Hidden In Paris Part 13

"What makes you think I want to?"

Annie moved her scrabble pieces around hastily. "Bat, boot, zoot. Is zoot a word?"

"Possibly in Chinese," he said, looking up at her from above his reading gla.s.ses, searching for signs that she was about to work herself into a tizzy. She was wearing a white T-shirt that looked good on her. Her bare arms were strong and smooth over the table. Scrabble was good for her, like medicine. Also, he liked it when it was just the two of them, like an old couple. "What are you upset about?" he asked.

"What? I'm not upset. Maybe I'm just restless in comparison to her."

Lola, he thought. Of course Lola. "No one is comparing the two of you," he said.

Well, I am. I'm comparing. "I'm not like Lola. You know, sweet, positive, goody two shoes." Annie peeled away strands of hair that had fallen over her eyes. "I'm going through a phase of..." She thought for a moment. "I think the word I'm looking for is discontent?"

Lucas studied the board. "That's a long word. Where are you going to put it?"

"Discontent is how I feel. And this," she said, laying down the letters Z-O-O-T. one after the other, "is my word."

Lucas thought, and added A-N-G under Annie's Z to spell Zang.

"Hey!" she said, her hands on her hips.

"It's Cantonese for cheater."

Annie held her face in her hands, her elbows on the table, searching her letters. "I'm just saying that she and I don't raise our children the same way, that's all. She doesn't raise her children, in fact. She lets them grow rampant like... like crab gra.s.s. And Lia is rubbing off on Maxence. That weasel actually rolled his eyes to the ceiling when I asked him to help with the dishes last night."

Lucas arranged his letters. "You can't control everything."

"That's controlling of me? Controlling?" Annie put the word "nasty" on the board. "Lola gets beat up by Lia emotionally and physically and we are all witness to that, my boys included, but Lola never acknowledges it. Maybe she thinks that as long as she doesn't acknowledge it, I won't notice it. Lola has such a pattern of...avoidance! That's the word. A pattern of avoidance."

"How insightful of you," Lucas teased.

"Call me Sigmund."

"She may not like confrontations."

"Oh no, she doesn't. Next to her, I probably seem manic."

Lucas looked up over his reading gla.s.ses. "Annie, you are manic."

Annie froze and glowered at him. "Me?"

Lucas pointed his finger at her gently. "You."

"When am I manic?"

"Most of the time," Lucas said, and he put down a word, carefully, took a pen and pencil and methodically added twenty-three points to his column.

Annie looked like she was going to yell, or throw the board across the room. Instead, she pushed her letters away and put her head in her hands. "I'm not likable," she said.

Lucas looked at her dumfounded. He hadn't meant to make her feel bad. He had meant to state the obvious. He accepted her manic side, liked it in fact, just like he liked every side of her. Her manic side didn't threaten him in any way. But how to say that and not...He sighed, "Of course, you are very likable. Manic is the wrong word. I meant hurried. Reactive. Or maybe the word to use is unpredictable. You're a little bit like having a grenade in the house."

"So you're afraid of me?"

"Me, no. Of course not," he said, though it occurred to him that in many ways, he was. "I was thinking of Lola or Althea, or even the children."

"Which kids? Not my kids?"

Lucas did not like himself very much when he said, "We're all a little bit afraid of your reactions."

Annie let out a huge sigh. She got up, sat down again, and then burst into tears.

"I'm a b.i.t.c.h."

"Of course you're not, Annie." Lucas grabbed a box of tissues. "You're just a little...intense. Where is all this coming from, anyway?"

"Lola told me I was a b.i.t.c.h."

"Lola? Told you?"

"She insinuated. And she's right. With Johnny, I was p.i.s.sed most of the time." Lucas tensed up like he did every time Annie brought up Johnny. He had told himself long ago, had made a pact with himself, to not say anything against Johnny. "I was just being insecure," Annie continued. She blew her nose; he saw her determination to stop crying. "I was always worried about other women, suspicious. Maybe I don't have a trusting nature," she added.

Lucas took Annie's hand. He felt her sadness. So much could not be said, and so many opportunities to tell her how he felt about Johnny, about her marriage to him, about his death, about the way he chose to conduct his life. So much had never been said that he burned to say. It remained unsaid out of fear. Out of respect for a dead man. Out of a pattern of avoidance. "To the contrary, I think you have a very trusting nature," he told her, and he meant it.

"I'm frigging frozen in time. I don't let myself have fun. I don't even know why," she said, sobbing.

"There is nothing wrong with wanting things, looking forward to things," Lucas whispered, marveling at how the conversation had shifted to exactly what he wanted to talk about, what they were never allowed to talk about.

