‘See you at the belvedere in an hour?’
I should have changed my mind at the familiar lightening of Jean-Luc’s voice as soon as I agreed to see him. If all we’d done was screw each other senseless it would have come to a natural end. Sooner or later one of us would have lost interest and it probably wouldn’t have been me. But having allowed him to get hooked on me, I had to make him see what a disastrous idea that really was.
I was genuinely more concerned about him. He may have been a thinker, an intello, an amazing lover, but underneath he had a kind of innocence that went with his refusal to compromise. I remember thinking that our history would mark him for ever. We were the same in that respect.
But I was tougher, and it’s not very often I get to say that. I’d get through this somehow because of the other shit I’d gotten through. I gashed my head open on a boulder and willed myself out of unconsciousness and my brother still died because of me. My mom and dad’s marriage had foundered on those same rocks. Leaving the wreckage, I’d spent my adolescence as an orphan with two living parents, the three of us on different continents.
I always had the feeling I’d never get over any of the traumas in my life and that’s not what this has been about. It’s about figuring out a way to live with it – there’s a difference – and to understand there’s more to that than just continuing to draw breath. Who was it who said you can search for happiness or you can search for meaning? Having to choose between two options usually makes you want both. I’d stopped believing in either one.
I turned to you when the pain was too great to live with but not so bad that I wanted to die. Nearly, but not quite. I couldn’t do that to my mother, or Philippe, or to a life that depended on me for the opportunity to be lived – so I suppose that was a win for meaning. Happiness isn’t 24/7 – sometimes it’s ephemeral, in the very smallest things: the baby kicking, the sunlight glittering on the ocean, a crunchy apple. Some days it’s really hard but I owe it to all of us, even myself, to give it a shot. I can’t claim any of this comes naturally, but I’m getting there.
I’m also getting ahead of myself.
It was a fittingly ominous afternoon for my meeting with Jean-Luc, humid and grey with a menacing sky. I hadn’t done anything with my hair after showering the night before and scraped it into a lank ponytail without checking the sides. I put on dark jeans that were uncomfortably hot and a T-shirt I hadn’t worn in years. I’d long since adopted the standards of the well-groomed Parisienne: no casual gear unless actually doing sport and even then it should look good. I had no need of a mirror to know I looked anything but.
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was too far to walk. I took a counterintuitive route, heading for Line 10 on autopilot at the start of my journey – I didn’t care if it didn’t go where I wanted. My ability to think was so limited that I could only plan one segment ahead. Change at Gare d’Austerlitz. Change at République. To avoid a third change I got out at Pyrénées and set off down Avenue Simon-Bolivar.
Despite my convoluted journey, I was early. Outside the entrance to the park a group of street vendors from Côte d’Ivoire were shoving their displays of knock-off sunglasses and perfumes into sports bags at the sight of two gendarmes approaching. An undernourished busker was murdering ‘Yesterday’ – the poor guy was off-key but he’d captured the depressed mood. I couldn’t recall the last time my troubles seemed far away. I tossed a two euro coin into his guitar case without a glance, to spare him having to manage a smile.
I walked through the park in the full leaf of summer. As I crossed the bridge leading to the island with the belvedere up on the butte, the sight of Jean-Luc leaning heavily against the black railings reminded me of Philippe and the low iron balcony at the living room window. It was a sheer drop to the lake. I feared for the men who fell for me.
Chapter Fifty Five
The afternoon was fading and the park emptied as a stiff breeze set the trees in motion. As I walked up the steps to the belvedere, the clouds arranged themselves into a doom-laden backdrop to the Paris skyline – this place was known for its dramatic views with the Sacré-Cœur on the horizon. The last visitors to the lookout passed me on their way down, leaving Jean-Luc alone. I’d seen them kissing, which would have been more than either of us could bear. I couldn’t believe I’d picked such a romantic spot for something like this. I may have told him yesterday that it was over but of course that would be hard to accept after what happened next. And now he’d decided to confide in me after all. I couldn’t turn around and say I didn’t want to know.
