The Runaway Wife (14 page)

Jim walked to the edge of the terrace. The shadow from the tallest peak covered this part of town. He guessed it would be another hour before the sun would shine through to where he stood.

“Dad. Mom, will you please hang up. I can hear you breathing.” Jim waited, closing his eyes, pacing the small terrace. An older couple, walking arm-in-arm, passed him. And then there were his parents, arm-locked in repressed rage over the decades, separated by the different floors of the house they shared. The older man in the walking couple wore a plaid hat tilted sideways in a stylish way. Jim imagined the woman pulling it down over the man's left eye before they left their home. “There,” she might have said. “That's smart.” The old couple rounded the corner.

The voice that had given up so many battles spoke. “Hello, son.”

“Dad,” Jim said. “Yes, I'm fine. Yes. Dad. Mom, I heard you pick up. Mom, will you please let me speak to Dad alone?” He wished his father would do this for him, this one time: tell his mother to put down the receiver and quit eavesdropping.

“Mom, NOW.”

He waited until he heard the click.

“I know what you're going to say, Dad—yes, ‘that's Mom,' but I want to talk to
you
. I want to tell you that I love you. That's all I want to say.”

There was quiet on the other end, as if Jim's words were an inscrutable riddle for which the recipient had no answer. Jim continued his pacing back and forth on the terrace. He watched his breath unfurl into the cold.

Was that his mother's impatient sigh on the other end of the phone?

“Dad, are you there?”

No sound, only the static. Jim waited. “I'll call again, Dad. I'll call again, okay?”

He heard himself bark, “You will visit me in New York City when I get back.”

This was the language his father understood.

“Yes, I will—yes,
we
will,” his father corrected himself. No doubt his mother was back on the line.

His father would never leave his mother to visit him alone.

Jim hung up the phone. On that terrace, gazing at the mountains to the west, he vowed that he would never end up like his father. He vowed that today was the last day he would be a passive party to his mother's bullying. If his mother did not change her tone, change her tune, he would never speak to her again.
Mountains, you are my witness.

Next call: Jay Wolfe. He decided to sidestep the hierarchy and go straight to the top.

As part of the interview process more than a month ago, Jim had played a round of golf with Jay. The way Jay had ordered golf clubs from his caddy—“Sand wedge,” “9 iron”—and held out his arm without looking up or acknowledging the caddy's presence bothered Jim. It wasn't a cataclysmic character flaw, but each time Jay did it Jim found himself wincing.

It was Sunday evening, but Jay was at the office.

“I apologize for not letting you know sooner. I was in the Alps, I lost service—”

“The point is not where you were vacationing, Jim; the point is that without you here next week, you will cost us money and time. Whe
n
will
you be in the office?”

“A week from tomorrow.”

Helene would have appreciated his gumption. What made him think of Helene?

Jay Wolfe hung up the phone without another word.

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER AN ALMOST SLEEPLESS
night of undefined and disturbing dreams, he hired a taxi to Gstaad and caught the 9 a.m. train to Geneva. In Geneva, three hours later, he found the passport agency and received an emergency passport, thanks to Swiss efficiency. At an Internet café, he checked his e-mails and was relieved to see a response from Thalia. After he confirmed his flight details, he wrote that he would meet her that night at 5:30 p.m. at the café Les Deux Magots.

I
T WAS THE HOUR CALLIOPE LIKED MOST: DUSK,
when the day was mature and all that remained was reflection. “Sunset,” she'd said—Jim remembered her flipping her palm upward—“there's mischief in a sunset, in the hush of it, when the world says
shhhhhhh
.” She'd paused, and with her he'd felt the resonance in the moments before the sun bowed its head—before the night animals and insects broke the stillness with their buzzing and swarming.

The buzz at Les Deux Magots was at high frequency at 5:30 that evening, not with insects but with Parisians. The waiters, tight faced, narrow eyed, and stingy with requests, zigzagged in their long white aprons from table to table. Jim was ten minutes early, thanks to the punctual Swiss trains. He'd had just enough time to drop off his things in the foyer
of Ambrose's apartment. Unfortunately neither Ambrose, Stephanie, nor the kids were home. Ambrose was away on business: a Giacometti had recently appeared on the market, the seller lived in Brussels, and Ambrose was escorting a client to view it. Stephanie was at dinner with the kids at her parent's apartment. As Jim had left to meet Thalia, he had spotted her book of poetry poking out of the pocket of the new knapsack he had bought in Lauenen. In a last-minute impulse, he took it with him. Perhaps its presence would rekindle the mood of the night with Thalia and her sisters. Perhaps she would explain why she'd translated that one stanza. Would she use the wine as her excuse? The altitude? Or had her private message been merely a device to bribe a hiker to find her mother?

It was chilly, but the sun on the café terrace tempted Jim into taking a table outside. As he waited for Thalia, he absorbed the movement and color of the Parisian boulevards, dressed as they were with dancing colored leaves from the nearby plane trees.

