The Eleventh Year (41 page)

“How quickly you think on your feet,” he said with admiration.

She turned to him, triumphant, and waited for him to call her back to bed. But instead he sighed and murmured: “When does it all end? When can we all have peace?”

“
You,
Paul, want
peace?”

“I'm thirty-seven. I'm useless. I possess no talents. Maybe one day I'll wake up in the morning and want to feel one tiny bit of self-respect. Don't you ever wish for an end to the struggle? For something you could be proud of?”

“You're beginning to bore me, darling. Remember which brother you are before you turn completely moral on me.”

He stood up, and she saw the elongated, firm chest, the long, strong legs. He stretched. “Elena, it isn't a question of morality or immorality. Bertrand said I'd have to make Cassandra proud of me. How the hell do you propose I do that? By telling her I've been blackmailing her godmother and my own brother in the process? By explaining that I can't support myself?”

“The child is three. You aren't going to have any explaining to do for years.”

“But to Jamie I will. She'll be watching my every move to make sure no ‘person of my ill-repute' ever again crosses paths with her daughter. How do I win out on that one?”

“Maybe,” she remarked softly, “you
don't.
You tell yourself Cassandra's all right, that she doesn't really need you. Sooner or later Jamie will marry. And you can have other children if you still feel this urge. Don't become obsessed, Paul. It'll ruin your life.”

He said, so harshly that his tone jolted her: “Isn't obsession ruining yours, Lena? Years and years of not forgiving the world for what it did to you when you were eighteen? Years of unfocused vengefulness that have now become focused on Lesley?”

She couldn't reply. He moved to the window, looked out at the small back garden set in stone. Then he turned around. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.

She was standing naked by the bed, her chin slack, her eyes unreadable. He'd always been able to read the beauty in Jamie's eyes. Paul felt his own sense of alienation right there in that room, his sense of not knowing where he belonged. Was Elena really saving him? And from what? From poverty. From having to keep working for Bertrand.

From making a connection with his daughter.

“You hate Lesley too,” Elena was saying.

“She's too insignificant to hate. I hated my brother. But Bertrand says that Alexandre has made Cassandra his heiress. I don't hate Alex. We're just not the same.”

“But don't you see that we need the money?”

“Yes. That much I see. Still, Elena, I didn't enjoy having to blackmail Lesley. You'd have enjoyed it. To me it was like stepping on a wounded bird.”

“And you think I obtain my pleasure from crushing defenseless people?”

“I have no idea. I see Lesley as a source of money, but you also see her as a means to your revenge. I don't care, Lena. I don't care what you do to Lesley. She's unimportant to me. But if Cassie learns of this whole thing one day, do you think for an instant that her mother would let her forgive me?”

Elena uttered a strangled, animal cry, a cry of such passion and helpless rage that it frightened him. Her face was twisted into a grimace that was ugly. He felt the force of it and his stomach twisted. He said, trying for gentleness: “Lena…”

She made a move, like a jungle panther, and leaped at him. She slapped his cheek, then slapped the other cheek. There were tears, odd, feral tears, on the edge of her lashes. Her face was frightening. Suddenly they were entwined on the carpet and she covered his mouth with hers, plunging her tongue deep into his throat. She bit his neck. She found his penis and rammed it inside her, and rode him, like a stallion, her eyes closed and her hair swinging in rhythm. Nothing had been left up to him, and he felt that this must be what rape was all about.

When it was all over, she collapsed against his chest, breathing in uneven gulps. He touched her hair, tried to hold her. She was trembling in every limb. “This is what you want,” she then said, with a fierceness that came at him like a cold, harsh wind.

But he wondered, as he transported her to their bed, if he had not changed a little. Jamie would never have assaulted him this way. Jamie had bored him a little. But too much of Elena was perhaps not enough of something else….

What, or whom, did he love? He loved himself. He thought he loved Elena. He loved Cassandra. Covering his mistress with the sheet and blanket, he felt a new wave of hopelessness. He was caught not knowing where he wanted to be, by choices he had made three, four years before. He inched closer to Elena, to her warmth, and for the first time it repelled him. She was too strong, too definite, too unbridled. His neck hurt from the bites and his penis felt sore. She made a moaning noise and groped for his hand, and he let her take it, mutely.

