The Secret Lovers (14 page)

“Paul,” she said, “where did you go yesterday?”

Christopher refolded the newspaper he had been reading and dropped it on the floor. “I had to go see a man who’s sick.”

Cathy said, coldly, “You had to sit up with a sick spy.” She bit into a croissant. “Just as you went out the door yesterday,” she said, “you had a phone call. It
was a female.”

“Females make up half the human race, Cathy. If you answer the phone, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of hearing a woman’s voice on the line.”

Cathy gave him a tight smile. She did not like his way of treating her jealousy lightly. In Cathy, it was a force, like the flow of blood to the brain, that was in play all the time. When
Christopher looked at another woman in the street, Cathy would strike him; once, in the Grand Vefour, she had diverted his attention from a slender French girl at another table by pouring most of a
bottle of Pommard into his lap. If he sang a love song she demanded to know what woman from an earlier life he was thinking about. “To be the way you are,” she told him, “not to
feel jealousy at all, to be that heartless, is a form of madness.”

“I knew the voice of this female,” Cathy said. “It was Maria Custer. We were at Farmington together. She was three years ahead of me. I thought I knew her voice. I said,
‘Maria, isn’t that you?’ And she said, ‘Who’s this?’ ‘Paul’s wife, Catherine Kirkpatrick Christopher,’ I replied. Maria went dead silent and
then she said, as if I didn’t exist, as if only she and you existed, she said, ‘Tell Paul I called.’ That was the whole conversation.”

Cathy was sitting with her back to the tall window, her hair gathering the light.

“I knew that you had been at school at the same time,” Christopher said. “Maria remembers you.”

“I’m not surprised. She was famous as a field hockey player, and she used to knock me down in practice every chance she got.”

Cathy spread jam on a bit of croissant, then placed it uneaten on her plate.

“Is Maria married?” she asked. “Does she have children?”

Christopher answered the questions. Cathy asked how long he had known Maria.

“Five years, more or less.”

“And you never thought it would interest me that you and my old schoolmate were friends? Paul, why did she call? Why did you go see her yesterday?”

Christopher returned Cathy’s steady look. At last she broke her stare and let her hands fall helplessly into her lap.

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “Maria is a lady spy.”

Christopher did not respond.

Cathy turned her profile toward him. She tossed her head as if to throw back a lock of hair; it was a gesture she seldom made, and one of the few false ones she used.

“Maria,” Cathy said, “is married to an older man, a White Russian who looks like someone in a silent movie. His name is Otto Rothchild. They live in a place on the Île
Saint-Louis that costs four thousand francs a month if it costs a penny, and he’s had a stroke or something so that he’s partially paralyzed.” She paused. “That’s just
so you’ll realize you don’t know everything.”

Christopher laughed at Cathy’s animation. She snatched the croissant from her plate and ate it, and drank greedily from her coffee cup.

“How did you find out about Maria being married to Otto?” Christopher asked.

Cathy grinned. “I have my ways.”

“Seriously, Cathy.”

She licked her fingertips. “Well, I don’t exactly live in a vacuum, you know. I’d heard from some of the girls that Maria had married an old man. And I knew she was in Paris
because people had seen her, to say hello.”

“So you hunted her down remorselessly.”

“No. I was shopping one day in the Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, looking for a scarf for me and those nice gloves I got for you, and when I turned around in a shop there was Maria. We were
eye to eye. She looked like she wanted to jump through the window for a minute, and then she smiled. We chatted away and then she said it was four o’clock and why didn’t we trot down to
Queenie’s for some tea. Trot down to Queenie’s is how she put it. These muscular women are always so arch. So we trotted. We told each other all our news. I said I’d married this
delicious man named Paul Christopher and got out all my pictures of you. She said
hmmmm
when she saw you, but she never let on that she knew you. Not a hint.”

“And Maria showed you her pictures of Otto in his wheelchair?”

Cathy shook her head. “No. After a couple of hours in Queenie’s, Maria said she was having so much fun talking to me after all those years she wondered if I was free to have dinner
at her house. She said she wanted me to meet her husband and they were having something that the cook could stretch for three, and would I come as I was. I had nothing to do except wait for you, so
I said sure. The Rothchilds have a very good cook. He, Otto Rothchild that is, did his best to be hospitable. But he really was ill, poor man. He kept lapsing into a stupor, and coming out of it.
It was sad. I don’t want to go back there.”

