The Love Book

by Nina Solomon

  “Cry if it makes you feel better,” Beatrice said. “But when you’re finished, do something about it. Toughen up, babe. People today have such thin skins. They make much too much out of anything. You think wallowing in so-called guilt and self-pity will make things right? What a waste of time—unless you’re a glutton for punishment. Albert and I didn’t hurt anyone. So what if he was married. So what if he had a few girlfriends on the side. Good for him. Stick your nose in your own business.”

  Cathy gasped. “He had other women besides you? Not counting his wife, I mean?”

  “De temps en temps, oui!”

  “And you tolerated that?”

  Beatrice laughed. “Why would I begrudge him his liberties, when I was taking mine?” The reaction didn’t surprise her. Her espousal of free love, in the Victoria Woodhull sense, had never been met with acceptance, though for the life of her she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want the government interfering in her personal life.

  “Weren’t you afraid that one day he wouldn’t come back?” Cathy asked.

  “And be with a man who felt obligated to me? That’s the beauty of being free that you don’t understand, that obviously terrifies you.”

  Cathy seized upon the opportunity for a teachable moment. “On Super Soul Sunday I heard you have to be the perfect partner to attract the perfect partner. If you ever want to find your soul mate­—”

  “Let’s get something straight,” Beatrice interrupted. “I don’t want a man hither, thither, or yon, thank you very much. If you’re waiting for Mr. Perfect, you’re going to be waiting for a very long time.”

  “I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Cathy said. “My soul mate and I are destined to find each other.”

  “Don’t wait, take those dogs for a walk.”

  Max shook her head and laughed, muttering something under her breath. They all looked at her. “It’s nothing,” she explained. “I was just thinking how interesting it is to spend time with all of you in this place where I never—ever—expected to find myself.”

  “What do you mean?” Cathy asked. “You’re here to find your one and only, your soul mate, aren’t you?”

  Max rolled her eyes. “Read a lot of Harlequins?”

  Beatrice liked straight shooters, and though Max was probably right—hope was a killer—for some reason she felt protective of Cathy.

  “What are you doing on a singles bike trip then? Chasing butterflies?” Beatrice asked.

  “That’s what I’m going to ask the bitch who traded this freak show of a trip to me,” Max said. “No offense intended.”

  Cathy looked at Emily. “You want to find your soul mate, don’t you?”

  Emily shook her head. “Sorry. For me, this is actually an . . . assignment. I’m writing an article for a travel magazine.” A half-truth. In fact, she was planning to write a freelance article and see if she could sell it to a friend who wasn’t answering her calls. But given the chance, she would have welcomed a brief foreign entanglement before returning to her real life.

  “None of you wants to find your soul mate?” Cathy pressed.

  The garçon brought over a plate of champagne truffles, which were consumed in silence. Emily thought, Did they all really want soul mates, and if they did, would they even know what one looked like? Was there even such a thing? A soul mate? Pfffft! How many times had they been disappointed in love before? What would make them take a chance on something so fickle again?

  Beatrice finished her digestif, every drop of which she’d savored as though it was her last. When she lifted her glass, Cathy peered at her expectantly. The Knights of the Round Table may all be assembled, their “quest” yet to be determined, but Beatrice had no intention of raising a metaphorical sword to make a pledge of allegiance to love and soul mates; she just wanted a refill.

  After an effusion of mercis to the aubergiste, who was slightly less effusive, the four women retired to their rooms, much to the relief of the aubergiste, who was waiting for them to turn out the lights so he could sneak into Max’s chamber.

  Upstairs, Cathy scanned the bookshelves lining the low crooked hallway in search of a cure for insomnia. She decided upon a slender book with a red leather cover, gold leaf, and onion-skin pages, chosen solely and precisely for the title embossed on its spine: The Love Book.

  * * *

  The next morning, not five minutes after they’d said their au revoirs, the tires of their bicycles sinking deeply into the squishy bouses that the rain had democratically spread across the road (even cow dung sounded better in French), Beatrice swerved to avoid a tractor zigzagging down the road and fell, twisting her ankle and bruising her hip. The handlebars of her Cooper were mangled, and her now mud-cum-manure-covered belongings were strewn everywhere, most notably an old French novel. That’s how they discovered that Beatrice was on her own Madame Bovary pilgrimage.

