“It was thrown up in less than seventy days,” Alain explained as they approached the enchanting little villa nestled on the far edge of the garden. “By the Count of Artois, the future Charles the Tenth. He bet his sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette, that he could complete it in three months.”
“And obviously he won,” Janie exclaimed, peering on tiptoe into the curtained French windows. The small, perfectly proportioned building was constructed of various subtle shades of marble and looked like something out of a fairy tale. Precious, ornate, a jewelry box of a place. Janie couldn’t imagine anyone actually living there. “Bagatelle.” Janie repeated the name of the garden they were visiting on the western edge of Paris. “Doesn’t that mean … a bauble … or plaything?”
“Very good,” Alain told her with a smile, trying to center the umbrella above her head. It had been drizzling off and on all morning, but now the slow rain had begun to quicken. “You obviously passed more than first-year French. I bet you were an excellent student. I can see you with long red braids, eagerly holding up your hand in class.”
“Hardly.” Janie laughed ruefully. “You have an oddly inflated vision of my girlhood.” This was not the first time during their three days in Paris together that Alain had imagined her childhood in wildly romantic terms. He insisted on seeing her in starched pinafores, riding ponies, surrounded by throngs of loving little friends. Each time he started to paint one of his pretty scenarios, she tried her best to redesign the portrait to match the truth more closely. But for some reason he persisted, and she was beginning to lose the desire to constantly correct what was essentially a flattering misconception of who she had been … and who she was now. By tacit agreement, they did not discuss her drastic weight loss. At first she thought Alain was too much of a gentleman to mention it. But gradually, as they spent more and more time exclusively in each other’s company, she came to realize that he didn’t wish to remember her any other way. That was fine by her, of course, even though there was something a little unreal about it. But then the last three days had been filled with such fantastic sights and feelings for Janie, she was beginning to doubt her ability to judge what was real and what wasn’t.
She had been wrong, for instance, about thinking Alain wanted to stay on in Paris strictly for Melina’s sake. When Alain had dropped her at the small luxury hotel near the Jardins de Luxembourg that first morning, he had told her that he would be happy to contact Melina and deal with her travel arrangements. But that evening, when she asked him over the candlelit table at a neighborhood bistro what Melina had said, he replied evasively, “Things are still a bit up in the air, so to speak. I hope to verify the situation tomorrow.”
“Perhaps I should call,” Janie had ventured, though she hadn’t really wanted to. She knew it was selfish, but she wanted Alain for herself as long as she could possibly have him. And she didn’t want to remember any other existence except this one: a cool May night in Paris, other couples strolling along the Boulevard Saint Germain, her arm lightly resting on Alain’s as they walked to the quiet, warmly lit restaurant near the hotel.
He seemed to sense her reluctance, or he harbored some of his own, for he had instantly replied, “No, transatlantic calls can be a bother. Let me handle it, Jane. And let’s forget about all that for now. Tell me … what would you like to do tomorrow?”
Well, that had been easy: she wanted to be with him. It didn’t matter where, really, though Paris seemed the perfect backdrop in which to study Alain up close. Was he aware how minutely she watched him? Could he sense the intensity of her interest in everything he said, each smile, each gesture? Did he have any idea how obsessively she treasured each moment they were together? She hardly breathed in his presence. She could concentrate on nothing but him. She had memorized his face so accurately that at night, alone, she could draw his profile unhesitatingly in the little sketchbook she kept in her room at the hotel. Their second morning together, when he had left her briefly at an outdoor café to phone the office from across the street, he had come back to find her doodling intently on her place mat. He had seemed both surprised and pleased to see that she had been sketching him. “Those are quite good,” he had told her, “though far superior to the original, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, please,” Janie had stammered, crumpling the stiff paper place mat. “No, they’re awful. I don’t know what possessed me … you were just standing there.” But she could feel he sensed her warmth toward him. She herself could feel the heat she gave off in his presence, as if she were always running a slight fever. And she knew others felt it, too: the concierge at the hotel, Alain’s chauffeur, the sommelier at the restaurant that first night. They glanced from her to Alain, then back to her again, and smiled knowingly.
“I’m keeping you from the office,” she told him that second morning. “You must have a million important things to do. You really don’t need to play tour guide, you know.”
“I know,” he had replied simply, carefully spreading out the wrinkled paper mat in front of him and studying the portrait she had drawn. “Don’t worry, I know what I need—and need not—do. Now, where shall we wander this afternoon?”
Because of the rainy weather, they had spent a good deal of time in museums: the Louvre, the Picasso, the Marmottan, the new Gare d’Orsay. Janie had found herself speaking eloquently about the paintings and sculpture she admired the most: the powerful religious paintings of de La Tour, Delacroix’s massive murals of men at war, Cezanne’s deceptively simple still lives. His presence inspired her, and she wondered if he realized just how much he affected her. She caught him looking at her once or twice with an expression she could not read: it was both troubled and speculative, as if he wasn’t quite sure of what he was seeing. He was probably brooding about something else entirely, Janie decided. He often seemed distracted and aloof. And yet he never failed to be scrupulously polite.
That morning, for instance, they had walked through the Bois de Boulogne toward the Bagatelle for nearly half an hour without uttering a single word. The drizzle and the consequent need for umbrellas had kept them naturally apart. And, too, the unsteady ground cover of chestnut husks and fallen branches made concentration on the path ahead essential. Still, Janie found herself immersed in Alain’s silent introspection. At first she tried to imagine what he was thinking, and then she simply gave herself up to his dominant, oppressive mood. She was more than content to wait him out, march quietly beside him, breathe in the mingled smells of damp earth and grass and his lightly spiced skin lotion.
