The Eleventh Year (31 page)

She shrugged, surprised. She knew that Lesley didn't like Alex's study, with its strict Louis XIII furnishings. But she followed the maître d'hôtel. He bowed slightly and opened the door in front of her, and then made a courtly gesture with his hand. Elena walked in. He was already closing the door behind her.

Lesley was seated behind the desk, absurdly tiny in comparison to its proportions. She wasn't dressed to go out. Instead, a housecoat of dark-green velvet was loosely wrapped around her, and her face showed no signs of makeup. “You aren't going?” Elena asked. “Is anything wrong?”

Lesley stood up, feeling lightheaded. Alex had said the same thing last night. She kissed her friend and offered her the leather armchair on the other side of the desk. Between them stood a bucket of ice with a champagne bottle wedged inside it, already popped by the expert Bouchard. She poured the foamy contents into two
coupes,
handed one to Elena. “Everything's wrong, nothing's wrong. I just don't know any more….”

Elena took a sip, crossed her long, elegant legs. “You don't feel well?”

“I'm dreadfully hung-over.”

Elena started to laugh. “Well, then, that's not a problem we can't overcome! Is that all?”

Lesley could feel the despair again, like a horrid English fog, clamping down on her. “Must we go? Must
you
go?”

Elena shook her head. Lesley wondered how her friend managed, day after day, sitting through those awful sessions with crude, arrogant men who shared nothing in common with her. She asked hesitantly: “What do you find to say to someone like Soutine?”

Elena sighed. “Nothing at all. I just look at him as if I were breathing in his words. He thinks, simply because we're both Russian, that he understands me. But I was in Petersburg, dancing at the Winter Palace, while he huddled miserably in
his shtetl.
It wouldn't be appropriate to remind him.”

“Aren't you ever lonely? Dreadfully, terribly alone? Feeling that nobody at all can understand you?”

“All the time. Why do you ask?”

“Because that's how
I
feel.”

They stopped speaking, each of them drinking her champagne, and the room, with its pleasant, crackling fire in the marble-topped fireplace, surrounded them like a protective cocoon. “You don't know how ashamed I am,” Lesley whispered. “I hate the life I lead. It's so useless! Fittings, exhibits, dinners. You forget what year it is. Every year's the same! What difference does it make that one of them had an election, or that the styles have changed again and Chanel's invented a new synthetic perfume?”

“Isn't there something
you
want, Lesley? For yourself?”

“And you?”

Elena said: “I want to stop worrying about money. I want to stop having to work.”

“Nothing else?”

Elena poured them both new glasses of champagne. “Nothing else, Elena?” Lesley persisted.

“Like what?”

“Like wanting to compose a symphony, or write a poem. Or—wanting a particular man to love you.”

“I specifically hope
against
falling in love. When our emotions take the lead, Lesley, our lives go awry. We make all the wrong decisions. Has any woman ever been able to love the right man?”

“I don't know!” Lesley sat, her beautiful ringed hands clasped over the stem of her glass, diminutive in the large armchair. “I thought I loved Alex. Now I'm not sure. Everything's confused. I've made such a mess of my life, Elena. I took the wrong turn, and after that, I kept making other wrong turns. It's like waking up in the wrong country and hearing people speaking a language you aren't expecting. Lately that's all I can think of. It's like a nightmare!”

Softly Elena asked: “And what was the first wrong turn?”

Lesley brushed the hair from her forehead with the back of her hand and swallowed more champagne. Elena could drink, because she was big, and also because in Russia people consumed unbelievably large amounts of alcohol and became used to it. But Lesley was smaller, and not Russian. She could already feel the lightness flowing through her veins, a giddiness. She looked at her friend and felt her throat contracting. The first “wrong turn…”

“I did something terrible. Years ago.” Suddenly she was on the rollercoaster and couldn't get off. She had to finish. “It was my fault too,” she said, her voice catching.

“What did you do?”

“I was pregnant. I had it taken care of. Just like that. I never wrote to him, never let him know….”

“Who was he?”

Lesley couldn't hold the glass anymore, her fingers were shaking too much. She tried to raise the glass, drank some more, felt better. She put her head into her hands, and then, when she had finished sobbing, she looked at Elena, a strange calmness coming upon her. “He was a thief.”

Elena stared at her, dumbstruck. She heard herself ask: “But—what was his name? Where was he from?”

“It doesn't really matter. He was English. The son of someone who grew up with my mother. An English baronet. I loved him so much—”

“And this was…before Alex?”

“Yes, of course! I should have accepted him as he was. I should have let him know about the child. He would have married me—I know!”

“You can't know for sure,” Elena commented. “Men are too elusive.”

“But it was my own stubbornness, Elena! I should have written him! Instead I had the child—our child—killed.”

Elena said nothing. Lesley was so intent on her own memories that there was nothing she would have heard, in any case. But Elena was wondering, shocked. And she was frankly appalled at Lesley's lack of discretion in revealing such a dangerous secret.

Lesley said, in a low voice: “I could never face the idea of another child. I've always refused to discuss it with Alex. But I never knew why, till right now! I thought it was the memory of the last child. But it's the fact that I loved
him
—this other man—so much, and that it was
his
child I had ripped out. It was
his
child I
should
have borne. It was him I should have married, not Alex. I made all the wrong turns.”

Elena sat absolutely quiet, the room like a mausoleum, chilling her. She made herself say: “Don't condemn yourself, Lesley. What's in the past can't be changed. It doesn't do any good to regret. Maybe you didn't really love that man.”