At first glance, Thalia was less beautiful than she had been when they'd first met. Her skin looked paler and her face smaller, her chin sharper and her eyes set too far apart on her face. But her eyes were that same light blue whose brightness had startled him at first glance in the Cabane des Audannes. He stood as she approached and he leaned over the table to kiss her on the cheek. Thalia averted her head to avoid the kiss, leaving in its wake a sweet scent that Jim did not recognize. It was different—musty, like something that
had been in the attic for too long. The fragrance lingered in the space between them. Her lips moved, but her eyes stayed watchful. With her mother's grace, she lowered herself into the chair that Jim pulled out for her.

Ah, Calliope! Where are you now, to soften the hard edges between people?
Thalia twisted to catch the attention of the waiter, her wavy, shiny hair swishing along her pink silk scarf.

When their eyes finally met, Thalia quickly looked away. It was her lips that disturbed him most. They pouted oh so beautifully, with such a plump bottom lip; but the look they created was of a spoiled child.

“Mademoiselle?” said the waiter.

“Un kir, s'il vous plaît,” she said. Where was the flirtatious curve of her lips as she spoke, her jaunty movements? Where were Calliope's lilting and winged melodies, silky like rose petals on their last day of bloom?

He ordered a Stella Artois.

“What happened?” Her tone was clipped; her eyes questioned him. Pigeons scattered in front of running children and flew toward them. As if Thalia and he were one person, they lifted their hands and ducked their heads in unison. If he had been with Calliope, she would have laughed at their simultaneous reaction. But Thalia was not interested in such frivolity. She placed her hands on the table; she was here to do business, to extract reasons. Tender, delicate hands, fingernails painted a light pink.

“I asked you what happened,” she said.

A truck with
SAINT YVES,
6
PLACE DE LA LIBERTÉ
in bold black letters across the side lurched nearby, and he felt the grating grinding of the brakes somewhere deep inside him. How long would it take for him to become desensitized once again to the harsh city sounds? Where were the murmurs of the mountain winds and owls and the ever-present hum of running water? The irony of the juxtaposition of the words “Saint Yves” and “Place de la Liberté” was not lost on him.

“What happened?” she repeated. Her blue eyes searched his, then quickly moved to her slender, folded fingers. An oval sapphire surrounded by diamonds was perched on the ring finger of her left hand.

“I returned your mother,” he said.

“You nearly returned her to her Maker,” she said, her thick black lashes clamping shut. She touched the scarf at her neck, then clasped her hands.

“She had pneumonia,” Thalia continued. “She was in critical condition and was finally released to go home this morning.”

The waiter returned with their drinks and placed the torn bill in the small ashtray. Thalia sipped her kir. Her hand trembled when she returned the glass to the table. Perhaps that was why she clasped her hands together so fiercely—so he wouldn't see. The orange-pink sunset color of the kir was the hue of her lips. Her fingertips grew white as she pressed her knuckles.

“You told us that you would bring her down if you lo
cated her . . . that you would call us from Gstaad. You were gone for a week!”

He looked down at her pink fingernails and her wrist, the delicate gold bracelet that lay around it, and followed her long, slender arms to the puckered black short sleeves of her dress. He wondered how long it had taken her to choose the dress. Had she thrown the clothes that didn't satisfy her on the closet floor, as he'd watched Sally do countless times? She'd decided on sexy. This dress dipped down in front in a shape that suggested the curve of a heart. So many small details contributed to a French woman's allure.

“We refrained from sending in the Swiss Air Ambulance for three days,” she continued, “and then, with the snow, it was impossible. Did you know that for two terrifying days, the Swiss gave you both up for buried in snow? The press went berserk. We couldn't leave our homes.”

“You forget—” he began. It was Helene and her wish to protect her mother's liberty, who had dissuaded her sisters from hiring the experienced rescue service at an earlier time.

Jim could have apologized, told the scowling daughter that he could have been more determined and forceful, that he shouldn't have let her mother convince him to visit the hermitess when the snow loomed. He also could have told Thalia that he had not left her mother's side during her illness, that instead of excoriation he should be receiving praise for ensuring her capture. What he was tempted to tell her was what it felt like to spend time with her mother—as if he
was drunk with life, really alive for the first time in his life.

Tilting her head, Thalia gazed at Jim from the corners of her blue-blue eyes. She'd written him off as below her noble pedigree.

“How is she?” he asked.

Thalia sipped her kir and regarded the couple at the adjacent table. They were approximately the same age as them. The woman's hair was disheveled. Lovers, perhaps, having a drink after an afternoon nap.

“How is she?” he repeated.

“You were supposed to—”

“I did.”

She sighed loudly. She reached to pick up her purse beside her chair and placed it on her lap. “What took you so long?” she asked. She shook her head quickly. A strand of hair fell across her brow, splitting her face into two halves. “We misjudged you,” she said. She rose from the table. He stood also.

“And I you.”

“Do you know that yesterday, when she came home from the hospital she ran around the house in Paris like a madwoman, pulling oil paintings from the wall?”

“Which paintings?”

“Family heirlooms, the ones of the muses, masterpieces that belong in a museum . . .”

