CHAPTER SEVEN:The Party At The Hotel Particulier
674 Words
Chapter Seven — The Party at the Hôtel Particulier
The complication arrived in the form of Isabelle Fontaine.
Armand's sister was twenty-nine, sharp, and had the particular social acuity of a woman who had survived her family by watching everything with a smile that showed nothing. She appeared at the reception hosted by the Comte de Vaurien — a gathering of sixty people in a large house on the Île Saint-Louis — and she spent much of the evening watching Élise with precisely that smile.
Élise had attended the reception because refusing was no longer sustainable. She had put on the ivory dress and the pearls and had stood beside Armand while he talked to a man named Edouard Petit-Blanc about tariffs, and she had made herself present and agreeable and invisible in the way that was expected, and she had been doing well.
And then she had turned and found Isabelle Fontaine at her elbow, offering a cigarette with an elegant hand.
"I don't smoke," Élise said.
"Pity." Isabelle lit her own. "It gives you something to do with your hands when you're bored. Which you clearly are."
Élise looked at her carefully. "I'm perfectly engaged."
"You were thinking about something else for the entire conversation about tariffs." Isabelle exhaled. "I don't blame you. Edouard Petit-Blanc has been talking about tariffs since 1919 and shows no sign of resolution." She paused. "My brother is a good man, you know."
"I know."
"But goodness isn't the only thing a person needs." Isabelle looked at her directly then, with something that wasn't quite a threat and wasn't quite sympathy — something more complicated, the way intelligent people signal that they see more than they're saying. "I hope you know what you want, Élise. Before September makes the question irrelevant."
She moved away, trailing smoke, and was absorbed into the party.
Élise stood alone for a moment, her heart beating with the specific urgency of someone who has just been told something true.
* * *
She told Jimmy about the party. He listened the way he always listened — completely, giving the conversation the same focused attention he gave music.
"She's right," he said.
"I know she's right." They were in the café on Rue des Martyrs. Afternoon light striped the table. "The question is what I do about it."
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to stay in this café forever and not have to decide."
He smiled. "Not an option."
"Then I want —" She stopped. She looked at him. The thing that had been building since the pavilion in the rain was present in the room with them like a fourth person, patient and undeniable. "I want to know what this is. Before I decide anything about anything, I need to know what this is."
"What do you think it is?"
"I think it's the most honest thing that's ever happened to me." She said it quietly but without hesitation. "I think you see me, and I don't think anyone has ever seen me before. And I think I see you. And I don't know what to do with that."
He was very still across the table.
"Élise," he said, and the way he said her name — not the French way her family said it, but something slightly different, his own version, a pronunciation that belonged to him alone — made her understand that she was in the middle of something she would not be able to unsee.
"You know what I am here," he said carefully. "And you know what you are. And you know that the world between us is not — " He paused. "It's not a small distance."
"I know."
"Your family. The city. The time we're in."
"I know all of that."
"And you still — "
"Yes," she said. Simply. Completely.
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. The same gesture, reversed.
"Then I think," he said slowly, "that we need to be honest about what we're choosing."
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