Once she was in Paris, Olivia knew she wanted to stay. She had no friends here but hoped to meet people. She was in touch with Claire Smith, her assistant from her defunct magazine, who had just taken a job in L.A., and encouraged her to try a change of scene too. They were unattached women who had put everything into their careers and were free to go anywhere they wanted now. It was both the upside and downside of having invested everything in their jobs and being unmarried and unattached at their ages. Claire had just turned forty, and had taken a job with Architectural Digest as their rep in L.A. Olivia was forty-three. It shocked her sometimes to realize that she was probably halfway through her life and still trying to figure things out, where she wanted to live, and what she wanted to do when she grew up. She was supposed to be grown up now, but didn’t always feel that way, especially lately. She was starting over, and now she wanted to take a year off and sidetrack herself while she rethought her life and what her goals were. She didn’t want to start another magazine, nor go to work for someone else, after having been her own boss for ten years, but she realized she’d probably have to. At least for now, there was no pressure on her to make any decisions. She could just enjoy Paris and adjust to all the recent changes in her life. She had no man she was involved with at the moment but had never wanted to base her life on any man, or to depend on one. She had seen what that had done to her mother, and the high price she had paid for it emotionally.
After Olivia unpacked, she flipped through a magazine, and saw an ad for Sotheby’s real estate agency in Paris. She assumed they’d speak English and decided to call and see what kind of rentals they might have for six months or a year. She felt brave and adventuresome when she called them and spoke to a woman agent with a British accent. She promised to get back to Olivia after she checked her listings. She recommended the seventh, eighth, and sixteenth arrondissements when she heard where Olivia was staying. They were the three most elegant and desirable areas of Paris, as well as the first arrondissement, around the Place Vend?me. She asked if Olivia wanted a furnished or unfurnished apartment, and if a house would be acceptable. Olivia said she thought a house might be too big, and perhaps not as safe and protected as an apartment. She didn’t care whether it was furnished or not. She thought it might be fun to furnish a place sparsely with special things she found and could ship back to New York when she left. Her apartment in New York was tired and dreary anyway, and some new pieces from Paris might improve it when she went back. It all sounded like fun to her now and was part of the adventure. What mattered to her was that she live her life fully, meet new people, do new things, breathe the air of Paris, and be completely alive, not buried in a job going nowhere, tied to a man who never came through for her, with her life on hold, waiting for a miracle that would never happen. Seeing how empty her mother’s life had been right to the end had been a powerful wake-up call. It was everything she didn’t want and was determined she wouldn’t let happen to her. Her mother’s life had seemed like a living death. She had sacrificed her whole life to George and what suited him, and in the end, he had died with his wife at his side, not Olivia’s mother.
The Sotheby’s agent promised to call Olivia as soon as she had something to show her. She said she was going to get right on it and do some research. Olivia was excited when she hung up. She went for a long walk along the quais of the Seine, with Notre-Dame behind her and the Eiffel Tower up ahead, underneath a gray Paris sky, filled with fluffy white clouds. She loved the Paris sky. She was happy just being there, and confident that it had been the right move, and good things were going to happen. She could feel it in the air.
* * *
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The best domestic agency in Paris was surprisingly small, Joachim discovered when he went there for an appointment two days later. He had spent the days putting order in his mother’s apartment. He had reorganized her closets, straightened the papers on her desk, which she had scolded him for, bought all the kitchen implements she was missing, sent drapes to the dry cleaners for her. He had been a whiz around her apartment, and she told him she was afraid to come home at night, for fear of what he might have done while she was at work. She tried to explain to him that she liked the friendly disorder in her apartment, it was her mess and it worked for her. She knew he meant well, but she told him he needed a job or activity of some kind to keep him busy. So he had called the agency to make an appointment, and look for something temporary.