“You can’t just come in here when I’m in the bath!”
“You’re my wife.”
“Get out!” I screamed, splashing water at him. “Get out of here. Now!”
After Nikolai left the bathroom, I wrapped myself in a towel, walked to the hallway, and locked the Paris-Lyon door between the first and second floors. Each night after, I would repeat this gesture, fastening the lock on the door, securing my territory. The Paris-Lyon door became our new border, a definitive point of entry to our respective jurisdictions. I was in Paris. He was in Lyon.
—
EACH NIGHT AFTER the second floor was locked securely, I made the rounds, checking that the windows were latched, turning off the lights in the living room, turning on the night-light in the hallway, kissing Alex and Nico a second time, and adding more water to Fly’s bowl. It was a nightly ritual, like scouting the perimeter of a campsite to make sure the wolves were at bay.
After the surprise visit during my bath, I taped my scorpion protection mandala to my bedroom door and put the mala mirror in the hallway, between the kids’ doors. I had no idea how to use the mala, and so I hung it at eye level, so as to check my teeth or my hair should the need arise. The mala refracted light across the stone floor, sending wavering white disks over our feet when we walked downstairs. A mystical disco ball.
Although Nikolai had given me these gifts months before, I had never taken the time to learn what they were meant to do. My astrological sign is Scorpio, which is probably why he’d given me the scorpion protection mandala, but I’d never understood the symbolism of a scorpion. One afternoon before the kids came home from school, I looked it up online and found that the main symbol of the scorpion is defense. A Web page about animal symbolism described the scorpion physique as threatening and tough, with its hard, protective exoskeleton meant for attack. The page went on to describe the scorpion method of defense: It holds its stinger high and arched, ready to strike. Another Web site suggested that the essence of the scorpion is like a ninja in black, swaying its tail, silent in its approach, striking quickly and decisively. After I read this, I felt a shot of confidence every time I walked past my scorpion protection mandala. I was a badass scorpion ninja warrior, ready to sting.
But despite my tough exoskeleton, I was taking a beating. Earlier that afternoon I’d fainted on the stairwell. I was climbing the steps, and suddenly everything around me began to drain away. I felt my fingers slip along the smooth wooden banister, a slow, sweeping release, and then I hit the floor. I woke a few seconds later with Nico screaming my name, standing over me, afraid. Nikolai heard the commotion, stepped out of his office, glanced at me lying on the floor, turned, and walked away, leaving Nico to help me stand up. I spent a long time with her afterward, assuring her that I was okay.
And I was. Sort of. By nightfall I was sore everywhere, and a new bruise spread over my shoulder. I collapsed into bed, exhausted and stiff. Turning on my lamp, I picked up a book from the stack near my bed. I tried to concentrate on the words on the page, but they seemed to move and bend, dancing away before I could read them. I willed myself to concentrate. Reading was freedom. It allowed me to imagine I was someone else, a character in some other story than my own. It was my nightly escape. And so I fixed the letters with my eyes, reading the same sentence three times without retaining the meaning before giving up and putting the book down.
I turned the light off, and the room swept away, leaving only the faint outline of a chair, a glint of curtain, a nightstand. Suddenly Fly ran to the side of my bed and barked. His ears stood alert, and his curly tail had gone straight. Something wasn’t right.
I slid out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom, to check the window. It was secure, and so I walked out into the hallway, my feet slipping on the cool stone. It was after midnight, dark and quiet. Nothing seemed to be wrong—there was not a sound coming from Alex’s and Nico’s rooms—and yet Fly was pacing around frantic. I bent to scratch the scruff of his neck, trying to calm him down, when suddenly a shadow passed over me, fluttering upon the floor like a black curtain. I looked up, and the shadow coalesced into a tall, dark figure wavering behind the glass door. My heart leaped to my throat. This phantom being, this black shadow standing on the other side of the Paris-Lyon door, staring at me with fixed eyes, was my husband. How long he’d been there and what he wanted, I didn’t know, but I understood one thing: No matter how well I barricaded myself upstairs, no matter what divisions I made between us, he was not going to leave me alone. I met his gaze and held it for a long moment. He didn’t blink; he didn’t turn away. His expression was uninflected. He stared at me with the frightening neutrality of the walking dead.
