According to the news reports, it was mayhem in the streets: looters running barefoot with used office chairs and desks, ceiling fans and smashed computers piled on top of donkeys. A reporter from the Associated Press claimed he saw a group of men wheeling a hotel’s grand piano down the street. The news reports seemed almost giddy with the magical realism of it: just look at what they’re taking! Everything laced with visual contradictions between “there” and “here.”
There: car bombs; dusty basements stockpiled with foreign-purchased weapons; journalists dying in hotel bars three minutes after ordering a Schweppes; terror and confusion only worsened by long periods of silence.
And Paris? My Paris? Phone calls from Azar that my installation was going to sell. Three different potential buyers, possibly a fourth. Articles and sound bites that I was some kind of soothsayer. Overexcited, underexposed bloggers claiming that a little-known Englishman was “the new face of French art.” I should have been happy, proud of myself, even. But in those first weeks of too-warm, overpollinated April, I felt like the new face of despair.
Anne had rebuffed all my attempts to discuss the trajectory of our marriage, along with my passive-aggressive inquiries into her “dates.” Time, she kept telling me. She needed more time. But with my installation over, I had nothing but time, and even though I knew that forcing her to talk through things when she wasn’t ready would backfire, it was getting harder and harder to stay quiet.
And then, as if things weren’t glum enough, The Blue Bear returned. Claiming it would be bad for his business karma to store a painting that had already sold, Julien asked me if I wouldn’t take it. I wanted to call Anne to talk about it, to see if she didn’t want it—or at least, would store it—in our much larger house. Her larger house.
But I didn’t want the painting to arrive at la Rue de la Tombe-Issoire in defeat, a pitiful reminder, a deflated balloon. I had visions of her instructing deliverymen to carry it down to the basement. I saw her head cock as she watched them maneuver it down the stairs, I saw her going down there later and covering it up with a sheet, her face filled not with regret, but resignation. And what if he was there? The faceless dater? The man who was wining and dining and romancing my wife? What if they had a drink after the delivery van left, and he asked her about the painting: why was the bear blue? She would pour wine for both of them and laugh, or shrug her shoulders. She would say it didn’t matter. That she couldn’t remember. That it was just this thing she had to store in the house.
And so I told Julien to deliver the damn thing to my flat. It arrived in a white van one morning, driven by a surly Greek who equated “art handling” with the literal dumping of the article onto the street, followed by an über-succinct text message: HERE.
Getting a 117 x 140 cm painting up one of the narrowest staircases in Paris was no small feat, but fitting it into my 14m2 apartment was a tour de force of space management.
I tried hanging it behind my bed, but it only fit if I tilted it ninety degrees so that it was in the shape of a diamond. It almost fit behind my clothes rack except for a delinquent curve where the right side of the wall folded into the back wall of the bathroom. I even attempted to hang it on the ceiling of my dining room slash kitchen, but there was something discomforting about having it above my head. Finally, I decided to hang it on the wall just to the right of the stovetop. This wall also curved, causing the painting to wobble back and forth each time the front door was opened or closed.
It didn’t look good there. It looked awful in my flat. It dominated what little space there was, and plus, it was absorbing all of the malodorous cooking fumes from my fish-sauce-loving neighbors. And yet I felt comforted to have my old friend back. It seemed appropriately pathetic that it had made so many useless journeys only to end up in a glorified hovel with tired, old me. With two more weeks of exposure to the neighbors’ abuse of condiments, the fissures of the canvas would take on the odor of an unwashed sexual organ, an olfactory essence that would stay with the painting for the duration of its life. This, too, felt appropriate. After all, I felt like I was emanating something putrid myself. The damp heat of aimlessness. The soured odor of defeat.
The time passed. And passed, and passed. Young men whizzed about on scooters in collarless jackets and the lilies bloomed. I found a café to have coffee in the morning where I could stand at the counter and listen to the regulars discuss the scores from the previous night’s games. I’d listen to the waiters complain about the things that had or hadn’t arrived from the Rungis Market for the midday lunch service, complain about the fact that even the Americans were no longer leaving tips.
And I started pity-watching the Witness videos again. My parents, the Gadfreys, the Adsits, their recorded happiness, in loops. After my morning coffee, I’d lope around the Canal Saint-Martin area where the neighborhood’s graffiti artists sprayed their tags underneath the street artist Invader’s famous ceramic space aliens, looking for another direction in which to take my filming, something that had nothing to do with romance.
But I couldn’t help it. Morning after morning, I found myself stealing images from lives that weren’t mine. I didn’t actually film people—I’d become too depressed to find the energy to use my camera again—but mentally, I cataloged their joys, storing them like cathartic shots of serotonin for the times I felt the worst. In the evenings, especially, when I had nowhere left to roam, when I literally longed to watch Cam’s nose crinkle with concentration as she squeezed toothpaste onto her alligator toothbrush—it soothed me to think back on the random moments of contentment I’d witnessed that day, to know that there were people out there having so much fun.
