Даниэла Стил - The Affair

“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.”