“What’s happening?” I said, as if I there were nothing at all out of the ordinary going on in my life, as if it were just another sunny afternoon in the Midi with two women having coffee in the shade. Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
“There are things that Nikolai is saying about you,” she said, giving me a serious look. “In the village.”
The tone of her voice chilled me. “Nikolai has been at your place?”
“He came three times in the last week,” she said. “He stays up drinking with Jules.” She looked uncomfortable but continued. “I’m not going to repeat the details, honey, but he’s saying things about you that strike me as…well, they just don’t seem like you. Honestly, I don’t recognize the woman he’s talking about.” She bent over and wiped her son’s nose. “I know what it’s like to have people gossip about me—we live in a small town, after all, and people always talk—but those people are not my husband.”
“What is he saying?” I asked.
She bit her lip. “It is like you’re the devil or something—the most evil woman in the world. He comes to our place and starts complaining about you and goes on about how you are mentally sick, an alcoholic, suicidal. He talks about how you’ve ruined his life. He says things about you that are totally unbelievable.”
“Like what?” I said, feeling my stomach clench. I had some clue about what he was saying, but I wanted to hear her say it.
“About your character, darling. About your abilities as a mother. He says you have a drug problem that keeps you from being a good wife. He says you’re frigid, but then he turns around and says that you are a slut. He isn’t making much sense.”
“I must be both,” I said, sarcastic. “A frigid slut.”
“I don’t believe what he says anyway. I know you, and I’m not blind: I can see the truth for myself.” She looked at me a moment, as if trying to decide something. “But you know, if he keeps doing this routine around the village, people are going to start listening to him.”
“He’s angry,” I said. “He’s trying to hurt me. Isn’t it obvious?”
She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “He’s making his stories pretty believable.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I asked anyway. “How?”
“Last night he came to our house and told us that you had a history of having affairs. When I told him I didn’t believe him, he took out a piece of paper. It was an e-mail you wrote to a man named Jack. I read it. It looks pretty bad for you, darling.”
“That is an old e-mail,” I said, realizing suddenly that Nikolai had been planning this. He’d saved the e-mail so that he could use it against me one day, and I had to admit he’d used it to great effect. Although the incident with Jack had been one night of partying, Nikolai had turned it into a full-fledged duplicitous affair. “That happened years ago,” I said lamely. “And it wasn’t actually an affair. It was just a stupid fling.”
“And this new guy?” she asked, referring to Hadrien.
“That’s a different story,” I said. “I met him with Nikolai when we were in Paris in March.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. People have new relationships. It’s natural. But he’s saying that you’ve been sneaking around on him for your entire marriage.”
“He doesn’t just want to divorce me. He wants to humiliate me. He wants to make sure that I can’t go anywhere in this village again.”
I put my head on the table and closed my eyes. It was one thing for the village to know we were splitting up, but it was another for people to believe I was a bipolar, alcoholic, suicidal nympho. I was so mortified that I wanted to crawl into bed and stay there for a week. I had always been sensitive about what other people thought of me. Consciously or unconsciously, I’d stayed within irreproachable feminine boundaries: the good wife, the good mother, pretty but not tasteless, sexy but not flamboyant, in control but not controlling. I shouldn’t have cared if people judged me, but I did care, especially when the information they had was so one-sided. Surely people in the village understood that a love story is a duet. Sometimes in sync, sometimes out of rhythm, but there are always two voices. There was Nikolai’s story, and of course there was mine.
“I didn’t come here to upset you,” Gretta said, rubbing my hand. “I’m here, darling, because I want to tell you that you need to wake up. I know you want to pretend this isn’t happening. It’s only natural, but you need to fight back.”
“How?” I said.
“Do you have a lawyer?” she asked.
I shook my head. Although Hadrien had been urging me to call the lawyer he’d found, I hadn’t been able to actually dial the number. I was stuck, frozen, unable to move forward to do anything that would make the situation real.
“So you must call a lawyer today,” she said. “As soon as I leave. You shouldn’t have to go through this by yourself. Get help. You aren’t the only one who has had a bad breakup.”
Gretta was right. I needed to defend myself. I needed to stop living in Neverland and get help.
“This is a small place,” she said. “Everyone knows everything. Even if you don’t say a word, they know.”
“Believe me, I see that.”
“And people are always harder, more judgmental, with women. A man can do almost anything and get away with it. But a woman? Never. If you don’t defend yourself, they’ll burn you at the stake.”
—
I WASN’T SPENDING time out in the village, but I wasn’t completely alone either. After Andy left, I spoke to my mom on the phone many times each week. I also called Diana in London and my friend Laura, who lived in New York City. These women had been through divorces—Diana was still going through her divorce, and Laura had been divorced ten years before. Together they gave advice and support that kept me from sinking even deeper into isolation. Laura was a lawyer, a mother of two, and she understood exactly what it felt like to be in my shoes. Laura’s ex-husband had suffered mental-health issues, and she stressed that these problems had only become worse during their divorce. “There is no rational way to discuss things with a man like that,” she’d said. “It’s black or white. You’re his perfect goddess or you’re his worst enemy. A narcissistic personality makes everything into a personal attack. When he feels you’ve turned on him, he’ll go for blood. You could offer him every last dime you have, you could give him full custody of your kids, and he’ll want more, because it isn’t about finding a solution—it’s about his ego.”
