Read Online The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd - Free Book Online

reader,” I told her.
    “A collector. He has Simone de Beauvoir and Colette. A first edition of The Second Sex . Yes.” She nodded to herself, surveying, blinking, then, “It’s a nice apartment,” but there was such querying force in this too that I could easily take it to mean she didn’t care for the apartment at all or wanted, powerfully, to be elsewhere. Suddenly so did I.
    “Here I am.” Hope swanned in, hair swept up without one dissenting strand, at once full and contained, lipstick on. She wore a man’s white dress shirt, blue trouser pants, and a silk ivory scarf tied around her neck.
    “Leo?” she called.
    He emerged from the bedroom. “Sorry, I was—”
    “Indisposed,” his mother supplied.
    “Right.”
    “Celia, welcome.”
    I stood.
    “You met my children.”
    “Yes,” I said softly. “A pleasure.”
    “Come, everyone, sit. Let’s eat. Let’s get to know Celia. She’s been very generous to me, allowed me to stay at George’s.”
    It was an overstatement, it embarrassed me. Perhaps that was the point of the invite.
    A stream of commentary accompanied Hope’s movements as she poured tea, offered cream, sugar, honey. “Leo has always loved honey.” The scones were almond and cinnamon, respectively. “And Danielle wouldn’t eat anything but bread as a baby.” Hope did not rush. She’d done this before and did it commandingly. I wanted to ask after the gardenias—I still could not pinpoint their source—but I didn’t, relaxing instead into Hope’s patter. There was song in her voice and pleasure—the pleasure of being a hostess, mother, of demonstrating this. The marks on her neck were covered by the scarf and may have healed. Whatever their state, this was meant to be a new day. Her skin was unblemished; her eyes were clear. “The tea is called Thé de Fête, party tea. We bought it in Paris at Mariage Frères, this wonderful teahouse in the Marais. You have to go if you haven’t been.”
    “I haven’t.”
    “I took the kids when we’d go every year, but now they’re selling tea all over the world and it’s lost its specialness a little, hasn’t it?”
    Danielle nodded at her mother and said vacantly, “Globalization.”
    “Or progress,” said Leo, without contention. “I mean they have a good thing.”
    “Yes, but that doesn’t mean they should just give it away,” said Danielle, blinking, “to anyone.”
    “They’re not giving anything away,” said Leo calmly.
    “We haven’t been to Paris this year. The kids’ schedules have been harder. Danielle’s finishing her senior year. Leo has a job.”
    “We were there last year,” Danielle said. “I studied there. At the Sorbonne. All of us were there … All four of us.”
    Hope’s back stiffened. “Yes, that’s right. Well, Celia, you’ll have to tell me if you like the tea—it’s got a lot of vanilla in it. Can you smell it?”
    Here was my chance. “Yes, now that it’s in the cup. It smells delicious, but I keep smelling gardenia. That can’t be the tea.”
    “Oh, no, or yes, it’s in the bedroom. An adorable plant with what? Two blossoms?”
    “Three,” said Danielle.
    “A gift from my children.”
    “Oh, how nice.”
    “What a scent,” Hope marveled. She sipped her tea. “I grew up in North Carolina and under my bedroom window there was this old chicken coop that had been claimed by what I still swear was this wild growth of gardenias.”
    “You still swear?” Danielle asked.
    “Oh, well, I’ve since been told by someone who claims to be an authority on these things that gardenias don’t grow wild in North Carolina, that it couldn’t have been gardenias or that it’s unlikely.”
    Danielle put her teacup down. “But you’ve always told us it was gardenias, Mother. I mean, that’s why we bought the plant for you. To remind you.” Color climbed up Danielle’s cheeks; her brow broke into lines.
    “Well, it might have been. That was the scent or that’s what I recall. It