Paris Ever After

by K. S. R. Burns

  My humble version of sowing wild oats. I’ve never been ashamed of it or regretted it. Our love affair was sweet and good. But not permanent. Not real, not for me. For Kat it probably could have been—I will always feel bad for rejecting her passion—but we stayed best friends in spite of it all.

  What’s more, this happened more than ten years ago. It’s old news.

  “Do you have a point?” I ask. I couldn’t be to Kat what she wanted me to be, but I did honestly adore her. She was my first love and my best friend.

  And I’ve never missed her more than I do right now, this minute.

  William snorts. “My point is that I work for a conservative company.”

  “Oh please, Will. It’s the twenty-first century. Even in Phoenix. What you call my ‘friendship’”—I do the air quotes—“was a long time ago, was not a big deal, and was between me and Kat. Period. End of story.”

  Literally the end. Kat, my friend, my sister, my one-time lover, is gone forever. It’s a fact I need to get used to, but suspect that, at the deepest level, I never will. I pinch the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger because I read somewhere it’s a good way to keep from crying.

  William crouches to zip his boots, then begins to pace. He’s not a large man, but he’s several inches taller than I am and looks massive right now. Intimidating.

  “You, on the other hand,” I add in a louder voice, “appear to be carrying on an extramarital affair. How ‘conservative’ is that?”

  His answer is to kick over the suitcase standing beside the window. If there were a chair in the room, I suppose he would throw it.

  Fear skitters through me, like dry leaves being blown over a patio. It’s a keener fear than when I was down in the catacombs, wading through knee-deep water in black-as-India-ink tunnels. Or when Dad died while I was still in high school. Or when I first came to Paris, alone and grieving. But I can’t afford to be afraid right now. I’ve got tiny Catherine right here with me, needing protection, needing shelter, needing her mother to step up and be Amy 2.0.

  So as William continues pacing I wrap the sheet more tightly around my body and try to act as if I’m not sitting naked in a strange bed in a hotel room in Paris having a marriage-ending fight with my husband.

  “What do you really want, William?”

  He pauses to stare at me. The question is existential even for a person like me, who never tires of existential questions. For William, it’s too much. He stands motionless, his lips parted. I think he’s ready to speak. But no. He spins around, strides to the door, and stomps out of the room. His hipster ankle boots bang down the uncarpeted stairs like gunshots.

  Every muscle in my body is quivering—as if I’ve run a marathon or climbed fifty flights of stairs—but I leap from the bed and stumble out to the landing.

  “Coward!” I yell as loud as I can. “Coward!

  eighteen

  I don’t pursue William down the stairs. I’m pregnant and not about to chase a man all over Paris.

  Also, I’m wrapped in only a sheet, have started to cry, and need to pee.

  I shuffle back into his room, where I slam the door, lock it, drop the sheet, and head to the bathroom. There the walls aren’t carpeted, but—true to the room’s color scheme—they’re painted a dark dispiriting tan. I sit, bawling like a two-year-old and despising myself a little more with each hot tear that drips down my face.

  Because I should have known.

  The ironic stubble beard, the hip ankle boots, the strange selfie series—those were all major clues that William was under a new influence. Kat would’ve guessed right from the start. Along with most people. I mean, we weren’t exactly together anymore. Not too surprising his interest would turn elsewhere.

  Yet I’ve always needed to believe William was someone with firm principles. Smarter and steadier and saner than I am. Certainly above infidelity to his lawful wife. Perhaps even incapable of it. After all, he’s not only an introvert, he’s painfully shy around women. “Women are an indeterminate value,” he once said to me in what I thought was a joke. “You cannot solve for them.”

  Twenty minutes later I blow my nose and stand up. William mustn’t return and find me still in his room, sitting naked on the toilet, and sniveling like a toddler. I hurry out of the bathroom, pull on my clothes, and start to hunt around for my sandals.

  “Damn it.”

  I say this out loud because I’ve just stubbed my toe on William’s suitcase, still lying on its side where he kicked it over.

  “Damn,” I repeat. “Double damn. Triple damn.” On the final “damn” I sink to my knees and start to beat the canvas suitcase with my fists. Just because it feels so very, very good.

  Wait. The bag shouldn’t be this solid. I heft it. It’s nearly full. This isn’t like William, who’s super-conscientious about unpacking and hanging up all his shirts and pants immediately upon arriving anywhere. The military instilled in him an aversion to appearing rumpled. But I guess it’s a clue he wasn’t intending to stay in Paris for long. Jet to France, tell the dingbat wife he wants out of this joke of a marriage, then jet home to Samantha’s well-toned arms.

