Gen Teensybang Fic! Paris Today, Tomorrow the World
Title: Paris Today, Tomorrow the World
Author: brutti_ma_buoni
Pairing (if any): Jared/Gen
Rating: NC17
Genre: historical AU
Word Count (approximate): 6700
Contents (warnings and kinks both apply): bohemian setting, references to other partners and to alternative lifestyles, actual body hair before waxing; interwar setting with references to anti-semitism and to the early rise of Nazism in Germany
Summary: Jared's a raw youth when he first visits Paris. He is drawn into the ambit of Genevieve and her bohemian Parisian world, enchanted by her for a summer. But he has to move on, and Gen won't. As years pass, events push their lives together once more. But is what they once had still there? And can they keep it, as life and the world changes for them both?
Art And because this is a bang, there is Art too - go have a look at the marvellousness that quickreaver came up with: because it is full of amazing [the COLOURS! the CLOTHES!]
He sees her first from afar. She would be hard to miss, though she's the smallest person in the room. Her personality, though, it's huge. The laughter produced by her small frame is gusting, overpowering. Head-turning. The men around her laugh into their beards, their wine glasses, their brushes, their cigarette-holders.
Also, of course, she's naked.
That part is hard to overlook. Jared doesn't.
Jensen nudges him, hard, in the ribs. "Friend, you don't want to look like the ingenu you are, you might want to put your tongue back in your mouth."
"Like you weren't as bad yesterday," says Jared, cheerfully. Yesterday the naked one was a man, vaguely Algerian, strung muscle and lean lines, and Jensen had choked hard enough that heads had turned. At Chez Monique, heads turning equates to a fat Rheims matron on a chair, screaming her head off at some dire social faux pas. Pretty major.
At Chez Monique, anything goes. Everybody knows. There's a song about it, all jazz trumpet and strings, Josephine Baker singing her husky heart out, recorded for posterity. And sure, Baker has moved on, and Chez Monique isn't the topmost top of the daring world of Paris today. But that's all to the good when you're aged 22 and American, regarded in Paris as an interesting combination of hick and open bank draft. Jared has been turned away from too many of the hottest nightclubs, laughed at by doormen. "Come back when you're older, kid," they say, or simply, "Va t'en, enfant," which Jared shouldn’t understand maybe but does.
He's done better, since Jensen dusted him down after one such episode and decided to adopt Jared as an amusement in his bohemian life. But it's still a life on the edge of acceptance. Jared knows this. A cravat and an unbuttoned vest do not a hot Paris clubman make. Chez Monique, on the downward slope from utter chic, is willing to accept him. And that pleases him.
"Want to meet her?" Jensen asks, sun-bright and confident. "I can't promise she's for sale, but the models will usually talk, maybe drink, if you like, and she's a regular."
Jensen, last night, talked, then drank, then fucked, with Younes, and might struggle to recognise him today if he's fully clothed. Jared didn't blush over that, being now accustomed to Jensen's ways. But the suggestion he talk with this woman makes him flood with embarrassment. She's perfect. He's too- too everything. Too uncouth. Too New World. Too large and clumsy. Too shy, come to that.
Jensen is walking over to the model's podium. He elbows his way through the grumbling sketchers. (They aren't much, at Chez Monique. "Figurative," said Jensen, dismissively, the first time he brought Jared here. "And if they cared about being good, they'd work somewhere with decent light. Mostly just want to pretend to be living la vie bohème and ogling naked asses till their allowances run out." Jared had blushed. He has plenty of his allowance remaining. And always will have, so long as he puts in appearances at his father's bank in good enough form to pass muster.)
"Hé, cherie," Jensen says, cheerfully, "When you're done, you want to have a drink with my friend? He's shy, but he's sweet. And rich. And he loves Paris, so it's time I passed him on to someone who isn’t such a cynical old bastard, non?"
Her laugh is booming, so strong her whole body shakes. "Oh, bébé, you trust me? He looks like such a little rabbit, all eyes and fluff."
The good news Jared takes from this is that the woman has been looking at him. The bad, that like everyone else in Paris, she can't see who he could be, who he longs to be. Just his innocent now-self.
"Cruel," Jensen says, pressing firmly on the shoulder of one of the half-assed artists, who is trying to object to his interference in the composition, the light, the mood of great art… "Shush, you, Evan. You were new here once too, and cuntstruck for some gal you just laid eyes on. Let my friend have his first experience of le vrai Paris, hmm?"
The woman shouts, "You, there, American boy?"
"Me?" says Jared, and it squeaks, so that the unkinder artists laugh.
"You," she says, "I want a kir royale, for now, and the rest of the bottle for later, and I'll join you to drink it in twenty, yes? I promised Jean-Luc he could paint my ass tonight, and he's the slowest in the world."
Jared nods, and signals to the barman, who has been watching. He doesn't know what the hell a kir royale is, but he can afford it, for sure. He can afford anything in Europe. It's one of the many things he's learning on this trip. Intoxicating.
Jensen's frowning. "Man, he'll use the Veuve or something, make sure he goes with house if you're buying champagne." Jared shrugs, caring not one jot.
"Yeah, okay," says Jensen, in response. "I'm gonna leave you to it, stud. Don't bankrupt tonight, though, you hear? Rent's due Thursday."
Jared nods, absently, as sparkling purple liquid is conveyed to the model, who tips her chin to him and drinks half of it right off. Then belches, and laughs again. He can feel his own mouth is smiling. Dammit, he's not going to not drink. The rest of the bottle of - Jensen was right - Veuve Clicquot is at his elbow, chilled and perfect. He commands another glass, and sips, more gently than she did. And watches.
Her pose is anything but coy. She sits, arms spread along the back of the ratty couch, her head resting on one crooked arm. Her body is not foursquare, a little twisted to one side, forming angles and shadows that the artists are relishing. Shallow breasts sit high, pulled up by her pectorals in this posture. Her thighs are parted, but he is sitting to her coy side, all blank wall of thigh. Men across from him will be sketching her sex, dark hair and pink flesh. Jared wants to move, to ogle. Instead, he drink slow, controlled sips, and tries not to imagine what he can't see.
Eventually, she stands up, and pulls on a robe. It's thin silk, watered and rippled in a pale rainbow of colours. He can see her hair through it, at armpit and between her thighs. "Hi," she says, non-sexual and cheerful, as she hops onto the barstool beside him. "You like watching?"
He blushes, "I like watching you?" He's hard, of course, but he thinks she'd be disappointed if he weren't. And he doesn't like watching in general. Jensen's taken him to places where sex is a part of every evening, naked bodies writhing in imperfectly-hidden back rooms. He's looked, a few times, but he's never been tempted to join the slack-mouthed troupe surrounding each glimpse into something private.
He pours her wine, and she smiles across the rim of her glass. "You're very sweet," she says. "I'm Genevieve." She doesn't pronounce it like the French would. Sounds American, almost, but she was bavarding with the painters like Pigalle is her backyard.
"Jared," he says, and wonders. "I'm from the United States."
"Oh honey," she says. "As if I couldn't tell."
*
Two hours, Jared's champagne buys him, and by the end, he knows Genevieve better than anyone else in Paris, or so it feels for the night. She's Italian-American, sort of, "But he met my mother here, and stayed. Mama was a Russian Jewess, and her family fled here right after the first Revolution, the year before I was born-" That confuses Jared, but eventually he understands there was stuff in Russia before the War, stuff he's never registered before, God, so much history that never seemed to matter. Genevieve is twenty-two, just his junior, and, "If I'm anything, I'm Parisienne."
In turn, he tries to explain his position. "-two years at our headquarters. Which is in Manhattan. But-"
"You don't exactly look like an international financier, sweetheart," says Gen, and laughs, loud and hearty, which somehow draws the sting of this patronising statement.
"I- I know. I guess I'm here for, uh, polish?"
"Wow, bébé, they didn't mean for you to end up here, huh?" Gen waves a hand around at Chez Monique, at Pigalle, at the whole world Jared found here. The one against whose windows he had pressed his naïve little tourist nose. The world that Jensen opened up for him.
