Hidden in Paris (16 page)

“Whatever you say, Romeo!”

Johnny loved dinner parties and she had cooked for as many as twenty-five people almost every weekend. She had felt more comfortable in the kitchen while witty conversations in French darted around the dining room table. As intimidating went, Paris’s advertising world was right up there with the Third Reich. Elitist, power hungry, and ruthless. She was left in the dust, among the internal political attacks and the
sous-entendus
.

But dinner that night, the largest dinner party she had hosted and cooked for since Johnny’s death, was different. She was not retreating to the kitchen. The kids monkeyed around at the grown up table instead of being fed first and then sent to their bedroom. They drank several bottles from Lucas’s family cellar, a wine collection that rested mostly undisturbed in the family’s manor cave in Normandy, and the wine lifted spirits the way only fantastic Bourgogne could. The conversation, a blend of French and English had turned to everyone criticizing the United States, and Annie had taken on the role of its staunchest supporter. She who had been so critical of it while she lived there. Lola fell into easy laughs at everything anyone said. Johnny’s dinner parties had always been filled with beautiful women as dependent on men’s attention as if it were air or water. Annie had hated them, so why then could she not manage to hate Lola? Was it because Johnny wasn’t there? Or was it that Lola listened to Annie intently and guffawed at her jokes?

Althea was the only one not speaking. She had stopped all manic talk since that day at the park. It was as though she allowed herself silence at last. She did not take part in discussions and did not seem very interested in what was said, but she did hide in her room as much. She hid in quietness and this suited Annie just fine. Now that Althea didn’t try so hard, her face had relaxed and showed more vulnerability than tension. There was to Althea’s face a romantic beauty, a charm that had not been apparent before. Charm was something so hard to put your finger on. You could be gorgeous and have no charm. You could be ugly and have charm. Everyone in this room had charm. Jared, of course, had a brooding charm. Even Lucas, that old rascal, was full of French upper-crust charm. Everyone was so darn charming, except, alas for herself.

After dessert, the children left the table to watch the brand new television delivered and installed that morning. Once they had left, Lucas, who was always mindful of the children’s ears, began regaling the adults with a renewed repertoire of salacious jokes and juicy bits about past hunts and fishing trips with ridiculously inbred relatives, all the while extolling the virtues of France. The thin line between patriotism and bigotry so often crossed in her own country was not something Annie suffered gladly. “The golden age of France died with your glamorous ancestors,” she reminded him, just to see where it would lead them. “France is finished. Now all it’s known for the world over is negativism and snobbism.”

Lucas raised his gaze from his glass. “Annie,” he said, “you are the Queen of understatement and verbal restraint.” Annie smiled. Bourgogne helping she had a glimpse of him from Lola’s standpoint, or from any woman’s standpoint, really. Lucas looked pretty good in his black slack and grey polo shirt. His face was handsome, his smile charming as heck.

“Look,” she said, “I love my French children and I like my French cheese on my French baguette, but collectively, the French are inbred and the society has been stagnating for eons.”

Lola giggled in her Bourgogne. “From my perspective, the French are as attractive, as charming, as poetic as their reputation.” She smiled at Lucas. “Besides, they value the enjoyment of life. That’s a form of intelligence Americans don’t have. We go so fast. We accumulate, spend, consume. We have abundance and wealth, yet our lives miss the richness of being able to appreciate the moment.”

Lola’s platitude gave Annie satisfaction. “It’s not because the French take their
joie de vivre
very seriously that it makes them decent people. Actually, doesn’t that make them pretty selfish?”

Jared played with his knife and the breadcrumbs on the white tablecloth. “Are you sure you don’t want to pack your bags and return to that great country of yours? Or maybe they won’t take you back. You are so French now, so nihilist,” he said.

“That’s why I blend in so beautifully in France. Being in a good mood is considered socially unacceptable here. Be optimistic and people look at you like you’re a simpleton.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” Lola said with a pout.

“Neither is it even remotely true,” Lucas answered, unruffled.

But she had hit a raw nerve in Jared. “How can you be so misinformed?” Jared said. “Please remind me, you received your education where? Ah, yes, in
America!
”

“Education, of course. That wild card! You French are such intellectual snobs!”

Lola raised her glass. “I, for one, intend to learn as much from the French as possible.”

Jared took a cigarette and offered his open pack around the table. “So, you haven’t answered my question, Annie.”

“Please smoke outside. I’m enjoying my life in Paris on the sidelines of all this, as a voyeur, and I’m witnessing the unraveling of the French.”

Jared folded his napkin, placed it on the table and walked out of the dining room without a word. Lola and Lucas whispered to each other and Althea went nose-diving into her plate. Annie wondered if she had gone too far. Through the window, she saw Jared on the front steps of the house, his wide shoulders silhouetted, then his profile as he lit his cigarette. He took a long drag and tilted his head toward the dark sky. When Annie looked up, she saw that Althea was watching Jared too.

