“Nikolai, hello!” Silvia said, giving me a look that said, I don’t have to deal with my own husband—why should I deal with yours? “Yes, yes, we’re at the Hôtel du Nord. Yes, it’s very nice. We’re having dinner and then going dancing.”
She shot me a look. What should I say?
I shrugged. Whatever makes him happy.
“Yes, of course, Pierre is here, too.” She listened, and I could imagine Nikolai drilling her with questions. Who? Where? What? When? Why? “Yes, actually, he’s here, too. You remember him, of course, from his party last month.”
Suddenly I realized how stupid, how utterly stupid, I’d been to give Silvia my phone. I hadn’t prepared her for Nikolai’s Gestapo-style interrogation.
“Oh? She didn’t tell you?” There was a long silence, and then Silvia said, “Well, really, I don’t think it is such a problem, you know. We’re just having a drink. Nothing more than that.” She glanced at me again, her eyes wide with surprise, and I knew that Nikolai was losing it. “Give it to me,” I whispered, gesturing for her to pass me the phone, and Silvia said, “Well, got to run now, darling. Here’s Danielle!” And she dropped the phone into my hand as if it burned her fingers.
As I put the phone to my ear and heard Nikolai say my name, I understood all the consequences of my actions. I understood the pain I would cause my children, the disappointment of our families, the division of our house and our friends. I felt the loss of all the traditions we’d made—the Sunday lunches in the courtyard, the birthday parties and morning coffees. Everything, the family I cherished, would dissolve. I understood all of these things and then, as if fairy dust had been sprinkled over me, I forgot them.
“Listen,” I said to Nikolai, “I can’t talk now. Call you later.” With that I turned my phone off.
—
THE NEXT DAY I met Andy at the arrivals area of Charles de Gaulle. My stepfather stood smiling, his suitcase in hand. I felt a rush of relief and then simple happiness to see him. He’d come all the way to France to help, and I was grateful that he was there.
Andy came into my life twenty-five years before, when he and my mother fell in love. Both Andy and my mom were married at the time, and both left their spouses for each other. I had disliked Andy in the beginning, believing his appearance on the scene responsible for the destruction of my family. While I blamed Andy during the divorce, I came to see over the decades I’d known him that he was good for my mother and that there were far deeper reasons for my parents’ split. As a little girl, I couldn’t see the whole picture. I couldn’t understand that blame wasn’t so easily assigned. Over the years Andy and I had become close. Now I couldn’t imagine life my without him.
We set off for the train station on the lower level of the airport. We boarded the TGV for Nîmes and found our seats. I sat near the window, watching the countryside speed by. In this high-speed transit between Paris and the south, I could feel myself readjust from the woman I’d been with Hadrien to the one I would have to be back home. I could not have imagined, when we’d planned Andy’s visit months before, that it would coincide with the breakup of my marriage. It seemed to me in that moment that Andy and I had come full circle. I had watched his life change when he met my mother. Now he would stand witness to the upheaval that lay ahead in my own life.
As the train sped south, I remembered my night with Hadrien. After dinner at the Hôtel du Nord, we went dancing, staying at Silencio until the early-morning hours. We walked hand in hand along the rue Montmartre, making our way to Hadrien’s apartment, the small garret where we had met weeks before.
“I am not going up there,” I said when we arrived at his building. It was a ridiculous thing to say, as we were almost at his front door.
“A bon?” he said. “Is that so?”
“Not tonight.”
“You’re sure?” he asked, taking me by the waist and pulling me close.
“Definitely not,” I said. “No way.”
“Really?” he said, leaning closer.
“Absolutely.”
And then he kissed me, a long, lingering kiss that made my entire body tingle. There it was: All I’d been missing. Pleasure. Desire. Passion.
“Okay, I’m going up there,” I said, following him up the winding steps to the seventh floor.
As we climbed the steps to his apartment, I knew there was no going back to my old life. I was going to be happy. I was choosing to be happy. The consequences of my choice would be severe, I knew this, and yet I wasn’t afraid. I was more afraid of losing the clarity I had won, the vision of who I was and of who I could be, and the strength I’d found to make this new woman come into being.
