Paris, He Said (24 page)

I remember now that it was more than a few weeks that Caroline and I were seeing each other; it must have been closer to six or seven. André was in New York during some of this time, looking for locations for our new gallery. When he returned to Paris, I had trouble meeting his eyes for a few days but forced myself to do so. I also made sure that I had errands and appointments outside the gallery whenever he planned to be there for more than a couple of hours at a time. This was not unusual—I often had to be away from rue du Louvre for one reason or another, and I knew that if I wanted to continue working with him, I had to stop seeing Caroline. It would have to be a gentle break though, nothing too violent or dramatic that would have her swearing revenge on me too. Ideally, I wanted her to be the one who called it off. By invoking my guilt, by reminding her of some of André’s good qualities (his spontaneity, his tendency not always to jump to the most obvious conclusion, his playful sense of humor), I was able to make her pause and reflect, to feel some of the shame I also felt. It was possible that my tactics would send her running back to their marital bed, and although I wasn’t thrilled about this prospect, our liaison needed to end before I did long-term damage to Vie Bohème and the trust we’d built among art collectors and the emotionally fragile, often insecure artists who were our cakes and ale, our raison d’être.

Before you make up your mind about me, slashing an
X
through the box of my murky character, you should know there is more to the story. My daughter was one of the women with whom André had his own idylls while he was married to Caroline. Jeanne-Lucie and André of course tried to hide this fact from me, but if you live long enough and are at all vigilant, most truths will be revealed, whether or not you’d like them to be.

This was about five or six years ago, before Jeanne-Lucie had met Daniel, or maybe just after, but they weren’t a real couple yet, I don’t think. To a certain kind of woman, André is quite appealing: he is attentive, confident, and gives the appearance of having quite a lot of money. He does have some, but at the time he and Jeanne-Lucie were meeting for trysts at the apartment she lived in off of Avenue de Wagram, one of the spokes protruding from the Arc de Triomphe—an apartment, incidentally, that I was paying for—a fair portion of André’s money was Caroline’s from her success as a musician, and from her father’s willingness to connect us with artists we were interested in representing.

Upon learning that one of Jeanne-Lucie’s lovers was my married business partner, I had a few different reactions. On the one hand, I was outraged and alarmed—What was she thinking? Where was her conscience? What if André, as unlikely as this was, ruined her chance for future happiness with a more suitable man? What if Caroline became unhinged and, in a jealous fury, murdered my daughter? (And her own husband too, though I wasn’t as worried about that.) Conversely, I also felt something close to admiration. What chutzpah my daughter had. She had found herself drawn to an older, attractive man and had decided to enjoy him. She was twenty-two, André thirty-five. She told me later, after their fling was over, that she had never seen a future with him—not at all. She had wanted to have fun, and he had made her feel good about herself. In her view, it was uncomplicated. Though it was also risky. She professed to feel respect for Caroline and did not intend to let her find out. I don’t think Caroline ever has, unless André himself has told her, but I doubt that. He likely thinks of it only as a footnote in his catalog of amorous adventures anyway.

A daughter is different from a wife, yes, but I don’t believe that the feelings of trespass and affront are much different in the situations I have been describing. It’s a rare husband who doesn’t mind the thought of another man touching his wife’s willing and supple body. But it is also a rare father who isn’t upset by thoughts of his fair young daughter falling prey to a libidinous, deceitful man.

Even if, yes, it is two who must walk the path from the front door to the bedroom and its inviting confines.

My daughter, somehow, got a slightly more generous helping from Eros’s bag of tricks and troubles than I believe my son did. She is a sensualist, which in general and within reason, I believe to be a good quality—why inhabit a world as sumptuous as ours and not enjoy its riches? (In the case of friends and lovers too, the sensualist generally makes a more interesting companion than an ascetic does.) When Jeanne-Lucie told me a few years ago that she intended to marry Daniel, I tried to dissuade her, but she was pregnant and sure that it was his. He wanted to be a father; he was five years her senior and ready to settle down, he’d told her. And so Jeanne-Lucie thought she should try and learn to like or at least abide the conventions of marriage and motherhood and monogamy.