S
he watched
the gardeners cleaning up the front flowerbeds in back of the porch, her long, cool hand poised on the soft silk curtain that framed the bay window. Numbly, she gazed down at the coral gloss of her nails, now no longer chewed and ragged. The neat enamel reflected back all her outward perfection, the same perfection that mocked her in the three panels of her boudoir mirror. She was thirty years old, and Dolly Wilde had said of her the previous night that she seemed the flapper personified: modern, fluid, boyish. Dolly liked boyish women because she was a Lesbian. But what she really would have said, had her proclivities been different, was “sexless.” The erect back, the small bone structure, the smoothness of her pallid skin. There was always a perfect dress to hide the jutting shoulder blades and the flat, empty breasts: a dress of pure silk, or of the new synthetic jerseys made famous by Chanel, a dress with raglan sleeves that were tight around the wrists, then flowed in a single line to the waist and in another to the neckline. Dresses like the one she was wearing today, in a soft pastel blend, picturing abstract globes of romantic purity. A package well wrapped but containing used goods.

He came up behind her and she felt him move beside her, his shadow filling the space next to her. “I was writing to your father,” he said. “About the stock market. I've pulled all your funds out of stocks for the moment. I think he should do the same. The European market hangs in such precarious balance that the American one, be it later, can't help but eventually be affected by our world's economic fluctuations. It's politics that make economies change: faith in governments, wars, peace. After our war there was a resurgence of faith in the world, in a new society—and so everybody celebrated by spending. Now…I foresee a darker future.”

She turned a little to look at him. Such a long talk for him, her husband who did not trust her. She'd once accused him of patronizing her about politics, of wanting her to be a carbon copy of himself and his beliefs. Now the thought filtered through the dreadful numbness to the core of her. He was protecting her assets, which was, of course, also protecting his own; but he was, in addition, sharing his advice with her father. She was touched. “Are things so bad?” she asked faintly.

“I'm not sure. I could be wrong. But buying on margins has always seemed to me to be an unsafe risk. I thought I should bring my ideas to Ned so that, when he makes up his own mind, he can think about them too.”

“But my father's taken risks all his life. He lives this way. His profession is risk oriented.”

“Not necessarily. He doesn't take on new business unless he believes the client will be successful. Other advertising firms are notorious for gambling. But your father is cautious. Once he is committed to a client, yes, he will push as hard and as flamboyantly as he can to produce the most sensational campaign. But that comes later.”

She thought: I'd never seen Daddy as “cautious.” I suppose, all these years, I saw Mother as holding him back, being the driver pulling the reins. Alex, however, had never pictured him this way. He visualized her father as a man not unlike himself—willing to take some educated risks and only then plunging in. She looked more fully at her husband. Yes: He, whom she'd always categorized as afraid of risks, wouldn't have entered the political arena, especially now, after one loss, unless there was a certain daring, a certain breaking of conventional fears, in his own making.

“Why are you staring at me?” he asked her. “It's as if you were seeing a stranger.”

“We're all composed of onion layers,” she whispered, looking quickly away. “Every now and then one of our layers peels off and there's a new one to examine. In that sense we're all strangers, even to ourselves, at the various stages of our lives.”

She saw his gray eyes fasten on her pensively. He was someone to be valued. She'd misunderstood who he was, fundamentally, from the beginning. He wasn't, after all, only a figure etched in black and white. And yet . . .

She felt she was always waiting. Waiting for one of
them
to send a letter to him, revealing all the sordid events of 1916. Waiting with her heart in her throat every time the mail came. What if the letter came at the office? What if he lost the election because of this? Learning about what she had done, feeling so sick he'd give up.…Or they might come in person. She refused to go out, spending her days in the salon, waiting for the doorbell to ring when he was home, so that she would be the first one to reach Paul, or Elena, and stop them before they told him. Hanging on one more day.

She couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Abruptly she needed a glass of something strong and left the window, going to the sideboard. He watched her pouring whiskey into a highball glass, without ice. He made no comments, but she saw him watching her. Almost defiantly—defying his silent reproach, and defying those two who sought to ruin her—she swallowed once, twice. She liked the strong taste.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice catching, “for writing to my father.”

“It's only natural.”

“You're a good man, Alex.”

Fumbling with the cord of the curtain, he murmured, his own voice unreadable: “But ‘good men' are not often the ones that are loved.”

