Boxed Set: A Possessive Billionaire - Vol. 1-3: His, Body and Soul (9 page)

“Let’s go! It’s time for some pasta!”

I would have liked to spend all day between the sheets, but I didn’t forget that Maria is waiting for us…Anyway, I’m hungry! I get dressed quickly, jeans and a t-shirt, when I realize that Charles is putting on a suit.

“It’s a family meal. It’s important here, you know. I put a dress in your bag.”

He has indeed packed one of my dresses. An old dress that I usually save for my professors or older people. He’s usually so on-point when it comes to fashion, it seems like he took a lot of trouble to find my most old-fashioned outfit.

“I didn’t want to bring your black dress, it’s too dressy for here, you just need to look like you made an effort. Put your hair up, there you go. You’re perfect.”

Giovanni soon arrives, and he’s in his Sunday best, too. He seems particularly affable and happy, just like the night before. He also gives me a warm welcome. We get back to land and walk to Maria’s place. It’s a little single-storey house with a kitchen that opens up to the outside. In fact, everyone is outside. In the garden, Maria and Giovanni have placed a table laden with big pots of pasta and everyone is invited to help themselves. There must be twenty-five of us from all different generations. Kids run around yelling, old ladies gossip under a tree, their warm plates on their knees. We soon finish the pasta and Maria brings out big platters full of pastries with coffee and grappa.

Suddenly, we’re asked to be quiet. Young Mario, stuffed into his communion suit which is now too short for him, is going to play his violin for us. He first plays a melancholy air everyone seems to know, bringing tears to the eyes of the older folks. Then Giovanni calls for a tarantella and the rhythm accelerates. The atmosphere is soon euphoric, people tap their feet and clap their hands, the fishermen sing in dialect. Suddenly, Giovanni takes my hand and leads me in a crazy dance. Charles watches, smiling. He invites Maria to dance and soon everyone joins us. I laugh, carried away by the joy and the rhythm. Charles steals me from Giovanni and now I’m spinning around in his arms. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy.

It’s so nice, I feel incredibly good. Charles is happy too, we could stay like this for the rest of our lives. And then the telephone rings and I see the Charles Delmonte I hate reappears. This secret man who’s suffering under a burden he doesn’t want to share. When he goes to take the call in the house, I know that our honeymoon is over. He returns a little while later, worried, and speaks with Giovanni for a moment. Giovanni hugs him and goes to tell his mother.

“Emma, I’m sorry, we need to go back to Paris.”

Those are the only words he’s spoken since we left the party. Back on the boat, we pack our bags quickly and everything happens so fast. Car, jet, car. In silence. He left me on my doorstep a few minutes ago.

“Emma, I have to leave early tomorrow morning. Don’t hold it against me, I have some important business to take care of.”

Then he appeased me with a chaste kiss on my forehead before returning to his apartment. I feel so alone and so disconcerted that I decide to call Manon.

“Stay right there, I’m coming over.”

An hour later, she’s standing in front of my door with an enormous container of ice cream.

“You eat this kind of thing?”

“Good lord, no! It’s for you, I’ve seen enough romantic comedies to know how to feed an American in distress!” I knew that Manon was the right person to call when I needed my spirits lifted!

I tell her the entire story as she listens devotedly.

“Do you know what time he needs to leave tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, he asked his driver to have the car ready downstairs at 10:00 am. It seems like he wants to be alone.”

“Okay. I’ll go get my car from my parents’ house. Meet me tomorrow morning downstairs at 9:30 am. Make sure you wear a scarf, hat and sunglasses.”

“Are you joking?”

“Do you want to know what he’s up to or not?”

“Yes…”

“Good. We’ll follow him the old-fashioned way. After all, nobody ever said you couldn’t have a little fun…”

That’s how my new friend sees things. She’s always up for some fun. But she’s also there to help me out. I know that her parents live far away in the suburbs, she’s probably going to spend the rest of the evening on public transportation just to get to her car.

The next morning, Manon is there right on time. She waits for me behind the wheel of a magnificent cream Super 5, straight out of the 1980s. It’s raining. “The perfect weather for a little stalking,” she says, putting a paper bag on my knees as I sit down in the front seat.

“What’s this?”

“Chouquettes, they’re like beignets. I couldn’t find any donuts in Paris, sorry. There’s a thermos of Earl Grey in the backseat if you want any.”

My friend is unrecognizable. Usually so well put-together, today she’s wearing an apple green tracksuit and a black down jacket. Her beautiful blonde hair is pulled back tightly and she went so far as to wear a pair of plastic pink sunglasses. As for me, I just went for black clothes. She looks at me, disappointed.

“There’s a wig in the bag on the backseat, at least put that on.”

I follow orders, like a bad student being reprimanded. It’s an afro wig. Perfect.

