“What did you just do?”
“It’ll look great on you when you’re here with me,” he told her, and after the auction, they lined up to pay for what they got and collected both bags in their original boxes. And as they waited, Maylis noticed Natasha again. She looked different than she had before, at the restaurant. She was wearing no makeup, and she blended into the crowd. Maylis glanced around for Vladimir but didn’t see him, and she wondered if he knew Natasha was there selling her Birkins. It seemed odd to her. And after the auction, Natasha didn’t collect any purchases. Instead she put her catalog in the plain black leather Birkin she was carrying, with discreet black hardware, pulled up the collar of her peacoat, and scurried away looking pleased.
“I wonder what that’s about,” she commented to Gabriel, and then thanked him profusely again for his extravagance. And then she had a thought about Natasha. “I don’t think we should tell Theo we saw her,” Maylis said quietly. “He was torturing himself about her for a while, that whole thing about being obsessed by unattainable women. He seems to have gotten over it, but I don’t want to get him started again,” she told Gabriel, and he nodded.
“I won’t say anything. Promise. She’s a beautiful girl, though.”
“Of course she is. She’s a billionaire’s mistress, and that’s what she’ll always be. That’s how it works. She has no use for a boy like Theo.” He was no longer a boy—he was a thirty-one-year-old man. “And obsessions are a strange thing. He painted a beautiful portrait of her, and I think he gave it to her.”
“I remember it. I told him to put it in the show. It was one of his finest pieces. For an artist, obsession can be a good thing.”
“But not in life.” She wanted her son to be happy, not tormented over a woman he couldn’t have. And she had no intention of telling him she’d seen her, for fear it would cause him to obsess about her again. And whatever she was doing there, buying or selling, had nothing to do with them anyway.
Maylis left the H?tel Drouot looking very pleased. The bag Gabriel had bought her was a beauty, and had never been used.
“I like Drouot,” she said happily to him in the cab on the way home. And he promised her they’d come back again. Paris was turning out to be a lot of fun after all.
—
And on the Metro on the way back to the seventh arrondissement, Natasha was looking at the catalog and smiling too. She could live for a long time on what she’d just made at the sale that day, and little by little she was feeling more secure. Her new life was going well.
Chapter 16
As she had done with the apartment on Avenue Montaigne, Natasha kept adding to her tiny apartment on the rue du Bac, just on a smaller scale. She found some unusual items at Drouot, some jades to put in her bookcase for an absurdly minimal price, a terrific Italian table and chairs for her kitchen, even a painting or two. None of it was expensive, but it had a good look, and she applied her own sense of style now to cheap things the way she once had to expensive ones, and she had created an atmosphere that she loved.
The sale of her haute couture clothes at Drouot had gone well. It had exceeded all their expectations, and between the Hermès sale and the haute couture sale, she had enough money in the bank not to worry for quite a while and to support herself. And she intended to work. She was going to look seriously after the first of the year. She had made enough on what she’d sold to coast for a few more months, while she adjusted to her new life.
She loved her course on twentieth-century modernism. It had just started that week and was exactly what she’d wanted. Everything was going well for her, and she felt more like her own person every day. She was still ashamed of what she’d done for the past years—it suddenly felt like prostitution to her, but it hadn’t seemed that way at the time. She had to learn to forgive herself and move on, but at least she was proud of her life now. She was starting all over again. And the truth was that she would never have been able to get out of Moscow without Vladimir, and might have died of illness or despair.
She didn’t miss the clothes or jewelry she had sold, or her life with Vladimir. She had never heard from him again since he left her on the quai. And she was relieved that she had never run into Yuri again. He had no idea how to contact her, so he couldn’t repeat his offer. She had gotten a new cellphone with an unlisted number. She never used it, she had no one to call, but she had it in case she ever needed it. And even without Vladimir, she still lived in a totally isolated world. She had no friends yet, but she had been busy building her nest for the past four months. The rest would come in time.
—
Theo painted as frantically through the fall as he had during the summer, and Jean Pasquier asked him to come to Paris in October, to talk about a new show. He asked if Theo felt he had enough new work, and he said he did. Jean was thinking about February. They had done so well with the last show that he didn’t want to lose momentum and was anxious to exhibit his new work.