But Gen's getting the wrong idea. "Uh, no? I think maybe this a little? My dad was in Europe in the nineties, and uh, I think he had some adventures. I'm not here just to look at galleries and whatever. Buy clothes? I'm-"
"Polishing," she says, smiling at the word. "Just exactly which parts of you are included in the polish? Because, babe, I'll polish your anything you please."
Wow. That's the most blatant proposition Jared's ever- Oh, wait, he should be saying yes, right? “Anything you want,” he says, blushing.
“I want you,” she says, “But I’m assuming you knew that. Bring the champagne.” And she leaves the bar, still barefoot and dressed in her thin silky robe.
She walks upstairs. Chez Monique isn’t actually a brothel, so far as Jared knows. And, indeed, Genevieve takes him through doors marked STAFF ONLY, and into passages not designed for decadence and pleasure. Here there is bare brick, grey tile, rough murals unfinished as if the artist lost heart or went hungry. Up, and up, and she opens a double-locked door, and takes Jared into an apartment. “Home,” she says, and raises her still-held champagne glass. He’s only glad he remembered to bring the unfinished second bottle.
He has dreamed of this. A beautiful woman, naked for him in a romantic, desperate garret. Although the garret is furnished with style and luxury, and lacks drafty corners and evidence of Great Art undertaken. It is just a space, for living. The view, so high up in the building, should be meaningful, but it is not. Just another street, just another row of shops and apartments.
There is no time for disappointment, though, as Genevieve places her glass on an occasional table, switching on the coloured-glass lamp (Tiffany, maybe? Jared is struggling to focus), and lets the robe slide from her shoulders. Her pale buttocks glimmer in the soft light as she walks away from him, into a half-seen bedroom.
“Allons,” she says, and nothing more.
He’s not a virgin. Not at all, thank you. Three girls, and only one a whore, and Jared considers himself well versed, on the whole, within the boundaries of taste and discretion. He’s a gentleman, after all.
And yet. He stands in the doorway of her bedroom, paralysed. She wriggles onto the bed, still facing away, so that he can watch the perfect lines of her back smoothing into curves, and thighs, and shadows between and he wants. But however he is with sex, he is quite certain he is not Parisian enough for this mysterious goddess. She turns her head, in profile, dark eyes in pale face, unreadable.
“Lover,” she says, “I need a man, and I decided it was going to be you tonight. So stop fearing, and come to me.”
When Jensen asks him, which next day he most inevitably does, Jared can’t remember a particular which made this more than his past experiences. She isn’t a woman of tricks and mystery; but at the time, it is so much more than he knew before. The scent of her, perfume mixed with sweat, smoke, her own liquid response to his careful touch. The way her back arches, hard and desperate, the first time he brings her off. The way she smiles, half-laughing, at him after, and says, “I knew you could. You’re a good man, and you pay attention.” The care with which she smoothes on the French letter - his own half-distraction trying to recall the term the French use instead (“Capot anglais,” comes to him, sometime before dawn, and he almost laughs. Damn European rivalries). How she kneels across him, reaching to guide him home, and he feels his toes curling into the mattress with the effort of not coming then and there, and how she pats his chest, and says, “Good work,” before she starts to move, like she knows how close he is. How she tastes, when emboldened he asks if he may, and she spreads herself, neat black triangle not hiding open, wet flesh than meets his tongue with confirmation of how much she wants (needs?) him that night.
How, when it is very dark, and cold, and he is not laughing at national rivalries in the naming of rubber goods, he makes to find his clothes, and she says, “You need not leave, unless-“ So he stays. And she wakes him, late, with his cock hard in her mouth already, and the morning begins with one last, glorious act.
Jensen asks, also, “So, your one night of passion in Paris. How do you feel?”
And Jared says, “She told me to come back.” Jensen blinks hard at him, because this is not how l’amour usually works in this world, and Jared knows it.
(But so it is, in the morning, when Genevieve says, “You know where to find me. I hope you will return. Often.”
Jared says, “I will.” How could it be otherwise?)
*
To Jensen’s everlasting surprise, it appears that Genevieve has decided to take Jared as a lover, public and declared. Around Jared’s duties at the bank, which are far from onerous, he spends almost all his time at Chez Monique. He is hypnotised by her. Every sight of her, be it shoulder or hairline or feet or cunt, every single one makes his heart jump and his mouth curl. She always seems pleased to see him too, leaping into his arms before her patrons, kissing him deep and wet in public places, and always, always wanting to hear what he says, where he has visited, what his hopes are, what he has learned.
It is a while before he realises that Genevieve is the owner of Chez Monique. Jensen didn’t know it. Few of the patrons seem to, either, though she is largely unmolested and uninsulted on those nights when she chooses to be naked for her clientele. Mostly that is thanks to Isaac, the vast and rumbling gentleman who manages the front of house with style, charm and a strong hint of imminent violence should anyone offer less than perfect courtesy.
“Isaac raised me,” says Genevieve, one night, when Jared comments on the - to him - great mystery of their relationship, and her ownership of the club. “After my parents died, that is.”
Monique was her mother. Maria Feodorovna Volokov, once, but she took a new name for her Parisian life, when Danny Cortese decided she was his muse. They never married, which perhaps shocks Jared. But he conceals it. He is, after all, not married to Genevieve. It crosses his mind for the first time that he would perhaps like to be. That perhaps that is where this leads.
Monique died in the influenza; one among so many that only her closest family could mourn. Genevieve was barely thirteen. Danny lasted another two years, but heartbreak and ownership of an emporium notorious for alcohol and less legal substances are not factors conducive to a long life.
Gen tells him this one night, when the clocks are past three, and Isaac broke a man’s jaw for an attempt to lick Genevieve’s ankle. She is in a pensive mood, somehow. Unlike herself. She says, “I wonder how long we will live. I don’t feel like I have much time.” She has lived alone but for Isaac ever since she was fifteen. She was seventeen when the club became the epitome of fashionable Parisian addresses; twenty when it passed its peak. No wonder she feels ephemeral.
“But, you were a child,” Jared protests, once, when she talks about some deal with the authorities to ignore the supplies she has received of plum brandy from the east in ‘21, from desperate men fleeing yet more post-war revolutions, and paying their way with clear spirit and silence.
“I didn’t know that,” she says. “All I knew was here.” Her hand encompasses Chez Monique, Pigalle, Isaac, and very little more.
Jared comes to understand, in quick-slow spurts of information, that this most worldly of women is also utterly sheltered. That his life in New York, Harvard, his trip to Europe, even his elite Connecticut prep school, have taken him so, so far beyond her comprehension of the world.
She never leaves Paris. Rarely even strays from Pigalle, Montmartre, the shabby-glamorous world of the Bohemians. He speaks of the Louvre, and she nods. She went there for school. It is perhaps a mile away, maybe two miles. This is her home. She has never left it. And she doesn’t think this strange in the slightest, until he starts to talk about the wider world.
“The war,” she shrugs, when he eventually asks, “Well. It was bad, you know. Very bad shopping. But good business. So many soldiers on leave, they wanted quick service and hard liquor, and we gave it to them.”
“But you didn’t flee?” During that first retreat across the Marne in the autumn of 1914, when the Boche were so fast, so close to Paris. Or the spring push of ’18, when Jared remembers his father following the front line with a finger, and worried wrinkle of his brow. Padalecki, Kraznik has had a Paris office since 1909. His father must have wondered whether it was going the way of their ill-advised Vienna venture, a dead loss in the hands of the enemy from 1917, and profitless before that for the duration.
“No,” says Genevieve. “Mother said running once was plenty. And Father said this was home. So we stayed.”
Jared says, “But you could move on. This isn’t the entire world.” She laughs at him, and makes no response. He thinks, silently, of the bank branches, the great European expansion he is here eventually to support. Of London, and Berlin, and- No. Perhaps best not to think of that. He’s here, right now, to be polished, and Genevieve is a part of that.
It is an idyll, and like all the best idylls it will end. But the surest way to precipitate the end is to think about it.
