Chapter XXI. Après.
XXI.
APRèS.
LOS ANGELES.
If I thought being intimate with a woman would not be followed by the usual rush of emotions, anxiety, and second-guessing that I’d typically experienced after being with a man, I thought wrong.
Maybe it was the strict Jamaican upbringing, or maybe I was just wired differently, but even at the age of forty-five, I found it difficult to view sex with someone new as a casual thing.
Even when we were both married to other people.
Post-Napa, I was immediately twenty-five again.
Wondering how long to wait to call or text her.
Or if she would call or text first. And whether what had happened between us was a onetime thing. Or if it would continue.
I don’t hear from her for three days.
She and Frederick head to their place in Aspen for the holiday, while the kids, Fran, and I road-trip to Laguna to spend the long weekend at the Montage, and for the entirety of our getaway I pretend we have a normal, functioning marriage.
Francois and I indulge in the spa, lounge at the beach, sip margaritas poolside.
We even have sex. With the kids in the adjoining room of our suite, completely unaware (we hope).
And while the act does not hold the excitement and mystery of discovery that it did with Anouk, it is still respectable.
He knows the shortcuts. He knows precisely what I like, how, and at what intensity.
After fifteen years of lovemaking, I have no secrets left.
Until now.
“I missed you,” he says later, much later, when we have both drifted off and then awoken again in the middle of the night. His hand finding mine beneath the covers.
“I missed you, too.”
“Thank you for coming here with me.”
“Who would say no to Laguna?”
“No. To America,” he says, soft.
He still hasn’t articulated it, the real reason the kids and I are here.
Not because he couldn’t bear to be away from us for long stretches of time, but because he wasn’t certain he could handle the distance plus the temptation.
Because there was less of a chance of his fucking up and falling into one of his actresses once again if his family was just a short ride away.
When he slept with élodie (or when he said he slept with élodie) in September of 2012, it was during the Venice Film Festival.
An event I would have happily attended had I not had to stay behind in Paris while the kids started a new school year.
It happened more than once during that week.
Not that he’d shared the specifics, but just that in coming clean, that November night at the Vietnamese restaurant, he’d slipped up and used the plural.
“We didn’t plan it, Cecilia. Je te promets,” he’d said, earnest. His hands gripping mine.
“There had been so much tension on set, because she was juvenile and difficult to work with. But I knew, carrément, that she had this character inside of her, and I managed to pull out this performance. And then in Venice, she got all this attention, because everyone fell in love with the film and they fell in love with her and it was magical. And we just got caught up in the adulation, and celebration of our art. And those times it happened, I feel like it was just a…” He’d searched for the word.
“… a release. But I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you.”
And so somehow, he had gotten it into his head that keeping us close—keeping me close—would curb his appetite for infidelity. He had not, up to that point, put it in so many words. But he did not have to. It was in the silences. The things he dared not say.
As we lay there, staring at the ceiling, not saying things to each other, I thought of my conversation with Victoire de Fleury during our photo shoot in Paris.
Her advice about our time in America and viewing it as an adventure.
About not being afraid to try something new, unexpected.
About thinking of it as a gift for all of us.
About using it for my art. And it dawns on me then that I might be less riddled with anxiety regarding the situation with Anouk if I did not allow myself to view it as a burgeoning love affair, one in which I might once again be hurt, but instead regard it as a release, an adventure, an inspiration for my art.
A muse. Like Anouk’s friends at that first dinner in Paris.
The painter and the ingenue. A symbiotic relationship if ever there was one.
It might serve me better to imagine us as that.
On the ride back to LA, while the kids are tuned in to their iPads in the back seat and Fran navigates 405 traffic and listens to Coldplay, I text her.
Hey there. Heading back from Laguna. Hope Aspen was lovely. Adult company maybe this week?
It takes her less than a minute to respond.
Absolutely.
“What are you smiling about?” Fran asks, his eyes never leaving the road.
“Nothing. Just … something funny a friend said.”
He nods.
The lying has begun.
And so it happens again. And again. And again.