Christopher gave himself another cup of coffee. “When was this?” he asked.

“When you were in Germany,” Cathy replied.

2

On Palm Sunday, Cathy’s father’s horse fell early in the race. The family stayed late at the American Hospital with the injured jockey and missed the party they had
hoped to attend as victors. “Your father is positively grateful to Fernando for having broken his leg and rescued us from the Bourbon de Blamonts’ soirée,” Cathy’s
mother said. “He says the French are a young man’s vice. He likes them less and less as he grows older and older. He doesn’t understand why they think they’re flattering him
when they insult his nationality. Eleazer Kirkpatrick does not take it as a compliment to be told that he is, heureusement, not like the other Americans. I have to bind him hand and foot to get him
to go inside a French house.”

Cathy and Christopher dined at home with the Kirkpatricks and afterward watched the older couple play cribbage. Cathy’s father broke his silence only to count his cards and peg his score
on the board. Her mother had the Southern belle’s gift of releasing butterflies of wit each time she spoke. Her name was Letitia, and she and her husband were both called Lee. They were
cousins, and even before they were married they were named Lee Kirkpatrick and Lee Kirkpatrick. The male parent seldom spoke. On first meeting he had established that he and Christopher had been in
the same regiment of Marines in different wars and in the same house at Harvard; he had never asked Christopher another question. “He knows everything about you, knowing those two things,
that he needs to know,” Cathy said.

Letitia Kirkpatrick was a storyteller. “Aunt Elizabeth came to stay the week before Ash Wednesday,” she said of an aged relative. “She likes to be with us before Lent begins,
so that she can drink Maker’s Mark for her winter ailments without giving offense to the Lord.” She gave an exclamation when she saw the cards her husband had dealt her. “Eleazer
is going to be
skunked
!” she cried. “Aunt Elizabeth kept fondling your wedding photograph, Cathy, and one night, finally, she said. ‘Oh my, Lee, what a pity that you did
not require Catherine to have a white wedding as every one of our other brides has done since dear dead Ambrose Kirkpatrick came to these lands from Virginia before the Revolution. Dear Catherine
looks so much like dear beautiful cousin Eugénie.” Cathy’s father knocked peremptorily on the table and his wife counted her score, moving her peg to the last hold.

“My husband is a hateful man,” said Cathy’s mother, “who doubts the genealogy of our family. He believes in the bloodlines of horses because there are witnesses to their
acts of procreation, but he is convinced that humans lie about their sex lives. However, and what luck it is for us, Aunt Elizabeth has the family tree by heart. Eugénie
was
our
cousin through her Southern mother, and even after she married the emperor of France she never ceased to long for us. ‘I have been saving a dozen of Eugénie’s crystal
goblets,’ Aunt Elizabeth told me; ‘dear Eugénie entrusted some of her lovely things into our care after Napoleon lost everything and she had to move to England and didn’t
entertain nearly so much as she had in Paris. I wanted to give them to Catherine, but of course I had thought she would marry one of us, and I don’t know if that Northern boy she ran away
with would understand.’ Understand what, I asked. ‘That his lips were touchin’ the goblet that had been kissed by dear cousin Eugénie,’ she explained. I said if Cathy
was anything like the rest of
my
branch of Kirkpatricks she would not want a necrophile for a husband, and poor Aunt Elizabeth packed her bags on the instant. She ran wild-haired and
weeping down the drive, and I thought we’d have to send the dogs to bring her back. But she came by herself after sitting on her valise for a while under the willow tree.”

