It’s an unparalleled feeling, the moment when you know without any doubt that you are going to come inside of a woman whom you haven’t touched yet. Summoning up five years of advanced French into the delivery of a verse that was well timed felt impressive, but even better was the expression on Anne’s face while she absorbed it, that irresistible mixture of befuddlement and desire that comes over a certain type of woman when she realizes she is in the process of being won over by a less attractive man. The energy was so electric, it was a miracle that we managed not to betray her cousin’s earlier request and hightail it out of there, leaving Esther’s bag untended.
When Esther did return, she found Anne drinking a martini that I had proudly purchased. Introductions were made, and Esther conveyed her dissatisfaction with my presence by rifling through her handbag with exaggerated exhales and muttered curses purportedly leveled at the hide-and-seek skills of her wallet.
“It’s okay,” said Anne, stilling her friend’s flailing elbow with her hand. “I’ll take care of it.”
A classy way to say piss off, if you ask me. Esther looked up, reddened, and glowered at me.
“I see,” she said. “Well, thank you. You’ll make it to Pilates?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, well . . .” Esther buttoned up her coat, picked some lint off her collar, and generally indulged in the kind of busywork that signifies a girl’s last chance.
“You’ll call me if you need me?” she attempted.
Anne smiled. “Sure.”
And the little dumpling left us to our stew. Anne wouldn’t kiss me that night and she sure as hell made it clear she wasn’t going to fuck me, even though she mentioned that she was staying in a hotel because she couldn’t stand the alcoholic thicknecks running naked around Esther’s dorm. This seemed particularly cruel of her, acknowledging that she was in possession of a prepaid, neutral space, but I had proclaimed myself in the possession of a “burning patience,” and now needed to prove it.
Resigned to the fact that my evening was going to end with a slice of pizza and a solo wank, I asked Anne what she was doing the next day, and she said that she was leaving. She mentioned that she planned to return to Providence in three weeks’ time to see Esther in some play. To my Glenfiddich-soaked mind, three weeks felt unfathomable, so I asked her if she was certain about not having me back to her room. She was. I suggested breakfast, and was impressed when she said she liked her mornings private. Out of options, I offered to drive her to the train the next day.
She replied that her hotel, the Biltmore, was approximately two blocks away from the train station. I pointed out that if we drove around the block three times, that would make a total of six blocks, which—if you took into account potential traffic or bad weather—could make for a bonus round of ten, maybe even twelve minutes together. Preempted, she agreed.
The next day, Anne kissed me when I dropped her off. She said she thought it was a very intimate gesture, dropping someone off at a train station, that it made her feel old-fashioned. I agreed, and added that dropping someone off at a train station without ever having slept with them made it feel incredibly old-fashioned indeed. She said she found me arrestingly crude, but not inconsequential. We agreed to see each other again when she returned to Providence. I kissed her good-bye on the hand, just to spite her. It was November. By August, we were married.
• • •
If you were to succeed in prolonging the deliriously ecstatic puppy-dog love stage of the first months of courtship throughout the entire relationship itself—through marriage, unto death—would this same love, so celebrated, so sought after, break down in utter incredulity at the duration of its own existence?
I no longer love her. But oh, how I loved her. We were partners in crime when we met in America. We had accents. Tailored clothes. Anne wore nothing but stilettos for a year, and I took to wearing an American black-and-gold flag as a scarf. We drank heady red wine and threw Yorkshire pudding dinners on the weekends. We licked coke off of menthol cigarettes. We managed near penetration in the Absolute Quiet section of the Rockefeller Library. I made friends with lacrosse players at Brown University just to annoy her, and she did the same with select members of the crew team. Despite her physique, I made friends more easily than Anne did because my charm was more accessible. We spent a great deal of time apart, but, in our own way, remained inseparable.
I asked Anne to marry me five months into our relationship. I think I did it more for the drama of the gesture than for the appeal of marriage itself. I didn’t want to reach a point in our relationship where we turned to each other, side by side in our usual places on some couch, and burped, “Don’t you think it’s about time we get married?” during the commercial break of our favorite program. Being a romantic, I have a certain respect for the idea of the old-fashioned, somewhat spontaneous (albeit highly awaited) marriage proposal, which I pulled off with finesse, if I do say so myself.
I took out a personal ad in the Providence Phoenix, an offbeat leftist publication published in the downtown warehouse district. It read thus: Anne-Laure: Will you marry me? Richard H.
Whether we were at my apartment or hers, Anne had a charming habit of reading the personal ads in any publication put before her. The New Yorker, the New York Times, Cosmo, Glamour, Star—no matter the quality of the periodical in question, she always read the personals before anything else.
I paid for and published the advert for the April 5 edition, 1995. Because she derives a certain pleasure from being withholding, to this day, Anne still hasn’t told me when she saw it, but on May 21, I found an ad in the classifieds section that showed one of Anne’s illustrated donkeys wearing a veiled tiara. Across the tiara was written the word yes.
We got married in Cape Cod at the same friend’s house where we would spend the following summer with Anne skimming pregnancy books and me painting The Blue Bear. Anne wore the dress she’d bought for her debutante ball in Paris with sparkle jelly flats. We got drunk and had a barbecue. For dessert, we ate homemade Rice Krispies treats under blankets on the beach.
