many questions. I had panicked too quickly. Besides, I had been extremely rattled by what I had witnessed that morning. I had been in a state, and that was why I had jumped to conclusions about Marcelle.
She spoke of being a newlywed alone in Paris, just as I had been. Lacking in community, and in female friends especially. She had lived with her in-laws at first on the rue du Beaujolais behind the Palais Royal, but she had felt stifled there.
“My mother-in-law prefers to frown,” she said, plunging her head underwater, despite not having a bathing cap on.
“She can’t be worse than Victor’s mother.”
“Of course she is,” she said, slicking back her wet hair. “Victor’s mother is a Michelin. All of Victor’s money is hers, yes?”
“Most of it,” I said, which was true. “She is related to the very rich aunt, on their mother’s side, who gave a large sum and helped Michelin reestablish themselves in 1889 when the brothers took over the company and renamed it. So Victor is a bit of a distant cousin, but he’s the right cousin.”
There was money on the Lesage side, too, but Victor’s father had kept the bulk of it with him when he’d left the family a decade before.
“Then she is better, Victor’s mother, even if she is worse,” said Marcelle. She moved her hat brim higher as the only cloud in the sky passed over us. “Did the family mind that you worked before you were married? That was such a point of contention between Arnaud, his family, and me. They thought being a fashion model, even one for the best designers, designers they wore themselves, was on par with being a prostitute. Une pute.”
I looked at her animated face as she attempted to walk alluringly in the pool, both of us laughing as she tried to sway her hips.
“In all the years we’ve been married, Agathe never brought up that I was a teacher,” I said, thinking back. “It was unsaid, but quite obvious, that she liked me to pretend that I was rather unformed before encountering Victor. That I was just floating around waiting for a husband. She did tell me I was never allowed to work as a married woman. She said that even before Lucie was born. But I don’t think a woman like her could understand that aspect of a woman like me. Or you. I really did enjoy my job. I liked being around young people, and I loved giving another language, another culture, to children. I had French growing up through my mother, but I was so starved for everything else when I was young. I was given the language, but no view of the world that went with it. We never traveled north to Quebec. We certainly never went overseas. So I spoke a language that only got me from one end of my house to the other. And that was about thirty feet.” I didn’t usually admit the circumstances of my childhood so readily to people, especially well-to-do women, but there was something about Marcelle that indicated that she hadn’t grown up wealthy, either. She seemed far too carefree.
“But then New York,” she said, stretching out her arms as she spoke.
“Well, first the local teachers’ college. That’s what really helped me escape my small, rural world. But yes, then New York.”
“Then Paris, and now you’re here. Starving no longer,” she said gaily. “If awful Caroline had known all this about you on your first night, she wouldn’t have wondered why Victor picked you over all those dim-witted socialites back home that were surely buzzing around him like gnats.”
“Sometimes I still wonder,” I said, smiling.
“No,” she said, shaking her head, her wet hair stuck together in thick strands. “Brains are more effective than beauty. Only the world tries to make women forget it. They don’t want us to be too smart,” she concluded. “They’re scared that if they encourage it, we’ll end up more intelligent than the men. With the big secret being,” she said at a whisper, “that we already are.”
Victor had picked me, she’d said. And it was true; he had.
Ours was a believable enough scenario, I always thought. I was pretty enough. Clever enough. And of course, I was also starving enough. That was the part Marcelle couldn’t see.
Victor had told the story about how we met at Maxim’s by chance, just before Bastille Day, countless times. But it wasn’t true. There was nothing chanced about it.
It was true that