“Exactly,” he said. “Hadrien. Like the emperor.”
—
AN HOUR LATER the party had moved down to the rue Montmartre, to Silencio, a club owned by the experimental filmmaker and Transcendental Meditation proponent David Lynch. The club was an exclusive venue for film, performance art, music, and dancing, with daily screenings and events. Silencio was created as a space for artists, and while it was difficult to get into if you were, say, a hedge-fund manager, I’d applied as a novelist and had been given a black membership card with the word SILENCIO in silver. We walked past a long line outside the club, stopping near the bouncers. I flashed my membership card, a black velvet cord was swept aside, and we were waved into the darkness.
We stepped inside among a pulsing mass of people. Silvia was drunk, falling over her Louboutin heels, Hadrien on one arm and Petro on the other, a beautiful woman accompanied by gladiators. I glanced at Nikolai, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. He was furious. He didn’t want to be at Silencio, and he wanted me to know it.
Suddenly Silvia grabbed my hand. “Ladies’ room!” she said, and although I could hardly hear her above the noise, I followed her through a narrow hallway, to a powder room with huge round mirrors. Silvia took lipstick from her bag and, after putting some on, gave it to me.
“Don’t worry about Nikolai,” she said. “Petro doesn’t dance either.”
“Is it that obvious that he doesn’t want to be here?”
“He’ll loosen up,” she said, giving me a reassuring smile.
“That is pretty much impossible.”
“He can talk to Petro about stocks or something.”
“Nikolai isn’t interested in stocks,” I said.
“Really?” she said, looking at me with surprise, as if to say, What man in his right mind is not interested in stocks?
“I’m going to have to hear about this all day tomorrow,” I said, knowing that the night would be fuel for many future arguments. “He’s never going to let me forget about it.”
“But you like dancing, don’t you?”
Of course I liked to dance. I loved it. I used to go out dancing all the time before I met Nikolai. “Actually,” I said, “I do.”
“Then don’t let Nikolai stop you,” Silvia said, flipping her blond hair over her shoulder. “That’s how Petro and I have stayed together. I don’t prevent him from doing what makes him happy, and he doesn’t stop me from doing what makes me happy.”
“Sounds ideal,” I said, feeling as if she’d just spoken scripture from some esoteric relationship bible, one that I could not quite interpret.
“Well, nothing is ideal, especially when you have kids. But it works for us.”
We walked back out into the club and found Nikolai, Petro, Hadrien, and Pierre at a table. Silvia sank into a chair and began talking to her husband, forgetting that she’d wanted to dance. I looked to Nikolai. “Come dance with me!” I said over the music, giving him a hopeful smile.
Nikolai regarded me with a flat expression, as if I’d asked him to jump off the Eiffel Tower. He shook his head. No way.
“Why not?” I asked, remembering the fête in Aubais. He hadn’t danced with me that night either.
He shook his head a second time, a definite negative.
“Please,” I said, giving him a look that could only be considered a final plea, a look that said, Let’s have fun together. Let’s be foolish together. Let’s forget that we have all these problems and dance until the world fades away.
Nikolai shook his head a third time, an answer so clear that I couldn’t possibly mistake his meaning. He wasn’t dancing, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind.
I looked around to see if Silvia was free, but she was talking to Petro. Hadrien sat alone, seeming bored. I considered him a moment, and then I stepped close to this young, beautiful Frenchman and asked him if he wanted to dance. In the same way Nikolai had chosen me in Iowa City, I chose Hadrien.
Tu aimerais danser? Would you like to dance?
—
“THAT WAS ALL so pathetic,” Nikolai said the next day as we settled into our seats on the TGV at the Gare de Lyon. He took out his book, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, and put it on his lap. “Mindless,” he pronounced. “And worse. It was all so cliché. Champagne and clubbing? Do Petro and Silvia think they’re original, throwing money around in crass places like that? It was terrible. And thanks to you we were stuck with them all night.”
