Hidden in Paris (3 page)

Johnny poured wine into her glass and handed it to her, waited for her to take a sip. “So?” he said, a half smile on his lips, “you want to get married?” She swallowed the wine and coughed, “Do you mean in general? I guess one day, with the right man, at the right time.”

“No, not in general. I mean the two of us. This week.”

Yes, her stomach dropped indeed. Sank down to her ankles, as a matter of fact. She felt her cheeks burn crimson, as sweat sprang from every pore of her skin. Her shaken response came from the heart. “
Me
?”

Johnny laughed at that one.

In the Italian restaurant, life moved at a different speed now. Johnny took her hand, placed something in it, and closed her fingers over it. What did she hope to find when she opened her hand?

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” she said, trying to contain the head-to-toe trembling.

She opened her hand. In her palm was a thin gold band.

Across from the table that was now the center of the universe, Johnny looked at her, a bemused expression on his face. “So, what’s it gonna be?” he said, tilting his head like a cocker spaniel. “Wanna get hitched and move to Paris with me?”

“I... I will have to get back to you on that,” Annie answered, her throat already constricted.

“All right, go ahead,” he said. And a second later, “so?”

She laughed, and the same time tried very hard not to cry. If this was a practical joke, she was a dead woman on campus. But she could not hold the tears. “You’re not serious.”

He had taken her hand, and slowly, incredibly, placed the ring on her finger. “Very serious. Come on, just say yes, don’t leave me hanging like this.”

And then came the single word that changed her entire life.

“Yes,” she sobbed.

They were married a week later so that they could move to France as Mr. and Mrs. Roland. No big wedding, and she couldn’t have cared less. The opportunity to work with his brother as soon as he graduated had to be grabbed. Johnny had learned French for years in preparation but Annie knew not a word of French except for
bonbon
and
voulayvouparlay
. Her parents disliked the France idea just as much as the Johnny idea. Her mom, especially, was frantic.

“You hardly know him!”

“Well, does one say no to winning the lottery?”

“You did not think this through. You’re willingly putting your hand down the meat grinder, that’s what you’re doing!”

“Oh come on mom, the French can’t be that bad.”

“I’m not talking about the French, dammit! This...adventurer...your education!”

This was the first time she had ever heard her mother curse.

It turned out that her mom and dad, who got most of their exercise from arguing about virtually everything, united beautifully in disliking Johnny. They insisted Johnny was self-involved, unreliable, and immature. Annie wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Johnny was too handsome, and that a man who surpasses his wife in beauty has to be immediately suspicious. She wondered if she did not think that herself.

It was a whirlwind time of which she had little recollection. A promising (and expensive) education ended abruptly. She met Johnny’s parents for the first time the day of the civil wedding. Tearful goodbyes followed at the airport.

And overnight, or almost, she was a married woman living in Paris. Her sheltered and, up until now, mostly academic life transformed immediately into chaos, confusion, and very hard work. She had to learn an entirely alien language in a particularly alien culture. She had to figure it all out on her own, learn her
baguette
from her
ficelle
, her
Roquefort
from her
Reblochon
. She had to learn to live without her family. How she missed her family. Without friends. How she missed her friends. And how hard it was to make new ones when you suddenly found your ability to communicate reduced to that of a trained chimpanzee. She had to learn to take care of a husband who worked all the time. Then, so fast, she had to figure out how to raise one, two, and then three children. Heck, she had to learn to take care of herself. She had to learn to make beds, wash laundry, shop, cook, take sick babies to the doctor, and drive through Paris with a stick shift, the whole thing
en Français
!

Her parents had been wrong. Everyone had been. Their ten-year marriage proved it. Yes, Johnny had been immature, independent, but in a way that made every day an adventure. And he wasn’t unreliable at all. She trusted him.

