Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [85]
It was times like this that Michael saw how far apart the French and American cultures were. Didier was talking about the need for adultery as if it were absolutely normal and understandable. “She’ll never forgive me,” he said.
“She will,” Didier said. “Because she really loves you. I know because Patrice told me.”
Michael knew it too, but he wasn’t sure it would be enough to let her forgive him. Also, what if he couldn’t forgive himself? “I’d better go,” he said to Didier, starting to rise.
“Where? Your hotel room?” Didier asked. “Sit down for a little longer. Calm yourself, then come home for dinner with me.”
Michael smiled, thinking of what Patrice would do if Didier unexpectedly brought home a dinner guest. “Thanks anyway,” he said.
“Give Lydie the chance to forgive you,” Didier said. “You’ll have a stronger marriage when it’s done. I guarantee it.”
“How?” Michael asked. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen a thing or two. I’m a little wiser than you are, you know. I am older and I am French, and both those facts make me wiser than a young American. Tu comprends?”
“Yes, I understand,” Michael said. But all he really understood was that Didier was trying to cheer him up.
Lydie received a letter from her mother replying to the one Lydie had sent. In her bewilderment, her resolve to not upset Lydie further, Julia had managed to execute a postal soft shoe. “Dear Lydie,” (she read) “I am shocked by your news. You do not say how you are feeling about everything. I just cannot imagine Michael moving out, and you don’t quite explain why he has done this. I know, the heart has its reasons. But still, some further details would be appreciated. Are you speaking at least? Never forget: your father and I never stopped speaking. The fact that you so rarely call worries me. With love, Mother.”
Could Julia be serious, holding her own situation up as something Michael and Lydie could learn from? It amazed and saddened Lydie to see how blind Julia remained—wished to remain—to Neil’s betrayal. Perhaps it was true, that her parents had never stopped speaking. Lydie remembered her mother’s tearful recount of their last conversation: Neil had asked if she needed anything from the store. Julia had said yes, a quart of whole milk and some Ritz crackers. She had reminded him to wear his hat, it was raining. “You always do take care of me, don’t you?” Neil had said. When Julia repeated his last words, describing his smile and the glint in his eyes, she would dissolve into tears, as if their fond good-bye was the end of the story. Of course it wasn’t: Neil had gone from there to the store to Margaret Downes’s. In her kitchen he had filled her child’s bottle with the milk he had bought. Then he had taken Margaret into the bedroom and shot her.
For a long time afterward Lydie, like her mother, had concentrated not on the story’s end, but on an earlier aspect. Had her father really bought that milk for Julia? A quart of whole milk seemed a stupid thing to bring his lover. Unless she had asked him to, but the police had said there was plenty in the refrigerator. For weeks after his death Lydie had spent many nights keeping Michael awake, trying to answer that question, as if solving the mystery could push away the truth. But one night Michael put an end to it, to her thinking out loud. “If he bought the milk for Mom, he must have been intending to come home,” Lydie said.
“Lydie, he also had a gun. Why would he take the gun with him if he didn’t intend to use it?”
“Maybe he was afraid of being robbed.” Neil and Julia had been mugged twice within six months, and his office had been robbed. They had lost two thousand dollars altogether.
“He didn’t believe in carrying guns. He didn’t even keep one at work. The police said he bought it the day before the shooting.”
“But what