Hidden in Paris (18 page)

They had a routine now. Evenings after homework, the children were allowed to turn on the TV. Annie and Lola tiptoed into the family room to watch the children in the act of gazing adoringly at a forty-two-inch flat screen TV that Lucas had selected and installed for them. Maxence and Laurent were curled up on one sofa with a beatific expression on their faces, and Paul, bearing the same expression, was lying on the rug. On the other couch were Lia and Simon, she peaceful, he snuggled beside her, sucking avidly on his thumb. No sign of the latest tantrum she had entertained them with just an hour before. As Annie predicted, Lia adapted to school rapidly. The bulk of Lia’s obnoxious behavior was reserved for the times when her mother was around to suffer from it, as though she must be punished for some unknown crime. Lia would seem fine until Lola appeared, at which point she would melt into angry tears issued of a perfectly fabricated drama that everyone but Lola could see right through. This baffled Annie. Lola was so patient—so much more patient than she was—so sweet, so utterly beyond reproach. She reasoned that maybe this was what daughters did. Her boys were the opposite. They did ask for things, of course, but never made demands. They knew to get into line the minute she raised her voice. They made her laugh when she looked sad, and tiptoed around her bad moods. Were the boys easy because she was a great mother? Was it because there was a solidarity born of their common loss? Or was it, as she had told Lola before, that she was scary. And if she was indeed scary, was that necessarily a good thing? “I love this machine,” Annie told Lola pointing to the TV. “It’s the great unifier. Why wasn’t I told about this invention earlier?” She turned on her heels and walked to the kitchen to make dinner hoping that Lola would stay behind. The last thing she wanted to deal with was what Lola called a cooking lesson and what she called misery. Lola had no instinct, no natural inclination when it came to cooking. But already, Lola was following her. “Why don’t you sit on the couch and relax with the kids. I’ll make dinner.” She told Lola.

The answer was no, unfortunately. In the kitchen, Annie began to work on her
endives au jambon
, washing the endives, arranging slices of ham, grating gruyère and preparing the béchamel sauce. Lola was in charge of the vinaigrette, a simple enough task she had instructed her on several times. Lola scratched her head before the salt and pepper grinders and the jars of vinegar, olive oil, and mustard asking: “Which one goes in first, again?”

“When do you plan on calling Mark?” she asked, that question often resulting in Lola running away and giving her some freedom.

“I, well, not, I didn’t, I mean, not yet. So it’s vinegar first?”

There was also the more bothersome question: Why was Lola pretending to be in the United States. Why this charade? Annie was wondering how to phrase her question when Lia barged into the kitchen.

“I’m
not
watching stupid French cartoons. Maxence is choosing all the channels. Mom! Tell him!” Lola turned to her daughter with a blank expression. “Mom! Wake up!” Lola fumbled with a response and looked at Annie apologetically. Lia was already raising her voice. “Mom! Do something. Maxence is being an asshole!”

Annie gave Lia a piercing look. “Well, pardon your French, young lady.”

Lia stood, defiant. “Well, he is!”

Annie turned to Lola, who averted her eyes, which Annie took as an invitation to set down the rule. “Deal with it, Lia.”

Lia’s faced turned pale with fury. Annie watched Lia’s anger gather energy, her gaze darting around the kitchen like she was looking for something to break, and a second later she was charging toward Lola, pushing her hard with both hands. “I hate you!” she screamed.

“Lia, get out of this kitchen this instant,” Annie said. Lia looked defiantly from her mother to Annie, waiting for Lola to come to her rescue. Annie smiled inwardly. If Lola could not take a stand with her daughter, she was not about to take one with her. Lia murdered her with her eyes, stormed out of the kitchen and slammed the door.

“What was that?” Lola said with a little laugh. If someone had disciplined her children, Annie would have seen red, but Lola sounded apologetic. “All this change will be good ultimately.”

Did Lola mean leaving Mark, moving to France, or having boundaries set by a stranger? It was as good as any entry into her preferred subject. “Does Lia ask about her father? What do you tell her? What did the judge say about visitations?”

“I’m definitely going to call him.”

“The Judge or Mark?”

“Hm...both.” Lola presented her bowl. “How much mustard?”

She felt an urge to torment her. “Eyeball it.”

Lola examined the contents of the bowl, added a minuscule amount of mustard, and pushed the bowl in front of Annie. “Like this much?” Annie made a gesture to add more, and Lola added a tiny amount. “More?” Lola asked. “More? Still more?”