  “Through with love?” queried Emily, as she wiped the mud from the cover.

  Max did triage, both on Beatrice and the Cooper, and Cathy quoted a Buddhist master, “No mud, no lotus,” and no one was the wiser for it. The tour guide finally reappeared and Beatrice was conveyed by van to the nearest doctor.

  After much grumbling about preferring to be a free agent, Beatrice agreed to unofficially join their Tour de Flaubert. Everyone had pegged her as least likely to keep up with the twenty-plus kilometers of cycling per day. Not overtly athletic, the sixty-nine-year-old former DA from Albany looked like a middle-aged beauty who’d been left in cold storage for perhaps a decade or two, with little ill effect. She turned men’s heads of any age with her infectious laugh, shoulder-length auburn hair, nouveau cool purple sunglasses, manicured fingernails, and the perpetual twinkle in her emerald eyes. No amateur she, Beatrice had planned her trip as methodically as a woman chooses a man and plants her crosshairs on his heart. She ordered a brand-new Cooper shipped to France, with a wicker basket, gears, a bell, and a Brooks seat. A Cooper was the only thing a sensible woman would put between her legs, she liked to explain.

  Even with her injuries, she turned out to be real Tour de France material, rarely breaking a sweat, never complaining, though she could not quite understand how the French could claim to be more civilized, without ice cubes or air-conditioning.

  * * *

  One might suppose that these four intrepid women, despite their age differences and disparate backgrounds, would become fast friends, bonding over their shared passion for Madame Bovary and their mutual, if not acknowledged, fear of love. But while they binged liberally on carbs and male-bashing sessions; commiserated over cheating partners or lack thereof; complained about inclement weather and French bathrooms; lost their way in the largest hedge maze in the area; and spent many a sleepless night in ramshackle farmhouses, with creaky beds covered in plastic and currents of tiny flies swarming around a bare bulb—in truth, they could barely tolerate each other. Between Beatrice’s increasingly self-assured and preachy pronouncements, Emily’s moodiness, Max’s overcompetitiveness, and Cathy’s voodoo soul mate–conjuring rituals, the sooner this trip was over the better.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE INVITATION

  THE INVITATION APPEARED in Emily’s in-box early one September morning, two weeks after she’d returned from the bike tour, in a swirling pink font with tiny pulsing hearts: Soul Mate Soirée!

  Had it been scratch-and-sniff like the key lime pie T-shirt Zach had brought home last summer from a trip to Disney World with his father (the air gun had been confiscated at airport security), it would have been strawberry shortcake. She almost deleted it, thinking it was yet another chain letter promising all sorts of blessings that would rain down on her if she forwarded it to seven friends—money, fame, love—which she invariably did, not because she was afraid of suffering the karmic consequences, but because she didn’t want to disappoint the person who’d sent it, even at the cost of annoying the friends she sent it to. But curiosity got the best of her and she opened it.

  The proposed so
irée was at Cathy’s home in Bayonne, New Jersey—probably, Emily imagined, in some kind of life-sized Polly Pocket Dream House. She hoped she could use Zach as an excuse, then looked at the date. It was Charles’s weekend. She’d never been a good liar, except when it came to Nick, the married man she dated toward the end of her own failing marriage.

  After the second postscript, Cathy had written: BYOB. For Cathy, who was basically a teetotaler, this seemed a bit odd. She couldn’t possibly have meant bike, could she? Emily had roomed with a girl like Cathy freshman year, who wore frosted lip gloss, wielded a curling iron, and used double-sided tape to affix posters of orange kittens in baskets to the dorm room’s cinder-block walls. All year the girl had tried to get Emily out of her dark “urban” clothes and into one of her flouncy Laura Ashley dresses, finally succeeding for an Easter brunch in Philadelphia with her sorority pledges. Emily looked like a Jewish Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  Her hand floated over the delete button. How easy to send the email to spam and pretend it had never arrived. She looked at the names of the other recipients. What must Max be thinking? Or Beatrice? Would any of them make the trip to New Jersey for this?

