The Eleventh Year (20 page)

“How do you do. And my friend, Jamie Lynne Stewart—”

If she hadn't reminded him, Alexandre would have all but forgotten the other girl. He saw the teasing in the green eyes, as if she understood. But the teasing was soft, amused, not hurtful. He went to her friend and introduced himself, and then took a seat on the sofa beside his mother, on the side nearest to the girl in green and gold.

“Paul is taking us to the Tour d'Argent for dinner,” Jamie was saying.

“It's the best restaurant in town.” Alexandre wondered which of the two was Paul's latest interest and felt sorry for Martine. But then again—it wasn't his business. He'd heard so many rumors.

“Perhaps you could join us for supper,” the other girl said in a lovely, engaging voice. She wasn't smiling now, but had an air of gravity that moved him. He wanted to take her hand again. A good feeling. He could remember it from Yvonne. But this girl, with her green eyes, was creating for him delicious sensations of joy, of wanting to belong.

“I would be delighted,” he replied.

This girl did not belong to Paul. Alexandre, realizing this with relief, moved closer to her, admiring the cut of her dress, the small breasts, the slender throat. He had just accepted a dinner invitation when he'd had the intention of returning to the office and preparing a legal brief.

He turned away and looked at Lesley's friend. She was so innocent, so pretty in her quiet way. On second glance her beauty became apparent. Her eyes were the key, revealing her soul to the object of her glances. This one was Paul's girl?

For the first time since his brief courting of his wife, Alexandre thought of his own looks, worried about the conservative cut of his suit. The red-haired girl was tilting her head to the side, looking at him. He blushed. The whole thing was stupid; he was twenty-eight years old but he felt like the child he'd never allowed himself to be—not even with Yvonne. He sat back and began to look forward to the evening.

L
a Tour d'Argent
, 15, quai de la Tournelle, was a splendid establishment. Gaston Masson had taken them to their table; Andre Terrail, the new owner, had come to speak to Paul and Alexandre. Jamie had sat there, glassy-eyed, her
magrets de canard
untouched on her plate. Lesley had felt annoyed at her for looking at Paul with such candid, open eyes. He was absolutely the wrong man for Jamie.

Alexandre de Varenne was different. Not your usual sort of man. He was attractive. He was even handsome. She liked his quiet ways, his seriousness. As different from Paul as she herself was from her own sister.

Paul was telling Jamie that he wanted to go to La Boule Blanche, where there was Negro dancing. Lesley saw her friend's nod, the eagerness in it. Jamie was almost straining toward Paul, as if he were an irresistible magnet. Lesley glanced surreptitiously at Alex and saw the stiffness of his face. He shared her concern. But Paul was his own brother.

And then Alex turned to her and said: “Perhaps you and Miss Stewart will go dancing. But Miss Richardson and I are going to go ice skating at the Palais de Glace. Aren't we?”

Lesley was enchanted. She almost laughed. “Of course!” she cried. There was an excitement in her voice that sent thrills up and down Alexandre's spine. He had proposed this as a pretext not to accompany his brother. He had never been ice skating in his life. He had to learn to dream up diversions that were not of the usual kind, for Lesley Richardson was an original.

Nobody opposed the plan. Paul helped Jamie into her coat, and she took his arm. They disappeared into the night, in Paul's car. Lesley shivered and drew her white mink coat more closely around her shoulders. Alexandre and she stared after Paul and Jamie until long after their automobile had departed. Then he said: “Your friend shouldn't be getting involved with my brother.”

Lesley looked at him. “Why not?”

Grimly, Alex shook his head. Who was he to warn a grownup young woman? But he was upset for Jamie Stewart, who had obviously no experience with men such as Paul. He took Lesley's arm, and they entered his Bugatti Royale. He was glad he'd bought it on his return from the war, for she was a woman made for luxuries, and it was evident that she was accustomed to them.