So he lives day to day, for a span which stretches into, two months, three months, four, into the dog days of summer, when the beau monde abandons Paris, and Chez Monique is closed four days in seven because who wants art and la vie bohème when everything is so fatiguing outside? Jensen, who has in any case deemed Jared wholly unbearable in his calf love and become less of a trusted confidant of late, is in Antibes, and Jared abandons their apartment, passes his nights in Genevieve’s. Windows open, the slightest of evening breezes keeping the attic almost bearable. Clothing seems nonetheless impossibly confining. He spends too much time naked, to the point where Genevieve asks him if he’s auditioning for the model spot downstairs, and sketches him in revenge when he laughs. She’s no artist, but it’s almost recognisable as him, he thinks, or it could be if he had a real idea of what he looks like from behind, unclothed.
One closed day, he takes her to Versailles, where inevitably she has not been, and she is enchanted by the gardens. The state rooms, full of sweating tourist crowds, are less enticing, and the dust on the Hall of Mirrors makes her shrug. It’s a place fraught with too many histories, just now, and no one wishes to think about the war and its ending. In a return to the gardens, they wander far from the main paths, ignoring Trianon. He has her up against a tree, in earshot of children and matrons, sure they are observed, and caring not at all. Afterward, the long walk back to the palace and town is made longer by Genevieve’s commentary. “I should have put my knickers back on… So sticky, now, people must be able to smell you on me… Running wet with you, and me-“
He waits till they are home, then takes revenge, holding her on all fours, taking her roughly, feeling the truth of her words in her still-open, still-wet body, as much as on the stains on the inside of her skirt.
She tells him, at the start of September, that they were lucky in their foolishness, and there is no child resulting from Versailles. He tells her he is going to Vienna, and that she should come too.
Her news brings him relief, of a sort, though he thinks a child of theirs would be a miracle, in due course. His news brings her- He is not sure. She looks, for a moment, quite disconnected, her jaw unstrung, her expressive small hands hanging inelegant. “What? But why?”
“Because expansion is life,” he says. “We want a piece of the Europeans as the economies stabilise post-war. We lost a buttload in Vienna, in ’17, and we always wanted to get back in there. It’s a great city, my dad says. Lots of art, culture, cafes… I guess maybe not so much the nightclubs, but I’m hoping to be transferred to Berlin later, and you’d like that, I think-“
“I live here,” she says.
“But-“
“No buts. You come back to Paris, fine. Otherwise,” she shrugs. “Goodbye.”
And that is the end of his idyll.
*
Seven years pass before Jared has more than fleeting days in Paris again. The founding of the Viennese branch starts well, but the crisis of 1929 leaves nothing safe, and he has years of endless shoring up. He thrives, it’s true. Finance is something he was bred for, and he’s unexpectedly excited by the challenge it brings. But while Vienna has her charms, warm Mädchens and music in its blood, he never, ever feels free of Paris.
They write, something he had not expected. Gen tells him of bar fights and the tedium of posing for expressionists, who have taken over from the figuratives now that the latter have mostly run home as their money ran out (“I looked like three rocks and a bad temper,” she writes. “And the poor man expected me to be so pleased!”). She also writes, just occasionally, of trips out of the city, without any indication that this is unusual, or any sense of hostility to the world beyond Paris. She sees Rouen, and Beaune, and the sea, once, at Deauville. She writes of trains, autobuses, tramways, unfamiliar foodstuffs, good wine which she orders in bulk for those of her clientele who still care about their palates. Jared, in turn, describes Kaffee und Kuchen, the rituals of Viennese life, the impossible challenges of banking in a system that cannot remember normality but pretends normality is here.
The hell of 1931, when truly any bank in Austria feels like it might fall, is exciting enough that he writes to Gen, asking if, perhaps, she might see him when it’s over. Because he wants to work out the stored energy of months of walking a tightrope of failure and overconfidence.
“Of course,” she writes, “You know where I am.” As though she has never left Paris. As though she has waited for him. He is quite sure that is an illusion.
Pigalle is shabbier, with jobless men queuing at labour exchanges. Chez Monique shines in the darkness, but in the day it is ageing too. Genevieve poses more, pays fewer models. “We economise,” she shrugs.
“What will you do,” he asks, “When your customers dry up entirely?”
“Not everything is about business, Mr American,” is all she responds. But she looks quietly frightened, and he’s sorry.
They make love as if he had never been away, hard and passionate and living without memory. Asking no questions about the lovers who have come between, and when his leave of absence is up, Jared feels a great tug of longing. “I could stay,” he says.
“No,” she says, “You were right to go. I can see you love the life you lead.” She’s right, of course. Jared has done little but tell her just that.
“You could come,” he says. Expecting this to be his leavetaking, like the last time.
“I wish I could,” she says, this time. It is quite the change. He feels a great leap of hope, because- He could marry her, and take her to Vienna as his wife, and they could-
“I’m a Jew,” she says, crushing it. “Or, you know, a little on one side, though Mother was never observant, and nobody here gives a fuck. You don’t read the newspapers?”
“But that’s some fools making a big noise in Germany,” he says, “It’s another country, and they'll be taken down soon enough.”
“It’s inches away,” she responds. “And your Vienna, it’s not always such a nice city for Jews, either, you know. Or maybe you don’t. So, my love, I thank you for the offer. And I thank you more for showing me there were places beyond Pigalle, places I should discover. Places I should read about. So I’ve travelled, and I’ve read, and- I think I am better here.”
Jared’s return to Vienna is a sober thing, but not unhopeful. Genevieve of ’28 could not even conceive of leaving Paris. Genevieve of ’31 has too many reasons why not. But reasons are arguments. He leaves her, this time.
But he carries her with him. He reads. If he taught Genevieve that moving beyond her home had a value, she has this time taught him that reading for more than pleasure and business need is important. He sees the ugliness as it grows. In ’33, after the bastards take government in Berlin, he takes the night train to Paris purely for a day in Genevieve’s company, to see that she is not too alarmed, yet, about what has happened in Germany.
“Not yet,” she says, “But we should agree some words, you know? Words that other people can’t read, or understand. Just in case.”
Valentine becomes Jared’s warning to her, that he believes France is under threat, that she should run. Cherub - of all things - is Genevieve’s plea for rescue, if needed. She knows a place near Bordeaux, which might be a place of safety if Paris falls. She tells him the address, makes him learn directions, and will not allow him to write any of it down. He does not think that she is excessive in her caution.
In March ‘34, he is sent to Berlin. Berlin is where the action is, says the bank. Young Mr Padalecki should be there, see what can be cashed in from this growing economic miracle, this Hitler guy and his can-do attitude. Jared is intensely thankful for Gen’s warnings. It takes little to see the dirty smear of evil under the gloss of organisation and Getting Things Done. But it’s good to have been prepared, and to have ways of contacting her which are not simply writing letters and telegrams which are read before delivery.
In July ’35, Jared watches a man named Goldwasser, a pudgy middle-aged baker with a local reputation for excellent bread and bad timekeeping, running for his life from three younger, fitter men in black, lightning flashes on their arms, stones in their hands. Goldwasser ducks into a shop, and Jared follows. “Mr Goldwasser,” he says, broadest accent he can muster, full of dumb American innocence, or so he hopes. “Is there anything wrong?” The baker gestures, something composed of despair and hope, that yes, everything is wrong, but perhaps today he has gained a few hours.
When the SS burst in, Jared enquires as to their purpose in language so slow, so execrable, and yet so very respectably well-meaning, like his hand-made suit and silk cravat, like his New York armour, that they do not even attempt to explain or justify their recent decision to stone to death a mildly incompetent local tradesman in broad daylight. They leave the shop, grumbling to each other. Jared walks Mr Goldwasser home, and enquires as to his plans. Flight, of course, though he has no relatives to the south and God knows what he will find there, but (a shrug), his family will agree it is time to go.
It is a small incident, maybe. Not something that the foreign press, in their confused bedazzlement at the Nazi spectre, would dream of reporting. But it’s enough, for Jared, to know that this is a place where the norm is attack, and where citizens are less than citizens at the whim of the state. He cables home. Resigning Berlin position. Recommend branch closure. Unhealthy nation. Headed Paris. New York return fall. Will cable.
