Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [3]
“Oh, home,” the woman said. “I told my housekeeper she could go online.”
“Your housekeeper?”
“Yes. I’m teaching her to use the computer. Didier bought it when personal computers hit Paris in a big way, but it just sits there.”
Lydie regarded the woman more carefully. With her jewelry and clothes and slightly regal bearing, she gave the impression of someone who would want distance between herself and a domestic employee. “Are you training her to do your correspondence?” Lydie asked.
The woman smiled, but the smile seemed distant. “Kelly wants to improve her life. She’s a Filipino, from the provinces outside Manila, and she’s here in Paris illegally. She’s just a little younger than I am—she’s been to college. She shares a place with an amazing number of brothers and sisters. Her goal is to get to the United States.”
“And you want to help her?” Lydie asked, sitting on the edge of her chair.
“Well, it’s practically impossible.”
“My parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland,” Lydie said.
“It’s especially hard for Filipinos,” the woman said, again looking at her watch. She gathered her bags and stood. “Well. Hasn’t this been fun?” she said.
“Maybe …” Lydie began.
“We should exchange phone numbers,” the woman said, grinning.
And while Lydie wrote out her name and number on a piece of notepaper, the dark-haired woman held out a vellum calling card, simply engraved, with an address on the Place des Vosges and the name “Patrice d’Origny.”
Walking down the rue des Petits Champs, Lydie felt in no hurry to get to the Bibliothèque Nationale. Even though she had hours of research to do for a photo series that was already a week overdue, she felt like playing hooky. The BBS wheels on a red BMW 750 parked by the curb caught her eye. Nice wheels, Lydie thought. She had spent many childhood Saturdays at her father’s body shop in the Bronx—a cavernous place filled with smells of exhaust and paint, the flare of welding torches, the shrieks of machinery and metal tearing—without seeing many BBS wheels. Her father was the boss but wore blue overalls anyway. He would leave her in the office, separated from the shop by a glass window, coming back every fifteen minutes or so to visit her.
“What happened to that car?” Lydie had asked once, watching another wreck towed in.
“An accident, darling. He hit a tree off the Pelham Parkway, and he must have been drunk, because he knew how to drive.”
“How do you know?” Lydie asked, when what she really wanted to know was what had happened to the man.
“See his wheels?” her father asked, pointing at the car, leaning his head so close to Lydie’s that she caught a whiff of the exhaust that always seemed to cling to his hair and clothes. “They’re BBS. A man doesn’t buy wheels like that if he doesn’t know how to drive.”
To her father, “knowing how to drive” had covered more than mere competence. It was a high compliment and meant the driver was alert behind the wheel, unified with his car and the road, aware of the difference between excellent and ordinary machinery.
Walking away from the red BMW with its high-performance, nonproduction wheels, down the narrow Paris street, Lydie had the urge to drive fast. In America she raced cars for a hobby, but over here she hadn’t had the desire. She had resisted this move to Paris. She had told Michael it was because she didn’t want to leave her family, which now consisted of only Lydie and her mother. But Michael had said no, what Lydie did not want to leave was her family tragedy.
Eight months before Michael accepted the position at the Louvre, Lydie’s father had killed his lover and himself. Margaret Downes. Lydie felt a jolt every time she remembered the name. After forty years of what everyone considered a great marriage, Cornelius Benedict Fallon had fallen in love with another woman. Lydie hadn’t known and Julia claimed, even now, to have had no clue. Lydie knew there must have been clues, and she often felt furious with her mother for not seeing them. Because