A Small Indiscretion Page 14

  “Next stop, Trocadéro,” Louise said. “I must find one or two more things for Daisy for Christmas.”

  While Louise shopped, Patrick and Malcolm and I walked across the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. We bought tickets and stood in line, but Malcolm said he was feeling a little dizzy and would wait below while we rode up. At the top, Patrick and I could see almost nothing because of the rain. We rode back down again and collected Malcolm and returned to Trocadéro. Patrick joined Louise in a shop. Malcolm and I waited outside. When Patrick emerged, he handed me a small shopping bag. Inside was a parcel wrapped in tissue paper. I pulled off the tissues and lifted out a wool scarf, pale gray with a faint green geometric pattern.

  “A scarf of moonlight and whispers,” Patrick said.

  “Moonlight and whispers?”

  “It’s from a poem,” he replied, opening his umbrella dramatically into the wind. “Can’t remember the rest, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Louise eyed Patrick curiously. “How sweet,” she said.

  “She lost her scarf on the ferry,” Patrick replied.

  I wrapped the scarf around my shoulders.

  Patrick reached over and rearranged it. “More like this,” he said.

  “Very nice,” Malcolm said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Bit of a stiff neck. Must have slept at a bad angle on the pillow.”

  Where had he slept, and with whom? It was the first time I’d wondered. And what did he think of Patrick, whom I was supposed to have met only once before, giving me a gift? There is no way to know. No way, now, to reconstruct the probabilities of Malcolm’s brain, or his heart.

  Louise gave Malcolm her shopping bags to carry. “Look at that, now,” Malcolm said. “There’s a bit of sun fighting out.”

  “We’d better get over to Montmartre before the rain starts up again,” Louise said. “We can take a taxi and walk to the top.”

  “Or we could take a taxi the other way around,” Malcolm said. “The back way. Right to the church. Save the walk up the steps.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Louise said.

  “I’d like to walk up the steps,” I said. “If nobody minds.”

  I had read about the journey in the guidebook—the more than three hundred steps to the top, and the graffiti on some of the buildings that flanked the stairs. It was something I thought Patrick might want to photograph.

  We found a taxi. We walked up the steps. Patrick took pictures. I stayed beside him, wearing my scarf of moonlight and whispers. Malcolm and Louise lagged. Halfway up I turned back to see that Malcolm was no longer climbing the stairs but standing beside Louise, leaning his hip against the railing. Patrick and I descended again, to join them. Malcolm’s face was pale as he put his hands to the back of his head. “I’ll just sit down here a minute,” he said. “It’s my head.”

  It was not like Malcolm to make a fuss. Not like him to feel unwell.

  Louise sat down next to him. She took his hands in hers.

  “I’ll stay with him,” Louise said to Patrick and me. “You two go on. We’ll be up in a minute.”

  I did not hesitate. I did not worry about how Malcolm was feeling. Patrick and I climbed the stairs together. He linked his arm in mine. At the top of the stairs he leaned over and took my chin in his hand and kissed me deeply. We reached the church, gray and immense against the massing clouds. We walked around inside. We looked at the stained glass. He kissed me again.

  Outside, a clearing of blue was visible between the clouds. The day was fading, and a thin geometry of colored light lay over the city. In front of the church, a girl was tapping a tambourine against her hip and singing.

  Patrick took a picture of her, then we moved closer.

  “My God,” he said suddenly, “it’s Mary McShane. Her brother was with me at school.”

  He walked right over to her. There was a blue velvet hat at her feet, filled with coins and bills into which Patrick dropped a ten-franc note. When she finished her song, they embraced. A young man sat on the ground beside her. A guitar lay dormant in his lap, and in his hands was an emaciated gray rat. He let the rat run along the back of his neck, over his shoulder and along his arm.

  Louise was suddenly beside me. “That rat turns my stomach,” she said.

  “Is Malcolm all right?” I asked her.

