Chapter VI. Smoke and Mirrors, a Study.
VI.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS, A STUDY.
NEW YORK.
“God, they were something, weren’t they?”
“They were. They still are.”
“I’m sorry about my mom’s Lorry comment,” Jane continues. “I hope it wasn’t too triggering.”
“Well, he was handsome. I’ll give her that.”
“He had a great face.” She smiles. “And he was passionate and thoughtful and tall.”
“Deliciously so.”
“Deliciously so.” She laughs. “Still, you deserved better.”
“Did I?”
“Did you?? Yes, CeCe! Of course you did. Why do so many women feel that they don’t deserve someone who sees and values them for who they are?
Francois is better. He’s handsome. And passionate and thoughtful.
Remember when he came to your place with Leelou and said someone had left her in a box at the Raspail market and he couldn’t bear to leave her there because she had almond-shaped eyes that reminded him of you, and if you didn’t want to keep her then he would?
” she recounts. As if I could ever forget.
“And he’s tall enough. Plus, beautiful and sexy and French.
He’s like a full smorgasbord of things. Do the French do smorgasbords? ”
“No, not really.”
“A charcuterie board, then. Your husband is a charcuterie board of desirables.”
I chuckle. And even that feels forced. “So is yours.”
“Anyway … I wish I’d known you were coming for the show.
I would have loved to have seen your pieces.
With you. I still get swoony when I think about what you did with that Broken short.
Such a beautiful love story,” she says, referencing a project I’d poured my heart into.
A project that in retrospect might have cost me everything.
Because I’d been too busy creating art to pay attention to what was happening around me.
“Thank you. But it’s a trek for you from Brooklyn. And it’s not a big deal. Really. Just a few photos.”
“It is a big deal. You’re an artist, Cee.
We need to support each other. You know that I’m very familiar with the torture of being an artist in this family and the lack of respect.
Sylvie, too, although she often acts otherwise.
I mean tolerance, yeah, sort of, but real respect for what we do?
” She shakes her head and sighs. “They save the glory for the lawyers.”
“Thanks, cuz.”
“What are the pieces like?”
I pause. I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. But I’m not ready. “They’re moody. Complex,” I say, and I leave it at that.
I’ve gotten quite good at hiding things.
“Well, these next few days are hectic with the girls’ piano recitals, but I’m going to try to make it over there.”
“That’s sweet of you, but you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. You would do the same for me.”
The following evening, after a full day at the armory and meetings with two LA-based galleries in town for the show—including the one I was scheduled to meet with the morning I went careening into Anouk’s Tesla—I find myself back at my Midtown hotel going down a familiar rabbit hole.
My mother mentioning his name hadn’t been a trigger so much as an inconvenient reminder of what I’d been trying to bury.
But there was no being in New York and not thinking of him.
Imagining him in random doorways, on street corners, in all the places we’d been.
The boy from Connecticut. The boy who broke me. Lorry.
He’d moved on.
After my week in Cabo. After the thing with Anouk. After I’d picked up and moved to France to flee the carnage.
He’d married the girl we’d met outside of the Louvre, all those years ago.
The tall, horsey brunette from Virginia.
They’d had twin girls. Towheads. At some point they’d left the East Coast and moved to Los Angeles.
Where exactly I didn’t know. Some place open and rustic and, I hoped, far, far from our rented house in the canyon. I had not told Francois.
I’d learned all this on the internet, of course. Late-night googling, over the better part of two decades.
It’s where I find myself again that night.
Dissecting Lorry’s Instagram account: the kids, the wife, the mindful-awareness practice (because that is apparently one of the many things he is doing now in LA).
It’s a unique form of self-torture. Like cutting, but without the telltale scars.
And then, to ease the pain, I peruse my own profile.
The carefully curated life I want the world to see.
The one I hope he will trip upon if and when he puts my name into a search engine.
My photography, my art, my charming, devoted husband, my winsome, well-adjusted kids.
Look at how beautiful my life is, Lorry Kenter.
Look at how content I am. This is what you threw away.
When Lorry and I first broke up and I spiraled into a suicidal depression, my then new therapist asked me if I had ever cut myself.
“Intentionally??”
She nodded. “As a coping mechanism.”
I laughed aloud at the idea. “I am far too vain to ever do such a thing,” I said.
But this kind of self-harm, cutting on the inside. At this, I had become quite good.
I am half asleep when the phone vibrates. My ringer is off, but the rumbling on the nightstand jars me, and I click through without fully registering the number, other than that it is coming from our new area code in California.
“You’re sleeping? Déjà? I’m sorry. I can call you back.”
It takes a second. Her voice deep, slow.
“Anouk?”
“Oui, c’est moi. Sorry. I thought you would be awake.”
“I’m in New York.”
“Ah,” she says, soft. “I’m in Paris. I couldn’t sleep.” And then, after a prolonged moment. “What were the boys’ names again?”
“The boys?”
“The models, from the shoot in Cabo.”
I sit up then. Awake. My eyes adjusting in the dark. The chocolate-brown curtains, the plush throw pillows, the oversized art books on the nesting coffee tables. I’d become accustomed to this, the faux intimacy of boutique hotels.
“Elliot. Elliot Lyons-Thorpe,” I say. “And Bas van den Broeck.”
“Bas. He was the blond one?”
“Yes.”
For a moment Anouk says nothing, but I can hear her breathing.
As closely as if she were here, beside me in the bed, and not some four thousand miles away.
In a restored h?tel particulier, I imagine.
Somewhere in the Faubourg Saint-Germain or Chaillot.
Views of the Eiffel Tower, a marble entry, a sweeping staircase, an indoor pool.
And her. Wrapped in Sferra sheets. I wonder what she wears to bed.
If she wears anything at all. I wonder if she runs hot and cold.
“Was he nice to you?” she asks, finally.
“Mostly.”
“Was I nice to you?”
“Very.”
She is quiet again, and this time I can hear myself breathing.
Anticipating what comes next. Wanting to ask her a million questions about our shared week in Cabo San Lucas.
Wanting to answer none. Does she remember that night at the ocean?
The dinner that got out of hand. The incident in her hotel room.
The shots we took in the surf. The line that was crossed.
Again and again and again. We called it art.
“I’ll be in Paris on Monday,” I say then, taking the reins.
“Vraiment?”
“Yes, I’ll be there for the week. I have work. If you’re available, I’d love to see you again.”
It sounds like a date. Maybe that is my intention. Maybe I want to know what she remembers. Compare it to my own recollections. Maybe I just want to pick up where we left off. All those years ago. But maybe it’s retribution.
What the hell am I doing?
“Call me,” she says. And across an ocean, I am certain I can hear her smile. “When you get here. Call me.”
“I will.”
This time, I will not flee.