  * * *

  The following day The Love Book arrived from out of nowhere. Emily stuck it on the windowsill with the other two copies that had already “manifested” through no effort or desire on her part. The first was the multicolored Post-it–festooned copy Cathy had swiped from the auberge and accidentally left at Charles de Gaulle. The second was from Emily’s mother, who thought her daughter needed a little help in the love department. She’d even inscribed it: Time to find you another fella! Joyce’s concern about her daughter’s love life was purely financial in nature. Spousal support ended in January. Like Charles, she had little faith in Emily’s ability to be self-supporting. And now, this third copy of The Love Book of mysterious provenance with no identifiable markings other than the words Return to Sender stamped in red. She was tempted to look online for an antidote for unbidden self-help books. The last thing she needed was a soul mate. And definitely not another copy of The Love Book.

  Emily made a pot of tea and sat by the window. It was Zach’s first day of school after summer break. She’d let him sleep a little longer. Her view, a patchwork of rooftops and water towers, had always seemed so exotic. She should have been working on a post for a friend’s blog, but she was thinking about the muddy ride from Lyons-la-Forêt to Ry, a soggy but not unpleasant two hours. It had given Emily a chance to think. Max had raced ahead with the tour guide, Beatrice was keeping Cathy company in the rear, walking their bikes up even the most gradual inclines, and Emily was lost in thought as she meandered along the quiet country road, her rain slicker flapping in the wind, trying not to worry about Zach, who was hiking with his father and Charles’s fiancée, Clarissa, in Yellowstone and, in Emily’s opinion, precariously out of cell phone range. Not that Zach needed to call his mother; he was a well-adjusted, independent ten-year-old. It was her issue and she knew it. Of the two of them, she often felt like the child, and, for the two weeks she was in Normandy, one whose pacifier had been yanked unceremoniously out of her mouth.

  Her friends were concerned that she was isolating. Since divorcing Charles, she hadn’t made any attempts to meet someone, let alone gone out on a single date. Even Zach had tried hooking her up, first with his phys ed instructor, then a divorced dad from the stables where he rode, and last spring, when a sanitation worker whistled at her, Zach observed, “Maybe he wants to marry you?”

  The divorce hadn’t been a complete surprise. Emily had known before they’d married that she was wrong for Charles, but he had been so certain. Of everything. And his certainty had made her feel safe, providing her with guidelines, parameters, and consistency. He wanted a wife and four children in a house in the suburbs with dinner on the table when he pulled into the driveway.

  She’d failed miserably on all accounts. She hated cooking anything other than brownies, and miscarried with a vengeance, as if her uterus was triple-coated with Teflon. The mere idea of the suburbs gave her anxiety, and every morning she’d wake up like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, freaking out in his hotel room in Saigon, waiting for a mission.

  In sum, she was a pretty useless housewife. She understood perfectly Charles’s disappointment. He thought he was getting Madame Homais, the pharmacist’s dutiful wife, but wound up with Emma Bovary instead.

  When they were newlyweds, a bowl of M&Ms or cheese and crackers had sufficed for dinner; and at least in those first years, Emily had more than made up for the lack of food with an overabundance of passion. She was a freelance writer and had a tendency to lose track of time when she was in her office, a tiny alcove off the kitchen overlooking the courtyard. If there was food in the fridge, it was often spoiled or inedible, which infuriated Charles who hated to waste anything. That all changed when she discovered she was miraculously pregnant.

  For the next nine months What to Expect When You’re Expecting became her Bible. She’d morphed into a food Nazi, eating only organic, unprocessed food with no caffeine, no preservatives, no artificial colors or flavors, practically no anything, to Charles’s complete and utter and maddening dismay.

  Then Zach was born, and it was happily back to M&Ms, though now she dispensed with the bowl.

