Secrets of Paris (3 page)

Just before a race, Lydie always experienced a vision. In a flash she saw the crash, the rollover, herself paralyzed in a hospital. And the vision always refined her concentration, made her take great care and drive more safely. Now, walking numb through the streets of Paris, she felt as if the crash had happened, and she hadn’t even seen it coming.

“Why didn’t anyone tell us it stays light in Paris till midnight?” Michael McBride asked. He was watching Lydie cook dinner. They stood in the kitchen of their Belle Epoque apartment overlooking the Pont de l’Alma. A roasting chicken sizzled in the oven.

“It’s nowhere near midnight,” Lydie said, smiling. “It’s ten-fifteen, and the sun’s going down.”

“Lydie!” Michael said, feeling impatient but vowing to stay calm. “I think you’re missing my point. All I’m saying is that the sun would have set two hours ago in New York. It’s something different, and I think it’s neat.”

“Paris is farther north than New York,” Lydie said. “New York is actually on the same parallel as Rome.”

Michael let it drop. If he opened his mouth again, he knew Lydie would come back with another rebuttal. They kept just
missing each other these days. Sometimes they had full-scale fights. Like yesterday, when Michael had asked Lydie to meet him at Chez Francis for dinner and Lydie complaining bitterly about how she missed Chinese takeout. Then Michael had accused her of deliberately trying not to enjoy their year in Paris and Lydie going on and on about eggrolls.

Still, watching her now, he felt a shock of love for Lydie. She moved around the kitchen with an unconscious grace, a small frown on her face when she concentrated on cooking the meal. He’d seen that same expression on her face when she raced cars. She looked delicate, with her pale skin and fine reddish-gold hair, but Michael had always thought of her as a tiger: strong, always moving, ready for anything.

“I met someone in a café today,” Lydie said. “An American.”

“Oh?” Michael said.

“We talked for a while, and it made me realize how much I’ve missed that. Someone to talk to.”

“What do you call what goes on between us?” Michael asked. “A silent movie?”

Lydie smiled and laid down her wooden spoon. Taking her hand, Michael led her into the living room. He still felt a jolt when he came upon their furniture, which for seven years had sat in the same New York apartment, here, across the Atlantic, in Paris. There were the low mahogany table, the seascape by Lydie’s mother, the sofa covered in a pattern Lydie called “flame-stitch,” the ugly lounge chair his father had given him for his thirty-fifth birthday. Lydie, as a stylist specializing in interior design, had great taste, and it had pained Michael to inflict that eyesore on her. But she had said it wouldn’t do to hurt the old man’s feelings.

“Her name is Patrice d’Origny,” Lydie was saying. “She’s married to a Frenchman and lives here permanently.”

“Why don’t you ask them for dinner?” Michael asked.

“Maybe,” Lydie said. Although her voice still sounded subdued, her eyes looked happier than Michael had seen them in quite a while. After eight years of marriage, the sight of her smiling eyes, hazel framed with thick blond lashes, made the back of Michael’s neck tingle. The feeling of excitement saddened him, because it was the only important thing between them that still felt true. He wanted to kiss Lydie, but she seemed to be concentrating on something.

“Why say ‘maybe’?” he asked. “Why not just invite them?”

Lydie cocked her head slightly, as if she was trying to figure out her own hesitation. But the moment passed quickly. “Why not?” she said.

From her indolent tone, Michael doubted that a dinner with the d’Orignys would come to pass. He cursed himself for the disappointment he felt toward Lydie. But he’d been through it all with her: the sorrow, the mourning, the struggle to understand, and there didn’t seem an end to it. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so deprived if the contrast were not so great. Old Lydie versus new Lydie; he loved the old Lydie better.

He could see her now, one October day at Lime Rock, the old Lydie speeding them around the track. She wore her racing overalls and sunglasses; she gripped the wheel with wicked intensity. “You scared?” she asked, possibly wanting him to be. But he wasn’t. He was fascinated. He loved riding with her while she cranked the Volvo wagon up to 135
MPH
. Seven miles down Route 112 Michael had pulled off the road and there, behind a red barn, Lydie dropped her overalls, laughing because she wore nothing under them, wanting Michael to be amused. Amusement was not what he remembered feeling. He remembered pulling her close, kissing her, feeling her shiver in the autumn air, making love to her on the cold ground.

And the words “cold ground” made Michael think of Neil
Fallon. He and Neil had gotten along well, more like friends than father- and son-in-law. But Michael laid the blame for Lydie’s transformation directly at Neil’s feet. The man had lived his whole life as a good husband and father, an average businessman who had cared more about coming home for dinner every night than making a million dollars. He had devilish charm; on a bet he had truly, before witnesses, sold drunken Dennis Lavery his own car. With his elegant profile and wild black hair, Neil was so handsome that even Michael noticed. He was a Lion and a Knight of Columbus, a regular churchgoer who could be seen passing the basket at nine o’clock mass at St. Anthony’s. By the time he started spending time with Margaret Downes, he had established himself as such a pillar that Julia and Lydie never questioned his absence or preoccupation. So how could Michael blame Lydie for falling apart when Neil, with his sharp-tongued, gentle-eyed Irish devil act, had turned out to be the Devil himself?

Michael knew that he was the only person Neil had told about Margaret Downes. Two nights before the shooting, Michael dropped his own car off at Neil’s shop and hung around waiting for Neil to give him a ride home. Dented or mangled cars filled the six bays. Welding torches roared. An irate customer leaned across the office desk, haggling over the cost of replacing his Ford LTD quarter panel.

