Chapter Thirty-Six
On Tuesday evenings, they played cards with their neighbors, crowded around the tiny table next to the hot plate and sink and freezer box that comprised their makeshift kitchen.
“I don’t think I would have ever left my husband if he spoke French,” Astrid said, taking a drag on her cigarette in one hand and surveying her cards in the other.
“French is such a romantic language. Every time they speak, it sounds like they’re making love to you.
But English, it’s so vulgar, all the harsh consonants, the r’s.
We sound like barking seals. And it’s easy to be cross and fight when you sound like that.
But I don’t think French men ever say anything ugly. ”
“Never mind how they speak,” Gisele said. “It’s how they make love that sets them apart. I’ve never been so pleasured by an American man, an English man, even an Italian, as I have by the French.”
Astrid laughed and laid down a card. “Well, I can’t speak to that—yet.”
Astrid and Florence had been in Paris for over a year now.
They’d settled in Montmartre, a hilltop neighborhood on the northern fringes of Paris, where the rent was cheap.
Rent went down as the hill went up, so they’d taken an apartment near the top, a few blocks from where a young, struggling Picasso had once lived in his artist abode, Le Bateau-Lavoir.
Their apartment was small—a single room, with a shared bath down the hall.
Just a few steps from the table where they now sat was the bed where Astrid and Florence both slept at night.
Their laundry hung from a drying rack near the solitary window that they’d left open in hopes of tempting in any passing breeze.
“What about you, Florence?” Gisele asked. “Have you experienced all that French men have to offer?”
“No,” Florence said, blushing. “I’m a tabula rasa when it comes to love.”
“How very Lockean of you,” Hugo said, exhaling a plume of smoke from his cigarette.
“A virgin? At nineteen?” Gisele said, sounding horrified. “Mon Dieu! Mon pauvre. Is this by choice or circumstance?”
“My Florence is an ingenue,” Astrid said, wrapping an arm protectively around Florence’s shoulders.
“I happen to think it’s quite romantic that she’s saved herself for so long.
I, for one, would love to go back and experience it all again for the first time—that heart-pounding first kiss, the first time you fall in love. But we all only get one first.”
“Paris is the perfect place for that,” Gisele admitted.
Gisele and Hugo only left when all the wine was gone, so it was after midnight when Astrid and Florence got ready for bed.
They undressed at separate ends, unbuttoning their blouses, unzipping their skirts, rolling down their pantyhose.
Florence always turned away to dress or undress, facing the wall, but Astrid would strip down to the nude facing any which direction, without a stitch of self-consciousness.
But then, what did she have to be self-conscious about? She was thin and beautiful.
“You never told me,” Astrid said as she slid her nightgown over her head, “was there a boy in school you were sweet on?”
“No,” Florence said, still facing the wall. She buttoned the top of her own nightgown and turned around to help Astrid turn back the coverlet.
“Have you never been kissed, Florence?” Astrid asked, very serious now.
Florence shook her head.
In truth, Florence had never felt an ounce of attraction when she looked at a boy.
Even Adam Cunningham, arguably the handsomest, most sought-after boy at the high school she had attended—the quarterback of the football team and senior prom king.
She could admit that he was objectively good looking, but she never felt that drop in her stomach when she looked at him.
Her palms didn’t sweat, her voice didn’t quiver, her face didn’t flush when he looked at her.
Florence always felt that women were more attractive and pleasing to look at than men.
The soft curves of their hips, the thin circles of their waists, the fullness of their breasts—there was a poetry, a real beauty, in their shape.
“Every girl should be kissed properly at least once in their life by someone who really knows what they’re doing,” Astrid said as she climbed into bed.
“Mm, is that so?” Florence asked, sitting down. She turned to fluff her pillow.
“Yes,” Astrid said. “I’m no Elizabeth Taylor, but I fancy myself fairly experienced.”
“You?” Florence asked, finally catching on. “You don’t mean that you want to . . . you’re not suggesting that we—?”
“Don’t be such a goose,” Astrid said. “I’ve kissed plenty of girls. We did it all the time at Choate. How else were we supposed to get any practice? We didn’t want to be complete ninnies the first time a cute boy kissed us. We wanted to know what we were doing.”
