The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [49]
Looking to her husband now, she wished he could be like her father. If the news was bad, it was bad. They loved each other, they were married, they were expecting a child. The darkness outside only made his distance more painful to understand.
Across the room the clothes washer stopped, its cycle finished. Immediately Henri got up, opened the washer door and pulled out his work clothes. Looking at them, he cursed out loud, then crossed the room to pull open a closet door angrily. A moment later he was stuffing the still-wet laundry inside a plastic garbage bag and sealing it with a plastic tie.
“What are you doing?” Michele asked.
Abruptly, he looked up. “I want you to go away,’ he said. “To your sister’s house in Marseilles. Take back your family name and tell everyone I’ve left you, that I’m a louse, and you have no idea where I’ve gone.”
“What are you saying?” Michele was flabbergasted.
“Do what I tell you. I want you to leave now. Tonight.”
“Henri, tell me what’s wrong, please.”
In answer, Kanarack threw down the garbage bag and went into the bedroom.
“Henri, please . . . Let me help . . . .” Suddenly she realized he meant it. She came into the room behind him scared half to death and stood in the doorway as he dug two battered suitcases from under the bed. He pushed them toward her.
“Take these,” he said. “You can fit enough into them.”
“No! I am your wife. What the hell is the matter? How can you say these things without explanation?”
Kanarack looked at her for a long moment. He wanted to say something but he didn’t know how. Then, from outside, an automobile horn sounded once, then twice. Michele’s eyes narrowed. Pushing past him, she went to the window. In the street below she could see Agnes Demblon’s white Citroën, its motor running, its exhaust drifting upward in the night air.
Henri looked at her. “I love you,” he said. “Now go to Marseilles. I will send money to you there.”
Michele pushed back from him. “You never went to Rouen. You were with her!”
Kanarack said nothing.
“Get the hell out of here, you bastard. Go to your goddamn Agnes Demblon.”
“It’s you who has to go,” he said.
“Why? She’s moving in?”
“If that’s what you want to hear. All right, yes, she’s moving in.”
“Then go to hell, for all time. Go to hell, you son of a bitch, and God damn you!”
26
* * *
“I SEE,” François Christian said quietly and without emotion. A glass of cognac was in his hand; swirling it lightly, he looked off into the fire.
Vera said nothing. Leaving him was difficult enough, she owed him a great deal and would not insult him, or them, by simply getting up and walking out as if she were a whore, because she wasn’t,
It was a little before ten. They had just finished supper and were sitting in the large living room of a grand apartment on the rue Paul Valery between avenue Foch and avenue Victor Hugo. She knew Francois also kept a house in the country where his wife and three children lived. She also suspected he might have more than one apartment in the city, but she never asked. Any more than she’d asked if she were his only lover, which she suspected she wasn’t.
Taking a sip of coffee she looked up at him. He still hadn’t moved. His hair was dark, neatly trimmed, with a touch of gray at the temples. In his dark pin-stripe suit, crisp white cuffs protruding in tailored precision from the sleeves of his double-breasted jacket, he looked like the aristocrat he was. The wedding band on his left hand glinted in the firelight as he absently sipped at his drink while still staring into the flames. How many times had his hands caressed her? Touched her in a way only he had been able to touch her?
Her