Hidden in Paris

Chapter 24


At four-fifty the next morning, Annie opened her eyes. Closed them again, tight. What in the world? The irreversibility of the last few hours, her wanton and libidinous self, in the dreadful lucidity of the early hour all came to her in a rush. Horrific! She dared open her eyes again. Judging from the last of the moonlight reflected on the ceiling above her bed, the rain had wiped the sky clean and today would be a beautiful day. She ever so slowly glanced to her right and barely repressed a giggle. There he was! Lying right beside her on his stomach was Lucas, his head buried in the pillow—Johnny’s pillow—sleeping like a gentle brute.

Without moving a muscle, Annie contemplated Lucas’s bare back, which was on this side of hairy. She found it hysterically funny that it hadn’t bothered her in the least a few hours earlier.

She slipped a leg out of the sheet, her cutely painted toes, her freshly waxed calf, and had to admit to herself that what had happened wasn’t entirely free of premeditation. The cellulite on her thigh gleamed in the early morning light and she thanked her good stars for a chance to gather herself before Lucas saw her au naturel. She felt as giddy as a teenager at the thought, and sight, of a nude man in her marital bed. She had done it! Boy, had she been at the end of her rope after those years of forced abstinence. But with Lucas? She was glad it was with Lucas. Of course, it had to be with him. Her cluelessness baffled her and she almost laughed out loud. She pulled the sheet under her chin continuing to feel in turns embarrassed and elated.

What would happen when Lucas woke up, both literally and figuratively? Would he wish he hadn’t followed her after dinner, after they had cleaned the kitchen, after a few drinks too many. Would he wish he hadn’t dragged her into that dark corner of the stairwell?

Lucas had invited himself to dinner after a day of nerve-racking silence. He just appeared as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened between them. What had first felt like a relief quickly turned to wrath. How could he say nothing? She had felt the deep burn of humiliation. Lucas continued to be tactlessly normal during dinner, that a*shole, so cruelly without conspicuous eye contact.

She had lost at her own game of planned aloofness in a matter of thirty minutes. It was one thing to act as though the kiss in the park had been insignificant to her, but that it be insignificant to Lucas flustered her so much that she had behaved erratically. She had drunk too much wine with dinner, spoken too loudly, been heavily opinionated, so much more so than usual, that she had read it in Maxence’s air of sulking disapproval.

After dinner, she had put the boys to bed only to come back downstairs to find Lucas and Lola sitting together on the loveseat. The loveseat! They were so wrapped up in one of their trademark flirtatious conversations that they didn’t even acknowledge her being back in the room. She could have murdered them both. That’s maybe what triggered the whole thing. She would not, could not, let either of them perceive her as a fool.

All three of them drank vodka, too much of it. She maybe, possibly, got a little flirtatious at that point. Nothing too obvious, though it is hard to tell how obvious she got. Things got blurry. She did remember going into the kitchen around midnight and opening the two top buttons of her top. When she got back in the room, Lola sent her eye signals that her brand new black lace bra was showing.

They drank some more, joked around, flirted heavily, and suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, Lola stood up, teetered a little, said she was going to bed, and just disappeared. Annie had enough brain left to sense the danger. She got to her feet and called it a night, but Lucas didn’t leave. Instead, he followed her into the hallway, and before they reached the kitchen, he had put his hand around her waist and dragged her into the corner of the staircase where she had turned to mush.

Should she pretend to be asleep, see how Lucas would handle the morning, take her cues from him, or pounce on him like the starving she-wolf she was? She sat up and gathered the sheet over the negligee purchased the day before when she still believed herself above suspicion. Lucas had nice skin. And he was a deliciously attentive lover. Better than Johnny. And to think she had accused Lucas of being a legend in his own mind. She took a look at the clock and watched it turn to five a.m.

That’s when the shrill ring of the telephone pierced through the sleepy house.



