Hidden In Paris Part 23

"And the kids like him a lot."

"They do."

Annie felt the tears, tried to contain them. "But he can have any girl he wants," she said.

"Maybe he can, maybe he can't. The fact is, he kissed you."

Annie said the words that she had not dared tell herself and let herself cry openly, "Oh, Lola, I'm so afraid to hope."

Lola nodded. She seemed to understand precisely what Annie meant.

"Listen, I'm not holding my breath. Okay, so he kissed me. He will realize this is going to ruin our friends.h.i.+p. We have a very special friends.h.i.+p." Annie blew her nose loudly. She stopped crying as abruptly as she had started.

Lola shook her head in disbelief. "You never realized that a single, handsome, heteros.e.xual man wouldn't spend so much of his time with you if he didn't desire you all along?"

Desire? Now the big words. But could Lola be right? "So you think he might actually like me? Wow," she added. "Far out." She laughed out loud.

"You do like him!" Lola exclaimed. "You've always liked him! Of course! Even the kids can see it. In fact, I spent my first month here convinced you were together, remember?"

"So you think he might like me, and you think I might like him?"

"This conversation is really weird. The real question to me is how come you haven't kissed before?"

"No, no, the real question is, how can I get him to kiss me again and not look like a total s.l.u.t."

Just as she was saying the word s.l.u.t, Althea entered the kitchen. Annie exchanged glances with Lola and they waited in silence as Althea opened a folded-up Kleenex, retrieved a used tea bag, and dipped it into a mug filled with cold water. Strange. That girl was strange. They watched as Althea placed the mug into the microwave and the three of them stared as the seconds went down on the microwave screen for a whole minute. The microwave beeped and Annie noticed she was holding her breath.

"May I?" Althea said, taking two apples from the fruit bowl.

Annie shrugged yes. They waited for Althea to leave and Lola said, "I've tried to not seem like a s.l.u.t all my life, and for what?"

"Yes, for what? s.l.u.ttish is good!" Annie said, and laughed ferociously.

"But you'll take it slow, right?"

"What do you think I am? A s.l.u.t? I have all the time in the world."

She did not yet know just how little time there was, and how frantic the next twenty-four hours would turn out to be.

Lying on Althea's bed, his arms behind his head, a cigarette in his mouth, Jared watched Althea as she stepped over canvases, tubes of paint, dirty gla.s.ses, a filled ashtray and picked her clothes up from the floor. It was pouring outside and rain whipped the tree branches against the bedroom window. "I'm getting breakfast," she said, leaving the bedroom. It was eight in the morning and they had not gone to bed yet. They had gone out until five in the morning and then he had wanted to paint her. He realized this was unfair to Althea for two reasons: he knew she would not be able to say no, and she did not know he had taken speed at the beginning of the night. But now it was the morning and he hated himself for it, for invading her s.p.a.ce, for taking advantage of her, for not letting her sleep. He had meant to paint her to capture her stomach-churning beauty, her smiles so quick to vanish. As a small boy he tried to make his little sister smile, and then his mother smile, and it worked for a while until they got too sick to smile at all. He had always been surrounded with sick women. Now he could see that Althea was more of the same and he was furious at her and at himself.

Althea re-entered the bedroom, carrying a cup of tea and three apples.

"That's our breakfast?" he said, feeling mean.

"They were there," Althea said as an explanation.

"Who?"

"Annie and Lola. And they were laughing. They always laugh. I mean, I went in and out of the kitchen, I don't think they even noticed that I was there."

Althea looked spent. What kind of selfish b.a.s.t.a.r.d was he to not let her sleep? Was this love? Would he love her if she were well?

"And I'm a burden to them," Althea said. She reddened, looked away. "Sometimes I think I'm also a burden for you. Like you feel that you have to take care of me or something."

Was he an angel of death, killing one by one all the women he loved? "What burden?"

She sat on the bed and looked at him. "Every day I know you're going to feed me, and I don't want to say no to you."

He had wondered how long they could go on, not saying what needed to be said. "You need to eat." He moved his chin in the direction of the tray. "And not only apples."

Althea looked at him with a sort of defiance. "When you feed me I eat too much. So then I end up eating nothing else the rest of the day or..." she stopped herself.

Jared searched his memory for the word in English. "Do you throw up?" he asked.

"It just kind of happens sometimes, after I eat like a pig."

He could see her ribs under the thin sweater, hidden behind the red ma.s.s of her hair. He felt sick. His cowardice made him sick, feeding her all this time without talking about why, letting her be insane.