After dinner, Annie held onto Lucas’s arm as she accompanied him toward the door in a way that only she could see as sisterly. When Annie drank, she became a tad seductive, Lucas had noticed. But he knew better. She leaned against the front door, in the semidarkness, her hand on the doorknob.

“So, that was a nice evening, huh?” she said and she nudged him with her shoulder and stayed there. “It’s nice to see you being the life of the party. Something tells me that you’re not impervious to Lola’s charm.”

Annie was so short that when they stood next to each other like this, she had to lift her chin up to look at him. He had the urge to lift her up toward him. “A lovely dinner,” he responded. “But I’m only coming to see you, as you know.”

“Oh, come on. It’s blatant that you’re smitten.” She looked at Lucas expectantly, her neck stretched up to read his expression. “Come on,” she cajoled, “admit it.”

Lucas stiffened, wondering for the hundredth time why women were in general so easy to get into bed, and why he became so thoroughly inept when it came to Annie. “I’m just being friendly,” he said.

“You don’t have to apologize for flirting with her. She’s having a grand time,” Annie mused, stepping even closer to him, close enough for him to smell her perfume—a cheap perfume she bought in
grande surfaces
, something musky and wonderful, something full of promises. “If I were her, I’d have surrendered to your charm right then and there,” she added. In the dark of the hallway, with the lamppost shining through the window as sole lighting, things seemed possible for an instant. “Alas,” she said, stepping away from him suddenly and opening the front door, “you’re going to have to try a little harder. Lola’s convinced that she
loves
her moronic husband. She is so wrapped up in her lousy marriage that she wouldn’t be able to spot a decent man if he came crashing down on her head.”

Not unlike yourself, Lucas wanted to say. “Perhaps you spend too much energy thinking about your renters,” he said instead.

She looked vexed. “I’m concerned, that’s all,” she announced. “I’m concerned for Lola, and I’m concerned for Althea, as a matter of fact. It’s what we call compassion.”

The thought occurred to him to ask her to be concerned about herself, to be concerned about him, but there was no good place for this to go.

“Maxence has renamed Althea ‘Madame de Gloom,’” Annie continued sweetly. “Did you notice she’s got a strange way of eating?”

“No.”

“Sometimes she eats and eats. Other times she doesn’t even come down for dinner. She says she is not used to French food, it doesn’t agree with her. But to eat nothing at all? Don’t you think she’s skeletal as it is?”

Lucas stepped outside. ”Let me know if you need help with Madame de Gloom and Madame...” He looked for a word, “bimbo.”

“You’re being unfair,” she said, visibly pleased. “Lola’s down-to-earth, not the snob you’d expect to find in someone so...” she paused, looking entirely disingenuous, “perfect.”

The conversation was back on them, always other people. He wanted Annie close to him again, flirting with him, or did he imagine this? “She is gorgeous, and quite relaxed,” he agreed.

Annie nodded gravely, but Lucas could tell she was fuming. “A little
too
relaxed. You know what she’s been doing with her ex? I know there’s a restraining order and all that, but she’s been sending him postcards, through a friend of hers who lives in New York so he won’t know she’s in France. I think the later he finds out, the more chances Lola might have a wounded rhinoceros to deal with. I know that’s how I’d react.”

“Still,” Lucas said, “does he deserve to be cut off from his children? Am I the only one who wonders about that?”

“Every time I bring it up to Lola—which, believe me, I do—she says she’s going to write to him and spill the beans.”

“Spill the beans?”

“Spit it out.”

“Spit, ah yes,” he said, having no idea what she was talking about. It was late now. The alcohol was wearing off; the window of opportunity was missed, if there had ever been one. “If I were you,” he said, “I would look into Lola’s story. Beans and all.”

“My business is to bite my tongue, which does not come naturally to me.”

“Those are your words, not mine.”

Annie came close again, nudged him, and whispered against his neck. “Honey, I can keep quiet when I need to. I have my little secrets, you know. Don’t think you have me all figured out quite yet.”

Flustered, he changed the subject. “I.. hum.. I hope bringing Jared here was a good idea.”

“Are you worried Jared will seduce Lola before you do?”

He had an epiphany. “Are you upset about the attention she is getting?”

“No. But I notice a lot of animosity coming my way.”

“Animosity? Me?”

“Yes. I’m making a living. I didn’t sell the house. You were wrong, and it pisses the hell out of you. How do you like them apples?”

“What are you talking about? What apples?” he said, baffled. And Annie pushed him out of the house and closed the door.

After dinner, Althea removed her clothes and folded them into the small cabinet. Everything fit exactly. She wrapped herself in the terry cloth robe and lay on her bed, waiting for the house to become silent so she could have the bathroom to herself. Tonight again, she waited until it was too late to call her mother. If her mom was angry with her or sad that she was in Paris, she did not say, but the phone calls to her mother filled her with dread.