Althea was awake and curled up at the base of her bed when the phone rang somewhere in the sleeping house. She looked up at the clock. It was precisely five in the morning. Jared had left her room at nine the morning before, twenty hours ago. After he had yelled at her and abandoned her she had put her clothes on, bundled herself up in her coat and sat at the base of her bed amongst freshly painted canvases and dirty socks. There she had drifted in and out of sleep and counted the hours until Jared came back. But this time, for the first time, he had not come back.

Her make-up was smeared from crying and her nose and mouth were swollen with tears. Within arm’s reach were the tea and the three apples she had brought up twenty hours ago but she was too desperate to reach for them. She did not deserve food or water. There was nothing in her stomach but a nauseating loneliness. During the night, a hundred times she almost rose to her feet, a hundred times she stayed down. Her stomach was empty, and her chest was full with a dry rage she couldn’t contain or understand. Soon day would come and the house would wake up. Happy noises of life, like a slap in the face. The children would complain and fight for the bathroom. She would smell the coffee and toasted bread that made her stomach scream. Lola and Annie would bark endless commands to the children who would ignore them.

The way the phone rang, or was it the time that it rang, Althea knew immediately that something was wrong. After the phone stopped ringing, there was an interminable silence, then doors began to open and close throughout the house. There were hurried footsteps down the hall. Althea stood up and put her ear against her bedroom door. Her whole body began shaking uncontrollably. Footsteps rushed up the staircase. A violent knock at her door. Nausea. She opened her door and faced Annie, who was barefoot and clad in a short lacy nightgown. Annie eyed the incredible chaos that was her room with incredulity and frowned with surprise at the sight of Althea dressed and wearing a coat. “Do you know?” she asked.

Althea felt faint. “No! What’s wrong?”

“It’s Jared.” She put her hand on Althea’s arm. “He’s at the hospital. They think it might be a drug overdose!”

Althea put her hand to her mouth. Her legs stopped carrying her and she held onto the doorknob. Annie looked at her face with suspicion. “Did you guys have a fight?”

Althea answered the truth: “I don’t know.”

“Look, you’re already dressed. You should go ahead of us. He’s is at Hôpital Bichat in the eighteenth arrondissement in the emergency department.”

“Is he all right?”

“Honey, they say he’s in critical condition.”

Althea received the news like a punch. Annie continued. “Lola will stay here with the kids. Lucas and I...he’s here. He spent the night but we’re getting dressed. Grab a cab now. We’ll meet you there. Run, honey, all right?”

Overdose? But Jared didn’t take drugs. Althea needed to tell the doctors. Maybe they didn’t diagnose him correctly. Althea ran with legs that couldn’t run, thought with a brain that couldn’t think. Her body moved out of the house and onto the street. She nearly threw herself at a passing cab. “Hôpital Bichat. Urgences s’il vous plait. Vite!” The cab, a BMW, accelerated to sixty kilometers per hour within seconds. “Stop! Stop,” she yelled. The cab’s tires screeched, and the car stopped just in time for Althea to open the door and vomit bile.



In the hospital room, Althea stood in her coat, her hands tight on her purse, her eyes scanning the room for a blanket, for Jared who laid there, unconscious, and whose body was covered by only a thin, white sheet. He was like a wax rendition of himself. He was very pale. The wiry muscle on his forearms almost flaccid. Clear plastic containers filled with liquid dangled above him, dispensing their fluids through catheters. The only sound in the room, the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, failed to reassure her.

Voices came from outside the room. Through the small window in the door, she saw the doctor speak to Annie and Lucas. The same doctor, repeating the same words he had given her: There was no evidence that Jared could hear at the moment, but they could speak to him anyway.

