Chapter 3 #2
He laughs at my formality. “ ‘Matthew’ will do just fine. ‘Monsieur Swanson’ is better suited to my father.” I raise my hand to try to hail a taxi even though I don’t have the money for it.
“You’ll never get one. Join me and then I can have my driver take you back to your place. I’ll get you fed, warm, and home, safely, and preferably drier than you are right now. Maybe even a little tipsy.”
I’ve eaten nothing since a stale pain au chocolat this morning and my head is pounding with hunger, my stomach slightly nauseous from being empty for so long.
Curiosity about this strange, deliriously wealthy family is also gnawing at me.
Who does Stella think will lock her away and what is the job Caroline needs Matthew to do?
“Why not? I can always eat.”
“A woman after my own heart.”
We walk down Quai Voltaire and I salivate only slightly as we pass by the green door of Sennelier, the oldest art supply shop in Paris, stocked floor to ceiling with wooden drawers filled with pigments and brushes.
A couple blocks away, the gorgeous graffitied wall of Serge Gainsbourg’s family home, where he died only five years earlier, drips with fresh paint.
The dark and cozy café is a welcome relief from the storm.
I’ve passed it many times, but my restaurant budget is limited.
My roommates and I subsist mostly on grocery store noodles and cheap kebabs from Paristanbul, a take-out place across from our building.
One of them, Colette, will cook us elaborate meals once in a while when we can afford ingredients, and the other, Lucie, often brings home expensive wine from her clients.
It’s a strange hour to be in a café. No longer lunch, much too early for dinner, and it’s mostly empty. I wonder if they’re even serving food. Most Parisian restaurants are fairly strict about mealtimes and only tourist traps serve consistently throughout the day.
I take a detour to the bathroom, where I comb my fingers through my soaking-wet blond hair and swipe on the red lipstick I always keep in my pocket.
It was a gift from Lucie. As she always says, “Red lipstick is its own outfit no matter what else you’re wearing, even if you’re wearing nothing. ” It’s a very Lucie thing to say.
I like this café before I even take a bite of their food. I like the gold faucets in the bathroom, shaped like the head of a swan. I like the spicy candle burning on the counter and the linen hand towels neatly folded next to it.
Many of the cafés lining the narrow Parisian streets could seem like massive clichés with their deep red walls, velvet banquettes, and gold fixtures.
You’ve seen them dozens of times in dozens of Hollywood movies.
Yet I’ve come to realize they aren’t clichés.
The French just like what they like and they’re unapologetic about it.
Why reinvent the wheel when the wheel is perfect?
A server appears to pull my chair out for me when I get back to the table. Matthew speaks to him in unaccented French.
“I ordered for us,” he says as he settles back into his own chair.
“Yeah. I heard.” I shrug off my coat, making an embarrassing puddle on the floor. “I’m capable of ordering for myself, though.”
“In French?” he smirks.
“Je sais comment commander mon propre d?ner.”
“I’m sure you do know how to order from a menu, but there is no menu at this hour. You need to know what they have in the kitchen.”
“And you know?”
“I come here enough. I bring Stella here.”
And who else do you bring here? I can’t help but wonder. Does he have a girlfriend, a boyfriend? All of the above?
“Why do you call her Stella?”
“She never took to the name Grandmother. It made her feel old.”
“I can see that about her. I like her spunk. She’s feisty. Although she would probably hate that word too. Do we ever use the word feisty to describe anyone under the age of sixty?”
“We don’t. And yes, I think she would hate it. I won’t tell her you said it,” Matthew promises. “Want to hear my favorite Stella story?”
“I’d love to!”
“This one is wild! My grandfather bought her a lion cub from Harrods department store in London as a gag. You could apparently do that in the sixties. They were kept in cages in the shop basement and Maxwell bought one for Stella’s fiftieth.
He didn’t think she’d keep it. The cub was really just for show at the party, but she was completely smitten and it lived in their Belgravia town house for an entire month.
She used to walk him on a diamond-encrusted leash around St. George’s Square.
