Isn’t that funny? The man punched me in the face and my eyes stayed dry, but rob me of my chance to see the Colosseum and I was a mess of tears. Confusing time, one’s twenties.
And then, there was Paris.
The city I’d dreamed of my whole life, a place I’d imbued with magic and romance and every fanciful thing you can think of, and yet it was somehow still even better than I’d hoped. Even lovelier.
I’ve never been back, of course, and sometimes I think I resent Duke for that more than anything.
We stayed at his father’s pied-à-terre in the eighth arrondissement, just off the Champs-?lysées, a beautiful building made of white stone where bright pink flowers spilled out of window boxes and the most famous names in French fashion—Dior, Chanel—were just steps away. I still have one of the gowns I had made at Dior. The green one I’m wearing in Andrew’s portrait of me.
The days were glorious. I set off on my own in the mornings, drinking in the beauty of Paris in the spring, enjoying the solitude, the feeling of being a grown woman out in the world alone, buying what she wanted to buy, stopping into any little shop or museum or gallery that caught her interest.
Duke sometimes joined me in the afternoons, once he’d woken up, and that could be lovely, too. We’d walk arm in arm along the Seine, and I would pretend that everything was going to be fine, that we could be these people forever.
And then the nights would come.
Every night, we dressed and went out, trying new restaurants, new nightclubs, and it would feel thrilling and fun, and I’d smoke Gauloises in a long ivory holder, and Duke would light each one for me with a practiced flick of his platinum lighter, and I thought how people must look at us and think how young and bright and beautiful we were.
How lucky.
But then the champagne would lead to whiskey sours, the whiskey sours to straight whiskey, and I would learn that it wasn’t just gin that turned Duke into a beast.
A shove on the stairs when we got home because I’d been “flirting” with a waiter.
His fingers, clamped around my jaw, tilting my head back so far that I thought my neck might snap, the awful wormwood scent of absinthe in my nose as he demanded to know what I was implying when I asked who he’d been with that night.
The back of my skull, bouncing off the marble floor of the bathroom because I’d been crying in there, and didn’t I know this house had servants? They could hear me, and what were they going to think of Mr. Callahan’s new bride sobbing her eyes out in the downstairs toilet?
He got rid of the servants at night after that, sending them all home by seven. Another one of those choices that doomed him, although he couldn’t have known it at the time.
Every day, I put my makeup on, dressed well, and set out on the streets of Paris, thinking how lovely it was—and how nothing lovely would ever really matter again. This would be my life now, until Duke pushed too hard, or my head hit something at just the wrong angle, and I would never know when that moment was coming, only that it was.
That was the part I hated the most. Not the hits and the shoves, although those hurt. It was the uncertainty.
And the hope of it! God, I hated the hope. Because it was always there. This belief that maybe, today it would all somehow be different. Duke wouldn’t drink so much, or I wouldn’t say the wrong thing to set him off, and it would, miraculously, set us back on the right track.
I still loved him, sadly. Or I thought I did. I know now that what I felt for Duke was mostly lust, but that’s a powerful emotion in its own right, especially when you’re only twenty-one. I dreaded his hands even as I craved his touch, and it nearly tore me apart, those wildly disparate feelings. A terrible thing, wanting someone and hating them all at the same time. Is it any wonder, pulled taut as I was, that I finally snapped?
June 13, 1961
No sign that anything would be different that night. We’d been in Paris for well over a month by then, our other accommodations and travel plans canceled because Duke was having such a lovely time with all his old friends, a pack of men he’d known at Yale who were all pale imitations of him and therefore made him look even more golden in contrast. We’d stay until August, he’d decided, and I didn’t even try to protest.
I hadn’t been feeling well for days by then, nauseous, my head aching. I was terrified that I might be pregnant, but also, I’d fallen down the stairs the week before in an attempt to avoid one of Duke’s swinging fists and hit my head hard on the banister, so it was equally likely to be that.