“Aren’t you cold out here, Mother?” The words were as chilly as the terrace tiles. Pilar had spoken to her as though she were an oddity, standing there in her bathrobe and bare feet. Deanna cast a look at the ship and turned slowly around with a smile.

“Not really. I like it out here. And besides, I couldn’t find my slippers.” She said it with the same steady smile and looked directly into her daughter’s brilliant blue eyes. The girl was everything Deanna was not. Her hair was the palest gold, her eyes an almost iridescent blue, and her skin had the rich glow of youth. She was almost a head taller than her mother, and in almost every possible way the image of Marc-Edouard. But she did not yet have his aura of power-that would come later. And if she learned her lessons well from her grandmother and aunts, she would learn to mask it almost as viciously as they did. Marc-Edouard was not quite as artful; there was no need to be, he was a man. But the Duras women practiced a far subtler art. There was little Deanna could do to change that now, except perhaps keep Pilar away, but that would be a fruitless venture. Pilar, Marc, the old woman herself, all conspired to keep Pilar in Europe much of the time. And there was more to Pilar’s resemblance to her grandmother than mimicry. It was something that ran in her blood. There was nothing Deanna could do, other than accept it. She never ceased to marvel, though, at how acutely painful the disappointment always was. There was never a moment when she didn’t care, when it mattered less. It always mattered. She always felt Pilar’s loss. Always.

She smiled now and looked down at her daughter’s feet. She was wearing the absentee slippers. “I see you’ve found them.” Deanna’s words teased, but her eyes wore the pain of a lifetime. Tragedy constantly hidden by jokes.

“Is that supposed to be funny, Mother?” There was already warfare in Pilar’s face, at barely seven-thirty in the morning. “I can’t find any of my good sweaters, and my black skirt isn’t back from your dressmaker.” It was an accusation of major importance. Pilar flung back her long, straight, blonde hair and looked angrily at her mother.

Deanna always wondered at Pilar’s fury. Teenage rebellion? Or merely that she didn’t want to share Marc with Deanna? There was nothing Deanna could do. At least not for the moment. Maybe one day, maybe later, maybe in five years she’d get another chance to win back her daughter and become her friend. It was something she lived for. A hope that refused to die.

“The skirt came back yesterday. It’s in the hall closet. The sweaters are already in your suitcase. Margaret packed for you yesterday. Does that solve all your problems?” The words were spoken gently. Pilar would always be the child of her dreams, no matter what, no matter how badly the dreams had been shattered.

“Mother! You’re not paying attention!” For a moment Deanna’s mind had wandered, and Pilar’s eyes blazed at her. “I asked you what you did with my passport.”

Deanna’s green eyes met Pilar’s blue ones and held them for a long moment. She wanted to say something, the right thing. All she said was, “I have your passport. I’ll give it to you at the airport.”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of it myself.”

“I’m sure you are.” Deanna stepped carefully back into her studio, avoiding the girl’s gaze. “Are you going to have breakfast?”

“Later. I have to wash my hair.”

“I’ll have Margaret bring you a tray.”

“Fine.” Then she was gone, a bright arrow of youth that had pierced Deanna’s heart yet again. It took so little to hurt. The words were all so small, but their emptiness stung her. Surely there had to be more. Surely one did not have children merely to have it end like this? She wondered sometimes if it would have been this way with her sons. Maybe it was just Pilar. Maybe the pull between two countries, and two worlds, was too great for her.

The phone buzzed softly on her desk as she sighed and sat down. It was the house line, no doubt Margaret asking if she wanted her coffee in the studio. When Marc was away, Deanna often ate alone in this room. When he was at home, breakfast with him was a ritual, sometimes the only meal they shared.

“Yes?” Her voice had a soft, smoky quality that always lent gentleness to her words.

“Deanna, I have to call Paris. I won’t be downstairs for another fifteen minutes. Please tell Margaret that I want my eggs fried, and not burned to a crisp. Have you got the newspapers up there?”

“No, Margaret must have them waiting for you at the table.”

“Bon. À tout de suite.”

