Topaz - Leon Uris [34]
“Well?”
“You’ve a good nose for intelligence.”
“Your health is not the only thing that disturbs me. The hostility against you at the Embassy is becoming quite apparent. I hear things and sense things that upset me. They say the Americans are just using you.”
“Indeed they are. However, I’ve always been perfectly willing to be used in the interest of France.”
“You and your twisting words. Lord, how I envy those people who live and breathe around us and who know a day of peace. Do you realize, André, since I’ve known you you’ve never really spent a day that you weren’t in battle? For twenty years, day in and day out, this war you’re in never stops. You bring it home with you, into the dining room, into the bedroom. As often as not I’m made to feel I’m looking at a detached stranger.”
“Well, darling, better luck in your next life. Maybe you’ll find a Tucker Brown IV.”
“Why does it always have to be you who does it? What about the others? Why are you the one always in the middle?”
“President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I’ve always admired its philosophy. It read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I’ve envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can’t explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can’t run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can.”
She looked at him blankly, not drinking in his words, but only feeling their thud as another of his well-phrased rejections.
“I’m going up to see Michele,” she said tersely. “I’m thinking of going off with her on a trip.”
“Where? When?”
“I don’t know. France, to your father’s. Switzerland, Outer Mongolia. Some place where I don’t have to be a daily witness to your demise.”
Coming home these days, he thought, is not my idea of heaven, but I never thought of a home without Nicole. If I don’t know how to quit and if you love me, then, God, woman, accept it for what it is and try to make things a little easier.
“For whatever it means,” André said, “I still love you dearly and I don’t want to go through life without you.”
Nicole took her hand out of his, folded her napkin, and stood. “Give Juanita de Córdoba my regards,” she said.
André watched her leave the room, stinging from the slur. Damn it! Juanita de Córdoba had no place in this conversation! It was the unpredictable quiltwork of a woman’s mind, the determined illogic of ending up with a stab.
Or was it so illogical? André ticked the ash from his cigar and spun his cognac around slowly. Wasn’t this the real heart of the matter and wasn’t Nicole’s intuition perfect?
Lord knows he had tried to keep the affair with
Juanita from his wife and Lord knows he was a fool to think he could. He had intended to live with Nicole forever and let things go on as they were. Yes, even to love Nicole in that certain way that two decades of marriage dictated.
But his real love, though denied and buried, belonged to Juanita de Córdoba. How many days and weeks and months had he gone on without daring to think about her, shutting this longing for her out of his life?
But the thrill and the hunger for Juanita never failed to renew itself.
In this moment of honest appraisal, Nicole understood perfectly.
André had tossed around his decision of whether or not to go to Cuba for the Americans. In the end the scale tipped in favor of the trip because Juanita would be there. And even though he denied it to himself and justified it otherwise, this was the truth.
His lips touched the cognac snifter .... “Juanita ... yes ... I am afraid I love you very much ... I am sorry for that ... for both of us....”
He drew himself from the table and made his way slowly to the head of the steps. A ray of light from Nicole’s room fell over the hallway and down the stairwell. He stood motionless, waiting until her door closed at last.
“Nicole,” he whispered to himself, “please,