The train left the station, gaining speed. I loved to watch the city recede and the countryside approach, the fields of rural France spreading out from the window, the hills topped with cottages and the valleys clotted with sheep. From Paris to Lyon and from Lyon to Nîmes. The land rushed by, so idyllic it seemed cut from a children’s picture book.
I pretended to read a magazine, but all I could think about was the Frenchman. His features were burned into my mind. I remembered the broad forehead, the thick eyebrows, the straight Roman nose. I didn’t want the image I had of him to slip away, to flutter off in some gust of forgetfulness. Had he smelled of cedar and leather? Or was it musk? Had he actually kissed my ear when he’d whispered to me, or had I imagined it? Had he touched my hand when we danced? Such questions had been on my mind as Nikolai pulled me out of the club and to the street, where he’d hailed a cab and gestured for me to get inside the car. Such thoughts had been on my mind as we lay in bed, Nikolai asleep at my side. Everything about Hadrien seemed dreamlike, unreal. The facts I had were these: I knew his first name, and I knew where he lived. I knew he was a friend of Pierre’s. Other than this, I had no concrete information to go on.
Nikolai and I sat in excruciating silence. Finally, near Lyon, he set aside his book and looked at me. He cleared his throat and said, “How drunk were you last night?”
“Very,” I replied, without looking up.
“What do you remember about the club?”
“Not much,” I said, although of course I remembered everything, every last detail.
“Well, I can tell you that you acted totally ridiculous.”
“I did?”
Nikolai was, I realized, offering me a way out. If I claimed that I remembered nothing, he might let it go. This was my escape route. Nothing happened if I couldn’t recall it.
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s good you don’t. You were stupid, but you were led into it by Silvia. She is such a cliché,” he said. He was doing what he usually did when outsiders threatened us: He cut them down and buried them before they could be a problem. “The rich housewife playing the artist.”
“That she can manage to paint with all of those kids is pretty extraordinary, if you ask me.”
“She’s not a real painter,” he said.
“Sounds like you’re jealous,” I said, and Nikolai shot me a look of reprimand. I’d broken our unspoken tradition, one that had bound us together for years, of criticizing other couples. Some nights after we’d been to a dinner party, we would come home and gossip about whoever happened to be around the table. We would dissect their careers, their marriages, their kids, their finances, their lifestyles. We weren’t always cruel, but sometimes we were, and I now understood why: Ripping apart these people was the only way Nikolai and I could feel good about our own marriage. Diminishing someone else’s happiness made our misery bearable. We had to tear down the castles of others to make our own castle strong. But I didn’t want that anymore. Now the castle I wanted to tear down was my own.
“I don’t want you to see Petro and Silvia again,” he said, looking up. “Those people are toxic.”
“We just met them,” I objected. “They’re fun.”
“I don’t like how you behave around them,” he said. “You’re not yourself with them. You’re too good for them. They change you.”
“Change me?”
“They make you less special,” he said. “I don’t like your behavior when you’re with them. It’s childish. And desperate.”
“Well, you were last night, dancing around like a teenager,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”
“We were just having fun,” I said. I’d rolled my Paris Match into a truncheon and was gripping it like a weapon. “And the club was full of people, most of them having fun and none of them teenagers. By the way, that’s David Lynch’s club. You like Eraserhead.”
“You were out of control,” he said.
“Whose control was I out of?” I replied. “Yours?”
“Since when do you like going to clubs?” he said. “You used to like spending the day at the Louvre.”
“We always do the same thing. I don’t want to keep going in the same circles my whole life.”
“With those people,” Nikolai said, a look of snobbery on his face, “you’re just going backward.”
Nikolai returned to his book. I unrolled the Paris Match and tried to read. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind kept going back to Hadrien and then, even further back, to a fact that I had all but deleted from the story of my marriage to Nikolai. I didn’t think of this eliminated episode of my life, just as I didn’t speak of it to anyone during my second marriage. It was the unspoken past, something that lurked below the surface of my marriage to Nikolai. As a novelist, someone who created characters and killed them off, I had the luxury of editing out whole lives in my books, but no matter how I wished to expunge a scene from my own story, I couldn’t: I had been married to my first husband, Sam, when I fell in love with Nikolai.