  “He’s just there, by the church, resting. He’s got a terrible headache,” she said. “Which isn’t like him. We’re going to have to go back to the penthouse. We’ll take a cab. We could all probably use a little lie-down before dinner anyway.”

  “Patrick’s bumped into someone he knows from home,” I said.

  He was standing with the girl, Mary McShane, talking and laughing. He saw Louise and walked toward us and the girl began to sing another song.

  “We’re going to need to head back now,” Louise said. “Malcolm’s not well.”

  “I’ll catch up to you, why don’t I?” Patrick said offhandedly. “I’ll be back in time to change for dinner.”

  “I might need your help, though,” Louise said, “with Malcolm.”

  Something rose in Patrick’s face. I saw it, and recognized it—an arc of resistance stretching toward an outright refusal. He would not allow himself to be reined in by her any more than by me. I’ll admit that it pleased me to see him refuse her. He might have come along out of deference to Malcolm, who had stood to join us now, but he did not, he would not, once Louise had pressed him to.

  “I’ll be all right,” Malcolm said. “Let him stay and talk to his friend.”

  “Suit yourself,” Louise said to Patrick.

  “I may as well stay for a bit, too,” I said, “since the weather’s finally cooperating.”

  Louise sighed. “Fine,” she said. She ordered Malcolm to stay where he was, and Patrick to flag them a cab while she went to use the bathroom in the church.

  Malcolm and I were left alone. He sat down on a step. I sat down next to him. He looked at me. His eyes were watering and his face was drained of color. Did I worry that he was sick? I don’t think I did.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that this morning was one of the highlights of my life.”

  I felt my face color. What did I say in return? I don’t know. I don’t remember. Maybe nothing at all.

  “You should stay and have fun,” he said. “No sense my spoiling the afternoon for everyone. You’ll be all right getting back?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. And I was, but he was not.

  Twenty-five

  THE SUN DIPPED behind a cloud after Malcolm and Louise had gone, and it began to rain again, hard and fast. Mary McShane picked up her hat and the boy put his guitar in its case. Patrick finally introduced me to Mary. She had blue eyes and a small nose and her hair was dyed black and cut short, like a man’s. She had earrings all up and down her ears and she was wearing a peasant skirt she kept clamping down against the wind.

  It was decided we should all get out of the rain and go for a drink in Mary’s flat. She and Patrick walked ahead, talking about people they knew, and the boy and his rat and I walked behind. It was still raining hard and we walked fast, holding our coats over our heads and winding our way through the narrow cobbled streets of Montmartre, past small galleries and shops and bars and cafés that smelled of garlic and rotting vegetables.

  We climbed three narrow flights of stairs to an apartment. Mary and the boy lived there with a third roommate, Mary’s boyfriend, who was asleep in the back room. It was necessary, Mary warned, to keep our voices down. Her boyfriend had trouble sleeping at night, so mostly he slept during the day while she worked the church.

  Bright cotton scarves were hung over the windows. There were books stacked a foot high against the walls. There was a mattress in one corner, and a cardboard box in another, where the rat slept. There was cracked plaster peeling from the walls, revealing dark paint beneath, and spots on the ceiling like giant coffee stains.

  Mary offer
ed us red wine in water glasses. There were only two chairs. Mary sat in one with her guitar in her lap, so I sat in the other. The boy sprawled out on the mattress with the rat. Patrick stood at first, moving aimlessly about the room, then he perched himself on the arm of Mary’s chair. He asked her questions about herself, about her sisters and her family. Her brother, Ian, had gotten away after their mother died. He’d gone to the States, she said. But she’d been stuck. The eldest girl, with four younger sisters needing caring for. She hadn’t been able to stand it. The sadness and the grief and the God-awful mess. She’d told her father she’d found a post with a French family, as a nanny.

  She laughed. “Imagine anybody in their right mind leaving little ones with the likes of me!”

  “Give us a go,” Patrick said, and she handed him the guitar. He played a few chords. I finished my wine and Mary refilled my glass.

