Early Warning by Smiley Jane

Author:Smiley, Jane [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-28T07:00:00+00:00

1971

WHEN FRANK SUGGESTED that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different—maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.

Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement—from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe, being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly—keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.

In the meantime, since they had come in the winter, they were surrounded by French people, not tourists, and though Janet’s French was good, and people smiled at her and were helpful, Frank was a little nettled by Janet’s loud voice, Richie’s and Michael’s exaggerated movements, Andy’s endless observations. It was this last that was a revelation—Andy had always kept her thoughts to herself, except when she had been drinking, and she only drank at home. But now that she wasn’t drinking, she talked all the time—what an elegant building, is that really Napoleon, I thought he was short, oh, there were more Napoleons than the one, look at those horse statues on that pillar. The French didn’t stare at her, the kids didn’t seem to care (though Janet answered a lot of her questions), but it drove Frank crazy. The thing he couldn’t stop noticing was the way her mouth worked. All around him, Parisians hardly moved their lips, and their words issued forth in a liquid stream. Andy’s mouth was like the mouth of a puppet flapping, revealing the empty cavern within. For ten days, he felt as though his

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