Diana phoned me from London to tell me she had consulted her psychic, Yolanda, about my situation. Diana had consulted Yolanda in the past about her own divorce, and had told me that the woman had an uncanny ability to see these kinds of situations clearly. Diana gave Yolanda the basic information about me and Nikolai—birthdays, the fact that we had a child, and that we were having relationship troubles. I had never consulted a psychic before, but at that point I was interested in hearing anything that might help me to understand what to do next. Yolanda sent the following assessment of the situation:
The meeting in Time and Space between Danielle and Nikolai happened only so that they could create the child.
At this point they do not have a common path together. If they manage to achieve a peaceful existence and do not get divorced and everyone has their own private life, that would be fine. If not, they will be better off apart. (That is if they are formally married.) If they are not married, they are practically not together. If at this point they manage to get over their EGOs, they will give the child a chance to go very far. The child is a gift from God—a soul which has come into this world for art, for Love. The child is overly sensitive, and there is a danger that if at the moment they do not manage to get over themselves, they might put her into such a state of stress that she will shut down. The child has very abstract thinking, and with parents, between whom there is peace, love and harmony, she could show the world what she is capable of. Of course, I write all this with an “if.”
At this point the
y really do not have a common path together, and splitting up would lead to a calm environment. If the child has not been christened, she should get christened. The bond between the child and the father is very strong. Why hasn’t the child taken the family name of the father? I am just curious.
Neither you nor I could give advice to Danielle. She chooses what to do.
As a whole, if they can survive 2012 and 2013 without divorcing and to live together in peace, from 2014 they can get close again. The choice is theirs.
Diana and Laura were very different women, but they both urged me to get the financial situation under control. Nikolai and I had joint bank accounts, we owned the house together, and all our assets were mixed. Beginning with his trip to Bulgaria by way of Venice, he was burning through a lot of cash.
My mom was worried about money, too, but she was more concerned about the living arrangement. “Has he moved out yet?” she would ask when she called from the States. She had been getting updates about the situation from Andy when he was still in Aubais, and she knew how emotionally tense the breakup had become. “It’s clear to me,” she said during one of our calls, “that one of you will need to leave that house. Like now.”
“His lawyer told him that if he leaves, I can take legal possession of the house,” I said. “So he says he won’t go.”
A few years back, a childhood friend had been killed by her husband during an argument. He’d hit her over the head with a lamp. She died of head trauma, and the husband went to jail. This was the unspoken benchmark of how bad things could get.
“Then you need to get out of there,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
“But the kids are here. I can’t abandon them during this. And if I leave, it’s the same thing: He has possession of the house.”
“So you’re both squatting?”
“We’re both squatting.”
“Well, better safe than sorry,” she said, worry filling her voice. “People go out of their minds during a divorce. You need to make a clear separation. If you’re alone together in that house, anything could happen.”
—
NOT LONG AFTER Andy left, our separate domains of La Commanderie solidified into two distinct territories. Nikolai’s territory comprised the entire first floor: his office, my office, the window-lined salon with the piano, the downstairs kitchen, and the dining room. Mine was the second floor, with the kids’ rooms, the attic playroom, the master bedroom, and the makeshift upstairs kitchen. Although the kids roamed between the floors and had access to the courtyard whenever they wished, I didn’t go to the first floor if I could help it. I used a back stairway that led directly to the garden to get outside, and I only went to the courtyard when I was certain that Nikolai was gone.
One afternoon I decided to clear out all of Nikolai’s belongings from the second floor. I set about removing his clothes from our closet and packing them in a duffel bag. As I folded his cotton dress shirts into a crisp pile, I noted that I’d chosen almost all these shirts. I remembered buying the purple-and-black-striped one in Paris the year before. I loved shopping in Paris, and I’d had fun buying it. I had worried over the size and the fabric, wondering if the color would be right for him. I realized, as I threw the shirts in the duffel bag, that he hadn’t actually worn many of them. Lots of them still had the price tags attached. I had liked the shirt with the purple and black stripes, but maybe it hadn’t been his style.
I grabbed a stack of jeans and threw them into the bag. The Vilebrequin swim trunks I’d bought on clearance, all his socks—matched or mismatched—I dumped in. T-shirts. Underwear (boxers and briefs), sweatshirts—I removed every last piece of clothing that was in our closet until his half was empty. I pushed my clothes over to his side, spreading them out, letting them luxuriate in all the space. It was so strange, so unnatural, having such an empty closet.
The duffel bag was heavy, as if I’d zipped a cadaver inside. I dragged it down the hallway to the stairs. I passed the Paris-Lyon door, descending the stone steps, letting the bag thud as I went. The steps were worn to a gloss from hundreds of years of feet passing up and down, and although I had walked them many times, I was always careful not to slip, especially after I’d fallen when Nico was in Bulgaria. I knew from experience that it was a long, hard drop to the bottom.
