The Affair Page 3

  “It’s okay, Mom. The stupid thing is I love him. He’s a good husband and a wonderful father and we love each other. At least I think he loves me too. He says so. He’s upside down at the moment. It’s like he forgot he was married, and now he’s up to his ears in the affair and the press is all over him because they’re both so well known. I know it’s wrong, but people do that here. They have mistresses and affairs, and women do it too. Usually, they’re disenchanted with their marriages. He says he isn’t. He just couldn’t resist her. Nicolas is very clear that he doesn’t want to leave me for her.”

  “Do you want to leave him?” Rose asked. She wondered if she should. She didn’t like the situation, and “confused” was a poor excuse for prolonging the affair. He was indulging himself and hurting Nadia while he did.

  “I don’t know,” she said cautiously. “I don’t want to lose him or give up on our marriage, but I’m not going to hang around while he has an affair with someone else. I’m not so much shocked as hurt. I was furious at first. Now I’m just sad about it. Some of my friends here have been in this situation. Most of the time, they don’t get divorced. Some of my women friends have had affairs too. They say it keeps their marriage ‘fresh.’ Anyway, that doesn’t apply here.” There was nothing fresh about the situation. Nadia sounded wilted and depressed, understandably.

  “Do your daughters know?” Rose asked her.

  “Not yet. But someone will tell Sylvie at school sooner or later. I’m sure their parents all know. Nicolas is famous in France. And it’s all over the internet.”

  “Which means he needs to be that much more circumspect. He can’t go around having affairs with starlets and expect you to live with that and stick around,” Rose said angrily.

  “He feels terrible about it,” Nadia said protectively. She almost felt sorry for him, except that she was so miserable herself. She wanted to hate him for it but she didn’t. She just wanted the affair to be over and to have their happy life back. She didn’t see now how that could happen. And he hadn’t given up Pascale, despite their tearful discussions about it.

  “Is he going to get out of it?” Rose asked, angrier by the minute. Nadia didn’t deserve this. She was such a loving wife to him, and he had been loving to her too. What was he thinking?

  “He says he will get out of it, but he wants to do it carefully, so he doesn’t make an even bigger fuss in the press about a breakup.” It sounded like an excuse to Rose, but she didn’t say it to her daughter, to avoid upsetting her more.

  “Do you want to come home with Sylvie and Laure for a while?” Rose suggested. Getting away sounded like a good idea to her. But “home” was no longer home to Nadia. Paris was.

  “No. There would be even more talk then. The press would say we’re getting divorced. This is bad enough. I’m just trying to keep below the radar and avoid the photographers when I go out. I’ve told the girls it’s because their father’s movie is such a big hit.”

  “Why don’t I come over to see you? I can come for a weekend,” Rose offered.

  “Are you going to put Pascale on the cover?” Nadia asked, thinking about Mode Magazine.

  “Not if I can avoid it,” Rose said. For the first time, she was letting her personal interests come before those of the magazine. “I can’t hold back the tide forever if this becomes a huge story and lasts, but I’ll do what I can to discourage it. The stylist who suggested it was pushing hard. Let’s hope Nicolas gets out of this quickly, and then you can decide what you want to do about it. You can’t be married to a man who cheats on you every few years. Twice in eleven years is two times too many.” Nadia nodded, with tears in her eyes, grateful for her mother’s call. She’d been embarrassed to tell her, and she hadn’t known for long. Nadia was still reeling from the shock herself.

  “I feel so stupid. I’m the one he doesn’t want.” She started to cry then, and Rose felt as though someone was ripping her heart out of her chest as she listened. She wanted to strangle Nicolas for the meanness and stupidity of it, and the selfishness. It was all so public, in the tabloids and on the internet.

  “It sounds like he’s out of his mind at the moment,” Rose said, still trying to understand it, “which is no excuse. I know people who’ve survived worse things in their marriages, but this is bad enough. He needs to end it quickly, and get out of it, and then people will forget. But if he carries on with her, it’s going to be a huge mess.”