It is the first truly undutiful thing that he has done. But he doesn’t hesitate.
*
Genevieve is older, now. Of course she is. He loves the fine lines around her eyes, that hint at her future, although she hasn’t quite yet reached his own eminent age of thirty. Chez Monique has been redecorated, but cheaply, so that the gilding looks grimier than the faded, chipped surface it replaces. The clientele is almost wholly made up of tourists. No one who is anyone comes to Chez Monique now.
Isaac is almost sixty, and breathes hard when he climbs the stairs. He has a younger man to enforce good manners now, and talks of retirement to the south, and the warm.
“It’s time to leave,” Jared tells Gen. “I know you don’t want to believe, but-“
“I know,” she says, which floors him. “I’m going to the Midi. With Isaac.”
“No,” he returns. “You’re coming to New York, as my wife. Isaac too, if he wants.” He pauses, masterful pose suddenly undercut, “Uh, not as my wife in that case, yeah?”
Her laughter makes angels cry, and she says yes right off, which he never expected. “You know, I have no idea how to be a wife, yes? I never knew one. I’m guessing the bankers’ wives don’t appear in thousands of nude studies-“
“Some bankers’ wives were showgirls,” he says, and it makes her laugh. “You’ll fit right in.”
“I hear New York is cold and miserable, and there is nothing to drink.” But she is coming anyway, and Jared will make it right.
It takes two weeks to arrange their marriage, with the American consul, and all the panoply of officialdom that Jared can muster. His illegitimate half-Russian-Jewish wife will not lack for paperwork any longer (there has, already, been some confusion as to her very existence, which appears to have been imperfectly registered by her parents; Jared approaches boiling point in fresh impatience with bohemian lives. Genevieve laughs at him, and finds the correct official to bribe, and all is well). Isaac's passport, similarly, requires a certain amount of negotiation, but he is present, on their day, as witness.
So is Jensen, yellowing of eyeball and with crows' feet sprouting. He has spent too much time in the south, he says, and Jared diagnoses too much raki, too many boys, and too much hashish. Opium, even, perhaps. But he's still Jensen, and he is in Paris for now, and Jared wants someone who understands to be there when he makes Genevieve his wife.
They exchange words, after, at La Cochon D'Inde, where the wine list is broad and the chef brilliant when sober. It is very Paris. It feels like goodbye.
"You staying?" Jared asks.
Jensen meets his eyes, very calm. "I don't have any place else to be." He sounds like Genevieve, seven years ago. Jared aches.
Jared has read of what is happening to the homosexuals in Germany. Jensen knows it. But France is France, and not Germany, and, surely, it will never-
Genevieve, pessimistic and practical, sets another code. If Jensen sends Galerie des Glaces to her, or to Padalecki, Kraznik, then Jared will know it is time, try to get him out. Now that she has decided that there is danger, she is so very practical. Jared is glad of it. It's a low, low part of him that wishes she was still so blankly incapable of leaving Paris. It's that same part that asks himself, quietly, how well he knows this woman, to whom he has just tied himself.
He is her saviour, her wealthy, doting escape, from this life, and from what may overcome Europe. But is it more than that, for her?
Is it, more dangerously, more than that for him? Does a few months of idyll, a few years of yearning, a few days of confederacy, equal a lifetime together? He finds, suddenly, that he doubts.
*
Genevieve finds the trip to Southampton enchanting. He watches her watching the world, and revels in her excitement at new travel, at new land. Good, he thinks, testing himself. This much, he adores.
He is a decent sailor, and glad to find she weathers the Channel crossing easily enough. The Atlantic trip should not be too dire, for their first weeks together.
"Our honeymoon in such a cabin," says Gen, laughing, when she sees the liner for the first time. It’s tiny, and yet there is an air of luxury which Jared remembers, from his old life. For Gen, it’s all new. Whatever she married him for, it’s not money. He knew that.
She sits back on the bunk, with a look of mischief that he recognises, and they are closely engaged when there is a knock at the cabin and their steward enters to introduce himself. They must see this a lot, judging by the smooth way he ignores their hasty manoeuvres, and Jared’s rebuttoning. Honeymooners, says his face, silently, indulgent. Jared makes a mental note to tip well, if this continues.
It is not a good crossing, nor a fast one, but it is good for them. They are rediscovering each other, without the enchantment of first love and Paris. Jared’s increasing irritation at the cabin confines is matched by Genevieve’s boredom with some fellow passengers who descend, relentlessly, on their dining table with cries of, “Darling! We must sit together again!” They tease each other out of dark moods, and find mutual ways to distract and soothe.
The night before they should arrive in New York, Gen is lying in bed watching Jared wrestle his way out of cufflinks and formal shirt. She says, “Thank you.”
He’s too irritated to pay her the proper attention, so he doesn’t realise she’s waiting till he detaches a troublesome collar stud and looks up to find her gazing at him. “For what?”
“For finding my courage,” she says. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
He’s confused, but he abandons the shirt half-on, and ducks down to sit beside her on the bed. “Cherie, what’s amiss?” She hasn’t been serious for a long time.
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all. I’m with you, and I have left my home, and the world still turns. So, thank you. I wish I could have been so brave seven years ago. We missed so many years together.”
He kisses her, because it seems appropriate. “Did you wish to follow me, then? It didn’t seem so difficult for you to stay.” He tries not to sound injured. It was long ago. But he remembers how it felt, and it is far from easy to be gracious, even in such retrospect.
“I’ve wanted you to be mine since the first night we met,” she says, in response. “How could you miss it?” She sounds bewildered. Maybe hurt in her turn.
“Because I was a young idiot with nothing to recommend me, and you’re a goddess,” he says, and laughs. Somehow, mutual injury is easier to take. Certainly, it speaks to a mutual depth of feeling he had feared was one-sided. Gen starts to remove his remaining collar-studs, gentle fingers moving elegantly.
“Will they hate me,” she says, suddenly. “Your family, your respectable friends? I don’t want them to make you unhappy if we don't get along well.”
He tries to picture her among the grandes dames of the Upper East Side, and realises that marriage means yet more changes. “Some will. You matter more to me. We won’t find Paris in New York, but we’ll find somewhere we can be happy. I promise it.”
"I'm already happy," says Genevieve. He feels her words, like a hot drink on a cold day. Warmth from within. She did want him, and still does. "I had lost hope, somewhere lately, that we would ever find our way back together. And yet, here we are."
“I was afraid-“ he says.
“That I didn’t love you,” she responds. “I didn’t choose to show you my vulnerabilities before. I thought I was strong, in my own place. But then I found I was weak, when I wanted to leave it for you. And that was unbearable.”
He kisses her, but absently. It’s not the whole story. “I am still afraid,” he says, again. “That I’ll make you small. Wife of a Manhattan banker? Respectable gloves and the perfect charity patroness?”
She laughs, and it’s with the whole of her body. “Cheri, nobody in your world will think me perfect. I want to know you will love my imperfections in their eyes. And help me to do so.”
Jared picks up her hand, and kisses, finger by finger. “Beloved. I came to Europe to find adventure. But nothing ever matched you. And now I’m bringing you back with me, don’t think for a moment I want you to lose yourself.”
“If I want to pose naked in-“ she waves her hand, clearly at a loss for a good example, “Times Square, will you be angry?”
He kisses further up her arm, laughter snuffling against the skin. “No. I’d question your sanity, when you see the area, and suggest an ice bath and a Manhattan, after, if you do it at this season. But no.”
He reaches her vulnerable armpit, mouth whispering against the delicate skin and hair. “If you truly want it, take it. Do it. You will be magnificent.”
His mouth moves across, finding the swell of her breast, tasting her heartbeat, the breath of her stirring in his hair. “Promise me, lover,” he adds. “Promise me we can still have Paris?”
“Toujours,” she says, brushing hair from his brow, and nudging him to suckle at her breast. “Forever, with you.”
He closes his eyes, and inhales her, perfume and sweat, and his Genevieve, seven years beloved. He believes, now. She is his home, and he has been wise and lucky enough to bring her with him, forever.
