Revenge of the Black Virgin (5 page)

“Is that all you know?”

“
Madame
said there was a family
emergency. That’s all she would tell me.”

“So perhaps there was. Is it so impossible to
believe?”

Luc hung his head. Anna was so fair-minded.
So insightful. Maybe she was right. She was a well-respected oral
surgeon, adept at reading people and accustomed to winning their
trust and admiration. Maybe he should trust her instincts on this
one, too.

“No, I guess not,” he answered. “But if there
was a problem I can’t understand why she wouldn’t come to me for
help. And why she didn’t leave me a note. Then, or since. That’s
probably the worst part.”

“I understand,” Anna said softly as she
placed her hand over his.

Luc knew she would. He looked up at her
gratefully, everything a little blurry because of the tears in his
eyes, and raised her hand to his lips.

“
Mon dieu.
I’m such a fool, aren’t I?”
He smiled and shook his head. “And you, as always, are so patient
with me.”

Then he changed the subject. “I thought you
had a date tonight?”

Anna had been seeing a lawyer for the last
six months. She thought it might be getting serious.

“He had to cancel,” she said as she shrugged.
“And that’s fine. I was looking forward to a quiet night
anyway.”

Luc thought she’d been looking happier
lately. He hoped things would work out well for her.

“You haven’t said much about Simone,” Anna
said. “I’m guessing she took it badly when you told her about your
American?”

Luc sighed, and looked down to inspect his
fingernails. “That’s an understatement. It was pretty bad. I don’t
really want to talk about it.”

“Okay. I can imagine. She’s high-strung, I
know.”

Cahors was not a large city, and Anna had
known Simone before Luc had begun seeing her.

He put his head in his hands and grimaced.
More than high-strung.
Borderline unmanageable is more
like it. I think I’m lucky to have escaped.

“Well let’s just hope she doesn’t turn out to
be another Marta,” Luc said grimly, straightening up. “I couldn’t
handle anything like that right now.”

Anna raised her eyebrows in alarm. “Do you
think she could get that bad?” Marta had made all of their lives
hell for almost a year.

Luc shook his head. “No, I guess I’m just
seeing the worst side of everything right now. She’ll be fine.”

Anna stood up and began to clear the table.
“I think you need a break in your routine. Get away from all of
this. What about a road trip?”

Luc looked up, alarmed. “But what if
Joanna….?”

Anna stopped what she was doing and looked
down at him. “What? Tries to contact you?”

Luc nodded, feeling even more foolish. The
chances of that happening at this point were slim. And if she did,
Joanna would reach him through the email address or phone numbers
on the card he’d given her.

“Don’t worry. You can check email wherever
you go and I’ll pick up your mail. If a letter comes I’ll email
you.”

“And Daniel?” He didn’t feel good about
running out on his son at this difficult time in the boy’s life.
But then he hadn’t been much of a father lately.

“He’ll be fine. Your brother’s going to take
them all to down to Nice next weekend—remember?”

“
Oui. Oui.
Okay. Good.”

Luc paused, thought about it some more, then
nodded again slowly.

“Yeah. Sure. I need diversion, I guess.”

He drained his glass and got up to help Anna
with the dishes.

Chapter Six

Brenda had been right. Jo was much better off
at the office than she was mourning alone at home with only her dog
to talk to. It felt good to be surrounded by the disinterested
fellow employees of the successful Westcoast lifestyle magazine,
people who’d never heard of Luc. Evenings were still very hard, but
during the day Jo was so busy she could put her most of her pain
aside.

She began to take an extra special interest
in her colleagues’ love lives, something she’d never done before.
Soon she realized that disappointed and broken hearts were the
norm, rather than tragic one-off events.

One of the young graphic designers, Kayla,
started coming to Jo for advice. Jo didn’t know if she should be
flattered or alarmed. What did she have to teach a young woman
about love? Part of her wanted to tell Kayla to go visit the Black
Virgin of Rocamadour.

