Destiny (50 page)

She drank two glasses of wine, and refused a third. When the waiter addressed Edouard by his title, she glanced up at him with that level blue-gray gaze, but registered nothing more. She might have heard of him, she might not; he had no way of telling.

When they had finished their meal and were drinking their coffee, she put down her cup and looked up at him.

"This place is very famous, isn't it?"

"Very." Edouard smiled. "In the twenties and the early thirties it was the great haunt of writers and painters. Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford. . . . Here and at the Coupole— there's great rivalry between them still. Only now—"

He paused, glancing across at a noisy group in the comer. "Now they vie more for the attention of film stars and singers and fashion models. The writers go elsewhere—the cafes on the Boulevard St. Germain, for instance. Deux Magots—Sartre goes there, and Simone de Beauvoir. ..."

"I'm glad you brought me here. Thank you."

She leaned back in her chair and looked carefully around the huge mirrored interior, at the waiters in their long white aprons, at the dazzle of people. A man at a nearby table raised his glass to her with a smile, and she gave him a cold stare. Edouard leaned forward.

"You've not been here before?"

"Oh, no. But I want to learn about places like this."

She spoke with complete seriousness. Edouard's eyebrows rose.

"You want to learn about them?"

"But of course. And other places too. And things. So many things."

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She lifted her hand and began to count items on her slender fingers, a little smile hovering about her lips.

"About cafes and restaurants. About food. About wine. About clothes —beautiful clothes, like that woman over there is wearing. About paintings, buildings, books. About cars. Houses. Furniture. Jewelry. All those things." She raised her clear eyes candidly to his face. "I expect you would find that hard to understand. ..." She paused. "Have you ever been hungry—really hungry?"

"Very hungry, I suppose—yes, once or twice."

"I feel hungry for that. For all those things. To know about them. To understand them. I—well, I grew up in a very small place."

"Is that why you came to Paris?"

Edouard looked at her curiously, for a note of emotion had crept into her voice for the first time.

As if she were aware of that, too, and regretted it, she smiled quickly. "One of the reasons. And I've been working hard. Do you know what I do every morning before I start work, and every evening when I've finished?"

"Tell me."

"I walk around Paris, and I look at things. Markets. Galleries. Houses. Churches. And shops, of course. It's rather difficult to go into the very grand ones, because I don't have the right clothes, but I look in their windows. I look at dresses, and hats, and gloves, and shoes, and stockings. I look at handbags and silk underwear. I've been to Vuitton, and Hermes, and Gucci, and yesterday I stood outside Chanel and Givenchy and Dior —I'd been saving those. You can't see any clothes there of course, unless you go inside, so I made do with the nameplates." She gave a wry smile.

"I see." Edouard, touched and amused, hesitated. "And of all the things you have seen, which did you like the best?"

"That's difficult." She frowned. "At first everything seemed perfect. Then I began to know what I didn 't like—things covered in initials, things with too much gold, things that . . . that proclaimed themselves too much. But best of all—yes—best of all, I liked a pair of gloves."

"A pair of gloves?"

"They were very beautiful gloves." Her color rose a little. "At Hermes. They were very plain, the softest gray kid. Just to the wrist. They had three tucks there." She indicated the place on the back of her hand. "And they had a small flat stitched bow, just there at the top of the wrist. And they were beautiful. I love beautiful gloves. So did my mother. She must have had dozens. ..."

"I see." Edouard looked at her solemnly. The gray-blue eyes met his defiantly, as if she dared him to mock her. He glanced down at the white linen cloth.

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"And jewelry," he said carefully. "Do you want to learn about that too? Do you look in jewelers' windows?"

"Sometimes." She lowered her eyes. "I have looked in yours. It is yours, isn't it, in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore?"

"It is indeed."

"I went there two days ago. And then Cartier's." A mischievous glint came into her eyes.

"And which display did you prefer? Mine, or my rival's?"

"To be truthful, Cartier. But I'm so ignorant. I know nothing about stones, nothing about settings. ..."

