The Day After Tomorrow

Michele looked at him without knowing what to say. He’d been fired, she was sure of it. How or why, she had no idea. The last thing he’d told her was that he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to look over a possible site for a new bakery. Now, little more than twenty-four hours later, here he was, sitting in his underwear and staring out at the night.

The night, that was a thing Michele had inherited from her father. Forty-one when his daughter had been born, he’d been a Parisian auto mechanic when the German army overran the city. A member of the underground, he spent three hours every evening after work on the roof of their apartment building clandestinely watching and recording Nazi military traffic on the street below.

The war had been over for seventeen years when he’d brought four-year-old Michele back to the apartment house and up onto the roof to show her what he’d been doing during the occupation. The traffic on the street below magically became German tanks, half-tracks and motorcycles. The pedestrians, Nazi soldiers with rifles and machine guns. That Michele hadn’t understood the purpose behind his actions didn’t matter. What did matter was that in taking her to that building and leading her up to the roof in the darkness to show her how and what he had done, he had shared a secret and dangerous past with her. He had included her in something very personal and very special and, in remembering him, that was what counted.

Looking to her husband now, she wished he could be like her father. If the news was bad, it was bad. They loved each other, they were married, they were expecting a child. The darkness outside only made his distance more painful to understand.

Across the room the clothes washer stopped, its cycle finished. Immediately Henri got up, opened the washer door and pulled out his work clothes. Looking at them, he cursed out loud, then crossed the room to pull open a closet door angrily. A moment later he was stuffing the still-wet laundry inside a plastic garbage bag and sealing it with a plastic tie.

“What are you doing?” Michele asked.

Abruptly, he looked up. “I want you to go away,’ he said. “To your sister’s house in Marseilles. Take back your family name and tell everyone I’ve left you, that I’m a louse, and you have no idea where I’ve gone.”

“What are you saying?” Michele was flabbergasted.

“Do what I tell you. I want you to leave now. Tonight.”

“Henri, tell me what’s wrong, please.”

In answer, Kanarack threw down the garbage bag and went into the bedroom.

“Henri, please . . . Let me help . . . .” Suddenly she realized he meant it. She came into the room behind him scared half to death and stood in the doorway as he dug two battered suitcases from under the bed. He pushed them toward her.

“Take these,” he said. “You can fit enough into them.”

“No! I am your wife. What the hell is the matter? How can you say these things without explanation?”

Kanarack looked at her for a long moment. He wanted to say something but he didn’t know how. Then, from outside, an automobile horn sounded once, then twice. Michele’s eyes narrowed. Pushing past him, she went to the window. In the street below she could see Agnes Demblon’s white Citroen, its motor running, its exhaust drifting upward in the night air.

Henri looked at her. “I love you,” he said. “Now go to Marseilles. I will send money to you there.”

Michele pushed back from him. “You never went to Rouen. You were with her!”

Kanarack said nothing.

“Get the hell out of here, you bastard. Go to your goddamn Agnes Demblon.”

“It’s you who has to go,” he said.

“Why? She’s moving in?”

“If that’s what you want to hear. All right, yes, she’s moving in.”

“Then go to hell, for all time. Go to hell, you son of a bitch, and God damn you!”

26

“I SEE,” Francois Christian said quietly and without emotion. A glass of cognac was in his hand; swirling it lightly, he looked off into the fire.

Vera said nothing. Leaving him was difficult enough, she owed him a great deal and would not insult him, or them, by simply getting up and walking out as if she were a whore, because she wasn’t,

It was a little before ten. They had just finished supper and were sitting in the large living room of a grand apartment on the rue Paul Valery between avenue Foch and avenue Victor Hugo. She knew Francois also kept a house in the country where his wife and three children lived. She also suspected he might have more than one apartment in the city, but she never asked. Any more than she’d asked if she were his only lover, which she suspected she wasn’t.

Taking a sip of coffee she looked up at him. He still hadn’t moved. His hair was dark, neatly trimmed, with a touch of gray at the temples. In his dark pin-stripe suit, crisp white cuffs protruding in tailored precision from the sleeves of his double-breasted jacket, he looked like the aristocrat he was. The wedding band on his left hand glinted in the firelight as he absently sipped at his drink while still staring into the flames. How many times had his hands caressed her? Touched her in a way only he had been able to touch her?

Her father, Alexandre Baptiste Monneray, had been a ranking career naval officer. In her early life, she, her mother and her younger brother had traveled the world following his variety of commands and naval postings. When she was sixteen her father retired to become an independent defense consultant and they settled permanently into a large home in the south of France.

It was here that Francois Christian, then an undersecretary in the Ministry of Defense, became, among others, a frequent guest. And it was here that their relationship began. It was Francois who talked to her at length about the arts, about life and about love. And, one very special afternoon, about the direction of her studies. When she told him medicine, he was astounded.

It was true, she’d argued. Not only did she wish to become a physician, she was determined to become one, if for nothing more than a defiant promise she’d made to her father at age six around a Sunday dinner table, when her parents had been discussing suitable careers for women. Out of the blue she’d announced she was going to be a doctor. Her father had asked her if she was serious and she’d said she was. She even remembered the slight smile he’d given to her mother when he accepted Vera’s choice. The smile she’d taken as a challenge. Neither of her parents believed she could do it or would do it. Right then she determined to prove them wrong. And at that moment of resolve something had happened and a white light rose up around her and held there glowing. And though she knew no one else could see it, she felt warm and comforted and sensed a strength greater than anything she’d ever experienced. And she took it as an affirmation that her promise to her father was real and that her destiny was resolute.

And, that same afternoon, as she told her story to Francois Christian, the same glow appeared, and she told him it was there. Smiling as if he understood completely, he’d taken her hand in his and fully encouraged her to follow her dreams.

At age twenty she graduated from the University of Paris and was accepted immediately into the medical school at Montpellier, at which time her father relented and gave her his full blessing. A year later, after spending the Christmas holidays with her grandmother in Calais, Vera stopped in Paris to visit friends. For no reason, she suddenly had the idea to visit Francois Christian, whom she had not seen in nearly three years.

It was a lark, of course, with no purpose other than to say hello. But Francois was now leader of the French Democratic Party and a major political figure, and how to reach him through a battery of underlings she had no idea, except to go to his office and ask to be seen. To her surprise, she was shown in almost immediately.

The moment she entered the room and he rose from his desk to greet her, she’d sensed something extraordinary happening. He called for tea and they sat on a window seat overlooking the garden outside his office. He’d met her when she was sixteen; she was how almost twenty-two. In less than six years, a pert teenage girl had become a strikingly beautiful, extremely intelligent and wholly alluring young woman. If she did not believe it