—
I LAY IN bed, anxiety pulsing through me. I waited, expecting Nikolai to materialize from the darkness, to hover like a bat in the dark over my bed, watching me as I slept. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake, going in circles in my head about what in the hell was going on. Why had he been there, standing at the Paris-Lyon door, watching? Had he been there for a long time, or had he just walked up seconds before? Had he been in a trance, sleepwalking, high on valerian tea? Was he trying to get past the door or just observe us? He’d stood there watching me. Our eyes locked for thirty seconds or so before he turned and floated back down the stairs, silent, gray as a zombie.
Finally, after an hour of such questioning, I crawled out of bed and walked through the rooms of the second floor, trying to bring myself down, trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t in a horror novel: This man is your husband. He is not a zombie. He is not a vampire, not a killer, not a ghost. This is a man, not a monster. A man.
I went to the Paris-Lyon door and unlatched the lock. A depth opened below me, a cavern of emptiness, a cascade of thick space in the darkness. I grasped the slippery wooden banister, guiding myself down the steps, down into the dark. I wasn’t going to turn on the lights. It might call someone, or something, to the stairwell, and I wanted to be alone.
The stone chilled my bare feet as I stepped into the hallway on the first floor. Everything was still. No light shone from under Nikolai’s office door. He was asleep, or maybe awake in the darkness. I tiptoed past the Death-Mantra Door, walking softly through the salon. Moonlight shone through the windows, over the piano, pooling on the gray floor. Wading through the shadows, I made my way into the kitchen, to the oldest part of La Commanderie, where the thirteenth-century wall rose over the trapdoor. I should have been afraid, but there was nothing at all to fear, and so I knelt on the cool marble floor and lay down over the trapdoor, my cheek against the broken tile. “Come back,” I whispered, hoping the woman in blue would hear me. I needed the sense of calm, the comfort, she had promised. I needed her guidance. “Come back. Come back.” But there was no stirring in the air, not the least sign of her existence. There was nothing at all except my voice, whispering.
Later, in my bed, I slept fitfully, my mind filled with terrors. I floated in and out of a place where pictures blossomed like poisonous flowers behind my eyes. I stood with Gretta at the center of the village as a woman was led to a pyre. The villagers circled, waiting, and suddenly there was music and dancing. C’est la Fête Votive d’Aubais! Everyone gathered together to watch the running of the bulls. There was smoke and the smell of tar. A jester called out to the crowd, Back to your houses, the plague, the plague! And then the baby appeared, walking timorously over the roof tiles toward the edge. One leg, then the next, it strained onward to its end. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing at all.
I woke the next morning, a blanket of light streaming over the bed. I hadn’t slept much, and I was exhausted and disoriented, the world of my mind spilling forth into the real world, the two bleeding together, liquescent realities. Where was I? In a dream? In a story? I tried to put all the pieces back together again: You are locked in the top floor of your house, waiting for your husband to leave, holding out to keep your home and your kids, holding out for some kind of agreement. This is
just a bad dream. It will disappear when you open your eyes and wake.
—
ON SCHOOL MORNINGS I pulled myself out of bed and made the kids breakfast. I would make French toast or crepes filled with Nutella, putting everything out on the table before I woke them. They would sleepwalk to breakfast and become conscious halfway through their first crepe, the sugar kicking into their systems. By the second crepe, they would be telling me what was planned at school that day. Fly would be wagging his tail and waiting for one of them to throw his toy squirrel. I would make a second latte at the Nespresso machine. It was times like these, when my children were happy and energetic, that I felt the most unsettled: How, in the middle of this cataclysm, could everything seem so normal?
