Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [75]
“Gaston will come with his men tomorrow,” Charles said. “To hang Apollo and Daphne. Don’t despair—it is a magnificent painting.”
“Right,” Michael said. He said good-bye and left the office. Usually while visiting the Louvre’s third floor he stopped in to see Anne. But today he took the back stairs to the street and began to walk west along the Seine. He remembered coming along here, but in the opposite direction, with Lydie last spring. She had gotten a blister. He reached for his back pocket, where he kept his wallet. He was about to check whether he still had any Band-Aids for Lydie’s tender feet, but he let his hand drop. This was the spot where she had stood on her toes to kiss him. Sometimes Michael imagined Lydie kissing someone else. If he ever actually saw her with another man, would it drive him home to her? He pondered the concept of “possession.” If another man kissed her, would Lydie be more lost to Michael than she had been for the past year?
He cut through the Tuileries and walked up the rue Royale toward the Madeleine. Its Corinthian columns and clean lines gave it the look of a temple, more properly set in the Roman hills than this glitzy shopping street. He turned into the rue de l’Arcade and found his hotel.
“Bonjour,” he said to the surly Algerian desk clerk, who handed him his key without a word. He mounted the stairs. Room 320 looked over a quiet, thoughtlessly landscaped courtyard behind the hotel. Michael loosened his tie, took off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. The voices, now familiar, of two neighborhood concierges drifted up. Michael closed his eyes and tried to block them out.
What was he doing, lying on a hotel bed in the middle of the afternoon? He hadn’t slept last night. He had lain beside Anne, blinking into the canopy-swagged darkness, sweating. Yet seconds after he’d thrown off the covers, he’d begun to shiver. This had gone on all night. Somehow he had known he wouldn’t get Sacrament. Let it be Charles’s problem, he tried to tell himself. Soon Michael would return to New York, where everyone would know him as the American who had worked on the Louvre. They wouldn’t realize, as the French would, that his authority was insufficient to command the best Poussin to hang in his Salle.
The room was too bright. Michael propped himself up on his elbows, considered closing the room’s metal shutters. He felt acutely aware of the fact that he was lying in a hotel room. Everything proclaimed it: the cheap furniture, the thin walls through which he could hear a maid cleaning the adjacent room, the extra towels stacked on the bureau. Michael had never thought he was the kind of guy who would end up living in a hotel. He had thought he was the kind of guy who would end up married to Lydie Fallon until one or both of them died.
Until Anne, Michael had never loved any woman but Lydie. His unrequited love for her had grown, secretly, in high school and ruined him for anyone else. It was a fact he hadn’t realized until after he’d left her. Michael had dated many women and even lived with one: Jean-Marie Fitzgibbon. He had considered asking Jean-Marie to marry him. But then he and Lydie had met through work and taken that trip to Washington. Michael had then realized what he had been missing all along: Lydie. Not that Jean-Marie wasn’t a great girl—she simply wasn’t Lydie Fallon.
By sleeping with Lydie, falling in love with her, he had betrayed Jean-Marie. He remembered feeling that he had won something he had wanted for a long time. Lydie loving him made up for all the times she had turned him away in high school. So, on top of the euphoria of new love, Michael had felt like a victor. It was all false; he saw that now. He felt baffled and exhausted, defeated by the simple truth. For as much as he had loved Lydie then, he had wound up betraying her.
Late one afternoon the urge to clean set upon Lydie. She was sitting on the living room sofa, trying to write a letter to her mother, when it hit her: things were in piles all around her. Piles of unanswered