Hidden in Paris

Chapter 11


The cab stopped in front of Annie’s house. At the moment, all Jared could feel was resentment. But when he lifted his eyes toward the house and took a breath, it was a breath of relief. There was something about this place, the maze of rooms, the toys everywhere, the loud kids, and that rare garden in the middle of the city that Jared had always loved. This was the house, the family he would have wanted to grow up with instead of the poverty and grief he had been dealt.

On warm summer nights, when Johnny was still alive, they had gathered there, he and many others to eat Annie’s food, to drink large quantities of Bordeaux, to talk about politics, and to laugh. All of it ended, of course, after Johnny’s accident. Annie was in shock and wanted to be left alone. Jared stopped visiting, and he hadn’t been the only one. At a loss as to what the appropriate behavior should be, he had chosen to be a coward rather than a fake. Somehow, he got news through Lucas, and since he was kept informed, it had given Jared the mistaken impression that he had kept in touch. It was only as he handed cash to the cab driver that the reality of his desertion dawned on him.

Now, after three years of this, Annie was saving his ass. He carefully pushed away a confused mix of guilt and irritation. Being able to live here for very little money was a huge break. A gay couple from Italy was subleasing his apartment for a nice amount of cash until June. That money would keep him going for a while afterward.

In the street, the driver helped him pull his suitcases out of the cab, and Jared braced himself for Annie. But there she was at the front steps, waving at him. Jared hoped there’d be no sign of despair over Johnny’s death, that it would be all clean and digested. Lucas had told him she had changed, that she was going though a difficult phase. Jared had trouble picturing her as anything other than the gregarious, witty and fun loving woman of three years ago. But he had changed too. What he was like three years ago had nothing to do with who he was now.

Annie threw herself into his arms to hug him, an American habit she had never quite replaced with the more French kiss on the cheek greeting. The American hug, too close for comfort made him feel self-conscious and he kicked himself for arriving empty-handed. Annie, hands on her hips and head cocked to the side, examined him from head to toe. She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “Still as good looking as ever! Hey, when was the last time you got a haircut? Lucas’s right, you look a mess!”

Jared didn’t know how to respond to what weren’t questions. Yes, she was different. Entirely different, but how, he had not yet taken it in. Her face looked strained, her body, forgotten. She was wearing stained painter’s overalls and her hair was held together in a haphazard ponytail. She was not wearing make up but, just as Lucas had told him, she was still wearing her wedding ring. Lucas said she was not accepting Johnny’s death. It looked to him like a part of her might have died along with him. He fumbled with words and vague attempts at pleasantness until Maxence, Paul, and Laurent stormed out of the house to greet him.

“The Man!” Maxence said as a form of greeting, and Jared felt his body soften. The boys were barely recognizable after two years, especially Paul, who was a toddler last time he saw him.

“There’s a new secret handshake and a new password,” Laurent said. They threw Jared a Nerf ball and pushed and shoved him into the house. Maxence whispered in his ear, warning him about the new people living here. All weirdos.

Inside the house, there were no obvious signs of sorrow. The entrance’s wall, bright yellow stenciled with large orange suns, was basking in the light that came through the open door. Facing the front door was the dark stairway, and to the left, the living room with the fireplace where year after year he had lingered with Lucas and their then respective girlfriends. They had listened to Johnny’s record collection and had drunk Tequila until no one could stand.

Annie waved the children instructions. “Help Jared with his stuff.”

Gesturing for Jared to follow, Maxence and Laurent dragged the suitcases up the stairs.

“Can I go on your back?” Paul said.

“You remember that?” Jared hoisted Paul to his shoulders.

“I have a little surprise for you, for later,” Annie sang as he started up the stairs. “That’s all I’ll say for now.”

“Are we glad you’re here!” Maxence said in French. He jerked the suitcase up from step to step using brute force. “Way too many girls here. It’s becoming unlivable!”

“And they’re stupid too,” Paul added with passion as he strangled Jared with his legs.

“Shhh!” Maxence interrupted.

A silhouette was slowly descending the dark stairs, hesitant. Struggling to breathe and trying to take Paul’s hands off his Adam’s apple, Jared looked up right as her hair came to mask her face. Eye contact. Gray eyes he noticed, and then the shadow of her body coming down the stairwell. Jared’s heart made a leap in his chest.