If Lola could be annoyingly persistent, so could she. “I’m just wondering, I’m just worried that your husband--”

“The one I’m worried about is Althea,” Lola interrupted according to her own tactic of diversion. “She’s so quiet.”

“I know. Isn’t it fantastic?” she answered, but Lola gave her a reproachful look. “At least she’s eating with us. For a few days, she was eating in her room. Lucas might be a bit much for Althea at mealtimes. You know how he is, the sexual innuendoes, the jokes, the flirting.”

Lola beamed at the mere thought of Lucas. “He’s a riot. And cute. And so devoted to you!”

“Lucas is a great friend,” Annie said, suspiciously.

“A friend who practically lives with you and can’t keep his eyes off you,” Lola chuckled.

“Seems to me that his eyes are going more in the general direction of your breasts.”

“I know...my breasts...” Lola sighed.

They were interrupted by Maxence who barged into the kitchen just as Lia had and said: “Lia keeps switching channels and putting my favorite show on mute!”

Apparently Lia had taken the situation into her own hands. “You guys figure it out or I’ll pull the plug.”

“It’s not fair!”

Annie grabbed a box of dry pasta from the table, and aimed it at Maxence like a remote control. “You’re on mute too now. Go!” Maxence left the room grumbling. She turned to Lola: “I don’t think it’s Lucas that Althea’s trying to avoid. I think it’s my food.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday she said she’d eat with us as long as she could eat her own food. She said mine doesn’t agree with her. Weird, but fine with me. Better than having her bring a heaping plate of
Linguini a la Carbonara
to her room and shoving it down the toilet behind my back like she did the other day.”

“She did?” Lola seemed shocked.

“The pancetta bits refused to be flushed. I guess their high fat content brought them back to the surface of the john’s water, an interesting piece of trivia. I told Althea that I noticed her tossing food down the toilet, that I wasn’t a complete numskull.”

Lola thought for a moment. “Tossed it before or
after
eating it?”

Annie froze. She had the vision of Althea putting fingers down her throat. “Wow. I
am
a numbskull! That’s terrible! We have to talk to her.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say a word about it,” Lola said as she slowly stirred the contents of her bowl, pausing every so often to observe the result. “Food issues are control issues.”

“So we should let her have full control over starving herself?”

“Those things get better on their own. I had one of those phases. Models all do.”

Annie now had the vision of Lola bent over the toilet bowl. “Let’s talk to her.”

Lola’s voiced slowed, and she turned her face away. “Bringing unpleasant things up will only make the atmosphere uncomfortable.”

Was Lola giving her a subliminal message about her own unpleasant things she’d rather not bring up? “Goodness, the last thing we want is an
uncomfortable atmosphere
, so I’ll shut up.”

“It’s a difficult subject for her I’m sure.”

“And if I start really opening my mouth about what’s on my mind, it won’t be pretty,” Annie said.

Chapter 13

The force of the first blow vibrated his entire body.
She was full of shit is what she was
.

Larry’s voice said, “Take it easy. Take it slow.”

Mark ignored Larry and hit the heavy bag with a right, then a left. Larry held the bag with his hairy paws. The guy had hair all over his back. A fucking disgrace. Mark alternated, quick right, quick left. A maid and a nanny while he busted his ass making a living. His face, his arms, and his body were slick with sweat as he punched. He felt the impact in his stomach, felt it in his jaw. Beads of sweat gathered down his neck. The gloves were shiny and red. The place stank like a fucking barn. Hit. Hit. Sweat squirted out of his body like a dog shaking after his bath. And that expression on her face? A professional victim. Hit. Hit.

Larry held the bag tighter. “Take it easy man, you gonna bust a knuckle.”

He didn’t drink. He didn’t screw around, and it’s not like there were no opportunities. Mark pummeled the bag. One two, one two. He was a happy guy. That’s what he fucking was. Mark let out a roar, and Larry moved away from the bag. Mark hit, hit, and hit again, out of control.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Larry said.

He was happy. Mark was fucking happy with what he had and she was wrecking everything.

Lia, Maxence, Laurent, and Paul walked through the school gate and Lola followed the four backpacks on legs until they made the turn into the schoolyard. Lia turned and waved to her, and a minute later she was gone. Just like that. Lia had entered school today again without the slightest drama. Could it be possible that Annie’s strict rules and unwavering consequences suited Lia better than the respect and freedom she was accustomed to? Lola kneeled next to the stroller. “And you,” she said, readjusting Simon’s hat. “You’re turning out to be a model citizen.” She kissed Simon on his cold cheek. “You gave Mommy a whole night’s sleep.”

