thought.
Oh, but you do,
the small, treacherous voice inside her whispered, and she sighed, ashamed. And, anyhow, was it infatuation? Or was this love? How was she supposed to tell?