I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

by Courtney Maum

  “What can I possibly add to that? You want me to write ‘I’m sorry’ fifty times?”

  “I don’t know, Richard,” he said, exasperated. “Just write something. I want a personal touch.”

  I gave the computer back, grabbed a sheet of paper, and copied out my favorite section from Kerouac’s On the Road, which I often use in birthday cards and wedding cards when I don’t know what to say.

  “The only people for me are the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

  I’m sorry. Thank you for your hospitality, for Ngendo, and the tea.

  Sincerely,

  Richard Haddon

  “Who’s Ngendo?” Julien asked, reading it over.

  “I told you! The sculpture . . . ? Anyway, Julien, I’ve got problems. There’s a Belgian in my house.”

  Julien narrowed his eyes. “Oh?”

  “Anne’s come back to Paris. She had a work emergency. She’s got this team of ridiculously good-looking paralegals in our kitchen.”

  “So you’re both there together?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And no. She’s too busy with a case to get into anything.”

  “Your wife doesn’t want to talk about the fact you cheated on her and you want to press the subject? Sorry, am I missing something here? Aren’t you British? Aren’t you supposed to be all, carry on and turn the other cheek and sweep things under the carpet?”

  “I’m trying to save my marriage.”

  “By bringing up your affair?”

  “If we don’t have a proper confrontation about it, we’re never going to heal.”

  “Heal?” he said, wincing. “My God, are you all right?”

  “No,” I said, exasperated. “I need something to . . . I want you to reconsider letting me do something about Iraq.”

  I watched him close his eyes. “You’ve got the clientele for it,” I insisted. “British, American, French . . .”

  “We talked about this,” he said. “I thought I made myself clear.”

  “You said you didn’t think me capable of doing political work again.”

  “No, I said you couldn’t sell it here. I signed you for the oils, Richard!” he protested. “We’ve sold almost every one! Do your political stuff publicly. Do it in a squat. I can’t represent it.”

  “So you’re actually telling me to go to another gallery?”

  “For your installation? Yes. But you keep your oils here. Don’t fuck me.”

  “You’re fucking me.”

  “Don’t bust my balls because I’m being pragmatic. You’re not well known enough to run around doing whatever project you feel like. You’re going to look crazy.”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, standing. “Shit. You’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “Richard—”

  “I’ll show you. I’ll go to Sabounjian.”

  “To Azar?” He laughed. “Oh, go ahead. He hates me. You think I’m tough? Good fucking luck with him.”

  “I can do this,” I said. “I need to.”

  “So fucking do it! That’s the thing about you, Richard. You spend so much time complaining and analyzing, but no one’s standing in your way! Go to Sabounjian! Go to Saatchi! Go to Gagosian, for all I care! I’ve been watching out for you, and you want to fuck me. You’re the one who’s a shitty friend.”

  I had my jaw closed so tight, I could feel my shoulders shake. A dozen things went rocketing through my mind, but the more seconds that passed in which I didn’t say them, the more I realized I was screaming, and being screamed at, by my closest friend.

  And so I left Julien at his cluttered desk with his acidic coffee and his belief in brand legacy and predictability and his new haircut which I hadn’t commented on.

  The real reason I was angry was that I was worried that he wasn’t wrong. That I didn’t have it in me to do something daring, that I maybe never did, and that I was heading down a path that would lead to my being ridiculed and made to feel superfluous, and that the world, my wife, the critics—no one would be wrong.

  • • •

  In order to give Anne-Laure space and get some distance from my interaction with Julien, I spent the rest of the day roaming around Paris trying to think. I saw a romantic “comedy” that focused on the burgeoning love affair between a young Romain Duris and an older, married woman. He broke the heart of his sweetheart back home and the older woman decided not to leave her husband, and all the uselessly expelled energy made me feel quite grim.

  After that, I trudged up to the command post of the aging glitterati, a gilded seafood slash cocktail palace called the Dôme. I ordered a severely overpriced dish of shrimp and a half carafe of rosé, an unfashionable wine choice for the time of year, a fact my judicious waiter had the tact not to point out. Some people self-soothe in retail outlets; I bask in pink wine. I raised my glass to the dowdy baronesses with their eggplant-colored hair, I saluted the right-wing horrifics in their pink pressed shirts. To each their fucking own.

  I headed back to the house around five, a wee tipsy but in most ways feeling a good deal more upbeat about the world. Knowing Anne’s work ethic, I doubted that her colleagues were gone yet, but I also knew that Anne and I had to be nice to each other for those same colleagues’ sakes, so I found myself hoping that they were still there.

  What I hadn’t counted on finding was a shoeless Thomas recumbent on my couch. And in front of a platter of cheese sticks and Chablis, no less. Certes, the coffee table was covered in papers and files and Thomas was curled up with what appeared to be the largest, perfect bound manuscript in the world, but still, the man might have had the decency to keep on his damn shoes.

  As I was standing in the doorframe gaping at this leviathan of a man, Anne came out of the kitchen. I might say that she pranced. Her face was bright and her eyes were brighter, but everything went all category-two hurricane when she saw me standing there.