Lucas and Annie would enter the room in an instant and she would no longer be alone with Jared. She ventured a small step toward the bed and had the hardest time getting her body to obey her. She glanced behind her shoulder, through the window. Annie and Lucas who had just arrived were still speaking with the doctor. She bent down and brought her face close to Jared’s. He did not smell like himself. She came close enough to feel his breath on her face. She had tricked herself into thinking that he loved her, but the brutal truth was that she knew nothing about him. He had never trusted her enough to let her in. They didn’t have a relationship. She couldn’t have despised herself more. She whispered in his ear the truest words she knew “I love you. And I hope that you love me, too,” and stood up as Annie and Lucas entered the room. Their faces displayed the same fear the doctor’s words had inflicted on her. Jared was in a coma. There was no evidence he could hear, no indication he ever would again. Althea refused Annie’s hug, walked past her and Lucas, and ran out of the hospital room.



Lucas couldn’t imagine himself staring at Jared’s still, waxy face another instant. “Why did Althea run out like that?” he asked Annie. “Isn’t she supposed to be his girlfriend? How come we’re staying here and she is gone?”

Annie was sitting in a gray chair next to the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes glued to Jared’s heart monitor. “You can go,” she said.

“Go? Go where? Why would I want to go? That’s not going to help Jared if I go.” Lucas paced in the small room full of awful medical smells. Everything in the room was gray, the walls, the chair, Jared’s face. “I need to go,” he finally said.

Annie looked at him. “So? Go.”

“I need to find an answer,” he explained.

“I’ll stay.”

Answers. Yes, he needed answers. What kind of answers he wasn’t sure. The hospital staff described precisely what drug Jared had used and how much, and no amount of additional information would improve his condition. Lucas left the hospital and walked down boulevard Boissière like a somnambulist. There had been no time for shaving or a shower and he was still wearing the clothes from the evening before—his charcoal Dior sports coat, a tailor-made baby blue dress shirt, and a gray raincoat by Karl Lagerfeld. Who knew Jared? Did Althea? He certainly didn’t know any more than what Jared deemed to show or tell him and that wasn’t much. Besides, Jared had a distaste for answering or asking questions.

Across the boulevard was the entrance of the métro Porte de Saint-Ouen. Lucas took taxis through Paris when he was not driving his own Mercedes, but he suddenly felt the commanding need to take the métro, something he had not done in perhaps fifteen years. Jared was always in the métro; this would be just like getting into Jared’s mind. He walked down the foul smelling steps, odors of trash and urine, and waited in line to purchase a ticket, feeling self-conscious. He was shocked to discover how much a ticket cost these days.

He stood on the platform, waiting for the next subway amid African workmen, maids and elderly men. His clothes suddenly felt deeply inappropriate. This attire had been meant to dazzle Annie, certainly not to wear in the métro in an undesirable neighborhood early in the morning. He discretely removed the folded silk pocket square from his suit jacket and buried it deep inside the pocket of his raincoat. He imagined he’d get himself mugged in this attire but all he got was indifference. He stepped into the subway car and held onto the bar rather than sit down. He studied the faces around him with great interest but no one looked at him. Men and women on their way to work, closed to the world. This was how people lived.

He changed trains at Place de Clichy and headed toward Place Blanche and Pigalle, reasoning that if this was the Paris he never set a foot in, it therefore had to be Jared’s territory. Only by attempting to retrace Jared’s footsteps, no matter how futile an endeavor, would Lucas have a chance to understand what might have happened.

He emerged from the métro station Pigalle and was surprised by the heat of the morning. Yesterday had been a day of storm and thundering rain and today would be a scorcher. A record heat had been predicted for the day. He removed his raincoat and folded it over his arm. Everything was upside down: the weather, Jared, and he and Annie.

At Pigalle, he stood in the middle of the boulevard and surveyed his surroundings. He had somehow expected stench and prostitutes in broad daylight, but instead found only a few tourists looking for a place to have breakfast, he assumed, looking as out of place as he did. A group of Senegalese men armed with brooms were laughing contagiously as they cleaned the front of closed stores still protected by metal screens.

A drug overdose made absolutely no sense. As a child, Jared had a charming intellectual curiosity and a promising gift for art. In adolescence, after the murder of his father, his sister’s death and his mother’s illness, he had taken refuge in a form of self-protection disguised as aloofness. Secretive, yes. A drug addict, no.