Sam and I had been unhappy and on the verge of breaking up, but it was Nikolai’s presence that gave me the courage to leave. I hadn’t had an affair—I wasn’t cut out for that kind of long-term deception—but once I understood my feelings for Nikolai, the day we met in the library and kissed in the European-history section, in fact, was the day I left Sam.
Sam had been beautiful and dangerous when I met him—six feet four with dyed-blond hair and shocking blue eyes, a body full of tattoos and piercings—and nonconformist in the extreme. He wore a beat-up leather jacket, wrote free-verse poems, and played pool like a genius. I fell for him in a single burning instant. In Sam I’d found someone kindred, someone I recognized. He was a free spirit who had read more books than anyone I knew, could write a beautiful love letter, and—most important to the lonely twenty-three-year-old I was—he loved me.
We had been together only a few months when I got a job teaching English in Japan. If Sam wanted to come with me, he needed a spousal visa, and so we decided to get married. We were in love in the way that twenty-three-year-olds love: selfishly, narcissistically, with a shortsighted passion that implied that we weren’t going to live past thirty, so why the hell try? We applied for a marriage license one day, and a few weeks later we were applying for a spousal visa, and a few months later we were living in Japan, and a few months after that I was pregnant. We were happy together. We were playing by our own rules. I kept my name. We didn’t wear rings. Our parents didn’t know we were married at all until a year after we’d eloped, when we were living on the island of Kyushu. We never imagined ourselves being married in the traditional sense, and so we didn’t consider it strange to hide the truth. And besides, we didn’t care what people thought. Our love was ours, and we decided what it meant.
After I became pregnant, everything changed. Our freewheeling, bohemian marriage turned into a relationship of the more traditional sort: We were man and wife with a baby boy on the way. Suddenly I needed more than a cool and romantic guy. I began to ask for more from Sam. I wanted him to go back to school and get a degree. I wanted him to get a real job. I had changed, and I wanted him to change, too. By the time Alex was born, I was no longer a wild child flouting convention, but a woman with a deep commitment to her son and his future. I wanted my child to have everything I hadn’t. And Sam, it seemed to me, was happy just the way we were.
Of course, there was much more behind the split with Sam than this—I see that now—and I often wish I could go back in time and explain those reasons better. If I could, I would return to the day I left, when Sam and I sat together in the basement of our Iowa City house. Sam was crying into his hands and saying, “Why are you doing this?” and all the while I just sat there, stupidly silent, watching him cry. He told me he hated me and that I was ruining his life, and still I said nothing. I didn’t have the words to describe the swirling, contradictory emotions I felt. I just knew I needed to go. I believed that my future was waiting for me. I couldn’t afford to let it pass me by. “I’m sorry,” I finally said, and I was sorry, so sorry for what I was doing to him, but despite the regret I felt, I couldn’t stay another moment. I’d fallen in love with a magician who would make all my dreams come true.
—
OUT OF CONTROL. This phrase stayed with me for days after we left Paris. Out of control, the laughter. Out of control, the dancing. I had been out of control, free, on the other side of the boundaries of my marriage. My husband had said these words as an insult, but in my ears they were liberating. I had been so tightly under control, so bound up in what I must do to keep things going, that I’d controlled myself into a straitjacket. The memory of being with Hadrien, the lightness of it, the simplicity of it, rushed over me, and I would momentarily be transported. With Hadrien I had laughed. It was nothing more complicated than that. I would remember our laughter when I drove Alex and Nico to school; I would remember it when I went to work and before I fell asleep. It was simple. With Hadrien I’d been happy.