It was a lovely little party. Simple. Silly. Us. We went to bed at dawn in a room with white floorboards. I held Anne against my chest as she fell asleep. I ran my finger along the smooth gold band that had warmed from the heat of her own finger and traced circles around her knuckles and listened to her breathe. I fell asleep smiling, fully at ease with the ludicrous prospect of spending the rest of my life with this one, single person. It’s not quite right what they say: love doesn’t make you blind, it makes you optimistic.
I hadn’t invited my parents to our wedding, or rather, I hadn’t gone out of my way to insist that they be there. Edna and George Haddon had always taken a laissez-faire approach to my existence, and their way of showing their love for me was by trusting my life choices. We agreed that we’d have an informal celebration with family and friends in Hemel Hempstead whenever we got back, and in the meantime, they wanted postcards, phone calls, photographs.
I didn’t find out that Anne had kept our marriage a secret from her own family until about ten days after our wedding when she broke down in tears over lunch. I thought she was upset because we’d had a dinner party the night before, and someone had smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, an indiscretion she considers adverse with good hygiene. She also dislikes eating leftovers (she finds them “disheartening”), and as our meal consisted of cold chicken from the previous night’s dinner, I attributed her distressed conduct to the food. But no, it was because she had neglected to tell her family—a bastion of bourgeois refinement—that she’d up and married a man of modest means who aspired neither to be a banker nor a consultant (not even a directeur marketing!), but who simply wanted to be happy, live richly, drink well, and make love often to their precious, only child.
I was furious. For several months, Anne had led me to believe that she’d been carrying out a series of phone
conversations acclimating her family to our approaching nuptials and her eternal union to a British commoner. In fact, these phone conversations had only taken place between herself and Esther, with whom she had concocted a complex plan that included a monthlong orientation period preceding my presentation as a serious suitor with respectable intentions, her father’s subsequent acquiescence, and finally, our wedding, to be (re)carried out in their summer house in Brittany with all her friends and family in attendance.
Not only was I infuriated with Anne for keeping it a secret, I was disgusted by the bourgeois stench of the entire thing. I’d always found Anne’s snobbery charming and sexy; it amused me to think of her filthy-rich family whose perfect little princess was living a double life in Boston: exemplary paralegal by day, whiskey-drinking suceuse by night. But this was different. This was geographical. This was going to touch upon our life. If we did move back to Paris as we’d been discussing, her parents would be something else entirely, no longer a foreign entity to be mocked over mimosas, but legal in-laws: phone-calling, Sunday-visiting, snooty, noisy in-laws with influence and authority over my new wife.
Initially, I loved the fact that we got married in a silo without giving the slightest thought to her family, my family, my country, hers. We were in love and we got married and the rest of the world could go shove it. But while I watched Anne sniffle over her untouched plate of chicken, I realized that our bubble was more fragile than I thought. We couldn’t shut out the external factors forever. I started to wonder what would happen if and when we crossed the ocean. What side of Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud would greet me on her home turf?
After several tearful phone calls with her mother, two perforated round-trip plane tickets to Paris appeared, courtesy of the Bourigeauds. It was time to meet the in-laws.
• • •
We planned our first official visit for a long weekend in October, and went straight from the Charles de Gaulle Airport to Anne’s parents’ place in Le Vésinet, thirty minutes outside of Paris. After a series of awkward cheek kisses and “nice to finally meet-you”s, we proceeded outside to the patio, where Madame had set up the aperitifs, skirting around the elephant in the garden by agreeing that it was, indeed, quite warm for October.
It quickly became clear to me that the Bourigeauds had spent the month before our arrival setting up a pros and cons list that must have looked a bit like this:
PROS (regarding Richard)
∙ speaks fluent French (without too much of an accent, according to Anne)
∙ has an appreciation for culture and the arts
∙ is European
∙ is loved deeply by Anne
∙ appears to love Anne back
∙ well-enough traveled
CONS (regarding Richard)
∙ will probably make no money in his chosen line of work
∙ comes from a modest family (probably with bad teeth)
∙ is a stranger (probably with bad teeth)
∙ is not French
∙ is not Catholic
∙ is not rich
I passed with flying colors through the first round of questions: the fact that my parents were on their fortieth year of marriage seemed to help my case a great deal, as did the fact that I spoke a rudimentary amount of Spanish, bringing my “spoken languages” tally up to three. But things got dicey when Alain de Bourigeaud inquired just what kind of artist I was.
“He’s a pop culturist, Dad,” Anne said, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Like Houellebecq, but for visual art.”
I almost spit up my white Burgundy at the words pop culturist.
“Pop politics,” I ventured. “It’s . . . I try to provoke thought.”
Both Alain and his wife, Inès, stared at me blankly, clearly expecting some kind of follow-up. But I couldn’t think of a single work of mine that didn’t make me sound spastic.
