It was a very painful breakup.
Jean-Claude was taller than her by nine inches. She felt small walking beside him. She felt small and special when he called her Ève, rhyming with rêve, and as if she could stumble and fail around him in ways she hadn’t with others. When she didn’t know the name of something, he provided it. When she came to his apartment hungry, he cooked. When she had a sore throat and went mute before the woman at the counter, he announced good-naturedly, ‘Elle a mal à la gorge,’ and some beautiful orange lozenges had appeared, paid for from his own pocket. When she didn’t understand a joke or some bit of slang and seemed excluded, he would explain in slower, simpler French, knowing she had a social aversion to speaking English.
She started having fragile, miraculous new thoughts in his language.
Jean-Claude smoked, like most French people. She sometimes did, too, in the beginning, but couldn’t help feeling a little false and couldn’t get over the sense that it was unhealthy. Like most French people, he liked wine. He was an atheist but had been brought up Catholic. He would take her to cathedrals or to look at religious art, like an urbanized farmboy who still knows how to milk a cow, and would prettily point out obvious things — La Vierge Marie, Jean le Baptiste, la résurrection du Christ. Like most French people, he punctuated his conversation with funny contemptuous puffs and splurts and growls, which she eventually learned to imitate.
He used dirty language often. His mind was often dirty.
Sometimes Jean-Claude’s eyes were green and sometimes gray or blue. Sometimes he reminded her of a lynx and sometimes of a hawk and sometimes of a python. His face was often patchily unshaven, which she didn’t like at first, but later loved. He was uncircumcised, which alarmed her as she mentally compared him to her high school boyfriend Elliot Goldberg, a Jew who had been too gloomy and prudish to sleep with her but whom she had once persuaded to undress in her bedroom while her parents were downstairs entertaining some people from her father’s church. She had looked at Elliot for a long time then gone on her knees and tried to kiss him there, and he had told her fastidiously, ‘Don’t do that,’ and then she had stroked him once and he’d made a mess on her rug and gone home sulking like she’d done him a great wrong.
With Jean-Claude, Evelyn never had this problem.
They were lovers within three weeks of meeting, and she was irreparably in love within four. She liked making love. She liked to believe she was good at lovemaking, as she was good at everything else. She liked to look at the two of them in the mirror that shone across from his bed while making love. They always looked so beautiful together, even more than they did apart, like a pair of actors or very good-looking siblings. Once, Jean-Claude had noticed her looking, and he’d laughed and said, ‘Oui, nous sommes les plus beaux amants,’ and it had been so perfect to hear it spoken.
We are the most beautiful lovers.
She was still the girl from the generous Methodist Church family, who could never accept the grace of God. She was still the girl who lost her virginity to a boy whose last name she didn’t know as black waves broke somewhere close by. She was still the girl who, working one summer as a bellhop at a San Francisco hotel, had gone up to the room of a businessman who propositioned her, hoping it might cure her to be with a man her father’s age. She was still the girl who since the age of fifteen had occasionally thought of killing herself. All of this was still true, yet seen as if looking down from the moon, and no longer painful to her, now that she was beautiful and somebody loved her.
She had been miserable and then she wasn’t. She had been a house of mirrors and then she was a sun-filled room with views of lavender fields. Jean-Claude loved her, and the best thing was, he also seemed to know her, to know what she wanted, as American boys never did. For it wasn’t all just poetry and lavender; he would refer to her body with crude names, comment on the way she smelled, whittle away at her with his tongue for what felt like hours then tell her she was a putain for wanting it so much. Once, she arrived at his apartment after a day of classes, looking windblown and plain, and had innocently asked what he wanted to do.
‘Je veux te violer, ha-ha,’ he said, laughing with perfect Gallic coldness.
And one day, in the February of 1966, he asked her to marry him and she said, ‘Oui.’
