Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In the hottest summer in living memory, Judith Flatland, together with her two children, leaves Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts to follow her husband, Jordan, to Paris, where he is about to finalise a high-profile business deal. Bored with her role as corporate wife, conscious of her age and suddenly aware that she has become sexually invisible, forty-two-year-old Judith feels jealous of and threatened by her nubile daughter. Has life passed her by? Cheating on her marriage and unable to help herself, Judith is drawn into a passionate affair with Felix Dumoulin, an urbane young artist. What begins as curiosity on her part leads to a poignant denouement: Judith must choose between her husband and her lover...

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

My name is Judith Flatland, I am forty-two years old, raised in New York and domiciled in Boston, no distinguishing features, and I have always feared the elements and been afraid of natural phenomena. Being a human being is pretty scary. I don’t mean not having enough to eat, being sick, ill, disadvantaged or living below the poverty line – all these things are bad enough, appalling – but simply having to cope in a world in which every day, from the moment one opens one’s eyes, there are a hundred different decisions to be made; each one perhaps unimportant in the grand order of things but determining the path one is to tread and leaving an indelible stamp upon one’s life, altering its course.


Most people are scared but manage to hide it. Scared of their insignificance in the cosmos with its seemingly immense past and its incomprehensible future in which, if we are to believe the latest quasi-scientific reports from think-tanks and market researchers who attempt to paint a picture of what life will be like in the twenty-first century, marriage will decline, women will spend less time having families and forming relationships, we can expect to live for around 120 years and there will be a radical restructuring of the traditional timetable of our lives. Given the inadequacy of our physical and mental equipment in the face of the forces we come up against, being scared is hardly surprising. We are born alone and we die alone. We bring nothing with us and we leave with our suitcases empty. It doesn’t sound difficult. But it is. There are too many tadpoles in the human pond, too many organisms struggling for survival against odds that most statisticians would find overwhelming. Ants in an ant colony, we struggle along, huddling together for protection, until a boot comes down decimating our busy procession, leaving us to reform and continue the march to the last syllable of recorded time, abandoning our dead behind us. It needn’t be a boot. Sometimes it’s a broom diverting us from our chosen path (more chance than Darwin), damaging us with its bristles. Or a deluge of water. Cold from the watering-can of natural selection or boiling hot from the kettle of destiny. Still we manage to march on. The survivors.


Once I was in San Francisco. Jordan was downstairs in a post-prandial meeting. West Coast bankers. I was performing my ablutions preparatory to going to bed when the water in one of the twin wash-basins started to slop from side to side and the marble tiles trembled beneath my bare feet. It only lasted a few seconds. A tremor, when the earthquake I dreaded and which was never far from my mind, almost became reality. When Jordan came to bed, flushed from the brandy that had been consumed, he said he hadn’t noticed anything, too busy with hostile takeover bids and suchlike, it often happened, think nothing of it.

An earthquake is produced by a sudden breaking of rock in the earth’s crust as the stresses become too great for the strength of the rock to withstand. Where the rock breaks, a fracture line, known as a fault, is left, and future movements are likely to happen along the same weakness. The force with which the rock breaks releases a large amount of energy in the form of waves that travel through the earth. These waves radiate outwards from where the fault has ruptured. The place at which the rupture begins is known as the hypocentre; the point on the earth’s surface directly above the hypocentre is called the epicentre, and the magnitude of the earthquake – the dreaded Richter scale – is a logarithmic approximation of the energy released. Controlling such enormous forces – which claimed 200,000 Chinese lives in 1920 and another 242,000 fifty-six years later, which wreaked indiscriminate havoc from Algeria to Guatemala and, in living memory, much nearer to home when the Northridge earthquake caused major damage to Los Angeles property and entire sections of the freeways collapsed – seems to be out of the question. It is necessary to look at other strategies, such as prediction and earthquake resistant design, to prevent further calamities.


Protecting against volcanoes, in which timely evacuation rather than reinforced buildings is the best option, is another matter. In the simplest terms, a volcano is a vent at the earth’s surface where molten rock – magma – from the interior can reach the surface. The magma originates in the mantle, but it is often stored in a magma reservoir with the crust as it moves upwards. It then erupts either as a stream of liquid rock (called lava at the surface) or as ash or cinder. Active volcanoes are those that are currently erupting, a process which can go on intermittently for years; dormant volcanoes may not have erupted for tens or hundreds of years but may be expected to erupt again; while those which were once active in response to the tectonic situation as it was millions of years ago but no longer represent a danger, are said to be extinct.