"Althea, you can't do that to yourself. You're too skinny," he said, knowing this was more of the same cowardice.

Althea spoke more to herself than to him. "Models are skinny, but they don't have the veins and the bones that show like I do. I don't feel skinny. I feel fat." She looked at him, powerless. "I'm too fat and too skinny."

Jared sprung up and sat next to her before he knew it. He grabbed her by the shoulders. "This has to stop, Althea," he growled.

Althea's eyes widened in horror. "I'm not doing anything wrong."

"You know d.a.m.n well you're doing something wrong. Don't lie to me."

She shook her head and began crying. "I'm not lying."

"I can't always be here to make sure you don't starve yourself!" he yelled.

"Then don't!" she yelled back. "I don't need anybody. I'm so sick of eating, and not eating, and being hungry, and throwing up. And Lola and Annie could care less; they're eating wads of b.u.t.ter. Like my mom, always cooking greasy food. And selfish." Defiant, Althea raised her head and, through her tears, said, "I know why they remind me of my mom. I could be dead for a week, and they would not notice. Maybe then they'd realize they should have paid attention."

"Is that what you want? Starve yourself and die?" he yelled. He let go of her.

Althea collapsed on the bed and he suddenly understood. His desire to paint Althea was no different from his desire to feed her. It was, in fact, an urgency to keep her alive. Jared had been there before. Up until his mother died, he painted her desperately. He had painted her so that there would be something left of her, like an insurance policy. Jared stood up and felt wobbly. He was not with Althea because he loved her. He was with her because he was supposed to sit with her and watch as she slowly killed herself. "I can't take care of you, Althea." He whispered.

As Althea sobbed in silence, Jared grabbed his clothes. He didn't have the words, or the courage to explain. He left the room, ran down the stairs, left the house, and he felt that he was followed by the cloud of stench, of darkness, of illness he carried everywhere with him. He left taking with him his destruction.

Chapter 24.

At four-fifty the next morning, Annie opened her eyes. Closed them again, tight. What in the world? The irreversibility of the last few hours, her wanton and libidinous self, in the dreadful lucidity of the early hour all came to her in a rush. Horrific! She dared open her eyes again. Judging from the last of the moonlight reflected on the ceiling above her bed, the rain had wiped the sky clean and today would be a beautiful day. She ever so slowly glanced to her right and barely repressed a giggle. There he was! Lying right beside her on his stomach was Lucas, his head buried in the pillow-Johnny's pillow-sleeping like a gentle brute.

Without moving a muscle, Annie contemplated Lucas's bare back, which was on this side of hairy. She found it hysterically funny that it hadn't bothered her in the least a few hours earlier.

She slipped a leg out of the sheet, her cutely painted toes, her freshly waxed calf, and had to admit to herself that what had happened wasn't entirely free of premeditation. The cellulite on her thigh gleamed in the early morning light and she thanked her good stars for a chance to gather herself before Lucas saw her au naturel. She felt as giddy as a teenager at the thought, and sight, of a nude man in her marital bed. She had done it! Boy, had she been at the end of her rope after those years of forced abstinence. But with Lucas? She was glad it was with Lucas. Of course, it had to be with him. Her cluelessness baffled her and she almost laughed out loud. She pulled the sheet under her chin continuing to feel in turns embarra.s.sed and elated.

What would happen when Lucas woke up, both literally and figuratively? Would he wish he hadn't followed her after dinner, after they had cleaned the kitchen, after a few drinks too many. Would he wish he hadn't dragged her into that dark corner of the stairwell?

Lucas had invited himself to dinner after a day of nerve-racking silence. He just appeared as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened between them. What had first felt like a relief quickly turned to wrath. How could he say nothing? She had felt the deep burn of humiliation. Lucas continued to be tactlessly normal during dinner, that a.s.shole, so cruelly without conspicuous eye contact.

She had lost at her own game of planned aloofness in a matter of thirty minutes. It was one thing to act as though the kiss in the park had been insignificant to her, but that it be insignificant to Lucas fl.u.s.tered her so much that she had behaved erratically. She had drunk too much wine with dinner, spoken too loudly, been heavily opinionated, so much more so than usual, that she had read it in Maxence's air of sulking disapproval.

After dinner, she had put the boys to bed only to come back downstairs to find Lucas and Lola sitting together on the loveseat. The loveseat! They were so wrapped up in one of their trademark flirtatious conversations that they didn't even acknowledge her being back in the room. She could have murdered them both. That's maybe what triggered the whole thing. She would not, could not, let either of them perceive her as a fool.