"Do you know which stone you prefer?"

"Oh, yes! I know that. Of course. I Uke diamonds."

"They're not necessarily the most valuable. . . ." He watched her closely. "A perfect emerald—a dark green emerald, which is very rare now, can be worth more."

"Oh, it's not a question of value. " A little scorn crept into her voice. "I like diamonds because they are clear. Without color. Because they are cold and hot at the same time. Like fire and ice. The diamonds I looked at—" She hesitated. "It was hke looking at hght. Into the heart of light. You probably think that is stupid."

"Not at all. I think precisely the same. Do you know that the diamond has one very curious property—something that makes it unique among stones?"

"No."

"Do you know how a diamond feels when you hold it in your hand? It feels cold. Ice cold. So cold it bums your skin."

"Fire and ice?"

"As you said. Precisely."

Their eyes met for a moment, and held. Edouard felt his mind loosen and spin, had the sensation for a second that he was falhng from a great height, a long fearsome free fall, heady, exhilarating, and also terrifying. King of cups; queen of diamonds . . . the memory of Pauline Simonescu's card readings flickered into his mind and then was gone.

She also experienced something; he could see that. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, she drew in a httle quick breath, as if in surprise. For an instant she looked startled, then wary. Slowly, Edouard reached across the table and rested his hand lightly over hers. It was the first time he had touched her, and it unleashed in him a violent perturbation of feeling, more intense than anything he had experienced since he was a boy. He had wanted her from the moment he saw her; now he felt his body surge with a desire so intense he trembled.

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He had a good instinct for self-preservation, honed to perfection over the years. Now, quickly, he withdrew his hand and stood up.

"It's late. I must take you home."

She looked up, apparently unmoved by his abruptness, and then slowly rose to her feet. Calm in the corolla of her beauty, she followed him from the restaurant, and climbed into the soft leather seat of the Aston-Martin. During the drive back, she did not speak once, but sat there quietly, apparently relaxed, gazing out at the streets and boulevards. Edouard, a powerful man used to recognizing power in others, usually in men, sensed it now in her. He could feel its emanations: these were as discernible to him as a perfume in the air. He glanced toward her and felt his flesh harden and leap; the wide lips, the high full breasts, the long slender hne of hips and thighs. Her slightest movement spoke of sexual promise, infinite delight. And yet her eyes seemed to him both mocking and disdainful, as if she knew the power of her own beauty, and half-despised the immediate response it awoke.

He slowed as they approached the brightly' ht cafe where she had said she worked, and she straightened.

"Would you drop me off here?"

"Let me take you back to your house."

"No, here would be better. I have a very bad-tempered concierge." She smiled. "It's only a couple of streets. I'll walk it later. I need to see the owner anyway—to check my schedule tomorrow."

She turned to him, and held out a long slender hand. "Thank you. It was a lovely dinner. I enjoyed myself very much."

She shook his hand solemnly, and Edouard cursed the heavens and his own apparent inability to say one coherent word. He felt as if he wanted to ask her to marry him. Or go home with him. Or go away with him. Or something. Anything.

"Do you work here every day?" he finally managed as he helped her from the car.

She looked at him with a slow smile. "Oh, yes. I finish work around six. Good-bye."

She turned without another glance, threaded her way through the tables outside, and disappeared into the cafe.

Edouard stared after her, wondering if he had the strength to drive away from that place and never go back, and knowing he had not. He turned back toward his car. He was aware, dimly, of faces and voices and laughter from the crowded tables on the terrasse, of an ordinary world going on somewhere else. A pretty girl glanced in his direction, but Edouard did not see her. On the far side of the terrasse a small plump and ugly man, sitting alone, also looked up, and watched him attentively. Edouard did not see

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him either. He was thinking that this woman was eighteen years old. Where had she learned that absolute assurance, that apparently cahn knowledge of her own sexual sovereignty? Had some man taught it to her —and if so, what man, where, and under what circumstances?