Annie cried softly as Lucas gently rubbed the palm of her hand with his thumb. "I'm so afraid to be disappointed that I don't know the first thing about how or where to find it," she said.

"What is it?" Lucas whispered.

"Happiness, I guess."

"Sometimes happiness is staring you right in the face," Lucas said, looking straight at her.

Annie wiped her tears angrily. She was becoming strong again, willing herself into being strong, detached. But Lucas did not let go of her hand. She would have to let go first. "I don't just want to talk the talk," she said. "I want to walk the walk. I find myself wanting more of it for...me."

"That's good," he said.

The phone rang and shattered the moment. Annie sprang to her feet. A moment later, she was handing Lucas the phone.

"It's the commissariat de police. Looks like you're going to have to postpone losing at scrabble."

The cemetery had closed hours before. Jared knew precisely where all this was headed, knew it, expected the outcome, and didn't care. He sat on a stone grave and laid a small parcel wrapped in white paper on the gra.s.s next to him. His mother's grave had not completely settled yet; there was a perceptible line between the gra.s.s that grew on her grave and the gra.s.s next to it, as though his mother wasn't entirely convinced she wanted to stay there. He pictured her full of exuberant energy, laughing out loud from wherever she was, laughing the way she used to when he and Sophie were little. Even after his dad was killed, his mom never stopped being strong. She had seemed invincible to him. But when they lost Sophie, his mom lost all her strength, all her joy. He often thought of the relief it must be for his mom, to finally be freed of the weight of her pain.

Before Sophie was sick, and even though their dad was gone and they had no money, things were still happy. On Sundays, there was a roasted chicken and for dessert, pastries, eclairs, always the same. He and his little sister both liked coffee eclairs and their mom liked chocolate. They stuffed the eclairs into their mouths trying to finish first. Their mom would eat slowly, and when they had gobbled up their pastries, she shared her eclair with them.

His mom had wanted so much for Jared to make her proud, and he had. He had felt that craving, had sought the success, the acclaim, the money. But he had wanted it for her, not for himself. He had wanted it to make her happy, but also to rea.s.sure her that he was fine, that he had a life purpose.

His mother's illness they had called old age, but she was too young for old age. There was no cause of death, no deteriorating organ, no cancer, no tumor, no infection, only a heart that got tired of beating. It had begun when she had climbed into bed one day, years ago, and started to forget taking baths or eating. She had given up and he could not blame her. He had moved in with her and had painted her all the way through to her last dying breath. He understood only after her death how much of his work was connected to her, how it was she, not his art, that was his life's purpose.

He had never been in love. His life did not allow for that kind of attachment, and now he wondered if the strange way he felt, his fascination with Althea, was maybe what love was supposed to feel like. Was love supposed to feel like a macabre obsession? Was he capable of an obsession that wasn't macabre? He had no map for this. He could clearly see what she was doing to her body. It filled him with anger and at the same time made him want to rescue her. He did not accept his attraction because he did not feel s.e.xually attracted to Althea. She looked sick. Did he see her as his little sister? No it wasn't that. She was beautiful and looking at her was like being punched in the gut. If there was such a thing as pa.s.sion without l.u.s.t, then this was it. Could the lack of l.u.s.t be an elevated form of love?

Jared unwrapped the white paper parcel and took out a coffee eclair. Sitting on the cold stone, he ate in silence, absorbing the wetness of the air, the smell of distant spring. In the distance, flashlights were advancing in his direction. He was able to make out the silhouette of the two guards, dark against dark. A moment later they were standing, towering over him.

"Monsieur can't learn to be here when the place is open like everyone else?" the skinny one said.

"No, he is too good for that," the fat one continued.

"This time we're taking Monsieur to the police station."

Jared crumpled the paper and put it in his pocket. "After you," he said.

Chapter 15.

"We're fine," Althea's mother said vacantly.

"Do you and dad know what to do on weekends, now that I'm in Paris?" Althea asked.

"The weekends are just fine."

"Well, my weekends are very busy, and noisy! With all these little kids around." When her mother didn't ask whose kids those were, Althea moved on. "I finally went up the Eiffel Tower," she said, though she hadn't. "It was so high, you could see everything."

"That's fine," Pamela answered.

Fine? Althea braced herself. "Well, I better go now, someone else needs the phone," she lied. "It's always so busy here, with everyone sharing the phone and all."

"All right then, I'll speak to you later. Goodbye."

"Love you, Mom!"

"Yes, yes," her mother answered.

