Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [51]
“It’s a long way to come to have a bad time,” Michael said.
Lydie picked up on something in his voice. She looked at him for a long time without speaking. She had the feeling he was talking about her, Lydie—not Patrice’s mother. It didn’t seem to matter to Michael that she felt better, was working hard on the d’Origny project. “Why don’t you say what’s on your mind?” she asked.
“The phone bill is on my mind. How often do you have to call Julia?”
“I hardly ever call her more than once a week!” Lydie said. “I thought staying in touch with her was part of the bargain.”
“I guess so,” Michael said. “But when you put it that way, you make it sound as if you and I are on opposite sides. That I dragged you here against your will.”
“I don’t feel that way,” Lydie said, taking Michael’s hand. He squeezed hers back, but he wasn’t smiling. This was a perfect example of how Lydie missed Patrice. She wished she could talk with her friend about Michael’s distance. She was in the mood to trade crabby husband stories with Patrice, but Patrice was on vacation.
Lydie crossed the days of August off the calendar. As the days fell away, a warehouse in Neuilly filled with objects for the ball. Every day Lydie walked miles, searching for props. Her outings took her up the funicular to Montmartre; through covered passages, all frosted glass, wrought iron, and tile, off the rue des Petits-Champs; into the leafy village square behind the Panthéon; along the crowded market streets of Mouffetard and Cité Berryer. So many shops were closed for August, the façades blank with lowered steel shutters.
An air of laziness pervaded Paris; Lydie noticed but did not feel it. She walked fast, urgently, as though the next destination was the most important one. She tried to keep the ball in mind. She thought of the countryside and pictured guests dancing to an orchestra outdoors. She saw the ball as a play, herself as the director. In this vision, she stood off to the side, not dancing. She was watching everyone, even Michael, whirl across grass wet with the night’s dew.
She felt uneasiness coming from Michael. Sometimes she caught him watching her. Quiet, holding something back, as though he had a secret or a gripe and was waiting for her to wheedle it out of him.
Stopping in her apartment between forays to the warehouse she would relax. She would sit on her terrace, tilt her face toward the sun, drink a glass of iced tea. She would think of her frenzy of activity, wonder what she wanted it to obscure.
“We haven’t even gone away for a weekend,” she said to Michael when he came home one night. It was late; work had kept him at the Louvre and they had eaten separately.
“This is my busiest time—yours too,” Michael said.
“Somehow I had thought our summer in France would be a little more fun,” Lydie said. “We bought all those guidebooks back in New York, and we’ve hardly even used them.”
Michael laughed.
“What?” Lydie asked, her feelings hurt.
“It just sounds funny—as if we can’t have fun without a guidebook. I can just see us, on a train through France, reading about, I don’t know, World War II battles, instead of looking out the window.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Lydie said, and she thought Michael’s comment was strange, coming from a man who went through museums reading the information cards tacked to the wall before standing back to look at the paintings. “You sound grouchy,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
“That’s all you have to say? ‘No’?”
“I’m not mad.”
“But you don’t seem exactly happy.”
“I’m fine, Lydie,” Michael said in a tone that infuriated her. She imagined that he sounded amused that she would be so worked up over, apparently, nothing. She stared at him, reading some report. His brown hair looked lighter, as though it had been bleached by the sun. When had that happened? she wondered. She looked away, blinded by the halogen lights of a passing tour boat.
“Patrice keeps