On these walks, I sought out fleeting moments. Intimate little poems. A pair of women’s sandals left by the canal. The cork to a champagne bottle rolled beneath a bench. A child sleeping against her father’s shoulder. A woman’s finger pressing the wet spot on his T-shirt where their child had drooled. A balloon in the shape of a dog discarded in the grass. An older woman breaking off baguette pieces for family members on a blanket. A passed bag of dark figs. A young couple leaving a movie theater, their hands going up to shield their eyes from the daylight at exactly the same time. All of these walk-by-and-you-miss-them moments that constituted other people’s lives.
It wasn’t healthy to back up this sentimental voyeurism against the videos I’d filmed in England, but that’s exactly what I found myself doing, night after night. In between the words spoken and the false complaints lobbed—deep sighs about wet towels, too much baking soda put into homemade crusts—in these films, there was the omnipresent palpability of these couples’ hard-won love. The irrefutable proof that other people were happy, and I was very sad.
In effect, what I had done with these videos was to film a giant absence—the more I watched the footage, the more I realized that Anne and I weren’t there. If someone asked us questions about our relationship, Anne would turn away. We were losing each other. I had lost her. I have lost my wife.
• • •
Near the end of April, I finally got my daughter to myself due not to the fact that she missed me, but rather to canceled sleepovers: most of her girlfriends had the flu that preys on tiny citizens at the change of each season.
I’d planned a parade of activities for us that weekend, each one designed to fill up my emotional Camille bank so that I missed her less viscerally during the week, as well as provide her with happy memories she could overshare with her mother when she got back. In this way, my innocent daughter unknowingly fulfilled two roles: therapist and public relations specialist.
I took her to the zoo nestled in the center of the Jardin des Plantes, which would have been depressing had I not had a five-year-old in hand. While staring at the monkey cage, all Camille saw was furry, alert beings who used their hands and feet in the same way that she did, who hugged their little ones the way that Anne and I hugged her. She didn’t see the unkempt c
ages, the unraked piles of hay soiled with urine; she didn’t see how the baboon had lost too much of his fur from stress, or how the mother kept rubbing her back repeatedly—unnaturally—against the bars.
I took her for a lemon butter crepe at Le Train Bleu, the most beautiful restaurant in Paris, if not France. Perched on the second story of the titanic Lyon train station, the space was a gilded celebration of arched ceilings, frenetic molding, champagne buckets, and glitz. Surrounded by elderly couples, businessmen, and Eastern European eye candy, I couldn’t have been happier to be there with my little girl. Well, I might have been happier if her single fold of wheat flour hadn’t set me back fourteen euros, but I was pretty happy, still.
We went to the movies: Finding Nemo. I took her to McDonald’s and made her promise not to tell her mom. I bought her a pair of green-and-white ballerina flats with ladybugs on the toe tips. I caught myself staring at her while she was eating, asking questions. She looked so much like her mom.
On Sunday afternoon, my final act as wonder dad was a pony ride through the Jardin de Luxembourg on the miniature Shetland horses Indian men kept lined up near the tennis courts. There was a sharp wind cutting through the imported palm trees in the park, and when we got back, Camille was exhausted. Anne was coming for her at six, and as it was only four o’clock, I set her up in the bedroom for a nap, promising myself I’d wake her after an hour so that she wouldn’t throw a tantrum when her mother tried to put her down at her regular bedtime that night.
I went downstairs to the small table that had been doubling as my dining area and editing room, although I wasn’t actually getting any editing done. Over the past weeks, I’d been toying with the idea of turning the interviews into some actual form of art, editing them in a way where I wove them in and out with unrelated content, but I hadn’t had the heart to cut anything yet. I just kept watching the films in their entirety. It was embarrassing. A sappy drug.
I sat down and cut to the first film I’d done of my parents and chose one of my favorite parts, seventeen minutes in.
“What’s your favorite memory of Dad, Mum?” went my voice.
She was chewing on her finger. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just one?”
“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” said my father, beaming. “I’m such a lively man!”
“Let me see now,” she said, still biting. “When I told him I was pregnant, he wore a pillow to work. Under his jumper. You remember that?”
My dad laughed. She continued: “And then there was a, remember, we were coming back from our honeymoon in Italy? We were in this small plane, just a ten-seater, really, and there was all this turbulence. It was awful.”
My father was nodding in agreement.
“And it just got worse and worse. And your father, whenever we’ve taken a plane together, when it gets bumpy, he holds my hand. So it was getting terrible, we had two seats next to each other, and there was this narrow aisle and just one seat to our right with this young girl in it, remember? She was sixteen or seventeen maybe, and she was terrified. I think it was her first time flying. She kept rocking back and forth. And your dad just reached across the aisle for her hand. He didn’t ask or anything, he just took it. You remember? And we sat like that, the three of us, until the turbulence passed.”
“That was a tough plane ride.” My dad coughed.
“That’s it?” My voice again. “That’s your favorite memory?”