She hesitated, her lips parted, wanting to say: But I do love you. She'd thought he was stiff, pressuring her about babies. That he could not understand her. In reality, had she ever tried to understand him? Once, she thought, feeling the ache as if it had happened anew, I thought that love was magic. Maybe love is having a man who gives advice to one's father, who stays even though I won't do what he wants. She felt a new ache, an ache to touch Alex, to bridge their gap. “Alex,” she began, touching his arm.

He looked at her. She stammered: “Alex. Kiss me?” So many months of absolute emptiness and distrust. And she knew, the way one always did after ten years together that he had someone else. It had come as a natural consequence to the distance between them. She could hardly blame him, given her part in causing their rift.

He took her whiskey glass and set it aside, and put his hands around the delicate oval of her face. She couldn't stand the intensity of his eyes on hers—the probing. He wanted her eyes to tell him why she'd lied. “Do you still love me?” she asked feebly.

He ran a finger down her nose, and she felt his pain, caused by the rejections she had made him endure: rejections of truth, rejections of a family, rejections of sharing. “I'm not sure, Lesley,” he answered softly.

“Do you love another woman?”

“I'll never love anyone as I loved you.”

Past tense. She'd ruined everything, with the dreams of English abbeys and moonlit seductions that had led to Justin. She hadn't seen reality. She cried for her youth, for the aborted pregnancy, for what
in her dreams
might have been. She'd confused book romance with real life and a real man.

And now he spoke to her in the past tense. Letting her understand that she had wasted the greatest love he'd ever feel for a woman. In the end, women were the stupid ones. They went after a rainbow even while happiness beckoned. He dropped his hands, gently. She thought: Anyway, what good would it do for me to make it right between us…even if it weren't too late? How many days would we be happy before the news would come to destroy us?

She picked up her glass and drank. It was like counting moments before one's execution: One wasn't dead…yet. But outside the world kept up its careless pace, oblivious of her agony.

E
lena sat
at a table at Fouquet's, sipping an
express,
the black pillbox hat planted firmly on a tight coil of black hair, the veil pulled down to the tip of her nose. Thus she could observe without being observed. It was the millinery of flappers, and she had spent a lifetime shunning hats, except for the generous, broad-brimmed extravaganzas of the
Belle Epoque
that she had worn to flaunt her disrespect for the dictates of
couturiers.
But this time she wondered if women had adopted this kind of demure apparel, with a veil, in order to hide their real selves. It was the hat of sad women who hid their eyes and of jealous women who looked for their men without wanting to be found out.

“Another, Madame?” She nodded to the young waiter and thought of anonymity. She had been defying it, creating immortal images of herself through her clothes, through her friendships, through the brushstrokes that had captured her. But if she didn't want to pose anymore, it wasn't, as she'd told Paul, because she found the process humiliating. She'd felt less used, less of an object in a painter's den than she had in the Orient—less used, perhaps, than she would have been if she'd married a young count in St. Petersburg before the debacle. It was her beauty that had inspired these artists. Lesley, on the other hand, was being used by Alexandre. He used her money, he used her grandfather's peerage, he used her as a hostess. No, she hadn't felt abused. She was afraid of aging. She'd simply grown worried that her voluptuous breasts had started a slow process of loss of tone in the ligaments, and that her hips had rounded, her eyes had creased. An old model wasn't usable. She'd wanted to exit before Kisling told Boldini that Egorova was finished—old.

The women who were ageless suffered just as much as those who looked like young elves, like Lesley, when thirty-five was viewed from the upward climb of the peak of life. Ageless women “matured.” They “ripened.” But nevertheless, the euphemisms didn't hide the truth. The veil did. That morning she felt old. Thirty-eight and thirsty, thirty-eight and frantic, and sad. I'll leave him before he thinks of me as a tragic old mistress, the way he did with Martine.

His obsession with the child had at first amused her. Now she had to admit that she felt a gnawing concern. He'd never wanted to procreate, so where was the sense of the child's mystique? What if he'd asked her, Elena, to bear him a child? What if he'd asked her to marry him? Comtesse Paul de Varenne. Not so bad. But he'd never broached either subject. She hadn't had a chance to decide whether the lack of her maternal instincts might have been overcome for him, to please him. Jamie had had a child to please herself, risking the loss of him. She'd thought Jamie pathetic. Yet Jamie, in her white mansion with its clean, Doric columns, was happy. She wasn't married, but she had lovers now and then. She'd survived Paul. She'd had a relationship with Pavel Tchelitchew, the painter. She'd been, on and off, sleeping with that strange Hilaire Hiller, the dark-clad, ugly American painter who owned the Jockey Club. She had odd tastes to have been attracted to him, but he was amusing, he was soulful, he was tragic: perfect material for a writer who once had lived the cloistered existence of middle-class Cincinnati. Elena had to admire her for having reached freedom to live as she pleased. She defied society without having to wear outlandish clothes and without brandishing scathing memories of a grand past. She still wore her skirts too long and her hair carelessly. But she was
somebody.
And she was only thirty. Young, wide-eyed. With the child
he
wanted, who looked like the better part of both of them.