Though what just happened to Jared was neither his fault nor his responsibility, Lucas blamed himself. He had made a promise to Jared’s mother to watch over her son. She had not burdened him with that request, not at all. Yet he had promised. What sickened him was that small sentence by the doctor: The combination of drugs and alcohol could have been intentional. The insinuation outraged him. But when he learned that Jared had been discovered by night guards at Cimetière de Montmartre, the cemetery where Jared’s mother and sister were buried, Lucas had a sinking feeling.

When he’d just turned eighteen, years before his mother died, Jared had materialized at Lucas’s doorstep. He said he was making a living with his art and that he and his mother would no longer need Lucas’s financial assistance. That was when he and Jared became friends, a friendship based on the mutual understanding that Jared, as far as Lucas was concerned, would never have to meet his expectation, search for his approval or even give signs of life, as well as a mutual understanding that Jared could always count on him.

No, Jared was a good boy. Lucas came to the only possible conclusion: Althea was the one who introduced Jared to drugs. It all made sense: she was uncommunicative, unhealthy-looking, antisocial. She definitely had something dark and self-destructive to hide. He would personally see to it that she be sent back to her country, her and her drugs.

Lucas walked in the empty streets, feeling the heat of the sun. Althea had ruined everything. This terrible tragedy could not have come at a less auspicious moment. He felt guilty to feel a smile on his lips: Annie!

The evening before had been a whirlwind and this by no choice of his own. Since the kiss, he had planned out his seduction. He had envisioned a slow and romantic progression, a re discovery of sorts, with tête-a-têtes, dinners, dating, kissing. After a while, ideally, Lola would have stayed home with the boys so that he and Annie could go to Normandy for a couple of nights and stay at his maison on the beach in Honfleur. They’d eat plateaux de fruits de mer, oysters, shrimp, crab. They’d walk on the beach hand in hand. Oysters are an aphrodisiac.

But with women, one had to know when to go with the flow. When he’d arrived at Annie’s house the night before, he was nervous. He needed to get a sense of how she felt about their kiss at the park before he began his planned romantic seduction. Apparently Annie was not in a romantic mood. He went with the flow, took his cues from her, and it was fantastic.

He spotted a taxi and hailed it. What to do now? It could go several ways from here. One of them involved Jared not waking up and Annie rejecting him. Another scenario was that Jared would wake up and that Annie would pretend that nothing had happened between them. Lucas was far from the hospital now, far from the two people he cared most about and whose next few hours would define his own destiny.



Lola played the last two hours back in her mind again and again like an incomprehensible movie where the plot and the sequence of events made no sense, where the protagonists acted bizarrely out of character: Annie banging at her door explaining in a run-on sentence about Jared, the hospital, and waking up in bed with Lucas. Althea emerging into the hallway, rushing down the stairs and out of the house, her black coat floating behind her like Batman’s cape. Lucas and Annie escaping out of the house like robbers at the crack of dawn to rush to the hospital.

And then, silence. Lola was left in the house with the sleeping children. So she did what needed to be done. Alone, she went and woke the children, one by one, hers and Annie’s, five kids in all. Five sets of breakfasts, teeth to brush, scattered clothes and shoes to extract from various bedrooms and closets, five sets of passive or active resistance techniques at the prospect of school or, in the case of Simon, daycare. She explained to the children that Jared had fallen sick and that everyone was at his bedside.

By eight, Lola had gotten four children to school on time, appropriately dressed and with full stomachs. After she said goodbye to the children and told the teachers they would be staying at school for lunch, she took Simon to the daycare for the day so she’d be free to go to the hospital or do whatever was needed. She felt senselessly proud of herself as she pushed Simon in his stroller toward the daycare. It was an exceptionally beautiful morning, and she could not help but be happy despite what was happening to Jared. It wasn’t happiness she felt exactly, but self-worth. Mark would have found ways to criticize her and to paste a couple new negative labels on her already bad record. Without Mark’s judgment, she saw how perfectly capable she was, and that felt better than any collagen injection, better than Bikram yoga, better than Pilates, even better than sex with Gunter! She arrived home and luxuriated in the feeling for a few more minutes, until Annie called and told her the gravity of Jared’s condition.