Cathy’s accent, never entirely subdued in northern schools, returned to her when she was with her family. As her mother talked, Cathy’s eyes shone with the recollection of a
childhood in a great creaking house, with packs of dogs in the dooryard and mad cheerful relations in the remodeled slave quarters in the back garden. When her father finished his game of cribbage,
she sat on a sofa with her head on his shoulder, asking for more family stories. An amiable ghost called General Wellington Kirkpatrick, Letitia said, lived in the Kirkpatricks’ stables. He
had fallen from a horse and broken his neck while recuperating from wounds received at the Battle of the Wilderness. Each year, on the night before the Kentucky Derby, the ghost went into the
paddocks and frightened the horses at midnight. “It’s one of the sights of the countryside, and relatives come from miles around on the first Friday in May to hang on the fence and
watch the horses flying around,” said Cathy’s mother. “Of course, the general is invisible.”

Cathy, fighting tears, said good-bye to her parents. They were packed to fly back to America the next morning. Christopher held her face in his hands as they descended in the elevator. Her eyes
had turned a deep bruised blue. Loneliness was, as she had always tried to tell him, a knife in her heart.

3

They moved from the Ritz to a flat in Montmartre that was used as a safe house. Christopher rose at dawn and went each day to a different meeting place, where Kamensky’s
novel, a photographic copy of the original and a typescript of the rough English translation, was handed to him by a messenger from the Paris station. At the end of the day he went out again and
gave the pages back to the messenger so that they could be locked overnight in the station’s safe.

While Cathy slept, Christopher worked on the book. He read Kamensky’s manuscript, and read it again. The Russian language flooded back into his consciousness. At the end of a week he was
able to read Kamensky’s sentences almost as fluently as he read English, and to feel the rhythm of the language.

The translation into English was the work of technicians and it had come from several hands. Christopher worked on it, as Patchen had ordered him to do, with a red pencil, restoring as best he
could Kamensky’s original meanings. The beauty of the writing could not be transposed from Russian to English. Reading Kamensky, re-creating his echoing sentences, Christopher grew to love
him.

Cathy wakened just before noon each day and went out to the market. She would come back with charcuterie and cheese and bread and fruit. She bought wine for herself and beer for Christopher. She
arranged the food on white plates, folding the cold meats, having bought them as much for color as for taste, into the shapes of flowers and animals. She liked to see Christopher’s amusement.
“What I miss, away from home, is the laughter,” she said. “You and I laugh all the time, or used to. But no one over here seems to find things funny. I feel impolite when I laugh
in public in Europe.”

The weather had turned cold again, and in the afternoons, Cathy wrapped herself in a blanket and curled her legs beneath her in a chair. The dome of Sacré Coeur rose just outside the
windows of the apartment, and Cathy gazed at it for hours on end through the blurring rain. She played the piano, softly, at the other end of the long room where Christopher worked. In
Kamensky’s book was a girl who played the piano. She was blond like Cathy, and melancholy. Christopher was startled to find Kamensky’s girl speaking in Russian to her lover a phrase
that Cathy had spoken in English to Christopher. The Russians in the novel were walking in a forest, while Christopher and Cathy in life had been standing on a beach, but the words were almost
exactly the same. “What do you want?” the real girl and the imaginary one had been asked. Both had replied, “Not what other girls want. No children, no career. I want a perfect
union with a man.”

Cathy found the mechanics of secret life ridiculous. Christopher would not let her use the telephone in the flat, or leave letters that came to her parents’ apartment lying about in the
safe house, or have deliveries made from shops. One night the messenger had been ill, and Christopher had carried Kamensky’s heavy manuscripts with him in a briefcase to a restaurant and the
theater and had gone to sleep with them on the bedside table.

“Really, Paul, it’s like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn swearing oaths in the haunted house.”

“Yes. It’s asinine. The whole idea of secret life is asinine, but if you don’t live it by these rules you make mistakes. Others are involved, and to them it’s no
joke.”

“More and more it seems to me it’s a mistake to live it at all. You can live any life you want to, Paul. You can, you know.”

“This is the life I want, not any other.”

“If this is what it is, sitting around in a shabby apartment watching it rain, I don’t see why you love it so.”

“It’s not always so tranquil.”

Christopher had finished his work for the day. Cathy crossed the room, bringing her blanket, and sat on his lap; she covered them both with the rough woolen robe. “My papa used to tell me
that my bones were filled with air, and that I was no heavier than a hummingbird when I sat on his lap,” she said. “Did he lie?” Christopher nodded. “Southern men are
perfect,” Cathy said.