Даниэла Стил - The Affair

“He hasn’t even left yet,” Nadia said quietly.

“That’s my point. You should have thrown his ass out after Cannes. What are you waiting for, Nadia? She’s having a baby, and it sounds like he’s almost living with her.”

“I’m just not ready to take such huge steps. I need time to get used to this too.”

“Do you want him back?” Athena interrupted both of them. It was probably the most important question of all.

“I haven’t decided. He did a stupid thing once years ago. It was just a one-night stand. I was pregnant. I didn’t want to end our marriage, and he felt terrible about it. I stayed and he never did it again. This is different. He’s up to his neck in it. At first I just thought it was a horrible indiscretion, a moment of madness, and we could recover from it. I’m not so sure of that now. In fact, I’m sure we can’t. The whole world knows about it. The baby will tie him to Pascale forever, even if they don’t stay together. And even after spending half my life here, I don’t think I’m French enough to live with this and pick up where we left off. It’s just not possible. I loved him so much. Now I’m not sure what I think, or how I feel. It’s like there’s too much noise in my head to know what I want.”

“You can’t love a man who has made a laughingstock of you,” Olivia said coldly. “That’s pathetic. You should hate him by now.”

“I don’t,” Nadia said honestly. She was a gentle soul, and not given to extreme reactions like her sister.

“I’d leave Harley in a hot minute if he cheated on me.” They could see she meant it. Olivia took no shit from anyone. She was a rigid, uncompromising person, even in matters of the heart. She was a colder person than her younger sister.

“I’m not sure what I’d do,” Venetia said thoughtfully, as they turned back on the path and headed toward the château. Of all of them, she seemed to have the best marriage, although Nicolas and Nadia had seemed close to it. “I love Ben so much, it would break my heart. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to divorce him, maybe for the kids’ sake, but I don’t think I’d ever feel the same about him again.” She was trying to imagine herself in Nadia’s shoes, and had a hard time doing it. At the thought of it, a shiver ran down her spine. She hoped Ben would never cheat on her, and, in spite of all her exuberance and joie de vivre, she thought it would kill her and she’d go dead inside. The idea of losing the life and man she loved was unbearable, just as it was for Nadia now. Nadia still felt dazed and numb. She felt as though she’d been underwater since the Festival in Cannes. “What would you do?” Nadia asked Athena, who had just picked a wildflower from the side of the path and was twirling it in her hand.

“That’s what my carving knives are for. That’s why I always keep them with me.” She had a professional set in a fancy case that was her prize possession. Her sisters laughed at her response, and then she grew serious.

“I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Joe cheated on me and knocked someone up. We’re not married, but we might as well be. He’s not just my lover, he’s my best friend. We’re partners in everything we do, we give each other advice. We insist that we’re separate people because we’re not married, but I’m not sure that’s true. We’re so much in harmony with each other, sometimes we say the same thing at the same time, or come to the same conclusion about a project. Sometimes we even show up dressed alike, which is really weird. We love the same food, same people. It all works. I think if I found out he was cheating on me, it would destroy me. And the bitch of it is I love Nicolas. He’s part of our family now. I’d love to sit down with him and ask him what the fuck he’s doing. It sounds like he went nuts for a minute, and now he’s stuck with the massive consequences of it.”

“He feels terrible about it,” Nadia said, grateful for Athena’s more temperate point of view.

“He should have thought of that before he got into bed with her,” Olivia said harshly. Her brief time as a judge hadn’t made her any softer. In fact, she had gotten noticeably tougher since she’d been on the bench. Harley was a hardline guy too. He was older and politically conservative. Nadia didn’t know what Olivia’s excuse was. She definitely made her younger sister feel like a total failure because she wasn’t being harder on Nicolas and didn’t feel ready to rush into a divorce. Nadia had never been an indecisive person, but this was the biggest decision she had ever had to face, and she wanted to do the right thing for herself and her daughters. Their mother was leaning more in Olivia’s direction, Nadia knew, although Rose was more compassionate for all concerned.

The three visitors went to their rooms to relax before dinner, since they were from different time zones and had only arrived that morning. Nadia went for a last swim with her girls, and had fun playing with them in the pool. They were just getting out of the pool when Nadia’s cellphone rang. It was Nicolas, asking to talk to Sylvie and Laure. He tried to talk to Nadia for a minute, but she handed the phone to Sylvie quickly, and walked away while they talked to their father. She was thinking of everything her sisters had said on their walk that afternoon.

They had dinner at the château that night, cooked by Athena, who made some delicious dishes all with vegetables. She even made a pizza for the girls with a crust made of cauliflower. Nadia roasted two chickens to add to the meal. She set a pretty table, with small vases of flowers that Sylvie and Laure had gathered for her. Before dinner, they watched the sunset from the terrace and shared a bottle of excellent Chateau Margaux from Nicolas’s wine cellar.

“We’ll go to the beach tomorrow,” Nadia promised, looking around at her sisters. It felt so good to be together, and however different their lives, their lifestyles, and their opinions, there was a bond that kept them close. They were bound by blood and history, their love for each other and their parents. She realized now how much all of that mattered. Their parents’ strong, loving marriage between two kind, intelligent, honorable people had served as a role model for them. Each of them had close, loving marriages and relationships, even Athena without the benefit of paperwork, which seemed insignificant to her. Nicolas’s parents had had a long marriage, but he had admitted to Nadia that early disappointments in their union and differences between them had led his father to have several mistresses and many affairs. His mother had turned a blind eye to it, as French women of their generation did, but she had never forgiven him for it. A chilly, polite, well-bred upper-class bitterness had set in. Nicolas said that he could always feel it when he was with them, and his mother hadn’t been a happy woman. Now he had created the same scenario, and provided an insurmountable obstacle for them that Nadia didn’t feel able to overcome.

“Papa said he misses us,” Laure had said when she handed her mother the phone after talking to her father.

“That’s nice,” Nadia said, forcing herself not to think about him, or who he was with. She didn’t want to spoil her four days with her sisters by thinking too much about him.

Their first dinner together turned out to be a festive affair, with Venetia reminding them of some of their most outrageous adventures as young girls. Athena sneaking out of the house to go to parties their parents wouldn’t give her permission to attend, so she took matters into her own hands, Venetia getting drunk at senior prom, and the others helping to get her into the house, and running smack into their father in the kitchen at three a.m. He had carried her upstairs and put her to bed. Olivia had accidentally started a fire in her bedroom once, while hiding an ashtray with a cigarette in it under her sheets, and then forgetting it. Nadia dyed her hair blue. They talked about their good and bad boyfriends, their best friends at school, the parties they went to, and the ones they gave when their parents went away for a weekend and left them in the care of their trusted housekeeper, who let them get away with murder and was deaf anyway. They hadn’t done anything truly terrible, but had gotten up to plenty of mischief, and were partners in crime.