“Are we not in Paris?” Gus asked. “Funny, as I was sure I saw the Notre-Dame across the way.”
“Smartass is not as cute on a sixty-year-old as I’m sure it was on Win Seton the writer. If it was even cute back then at all.”
“My guess is no,” Jamie said.
“Annie,” Gus said with a deep sigh. “I meant every word. The man who wrote that book, who loved your mother, he is gone. Win … he was the best part of me. A sad referendum on my true nature, of course, as Win was nothing to get excited about. But that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Enough with the self-deprecating crap.” Annie speared a piece of meat. “It was funny and even charming at first. Before I knew you were completely full of shit.”
“Aw, Annie,” Jamie said. “Cut the poor bloke some slack. He’s only a little full of shit. A half tank. Maybe only a quarter full.”
“I haven’t uttered a single lie,” Gus insisted. “That man. That life. It’s gone. When your mother left Paris, Pru disappeared and so did Win. What you see is his shell, the husk of a man. The rest of him remains forever in Paris, stuck in 1973.”
“That is completely pathetic,” Annie said, even as she felt her heart soften at the thought.
“Probably. But that’s how I see it. And that’s why I ended the tapes where I did. You want the truth? The epilogue? What happened after? Well, listen up, I’ll tell you exactly where Win and Pru went from there.”
Seventy-nine
?LE SAINT-LOUIS
PARIS
APRIL 1973
We believed Paris was the start of us.
It’s the kind of city that makes you think of beginnings, or even juicy middles. Paris is a book to savor, in whole or in part, at any time and in any season. At age ninety or at thirty-four, you can open any chapter and read from there.
Seeing Paris with Pru was like turning up the city’s volume, brightening its lights, painting the sky bluer. F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The best of America drifts to Paris.” Pru was the best of America, the best of everything.
In between the dispatches from the Grange, tidbits to help round out my book just as Mrs. Spencer promised, Pru and I gulped in the city. We frequented every worthy café, watering hole, underground club, and place to be seen and unseen. We clinked glasses at the Ritz, ferreted out underground discos, and paid more than a few visits to the gay nightclubs Pru still joked were merely colorful closets from which I refused to emerge.
On weekends we went to Brittany, or to Banbury. A half-dozen times we went with Gads to Blenheim, where Pru learned to ride horses and quickly became a foe to the indigenous fox population. You told me you lived in hunt country. I’d like to think Blenheim gave your mom a first taste.
My brother graciously employed Pru as a sometimes-courier at his bank. It was not for want of money but for want of not getting deported. In actuality the only things she ever couriered were the various sunglasses and wallets he’d left scattered throughout town.
Why did I not marry her then? Shed the courier fa?ade and make a proper wife out of her? I don’t have an answer other than it didn’t seem necessary. Something about superfluous paperwork, unneeded red tape, and a declining institution. Getting married in 1970s Paris was a bit like wearing a tuxedo just for the hell of it. Plus look at the duke and duchess. Things were fantastic, until they wed. They remained a cautionary tale lodged in our minds.
Soon it was April. Paris was coming out of its slush and gloom. In the States, the last batch of the six hundred POWs released under Operation Homecoming returned to American soil. Nixon was knee-deep in post-Watergate conspiracies and cover-ups. Mrs. Spencer’s chum Picasso died at his home in France.
It was early afternoon. We’d come from the Luxembourg Gardens, where I’d written the last lines of The Missing Duchess. Some claptrap about the duchess unknowing of true love. I’d go on to change these words, the book not published until after her death, but at the time I viewed the biography as good as done. It was the shortest distance between us and the sunset.
“Who are you going to write about next?” Pru asked as we bounded our way up the steps of my flat. “You spent twenty years chasing this broad. You’d better get cracking on the next.” She tapped her wrist. “Not a moment to waste.”
“The only broad I want to chase is you.”
I’d playfully nipped at Pru’s backside as she opened the door to the flat. It was two o’clock. Two-ten, to be precise. We knew instantly something was wrong.
“Jamie?” Pru called, tiptoeing down the hall.
He was not supposed to be there. He should’ve been working banker’s hours like the banker that he was. But his unmistakable inflection rang throughout the home. He was entertaining a guest, someone he didn’t know.
“In the living room!” he called, voice feeble. “Is my brother with you?”