She pushed the stroller, light enough to float above the sidewalk. She had thrown all principles—all Mark’s principles—to the wind and had let Simon sleep in bed with her. Annie said that women had been doing that from time immemorial, and what was the big deal. Last night she had put him in his pajamas and lied down next to him in her bed and woken up in disbelief after eight hours of uninterrupted slumber. No screams, no bad dream, no night terror, just sweet sleep. She should have listened to her own instinct sooner and claimed her right to soothe her own child. So what if she was “creating sleeping issues.” Weren’t they knee deep in sleeping issues already? She pushed the stroller toward the post office rue Singer, took an envelope from her pocket and opened it. She read the postcard it contained one last time.

Dear Mark, The weather is warming up here in New York. I hope this postcard finds you well. The children are doing fine. Simon slept through the night yesterday! We miss you, but I really need this time for right now.

I will continue to send you news weekly. Love. L.

She slid the postcard into the envelope and added the note for Alyssa.

Dear A., Please mail as usual. How will I repay you for your help?! Love, L.

She jotted down Alyssa’s address in Manhattan, dropped the envelope in the slot, and walked away from the mailbox harboring a complex mix of guilt and satisfaction. By the time she reached rue Duban, Lola’s postcard to Mark was a vague, unpleasant thought that added to all the other unpleasant thoughts she worked so hard to ignore.

She entered the indoor produce market rue Duban and strolled along the crowded market
aisles, marveling at the sights, the colors, the life of it. She wanted to get flowers for the house and took her time looking. She settled for an armful of pink peonies, some still in bud form, some already open and fluffy like cotton candy. She paid the price of gold for them. Mark would be surprised one day to find out she had money stashed away from her modeling days. That was probably a residue from what Mark called her “poor person mentality.” She had never told him about the account. It wasn’t a lie per se. It was an omission, her secret garden.

The fishmonger beamed his toothless smile at her when she bought half a kilo of shrimp for lunch. She knew her shrimp now, and favored the tiny grey ones so full of ocean flavor. People at the market and the bakery knew her now. They made conversation; they recommended their best products. She waited in line at the crèmerie and removed empty, washed glass jars from her straw bag. Simon saw his mother hand over the containers and receive her daily supply of fresh yogurt. He waved his arm at them. “
Yayout! Yayout!
”

“Simon! Your first French word,” Lola exclaimed.

She sat on a public bench outside the market, peeled off the jar’s thin metal seal, ran her hand around the bottom of her backpack, retrieved a plastic spoon, and licked it clean. She put a spoonful of raspberry yogurt on her tongue. “You’ve earned your
yayout
, sweetheart.” Here she was, feeding her toddler raspberry yogurt on a cold but clear morning in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Here she was, without make-up or acrylic nails, sitting on a stone bench, watching Parisians walk by with their arms filled with produce and bread. Here she was, light. Light as air. She felt tightness in her throat, that urge to cry. Was it sadness or was it relief? Could it possibly be both?

She ached for Mark far more than he would ever miss her and ache for her. Mark would be fine, really. Oh there was familiarity in that pain. It was the sweet pain of loving him, a sweet pain in feeling victimized by him even. In her life with Mark, Lola had grown to picture herself as someone who failed at everything and enjoyed nothing.

She could not remember a self that did not involve Mark’s vision of that self and the consequence, which was for her to feel hurt, neglected, unappreciated. Mark did not do this to her; most of the time, she did this to herself. It was a strange habit, a compulsion. Every decision, every emotion of every instant began with imagining what Mark would say or what Mark would think. But was Mark to blame? Now that she lived with Annie she had to wonder, because now there was a variation on the compulsion. It had become: How would
Annie react
? What would
Annie say
? What she needed to get to was: What do
I
alone think? What should
I
alone do? With the ultimate question being: Who am
I
?

She pushed away those thoughts. Right at this precise moment in time, she didn’t have a problem. The day was beautiful, Simon had slept through the night, and Parisians carried baskets brimming with produce from the market. Her Present was Paris. Her Present was her budding friendship with Annie and a new way to spend each day, which made so much more sense to her. This of course was temporary, this lightness, this break from the fear of disappointing Mark, this freedom of movement away from that tentacular Bel Air house. It was temporary but she needed to focus on the moment and just enjoy the fact that she breathed differently here. She even looked different. Her hair was bicolor now, black at the tip with the blonde roots apparent, which gave her a punkish look, an image of rebellion she liked. And she had stopped plucking her eyebrows, those perfect arches that betrayed tension and self-involvement. Here, no power was taken away from her. Here, she could let her baby crawl into her bed in exchange for a full night’s sleep. Here, she cooked and did the dishes and didn’t feel like a
bump on a log. Here, she took care of her own children, and they were doing better than with the nanny!