“He’s putting together his thesis show now, actually,” went Anne. “About the rise and fall of popular figures? How one movement can lead to another movement, influence trends. Like, for example”—Anne put her hand on top of mine—“he has this series of Russian dolls that tracks the commoditization of the food industry all the way up to the cult of Martha Stewart?”
Her mother cocked her head. “How interesting. Who’s that?”
Lunch passed without further incident, or rather, without any incidents at all, the mark of a successful luncheon in the Bourigeaud maison. When the final forkful of redfish was laid to rest on top of patterned china, Anne’s mother suggested that Anne and she do the dishes before dessert. We’d had soup before the entrée, and a cheese and salad course after that—there were a lot of dishes to be done. I suspected that the time had come for me and Mr. B to have a little chat.
Sure enough, as the women began to clear the table, Monsieur asked if I wouldn’t like to see their garden in more detail. (“Inès is simply a wizard with outdoor plants!”) I accepted, catching Anne’s eye as I walked toward the door. She gave me a thumbs-up, an out-of-character gesture that reminded me of my RISD roommate, Toby, who used to flip me the same hand signal after his morning visits to the loo.
Once outside, I realized I’d best not beat around the bush. In fact, I wouldn’t even circle it. Just jump right in there, Richard. There’s a good dog.
“Monsieur Bourigeaud,” I began, in the rather dressed-up French I reserve for the old guard, “I’m sorry things turned out like this. I don’t have as close a relationship with my family as Anne does, so I wasn’t thinking, really, of other people. I know we acted hastily. It’s just—they don’t like to fly?”
Mr. B threw a weed over the hedge into the neighbor’s yard. “If Anne cared so much about her family, I think she would have thought to introduce us to you beforehand. Or at least invite us to the wedding. That might have been nice.”
I assured him that my own parents hadn’t been invited either, an interruption he dismissed with a wave of his hand.
“Look, son, I don’t know you well enough to decide whether I like you or not yet, but Anne certainly seems to, so I suppose that’s good enough for now. But I want to get one thing straight: you need a job.”
Deeply rattled, I explained as calmly as I could that I didn’t just sit around all day flinging paint upon the floor.
“I sell things, you know. In a proper gallery.”
“I’m sure of it. Surely. But you’re both young, still. Anne’s going to be a great lawyer, but she’s got a lot to learn.” He reached down and tugged at another weed, treating me to a conciliatory view of his bald spot.
“If you do move back to Paris, we can help you get settled. I have lots of connections, friends who could be helpful, and I want Anne to be happy. I mean, that’s all Inès and I want.” He rubbed his chin, as if deciding whether or not to pursue this line of thought. “I’m an art lover myself, Richard, and I hold a great deal of respect for the work. But until you’ve got an established name in the business, I’d love to see you aim for something to rely on, a predictable income from a respectable source. I imagine that’s not too much to ask in exchange for her hand?” He clapped me on the shoulder with his manicured paw. “What do you think?”
Knowing full well that disagreeing would lead either to an imposed divorce, forced exile in England, or the disinheritance of his only daughter, I agreed as, of course, I had to. Monsieur seemed genuinely pleased, and shouted out to the washerwomen inside that we’d be having digestifs with our café.
Upon our return, the changed energy between us was enough to signal that I had been accepted. Inès embraced me, and Anne smiled with weary gratitude. Inès launched immediately into the planning of our second wedding, insinuating that the first had simply been a rehearsal for what would certainly be the grandest, most unforgettable day of our lives.
“After all,” Madame added as she put out the saucers for coffee and cake, “eve
ryone likes seconds!”
• • •
That meeting with her parents was probably the first time I felt like there was someone other than Anne whom I couldn’t disappoint. Nowadays, there are loads of people in my life to let down—my daughter, my gallerist, the baker at the boulangerie who looks absolutely crestfallen when I don’t have exact change—but up until then, it had just been Anne and me. There were fewer expectations. There were so many fewer things to do wrong. We simply had to love each other and earn enough for an occasional dinner out. It was easy. Easy! Love was all there was.
But no one tells you what you start doing to each other when you wed. People talk about the stability and the comfort of knowing that you have someone who will always have your back; they speak of the convenience of pooled assets and tax benefits and the joy of raising children, but no one explains that six years into it, a simple request to Pick up a half pound of ground turkey and maybe some organic leeks? on your way home is going to send the free, blue sky crashing down like a pillory around your neck, see you clutching your paper number at the butcher’s, ashamed to be just another sucker bringing white meat home.
And no one tells you what it’s going to feel like when the mystery is gone, or about the roots of repugnance that will twitch and rise inside you when you realize that your spouse has met the actual person behind each name in your phone’s repertoire, that she knows exactly how much wine you’ve drunk on any given evening, knows when you are constipated, that she has stooped over to pull your graying chest hair from the drain, and that the familiarity between you has transformed from something comforting into something corrosive. You can’t believe that you used to spend entire afternoons with your tongues inside each other’s mouth. Can’t remember when it started: the tit for tat, the scorecards, the bonus points and penalties for things promised and not done. No one explains that the busier you become with your careers and house and children, the more time you’ll find to disappoint each other; squirreling away indignities like domestic accountants. Tallying regrets.
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Page 5