They rode in silence. On the Champs Elysées they stopped and an attendant parked the car. Lesley's face was flushed, from the excellent Moët et Chandon at the Tour d'Argent, from the cold of the winter night. They entered the Palais de Glace where a myriad of ice skaters had gathered for their after-supper exercise. They went to the register and rented their skates, and he kneeled down and gallantly fitted hers on, tying the white laces. She giggled. Alex, so grave, was so out of context! She felt a tenderness at his effort, at his touching awkwardness.

She wanted to get to know him, to ask him personal questions. But perhaps he would resent her. Suddenly, as they hit the ice, he wobbled and fell. She laughed. He stood up, steadied himself, and made a gesture of helplessness. “Come,” she said. She took his arm and propelled him forward. She'd been on skates many times before.

And then she asked: “Why is it you don't like your brother?”

“Why is it you invited me to supper?” he countered.

“I'm not exactly sure. I didn't want to get in the way of Jamie and Paul. But also—I suppose, to tell you the truth, that I wanted another man around.”

She laid a hand gently on his arm, pressed it. “I meant nothing bad toward Paul,” she said. “Mainly I was thinking of Jamie. She wanted to be alone with him, and with you along—” She blushed, suddenly embarrassed.

“I understand.” But did he? She was afraid that she had broken the mystique. She realized, searching the fine features of Alex's Grecian profile, that she wanted to please him. She hadn't wanted to please a man in over three years.

“
I
wanted you along, Alexandre,” she said in a low voice.

He stopped, abruptly, clumsily. His face was drawn and tired, and she remembered the war injury to which his mother had alluded. “Let's take these off,” she suggested. All at once she wanted to leave, to go into the starlit freshness of the night. Too many people were milling about, red skirts and blue blazers and shrill laughter. They left the rink and turned in their skates, subdued.

Outside he wasn't certain how to proceed, where to take her. It was close to midnight. He thought: But I know almost nothing about her! She was the daughter of someone wealthy and powerful in New York, her mother was English, she liked to paint. She sat turned toward him, and he admired the triangular face with its wide-set eyes.

“Have you ever been in love?” she was asking him, sitting in the car. She had shrugged her coat off, and he felt her nearness, her vitality.

“I think so,” he answered carefully. Something about her made him want to be more open than he'd ever been. “I thought so. Now I'm not so sure. I was married, you know.”

She was startled. “I had no idea. When?”

“Before the war. It was very brief, you might say. She left with another man between the civil and the religious ceremonies.” He laughed bitterly. She laid a hand on his hand. The story touched her.

“Love is very cruel,” she commented. She looked away, removed her hand.

He was silent. She opened her purse, extracted a cigarette, a small lighter. Her fingers slightly shaking, she flicked it on, missed the tip of the cigarette, gave up, and tossed both cigarette and lighter back into her purse. He was conscious of wanting to do something for her, to make her happy again.

“The war has warped so many values,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “Do you know why I'm here? Because in the United States, people think only of the next product to buy, of the next movie star to imitate. Jamie wants to be the next Sherwood Anderson,
femme,
but I have no such illusions. I'm not a bad artist—but not quite good enough, as they say in my country, to ‘hack it.' ”

“Who says you aren't?”

She turned to him then, and he took her hand, raised it to his lips, kissed it reverently. Lesley was a challenge, yet an inviting one. The exhilaration of clear cool water on one's feet, the fear and the anticipation and then, finally, the plunge. Lesley was the turning of a page, the turning back of his past. He held her hand to his lips and then took her small chin in his fingers and kissed her lips.

She let Alex kiss her, and then she wound her arms about his neck, surprising him, and she pressed herself softly into his arms. The car smelled of her perfume and of the new leather. The sky was black, with an occasional spark of a distant star, and it felt good to be in his arms. He kissed the top of her head, protecting her, and she closed her eyes. The mysterious connection: Alexandre de Varenne. Now everything made sense, came together.
He
would never hurt her.

He held her and felt the soft points of her breasts against him, the vague stirrings, the joy of her presence. When he lifted Lesley's face to his, he kissed her with a new passion, furious and sudden. Henceforward only he and Lesley were important; no one, nothing else. “I think I love you,” he murmured, amazed. “I know I do.”