That’ll straighten her out! Show her a thing
or two about priorities. Without gut-wrenching, heart-stopping,
jean-creaming lust, there’s no point in carrying on with a
relationship. No matter how good the guy looks on paper.

Instead, she said very little to Kayla, only
offering her ear and the occasional stock supporting phrases every
girl needs to hear when she’s doubting herself. Jo realized that
although she was an emotional wreck herself, at least she wasn’t
twenty any more. Twenty was tough, she remembered.

Otherwise she worked contentedly and
efficiently alongside Brenda most of the time. But when it was time
to write her Dordogne Valley travel piece, she began to suffer at
work, as well as at home, from the pain of loss and regret.

As the days passed, her heart hurt more
acutely than ever. She became adept at conjuring up an image of
Luc, dark hair shining, blue eyes laughing, his sweet seductive
smile with that crooked little tooth that made him all the more
appealing. She could almost see him, almost smell his animal scent.
She could invoke his strangely wonderful accent and his deep,
gentle voice.

As the weeks slipped by she felt not less
desire for a man she’d barely begun to know, but more. Her body
literally ached when she realized she would never see him, hold
him, again.

She studied the photographs she’d taken in
the Dordogne, making paper copies of all of those with Luc in them.
She taped them to the wall in her study, fashioning a little
shrine. She spread the red bandana out on her desk below.

In the middle of her photo shrine she stuck a
picture of the Black Virgin. After all, Jo reasoned, she was the
reason everything turned out the way it had. And now the Virgin was
wreaking her revenge. Punishing Jo for running away from what could
be the best part of herself—her primal sexuality.

Irrational as it was, Jo accepted her
punishment. She would suffer an ever-growing, inextinguishable love
and longing for the only man in the world she was made for. The man
she’d run away from. And who would never, ever take her back.

Where is he? What’s he doing? What did he
think when he saw I’d gone? What
could
he think?

She wondered if
Madame
Guillmont, the
proprietor of the
gîte
where they spent their last day, told
Luc why she had to leave. But then she remembered that
Madame
probably didn’t know why she’d stolen away with James
like a guilty thief. It was likely that James wouldn’t have said
that Jo’s father had died. James was a very private man.

Luc must hate me now. Did he really care for
me then? Or was he just feeding on the lust that was driving us
both a little crazy?

And what about his other relationship? Was it
over, too? What was her name? Simone?

Ten, twenty, a hundred times a day she
thought that if Luc had really meant what he said to her that last
time they made love, he would have tried to contact her by now.

I love you,
he’d insisted.
I must.
How else can I explain this crazy thing I’m about to do?

She had to find a way to see him again.
Clearly, he wasn’t taking the initiative.

He knew her last name. He knew the name of
the magazine,
Inside/Outside
. If he wanted to, he could find
her easily enough.

But there had been no message from Luc. No
email. No snail mail.

He must have come to his senses. Realized it
wasn’t love at all he was feeling for me. Only lust. Therefore
temporary.

Maybe he was glad to get out of our messy
little affair, she sometimes thought. And the idea made her
sad.

Because with every day that passed Jo
believed even more strongly that what she shared with Luc had
indeed been exceptional. She looked at couples she passed on the
street, or sat beside in coffee shops. Did any of those people feel
for each other the way she felt about Luc? She couldn’t imagine
feeling that way, for anybody, ever again. He was her perfect
fit—her Yang to his Yin—and she’d left him. Without a word.

She was in hell.

Pragmatic Brenda wasn’t shy about telling Jo
she was a fool to pine after Luc.

“You have to forget about him, sweetie. You
have
to. It’s wrecking you to mope around like this.”

“I’m not ready to give up,” Jo insisted. “How
can I explain it, Bren. I don’t think you’d understand. He was the
one!
The perfect man for me in every way. It
can’t
be
over yet. It just
can’t.”

“But there are other
ones
out there.
Plenty of them. You could have any man you wanted, Jo. Or woman,”
she added in a lower voice. “You know that.”

“I don’t care. Surely you can see that!”

“Exactly, and it’s killing me to see you so
unhappy.”

Jo looked at her friend. Yes, Brenda was
suffering, too.

