Five Tuesdays in Winter(44)

He was still in the lobby when she returned, looking at an article on the wall, “Modern Magnificence,” about the house. She could hear Frances in the kitchen, washing the cups by hand.

“Goodbye,” Audrey said, without conviction.

He took her arm and brought her to the glass windows that looked out at the pool, already covered for winter, where Frances could not see them from the kitchen. His lips were like his hands, plump and warm, wetter than she had imagined. He took her lower lip in his teeth and tugged gently. He moved to her cheek and let out a moan in her ear. She felt him grow hard against her.

“Papa?” Frances called from the kitchen.

They pulled away.

“Is it a secret, where you live?” she said quickly.

His grin blossomed. “Of course not. Graham Street. Portland, Maine.”

Frances had taken off her shoes again and she came around the corner without sound. “What’s in Portland, Maine?”

“Just a place I lived once. I was on the second floor, above a sort of grimy hair salon. It was an old sea captain’s house that had been broken up into apartments. Not a very wealthy sea captain, I don’t think, no view of the sea. But a pretty mansard roof.” He’d stuck his hands in his front pockets, pulling out the fabric casually, reminding Audrey of boys in her youth after close dancing.

“I didn’t know you’d lived in Maine,” Frances said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Thank you for today,” Audrey said and kissed Frances on the cheek. She glanced briefly at him. “Nice to meet you.” She tried to make it as flat and bland as she could, as if they were really saying goodbye.

It wasn’t easy to drive two hours north and two hours home while her kids were at school without anyone noticing her absence. The first time she did it, Becky threw up at recess and had to go to Elinor’s house because no one could reach Audrey. She said she’d been shopping and lost track of time. Another time, Russell hit his head against a desk and had to stay on the cot in the school office for hours. “Where were you?” he wailed all the way home. And then in December, Larry came in from the garage and asked how in the heck the new Mustang had gone nine thousand miles already. She felt the blood drain, but he laughed and said, You head down to Atlantic City every time you drop the kids off? And she saw he didn’t expect an answer.

That first time, she didn’t even know what she was looking for. She just drove up and down Graham Street, two and seven-tenths miles, believing she would just know it. Had he said a number when he’d said Graham Street and she’d forgotten it? Old sea captain’s house, he’d said. Not wealthy. No view of the sea. Hairdresser on the bottom floor.

It was only driving home that she had remembered the roof. A kind of roof. It began with an m. She didn’t know roofs. She casually asked Larry one night coming home from a dinner party about the kinds of roofs there were.

“Well, you can make a roof out of slate or asphalt shingles or tile . . . or even grass like in Sweden.”

“No, styles of roofs.” Her arms burned in impatience. “Use the technical term. Be technical.”

“Do you need to take another tranquilizer, Auds?”

“A kind of roof that begins with an m.” She was nearly crying.

But he didn’t know.

She went to the library. It took all of five minutes.

Mansard.

Not one mansard roof on Graham Street in Portland, Maine. Mansard. It sounded French. It seemed French, like the houses in Madeline.

At a New Year’s Eve party, Frances said her father had been with them for a few days over Christmas.

“What a riot that man is,” Elinor said. “Why weren’t you there that night? Were you out of town?”

“Yes, we were visiting my mother,” Audrey said, low so Larry wouldn’t hear.

“I gave him the new Greene novel,” Frances said. “He loves Graham Greene.”

Madeline. Mansard. Graham Greene. It was clearly a puzzle she was meant to solve. She tried. That winter she drove up and down Green Street, Greenleaf Street, Greenwood Lane, Madeline Street, French Street, Queen’s Court. She had a babysitter with a license who could pick up the kids at school now, so she didn’t have to worry about time. She found a few mansard roofs, but they were mostly single-family houses. The two that weren’t had women’s names above the second-floor buzzers, no hairdressers on the bottom floor.

But she liked driving through the neighborhoods at dusk. She could see it so vividly at that hour, the tall house with the French roof, the hair salon closed for the evening, everything dark save the band of light around its middle, the second floor all lit up and glowing, waiting for her arrival.





SOUTH





They head south, and as they move out from under the dense Baltimore sky toward air and ocean and hot sun, Flo and Tristan beg their mother, Marie-Claude, to tell stories. Flo loves the ones about when Marie-Claude was as young as she is now, and Tristan wants to hear, over and over, how he was born.

Because Marie-Claude does not want her children to talk about their father, who left her at the end of last spring, nearly a year ago now, she gives them the stories they ask for. She tells Flo about Alain Delor, her first crush, and Tristan about the market in Paris where her sac broke as she stood buying peaches in the rain.