It took a moment to adjust her eyes to the garnet light of the Athenée lobby. New Yorkers loved foreign names for hotels and restaurants, she thought. The elevator mirror reflected circles under her eyes. The elevator boy with the black eyes in a dark-red monkey suit had ideas but didn't dare. In the corridor her high heels sank noiselessly in the thick blue carpet with the giant curled design. At a mahogany door she paused, listening for voices, before pushing a grey suede forefinger on the button.
An exasperated "Entréz!" penetrated the door. She opened it and walked through a narrow hall. Below three-quarter-drawn shades apricot light screened through a gauze onto a stagnant haze of tuberose scent and cigarette smoke in an almond-green room. Behind a barricade of green, yellow, and white bulbous and angular bottles and on the Empire arabesque of an old-gold brocade chaise longue lay Simone, flat as a fish, in black satin pajamas. Her triangular face, pale as the inside of a lemon rind, was turned expectantly, its lips a scarlet gash, its eyes narrowed in antagonism at an intruder.
An ink blob of a man, in a chair at her feet, bent toward Simone, and Lucy wondered whether it was a doctor. Then he rose and turned and it was Jacques.
Through the hazy vision of last night's bella donna Simone saw it was the girl who had been with Paul at the Chennonceaux and whom she had invited, but was it for today?
"Come in, come in, how pleasant of you to call. Do sit down." Lucy obeyed as a gilded French clock, between the wilting tuberoses and a small Buddha on the mantelpiece, chimed only four, only four, only four.
"I guess I'm too early."
"Not at all. What will you have? There is cr&me de menthe, gin, Scotch, Pernod?"
"No, thank you, I just got up."
The laconic words charged the antennae of Simone's nerves with a resurgence of the despair which an hour of wrangling with Jacques had lulled. Was it not Paul who had made bed irresistible? How vicious to come from him here. How stupid one had been to believe his words meant he would be waiting for her at the hotel when it had been a message to this méchante one.
A scratch of mouth parted, as if slashed in a crime of passion, and amber eyes widened to observe the insensitive creature in cloudy greys, a cocotte's effect to accentuate youth so prized by men. If youth was what Paul wished—Contract or no contract she would
