What Disappears, page 8
When the parade at Maison Worth was over, the bookkeeper had the devil of a time writing down all the orders for Paul’s designs. Paul was giddy with exhaustion by the time the last carriage had carried away the last devotee of fashion and he’d shooed the last mannequin, sometimes with a pat on her pretty derriere, into the dressing room to change and go home.
What a triumph for him! Every one of those titled ladies was hastening back to a grand house in the seventh arrondissement to rest and change for dinner—to stand before a mirror and imagine herself in one of Poiret’s dresses. Perhaps to think about eating only soup. Yes, telling the cook that tonight, and all the nights of this week, she will eat only soup. No bread.
Paul looked over at Jeannette, collapsed on a chair in the corner, her shoes off, an empty champagne glass toppled on the carpet beside her.
And then he looked more closely. This wasn’t Jeannette! Her hair was different, as was her body, for the love of God. This woman was softly rounded where Jeannette was taut and tight. How could he, with all the expertise of his gaze, have failed to notice?
And yet this stranger was so like her, with Jeannette’s heart-shaped face and graceful neck, deep-set eyes, and delicately sculpted nose. Long-fingered hands that were precisely like the hands he knew and loved so well, the fingers he’d kissed a thousand times.
Careful not to wake her, he lifted the hem of her skirt enough to be able to study the slender feet encased within the sheer ivory-colored stockings. There was the distinctively long first toe, sure enough, and the ballerina’s improbably high arch and slender ankle. But the toes were straight and smooth, unmarked by any of the insults and injuries suffered by Jeannette’s feet during her long years of dancing in toe-shoes.
Could it be that Jeannette’s doppelgänger—for what else could she be?—shared her sensual proclivities? Paul could hardly breathe. Could it be that fate was rewarding his hard work and perseverance not only with this professional triumph, but with the bonus of a second, slightly different version of his petite amie?
Moved almost to tears, he cupped her unspoiled left foot in both his hands, first caressing the arch with his thumbs. She moaned. He had to use every bit of self-control he had, and he knew he didn’t have much, to keep himself from running both hands up her leg. He didn’t want to wake her—not yet. So he caressed, very gently, a little bit more, with all the expertise he’d acquired in worshipping Jeannette’s body.
The lovely creature sighed a sigh that ended in another little moan.
He darted away from her just as she was waking, pretending to busy himself with the order book, giving her time to get her shoes back on and set her clothes to rights.
“Please excuse me, monsieur,” she said with that wonderful accent.
His heart was thumping. “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said. “I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”
“Madame,” she corrected him. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking very prim and proper, very unlike Jeannette. It was adorable.
“I am Paul Poiret,” he said, with a smile. “Would madame perhaps like another glass of champagne?”
She shook her head no.
Paul wondered how much French she spoke—for, of course, he realized, she was the same foreign person who’d so confused him at the Gare du Nord.
With pleasure he was hard pressed to conceal, Paul sat down in the chair next to hers. Even at that distance, he could sense the heat radiating from her body, inside her many layers of clothes. He stole a look into her eyes—Jeannette’s eyes! “Who are you?” he asked in a whisper.
He could see her struggle as she labored to find the right words and string them together in the right way. She bit her lip, and then she said, “I am the long-lost twin of the person you have mistaken me for. Please, Monsieur Poiret, I beg you! Tell me her name!”
Paul turned away from her then and had a long stare out through the beveled glass of the front doors, onto what was the sudden calm of the rue de la Paix.
A single carriage rattled by.
He could not have made up a more delicious fantasy. Turning back to this magical creature—this apparition—he realized the importance of proceeding with the utmost caution. “My dear, lovely madame,” he said, “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I must go,” Sonya said, feeling herself blush.
Speaking with what she hoped sounded like the haughtiness of a well-born Parisian lady, she added, “Forgive me, monsieur, for delaying you.”
“Forgive you? Why, madame, I would be delighted to be delayed by you for hours and hours. Do you have dinner plans?”
What was the right way to respond?
Sonya hardened her face in the way Daniel had instructed her to do, looking past the designer, out at the fading daylight. “In fact, I do have plans, monsieur,” she said carefully.
Her mind was racing.
What if this was her sole chance of finding out Zaneta’s whereabouts—and Sonya passed it up out of fear? The very thing she’d hoped for seemed to have happened, just as she’d imagined it might. And Paul Poiret was clearly lying to her, feigning not even to recognize her from the station. There was no doubt in her mind that he’d mistaken Sonya for her twin.
“But what a shame,” he said. “Could your plans, by any chance, be changed?” He took Sonya’s hand, brushing it with his lips.
Sonya snatched her hand away and sat up straighter, gazing furiously outside again. Think! she told herself.
Without doubt, Anna Pavlova would want Sonya to curry favor with the designer, perhaps to convince him to make a dress or a cloak for the ballerina, who was so well known and so well loved.
He looked like a gentleman. But was he a gentleman?
And what was she? There were limits to what she’d do for a patron, even so grand a patron as Anna Pavlova. Were there limits, Sonya asked herself, to what she’d do to find her sister?
