I
Alice
1
She is sitting at her desk before the French windows reading, when he thrusts the door open and stumbles through the doorway.
"Goodness," he says, totters across the room, and throws himself down on the small blue love seat in the corner. He is saying something about his client, the rich Russian who has recently opened an account with him at the bank. He had insisted he have a drink with him.
"I didn't know you were coming home for lunch," she says, closing the yellow folder.
"I told Djamilla," he says, referring to the Algerian housekeeper.
Alice has been in the garden gathering flowers. She has placed them in a silver trough on her desk. They are the color of the yellow folder she has before her. She hardly listens to what he is saying. Early afternoons when the sun is this bright are the hardest times for her to concentrate and particularly to practice her violin. These are the moments when her mind wanders to the past.
"It went on forever. He told me the whole story of his life! Didn't spare me a detail. The communal apartment, no bathtub, no hot water. The rats, the kids in the courtyard, the sticks. Made me sit there and drink his vile vodka, which he says is priceless. I'm quite drunk." He interrupts himself to say, looking at her, "But you look very pretty this afternoon, darling."
She has moved her old desk in order to have the view of the sea and the sky, but when she lifts her gaze now, the light is too bright, the water glinting brilliantly this afternoon.
She turns her head, gives her husband a sleepy, grateful smile. She looks at him with the kind of anxious uncompromising love that she has felt since she first met him in Paris so many years ago.
"Your hair looks almost red in this light," he says, staring at her, then leaning his head back, closing his bloodshot eyes, his legs stretched out before him in his gray trousers. He always wears his trousers too short, she thinks. Perhaps he will fall asleep, she hopes, but he stirs and opens his eyes.
"More like white-so many white hairs," she says, putting her hands to her head, though in reality she is proud of her thick dark curls. She feels young and lucky, so lucky to have this view before her, to live in this old villa that Michel bought for them so generously, ten years ago, with its beds of lavender and jasmine, the blue plumbago outside the dining room, the syringa tree in the circular driveway with its delicate branches and pale pink flowers, the yellow laburnum hanging over the iron gate that opens onto the road, the shiny frogs that hide at the edges of the pool.
She feels lucky to still be so slim at forty-two, to be able to play her violin every day, to perform frequently, to have a husband who loves her. She watches as Michel gets up to come over to her.
"No! No!" she says, alarmed, lifting up an arm, leaning forward to ward him off as she watches him sway. "You'll fall. Watch out! Stay where you are." She leans on the yellow folder on her desk.
"I won't. I'm not that drunk, though I've been drinking with that man for hours. I never thought I would escape! I didn't know I had such a hard head for alcohol-better than his!" He knocks his fist against his blond head and stumbles forward, coming toward her. "I don't know how much longer this can go on. He keeps wanting to give me more money! Heaven knows where it comes from."
"Dirty money?" she asks.
"Lots of gold," he says.
"Do people give you gold to keep?"
"Sometimes. Gold can be a good investment, but it fluctuates, of course, like everything else."
"And he has gold?" she asks, imagining the Russian with a briefcase filled with gold bars.
"'Don't you want my money?' he says and laughs. It's become a joke. I've tried to point out the risks, for his sake, but he says he likes my optimism. 'I trust you-we are friends,' he says."
"I see," Alice says uneasily.
"I don't even feel like a real banker anymore."
"You look like a fine banker to me, quite fine," she says sharply. But she is not thinking about him now. He smiles blankly at her. She sighs and asks, "Are things really that bad, Michel, at the bank?" asking, he must surely be aware, for reassurance, which he gives her.
He sways a little as he says, "Not worse, I suppose, than in many other banks. Not much to be done in any case." He looks at her.
"And the Russian?" she asks.
"Oh, he's not any worse than so many others. But I don't want any more of his money. He scares me."
"Why?" she asks.
"Doesn't take no for an answer. We may have to cut back. Make some choices. When I think of what we spent just a few years ago . . ." He stands close beside her now, looking out the French windows, fortunately lifting one hand and leaning on her shoulder, staring at the sea.
"Don't think about it," she says. Then despite herself she asks, "What exactly is happening at the bank? I mean I read the newspapers, but how serious is it for you, for us?"
"I don't really know, to tell you the truth. It's all become too complicated for me," he admits, and changes the subject. "Look at it-the sea," he says, and there is a glint of longing in his pale blue eyes.
He looks older, she thinks, looking up at him, noticing the lines on his thin neck, though he has remained as seductive as always, even now, half-drunk, because of something boyish, youthful, and innocent about the smooth, creamy skin, the narrow waist and hips, the way he stands casually on one foot, like a bird-a flamingo, perhaps-leaning on her. Though he is not tall, not much taller than she is, and his shoulders are not broad, his body is slim, his blue eyes still lustrous, his teeth small and even and almost transparent. He has the sort of physical vulnerability that appeals to both men and women. She has seen men staring with longing at him.
She hopes he is not going to tell her anything too disturbing about his work, this client who is probably a crook, about their finances, the leaks in the floors of the old house. She does not want to hear about too many bad things at once. She feels too cowardly, too frightened. She cannot bear it. She stares up at him.
If she were a painter like her sister, Lizzie, she thinks, she would paint him now, looking at him as he stands there unsteadily staring out the window. She would call the painting Lost Illusions.
"In what way will we have to cut back?" she asks despite herself.
"The house. We may have to sell the house."
"Not the house. I love the house," she says. She loves the breadth of the view, the vast blue sky, the sea. She can see a boat in the distance, a white sailboat on the sea, the sails unfurled, leaning so that it almost seems to touch the water with the mast.
He says, "It's the house or Pamela's boarding school."