He heard my footsteps. Unusually, he was completely clean shaven, probably since we’d spoken, his skin so smooth and perfect that my fingertips tingled. It was like there was an electric fence separating us. I leaned on the railings at some distance so we couldn’t see each other face on. Even so his eyes glowed like a gas flame. He edged a little closer.
‘You did clean up the bathroom, didn’t you?’ I blurted.
He looked at me in utter disbelief and we both laughed. I edged a little closer.
‘Yes, I cleaned up the bathroom,’ he said, in a tone that was falsely jokey, genuinely despondent. He held up his injured hand, a suppurating mass of scabs, flakes of dried skin and lurid raw patches.
‘That looks horrific,’ I said. ‘It should be covered up, you know.’
He shook his head and his mouth stretched into a bitter line. ‘You think this is what hurts? Because let me tell you, this is nothing. I can’t even feel it.’
How I envied the next one who made him feel this strongly. The right woman would feel euphoric when she realised how relentlessly he was capable of loving her back. That was never going to be me.
When his other arm stirred I flew over and grabbed it, thinking he was about to take a swipe at one of the stone pillars and break something. Turned out he was only reaching for his pocket. Realising my mistake, I let go. On the second attempt he took the cigarettes out of his jacket and offered them to me. We both smoked only when nervous or stressed and I was about to take one when I remembered I couldn’t.
‘What is it?’ he asked me, frowning. ‘For God’s sake, one a week’s not going to kill you.’
‘I have to sit down.’ I positioned myself on the cold stone base against a pillar as there was nowhere else, knees bent, my feet on the raised structure in the middle. Jean-Luc put the cigarettes away and took up the same position at the next pillar along, our backs to Paris, his newish Converses next to my battered ones. Nobody wants to be a grown-up any more. He offered me his leather jacket when he saw me shivering but I refused, hugging myself tight against the chill, against an unbearable longing for him to hold me. It would smell like him, be warm like him. My nipples hardened against my forearms.
He gave me a puzzled look and I thought of everything he didn’t know.
He might be – was – looking at the future mother of his child, but I couldn’t lay that on him in his volatile state when it might still come to nothing. Even in the animal frenzy of that first afternoon I’d told him there was no need to be careful. Keeping it to myself was my only option; it would be a lonely few weeks before I knew if I’d have to own up to everything, derailing several other lives. I’d always wanted a baby, but not like this.
‘I can’t remember not knowing you,’ he said.
‘It’s not been all that long.’ I reproached myself for trying to talk it down. My entire life could have ticked away without me experiencing what we’d had for this one short summer. I didn’t mean the fantastic sex or the thrill of the forbidden. There are rarer things.
‘And now you’re dropping me just like that—’
‘Just like what?’ The wind amplified my words and it sounded like I was shouting. ‘You think this is easy for me? We’ve been having the same conversation practically from the start! We can’t do this, okay? We have to stop whether we want to or not.’
‘So you admit you don’t want to stop. But who says we have to?’
‘I
do. Nobody else knows. At least not for certain,’ I added, mindful of Geneviève, who had more reasons to be incensed than I’d originally thought. ‘Believe me, if they find out they’ll have plenty to say.’
‘Why can’t we just do what we want? What’s the point of anything otherwise? You don’t even know what you want. You turn up at my parents’ place saying it’s over and we end up making love like that? That wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t feel the same way. It just wouldn’t…’ His voice trailed off and it was torment knowing we were both reliving moments almost violent in their passion, knowing it was the last time. I faced him straight on, the thudding in my chest echoing at my temple like the second heartbeat.
‘Don’t you think it’s possible I was disturbed by you putting your hand through a wall? That’s not normal behaviour.’ There it was, the difference in his approach to living and mine: I thought about harming myself and backed out; he went ahead with absolute commitment. ‘You’ve had a charmed existence if it’s taken you nearly twenty-four years to realise you can’t always have what you want.’
