Till We Meet Again (74 page)

She was that kind of woman. She was at the age he had always preferred. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to be treated like a whore. No other man in New York had ever dared to treat her as he treated her, and as yet, Bruno had only begun to do to her all the humiliating things he knew she craved. She was his creature.

That was precisely the problem, Bruno thought as he turned away from that scented room where the woman was waiting, and walked toward his own house. He could predict every one of her secrets. They weren’t new to him. He had
almost reached the age of those experienced women he had always preferred, and as each year passed, it became more and more difficult to find a woman whose most private and forbidden fantasies weren’t twice-told tales. Seldom, now, was he excited for long by any new woman, particularly among the society women of New York, whose attitudes toward sex were so often tame and banal, without subplots, lacking the dark and forbidden scenarios that were to be discovered among the women of Paris.

Yes, he blamed them, these richly glittering American women with clean-scrubbed, disappointingly hygienic imaginations, for his lack of desire. He felt no welcome stirring in his groin at the thought of that woman who was waiting for him at this very minute, ardent, avid and wet. He envied her arousal. At least, tonight, when she realized that he wasn’t coming to their rendezvous, she would find some way to relieve the lust that had been welling in her since his phone call this morning. She was lucky, she’d enjoyed hours of itching excitement, hours that, for him, had been as barren of anticipation as his whole day, as the predictable dinner party that faced him.

What could there possibly be to look forward to in this city, he asked himself as he walked unseeing through the thrilling streets of New York before Christmas, where, for everyone else, a dozen promises zinged through the snapping air; where, for everyone else, brightly lit windows competed with each other for attention; where, for everyone else, there was a rush of energy and vitality to be discovered at the crossing of every street.

New York. An ugly, ugly city, without charm, without intimacy, without history. The buildings were too tall or too short and, in all cases, too new. All their proportions were wrong, uninteresting, clumsy. The streets were too straight, too narrow, too regular, a grid of boredom. There were no trees—even that excuse for a park was enclosed within a severe rectangle—there were no hidden courtyards, no unexpected cul-de-sacs, no places where you could turn a corner and be forced to stop dead in your tracks by the power of a view. There was no necessary riverbank winding through the city, without which any urban landscape was only half-alive. People who considered themselves elegant were content to live in apartment houses on a dark, too-wide street called
Park Avenue, where anyone who was curious could gape at their windows, for there were no walls to protect their privacy.

New York society. A perfect reflection of the city, too noisy, too gaudy and too giddy, without charm or history, open to anyone who could afford the entrance fee. A society that would never comprehend and pay proper attention to the claims of family, to heritage. A society he could not even relate to the word
aristocracy
. An elaborate joke that had the pretension to take itself seriously. He wondered if any of his overanxious hostesses had the slightest idea of what he thought about them. Probably not—they were too stupid to expect his utter scorn, and his manners were too automatic to hint at it. Just as well, for they were the only people available. The French colony was made up of hairdressers and head waiters.

The only redeeming quality about New York was that it was not a European city. He could not have endured living in the second-rate, self-absorbed, yet provincial Europe of Rome or Madrid, with Paris only a few hours away, forbidden to him. At least here, in this completely sterile exile, the main topic of the city was money, and money, unlike sex, would never cease to fascinate him, never grow predictable and stale; its pursuit could never become devoid of interest. Even as he accumulated more and more of it, he never asked himself for what purpose, when it couldn’t even buy a decent valet, for money was totally good, in and of itself.

As Bruno approached his house, to which he never invited anyone, a house that he had decorated in exactly the same manner as the house in the Rue de Lille, he wondered if there would be a letter from Jeanne.

The housekeeper at Valmont had remained loyal to him. She wrote regularly, from her retirement cottage in Epernay, to tell him the news of the family, and he responded faithfully, for she was his only means of knowing what was going on in Champagne. Paul de Lancel was only sixty-four, and the Lancels were a long-lived family. His Lancel grandparents had both been in their eighties before they died. Yet accidents happened every day to people with equally good genes; car accidents, riding accidents, neglected infections, even a fall in the bathroom. Disease could strike without warning. His uncle Guillaume had died relatively young.