Calliope's small rebellion: exorcising the muses from her life. Perhaps she would change her name, ask for a divorce.

“What did she do with them?”

“Clio and I found them in a heap in the back hall to be picked up as trash the following day. She doesn't know it, but we hid them safely in the basement. When we asked her why she did it, she refused to answer. She began calling us names that weren't ours. She's still calling Helene Eleanor. She's said very little to any of us since she returned. That's why . . .”

He watched the color rise in her cheeks like a burst of flame in a fireplace. The flush settled in the lower part of her jaw. That was the face he'd remembered, Thalia of the transparent skin, the blue-blue eyes.

“I begged Clio to come with me today,” she continued, “but she refused. She said she couldn't look you in the face. I don't think you understand how completely deranged with worry we've been during your absence. Clio and Helene got into a huge fight and are still not talking—”

“You haven't told me how your mother is,” he persisted.

She placed a five-euro bill on the table.

He picked it up to return it to her.

“No,” she said, raising her palm. “Consider it your tip.
Oui
, five euros, yes, that should cover it.” She stood.

“Wait,” he said, his voice rough at the edges, “I never said thank you.”

“Thank you for what?” she said. Her purse swung forward and knocked over her half-drunk kir. She frowned and wiped at her dress with her napkin.

“Before you go,” he said.

She sat back down in the cramped space and continued
to rub her dress with the small paper napkin. The couple next to them kissed. Thalia raised her eyes to the sky.

“I wanted to thank you for this,” he said, placing on the table the tattered paperback of French poetry that had survived the snows.

She looked confused.

“That's not from me,” she said.

He opened the book to the blurred handwriting in blue pen and showed it to her.

“Not my handwriting,” she said, peering down at it. “It's Helene's.”

“What?”

“She's the poet in the family.” Thalia read the translated verse. She stood again. “This whole thing has become so, so . . .” She shook her head emphatically.

She slid awkwardly out of the tight arrangement of tables.

No backward glance. No sliver of light in the slammed door of her departure. She glided away down the street, walking as if she knew he was watching, gracefully sidestepping to avoid pedestrians, her figure growing smaller and smaller until finally she was lost in the sea of multitudes.

Helene had given him the book of poems! The verse that had told him only of Thalia's compelling emotions on a moonlit night now revealed a moon with a different luster. The world felt lighter; it reminded him of the moment when the whiteout ended and the mist began clearing, and he could see farther and farther into the distance. He called
Éditions Gallimard from his phone and asked for Helene Castellane. Out of town.

THAT NIGHT, JIM LOGGED ON TO AMBROSE'S COMPUTER
, and the news program confirmed that the presidential candidate's wife who had been lost in the Alps had been released from the hospital and was recovering at home. Jim also discovered that Calliope was a trustee of the Musée national du Moyen Âge, the National Museum of the Middle Ages, and that her husband had recently arranged to donate to the Cloisters in New York one of the most important of the seven tapestries in
The Hunt of the Unicorn
series from late-fifteenth-century Flanders. This one tapestry had been missing from the series from the museum because the owners, the presidential candidate's family, had wished to keep it warming the hallway of their ancestral home in Limousin, where it had been hanging since before the French Revolution. (During the French Revolution, it had been hidden in the cellar as a cover for potatoes.) The tapestry would be delivered to the Cloisters after an elongated exhibition stay at the Musée national du Moyen Âge.

The image of the tapestry,
The Unicorn in Captivity
on the Internet showed a unicorn, with a placid expression on its face, chained loosely to a tree surrounded by a low, circular fence. Wasn't one of the presidential candidate's slogans “Without border controls, there is no nation”?

Unicorns, he read, were caught only by deception. Jim remembered the coffeetable book in Calliope's chalet featuring a different unicorn tapestry.

Madame was scheduled to preside over the rededication of the
Unicorn
tapestry at the museum the following week. This would be Madame Castellane's first public appearance since her husband declared candidacy.

Political campaigns aside
, Jim thought,
shouldn't she be resting?

The following morning, Jim called the Department of Development at the museum and asked the director's assistant, who spoke fairly good English, to leave a message for Madame Castellane. He left his cell phone number and e-mail address.

There was no response for the next three days. Saturday morning before his rescheduled flight, in a small stationery boutique near Ambrose's apartment on the rue de Passy, Jim bought a card stamped at the top with the silhouette of a unicorn. He would hand-deliver the note to the Castellane residence, which, to his surprise, he had been able to find online.

“Dear Calliope,” he wrote. “I am relieved to know that you have recovered. I blame myself for your critical condition. I depart for NYC today, but I hope that we can continue to be friends. I can be reached at [email protected] or at +1 646-535-5777.

Sincerely,

J.”

He rang the bell and looked up at the lions' and horned rams' heads decorating the cornices of the mansion. A man dressed in full butler livery—complete with raised chin and open disdain for outsiders—took the envelope from Jim's hands.

“For Madame Castellane,” Jim said.

White gloves! The candidate from the Union for a Popular Movement greeted the world with a butler with white gloves?