When I woke up the next day—the same day, actually—the birds in the chestnut trees had already finished their morning songfest and the housewives of the neighborhood were shouting their children in for lunch. As soon as my eyes opened, anxiety and guilt made the room spin even more than the hangover did. I had missed my first class of the day and Gerald would be angry.
Slowly, my pulse throbbing in my head like a hammer, I sat up and remembered where I was. Paris. No classes. No Gerald. Freedom washed over me. I wouldn’t have to dread the first glance of hate from Gerald or the whispers of the schoolgirls who had turned the story of Allen and Lily into the kind of tragedy they whispered to one another late at night, in the dark.
There was a note under the door. See you later, Charlie had written. I’ll pick you up at six. I have lectures to attend at the Salpêtrière. The day, what is left of it, is yours.
A whole day, and no one to account to, no chores, no classes, no boring sherry hour with the school faculty. The day was a blank canvas for me to fill in with color. Trailing immediately behind the pleasure, though, was guilt, like a stray dog that wouldn’t go away. I was alone.
I dressed in my old frock and walked to the corner, aware of the strange glances I received from the very chic Parisians who knew an out-of-date dress when they saw it. At the café, I had a coffee and a roll with butter. I dawdled at the bookstalls crouching under the plane trees, then stopped at another café opposite the river for another cup of coffee, knowing all along what my destination was but wanting to postpone, to anticipate it the way Christmas gifts are anticipated, and embraces in dark rooms.
The Seine was a hard, brilliant silver in the strong afternoon light. The gardens of the Esplanade des Tuileries were busy with nannies pushing prams, young lovers walking with their arms around each other’s waists. The garden beds under the canopy of trees were filled with impatiens the exact color of one of the gowns I had seen at Elsa Schiaparelli’s salon. Shocking pink. I didn’t want to see pink, though, but blue: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with multihued sky and river in the background.
When I had spent that summer in Paris, this had been the painting that most captured my imagination, with its golds and reds and blues, blues made of precious azurite and lapis from the mountains of Afghanistan. On the bench in front of it was where I had fallen in love with Allen, who loved the painting for its mysterious geometry. “There are no straight lines,” he would point out with delight. “No suggestion of beginning or ending, or journey. No strife.”
I entered the crowded Louvre at the Denon wing, making my way up the grand staircase, loving all over again the mosaic floors, the grand vaulted ceilings, the crowds.
Mona Lisa’s smile represents Leonardo’s concept for the painting: happiness. Lisa was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and the name itself means smiling, happy, carefree—all those things that are the opposite of unhappy, sad, desperate. When you are first in love, Mona Lisa smiles with you, agrees with your joy. When you are widowed, her smile is a reminder of all you have lost.
And what many viewers of the Mona Lisa don’t recognize is that the colors, those subdued browns, russets, golds, and blues, have been changed by time. The varnish has added a layer of yellow to the painting. Originally, the sky and the lake behind Lisa would have been the bluest of blues, her sleeves a more definite red. To see the Mona Lisa is to see two paintings: what had been, and what is now. It had become a painting about what is stolen by time.
I sat on the burnished wooden bench, absorbing those shifting blues, the red of the road behind Lisa, the darkness of her garments that, when da Vinci painted her, would have been very stylish. Even the eternal Mona Lisa wanted to be fashionable.
It’s just a painting, Gerald would have said. But the calmness of the blue and the muted red besieged me with memories. I was crying, silently, with tears streaming down my cheeks, crying like I hadn’t since the funeral. People tiptoed past me, and I remembered what my father had told me once after a day of ice-skating in Central Park, the year before the Spanish flu invaded the city: that when the toes are frostbitten they are numb, but as the blood begins to flow through them again, as life begins to return to them, there is pain, a terrible burning. I sat in front of Allen’s favorite painting and burned with the loss of him.
Charlie and Ania took me out for supper at Café Dome, where we could eat cheaply and sit for as long as we wanted. Ania had purple circles under her eyes and had lost the easy vivacity of the day before. She wore a Chanel suit with a fitted jacket and epaulettes, military style, and a five-strand bracelet of perfectly matched pearls. Charlie had his arms folded over his chest. They seemed to be in the middle of a quarrel, so I talked for all three of us, asking questions and answering them. How was your day? Great. And yours? Get any sleep last night? Not much.
Gossip, maybe? “Interesting, meeting Coco Chanel last night,” I said. That woke up Ania, at least.
“Interesting,” Ania said. “Such a mild word for her. She was born poor, you know. Very poor. Somewhere in the south. Her mother died; her father abandoned her and her sisters and her brothers. She learned how to sew in an orphanage, though she tells people she was raised by aunts. Childhood,” Ania sighed. “How many stories we invent for ourselves.”
“Charlie and I were raised by our aunt,” I said, remembering how losing our parents had bonded Charlie and me even more fiercely together. Who was Coco Chanel close to?
“A sister, somewhere,” Ania said. “Gossip says that there might be a child that she calls her nephew, but I don’t think so. She doesn’t have much of the mother about her.” Her voice grew quiet, a sign, I would learn, that she was thinking of her own child.
