Hidden in Paris (27 page)

Lucas paced around the kitchen. “Is this new?” he said.

“What’s new?”

“Your clothes?”

She shook her head, feeling terribly embarrassed, like she had been caught in the act of being vain. “Nah,” she answered. Lucas was getting a tad hunchbacked with age, but to be objective, he was still a pretty handsome guy. That’s how nature was so unfair. The Sean Connery Syndrome is what she called it. Ameliorate versus deteriorate, the unjust advantage man gets over woman as age ripens one and withers the other.

“You could be wrong about leaving your door open,” he said. “You just could be wrong! And what happens then?”

“There’s nothing of value in this house except for your god-awful TV.”

“
My
TV?” Lucas choked on the injustice. He stirred the air with wide arm gestures. “I don’t care about robberies. I care about some maniac,” which he pronounced maniackeh, “coming to...I don’t know...”

“A rapist?” Annie pondered. “Now of course the upside is that I’d finally get laid.”

“Don’t say things like this!” Lucas said, horrified.

She looked up from her cookbook at last and flashed him an utterly innocent look. “Now what did I say?”

Lucas stopped pacing and crossed his arms. “Are you telling me the reason you leave your door open is that you want sex?”

She shrugged. “No one’s exactly banging on my door to...bang me, so why not?” The conversation was turning to a direction that had very little to do with the unlocked door.

Lucas uncrossed his arms, tapped the side of his cheek as though he was deep in thought. “Are you saying that all that stands between danger and a locked door is sex?”

Annie challenged him, raised her chin with apparent relief. “Are you finally offering your services here? At last! I thought you would never offer.”

In the kitchen, a spring breeze gently moved the muslin curtains, and Annie heard the chirping birds that were taking over her blossoming garden. What in the world was she saying?

Lucas’s eyes smiled with the kind of blazing gaze that only Frenchmen can muster without commanding an immediate slap across the face. “It would be my pleasure,” he said.

It was the way he said it. With that voice and the smirk, she found herself cooking from her head to her toes. A deeper shade of crimson than anything Althea could have produced. Annie sprang to her feet and advanced towards the sink to hide her face and that stupid blush. “Yeah, right, anytime!” she muttered.

Lucas walked backward out of the kitchen. “I... have to go. I’ll lock the door behind me,
d’accord
?”

“
D’accord
, whatever,” she yelled back.

She sat back down, and read the same line in the cookbook twenty times, smiling to herself like a nincompoop.

Chapter 20

Althea instinctively began to shadow Jared’s rhythm, like a mother resigned to getting sleep only when her baby does. She first fought the self-discipline that had always dictated she rise and go to bed early, but after a few days of staying up all night with him, she surrendered to going to sleep at sun up and not rising until the early afternoon. When they came back from their night in the city, Jared accompanied her to her room then went to his. If he fell asleep easily or not, her own sleep was uneasy, her ears vigilant for the familiar stirring in the next room, the moment when he would wake up sometime after two in the afternoon. Through difficult dreams where she was at war with the world, she heard him take showers in the bathroom, dress, walk down the stairs, and leave the house. After he was gone, she was left to wait for him. She passed the time by taking interminable baths, experimenting with Lola’s makeup, working the eyeliner with increased expertise, drawing on everything she could put her hands on. She waited impatiently for the times when she could find herself alone in the house. Then she felt free to move about and inspect the bedrooms, the closets, inside the refrigerator, the content of trashcans, cupboards, laundry baskets. She thought of what she would change, what she would clean, what she would keep and what she would throw away if this were to be hers and Jared’s house. In Lola’s room, there weren’t any more letters in the trash, but in Annie’s trashcan she was surprised to find strange new things. Today a pair of men’s shoes, the next day a man’s hat, photographs, even a watch one day. This bothered her. She had preferred Annie’s compulsion to keep her dead husband’s belongings. She herself had a small stash of things that Jared had left behind in her room: a T-shirt, an old métro pass with his photograph, an empty lighter which she hid under her bed in the darkest corner next to the wall.