Not even “good morning,” no “how are you? How did you sleep?… I love you.” Only the papers, the black skirt, the passport, the-Deanna’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. They didn’t do it deliberately, they were simply that way. But why didn’t they care where her black skirt was, where her slippers were, how her latest painting was coming. She glanced over her shoulder wistfully as she closed the door to her studio behind her. Her day had begun.


* * *

Margaret heard her rustling the papers in the dining room and opened the kitchen door with her customary smile. “Morning, Mrs. Duras.”

“Good morning, Margaret.”

And so it went, as ever, with precision and grace. Orders were given with kindness and a smile; the newspapers were carefully set out in order of importance; the coffee was immediately placed on the table in the delicate Limoges pot that had belonged to Marc’s mother; the curtains were pulled back; the weather was observed; and everyone manned his station, donned his mask, and began a new day.

Deanna forgot her earlier thoughts as she glanced at the paper and sipped coffee from the flowered blue cup, rubbing her feet along the carpet to warm them from the chill of the tile on the terrace. She looked young in the morning, her dark hair loose, her eyes wide, her skin as clear as Pilar’s, and her hands as delicate and unlined as they had been twenty years before. She didn’t look her thirty-seven years, but more like someone in her late twenties. It was the way she lifted her face when she spoke, the sparkle in her eyes, the smile that appeared like a rainbow that made her seem very young. Later in the day, the consummately conservative style, the carefully knotted hair, and the regal bearing as she moved would make her seem more than her age. But in the morning she was burdened with none of the symbols-she was simply herself.

She heard him coming down the stairs before she heard him speak, calling back gaily to Pilar in French as the girl stood with wet hair on the second-floor landing. It was something about staying out of Nice and making sure she behaved herself in Antibes. Unlike Deanna, Marc would be seeing his daughter again in the course of the summer. He would be back and forth between Paris and San Francisco several times, stopping off in Antibes for a weekend, whenever he could. Old habits were too hard to break, and the lure of his daughter was too great. They had always been friends.

“Bonjour, ma chère.”

Ma chère, not ma chérie. My dear, not my darling, Deanna observed. The i had fallen from the word many years since. “You look pretty this morning.”

“Thank you.” She looked up with the dawn of a smile, then saw him already studying the papers. The compliment had been a formality more than a truth. The art of the French. She knew it well. “Anything new in Paris?” Her face was once again grave.

“I’ll let you know. I’m going over tomorrow. For a while.” Something in his tone told her there was more. There always was.

“How long a while?”

He looked at her, amused, and she was reminded once again of all the reasons she had fallen in love with him. Marc was an incredibly handsome man, with a lean, aristocratic face and flashing blue eyes that even Pilar’s couldn’t match. The gray at his temples barely showed in the still-sandy-blond hair. He still looked young and dynamic, and almost always amused, particularly when he was in the States. He found Americans “amusing”: It amused him when he beat them at tennis and squash, at bridge or backgammon, and particularly in the courtroom. He worked the way he played- hard and fast and well, and with extraordinary results. He was a man whom men envied and over whom women fawned. He always won. Winning was his style. Deanna had loved that about him at first. It had been such a victory when he first told her he loved her.

“I asked you how long you’d be away.” There was a tiny edge to her voice.

“I’m not sure. A few days. Does it matter?”

“Of course.” The edge to her voice.

“Have we something important?” He looked surprised; he had checked the book and hadn’t seen anything there. “Well?”

No, nothing important, darling… only each other. “No, no, nothing like that. I just wondered.”

“I’ll let you know. I’ll have a better idea after some meetings today. There’s a problem apparently on the big shipping case. I may have to go directly to Athens from Paris.”

“Again?”

“So it would seem.” He went back to the papers until Margaret set his eggs in front of him then glanced at his wife again. “You’re taking Pilar to the airport?”

“Of course.”

“Please see to it that she’s properly dressed. Mother will have a stroke if she gets off the plane again in one of those outrageous costumes.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself?” Deanna fixed him with her green eyes.

“I thought that was more your province.” He looked unmoved.

“What, discipline or her wardrobe?” Each of them thankless tasks, as they both knew.

“Both, to a degree.” She wanted to ask to what degree, but she didn’t. To the degree that she was capable of it? Was that what he meant? Marc went on, “I’ve given her some money for the trip, by the way. So you won’t have to.”