Witnessing his anguish was like pressing hard on a bruise. Two people began climbing the steps to the lookout and soon changed their minds, turning around and heading in another direction, whispering.
‘You don’t realise what you are to me,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘You make me forget all the bad shit that’s happened.’ I watched his Adam’s apple dip as he swallowed hard. ‘Tout est foutu.’ Everything’s fucked.
It really felt like it.
‘This is all my mother’s fault,’ he said. ‘I will never forgive her for ruining things between us.’
For an instant I questioned whether Geneviève, or anyone, really had any right to object to me and Jean-Luc. It wasn’t the done thing, that was a given. She was entitled to be angry, to feel that I’d betrayed her trust and our husbands’ friendship. I could understand her resenting me for cheating on the man she’d secretly loved for years – with anyone, let alone her own son. It was hard to argue with any of it.
‘Don’t blame your mother,’ I said. ‘It’s not her fault or yours. What you feel for me is very strong and very real – I don’t doubt that. But you said yourself it’s an obsession, a way to block other things out. I’m just a fix, Jean-Luc, and even that’s not working. Think about it – you’ve had some of these episodes when we’re together. I wish I could, but I can’t make this right. You’ve got to get to what’s causing it.’
‘But who can I talk to, if I can’t talk to you?’
I had long sensed a kind of exclusion zone around him which I had breached somehow. ‘You can tell me anything,’ I said, hoping I’d be better than no one.
I recall that conversation not in words but in sensation, movement, contagious emotion. A diving accident in which Jean-Luc and another man had narrowly escaped death because of what happened to him. There was a name for it, though I didn’t discover that until later: Blue Orb Syndrome. When divers panic, become disoriented, behave irrationally. He talked of feeling claustrophobic, trapped. Tearing off equipment, pulling the other man down, all logic abandoned, all survival instincts suppressed. He gripped me so hard the colour drained from his hand to leave five tiny marks on my arm. Behind my back, my other hand clung to the railings of the belvedere: it was activating my own walls of water, black rocks, helpless terror. For him that day was followed by nightmares he could only avoid by sleeping in daylight, panic attacks that struck without warning, that same conviction he was about to die.
But the worst part was coming to fear what he had always loved. ‘Je n’ai plus rien sans toi.’ Without me he had nothing. He was looking for a replacement passion when he found me but I’d already proven that I was no match for the ocean.
‘You’re not going to die, Jean-Luc. You’re going to get through this and get on with your life,’ I said, stroking his head, my T-shirt soaked through.
‘You won’t tell my parents?’
Geneviève’s words at Honfleur came back to me. If you find out… But he wasn’t a kid and I wasn’t a snitch. ‘Not if you promise that you will,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you don’t deal with things like this, they can mess you up.’
Chapter Fifty Six
My teenage dreams used to stay with me in every detail, often leaving me in a state of agitation for hours, not helped by being surrounded by those who featured in them. Both asleep and awake under the covers my imagination ran wild with Emily’s assurance that it was even better when someone else made you come. In my imagination there was no shortage of candidates for the job, although when I finally enlisted male help I found she wasn’t always right. Not only that, but I wasn’t too keen on what the boys wanted in return.
As an adult, I don’t often remember my dreams, but those I do have one thing in common. They could never happen.
There’s one that I’ve had repeatedly, sometimes years apart. My brother Christopher and I are in our late twenties. It is fall and we are walking in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, close to where I used to live, albeit not at that time (I was in London with Jonathan then). I am wearing a beautiful red coat I’ve never owned, Christopher, who’s much taller than me, a pea coat with the collar turned up and a green wool scarf. He’s smart and funny, still earnest like he always used to be. We pay little attention to our surroundings, covering large distances as we talk something out, I never know what; perhaps some problem I’m trying to help with. Suddenly he grabs hold of me and pretends to push me into a huge pile of leaves. We both start kicking them up into the air, shrieking with laughter like we’re eight and ten again.