I sat up a little taller in my train seat when I thought of the night Hadrien and I had shared. We lit candles in his bedroom and kissed each other in the shadowy, flickering light. We opened the window so that the cool air swept the room. We spoke to each other in a mixture of French and English, and I felt that we were creating a new language, one that only he and I understood. I slept soundly, peacefully, untouched by nightmares, and in the morning I knew: I could live a new life. I just had to begin.
I didn’t know where the night would lead. I had no idea if Hadrien would be more than the handsome man who gave me one perfect night in Paris. But I was changed by this single night, renewed, made strong again. In fifty years, when I’m an old woman, I will look back at this night and know that such beautiful nights are what make life worth living. I came to France to find love again, and I had found love. Only it wasn’t with my husband.
Oubliette
After my weekend in Paris, the breakdown of my marriage was irreversible. Just as quickly as we had fallen in love in Iowa City—two unstable elements forming a new compound—so too did we fall apart, the bonds snapping. The undoing of our union might have been part of our makeup, built into the very chemical bonds that had fused us, but I never expected the dissolution to be so fast and so complete. Within six months Nikolai and I would be divorced, our kids would be separated, our possessions scattered, our family blown apart. La Commanderie would be for sale and many of our cherished belongings—the baby grand piano, for example—sold to pay legal fees. All that held us together would dissolve to nothing, like a dead star disintegrating in a void.
—
IT WAS DARK by the time Andy and I made it back to Aubais. The house was lit up, and from the courtyard I could see Alex and Nico come to a window, their faces bright with joy, and disappear down the stairs, running quickly through the house to the courtyard, hugging their grandfather and hugging me, looking for presents from Andy (Jelly Belly jelly beans and chocolate-covered cherries) and presents from me (Tom-Tom et Nana comic books). Fly bounded out after them, jumping onto my legs, clawing at my skin, yelping and whining with happiness, his tail curled up like a spring. Andy smiled at me with approval. I could see that he admired what Nikolai and I had created together—the house, the kids, this foreign life in France. It was different from the life he lived—and the one I grew up living—back in Wisconsin, but it was distinctly mine.
Andy deposited his suitcase in the guest room and walked upstairs with the kids, Fly’s nails clicking after them. I looked around. The house was utterly still, shadowy, filled with an oppressive gloom. I wandered through the salon, where the piano gleamed, past Nikolai’s office, and to the kitchen, but he was nowhere to be found. The rooms were immaculate, everything in its place. On the marble countertop, arrayed as if for a buffet-style dinner, were two homemade pizzas, one white and one red, a bottle of wine, a stack of plates, linen napkins, and silverware. I went to the counter to have a look. The pizza was hot, as if it had been taken from the oven just minutes before, and the wine—a white Languedoc Picpoul—chilled. It was eerie and quiet, a dinner party for ghosts.
I ran my finger over the edge of the plates, trying to understand why he would prepare dinner and then disappear. I took a glass from the cupboard and poured myself some of the white wine. It was the perfect temperatu
re, as if it had been whisked out of the fridge at just the right moment. I leaned against the counter, and my gaze fell on the meurtrière, the narrowing arrow slit that cut through the oldest wall of the La Commanderie. I imagined how it used to be, eight hundred years before, when it was the point of defense of the village. The knight positions himself near the wall, fixes his eye on the target, draws the arrow back, feeling the tension in the muscle as he steadies the arrow and releases.
“You’re back,” Nikolai said, stepping from behind the door, startling me. I jumped and splashed wine on the counter.
“Why are you sneaking up on me like that?” I said, taking one of the cloth napkins and wiping up the wine. “You scared me.”
“I made dinner.” His voice was flat, without expression, his face equally cool, smooth and affectless as a mask.
“I see that,” I said, taking a long sip of wine. “I’ll tell the kids to come and eat before it gets cold.”
“I want to talk to you,” he said, his voice wavering just enough to reveal the anger behind his neutral tone, the rage behind the mask.
“Okay,” I said, taking a piece of pizza and sliding it onto a plate. “Want a slice?”
“I want to talk to you,” he said again. “Now.”
