Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [7]
They road-tested a Ford pickup, down Zerega Avenue to the Hutchinson River Parkway. Neil drove easily, playing with the wheel and accelerating in a way that reminded Michael of Lydie. They headed north, toward Connecticut.
“What’s up?” Michael asked after a long while; he had never known Neil to maintain a silence for more than a minute, and it alarmed him.
“I’m in love,” Neil said, staring straight ahead.
“With someone …” Michael tried to hide his shock.
“With someone besides Julia,” Neil said, finishing Michael’s thought for him.
“What are you going to do?” Michael asked, with full Catholic knowledge that Neil could never divorce Julia, that Neil was talking about a mortal sin, that the situation was impossible.
“Not a damn thing. She won’t leave her husband,” Neil said, his voice bleak. “I want to see Margaret tonight; I’ll have one of the fellows drive you home.”
“That’s okay,” Michael said. “I’ll take the subway.”
“I want you to tell them you left me working at the shop.”
“You want me to lie to Lydie and Julia for you?” Michael asked, making it as plain as possible that he thought Neil had sunk very low. Was Neil implying that if Margaret would leave her husband he would leave Julia?
“Yes,” Neil said, sounding remote, without a trace of defiance. Then he shot Michael a dark look. “If you ever did this to Lydie, I’d kill you.”
That was in Michael’s mind now as he stared across his Paris apartment at Lydie: her father telling Michael he would kill him if he ever betrayed her. It had struck Michael odd at the time, for Neil to threaten, even if he hadn’t meant it, to kill Michael. It proved that killing was on his mind; two days later he had shot himself and Margaret.
“I know what,” Michael said to Lydie. “Get on the telephone, call your new friend, and ask her out to lunch tomorrow.”
“Right now?” Lydie asked.
“Sure. Before you forget all about each other,” he said, for he doubted she would call on her own.
Lydie went through her briefcase, found Patrice’s card, dialed a number on the phone. Turning his back, Michael walked to the window. He heard Lydie speak French, then English. Horns blared on the Avenue Montaigne. The tour boats plied the river Seine beneath their window; their spotlights shimmered across the white walls, a twinkling of pale yellow, peach, and silvery gray.
“She invited me over,” Lydie said, coming toward Michael. “Tomorrow, to her apartment on the Place des Vosges.”
“That’s great,” Michael said. He felt a mixture of things: relief, as if this new friend of Lydie’s could give to her some of the things Michael found himself increasingly unable to give, and hope. Hope that this could make her happy. He thought of her walking to the Place des Vosges tomorrow, of all the wonderful parks and monuments she would pass. The Grand Palais, the Champs-Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, the Louvre. Let Paris make you happy, he thought.
“I’d better check the chicken,” Lydie said. Michael had often heard her mother’s theory that roast chicken was the truest test of a good cook. He went to her then, held the back of her neck. She tilted her head, and he looked into her eyes, golden in the halflight. He kissed her, thinking of the places they had kissed in spring: at the track, underwater, on a peak in the White Mountains, in Florence, on a hot subway platform at Fourteenth Street, now in Paris. The kiss felt right, and so did his arms around his wife. But the rest of it was unfamiliar. He thought the word “wife.” It meant possession, love, sex: in that order. Then he thought “Lydie,” which had once meant everything in nature and the world, and wished that it did not now only mean “wife.”
You have taken my daughter on the most beautiful voyage in the world. She was thrilled with it, but you took her up and down mountains, exposing her to the precipices of your Alps and the waves of your Mediterranean. I am somewhat inclined to scold you, but not until I have embraced