He hated to think of it, of Madame Gérard knowing all and seeing all. “It was a bad enough way to find out,” he said.
“I want you to know it’s over,” Klara said. “I didn’t see him two weeks ago, and I won’t if he asks again.”
“I’m sure you’ve said that every time.”
“You have to believe me, Andras.”
“You’re still tied to him. You live in the house he bought you.”
“He made the down payment for me,” Klara said. “But I paid for the rest. Elisabet doesn’t know the details of our finances. Perhaps she doesn’t want to believe I support us. That would make it difficult for her to justify the way she behaves toward me.”
“But you did love him,” Andras said. “You still do. You took up with me to make him jealous, just as you did with those others. Marcel. And that writer, Édouard.”
“It’s true that when Zoltán turned away from me, I didn’t sit home alone. Not for long, in any case. When he claimed to be moving on with his life, I moved on with mine. But I didn’t care for Marcel or Édouard the way I cared for him, so I went back.”
“So it’s true, then,” Andras said. “You do love him.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. Zoltán and I are very close, or we were, once. But we didn’t give ourselves to each other. He couldn’t, because of what he felt for Edith; and I didn’t, also because of that. In the end I decided I didn’t want to be someone’s mistress for the rest of my life. And he decided we couldn’t keep on with it if he and Edith were to have a child.”
“And now?”
“I haven’t seen him since we made those decisions. Since November.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and folded her hands between her knees. “He was a dear friend, and he’s been a great help with Elisabet. She’s fond of him, too, or was. He’s the closest thing she’s had to a father. When we decided to end it, she felt as though he’d left both of us. She blamed me for it. I think she hoped I was seeing him again, those nights when I was with you.”
“And what now? What if he asks you again? You were together for eleven years, nearly a third of your life.”
“It’s finished, Andras. You’re in my life now.”
“Am I?” he said. “I thought you were finished with me. I didn’t know if you could forgive me for keeping Elisabet’s business from you.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she said, without a hint of humor. “Elisabet had no right to put you in that position, but once she did, you should have told me immediately. The man is five years older than she is-a rich American, studying painting at the Beaux-Arts on a lark. Not someone who’s likely to treat her kindly, or take her seriously. And worse than that, he knows my nephew.”
“You can hardly hold that against him,” Andras said. “I believe your nephew knows everyone between the ages of sixteen and thirty in the Quartier Latin.”
“In any case, it’s got to stop. I don’t intend to let that young man prove himself dishonorable.”
“And what about what Elisabet wants?”
“I’m afraid that’s beside the point.”
“But Elisabet won’t see it that way. If you oppose her, she’ll only become more resolved.”
Klara shook her head. “Don’t try to tell me how to raise that child, Andras.”
“I don’t claim to know how. But I do know how I felt at sixteen.”
“I told myself that was why you’d kept her secret,” Klara said. “I knew you felt a certain empathy with her, and I think it’s rather sweet of you, actually. But you’ve got to imagine my position, too.”
“I see. So you’ve put an end to things between Elisabet and Paul.”
“I hope so,” Klara said. “And I’ve punished her for showing you those letters.” Her brow folded into a familiar set of creases. “She seemed rather pleased with herself when she saw how upset I was about that. She told me I had gotten what I deserved. I’ve placed her under a kind of house arrest. Mrs. Apfel is keeping watch while I’m gone. Elisabet is not to go out until she writes you a letter of apology.”
“She’ll never do it. She’ll grow old and die first.”
“That will be her decision,” Klara said.
But he knew Elisabet wouldn’t remain bound by Klara’s house arrest for long, Mrs. Apfel notwithstanding. She’d soon find a way to escape, and he worried that when she did she’d leave no forwarding address. He didn’t want to be responsible for that.
“Let me come tomorrow and speak to her,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s any point.”
“Let me try.”
“She won’t see you. She’s been in a vicious mood.”
“It can’t have been as bad as my own.”
“You know what she’s like, Andras. She can be beastly.”
“I know. But she’s still just a girl, after all.”
Klara gave a deep sigh. “And what now?” she said, looking up at him from her chair. “What do we do, after all this?”
He ran a hand over the back of his neck. The question had been in his mind. “I don’t know, Klara. I don’t know. I’m going to sit down here on the bed. You can sit beside me if you like.” He waited until she sat beside him, and then he continued. “I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you the other night,” he said. “I acted as though you’d been unfaithful to me, but you haven’t, have you?”
“No,” she said, and put a hand on his knee, where it burned like a feverish bird. “What I feel for you would make that impossible. Or absurd, at the very least.”
“How is that, Klara? What is it you feel for me?”
“It may take me some time to answer that question,” she said, and smiled.
“I can’t be what he was. I can’t give you a place to live, or be anything like a father to Elisabet.”
“I have a place to live,” she said. “And Elisabet, though she’s still a child in many ways, will soon be grown. I don’t need now what I needed then.”
“What do you need now?”
She drew in her mouth in her pensive way. “I’m not certain, exactly. But I can’t seem to stand to be away from you. Even when I’m livid with anger at you.”
“There’s still a great deal I don’t know about you.” He stroked the curve of her back; he could feel the glowing coals of her vertebrae through her thin jersey.
“I hope there’ll be time to learn.”
He drew her down with him onto the bed, and she put her head on his shoulder. He ran his hand along the warm dark length of her hair and took its upturned ends between his fingers. “Let me talk to Elisabet,” he said. “If we’re to continue with this, I can’t have her hate me. And I can’t hate her.”
“All right,” Klara said. “You’re welcome to try.” She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the slope of the ceiling, with its water stains in the shape of fish and elephants. “I was terrible to my mother, too,” she said. “It’s foolish to pretend I wasn’t.”
“We’re all terrible to our parents at sixteen.”
“Not you, I’m sure,” she said, her eyelids closing. “You love your parents. You’re a good son.”
“I’m here in Paris while they’re in Konyár.”
“That’s not your fault. Your parents worked so you could go to school, and they wanted you to come here. You write to them every week. They know you love them.”
He hoped she was right. It had been nine months since he’d seen them. Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he’d been sick in Debrecen she’d taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he’d be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the time when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father’s orchard.