  “Oh,” she said, clutching the packet of crackers and salmon tarama in her hands. “You’re back.”

  “I tried to stay out as long as possible.” Thomas had finally noted my arrival and—hark!—was hurrying to put back on his loafers. “But I got cold.”

  “Of course,” she said. “We were just—we’re still working, but, you know. It’s been a long day.”

  “Making headway?” I asked, walking into the living room to accept the outstretched hand of Thomas, who was now standing.

  “We’re definitely getting there,” he said, not a little flushed. “You would think it would be easy, but . . .” He shook his head.

  “I know,” said Anne, reaching for a wineglass. “It’s just wine!” She put the glass to her lips and drained it. “You want some?”

  “Sure.”

  Anne left to get another glass. I stared down at the table, noticing the conspicuous absence of a third plate, a third glass.

  “Where’s Selena?” I asked.

  “She had to pick her daughter up from day care,” Thomas offered.

  “Oh,” I said. “And—no kids yourself?”

  He sat back down and reached for his own glass, which seemed discourteous of him as I did not yet have mine. “Not yet.”

  “Do you have a wife?”

  Again, the smile. “Not yet.”

  I watched him take a sip. Those lips! I bit the lower flap of fatty tissue that constituted my own sorry pair, their plushness compromised by too many cigarettes and poor decision making and a chronic lack of sleep.

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Well, I did have. . .” he said. “But she didn’t want to move.”

  “Here we go,” said Anne, arriving with more wine.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” I said, reaching for the bottle.

  �
�What’s too bad?” asked Anne.

  “About Thomas’s girlfriend,” I replied.

  “Oh,” said Anne. “Well, it’s tough, isn’t it? If you don’t want to relocate.”

  “She’s very close to her family,” Thomas said.

  Like a bunch of Robotrons, Anne and I hummed and hawed our agreement that yes, it sure was hard. Relocation. Yes.

  Uncomfortably, we bandied on until I could no longer identify whether the rising tension had to do with the fact that Anne and I were going out of our way to pretend that everything was hunky-dory for this fellow, or whether they actually had work to do and I was in their way.

  “Well,” I said, standing. “I’ve got some stuff to do in the studio. Um, dinner plans?”

  I watched my wife look at Thomas and it cut me like a knife.

  “We were going to maybe get some takeout, actually, or pizza, because”—she motioned to the paperwork on the table—“we’re not yet out of the dark.”

  I saw Thomas swallow. Courage, Richard. Class.

  “Do you want us to order something for you?” Anne asked.

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ll probably go out.”

  • • •

  Which I did a half-hour later, making quite a show of pretending that I was late for something, even though we all knew I’d only just gotten in.

  So what if my wife was downing Chablis with a Robert Redford lookalike during a work obligation that looked like it wasn’t any work at all? So what if my closest friend in Paris didn’t believe in me, didn’t want to support me, actually preferred when I was a hack? So what if I had no idea whatsoever how to approach what had happened between Lisa and me with my wife? I was an artist. Suffering was my oyster. If I couldn’t talk things out, at least I could draw.

  After slogging my way through two unneeded pints of Stella at a nearby pub where I penned potential sketches for an Iraq project accompanied by existential scribbles like What does it all mean? I slumped back home two hours later to find the house deserted. The lights were off, the glasses put away, the papers on the coffee table, vanished. I searched in the living room and on the kitchen counter for a note, but I found none. The absence of a hint about Anne’s whereabouts hurt me more than her absence. You left notes for people, dammit. Even if you were angry. Now I had no idea where to put myself, strategically. I didn’t want to start a movie downstairs if they were coming back. I’d fed myself and was dehydrated and fuzzy from alcoholic drink, and short of going at the pint of butter pecan ice cream in the freezer, there didn’t seem like there was much else for me to do. So I went up to the guest room, to mourn out of sight.

  I had only to open the door a crack to spot her garish, neon glory: Ngendo, the fertility goddess, assaulting me with all twelve of her blue tits, a note attached to her head.

  I forgot this was in the living room, it scared Selena half to death.

  Can you arrange for something to be done with this? I don’t want it here! We’ve gone out to dinner.

  Thanks.—Anne

  The “thanks” threw me. Thanks for what? Thanks for making myself scarce? But I knew that the “thanks” was just a placeholder for other words and phrases that she might normally have written. I hope you had a good night? I hope you had a good dinner. Sorry for all the people in the house. Sorry we’re not talking. I’m sorry that it’s like this. I’m sorry about what you did.

  Swallowing through the sudden tightness in my throat, I taped the note back and gave old Ngendo a pat on her horrid head. I walked over to the television set and opened up the credenza, pulling out the well-worn copy of Crocodile Dundee. I stripped down to my boxers and got under the covers while Paul Hogan slunk through the outback in a butchy, leather vest. I watched the lovely Linda Kozlowski filling up her water bottle in the iconic black one-piece with a G-string back. I listened for the front door. I listened for footsteps. I listened for the sound of Anne putting down her keys.

  Nothing came. Nothing happened. Groups of minutes passed. By the time the American journalist and her crocodile hunter were on the plane for his first trip to New York City, I was fast asleep.