It had taken her ten years to feel halfway settled in her new life. And then Johnny died. His death was terribly sudden. Gruesome. Shocking to all. None of it felt real or possible. Her pain had been abject, the despair of the children intolerable, but also—and this within days of his sudden disappearance from her life—it became clear that she’d never had a normal maturation from young woman to adult. Since arriving in France, she had relied almost entirely on Johnny for everything that took place outside the house. It was in Johnny’s nature to take charge, and she had found it easier to let him. She had let him sweep her off her feet, transplant her to Paris, keep her barefoot and pregnant. She was good at being a mother, possibly a mother to the exclusion of everything else. Johnny did the rest. He and his brother Steve had thrown themselves into their business and worked relentlessly at growing it. He traveled a lot in and outside France, and handled every aspect of their personal finances—something she would come to bitterly regret after his death. He bought and drove fast cars, dressed more French than the French, became an expert in wine, and because he needed to entertain large groups of people for business, he spent entire evenings in the best restaurants around Paris.

She never much liked the concept of entertaining to improve business, but one day she got the idea that she should entertain those people at home. At least by inviting people over, she and the children got to see Johnny. Via forced practice and also because she found it fun, she soon became an accomplished cook.

By the time Johnny died she had done little in France besides making babies, nursing, pushing strollers, and cooking. When he suddenly disappeared, she was lost again. Once again she had to figure out
everything
else. Some things never got figured out. The question of how to keep the business going, for example, never got solved. The business was shut down and with it all hope for an income. Another aspect of her life she had not been able to figure out yet was how to recover from more subtle losses: her carefree nature, innocence, playfulness, and the luxury of trust.

She was tough now, tough as in strong, and tough as in hard. She was a tough-as-nail mother, and tough-as-nail
femme au foyer,
or what Americans call a homemaker. She couldn’t argue the making part. She was making that home all right, if it killed her. Two and a half years later she was no longer the soft mother, the round-hipped and milky-breasted creature protected and taken care of by a man. She had become a she-bull that everyone (beside her children—hopefully not her children—and the indefatigable Lucas) feared and avoided. She had become the Sarah Connor of remodeling projects, as rough as the skin on her hands, as heavy as the bags of plaster she hauled up the stairs, and as hard as the planks she fed into the circular saw. She was busy building herself and the children a house out of something stronger than brick; something strong enough to never again let pain in. That home—that house—was her Great Wall of China, her Maginot line. It was her refuge and her jailor, her passion and her foe, her salvation and her demise.

She rubbed cream on her hands where the skin was the worst. She did everything herself in the house. No job too small, or too big. The very table she sat at was an example. She had painted it a warm tone of red, painstakingly varnished it, and had nearly passed out from the fumes. The stairwell was another example of her work, reconstructed plank by plank, so were every chair, couch and sofa in the house: scavenged, reupholstered and the woodwork refinished by yours truly.

The soft January light flattered and caressed every surface of the beloved kitchen. The carrera marble countertop, she kept in perfect shape. The ancient tile floor, she had regrouted herself with a hundred-year-old recipe that mixed sand, glue, and pigment. The glorious three-oven eight-burner AGA range, she had recomposed piece by piece.

The light and the silence of midmorning gave the kitchen the wistful feeling of an old painting. Those were lonely hours before the boys came back from school. Maxence was nine now, Laurent seven, and Paul five. They walked to school at the
Lycée International,
a few blocks away from the house. Thanks to the French education system, they came home for lunch daily so that she could do what she did best—feed them and smother them to death. In exchange, the boys gave her life meaning and purpose.

The enemy was Thinking. No, the enemy was Time, or having too much of it when the kids were at school, especially now that Paul was in kindergarten. Too much time bred too much thinking and that she could not have. Her next therapy, she had already decided, would have the combined benefits of being cheap and brutal. She wanted to refinish the maple wood floor in the entryway, a task that included, but was not limited to, sanding, gluing, restoring, tinting, varnishing, coughing, and crying. But projects didn’t solve everything; as her arms and fingers moved, so did her mind, and in pretty tight circles, too. And projects ended. Once the floor was refinished, then what? And now that she was utterly and desperately penniless, now really what?

