by Bex Brian
Two things. All those men I fucked during my marriage . . . I never let the fear of getting caught, or rather I should say the thrill, overwhelm my sense of self-preservation. Ralph was never to know. I put up with pimples, bad breath, sloping shoulders, puny dicks. At times I really suffered. But Ralph was never to know. I cleaned my teeth, rinsed my underwear, douched myself inside and out, all for him. He never knew. I kept my secrets.
The second thing. Why did I bow? Shake Ralph’s hand when he finally came downstairs? I was rattled. How do you make a person love you? We all say the same fucking things. As we walked away from the pension toward a cafe to get some breakfast, I tried to think of something new to say. But Lydia was right. We all say the same fucking things. I certainly did, for days. But he didn’t want me anymore. The tacit agreement seemed to be that it was my obvious failings. The first of which was made evident when I ordered café con leche, even though I hate coffee, from the cafe owner.
“Wrong country, Viv,” he said wearily, before ordering us two café Américains.
“No shit.”
“What possessed you?”
“I don’t know. Do I look thinner at least?”
“You do.”
“I pissed myself to this state.”
“Charming.”
“You on the other hand look just like a husband who was caught in bed with another woman.”
“Really?”
“Yes, not an ounce of remorse.”
“That’s because I don’t care.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“No.”
“Are you still in love with me?”
“That’s not a question I would expect from you.”
“There are only a finite number of things to say in these situations.”
“So let’s not say any of them.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because you did this to me. Your betrayal of me means something.”
“And?”
“And, when a person behaves out of character, then his punishment is to be bombarded with all the usual accusations.”
“Alright.”
“Good. So who is this fucking cunt sleeping with my husband?”
“Martha.”
“I know that. But who is she? Why her?”
“We get on.”
“And we didn’t?”
“We did.”
“So this is just a lazy flop from one woman to the next?”
“No. I can’t explain.”
“You have to.”
The waiter returned with our coffees, and Ralph leaned far back to give himself space. His shirt rode a little way up his stomach, and the thought crossed my mind that I should have done much more with that soft spate of skin. Maybe I am too crude for someone like Ralph. He took a sip, his lips curling back from the heat.
“I guess,” he said, putting his coffee down and pushing it away from him, “what I like is that there is no history.”
That stopped me. I didn’t know what to think. Escaping history, one’s own history—I had never heard of such a thing. Perhaps I should have thanked him for an answer of sorts, a clue, if you will, as to why it was I could never really see him, never really get a fix. He had tried to warn me all those years ago in Lake Turkana when he told me of a divide that existed in him, and how it was the only aspect of him that truly made sense. I hadn’t understood, or hadn’t believed. I once asked myself if the molten core of oneself had to cool before marriage was possible. Maybe I should have told myself instead to make sure that the person you love has a core, a solid, in-your-face core. If what Ralph is telling me, I remembered thinking, is true, he’s screwed. It was like declaring that you intend to live outside the confines of time, for Christ’s sake.
“There will be a history,” I said. “There is already. She’s your mistress, as I once was.”
“She’s my producer.”
“I won’t say how much you sound like my father,” I said, gathering up my bags in a show of something. “Look, no matter what you do you can’t escape history.”
“I can ours.”
“That’s the thing, Ralph, you can’t.”
“It’s already gone,” he said, looking down at his hands.
To feel him. To always know where in the world he was, to picture it, clear, real, was that not love? It was, except that it was my love. As for Ralph’s during that next week, even in its now obvious absence, I looked for the echo of what I had presumed was his love for me. Lonely pursuit. As we walked through the streets of Paris, past the rococo, the baroque, the lavish, the excessive, the sublime, the pompous, the whole vast history of a place built to be noticed, looked at, loved, I kept on bumping up against the unbelievably frightening thought that I would become, if Ralph didn’t love me anymore, invisible. All reality comes from being watched. Having been born under the lights, I had just assumed that Ralph had me in his sights. But each time I stole a glance at him I knew that if I just stopped walking, just lost myself in the crowd, it would be a long, long time before he even noticed. And when the panic of being invisible seized me, I would, much to Ralph’s annoyance, jump in front of him, wave my arms, thrust my face right up to his.
For how long, I wondered, hadn’t I existed? During all the moments of our marriage, for all that time where days merely unfolded—when I walked to the subway, when I read a paper, when I wandered through the supermarket, when I washed the grit out of the greens—was all that acted out for an unseeing audience of one? It occurred to me then that in his mind’s eye he had always been free of me, and that I had lived my life as a wife alone.
Wish there were a God. He might have helped to fill in the gap. I tried to believe. Abandoned now, my good white sweater a lump in the corner, I tried to roust up some faith. There was even an ecclesiastical light streaming through the pension’s windows that afternoon to give me hope. But there was to be no godly cavalry charge. So I decided to narrate my own despair until I found comfort in it. Ralph could be anything, I reasoned. I plucked him from an untenable reality and plopped him down in my newly imagined one. Over and over he’d come back to me, begging forgiveness, regret being my favorite emotion to dress him in, just like a girl might dress her Barbie doll, followed by remorse. Finding Martha replusive was good during the heated daylight hours. But at night, soft, yielding, I’d imagine Ralph out on his boat, bobbing in the endless Philippine Sea, head bowed, the sea spray hiding his tears as one singular thought consumed him: that one can’t escape the shackles of earthbound entanglements; that, in the end, what’s important are the minds behind those who watch us. Paddle me home, paddle me home.