***
Author: brutti_ma_buoni
Pairing (if any): Jared/Gen
Rating: NC17
Genre: historical AU
Word Count (approximate): 6700
Contents (warnings and kinks both apply): bohemian setting, references to other partners and to alternative lifestyles, actual body hair before waxing; interwar setting with references to anti-semitism and to the early rise of Nazism in Germany
Summary: Jared's a raw youth when he first visits Paris. He is drawn into the ambit of Genevieve and her bohemian Parisian world, enchanted by her for a summer. But he has to move on, and Gen won't. As years pass, events push their lives together once more. But is what they once had still there? And can they keep it, as life and the world changes for them both?
Art And because this is a bang, there is Art too - go have a look at the marvellousness that quickreaver came up with: because it is full of amazing [the COLOURS! the CLOTHES!]
He sees her first from afar. She would be hard to miss, though she's the smallest person in the room. Her personality, though, it's huge. The laughter produced by her small frame is gusting, overpowering. Head-turning. The men around her laugh into their beards, their wine glasses, their brushes, their cigarette-holders.
Also, of course, she's naked.
That part is hard to overlook. Jared doesn't.
Jensen nudges him, hard, in the ribs. "Friend, you don't want to look like the ingenu you are, you might want to put your tongue back in your mouth."
"Like you weren't as bad yesterday," says Jared, cheerfully. Yesterday the naked one was a man, vaguely Algerian, strung muscle and lean lines, and Jensen had choked hard enough that heads had turned. At Chez Monique, heads turning equates to a fat Rheims matron on a chair, screaming her head off at some dire social faux pas. Pretty major.
At Chez Monique, anything goes. Everybody knows. There's a song about it, all jazz trumpet and strings, Josephine Baker singing her husky heart out, recorded for posterity. And sure, Baker has moved on, and Chez Monique isn't the topmost top of the daring world of Paris today. But that's all to the good when you're aged 22 and American, regarded in Paris as an interesting combination of hick and open bank draft. Jared has been turned away from too many of the hottest nightclubs, laughed at by doormen. "Come back when you're older, kid," they say, or simply, "Va t'en, enfant," which Jared shouldn’t understand maybe but does.
He's done better, since Jensen dusted him down after one such episode and decided to adopt Jared as an amusement in his bohemian life. But it's still a life on the edge of acceptance. Jared knows this. A cravat and an unbuttoned vest do not a hot Paris clubman make. Chez Monique, on the downward slope from utter chic, is willing to accept him. And that pleases him.
"Want to meet her?" Jensen asks, sun-bright and confident. "I can't promise she's for sale, but the models will usually talk, maybe drink, if you like, and she's a regular."
Jensen, last night, talked, then drank, then fucked, with Younes, and might struggle to recognise him today if he's fully clothed. Jared didn't blush over that, being now accustomed to Jensen's ways. But the suggestion he talk with this woman makes him flood with embarrassment. She's perfect. He's too- too everything. Too uncouth. Too New World. Too large and clumsy. Too shy, come to that.
Jensen is walking over to the model's podium. He elbows his way through the grumbling sketchers. (They aren't much, at Chez Monique. "Figurative," said Jensen, dismissively, the first time he brought Jared here. "And if they cared about being good, they'd work somewhere with decent light. Mostly just want to pretend to be living la vie bohème and ogling naked asses till their allowances run out." Jared had blushed. He has plenty of his allowance remaining. And always will have, so long as he puts in appearances at his father's bank in good enough form to pass muster.)
"Hé, cherie," Jensen says, cheerfully, "When you're done, you want to have a drink with my friend? He's shy, but he's sweet. And rich. And he loves Paris, so it's time I passed him on to someone who isn’t such a cynical old bastard, non?"
Her laugh is booming, so strong her whole body shakes. "Oh, bébé, you trust me? He looks like such a little rabbit, all eyes and fluff."
The good news Jared takes from this is that the woman has been looking at him. The bad, that like everyone else in Paris, she can't see who he could be, who he longs to be. Just his innocent now-self.
"Cruel," Jensen says, pressing firmly on the shoulder of one of the half-assed artists, who is trying to object to his interference in the composition, the light, the mood of great art… "Shush, you, Evan. You were new here once too, and cuntstruck for some gal you just laid eyes on. Let my friend have his first experience of le vrai Paris, hmm?"
The woman shouts, "You, there, American boy?"
"Me?" says Jared, and it squeaks, so that the unkinder artists laugh.
"You," she says, "I want a kir royale, for now, and the rest of the bottle for later, and I'll join you to drink it in twenty, yes? I promised Jean-Luc he could paint my ass tonight, and he's the slowest in the world."
Jared nods, and signals to the barman, who has been watching. He doesn't know what the hell a kir royale is, but he can afford it, for sure. He can afford anything in Europe. It's one of the many things he's learning on this trip. Intoxicating.
Jensen's frowning. "Man, he'll use the Veuve or something, make sure he goes with house if you're buying champagne." Jared shrugs, caring not one jot.
"Yeah, okay," says Jensen, in response. "I'm gonna leave you to it, stud. Don't bankrupt tonight, though, you hear? Rent's due Thursday."
Jared nods, absently, as sparkling purple liquid is conveyed to the model, who tips her chin to him and drinks half of it right off. Then belches, and laughs again. He can feel his own mouth is smiling. Dammit, he's not going to not drink. The rest of the bottle of - Jensen was right - Veuve Clicquot is at his elbow, chilled and perfect. He commands another glass, and sips, more gently than she did. And watches.
Her pose is anything but coy. She sits, arms spread along the back of the ratty couch, her head resting on one crooked arm. Her body is not foursquare, a little twisted to one side, forming angles and shadows that the artists are relishing. Shallow breasts sit high, pulled up by her pectorals in this posture. Her thighs are parted, but he is sitting to her coy side, all blank wall of thigh. Men across from him will be sketching her sex, dark hair and pink flesh. Jared wants to move, to ogle. Instead, he drink slow, controlled sips, and tries not to imagine what he can't see.
Eventually, she stands up, and pulls on a robe. It's thin silk, watered and rippled in a pale rainbow of colours. He can see her hair through it, at armpit and between her thighs. "Hi," she says, non-sexual and cheerful, as she hops onto the barstool beside him. "You like watching?"
He blushes, "I like watching you?" He's hard, of course, but he thinks she'd be disappointed if he weren't. And he doesn't like watching in general. Jensen's taken him to places where sex is a part of every evening, naked bodies writhing in imperfectly-hidden back rooms. He's looked, a few times, but he's never been tempted to join the slack-mouthed troupe surrounding each glimpse into something private.
He pours her wine, and she smiles across the rim of her glass. "You're very sweet," she says. "I'm Genevieve." She doesn't pronounce it like the French would. Sounds American, almost, but she was bavarding with the painters like Pigalle is her backyard.
"Jared," he says, and wonders. "I'm from the United States."
"Oh honey," she says. "As if I couldn't tell."
*
Two hours, Jared's champagne buys him, and by the end, he knows Genevieve better than anyone else in Paris, or so it feels for the night. She's Italian-American, sort of, "But he met my mother here, and stayed. Mama was a Russian Jewess, and her family fled here right after the first Revolution, the year before I was born-" That confuses Jared, but eventually he understands there was stuff in Russia before the War, stuff he's never registered before, God, so much history that never seemed to matter. Genevieve is twenty-two, just his junior, and, "If I'm anything, I'm Parisienne."
In turn, he tries to explain his position. "-two years at our headquarters. Which is in Manhattan. But-"
"You don't exactly look like an international financier, sweetheart," says Gen, and laughs, loud and hearty, which somehow draws the sting of this patronising statement.
"I- I know. I guess I'm here for, uh, polish?"
"Wow, bébé, they didn't mean for you to end up here, huh?" Gen waves a hand around at Chez Monique, at Pigalle, at the whole world Jared found here. The one against whose windows he had pressed his naïve little tourist nose. The world that Jensen opened up for him.