“He was so incredibly beautiful: like a Florentine prince. He was my first lover. I was so hurt that he abandoned me, let me go home alone—that I never even considered having his child. And so Jamie arranged the operation. She paid for it too—I'll never understand where she found such money. How then, Elena, could I ever deserve to bear another child? I wasted the first one!”

“You're being sentimental, Lesley. You weren't even sure he would have married you. And you told me yourself: He was a thief. You could never live with a dishonest man. . . .” As opposed to me, she thought. Paul isn't honest, but to have him, to keep him—I would do almost anything. To take him from that self-sacrificing little writer—

“He probably thought so too. But who was I to pass judgment on him? In God's eyes, Elena, his sins are venal compared to mine. I killed. I deliberately ended a life. And you know, I don't even know what happened to him. He might himself have died in the war!”

Then Lesley was asking: “Haven't you ever been in love, Elena?”

“I don't know. I don't…think so.” Only
now,
of course. . .

“How do you do it? How do you get through the days? The men—they don't really matter, do they?”

“No,” Elena murmured. “They don't.” Only one did.

“It would be so easy to take a lover. They're everywhere! Marianne brings me their cards on a silver platter. And it's not just the men! The women, too! Dolly Wilde. Winnie de Polignac. God—it's revolting!”

“What is?”

“The thought of having a woman touch me. Of having a woman undress me.”

“It's not really bad at all,” Elena remarked softly, getting up again to refill their glasses. She returned to her chair. “It's much gentler, it's kinder, in a way it's even cleaner. A woman has considerations that a man can't have.”

“You mean, you've actually done it—gone to bed with another woman?”

“Yes. The first person I ever slept with was a woman. She was kind to me, and she loved me. She was the only lover I've ever been sure of. Men use us in ways that women can't. A woman will spare another woman from pain, because she knows exactly how it feels.”

It made sense then. Lesley looked at her friend and nodded. Even Alex, for all he claimed to love her, didn't begin to understand….

“You must never repeat what I've told you,” Lesley whispered suddenly. “If Alex ever knew—”

“I told you my secret, didn't I?” Elena said. “I think you can trust me with yours.”

She fastened her black eyes on Lesley, and for a moment each felt as if the world had stopped, as if the room had entombed them together. Then Lesley looked up, suddenly stirred to action. “My God!” she cried. “I'd forgotten all about the damned costumed ball!”

“Have a good time,” Elena whispered, and as she rose she smiled. But when she stepped forward to kiss her, Lesley noted the harsh lines of that smile, its essential grimness. She clung to Elena for a brief moment, then let her go.

Softly, Elena Egorova closed the door of the study behind her and walked into the corridor. Alexandre de Varenne was coming toward her, and she blinked. He appeared out of place there, after everything that had been said between her and Lesley. “Good evening, Marquis,” she murmured.

“Good evening, Princess.” His voice was cold. His gray eyes concentrated on a point above her head. It was easy to see why Lesley might not love him. He was, Elena thought, singularly unlovable. Totally unlike his brother, as Paul never failed to point out.

Knowing she made him uncomfortable, she taunted him, smiling: “I've had a lovely long visit with Lesley. She's in the study. A beautiful room, if somewhat cold. Your taste, Marquis?”

“My taste. Strange, but I've always found it the most comforting room in the house.”

“That, my dear Marquis, only points out how much we differ.” She knew that she was annoying him more with each word she spoke. Yet his marble face reflected none of the irritation, none of the hostility. He was a perfect diplomat, she thought. Her brittle smile faded, and she looked at him with a stare of unconcealed dislike. This was the man who was making life impossible for her, for Paul—the man who could have paid his brother enough to keep him out of Jamie Stewart's bed. Alexandre was saying:

“You must excuse me, but we're late for a ball.”

You're late for everything, Elena thought, hearing again Lesley's confession of love for another man. With a small nod, she walked away and saw Bouchard holding her black sable. A perfect household, she commented to herself with irony.

G
erald and Sara Murphy
were an elegant American couple, whom Lesley had known from New York. He was the heir to the Mark Cross leather goods store, she a blond society girl from Ohio. They'd come to Paris much as Lesley had, to break with their dominating families and think freely. They knew every artist of merit, and Gerald who fancied himself a painter as well, was taking lessons from one of the artists of the Ballets Russes, Natalia Gontcharova.

One day Gerald took Lesley with him to Gontcharova's studio. She'd always wished to meet the Russian artist who had done so much of the scenery and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes. Gontcharova was a middle-aged woman with a rather flat, ugly face, but who was animated, whose studio walls breathed life. Color sprang out everywhere, from every canvas. “So,” she said in her guttural accent to Lesley. “You too are a painter, it seems.”

“I once thought so.”

“Come to me some afternoon, alone. We'll have Russian tea and talk about your work.”

Lesley blushed, wanting to shrink into the woodwork, overcome with self-consciousness. But she didn't forget. She went home and sat again by her easel, and wondered. Perhaps her error lay in attempting to paint pictures. At Vassar what she had most enjoyed had been working on the backdrop for Jamie's play. Maybe the theater
was
the answer. She went to visit Gontcharova the very next day, arriving early. “Would you take me on as a student?” she asked. It almost came out as a supplication.

“Maybe you don't need me. Let's first see what you can do.” Gontcharova set forth a manikin and ordered: “Now imagine a Tatar princess from my country. She's going to dance. You'll want her clothing light, so she can move. Pick any of the materials here at your disposal. See what you can do to make her come alive.”