KARLA PARRISH ALMOST NEVER thought of herself as a successful woman. “Success,” in her mind, meant having a big apartment on a high floor in New York City or a BMW and a Porsche in the driveway of a house in Syosset or a lot of jewelry to wear to parties that had to be locked up in a safe afterward, for insurance reasons. Success, in other words, meant having a lot of things, and Karla had never had much in the way of things. Enough underwear to get through two weeks straight without doing laundry, as much in the way of other clothes as could be stuffed into a double strap pack without making her feel like she was lifting stones when she picked it up—Karla never seemed to need that much from day to day, and she honestly couldn’t think of what else she would buy for herself if she got the chance. She wore her long straight hair pulled back these days, instead of falling free to her shoulders, because she thought she had to make some concession to being forty-eight. She didn’t want to spend the time or the money to get it fixed up in beauty parlors. Her hips were beginning to spread a little now that she was racing through middle age. She was content to buy her jeans a couple of sizes larger and let it happen. Spending hundreds of dollars on a dress that would disguise the weight gain seemed so stupid, she had no idea why anyone ever did it. The one thing she did spend money on was her equipment—the cameras and the lenses and the tripods and the lights—but that was different. That was work. Karla Parrish understood absolutely why it was important to spend time and money on her work.
What she didn’t understand was the attitude of this man behind the registration desk at the George-V. She didn’t even understand what she was doing at the George-V. “Book us a hotel room in Paris,” she had told Evan when they were about to leave Nairobi—and then she had forgotten all about it, because she was tired and dirty and depressed, and the way things were going she wasn’t going to feel any better for weeks. She had just spent four weeks taking pictures in Rwanda, and her head hurt. Her film cases were full of images she didn’t want to see again. Every time she came to rest in a hotel room or a restaurant, she got phone calls from New York. She wanted to go someplace where she didn’t have to listen to anybody talking at her, but she didn’t know where that would be. Home, something in her head kept pounding at her, and that was when it had hit her. Karla Parrish was almost fifty years old and she didn’t have a home. She had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan with a lot of secondhand furniture in it. She had her camera equipment and the clothes in her pack and some books she’d picked up in the airport in London on her way out to Africa. She had this succession of hotel rooms that looked as if it was never going to end: Nairobi to Cairo to Lhasa to Athens to Tokyo to God-knows-where. Some of the hotels had electricity twenty-four hours a day. Some of them had electricity only some of the time. All of them had dust and bugs and heat in spite of their air-conditioning systems and their cheaper-than-cheap maid service.
The George-V had a lobby that looked like a stage set for a movie about France during the time of Marie Antoinette. The carpet was so plush, Karla felt as if she were swimming in it. The chandeliers were so large and densely packed with crystals, they sounded like factories full of glassware breaking every time there was a slight breeze. Karla saw a woman in a chinchilla coat down to her ankles and another woman walking five overgroomed dogs on silver lamé leashes. Karla could feel the dust in her pores, caked and hardening. Her hair felt so dirty, she wanted to cut it off instead of get it washed.
The man behind the registration desk was beaming and bouncing in her direction. He came around the counter to where she was standing and took her hand, talking all the time in a rapid-fire French Karla hadn’t a hope in hell of understanding. Karla wouldn’t have understood if he’d spoken in slow French. She had never paid much attention to her language classes.
Karla let the man take her hand and bow while she smiled back. Then she turned to Evan at her side and raised her eyebrows. Evan was her new assistant, hired less than ten months ago in a fit of craving for organization. This time, Karla had told herself, she was not going to go off for a year in the hinterlands and let her life unravel in the process. She was going to have somebody who would keep track of the bills and the receipts and the travel arrangements and let her keep her mind on her photography. She had put an ad in the Vassar College alumnae magazine, expecting to get a young woman with an itch for travel—and ended up with Evan instead. Vassar was coed these days. It kept slipping Karla’s mind.
Evan was tall and thin and wore wire-rimmed glasses, the way all the preppie boys did these days. He was also very smart and very eager and close to fluent in French.
“Evan,” Karla whispered, leaning back so that he could hear her. “What is going on here?”
Evan rubbed his soft hands together and blinked. “Monsieur Gaudet is welcoming the famous Karla Parrish to Paris.”
“The famous Karla Parrish?”
Evan reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine. His shoulder bag was an expensive piece from Mark Cross, given to him by his mother when he got this job with Karla. Evan’s mother was an oncologist in Grosse Pointe.
The magazine Evan handed to Karla was a copy of Paris-Match. The cover photo was a black-and-white of a refugee camp in Zaire. Karla checked it out critically and decided that she had blurred the print a little in the bottom left-hand corner. She hated developing on the road. She never got the effects she wanted unless she had days to work at them.
“They put my photograph on the cover,” she said. “That’s good.”
“Page twelve,” Evan said.
Karla opened to page twelve. There was a photograph of her there—a terrible photograph, she thought, taken at the worst possible moment in an airport somewhere, with her hair coming out of its pins and her eyes drooping. She looked down the column of print and found her name in bold-faced type halfway to the bottom of the page. This seemed to be some kind of gossip column. She handed the magazine back to Evan.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
Evan put the magazine back in his shoulder bag. “You could be bigger than Annie Liebowitz,” he said solemnly, “if you paid a little more attention to your image.”
“I don’t think Annie Liebowitz pays attention to her image.”
“Annie Liebowitz lived with the Rolling Stones for a year. You live with refugees in central Africa. It’s a different situation.”
“It’s my situation.”