But what can I do? I love him. I love him. I
love him.

And it’s hell.

There was one thing she could do, Jo decided.
Luc was a living, breathing human being. He lived and worked
somewhere
. She
had
to be able to track him down,
somehow
.

She convinced Brenda to help her work through
the labyrinth of French federal bureaucracy to make an educated
guess where she might find Luc’s office in his hometown of Cahors.
It wasn’t a large city, and there could be only a few buildings
that might house ministry offices.

Grumbling, Brenda gave in and, with the help
of her computer geek nephew, soon presented Jo with copies of the
kind of information she needed.

But nowhere, in any of the printouts she
scanned, did Luc’s name appear. It was as if he didn’t exist.

“Maybe you dreamed him up, sweetie,” Brenda
teased. But when she saw the look on Jo’s face she softened her
approach. “Look. The French Feds might be quite secretive about
their employees. There might be a Freedom of Information kind of
restriction in place.”

Jo nodded, mute.

“Or maybe…” Brenda lowered her voice, “he
doesn’t work for the government at all. You think he’s an
archaeologist? Maybe he’s a truck driver, and was afraid to tell
you.”

“He’s
not
a truck driver,” Jo said.
“He’s very well educated, articulate. And he’s been to Seattle. He
delivered a paper at a symposium at the U of W a few years
ago.”

“On what?”

“The archaeology of the Scottish lowlands,”
Jo answered.

“Okay, okay. Just checking. It’s pretty weird
that we can’t find a trace of him, though. What’ll you do now?”

Jo didn’t know. After checking through
several possibilities, she carefully copied out the mailing address
of the office Luc was most likely to use, if he in fact did work in
Cahors.

In the weeks since she’d been home, she’d
been composing a letter to him in her head. And the more she worked
on it, the more she came to see that it wasn’t the kind of letter
she could send as an email. It was right, rather, that she write
her words out on a piece of paper, buy a stamp, and mail it the old
fashioned way.

One night, after a quick dinner and a
shortened walk with Sammy, she cleared a space on her kitchen table
and wrote her heart out. It wasn’t a long letter, but in it she
told Luc she loved him, briefly explained why she did what she’d
done, and asked for his understanding and forgiveness.

Then she ripped it up. If her letter was
being sent blind to some anonymous office mail clerk, with no
promise of reaching its addressee, shouldn’t it be a little less
personal? She quickly redrafted a shorter note. It said essentially
the same thing, but in veiled terms.

She added her return mailing address, her
email addresses, and several telephone numbers. She didn’t want to
be accused of not making herself available.

Finally, just in case her letter went to the
wrong place, she wrote another one, care of
Madame
Guillmont. The old lady was very fond of Luc, and would likely
forward him his mail. She carefully worded a short note to
Madame
, enclosed Luc’s letter inside a sealed envelope and
addressed the whole to the
gîte
in Martel.

On her way to work the next morning, hope and
fear welling in her chest, she dropped the two envelopes into a
mail box.

If I don’t hear from him within a few weeks,
I’ll know either he lied to me about his employment or he hates
me.

While she waited for a response she grew even
more agitated. She became extremely picky about her food and
couldn’t eat much of anything. As a result, she had no energy.
Nightly insomnia became the norm, rather than the exception. Every
few days she visited her mother and swam laps in the family pool,
trying to tire herself enough to sleep. She took Sammy on long
walks every day after work.

After the two-week mark had passed without a
word, she sank into complete despair.

He doesn’t want me.

It was horrible. Her stomach hurt all the
time and she began to look like hell—too thin, with dark circles
under her eyes, hair and eyes dull with mourning. But now she
really had to face facts.

She knew she had to give up the hope that she
would be reunited with the only man in the world she wanted. In the
old days women could join a convent, shut themselves away from the
world and suffer their unrequited love in silence. But Jo had no
such luxury. She had to get up every morning, walk Sammy, then go
into the office where she’d be bombarded with supportive questions
and comments from her colleagues, who liked her, and her boss, who
loved her.