“Perhaps, monsieur,” she said in a measured tone, “my plans tonight could be—re-evaluated.”
Paul smiled. It was, unmistakably, a Russian accent underneath her very proper schoolgirl French. Most alluring. “Let me know where you’re staying—and I’ll send a carriage.”
“Absolutely no!” she said. She looked just like Jeannette when she got mad! It was immensely touching. “It is good for me to navigate myself in Paris,” she added in a friendlier tone. “If you will tell me where to meet you...”
How delectable she was, thought Paul, in every way. And what an amusing contrast to Jeannette, who loved nothing more than having a carriage sent for her. So alike—and yet so different. “Well then, if that’s your preference, Madame— Madame?”
“I am Sonya Danilov, Monsieur Poiret.”
“Enchanté, Madame Danilov!” said Paul, inclining his head in a little bow. “Eight o’clock. Will that suit you?”
He presented her with the business card for a petit restaurant where he knew there was no chance of meeting Jeannette. A place he often reserved for rendezvous with other women whose company he enjoyed from time to time.
The maître d’ seated them at an intimate table set slightly apart from the others—away from the window, half-hidden behind a stand of elaborately braided money trees.
They started with oysters and champagne. Sonya drank too slowly for Paul’s impatient sense of what he hoped would happen. So unlike Jeannette, who loved champagne and drank it as easily as water. Sonya asked for water.
“I have a great thirst in Paris,” she said.
Everything she said seemed luminous to him with portent and charm. “Yes, Paris does seem to have that effect upon people.” His eyes stole from her face, to the base of her throat—then, caressingly, all down the length of her arms to her hands, as he slurped his share of the oysters, one by one.
Sonya raised her still-full wineglass to the success of Paul Poiret’s label when he launched it, as he said he hoped to, in the fall—and began to tell him about her client, Anna Pavlova.
He took pains to appear to be listening with minute attention. He nodded and made listening noises, grateful that Madame Sonya Danilov couldn’t hear what he was thinking.
Their main course arrived. Paul had recommended the poulet rôti with its accompaniment of tiny onions, cloves of garlic, and new potatoes basted and browned in the fat that dripped from the slowly turning chicken rubbed with rosemary, salt, and thyme. Poulet rôti was one of Jeannette’s favorite dishes. Because Jeannette had an intense dislike of broccoli, Paul ordered a side of broccoli for Sonya, telling her that the chef here prepared it in a special way. He was filled with the excitement of a scientist in his laboratory.
Sonya ate slowly, with evident delectation, as Paul looked on, paying scant attention to his own dinner. She left the broccoli untouched. He had to keep himself from shouting out, Eureka!
“You are one of a set of twins, you say?” He topped up her glass of Burgundy, poured out the rest for himself, then called the waiter over and ordered another bottle of the same wine.
“Identical twins, from what I’ve been told,” she said, as if the fact were of little import. She was watching his face, studying him just as minutely as he was studying her.
“How overjoyed your parents must have been.”
“Zaneta, my twin, was blue and cold when she was born. But the—I’m not sure what the word is for a woman who assists at births.”
“Midwife,” said Paul.
“The midwife—what a good word that is in French!”
Sonya looked triumphant every time she managed to convey her thoughts in this language she was evidently so unused to speaking. “The midwife placed Zaneta next to me, wrapped up in a blanket by the stove. Later, when she found us—I was holding my sister close, embracing her, and she was warm again. She came back to life in my arms.”
“What a moving story.” Paul’s eyes were wide. He seemed to think for a moment before adding, “I can only imagine the gratitude your sister must feel.”
“I am ignorant of what she feels, or even if she still lives. We were separated, you see, as infants. Our mother was unable, briefly, to support us—and placed us in… Again, it seems, I don’t know the word. The place for children without parents?”
“An orphanage,” said Paul in a hushed whisper. He saw her taking in the significance this had for him—and warned himself to do a better job maintaining an opacity.
“An orphanage, yes.” Sonya paused, letting the word sparkle in the air between them. “It was meant to be for a short time only. My sister, however— Am I using that word correctly?”
He nodded, eager to hear the rest of her story. “Possibly so. It is a conjunctive adverb—but that’s neither here nor there. Your sister, you were saying—”
“My sister, however, was given by mistake to a French couple who had come to adopt a baby girl. They left a false name and address.”
Sonya’s eyes, so precisely like Jeannette’s, reflected the light of the votive candle flickering on the table. Paul said, “How extraordinary!”
He tore his gaze away from her, impatient for the waiter and the wine.
“Nothing is known of them,” she said. “Not their name nor where in France they came from.” She looked gratified to have his gaze on her again—perhaps to feel her power over him. He saw the care with which she was striving to maintain the balance of power between them—a balance that could, at any moment, shift.
The waiter appeared with another bottle, which he uncorked. He gave the cork to Paul, who sniffed it and nodded. Sonya was watching this ritual as if she’d never witnessed it before.
With the confident and exaggerated gestures born of long practice, Paul vigorously swirled the bit of wine the waiter poured out for him in the bowl of his glass before inhaling deeply. Then, with closed eyes, he tipped his head back and tasted it. “It’s good,” he said, nodding again before taking charge of the bottle and dismissing the waiter. He smiled paternally at Sonya. “I’ll wait till you finish what you have before I pour you some of this.”