And then there was the new dream, of a very different future to my now.
I’m on the Côte d’Azur with the others in this story, having lunch at a beachfront restaurant. It’s not hot or crowded so it must only be late spring or very early summer – the sky Yves Klein blue, that caressing warmth in the air. Everyone’s on good form, drinking rosé and eating grilled fish, talking across each other, waving our hands about. It seems we’re all still friends.
Some Italians at the next table are making a huge fuss of a little boy who has his mother’s dark hair and his father’s eyes. It’s my son, maybe three years old. It’s true, he is adorable. Everybody says so.
Philippe looks at his watch and gets up to leave the gathering, circling the table to embrace us all in turn. He slaps Henri Malavoine on the back, as usual. He kisses the boy’s head, ruffles his hair, and last of all, he kisses me. Not quite on the mouth, not quite far enough away.
‘Time for a siesta,’ I say. Jean-Luc catches my eye and tries not to smile. He and I leave with the little boy swinging between us.
Wrong. Wrong. All wrong.
I still have that dream often, there’s no predicting when. Sometimes I’m just not strong enough. Those nights I can’t sleep for fear of its blissful torture, right up there with the happiest I’ve ever been. It’s so vivid, so close, I want so much for it to be real that when I wake I have to remind myself he’s gone. I would be okay with the woman not being me – I didn’t try to keep him for myself. The sadness hollows me and for a second or two it’s all I can do to exist, let alone live.
And then I remember Jean-Luc left me someone to fill that space, when I could have been left with nothing. And the biggest lesson I have learned from everything I’ve told you is this: love comes in many kinds.
Chapter Fifty Seven
Just as I decided there could be no more calls, texts or meetings, Jean-Luc broke off contact completely. I felt as empty as it’s possible to feel when you’re pregnant and ravenous, and indescribably lonely. Eating packet mac and cheese made it better and worse with its new associations of Vanessa. The way I missed her was very straightforward compared to the way I missed her father. That’s right, I missed Philippe. We all spoke often on the phone, both of them keen to keep me up to date with their latest disagreements. Vanessa was getting on well with her cousins and had learned to ride a Vespa – against Philippe’
s wishes, but he was overruled by his family, who teased him for becoming an uptight Parisian. Hearing about her escapades made me smile just when I needed to remember how.
That Friday I had lunch as planned with Robert Levitsky from San Francisco, who unexpectedly brought along his partner, a Japanese-American dancer who was prettier and more feminine than most women. ‘It’s okay,’ said Robert, ‘nobody can stop staring at him.’ The object of our attention pouted fetchingly at us with one eye on the very handsome and not-at-all-gay waiter, who missed no opportunity to look down the front of my dress. I placed my hand over the top of my wine glass hoping nobody would notice I didn’t touch it as my companions laid in with enthusiasm.
We mostly talked about Icons and secular iconology, Robert’s area. He was writing a book that sounded a million times more marketable than ours (Che Guevara, Lady Gaga, David Beckham) but as his foundation had recently secured a large donation from a patron of East European descent, he wanted to make ours available in English. For the sake of both Editions Gallici and Baudelaire, whose volume we could otherwise barely afford to produce, I jumped to accept a figure more generous than I’d dared to hope for.
Negotiations concluded, we agreed to wait until September to proceed. I began to unwind, relieved I’d managed to carry off the meeting and summon some trace of the competent professional woman I was before I lost my grip on everything. Over dessert we switched to chit-chat about Paris and I realised how little I’d seen or done that summer, disregarding all the lies I’d told Philippe. I’d just launched into an anecdote about the Impressionist exhibition I dragged him to at the Musée Marmottan when instead of those luminous paintings, I saw our Metro ride that day like a couple of frames from a movie: Philippe looking at the little kid with the toy horses and how upset he’d been with the father. How sad he was about Vanessa. Him saying I would be a good mother.
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