Money had come to them via Johnny’s side of the family, in the form of a substantial inheritance at a time when the dollar was worth a whole lot more. She and Johnny had visited dozens of places, penthouses with pools, and apartments with views of the Trocadéro or the Eiffel Tower. The real estate woman wore skintight suits and stiletto heels and walked with each foot precisely in front of the other, as though there were cliffs on either side of her. Annie became excellent at imitating her behind her back to make Johnny laugh.

They saw the house on a spring day. The stiletto woman had shown it to them as an afterthought. “It came on the market this morning. I haven’t seen it, but look at the listing, an eight-bedroom townhouse with a private garden in the heart of the sixteenth arrondissement? There is work, it says. But the street alone is a gem,” she had assured them with a whisper that indicated that awe and respect were
de rigueur
. “It isn’t authorized to through traffic. There is a gate to the street.”

“A Parisian’s take on the gated community,” Johnny pointed out.

“I’m against it on principle,” Annie said.

But as soon as the three entered the street, bird songs and the smell of jasmine replaced the noise and smell of traffic. The street was lined with centuries-old gnarled sycamores, and the trees’ tender spring leaves filtered light like in a meadow. The real estate woman’s ankles bent in frightening angles on the cobblestone pavement, and Annie admired one more time the way French women surrendered to the enslavement of elegance.

The houses on the private alley were all
hôtel particuliers
, town houses, which really looked like miniature castles to her eyes, with their beautiful facades and moldings, handsome roofs and tall windows framed by well-kept wooden shutters symmetrically placed on either side of impressive front doors. One
hôtel particulier
was lovelier than the next. They had been built in the Haussman era and been kept up with respect to the protected historic monuments they were.

All except for the house in front of which the real estate woman was standing. She pointed an accusatory finger towards it. “What a pity.
Quelle honte, non?
” she said and turned toward them. Johnny made a sour face and looked at Annie.

Annie paid no attention. She was in the process of falling in love. Her face showed it before she knew it herself. This hôtel particulier was the very definition of ramshackle. Windows were broken, shutters missing, and the roof seemed to have collapsed in places, but Boston ivy and wisteria laced the stone walls and added softness to the architecture, giving the house a wildly romantic air. The owner “
une folle avec ses chats
” as defined by the real estate woman, had lacked funds but steadfastly refused to move. She had recently died inside the house and had been discovered there, dead among her cats a few days after the fact. The gruesomeness of the visual and the condition of the house made it borderline unsellable.

“We’ll take it,” Annie had said.

Johnny had looked at her with amusement. “Do we know that there is an actual inside to this place?”

The stiletto woman, seeing Annie’s face, started to work on Johnny. With time and money, she insisted, it could become the quintessence of class and luxury in terms of Parisian living. The woman and Johnny spent an inauspicious amount of time trying to open the door, but when they did, Annie thought she had entered Ali Baba’s cavern.

The house had soaring ceilings, original crown moldings, and crumbling chandeliers that had seldom been violated by a dust broom. Years of wallpaper layers fell in patches, and the smell of cat urine grabbed the throat like a claw. There were only two bathrooms, both with impractical claw-foot tubs, broken bidets, cracked faucets, and exquisite mosaic tile Annie knew instantly she would never tear down.

The house was purchased. “With time and money” became the motto. With time and money, the fissured stucco could be restored. With time and money, the wood floors could be brought back to their original luster. With time and money, the stories could be connected with proper working stairs. There had been no plan for time or money to run short.

She now saw things as they were: Johnny had been the world to her, and now the house and her boys were her entire universe. Within the confines of the house, no matter how limiting or punishing it might be, she felt safe. Only in her house did she see herself as master of her life. At home cooking, building, scraping and sanding, she felt capable and purposeful. Focusing on what was still a constant—the house and the boys—she did not need to let questions in, questions about Johnny, questions about what would have come of her had Johnny not died, questions also, about her own worth, the risks involved in loving and trusting someone, the validity of a life devoid of trust or love. Since that night two and a half years ago, she had become like someone with a fear of heights condemned to live on a rooftop.