  17

  ANNE AND I spent the next day avoiding each other completely. The legal task force had returned: Thomas and Selena and an older gentleman named Jacques whom I’d met at the company’s holiday parties. They picked up where they’d left off, camped out in the living room amid a shantytown of documents and books. On my trips down to the kitchen, I gleaned tidbits of their conversation. Legal jargon that gave me no indication if they were making any headway against the pregnant winos: admissible evidence, failure of consideration, declaratory judgment.

  I spent the day holed up in my studio, sketching. At some point in the middle of the night, I’d finally had a solid idea for an Iraq project—a personal way in. Startled from a bad dream, or perhaps still in one, I’d been stewing over the donkey graffiti artists, which made me think of an old friend of mine, a burly fellow who went by the street name Didactic, who had recently become something of a celebrity in England for fathering the concept of reverse graffiti. I remembered going on a mission with him through the Greenwich foot tunnel that runs under the Thames and leads (rather appropriately, given the tunnel’s filthy state) to an area called Isle of Dogs. He’d brought along his power washer, a regular bottle of dish soap, and a shoe brush. Once we’d taped his plexiglass cutout to the wall, we set about washing the area around it so that when we were finished, and the cutout was removed, we had reverse-graffiti’d one of the psychedelic eyeballs that Didactic was known for at the time.

  Even though it was after five in the morning, we went back to his place for breakfast, and I remembered that he changed out of his dirty clothes and threw them, along with the shoe brush, into the clothes washer. I remembered asking him if the shoe brush didn’t melt, and didn’t all of the street guck get all over his clothes? While he fried us eggs and rashers, he shrugged and said that all the nasty stuff just went out with the water.

  Which is where I got the idea to wash symbolic articles in gas. Petrol was more carcinogenic, more toxic surely than street grime, but then again, so was war. Before dawn, I started scribbling ideas out in the guest room, and it was these excited thinkings I spent the morning working on in my studio while my wife toiled one floor below me with her legal eagles.

  The trick, I thought, was to wash things in oil, not clothing. The absurdity of such an endeavor echoed the ever-mounting irrationality of the search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq. Both a purging and a cleansing, the objects I would wash would have a link to both my British and American pasts.

  What I’d do, I thought, was set up two machines: one of an American make, and one British—if I could still manage to find one now that Thatcher had all but abolished British manufacturing. The articles that went into each machine would have some tie to that respective country. As for the oil? The oil would be foreign.

  To the public, it would read as a commentary on fruitless endeavors and wasted energy, energy as both physical and combustible matter, a pillaging of resources, a costly waste of time. To me, it would be a sentimental inventory of my past mistakes.

  I could call it WarWash. Sardonic and polemical, with a nostalgic bent thrown in. Certainly, there was a lot left to figure out, and it would be a battle to find a gallery willing to show work using hazardous materials, but having stumbled on something on which I could apply my passion, I felt some life in me return. I was certain I was on the right track. Certain this was worth trying.

  With my confidence bolstered, I put the rest of my energy into creating an itinerary for the next night: the night Anne said we could be together, when she’d have time after her case. Even though she said she didn’t want to do dinner, in the private confines of my studio, I allowed myself to think of it as a date.

  Arranging an evening with your wife dedicated to a discussion of your e
xtramarital affair is not an easy task. I ran the gamut of our special places: Aux Lyonnais, a wonderland of oak and beveled glass where they were such fans of aspic, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the cutlery served en gelée; Naniwaya, a Japanese cantine where the shared tables would prohibit intimate conversation; La Régalade, for which I needed to reserve two months ago, and had not.

  After combing through my memories, magazines, and outdated restaurant guides, I decided that stilted and formal wasn’t what we needed. I needed to make Anne laugh. I picked out three places—appetizer, entrée, dessert—and then I called my dad.

  “Do I bring it up or does she?” I asked, after explaining my plan.

  “Well, she’s already brought it up by finding out,” he said. “So you do.”

  We stayed silent a long time.

  “Good luck,” he said. “Do good.”

  Before the legal team broke for lunch on Friday, I caught Anne in the kitchen.

  “We can still go out tonight, right?” I said, touching her lightly on the arm. “I’ve made . . . arrangements?”

  She swallowed, placed her hands on the counter. I was worried she had forgotten about the note she’d left me when we returned from the police station, or was going to back out. But instead—mildly, weakly—she said, “Okay.”

  I sequestered myself in my studio for the rest of the afternoon, determining how to approach things. Around five, while the legal session was wrapping up, I showered and chose a semiotic outfit to change into in the guest room. Signs and signifiers: a gray cotton dress shirt that Anne said she loved my eyes in, a navy wool blazer she’d bought me on a trip to Burgundy one winter, the white Stan Smiths that she called “boyish.”

  I sat down on the guest bed and listened to the shower go on in the next room. The team had departed, I’d heard them say good-bye. My guts were clenched. My left knee was bobbing up and down, a nervous tick I’d never been able to shake. I was as anxious as if I were being called to trial myself. Which I was.