“I’m sure I won’t need more,” she said. And then, noticing her glass was almost empty, she drank the final sip of wine, and it seemed as if she was tasting it for the first time. She closed her eyes briefly.
Paul was imagining her face in the throes of physical ecstasy. Would it be similar to Jeannette’s—or would it be completely different, given the difference in their histories and experience?
“But you ordered a second bottle of the same wine, isn’t it so? I do not understand the need to repeat—” She made a timid imitation of swirling and sniffing her empty glass.
Smiling, Paul gave her a generous pour—then filled his own glass. “Two bottles, even of the same vintage—made from the same grapes at the same time—can nonetheless be subtly different, depending on the physical circumstances of their vinification and how those bottles have been stored.”
“I see,” she said, seeming to puzzle over the words.
“Of course,” he added in a low, intimate tone, “it takes a connoisseur to recognize such differences.”
Paul was inflamed in more ways than one—uncomfortably so, to the point where he considered excusing himself to take care of it. “For dessert,” he said, “I would suggest the bittersweet chocolate pot de crème. They do it very well here.”
Sonya couldn’t remember ever having eaten quite such a delicious meal, and so completely to her taste. Well, the broccoli was a misstep, but otherwise he’d chosen flawlessly. There had been times, especially during the winter months, when she’d felt capable of selling her children for some dark chocolate.
She noted, as her surroundings seemed to move subtly up and down, and the ambient sounds of the restaurant receded and then returned again, how quickly she was becoming more and more adept in French.
“You introduced yourself as madame,” Poiret said to her, “and yet you’re very young.”
“I have two children.”
“Indeed! Forgive me if my question seemed impertinent—”
“All your questions seem impertinent.”
“Ah, but you’ll forgive me, won’t you?” He gave her a smile that was so kind and caring that she felt herself wanting to trust him. “I was only wondering,” he said, “whether it was an arranged marriage.”
“Yes, it was in the same year my mother died. My brother arranged the marriage, but I agreed to it. To him.” Sonya felt herself blush again.
“Arranged marriages are the tradition among certain families of the upper classes in France,” said Paul, “those who wish to consolidate their wealth.”
“In Russia, my family is not here—” She gestured high above her head. “But here.” She lowered her hand till it lay flat on the table. “I and all my family are Jews.”
“By some estimations, that is very much part of the upper classes.”
“Perhaps in France, Monsieur Poiret. In Russia, the Jews are always menaced by people’s hatred, especially in bad times.”
“One fact does not obviate the other. Was this man your brother found for you to your liking?”
“He is the father of my children.”
“But do you love him?” he asked, taking another sip of wine.
Sonya looked at him steadily, not replying. Until finally, she said, “You ask very personal questions, monsieur. Very—how do you say it?—impertinent.”
“You have a gift for language, don’t you? I would give anything to speak Russian as beautifully as you speak French.”
Sonya placed one hand over her glass when he tried to pour out more wine for her.
Changing course, Paul announced that he would create a dress or cape especially for Mademoiselle Pavlova. A model that would be the envy of every woman of fashion in Saint Petersburg.
“You are too kind, Monsieur Poiret.”
“Please call me Paul.”
She looked at him with as much an expression of wounded propriety as she could dredge up at this late hour, and in her present state of tipsiness. “But how can I, monsieur? It is not as if we were old friends.”
He and Zaneta were, without doubt, intimate friends. Sonya felt a pang of jealousy—a feeling she’d never expected to feel where her twin was concerned. Did Paul Poiret look at Sonya and see a used-up married woman, devoid of sensuality? Whereas Zaneta—what was Zaneta like?
Was Zaneta in love with this Paul Poiret? He was so full of himself, so worldly and charming—so willing, it would seem, to betray her.
Resentfully, Sonya licked the last bit of chocolate off her spoon. What if she, and not Zaneta, had been the baby plucked out of the crib that day? She tried to imagine a completely different life for herself.
And then Paul reached across the table and took her hand in his. “Such lovely, long-fingered hands!”
She looked down at his hand caressing hers. His thick-fingered, strong-looking hands. Without fuss, she slid her hand out from under his and touched her hair. “I’m very tired,” she said.
“Of course, madame,” he said. He signaled the waiter for the check.
As Paul helped her get into her coat, he told her that he would be hard pressed to have his creation for Pavlova ready on time for Sonya’s departure. He had some silk Shantung in mind. Perhaps Sonya would advise him as to the appropriateness of the color for the dancer’s complexion.
“Tomorrow, of course—yes,” she told him.
“But I will have to begin tonight.”
The air outside was bracing. “Although my skills are modest, Monsieur Poiret, I am dressmaker enough to know that one can’t see colors accurately by lamplight.”
“I have special lights,” he said. “An entire bank of mercury-vapor lamps. Have they not come yet to Saint Petersburg? Night work is a necessity for fashion designers here. We must be ready to respond, at all hours, to the urgent whims of the ladies.”