“I suppose that makes a certain sort of sense,” Florence said.
“Shall we give it a go?” Astrid asked.
They sat facing one another on the bed, Florence with her legs crossed in front of her, Astrid perched on her knees. Astrid leaned forward and tucked Florence’s hair behind her ear, and Florence’s skin burned in the wake of Astrid’s touch.
“Relax,” Astrid whispered, and her warm breath against Florence’s face sent goose bumps down her neck.
Florence tilted her chin up and closed her eyes. She felt Astrid cup the side of her face with her hand, and then Astrid’s lips were against her own, warm and soft—gentle, like a question.
Florence had never known anything like it before, the wanting that erupted low in her belly, the way her heart galloped in her chest. She leaned forward into Astrid, and the kiss shifted with a wild urgency.
She reached up and touched Astrid’s neck and heard Astrid’s sharp intake of breath.
After that, the kiss became something else entirely. They broke apart a few moments later.
“So that’s a kiss,” Florence said, slightly out of breath.
“I suppose we got carried away,” Astrid said, laughing.
Florence only nodded.
“Good night, dear,” Astrid said. She reached over and turned out the light and climbed under the covers.
Florence rolled onto her side, facing the wall, and pulled the covers close, even though it was a warm evening. She touched the tips of her fingers to her lips in the dark, still feeling the reverberations of Astrid’s lips on hers.
Florence worked at a café down the street from their apartment.
She got there early, before it opened, folded pats of cold butter into the creases of dough that the baker made fresh every morning, piped chocolate into the hot centers of croissants.
She always had flour dust in her hair and grains of sugar under her nails, and she stood all day at the counter, taking orders, handing the patrons their warm rolls in wax paper bags, frothing their milk at the espresso machine.
Astrid had worked for a while at a gallery when they’d first moved to Paris.
She’d taken art history at school and was proficient in French, so she could talk at length about impressionism and postimpressionism, cubism and surrealism, and the burgeoning new realism that was all the rage.
But while she was knowledgeable and charming, she often arrived late and left early.
She was prone to taking long breaks, where she’d wander off from the gallery and leave it unattended, and once, the owner had found her napping in the storage room in the middle of the day.
It wasn’t her fault. The pills the doctor had given her for her foot made her groggy, and then they started to wear off before they should have, leaving her in pain, so she’d take more than she ought to, until they were gone.
Florence and Astrid both agreed when the gallery let her go that it was useless for her to work until she was fully recovered, and so she spent her days sleeping late.
She took up sketching and painting and even cooking to some degree, making rabbit stew on the hot plate in their apartment.
In the evenings, they would go to the ivy-covered cabaret Au Lapin Agile and sit at a table in the back by the bar, sipping their beers as they listened to poets read their work from worn notebooks and activists ardently recite their anarchist manifestos to the dimly lit room.
Some nights, they’d get dressed up and wander down to the Moulin Rouge to watch the girls dance the cancan.
For the first time in their lives, their time was their own.
Florence had never felt more alive. She couldn’t remember a time when she had been this happy.
Once a week at first, and then more often, they’d go down to the foot of Montmartre to Pigalle, the red-light district, where there was a brothel that doubled as an opium den.
It was the only thing after the pills ran out that gave Astrid some relief.
Florence never partook in the ritual, but she’d sit at the back and observe as they passed around the oil lamp; the ceramic pot of the tarry, amber-brown drug; a needle; and a bamboo pipe.
The room was filled with an acrid smell.
Afterward, Florence would put her arm around Astrid and help her home, tuck her into bed.
When Florence came home from the café late one afternoon, she found Astrid at the kitchenette, busying herself with the electric kettle, her back to the door. A well-dressed man was sitting at the table. It took Florence a moment before she recognized him.
“Charles,” Florence said. The shock stole the breath from her body.
“Florence,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
“He’s tracked us down,” Astrid said brightly. “A regular Sherlock Holmes, this one.”
She set a steaming cup of tea down in front of Charles at the table and sat next to him with one of her own. She was wearing a silk kimono, her hair loose around her shoulders, and she had dark circles under her eyes from the previous night’s opium-induced haze.