  Patrick put the guitar down and stood up again and walked around the room, picking up books. He began to read from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  “Such rubbish,” Mary said, interrupting him. “For a while I loved that book. When I was naïve.”

  “Rubbish? Really?” Patrick said. “There’s the McShane bravado at last. I’ve been waiting for it to reappear.”

  “You’re one to speak about bravado,” she said.

  “You’ve got to admit Joyce was a genius,” Patrick said. “You’ve got to at the very least give me that.”

  “I will certainly not give you that,” she said.

  I had not read Joyce. I had not read anything of importance. I had not finished college, and I had been wasting my time working in an office when I ought to have been pursuing art. Patrick had told me that often enough, but I had not believed him. I was happy working for Malcolm. I felt useful and important. But in this squalid flat in Montmartre, I was too purposeful. I was party to the bourgeois corporatism, as Patrick had once called it, that threatened the modern world. I was involved in an enterprise that had turned the historic Isle of Dogs into a capitalist circus.

  The debate on Joyce was continuing, but I was not really listening. I was studying the girl—Mary—taking mental notes.

  “You pretentious fuck,” she said suddenly. She pronounced the word fuck so it rhymed with hook, and she said it with real fury. She leapt from her chair and snatched the book away from Patrick.

  He laughed. “And is your boyfriend a Joyce critic as well?”

  “No, he’s a musician. But he’s got a wee problem with the smack.”

  Patrick raised his eyebrows.

  Her boyfriend was a songwriter, she told us, only he’d gotten hooked on heroin, and the heroin had affected his songwriting. But now they were tangled up together, and he couldn’t give up the drugs, because he was afraid if he did, he wouldn’t be able to write music. But he couldn’t start writing music again while he was using, because if he was successful he’d never give up the drugs.

  I wanted to dislike her. I wanted the whole tableau to be a carefully constructed façade. I wanted her to be a fake. But I don’t think she was. She filled my glass again and took my hand and squeezed it. “You’re so beautiful,” she said. Then to Patrick: “She’s so beautiful. Wherever did you find her?”

  “Here and there,” Patrick said. “She doesn’t really belong to me.” And then to me, he said: “You don’t really belong to me, do you, Annie B.?” Then to Mary: “Her loyalties are somewhat in dispute.”

  Did he know what had happened in the penthouse that morning after he and Louise had gone to breakfast? He couldn’t know. But he seemed to.

  The door to the back hall opened suddenly and the boyfriend appeared in the doorway. His head was shaved and his face was gaunt. His skin was so white it was almost blue. Deep circles seemed to be carved under his eyes, like vowels. His shirt was unbuttoned and his chest was thin and hairless. Around his neck was a silver chain with a cross.

  He jutted his chin into the room and narrowed his eyes. “What’s all this?” he said to Mary.

  “We met them at the church,” she said. “This is Patrick Ardghal. He was at school with Ian, back home. It started to rain and we all got wet. They came in to get dry.”

  She stood up and moved toward the boyfriend, slipping her arm under his shirt. He did not accept or reject her embrace; he merely stood squinting into the room.

  Patrick was looking at Mary, as if trying to give her a sign. I now felt as he must have felt, too: She needed saving; she needed to be swept away from this place.

  “How did you make out today?” the boyfriend said.

  Mary handed him the hat. He took the money and shoved it in his pocket.

  “And who are you?” he said to me.

  “I’m Annie. Annie Black. We’re here visiting from London.”

  “But you’re not English, are you? You’re American.”

  I nodded and looked at Patrick. “We’d better go,” I said to him pointedly. “They’ll be waiting.”

  Patrick looked the man up and down with an air of challenge. “You go ahead,” he said to me. “Send my apologies, won’t you? I can’t suffer through that restaurant tonight, I’m afraid.”

  “But they made the reservations.”

  “They’ll survive.”

  “But—”

  “It’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Suit yourself,” I said, not realizing until after I said it that I sounded just like Louise.

