Parisian Promises Page 7

  “Won’t you tell me about the toucan and the best love story you’ve ever heard?” she pleaded. “I won’t interrupt you again.”

  Jean-Michel erased a section of the charcoal drawing and returned to his sketch, satisfied that Monica was a quick study and had acquiesced to him quickly. “Isabel is part of a love story of immense sacrifice. Could you ever see yourself waiting twenty years to see the love of your life again?”

  “I––I think so.”

  “Would you be willing to travel nearly 5,000 kilometers along the Amazon Basin, alone and frightened, in order to connect with him?”

  “Is this a real love story? I don’t believe it,” Monica said, confused again. Everything about being here––in this apartment, this bedroom, this city––was disorienting her.

  Jean-Michel walked over to the bedroom window and stared out at the river. “You don’t believe it? What exactly do you believe in? You say you would do anything for love, yet you deny that a woman could travel through black-caiman-infected waters to be reunited with the man she loves. You’re frivolous!”

  He rapped against the window and Monica jumped, surprised by the harshness of his words. She bit her lip and remained motionless, wondering what he would do or say next. Jean-Michel took advantage of her confusion and continued his verbal attack.

  “Didn’t you just tell me, right over there,” he pointed to the quais of the Seine, “that you’ve never wanted anyone as much as me? Now, three hours later, you doubt the veracity of my love story.”

  He opened the window and allowed the breeze to further chill the room. Monica, finally moved to action, tumbled off the bed and rushed towards him. When she tried to hug Jean-Michel, he pushed her off.

  “Do you ever stop and think about your actions and your words?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you!” Monica looked as though she was about to cry. “It just seemed like such a preposterous story. I, I couldn’t make the connection between this stuffed toucan and a woman who made a solo journey along the Amazon. You have to admit, it’s––”

  Jean-Michel grabbed her shoulders, his fingers digging into her soft skin.

  “You don’t know anything about love or sacrifice, do you? How can you make any connections about the risks one takes in life?” He let Monica go and turned his attention to the toucan, stroking its luminous feathers. “You come from California, where everything is new and shallow and insincere. And now you attempt to judge the depth of the love of Isabel Casamayor de Godin, an eighteenth-century Ecuadorian woman who loved her French husband with such devotion and intensity that she never gave up on seeing him again. After their reunion in French Guiana, they spent their last years together, here in France. You don’t have a clue about love.”

  He yanked a feather from the toucan’s wing and tossed it at her.

  “Featherbrain,” he said with contempt, and walked out of the room.

  Monica retreated to the bed and sat down, her mind as tangled as the messy sheets stained with spilled champagne and the rubble of crumbs and charcoal flakes. She felt as if she were completely alone, back in the tack room suffocating with the weight of leather saddles, and she longed for Jean-Michel to hold her again, to love and caress her the way he did earlier.

  “Please come back, Jean-Michel,” she cried out, but he didn’t reply. Of course he was right: what did she know about anything, other than mucking out manure and cleaning hoofs? The sophisticated Jean-Michel had selected her from all the beautiful women in Paris, and Monica had botched it with her small-town mentality and lack of finesse. She didn’t deserve to be with such a cultured, generous man.

  Monica sipped the last of the champagne, and picked up the sketch pad. Tears pricked her eyes when she saw Jean-Michel’s drawing. In his depiction of the longing in her eyes and the sensuality of her moist lips, he had perfectly captured her feeling of lust and abandon, the desperate desire Monica had never before felt––until today.

  Instead of positioning her in a lounging pose, like the Manet and Titian compositions he’d mentioned, Jean-Michel had drawn a posterior view of her with her back arched and legs parted in sexual excitement. But what Monica appreciated most in the sketch was Jean-Michel’s inclusion of two intricate details; specifics that revealed to Monica that now she belonged to him: his bite marks on her inner left thigh, and his own long fingers that rested possessively inside her. An erotic charge surged through her.