Anguish was feeling you were losing hold on the man you loved—wondering if you were paranoid for nothing. Being in pain all day, all night, even with him beside you. Having tight ropes on both sides of your spine, because he wasn't thinking of you as he once had. Living together was a bad idea. It allowed men—all men—to take women for granted. Their rare beauty became common. And then they began to notice the small flaws, the creases, the laugh lines. But to give up the communal life? Then she'd be taking a foolish risk that, at thirty-eight, given his proclivities, his enormous sexual need, would take him that much more away from her.

He'd forgiven Jamie for having had the child, yet if she, Elena, were to do the same thing, he'd turn away in disgust: Egorova at two years before forty, imitating the innocence of Jamie Lynne at twenty-six. She didn't want a child at all! She wanted Paul, the sexual thrill of him in her bed, his odor on her sheets. Money. If she could find a way to squeeze money— a great deal of it—from that little bitch, Lesley, then if he wanted the child, she would accept their taking her with them. There were ways that he, a Varenne, might win custody in court against a libertine American unwed mother novelist. If need be he could woo his brother into changing his opinion of them. They could get married and convince Alex of their great desire to prolong the Varenne dynasty. Alex, she had been told, had someone now. Marie-Laure de Noailles had told her that she'd glimpsed him in a remote tavern in Montmartre with someone sweet and young. That would definitely be his
modus operandi.
Sweet, young, adoring. Not an Egorova, figure of scandal. But in any event, they could, with money, obtain Cassandra for Paul. It was insulting, it made the blood pound against her forehead, to think this hedonist, this user, this amoral man, had turned soft in the head over a three-and-a-half-year-old child.

The
express
was bitter, and she drank it down, appreciating its acrid taste. Suddenly she saw, scraping a chair to sit at a table ahead of her, a tall, good-looking man with glossy black hair, a thin nose, dark eyes. Odd: Didn't she know him? He turned, feeling her eyes upon him, and she thought:
Do
I know him? I can't remember. He had a Van Dyke beard, very trim, very dashing, and a mustache. A Florentine figure of the Renaissance, dressed in the best of Saville Row. Elegant way of sitting.

He smiled, and she felt chilled. Men had spent twenty years smiling at her with desire. This one was merely trying to be polite. Through the veil he had caught her expression of question. And so he stood up, bowed: very British, smooth. “Madame,” he stated. The voice. Memories. “I don't believe we've met. Although you think we have?”

“My name is Princess Egorova,” she declared, realizing her voice was strained.

“Ah. I am honored. Daniel MacDougal, of Scotland. But I am right, aren't I? You're such a lovely woman, I'd have remembered meeting you,” he said.

“Thank you, kind sir, but it was my error. I thought you looked familiar.”

“I'm fairly new in Paris. In Parisian society. I sell some art works to a select few.”

“Oh. Then you must know Paul de Varenne, the man I live with. And our friend Bertrand de la Paume.”

“I've met the chevalier, but not your friend. As I say, I travel a great deal. It takes a while to establish oneself in this city.”

“I know the feeling only too well. I came here ten years ago, after the armistice. But I shall never be Parisian.”

“Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Unmistakably so.”

He was smiling, but she was thinking: My hair is coiled. I'm wearing a demure little black hat and a veil. I'm sitting down. Right now is one of the few times I can be sure I don't look Russian. Vaguely dark, yes. Slavic? Perhaps. But not “unmistakably Russian.” He was watching her and she couldn't read his eyes. Like her own, they had a bottomless blackness. Suddenly he stated, with a charming, self-deprecating smile: “I forgot that I had an appointment. It would have been a pleasure to pursue our acquaintanceship. Some other time, perhaps?”

“Absolutely.”