She liked being in the kitchen alone the most, boiling water, making and sipping tea and feeling the twists and turns of hunger traveling through her body. While the water boiled in the teapot, she passed her fingers over shelves sticky with honey, oil and crumbs. In the back of the shelves were small bottles, walnut oil, truffle oil, and tiny jars of mustard, maple syrup, broken pepper grinders, Asian spices, Tagine mix, flour in paper bags. She climbed on chairs to peer through deeper discarded layers of hardened packets of brown sugar, expired cans of beans and corn, two hundred Euros in a tin can, and little glass bottles she opened one by one and smelled. They had pretty names:
vanille, essence d’amande, eau de rose, eau de violette
. Some were full, some so old the contents had evaporated and all that was left were thick smelly substances at the bottom. She was fascinated with every corner of the house, the smell of mildew and food, the dust, the mess, the discarded objects, the abundance of useless things, the dough rising on the counter top, the fabric littered around the sewing machine, the seedlings growing under windows, everything in progress, nothing ever completed. She felt the burning desire to put things away, to discard, to clean, to make it perfect, to finish things for Annie. But this was not her house. She was not allowed.

Jared did not need a house, she thought. He might need a place to sleep and bathe, but the rest of the time, he was in motion. What was Jared doing between the time he woke up in the afternoon and sundown when he came back to the house to eat with her, an occupation she now thought of as ‘feeding time’? She wished she could ask him that question, but such was not the nature of their relationship. But what was the nature of their relationship?

Was it a relationship?

What she ought to do, while she waited for Jared, was call her mother. But this simple act was beyond her capacity. All she could do was think of calling her mother and marvel at the relief she experienced from not calling.

When the house filled with noise again, she retreated to her bedroom, sat at her desk, and doodled on Post-Its, bits of construction paper leftover from the children’s homework, even cigarette paper and the backs of subway tickets.

A few nights earlier, she and Jared were sitting at a bar. While Jared spoke with an acquaintance in a French much too rapid for her to follow, she had doodled on the back of his beer coaster. She had felt Jared’s eyes on her hand. “
Tu dessines bien
,” he said. You draw well. This was a statement, not necessarily a compliment, neither was it a mark of surprise. She did not see him pocket her drawing, a jumble of branches and birds, and she was shocked to find it pinned above her desk the next day. “
Tu ne jettes rien, d’accord
?” he told her. Don’t throw anything away. “You exhibit, now.” So now she kept her doodles and scotch-taped them next to the first one and watched her wall come to life in a way that somehow made her proud.

Around dinnertime, they had a ritual. She waited in her room and Jared tapped at her bedroom door. He looked happy when he entered, smelling of cigarettes and coffee and carrying a tray with their dinner. Here too she had resigned to follow his cue. This would be her only meal of the day. They ate it as they sat cross-legged on her bed, the tray of food between them. Jared ate but mostly watched her eat. When he was not satisfied with the way things were going, for example if she took too small a bite, or if she slowed down her eating, he would take his fork and food to her lips. She agonized about every bite and worried about the food that would be digested before she could get rid of it in the bathroom.

She wasn’t sure what to make of Jared’s obsession with food and began to hope it meant that he loved her. She wondered what would happen if he did not come. She wondered if she would be too embarrassed to go downstairs and ask for food herself.

Lola sat on the edge of her bed next to Lia in the girly pink room, under the canopy sprinkled with silk daisies. Lia was inconsolable. Her face was in her hands and her thin shoulders moved with each silent sob as Simon, seemingly oblivious, nudged coins between the cracks of the old wood floor and under the rug.

She wanted to caress Lia’s hair, but stopped herself—Like Mark, Lia had trouble expressing emotions other than anger—and waited. She hoped this was about a fight with the boys. She hoped it was about school. She hoped it was anything but the topic of Mark, a topic avoided in an unspoken agreement. Why did Lia no longer bring up her dad? Did her daughter understand it all but refuse to ask for fear of getting her worst fears confirmed? Was Lola tricking herself into thinking that Lia and Simon weren’t traumatized?

Lia lifted her head finally, and looked at her through tears and fire. “You’re so mean!” she cried.

Up until she met Annie, Lola believed it was a good mother’s job to be her child’s emotional punching bag. If not your mother, then who? Now she wasn’t so sure how to react to Lia’s anger. “What did I do this time?” she asked. Her sarcasm was really Annie’s sarcasm, but in her own mouth it sounded awful.

Lia looked at her in disbelief. Tears sprang from her eyes. “Why aren’t we going home? Why can’t we see Daddy? Why isn’t Daddy calling? Why aren’t we calling him?”

There it was, Lola thought. There it was. Words throbbed to get out. Lia needed to know that Lola was the victim! Lia needed to know that it was in fact Mark who had abandoned them by not loving them the way they needed to be loved. But really it was all so unclear. Who was the victim and who was the perpetrator? It took every ounce of her strength not to fall to her knees and beg Lia and Simon for forgiveness. What little strength she found at that moment she extracted from herself by thinking of Annie, who knew better than to frighten her children with her own weaknesses.

