V

THE PLANE LANDED A LITTLE before eight in the morning, Paris time, and the air terminal was chilly. Anxious to stretch her legs, Chloe was glad of the long walk through echoing and deserted halls to customs, and the even longer trek to the public transportation area. She was heading to the queue for buses into the city when Adam hailed a taxi. He opened the door for her and she climbed in, promising herself she would talk to him later about finances. For now, she was too excited, anticipating her first glimpse of fabled and romantic Paris.

The taxi driver was a woman, maybe mid-thirties, with long straight brown hair, impeccably cut. Adam gave her an address, in rapid and polished French, and the cab lurched into gear.

“Where are we going?” Chloe asked.

“I’ve made reservations for us—a little hotel I always stay in on the Île Saint-Louis.” When it seemed as if Chloe was about to object, Adam held up a hand and talked over her. “Please don’t be difficult about this, Chloe. We have different areas of expertise. This is mine.”

Chloe sat back abruptly, but not before she saw the small grin on the driver’s face.

“Ees your first time in Paree, yes?” the woman asked.

Chloe nodded.

“You will not be disappointed,” she promised, hurtling the cab into a small space between cars in the morning traffic headed for the city.

But Chloe was disappointed. The long, tedious drive from the airport resembled the approach to any large North American city: multi-laned highways and lots of ugly industrial parks separated by the occasional cluster of sterile high-rise buildings.

She was beginning to feel her morale sinking when Adam tugged at her sleeve and nodded his head toward the driver. At eighty kilometers an hour and with one hand, she was pouring mineral water from a large bottle into a little saucer set on the seat beside her. She didn’t spill a drop. A black and tan puppy, some kind of miniature terrier not much larger than a squirrel, began to lap from the dish. The driver laughed at Chloe’s amazement. The next moment she was leaning on the horn and cursing at another taxi cutting into the lane in front of her.

Finally, after some chilling lane changes, more cursing and sudden turns, the cab entered Paris and Chloe caught her breath. The Seine flowed beside her, silvery and serpentine, a mesmerizing force pulling her into the heart of the city. From her cab window, she could see tree-lined quais at the river’s edge and ancient buildings, their stone facades tinted pink by the morning sun. She thought of the great artists who had walked on these bridges and over these cobblestones, silently whispering their names like a kind of chant: David, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gaugin, Chagall, Picasso, Bonnard, Matisse. The list was glorious and seemed endless. Chloe relaxed and felt herself drawn into the net of beauty and history that hung like a bridal veil over Paris.

With one last turn, the taxi stopped in front of an elegant seventeenth-century building that looked more like a home than a hotel. As Adam counted out euros, the driver peeked around his shoulder and waved to Chloe. “I know always,” she laughed, “from first sight. Those who love Paree.”

When the cab was gone, Chloe and Adam stood side by side on the sidewalk in front of the Hôtel des Deux-Iles.

“The rooms won’t be ready until noon or thereabouts,” Adam said. “There’s a courtyard where we could wait if you’re very tired. Or we could walk.”

Chloe simply smiled and took his arm. They walked and walked, over the Pont Saint-Louis and past the magnificent Nôtre-Dame, the cradle of Paris, through the narrow streets of the Left Bank, past markets and churches, bookstores and antique shops, finally collapsing at a café. By this time, the sun had burned through the early mist, leaving the air fresh and damp, and perfumed from chestnuts in bloom. Chloe felt exhilarated, all her doubts of the previous night banished with her first whiff of adventure.

She took a long, slow taste of French coffee and watched a cat the colour of apricots grooming itself on a stack of Le Monde newspapers. Someone in a nearby flat was playing the piano, the notes spilling onto the street from an open window. This moment, she thought, was perfect.

Adam, too, seemed lost in his own reverie. She found it restful that the frequent silences between them did not make either of them anxious. He seemed content to let her drink in Paris on her own terms.

His hair, she noted, was beginning to curl in the dampness. It made him look less serious, despite his suit and tie.

“Do you always travel in a suit?” she asked.

Adam looked a little startled by the suddenness of the question, but answered agreeably enough. “It’s practical. Suits are difficult to pack.”

“Yes, but are you going to need a suit at all?”

“Maybe. Liliane, as I remember, is very chic.” He glanced casually, but not unkindly, at Chloe’s crumpled linen jacket and black jeans.

“It was good of you to make the hotel reservations, Adam. I shouldn’t have objected. I’m just not used to spending Sammy’s money. In fact, you and Dad have made things very easy for me, so unlike what it must’ve been like for Sylvie all those years ago. And, don’t worry, I’ll get some clothes. After all, I’m in Paris.”