He pulled out a card from a thin wallet of cordovan leather and handed it to her. Embossed, in black lettering, was his name: Daniel S. MacDougal, and below, in smaller letters: art consultant. So this was what he called himself: a consultant. There was an address on Avenue Montaigne—a business address? She wondered why he didn't know Paul and why he made her uncomfortable. He'd been smooth, poised, eloquent. Yet she knew he was lying. Suddenly she felt a flash of recognition. He was bowing, bringing her gloved fingertips to his lips. Then he was weaving out among the tables, disappearing into the morning throng of Parisians passing by.

Elena Egorova held the demitasse of
express
and felt the world blurring around her. There was only her hand, the whiteness of the cup—and the eyes of the bearded man. She could feel her heart pounding. Staring at the business card, she touched its corners as if discovering that they'd been dipped in gold. She stood up, stunned. And she was young again, and remarkable, and clever.

“Russian?” “Yes.”
“Unmistakably so.”

His mistake. He was the fool who would allow for her to build her house, the house where Paul would find her once again his miracle worker, his enchantress. He would have to say to her again: Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

She put down the change for the coffee and left the table. The day smiled at her and so she threw back the veil from her forehead and met it straight on, like a happy woman.

B
ertrand
de la Paume scrutinized the card, peering at it from his bifocals. Then he regarded Elena with a half smile. “Yes. I've met the man. Young: mid-thirties? Dark, with a beard? From Edinburgh? He's only recently come to Paris. I can't tell you much about him.”

“But surely, in art circles people have heard of him.”

“Oddly, no. He says he's been traveling. The Orient. Now he's settled on something he enjoys—but more as a dilettante than as a professional. He's bright, he's polite—he'll be good with the ladies of Paris.”

Elena stood up. “That's most informative. Of course, my reason for asking…Paul never mentioned him, but today this MacDougal looked at me as if he knew me. I was bewildered. Being right at Fouquet's, in the neighborhood.…I thought I'd drop in to ask you. It gives me a chance to sit with you for a while. We rarely see you,
cher ami.”

“Beautiful women are always intrigued when strange men pretend to know them in order to start a conversation.” He was looking at her with the amusement of an older man, and suddenly she felt the weight of her years fall away. To him she was still a young girl. But he hadn't responded to her comment about visiting them. Bertrand, who might or might not be Paul's father. Elena knew that Paul was to blame for the rift between the two men, once so close.

She walked around the office, fingering various precious knickknacks, a vase, some flowers. Admiring the Cézanne on the right wall. When she felt that she had remained long enough to convince him that her questions about MacDougal had been simple curiosity, she bade him good-bye with a kiss on the cheek. He was, she knew, partial to her. Perhaps, she thought wryly, I made a mistake in 1925: I could have married Bertrand and lived a life of quiet luxury.

When she returned home, Paul lay stretched out on the sofa, his red silk ascot loose around his neck. “You look most sedate,” he commented with good humor.

She tossed off the black velvet pillbox hat. “It's my disguise for the day.” She sat down beside him, loosening the coils until her hair came bouncing down her shoulders. She snuggled next to him, smelling the cologne, the slight animal perspiration that always clung to a man's skin. His hand rose and, with careless ease, touched the silken hair, her cheek. Wandered to her breast where the nipple hardened. She bent over to cover his lips with her own. She felt his tongue, lazy, playful. Her own tongue fought hard against it. But he didn't push her backward, didn't muster desire in the way he reacted. It was exactly that: He was kissing her
back,
responding to her initiation.

It had been so different that first time in the hallway of the Opéra, she remembered. Sadness enveloped her and she pulled gently away. Smoothing down her skirt, she said, her voice falsely bright: “We have a piece of extraordinary news. I have found the crack through which we can get to Lesley.”

His face came alive then, and she knew, as she had suspected would happen, that she had lit a magic fuse that she herself no longer could ignite—greed. After a few years one had to resort to outside means in order to keep the relationship alive. One also had to possess the financial capacity to feed one's fire. It was an insulting reality, but Paul was not hers as he had once been. He was a pawned good that had to be redeemed.

“I have found Ashley Taylor, an old friend from Singapore,” she announced gleefully. “And we're going to use a perfect stranger to blackmail him: Lesley!”

Paul stared at her, dumbstruck. “What on earth are you talking about?”

She touched her hair with an air of pride. “Ashley Taylor is
here! I saw him!
And he recognized me too. He pretended not to know me, but then gave himself away. It doesn't matter how, but he knew me. Do you remember what I told you about how I came to Paris? About the della Robbia forgery that fell into my hands? It was the same Ashley Taylor who gave it to me!”