“How is Althea?”

“Althea flipped, apparently,” Annie said, in a high-strung tone. “She left the hospital. She looked freaked. I was hoping you had heard from her.”

“I haven’t. And how’s Lucas?”

“Looks like he flipped too. I don’t think he felt too comfortable being in the same room with me. Everyone is freaking out right and left.”

“How about you?”

“I’m fine, of course,” Annie snapped. “Someone has to be.”

“You sound tense.”

“I’m perfect.”

Lola hung up the phone wondering about Annie’s choice of word.



Althea let the revolving door of the hospital’s windowless lobby sweep her away from muted light and stagnant air and propel her into the street. The heat of the day after the cool hospital temperature shocked her. She recoiled, swirled back inside the revolving door and back to the lobby. She stayed there, panting. Jared did not want her, and he did not love her. Whatever she had done had made him want to run away, and he had taken drugs, suffered an overdose. If he died it would be her fault for not giving him a reason to live. He had given her a reason to live. But if he did not want her anymore, or if he died, then her reason to live was gone. She rushed to the bathroom. In the stall, she heaved but she had nothing in her stomach left to vomit. At the sink, she put both hands on the cold, smooth marble, waiting for the nausea to subside. She faced her image in the mirror, studied her reflection for another unsparing minute and felt such pain in her heart, in her stomach, in her head and in her limbs that she thought she might be dying. Panic grabbed her. She ran out of the bathroom, expelled herself from the hospital through the revolving doors and thrust herself into the street.

In her black coat, her black scarf, her black pants that stuck to her legs, she ran along the boulevard. She ran in small streets, between cars and tall, ornate stone buildings. When her body stopped being able to run, she walked. She knew none of the streets and though she was losing her bearings to the point of toppling down, she continued walking. She was so thirsty. Her body would not go on for much longer without food or water or hope. All she needed now was a place to curl up and wait for death.

When she realized she was completely lost, she began following a single boulevard hoping to cross a river or a railroad where her life would end. But there seemed to be no end to this street, no end to the city. She advanced on wobbly legs toward a horizon that did not exist.

In the distance, she thought she saw something. It was strange. It was far away at the end of this interminable boulevard. From where she was, it looked like what might be the canopy of a circus, a series of white awnings or tents with colorful flags and balloons, red, yellow, pink floating above them. She advanced toward the floating colors, which appeared farther the more she advanced. She thought of her black tea still at the house. It was cold now. She needed it. She needed to get back to the house and drink her black tea. But first she would need to reach the flags and the canopies. But the flags were so far, and her body so weak that she could hardly make any progress toward them. She cried tearless tears and reached with her arm toward the tents.

Suddenly tents and flags expanded and reached toward her, and a moment later, she was swallowed. Wherever she was now was loud, blinding, filled with people and exotic shops. Strong smells of trash and spices emanated from the doors of buildings, the pavement. There were groups of children playing on the sidewalk. Was she in Africa? Maybe this was China, Egypt. There were people everywhere, hustling around, in a hurry. Busy, determined people from no country and from every country.

The sun, straight above, tracked her without mercy. Her heartbeat was loud. It was as loud a sound as Jared’s heart monitor. But she realized the pulsating came from outside her body, like the rhythmic throb of a distant drumbeat. As the crowd became more dense and determined, she found herself carried by it. Her movements became easier, she was no longer one but part of a human wave made up of entire families. There were women covered in burkas pushing strollers, and babies with dark hair and skin like golden silk. Everywhere, excited children were running and calling to each other. Men walked in groups, some with turbans, some kippas, all gesticulated, waving their hands, and speaking loudly to each other in strange languages. There were women in saris, women in miniskirts, women who carried young children and large totes.