  By the time Charles came home from work, usually past midnight, Zach finally and safely asleep in his crib, Emily was in no mood to get up and prepare anything, let alone talk to Charles about his latest case, or welcome his sexual advances. She’d pretend to be asleep, listening for the whir of his electric toothbrush, the sign that she was off the hook; he never made love after brushing his teeth. He began referring to the mound of pillows she erected between them to protect her lower back when she was pregnant as Hadrian’s Wall, a line of defense that persisted even after she gave birth. The few times Charles did manage to surmount the wall, she’d say she was too tired to put in her diaphragm.

  When Zach was in preschool, she’d started going to the gym and discovered that she could still catch the eye of the occasional man. Or two. Charles spent more and more time at work, until over breakfast one day he said, “Emily”—and she said, “I know, Charles, but how will we tell Zach?” The next week Charles moved into the Harvard Club, then a small furnished studio. Six months later he was living with Clarissa.

  Now that it was all finally over with, the sound of the guns no longer reverberating and the smoke cleared from the battlefield, she was sincerely glad Charles had found someone new. She wanted him to be happy, and Zach seemed to like Clarissa, except for that one time he locked her out of the apartment and disabled the doorbell when she went out with the garbage.

  Emily and Clarissa even went to lunch at Fred’s, on the ninth floor of Barney’s, at Clarissa’s suggestion. Emily waited and waited for Clarissa to say whatever she felt she had to say, but die neue suburban Hausfrau just picked at her chopped salad for an hour, scanning the room, more interested in seeing and being seen than engaging Emily. It was all a little too postmodern for Emily and something she hoped to never do again.

  Emily’s friends were wrong; she hadn’t been manless for the last four years, only for the past two, except for several unfortunate instances of phone sex with her college boyfriend, but it had been decidedly one-sided, so in her mind it didn’t really count. There had been some “overlap” between her marriage to Charles and her relationship with Nick, for which she would probably never forgive herself. The if onlys still kept her awake at night.

  Nick had been one of her first interviews after she began freelancing again. They’d met at one of those interchangeable “authentic” brasseries in the theater district. As he spoke about his work in landmark preservation, the intensity of his gaze had ignited something in her like a leftover cassoulet brought back to life. Somehow, the lines of discretion had been blurred by denial or depression or something, she wasn’t even quite sure. None of her friends would have suspected or believed her capable of having an
affair. Utterly “uncharacteristic,” they would have said—that is, if they’d found out. She’d never imagined she was capable of it either.

  She came to enjoy these interludes. No talking, no having to dress up or make dinner or do her hair. Just passion. An hour later, she’d walk Nick to the door and drift off to sleep as if it had never happened. A close call several years ago prompted Emily to put an end to the affair, an end that turned out to be one of many. Zach had been asleep for hours. It was one of those occasions when Nick would arrive unannounced already half-undressed when she opened the door and carry her to the bedroom for a quick romp. But on that night, they’d accidentally fallen asleep. Nick bolted awake at 5 a.m. and was sitting on the foot of the bed, hurriedly putting on his shoes, when Zach came in, rubbed his eyes, and, still half-asleep, said, “Daddy?”

  Emily put her arm around him and walked him to his room. “Go back to bed, sweetie,” she said softly.

  In the morning, when Zach asked why Daddy had been there, she told him that it had only been a dream, the first time she’d ever lied to him, another thing she’d never forgive herself for.

  * * *

  Emily had been meaning to mail The Love Book back to Cathy, but kept forgetting. The fact that Cathy had left something at the airport wasn’t surprising; she’d been in a complete daze from the time-release tranquilizers she’d taken to counteract her fear of flying, not having anticipated a three-hour delay. Despite gulping down a double espresso, every time Emily glanced up from her magazine, Cathy had slipped a little bit further down in her chair. But The Love Book? Since finding it at the auberge on that postdiluvian night, Cathy had never let it out of her sight, lugging it in her backpack along with her other emergency supplies. The red leather book was so often in her hands that her fingertips were stained red as though she’d eaten pistachios laced with red dye. By the time Emily noticed the forsaken book, Cathy had already boarded her plane back to Newark.