But Gen's getting the wrong idea. "Uh, no? I think maybe this a little? My dad was in Europe in the nineties, and uh, I think he had some adventures. I'm not here just to look at galleries and whatever. Buy clothes? I'm-"
"Polishing," she says, smiling at the word. "Just exactly which parts of you are included in the polish? Because, babe, I'll polish your anything you please."
Wow. That's the most blatant proposition Jared's ever- Oh, wait, he should be saying yes, right? “Anything you want,” he says, blushing.
“I want you,” she says, “But I’m assuming you knew that. Bring the champagne.” And she leaves the bar, still barefoot and dressed in her thin silky robe.
She walks upstairs. Chez Monique isn’t actually a brothel, so far as Jared knows. And, indeed, Genevieve takes him through doors marked STAFF ONLY, and into passages not designed for decadence and pleasure. Here there is bare brick, grey tile, rough murals unfinished as if the artist lost heart or went hungry. Up, and up, and she opens a double-locked door, and takes Jared into an apartment. “Home,” she says, and raises her still-held champagne glass. He’s only glad he remembered to bring the unfinished second bottle.
He has dreamed of this. A beautiful woman, naked for him in a romantic, desperate garret. Although the garret is furnished with style and luxury, and lacks drafty corners and evidence of Great Art undertaken. It is just a space, for living. The view, so high up in the building, should be meaningful, but it is not. Just another street, just another row of shops and apartments.
There is no time for disappointment, though, as Genevieve places her glass on an occasional table, switching on the coloured-glass lamp (Tiffany, maybe? Jared is struggling to focus), and lets the robe slide from her shoulders. Her pale buttocks glimmer in the soft light as she walks away from him, into a half-seen bedroom.
“Allons,” she says, and nothing more.
He’s not a virgin. Not at all, thank you. Three girls, and only one a whore, and Jared considers himself well versed, on the whole, within the boundaries of taste and discretion. He’s a gentleman, after all.
And yet. He stands in the doorway of her bedroom, paralysed. She wriggles onto the bed, still facing away, so that he can watch the perfect lines of her back smoothing into curves, and thighs, and shadows between and he wants. But however he is with sex, he is quite certain he is not Parisian enough for this mysterious goddess. She turns her head, in profile, dark eyes in pale face, unreadable.
“Lover,” she says, “I need a man, and I decided it was going to be you tonight. So stop fearing, and come to me.”
When Jensen asks him, which next day he most inevitably does, Jared can’t remember a particular which made this more than his past experiences. She isn’t a woman of tricks and mystery; but at the time, it is so much more than he knew before. The scent of her, perfume mixed with sweat, smoke, her own liquid response to his careful touch. The way her back arches, hard and desperate, the first time he brings her off. The way she smiles, half-laughing, at him after, and says, “I knew you could. You’re a good man, and you pay attention.” The care with which she smoothes on the French letter - his own half-distraction trying to recall the term the French use instead (“Capot anglais,” comes to him, sometime before dawn, and he almost laughs. Damn European rivalries). How she kneels across him, reaching to guide him home, and he feels his toes curling into the mattress with the effort of not coming then and there, and how she pats his chest, and says, “Good work,” before she starts to move, like she knows how close he is. How she tastes, when emboldened he asks if he may, and she spreads herself, neat black triangle not hiding open, wet flesh than meets his tongue with confirmation of how much she wants (needs?) him that night.
How, when it is very dark, and cold, and he is not laughing at national rivalries in the naming of rubber goods, he makes to find his clothes, and she says, “You need not leave, unless-“ So he stays. And she wakes him, late, with his cock hard in her mouth already, and the morning begins with one last, glorious act.
Jensen asks, also, “So, your one night of passion in Paris. How do you feel?”
And Jared says, “She told me to come back.” Jensen blinks hard at him, because this is not how l’amour usually works in this world, and Jared knows it.
(But so it is, in the morning, when Genevieve says, “You know where to find me. I hope you will return. Often.”
Jared says, “I will.” How could it be otherwise?)
*
To Jensen’s everlasting surprise, it appears that Genevieve has decided to take Jared as a lover, public and declared. Around Jared’s duties at the bank, which are far from onerous, he spends almost all his time at Chez Monique. He is hypnotised by her. Every sight of her, be it shoulder or hairline or feet or cunt, every single one makes his heart jump and his mouth curl. She always seems pleased to see him too, leaping into his arms before her patrons, kissing him deep and wet in public places, and always, always wanting to hear what he says, where he has visited, what his hopes are, what he has learned.
It is a while before he realises that Genevieve is the owner of Chez Monique. Jensen didn’t know it. Few of the patrons seem to, either, though she is largely unmolested and uninsulted on those nights when she chooses to be naked for her clientele. Mostly that is thanks to Isaac, the vast and rumbling gentleman who manages the front of house with style, charm and a strong hint of imminent violence should anyone offer less than perfect courtesy.
“Isaac raised me,” says Genevieve, one night, when Jared comments on the - to him - great mystery of their relationship, and her ownership of the club. “After my parents died, that is.”
Monique was her mother. Maria Feodorovna Volokov, once, but she took a new name for her Parisian life, when Danny Cortese decided she was his muse. They never married, which perhaps shocks Jared. But he conceals it. He is, after all, not married to Genevieve. It crosses his mind for the first time that he would perhaps like to be. That perhaps that is where this leads.
Monique died in the influenza; one among so many that only her closest family could mourn. Genevieve was barely thirteen. Danny lasted another two years, but heartbreak and ownership of an emporium notorious for alcohol and less legal substances are not factors conducive to a long life.
Gen tells him this one night, when the clocks are past three, and Isaac broke a man’s jaw for an attempt to lick Genevieve’s ankle. She is in a pensive mood, somehow. Unlike herself. She says, “I wonder how long we will live. I don’t feel like I have much time.” She has lived alone but for Isaac ever since she was fifteen. She was seventeen when the club became the epitome of fashionable Parisian addresses; twenty when it passed its peak. No wonder she feels ephemeral.
“But, you were a child,” Jared protests, once, when she talks about some deal with the authorities to ignore the supplies she has received of plum brandy from the east in ‘21, from desperate men fleeing yet more post-war revolutions, and paying their way with clear spirit and silence.
“I didn’t know that,” she says. “All I knew was here.” Her hand encompasses Chez Monique, Pigalle, Isaac, and very little more.
Jared comes to understand, in quick-slow spurts of information, that this most worldly of women is also utterly sheltered. That his life in New York, Harvard, his trip to Europe, even his elite Connecticut prep school, have taken him so, so far beyond her comprehension of the world.
She never leaves Paris. Rarely even strays from Pigalle, Montmartre, the shabby-glamorous world of the Bohemians. He speaks of the Louvre, and she nods. She went there for school. It is perhaps a mile away, maybe two miles. This is her home. She has never left it. And she doesn’t think this strange in the slightest, until he starts to talk about the wider world.
“The war,” she shrugs, when he eventually asks, “Well. It was bad, you know. Very bad shopping. But good business. So many soldiers on leave, they wanted quick service and hard liquor, and we gave it to them.”
“But you didn’t flee?” During that first retreat across the Marne in the autumn of 1914, when the Boche were so fast, so close to Paris. Or the spring push of ’18, when Jared remembers his father following the front line with a finger, and worried wrinkle of his brow. Padalecki, Kraznik has had a Paris office since 1909. His father must have wondered whether it was going the way of their ill-advised Vienna venture, a dead loss in the hands of the enemy from 1917, and profitless before that for the duration.
“No,” says Genevieve. “Mother said running once was plenty. And Father said this was home. So we stayed.”
Jared says, “But you could move on. This isn’t the entire world.” She laughs at him, and makes no response. He thinks, silently, of the bank branches, the great European expansion he is here eventually to support. Of London, and Berlin, and- No. Perhaps best not to think of that. He’s here, right now, to be polished, and Genevieve is a part of that.
It is an idyll, and like all the best idylls it will end. But the surest way to precipitate the end is to think about it.