In the early-morning hours, while Lesley and Alexandre were walking hand in hand, feeding the ducks in the lake of the Bois de Boulogne, Jamie Lynne Stewart held the body of Paul de Varenne close to hers, greeting the thrust of his maleness, feeling the power of him inside her. She relinquished control and gave in to the ecstasy, the red and purple joy of two bodies in one, and held him fiercely. She lay back on the pillow, drenched in perspiration, and wondered how she had survived without such sensations, without such perfect mutual giving. Paul de Varenne.

She wondered if he could love her. As she watched him fall asleep beside her, she thought of the vast differences between them. They possessed virtually nothing in common. Did it matter? She'd given herself up to him in an act of supreme voluptuousness. He'd accepted her easily, joyfully.

Jamie pulled the covers closer around Paul's shoulders, to protect him from the cold, and then she pressed her large soft breasts against his back, to protect herself from too much thinking.

B
eauce was undoubtedly
the most enchanting château that she had ever visited. Like Chenonceau, it was made of gray stone, with simple turrets that gave it graceful curves. The green trees and the moat and the small bridge, the rose garden to the left where she was now walking with Alexandre, were throwbacks to the Middle Ages. Romance hung heavy in the air. Wives and mistresses of kings had fought over it; she'd heard Charlotte say that Henri II had given it first to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who had been evicted upon his death by his widow, the embittered Catherine de Médicis. Sixteenth-century politics had been played out in its shaded alleys, famous children had been conceived in its arbors. Lesley, in the early spring of 1919, felt part of this romantic bygone era. She felt exhilaration and fear at what she sensed was on Alexandre's mind.

He looked at her, and she felt his delicate blue-gray eyes upon her. He had eyes that expressed what he felt, unlike the hard compelling gaze of Justin Reeve. She had felt as if Justin, through his eyes, had drawn her inexorably toward a precipice. With Alex, the feeling was different. She felt caressed, as though by rose petals or the soft feathers of a bird's wing. He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, then turned it over and kissed her palm and each one of her fingertips. “Lesley.”

She was so much smaller than he, and so perfect. Her teal dress had a low round collar, and around her neck she wore two gold chains with colored green and pearl beads falling at different lengths down the front; her slenderness was underscored by the loose belt and the straight, simple skirt. Her forest-green cape was trimmed with strips of ermine and matched the small green hat. She dressed with such easy grace, he thought, overcome. Never in his existence had he dreamed of possessing a girl like this. She was too precious for him. She needed someone gallant, witty, extravagant, and yet good enough to understand the vulnerability that lay behind the façade of the glamorous flapper.

“I wish I could tell you how deeply I love you,” he murmured. “I'm not a poet. You're a painter, you're fanciful—I'm not. I'm hopelessly prosaic, and what I feel is so grand that I am dwarfed by it—and by you.”

She laughed, reassured. “You're a war hero, Alex. There must be hundreds of young heiresses throwing themselves at you. I'm really not what you think—” She let her words trail off, suddenly chilled by the past. “It is I who am not worthy of you,” she said, and tears came to her eyes.

“But—why?”

‘I'm just not.” This was not the sort of man who would ever accept what had happened. She'd been with another man enough times to have become pregnant. Alexandre was old-fashioned. She had to stop him before he went too far, before it became too painful for her to resist what he had to propose. He didn't know her—didn't know what her past contained. She was all at once ashamed as she had never been before—ashamed, and filled with anguish. He was so fine, so good. Her throat was dry. Justin had betrayed her; God knew where he was now, but she had given the most precious part of herself to the wrong person, and he had maimed her forever, making all future unthinkable.

“You don't love me?” Alexandre was asking softly.

They had been walking away from the rose garden, and now they stopped by a small bench under a lilac tree. She couldn't meet his eyes. It was the shame and the fear. She pressed her other hand on the one that held hers. “Oh, Alex…You say ‘love.' I'm afraid of the word. I'm afraid, period.”

