“How was Austria?” he asked, glancing in the rearview mirror at Alex and Nico.
“Amazing!” they said in unison.
“So did you ski?” Nikolai asked.
“Of course!” Alex said. “We skied every day.”
“That’s ah-MAAA-zing!” he said in an over-the-top Mister Rogers voice.
“I went down a black run,” Alex said, his pride evident.
“A black run?” Nikolai exclaimed, his enthusiasm tangible. “Ah-MAAA-zing!”
“And I lost Stinky in the airport,” Nico said.
“What?” Nikolai said, his eyes wide with fake incredulity. “You lost Stinky?”
Stinky was Nico’s favorite stuffed animal, a hippo she slept with every night. Nico sat up on her knees, straining against her seat belt, the emotions of the experience coloring her voice, and said, “It was terrible! I left him at the play area in the airport, and we didn’t know he was gone until we were on the plane! And Mama had to run out past security to get him! I thought I would never see him again!”
“It’s a miracle we didn’t miss our flight,” I said, and it was true: I’d barely had time to get back through security before they closed the door to the plane. Nico loved Stinky so much that we all lived in fear of the day we actually lost him.
“It’s like in New York,” Nikolai said. “When she left Stinky in Central Park.”
“Did I lose Stinky in Central Park?” Nico asked, amazed.
“You were about four years old,” Nikolai said. “And we went to the Central Park Zoo. When we were driving away, you let out a shriek, and we realized that you’d forgotten Stinky on a park bench. I turned the car around, drove as fast as I could back to the park, ran to the bench, and rescued Stinky. You were so happy!”
I stared at Nikolai, taking in his version of the story. The details of the situation were correct—Nico had left her stuffed hippo on a bench in Central Park, and she’d screamed at the top of her lungs when she discovered it was missing. Nikolai had indeed turned the car around and driven back to the park, but he’d been driving the car, and so it had been up to me to run into the park and retrieve the hippo. I’d played a significant role in saving Stinky, and here he was, taking all the credit.
“Nikolai,” I said, “that’s not how it happened.”
He gave me an odd look, part confusion, part annoyance. “Of course it is.”
“You didn’t go into the park,” I continued.
Nikolai looked at me as if I were crazy. “Yes I did,” he said. “I ran to the zoo and hunted until I found Stinky.”
“Where did you find him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean where was he?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking this over. “Where Nico left him.”
“You don’t remember,” I said. “Because you were driving. You stopped, and I jumped out of the car and went into the park to get Stinky.”
“That’s not what happened,” he said.
“Yes it is,” I said, absolutely certain that I had the facts right. But even if I didn’t have the facts right, I was fighting for credit, fighting to be seen, fighting to be recognized for my role as Stinky’s savior. “Stinky was sitting on the third bench from the zoo entrance.”
As we continued our drive toward home, I stared at the highway, going over the incident in my mind, replaying the sequence of events. It was just one small and insignificant episode out of thousands of small and insignificant episodes in our lives, an unmemorable and random incident, but suddenly it took on a greater importance. It became, all at once, the single frame in the movie that had captured the whole narrative. We were living together, experiencing our day-to-day lives in tandem, but we had totally disconnected experiences. We both thought we were the heroes of the story. We both remembered saving Stinky. My husband lived in one story, and I lived in a different one.
I glanced into the backseat and saw Alex looking at me with interest. He’d been there, in the car, sitting next to his sister, watching quietly as his parents reacted to her missing-hippo emergency in Central Park. He remembered what had happened, I was sure of it. I loved his perfect repose, the tranquillity of his watchfulness. I wasn’t going to ask him to report his version of what had happened with Stinky. Asking him to correct Nikolai or to correct me would be asking him to take sides, to contradict one of us. Any judgment he made would unsettle his equilibrium. It was that very suspension that kept him aloft between his parents, that weightlessness that protected him from us. And this fragile balance was the one thing too sacred to break.