“It was a very kind moment, Richard,” said my mother. “When I get angry with him, I like to remember how he made that girl feel safe.”
There was a long period of them not speaking. My mother drummed her fingers on the table. My father watched her hand. I felt suffocated by the anaconda crush of it: silence. Silence. Silence.
All of a sudden there was a knock on the door. The Jesuits again. I put the film on pause but I didn’t get up; I decided to see how long it would take them to give up and go away.
The knock became more insistent. I switched the video on-screen to the one of Harold and Rosie. I didn’t need a bunch of adolescents from the Society of Jesus catching me red-eyed, viddying my own parents.
Another knock. “Richard?” went a woman’s voice. “It’s me.” Warmth flooded through my body when I realized it was Anne.
I jumped up and undid the flimsy latch that masqueraded as a lock.
“Hey!” I said, surprised.
“Hey.”
“Did you want to come in?”
She cocked her head. “It’s five.”
“Come in?” I swung the door open.
“It’s five, Richard. I was supposed to get her at five.” She was still standing in the hallway.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “She’s sleeping. I thought that we said six?”
Anne bit her lip. “Did we?” She exhaled. “Shit. Well, I have some errands to do, so—” She rifled through her purse.
“No, no,” I said again. “Come in! I can wake her, or we can just—” She stepped into the flat. I put my hand on her collar, insinuating that I wanted to take her coat.
“Oh,” she said, loosening one arm out. “Thanks.”
When I turned to hang her coat up, I heard her gasp.
“Oh. Shit!”
“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “I told you.”
“Look at that,” she said quietly, reaching out to touch The Blue Bear. “You could have . . . we could have stored it for you.”
“Yeah. I don’t know, I didn’t want to . . . I kind of wanted it back.”
She turned to me and smiled. My girlfriend. My wife. I remembered back in Cape Cod how she’d fall asleep with a book below her stomach while I was painting, the curtains lifting and falling in the breeze, the rhythm of her breath. The swell of her small stomach harboring our first and only child.
“Well, it’s good . . . it’s nice to see it,” she said, folding her arms. She stared at it awhile longer before taking in the cassettes and wires and the black pads of my headset.
“What is all this?” she asked, picking up a cassette tape.
“Oh,” I said, moving to the table, wishing I had a tablecloth to throw over my sentimental mess. “It’s nothing.”
“And who’s that?” She pointed to the frozen frame of Harold and Rosie that I’d hastily thrown up on the screen instead of my parents. They were caught in an embrace. Rosie still had her apron on. It was climbing up her bust.
“That’s a guy I became friendly with on the ferry, actually.”
She raised her eyes.
“He’s—that’s Harold. And his wife.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s nothing, it’s just a project I started a long time ago that I was messing about with.”
There was a noise upstairs.
“She’s sleeping?” said Anne, looking toward the staircase.
I nodded. She picked up another tape.
“You don’t want to talk about it? When did you start it?”
I sat down on the seat under the staircase. “It’s nothing—nothing official. I was just faffing about the first time I was back at my parents’, you know, this fall.” I felt like I was stuttering. The words came out all wrong. “I found this old video camera, and I started filming them. Interviewing them, really. And then I started interviewing other people. Not a lot.”
“Other couples?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“So it’s a documentary?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
She turned an empty cassette case over in her hands.
“You never mentioned it.”
“Well, there’s not much to mention. It isn’t very serious.”
Anne looked at all the crap spread on the table. “It doesn’t look that way to me.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Can I
watch some?” she asked, her hand hovering over the keyboard.
I swallowed. “I don’t know.”
“Is it pornographic?”
“Jesus!” I said. “No! It’s my parents, and their neighbors, and then the guy I met on the ferry, and his wife of like a zillion years.”
She looked contemplative. “So, can I watch some?”
I looked up the staircase, hoping Camille might choose that moment to wake up.
“It’s not fully edited. It’s not even close. But . . .” I reached for the mouse. “I can show you Harold. He sells copy machines.”
I unclicked the pause button. Harold was rubbing his wife’s back, and she had her head against his shoulder. Light streamed through the window behind their sink, illuminating the oven.
“Where is this?” Anne whispered.
“That’s at Harold’s,” I said. “In Great Gaddesden. Not far from my parents’.”
Anne nodded and continued watching. Harold and Rosie were embracing because Rosie had admitted something that made her sad. Their hug lasted a long time. Finally, after kissing his wife on the cheek, Harold sat back down. Rosie rubbed at her eyes with the dish towel and sat down as well.
“You want to keep going?” said my voice. “Because we could stop.”
“No, please,” said Rosie. “I’m embarrassed. It’s such a silly thing.” Harold reached out for her hand. “Ask us anything. Something funny.”
“Okay,” I went. “Can Harold cook?”
Rosie burst out laughing. “Can he cook?! Well, he can grill things? He can cook an egg. For a lot of men, that’s cooking. Yes, I’d say he cooks.”
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Page 28