On one such morning, I made the crepe batter—two eggs, flour, milk, and a pinch of salt—and then set the table. I’d just put the orange juice on the table when I looked out the window at the courtyard. Fly and the cats were roaming under the micocoulier, but there was something else that caught my eye. Parked near the Citroën sat Jett’s blue Peugeot. I was so surprised that I opened the window and looked closer, as if to verify that it wasn’t a hallucination. Jett’s car was never on our property anymore. We had virtually stopped talking in the past six months. She hadn’t called me back earlier in the week when I’d phoned. In fact, during our last conversation she told me that I shouldn’t call to discuss Nikolai with her, that she wanted to remain neutral. She said she was staying out of our war. But there was her car, right there.
Nikolai had people at the house all the time. Once when I made the mistake of venturing out into the courtyard during aperitif hour, Lord confronted me about the fact that I had filed a report at the gendarmerie. Apparently my complaint had been read aloud at the mairie, at some sort of local council meeting, and everyone in the village knew the details of Nico’s time in Venice and Bulgaria. “Shameless,” Lord said, shaking his head. “To embarrass your husband in public in such a manner. Utterly shameless.” I understood what he was saying. He believed that I should keep quiet about what was happening. He believed that I should keep up appearances and pretend that everything was fine. I knew that this was the way things were done in many marriages, because that was how things had been done in mine for the past decade. But I wasn’t interested in appearances. Trying to shame me into silence and secrecy wasn’t going to work. Not any more. I told Lord to go to hell and walked back into the house.
There had been a party in the courtyard the night before, but I hadn’t known that Jett had been there. I wiped my hands on a dish towel and walked down the hallway, past the Paris-Lyon door, down the stairs, to the first floor, Nikolai’s turf. There were voices coming from Nikolai’s office, low whispers, and the thought entered my mind that there had been something strange, something a little too familiar, about Nikolai and Jett over the past year. Since I’d been away for my book tour, actually. I remembered a weird moment the previous fall when Nikolai had told me he didn’t want Jett coming to the house anymore because she was “too desperate”—or was it that her pheromones were too strong? I could hardly recall. Of course. Too many pheromones. Overwhelming.
I knocked twice on the death mantra and turned the doorknob, fully expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t: The door opened a crack, just enough for me to see a nude Nikolai as he lunged at the door, slamming it shut in my face.
I knocked again, and for some reason—probably shock creating a short circuit in my brain—the only thing to come out of my mouth was this totally absurd sentence: “Can you two keep it down? I’m trying to make the kids breakfast!”
After some scrambling and urgent whispering, the door was flung open and they shot out like bulls in a rodeo. Nikolai shoved me backward, and Jett ran from the office down the hall, Nikolai scurrying after her, slamming the door to the salon shut and locking it. Click.
I pulled myself up from the floor, stunned. It took a minute or two—as much time as it took me to get back upstairs—before I realized that I had just found my not-yet-ex-husband naked, in his office, with my so-called friend. I expected as much from Nikolai, especially now that we were officially separated, but Jett? How many afternoons had we drunk wine and bitched about men together? How many times had she encouraged me to leave Nikolai so that I could be free?
I was going over in my mind what had just happened, as if double-checking the numbers of some complicated algebraic equation: I heard them, then I knocked, then I saw him naked, and then I informed them that they needed to be quiet because I was making breakfast. This calm, mathematical approach was a cover, a kind of shock-absorbent cloak that I put on to buffer me from the explosive core of red-hot pain and anger that was rising through me.
Back upstairs, the kids were waking. “Good morning, sunshine,” I said to Alex, trying to put on my best happy-mommy face while feeling that I’d been punched in the gut.
“What was all that noise?” Alex asked. He usually woke early and probably had been awake when I was making the crepe batter.
“Just your dad locking the doors again,” I said. “You want crepes?”
“Yeah!” Nico called from her room, where she’d been listening. “With Nutella!”
“And whipped cream.”
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” I said.
I made the crepes and began serving them when the full extent of my anger hit me: My friend is in my husband’s—okay, my estranged husband’s—bed, and I am making crepes? What was wrong with me? I needed to go back there and get that woman out of my house.
