Possessions (46 page)

“You look wonderful,” Ross said, watching her look at the other women. “And not out of place. Chez Philippe prides itself on individualism. Is that a Parisian dress?”

“Yes; is it really all right? I found a wonderful shop yesterday; one of the designers Victoria introduced me to told me about it, a place called Miss Griffes—” Ross nodded, and she said, “You've heard of it?”

“Melanie heard of it. Designer clothes that had been used on mannequins in store displays—isn't that it?—sold for next to nothing. Melanie never went there; she said she didn't like used clothes.”

“Victoria told me you'd separated.”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “So you liked Miss Griffes?”

“Liked it? I went into a trance. I didn't even count dollars; I just spent francs. I haven't spent so much on myself since—for more than a year.”

“It's about time you did. You're very lovely, Katherine.” Her color rose and she looked again around the room as Ross contemplated her. Her beauty was softer and less vivid than Melanie's, her gestures less sharp, her dress, though exquisitely cut, simpler than one Melanie would have chosen. But perhaps because of that she seemed steadier than Melanie, more steadfast, more—

Damn it, he cursed silently. Why the hell am I comparing her to Melanie? They have nothing to do with each other.

“I'll order, shall I?” he asked as the waiter approached. “The food is Basque and you might find it unfamiliar.”

“I might,” she agreed. “Since I don't even know what it is.”

He laughed. “It's from the Pyrenees, a cross between Gascon France and northern Spain. Do you like roast quail?”

“I have no idea.”

“We'll share, then.” He ordered it, then added, “And
cassoulet.
With a Pomerol or a Saint-Emilion. I leave the choice to you; the best year of the two.” He sat back. “If you dislike any of it, we'll order something else. But I think you'll find it worth giving up the showplaces.”

“I wish you'd stop expecting me to be disappointed,” Katherine
said mildly. “I like it here. I don't need showplaces; that was exactly what I didn't like about the bus tour. Everything I saw was magnificent, but it was the public face of the city. I kept wanting to see the hidden part, to make discoveries—”

“—to turn a corner and find real people—”

“—doing the laundry or making dinner—”

“—or eating together in a neighborhood restaurant.”

They were laughing. As the waiter brought glasses and the Pomerol, Ross put his hand on Katherine's. “You have my promise,” he said, “that for the next two days, you will see only the hidden side of Paris.”

*  *  *

He kept his word, beginning at seven thirty the next morning. “Victoria would be appalled at the hour,” he grinned when he met Katherine in the Meurice lobby. “But she would approve of my buying your breakfast.”

“I don't think this is quite what she had in mind,” Katherine commented as they stood at the bar of a small café while having their croissants and coffee. But she laughed as she said it, because the morning was sunlit and cool, the croissants hot and buttery, and she was as eager as Ross to begin—not to sit in a restaurant at the mercy of a waiter's deliberate pace, but to hurry into the city that awaited them.

There are so many cities called Paris that no one can count them, for no two people view it the same way and no one views it with indifference. Brilliantly beautiful, deafeningly noisy, jammed with people and traffic, stunning in its vistas, grubby in its corners, infinitely varied and experimental in food, couture, culture, churches and erotica, it is a city that prides itself on being at once a vast museum and a vibrant, living part of the modern world.

Ross's Paris embraced it all, but especially the hidden
arrondissements
behind the city's grandeur: narrow, twisting streets where generations of families have lived and loved, worshiped, worked, died, and been buried. Over the years, in trips with his parents and then alone or with Melanie, he had explored those labyrinthine neighborhoods, each centered on a church and a small square or park, listening to conversations in the bistros, making friends, reading French history and literature, and studying the architecture that religion and everyday life had inspired.

These were the streets he and Katherine walked, while he told her their legends and histories. It was as if he were peeling off layers of the past, revealing the quirks and dreams of centuries. “The owners found eighteenth-century torture instruments in the lower cellar,” he said as they stopped before the massive double doors of a renovated building. “If you can picture it—revolutionaries suspended over vats of boiling oil, while, three floors up, in the kitchen, the cook measures olive oil for the salad dressing. An eerie symmetry: death and life, killing and creating . . .”

