In Paris, we didn’t even have a car.
“I did. Ballet. But I hit puberty early and lost my lines and my confidence.”
“I was all lines,” she says. “But I didn’t have the drive, or the will, or the discipline. I wanted to spend my Saturdays hanging at Les Halles with my girlfriends, sneaking cigarettes and flirting with boys. Not sweating in a studio doingpiqués. My mother was not happy.”
I turn to look at her then. Her face slipping in and out of shadows, as we make our way toward the 110. Intermittent streetlights catching her cheekbones, her jaw. I try to imagine what she was like as a young teenager, petulant, rebellious. Angular and awkward. The Anouk before Cabo. I have difficulty reconciling her with the woman before me now.
The woman who is making me question everything. My sexuality, my identity, my Jamaican ideals and aversion to scandal. Everything I thought I knew about myself—what I would and would not do—is now up for debate.
She catches me studying her and smiles. “What?”
“I’m just… looking at you.”
For a moment she says nothing, but holds my gaze, intense. I am tempted to lean in, to kiss her. But there is the issue of the driver. And her husband. And mine. And so I opt for the next most intimate thing.
“I want to photograph you,” I say. “For my project on beauty, and our consumption of it. I want to photograph you.”
She smiles at me, coy, bites her lower lip. And I can’t make out if she’s mocking me or flirting. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Maybe this is a game to her. Maybe it’s not. But either way, I’m in.
Later, after she has dropped me off, and I have let Parisa go and made sure the kids are both asleep, I lie in bed and think of her. And think of her.
XVII.LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE.
LOS ANGELES.
APRIL. 2015.
I don’t see Anouk for several days. François has a break in his schedule and returns home for a long weekend, and because we have all missed him tremendously, we make the most of his time. An afternoon up at Zuma Beach, a visit to the Griffith Observatory, dinner at Nobu Malibu. A long bike ride along the water, with a stop for lunch at Shutters on the Beach. And on not one, not two, but three occasions: sex. And the fact that it does not feel perfunctory is noteworthy. The fact that for the first time in a long time, I allow myself to enjoy it.
“Hello, wife.” He corners me Sunday evening in the kitchen pantry, while I am prepping dinner. We are both fresh out of the shower post–bike ride, and I’m fetching cans of crushed tomatoes when he sidles up behind me, smelling of citrus and cedar.
“I’ve missed you,” he says, pressing himself against my back, his intention clear.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it feel like I’m doing?” His mouth moves to my earlobe and my response is immediate. He knows what it does to me.
“Fran, the kids…”
“They’re in their rooms.” With one hand he closes the door behindus, and with the other he draws me closer to him. His arm around my waist, his palm against my belly.
The pantry does not have a lock.
Something about sneaking like this feels illicit, alluring. Part of me needs this rush.
But as his hand steals into the waistband of my sweatpants, my mind wanders.
He doesn’t sound like her, or smell like her, or I imagine feel like her, and yet she is all I can think about when his hand forces its way between my legs. His fingers slipping inside me, blunt and familiar.Herhands,herperfume,herlegs uncrossing in the Louis Vuitton skirt. I picture the flesh on the inside of her knee, her mouth wrapping around the red-velvet cupcake, her biting her lip in the back of the Maybach. And when he centers on my clit, it’s her I’m imagining. Her fingers, her tongue. The risk of getting caught…
I come hard, and quickly, and even François seems shocked by my response. His free hand moving to cover my mouth.
“Ssshhh,” he warns.
It takes a moment to realize I am still clutching the canned tomatoes.
The following Wednesday morning after drop-off, I meet Anouk for a hike. My first in LA. She has talked me into a “not too challenging” trek at Will Rogers State Historic Park.