  “I know. He knows that too. He’s obsessed with her,” Nadia said. It was every wife’s worst nightmare, her husband in love with a gorgeous movie star twenty years younger than he was.

  “Exposing it at the Cannes Film Festival with all the press around was insanity.”

  “I guess he is insane at the moment,” Nadia said, but she sounded better and stronger while talking to her mother, and more confident again. There was something about her mother that always made her feel grounded. She had felt lost in the jungle alone without a compass since finding out about Pascale. Her mother was a beacon of light in the dark, and always had been, for her and her sisters. And her father had been too. He had been the perfect, equally solid male counterpoint to Rose, and a father they could always count on. They all missed him. He was conservative, but not unreasonably so.

  “I’ll figure out when I can come over,” Rose promised, and then had to hurry off to her next meeting. She was twenty minutes late, which never happened to her. But this was more important than meeting with the art department to talk about the look of the September cover and which photographer they wanted to use.

  She felt flustered thinking about her daughter, which was rare for her. She didn’t want to give her bad advice, or influence her about something as important as her marriage, but she wanted to throttle her son-in-law for what he’d done, and was still doing. And if Pascale was pregnant, as the press was insinuating, it would be even worse. She wondered if Nadia had heard that rumor too, but as down as she had sounded on the phone, Rose didn’t want to ask, especially if it wasn’t true. False rumors were the tabloids’ stock-in-trade. And they had a fearsome way of ferreting out racy tidbits, or were without conscience about inventing them, to spice up their headlines.

  Rose rushed out of her office for her meeting with the art department, and Jen handed her a fresh stack of phone messages.

  “Legal wants you to call them about a recall of a beauty product in the last issue. They need you to sign off on it.”

  “I’ll call them when I get back,” she said smoothly, trying to force her mind to the present and not think of Nicolas’s affair, but it was all she could think of, and how sad and defeated Nadia had sounded on the phone.

  “Everything okay?” Jen asked, looking at her carefully. Rose looked stressed and harried, unusually so.

  “Fine.” Rose smiled smoothly, in just the way she was famous for. The world could be coming to an end, and Rose always remained calm and unruffled, or appeared to, but she didn’t feel that way now. She never let on when she was upset, and thought it undignified to do so. But she felt like a lioness whose cub had been injured by a hunter. She was out for blood, Jen could see it in her eyes. “I’ll be back in a while.” The meeting lasted longer than expected, followed by a slew of phone calls, and others she had to return. It was eight o’clock by the time she got home, and eight-thirty when she called Athena in L.A. She sounded as she always did, happy and relaxed, when she answered the phone. It was five-thirty in the afternoon for her, her show had gone well, she was going to one of her restaurants shortly, and then she was going to meet Joe later to go out to dinner. They had a casual life, she lived in clogs and her chef’s jacket all the time, and appeared on TV in exercise clothes sometimes. She had never aspired to her mother’s elegant, fashionable style. She was heavier than her sisters, and had never worried about her looks and weight the way they did. She was almost as tall as her mother and had a full, lush Rubenesque body, which
Joe said he loved just the way it was. She had wanted to be a chef since high school. She loved food and the art of preparing it. Her theories were unorthodox and her recipes easy to follow, which had made her popular with the masses, first in California, and then all over the country.

  Athena had never been the student her sisters were, she had her own tempo and lifestyle. She had studied cooking in Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and Milan, and became fascinated by vegan and vegetarian cuisine. Her cookbooks were a huge success, her TV show even more so. Her fans felt as though they had a personal relationship with her because she was so personable, and they wrote her adoring letters.

  There were half a dozen dogs barking in the background when Rose called her. Two of them were rescue dogs, two were strays, and she had two others she’d gotten from breeders. Most of them were mixes, and one of them was huge.

