CHAPTER 21
Sebastian
The lion followed me across the river.
I couldn’t put it down: not the crayon drawing itself, which she’d tucked away before I could look too long, but the shape of it.
The child’s fist that made those thick, careless strokes.
The mane like a burst of small yellow suns.
A neighbor’s child, she’d said, and something in the way she said it had gone smooth and fast, the way a door closes when you hadn’t known it stood open.
I told myself I was building a story out of nothing. That is what a man does when he cannot stop wanting the woman he threw away: he reads the world for signs of her, and the world obliges.
But that night, in my hotel above the Tuileries, I couldn’t sleep, so I did the thing I do when I can’t sleep. I made a column. Two numbers on the back of a room-service receipt, in my grandfather’s fountain pen, because some part of me still believes that if I write a thing in ink it will behave.
She left in June. I did not have to check the year. I have that month tattooed on the inside of my skull: the roses, the banner, Chloe’s hand at my lips, and Ada’s green eyes finding me across the roaring room and showing me nothing at all before she walked out. Four years. Four years this month.
And the child in the drawing, the single mother’s child, the phrase the gallery girl had let slip like a coin dropped on marble, she does it all herself, the little one’s barely three.
I stopped writing.
Three. A child of three, and a woman four years gone.
You do not need to run a global empire to do that arithmetic.
I have closed nine-figure deals on thinner margins than the gap between those two numbers, and here I sat, unable to make my hand write the last line of the column, because to write it was to believe it, and to believe it was to understand exactly what I had done.
I put the pen down. My hand was not steady. I do not have unsteady hands. I am famous for it.
A neighbor’s child, I told myself. Paris is full of copper-haired women and other people’s children. Whatever else Ada is (brilliant, ruined by me, gone) she is not a liar. She does not have it in her.
Except she’d had it in her tonight, over the little crayon lion, and I had watched her do it and called it grief.
The dread came first. That if this were true, then everything I’d done that night in the gallery, every gentle, obscene word (you married up, everyone knows it but you), I had done to the mother of my child while she stood there carrying it, saying nothing, then left her ring behind and walked out to raise the thing alone rather than let me touch it.
And underneath the dread, unforgivable, a hope so wild I could not look at it directly. I have wanted a great many things and gotten most of them. I had never in thirty-seven years wanted anything the way I wanted, in that room, for this impossible sum to be true.
I did not dare believe it. A man who has been as wrong as I have been does not get to trust the first thing his heart offers him at three in the morning.
So I did the only thing I know how to do with a question I cannot bear. I worked it.
I moved my meetings. I let the Milan people wait, which the Milan people are not accustomed to, and I began to orbit the Marais: her arrondissement, Maison Cendre’s narrow blue-doored street on the rue de Poitou.
Not to confront her. I told myself that firmly, again and again, in the back of the car.
Not to confront her. I only wanted one clear look.
One unguarded second of her real life, in which the truth would simply be visible, and I would be either a fool who could go home or a father who could not.
For three days I saw nothing. Delphine Cross leaving with sample cases. Ada at the window with a blotter to her nose, unreachable. The blue door opening and closing on a life sealed against me.
On the fourth day I took a table at the café across the street, ordered a coffee I did not drink, and pretended to read a paper I did not see, and at twenty past four the blue door opened.
Ada came out with her coat over her arm, laughing at something below her sightline, and the laugh undid me (it was the field-in-Grasse laugh, the one I’d thought I had killed) and then the something she was laughing at stepped out of the doorway and took her hand.
A boy. Small. Copper hair catching the low gold light, exactly the shade of hers, uncombed. He talked with his whole body the way small children do, and she bent to him, and the whole street between us went silent and enormous.
I stood without deciding to. My coffee went over. I didn’t hear it.
Turn around, I thought, with everything I had. Turn around. Let me see your eyes.
And he did. He tipped his small face up and began to turn toward the street, toward the café, toward me.
And a bus slid between us, long and blue and full of the ordinary evening, and I stood pinned behind glass with my heart stopped for the three endless seconds it took to pass.
When it passed, the pavement was empty.