But when I went downstairs, the door to the hallway had been locked. Nikolai must have bolted it from the other side. And so I marched up the stairs, back through the Paris-Lyon door, through the kitchen, passing the kids—Brush your teeth when you finish with your crepes—stomped out the back door to the terrace, took the exterior staircase down into the courtyard—which was littered with empty wine bottles from Nikolai’s soiree the night before—to the table under the micocoulier tree, where Jett and Nikolai were drinking coffee and smoking.
They looked painfully hungover, their clothes wrinkled, the buttons done up the wrong way. The rage I’d felt just moments before drained away. I felt a sudden urge to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them. Despite the fact that I hated them at that moment and wanted to kill them both, I had once liked, even loved, these people. Considering that I was falling in love with Hadrien and wanted to sign a reasonable divorce settlement with Nikolai, I might even have welcomed the whole arrangement. I wanted my husband out of the house, and this was one way to do it. But as I walked up to them, Jett lifted her liquid black eyes and said, “Did you come to make us breakfast, too, darling?”
That, for me, was it. All my cloaked anger rushed forth. I folded my arms across my chest and said, “Get the hell out of my house, you fucking whore!”
Nikolai and Jett stared at me, stunned.
I turned to Nikolai. “How could you sleep with this woman with our children upstairs?”
Nikolai stared at me, his mouth agape. He stammered for a moment before saying, “I was sick last night, and she stayed to help me.”
“Stayed to help you?” I said. “Help you with what?”
“He was having a panic attack,” Jett said.
“Nothing happened,” Nikolai added.
“Ha!” I said, my voice rising. “Jett the nurse! Do you know the same Jett that I know? I suppose you’ve been doing this nurse routine the whole time.”
“Danielle,” Jett said, her voice condescending, “please.”
I gave Jett a look, and the look said, Shut up or I’ll rip that lascivious tongue from your mouth. “I suppose you’ve told him everything I’ve told you over the years. How perfect. Two spies in bed together!”
Jett started shaking her head. “I didn’t tell him anything—”
“I told you to get out of my house!” I screamed, and Jett half stumbled from her chair. They were really, truly, pathetically hungover. It must have been som
e night.
“You know what? Actually, bring him with you. You can have him,” I added as she started to walk away. “Because I don’t want him. I am having the most fantastic sex I have ever had in my life!”
Nikolai stood up, knocking his chair over. “So you admit it!”
“Yes, I admit it, I have slept with Hadrien, and he is fabulous in bed,” I said. “Incroyable.”
Nikolai looked at me, his face growing redder by the second.
The public acknowledgment, sotto voce, that I was having amazing sex after years of a nearly celibate marriage was so liberating, so freeing, that I said it again, rephrased. “I had no idea sex could be so good!”
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to ruin my life already?”
“Get out of here!” I shouted, pointing to the blue gate. “Out!”
“Demon!” he screamed, coming at me, his face beet red as he pushed me backward. Jett, who had edged closer to Nikolai, made a grab for him and pulled him back.
“Come on, Nikolai,” she said, taking him by the arm and steering him away. “Calm down. Let’s go. Calm down.”
Nikolai stared at me as Jett escorted him to her car. And as he left, his eyes fixed upon me with pure hatred, I could have sworn I heard him whispering the death threat he’d carved into his door, the mantra he’d texted me: “Death, decease, terminate, extinguish, die.”
—
AFTER NIKOLAI AND Jett had gone, I collapsed into a lawn chair. The confrontation left me utterly exhausted. For half an hour, I couldn’t move, and so I stared into the courtyard, at the roses in bloom, the waxy gloss of the oleander’s flowers, the huge dead cypress tree with its resident crows circling. The whole courtyard was blooming with flowers. The jasmine vines were a mess of tangled fragrance, the smell of rosemary hot in the air. It was paradise, the same paradise that had drawn me to the village to begin with. I couldn’t help but remember our first day in Aubais, and how I had fallen so deeply in love with the sounds and smells and colors of our village. It hadn’t been just the beauty of the place, but the promise of what we could become there that had so moved me. I loved it still, loved it the way one loves a prized childhood memory, one that has been slowly warped by the act of growing up.
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