  “Stanley, get your feet off the kitchen counter,” she said in a firm voice as she answered the phone, and was pleased to hear her mother at the other end. They chatted for a few minutes about what she was doing, and she said she was going to be taping a show in Japan at some point. Rose told her about Nadia then, and Nicolas’s affair with Pascale Solon.

  “Wow, that’s awful. Is she going to leave him?” Athena sounded worried about her.

  “She hasn’t figured it out yet. I think she’s in shock, and he’s still involved with Pascale.”

  “How terrible for her….Stanley, what did I just say?” Talking to Athena was always a three- or four-way conversation, which included several dogs, workmen, and people delivering groceries. Rose could never understand how four women could be so different. Athena’s world had nothing in common with her sisters’. They didn’t even like dogs. But Olivia, Nadia, and Venetia all had children, and Athena didn’t want any. At forty-three, she was perfectly content with her life as it was with Joe. He was a respected chef too, although he was less well known than Athena. She always seemed larger than life, and she lived in friendly chaos. “Maybe she should come here with her girls for a visit. I’ll suggest it to her. What’s happening with them this summer? Will he be with the girlfriend or with her?” Just asking the question turned her stomach. Athena didn’t like the situation either.

  “I didn’t even think to ask,” Rose admitted. “The whole story is so unnerving, and I feel so sorry for her.”

  “Maybe they should try couples therapy. We did a few years ago, when we started fighting about the restaurants, mine and Joe’s. The therapy really helped.”

  Her mother smiled at the idea. “Nicolas is French. Can you really see him going to therapy? Men don’t rush into that in France, or even here sometimes.”

  “Yeah, but I can see it if he wants to save his marriage.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Rose said. “He’s not promising to break it off anytime soon. He wants Nadia to give him time.”

  “For what? So he can continue sleeping with the girl? I don’t think so. She ought to lower the boom on him now, and see what he does.” It was a simple, direct approach. Rose didn’t disagree with her, but it didn’t sound like Nadia was willing to do that. For now, with Nadia still off balance, he had the upper hand. She hoped that would change soon.

  “I’ll text her later. I don’t have time now. I’ll tell her to come out this summer. It would be fun, for me too.” Rose was touched by Athena’s and Venetia’s reactions of unequivocal support for their sister. Particularly Athena, whom her sisters referred to as Mother Earth.

  * * *

  —

  Olivia was more vehement when Rose got hold of her after Athena. They had just finished dinner at nine o’clock. She and Harley both worked long days on their court cases.

  “She should divorce him. Immediately,” Olivia said without hesitating. She was the toughest and most hardline conservative of the four sisters. She saw everything in black-and-white, according to the letter of the law. They had a fourteen-year-old son, Will, who was a brilliant student, and Olivia treated him like an adult, and always had. It had seemed odd to Rose when he was younger. “She needs to contact a lawyer, now. I don’t know if they have no-fault divorce in France, but she needs to take action, protect her separate property, and go after him for whatever she can. Does he own any other property in France? Do they own the château jointly?”

  “I doubt it. He inherited it when his parents died.” As an only child, he had inherited everything. “I think inherited wealth is separate,” Rose said.

  “Well, she needs to divorce him as soon as possible. She has her own income and he needs to be accountable for his actions.” Everything she said made sense, but Rose could tell from talking to Nadia that she was too stunned to make a move, although Rose was sure she would eventually. The situation was untenable. Nicolas was having his cake and eating it, while Nadia’s heart was breaking.

  Olivia reported the conversation to her husband, Harley, after she hung up, and he agreed with her. He was just as tough with his opinions as Olivia. They were a good match and had an excellent marriage. Their careers were similar and complemented each other, and they agreed about most things, even about their son. It had given Olivia a somewhat skewed view of the world. She assumed that most “normal” people were as conservative as they were, or should be. She was rarely tolerant of people with a different point of view. It worried her mother at times that she had such a narrow perspective.