Simon walked toward the door. “Where are you going, love,” she asked.

“I play with the boys,” Simon answered casually as he left the room. Lola saw it as a parable of women’s condition. Boys went into the world and women stuck around and wrung their hands.

“Lia, these are very good questions,” she said, her words like cotton in her mouth. “You know things between grown-ups get very complicated sometimes. Your daddy loves you and your brother so much, but right now, he and I are taking some time apart. We’re taking a little break from each other.” Those were vapid words she would have considered an insult to Lia’s intelligence if she hadn’t been the one forced to use them. “It’s just temporary,” she added, not knowing if this was even a possibility any more.

“I want to go home. Why aren’t we going home? We’re not going to stay here forever, are we?” Lia cried. She was working herself into a tizzy. Girls. Lola had never been like this, maybe there lay the problem. Not that she wasn’t feeling hysterical herself, panicked suddenly, because, though theoretically Lola never gave Mark a way to reach them in France, had he
really
wanted them, had he
really
wanted
her
... For a man of such means and resourcefulness, there must have been ways....

“Don’t you like it here?” she asked emptily. “We’ve made good friends...we’re pretty happy here, aren’t we?” That was, of course, beside the point.

“This isn’t our real home,” Lia spat. “They aren’t my real friends. I hate French people. I want to see Daddy.” Then she added, her voice calmer, “Do you think Daddy could come here and live with us in France?”

Lia liked it here!
“Honey!” Lola mechanically braided Lia’s hair. But Lia didn’t want physical contact. She might have needed it as desperately as Lola needed it, but not now, and not from her mom. She cringed and moved away, and Lola hated her daughter for a flashing instant.

The hope, she realized now, had been that Mark would crack. That he’d crack and run back to her. She had read too many romance novels. Mark’s aloofness broke her heart. She was much more comfortable with his tantrums that gave her the illusion of attachment. In more ways than one, she was the one who was “cracking.”

“It’s your dad and me, Lia. We’re not getting along. We both love you guys so much.” Lola cringed at her own cliché. “But there was so much screaming and fighting at home.”

“Daddy is always screaming at you,” Lia said. She wasn’t crying suddenly. “Are you going to get a divorce?”

Lola swallowed, “We haven’t used that word,” she lied. “We’re taking some time apart to figure things out.” Lies and clichés.

“Rebecca at school, her parents are divorced,” Lia said matter-of-factly.

“That’s...that’s true.”

“But she sees her mom every weekend.”

“Her dad takes care of her?”

“I don’t want Daddy to take care of me. I want you to take care of me, and Simon. I don’t want to go back home to Bel Air and never see you anymore.” She burst into tears again. “Is that what would happen?”

Lia had just articulated Lola’s deepest terror. Her throat constricted, she was only able to let out a small “You, you’re going to see me every day.”

“I want to see Dad every day, too.”

“Of course, baby. Of course you do. And he wants to see you.”

“I think he doesn’t care about me so much,” Lia wept.

“That’s nonsense. He’s crazy about you!”

“But he’s not crazy about you, is he?”

The comment hurt Lola terribly. She had believed for so long that she and Mark couldn’t live apart, that they loved and needed each other despite the indignities, that the family was the priority to both of them. “I...just don’t know...what he thinks. Sometimes, loving someone is good, but not enough. You have to treat the people you love right. That’s what I want Daddy to do. Treat me nice.”

“I hate when he screams.”

“It’s scary,” Lola agreed.

“Did you tell him that?” Lia raised her shoulders and her mouth made a grimace of contempt that made her look like the teenager she would one day become. “What’s the point, he never listens.”

Lola felt small. “Not as much as I’d like,” she whispered.

“
I’ll
tell him then.” Lia jumped to her feet and faced her mom, her expression tight with determination. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll tell him that we’ll come back if he stops screaming all the time. That’s what I should tell him.” Lola, felt too overwhelmed to answer. Lia continued, “I’ll write him a letter, that way he can’t interrupt!”

Despite her anguish, Lola burst into laughter. “You know your father pretty well.”

“I’m a good negotiator, too. Remember when he didn’t want me to go to that sleepover at Joshua’s, and I convinced him, and he said I was a good negotiator, remember?”

“I remember.”

“Okay. I’ll do it right now.”

Lia went to Lola’s desk, took a pen and paper and began writing. She watched Lia and felt elated. They had communicated. This was for real. But as Lia wrote, hunched at the desk, Lola understood what she had to do next: Follow her child’s example and face Mark.