Jared found himself in a small bedroom under the roof with the low-slanted ceiling. The walls, the bed spread, the furniture, the painted floor, everything a harmony of whites and creams, all conspiring to remind him of the very thing he was trying to forget: white canvases. A moment later, Annie entered his room without an invitation. He’d have to lock it from the inside from now on. “Are you ready for your surprise?” she asked as she surveyed the room where the contents of Jared’s suitcase, mostly black clothes, were already scattered everywhere like shadows. “There are two other rooms on this floor beside this one. One’s not usable; it’s never been remodeled and it’s full of junk. So I was wondering if you’d make a deal with me.”

Jared peered at her. “Depends.”

“You get rid of the junk for me, clean the room, plaster it, dry wall it, whatever it, and in exchange for that, I’ll let you use it free of charge and make it your atelier.”

Jared looked out the window. The woman he had seen in the stairwell shared the floor with him. “I’m all right,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

“What good is it to have an in-house artist if he doesn’t have space to paint?”

“You’ve been talking to Lucas?”

“So what if your work isn’t selling? Neither did Van Gogh’s.”

“Old Vincent stuck with it and it eventually paid off. ” Jared brought a cigarette to his mouth and a finger to his temple like a gun.

“Please, don’t smoke in the house,” she said. Jared put down his lighter but kept the cigarette in his mouth. Annie had her hand on the doorknob. “I’m surrounding myself with people who have youth, beauty, intelligence, and talent but are too busy feeling sorry for themselves. Look at me—thirty-five, fast approaching forty, a dead husband, three kids, no marketable skills, and a house that’s on the verge of sending me into bankruptcy but do you hear me complain?” She shut the door rather angrily and he heard her grumbling her way down the stairs. He lay on the bed and lit his cigarette.



There were giggles and whispers in the dark staircase as Jared came downstairs for dinner later on, but those stopped the instant the children saw him. The boys were sitting on the steps with a little girl and a toddler. They all looked at him in silence, moving to the side as he made his way between them.

“Bonsoir,” he said.

“Bonsoir,” Maxence said. The other children stayed silent and he felt strangely excluded. As he stepped into the dark hallway and away from the stairs, the children’s whispers and giggles returned.

Jared walked toward the kitchen and opened the door to bright lights, loud conversations, humid heat, and the rising smell of Coq au Vin. Standing at the stove, all six stove burners going at once, Annie was like a percussionist, noisily opening and closing lids, stirring, adding ingredients, cranking up or reducing temperatures under bubbling pans of various sizes and shapes. Close to her, Lucas stood in her way, and she bumped into him every time she needed to get to the cutting board. The woman Jared had seen in the stairway was peeling vegetables and glanced briefly at him before disappearing in her task. Next to her was a beautiful woman with closely cropped black hair who flashed him a sexy smile.

“Jared! At last, honoring us with his presence,” Annie exclaimed. “Lola, Althea, here is Jared, Don Juan extraordinaire and famous painter on a ridiculous sabbatical.”

Unable to gather who was who, Jared gave a small “salut” in the direction of the women. Lucas poured a glass of wine and offered it to him. Jared went to sit at the table. The red-haired woman turned her face away and suddenly all he could see was her hair.

Lucas peeked over Annie’s shoulder into a pot. “You left the rooster’s bones in?” he pointed out.

“It’s chicken, ” Annie said, chopping parsley at high speed.

“Coq au vin sans coq?” Rooster cooked in wine without a rooster. Lucas seemed to put a great deal of thought into his reasoning. “But then,” he said “Don’t you have to work around the bones as you eat. Wouldn’t it be better to use a boneless rooster?”

“The bones give the dish its flavor. God forbid you’d have to put in the effort and work around the bones!” Annie turned to the dark-haired woman. “Lucas was born with a silver spoon, filled with boneless rooster, in his mouth.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked.

“An American expression. Hey, why don’t you tell Althea and Lola your theory on wrinkles, you know that bit about rich wrinkles and poor wrinkles.”

Lucas turned towards the dark-haired woman. “This is not my theory. It’s a known fact.”

“Tell them,” Annie insisted.

“Rich people’s wrinkles are horizontal from time spent smiling in the sun, on a boat, or on a golf course,” Lucas explained. “Poor people’s wrinkles are vertical. Furrows between the eyes, creases around the lips, lines on the cheeks, lines obtained from a life of worries over financial woes.”

