Lovers (52 page)

The area around the Rue Vaneau was like the dark stone in the luscious peach of Paris, so utterly without tourist attractions that it was almost as quiet as the countryside at night, although if she listened closely she could hear the unceasing rumble of the surrounding city, its softly brilliant invitation to gaiety, the allure of its lights, the impatient sound of taxi horns—almost, she imagined, the conspiratorial laughter of men and women.

But on the Rue de Varenne, the nearest cross street to the Rue Vaneau, stern policemen guarded the Prime Minister’s residence, allowing no car to park. Nothing interestingly commercial flourished, with the exception of a famous shoe-repair shop, the Cordonnerie Vaneau, to which all the old aristocracy brought their riding boots and handmade shoes; a tiny cheese store; a few small florists; several hairdressers; and, here and there, simple bistros that depended entirely on the local inhabitants for their clientele.

She was safe from meeting anyone she knew, Billy concluded, so long as she confined her peregrinations to the area between her house and the Luxembourg Gardens. Above all, she didn’t want to run into anyone who would recognize her and ask her what she was doing in Paris. But there was every reason to believe that even now, at the height of the fall tourist season, no one would have any reason to seek out the quiet, gray, narrow, rather melancholy streets that lay in this part of Paris. All the best hotels and the great shopping as well as most museums and famous restaurants were located on the Right Bank; the amusing little antique dealers, chic bistros, and galleries were elsewhere on the Left Bank, closer to the Seine. Her immediate
quartier
was grand indeed, if you knew its secrets, but uninviting, somber, and even unfriendly unless
you had
entrée
into one of the great stone mansions and embassies that hid their interior gardens from the passerby.

Billy felt driven by a need to walk until she dropped. Only constant motion kept her from the kind of thinking that she wasn’t ready to confront. She could escape the workings of her brain by walking for hours on end, but pavement alone could not satisfy her. Standing on the Rue Guynemer, the outer limit of the district to which she had confined herself, she looked across the street and covetously eyed the tempting vista of the vast Luxembourg Gardens, which lay behind sharply pointed, gilt-tipped bars. There was a little-frequented side entrance directly opposite her. All she had to do was cross this street to find herself in one of the biggest parks in Paris, an utterly bourgeois park where only the most leisurely and curious tourist would stray.

The leaves had already turned to that special shade of faded golden rust that is the uniform autumn color of Paris trees. Billy felt an acute need, a positive thirst to feel the cleanly swept surfaces of the pleasant pathways of the Luxembourg under her feet, to lose herself in the seclusion of the gardens that the Chartreux monks had established in 1257, to sit on a little slatted chair and look up at the open sky. Only schoolchildren, young mothers, students, and retired people frequented the gardens during the week, she remembered, although large families came from all over on the weekends, drawn by the marionette theater and the large, hexagonal, shallow basin in which generations of children had sailed their toy boats.

She looked in both directions, darted across the street, and within seconds she was within the formally laid out but almost empty confines of the Luxembourg. She drew a deep breath of freedom and began to stride quickly under the old trees, letting her fancy decide which crossing to take as she reached the end of each
allée
, only stopping to sit down when she was finally worn out.

She was hibernating outdoors, instead of in a cave, Billy
realized, driftingly, grateful for the uncomfortable chair, for it would have been unthinkable to sit on the grass in a Paris park. No one in the world knew where she was, and unless she dropped dead on this chair, no one would ever know, since, in accordance with French regulations, she always carried some sort of identification papers with her whenever she went out of the house. When she’d lived here before, she’d kept a photocopy of her passport in her wallet. Today she had only her driver’s license and a few hundred francs in the pocket of her slacks.

She needed this time of mindless solitude before she would be ready to take the next step in her life, Billy knew. If she had tried to simulate isolation in her walled garden at home, she could never have achieved the feeling of complete escape that was possible here, six thousand miles away, in the middle of a park that was shared by strangers who all had their own lives to lead. She would have been attached by a hundred strings to the house that lay outside the walled garden, and the people in that house and the problems that had driven her here. She had been frighteningly impulsive all her life, she knew that only too well, and this flight to Paris, abrupt as it might seem, had been a way of postponing any action. It was counterimpulsive, Billy thought soberly.