But another
M
-word complicated things: Martin.

How surprised Jayne was when I told her about the trysts I suspected Jeanne-Lucie and Martin of conducting at my apartment, during the months I was in New York overseeing Vie Bohème’s successful launch. Although I don’t want to be a scoundrel, sometimes it is hard to resist testing the limits of her innocence.

An example:

More than once after she moved in with me, I encouraged her to keep a diary, which she alleged that she did, but I never saw her writing in one, and for a few months I wasn’t sure if she really did possess one. One Wednesday evening, however, when she had taken herself to the movies after working at the gallery, I came upon it. It is a small green book with a black elastic band attached to either edge; she had left it on the desk in the study that I have turned over to her for painting and whatever else she sees fit to do in there. I am not in the habit of snooping in other people’s private papers. One thing that I know, from mistakes made when I was first married: it is not a good idea to go looking for bad news. Plenty will reveal itself to you of its own accord.

There is also the well-documented fact that a person’s desire to take stupid risks will lead to unnecessary complications—my ex-wife’s risk taking, for example. I once came upon her in our salon, sitting very close to a man with whom we were both friendly at the time. His arms had been around her, I was certain of this—his lips pressed to her lips—only a moment before I had entered the apartment, returning home from a three-day business trip to Cannes. Anne-Claire denied any wrongdoing, but I knew she was lying.

I believe that the impact of the kind of bad news encountered in someone’s diary can far outlast the impact of the bad news received through other channels of distribution, though—the words taking on special power in one’s distorting, guiltily seeking mind. A diary read behind its owner’s back is a deadly little object, its voice a Siren’s, its words the shoals you are broken upon each time you revisit them on the page or in memory.

Most of what I found when I opened Jayne’s diary, my heart sending out stern warnings as I rashly glanced at the pages of that little green book, was innocuous, sometimes charming. If I had kept reading, I’m sure that I would have come across some observation or confession too difficult to digest, but I realized I had been let off the hook, like the gambler who walks away with a few extra dollars in his pocket because he knows when to stop. I skipped around a little, glanced at sentences here and there, before I got to the following passage:

9 Sept. — A warm, sunny day after three miserable, rainy ones. I loved that this morning there were so many little dogs being walked on Bld Malesherbes, moving their stubby legs like robots on speed. A woman about my age with big silver hoop earrings was walking two short-haired dachshunds (“le teckel”—I looked it up the other day—what a strange word). They were so cute. I wanted to stop and pet them, but the woman looked like she was in a hurry.

I stopped to sit in Sq. Marcel Pagnol for a while too. I love that it’s only a couple of minutes from the apartment, and so beautiful, like a poem made out of flowers (corny, maybe, but true), crushed stone, wrought-iron benches. The little floral fountain with all the rosebushes growing around its base is something I could probably stare at for hours. I keep being surprised by intricate little things all over the city (Why don’t I remember them from when I was a student?)—sudden clamoring colors among all the beiges, grays, and dirty whites, small recessed fountains in the walls of old stone buildings, the way the city is lit at night—I can see why so many people have come here to claim (at last!) the lives they’ve been hoping for.

Whatever happens between Laurent and me, I have to thank him for bringing me here.

I read this passage fast and afterward forced myself to put back her tiny, grass-green book where I’d found it. I had to wonder, of course, if she had left the diary out on purpose, wanting me to pick it up and find something inside that she didn’t have the courage to tell me directly. I knew that she was still corresponding with Colin; she had admitted as much after she’d been with me in Paris for a few weeks, after I asked if he’d encouraged her to paint too. She said that he hadn’t, not really, but she hadn’t talked very much with him about art either—her own or anyone else’s. What I didn’t yet know was that he had managed to find a job requiring him to come to Paris from time to time, and he was trying to steal her back from me.