I didn’t know how to get in touch with Hadrien, and so I searched for him on online. Hadrien was Pierre’s friend, and Pierre was a friend of Silvia and Petro. Surely they were friends on Facebook. This web of connections would be my glass slipper, the tool by which I would find him. I looked through Silvia and Petro’s lists of friends on Facebook, but I didn’t find Hadrien. I had no idea of his family name, which meant it wouldn’t be possible to find him by doing a general search. And so I sent a friend request to Pierre, and then sent a message: COULD YOU PLEASE PUT ME IN TOUCH WITH HADRIEN? THANKS. Some hours later Pierre sent me Hadrien’s e-mail address. It sat in my in-box, waiting.
Did you like dancing with me at Silencio? I wrote to Hadrien a few days later. A message came back within an hour: No. Our time together was too short. Je voudrais t’entendre rire. To which I wrote, I’d like to hear you laugh, too. To which he responded, That is what I hoped you would say.
We began to exchange short messages. He didn’t ask anything of me, not to speak to me on the phone, not to see me again. His messages were always as light as the sound of his laughter. This softness was so different from the way Nikolai and I communicated. Even in the beginning, every gesture had been as cerebral as a game of chess, overintellectualized, urgent, economical. His Christmas letters were the most honest and emotional expressions between us, and they were urgent, filled with need. With us it had always been about efficiency and success. We fell in love right away; we married within six months; we had a baby soon after. No time to waste. In the past decade, we had become two hardened warriors, not two lovers. I wanted to take off the armor. I wanted to be vulnerable. I wanted to open my arms without feeling a dagger between the ribs.
For weeks Hadrien and I wrote messages to each other. And then, one month after we met, he wrote, When are you coming back to Paris? I wrote back: As soon as I can.
—
TO GO TO Paris. To dance. To laugh. To see Hadrien again. These became my most pressing wishes. I remembered the party at Hadrien’s apartment and replayed the evening in my mind over and over.
Laugh.
Laugh at what?
It doesn’t matter what. Just laugh like I told you a very funny, very dirty joke.
I wanted to go back to Paris, if only to see whether this man was for real. I wanted to know if he could make me fe
el the same way a second time.
And then an opportunity arose. My stepfather, Andy, would be flying to France from Wisconsin the first week of April to visit the kids and help me do some work on the house. Andy was an expert handyman and builder, and he’d offered to come to La Commanderie to repair some leaking pipes in the bathroom. The visit had been planned months before. Andy would be arriving in Paris on Sunday, April 1, so while it wasn’t exactly a lie when I told Nikolai that I was going to Paris to meet my stepfather at Charles de Gaulle, it wasn’t exactly the truth either. It was a half-truth, and only the first I would use to justify what I was doing.
As soon as the word “Paris” left my mouth, Nikolai knew what was going on. He began to reel off the reasons I should stay at home: The kids need you, you should be working on your new book, there’s a party in Aigues-Vives. But I had found a viable excuse, and so I insisted that Andy needed me at the airport. Andy was doing us a huge favor by coming to do repairs at the house, and I owed it to him to be there. And since I was going to Paris, I added, I would meet Silvia for dinner Saturday night. This, of course, made Nikolai furious, not only because he’d told me not to see Silvia again but because he suspected the truth: I was not really going to Paris to meet my stepfather at the airport, or to see Silvia, but to meet the man who had captured my heart.
One afternoon Nikolai cornered me in the kitchen. “Tell me again why you’re going to Paris,” he said.
“I told you, I’m meeting Silvia on Saturday night,” I said. “And picking up Andy on Sunday.”
“Where are you going with Silvia?”
“We’re going to dinner at Hôtel du Nord and then going dancing at Silencio.”
“Dancing,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Is that guy from the party going to be there?”
“What guy?”
“The guy you were dancing with the last time we went to Paris.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be there,” I said, which was technically true: I had no definite plans to meet Hadrien. Not yet.
“Come on,” Nikolai said, his voice rising. “You’re obviously going to Paris to see this guy.”
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