The man from behind the desk had summoned a bellhop. The bellhop took Karla’s backpack out of her hands with all the seriousness he would have brought to the luggage of the Pope. Karla felt like an idiot.
“It’s a question of knowing what to do and where to do it,” Evan said judiciously. “I got you in every gossip column in France practically, and I set up an interview with a man from People magazine. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow. And after that you’re going back to the United States for a month.”
“Am I really? Evan, for Christ’s sake. You can’t just rearrange my life that way.”
“You don’t have anything else to do for the next six weeks,” Evan pointed out. “You were the one who said you wanted to be calm for a while.”
“I was thinking of taking a vacation in the south of Spain. I always take my vacations in the south of Spain.”
“From what I can figure out looking through your records, you haven’t taken a vacation in twelve years. I got you a three-day visiting-artist thing at the University of Pennsylvania. Two lectures. Three seminars. One dinner.” Evan pawed through his shoulder bag and came up with a folded piece of paper. He handed it over to her and said, “I tried for Yale and I tried for Brown, but they’re going to have to wait. You’re going to have to let me work on your reputation for a while.”
“My reputation is the best in the business,” Karla said automatically, but she was looking over the letter from the University of Pennsylvania, half mesmerized by the engraved college seal at the top of the page. “Ambitious,” like “successful,” was not a word she would have applied to herself. It evoked images of blue-suited armies marching out the door of the Harvard Business School, each of the women wearing two-and-a-half-inch stack-heeled pumps. What else was this, though, if not ambition? She could see herself, standing at the front of a classroom full of teenagers, talking about a slide she had projected high up on a classroom wall. She felt Evan’s eyes on her and looked up to find him staring. She blushed hot red and handed the letter back.
“You’ll like doing it,” Evan said. “You’ll see. You’ll be a natural at this kind of thing.”
“I expect to like doing it,” Karla said truthfully.
“And I thought Philadelphia would be a good place.” Evan was going on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I thought you said you had friends there once, women you knew at college—”
“Julianne Corbett and Liza Verity,” Karla said promptly. “They were in my class. I don’t know if they were exactly friends.”
“It’s even better if they’re enemies,” Evan said. “You can come back the conquering hero. Heroine. You can come back and show them all what you’ve done with your life.”
“Is that what I want to do?”
“The problem with you is that you’ve never had any time to organize your life. You’ve been too busy working. You can’t leave things to chance like that these days. You have to go out and work for yourself.”
“I work all the time.”
“That’s different.”
“I like what I do.”
“I like to think I’m bringing you something nobody else could,” Evan said, sounding suddenly passionate, suddenly angry. “I like to think I have something unique to contribute to your life.”
The bellhop had brought Karla’s backpack and Evan’s suitcase to the elevator bank. The main elevator was an ornate thing framed in curling brass, its doors patterned to look as if the metal on them had been quilted. Evan wasn’t looking at her. There were two young South American women in the lobby, their hair knotted into elaborate wreaths that ended in high swinging ponytails. The heels on their shoes were much too high. They wobbled and stumbled when they tried to walk. Their pocketbooks were too big and too heavy. They both looked like they were about to tip over.
“Evan?” Karla said.
Evan started walking toward the elevators. “We have to go upstairs,” he told her. “I booked us a two-bedroom suite.”
“It must have cost a lot of money.”
“It cost less than it would have. Because you’re the famous Karla Parrish. Because your name is in Paris-Match. Because it’s an asset to the hotel to have you staying here.”
Karla was hurrying to keep up. Usually she thought of Evan as smaller than she was. What she really meant was that he was younger than she was, less experienced, with much less authority. In spite of the fact that he was slight, though, he was actually much taller than she was—at least six feet, while she was barely five five. He had stopped next to the bellhop at the elevator doors. Karla hurried a little faster and caught up with him.
“Evan,” she said again.
The elevator doors opened. An American couple came out, sounding very Texas and looking like an ad in GQ. The bellhop put their bags in the elevator cage and Evan followed them.
“I’m just trying to be of use around here,” he said when Karla came to stand beside him. “Don’t you ever feel useless, doing what you do? All those people dying. All those people starving. And you just stand around and take pictures.”
“You don’t want me to take pictures,” Karla said.
“You can take all the pictures you want,” Evan said. “It’s not the pictures. That’s not the point. You’re a genius at pictures.”
“What is the point?”
“Look at all this scrollwork,” Evan said, staring at the ceiling of the elevator cab. “The French are really incredible. Less is more. More is more. More is less.”
The elevator bounced to a stop. The doors opened and the bellhop got out, carrying their bags. They were in a long, carpeted hallway with ceilings a dozen feet high. Karla thought Evan was right about the scrollwork.
“Did you always know that you wanted to take pictures?” Evan asked her, looking at the wall above her head. “Even when you were at Vassar?”
“I never had a camera in my hands in my life until I was twenty-four years old,” Karla said. “Except for, you know, Brownies and that kind of thing.”
“I thought a Brownie was a kind of Girl Scout.”
The bellhop had opened the double doors at the end of the corridor. Karla walked through them and found herself in a living room larger than any she had ever been in. Evan shook through his trouser pockets and found a tip.
“Merci,” the bellhop said. He was not smiling. In France, Karla had noticed, only the managerial class smiled.
Evan threw himself into a mock Louis XVI chair and stared at the ceiling. Karla saw fat cherubs and even fatter grapes, molded in plaster, frozen in time.
“Jesus,” Evan said. “The way this thing is going, I’m never going to get you into bed.”