I should have realized Gisselle would have been involved with other men, I thought. She married Beau only as a way to get at me, to flaunt him. Even when she was going with him in high school, she was seeing other boys on the side. Whoever that man was who had just been here, he was right. One man was never enough for Gisselle. She was always thinking about what she was missing.
I could never be like that, I thought. Her friends would soon be chattering about how different she had suddenly become. I hoped they weren't smart enough to figure out why.
I regained my composure and continued to work on my studio. A little more than an hour later, Beau called to say he would be returning for lunch after all.
'Good,' I said. He heard the tension in my voice. 'Anything wrong?'
'I had a visitor.'
'Oh? Who?'
'One of Gisselle's secret lovers,' I revealed. He was silent a moment.
'I should have prepared you for that,' he admitted.
'You knew?'
'Let's say I had some strong suspicions.'
'Then why didn't you tell me, prepare me?' I demanded. His silence reconfirmed my theory. 'You were worried I wouldn't go through with doing this, weren't you?'
'A little.'
'You should have told me, Beau. It could have been a big problem.'
'I know. I'm sorry. What did you do? How did it go? You didn't . . .'
'Of course not. I acted annoyed about everything and drove him off. He accused me of sleeping with someone else. I don't even know his name.'
'What did he look like?'
I described him quickly and Beau laughed.
'George Denning. No wonder he was so nice to me all the time.' He laughed again. 'I would have thought she would have chosen someone better-looking.'
'Doesn't it bother you to learn this now, Beau, and confirm your suspicions?'
'No,' he said. 'Because now that I have you, there is no longer any past. There is only the present and the future,' he said.
'Beau,' I asked before he could end the conversation, 'were you seeing other women, too?'
'Yes,' he admitted. 'You. Remember?'
'I meant . . . other women.'
'No. My mind, my eyes, my soul, were fixed only on you, Ruby.'
'Come home, Beau. I'm a bit shaken.'
'All right. I'll hurry,' he said, and hung up.
We had met all the challenges and tests so far, I thought, but I was sure they would continue to come at me hard and heavy. I threw myself back into my work and kept busy so as not to worry, but at lunch Beau revealed we had to prepare for the biggest challenge of all.
'My parents,' he announced. 'They're returning from their European holiday trip in two days. We'll have to go there for dinner.'
'Oh, Beau, they'll surely see the differences and know, and you remember how much they disliked me, thanks to Daphne,' I reminded him.
'They won't be any more perceptive than anyone else,' he assured me. 'The fact is, they didn't see much of us after we were married. Gisselle wasn't very fond of my mother, and my father was too serious and too proper for her. They made her uncomfortable. I could count on my fingers how many times we were together. Whenever we were together, Gisselle was usually sullen and quiet. And we won't have to see them that often,' he added, but I was still quite nervous about meeting them as Gisselle.
That afternoon we met with the candidates for butler, maid, and cook. The butler was a proper Englishman, about five feet seven with thin, gray hair and hazel eyes. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, which kept falling down the bridge of his bony nose, but he was a pleasant man who had obviously worked for many fine families. His name was Aubrey Renner and he had a warm, friendly smile.
The maid's name was Sally Petersen. She was a tall, thin woman in her mid-forties with a long face that had eyes as big as half dollars and a thin nose that dipped over her pencil-thin mouth. I saw that being a maid was a profession to her, not a job. She appeared to me to be a very responsible person, a bit hard, but efficient.
Our cook was a light-skinned quadroon woman who said she was sixty, but I thought was closer to seventy. She called herself Mrs. Swann and said she rarely bothered to tell people her first name these days because it made her sound too rich, Delphinia. She was a short woman, not more than four feet five, with rolling-pin arms and a chubby face. But I imagined she was once a very pretty young lady. She had full, dark liquid eyes, coral lips, and teeth of pearl. She had worked in the homes of two wealthy Creole families most of her life. I had the feeling that she had retired and then became bored.
Once the servants were hired, Beau thought we should look into the nanny for Pearl; but I was reluctant about throwing another person at Pearl so soon.
'It's something Gisselle would do immediately,' Beau reminded me.
As luck would have it, a friend of his knew of a Frenchwoman who had worked as a private tutor as well as a