I took my glass of wine and followed Nikolai through the living room and upstairs to our bedroom. I stopped by Nico’s room, where Andy was sitting on the bed with Alex as Nico demonstrated her Playmobil village. “There’s pizza in the kitchen,” I said, and then—when they had gone downstairs, out of earshot—I went to the bedroom, where Nikolai waited.
He closed the door and turned to walk the length of the room, pacing from the large wooden door to the window before he turned and walked back to the door again. This is what I had dreaded, this moment of confrontation, the moment of finality when we actually said the words “It’s over.” The end of the story had arrived, and it was a tragedy. There was not even the possibility of fooling myself this time.
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding my wineglass too hard, as if it were the hand of a friend. I was scared. The time of reckoning had arrived.
He paced the room. “I want to know everything.”
His voice was terse, without pliancy. I didn’t respond but watched him walk to the window, turn, and pace back again.
“I’m waiting,” he said. “Start talking.”
“You’ll be waiting awhile,” I said, defiant. There was no way in hell I was going to tell him what had happened in Paris. It was too precious, too special, too perfect to be described under these circumstances. It was mine. I wanted to protect it.
He paused and looked at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means I am not going to tell you what happened,” I said. “It’s private.”
His cheeks flushed pink. He seemed to vibrate with anger. “You leave for the weekend against my wishes, you see the person I forbade you to see, and now you sit there and tell me that it’s private.” His voice was growing louder. “You are married. You. Do. Not. Have. A. Private. Life.” He began to pace again, and his voice returned to the same cool, interrogatory tone. “I’m your husband. You have an obligation to tell me everything. Not just a part of what happened but everything, every last detail. Or this marriage is over.”
“What do you want to know, exactly?”
“If you were unfaithful.”
Unfaithful. I thought a lot about this word over the course of my marriage, trying to parse the real meaning of it. Unfaithful. Faith was belief, and unfaithful was a loss of belief. I had believed in us, had fought for us, had bet everything I had and everything I was on us. But this relationship, this us, had become toxic. It was nothing like the pure us of our beginning, the one built of admiration, trust, and truth. My time in Paris with Hadrien had allowed me to see how very far away from love we had fallen. It had allowed me to feel, under the detritus of my cold, dead marriage, a possibility of something true and strong. This warm light was a fire kindling, growing, waiting to burn. This realization was a revolution in my heart. For the first time in many years, I had been deeply, truly faithful to myself.
It wasn’t the right moment to explain that to Nikolai. He continued to pace the room, walking over the stone floor, past the fireplace to the shuttered windows, where he turned on his heel and walked back. I sat very still, as if stillness would make him stop. Finally he leaned down and met my eye. He was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and strong; I was five foot four inches, fine-boned, petite. There was no comparison in our physical strength. And yet for some reason I had never thought of him as a threat. I’d always thought of myself as the stronger one. I glanced across the room, at the old rapier hanging on the wall. I could grab it with one jump if I needed to. I drank the last of my wine and set the glass on the floor.
“Are you telling me you want me to look away while you have a lover?”
“I am resigned to stay with you for Alex and Nico, but I’m not resigned to be miserable anymore.”
“You blame all your misery on me, but this is a hundred percent your fault. Your mental problems are to blame for everything.”
“My mental problems? Mine?”
“Yes, your mental problems.” His voice had become soft, his whole manner changing. “You are bipolar. Manic-depressive. An addict who snorts cocaine in bathrooms with strangers. You’re so unstable that you’re a threat to yourself and your children.”
“I’m the only stable person in this marriage,” I shot back.
“It is clear that you are going through some kind of bipolar episode.”
I stared at him, taking in this new twist on my personality. I knew what Nikolai was doing. He was rewriting my character. He was changing the adjectives to alter the noun. Bipolar, manic-depressive, addict, unstable. These words would circulate among our friends and families and lawyers, becoming his reason for what went wrong between us. I understood why he chose such strong, stinging words to describe me. If I were unstable, he was stable. If I were crazy, he was sane. If this mess of a marriage were my fault, he was innocent. But whatever words he might use, whatever new descriptions of me he might invent, there were no innocents in our marriage. I was at fault for the failure of our love, but so was he.