In June, when Francois leaves for Alberta, Canada, for a two-month stint (the glacial backdrop substituting for yet another alien world), and I am flitting between an array of end-of-school activities and packing Julien up to spend two weeks with his friend, Topher, and Eryx Barlow at the Barlows’ home in the Bahamas, while making arrangements for Jane and her girls to come and visit once school lets out.
In the midst of it all, I carve out time to be with her.
At her place. At mine. Once, in a hotel room at the Huntley following lunch at the Penthouse restaurant, overlooking the Pacific.
She’d planned ahead and booked the room in advance.
She, in an Ala?a jersey pencil skirt that clings to her ass. And slingbacks.
It felt decadent and dangerous. And afterward, watching her reapply her lipstick at the vanity, from my perch on the bed, I couldn’t help but feel giddy.
I can smell her. On my hands. In my hair. On my face.
My muse.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” She smiles at me in the mirror.
“I’m just … happy.”
“Good.”
“You’re beautiful. This is crazy. We’re going to get caught.”
“Are those thoughts related, or no?”
“Maybe.” I laugh, rising to make my way across the darkened room. My blouse and pants are hanging neatly in the closet, because God forbid I show up to the valet looking wrinkled, as if I’d been doing what I’d been doing.
Anouk is the opposite. While I take time to brush and reconfigure my bun, she musses her hair, smudges her liner. She looks like a very wealthy woman who has just been fucked. And I think she likes it.
“I want to interview you for my project. To accompany the photos.”
“About beauty?”
I nod. Her eyes are peeled to me as I button my silk blouse, tuck it into my pants, fasten my snakeskin belt. We are ladies who lunch.
“Yes,” I say. “But nothing surface or glib.”
She takes a moment, grins. “So probably not about my makeup routine, non?”
I smile at that. “No. Probably not.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Bon,” she says, peeling back the blackout curtains and then reaching for her purse. “On y va?”
“On y va.”
The week school ended, I put Julien on a private plane to Harbour Island with the tennis champion and his kids (evidently Cressida’s allotted vacation time with the children was in August), and Jane and her girls arrived for ten days of sightseeing and catching up with their cousin.
In between trips to Universal and Disneyland and the California Science Center, slipping off to be with Anouk was impossible.
But on one Friday afternoon, Minnie Atherton, of the save-the-elephants fundraising boutique, invited me to her Malibu house for lunch, fulfilling the promise she’d made back in April.
She’d assembled a handful of girlfriends whom she hoped I would adore and who would make the transition to LA easier, if not fun.
We lunched on her back terrace, overlooking Carbon Beach. A mere few yards from where the waves were crashing before us. Jane came as my date. Neither of us had ever been to a private home in Malibu, and we welcomed the adventure.
The day before, during a bike ride along the ocean—the sun in our faces, the wind in our hair, my happy place—I’d prepped her.
“Just warning you, there’s a ridiculous amount of wealth here.”
“Like Yale wealth?” she’d asked. She was the only other Chen to have attended my alma mater. It’s where she’d originally met Seth.
“Different. Yale was old money. East Coast. Slightly more discreet. This is Hollywood ostentatious. It’s competitive wealth. These people aren’t wearing L.L.Bean.”
“Got it.”
And so the two of us, along with Minnie, Anouk, and four other women, found ourselves clustered around an exquisitely dressed teak dining table, soaking up the conversation and the light.
The house, mostly cement and glass, was a long, narrow, three-story refuge, squeezed between two other seven-to-twelve-million-dollar structures upon tiny slips of sand, on what I understood was a highly coveted strip of Malibu.
Someone with a long enough wingspan could easily stand between the foundations and touch both.
I thought of the beach house my Uncle Neville had in Oracabessa when we were growing up.
The house at which I’d almost drowned at the age of three when a rogue wave knocked me out of my father’s arms and into the surf, providing me with my first true memory.
It was a sizable parcel of oceanfront property on Jamaica’s north coast. No traffic, no neighbors, no noise.
A rustic three-bedroom bungalow with a wraparound veranda and crystal waters as far as the eye could see.
There were no wraparound verandas here. Not with a house eight feet to the left, another eight feet to the right, and the Pacific Coast Highway holding in the backyard. And not for the first time, I wondered exactly what was so special about Los Angeles.