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He lay on his bed and locked his hands behind his head. A white parachute hung as a canopy over his small iron bed. He’d bought it in an army surplus store not far from the Boston prep school he attended. He liked the way the parachute rippled in the moving air currents and sheltered him like a great, silken womb.
On the whitewashed walls he’d hung his precious collection of photographs. Lauren Bacall in Helen Rose’s classic red sheath from Designing Woman. Carroll Baker swinging from a chandelier in The Carpetbaggers, clad in Edith Head’s gaudy sprinkle of beads and ostrich plumes. Above his desk, Rita Hayworth wore Jean Louis’s famous Gilda gown, and, by her side, Shirley Jones struck a pose in the deliciously tawdry pink slip she’d worn in Elmer Gantry. The women and their wonderful costumes enchanted him.
He picked up his sketch pad and began drawing a tall, thin girl, with bold slashes for eyebrows and a wide mouth. His telephone rang. It was André. Michel’s fingers began to tremble around the receiver.
“I just heard the wretched news about your grandmother,” André said. “I’m so sorry. This is very difficult for you.”
Michel’s throat constricted at the warm show of sympathy.
“Is it possible for you to slip out this evening? I—I want to see you. I want to comfort you, chéri.”
“I’d like that,” Michel said softly. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I’ve missed you. England was beastly, but Danielle insisted on staying through the weekend.”
Michel didn’t like being reminded of André’s wife, but soon André would leave her, and the two of them would move to the south of Spain and live in a fishing cottage. In the mornings Michel would sweep the terra-cotta floors, plump the cushions, a
nd set out earthenware pitchers filled with flowers and wicker bowls piled with ripe fruit. In the afternoons, while André read him poetry, Michel would create beautiful clothes on the sewing machine he’d taught himself to use. At night they would love each other to the music of the Gulf of Cadiz lapping at the sandy shore outside their window. That’s the way Michel dreamed it.
“I could meet you in an hour,” he said softly.
“An hour it is.” André’s voice dropped in pitch. “Je t’adore, Michel.”
Michel choked back his tears. “Je t’adore, André.”
Fleur had never worn such an elegant dress, a long-sleeved black sheath, with small, overlapping leaves picked out in tiny black beads at one shoulder. Belinda put Fleur’s hair up in a loose chignon and fastened polished onyx drops at her ears. “There,” her mother said as she stepped back to observe her handiwork. “Let him call you a peasant now.”
Fleur could see that she looked older and more sophisticated than sixteen, but she felt weird, as if she’d dressed up in Belinda’s clothes.
Fleur took her place at the center of the long, silent dinner table with Belinda sitting at one end and Alexi at the other. Everything was white. White linen, white candles, heavy alabaster vases holding dozens of full-blown white roses. Even the food was white—a cream soup, white asparagus, and pale scallops whose smell mixed with the cloying fragrance of the white roses. The three of them dressed in black looked like ravens perched around a funeral bier, with Belinda’s blood-red fingernails the only spot of color. Even Michel’s absence didn’t make the awful meal bearable.
Fleur wished her mother would stop drinking, but Belinda consumed one glass of wine after another while only toying with her food. When her mother ground out a cigarette on her dinner plate, a servant whisked it away. Alexi’s voice penetrated the silence. “I will take you to view your grandmother now.”
Wine sloshed over the rim of Belinda’s glass. “For God’s sake, Alexi. Fleur didn’t even know her. There’s no need for this.”
Fleur couldn’t bear the twisted, frightened expression on her mother’s face. “It’s okay. I’m not afraid.” A servant pulled back Fleur’s chair while Belinda sat frozen, her skin as pale as the white roses in front of her.
Fleur followed Alexi into the hallway. Their footsteps echoed off a vaulted ceiling, with violent frescoes of women in breastplates and men stabbing each other. They reached the gilded doors that marked the entrance to the main salon. He opened one of them and gestured for her to enter.
The room held only a shiny black casket banked in white roses and a small ebony chair. Fleur tried to act as though she saw corpses all the time, but the only dead body she’d seen had belonged to Sister Madeleine, and that had only been a glimpse. Solange Savagar’s wrinkled face looked as if it had been molded from old candle wax.
“Kiss your grandmother’s lips as a sign of respect.”
“You’re not serious.” She nearly laughed, but then she looked at him, and the expression on his face stopped her cold. He didn’t care about Fleur showing respect. He was testing her courage. This was a dare, un defi. And he didn’t believe for one moment she could meet it.
“Oh, but I’m very serious,” he said.
She locked her knees so they didn’t tremble. “I’ve been facing bullies all my life.”
His mouth curled unpleasantly. “Is that what you think I am? A bully?”
“No.” She forced her own mouth to form the same unpleasant sneer. “I think you’re a monster.”
“You are such a child.”
She’d never imagined she could hate anyone so much. Slowly she took a step, and then another. She moved across the polished floor toward the casket, and as she came closer, she fought the urge to run from this silent house, run from the Street of Charity, run from Alexi Savagar back to the safe, suffocating comfort of the nuns. But she couldn’t run. Not until she showed him what he’d tossed away.
She reached the casket and sucked in her breath. Then she bent forward and touched her lips to the cold, still ones of her grandmother.