So did I purposely step out in front of that truck? No. But after a week locked in that pension room—Ralph’s oars magical and swift—I did believe, as I walked out into daylight for the first time, that there, across Rue du Cherche Midi, coming toward me, was the man of my dreams.
I danced once with a man who had a new heart. He started very slowly, shuffling from one foot to the other, while I went mad in the raucous beat. Eventually, though, he picked up the pace and when the song ended he said we must go for a walk, to give his heart time to slow. For twenty minutes we circled the house where the party was being held as he explained it all. The heart is just a pump, or so he was told. Now his literally was. Its beat, no longer regulated by now severed nerves, speeded up only when other secretions—what, I wondered—made their way through the blood to his power source. He started to cry, flat tears, or perhaps I was reading into what he had just told me. I stayed with him, fighting the whole time the same disconcerting sensation I get when I watch the sun go down or the moon rise, the feeling of dizzying speed, the earth’s own rapid movement. He was alive but seemed not human. He wanted another dance, but I demurred and showed him a blister forming on the bottom of my foot.
I am looking now, scanning all the faces. Gare du Nord is huge. It is difficult. My first outing and I am here, try
ing not to get in the way of those who have important places to go, trying to ignore the throb in my leg, trying, against ridiculous odds, to find Sonia.
I am everywhere. “Hello” to you too. Watched from between the pages and from the station’s cafe tables down below. Alastair and Lydia. I can thank Lionel Charge for both things. He was the one to send me my two rescuers. Now that I am found, I can no longer believe my determined solitude.
Look at the two of them. They pretend to read magazines—not the one I’m in, I might add—as they sit before untouched Brie sandwiches and cooling espressos. I love them for offering to help, but they don’t know what they are looking for. A young girl wearing my white sweater isn’t much to go on. Alastair’s attentions are starting to drift toward a bunch of teenage schoolboys and Lydia’s toward the fatty come-on of her Brie sandwich.
They’re family now, if they weren’t always. How I cried when they walked though my hospital room door, surprising even myself. Alastair, not to be outdone, fell into a faint. No, for things like helping me get up, for the opening of doors, for the bathing and the topping off of my drink, it will be back to old habits now that the drip is gone. It’s going to have to be Lydia. She’s the one with all the vengeful energy. I recognize it, and I am grateful for it, remembering, of course, Alastair shepherding my father through his messy death. His efficiency and patience his own badge of unrequited love. Still, I’m something different altogether. I love him and he loves me, and I wish at this moment I was down there in the bosom of my family. Right now, however, I have a job to do.
“She’s not yet eighteen,” I said, to Dr. Luc and Dr. Ricard, as if that mattered. They had finally come to me, yesterday, diagrams in hand, time charts, options, but all of it pointless if they didn’t have a patient.
“Her heart is that of an eighty-year-old,” the doctor said. “Thin as paper and about as strong.”
I cried, and then I agreed to come out here to find her; standing here now, my forearms chafing against the crutch wedge, my leg throbbing, my own heart breaking, it all seems so impossible. Is this the best place to be looking or should I hobble over there? I once lost Ralph in a department store. Going up to the third floor to find him was no help if at that very moment he was heading down to the basement. No place was the right place, I realized, and in tears, I went home. As for this vantage point, standing by the top of the up escalator leading to the Chunnel trains, it’s above the general throng, and yet it doesn’t feel bull’s-eye enough. I really should have peacock feathers, a glorious plumage extended to attract attention, or better yet a big bulbous red baboon rump.
We could all use a bit of flair, from the looks of things. Lumpen. Not fair but so easy. People-watching is too overwhelming in a crowded train station, everybody rushing this way and that. You need to be able to freeze-frame a person in his own world to even pretend to spot a personality. Pair off in twos, gather in the smells, note and know the particular shine or curl of your lover’s hair, the slumped or bobbing walk, then you can part the crowds, spot among the masses you and yours. We need that.
Do I love Sonia well enough to pick her out? I wonder. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want her to even think of it, like when I thought for sure it was my brains swirling down the drain. Turned out only to be a prosaic leg break, a few hardy bones taken to task, and yet I assumed in my confusion it would lead forever to darkness. When she stumbled into the room and witnessed Marcel cutting down the refugee that was the first time she had seen a dead body. It would certainly be enough to fuel images of one’s own death. Maybe her heart will surprise, slow and become the sun, constant and faithful, of her own blood’s orbit.
What did we have, Sonia and I? Five, six weeks? Couple of old socks in the time compression chamber of a hospital room. More than time. I heard her blow the good doctor. Friends for life after that slurry. More than that even. Providence. A bad break brought us together, a bad death made us friends, and a bad marriage led me to this point, a savior of sorts. If I am up to it. I could just hightail it out of here. Pivot on these very crutches, join the queue, and be in London before you know it. But something tells me not to. I am rooted to this spot, desperate to find her, needing, I suppose, to reel in the runaway both for her heart’s sake and mine.