He groaned aloud, climbed back into the Aston-Martin, drove at high speed back to St. Cloud, and there attempted to drown her memory in a bottle of Armagnac, and a night without sleep.

In the morning he sent to Hermes, and bought the pair of gray kid gloves. Around the finger of one of them, he slipped a sohtaire diamond ring. The diamond was a fifteen-carat stone, graded "D," the highest classification, for purity of color, and "IF," internally flawless, for clarity. It had been cut by a master; it burned with a blue-white fire; it was the perfect marriage between nature and art.

He put gloves and ring back in their box and closed the lid. Then he waited, in feverish anxiety, for six o'clock to come.

The second night, he took her to dinner at the Coupole. Her manner was unchanged. She accepted his arrival outside the crowded cafe without question. She was calm and polite. As before, she answered his questions, but volunteered Uttle. She asked only the most neutral questions in return. None of the usual woman's subterfuge, to which he was accustomed: no questions subtly designed to ehcit information about his private Ufe; no attempt to discover whether he was married, or whether any other woman held sway. She spoke to him about his work and his professional hfe; she asked him questions about Paris, about France and the French. She gave no sign that she was aware of the sexual magnetism Edouard felt, and he—reeling from the waves of it—desperately tried to make himself as calm and detached as she was.

He forced himself to look at her coolly, as he might have a potential employee. She was wearing a plain cotton shift that evening, of a gray-blue color close to that of her eyes. No jewelry, just a very ordinary cheap watch, which she shook occasionally, because, she said, it sometimes stopped. She had very lovely hands, with long slender fingers, the oval nails cut short and unpolished, hke a schoolgirl's. She sat very straight, and there was an exceptional stillness about her, an absence of vivacity that could have been dull, but which in her case was powerfully mesmeric.

Once or twice, looking at her closely, Edouard wondered if she had lied about her age. She could sometimes look much younger than eighteen, like a solemn child unaware of her own eroticism, a child in a Victorian photograph. At other times, she looked older than she said, hke a woman in her

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twenties, in the prime of her beauty. Often, especially when she looked at him directly, the two impressions—of innocence and of sensuality—overlapped. Then, he found himself looking into the grave and lovely face of a well-brought-up young woman, a young woman who might have attended a convent school, who had led a sheltered life, and whose pure and steady gaze aroused in him sensations and thoughts and imaginings that were anything but pure.

Then, the immediate response of his own body and mind shocked him deeply; the strain of puritanism in his nature battled with his own strong sensuality; he imagined making love to her, and hated himself for the seduction of the images that ricocheted through his mind. To his own dismay, he found the male and female roles to which he was accustomed were reversing themselves. It was he, despising himself as he did so, who heard himself asking questions designed to prompt personal revelations. It was she who gracefully but firmly turned all those probing questions aside.

It was impossible to look at her dispassionately, he thought. His mind attempted to make judgments, but the judgments of his mind were drowned out by the clamor of his senses. She was not even wearing scent— she smelled of soap, of freshly washed skin and hair, of herself To Edouard it was the most intoxicating perfume he had ever known.

Eventually, when he was in a state of turmoil that those who knew him or worked with him would have imagined impossible, he abruptly suggested they should leave.

"Very well."

Their eyes met; neither of them moved; Edouard's mind blurred.

"I could take you home. Or—if you preferred—we could go back to my house at St. Cloud. It's just outside Paris."

His voice trailed away. The gray-blue eyes regarded him levelly. Edouard felt a whole series of idiotic and embarrassing disclaimers surge through his mind. He wanted her to understand—this was not a calculated lead-up, not a routine move in a routine seduction, he had no ulterior motives: quite simply he could not bear to think of another evening without her presence.

"Thank you. I would like that."

He drove them back very fast, with music playing, and as he did so, he felt a rising exhilaration. The speed and the triumphant music of the Mozart quartet seemed to him to bridge the silence between them, so he felt a sense of perfect communion. She knows; she understands, he thought incoherently and triumphantly.