Paris, I thought, is always a good idea. I had found refuge there before. But the city I returned to was different from the city I had left. It struck me that people who loved Paris always remembered it the same way: the Seine brilliant in the sunlight, boulevards lined with chestnuts in bloom, flower markets and fountains and little sun-soaked cafés. And always, somewhere in the distance, music.

But this Paris was a dull metallic gray. This Paris was jumpy and surly, a heady mix of bravado and dread. The German threat hung over the streets and the parks and the monuments like a thick mist.

Nonetheless, I felt safe and anonymous here. The streets were dark and I could walk them for hours, invisible, head down like all the world these days, moving quickly, just one more shadow in the twilight.

After a little searching, I found my aunt had moved to the outskirts of the city, to the unfashionable northern fringes of the Bois de Boulogne. She was not overjoyed to see me. In her eyes, I was a disgrace. I had divorced my husband, an elderly and, more importantly, wealthy Russian. It did no good to explain to her that his hands were the coldest I had ever known. Worse, I had allowed scandalous pictures of myself to be shown in public. The glorious canvases that took months for Matisse to paint and the sensual and flowing lines of his drawings were just “nudie” pictures to my aunt. Models were prostitutes. Her accusations were directed at me like sniper fire, unforgiving and unrelenting.

Still, she took me in as I knew she must. We were both Russian, after all, born of the same bitter past. As children, wrapped head to toe in thick, scratchy wool, we had walked to school between high, hard-packed walls of snow. We knew how the sky could disappear among sheets of fast-moving clouds, and how the winds could howl. We remembered larders outside kitchen windows filled with dead rabbits stacked stiff and straight like rifles in a gun-case. We remembered dead bodies, alabaster skin punctured with bullet holes like black moons, and the cholera and typhus epidemics that swept away first my mother and then my father.

I found work modeling in a furrier’s showroom. I spent my days draped in luxury—champagne-coloured minks, white and black-spotted snow leopards, thick, midnight sables—and my nights trying to stay warm in my aunt’s drafty apartment, with its leaky roof and slanting floors. I read a good deal, and thought about training as a nurse. I knew what kind of damage war would bring. Once, when I’d been kneeling beside Madame’s bedside, Matisse had teased that I was undeniably a doctor’s daughter, a stretcher-bearer, with first-aid written on my heart.

Sylvie was my lifeline, my one friend. Her letters to me were not always comforting, but they were honest, somehow more real than the glittery nervousness of Paris. In them, she spoke of her growing love for André, and her growing fear of the Fascist rallies in Nice. She described a terrible row that broke out in one of the many restaurants that lined the Cours Saleya. Two opposing groups of men shouted at each other. Tables were knocked over and a tray of glasses smashed. An innocent woman passing by was cut on the cheek by the flying shards of glass. Sylvie worried that both of us, both foreigners, might soon be at risk.

Most of all she worried about Matisse. Madame had left the apartment in the Regina for an unknown destination in Paris in early March, but only after her lawyer had drawn up a detailed deed of separation. Her trunks were jam-packed with etchings, drawings, sculptures, and paintings.

“Matisse,” Sylvie wrote, “is utterly alone, except for me and André. Marguerite and Berthe have left. Even the cook has departed. Since he can’t paint, he pours his energy into long, long letters to his son, Pierre. He’s the only occupant of this whole, vast, empty, echoing building. He does not ask me about you, except to inquire after your health.”

Finally, in August, the distracting chatter of Parisian existence came to an end. The French government declared war. It seemed as if all of Europe let out a long pent-up breath and suddenly started to move. The desire to act, to do something, anything, was contagious.

I put on some lipstick and climbed all the way up to the Montmartre in search of red wine, smoky jazz and tall, handsome men convinced they would soon be fodder for German guns. I felt a fierce need for sex, for skin against my skin, for stripping away clothes with passionate speed. It was not difficult to find a partner in a generation adrift. He bought me pink roses from one of those tired women who carry them around in wicker baskets from one café table to another. In the hotel room, with its scratchy blanket, he undressed me with appropriate hurriedness. “Lovely,” he said. Between the two of us, I hoped we had enough art to get to pleasure.

His kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling me up out of the water, lifting me up from a place of drowning and into the reckless air.

In the end, we managed to achieve something that felt good and physically exhausting. Then we lay without talking in each other’s arms for several hours, which, I suspected, is what we both came for. In the morning, we smiled too much to hide our embarrassment and wished each other good luck. I can’t remember his name. I remember waking up once, seeing pink roses in the dark night.