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. It was such a stupid thing to argue about—who’d saved Nico’s hippo?—but this small, silly thing tipped a scale inside me. At home I grabbed my coat and walked through the courtyard. Aubais was warm compared to Austria, but I threw on my jacket anyway and headed to my car. The prospect of going back into La Commanderie and returning to my life with Nikolai there was too much for me. I fought back tears. This is what my life had come to: Even before I got home, I needed to leave again.
Driving would clear my mind. I got into my car, opened the windows, and turned on the French news. I pulled out into the village and drove down past the bulls. It was blue, blue skies for as far as I could see. I drove past an olive grove filled with barren trees. My eyes were brimming with tears, and I could hardly see, but I was driving faster and faster, taking the corners without slowing, daring fate to put me in harm’s way. Maybe it was for the best. If I were to die in an accident, no one could blame me for giving up on my marriage. I wouldn’t be a terrible wife. I wouldn’t have to explain my failure to my children. I could escape without making the hardest decision of my life: to leave.
In Sommières I parked by the Vidourle River and called Diana. She’d just made it back to London, and I could hear her boys running through the apartment, screaming and laughing in the background, and for the first time in all the years I’d known Diana, I envied my friend, truly envied her. Not for her expensive things or her apartment in Kensington or her fat maintenance check. I envied her freedom.
By the time I asked her to help me find a lawyer, I knew that I’d made up my mind. I was going to take a separate path. I was getting ready, packing my hopes and expectations away, and preparing for my journey out of there. The question was only how and when that path would materialize. In the meantime I would wait until the right moment arrived. I would camouflage my impulses. I would live my days as if I were the same woman I’d always been. But I wasn’t the same woman. I was a woman planning, scheming, waiting for the right moment to flee.
The Knight
Petro and Silvia were a couple we knew only slightly, but we happened to be in Paris the same weekend, and so we met them for dinner near the Palais Garnier, the enormous Second Empire opera house in the 9th arrondissement. As we joined their table, I looked them over, curious. We had met them just a few times before, and always with other friends. Petro was a banker, and Silvia was an artist. Bulgarian by birth, they had four children, lived in Switzerland, and owned a summerhouse in the Corniche in Cannes. They were thirty-eight, the same age as Nikolai and me, and had been married for eighteen years. On the couple-happiness index, they would get, at first glance, a seven.
They had reserved a table for six. Two men sat with them, a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma and a young Parisian filmmaker named Pierre. As Silvia introduced us, Nikolai shot me an uncomfortable look, a What the hell are we doing here? kind of look. Nikolai didn’t want to spend time with Petro and Silvia to begin with, let alone meet these new people. He’d told me on the way to the restaurant that he was only going to the dinner to please me, that he wasn’t in the mood for stuffy restaurants or stuffy people. I was always dragging him out to these stupid dinners, he said. I should be grateful he was there at all.
I sat on the red leather banquette, and Nikolai slid next to me. There was more than enough space, and yet he pressed himself right up against me, sitt
ing so close that our legs and hips touched. I inched away, to get some space, but Nikolai moved with me, as if our bodies were stitched together. I could feel his every movement, grating, rubbing, scratching me. He tapped his foot under the table and wiggled his knees. His cologne—the same expensive cologne I’d found so alluring when we met—was now too strong, cloying. His leg bumped my leg; his arm brushed my arm. He was tap-tap-tapping his foot under the table. He was too close to me. He wouldn’t stop touching me. If I could just inch a little to the left, I would be much, much more comfortable. I tried to slide over, and he moved even closer. He was trying to trap me in the banquette. He was letting me know how irritated he was that I’d forced him to have dinner at this restaurant with these unknown people. I glanced at him and gave him a look, exasperated: Can you give me some room, please? He ignored me, and I felt an urgent desire—a wild, primitive need—to leap up, jump over the table, and run as far away as I could.