Yes, he knew that soon—if not today, then soon, for it would drive him mad to think otherwise—there had to
arrive a grieving letter from Jeanne that would give him back his life.

Freddy perched on Tony’s desk on a Friday afternoon in March of 1950 and looked at him hopefully. “Tony, let’s go for a drive. Jock and Swede are nailed to their desks, but there’s no reason why all the bosses have to be in at the same time. It’s such a lovely day.”

Tony looked up from the empty blotter at which he’d been frowning when she came into his office.

“Go for a drive? Where to? What scenic wonder lures you? The amazing view of the Hollywood sign? The flat beige sands of Santa Monica? Don’t you really mean that you’d like to hop into your new Bonanza? Don’t you mean go for a plane ride, not a drive?”

“No, I mean a drive,” Freddy said patiently. He was in a vile mood. Too much whiskey at lunch or just general bloody-mindedness? It was impossible to say for sure this early in the day. “Come on, we can put the top of my car down. I’m dying to get out of this place. It’s not that much fun anymore, with everything running smoothly and business so good. Do come on, darling.”

Tony sighed reluctantly, but he got up and followed her out to the parking lot of their new main office building at the Burbank Airport, and sat listlessly as she drove back from the San Fernando Valley over the hills into the Los Feliz neighborhood.

Freddy drove straight up a street that she seemed to have picked at random, and parked in front of a house at the top of the hill, a typically Californian version of a Spanish hacienda, that rambling old house with balconies and two courtyards which she’d bought in November, not quite five months earlier. She’d insisted on a short escrow, and the day after the escrow closed she’d had a contractor with two crews working overtime putting the house back into perfect order, while a decorator was busy full-time, working on the furnishings. The avenue of old orange trees that lined the driveway was in fragrant blossom, and a landscape architect had finished pruning every tree and restoring the garden that Freddy remembered so well, turning over and enriching the neglected soil, planting wide beds of English primroses and tiny purple violas. Pansies were everywhere, their yellow, white and dark ruby faces mingling with the smaller blue dots of
the impertinent forget-me-nots. In another month the bushes of the rose garden, on which the buds were already swelling, would be in their first bloom; all the lawns were green with newly laid turf. The house had been entirely repainted, and the red tiles of the roof were in perfect condition. She turned off the motor.

“I thought you wanted to go for a drive,” Tony said. “We haven’t been on the road for fifteen minutes.”

“Do you like this house?” she asked.

“Actually, yes. This is probably the only kind of house that looks absolutely right in California. I’ve always said that, as well you know.”

“We need a new house, don’t we?”

“I certainly can’t disagree about that.”

“Something like, as an example, this one?” she asked eagerly.

“I assume that means that you’ve already bought it?” Tony glanced at Freddy’s face. Her eyes were downcast to hide her expression, but from her heightened color and the carefully neutral look on her always mobile, readable face, he knew the answer. “It looks very pretty indeed, and in good condition, I imagine,” he continued, without waiting for her reply. “Shipshape from top to toe. All systems working, checked out and ready to be lived in.”

“You’re not surprised.” Freddy felt flat with extinguished excitement. Every day, while the contractor and the landscape people had been working on the house, she’d managed to sneak away from the office and drop in and oversee their progress, bullying and cajoling, threatening and vamping shamelessly, until it had all been done exactly to her specifications and in less time than anyone would have anticipated. She’d been on the phone to her decorator a half-dozen times a day, and had met with her to make final choices every week, without anyone at Eagles knowing what she was doing. She’d been filled to the brim with her wonderful secret.

“Well, in point of fact, how could I be?” Tony answered. “Now that we’re filthy rich, a new house was only a matter of time. You do like to get things done, don’t you, Freddy?” He spoke with a gentleness of tone that touched her as uneasily as would an unfamiliar chord in a well-known tune. It wasn’t a gentleness she’d ever heard before from this essentially gentle man. There was something new about it, something
forced, as if gentleness were covering up another feeling she couldn’t identify.