I can’t stop myself from laughing when I see us both decked out in these disguises. I don’t know what’s in store for us today but for now, we’re having fun like two crazy girls. But the euphoria doesn’t last long. Charles leaves the building and runs towards his car, looking both somber and worried. Manon turns on the music (a Hitchcock soundtrack compilation, as if by chance) and we start following the car. We have no idea where we’re going. Manon says that we can drive for three and a half hours before we need more gas, but who knows where this is going to lead us?

The sedan exits the highway after three hours. It looks like we’re in Normandy. We’re lucky, it finally stops raining. We’re surrounded by fields, hills, cows, it’s very pastoral, it almost makes us want to have a picnic. The black car suddenly stops in front of a giant gate, which slowly opens to allow it to enter. We have to keep on going. We stop two hundred meters further down, at the entrance of a national park.

“What are we doing?”

“We’re going in. But on foot. Grab the bag from the back seat.”

We’re there. If there’s something to find out, we’re going to discover it out now. I don’t know if I want to know, I feel like I’m blocked.

“Come on, move it! We’re going mushroom hunting!” Manon shuts the door with an authoritative gesture and puts the bag in a wicker basket. She walks with confident steps towards the place where we lost the car. I follow her, without wanting to. We reach a gate that’s now closed. It’s an estate full of greenery, and there’s a huge mansion at the end of the road. It looks like a hotel or a clinic.

“La Vire Psychiatric Clinic, long-term hospitalization,” Manon reads on the gold-plated plaque. “So we know where he’s run off to. The question now is who he’s here to see. Let’s take a walk around.”

The estate is huge and surrounded by daunting walls. Are the patients dangerous?”

After twenty minutes of walking, Manon puts her basket on the ground. Should we stop here? Apparently not. My friend starts climbing the wall…I really misjudged her the first time I ever saw her!

“Pass me the binoculars!”

“What?”

“In the bag!”

She’s thought of everything.

“It’s a huge garden. Not too many people. It looks like a retirement home. And hey, there’s Charles. He’s all alone, he looks upset. But he’s still cute…”

“Manon!”

“It’s okay…they’re coming towards him with a wheelchair.”

“Who is it?”

“Hold on, I can’t tell, I have to wait for them to walk in the other direction…”

“Let it go, it must be some old relative.”

“It’s a gorgeous woman!”

“What?”

“A woman. Extremely beautiful. But crazy, that’s for sure. She’s staring into space. I don’t think she can move. He’s not talking to her, he’s just walking next to her. Okay, I’m going to get down, we won’t find out any more from up here.”

We both decide to go back to the car while digesting the situation. So, Charles is visiting a mysterious and beautiful woman in a psychiatric hospital in Normandy. Somebody who’s important enough for him to come whenever she calls. Is it a relative? A lover? And why did they call him? How many times has this woman been in this institution? We have more questions now than we did before we made this discovery this morning. We get back to Paris, extremely curious. We spend the entire ride back in complete silence. We get back to my house, Manon comes in so that we can discuss the events and cook the mushrooms she picked along the way – I didn’t notice her doing that at all. Mathieu joins us, but all three of our brains are unable to solve the puzzle. While we finish eating our mushroom omelet, we hear someone in the elevator. It’s Charles! Through the peephole, I can see that his facial expression hasn’t changed much from this afternoon. He goes back inside his house without so much as a glance in my direction.

“Okay. Now that he’s home again, let’s move.” Mathieu seems to have an idea. After looking for the contact information on the internet, he dials a number.

“Hello, Michel Dumont, I’m Mr. Delmonte’s assistant. He seems to have lost his smartphone, could you please check to see if he left it there?...Yes, I see, thank you. And in his sister’s room?...Sorry, yes, of course, excuse me. Could you please go and check?...That’s too bad, thank you anyway. Goodbye.”

“So?” We ask in unison.

“Well, they didn’t find his smartphone. What a pain in the neck.”

“Mathieu!”

“Sit down, you’re going to be surprised. The woman is his wife.”

“What?”

“When I mentioned his sister, she kindly corrected me: ‘his wife, you mean’…”

“The pig…”

“Yeah.”

We fall silent, taken aback by the news. So Charles is married. To a gorgeous woman who’s locked up. I’m going to need someone else’s help to figure this out…

I can’t sleep that night. I know who I need to talk to if I want to find out more. But is that what I really want to do? After all, if Charles isn’t talking to me, it’s because he doesn’t want me to know. And if he doesn’t want me to know, it’s because he doesn’t want me to be a part of his life…but he took me to Portofino…I don’t understand anything. How can we be so close and yet so closed off from each other? We can’t go on like this, if he keeps on hiding such important things in his life from me. He’s even married! That’s no small thing. If we’re going to go further, I need to understand what’s going on…that’s what I think. And it’s really fantastic how he chases me out of his life during these crazy moments, but it’d be much easier to deal with if I had subtitles. “Sorry, I was thinking about my crazy wife, that depresses me, please leave me alone.” I need to know.