“That is ridiculous,” I said, rising to defend myself. “You know very well I’m not bipolar. I’m not even depressed.”
“You’re always unhappy. Unhappy with me. Unhappy with our marriage. We were fine in Providence, but you wanted to move all the way here and start over in France. Does that sound sane?”
“We were not fine in Providence.”
“I went along with your madness—the move, that ridiculous renewal ceremony, everything—so that you wouldn’t kill yourself.”
I sat on the bed, watching him, too stunned to speak. I had never tried to kill myself; I had never even expressed the smallest desire to kill myself. I loved being alive. If an immortality pill existed, I would swallow it. If this was his version of me, no wonder we’d had so many problems.
“I saved you from yourself,” he continued, moving close to me until he was right up in my face, his large green-hazel eyes close to mine. “You need me. I am the only one keeping you from committing suicide.”
“That is absurd,” I said, scooting backward on the bed, to escape. “I’ve never tried to commit suicide.”
“That’s because I’m here,” he replied, inching forward. “To stop you.”
“Before I knew you, I never tried to kill myself.”
“I’ll forgive you,” he said, his gaze locked with mine. “I’ll forget about Paris. We’ll pretend it never happened. If you tell me everything.”
I felt myself being drawn into the maddening rhythm of his thinking. Not so long before, I would have been able to shove my feelings underground, bury them and move on. I’d become so adept at it, that kind of emotional masochism, that it was almost natural. But now, here, at this moment, it was impossible.
“We can’t forget about Paris,
” I said. “I can’t forget.”
His expression became soft, tentative. Time folded over, and suddenly he was the same man I’d kissed in the library in Iowa City. There was the liquid sincerity in his eyes, the hope. “Do you love me?” he asked. “Answer that at least.”
I looked at my husband, really looked at him. I saw the man whose life had been intricately stitched to mine. I saw Nico’s father and Alex’s stepfather. I saw the man I’d followed to Bulgaria, whose work I’d championed, whose family I’d admired, whose lips I’d kissed. I loved what we’d created together, the big, towering edifice of our shared dreams, but the edifice was crushing me. I didn’t love him, not anymore.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
He lowered his head into his hands. “You’re only saying that because you saw that guy in Paris. You saw him, didn’t you?”
“You know I saw him,” I replied.
“And you slept with him, too, didn’t you?”
“I’m not going to talk about that. Not now. You’re too angry.”
“Well, we’re going to talk about it,” he said, slipping his hands over my wrists, lightly, his touch like the cool caress of handcuffs.
“No,” I said, pulling away. “We’re not.”
He grabbed my wrists harder and pulled me off the bed. A burst of anger swept over me, and I pushed back, hard, a solid two-handed shove, giving it all my weight. I knocked him off balance, and he fell backward, hitting the wall. I went at him, pushing him again, hard. As he recovered his balance, I saw a flash of rage, a moment when reason and instinct squared off. He wanted to shove me back. He wanted to make me feel his anger. But he didn’t touch me.
“Let me tell you what is going to happen,” he said. “I am divorcing you. Do you understand? I am selling this house, taking the kids, and leaving this godforsaken village. This farce is over.”
—
AFTER HE’D LEFT, I sat on the bed staring at the rapier. I heard the kids come back upstairs, Andy coaxing them into their beds. I walked out of my room, composed, chilly with unexpressed emotion, and kissed Alex and Nico good night. I said good night to Andy, and then—turning all the lights off except the bathroom night-light—I walked past the Paris-Lyon door to the top of the stairwell. Sitting, I rested my head against the wrought-iron balustrade, my eye following the steep descent of the stone stairway. The night-light cast a shadow that faded as it fell downward, dissolving with each gradation. I kicked off a shoe and watched it tumble down, slipping into the murk, then kicked off the other. After a while Fly climbed onto my lap. I hugged him and buried my head in the folds of his skin. His pigtail curled as he licked my hand. The scenario that Nikolai had just described—of selling La Commanderie and taking the kids away—wasn’t possible and yet, I was terrified. He was mad, and his anger made him irrational. When he’d had some time to think, we would sit down and talk everything through.
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