The Eleventh Year (40 page)

He had the upper hand. It wasn't fair. She thought: I've done nothing wrong, except that I didn't tell him about Justin. But that was my private life before I ever met him. He has a mistress. Alexandre, who can live without sex for long periods of time, has a mistress! Who could it be? Does it matter?

“Do you love her?” she asked in a low voice.

“Who?”

“The girl.”

“Come on, Lesley.” Not giving an inch. Always the smooth diplomat.

“Be honest. I need to know.”

“I needed to understand the falsified bills too. Will you explain them right now? That last one from Doucet, for the fur hat I've never seen?”

She tried to find another cigarette, and, deftly, he reached for the packet and extracted one for her. He took the small gold lighter and lit it. Then, coolly, he handed it back to her. “Would you like an Armagnac?”

“Yes.” Neither made any comment on the fact that it was nine in the morning. He went to a small cabinet, all of chiseled Louis XVI rosewood, and opened the door. He took out a cut-crystal decanter and a small fluted glass. He poured out golden-brown liquid and held out his hand. Her fingers took the glass away from him, her lips drained the liqueur.

“Well?” he said. “Are you going to explain?”

She was past tears. Elena and Paul had lived inside her head for three years, like a cancer, eating away at everything that had allowed her to think and feel as a human being. She spoke with a halting softness, an ethereal quality to her words. “Alex, I can't explain. It isn't another man. It isn't anything I've done during our marriage. But there's no way I could make you understand.”

“No way?”

She shook her head.

“If you don't trust me enough to tell me the truth, if you must continue this charade—then so be it. I won't ask again. There are areas in each of our lives that are better left unspoken. I'd thought love was the supreme unveiler. But I was wrong. Each of us is born alone, and as we go through life, we can't share every step of our progress with another person. So keep your secret, Lesley. But know this much: I can't finance you through this little game, whatever it may involve. You're on your own now.”

“What does that mean? I have nothing ‘on my own.' Every penny is under your control.”

“Then take it from there. You've been selling your paintings. I have to protect our assets. It's bad enough that Paul can't meet his bills half the time—”

“You're still paying his bills?” Her voice had risen to shrillness.

“Not very often. But if I weren't here to ‘come through' once in a while on a gambling debt or other, he'd have become an embarrassment. That would hardly help our reputation, would it? I don't see how he and Elena live. She's just about stopped working, and I don't see him helping Bertrand much these days.”

“You shouldn't pay!” she cried. Her voice shook.

“Tell me about it,” he commented dryly. He ran a comb through his hair, checked himself for a final effect in the mirror. “My entire family bleeds me dry. Nobody works. Nobody cares. But everybody begs for financial assistance.”

“I'm sorry, Alex.”

“Sorry doesn't seem to be enough.”

“What is it you expect of me?”

He looked at her, and there was a set to his jaw that made her nervous. “Nothing anymore,” he replied.

She wanted to cry but couldn't. She wanted to will herself out of the room, but her knees wouldn't work. She could only stare at him as he moved with quiet grace, getting ready to leave for the office. So cold. She tried to speak but didn't have anything to say. “Will you be home for supper?” she asked finally. She was proud of the control in her voice, of the casual, wife-to-husband question. As if the previous scene hadn't even taken place.

“I might work late,” he replied, equally casually. She thought: There
is
another woman. And the fact registered itself on her dulled consciousness as just another bruise on her battered emotions. It was almost laughable. Alexandre, the image of the faithful husband, taking a mistress because his wife had lied to him in order to protect him from learning a painful truth.

No, she thought, it's not that. I'm protecting myself. A mistress is one thing. Being abandoned is another. And he'd leave in a minute. She couldn't bear to think of being left, the way she'd been left by Justin years ago. That wrenching pain had maimed her deep inside, left her afraid to be alone. Better this flawed marriage than total bereavement. And she loved Alex. She loved the honor of the man, his basic dignity. She'd loved him when they'd married, though she hadn't then understood that their union transcended the quicksilver lust that had been the base of her relationship with Justin Reeve. If only she had known how to express her love, how to hold Alex to her. But she'd been afraid to give in to her emotions. The last time she had let herself be controlled by her feelings, she had become pregnant. She wanted to prevent this from ever happening again. Now there was also the terrible, ever present fear of being blackmailed. The tension and deception had created a wall between Lesley and her husband. They barely communicated at all. At the top of the staircase she clung to the wrought-iron rail and looked down as he moved away from her. Despair filled her. She leaned over the stairs and cried, suddenly, just as she saw him emerging into the hallway: “Alexandre!”

He wheeled about, turning his head upward to look at her. She thought: He is a beautiful man; I have never fully appreciated him. “Yes?” he called up to her. She thought the taut lines of his face were relaxing into hesitant expectation. But maybe she was only hoping that they were.

She wanted to say: Stay. I need you. We'll talk if you wish. We'll do whatever you feel might make things better. But his eyes were too far away for her to really decipher. She became afraid, afraid of confrontation, afraid of telling him the truth. It was going to have to come out, in any case. She had run out of gas, like an old car on a deserted road. Paul and Elena would have to tell him, because he'd stopped their funds now by cancelling her access to extra money. She thought: All right, soon enough he'll throw me out. Right now I still am married to him. And so she shook her head and said, barely loudly enough for him to hear on the ground floor:

“Have a good day, Alex.”