Catastrophic and disastrous as earthquakes and volcanoes can be, sometimes they give rise to another phenomenon that can cause even more destruction and loss of life: the tsunami. Tsunami is a Japanese word meaning ‘harbour wave’, or – inaccurately for tides play no part – ‘tidal wave’. When an earthquake occurs offshore, it may bring about a sudden change in the shape of the ocean floor. This change causes a massive displacement of water, which in turn produces a powerful wave – or series of waves – that spreads out in all directions. As long as the wave travels in deep ocean, its wavelength is so long that its rise and fall is practically undetectable. Its speed is about 700km per hour. But when it reaches shallow water, the wave has to slow to about 100km per hour and, as a consequence, piles up into a breaker that surges inland, carrying everything before it and doing untold damage. In the case of the great earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal in 1755, the tsunami, or wall of water, that hit the city shortly after the earthquake, caused more devastation than the earthquake itself.


When Jordan was summoned to Paris to conclude the high profile takeover of Rochelle Eléctronique on behalf of Pilcher Bain, he took the entourage that was his family with him. Joey, aged nine, was on vacation from school; Michelle, at eighteen, was anxious to sign up for a summer course (French Language and Civilization) at the Sorbonne; and I, on leave from the Museum of Fine Arts where I worked as a guide, was all set to take on the role of corporate wife. The fact that we hit one of the hottest summers in living memory, that Jordan’s deal ran into eleventh hour problems, that Michelle freaked out on la vie Parisienne and Joey missed his pals, was, in view of what happened, immaterial. If an earthquake hits and you are in a secure building, you can strike lucky; confronted with molten lava from an erupting volcano, you can always run; in the face of a tsunami, you don’t stand a chance.


Let me tell you something about the Flatlands. Like Mr and Mrs Bun the Bakers and Mr and Mrs Field the Farmers, if you didn’t scratch too far below the surface, we were a Happy (enough) Family. Therapy had had its place. Me, early on in our relationship when I had an inexplicable bout of melancholy; Joey, when he fell incomprehensibly behind at school; and Michelle, when she was fighting a losing battle with her adolescent hormones. Three out of the four of us. Not Jordan, to whom the mind was a closed book. With Jordan what you saw was what you got; there was no hassle, no angst. Right was right – his word was his bond, etc. – and you didn’t mess with wrong. That was what made him such a good banker. Sometimes, when we were having a discussion about a course of action, something which concerned ourselves or the children, I’d say, but how do you ‘feel’ about it and he’d say, feelings don’t come into it. And they didn’t. The psychoanalytic view was that every problem had to have a cause, and that men like Jordan carried a psychological wound brought about by separation from their mothers and their own humiliating inability to give birth or to suckle. It was not that Jordan was deficient in feelings. Just that he wouldn’t recognize them if he met them in the street, and after the first few years of marriage, when I grew tired of trying to access them, I accepted him as he was. Which was pretty terrific.


Everyone on Beacon Hill envied us. The Flatlands. We had money – Jordan saw to that; status – he was Vice-Chairman of the bank; two lovely children; a fine house with a large rear garden and a French country kitchen; Maurice, a handsome Weimeraner (my third child); two hamsters (Joey’s); and a posse of friends – ‘his’, ‘hers’ and ‘ours’. It was a pretty good marriage although unlike some of the couples we knew, Jordan and I were not joined at the hip, which in my book is the recipe for a coma, and we allowed each other plenty of freedom. Life in our circle was pretty good too, despite the fact that children fell sick and loved ones died, and the odd affair left broken marital shards to be picked up and delicately repaired or led to divorce, messy or otherwise, and marauding cancer cells struck indiscriminately, and responded to treatment or did not, drawing those of us who had escaped closer together in communal Schadenfreude.


The Flatlands had been lucky. Apart from the usual childhood ailments and Joey’s broken collar-bone and Michelle’s glandular fever and a couple of basal cell carcinomas on Jordan’s back – after which he gave up sitting in the sun – and my own peritonitis from which I almost died, we had escaped pretty lightly. When the call came from Offenbach Frères for Jordan to go to Paris for several weeks to help his corporate manager, Sherman McCurn – Sherman and his wife, Nadine, were our close friends – clinch the Rochelle deal which promised to be a pretty big number, we held a family conclave, the result of which was that the four of us upped sticks and headed for Europe.