"Miss you! Give a kiss to Dad for me."

"All right then, bye." And her mother hung up.

Althea's knuckles went white from clenching the phone. Her mother had nothing to say, and worse, no questions to ask. That was the gist of their relationship. Maybe her mother was too depressed to show real interest in her, or in anything, or maybe she had interest only in herself and what affected her. By traveling to Paris, Althea was no longer affecting her. She was twenty-five years old and for the first time she dared contemplating the fact that this was not what mothers were supposed to be like. Living at Annie's for a short month, she could not help but witness what it was that mothers did. Mothers did things with their children, when they were not talking about their children, thinking about their children, or living their lives around their children. Sure, the children of the house were young and she was a grown woman, but her mother had been no different then than she was now. Her mother had always been deadened and indifferent at best, punishing at worst. She, the child, had been the one preoccupied with her mother's well being. Even as a little girl, she had been the one who jumped through hoops and tried to read her mother for signs of displeasure and pain, and maybe the occasional light of joy. And how did it come to this? Why was it that those moments of faint satisfaction came only when she brought her mother accounts of her own failure and unhappiness? Yet, even knowing all this, or not knowing but sensing, she had been hoping that her mother would show an interest in her life in France. Or concern, any concern at all. Crazy as it was, her mother had yet to ask for her phone number or her address in Paris. The simple reality was that her mother would have no way to find her if Althea stopped calling. It would be the end.

"I'm healthy," she had told Annie.

"You don't look it," Annie had said.

All had seemed to be fully in her control in the beginning, but no longer. No longer was it about not eating food, but about food eating her. A war was raging inside. Althea was the a.s.sailant and the victim-she was the war zone. These days, the battle wasn't simply against fat. It was for survival. Getting out of bed, having simple desires, not hating everyone, trusting someone, keeping a banana down, having even a few normal moments in a day. How far had she been ready to go to procure her mother some sick joy or to trigger motherly instinct her mother was clearly incapable of? But now she was in too deep to recover or even desire recovery. She had practice only in despair and did not remember what it felt like to feel good, if she had ever known.

Althea walked up the stairs. The house was empty, or so it seemed, the children in school, Annie and Lola on one of their outings. Those two did things together all the time. Althea closed her eyes as she climbed, helping herself to the railing. The railing was smooth and warm. The steps were uneven in places under her bare feet. The house smelled of wax and soup. There were three doors on her floor: her room, Jared's room, and the third room that was full of rubbish and that no one went into. Her floor was the silent floor.

When she was sure everyone was gone, Althea had the habit of walking around the house, opening doors, closets, drawers. Lola's trashcan was filled with crumpled unsent letters to a man named Mark, and her floor was covered with health and parenting magazines. Annie's room was most interesting because of the photo alb.u.ms, filled with pictures of the boys and of a handsome man, year after year. Here, the father and boys at the beach. Here, they were celebrating Christmas. There, the father and boys skiing. But where was Annie? She must have been the one taking the photographs because she was in very few of them. In the early days, she looked so different than she now did. She looked happy, beaming at the camera with an expression Althea had never seen on her face, an expression that was playful and relaxed. But as the years pa.s.sed, so did her look of joy, and pictures of her became rare. The man in every image with the boys and with Annie looked like an actor, almost looking younger and better as time pa.s.sed.

Jared's room remained locked. She wondered if he even lived in the house at all until she began to figure out a pattern. He made sure to never be home around meal times and came in very silently and late into the night, sometimes not until the first hours of the morning. Then he slept, but his room was so silent that at first she had trouble knowing if he was in. She learned to put her nose to his door and recognize his presence though the smell of cigarette, weed, and paint thinner. At some point in the afternoon Jared took a brief shower, always leaving a mess behind him, after which she spend a long time putting everything back in order. She took care of his things. She hung his towel to dry, put the shaving cream and the razor away, closed the shampoo bottle, mopped the wet tile, and scrubbed the sink. Once she left her hairbrush in the bathroom and the next day retrieved several of Jared's black hairs tangled in it. It shocked her to think of her hairbrush, such an intimate possession, being used by him. After that, she made a habit of leaving it behind. One day she left a few of her own long red hairs in the brush on purpose. It made her dizzy when the next day she found some of his hair entwined with hers. She wondered if he ever noticed.

Althea liked her yellow room. She had stopped making her bed or putting away her clothes. She kept her room as messy as she kept the bathroom spotless. She spent hours each day staring out the window. If she remained absolutely still, she became invisible enough for the birds to come very close to where she was, using the metal railing of the balcony as a perch, sometime even tapping at the window and peering into her eyes.

