Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [76]
It had been a white load: sheets, towels, and underwear. Folding it, she noticed straight off that all of the underwear was hers. Her skimpy silk bikini pants, a more substantial cotton pair, her underwire push-up bra—when she had worn that last, Lydie couldn’t begin to remember, figured that it must have been thrown into the wash accidentally. It had been a long time since she had folded white laundry without any of Michael’s underwear in it. Yet surely she had washed clothes in the weeks he’d been gone? Suddenly she missed him so acutely she felt dizzy.
Placing the clean, folded things into her dresser drawer, her gaze lit on Michael’s letter box. It sat on the dresser top. She couldn’t resist tracing its glossy, lacquered surface with her fingertip. She found a couple of drips she hadn’t sanded down. She touched the crescent moon and the plum tree, its blossom-stippled branches spreading across the river, and her fingers came away dusted with gold leaf.
It was full of love letters they had written to each other. She shuffled through them, all postmarked “New York.” Some envelopes bore letterheads of the company she had worked for then. She opened one from Michael and read it with her heart in her throat.
“Making love last night made me wonder what kind of thrills you get driving a fast car. Is it at all the same? A sense of being nearly out of control while meanwhile staying very steady and alert? But as I write this, I’m answering my own question. It’s not the same at all. Racing, you start out fast and stay fast and you have to keep control of the car every second. Last night, the way I remember it, we started out slow and didn’t speed up for a long time—and while I remember staying sort of steady, I was at no time in control. But it was definitely more fun than I ever have at the track. All my love, Michael.”
Lydie folded the letter, put it back into its envelope. She opened another, this one to Michael.
“It’s great writing you a letter while knowing I’m going to see you tonight. Not that I’ve written any [here a letter that might have been an m had been erased just before the “any”] love letters before, but I’ll bet there’s usually a certain sadness in them. Because if you’re writing a letter, it means your beloved is far away, right? I love knowing you’re just six blocks uptown. Dad called me at work this morning and asked if I’d bring you home for dinner tonight. I told him no, I’m keeping you all to myself. He obviously thinks you’re swell—a factor that has gone against many a boy, but not you! See you tonight—I hope you like our journey to Spain via my experiment in paella. But by the time you receive this, we’ll know, won’t we? Love, Lydie.”
How shallow she sounded, Lydie thought, reading the words she’d written nine years ago. That cheap trick of turning “many” into “any”—she and Michael had been courting back then, and although she had certainly loved him, she had made him wait and wonder. And that business about her father. While it was true that any time he approved of a boy Lydie liked, Lydie would instantly lose interest, she couldn’t believe she had tormented Michael with it. And yet, she had to admit, she liked the girl who had written that letter: confident and full of pizzazz.
Lydie had adored beards and long hair on men; her father wanted everyone to look like the Beach Boys. Lydie had a weak spot for unorthodox Catholic priests or men who had abandoned the faith. Her father saved his highest regard for men seen every Sunday at church with their families—as children with their parents, as adults with their wives and children.
Michael had fit none of those categories. He had long hair but no beard, he was a run-of-the-mill Catholic who went to church when he felt like it. Anytime he heard a song with an even slightly sad or wistful melody, he told Lydie it reminded him of her. Most of the