Chapter Fourteen
Cook was in the kitchen, getting ready to run her errands, when I came in. After hugging me and asking me about my trip, she said, “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen the cat in five days now.”
“Oh, no. Do you think something happened to her?” I hadn’t thought much about the cat while I was away, but I’d never fathomed she wouldn’t be here.
“I don’t know. I keep leaving out a dish for her, and it goes untouched.”
Cook and I talked for a few more minutes about what might have become of our kitty and what we might do to lure her back. Perhaps she hadn’t thought as much of us as we thought of her. Or, god forbid, something terrible happened.
“Don’t worry too much about her,” Cook said. “She’s a smart kitty. And she survived just fine before finding her way to us.”
Cook left to run her errands then, but the news of the missing cat dampened my return.
I found my mail stacked on the table in the foyer. None of the letters were from Benoit. Or Charlotte. I trudged upstairs and didn’t encounter a soul on my way to my room. The place was in a rare, though not unheard of, state of quiet. After the clamor of train travel all day, I didn’t mind.
My room was exactly as I’d left it. My stacks of papers were all still there, including one of Benoit’s work on the nightstand.
Everything I’d been reading and thinking about before the trip felt like another life.
A different person had read all his stories in that stack.
It was foolish, but my first thought was that of course I was a different person.
I mean for goodness sake, I had lost my virginity!
I had been thoroughly ravaged. Ravaged by the wrong man—there was no such thing as the right one—but ravaged nonetheless. Of course, I was a changed woman.
This had to be why I couldn’t stop thinking about Benoit.
About how lonely I had felt since we parted ways.
The feeling like I wanted to tell him something but he wasn’t there.
Looking for him in every room I entered.
Wondering what he’d think or say about this or that.
Wanting to hear him laugh. The sensation of his hands on my body.
The sensation of standing next to him. The sensation of him being in the room.
This was because of the physical intimacy we’d shared, nothing more serious or detrimental to my way of life than that.
The agonizing part was that we hadn’t talked after our argument. Had I known it would be so long before I saw him again, I wouldn’t have said some things. I would have worked harder to contain my impulsive negativity. And so I was looking forward to seeing him at work.
That night at dinner, Nadine and Madame welcomed me back warmly. Diane and Catherine still had family in the city—even more family than there’d been when I left, apparently. So they were having dinner out.
“I’ve heard from Charlotte,” Nadine said with a bright smile. “She’s engaged to the vicomte’s son! She’s coming back to the house to stay for a few months until the wedding. And he’s paying for everything.”
“That’s amazing!” I was genuinely happy for Charlotte. Relieved as well.
“It is.” Madame, who sat at the head of the table in her usual spot, nodded approvingly.
Nadine passed the chicken to me. “She doesn’t hate you, you know. But she’s mad. And if she hasn’t written, then it’s probably because she’s still trying to figure out what to say.”
“I understand.” And I did. I wanted the absolution that would come with Charlotte responding to my letter.
But that was a selfish want. Being forgivable had to be tied up somehow in accepting Charlotte’s timeline for forgiving me.
I would have to be patient. I chose a slice of breast meat and passed the chicken to Madame.
“I believe Catherine will be leaving with her family when they go,” Madame said as she accepted the dish from me. “Back to America.”
“Will she? Did she say that?”
“She did. It’s why her family came in the first place.”
“Diane’s not going, though?” Nadine asked.
“Last time I saw her, she insisted she wasn’t,” Madame said.She was wearing one of her plain work dresses, but she’d taken off her apron and fixed her graying hair in a fresh bun for dinner. “But one can never say with Diane.”
Diane seemed never to be satisfied or tired.
She’d had several different jobs since moving in and it hadn’t been a year.
She’d always struck me as a frivolous sort of person.
But since L’Etoile took over L’Entreprise , I appreciated her ability to keep going after a setback.
And, as Apolline had said, not everyone cared so much about work as I did. Work wasn’t everything.