“What stories did you invent?” Charlie asked, his hands now spread wide over the tabletop, good strong hands. But perhaps Ania didn’t know this yet, about him, that he stared at his hands like this when he was unhappy.
“About a Prince Charming who would come for me. He had blond hair and blue eyes. Let me see. He looked like you!”
“And here I am.” Unable to resist her, unable to continue whatever the quarrel had been, he picked up her hand, the one without the wedding ring, and kissed it.
“Coco knew how to use her looks,” Ania said. “She knows how to please men. Do I please you, Charlie?”
“You already know the answer, don’t you?”
An accordionist took up his place on the corner and began playing the bittersweet musette music of the Parisian streets. There at our little table at Café Dome, as I crumbled pieces of baguette as waiters in black suits and white aprons bustled around us, Ania began to cry, two large crystal tears sliding down her cheeks.
“Oh God,” said Charlie. “I can’t take this.” He rose, his chair scraping over the floor like a grinding gear in a badly shifted car. He skulked in the direction of the bar. I sat with Ania and put my hand over hers. Her shoulders shook, and she hid her face behind a lace handkerchief. We sat like that for a long while, till the handkerchief fell onto the table. Ania grimaced and sat up straight, pulling at the emerald-green bolero jacket she wore over her dress.
“Want to talk?” I offered.
“It is all so bad,” she sighed in her deep, beautiful voice. “So very bad and so difficult. Charlie doesn’t understand.” She would not explain what it was Charlie would not understand, but given that she had a husband and a child and a lover and seemed to be also in love with my brother, I thought the situation was pretty self-explanatory.
The long summer day disappeared, and the evening stole all the colors. Ania and I sat in gray twilight punctuated with flickers of candles, glowing tips of cigarettes, and the headlights of passing cars. We were sitting outside, and I could hear Charlie inside, arguing with someone at the bar. He did not come back out to join us, and when a car came for Ania at ten, she gave me a quick embrace and walked out alone, to where the driver held the door for her. There was a defeated slump to her shoulders.
Someone was waiting for her in the backseat, a man who kept his face turned away from the café. Von Dincklage.
“Ania!” Charlie shouted, running into the street as the car pulled away.
“Too late,” I told him. “Sit down with me. Have another drink. Charlie, what do you know about her?”
“She’s from Warsaw. She married young, an arranged marriage. I think it helped to pay some debts her father had. Her husband is an antiques dealer, too. Furniture. Other things.”
“Antiques?” She wore jewels that a duchess would have coveted and seemed to wear only couture. Her husband would have to sell a lot of Louis XVI chairs to pay those bills. I wondered if Ania, like Coco, embroidered her own story.
Charlie turned away and with a long, steady finger traced the ornate molding on the black iron café chair. “Who we were yesterday doesn’t matter.”
That was a physician talking. The past could be cut away like damaged tissue, like a crushed limb.
Charlie and I spent the next day together, from breakfast till bedtime, and by his devotion to me I understood the depth of his quarrel with Ania. They were staying away from each other.
“Oh, just call her,” I said. “We’ve gone to the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, too many gardens with too many roses. I’m tired of being a tourist, and you’re not really here with me, you know.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But I can’t just phone her, can I?”
No, of course not. Who might answer the phone?
We were sitting in the dappled shade of plane trees in the Place Dauphine, watching old men play boules. Charlie, next to me on the bench, leaned forward so I couldn’t see his face.
“I want her to leave her husband. To come with me, back to Boston. She may not be the perfect doctor’s wife. Marrying a divorced woman . . .”
“If she can get a divorce . . .”
“A divorcée wouldn’t have been my first choice. But I love her, Lily. The kid’s okay, too. I met her once. She’s about seven, looks just like Ania, sweet as honey.”
Charlie, the boy who earned straight As and excelled in collegiate sport; who had dated girls whose fathers owned banks and whose mothers organized charity balls, who queened it in the society pages; Charlie, who planned to open a private clinic, would risk it all for Ania.
“She is lovely,” I agreed, “but—”
“Stop,” he said. “No lectures.”
We sat in silence and watched the old men playing boules with a ferocity and competitiveness that made me wonder what they, in earlier years, had done for their various loves.
“I’m sorry about Allen,” Charlie said. “I can’t imagine how difficult this has been for you. Well, maybe I can now, after this thing with Ania. If I lose her . . .”
“I know. Missing Allen is all I have left of him.”
“You need someone to take care of you, someone who is actually here, with you.”
“Do I? You know, I’ve never really been on my own for more than a month or two. My brother-in-law wasn’t exactly sympathetic after Allen died, but at least he made sure I had a roof over me. Now, I have no idea what I’m capable of.”
He didn’t look convinced. “Is this the best time to find out? There may be a war, you know.”
“Even if there is . . .” War was something that happened to other people, wasn’t it? For two years I’d carried a sense of immunity, the feeling that the worst had already happened to me. In Paris, if anything, it felt even stronger. Nothing could touch me. Nothing, except my brother’s unhappiness.