All three of them drank vodka, too much of it. She maybe, possibly, got a little flirtatious at that point. Nothing too obvious, though it is hard to tell how obvious she got. Things got blurry. She did remember going into the kitchen around midnight and opening the two top b.u.t.tons of her top. When she got back in the room, Lola sent her eye signals that her brand new black lace bra was showing.

They drank some more, joked around, flirted heavily, and suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, Lola stood up, teetered a little, said she was going to bed, and just disappeared. Annie had enough brain left to sense the danger. She got to her feet and called it a night, but Lucas didn't leave. Instead, he followed her into the hallway, and before they reached the kitchen, he had put his hand around her waist and dragged her into the corner of the staircase where she had turned to mush.

Should she pretend to be asleep, see how Lucas would handle the morning, take her cues from him, or pounce on him like the starving she-wolf she was? She sat up and gathered the sheet over the negligee purchased the day before when she still believed herself above suspicion. Lucas had nice skin. And he was a deliciously attentive lover. Better than Johnny. And to think she had accused Lucas of being a legend in his own mind. She took a look at the clock and watched it turn to five a.m.

That's when the shrill ring of the telephone pierced through the sleepy house.

Althea was awake and curled up at the base of her bed when the phone rang somewhere in the sleeping house. She looked up at the clock. It was precisely five in the morning. Jared had left her room at nine the morning before, twenty hours ago. After he had yelled at her and abandoned her she had put her clothes on, bundled herself up in her coat and sat at the base of her bed amongst freshly painted canvases and dirty socks. There she had drifted in and out of sleep and counted the hours until Jared came back. But this time, for the first time, he had not come back.

Her make-up was smeared from crying and her nose and mouth were swollen with tears. Within arm's reach were the tea and the three apples she had brought up twenty hours ago but she was too desperate to reach for them. She did not deserve food or water. There was nothing in her stomach but a nauseating loneliness. During the night, a hundred times she almost rose to her feet, a hundred times she stayed down. Her stomach was empty, and her chest was full with a dry rage she couldn't contain or understand. Soon day would come and the house would wake up. Happy noises of life, like a slap in the face. The children would complain and fight for the bathroom. She would smell the coffee and toasted bread that made her stomach scream. Lola and Annie would bark endless commands to the children who would ignore them.

The way the phone rang, or was it the time that it rang, Althea knew immediately that something was wrong. After the phone stopped ringing, there was an interminable silence, then doors began to open and close throughout the house. There were hurried footsteps down the hall. Althea stood up and put her ear against her bedroom door. Her whole body began shaking uncontrollably. Footsteps rushed up the staircase. A violent knock at her door. Nausea. She opened her door and faced Annie, who was barefoot and clad in a short lacy nightgown. Annie eyed the incredible chaos that was her room with incredulity and frowned with surprise at the sight of Althea dressed and wearing a coat. "Do you know?" she asked.

Althea felt faint. "No! What's wrong?"

"It's Jared." She put her hand on Althea's arm. "He's at the hospital. They think it might be a drug overdose!"

Althea put her hand to her mouth. Her legs stopped carrying her and she held onto the doork.n.o.b. Annie looked at her face with suspicion. "Did you guys have a fight?"

Althea answered the truth: "I don't know."

"Look, you're already dressed. You should go ahead of us. He's is at Hopital b.i.+.c.hat in the eighteenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt in the emergency department."

"Is he all right?"

"Honey, they say he's in critical condition."

Althea received the news like a punch. Annie continued. "Lola will stay here with the kids. Lucas and I...he's here. He spent the night but we're getting dressed. Grab a cab now. We'll meet you there. Run, honey, all right?"

Overdose? But Jared didn't take drugs. Althea needed to tell the doctors. Maybe they didn't diagnose him correctly. Althea ran with legs that couldn't run, thought with a brain that couldn't think. Her body moved out of the house and onto the street. She nearly threw herself at a pa.s.sing cab. "Hopital b.i.+.c.hat. Urgences s'il vous plait. Vite!" The cab, a BMW, accelerated to sixty kilometers per hour within seconds. "Stop! Stop," she yelled. The cab's tires screeched, and the car stopped just in time for Althea to open the door and vomit bile.

In the hospital room, Althea stood in her coat, her hands tight on her purse, her eyes scanning the room for a blanket, for Jared who laid there, unconscious, and whose body was covered by only a thin, white sheet. He was like a wax rendition of himself. He was very pale. The wiry muscle on his forearms almost flaccid. Clear plastic containers filled with liquid dangled above him, dispensing their fluids through catheters. The only sound in the room, the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, failed to rea.s.sure her.

