“Are you all right?” he asked. “Of course not. I mean, it’s hard to be in two places at once.”
“For you?” And maybe she didn’t want the answer to that, to hear his feelings were divided when he was with her, and who else he might be thinking of, but they had a long habit of being honest with each other, and it was out of her mouth before she could think twice.
Tim fiddled with the cocktail napkin. Finally he looked at her, and all his high fervent promises were in that look: how she was like no one else, how they were like no one else together.
“We could run away,” he said.
“You don’t really think so.”
“I’ve found it to be a perfectly acceptable response to life’s difficulties. Don’t I seem comfortable on the run? Dashing, even.”
“You’re trying to make me laugh.”
“So laugh,” he said. “Will you?”
* * *
It became her job to perform a certain part of every day as though she knew a great deal more about France than she did. She rose to the occasion, offering translation, checking maps, and making itineraries with Mrs. Parrish over lunch, because now that she and Tim stayed up half the night, nobody ate breakfast anymore, and their days unfolded from the table according to the various attractions of Paris.
Cathedral after cathedral, she stared hard at the guide and the French that rolled out of him. She had to concentrate to understand, Dijon two years gone, but worse and harder, Tim at her elbow in his beautiful blue suit, his overcoat open. He stood so close, she could feel the difference in the air inside his coat and out.
He leaned to her. “The church is what?”
“Old,” she said. “Old and… important.”
He told his mother this was a church built during the Dark Ages, with marble quarried from the Hebrides, that every king of France had been interred there, and that the monks now made beautiful cheese. There were no monks or marble in the Hebrides, but he was right about the kings. The guide kept speaking and Tim leaning close to her; everything kept happening.
The guide spoke of an abbey made famous for the marriage of Louis XIV and something to do with lace. There was Tim’s hand, and she let her hand fall beside it, this part of France the province of apples, of honey, of sheep, of iron, and like it was an accident of proximity, the back of his knuckles brushed hers and her body leaped and rushed to remember the night before.
Mrs. Parrish asked, “What are they talking about sheep for?”
Mary Frances couldn’t say. Her blood thrummed in her ears.
“My dear, are you sure you’re listening?”
* * *
Tim stood in the gallery at the Musée de l’Orangerie and realized how long it had been since he’d painted. Gauguin’s Tahiti before him now, violently affixed to canvas, green and gold and red and cerulean blue in the light that seemed to come from everywhere, an explosion, ecstasy; he loved it. It had been too long since he’d spent time in museums, too long between shows; he’d forgotten what this test felt like, to measure your fire against another.
Of course, he thought of Al. Tim had never been unable to do what he wanted, whether it be to write or paint; he’d opened restaurants and tea shops, torn houses to the ground to rebuild them. He felt a stab of sympathy, another unexpected feeling in this situation. But he could not understand where Al’s congratulations for his wife had gone. How could you not be happy for the woman you loved?
Mary Frances stopped behind his shoulder, and Tim turned to look at her.
Her eyes worked fast across the canvas. She would say something, soon, she would say something he’d never thought about, and that made him want to paint all the more, just to hear whatever it was she said next. God, he loved women: young women, smart women with talent, Mary Frances. He was forty-two. There was still time to be a genius in her eyes.
“What do you think?” he whispered.
“It doesn’t seem to care,” she said, “does it?”
He laughed out loud; heads turned. They drew such attention wherever they went, a triumvirate of statuesque travelers, insulated by their English, their apparent wealth. Tim saw no point in pretending to hide, but Mary Frances brought a finger to her lips and moved away. She sat beside his mother on a green velvet bench in the next gallery, removed her notebook from her purse, and bent to it.
He followed. “Lunch?”
“Timmy,” his mother said. “Who can think about lunch at this hour?”
“Most of the Western world. It’s two o’clock.”
Mary Frances put a hand on his mother’s arm. “We could send Tim ahead, Mrs. Parrish. There’s no rush. You and I could take a taxi when we feel ready to leave.”
His mother looked pleased. “Would you be able to get yourself a drink?”
“I’m capable of the hand signals.”
“Here, then.” Mrs. Parrish reached into her purse for a fistful of francs.
“I’ve got money, Mother. I’m fine.”
They agreed on the bar at the Ritz, and Tim set out through Monet’s water lilies to the sparkling cold Tuileries. He’d been to Paris last winter, after Gigi left him, and winters before they were married, winters during the war. It was a city he was quite familiar with. But today with Mary Frances, with the stir of work and watching her, the attenuated hours of want ahead, this Paris seemed like the culmination of all those others, the whole point.
Perhaps he would just get drunk at lunch, tell his mother everything she well suspected already, and persuade Mary Frances to really run away with him. Perhaps he would just get drunk.
Sometime over the weekend, when it seemed nothing could be done about it, Hitler marched into the Rhineland, knocking on the door of France.
* * *
We go everywhere, Al, and we see everything, eat everything, and the Parrish pocketbook never seems to flag. Soufflé! Omelets with burnt sugar, like we used to get at Aux Trois Faisons, with our initials burned into the crust. The Tuileries! the wind biting at our coats. We walk and walk and walk (so as to wear out Mrs. Parrish so that when they did return, she was exhausted. She begged off dinner. She began to lose weight, they all did, even though they ate the lunches of duck, creamed Brussels sprouts with lardons, terrine, confit, fromage blanc, steak tartare with shimmering soft-set eggs, brioche. And they passed cathedral and train station and park and square. They passed women with their prams, old women, tired women — they all made Mary Frances want Tim more, as though he could keep her from the ages to come).
I was so cold this afternoon, I thought about that February in Strasbourg, how the wind was so bitter and we moved into the rooms at the Elisa, where the heat came blaring off the radiators. I would sit at the window and watch you leave for the university in the mornings — how cold you looked, your collar turned up, while I basked like a lizard inside. I welcomed you home warmly, as I recall. I wish for that same welcome now.
Your last letter sounded so melancholy. And I know it’s wrong of me to be oceans away and having a high time in all our old haunts, telling you to keep your chin up. But I do worry. His grief seemed like a thick blanket that wrapped him away from her now, as if he too were carrying on a separate life back in California, as if they both had somehow moved on. She knew this wasn’t true, but every thought she had of them together seemed sepia-toned and distant, their youth in Dijon, the ghosts of who they had become.
France reminds me of you every day, and everywhere we go there is a fourth seat for you, my dear, as though you might meet us any moment.
* * *
They took a carriage through the Bois de Boulogne, the women bundled in lap robes and furs, Tim on the buckboard with the driver, the wide allée stretching ahead. The wind whipped across the lake, ice still clinging to its edges, but Mrs. Parrish spoke of a sunny lunch fifty years before on the topmost balcony of the Chalet des Iles. Her companion had rowed them across in a tiny wooden boat, her father one boat behind.