“You're afraid of my hurting you?” He cleared his throat, looked away, said: “Lesley. I wouldn't ask you to marry me if I intended ever to harm you. I believe in outdated ideals: in the sanctity of marriage vows, in God, in my Church. My brother laughs at me. But when I went to war, I fought for my country, not for medals. You ask me about young women throwing themselves at me. I don't ask to be thanked for what I did, because it was right. And if now I want you to be my wife, it's because what I feel for you must be sanctified formally. Any man could smile at a pretty girl and make love to her. I want so much more for us!”

If he knew, she thought, sweat breaking out on her palms, under her arms. If he only knew, he would shy away from me and call me a whore. He wouldn't understand, and perhaps he'd be correct. Justin and I behaved recklessly, and I thought I'd paid through the pain I had to undergo. It's not true! I'm not finished paying! I'm going to be paying for the rest of my life, every time I meet someone I might love, every time the future opens up its possibilities….

“Lesley,” he was saying, his voice more even now, but still with that tone of grave tenderness. “You're a wealthy woman, and I'm not yet a wealthy man. My father left us riddled with debts. This château itself is heavily mortgaged—the château of my ancestors….”

She saw the hard line of his jaw suddenly. “Please, Alex,” she whispered, touching his face. “It's all right.” She added: “I understand—truly I do. You come from such an old, noble family—like my grandfather's. You believe in preserving the château not simply because it's so beautiful, but because it housed generations of Varenne men who felt the same ideals as you—who fought for their country and perhaps died for it.” She'd taken a human life as much as any warrior, and only for a selfish reason.

“You
do
understand,” he was saying. At that moment she yearned to show him how much she respected him, how much his fine loveliness of spirit moved her.

“But still, I must explain. Your father would want to know everything. Lesley—my mother is a very selfish woman, and my brother.…You know him a little, enough to see him for what he is. I've had to work very hard to support their extravagant life styles. Paul works, but what he makes isn't nearly enough to keep him safely away from bankruptcy.”

“He doesn't deserve your sacrifices,” she stated bitterly, thinking of Jamie, who was spending night after night away from the suite, arriving in the early-morning hours like a guilty husband.

“If I didn't pay his debts, our family would acquire a bad reputation,” he answered her. Again she noticed the tautness of his expression.

“What is it?” she asked, stroking his hand.

“I was only thinking of things better left unsaid, Lesley. You are too pure to be mixed up with us. We are a family of bad seed. You're right. A marriage would be wrong between us. You're too good to become one of us.”

“Alex,” she cried, “what has your family to do with
you? You
are the one I care about! You are a man with feelings, with self-respect. I don't give a damn about the other members of your family!”

“Then—you'll marry me?”

His face lit up with joy, the eyes all at once bright, hopeful. She felt trapped. Part of her wanted so much to take his face in her hands, to kiss his mouth, to feel his joy and to share it. But the other part pushed the idea away, with fright, with shame, with confusion. “You're not the first man I've loved,” she said, her voice shaking. She looked down.

“You're speaking to a man who was once married—even if in name only.”

And I, she thought, was married in everything
but
name. . .

“You
don't
understand,” she whispered miserably. “You don't
want
to understand, do you, what I'm trying—have been trying—to tell you?”

She was now staring at him with a new insistency. There—she'd practically admitted everything, and if he backed away, that was only to be expected. She waited, unsmiling, almost angry for having had to lay herself out in the open this way. But he only colored slightly and cast his eyes down. She could see the wheels turning in his mind: She's not who I thought. She's just another easy woman…like my mother. Lesley had heard all about the Marquise.

Instead he asked in a low voice: “Do you still love him? This other man?”

Her heart was beating very quickly. “No.”

He'd been afraid she was still in love with Justin and hadn't understood at all! And then, suddenly, she thought, To hell with it! I don't know if what I feel is love. I was so sure I felt it with Justin—and it was only lust. This is a person with whom, truly, I could make a life.…And if he won't look at the picture the way I've obviously painted it, perhaps it's because God wants him to believe in me. Perhaps God wants me to have a life, after all, and happiness. It was so incredible, imagining happiness.…She was twenty-one years old, and for three years she had lived as a nun, condemned to loneliness.

She needed for it to be all right with Alex now, needed for him to accept her, and if she had to skip over the bare facts, then she would.

