Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [40]
“Will you come to my house? It is not far …”
Michael wondered whether this was how it felt to be hypnotized. He stood, gathered his towel and newspaper, followed Anne to the bathhouses. If she had told him to bark like a dog, he might have dropped to his knees and howled. She disappeared into one bathhouse, his signal to find his own and get dressed. He moved in slow motion, as though injected with a muscle relaxant. He noticed, with great clarity, the details of his clothes. The waistband of his boxer shorts, his blue boxer shorts, coming apart now, trailing filaments of elastic. His white broadcloth shirt bearing laundry marks from Wong’s in New York and the Blanchisserie Clement Marot here in Paris. The madras tie, a gift from Julia.
His trance evaporated the instant he stepped from the dark bathhouse into the bright sunlight. Anne stood there, glowing, the sun on her hair. He went to her, held her face between his hands, kissed her. The kiss was white-hot, fire. Then she touched a cool hand to the back of his neck, making him shiver.
She pulled away. Her smile was gentle, forgiving: it gave him one last chance to get away. He thought of Lydie. He thought her name, “Lydie,” and an image of her collarbone, elegant and delicate, came to him. Then Michael, whose romance with Anne had so far taken place in his dreams and imagination, willed his mind to be empty.
“Is it too far to walk?” he asked.
She lived in an apartment on the second floor of an old, impeccably restored building in the Sixth Arrondissement. It overlooked the rue Jacob, a street so narrow it afforded exquisite intimacy with the building just opposite. Anne walked to the window, to draw the curtain, but Michael stopped her. He stepped onto the balcony, looked up and down the street.
“You must know your neighbors well,” he said, gazing across the street into the boudoir of one, the living room of another. He was stalling for time, and he knew it.
“I know everything about every one of them,” Anne said. “For example, the man who lives there.” She pointed at a window to the left. “Every night at eight o’clock he appears on his balcony in white pajamas. He unwraps a cigar, bites the end off it, and spits it into the street. Then he disappears. And the man who lives there …” She pointed at the window exactly opposite. “He is a doctor. On weekdays he lives with his wife, who is fat and blond, but on weekends, when she goes to visit her mother, his mistress, who is fat and blond, moves in.”
Michael stared at the doctor’s apartment. He kept a red plastic garbage can on the balcony. Also a collection of brooms and mops. Then he noticed the apartment above, which had laundry hanging on a line between two windows. “You’d think the doctor would put a tree or something there instead of cleaning supplies,” he said, thinking “mistress.”
“That building is a slum,” Anne said. “The inhabitants are all well-to-do, but look: laundry hanging out, mops and garbage cans on every balcony.” She frowned, perhaps assessing the impression the building made on Michael. He noticed the tension in her shoulders, her neck. She probably wondered what they were doing, standing in front of her window, talking about her neighbors. He hated to think of them living so close, looking in at her.
He put his arms around her, felt a thrill that reminded him of the first time he had touched a girl. Her smallness excited him, and why? Because it symbolized the difference between men and women? Because it reminded him of the year he shot up six inches, discovered sex, had to bend nearly double when dancing with girls in the gym? He lowered his head, kissed her deeply. Her lips felt soft; she tasted so delicious. Everything slid away except the kiss, their mouths, his and Anne’s. He wanted the kiss to go on, not stop; exactly the way that other times, during sex, just before coming, he would wish for the feeling to last, or at least recur on demand.
Anne stepped back. She held his forearms, smiled up at him. “I’m glad we are here,” she said.
“Yes,” Michael said. He glanced around, realized