Marceau thought that the goddamn ring with a diamond so goddamn big and bright that it would make a goddamn blind man see would have put an end to his misery. He sat smoking on the terrace of the master bedroom. At the end of the rue des Mimosas a funeral wake for a black bwana had been going on for three days, and at two in the morning the live band had left and guests were dancing to Stevie Wonder tapes. I just called to say I love you, I just called to say I care . . . A dilapidated car farted past the house.
Marceau slid back the doors of the bedroom. “Nicole? You going to stay in that damned bathroom all night?”
There was no answer. He went back and sat down and propped his feet on the railing of the terrace.
“What is it?” Nicole said. She was wearing a white satin dressing gown and her dark, lank hair fell down her back. In the half-light of the terrace, her broad features looked harsh and masculine. “Tu te fais du mauvais sang pour rien,” she said and waited at the threshold of the door. “Why do you always have to make such a fuss?”
“Let’s get back to the time I called you from Geneva. Sick as a dog, not knowing whether I was dead or alive, shaking so bad, I can barely make the call, but, by damn, I kick ass and get a call through to this house. This house, tu entends? I didn’t pay a fortune for a cell phone for nothing. Madame n’est pas là, Gaston says. Now. Mon petit ange, why the goddamn hell would Gaston say you weren’t at home if you were?”
“I have no idea. Besides, Gaston doesn’t even remember that you called. You were feverish. You got confused.” They had had this conversation so many times that she could have done it in her sleep. Sometimes she thought that she had.
“Okay.” Marceau said. “The fact remains that for two days . . . two days, got that? . . . after I got back, lying up here in that bed raving with malaria, you are nowhere to be found. That’s a fact.”
“You didn’t look for me. I told you. Jacques Delpech called me to hostess a small party with him, and then the power went down in the morning and Dieudonné refused to do the dinner. He’s like that, Dieudonné. Temperamental.”
She knew that he hated it when she showed how familiar she was with Delpech’s household.
“So your ex-lover Delpech . . . ex-lover, got that? . . . cancels the party and takes you out for dinner, a pizza at Chez Nicolas. And then you go back to your own apartment for the night and the next night. Right? While I’m lying up here in that bed in there not knowing whether I’m dead or alive. Okay. So why doesn’t Nicolas remember seeing you two ex-lovers in his restaurant that night? I would remember it if I saw you two lovey-doveys in my restaurant.”
“Nicholas drinks too much of his own vino fino to remember who’s been in his restaurant. Can we go to bed now?” She hesitated a moment before going back into the bedroom. Marceau was so zeroed in on Delpech that she felt certain that he would never find out where she had been while he was making his business trip to Paris. Which should have lasted four days and instead took barely two. When Sam Wofford invited her to come along with him and a man who said he was Adnan Khashoggi’s brother-in-law on a deep-sea fishing trip to Mombassa, she was sure that she could get back before Marceau returned from Paris. Nicole had seen this man who claimed to be Khashoggi’s brother-in-law several times in L’Atmosphere and had even danced with him one night, though later he had not remembered her. He was a not too unattractive Arab, a little too fat, too oily, but he had terrific jewelry and a private jet that would take them to Mombassa. She had jumped at Sam’s invitation. She was bored. Life with Marceau was heavy. Marceau was heavy. Moreover, he was not the best lover she had ever had. He was too wet. He sweated copiously during lovemaking and slobbered into her mouth so that in the morning she woke up with foul breath as if she had been chewing stale cigarette butts all night long. It had not been a dream trip, though. The Arab had rubbed up against her a few times on the flight to Nairobi, but there he had picked up a sixteen-year-old Swedish blond with short hair and a flat chest who looked exactly like a boy with freckles and, after a late lunch the next day, Nicole had fellated an Englishman named Reggie who led safaris, in the cabin below while Sam and Khashoggi’s so-called brother-in-law drank beer and talked business deals on deck and the blond Swedish girl who looked like a boy sunbathed in the nude. Marceau would never find out where she had been. He was so obsessed with Jacques that he never raised his head to look around and see what was really going on. So what if Marceau hated Jacques like a lunatic? No harm in that. Jacques looked so smug these days, mooning over his American girl, unable to keep his hands off her. The point was to keep a man like Marceau off guard. Keep him dangling. She could tell that a man like him, once he was entirely sure of his conquest, would get cocky. His eye would start to rove. And there were too many stray women on the loose in Africa who would give anything to step into her lucky shoes. Nicole slipped into bed and turned out the bedside lamp. In the dark, she rubbed an index finger over the splendid diamond on her left hand. She had worked too hard to get lazy now. Yes, the point was to keep Marceau walking the floor at night, wondering whether she loved him. A little? A lot? Not at all?