I’d planned to leave the bag outside Nikolai’s office door and go back upstairs, quick and quiet, before he had the chance to come out. But as I dropped it, something strange caught my eye. There, carved into the wood of his office door, was a series of symbols:
I studied them, trying to recognize the strange shapes. They were not letters or even pictures, but a strange script I couldn’t read. I looked at it sideways, back to front. Suddenly I understood: These were Tibetan words. I had seen such symbols in the Buddhist texts Nikolai had on his altar and in the books in his office. I squinted at the symbols, wishing I could understand their meaning. Maybe they were some kind of prayer, or wish, or mantra. I couldn’t know for sure, as I didn’t understand Tibetan and had no access to a Tibetan dictionary.
Suddenly the door swung open and Nikolai stood before me. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days—his black hair stuck up in all directions, and his face was pale and puffy. He had dark circles under his eyes. He reeked of smoke and sweat. I glanced over his shoulder. There were bottles of wine everywhere, ashtrays overflowing with pipe tobacco, books and papers spread on the floor. There were pillows and blankets on his couch and a pile of dirty clothes thrown in a corner.
“What do you want?” he said, glancing down at the duffel bag.
I pushed it to him—These belong to you—and pointed to the carved symbols on the door. “What’s that?”
He stared at me, confused.
“The door,” I said. “What in the hell is that?”
“What does it look like?”
“Vandalism.”
“It’s not vandalism,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “It’s protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“From you.”
“Do you think I’m going to break down your door?” I asked.
“Protection from your psychic attacks.”
I considered this phrase a moment. Psychic attacks. Nikolai was telling me that he’d carved a Buddhist mantra into the door of his office to protect himself from my psychic attacks.
“I don’t even know what’s involved in a psychic attack,” I said.
“You should. You do it all the time,” he said. “Even when you don’t realize it. Your mind creates the attack, and I feel it in the air.”
“Like pheromones?” I asked.
He started to close the door. I put my foot in the way. I wasn’t done yet.
“This is an antique door,” I said. “You can’t just ruin it like this.”
“Does it look like I care about the fucking door?” he replied, bending to pick up the duffel bag. It was true. He didn’t look like he cared about the door. He didn’t look like he cared if he carved up everything we owned, or if he emptied our bank account, or fucked up our kids, or destroyed all our friendships. He didn’t care if he dragged himself in the mud, so long as I was dirtier at the end of the struggle.
—
NIKOLAI WAS GONE—THE Citroën was not parked in the courtyard, and his office door was locked shut—when I rounded up the kids. “Who wants to go to Sommières for ice cream?” I yelled down the hall. They emerged from their bedrooms. Alex put on his shoes and seemed ready to go, but Nico seemed uncertain. Since they had returned from Bulgaria, Nikolai had a habit of keeping Nico under his watch at all times. I couldn’t know for sure, but I suspected that he asked her to report to him all her actions when she was with me, as if I might do exactly what he had done: Steal her away when he wasn’t looking. The thought had crossed my mind. I could load both kids and Fly into the car, drive away from Aubais, and never look back.
But that wasn’t the plan. Today we were only going for ice cream. Alex tucked a book
under his arm, and Nico slipped on some sandals, and together they followed me out to the car. But when I went to open the gate, it wouldn’t budge. The gate was heavy, and I’d always had some trouble with it, but now it wouldn’t move no matter how hard I pulled. I tried again, putting my weight into it, but it didn’t slide an inch. I was about to ask Alex to help when I saw something stuck under the bottom of the gate: There was a board wedged into the groove between the gate and the ground. Someone—it wasn’t too hard to guess who—had worked it under, jamming the door closed. I squatted down and began working the wood out, tugging and prying at it, mumbling, “Does that motherfucker really think he can block me in the house with a piece of wood? I’m not that easy to lock up.” A splinter slid under my fingernail, and I scraped my knuckles on the gravel, but I managed to tug the board free and toss it aside. Freedom, I thought as I unlatched the gate, lugging the heavy doors open.
But as the door swung back, I saw a streak of silver glinting in the afternoon sun: It was the Citroën, parked in front of the gate, blocking my car from leaving. I couldn’t take the kids to Sommières for ice cream if I couldn’t drive through the gate. Absolute pin.
I looked at the car for a long moment. My mother’s Toyota Celica had been the exact same shade of silver. I remembered the time, just after my parents split up, when my father had yanked out the spark plugs of my mother’s Toyota. It had been the dead of winter, the streets covered with snow, the worst conditions in which to be carless in Wisconsin. I paid for that car! my father had yelled, shaking the spark plugs in his fist. I’ll be damned if you’ll drive it! My mother said nothing, but she turned and walked off into the snowstorm, disappearing in a white haze.
“Why did Dad park the car there?” Alex asked, scrunching up his nose as if trying to solve a bizarre riddle.
“I’m not sure,” I said, leaving the gate open and walking into the downstairs kitchen, enemy territory, where I pulled out a box of Petit Écolier cookies from a drawer. I’d wanted to talk to them over ice cream, but milk and cookies would have to do. I put the cookies on a plate and poured out two glasses of milk.
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