Those thoughts of Mark were like the Sword of Damocles at times, but only at times. She realized there was something obtuse about the way she had just wished Mark away, or how strangely successful she was at avoiding thinking about disagreeable things such as the consequences of her disappearance, as well as what the future held.

Althea lay in bed, dressed in her coat, boots, and scarf. She was torn between the obligation to call her mother, something she had not done in days and felt guilty about, and the obligation to get out of the house so as to not appear strange. Those, she knew, were no obligations at all. She could stay like this and not make another decision all day. She could stay on her bed and daydream about Jared until night if she wanted to. She didn’t move when she heard a tap at her bedroom door.

“Althea? It’s Lola. May I come in?”

She felt too apathetic to get up. “Come in,” she said.

Lola open the door and looked at her lying in bed with a coat on. “Were you busy?”

“Do I look busy?” she said. She had not meant to sound antagonistic, yet she did not feel sorry she did.

“Do you want to do the makeover?” Lola asked, dangling a large Vuitton make-up case before her.

Althea wanted to say no, but instead took off her coat and followed Lola to the bathroom they shared but that Althea had come to consider as her own. When she had first entered it, the clutter had been a shock. A cornucopia of seashells and polished rocks marred every surface. The shelves were heavy with glass jars filled with sand and marked
Biarritz, Cannes, La Baule
, and bottle after sticky bottle of various bubble baths. The bathroom looked clean on first inspection, but Althea had soon noticed mildew on tiles and dull grime hidden beneath the sink, the claw foot bathtub and the toilet. She had spent hours on her knees scrubbing the bathroom tile by tile with an old toothbrush. She had rearranged the blue and white room, polished the jars, even cleaned the seashells and rocks. It was Annie’s house, maybe, but the bathroom had become Althea’s territory. She liked to spend hours bathing in the massive tub or combing her hair as she sat at the antique vanity imagining she was lost in an entirely different place in time.

Lola, barefoot and in T-shirt and yoga pants emptied the content of the make-up case on the vanity. What must have been over a thousand dollars worth of beauty products—Dior foundation, Max make-up, Crème de la Mer, Estée Lauder anti-wrinkle creams, and twenty or so tubes of lipstick—fell noisily onto the wood. Althea sat down in front of the mirror and Lola began touching her hair, which surprised Althea and made her cringe almost visibly.

“I think you’re a spring,” Lola said, pulling Althea’s hair away from her face and holding it together with a clip. “You have beautiful bone structure and your eyes are gorgeous. And that hair! Your skin is dry. You need to consume more fatty acid. Omega, fish oil, and vitamin D. It’s the new fountain of youth.”

The warmth of a human body so close to hers felt terribly uncomfortable. Lola’s face came to within inches of hers, beautiful despite the thin wrinkles, the skin around her neck a bit tender and loose and betraying her age. Althea watched her face in the mirror as Lola added pink on the cheeks, red on the lips, and mascara. “You know, French women are no better than the rest of us but they know how to make the absolute best of what they have. That’s their secret. We have this idea that blonde, busted, and thin is what’s attractive, so we become blonde, busted, and thin. French women are individualistic. They would rather look unique than fashionable.” Lola was combing Althea’s hair now, softly, like Althea had done with her girlfriends when they were little and would go to each other’s house. But when it was Althea’s turn to have the playdate at her house, her mom refused. She didn’t like other children coming over. Althea wasn’t invited much after a while.

“Maybe they have good self-esteem,” Althea said.

“Annie says that French women always have seduction in mind. They are always open to temptations and romance.”

“It seems like too much effort.” She was becoming a rag doll between Lola’s hands. She felt bad about it somehow, but didn’t want Lola to stop.

“This is a new country and a new city. You can reinvent yourself. Find your inner Parisian, have a little fun, be playful. And never go out without lipstick, it will cheer you up, it’s automatic. And,” she added, smiling at herself in the mirror, “with the gorgeous Jared sleeping in the next room, it should give you some incentive, no? Lordy lordy, is he hot!” she said as she sensually applied lipstick to her own parted lips. “
Voilà
,” Lola said, pleased with her work. “You look just like a Barbie doll.” She waved at the mountain of make-up in front of Althea. “You can keep my make-up. It’s a gift.”