“It will be strange without Catherine,” I said. She was always up for anything, and she’d often accompanied me to shows I was writing about. It was hard to imagine the sisters living separately. “I’ve grown quite fond.”
“Well, she didn’t come here intending to stay,” Madame said. She poured wine into each of our glasses as she spoke. “I’m more surprised that Diane isn’t going too.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Catherine doesn’t have it easy.” Nadine wrinkled her nose. “She fancies her step-brother. He’s here too.”
“Oh,” I said. “I think she told me about him. Or at least I knew there was someone back in America. But a step-brother? How tragic.”
“I don’t think he’s really a step-brother. I think he’s her father’s fiancée’s stepson.”
“Interesting.” It took a second to work through all those steps.
“He came all this way,” Nadine said. “To get her back.”
Madame tutted. Like me, she held herself above romantic notions. Though one of her letters to me in Cabourg had mentioned dinner with Monsieur Gauthier, which made a total of two confirmed dates with the same gentleman.
It was certainly a romantic gesture: transatlantic travel.
Not that I needed anything like that. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Benoit and I didn’t need such gestures because romance had nothing to do with it.
Staunch as my view on that was, however, I was still thinking about him.
I had admittedly imagined a bouquet of flowers on my desk when I returned to work.
Dispelling my pervasive thoughts about Benoit Levin had been my motivation for sleeping with him in the first place.
I had anticipated that the act would make him less interesting, would release the mental hold he had on me.
But that hadn’t worked. And even though I was back in Paris, far away from the hotel in Cabourg, he was on my mind.
The next morning, my first day back to work, I dressed smartly in my new split skirt and my favorite white blouse.
After sleeping in my own bed and sifting through my emotions, what I really wanted was for Benoit to still want me.
I refused to believe I was in love with him.
Even if I was, I could talk myself out of it.
A small and barely acknowledged part of me was coming around to the idea of us continuing our affair in some way here in Paris.
Not flowers and drawing rooms, for sure, but a little something.
An occasional friend, maybe? And I felt mildly guilty about what he’d said about using him for sex.
I hadn’t meant to make him feel bad, and I hadn’t exactly chosen my words correctly when I was trying to explain it to him.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I was confused—about my feelings for him, my feelings about everything, how to proceed, what I really wanted, and what he meant when he said all the things he’d said.
I couldn’t bring any of this up at work, of course.
But maybe we could meet afterward for dinner.
Cook had already gone to the market by the time I came down, and there was still no sign of the cat in the yard.
But the heat of late summer seemed to have broken in Paris, and there was a hint of cooler weather to come.
My bicycle ride to work, in my new riding garments, was just as wonderful as I’d hoped.
I’d missed my usual rides through the streets of Paris, waving at the familiar people, the rumble of my tires on the pavement, the ding of my bell.
As much as I had enjoyed traveling, being home was pretty great too.
Maybe it was the existence of both that made the whole traveling endeavor so grand.
When I reached L’Entreprise , I steered my bicycle into the service yard and parked along the edge of the loading bay.
Work was the same and different all at once.
The familiar smell of ink and paper that permeated even the lobby.
The click of my shoes on the stairs and the cool marble handrail as I ascended.
But there were faces I didn’t recognize, desks in places I didn’t remember them being.
More of the business of combining two publications.
Benoit wasn’t in the pen. My desk was empty, and he wasn’t seated at any of the others. I had beaten him in. Either that or whatever happened to his mother was serious enough that he was still engaged.
I went to the editors’ office to check in with Vartre, who would be the only one in there now that Paquin was gone.
When I reached the open door, though, Benoit was inside.
He was sitting at the desk. There was only one of those now.
And he had the same clean, freshly dressed morning appearance that I’d become so achingly familiar with over the past few weeks.
His brown hair was smoothed into place. His jawline was freshly shaved, his mustache neat.
But his eyes, when he looked up at me, seemed tired.
“You’re back,” he said and stood abruptly, like I’d caught him in some devious act.
I was still trying to determine what exactly I was looking at. “I am. Where is Vartre? And why are you sitting in her desk like it belongs to you?”