Voices came from outside the room. Through the small window in the door, she saw the doctor speak to Annie and Lucas. The same doctor, repeating the same words he had given her: There was no evidence that Jared could hear at the moment, but they could speak to him anyway.

Lucas and Annie would enter the room in an instant and she would no longer be alone with Jared. She ventured a small step toward the bed and had the hardest time getting her body to obey her. She glanced behind her shoulder, through the window. Annie and Lucas who had just arrived were still speaking with the doctor. She bent down and brought her face close to Jared's. He did not smell like himself. She came close enough to feel his breath on her face. She had tricked herself into thinking that he loved her, but the brutal truth was that she knew nothing about him. He had never trusted her enough to let her in. They didn't have a relations.h.i.+p. She couldn't have despised herself more. She whispered in his ear the truest words she knew "I love you. And I hope that you love me, too," and stood up as Annie and Lucas entered the room. Their faces displayed the same fear the doctor's words had inflicted on her. Jared was in a coma. There was no evidence he could hear, no indication he ever would again. Althea refused Annie's hug, walked past her and Lucas, and ran out of the hospital room.

Lucas couldn't imagine himself staring at Jared's still, waxy face another instant. "Why did Althea run out like that?" he asked Annie. "Isn't she supposed to be his girlfriend? How come we're staying here and she is gone?"

Annie was sitting in a gray chair next to the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes glued to Jared's heart monitor. "You can go," she said.

"Go? Go where? Why would I want to go? That's not going to help Jared if I go." Lucas paced in the small room full of awful medical smells. Everything in the room was gray, the walls, the chair, Jared's face. "I need to go," he finally said.

Annie looked at him. "So? Go."

"I need to find an answer," he explained.

"I'll stay."

Answers. Yes, he needed answers. What kind of answers he wasn't sure. The hospital staff described precisely what drug Jared had used and how much, and no amount of additional information would improve his condition. Lucas left the hospital and walked down boulevard Boissiere like a somnambulist. There had been no time for shaving or a shower and he was still wearing the clothes from the evening before-his charcoal Dior sports coat, a tailor-made baby blue dress s.h.i.+rt, and a gray raincoat by Karl Lagerfeld. Who knew Jared? Did Althea? He certainly didn't know any more than what Jared deemed to show or tell him and that wasn't much. Besides, Jared had a distaste for answering or asking questions.

Across the boulevard was the entrance of the metro Porte de Saint-Ouen. Lucas took taxis through Paris when he was not driving his own Mercedes, but he suddenly felt the commanding need to take the metro, something he had not done in perhaps fifteen years. Jared was always in the metro; this would be just like getting into Jared's mind. He walked down the foul smelling steps, odors of trash and urine, and waited in line to purchase a ticket, feeling self-conscious. He was shocked to discover how much a ticket cost these days.

He stood on the platform, waiting for the next subway amid African workmen, maids and elderly men. His clothes suddenly felt deeply inappropriate. This attire had been meant to dazzle Annie, certainly not to wear in the metro in an undesirable neighborhood early in the morning. He discretely removed the folded silk pocket square from his suit jacket and buried it deep inside the pocket of his raincoat. He imagined he'd get himself mugged in this attire but all he got was indifference. He stepped into the subway car and held onto the bar rather than sit down. He studied the faces around him with great interest but no one looked at him. Men and women on their way to work, closed to the world. This was how people lived.

He changed trains at Place de Clichy and headed toward Place Blanche and Pigalle, reasoning that if this was the Paris he never set a foot in, it therefore had to be Jared's territory. Only by attempting to retrace Jared's footsteps, no matter how futile an endeavor, would Lucas have a chance to understand what might have happened.

He emerged from the metro station Pigalle and was surprised by the heat of the morning. Yesterday had been a day of storm and thundering rain and today would be a scorcher. A record heat had been predicted for the day. He removed his raincoat and folded it over his arm. Everything was upside down: the weather, Jared, and he and Annie.

At Pigalle, he stood in the middle of the boulevard and surveyed his surroundings. He had somehow expected stench and prost.i.tutes in broad daylight, but instead found only a few tourists looking for a place to have breakfast, he a.s.sumed, looking as out of place as he did. A group of Senegalese men armed with brooms were laughing contagiously as they cleaned the front of closed stores still protected by metal screens.