Should she be troubled in any way by finding herself so utterly alone? How ridiculous she was. A woman with a house within a brisk twenty-five-minute walk, a woman with a banker just across the Seine at the branch of the Chase on the Rue Cambon, a woman who had only to hail a taxi and appear at the Ritz reception desk to be given any service she asked for, a woman who could be on the Concorde to New York tomorrow and on the plane back to Los Angeles an hour later, was hardly cut off from the world. The Luxembourg was not Tibet.

No, on the other hand, realistically she
was
alone, for she was all by herself, and nobody but the
gardien
and his wife knew she was in Paris. The fact that she had resources to change that condition quickly was no reason to deny
that she had gone to ground here, in the center of the most civilized dot on the globe, as effectively as if she had burrowed deep into a cave in the wilderness. She had fled by instinct after the fight with Spider. This was her own chosen place, a place she had never shared with him, a place that she knew in a thousand deep ways in which she could never know Los Angeles, even if she had been born in California and never left it during her lifetime. Los Angeles might change its skin ten times over without affecting her, but a modern building erected in central Paris diminished and distressed her.

How long would she stay? Perhaps the same instinct that had brought her here would tell her if she should stay forever, Billy reflected, and made her way back to the Rue Vaneau where she showered and changed to an equally inconspicuous sweater and pair of pants, before she went out for her early dinner. At the moment the most pressing problem she was willing to consider was whether to start her meal with a plate of plump Brittany sardines in oil, the vegetable soup of the day, or a slice of Paris ham, a succulent pale pink, cooked on the bone. She had walked enough to eat anything she wanted, Billy realized, although, in some strange way, she had lost her appetite. Probably jet lag.

For the next five days Billy walked for six hours a day, slept ten hours a night without remembering a single dream, and ate brief, simple meals without appetite. She lived in the moment, rejecting all introspection with the help of a pile of mystery paperbacks, one of which was always in her shoulder bag. The only interruption to her routine was a visit to the small hairdresser two streets away, confirming her belief that it was impossible to be badly coiffed in Paris. She became so bold in her anonymity that she occasionally permitted herself to sit by the sailboat basin and observe the misadventures of the miniature regatta. She listened to the placid gossip of the mothers and the grandmothers with their knitting, and managed, by fierce concentration
on this small local drama, to think successfully about nothing at all. Eventually, one afternoon, she was so lulled into weary relaxation that she found her eyes closing as she sat in the October sunshine. She pushed off her sneakers and dozed deliciously.

“They say that if you sit here long enough you’ll see everybody you know,” Sam Jamison’s voice remarked as he pulled up a chair and sat down next to her.

She had dreamed it, Billy told herself in a scurrying leap of disbelief, and didn’t bother to open her eyes.

“Are you still calling yourself Honey Winthrop?” It was his voice, just as speculative, just as humorous.

She kept her lids firmly closed, without a flicker of recognition, but she knew she was awake.

“It’s the most direct shortcut from my studio to the Boulevard de Montparnasse, since you inquire,” Sam continued. “And what, you’re probably asking yourself, would I be doing going toward Montparnasse in the afternoon? Would you believe that I’m on my way to see a framer who’s making a base for a new piece I recently finished? I was planning to go on Saturday, but it was too nice out today to spend time indoors. I can see you agree with me, or why would you be here? I didn’t have any idea that you’d returned to Paris. I never left, you know. No, you wouldn’t know, would you? Unless you read the art magazines. I had a show in L.A. last year, but I didn’t invite you, it didn’t seem like a great idea at the time—”

“How dare you sit here and babble like a fool?” Billy demanded furiously, opening her eyes and turning on him. “Where do you find the nerve to talk to me? You’re annoying me in a public place, and either you move or I will!”

“At least you’re still mad,” Sam replied. “If you’d just laughed at me, I’d have been crushed.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Billy said, gathering her wits as she tied her sneakers with trembling fingers. “Do you really believe that I’d give enough of a damn about you to stay mad for three years? You have an incredibly exaggerated idea of your importance.”