  “Jean-Michel, I love the sketch,” Monica called out, “I’m sorry for whatever I said that upset you. Won’t you please come back to bed? Or we could go out dancing and meet the rest of our friends ––whatever you want.”

  When Jean-Michel didn’t answer, Monica summoned the courage to go and look for him. She walked naked from room to room of his apartment, but there was no sign of him anywhere. He was gone.

  Monica felt a panic rising from within her and she shook with the coldness of his actions. How could he have just walked out without an explanation? She hurried back to the bedroom and peered out the window. Maybe, as a way to make-up to her for his harsh words to her, Jean-Michel had left the apartment to buy her art supplies, or to pick up some dinner. But she couldn’t see him on the street or down on the quai.

  This was all her own stupid fault. Why hadn’t she just listened when Jean-Michel was telling her the love story about the woman and the Amazon River? He’d been trying to talk of grand passion, something she had never experienced, and she’d been skeptical and ignorant, too unimaginative to understand what he was really saying.

  The longer Monica waited for Jean-Michel to return so she could apologize to him, the more guilt she felt at not having shown him respect. He was far more worldly and refined than she, and she had belittled him. It was no surprise that he’d been offended, and that he’d accused her of being superficial and unrefined––and he was right. Monica shivered in the chilly air, closing the window. There was no point in standing here, exposing herself to the world. She crawled with shame back into bed and waited for Jean-Michel’s return.

  A series of soft knocks on the apartment’s door woke Monica from a foggy sleep. After that bottle of champagne, her head was fuzzy, and the bat canopy above the bed looked as though it was about to drop onto her head. The room was dark, and for a moment Monica had to think to remember where she was.

  Since she could still hear the incessant tapping sound, Monica wrapped the top sheet around her and stumbled from the room. She walked in hesitant steps along the hallway, patting the walls to find a light switch, but no lights turned on, no matter how many switches she flipped. Her feet cold on the marble of the foyer, Monica managed to find the handle to the front door, and opened it with a creak. She was about to call out Jean-Michel’s name until she realized that the knocking came from another outer door, one she could not open. There must be a second landing or another foyer, something she hadn’t noticed when Jean-Michel escorted her into his apartment earlier that evening. Slowly, she realized she was trapped.

  Outside a man’s voice whispered something in French, and then he whistled some type of musical code consisting of three notes. He rattled the door and whistled again. Monica remained frozen in place, one hand on the door handle that would not turn, and the other one stuffed in her mouth so she would not scream.

  After a few moments, to her relief, Monica could hear the man’s heavy footsteps thumping away and down the stairs. She hurried back to the hallway, tripping over the trailing end of the sheet, hunting for a telephone. If only she could call Madame Caron de Pichet, her housemother would tell her what do. But there seemed to be no telephone anywhere in the apartment.

  Panic rising in her throat, Monica retreated to the bedroom and locked herself in. She searched the floor for her underclothes, blue dress, and shoes but they were no longer in the bedroom. Panting with fear, she jerked open drawers and peeked inside an oversized armoire to find something––anything––to wear, but the cabinets were either packed with stuffed birds or complet
ely empty.

  Outside the window, the sky was cloudy and starless, and she had no idea what time it was. Without her watch, her clothes, a telephone, a radio, or lights, Monica tried to orient herself based on her recollection of Doisneau’s photographs of Paris. Weren’t the bookstall dealers, the famous bouquinistes, supposed to line the Seine? Where was the alluring accordionist who walked home along the quiet quais after a long night of playing her heavy instrument and singing the same lament, “You can’t imagine how much I love you”? And shouldn’t there be countless old ladies bent over and walking their poodles?