“Interesting you’d say this in front of a widow on the brink of bankruptcy,” Annie spoke to the women as witnesses. “Isn’t this elitist, and revoltingly macho?”

“Elitist perhaps, but why is it macho?” Lucas asked.

“Because I’m approaching middle age, or will be in the next ten years.” Annie looked at the beautiful dark-haired woman, who was laughing. “I guess this must be why women find him charming.” Annie grabbed a large knife from behind Lucas. “I’m immune though. Lucas, please sit down, you’ll get wounded standing there.”

The beautiful woman extended a graceful hand towards Jared, which he shook. “Welcome, we’re glad to have you,” she said languidly. She was flirting with him, that much he recognized.

“Sorry. I don’t speak English very well,” he said, looking at the red haired woman.

“I’ll have to hurry and learn French then,” she smiled. Lucas came close to her and whispered in her ear and the woman giggled. Lucas at his best. His approach seemed self-defeating if Lucas’s goal was to seduce Annie. Annie, using a butcher’s knife as long as her forearm was chopping mushrooms at great speed, ignoring them. The red haired woman stood up and brought the peeled vegetables to Annie. She put the peels in the trash and left the kitchen without a word. Jared got up to leave the kitchen as well but Annie interrupted his motion by grabbing his arm.

“You better not have become a vegetarian or something,” she said. “There is an endive and beet salad, and for dessert, a mousse au chocolat.” She added, speaking to no one in particular, “Jared, he is too independent to be having dinner with us every night, but tonight, he is bestowing on us the honor of his company.” Lucas was giving the shorthaired woman a wine tasting lesson, twirling her glass by putting his hand over hers; neither of them paid attention to Annie.

“What did you say her name was?” Jared asked Annie in a low voice so that the other two wouldn’t hear.

“Oh, yeah, Casanova is waking up? Lola is married with children and Lucas has obviously claimed her for himself from the moment she landed here.” She stepped toward the refrigerator angrily.

Of course he wasn’t asking about that woman. “Stop calling me Casanova and Don Juan. D’accord?” he said.

“Whatever you say, Romeo!”



Johnny loved dinner parties and she had cooked for as many as twenty-five people almost every weekend. She had felt more comfortable in the kitchen while witty conversations in French darted around the dining room table. As intimidating went, Paris’s advertising world was right up there with the Third Reich. Elitist, power hungry, and ruthless. She was left in the dust, among the internal political attacks and the sous-entendus.

But dinner that night, the largest dinner party she had hosted and cooked for since Johnny’s death, was different. She was not retreating to the kitchen. The kids monkeyed around at the grown up table instead of being fed first and then sent to their bedroom. They drank several bottles from Lucas’s family cellar, a wine collection that rested mostly undisturbed in the family’s manor cave in Normandy, and the wine lifted spirits the way only fantastic Bourgogne could. The conversation, a blend of French and English had turned to everyone criticizing the United States, and Annie had taken on the role of its staunchest supporter. She who had been so critical of it while she lived there. Lola fell into easy laughs at everything anyone said. Johnny’s dinner parties had always been filled with beautiful women as dependent on men’s attention as if it were air or water. Annie had hated them, so why then could she not manage to hate Lola? Was it because Johnny wasn’t there? Or was it that Lola listened to Annie intently and guffawed at her jokes?

Althea was the only one not speaking. She had stopped all manic talk since that day at the park. It was as though she allowed herself silence at last. She did not take part in discussions and did not seem very interested in what was said, but she did hide in her room as much. She hid in quietness and this suited Annie just fine. Now that Althea didn’t try so hard, her face had relaxed and showed more vulnerability than tension. There was to Althea’s face a romantic beauty, a charm that had not been apparent before. Charm was something so hard to put your finger on. You could be gorgeous and have no charm. You could be ugly and have charm. Everyone in this room had charm. Jared, of course, had a brooding charm. Even Lucas, that old rascal, was full of French upper-crust charm. Everyone was so darn charming, except, alas for herself.