“It depends,” Sam said slowly. “It depends on just how rotten and stupid I was. I think you could have stayed mad at me forever without getting close to how mad you deserved to be.”

“If that’s supposed to be an apology, keep it! It doesn’t interest me.”

Billy jumped up and started walking rapidly in the direction of the Medici Fountain. He followed her easily, physically unchanged from the sinewy redhead she’d allowed to pick her up and call her “babe” and throw her naked on his bed an hour after she’d met him.

Sam put one of his strong sculptor’s hands on her shoulder and stopped her in the middle of the path. “Please! Honey, don’t run away! If you’re really not mad anymore, couldn’t you just give me a minute to explain?”

She was trapped, Billy realized. If she didn’t give him his lousy minute, he’d spend the rest of his life thinking he still meant a great deal to her, and catering to his ego was the last thing she wanted to do.

She looked at her watch. “I can spare a minute,” she said. “But don’t call me ‘Honey’—it was a nickname, and I always hated it.”

“What, then?”

“Billy.”

“Billy Ikehorn … I remember that last night when you told me who you were. Is that still who you are?”

“Close enough,” she said brusquely.

“Billy, I read your letter but I didn’t believe you.”

“That’s not new news.” Billy shrugged in indifferent disdain. “Henri told me, after you practically spat in my face at Lipp’s.”

“But don’t you see,” he pleaded, awkward but determined to have his say. “I’d just sold five big pieces of sculpture in one afternoon.
Five!
More than half the show, the first I’d ever had in Paris, and I’d been working on them for years. I’d gone from being an unknown to being an unheard-of success.
Of course
I was convinced that you were behind it, anybody in the art world would have been,
much less me. Since then I’ve sold just about everything I make … but, for God’s sake, Billy, that was the very start of it—and it was right after I found out how rich you were. Are. Be fair, you had never told me the truth about yourself …”

“I told you why I’d lied in my letter.” Billy was implacable.

“I only had minutes to read it before the first piece sold. Those first clients—I fucking couldn’t believe in them! Years of trying, and suddenly, out of the blue, a triumph? On that scale? Billy, with each sale I believed in myself less and less. I felt … Jesus … like a kept man! Like your gigolo, your toy, your spoiled darling who couldn’t cut it on his own. It was the worst afternoon of my life. I tracked down every last buyer, I grilled them about their relationship to you—they thought I was nuts—but finally I proved to myself that you’d had nothing to do with it. But by that time you’d disappeared.
And I’ve never, never forgiven myself.”

“Big fucking deal,” Billy said, relentlessly.

“It was,” he answered, helplessly. “It was a bigger deal than I ever knew.”

“If you felt so guilty about the way you treated me, why didn’t you write? You knew a letter to the Ritz would have reached me.”

“I … it’s hard to explain …” He blushed deeply, as he always had when he was moved.

“Good-bye, Sam,” Billy said, turning quickly. She didn’t need to know. She didn’t want to know.

“No, wait, it
was
your money, damn it!” He was abrupt, almost breathless. “I thought that if I wrote, after being so … such a total shit … so utterly heartless … those cold, terrible things I said … you’d think I was doing it … oh hell!—
because
of the money, like all those other guys. I knew that wasn’t my reason, but in your letter you said that every man you’d ever known was changed—by the money—I was afraid that you’d think I was … another one of them.”

“You were always too damn proud, Sam. It’s a vice in you, not a virtue.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” He gripped her arms with both his hands. “Look what it cost me—I’ve never been able to fall in love again. And believe me, I’ve tried!”

“Sam, don’t exaggerate. It isn’t like you, and it doesn’t make anything different or better. There are a thousand mixtures in the world called love, you can make any claim you want, it cuts no ice with me.”

“Billy—you were the only woman for me.
You are.”

“Nicely said, Sam, but it comes a little late, doesn’t it? Your apology—if that’s what it is—is accepted, but words are cheap. Let’s say good-bye here, this isn’t my direction anyway.”