Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [31]
I’m the one who is most like her, thought Paris, and the one who physically was always the farthest away. The eldest daughter, the one kept secret from the world for years because the scandal could have broken Jenny Haven’s career. In those hazy childhood years Jenny had been a dazzlingly beautiful secret visitor who came to see her at the villa in France where Paris lived with her “family.” Until India had come along, and then Jenny had just shrugged and said to hell with it, let them accept me as I am or not at all. And the public had accepted her liaisons and indiscretions—and her children—as part of the myth. Jenny Haven could do no wrong.
A fleeting thought of her father crossed Paris’s mind. What of him? He must have read the papers, seen on television the reports of Jenny’s accident … or suicide. What did he feel, and did he still remember? How could he forget? Jenny had been at the peak of her success and beauty when she had met him, and he had been a young avant-garde French movie director just on his way up in the world. It hadn’t lasted long, Jenny had told her; it had been one of those white-hot passionate affairs where for three whole months they couldn’t bear to be out of each other’s sight, and the need for physical contact had been so overwhelming that even on the movie set Jenny would break in the middle of a scene, pretending to need direction just to take his hand and hold it to her lips, just to feel his breath against her cheek, and where there had been no time for sleep because the warm evenings and the soft nights and the gray Parisian dawns were spent making love in that vast suite at the Ritz.
No, her father couldn’t have forgotten Jenny Haven, though their passion had died as quickly as it had flowered, and when Jenny had known that she was pregnant she had decided that her child had nothing to do with what she had felt for its father. It was hers and she would bring it up alone.
Paris could see Jenny now as the two of them had walked, arms linked, by Lake Lucerne on a bright Swiss autumn day that had gilded her mother’s beautiful hair with lemony gold lights as Jenny told her the story of her father. Paris was eighteen years old and it was the first time she had known his name. The sudden knowledge that her father was an international celebrity, famous not just for his work in films but also his reputation as a maker of “stars” from a succession of nubile and beautiful young girls cast in the same mold of pouting lips and pert breasts, tumbling manes of hair and challenging eyes, a man whose picture she and her friends in school had pinned to their walls as someone to dream over in hazy and erotic teenage sexual fantasies, had shocked her into silence. Jenny had looked at her worriedly.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you his name,” she’d said despondently, “but you’re eighteen now, Paris. You’ve never asked me about him since you were seven, but one day you would have wanted to know who he was and I wanted to be the one to tell you. You were a child of passion, Paris, and he could never have been a father to you. Having to be both parents made me be a better mother, don’t you think so?” Her eyes had been wistful. Jenny had always wanted so much love—from her friends, from her lovers, and from her daughters.
Paris tossed restlessly, stretched across the velour plane seats, covering her eyes with a soft brown vicuna blanket. Her father was married now to a girl younger than Vennie, the fifth wife in line of succession of the nubile “stars.” Paris had never seen any reason to seek him out and let him know of her existence. And now that Jenny was dead he would never know. It would be her secret forever.
Amadeo Vitrazzi slithered again through her mind, his bronzed body thrust against hers, the gray silk in a heap on the floor. “Oh, Jenny, Jenny,” moaned Paris as the tears finally came, “I betrayed you. You didn’t bring