“Even if you’re not surprised,” she said, hiding her childish disappointment at the way he was taking her achievement for granted, “aren’t you dying to see what it looks like inside?”

“I’m certain it’s perfectly charming. And I know I’m going to get the grand tour, so push on,” Tony said, getting out of the car and starting toward the front door.

In all the times Freddy had played this scene in her head, trying to picture Tony’s response to the new house, imagining his delight at the new vision of daily life that it offered, the new possibilities it opened up to them, she had never thought of such a low-key, almost resigned reaction, as if he were being offered a dish that he had to eat out of politeness, even though he wasn’t hungry. Maybe he had a hangover, she thought as she followed him, digging in her purse for the key to the front door. Maybe he was being as nice as he could be with a terrible headache and a dry mouth. It was impossible to tell with Tony. He held his liquor far too well. His drinking was deceptive. Sometimes it was only after he passed out that she realized how drunk he’d been.

Freddy led Tony through all the main rooms of the house. There were palms and flowering plants in baskets everywhere; the floors were covered in large squares of Mexican terra-cotta on which soft-toned rugs had been placed; the furniture, beautifully made but uncomplicated in design, was an illustration of the deepest meaning of the word comfort, and the fabrics were mellow linens and cottons, hand-printed in unfussy patterns. There were so many windows that in each room, people could spend hours of tranquility watching the light change. It was, deliberately, a house without grandeur, in spite of the generous scale of the rooms and the high-beamed ceilings; just as deliberately as it was a house in which a man would feel as much at home as a woman.

As they went from one room to another, Tony paused in each doorway and murmured, “Charming, really charming,” until she wanted to punch him. He sounded like a well-bred visitor, not like a man seeing his own house for the first time. He hadn’t peered into a closet or opened a single drawer or demonstrated as much curiosity about any single detail as a person entering a new hotel room might show the bellman.
“Charming.”
But she hadn’t bought the house and fixed it up
to charm him. She’d done it to make him happy. Or, at the very least,
happier
.

“Where’s the bar?” Tony asked as they sat down at last in the living room, where six arched, floor-to-ceiling doors opened out on three sides to the beckoning gardens.

“Over there,” Freddy said, pointing out a long, hospitable-looking table on which were placed crystal glasses of every shape and kind, a gay array of bottles, club soda, ginger ale, jars of nuts and olives, and a silver bowl of lemons.

“What does one do about ice?” Tony asked, pouring himself a whiskey.

“One brings in an ice bucket from the kitchen,” Freddy answered, forcing a smile. It was the first question he’d asked. “But you don’t use ice, do you, darling, so we’ll only have to do that when we have guests,” she added, feeling like a saleswoman pushing a product on a reluctant buyer.

Tony drank his whiskey in one gulp and poured another. “Do you fancy a wee dram?” he asked.

“Please. Same as yours.”

“Cheers,” she said, as he handed her her glass and sat down on the other side of the coffee table. Never, she thought, had she spoken that word in such a curious atmosphere. It was so … tentative … yet he knew the house was definitively theirs, even if he lacked the enthusiasm she’d been so sure he’d feel.

He hoisted his glass a few inches, in a vaguely sketched salute, but he didn’t say anything before he drank half of it.

A silence fell. Freddy inspected the contents of her heavy crystal tumbler as if there might be informative tea leaves lurking at the bottom. Nervously she finished her drink. He must be getting the feel of the house, she told herself, just letting it seep into his pores. Perhaps he’d actually been far more surprised than he’d seemed, and didn’t quite know what to say.

“You don’t think it’s too big, do you, Tony?” Freddy asked, breaking the silence. “Because when we have more children and when we entertain and have houseguests and later, when the kids bring their friends home, it won’t seem nearly as big as it does with just the two of us sitting here.”

“So you have all that planned already, do you? You’re a bloody wonder, you are, Freddy. I should never underestimate you. I know you can’t have conceived a child, but you
may well have sent out invitations to a house-warming by now, isn’t that so?”