After dessert, the children left the table to watch the brand new television delivered and installed that morning. Once they had left, Lucas, who was always mindful of the children’s ears, began regaling the adults with a renewed repertoire of salacious jokes and juicy bits about past hunts and fishing trips with ridiculously inbred relatives, all the while extolling the virtues of France. The thin line between patriotism and bigotry so often crossed in her own country was not something Annie suffered gladly. “The golden age of France died with your glamorous ancestors,” she reminded him, just to see where it would lead them. “France is finished. Now all it’s known for the world over is negativism and snobbism.”

Lucas raised his gaze from his glass. “Annie,” he said, “you are the Queen of understatement and verbal restraint.” Annie smiled. Bourgogne helping she had a glimpse of him from Lola’s standpoint, or from any woman’s standpoint, really. Lucas looked pretty good in his black slack and grey polo shirt. His face was handsome, his smile charming as heck.

“Look,” she said, “I love my French children and I like my French cheese on my French baguette, but collectively, the French are inbred and the society has been stagnating for eons.”

Lola giggled in her Bourgogne. “From my perspective, the French are as attractive, as charming, as poetic as their reputation.” She smiled at Lucas. “Besides, they value the enjoyment of life. That’s a form of intelligence Americans don’t have. We go so fast. We accumulate, spend, consume. We have abundance and wealth, yet our lives miss the richness of being able to appreciate the moment.”

Lola’s platitude gave Annie satisfaction. “It’s not because the French take their joie de vivre very seriously that it makes them decent people. Actually, doesn’t that make them pretty selfish?”

Jared played with his knife and the breadcrumbs on the white tablecloth. “Are you sure you don’t want to pack your bags and return to that great country of yours? Or maybe they won’t take you back. You are so French now, so nihilist,” he said.

“That’s why I blend in so beautifully in France. Being in a good mood is considered socially unacceptable here. Be optimistic and people look at you like you’re a simpleton.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” Lola said with a pout.

“Neither is it even remotely true,” Lucas answered, unruffled.

But she had hit a raw nerve in Jared. “How can you be so misinformed?” Jared said. “Please remind me, you received your education where? Ah, yes, in America!”

“Education, of course. That wild card! You French are such intellectual snobs!”

Lola raised her glass. “I, for one, intend to learn as much from the French as possible.”

Jared took a cigarette and offered his open pack around the table. “So, you haven’t answered my question, Annie.”

“Please smoke outside. I’m enjoying my life in Paris on the sidelines of all this, as a voyeur, and I’m witnessing the unraveling of the French.”

Jared folded his napkin, placed it on the table and walked out of the dining room without a word. Lola and Lucas whispered to each other and Althea went nose-diving into her plate. Annie wondered if she had gone too far. Through the window, she saw Jared on the front steps of the house, his wide shoulders silhouetted, then his profile as he lit his cigarette. He took a long drag and tilted his head toward the dark sky. When Annie looked up, she saw that Althea was watching Jared too.



After dinner, Annie held onto Lucas’s arm as she accompanied him toward the door in a way that only she could see as sisterly. When Annie drank, she became a tad seductive, Lucas had noticed. But he knew better. She leaned against the front door, in the semidarkness, her hand on the doorknob.

“So, that was a nice evening, huh?” she said and she nudged him with her shoulder and stayed there. “It’s nice to see you being the life of the party. Something tells me that you’re not impervious to Lola’s charm.”

Annie was so short that when they stood next to each other like this, she had to lift her chin up to look at him. He had the urge to lift her up toward him. “A lovely dinner,” he responded. “But I’m only coming to see you, as you know.”

“Oh, come on. It’s blatant that you’re smitten.” She looked at Lucas expectantly, her neck stretched up to read his expression. “Come on,” she cajoled, “admit it.”

Lucas stiffened, wondering for the hundredth time why women were in general so easy to get into bed, and why he became so thoroughly inept when it came to Annie. “I’m just being friendly,” he said.

“You don’t have to apologize for flirting with her. She’s having a grand time,” Annie mused, stepping even closer to him, close enough for him to smell her perfume—a cheap perfume she bought in grande surfaces, something musky and wonderful, something full of promises. “If I were her, I’d have surrendered to your charm right then and there,” she added. In the dark of the hallway, with the lamppost shining through the window as sole lighting, things seemed possible for an instant. “Alas,” she said, stepping away from him suddenly and opening the front door, “you’re going to have to try a little harder. Lola’s convinced that she loves her moronic husband. She is so wrapped up in her lousy marriage that she wouldn’t be able to spot a decent man if he came crashing down on her head.”