It was Lauren who found the apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement in the same building as her own, and Pilcher Bain who picked up the tab. Lauren and I had been at school together. Lauren had majored in Modern European Languages and Design while I studied English Literature and Fine Arts, and for three years we had been inseparable. Lauren was a short plump dynamo with a sex problem and it was she who had first abortively dated Jordan while he was still at Harvard; she had lusted after him ever since. It didn’t destroy our relationship – mine and Lauren’s I mean – for Jordan wasn’t the slightest bit interested. Lauren wasn’t his type, and the fact that she would have given her right arm to get him into bed was a standing joke. Lauren and I told each other everything – before she landed a serious job as chief designer with a multinational prêt-à-porter fashion house in Paris, and Jordan and I got married, that is. After that it was letters and never-ending telephone calls, then faxes and emails from our respective sides of the Atlantic. It was easier for Lauren. All she had to deal with from me over the years were boring old pregnancies and abortions (one), the usual parental difficulties and run-of-the-mill traumas of marriage and motherhood, the problems inherent in coping simultaneously with a (part-time) career and family crises and second homes and one and a half sets of ageing parents (Jordan had little time to deal with his mother). Lauren’s news, by contrast, rattled and shook and at times bordered on the scandalous. Over the years I had lived with the demands of her demanding business, her serial affairs, her whistle-stop tours from Guam to Guyana – ‘talk to you soon, darling’ – and the black holes of depression she fell into from time to time. When she heard we were coming, en famille to Paris, the text messages flew. She would find us somewhere to live, pals for Joey, friends for Michelle, a bolt-hole on the Côte d’Azur so that we could escape from the inferno of the city, an au pair to help us and to babysit Joey so that she and I could go out on the town. My God, what we weren’t only going to do!


The elegant nineteenth-century apartment, with its French windows and graceful wrought iron balcony overlooking the Parc Monceau, was on the Boulevard Courcelles where wealthy Parisians lived in stadium-sized splendour. Mod cons? Forget it. The apartment was designed neither to impress nor reassure. The refrigerator was as inadequate, by US standards, as the rooms were enormous, and both were of similar vintage. When I enquired about en suite bathrooms, Lauren laughed. Despite the appellation, ‘en suite’ meant little in France. Parisians, many of whom had lived in the same place forever, were conservative where their houses or apartments were concerned, and the clocks of decoration had stopped a long time ago. There were, however, sufficient bedrooms, endless corridors for Joey to race his Red Sox Thunderbird convertible, and several deep and gloomy cupboards for our obscene number of suitcases. The fact that the apartment was on the fifth floor and the caged monolith of an elevator, unreliable, was not reflected in the exorbitant rent. Jordan was not worried about it. He left that side of things to me and I left it to Lauren who could not have been more excited about the prospect of our trip.


As it turned out it was not so much a trip as a cataclysm, no more predictable than the throw of a dice or the spin of a roulette wheel. While a little knowledge of what to do and what not to do when such a dynamic circumstance takes place, together with a little advance planning, can make a big difference to one’s chances of survival, I walked into it blind.




It was not my first visit to Paris. There had been several trips to Europe over the years and I had spent many happy days gorging myself on the cornucopia of paintings on offer while Jordan wheeled and dealed. We had never visited in August, which at best was not the month of choice and this year managed to produce some of the highest temperatures in living memory. Hot weather and I had never got on and of course there was no such thing as air-conditioning in the Boulevard Courcelles; you could barely open the windows in some of the rooms and it made little difference to the ambient temperature if you did. Parisians didn’t worry about such unimportant details. In any case, those who could had left the capital for the mountains, the country, or the Côte d’Azur, fleeing like lemmings, as they did every summer, from the shops with their padlocked doors and handwritten notices proclaiming fermetures annuelles, postmen who had gone on strike, and refuse collectors who had come out in sympathy, leaving the overflowing black bags piled up in the streets and stinking rubbish everywhere, not to mention the ubiquitous dog shit.


Most people were bad-tempered and I caught the bug, snapping at Jordan, screaming at Joey, getting confrontational with Michelle (not difficult at any time) and impatient with Helga, the Swiss au pair, a newcomer to domesticity, who had come to help us out and whom I reckoned should be paying me rather than the other way round. Uprooted, before I’d had time to get used to the idea, to prepare myself mentally, I missed my home and I missed what Michelle disparagingly referred to as my ‘jobette’ at the museum, where I shepherded groups of visitors round the galleries. As we assembled in the foyer I would give them an overview of the building with its dedicated team of curators and museum professionals, for some of whom the special exhibitions – New Egyptian Funerary Arts, Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries, ‘Paisley’ Motifs from Kashmir to Europe – represented a lifetime of research and study.


My particular area of expertise was the life and work, the one informing the other, of Pablo Picasso. Staking his wits and skill against the world, his images changed with breakneck. . .