No one paid attention to Althea, as always. So she made herself one with the crowd without intention or thought other than to get to water. Suddenly, she was right under the flags and colorful awnings, engulfed in the scents of exotic food, grilled meats, spices, mint. There were perfumes too, musk, patchouli. A market? The drumbeat became more insistent as new instruments joined in the rhythmic melody of Arabic music that grew louder and more exuberant as she approached. There were piles of fruit, huge legs of lamb turning on skewers with blades like swords, their juices oozing out over the flames that licked them, vegetable stews cooking in immense pots. Men and women waited in line to be served. She recognized couscous. Annie had served it once and she had not dared taste it at the time. But today she would. She would wait in line and be served steaming couscous, and maybe one of the thin spicy sausages. But before she could get closer to the food stands the crowd carried her away, toward an area of vibrant color: rugs, gold, jewels, beads, and Indian fabrics, piles of it, caressed by a woman in a sari, so green and vivid it was fluorescent. The woman’s wrinkled hands like leather on silk. Everywhere, there were children with cotton candy in their hands darting around their mothers like flashes of lights. An old man was setting up copper pots, pans, and jars, all gleaming in the light, and smiled broadly at her, the porcelain white smile against his dark face. He told her something, something she did not understand. She wanted to stop moving but her body was in motion, her body had someplace to go; her body that wanted water or food but knew only how not to eat and drink. She did not feel in control of her senses. She could smell, and see with such delicious and heartbreaking clarity despite her thirst, hunger and exhaustion. Her senses had expanded in wild surges. Everything she saw and smelled and touched was intensified, magnified. A knobby man with slick hair was holding a voluptuous woman, his thin arms around her bare waist. Her skin was made of melted chocolate. Althea loved that beautiful skin, she who had never noticed skin before, hers or anyone else’s. But already the couple had disappeared. A small man in a dark suit walked toward her holding a sandwich. As he walked, he bit into the overflowing sandwich, juices dripped onto the ground—a disgusting sight, a fascinating sight. Althea wanted to tear the sandwich out of the man’s hand. Food was everywhere again; Kebabs folded in pita bread. A fruit salad a woman cut before her eyes, her wet hands holding peaches and splitting them into chunks. Lemonade, the lemons dancing with ice cubes. Her head spun. This was the throbbing life that had been accessible to the rest of humanity all along. It did exist. It was real. And she did not need to be with Jared to experience it. And she liked it, yes, she wanted it. She wanted to touch it and be touched by it. She wanted to taste and feel. She wanted to bask in the immense sensuality of being alive; she wanted to learn how to make it happen to her every day like it was happening now.

Her heartbeat raced, involuntarily catching up to the rhythm of the drums. The burning sun baked her hair, shoulders, and back. Her tongue felt swollen inside her mouth, and her hair stuck to her face and neck. Under her coat, she sweated the last drop of her body’s moisture. The crowd grew denser, more jubilant with every step. She needed to get back to the hospital and Jared. But where was the hospital? She didn’t recognize anything in this blinding light, this crushing heat.

And suddenly, shade. She stopped walking and lifted her head. The dense shade under the canopy of giant sycamores poured on her like a liquid blanket. There was a breeze suddenly, a delicious breeze. Althea began spinning in place, looking up at the leaves playing in the breeze. The shade of the tree seemed to be there for her only, like her own private oasis. Soon there would be peaches, lemons floating in iced water, and love. She laughed. But first, she had to strip her body of this armor of a coat that choked her. Her arms had trouble getting out of the sleeves as she slowly whirled and looked up at the canopy. When her coat came off, she let it drop to the pavement.

There were faces, people watching her. Some had surprised faces. Some were laughing. She twirled and removed her turtleneck, the drenched T-shirt that clung to her chest, until she was down to her minuscule bra and the horror of her devastated body. She felt the cool air, the refreshing spin, and the strange well being that came upon her. She stopped, looked down at the ground where her shed clothes lay like fallen black wings. The floor danced. The crowd danced and laughed. There was a bright white cloud before her eyes like gauze, and then darkness.