“I can’t leave yet, but let’s get out,” Neil said, frowning, leaving his Danish office manager to placate the customer.

They road-tested a Ford pickup, down Zerega Avenue to the Hutchinson River Parkway. Neil drove easily, playing with the wheel and accelerating in a way that reminded Michael of Lydie. They headed north, toward Connecticut.

“What’s up?” Michael asked after a long while; he had never known Neil to maintain a silence for more than a minute, and it alarmed him.

“I’m in love,” Neil said, staring straight ahead.

“With someone …” Michael tried to hide his shock.

“With someone besides Julia,” Neil said, finishing Michael’s thought for him.

“What are you going to do?” Michael asked, with full Catholic knowledge that Neil could never divorce Julia, that Neil was talking about a mortal sin, that the situation was impossible.

“Not a damn thing. She won’t leave her husband,” Neil said, his voice bleak. “I want to see Margaret tonight; I’ll have one of the fellows drive you home.”

“That’s okay,” Michael said. “I’ll take the subway.”

“I want you to tell them you left me working at the shop.”

“You want me to lie to Lydie and Julia for you?” Michael asked, making it as plain as possible that he thought Neil had sunk very low. Was Neil implying that if Margaret would leave her husband he would leave Julia?

“Yes,” Neil said, sounding remote, without a trace of defiance. Then he shot Michael a dark look. “If you ever did this to Lydie, I’d kill you.”

That was in Michael’s mind now as he stared across his Paris apartment at Lydie: her father telling Michael he would kill him if he ever betrayed her. It had struck Michael odd at the time, for Neil to threaten, even if he hadn’t meant it, to kill Michael. It proved that killing was on his mind; two days later he had shot himself and Margaret.

“I know what,” Michael said to Lydie. “Get on the telephone, call your new friend, and ask her out to lunch tomorrow.”

“Right now?” Lydie asked.

“Sure. Before you forget all about each other,” he said, for he doubted she would call on her own.

Lydie went through her briefcase, found Patrice’s card, dialed a number on the phone. Turning his back, Michael walked to the
window. He heard Lydie speak French, then English. Horns blared on the Avenue Montaigne. The tour boats plied the river Seine beneath their window; their spotlights shimmered across the white walls, a twinkling of pale yellow, peach, and silvery gray.

“She invited me over,” Lydie said, coming toward Michael. “Tomorrow, to her apartment on the Place des Vosges.”

“That’s great,” Michael said. He felt a mixture of things: relief, as if this new friend of Lydie’s could give to her some of the things Michael found himself increasingly unable to give, and hope. Hope that this could make her happy. He thought of her walking to the Place des Vosges tomorrow, of all the wonderful parks and monuments she would pass. The Grand Palais, the Champs-Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, the Louvre. Let Paris make you happy, he thought.

“I’d better check the chicken,” Lydie said. Michael had often heard her mother’s theory that roast chicken was the truest test of a good cook. He went to her then, held the back of her neck. She tilted her head, and he looked into her eyes, golden in the halflight. He kissed her, thinking of the places they had kissed in spring: at the track, underwater, on a peak in the White Mountains, in Florence, on a hot subway platform at Fourteenth Street, now in Paris. The kiss felt right, and so did his arms around his wife. But the rest of it was unfamiliar. He thought the word “wife.” It meant possession, love, sex: in that order. Then he thought “Lydie,” which had once meant everything in nature and the world, and wished that it did not now only mean “wife.”

L
YDIE WAS AWAKE
at dawn the next morning. Michael slept beside her. His back was tan and muscular, his light brown hair tangled on the pillow. She watched him, trying to tell whether he was dreaming. She pressed closer to him, their bare bodies sticking slightly with sleep’s sweat. She kissed his shoulder.

She thought of her date with Patrice today, and for the first time she thought that maybe coming to Paris was the best way to forget. She had resisted coming, to put it mildly, at the beginning. The destination, Paris—imagine!—had paled compared to what she was leaving: one despondent mother and her father’s grave. Yet she had always wanted to live in a foreign country. It had
seemed her destiny. The pretty accents of her parents and relatives, her mother’s stories about Clew Bay and her father’s about Dublin had constantly reminded her that the world went beyond her block in New York.

Lydie had visited Ireland, at sixteen, with her parents. Ireland, although beautiful, had frightened her. From her parents’ tales she had expected soft edges: verdant pastures, gentle rain, cozy priories, friendly people who earned their livings as farmers and stonecutters. Instead, she was struck by the feeling of danger: by the coastline, steep and intricate as a Gothic steeple, by gray stone churches, grim, in every market square, by an undercurrent her parents had not prepared her for.

There were people who still remembered her parents, people Lydie had heard about her whole life, who seemed at once gentle and fierce. The combination had alarmed her. Her mother’s people were intense when it came to their memories, to Ireland, to the Church. Her father’s people, in Dublin, no longer attended mass, and they were intense about
that
.

Lying in bed, Lydie remembered the time she and her father had climbed Ireland’s holy mountain. The memory, vivid and exact, was one of her most powerful. Croagh Patrick, named for the saint, overlooked Clew Bay and the countryside outside Westport, where Lydie’s mother had grown up. The ascent had been fun: a lark. Lydie had pretended to be Maria von Trapp crossing the Alps in
The Sound of Music
. At the various holy points along the way she had interrupted her fantasy to do the requisite Catholic rituals like walking seven times around the statue of Saint Patrick while saying seven Hail Marys.