A drug overdose made absolutely no sense. As a child, Jared had a charming intellectual curiosity and a promising gift for art. In adolescence, after the murder of his father, his sister's death and his mother's illness, he had taken refuge in a form of self-protection disguised as aloofness. Secretive, yes. A drug addict, no.

Though what just happened to Jared was neither his fault nor his responsibility, Lucas blamed himself. He had made a promise to Jared's mother to watch over her son. She had not burdened him with that request, not at all. Yet he had promised. What sickened him was that small sentence by the doctor: The combination of drugs and alcohol could have been intentional. The insinuation outraged him. But when he learned that Jared had been discovered by night guards at Cimetiere de Montmartre, the cemetery where Jared's mother and sister were buried, Lucas had a sinking feeling.

When he'd just turned eighteen, years before his mother died, Jared had materialized at Lucas's doorstep. He said he was making a living with his art and that he and his mother would no longer need Lucas's financial a.s.sistance. That was when he and Jared became friends, a friends.h.i.+p based on the mutual understanding that Jared, as far as Lucas was concerned, would never have to meet his expectation, search for his approval or even give signs of life, as well as a mutual understanding that Jared could always count on him.

No, Jared was a good boy. Lucas came to the only possible conclusion: Althea was the one who introduced Jared to drugs. It all made sense: she was uncommunicative, unhealthy-looking, antisocial. She definitely had something dark and self-destructive to hide. He would personally see to it that she be sent back to her country, her and her drugs.

Lucas walked in the empty streets, feeling the heat of the sun. Althea had ruined everything. This terrible tragedy could not have come at a less auspicious moment. He felt guilty to feel a smile on his lips: Annie!

The evening before had been a whirlwind and this by no choice of his own. Since the kiss, he had planned out his seduction. He had envisioned a slow and romantic progression, a re discovery of sorts, with tete-a-tetes, dinners, dating, kissing. After a while, ideally, Lola would have stayed home with the boys so that he and Annie could go to Normandy for a couple of nights and stay at his maison on the beach in Honfleur. They'd eat plateaux de fruits de mer, oysters, shrimp, crab. They'd walk on the beach hand in hand. Oysters are an aphrodisiac.

But with women, one had to know when to go with the flow. When he'd arrived at Annie's house the night before, he was nervous. He needed to get a sense of how she felt about their kiss at the park before he began his planned romantic seduction. Apparently Annie was not in a romantic mood. He went with the flow, took his cues from her, and it was fantastic.

He spotted a taxi and hailed it. What to do now? It could go several ways from here. One of them involved Jared not waking up and Annie rejecting him. Another scenario was that Jared would wake up and that Annie would pretend that nothing had happened between them. Lucas was far from the hospital now, far from the two people he cared most about and whose next few hours would define his own destiny.

Lola played the last two hours back in her mind again and again like an incomprehensible movie where the plot and the sequence of events made no sense, where the protagonists acted bizarrely out of character: Annie banging at her door explaining in a run-on sentence about Jared, the hospital, and waking up in bed with Lucas. Althea emerging into the hallway, rus.h.i.+ng down the stairs and out of the house, her black coat floating behind her like Batman's cape. Lucas and Annie escaping out of the house like robbers at the crack of dawn to rush to the hospital.

And then, silence. Lola was left in the house with the sleeping children. So she did what needed to be done. Alone, she went and woke the children, one by one, hers and Annie's, five kids in all. Five sets of breakfasts, teeth to brush, scattered clothes and shoes to extract from various bedrooms and closets, five sets of pa.s.sive or active resistance techniques at the prospect of school or, in the case of Simon, daycare. She explained to the children that Jared had fallen sick and that everyone was at his bedside.

By eight, Lola had gotten four children to school on time, appropriately dressed and with full stomachs. After she said goodbye to the children and told the teachers they would be staying at school for lunch, she took Simon to the daycare for the day so she'd be free to go to the hospital or do whatever was needed. She felt senselessly proud of herself as she pushed Simon in his stroller toward the daycare. It was an exceptionally beautiful morning, and she could not help but be happy despite what was happening to Jared. It wasn't happiness she felt exactly, but self-worth. Mark would have found ways to criticize her and to paste a couple new negative labels on her already bad record. Without Mark's judgment, she saw how perfectly capable she was, and that felt better than any collagen injection, better than Bikram yoga, better than Pilates, even better than s.e.x with Gunter! She arrived home and luxuriated in the feeling for a few more minutes, until Annie called and told her the gravity of Jared's condition.