So he lives day to day, for a span which stretches into, two months, three months, four, into the dog days of summer, when the beau monde abandons Paris, and Chez Monique is closed four days in seven because who wants art and la vie bohème when everything is so fatiguing outside? Jensen, who has in any case deemed Jared wholly unbearable in his calf love and become less of a trusted confidant of late, is in Antibes, and Jared abandons their apartment, passes his nights in Genevieve’s. Windows open, the slightest of evening breezes keeping the attic almost bearable. Clothing seems nonetheless impossibly confining. He spends too much time naked, to the point where Genevieve asks him if he’s auditioning for the model spot downstairs, and sketches him in revenge when he laughs. She’s no artist, but it’s almost recognisable as him, he thinks, or it could be if he had a real idea of what he looks like from behind, unclothed.
One closed day, he takes her to Versailles, where inevitably she has not been, and she is enchanted by the gardens. The state rooms, full of sweating tourist crowds, are less enticing, and the dust on the Hall of Mirrors makes her shrug. It’s a place fraught with too many histories, just now, and no one wishes to think about the war and its ending. In a return to the gardens, they wander far from the main paths, ignoring Trianon. He has her up against a tree, in earshot of children and matrons, sure they are observed, and caring not at all. Afterward, the long walk back to the palace and town is made longer by Genevieve’s commentary. “I should have put my knickers back on… So sticky, now, people must be able to smell you on me… Running wet with you, and me-“
He waits till they are home, then takes revenge, holding her on all fours, taking her roughly, feeling the truth of her words in her still-open, still-wet body, as much as on the stains on the inside of her skirt.
She tells him, at the start of September, that they were lucky in their foolishness, and there is no child resulting from Versailles. He tells her he is going to Vienna, and that she should come too.
Her news brings him relief, of a sort, though he thinks a child of theirs would be a miracle, in due course. His news brings her- He is not sure. She looks, for a moment, quite disconnected, her jaw unstrung, her expressive small hands hanging inelegant. “What? But why?”
“Because expansion is life,” he says. “We want a piece of the Europeans as the economies stabilise post-war. We lost a buttload in Vienna, in ’17, and we always wanted to get back in there. It’s a great city, my dad says. Lots of art, culture, cafes… I guess maybe not so much the nightclubs, but I’m hoping to be transferred to Berlin later, and you’d like that, I think-“
“I live here,” she says.
“But-“
“No buts. You come back to Paris, fine. Otherwise,” she shrugs. “Goodbye.”
And that is the end of his idyll.
*
Seven years pass before Jared has more than fleeting days in Paris again. The founding of the Viennese branch starts well, but the crisis of 1929 leaves nothing safe, and he has years of endless shoring up. He thrives, it’s true. Finance is something he was bred for, and he’s unexpectedly excited by the challenge it brings. But while Vienna has her charms, warm Mädchens and music in its blood, he never, ever feels free of Paris.
They write, something he had not expected. Gen tells him of bar fights and the tedium of posing for expressionists, who have taken over from the figuratives now that the latter have mostly run home as their money ran out (“I looked like three rocks and a bad temper,” she writes. “And the poor man expected me to be so pleased!”). She also writes, just occasionally, of trips out of the city, without any indication that this is unusual, or any sense of hostility to the world beyond Paris. She sees Rouen, and Beaune, and the sea, once, at Deauville. She writes of trains, autobuses, tramways, unfamiliar foodstuffs, good wine which she orders in bulk for those of her clientele who still care about their palates. Jared, in turn, describes Kaffee und Kuchen, the rituals of Viennese life, the impossible challenges of banking in a system that cannot remember normality but pretends normality is here.
The hell of 1931, when truly any bank in Austria feels like it might fall, is exciting enough that he writes to Gen, asking if, perhaps, she might see him when it’s over. Because he wants to work out the stored energy of months of walking a tightrope of failure and overconfidence.
“Of course,” she writes, “You know where I am.” As though she has never left Paris. As though she has waited for him. He is quite sure that is an illusion.
Pigalle is shabbier, with jobless men queuing at labour exchanges. Chez Monique shines in the darkness, but in the day it is ageing too. Genevieve poses more, pays fewer models. “We economise,” she shrugs.
“What will you do,” he asks, “When your customers dry up entirely?”
“Not everything is about business, Mr American,” is all she responds. But she looks quietly frightened, and he’s sorry.
They make love as if he had never been away, hard and passionate and living without memory. Asking no questions about the lovers who have come between, and when his leave of absence is up, Jared feels a great tug of longing. “I could stay,” he says.
“No,” she says, “You were right to go. I can see you love the life you lead.” She’s right, of course. Jared has done little but tell her just that.
“You could come,” he says. Expecting this to be his leavetaking, like the last time.
“I wish I could,” she says, this time. It is quite the change. He feels a great leap of hope, because- He could marry her, and take her to Vienna as his wife, and they could-
“I’m a Jew,” she says, crushing it. “Or, you know, a little on one side, though Mother was never observant, and nobody here gives a fuck. You don’t read the newspapers?”
“But that’s some fools making a big noise in Germany,” he says, “It’s another country, and they'll be taken down soon enough.”
“It’s inches away,” she responds. “And your Vienna, it’s not always such a nice city for Jews, either, you know. Or maybe you don’t. So, my love, I thank you for the offer. And I thank you more for showing me there were places beyond Pigalle, places I should discover. Places I should read about. So I’ve travelled, and I’ve read, and- I think I am better here.”
Jared’s return to Vienna is a sober thing, but not unhopeful. Genevieve of ’28 could not even conceive of leaving Paris. Genevieve of ’31 has too many reasons why not. But reasons are arguments. He leaves her, this time.
But he carries her with him. He reads. If he taught Genevieve that moving beyond her home had a value, she has this time taught him that reading for more than pleasure and business need is important. He sees the ugliness as it grows. In ’33, after the bastards take government in Berlin, he takes the night train to Paris purely for a day in Genevieve’s company, to see that she is not too alarmed, yet, about what has happened in Germany.
“Not yet,” she says, “But we should agree some words, you know? Words that other people can’t read, or understand. Just in case.”
Valentine becomes Jared’s warning to her, that he believes France is under threat, that she should run. Cherub - of all things - is Genevieve’s plea for rescue, if needed. She knows a place near Bordeaux, which might be a place of safety if Paris falls. She tells him the address, makes him learn directions, and will not allow him to write any of it down. He does not think that she is excessive in her caution.
In March ‘34, he is sent to Berlin. Berlin is where the action is, says the bank. Young Mr Padalecki should be there, see what can be cashed in from this growing economic miracle, this Hitler guy and his can-do attitude. Jared is intensely thankful for Gen’s warnings. It takes little to see the dirty smear of evil under the gloss of organisation and Getting Things Done. But it’s good to have been prepared, and to have ways of contacting her which are not simply writing letters and telegrams which are read before delivery.
In July ’35, Jared watches a man named Goldwasser, a pudgy middle-aged baker with a local reputation for excellent bread and bad timekeeping, running for his life from three younger, fitter men in black, lightning flashes on their arms, stones in their hands. Goldwasser ducks into a shop, and Jared follows. “Mr Goldwasser,” he says, broadest accent he can muster, full of dumb American innocence, or so he hopes. “Is there anything wrong?” The baker gestures, something composed of despair and hope, that yes, everything is wrong, but perhaps today he has gained a few hours.
When the SS burst in, Jared enquires as to their purpose in language so slow, so execrable, and yet so very respectably well-meaning, like his hand-made suit and silk cravat, like his New York armour, that they do not even attempt to explain or justify their recent decision to stone to death a mildly incompetent local tradesman in broad daylight. They leave the shop, grumbling to each other. Jared walks Mr Goldwasser home, and enquires as to his plans. Flight, of course, though he has no relatives to the south and God knows what he will find there, but (a shrug), his family will agree it is time to go.
It is a small incident, maybe. Not something that the foreign press, in their confused bedazzlement at the Nazi spectre, would dream of reporting. But it’s enough, for Jared, to know that this is a place where the norm is attack, and where citizens are less than citizens at the whim of the state. He cables home. Resigning Berlin position. Recommend branch closure. Unhealthy nation. Headed Paris. New York return fall. Will cable.