When he had disappeared from view, she leaned against the railing with the small of her back. The world seemed to have stopped. Nearly ten years of marriage. Her face felt paralyzed, her stomach twisted. What's been my life? she asked herself. Paintings that sell for half of nothing to a few kind friends in society? I could have been a great set designer, but
they
wouldn't grant me the peace of mind. No one can create in a panic! I could have been a good wife, but the memories of what happened before were just too burdensome. She'd had the misfortune to make a mistake—and to have then lied about it.

E
lena Egorova watched
him sleep and thought that age, for women, was implacable. Thirty-eight. He was thirty-seven, but in sleep his face was unlined, the mouth softened into a half smile, no tension lines around the eyelids as delicate as a bird's wings. An overwhelming sensation of need came over her. He was a child, with no sense of tomorrow, with no purpose in life. She'd loved that about him. She was so driven that his simple desire for comfort, for more time in which to live out his passions, had seemed a blissful counterpoint. Now she wondered. He'd always been the man of the moment. But in reality, the past,
his
past, had been haunting him. He'd felt such an urgency about understanding who he was, where he came from, where he was going, that in his quest he had destroyed their equilibrium.

It was Jamie Stewart's fault. He'd gone out there and seen the child and found that she looked like him. He wanted the child now. But the child was also
her.
The child had her eyes, and Paul had always talked about Jamie's wild, blue eyes. Like a clear sea. Elena hated the child.

He stirred, moving the satin sheets, and sat up, brushing the hair from his eyes. She went to him, naked, her large breasts pressing against his arm to bring him to full consciousness. Consciousness that she willed to be of her, of his need for her.

There were so many needs inside her: the need for him, for his body; the need to feel quenched of revenge on Lesley, who had done to her what all her friends had done after her father's arrest—dropped her. No one was going to dismiss Egorova again. There was also the need to keep Paul there—away from Jamie and Cassandra. Without money, how could she accomplish this? She looked into his waking eyes and wondered whether to tell him about Lesley's note. Then she decided not to. Instead she slipped under the sheet beside him and touched the tips of his nipples with her fingers. “Paul,” she murmured. “Paul.” She bridged all gaps between them and pressed against him, wanting him.

While he was inside her it occurred to her that things weren't going quite right: He'd moved too quickly. She tried to make him hold back, but it was almost as if he weren't aware of her. Maybe he hadn't awakened properly. She felt a wave of frustration and whispered: “Say something, darling. Love me.”

She'd now done something terrible—she'd begged. She could feel the sense of her own mental recoil, yet she held on, tightly. He said, “Of course I love you, Elena.” But she wanted to cry. Egorova didn't cry. She choked both on her tears and on her insatiable desire for more of Paul.

At length he sat up, plumping the pillow, and she snuggled into the crook of his arm. “What's on the agenda for tonight?” he asked.

“Nothing. Too many champagne dinners make us society cats, and I wanted to save you for me alone.”

He didn't answer, and she felt the absence of his comment as a personal rejection. “Foie gras, with caviar, to begin with. Then roast quails in juniper sauce with potatoes
à la Dauphinoise
and baby peas, and an endive salad with watercress. And for dessert,
bombe glacée.
You can choose the wines.”

He smiled. “A beautiful menu, Elena.”

She'd wanted him to say: I'd rather have
you.
She asked, teasing the hairs on his stomach: “And me? Before or after?”

“Whenever you'd like.” He smiled at her. I want that smile, indelible, to be forever.

“Bertrand,” he said, “doesn't understand. Something has changed between us. It's as if years of a tenuous, unspoken bond had suddenly been shattered by the question, asked and unanswered. He doesn't understand about Cassandra.”

“What's there to understand? He doesn't want you chasing rainbows. I don't want you to get hurt either. Jamie holds all the cards and you can't keep bashing your head against the wall. It's futile!”

“You can't be sure of that,” he answered. “Elena: She's the only child I have! Suddenly I've been made aware that all my existence has been spent in waste—total, utter waste. I feel like a failure. No wonder Jamie doesn't want Cassandra to know me.”

“And I? Would I have you if I considered you a failure?”

“Oh, Elena…I don't know. I can't think.”

“I thought we were happy, until you decided to go hunting and made that senseless trip to Louveciennes.” She turned away from him, her bitterness on the verge of exploding. “Damn it! Why, Paul? You didn't want her to have that child! For three years you ignored her existence!”

“For three years I spent day and night with you, thinking this was Life. I love you, Lena. But my life isn't just you. I ran around wearing blinders in order to pretend I had no daughter. I can't do that anymore. I want her to be recognized as a Varenne.”

“What if we had a child?”

“Lena—any child of ours still wouldn't erase Cassandra. She's my daughter.”

Elena stood up, so that he would not see the tension in her white face. She wanted to hurt him for having hurt her. But if she hurt him—then what? If she turned around and slapped him on both cheeks, raised her knee to his groin—then what? She'd be showing her hand. That she needed him. So she said coolly: “We received some news today, while you were sleeping. It seems that Alexandre has caught on to Lesley and isn't going to give her any more money. She's desperate. But I think if we let her stew until the elections, she'll be near the breaking point, and we'll be able to use her in some new fashion we haven't thought up yet. It will give us time, and her worry. Don't you agree?”

“And in the meantime?”

“We still have enough from the last check to last those few weeks.”

“If she cracks completely, she might tell him herself. And then where would we be?”

“Lesley will never tell. At heart, she'll be praying and hoping we won't carry out our promise to blackmail her. She'll be waiting—but she won't tell. Not with the elections around the corner in April.”