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Duke sometimes joined me in the afternoons, once he’d woken up, and that could be lovely, too. We’d walk arm in arm along the Seine, and I would pretend that everything was going to be fine, that we could be these people forever.
And then the nights would come.
Every night, we dressed and went out, trying newrestaurants, new nightclubs, and it would feel thrilling and fun, and I’d smoke Gauloises in a long ivory holder, and Duke would light each one for me with a practiced flick of his platinum lighter, and I thought how people must look at us and think how young and bright and beautiful we were.
How lucky.
But then the champagne would lead to whiskey sours, the whiskey sours to straight whiskey, and I would learn that it wasn’t just gin that turned Duke into a beast.
A shove on the stairs when we got home because I’d been “flirting” with a waiter.
His fingers, clamped around my jaw, tilting my head back so far that I thought my neck might snap, the awful wormwood scent of absinthe in my nose as he demanded to know what I was implying when I asked who he’d been with that night.
The back of my skull, bouncing off the marble floor of the bathroom because I’d been crying in there, and didn’t I know this house had servants? They could hear me, and what were they going to think of Mr. Callahan’s new bride sobbing her eyes out in the downstairs toilet?
He got rid of the servants at night after that, sending them all home by seven. Another one of those choices that doomed him, although he couldn’t have known it at the time.
Every day, I put my makeup on, dressed well, and set out on the streets of Paris, thinking how lovely it was—and how nothing lovely would ever really matter again. This would be my life now, until Duke pushed too hard, or my head hit something at just the wrong angle, and I would never know when that moment was coming, only that it was.
That was the part I hated the most. Not the hits and the shoves, although those hurt. It was the uncertainty.
And the hope of it! God, I hated the hope. Because it was always there. This belief that maybe, today it would all somehow be different. Duke wouldn’t drink so much, or I wouldn’t say the wrong thing to set him off, and it would, miraculously, set us back on the right track.
I still loved him, sadly. Or I thought I did. I know now that what I felt for Duke was mostly lust, but that’s a powerful emotion in its own right, especially when you’re only twenty-one. I dreaded his hands even as I craved his touch, and it nearly tore me apart, those wildly disparate feelings. A terrible thing, wanting someone and hating them all at the same time. Is it any wonder, pulled taut as I was, that I finally snapped?
June 13, 1961
No sign that anything would be different that night. We’d been in Paris for well over a month by then, our other accommodations and travel plans canceled because Duke was having such a lovely time with all his old friends, a pack of men he’d known at Yale who were all pale imitations of him and therefore made him look even more golden in contrast. We’d stay until August, he’d decided, and I didn’t even try to protest.
I hadn’t been feeling well for days by then, nauseous, my head aching. I was terrified that I might be pregnant, but also, I’d fallen down the stairs the week before in an attempt to avoid one of Duke’s swinging fists and hit my head hard on the banister, so it was equally likely to be that.
I’d managed to make it through dinner, but begged off when Duke wanted to move on to a club. He hadn’t had much to drink at that point in the night, so I was sent on my waywith a kiss and a fond farewell instead of glares and ugly words.
I’d returned to the flat, let myself in, and gone to bed.
I awoke hitting the floor, my head bouncing against the wooden frame of the bed.
For a moment, I thought I’d fallen, but then I felt the warm band of fingers around my ankle and looked up to see Duke crouching over me.
He was smiling, his bow tie once again undone, his shirt very white in the near darkness of the bedroom.
In his other hand, he held a rifle.
The sight of that blue-black barrel in the moonlight made my breath stop, my lungs tight, and a distant buzzing started up in my ears.
“Look what I won tonight,” he said, letting go of my ankle to caress the gun, his long fingers elegant and deadly against the metal. “Belonged to Darcy’s dad. Shot three elephants—no, four—in Rhodesia, and a tiger in India. Kept it over the mantel in his place here, and Darce fucking bet it on a pair. Apair.”
He laughed, and rose to his feet while I lay on the carpet, a rabbit in a predator’s sights.
Shifting the gun against his shoulder, he pointed it at me, one eye closed as he looked down the barrel.
“What do you think is more impressive? Shooting a tiger or shooting a person?”
I couldn’t breathe now, my skin numb even as every nerve in my body lit up in panic.
That laugh again. “Tigers are bigger,” he said, adjusting the angle of the gun slightly. “Deadlier, maybe. But people are smarter. Still, you don’t brag about that kind of thing, do you? Don’t hang the gun on the wall and say, ‘You know, boy, I shot my first wife with that gun.’”
My mouth was so dry that it was an effort to lick my lips, to make myself say something, and when I did, it was just his name.