Frightened the knickers off the postman more than once, I heard.
They eventually sent it off to our hunting facilities in Tanzania, where he was marked as absolutely off-limits to the game hunters.
He lived for twenty years, sired ten cubs, and apparently he recognized Stella until the very end.
It was gossiped about for years, which the rest of my family was none too fond of. ”
“Why not?”
“We’re private. Very private. But Stella has never been able to be contained. My other favorite story is how she used to get guests to leave their dinner parties when they overstayed their welcome.”
“How?”
“She kept Tipu Sultan’s massive antique war sword mounted over her bed, and when it was time to clear the house she’d take it down and run through the dining room with it, roaring like she was going into battle.”
I can picture it easily. “I’d love to see that.”
“Sadly, she doesn’t have many parties any longer.”
The server arrives with a bottle of wine and pours us goblets of the thick bloodred liquid.
“Maybe you should hire someone to care for her, a nurse or a home aide. I think she’s lonely,” I tell Matthew.
Something passes over his face and he makes the same irritated expression he wore when he came out of the elevator. “It’s not possible right now, I’m afraid.”
“Not possible?”
His pause makes it clear he’s weighing what to say, how much to reveal.
“My father and sister think it’s time for her to go somewhere with more care. I’m supposed to convince her, but I don’t think it’s time yet. I wanted to ask you…how has she been when you’re in the apartment? Has she acted oddly? Said anything unusual?”
Is he fishing for information?
“I don’t know her well enough to know what’s ordinary for her,” I say. “She seems to like chatting with me.”
“What do you talk about?” His tone is sharper now.
“She’s talked about you. She adores you.”
He blushes slightly. “And I her. Does she ever mention my father or my sister?”
“No. I don’t think she has. We haven’t spoken all that much, but when we have it’s been about art.”
“Do you enjoy art?”
“I do.”
“Well then, there’s plenty to talk about with Stella.
She has one of the sharpest eyes I have ever encountered in the art world and impeccable taste.
She’s always been underappreciated. She was my grandfather’s right-hand man…
er, woman…helped run our business alongside him until my father took over, got zero credit for it.
” Matthew leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette.
“For her sake I wish she got along better with Father.”
“She doesn’t?”
“My pops believes Stella destroyed his parents’ marriage, that she’s a seductress homewrecker responsible for all his childhood misery.”
I almost giggle at the melodrama but manage to keep a straight face. “That’s a long time to hold a childhood grudge.”
“Father is excellent at grudges,” he deadpans.
“How long were Stella and your grandfather together?”
“Nearly fifty years,” he says.
I’m honestly blown away by the number. “A lifetime for some!”
“Indeed. I want to protect her as best I can, but the rest of my family would love nothing more than to see her disappear.”
Don’t let them lock me away, her frail voice echoes in my head.
Matthew is finished with his glass of wine now. The waiter hurries to pour him another.
“Where do they want her to go?”
“There’s a facility in the country. She would be well cared for, but I don’t think it is quite time yet. My father and sister have been very insistent about it.”
Matthew pauses. “Maybe they’re right. I worry about Stella. She’s forgetful and confused.”
“Dementia?”
“I believe so. Though she refuses to be tested and it’s complicated.”
I know what that’s like. My mother began having her “episodes” after my father left even though she was very young.
The brain is an unpredictable organ. She was a brilliant mathematician.
Ahead of her time when it came to algorithms and digital networks.
But her incredible brain came at a cost. She described it as though her mind was overheating.
There were weeks when she didn’t get out of bed, when I had to feed myself and get myself to school.
Most days I didn’t go to class, and eventually that triggered something in the system, causing a social worker to come to our apartment to take me away for a little while, but Mom always got me back in a few months.
There were other times she was so manic she banged her head against the wall until she had to go to the emergency room for stitches.
She heard things that were never spoken, saw things that weren’t there.
And other days she was perfect. A wonder.
Being away from her is both a relief and one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through. I miss her every day.
But I don’t say any of this to Matthew. Our food has arrived.
“Just in time. I’m starving.” I state the obvious instead.