Petro ordered wine—a few bottles of burgundy, white and red. The food came. We drank and ate. The lights were low and the conversation filled with talk of art and films and books. I began to tell them about Nikolai’s work, talking up his books, hailing his new novel as a masterpiece, the kind of brilliant social novel that wasn’t written anymore. “It’s like A Clockwork Orange meets Orwell’s 1984,” I said, smiling and proud, the supportive wife. That’s how we’d come to deal with the disparities in our careers. It was just luck, I would say, downplaying my success. Instead I praised his books, pushing him into the spotlight, while I didn’t mention my work at all. Sometimes at the end of a dinner party, no one had the slightest idea of what I did professionally. I could talk about the kids and I could talk about our house, but if I began to talk about hitting the bestseller list or the book tours in Italy and Spain, Nikolai would fall into a funk. The slightest aroma of my success would sour his mood.
Of course, when we met, he was the successful one. This hadn’t caused strife or jealousy between us: It didn’t matter who scored, because we were on the same team. His first book in English—the memoir of his time in India that he wrote in Providence—had done well and gotten strong reviews. Then Nikolai’s second book in English—a novel about his life as a pianist—had been published. It hadn’t sold well, and although it was well received, there was not a review in the bible of book reviews, the New York Times. He’d spent years writing the book, and he felt slighted. It is a writer’s biggest fear, the one thing that is sure to produce megadoses of anxiety: the possibility that our work might be ignored. He came to my office some months after the book was released and leaned against the doorway. “I didn’t expect this to happen,” he said. By “this” he meant “nothing.” He hadn’t expected nothing to happen in the New York Times Book Review. My heart sank. I wanted to tell him that I could fix it, that I could call up someone in New York and make the review happen. But I couldn’t. Fortune did not owe us equal bounty or equal review space.
At the restaurant in Paris, I sat back against the soft leather watching operagoers making their way to the Palais Garnier. Black-tied, satin-gowned, they were a horde of beautiful people walking through the glow of a warm Paris evening. It was like a parade of Renaissance courtesans and jesters and knaves, and I—inside the restaurant, glass of wine in hand—longed to be part of the carnival. How perfect everyone seemed out there, I thought. How free.
After dessert we walked out into the street. The opera had begun; the avenue was empty. “We’re going to a party,” Silvia said. “It’s at a friend’s place in the second arrondissement. Why don’t you come along?”
I looked at my watch. It was only ten o’clock, too early to go to sleep. “Sure,” I said, and instantly I felt Nikolai’s fingers grip my wrist. He didn’t want to go. He hated parties. A party would be crowded. There would be strangers and uncomfortable silences, and all sorts of potentially disturbing encounters. “Just for a little while,” I added, to appease him.
“Great,” Petro said and, before I knew it, he had hailed a taxi and we were on our way to the 2nd arrondissement.
—
THE EXACT MANEUVERS of the taxi from the restaurant to the party have faded, but I remember the moment I saw the Frenchman—that scorching-hot monsieur from the beginning of this story—with a precise, telescopic clarity, as if the lens of my mind had been focused and waiting for him to appear all my life. He opened the door to his small, mansard-roofed apartment on the top floor of an old Parisian building, and there he was, the most magnetic man I’d ever seen.
“Hello,” he said in French-accented English. He kissed Silvia’s cheeks before going on to kiss mine. He smelled of cedar and musk and leather, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to stop, to let the others pass by, and stand at his side as he greeted his guests.
“Who is that?” I whispered to Silvia as we stepped into the apartment.
“This is his party,” she whispered back. “He’s a friend of Pierre’s, a young filmmaker. Handsome, n’est-ce pas?”