She avoided Jared and made sure never to look at him if they ever were in the same room. Since he had arrived in the house, the extent of their communications were quick exchanges of "bonjour comment ca va" with both of them hurrying away and not making eye contact. This was how she reacted to men, especially to men she liked, dooming any possibility of romance. And she told herself that she preferred it that way. But she was aware that there were no possibilities with Jared. To someone like him, she would always remain invisible. She almost preferred when Jared wasn't around, so she could imagine him. She would dream him until she could catch a glimpse of him again. She daydreamed of walking the streets of Paris, the two of them holding hands.

This was the last place Lucas should have been in the mood he was in. Outside the cafe on rue de Pa.s.sy, tires glided on slick pavement. The icy rain had been pouring for four consecutive days. Inside the cafe, the noise level was deafening, what with the espresso machines expelling their steam and waiters calling orders and the clanking of dishes and utensils. The counter was so crowded that he had to sip his espresso with his shoulders perpendicular to it. Apparently, no one seemed ready to venture out of the groggy and womb-like atmosphere of the two-hour lunch break. People actually liked being here, even though the air was saturated with the smell of cigarettes and Plat du Jour, and steam from humidity and human heat clouded the windows. A tall man with a lifetime of practice at carving himself a spot in busy Parisian cafes, Lucas didn't usually resent the invasion of his personal s.p.a.ce, but today, it was insufferable. His mood was not improved by the spectacle of Jared, unshaven, unwashed, and devouring his second greasy Croque-Monsieur with his left arm and shoulder literally glued to him. Lucas preferred things to be neat and in their places, and he was feeling his stomach turn periodically at the sight of the cheese's grease dripping from Jared's sandwich onto the plate and his three-day-old beard.

"One day I won't be there to bail you out," he accused. "One day, I simply will be out of town, and you'll have to rot at the commissariat."

Jared shrugged and continued to devour his Croque-Monsieur. Lucas took a mental count of the number of times one of the men at his left elbowed him without an apology. They were dressed without any cla.s.s whatsoever, their ties too colorful, their shirts clashing, the cuts of their suits primitive. They looked like pimps as far as he was concerned. This was Johnny's flashy crowd. What Annie had ever seen in that man remained a mystery to him. The men laughed and eyed a table of pretty women in spring wardrobe. The women giggled, crossed and uncrossed their bare legs. The spring dance has started, again. This realization depressed him. Would this be one more spring of reluctantly chasing the wrong women while the one that mattered continued to elude him? The reason she eluded him, he hated to admit. It could be summed up in a few words: As long as he tried nothing, took no chance, he still had his chances.

One poke too many from the colorful cretin with the pointy elbow tipped the balance and he suddenly felt very irritated. "Annie is constantly alluding to the fact that I haven't made a move on Lola. Why is Annie so invested in this? Does it mean that she wants me to, or that she doesn't?"

"Be a man, Lucas. It's time to make your move."

"I... I'm not ... there quite yet."

"So make a move on Lola and see what happens," Jared said Lucas waved the notion away. "If I wanted to have an affair with a model, I would already have done so," he said.

Jared laughed, a rare feat that brightened his face. "How humble of you. Why not this particular model, if it's that easy for you?"

"Why of course that would be a terrible mistake for two reasons. Number one, she and Annie are new best friends. So the day the affair ends, it would become really complicated there at the house." He took a breath. "Last but not least, once that story ends, I'll still have to deal with her at Annie's."

"That's the same reason twice."

Lucas waved his hands angrily. "I can't ruin my chance with Annie by having s.e.x with her supermodel best friend in her own house."

"Bien sur," Jared said. He reached in his pocket for money and seemed to find nothing. "You know, she's a supermodel with a millionaire husband. There is also the possibility she might not want you."

"I'll have you know that according to Annie, she does." Lucas unfolded his napkin, jammed his elbow into the side of the man to his left, and dabbed his mouth with affected poise. "Does that surprise you? You think she is too good for me? I suppose you think Lola might be interested in you. I must laugh," he added with a forced laugh.

"Not my type," Jared said.

"You're too young to have a type. When I was your age, I made love indiscriminately to any woman kind enough to say yes."

"See that's the difference between us. I get to discriminate," Jared said. To Lucas's great relief, he had finally finished his lunch and was wiping his mouth. "Anyway," Jared continued, "I like the other one better."

Lucas cried out, "Annie?"

Jared looked at him like he had lost his mind. "Of course not Annie! The other one."

Lucas opened his eyes wide. "What other one? No! You don't mean that skinny girl?"