What had Jayne told him about our life together? What did he think her true feelings for me were? What had she told him they were? I tried to see myself through his young, covetous eyes: an older, wealthier man from an elitist country (we know what the world thinks of us, just as many Americans I’ve met are aware they are considered loud, self-indulgent, but contrarily puritanical), an art gallery owner, a fool to believe that a woman Jayne’s age, as lovely as she is, as talented, could truly be interested in me as a long-term lover, or eventually a husband.

She might not have told him that I’d made it clear before we left New York that I did not see us marrying—which is not so much a reflection of my feelings for her as it is a reflection of my feelings about marriage. Once was enough.

She doesn’t seem eager to marry anyone, though, and I think she felt this way even before she learned that a marriage she has long believed to be stable—her parents’—is not an inviolable institution either. For a number of days this past October, she was very upset when she learned from her sister that their mother had left their father, not for the first time, and moved into a nearby friend’s house, but after ten days, Kendra Marks apparently returned to Lloyd Marks because he promised to take her to Paris to see Jayne in the spring, and he also vowed to help more often with the laundry. He intended to pick up after himself more regularly too, and pledged not to begrudge her every eight-dollar pair of socks or pantyhose that she decided to buy. I wondered how long their truce would last, but did not ask this question aloud. Anne-Claire and I had had similar détentes in our own marriage, and needless to say, they had not lasted.

As an older man with a talented, attractive younger woman, I know that I am playing a game with long odds. Even if she is coming home to me every night, even if she is telling me she adores me, there are forces at work I cannot hope to control. I don’t think about this very often though because what is the point? The Buddhists seem to have it right—be present, forget yourself, the goal is in the path. The Buddhists also say that life isn’t about pleasure; knowledge and wisdom come instead from the experience of difficulty. I am not a Buddhist, but I have known some—my friend Paul Ligault, for one. I admire what I have learned about his practice without embracing it myself, although with time, I do think that all men find religion—whether it is in a church or a tavern or a whorehouse or the natural world.

Paul met Jayne after she had been living with me for a little over four months when he dropped by unexpectedly one night after he’d returned from a long stay in Japan with a woman he knows there, another Buddhist, a priest, in fact. We had been talking amiably for a little while when he called Jayne by Sofia’s name. He’d had had a few glasses of wine and lay stretched out on the living room floor, one of the purple throw pillows from the
canapé
under his head. I was teasing him about his dislike of chairs, an old argument. Neither of us ever gives in. The posture they force us into is destructive and unnatural for the human body, Paul always says.

“I believe you,” I said, as I always do. “But how to stop using them?”

He laughed at me and turned to Jayne. “You can stand or lie down. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it, Sofia?”

Jayne looked from him to me, a smile trembling around the edges of her lips, her eyes stricken. A nervous laugh escaped her. (The next morning she would ask me why he had said this, though she knew by then that Sofia and I had once been lovers.) Paul looked at her, bewildered, not yet having realized his mistake. She and Sofia do resemble each other, something Jayne discovered on her own by finding photos of her perceived rival online.

“Her name is Jayne,” I said to Paul.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Sorry.” He laughed now too, embarrassed. “Well, you keep me on my toes, don’t you, Laurent.”

“As you do me,” I said calmly. He couldn’t have known that he had chosen the name of the one person he should not have mistaken Jayne for.

He glanced at her, his smile sheepish. “I apologize, my dear.”

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice too cheerful. Her hands were gripping her knees. I could see her knuckles straining.

The apartment smelled like sauteed garlic, the odor suddenly asserting itself in this moment of distress. Jayne had made us a very good simple marinara sauce for dinner, one that I loved and she was happy to make frequently because it took so little time and had only a few ingredients: plum tomatoes, garlic, dried chili flakes, olive oil, salt. Paul had come in sniffing the air an hour earlier and had eaten all of our leftovers. I loved him as I would have loved a brother—maybe more. We’ve known each other since we were nine years old, and his parents also owned a vineyard in the Gevrey-Chambertin collective. He was more involved with his family’s business than I, but as a working novelist (although not so much in the last several years), and as someone who had recently decided to study to become a Buddhist priest himself, he had left its care more and more in the hands of his aging father and a younger brother.