Handsome to say the least. He’d leaned against the wall, and the dim candlelight washed over him, illuminating his high cheekbones and dark eyes. He had wild caramel-brown hair, a Roman nose, and full lips. Everything about him seemed a study in artistic messiness, as if much thought had gone into the disarrangement of his hair, his wrinkled jean jacket, his unshaven chin. He was thirty at most, probably younger, but with a seriousness in his expression that gave one the sense that he suffered from some long-standing existential aggravation. He had been born handsome, and as if to spite the gods who’d given him this gift, he did everything in his power to downplay his beauty.
I watched him while he performed his duties as host—putting on music and pouring drinks and opening the window to cool off the room—all the while feeling that there was something strange about him, something foreign yet familiar, a feeling of déjà vu. Then it came at me, quick as a slap to the face, a realization so strange and yet so obvious that it left me momentarily confused: That strange yet familiar feeling was desire. I wanted to push this French guy, this total and complete stranger, against the wall and rip his clothes off.
There were bottles of champagne and glasses of whiskey with ice, and loud electronic music, and by the time midnight rolled around, I was dizzy from it all—the champagne, the dancing, the magnetic attraction I felt whenever our host walked by.
“What do you know about him?” I asked Silvia later that night, when champagne had made me bold.
“Well, I know he is getting over a bad breakup,” she said. The champagne had thrown her off balance, too, and she leaned heavily on a chair. “Pierre says he’s been a bit depressed. Drinking too much. Doing some drugs. Sleeping around. You know—post-breakup Band-Aids.”
“Dangerous,” I said.
“Yes, very,” Silvia said. “Oh, and he’s twenty-six years old.”
I did a quick calculation: thirty-eight minus twenty-six. That was a twelve-year difference.
“Come on,” Silvia said, taking me by the arm and walking me over to the Frenchman. Soon the three of us were talking and drinking another glass of champagne together. When Silvia walked off to dance, I told him stories of the bull runs in Aubais, about the hedonism of the fête, the way the village transformed from a quiet village into a bacchanal every August.
“Everyone is drinking and dancing and making love in the streets. Actually, there’s a saying that the population of Aubais always grows nine months after the fête—new babies born.”
“Sounds like fun,” he said, smiling at me.
“You should come south next summer,” I said.
“Maybe I will,” he said, looking into my eyes as if trying to read something hidden behind them.
I glanced up and saw Nikolai, standing across the room staring at us as we spoke. I would definitely have to pay for talking to this guy when we left. I took a step away, turning my back so that Nikolai couldn’t see my face.
“Something the matter?”
“My husband
isn’t happy that I’m talking to you,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I know,” I said.
He glanced over toward Nikolai. “We’re just talking.”
“He can see that I’m enjoying myself.”
“You aren’t allowed to have fun?” he asked, perplexed, as if this were the strangest thing he’d heard all evening.
“I can have fun,” I said, “but not too much fun. Especially not with you.”
“Why not with me?”
“Well, because…well, look at you.”
“Ah, he is jealous.”
“He’s probably thinking, What’s he saying that’s so funny? What is she laughing at now?”
“You don’t laugh like this all the time?”
“No,” I said, giving him a smile. “Not often.”
“You should laugh more often,” he said, moving closer to me.
“If you say so,” I said, trying to get away from the subject of my husband.
“Come,” he said, looking like a mischievous child. He leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Laugh.”
“Laugh at what?” I said, whispering back.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just laugh like I told you a very funny, very dirty joke.”
I considered this a moment and then laughed, a boisterous and bold laugh. A laugh filled with hope and inspiration and joy and light. The kind of laugh that can change the composition of the universe. Following my lead, he laughed, too, and soon the very act of laughing was funny in itself, funny enough to spur us on until we were genuinely laughing, laughing so hard that tears came to my eyes. Laughter had created a conspiracy of happiness between us.
“What’s your name?” I asked, realizing that I hadn’t asked earlier.
“Hadrien,” he said, smiling sweetly, his face flushed.
“Hadrien,” I said, turning the word over as if it were a golden coin. “Like Hadrian’s Wall?”
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