She said the thing that seemed most natural, and then retreated into herself like a mollusk, because the happiness was too raw. Jean-Claude, too, had seemed lost for words, shaken his head and smiled in a dazed fashion and said, ‘Ah — bon! ’ and patted her arm like an awkward male relative. After that, he’d paced and clapped his hands and said, ‘Alors …’ and looked at her as if she was a new toy he couldn’t figure out how to play with, before going for his coat. She had tried to follow, but vehemently he told her, ‘Non, non. Attends,’ and left the apartment. When he returned, he was very cool, with a cigarette dangling from his lips and many paper bags, and he cooked, and she helped him, and later some friends of his came by and urged them to get drunk.
She sat among his friends until late with his arm around her chair — the American minister’s daughter who looked French, who could’ve passed for Jean-Claude’s incestuous French sister, who had done such a good job of breaking free of her homeland.
Perhaps the doubt was with her already. In the time that Jean-Claude was gone, she had stared into the void, smiling. She had seen a slip of scrap paper with a series of call numbers, the word ‘allumettes’ without context, a severe-looking man in profile. She had thought to herself, The man who will be my husband did this, and then simply, My husband. She had thought she was happy, but maybe it was only the absurd emptiness of the world.
They tried to call Evelyn’s parents long-distance, but they weren’t home — they were busy and popular people — and instead she spoke cryptically to her teenage sister Vicky: ‘I have important news, but I shall send it in writing.’ Jean-Claude, who was huddled in the phone booth with her, had then asked for the phone, and with endearing solemnity had told Vicky, ‘Ev-Lynne, I like her very much,’ before Evelyn snatched the phone back, laughing.
He was with her when she wrote the letter announcing her engagement, a letter that said things like: This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write, and Jean-Claude treats me beautifully, and I am very happy living here in France. Then the letter was sent and a cold feeling of security settled over her, as if she’d just cleaned the last speck of blood from a crime scene. She had resumed her wonderful French life, bragged to her American friends, dashed off brilliant essays, spoken to the university administration, dreamed, planned, read the newspapers. News about America was often upsetting, the unjust war that America was waging, US troops totaling 385,000 — but her life, wasn’t that everything?
Evelyn’s parents wrote back; they were happy for her, if this was the life she wanted. They asked for a photograph. They enclosed a generous check and a letter to Jean-Claude, welcoming him to the family. Jean-Claude only read the letter once before passing it back to her, but he had liked the check very much, said that she should write to her parents more often, and helped her spend most of it on records and leather goods. Other relatives wrote and were encouraging, with the exception of her great-aunt Gracie, who sent a six-page polemic denouncing the French as lazy, dirty, decadent, a nation of communists and sexual deviants. At the next dinner party, Evelyn stood in her black turtleneck with a wine glass in one hand and Aunt Gracie’s letter in the other, provoking Jean-Claude’s friends into squawks of red-faced laughter.
Yet Aunt Gracie’s letter obsessed her. America obsessed her, without her fully realizing it. She found herself speaking often of her father’s church work and being met with nonchalant French noises. She argued with Jean-Claude about organized religion, was irked by his pronouncement that all churches should be replaced by socialist collectives, and offended when he denounced all clergymen as opium-pushers. He saw that she was offended but made no apologi
es.
She met his large family, and found things to dislike about them. His mother refused to speak anything but English with her and was forever talking about Jean-Claude in an offhand, infantalizing manner: Ee is only a boy, All men is same, Always ee must win ze argument. His father was considerably older than his mother, quiet like her own, yet with nothing to say about the fascinating period of history surrounding Jean-Claude’s birth except that the Germans were swine. His brothers were less attractive versions of him, hook-nosed and running to fat, with a tendency to get very drunk and play fight. His sisters were too young and pretty, prone to giggling over things she didn’t understand, and she was disconcerted by his fondness for them; she was meant to be his incestuous French sister, no one else.
There were tones of Jean-Claude’s voice that Evelyn got to know and dislike: a princely whine when speaking to his mother, which almost always resulted in more money; a high, schoolboy-ish laugh with his brothers; a faint American accent when he wished to mock her without being especially clever about it. She began being plagued by a sense of total anarchy when she imagined living with him forever. Many nights, she woke with her heart scrambling inside her, like a clawed creature wanting to get out.