“You’re being awfully quiet this morning,” he had told her as they passed through the stone archway and into the garden proper. But they both knew that it was he, so far, who had set the tenor of their days. This was simply his way of saying that he would welcome conversation again, she realized.
“I was just thinking how lucky I am to have someone like you show me Paris,” Janie said. “And I was wondering about Melina. Have you heard anything definite from her yet?”
“Actually, yes,” Alain replied. “I’ll tell you about it at lunch. Now … let me show you the walled iris garden which should be at its height just now … and then there’s the villa and the water lilies. Shall we dine later, right here? There’s a rather fine little restaurant just beyond those trees.”
By the time they were seated in the restaurant’s glassed-in porch overlooking a small courtyard, both the weather and Alain’s mood had brightened considerably.
“Oh, look!” Janie cried, pointing across the walkway to the rain-drenched lawn, now glistening in the wavering sunlight. “Peacocks! Aren’t they beautiful? Oh, look at them, Alain!”
“Yes,” Alain said, smiling across at her, “I see them.”
“But you’re not even looking,” Janie objected, glancing from him back to the birds. “There they are, over there, on the lawn.”
“Absolutely beautiful,” he replied, still holding her gaze.
She glanced away, embarrassed. Had he meant what his look implied? She didn’t know how to answer and turned her attention a little too avidly to the ornately printed menu. But she was never hungry these days, hardly able to eat more than half a serving of anything in his presence. As usual, he ordered for them both. When the wine arrived, he carefully swished the sample around in his glass, sniffed it, tasted it, and waved the waiter away.
“It needs to breathe, obviously. Bring us two coupes de champagnes in the meantime.”
“This is starting to seem like a celebration,” Janie said when the champagne flutes arrived on a silver tray. She held up her glass to his.
“In a way it is,” he told her, crystal clinking against crystal. “At least I feel it is. I have convinced Melina that she need not come.”
“You what?” Janie demanded, happiness flooding her veins.
“I explained to her that her presence was redundant,” Alain went on matter-of-factly, though Janie could detect an amused glimmer in his eye. “That you seemed to know what you would be looking for by way of locations in Bordeaux. And since I would have to foot her bill ultimately, I didn’t wish to shoulder any further expenses.”
Janie looked down at her champagne, then back at him. He had been paying for everything … and she hadn’t thought to question his generosity. Had she been imposing thoughtlessly? She felt suddenly wretched and unsure. What was he telling her?
“Jane,” he said, his free hand closing over hers, “forget what you are thinking. Now. Immediately. I was, how should I put it, telling Melina a small untruth. What do I care about another airplane ticket? It means nothing to me one way or another. I only thought, well, we seem to be having such a good time together, yes? No? Are you sorry? Should I call her back and say I changed my mind?”
“How did she react?” Janie countered, hoping he could not tell how thrilled she was by his news. Could it be true? Would she really have Alain for herself for the whole week ahead? It hardly seemed possible that the very thing she had been praying for for the last few days could come to be. If it was so, she promised herself, she would wish for nothing else her entire life. A week alone with Alain Chanson would be enough.
“She was not exactly pleased,” Alain admitted. “In fact, she was quite put out. But I am, after all, the client, and she didn’t have much of a choice in the long run.”
“I should call her,” Janie murmured, looking across the rain-drenched lawn. The peacocks had wandered off. “She’ll … think it was all my idea. She knows how I…”
“She knows nothing,” Alain interrupted, “except that I decided her presence was superfluous. It was strictly a business decision on my part, one, in fact, I should have made when I first proposed the location work. Understood?”
Jane smiled into his gaze, the startling blue depths of his eyes mesmerizing her. She felt light-headed, powerless, beside herself with happiness. But also more than a little terrified. For years she had longed to be his. How many hundreds of hours had she dreamt of a moment like this one? And now that she was here, now that his hand covered hers, she realized how completely she was giving herself over to him. There was no distance any longer between her deepest desires … and the object of them. For he was no longer the object, she realized … she was. She had put herself within his grasp and—amazingly—she could feel his fingers tightening around hers.
“Yes, understood,” she replied so softly that he had to lean over to hear her response.
“Good,” he said, sitting back and regarding her intently. “Then this is my suggestion. We shall spend tomorrow morning in Paris. I have a few boring details I have to attend to at the office during which time you can shop, perhaps around the Place des Victoires, which is not far from our headquarters. In the afternoon I propose we drive down to Tours and take a late dinner there. We’ll leave early the next day for Bordeaux. We should be at the chateau by dinner. I’ll alert the staff that we’re coming. Then I shall have—what?—four or five more days to show you the vineyards and the city. How does that sound to you, Jane?”
It sounded like heaven, of course, and she was tempted to tell him so. But once again the intensity of her total capitulation to him made her hesitate. Not that they had gone further than holding hands—an innocent enough gesture, to be sure. She tried hard to back up and see herself as Alain must, to place herself within the context of his world. What was she to him? What did he intend for her to be?
She must have looked troubled, because he asked her again, this time more urgently, “How does that sound? Is there some problem?”
“No, of course not,” Jane replied hurriedly, smiling to reassure him. “It sounds perfect. I can’t wait.” But, oh, she could indeed. For the one thing she wanted now more than anything else … was for the week ahead to never, ever end.