“Maybe,” she said with hesitation. “Maybe we could be married. But—”

“Lesley—”

“But I don't want to have any children.”

His eyes became opaque. “Why not?”

“I can't explain. Either you accept this, or I shall refuse.”

“But you were just speaking about generations of noble individuals, and you would not want for us to continue their line? For us to have a son—or a daughter—to carry on our ideals, a wonderful tradition?”

“I don't want children.”

She was speaking with such intensity that he felt her fright and took her in his arms. He knew what she feared—all women did. Eventually the fright would dissolve, because he would treat her so gently, like the softest of flowers.…Thinking about this brought a sudden, almost shameful feeling of lust. He was a twenty-eight-year-old man, and she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he wanted her. He wanted her now, in the garden of his ancestors, he wanted to feel her body beneath his, he wanted to possess all of Lesley Aymes Richardson, the woman he wanted to marry. He wasn't going to hurt her, because in a short while they would be man and wife….

He had never slept with Yvonne, but he needed to touch the wholeness of Lesley, to feel her his woman. She was trembling against him, and for a moment he felt that it was wrong. But it didn't matter right now. He would make it all good, somehow, because
not
to have her would be refusing a gift he had been offered by Fate: This girl, in his life.

He was kissing her, his kisses traveling down to her throat, and for a moment he was deeply remorseful when he felt the tears on her cheeks. “Darling,” he whispered, “don't cry—I love you so much—”

The words were lost in the vaporous cloth of the teal dress, and the magic that happened when the beads fell on the moist earth, and he felt her, naked, in his arms. Her face was closed, like a statue, her eyes shut too, and he kissed their lids, kissed the tears. He wasn't going to hurt her, was never going to hurt her. And then he put his jacket on the ground for a bed and lifted her below him onto it. She didn't cry out, didn't sigh, didn't make a sound. Lesley was going to be his wife, and he told her so, after his ecstasy had drained him and he lay against her soft breasts that tasted like sweet spring apples. “You are my wife. You are the only thing of worth in my entire life….”

Still she did not speak. Guiltily he brushed his lips against her tear-streaked cheek, thinking that he had committed the greatest sin of his life. And then, finally, she opened her green eyes and something between fear and hope shone in them. She said: “I love you, Alex,” and buried her face against his neck.

Now, she thought, it would be all right. He had had her and hadn't stopped in midstream, wondering. Either he had chosen to accept her lack of virginity, or, in the power of his passion, he had passed it over. Perhaps his experience with women had been minimal. But after what she'd been through, how could he not have felt it? And she thought of the knife that had scraped out the tiny fetus.

And knew in that instant that she would fight forever against his ever learning of it. But no one knew, except Jamie and the woman in Poughkeepsie. She was in France now, an ocean away.

“Yes, Alex,” she cried, hugging him tightly. “I'll marry you. I'll marry you as soon as you want to. I will never betray you.”

“Shh,” he whispered, drawing a piece of his topcoat over them. He had never felt such joy coursing through his body, through his heart. Lesley Aymes Richardson, Marquise de Varenne. He would make himself worthy of her love.

N
o American girl
of good family and cultural bent could have resisted the magnetic attraction to the pavilion on 20, rue Jacob. It was the abode of Natalie Clifford Barney and her friend, the painter Romaine Brooks. Natalie Barney, at forty-three, was still a remarkable classical beauty, who had been born in Dayton, Ohio, and had made a brilliant debut in Washington, D.C. Then she had come to Paris and given free rein to her predilection for lovely women. She had had a notorious liaison with Liane de Pougy, the most famous courtesan of the
Belle Epoque,
and with the poet Renée Vivien, who had died young. Now she shared her life with Brooks, two years her senior, but it was rumored that she still could not resist a new and fetching female. For good reason, then, Paris had surnamed her “the Seductress.” But she was also known as the Amazon and had recently published a volume of epigrams, mostly on love, called
The Thoughts of an Amazon.
She wrote in French; yet she exemplified the culmination of American liberation that Frenchmen most admired in their allies from across the Atlantic.