Locust Lane(10)
She had the idea while seated on the toilet. It was brilliant. She snatched the phone from the counter.
“Papillon?” she wrote.
“That would be lovely,” came the immediate reply.
Which was pure Celia. Anyone else would have sent her back a simple thumbs-up. But Celia was not one for emojis or partial sentences or conflated spelling. If you sent her a text, you got a reply, usually immediate, always grammatically sound and perfectly punctuated. They settled on noon. A bit early, but Alice was suddenly extremely eager for lunch.
It was a smooth move, choosing Papillon. Showing up at Michel’s restaurant alone was out of the question. She’d pulled that stunt one time too many. But rolling in with Celia Parrish could not be criticized. It would be frustrating, of course, to inhabit the same space as him without any intimate communication. Especially that space. Their space. And she’d have to be careful around Celia. She still had no idea how she’d react to news that Alice was having an affair. Although Celia clearly took vicarious thrills in Alice’s tales of a wild past, this might be a transgression too far.
Most decisively, Michel had made her swear to keep their secret. It was deeply important to him, even though she’d tried to convince him that people wouldn’t care as much as he thought. This wasn’t the 1600s. And if he was worried about the racial thing—people didn’t give a shit. Not these people, with their Ivy League educations and their third-generation Kennedy congressman. Michel might not be a WASP, but he was a French-educated Lebanese Catholic who owned a restaurant you needed to book weeks in advance for a Friday-night table. The only flak he was liable to get from this crowd was for putting an unhealthy amount of butter in his béarnaise.
She needed to get a move on. Her instinct was to throw on a pair of jeans and a sweater. Michel liked it when she dressed young and American. Last week, when they finally got to spend some quality time together, she’d worn a pair of Daisy Dukes and he’d more or less flipped his wig. That had been one for the books. But this was Celia they were talking about. Conversation might be relaxed with her, but not appearances. You brought your A game with Mrs. Parrish. The woman could stroll through a car wash and come out perfect. When they met, Alice’s first thought was God, I hope I look like this in twenty years. Fuckable at fifty. The porcelain skin that carried a fine network of lines like an artwork that would just keep increasing in value. The extra few pounds that had accumulated in all the right places, distinguishing her from the anorexic voodoo dolls who populated Emerson. Most of all, those sparkling blue eyes, which still made men of all ages sit up and take notice.
Alice chose a simple black skirt and a tan cardigan; a touch of lipstick and blush. She’d do hair and mascara on the drive over. She swung by Geoff’s office on the way out—she still needed to alert him to his daughter’s middle-of-the-night distress. His door was shut tightly. She heard him clacking away. She really wished he’d bury the hatchet with his boss. Having him around the house 24/7 was getting oppressive. She knocked twice. It took him several annoyed seconds to answer. In his Clam Shack T-shirt and food-stained sweatpants, his too-long hair and unshaven cheeks, he appeared to be exactly what he was: a dweeb desperately trying not to look like a dweeb.
“How’s the work going?” she asked.
“No, yeah, it’s good. You going out?”
“Ladies who lunch. So Hannah was up in the middle of the night. She seemed pretty upset about something.”
“Did she say what?”
“Not sure. You know that Jack stayed over, right?”
“Yeah, I saw him head out around seven.”
“And we’re okay with that?”
“She’s a big girl,” he said.
Alice could have debated the point, but she let it go.
“So you got this? You’re going to talk to her?”
“It’s all good,” he said.
Having discharged her stepmotherly duty, Alice headed out into what proved to be a fine spring day. As she rocked over the formidable array of speed bumps that stood between her and the town’s center, she allowed herself to get excited by the prospect of seeing Michel. Their last time together had been so perfect. Six blissful hours spent alone in his house last Friday, luxuriating in the knowledge that his son, Christopher, was attending a concert in Boston with Jack and Hannah and then staying at Jack’s grandmother’s Back Bay mansion. If not for Geoff, she could have spent an entire night with her beloved. Although her husband probably wouldn’t have noticed if she rolled in after dawn. These days, he wouldn’t notice if her hair was on fire, except to complain about the smell.
It had been the longest period of time they’d spent together. Before that, their encounters had always been brief. Usually in the morning, after the kids were at school and Geoff was at the lab. Or late at night. Sometimes they’d use their homes, although it was impossible to relax at either place. Geoff kept odd hours, even before falling out with his boss. And, because of his son, Michel was weird about using his own place. They’d rented a room at the Hilton once, but that felt as gross as some no-tell motel out on Route 9. Mostly, they’d been confined to his office at the restaurant, with its massive, redolent sofa she liked to imagine he’d brought with him from Beirut, even though he’d only lived there as a boy. Their divan, as she came to think of it. Once, after closing, they wound up in the kitchen, where she’d gripped the smooth hot steel bar on the oven door as he had at her.