They took their arguments into the bedroom. They had heated, apologetic sex that left her feeling smothered. More and more, she craved structure, her father’s church, fundraising, volunteer work, the challenge of being kind to people she had little in common with. She convinced herself that she was a good person because she longed for these things. She started plotting the breakup, and did not think she was a bad person for letting Jean-Claude continue to cook for her and improve her vocabulary while she did so. She told the university that she would be returning to America.
On a warm day in June, she went to Jean-Claude’s apartment and made love to him, knowing it would clear her mind and muddle his. Afterward, she had spoken her lines without expression: Je ne peux pas t’epouser. Je ne t’aime pas. Tu n’es pas l’homme pour moi. He had told her that he didn’t believe her. She had said some more things — that she didn’t want a life with him, had never loved him. No, he said, he didn’t believe her, they were lovers, until his green-gray-blue eyes drew tears and his voice cracked. She had the impression of a python, a hawk, a lynx, but pitifully injured, and knew she had to finish the job. She took off her little ring and attempted to put her clothes on but he confiscated them, sat her on the bed in her underwear like a hostage, wept, stroked her, tried to jam the ring into her closed fist. ‘Je ne t’aime pas,’ she said, over and over, and it gave her pleasure to say, the truth of it, almost holy, though she couldn’t remember why she didn’t love him or what there was in the world besides this love she was rejecting. Je ne t’aime pas. After a while, he had been too distraught to even weep, and she had taken the moment to stand up and dress and fix her hair. Her face was very composed; she did not in the least feel like crying. Somehow she became aware of Jean-Claude watching her in mute disbelief, shaking his head as she gave her hair a final pat, and she glanced at him coolly, and what he said next she’d remember always as more hateful for being said in English, not the language of their love.
‘Bitch,’ he said.
5.
If Lenny worries about Jim Jones visiting his wife when he isn’t home, he doesn’t worry for long. Evelyn is always ready to explain the reasons for the pair of used coffee cups, the newest pile of paperwork, why she hasn’t started cooking yet. By the time she starts teaching in the fall, it has become so usual for them not to eat until eight or even later that he begins stopping some nights for French fries and cheeseburgers, eating them furtively in the car and worrying about stains on his white uniform, but if Evelyn notices she never says anything.
If Lenny is disappointed that Evelyn’s work for the Temple doesn’t let up by the end of summer, he doesn’t let himself stay disappointed for long. Evelyn is doing good work: helping Sister Joya, the cop’s wife, organize several letter-writing campaigns to county officials; helping Sister Diane, a social worker and an actual lesbian, put together an education package for juvenile delinquents; helping Sister Molly, a florid-faced medical secretary, maintain the Temple’s membership files. Sometimes, Evelyn goes straight from her job at the high school to meetings with Temple ladies, and actually gets home later than Lenny, apologetic but happy, slipping off her heeled shoes, sighing about her long day.
If Lenny questions whether he is as happy as Evelyn, he never questions for long. Evelyn always seems to surprise him with nice things at exactly the right time: cookies left over from some Temple ladies’ bake-diplomacy effort; a clipping from the latest National Geographic; asking him for a massage, which usually leads to more. They still have sex, maybe not as much as they used to, that’s normal in marriage, but once during the week if he’s lucky, and again on weekends. The sex is good, too, though it’s true she hurries him more than she used to, and she rarely cries his name like she used to, and the last time he tried to use his mouth on her, she made a face and told him to please stop messing around down there.
‘We’ve found God,’ Lenny tells his older brother, Ned, one evening when Ned calls from Harvard. ‘We raise our hands in the air to feel his energy.’
Evelyn laughs when she hears that, and, when Lenny gets off the phone, she tells him Ned will think they’ve gone insane, for sure.