  Monica didn’t blame Monsieur Doisneau’s romanticized images of Paris for her disappointment and disorientation. He wasn’t the reason Jean-Michel had walked out and left her here alone. It was her own lack of perception about life, her dull birdbrained perspective. She had bored Jean-Michel, disgusted him. The sound of a distant motorcycle reminded Monica of Doisneau’s photograph of a helmeted couple reaching from one motorcycle to the other in order to kiss passionately––during peak traffic no less––and she craved to recreate this very image with Jean-Michel. When he picked her out from the crowd, Monica had felt special for the first time in her life. How could she have blown this passionate love affair and all the excitement and romance it promised, so soon?

  In the somber locked bedroom, Monica murmured her sorrowful prayer of confession and beat her chest three times: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mind Control

  Unable to shake the fog of the champagne, Monica continued to sleep fretfully in the unfamiliar surroundings of Jean-Michel’s apartment. She wrapped herself in the stained sheets and, as she tossed and turned, she thought she heard the same three-note whistle at random intervals outside the door. Sometimes, she covered her ears; finally she crawled under the bed in fear and confusion. She was certain that the eerie sounds weren’t coming from the man at the front door, but from the dangling bats above her head, communicating their disapproval. “She is not a woman worthy of our master’s love!” growled the bats in unison, their fangs glowing in the dark chamber.

  The irate toucan opened its huge serrated bill and joined the chorus.

  “She will never love him deeply,” it bellowed. “Never in the way he already loves her––jamais!”

  Monica berated herself for having consumed the other two bottles of champagne: she’d wanted to knock herself out until morning, when, hopefully, she would be able to think more clearly. Her fear increased with every creak of the wooden floors and crack of the centuries-old beams. She covered her ears to block out the toucan’s grinding bill as it prepared to defend its territory against the American intruder. In Monica’s nightmare, the toucan’s six-inch tongue and razor-sharp bill bored through her body cavities, reminding her of the pain––and pleasure––she’d felt at Jean-Michel’s bite.

  “This is how you mark your territory, my master!” the toucan squawked as it drilled deeper and deeper. “This is how you let her know that she belongs to you now.”

  Monica woke-up long enough to cry out for her horse––“Rocky, be careful! A coyote is following us!”–– before falling back into her kaleidoscopic daze, dreaming of the domineering coyotes that marked their territory all along the chaparral peaks surrounding her ranch in California. With images of territorial coyotes and hawks whirling through her subconscious, Monica felt strangely at home. Jean-Michel had the instincts of an animal: he had already marked her as his, and now she was part of their mated pair. As a couple he would protect her, no matter what.

  But this part of the dream was disrupted by the shrill squawks of another creature’s voice, turning Monica’s dream into a nightmare.

  “She’s incapable of loving our master. She’ll never know true love!” the dream-toucan cried, to a resounding bat chorus of “Jamais, jamais, jamais.”

  Monica woke up, her head throbbing. She did feel unworthy of Jean-Michel’s love. From the minute he had inserted the cigar into her fingers at the café with the red awning, he had seemed the answer to her prayers. He was attentive, intelligent, sophisticated, and charismatic. Before leaving California, Monica had petitioned the heavens to let her fall in love in Paris, the city of her dreams.

  But instead of capturing Jean-Michel with her goodness and warmth, she’d pushed him away with her clumsy provincialism, disparaging his romantic tale of love in the Amazon. In one way this seemed like such a small grain of irritation, but didn’t an oyster clamp down and form layers of protection against that singular grain of sand? Monica had often rebuffed other people in her life, wanting them away from her rancorous ranch––ostensibly because she wanted to shield other people from her feuding parents, but mostly because, little by little, she preferred solitude. In time, she’d found joy in following a simple schedule: going to class, daydreaming about her future life in Paris, drawing her surroundings, and rushing home to Rocky and to help her mother with the other horses. Others might have described this as a monotonous routine, but it gave Monica ample time to dream about falling in love one day in Paris.