“Elisabeth, it’s Emma Maugham. Do you have time to talk?”

We agree to meet in a little café in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. She didn’t want to talk to me on the phone. Really, she didn’t want to talk to me at all at first, she told me Charles would kill her if he found out. I had to cry. Over-react. Finally, she admitted that I meant something to Charles and maybe we did have a future together. Basically, she felt she had to help our relationship along a little, but…”it’s not a sure thing”. She’s early, she seems restless. She starts before I can even take off my coat.

“They met at the university. I mean, he met her at school. Alice, that’s her name, was supposedly studying literature. But really, nobody knows exactly what she was doing there. We’d always see her walking around the campus, alone, or scribbling in her notebooks, sitting on a bench. She wrote poetry. I never read anything she wrote but I got the impression that it was mostly about death…basically, Charles immediately fell madly in love. The type of passion you can’t explain, especially since it wasn’t mutual. He spent about a year trying to talk to her, but she never responded. The next year, I think that he was able to convince her to go out for coffee. Then she disappeared for six months. He was crushed. They said that she had attempted suicide and that her parents had put her in a treatment center. And then she came back to roam the school halls again and continue scribbling in her notebooks…She was a little bit more open then, and that’s when they started going out together. Not really ‘going out’…they spent most of their time at home. Sometimes he managed to bring her along to one of our parties, but I think she looked down on us. But I don’t really know. What I do know is that she didn’t like hanging around us and that when she was forced to she would drink more than she could handle. She’d drink until she got sick.

And then one day he announced that he was going to marry her, that it was the only way to keep her close to him, that her parents were crazy, that they still wanted to put her in the hospital. We let him do what he wanted to do, what could we say? And life went on. We barely saw the Delmonte’s, they avoided hanging around us. Right until Alice met François. François du Tetre, yes. When he was around, she’d immediately transform, become happier, pretending to be more interested in everything. Charles didn’t stop her, he thought it did her good, that she was learning to ‘be social’. However, and we only found this out later, François had introduced her to the pleasures of drugs and she quickly became an addict. In the beginning, it was just a little joint here and there, nothing all that bad. But they encouraged each other in chasing after new sensations and one day François decided it was time for them to go further faster. They started snorting coke and then, one evening, they decided to get into heroin. François was a novice then. He didn’t know anything about doses. She ended up having an awful overdose in a bar bathroom, not far from my gallery. Luckily the ambulance got there in time and they were able to save her. ‘Luckily’, today I don’t know if that’s really the right word. Because she never ‘came down’, as they say. She’s been a complete zombie ever since she regained consciousness. It’s been almost four years know. Charles had to put her in the institution, he couldn’t take care of her all the time. Sometimes she talks in her sleep, or she moves, and then the staff notify Charles, who rushes right over there…but the doctors are convinced, she’s never really going to fully recover, though it’s not like she ever was all there in the first place…the relationship he has with her is rather unhealthy. He’s legally responsible for her and feels guilty, but he doesn’t love her anymore. Really, it’s complicated…”

“You don’t seem to like her very much…”

“No, you’re right, I’ve never had a high opinion of her. Of course, I felt bad, I was horrified about what happened to her but I can’t get over how much she’s ruined my friend’s life. Sometimes I think she did it on purpose…”

This confession leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. So that’s it, the famous ‘secret wound’ my lover’s been hiding! It would probably have been better if he was just ‘boring’…instead, I have a rival, some catatonic poet who will never recover from her silence…what can I do about it? I can’t help from feeling jealous. This passion that Elisabeth just described, will he ever feel that for me? What can our relationship possibly amount to, compared to such a tragic love story?

“A real story, not a crummy excuse,” Manon says, always ready to comfort me.

“You think so? I don’t think I’ve got much over a girl who writes poetry…”

“A vegetable that used to be a girl, you mean? Come on, Emma, think clearly! This woman was just a teenager’s fantasy, you’re much more than that!”

“A fantasy?”

“Yes, basically…something that never would have gone much further, but was frozen in time thanks to that dashing addict…uh…”

“François.”

“Yes. If everything had gone normally, your Charles would have realized his mistake after a few months and that would have been the end of this whole story. It’s as simple as that. You and Charles share things, you have sex, you laugh, it’s how a couple works…”

“I think you’re right.”

“So there you go.”

“And now what? What should I do?”

“I don’t know. If you want things to continue, you’ll have to break the spell. Either you wait for him to do it himself, but that might take centuries, or you bring it up…but that might cause some trouble.”

“I don’t know if I want any more trouble…”

Like I’ve done each time since this whole thing began, I decide to do nothing to see where things will go. Until now, it’s been mixed results, but I think that this solution is the least dangerous option. And it also lets me get back to work, I only have a week to hand something in to Mrs. Granchamps and I’m having a hard time concentrating. As long as he doesn’t come to me, I can stay at my desk and work. I’ve got enough dried fruit and nuts to hold down the fort and all the books I need.