"Oh! She would be devastated. It's the first school where she has finally-at fourteen!-been really happy. She adores her Swiss school, her friends, that English teacher-what's her name?" Alice says.
"We could probably get a good price for the house," he says.
"I could do more concerts. Perhaps even sign up with an orchestra. I could get maybe thirty or forty thousand dollars a year. They might even have me in Nice. I could ask Dominique."
"Dominique? Who's he?" he asks suspiciously.
"You remember the conductor?" He looks vague. He never does remember the people she introduces him to, or rarely. "The house doesn't cost us that much," she says a little desperately, though she knows it does, indeed, need repair. She looks around her big room with its pale blue sofa and old gold chairs-such pretty chairs, which belonged to her mother-where she practically lives, where she plays her violin for hours.
"Alice, we can't afford it," he says, and puts his hand on her head, stroking her hair, but she pushes it away, hearing footsteps.
The housekeeper, Djamilla, who brought Michel up, who came with the family from Algeria years ago, is scratching on the open door to warn them of her presence. She announces lunch in her old-fashioned, formal way.
"Monsieur est servi," she says grandly, standing in the doorway in her long black dress, her black head scarf, like some sort of portent of disaster, Alice thinks. She knows the woman would do anything for Michel. Alice laughs and says, "And what about madame?" and winks at Michel, but Djamilla has already left the room.
"She adores you," Alice says, sighing.
"I'm not so sure at this point. Seems rather surly these days," Michel responds. He leans across and picks up the bowl of flowers.
"What are you doing? You'll spill!" she says.
"For the table, such a pretty yellow." But he is spilling water on the folder on the desk.
"Look what you are doing!" she exclaims as he puts the bowl down and picks up the wet folder, the letter fluttering slowly to the floor. "Come on, let's have lunch. Djamilla is waiting. Leave it-I'll throw it away!" she says urgently. But he is looking at her, has her firmly by the hand to stop her from picking it up. He bends down and picks up the letter. He is holding the thin paper in trembling hands, looking at the writing, the signature. Everything seems to be happening fast. She feels herself growing old in an instant.
If Djamilla had told me he was coming back for lunch; if I had come back to the house half an hour earlier; if I had put the folder away; if I had burned the letter; if it had never been written! Who writes letters today!
He is turning slightly green, particularly around the nose. He is breathing rapidly.
She, too, has difficulty breathing. She thinks of the saints being buried under stones.
"A letter from Luigi?" he says, staring at her pathetically, as though there were some way she could deny it.
"An old one; I had forgotten it was even there," she says sadly. Why did she not tear it up, throw it away? But he has it in his trembling hands and is reading. I won't be able to save him now.
Her pity is fast dissolving into a kind of impatience. She wishes he would pick something up, smash something, shout-anything but the sorrow in his eyes. His voice is soft, almost pleading. He blinks.
She remembers how he came up to her that time after the concert she had given in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, how he said in a breathless voice, his blue eyes shining, "You were wonderful!" with such admiration. It was irresistible.
Now he reads aloud, "'Here is no word tender enough for your name.' I have heard that before," he says bitterly, his mouth, once such a tender bud of a mouth, hard and thin, brittle. Suddenly she feels she is looking at someone else.
"Did you answer the letter?" he asks.
"No, of course not," she says, feeling her eyes fill with tears.
"Why not?"
"Because I had nothing to say. It was over, over, over!" She wants to weep. She can hear the clock on the mantelpiece ticking in time to the thump of her heart.
"Oh, Michel," she says, "we will get over it, won't we?" He just stares at her. She is listening to the sound of the wind.
For some reason she thinks of her mother's death. Alice was twelve years old when she found her mother one morning early on the old brown sofa in the house in Amagansett. She was lying there still and gray and alone. Alice knew immediately she was dead, though no one had ever mentioned the possibility that she might die and she had never seen a dead person before.
She had not run to call her father, who was out in the garden, but upstairs into the bedroom where she and Lizzie slept. She told her little sister, only five years old, that their mother was dead. "Mommy is dead," she announced flatly, almost accusingly. Lizzie was in front of the standing mirror and holding her blond plaits with the blue bows. She was staring at Alice in the mirror. Alice will always remember the look in Lizzie's light eyes. "You don't have to cry," Alice said.
II
Michel
1
When Alice closes the door on their bedroom that night, Michel goes to his study, throws his book on his desk, gathers up his papers, and paces up and down. He is suddenly full of energy, though it is late, after ten o'clock. He is imagining all the terrible secret words Alice must have whispered to Luigi, the same secret words she has used with him. He needs to move. He holds himself erect, clenching his jaw, grinding his teeth. He finds himself reciting certain passages from Luigi's letter; better to be angry than miserable, he tells himself. How little we know about ourselves, he thinks. Where can he go? he wonders. What can he do? He cannot stay here.
He picks up the telephone, calls the Russian at his villa, and asks if they can meet. He says he needs to talk to someone. For some reason he thinks the Russian will understand, and indeed the man immediately invites him, tells him to come to his house. Michel lights a cigarette and then leaves it in the ashtray to burn before he leaves.
Fire and fury, he thinks as he drives in the dark, taking the long way, the sea route to the villa in Nice. He opens the windows, letting the warm night air into the car. The movement makes him feel better. If I can just keep moving, moving.
In the state he is in, it is wiser to leave, he considers. He imagines Alice with a pillow over her beautiful face. He glances at himself in the car mirror and smooths down his hair, which is curling in the damp air.
He has been to the Russian's house before, though never at night. He remembers walking out of the shadows of the study on the second floor, standing blinking on the balcony in the bright light, looking down at the group of men sitting around the table on the lower-floor terrace by the pool and seeing a pink hydrangea in a pot in the middle of the table and the glint of a gun. Could he have imagined such a thing?
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