Katherine gazed at the carving of the Greek goddess of justice above the door. “I wonder if every family has a cellar it would like to forget.”

A smile lit Ross's eyes. It was a thought he'd had often when restoring old buildings, but he had never talked about it with anyone. “People, too,” he said. “We have our cellars inside us—things in our past we try to bury and ignore.”

The words hung in the air. Repeating them silently, Ross thought of the one person they best described. He scrutinized Katherine, trying to think of her as Craig's wife. But Craig was remote; absent. Nothing seemed real but Paris.

Katherine looked past him. His words had tugged at her, but the pull of the present was stronger. Just as she had at Victoria's villa, she felt cut off from everything that had happened before. At least for a while, it had been left behind. She met Ross's eyes. “I'm sure we all do,” she said easily.

Slowly, he let out his breath and together they turned and walked on. In the Rue de la Bucherie they came to a wall that Ross said had been part of the Faculty of Medicine five hundred years earlier. “Only monks practiced medicine then,” he mused. “They prescribed eating earthworms in white wine to cure jaundice, droppings of mice for bladder stones and the blood of a hare for gallstones.” He glanced at Katherine. “In a classic case of discrimination, women weren't permitted medical care.”

“Fortunate women,” she murmured, and they laughed as they moved on. A few blocks farther, Ross touched Katherine's arm.

“Here's the other side of the story of torture in the cellar.” He ran his hand over a dark stone embedded in the corner of a new building. “Buried treasure. When the old building was condemned, and wreckers ripped open the wall, a torrent of
louis d'or
gold pieces poured out—over three thousand twenty-two-carat gold coins—and the will of a man who'd disappeared in 1757, bequeathing it all to his daughter. Eventually eighty or so descendants of the daughter were found, and they divided up the fortune.”

“The other side of the story,” Katherine repeated slowly. “Torture and treasure, balancing each other. Symmetry. Is that what you look for in your work?”

Ross felt the rush of joy that came with having someone to share his thoughts. “In my work and for myself. To be able to juggle things so that, even if I go off half-cocked over something, eventually I can come back to a balanced center. That's probably why I love Paris, because it exists by its own balancing act: some of the bloodiest history of all time alongside a reverence for life; memorials to hermits next to monuments to the family; the wildest post-modernism a few feet from the most lovingly preserved works of ancient times. All those wonderful contradictions that add up to symmetry.”

The idea intrigued Katherine. He had described not only architecture, but jewelry design as well. They strolled on and she thought about it, exhilarated by having a new way of thinking about familiar things. “Ross,” she said impulsively. “I'm having a wonderful time.”

His eyes swung to her, almost stunned with surprise. “I'm glad,” he said. “There's so much more I want you to see . . .” And as they walked on, Katherine wondered what had surprised him: that she was having a good time, or that she had told him she was.

They walked all that day, the hours passing for Katherine in a reverie of the past intertwined with the bustle of a modern city. She and Ross convinced sextons to show them through ancient churches, and concierges to let them look into renovated apartment buildings with their inner courtyards and formal gardens; they stopped at kiosks where Ross translated the colorful posters plastered on all sides, announcing everything from operas to protest marches; they dawdled at open bookstalls on the Left Bank of the Seine where neither could resist buying (“Just a few,” Katherine kept vowing, “I'm getting heavier by the minute”); they paused beside sidewalk artists and musicians; after lunch in a small bistro they climbed steep steps to the plateau at the top of Montmartre where Paris disappeared in
the crooked streets of a small village of dilapidated studios of earnest young painters and sculptors. And they walked along the quays beside the Seine in the soft silver light of early evening that lay like a delicate veil over the river and its arched stone bridges, and the people, lingering before going home.