Not unlike yourself, Lucas wanted to say. “Perhaps you spend too much energy thinking about your renters,” he said instead.

She looked vexed. “I’m concerned, that’s all,” she announced. “I’m concerned for Lola, and I’m concerned for Althea, as a matter of fact. It’s what we call compassion.”

The thought occurred to him to ask her to be concerned about herself, to be concerned about him, but there was no good place for this to go.

“Maxence has renamed Althea ‘Madame de Gloom,’” Annie continued sweetly. “Did you notice she’s got a strange way of eating?”

“No.”

“Sometimes she eats and eats. Other times she doesn’t even come down for dinner. She says she is not used to French food, it doesn’t agree with her. But to eat nothing at all? Don’t you think she’s skeletal as it is?”

Lucas stepped outside. ”Let me know if you need help with Madame de Gloom and Madame...” He looked for a word, “bimbo.”

“You’re being unfair,” she said, visibly pleased. “Lola’s down-to-earth, not the snob you’d expect to find in someone so...” she paused, looking entirely disingenuous, “perfect.”

The conversation was back on them, always other people. He wanted Annie close to him again, flirting with him, or did he imagine this? “She is gorgeous, and quite relaxed,” he agreed.

Annie nodded gravely, but Lucas could tell she was fuming. “A little too relaxed. You know what she’s been doing with her ex? I know there’s a restraining order and all that, but she’s been sending him postcards, through a friend of hers who lives in New York so he won’t know she’s in France. I think the later he finds out, the more chances Lola might have a wounded rhinoceros to deal with. I know that’s how I’d react.”

“Still,” Lucas said, “does he deserve to be cut off from his children? Am I the only one who wonders about that?”

“Every time I bring it up to Lola—which, believe me, I do—she says she’s going to write to him and spill the beans.”

“Spill the beans?”

“Spit it out.”

“Spit, ah yes,” he said, having no idea what she was talking about. It was late now. The alcohol was wearing off; the window of opportunity was missed, if there had ever been one. “If I were you,” he said, “I would look into Lola’s story. Beans and all.”

“My business is to bite my tongue, which does not come naturally to me.”

“Those are your words, not mine.”

Annie came close again, nudged him, and whispered against his neck. “Honey, I can keep quiet when I need to. I have my little secrets, you know. Don’t think you have me all figured out quite yet.”

Flustered, he changed the subject. “I.. hum.. I hope bringing Jared here was a good idea.”

“Are you worried Jared will seduce Lola before you do?”

He had an epiphany. “Are you upset about the attention she is getting?”

“No. But I notice a lot of animosity coming my way.”

“Animosity? Me?”

“Yes. I’m making a living. I didn’t sell the house. You were wrong, and it pisses the hell out of you. How do you like them apples?”

“What are you talking about? What apples?” he said, baffled. And Annie pushed him out of the house and closed the door.



After dinner, Althea removed her clothes and folded them into the small cabinet. Everything fit exactly. She wrapped herself in the terry cloth robe and lay on her bed, waiting for the house to become silent so she could have the bathroom to herself. Tonight again, she waited until it was too late to call her mother. If her mom was angry with her or sad that she was in Paris, she did not say, but the phone calls to her mother filled her with dread.

From her bed, Althea stared out the window at the night. During the day, she stayed in the house, in her bedroom, coming down to the kitchen only to make tea. She did not want to see Paris. Not yet. What if it disappointed her? How could she handle that? Instead she stood at the window and watched the sparrows on the branch. They were noisy and active, jumping between branches and then disappearing in a delirium of feathers. In the morning, the children ran around, calling, climbing stairs, then, in an instant, everyone was gone, and the house became very still. Later, like the sparrows, the children came back and the house was noisy again. She felt safe here, in this room, in this house. In this foreign place, this house full of strangers, she felt out of harm’s reach. Also, these strangers didn’t burden her with their love, and she did not have to carry the burden of loving them.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m great!” she had told her mother on the phone the last time they spoke.

“You’re a big girl. You do whatever you want.”

“I walked on the Champs Élysées today. It was really...totally awesome. I wish you could have seen it.”

“My dinner is not going to make itself.”

“Of, course, Mom. Go ahead. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Althea knew she would not call her mom tonight. Instead, she lay on her bed and thought of Jared, the new renter on the other side of her wall.