Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [2]
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
About the Author
What I am about to communicate to you is the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, most triumphant, most baffling, most unheard of, most singular, most unbelievable, most unforeseen, biggest, tiniest, rarest, commonest, the most talked about, the most secret up to this day, the most enviable, in fact a thing of which only one example can be found in past ages, and, moreover, that example is a false one; a thing nobody can believe in Paris (how could anyone believe it in Lyons?).
—FROM MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ TO COULANGES,
DECEMBER 1672
LYDIE MCBRIDE OCCUPIED a café table in the Jardin du Palais Royal and thought how fine it was to be an American woman in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. The sun warmed her arms. People strolled along the dry paths, and the silvery dust mingled with the smell of strong coffee. It was one of the first hot spring days. Then something happened—cups clattered on the waiter’s tray, or the breeze shifted, and Lydie thought of home. She felt a keen hankering for it: for her family, for her block in New York City, for the racetrack, for strangers speaking English.
“May I borrow your sugar?” someone asked in a low voice.
Lydie jumped. She had just been longing so hard to hear the English language, she wondered for an instant whether she had conjured the sound out of the May air. But then she regained her composure.
“Of course,” she said, passing the china bowl to the woman at the next table. She watched her, a tall woman Lydie’s age with dark hair twisted into a chignon, stir two sugar cubes into her coffee. This woman wore red lipstick perfectly; her eyes were hidden behind big sunglasses. Lydie, who never wore much makeup and had the sort of flyaway red hair that always looked uncombed, had the impression of much gold jewelry.
“I need some quick energy,” the woman explained. “I just had a fitting at Chanel—an experience that never fails to take the heart out of me.”
Lydie smiled at the way she made shopping at Chanel sound like torture—somehow Lydie knew that she lived here.
“What brings you to Paris?” the woman asked.
Lydie hesitated, trying to formulate the short version of a complicated answer. “Well, for work. Michael—my husband—is an architect. He’s working on the Louvre, part of an exchange program. And I’m a stylist.”
“A stylist? As in hair?”
Lydie laughed. “No, I work with photographers, doing pieces for magazines and catalogues. I set up the shots. The editor tells me what he wants in a photo layout, and it’s my job to get all the props.”
“I think my husband uses stylists,” the woman said. “He’s in the jewelry business.”
“Yes,” Lydie said, nodding. “I work with jewelers a lot. He’s French?”
“Yes, but we met in America …” The woman trailed off, as if she thought the conversation was going on too long or growing too intimate. “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I met my husband one day, he took me to Guadeloupe the next weekend, and then I enrolled in Berlitz, and then he asked me to marry him. You’ll think I’m crazy, but it all took place in less than five weeks. The French understand, but Americans never do.”
Lydie leaned forward, and she captured the moment, sure as a photograph: the way the sun struck the woman’s hair, the blaze of primroses in a jardiniere behind her head, Richelieu’s palace casting a shadow on the garden. “I don’t think that’s crazy,” Lydie said. “I believe in love at first sight.”
“Well,” the woman said. She checked her watch, a tiny gold one with Chinese figures instead of numerals. Then she looked at the sky. “I should go. I’m running late.”
Now Lydie checked her watch. She had planned to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale, to look up details of seventeenth-century weddings for a piece in Vogue. Then, like the woman, she gazed up. She felt unwilling to leave. The palace against the blue sky looked dark and ancient, as if it had stood there forever. She wanted to stall for time, to prolong this pleasant, casual conversation