El Paso: A Novel by Winston Groom

where they secretly met in afternoons or mornings when Xenia managed to slip away from her mother. Paris became their enchanted city.

    “OH, ARTHUR,” SHE’D SAID WITH A LAUGH one day as they lay on cool sheets with the breeze blowing a translucent curtain through the window of Arthur’s rooms near Xenia’s hotel off the Champs-Élysées, “it’s impossible!” Paris was beautiful in June, before the sun of July and August turned it into a sweatbox. The parks were full of flowers and the skies deep blue and cloudless.
    “Why? I think it’s perfectly proper. Besides, it’ll give us an excuse to see each other in the evenings. For dinners, I mean.”
    “ Tout au contraire! ” she exclaimed almost condescendingly in her finishing school French. They were lying spoonlike, he pressed tightly against her, absorbing her smells and feeling the pulsing of her blood against his skin.
    “Why not? Why wouldn’t your mother be glad to find an American in this city, one whom she’s already met? What could be the harm if I took the both of you out to dinner now and then?”
    “She’d suspect something immediately,” Xenia replied. “Oh, she might acquiesce once, but then she’d watch me like a hawk. No more freedom to go out on my own on afternoons like this.” She turned and made a slicing motion with her hand across Arthur’s nose. “ Nez coup! N’est-ce pas, mon cher? ”
    “Because you’ve done this kind of thing before?” he said peevishly.
    “No, silly, but I know Mama. She’s shrewd. There’s no way you could disguise the look in your eyes if we were to meet with her—nor I in mine. She would see you looking at me tout nu , and it would all be over. Mama is a noticer—she notices everything. She’d put me on the leash.”
    They had all been in Paris for three weeks, and it was the longest and grandest three weeks of Arthur’s life.
    He’d found out from Xenia where she’d be staying before they left England and upon arriving in Paris had immediately taken rooms a few blocks away from her hotel. He’d hung around there in the shadows for several days until he spied her and her mother at an outdoor café, which he correctly concluded was where they went in the afternoons. After several days of this, when her mother once left the table, he gave a waiter ten francs and a note he’d kept in his pocket since arriving, telling her his address and asking her to leave a note of her own at another café near his apartment if she would like to meet him sometime. She did, next morning.
    “But I can’t stand it,” Arthur said, “just seeing you for an hour or so—and not even every day, at that.”
    “It will have to do, darling,” she told him. “And now I must go.” She got up from the bed, stripping the top sheet with her and wrapping it around her figure like a Greek goddess. Her bright eyes gave Arthur a shimmering thrill of excitement, as if she were the only woman in the world for him, which of course she was. He wanted never to let her from his sight.
    “We’re going back to the Louvre in the morning,” she said. “Mama will be tired after that. She’ll take a nap after lunch. I’ll say I’m going out for a walk on the Champs. I’ll meet you at the Rive Gauche between two and three— à la bonne heure !”
    “Yes, but—”
    “You must stay out of the picture for now,” Xenia said firmly. She was seated on a chair next to the bed, picking up her underclothes, and gave him a loving squeeze on his wrist. She had thought of all the Polish boys she had known back in Pittsburgh—nice enough, for Polish boys whose families had also made something of themselves other than fruit-stand peddlers or garbage men—but they were rough-and-tumble compared with Arthur Shaughnessy of Boston, Massachusetts.
    What Miss Walton’s School had taught Xenia Kzwalskci was that there was more to life than what her parents had had in mind for her, and in her four years there she’d developed a fierce