“What’re you doing here?” Florence asked.
Charles gave Florence a reassuring smile.
“Scarlet was worried sick when your letters stopped,” Charles said.
“She phoned RJ, but he was evasive. First, you were always out. Then, you had gone on a trip. It was weeks before he admitted that the two of you had left and he didn’t know where you had gone off to or if you were ever coming back. ”
“We’re not,” Astrid said, taking a sip of her tea. “Sit, darling,” Astrid said to Florence. “You’re making me nervous, just hovering by the door like that.”
Florence sank into a chair at the table, her knees weak. “But how did you find us?” Florence asked.
“I came to London myself after RJ admitted that you’d taken off,” Charles said. “I hired a private detective. You rented this place under your real names. It wouldn’t take RJ half a week to find you if he put his mind to it.”
He sounded slightly admonishing when he said this part. Florence couldn’t decide if the censure in his voice was directed at them for running off and hiding or the fact that they hadn’t done it well enough. Or perhaps it was directed at RJ for not putting an ounce of effort into finding them.
“Scarlet was fit to be tied when she heard you’d run off,” Charles said. “The doctor prescribed her bed rest. She refuses to eat.”
“Mother has always loved her theatrics,” Astrid said, sounding exasperated.
“Astrid, this is serious,” Charles said. “Scarlet was devastated not knowing where you were, if you were all right.”
“We’re fine,” Astrid said dismissively. “In fact, we’re better than fine. We’re more fine than we’ve ever been in our entire lives.”
“I can see that,” Charles said, looking around the room.
“Tell her we’re living in a quaint little apartment in Paris,” Astrid said. “I’ve taken up painting. We’ll come home for Christmas if that’ll make her happy. Tell her to eat something.”
Florence looked over at Astrid—how flippantly and casually she had offered for them to fly home and back again for the holiday.
Did she not know the cost of two round-trip transcontinental tickets?
Did she not grasp the stark reality of their financial situation?
They were barely getting by, week to week. They were barely making rent.
“Now, I’m starving,” Astrid said, as if she were bored with the conversation. “I’m going to go rinse off, and then let’s go out. There’s a Peruvian restaurant down the street that you’ll just die for, Charles.” Astrid gathered her towel and her bath caddy and disappeared out the door.
For a moment after she’d gone, Florence and Charles just looked at each other across the table.
“She’s not well,” Charles said.
“I know how it looks, but—it’s because of her foot,” Florence said hurriedly, wanting to reassure him. “It bothers her. It’s the only thing that helps.”
“How did it happen?” Charles asked. “Her injury?”
Florence paused, bit her lip. “When she told RJ that she wouldn’t give up dancing, he told her he’d make it so she couldn’t anymore,” Florence said. “He took a hammer to her foot while the butler held her down.”
A vein flared in Charles’s neck. Florence knew him to be an even-tempered man. She’d never seen him angry before.
“Animal,” Charles said under his breath.
“Please,” Florence said, leaning forward. She set her hand on top of his on the table, imploringly. “Don’t send her back to him, Charles. He’ll kill her.”
Charles thought for a moment. “And I suppose she won’t come home?” Charles asked. “I mean, more than just for the holidays. To stay.”
“That would kill her, too, but in a different way,” Florence said. “I’m not sure which would be worse, in her eyes. She’s happy here, you know.”
Charles looked around the room again. His eyes landed on the single bed. “There’s a sanatorium about a day’s drive from here,” Charles said. “I don’t suppose she’d go?”
Florence shook her head. “I know her too well to ask.”
After their newly found freedom, to go to a place where she didn’t have any—Florence knew that would break Astrid.
“She’s happy here?” Charles asked. “Truly? You both are?”
Florence nodded. “Yes.”
They ate at the Peruvian restaurant, and Charles paid for their dinner.
He stayed a week. He found a nice apartment for them on a quiet cobblestone street in the sixteenth arrondissement and rented it under a false name.
Before he left, he took Florence aside and said he’d send her a weekly allowance to get them by.
“Take care of her, will you?” Charles said.
Florence nodded and promised him that she would.
Eight weeks later, Astrid was dead.