“I have a pilot’s license,” Simon explained. “That’s a model of my Cessna.”
Josie looked at him. “Your wife is perfect,” she said. “I mean, she’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone I could hate.”
“I didn’t fall for you because I hate my wife.”
“Why did you fall for me?” Josie turned away from the long, cresting wave of the painting and looked into Simon’s eyes.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said simply. “I saw you onstage that day-I don’t know-I was starstruck. Can that happen?”
“Have you brought other women here?”
“No. I told you. I’ve never done this before.”
“I’m an idiot. I believe you.”
He pulled her into his arms. “I promise you.”
They kissed and she pressed herself into his body, wrapping her arms low around his waist, pulling him closer. She felt too many layers of clothes between them. She started to pull off his coat.
“Wait. There’s a Murphy bed. I have to pull it down.”
She turned around, surprised. It was a one-room studio and, sure enough, there was no bed.
Simon walked to the wall unit, then slid the bookcases aside, revealing a bed built into the wall.
“Amazing,” she said.
He pulled a cord and the bed descended gracefully. It was neatly made, with pale blue sheets and a gray blanket.
“I can’t,” Josie said. She could feel her throat tightening.
Simon looked at her.
“It’s her bed. It’s where you sleep with your wife.”
“Josie.”
She shook her head. “I feel like Goldilocks in someone else’s house. I can’t do this.”
“The sheets are fresh. I made the bed this morning.”
“No.”
He came toward her and took her in his arms again.
“She’ll never know,” he said.
“Let’s go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
Later, in their room on the fourteenth floor of the Clift Hotel, they lay in each other’s arms after sex and Ghirardelli chocolate and scotch and more sex.
“How did Brady do?” Simon asked.
Josie looked at him. “I wondered why you hadn’t asked.”
“I should have been there.”
“You’ll come tomorrow.”
“I didn’t want to be there with my wife. I didn’t want to stand next to her and shake your hand. She knows me too well.”
Josie climbed on top of him. She looked down into Simon’s face.
“We can’t do this, can we?”
“We have to do this.”
He pulled her face to his and kissed her.
“Why?” Josie asked.
“Because I have to trust this. I know what love is-I love my wife, I love my son-I won’t lie to you. But I’ve never felt this-I don’t know-need. Desire. I’ve never known this”-he pressed her close to him, finishing his sentence as a whisper in her ear-“before.”
Josie watched him for a moment. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “I’ve had boyfriends, but this is not what that was. What is this?”
“Kiss me,” Simon said.
Josie can hear the shoe saleswoman and the tutor talking to each other. She hears the words petite amie: girlfriend. “Does your girlfriend do this often?”
The tutor doesn’t correct her. “No,” he says. “She’s not feeling well today.”
Josie rinses her hands in the tiny sink in the back of the store and considers slipping a pair of shoes into her bag. She has never shoplifted in her life, but who knows what she might be capable of now? The saleswoman didn’t want her in the bathroom of her piggy store, but Josie had marched through the curtains anyway and found a toilet to throw up in rather than the white marble floor. She picks up a pair of red shoes-Dorothy-in-Oz shoes-and clicks the heels.
There’s no place like home.
Why should she fly home on Sunday? Why not stay in Paris and become Nico’s girlfriend and shoplifter of expensive shoes?
She puts the shoes back on the shelf. She steps back into the showroom.
“Ça va?” Nico asks. He looks concerned. Most of his students are not pregnant, crazy ladies, she assumes.
“Ça va,” she sighs, and offers a smile. Poor guy. He deserves better in a girlfriend.
“I don’t want the shoes,” she tells the saleswoman. “I seem to be allergic to them.”
Nico nods and takes her arm, guiding her out of there.
“Does your boyfriend know?” he asks her when they are on the street, standing close to each other in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, all of them wearing extraordinary shoes.
She is not surprised; this tutor seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. Why shouldn’t he also be able to guess her secrets? She shakes her head.
“Will he be happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, assuredly. “He will be very happy.”
“Good,” Nico says. “I once had a girlfriend who broke up with me and then, a month later, called to tell me she was pregnant. She wanted to have the baby. I told her I’d raise the baby with her. She said she was moving to Morocco and that she would send me pictures of the kid from time to time. I never heard from her again.”
“That’s awful.”
“I think about it all the time. The kid would be three now. I wander through playgrounds looking for him. Or her.”
Thunder rumbles through the skies.
“Let’s find someplace to go,” Nico says, “before it rains.”
But the skies open immediately and the rain blasts them. Josie feels Nico’s arm wrap around her back and move her along rue de Grenelle. She doesn’t mind the rain; she doesn’t mind his arm around her. She’ll give herself up to this, she decides. It is easier than every day of the past weeks.
Nico opens a door and leads her inside. It is a small museum, though it looks nothing like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and pale marble walls and floors. A sign reads: MUSÉE MAILLOL. A teenage boy chews gum behind a counter; he doesn’t even look up. Josie glances around-she doesn’t see anyone else in the building. Ahead of them is an enormous statue of a nude man.
Nico leads her to the desk and buys two tickets.
“I can pay,” she says.
“No. Please.”
The boy cracks his gum and pushes his comic book under the counter. He passes them the tickets and a brochure: Marilyn Monroe: The Last Photographs.
They walk past the turnstile. There is no one to take their tickets. When Josie looks back, the boy is reading his comic book again. For a moment, he looks like Brady, serious and shy. Brady before he became a star. Brady before.
She puts her hand on her belly. The nausea has passed, but now she feels light-headed, a little dizzy. She has never been pregnant, has never yet considered having a baby. She had thought that would be years away, when she was married and had moved from teaching to playwriting, her real passion. She had imagined a young husband, a cottage in the country, a couple of big dogs, and a vegetable garden.
But she’s pregnant without the guy, the job, the house, the dogs. In fact, it’s all she has. This baby.
She has no right to this baby. She thinks of Simon’s wife at the funeral, her skin the color of ash, her eyes as flat as a lake. The woman didn’t remember Josie. She nodded, accepting condolences that meant nothing. Nothing could penetrate that grief. What right did Josie have to her grief?
“She is tragic, no?” the French tutor asks.
Josie looks up. Marilyn Monroe stares back at her, her mouth slightly open, her eyes half closed. She looks drunk on sex, on booze, on death. She looks luscious and ripe and ready to die. Josie’s eyes fill up. She steps back, away from the seductive stare. They’re in a gallery space, full of Marilyn. Every photo-and the photos are huge, pressing the limits of each room-is of Marilyn. Marilyn with her head tilted back, a sated smile on her face. Marilyn drawing on a cigarette. Marilyn puckering up. Marilyn with her hand resting on the curve of her hip, stretched out on a couch, offering herself up. Love me.