Indiscretion Read Online Free PDF

had her own room, as did her brother. She went to school, earned high marks, learned how to ice skate and kiss boys. Their mother taught them French and on Sundays took them to Mass.
    Every year Claire’s mother returned to Paris to visit her parents, bringing Claire and her brother. Claire hated these trips. She found her grandparents old and distant, relics of another century, another life. What she liked best were the walks through the streets and parks of Paris. It was a world unimaginable to her classmates, who had barely been beyond the aging factories that surrounded their town, and who considered Boston as distant as the moon. She would see French boys her age and pretend that she was meeting them, that they were waiting for her. They would let her smoke their cigarettes and ride behind them on their motor scooters, her hands clasped tightly around their thin, hard bellies. Instead she and her mother and brother dutifully toured the Louvre and visited cafés where they would invariably order the prix fixe. Once, for a special treat, their father joined them, and they traveled down to Nice for a week by the beach. By then her grandfather was dead, and her grandmother had become even more remote, sitting in an old chair by the window in that familiar, oppressive room amid stale biscuits and the smell of decay. That had been the last trip. Shortly after, her parents divorced.
    Her father remarried. He moved to Belmont, and before long his wife gave birth to a daughter. He was starting over. Claire was sixteen. She lived with her mother in their old house and communicated with her father on holidays and birthdays. By the time she went off to college, two years later, she had learned that love did not give itself freely. That if she wanted it, it had to be taken. The protective shell that had been slowly growing around her finally hardened into place. She did not resent her father. She only knew that neither of them had much to say to each other. A few weeks after she had moved to New York he had sent her a small check. In a brief note he had written I hope this will help you get started, but she had left the check uncashed for many months, despite her low salary, and finally tore it up. He never mentioned it to her.
    When Claire was in college her mother moved back to take care of her own mother. After the old lady died, her mother inherited a little money and the apartment, which she sold. She did not remarry. Claire had visited once. Her mother was living outside of Paris in the former royal city of Senlis, in a little apartment near the cathedral. She looked older but more serene. Around her neck she wore a small gold cross. They were more like two old friends chatting than mother and daughter. When Claire left, her mother embraced her but said nothing.
    All that was years before. Now Claire was a member of that tribe of independent females, working without guarantees or guidance in the city, hoping to find love and, if not love, success or something like it. She was not promiscuous but she was available, which explains Clive and the men who had come before him and would no doubt follow.
    The traffic had been worse than Claire expected. When she arrives at Clive’s house they are already late for dinner. “You took your bloody time getting here,” he says, offering her a perfunctory kiss. He is already dressed, a glass of champagne in his hand. He does not offer her one. “Sorry, traffic,” she says, hurrying into the bedroom to shower quickly and change.
    Five minutes later she is rushing down the front steps, carrying her shoes while Clive waits in his car, the motor already running. “All right?” he says, barely waiting for her to close her door before accelerating down the drive, spitting gravel over the grass. She will swipe lipstick across her mouth and brush her hair in the car. “I told you it was silly to drive out,” he says. “I would have been happy to collect you at the station.” She ignores