Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [91]
Standing there, listening to the woman who had been his lover, Michael thought he deserved an award for lack of discipline. He had an impulse to run out of the Louvre, leaving behind everything venerable and ancient, into the bright sunshine. At that moment, gazing at Anne in her wig and crumbling dress, he wanted twentieth-century noise: traffic, loud music, loudspeakers blaring from the tour boats. Standing there with Anne, he felt that the air in the Salle des Quatre Saisons had not moved since the seventeenth century.
“What a trouper you are,” Patrice said, turning to speak to Lydie in the backseat. “It’s really big of you, making an appearance at this thing.”
Lydie smiled, then resumed staring at the back of Didier’s head. He drove his Citroën toward the Louvre in fits and starts, using the brake twice as often as necessary.
“Why do you say it’s big of her?” Didier asked. “She is going because she wants to see the Salle des Quatre Saisons.”
“She is giving Michael his due,” Patrice said. “She’s keeping her personal feelings out of it, and I commend her.”
“I’m just staying long enough to say hello,” Lydie said, uneasy about the whole enterprise.
Now Didier was searching for a parking spot. For some reason Patrice felt personally responsible for Lydie’s decision to attend Michael’s opening. It put Lydie in mind of a story her father had told her about a boy who convinced a pagan to attend Christmas mass and felt as if he had given Jesus a nonbeliever’s soul for his birthday.
Curiosity, not Patrice, had made Lydie decide to come. She wanted to see Michael’s work, and she wanted to see his response when he caught sight of her. She had not told him she was coming. She didn’t want him on his best behavior, trotting her around, introducing her to people as “my wife.” She wanted to slip in with the crowd, catch his eye, and see what would happen. Dressing as she had, however, she could not pretend she didn’t want him to notice her at all. She wore a black dress by Azzadine Alaia, form-fitting to say the least, with a deep “V” in back.
She and the d’Orignys presented their engraved invitations to a guard and he pointed the way. “I know where it is,” Didier said importantly. “We know Monsieur McBride.”
Suddenly Lydie felt charged with anticipation. The event was gala, after all. The man just ahead of them used an ebony walking stick although he had no limp. Women wore their best dresses. People chattered, craning their necks. Everyone looked important, although Lydie could not say why. Perhaps the occasion gave importance to the crowd, the way it would at ballet premieres, first nights on Broadway, presidential inaugurations.
They entered the Salle and Lydie blocked the door, taking everything in. Her gaze lit on a beautiful long table—it could only be the information table Michael had commissioned. A mosaic floor glinted here and there with tiny gold tiles. Beneath the smell of perfume and hot food, she detected the scent of new plaster. A tapestry covering an entire wall depicted men returning from a hunt. But above all, her eye was drawn to a painting between the doors.
She stared at it and tried to place the story: a scene from Greek mythology? There was Mercury—she recognized his winged feet. A dead boy lay on the ground before a god at once handsome and tortured. Herds of cows, a magnificent tree, Cupid, nymphs.
“It’s called Apollo and Daphne,” Patrice said, coming over with a printed guide. “I can’t tell who’s supposed to be Daphne unless she’s the one in the tree.”
Now that Lydie knew the painting’s title, she remembered the story. “That’s her—in her father’s arms,” Lydie said, pointing. “It hasn’t been working out for her and Apollo.”
“What’s not to work out?” Patrice asked in her burlesque voice. “Check out Apollo.”
Now Lydie began to look around, subtly she hoped, for Michael. There were Arthur Chase, Dot Graulty, Dot’s