  WITH SOME DIFFICULTY, I flagged down a taxi. It took two hours and cost me a small fortune to get back to the penthouse. There were traffic jams all across the city because of the storm, and the taxi driver had to keep backtracking and taking alternate routes. It was nearly eight by the time I arrived at the penthouse, and the power was out. The concierge gave me a flashlight and walked me up the stairs and opened the door for me with the master key. I wielded the flashlight and peered around the kitchen and the living room and down the hall, but nobody was there. I sat down to think. They must have already gone to the restaurant. I could find out where it was located and take another taxi to meet them. But I would have to explain myself. I would have to apologize for my rudeness, and for Patrick’s. I would have to suffer through dinner alone with Malcolm and Louise, and I knew I couldn’t do it.

  I changed out of my wet clothes. I walked downstairs with my flashlight to the restaurant from the night before, which was open and lit with candles. They were not serving food, but they were still serving drinks. I sat and drank alone until the bar closed at midnight, then I returned to the penthouse. It was still empty, and it was very dark, and the storm was raging outside the window. I lay on the bed in the room I’d woken up in and tried to think, but the room was spinning. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and except for the taxi ride, I’d been drinking since we’d stepped into Mary’s flat many hours before. I tried to find my nightgown in my bag. The difficulty of this task, the way my hands did not respond as I anticipated they might, the way I stumbled against the wall, informed me that I was even drunker than I’d imagined. I lay back down on the bed, still in my clothes, on top of the covers, willing the room to stay still. Dread overcame me.

  After a little while I heard the door to the penthouse open. I listened for Malcolm’s heavy steps, and Louise’s lighter steps, in the hall. But it was Patrick. He entered my room and flicked the light switch, but of course there was no power. I peered at my watch. It was two in the morning. A great crack sounded outside.

  “What was that?” I managed to say, enunciating carefully so he would not know how drunk I was.

  “A tree, probably. This storm is shattering the city. I barely got back,” he said. “There were trees fallen in the road. They’re not back yet, are they? The métro is shut down and it’d be nearly impossible to get a taxi. I wonder if they’re stuck.”

  He stripped off his jacket and the rest of his clothes. He dropped them on a chair. He made me get up so he could pull the covers back, then he climbed into bed and pulled me in after him.

  “
Now, then,” he said, which was the thing he always said to begin.

  There was to be none of the feeling from Canterbury. I could sense that, and yet I did not at first try to resist. I found I was happy to be in his arms. But something in me became shocked at myself for being so pliable, for already having forgiven him for abandoning me the night before and spending the night in Louise’s room, and for ignoring me in Mary’s flat, and leaving me to make my way across Paris alone. Then I remembered what I had done with Malcolm that morning. If there were amends to be made, it could be argued they needed to be made by me as well. I could feel Patrick’s erection against my thigh and his hands moving along my body. I had moved against Malcolm that morning, not so differently from this, feeling not love but detached animal desire. Patrick might be feeling the very same thing, ignited not by me but by Mary McShane.

  “Not tonight,” I said, removing his hands from my body and rolling away from him.

  If he’d protested at all, if he’d tried a little harder, I would have given in without a fight. But he fell right to sleep. I listened to him breathe deeply, then begin to snore. The sounds of the storm filled the room. Great crashing and groans. Wood bending and moaning in the wind. The rain hammering the windows. I could reach over and touch him and wake him. I could see if it might be possible, with Patrick, to achieve what I had achieved that morning with Malcolm. But I didn’t do it. I remained turned away from him and went to sleep.

  In the morning, he was not there. There was a note—an excerpt from an Oscar Wilde poem—written on a sheet torn from a pad and folded in half and perched like a tent on top of my backpack:

  How sad it seems.

  Sweet, there is nothing left to say

  But this, that love is never lost …

  I’m off home.

  P.

  The storm had ended and the penthouse was silent. I walked down the hall and put my ear to the door of the second bedroom. I opened it a crack. The room was empty. Louise and Malcolm were not there. Daisy was not there, either. I was alone.