Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin

Author:Melanie Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Published: 2019-05-20T23:00:00+00:00

Lily is back.

The note—delivered to Blanche with a bouquet of violets—says to meet her on a bench at the flower market, although it doesn’t say which one. But the only market Blanche knows well is the one on the Île de la Cité, near Notre Dame, and that is where she goes this late afternoon, after first deciding—oh, good God, the look on his face!—to bedevil her husband and ruin his evening. What came over her, what imp whispered into her ear, she has no idea; she’s just tickled she did, and wishes she’d done it years ago. Why not torture him as he tortures her?

Why not let the bastard believe that she has a lover, too? It will do him good to think that. It will do her good to let him. And it isn’t as if she’s not thought of taking a lover before.

It’s just that she’s never been able to bring herself to. Because there are things about her husband, she is forced to admit, that she loves. And unlike the French, Blanche was raised to believe that love and sex very much were synonymous. It’s a habit she’s never been able to break—the Puritan in her (in all Americans, according to Claude) is too strong.

But she loves the way he presents himself—to her, to everyone. Even if Claude has a day off and plans only to sit with her in their apartment, reading, he shaves, he splashes his face with cologne, he grooms his hair, he dresses impeccably. Blanche can’t help but be touched by his arraying himself like this, just for her.

She loves the way Claude reads through the mail first, in case there’s something in it that might upset her. She loves the way he settles her into bed before they make love; he must fluff the pillow, arrange the sheets perfectly, arrange her into them with the delicacy of an artist deciding upon the perfect frame for a finished painting. She loves how he takes care of her needs, before his.

She loves how he reads a book, even—slowly, licking his finger to turn the pages with great care, always using one of his beautiful leather bookmarks with his name embossed upon them, making notes in a special leather-bound notebook, the pages gilded. Watching him read sometimes reminds Blanche of how he makes love, to tell the truth. And she’s never in her life met a man who could turn her on simply by turning the pages in a book.

She loves her husband, goddammit. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t savoring the triumph of making him wonder about her.

By the time Blanche crosses the Seine, however, her husband is no longer on her mind. She takes long, sure—masculine—strides, impatient to walk through the pretty little market full of blossoms and birds in cages, songbirds mostly, vivid with blue feathers, yellow. Blanche, despite her fear of birds, finds them charming, for she’d never seen anything like them back in the States. Although they don’t

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