“And your wife?”
“Shehad neither excuse nor explanation.”
“Is that her?” Rosalyn asked as she looked at a photo of a striking blond woman holding a baby.
He nodded. “Naomi.”
“She’s very beautiful,” she said.
“She is.” A muscle worked in his jaw as he looked at it. “I keep that photograph for Laurent.”
“How did you two meet?”
Jérôme sighed, relaxed into the sofa, and put his feet up on a low table. “It could not have been more of a cliché. We met in Paris, at Shakespeare and Company. Have you heard of it?”
“The famous bookstore?”
“The very one. It’s an iconic place, especially for those of us with a love of English literature. With Notre-Dame visible out the window, no less. The store had this friendly black dog that would greet the customers, and a huge sign saying: ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.’”
“And did you think Naomi was an angel in disguise?”
“I blush to say it now, but at the time I did,” he said with a wry smile. “She had fallen asleep on one of the cots—the store has these cots left over from when exhausted students needed to nap—and she was lying there with a book of Yeats’s poetry splayed open on her chest. She was a vision, her hair strewn out behind her....”
“That’s very romantic.”
Jérôme gave a bitter laugh. “Are you familiar with Yeats? He’s one of my favorite poets. ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ It was only much laterthat Naomi confessed to me that she wasn’t a poetry lover after all. She simply wanted to nap and had chosen the book by chance.”
“Well, she’s resourceful, at least.”
“She was that. The worst of it? She was napping because she’d been up all night drinking and dancing in a discotheque.”
“That’s hardly a crime,” Rosalyn said.
“I suppose. But I thought she loved Yeats.”
“At least the beauty wasn’t a lie.”
“Amazing how little that can matter, over time. Don’t get me wrong. She isn’t a bad person. We were both at fault—I thought Naomi was a beautiful poetry lover, and she thought I was a Parisian English professor. Turns out, we were both wrong. Cochet, as you may have noticed, isn’t Paris. Naomi wasn’t cut out for village life.”
“That’s no excuse for running off with your brother.” Rosalyn put her hand to her mouth, as though she could get the words back. “I’m sorry, again. That was over the line.”
“It’s the truth, though. Turns out, she was...déloyale. Is it ‘disloyal,’ in English?”
Rosalyn nodded.
“And it wasn’t just that Naomi didn’t like poetry—she didn’t even like toread. We had almost nothing in common, except Laurent. He came along quickly. Otherwise we would have broken up long before.”
“He’s a charmer.”
“He’s my everything. It breaks my heart to see him miss his mother, despite everything.”
“I missed my father after he left, even though he didn’t deserve it.” Rosalyn stared into the fire, remembering running after her father’s car as he drove away; she had screamed and cried, begging him not to leave. The image was so vivid, she sometimes wondered if shehad seen the scene in a movie and superimposed it over her own memory. After that, their only contact was an annual birthday card, holding a ten- or twenty-dollar bill. She hoarded the money in a jar on her bookshelf, imagining taking him out to lunch the next time she saw him, impressing him with how grown-up she had become. But he never visited. Dash had managed to track him down and flown him in for their wedding; she used the opportunity to give him his money back. It was the last time she saw him.
“So, Naomi moved back to Paris?” she asked.
“Last I heard, Berlin. She’s living with a fashion designer there. She shows up when she feels like it.”
“She looks like she’s a lot of work.”