  With every passing hour of the night, Monica’s disorientation inside the ice-cold apartment led her to a clear understanding of the reprehensible person she truly was: she wasn’t fascinating or special. Even worse, she wasn’t trustworthy, and she didn’t know how to love. She was destined to a lonely existence. Every time Monica lay awake, she shuddered at this future vision of herself, trudging from the barn to the arena to the local horseshows trying to sell her swayback trail horses, filled with remorse for scaring off the only cultured man who had ever loved her.

  At the first ray of daylight in the sky, Monica wobbled to the morgue-cold bathroom and tried to groom herself. She waited for the rust-colored water to run through the faucet and then took a couple of sips. While she stood transfixed at her reflection, patchy in the silvered antique mirror, she rehashed all the events of the day before and her heart sank at the unavoidable truth. She’d behaved poorly with Jean-Michel. He’d opened up his heart to her, trying to share his treasured love story of Isabel and the Amazon River calamity. Instead of listening to him and hearing what he was trying to tell her about true love and a burning passion, Monica had prattled on about books and movies, and harangued him with vapid questions. No wonder Jean-Michel had dismissed her as featherbrained. She’d muddled and blundered, challenging him and, in effect, accused him of gross exaggeration.

  Monica smoothed back her hair and splashed some water on her drawn face. Perhaps she’d always been a goofball, frivolous and banal, without a solid core. Perhaps Lola and Karen and Annie all rolled their eyes behind her back, appalled by the way she swayed one direction on a topic and then flip-flopped back again. As she shivered in the frigid bathroom, afraid to look at the accusatory eyes of the toucan in the next room, she vowed that if Jean-Michel would give her a second chance and open up to her again, she would do anything to prove her commitment to him.

  Even in full daylight the apartment remained gloomy. Today it didn’t look quite so grand and impressive: it was revealed as desolate and uninhabited, simply a resting place for obscure pieces of art that had never sold and leather-bound books no one had ever read. The atmosphere was a little creepy, Monica decided, as though the place hadn’t been lived in for decades: there were no worn slippers under the bed, no open bottles of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, not even a used tissue in a trash can. When she attempted to pull a book from the stacks, Monica had to give up: the years of leaning on each other had made each tome cling to the next for dear life, and they were stuck like glue.

  With a Sisyphean resolve, Monica walked up to the front door and turned its handle, only to realize––again and again and again––that the brass handle would not budge; she was locked inside the cold cage, no different from her fellow avian inmates. With her ear pressed to the door, Monica tried to hear any sign of life on the floors below. No one knew her whereabouts, but she couldn’t believe that she’d have to resort to o
pening the window and calling out for help to passersby on the street below. Jean-Michel would come back for her, wouldn’t he?

  In her wearied mental state, quivering with cold and hunger, Monica accepted her place in this limbo, in the purgatory of her own making, in this place of torment––this was the penance she must perform for having offended Jean-Michel. That much she’d learned back at her parish church. Her mother had taught her well. Sometimes you must do penance for sins you didn’t even know you had committed.

  By dusk of the third torturous day, after Monica had consumed two boxes of macarons and all the champagne, she discovered a stack of dusty sheets dropped haphazardly in a corner pantry, although there was absolutely nothing to eat in its cupboards. She wondered if the entire apartment had been covered with these sheets. Perhaps Jean-Michel did not live here, at all, and she would have to scream until someone came to rescue her. By now Monica didn’t dare return to the bedroom where she’d had the most dreadful two nights of terror under the menacing canopy of bats. Instead, she sat slumped in the corner of the pantry and tried to convince herself that Jean-Michel was the man of her dreams, and that he would return and explain his actions. She studied the sketch he’d drawn of her and compared it to the faint teeth marks surrounded by a yellow-green bruise on her inner thigh. Just as she was about to wrap herself in the dusty sheets to warm up for another night of punishment, she heard the front door open.

  “My poor, poor, darling, where are you?” shouted Jean-Michel. “You must be freezing and hungry. Oh, what a dreadful two days I’ve had! Where are you, my love?”