But Lenny hasn’t gone insane. Though life confuses him sometimes, life in the Temple, life with Jim Jones. Lenny is still attending Jim Jones’s night classes, and while Jim Jones rarely asks about Evelyn, he almost always gives Lenny bizarre, friendly greetings — ‘Hey, baby’, ‘Lenny-husband’, ‘Fly in, dove’ — and a manly hug, smelling like Brut and Brylcreem. One time, Lenny happens to be walking behind some girls on his way out of class, and one of those girls in a miniskirt, and sees Jim Jones lingering by the doorway and looking up the girl’s skirt. Then Jim Jones sees Lenny and smiles in a way like nothing else needs to be said, and Lenny smiles, too, and Jim slaps him on the back, and though Jim sometimes visits Lenny’s wife when he isn’t home, it doesn’t matter; Lenny and Jim have a special friendship.
So it doesn’t immediately occur to Lenny to be suspicious one evening in September when he comes home to find two used coffee cups, but no explanation from Evelyn. He’s about to ask her, yet something about her attitude stops him, the congested expression with which she seems to be regarding her lesson plans. He notices then that her eyes are puffy, her nose pink. Instead, he asks, ‘What’s wrong, Evelyn?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says quickly, and gives him a strange, helpless look. ‘I was just chopping onions.’
She gestures at the stove, where indeed there is something oniony bubbling. Then she gathers her shawl about her and gets up to stir the pot, her flimsy dress casting shadows on the backs of her legs. Lenny decides to believe her.
6.
There is nothing unusual about the afternoon. It’s not unusual that there’s music playing when she steps out of the shower — French music, Jean Ferrat. It’s not unusual that her breasts are naked under her cotton-gauze housedress, or her hair wet, or her elbows stark as baby bird wings, working the towel through her hair. It’s not unusual that her feet leave ghostly imprints walking down the hall to the kitchen where her paperwork awaits. Yet the moment she passes through the bead curtains, she has a sense of wide-open panic, as if she’s just smelled smoke or heard a window shattering. Then she sees Jim standing in the backyard and knows this is what has made her stomach dip, and she thinks: Oh.
He is stroking a white cat that is not theirs but that comes around sometimes. She would like to be the cat. He looks up. Oh.
And even after she lets him in and apologizes for making him wait and he says, ‘It’s alright, sweetheart,’ things are strange, frantic. She would like to excuse herself and fix her hair, put on a bra maybe, turn off the French music, which now seems ridiculous, but Jim’s voice keeps her roped near, makin
g coffee. He is asking after Lenny. They often talk of Lenny when they are alone together; it makes ‘alone together’ somehow less problematic. What kind of woman listens to French music and doesn’t wear a bra at four-thirty on a Tuesday, anyway? Oh, oh, she must get herself together.
‘That pussycat … Ever put milk in a saucer for that cat?’ Jim asks as she takes out the milk, and the question seems disconcertingly intimate, that knowing little smile, why must her mind keep flying off to dirty places?
‘Sometimes.’ Forlornly, Evelyn looks at the milk. ‘I don’t know if there’s enough.’
‘Cat’s gone, baby.’
How she loves the way he talks, his Indiana accent, which somehow manages to be both a Yankee clip and a Southern drawl. ‘Gimme some sugar, huh,’ he blurts as her hands hesitate on the canister, and even this isn’t rude but charmingly direct. He watches over her shoulder as she spoons the sugar and tells her, ‘L’il more … Mmm … Thank you, darlin’,’ and briefly holds his hand over hers so they both feel the warmth pulsing through the mug like a tiny heartbeat.
‘Please — sit,’ she says with quiet desperation.
But he doesn’t seem to hear her, just raises the mug to his lips, and when she edges diplomatically toward the kitchen table, he placidly follows. ‘Been meaning to run by you, uh, idea, for the, uh … newsletter.’ Jim takes another sip and lists closer and again she is cornered, this time against the table. ‘Interviews with local pacifists. “Peace in the Valley”, somethin’ like that. Your husband, could do a profile on him, print a picture maybe …’
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