The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [17]
After dinner they walked down the rue des Alpes and watched the moon rise over Lake Geneva. Behind them was the Beau-Rivage, Paul’s hotel. He’d planned dinner, the walk, the evening, to end there in his room, but suddenly, now that it was at hand, he wasn’t quite as sure of himself as he thought. He’d been divorced less than four months, hardly time enough to get back the confidence of being an attractive bachelor, and a doctor at that. In the old days, he tried to remember, how did he do it? Get a woman to his room? His mind went blank, he couldn’t remember a thing. He didn’t have to; Vera was way ahead of him.
“Paul,” she said and smiled, tucking her arm in his, pulling him close against the chill of the air coming across the lake, “the thing to always remember about a woman is that you only get her in bed if the decision is hers.”
“Is that a fact?” he deadpanned.
“Absolute truth.”
Reaching in his pocket he took out a key and held it up. “To my hotel room,” he said.
“I have a train. The ten o’clock TGV to Paris,” she said matter-of-factly, as if it was something he should have known.
“I don’t understand.” His heart sank. She’d never mentioned a train, or that she was leaving Geneva that night.
“Paul, this is Friday. I have things to do in Paris over the weekend, and Monday at noon I must be in Calais. It’s, my grandmother’s eighty-first birthday.”
“What do you have to do in Paris this weekend that can’t wait?”
Vera just looked at him.
“Well, what?” he said.
“What if I told you I had a boyfriend?”
“Do beautiful residents with boyfriends sneak out of town to pick up new lovers? Is that the medical world in Paris?”
“I didn’t ‘pick you up’!” Vera stood back, indignant. Trouble was, a little smile escaped from the corner of her mouth. He saw it and she knew he saw it.
“Is there an airport in Calais?” he asked.
“Why?” she pushed back.
“It’s an easy question.” He smiled. “Yes, there is an airport in Calais. No, there isn’t an airport in Calais.”
Vera’s eyes shimmered in the moonlight. A light wind off the lake lifted her hair.
“I’m not sure—”
“But there is an airport in Paris.”
“Two.”
“Then on Monday morning you can fly to Paris and take the train to Calais.” If she wanted him to do this, make him work for her, he was.
“What would I do here until Monday morning?” This time her smile was a little broader. But, yes, she was making him work for her.
“For a man to get a woman into his bed, the decision must be hers,” he said quietly, and once again held up the key to his room. Vera’s eyes came up to his and held there. And as they did, her fingers reached up and slowly encircled the key.
10
* * *
TWO DAYS would not be enough, Osborn decided the following morning. Vera had just gotten out of bed and he’d watched her walk around the foot of it and go into the bathroom. Her shoulders thrown back, unashamedly extending her small alabaster breasts before her, she’d crossed the room with the grace of a barely tamed animal unaware of its magnificence. Purposefully, he thought, she’d put nothing on—not his L.A. Kings T-shirt he’d given her to sleep in but that she’d never put on—nor wrapped around her one of several towels still on the floor, spent trophies of three extended episodes of sex in the shower. It was a way of telling him that the night before had not been a lark and this morning she was embarrassed by it.
Somewhere in the hours before daylight, between the sessions of lovemaking, they’d decided to spend the following day seeing Switzerland by train. Geneva, to Lausanne,