  Being married to a much older man had suited her, from the moment she and Harley had fallen in love while she was in law school. He had been married and widowed years before, and never remarried until he met Olivia. He was inordinately proud of Will, their only son, who was a straight-A student. They shared their opinions with him liberally, and he didn’t always agree with them, but rarely said so. He knew what was expected in their home, and who you had to be to get along. His parents would never have tolerated it if he voiced his differences, so he didn’t. Rose worried about him and thought him almost too compliant and accommodating, and couldn’t help wondering at times if that was who he really was, or if it was a persona he pretended to be in order to please his parents. They made it very clear that no straying off their path would be acceptable to them. Olivia was almost more rigid in her ideas than her husband, despite the difference in their ages.

  * * *

  —

  Rose lost the battle for the cover, and conceded regretfully, in June. She called Nadia as soon as it was decided, to warn her. She still hated the idea of putting Pascale Solon on the cover of the September issue. It tacitly endorsed behavior which she found abhorrent. Others were caught up in the romance of it, swayed by how in love they seemed, and how physically attractive Pascale and Nicolas both were. Rose almost wondered, if they had been less beautiful, would people have been less tolerant of the fact that he was still married, living with his wife, had cheated on her, and fallen “madly in love” with someone else?

  Charity Bennett almost crowed over her victory when Rose backed down and gave in about the cover. Pascale was the girl of the hour, and they were the “It” couple. Their love affair was out in the open by then, and Nicolas wasn’t even publicly apologetic about it. He was more so to his wife, privately, and insisted he didn’t want to lose her, which enraged his mother-in-law, given his flagrant behavior and the pain it was causing Nadia. It was as though he and his fans had forgotten that he was married, Nadia existed, he had children, and that his passion for Pascale was forbidden fruit. He was living out every man’s fantasy, to have a beautiful young woman at his feet and a wife to meet his more practical needs at home.

  Within days of their deciding to put Pascale on the cover of the September issue, Pascale admitted publicly that she was pregnant. It upset Rose even more that Nadia had to deal with that too. Nadia made no comments to the press, and was unavailable to discuss it with anyone. As soon as the news was out, Rose made a reservation to go to Paris and spend the weekend with her daughte
r. She couldn’t think of anything else to do except be there for her. And Rose also felt that it made the magazine seem less than respectable to endorse their affair with a cover story.

  * * *

  —

  Rose had had no contact with Nicolas since the affair became obvious at the Cannes Film Festival, and she hoped she wouldn’t see him in Paris, although she knew from Nadia that he still spent time at the house, stayed there frequently, and hadn’t moved out. He visited his daughters daily. They knew nothing about Pascale and the baby, which seemed miraculous to Rose, given the furor in the press. But at seven and ten, they were sheltered and knew nothing of their father’s behavior, and their mother didn’t tell them, and was keeping them off the internet.

  Rose was planning to urge her daughter to consult a lawyer as soon as possible. Rose had never felt as conflicted as she did now in her role as editor of Mode Magazine, delivering what their readers wanted, satisfying their curiosity about two people so publicly enamored with each other. She knew that contributing to the feeding frenzy would hurt her daughter deeply and make her feel even more betrayed.

  Rose had a heavy heart as she boarded the Air France flight on Friday night after she left the office. All of Nadia’s sisters were up in arms on her behalf. They didn’t criticize their mother for the upcoming cover and interview with Pascale that would appear in Mode, but they hated Nicolas for what he was doing to their sister, and they closed ranks around her to support her.

  Rose had said nothing at the magazine about her personal connection to Nicolas Bateau, and no one except her assistant, Jen Morgan, remembered. Others vaguely recalled that she had a married daughter who lived in France, but not for an instant did they suspect the heartbreak it was for Rose.

  Rose was quiet and pensive as the plane landed early the next morning at Charles de Gaulle airport. She wanted to see her daughter now and comfort her. She had left her role as editor of the world’s most influential fashion magazine behind in New York. All she was in Paris was Nadia’s mother, and she hoped her presence would be enough to give her daughter strength to face the nightmare she was living and the grief that lay ahead.