It is the first truly undutiful thing that he has done. But he doesn’t hesitate.
*
Genevieve is older, now. Of course she is. He loves the fine lines around her eyes, that hint at her future, although she hasn’t quite yet reached his own eminent age of thirty. Chez Monique has been redecorated, but cheaply, so that the gilding looks grimier than the faded, chipped surface it replaces. The clientele is almost wholly made up of tourists. No one who is anyone comes to Chez Monique now.
Isaac is almost sixty, and breathes hard when he climbs the stairs. He has a younger man to enforce good manners now, and talks of retirement to the south, and the warm.
“It’s time to leave,” Jared tells Gen. “I know you don’t want to believe, but-“
“I know,” she says, which floors him. “I’m going to the Midi. With Isaac.”
“No,” he returns. “You’re coming to New York, as my wife. Isaac too, if he wants.” He pauses, masterful pose suddenly undercut, “Uh, not as my wife in that case, yeah?”
Her laughter makes angels cry, and she says yes right off, which he never expected. “You know, I have no idea how to be a wife, yes? I never knew one. I’m guessing the bankers’ wives don’t appear in thousands of nude studies-“
“Some bankers’ wives were showgirls,” he says, and it makes her laugh. “You’ll fit right in.”
“I hear New York is cold and miserable, and there is nothing to drink.” But she is coming anyway, and Jared will make it right.
It takes two weeks to arrange their marriage, with the American consul, and all the panoply of officialdom that Jared can muster. His illegitimate half-Russian-Jewish wife will not lack for paperwork any longer (there has, already, been some confusion as to her very existence, which appears to have been imperfectly registered by her parents; Jared approaches boiling point in fresh impatience with bohemian lives. Genevieve laughs at him, and finds the correct official to bribe, and all is well). Isaac's passport, similarly, requires a certain amount of negotiation, but he is present, on their day, as witness.
So is Jensen, yellowing of eyeball and with crows' feet sprouting. He has spent too much time in the south, he says, and Jared diagnoses too much raki, too many boys, and too much hashish. Opium, even, perhaps. But he's still Jensen, and he is in Paris for now, and Jared wants someone who understands to be there when he makes Genevieve his wife.
They exchange words, after, at La Cochon D'Inde, where the wine list is broad and the chef brilliant when sober. It is very Paris. It feels like goodbye.
"You staying?" Jared asks.
Jensen meets his eyes, very calm. "I don't have any place else to be." He sounds like Genevieve, seven years ago. Jared aches.
Jared has read of what is happening to the homosexuals in Germany. Jensen knows it. But France is France, and not Germany, and, surely, it will never-
Genevieve, pessimistic and practical, sets another code. If Jensen sends Galerie des Glaces to her, or to Padalecki, Kraznik, then Jared will know it is time, try to get him out. Now that she has decided that there is danger, she is so very practical. Jared is glad of it. It's a low, low part of him that wishes she was still so blankly incapable of leaving Paris. It's that same part that asks himself, quietly, how well he knows this woman, to whom he has just tied himself.
He is her saviour, her wealthy, doting escape, from this life, and from what may overcome Europe. But is it more than that, for her?
Is it, more dangerously, more than that for him? Does a few months of idyll, a few years of yearning, a few days of confederacy, equal a lifetime together? He finds, suddenly, that he doubts.
*
Genevieve finds the trip to Southampton enchanting. He watches her watching the world, and revels in her excitement at new travel, at new land. Good, he thinks, testing himself. This much, he adores.
He is a decent sailor, and glad to find she weathers the Channel crossing easily enough. The Atlantic trip should not be too dire, for their first weeks together.
"Our honeymoon in such a cabin," says Gen, laughing, when she sees the liner for the first time. It’s tiny, and yet there is an air of luxury which Jared remembers, from his old life. For Gen, it’s all new. Whatever she married him for, it’s not money. He knew that.
She sits back on the bunk, with a look of mischief that he recognises, and they are closely engaged when there is a knock at the cabin and their steward enters to introduce himself. They must see this a lot, judging by the smooth way he ignores their hasty manoeuvres, and Jared’s rebuttoning. Honeymooners, says his face, silently, indulgent. Jared makes a mental note to tip well, if this continues.
It is not a good crossing, nor a fast one, but it is good for them. They are rediscovering each other, without the enchantment of first love and Paris. Jared’s increasing irritation at the cabin confines is matched by Genevieve’s boredom with some fellow passengers who descend, relentlessly, on their dining table with cries of, “Darling! We must sit together again!” They tease each other out of dark moods, and find mutual ways to distract and soothe.
The night before they should arrive in New York, Gen is lying in bed watching Jared wrestle his way out of cufflinks and formal shirt. She says, “Thank you.”
He’s too irritated to pay her the proper attention, so he doesn’t realise she’s waiting till he detaches a troublesome collar stud and looks up to find her gazing at him. “For what?”
“For finding my courage,” she says. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
He’s confused, but he abandons the shirt half-on, and ducks down to sit beside her on the bed. “Cherie, what’s amiss?” She hasn’t been serious for a long time.
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all. I’m with you, and I have left my home, and the world still turns. So, thank you. I wish I could have been so brave seven years ago. We missed so many years together.”
He kisses her, because it seems appropriate. “Did you wish to follow me, then? It didn’t seem so difficult for you to stay.” He tries not to sound injured. It was long ago. But he remembers how it felt, and it is far from easy to be gracious, even in such retrospect.
“I’ve wanted you to be mine since the first night we met,” she says, in response. “How could you miss it?” She sounds bewildered. Maybe hurt in her turn.
“Because I was a young idiot with nothing to recommend me, and you’re a goddess,” he says, and laughs. Somehow, mutual injury is easier to take. Certainly, it speaks to a mutual depth of feeling he had feared was one-sided. Gen starts to remove his remaining collar-studs, gentle fingers moving elegantly.
“Will they hate me,” she says, suddenly. “Your family, your respectable friends? I don’t want them to make you unhappy if we don't get along well.”
He tries to picture her among the grandes dames of the Upper East Side, and realises that marriage means yet more changes. “Some will. You matter more to me. We won’t find Paris in New York, but we’ll find somewhere we can be happy. I promise it.”
"I'm already happy," says Genevieve. He feels her words, like a hot drink on a cold day. Warmth from within. She did want him, and still does. "I had lost hope, somewhere lately, that we would ever find our way back together. And yet, here we are."
“I was afraid-“ he says.
“That I didn’t love you,” she responds. “I didn’t choose to show you my vulnerabilities before. I thought I was strong, in my own place. But then I found I was weak, when I wanted to leave it for you. And that was unbearable.”
He kisses her, but absently. It’s not the whole story. “I am still afraid,” he says, again. “That I’ll make you small. Wife of a Manhattan banker? Respectable gloves and the perfect charity patroness?”
She laughs, and it’s with the whole of her body. “Cheri, nobody in your world will think me perfect. I want to know you will love my imperfections in their eyes. And help me to do so.”
Jared picks up her hand, and kisses, finger by finger. “Beloved. I came to Europe to find adventure. But nothing ever matched you. And now I’m bringing you back with me, don’t think for a moment I want you to lose yourself.”
“If I want to pose naked in-“ she waves her hand, clearly at a loss for a good example, “Times Square, will you be angry?”
He kisses further up her arm, laughter snuffling against the skin. “No. I’d question your sanity, when you see the area, and suggest an ice bath and a Manhattan, after, if you do it at this season. But no.”
He reaches her vulnerable armpit, mouth whispering against the delicate skin and hair. “If you truly want it, take it. Do it. You will be magnificent.”
His mouth moves across, finding the swell of her breast, tasting her heartbeat, the breath of her stirring in his hair. “Promise me, lover,” he adds. “Promise me we can still have Paris?”
“Toujours,” she says, brushing hair from his brow, and nudging him to suckle at her breast. “Forever, with you.”
He closes his eyes, and inhales her, perfume and sweat, and his Genevieve, seven years beloved. He believes, now. She is his home, and he has been wise and lucky enough to bring her with him, forever.
***