For two days they traversed the city, on foot, by bus, or on the
Métro,
with its wide, brightly lit corridors lined with huge paintings and enlivened by young musicians sitting cross-legged, playing guitars or saxophones or flutes. But most of the time they walked and Ross talked, and as he did, Katherine's eyes kept returning to his face. The harshness she had often seen there was gone. Except at their first lunch, when he had told her about BayBridge, she had never seen him look so relaxed, his deep voice warm and animated, with a boyish delight in sharing what he knew. But what struck her most were his hands when he ran them over ancient stones and grillework: warm and sensual as if the material were alive. Mine must look like that, she thought, remembering the feel of warm gold as she shaped and worked it, and she knew they both felt they could touch the hidden life of stone and metal through their fingertips. But Ross had something more, she thought enviously; he also touched the work of others, as if he clasped hands, over the ages, with builders long dead but living still in the structures they left behind.

“It's a way of staying close to my grandfather,” Ross said, startling Katherine by seeming to respond to her thoughts. They were standing in a small courtyard tucked away on the Rue Jacob, facing two houses, one restored and inhabited, the other empty and crumbling with the ravages of three hundred years. Ross ran his hand over one of the two stone lions guarding the restored house. “Every time I bring a building to life, I'm keeping him alive. In fact,” he added half-humorously, “I can hear him criticizing me or approving the kind of restoration I'm doing, as if we're still having the long conversations we had when he was alive. It's almost as if we're working together.”

“I wish I'd known him,” Katherine said.

“He would have loved you.” Ross opened the gate and they left the courtyard. “You would have reminded him of Victoria.”

Katherine flushed with pleasure, and was silent, treasuring his words as they walked together toward Rue Bonaparte and
Ross pointed out details on houses and shops that he admired. Watching his long fingers trace fanciful wrought-iron gates and stone figures from mythology or the Bible, Katherine wanted to put her hand on his, to share his sensual touch on the material and his connection with the past. Instead, she shared them by talking with him and watching the movements of his hands, his mobile face, and the sights he pointed out, liking him more and more for his concentration and depth of feeling. We share that, too, she thought, remembering her own absorption in her work, until she realized that in Ross's concentration there were times when he seemed to forget she was there. Which is more important to him, she wondered—the past or the present?

Which is more important to me?
The thought sprang out, but no sooner was it there than she pushed it back. She was thinking about Ross; later, she'd think about herself.

When they went to their separate hotels to change for dinner, Katherine lay in her marble tub, soaking muscles that had carried her through countless Parisian miles. The next morning, she would fly back to Menton. She thought about the past three days, and about Ross Hayward—who avoided fancy restaurants but was expert in fine cuisine and wines; who moved easily in international social and professional circles but sought out the hidden streets of Paris; who built the most modern urban developments while preserving buildings from the past; who had a family but avoided talking about it; who was handsome and successful but who almost never spoke about himself; who had given her two of the most companionable days she had ever known after months of being cool and distant in San Francisco. And she knew she did not understand him at all.

“One last hidden part of Paris,” he said as, that evening, they walked through the kitchen of Allard and were shown a table. “One of my favorites.”

The waiter knew Ross, jovially calling him
Monsieur le Président
as he did all his favorite customers, and conducting a vigorous debate with him over their after-dinner drink. “Of course it doesn't matter,” Ross confided to Katherine. “They bring Calvados whatever one orders, because that's what they consider proper. But debate comes first; one must honor tradition.”

The past and the present, Katherine thought. “Is that most
important to you?” she asked. “Tradition? The things of the past?”

“They endure,” he said.

“But they don't. They crumble.”

“You were in St. Julien le Pauvre today. Built in 587.”

“But—what does that mean? That you trust stone because sometimes it endures?”

“It's a better bet than paper. Better than metal, clay, wood . . . Or love,” he added lightly. “Or marriage.” The waiter brought their Calvados and poured from the bottle into two snifters, addressing Katherine as
Madame la Présidente
and complimenting them on what a
harmonieux
couple they made.