  Sounds like the sort of efficacious plan William would devise. He would want to get the legal bits ironed out as soon as possible. And it would be like him to come to Paris to break it off in person, face to face. In his mind, that would be doing the right thing.

  He had no way to predict I would surprise him with Catherine.

  I’m about to get to my feet and go wash my face when I spot an orange object poking out of the partially unzipped suitcase. For a while I just stare. It’s not a piece of clothing. Besides, William would never wear such a bright color. I don’t touch it. Normally I wouldn’t go through his stuff. We don’t have that kind of marriage.

  But what’s normal here? Screwing Samantha? Showing up in Paris, with no warning, to ask for a divorce? Then falling into bed with the person you came to ask for a divorce from?

  I unzip the bag the rest of the way and flip open the lid.

  The “something orange” is an Hermès box. Flat, square, about the size of a trivet—the kind of box high-end silk scarves come in. I should have recognized it right away because only Hermès uses this distinctive shade of mandarin and because Margaret has a collection of identical boxes stacked on top of her armoire. An Hermès scarf was one of the first items she lent me, when she was dressing me up in her and Sophie’s clothes.

  A fist closes around my heart. In the early months of my marriage to William I expected him to bring me home trinkets from his business trips. Maybe it was silly, but television and the movies taught me that’s what newlyweds do. When he never brought me a single thing, not even a used swizzle stick, I was hurt.

  It took a bit for me to figure out William gives presents only for occasions such as anniversaries and birthdays. Only because it’s a kind of rule. In truth, he doesn’t much like giving gifts. Nor does he like receiving them. “They are an inefficient reallocation of resources,” he once told me.

  Again, I told myself he was joking. I was in love.

  But love can make you stupid. Just yesterday William and I had what I thought was a great time exploring Paris. This morning we fell into bed and had what I thought was great sex. Yet all the while he’s been carrying on an intense romantic relationship with someone else. What could he be thinking?

  I know what Kat would say: “Women spend more time thinking about what men think than men actually spend thinking.”

  I reach for the box. The narrow ribbon, chocolate brown and imprinted with the word “Hermès,” falls away with a single tug. The lid slips off smoothly, easily. Inside lies a folded pink and orange scarf. The vivid colors of an Arizona sunset.

  The scarf, pure double-ply silk, glows invitingly. I pluck it out, shake it open, hold it up, and sigh. Exquisite. Perfectly square. A hand-rolled and hand-stitched hem. Signed by the artist. Probably cost at least three hundred euros.

  I admire its beauty. The
n I use it to blow my nose.

  When the gods of fashion fail to send down a bolt of lightning to strike me dead, I get to my feet and walk in circles around the small room, the defiled scarf balled up in one hand. On the third lap I stop at the window and rest my forehead against the cold glass. Six stories below, a family of four hurries down the sidewalk. The mother carries a white pâtisserie box. The father grips a baguette in one hand and a bouquet of long-stemmed white roses in the other. The two little girls, wearing white cotton dresses and shiny black patent leather Mary Janes, are trailing behind. They’re probably on their way to grand-mère’s for Sunday lunch.

  Margaret once described for me the grand French tradition of family Sunday lunches. The meals last for hours, involve many courses and multiple generations, and are sadly falling out of fashion. I pull the window open to watch the second little girl disappear around a corner.

  Family. A thing I don’t know much about but will have to build for Catherine. Whatever it takes.

  I again blow my nose into the Hermès scarf, which doesn’t make for a very absorbent handkerchief, and prop my forearms on the black wrought-iron railing. A crisp autumn breeze strokes my face. That’s what cool weather does—it cheers you. It bucks you up. Hot weather just makes you want to lie down in the dark and die. I never learned to tolerate summers in Phoenix even though I lived there my whole life. Every day of these past months in Paris has been like a death-row reprieve. Sometimes I felt guilty, like I was getting away with something by not suffering through the annual inferno with the rest of my fellow Arizonans.

  Little did I know that all along it was William who was getting away with something.

  I dab my nose with the scarf. Then I lean out as far as I safely can and fling it upwards with all my might. The breeze catches it, and I admire how it billows, the bubblegum pink and clementine orange showing up brilliantly against the dove gray Paris sky.

  But its moment of glory is fleeting. Inevitably, inexorably, like an expiring ballerina at the end of act three, it wafts and slithers and ripples to the pavement six stories below. There, it is promptly run over by a bus.

  Too bad. A waste of perfectly good Hermès.

  Nevertheless, the sight of the scarf lying flat in the street, vanquished, is gratifying. Even inspiring. I need to get going, but when I turn I spot William’s suitcase again. It’s splayed open at my feet, nearly full of perfectly folded shirts, Dockers, and underwear. No more Hermès boxes, as far as I can tell. Just regular William-type stuff. I use my bare foot to flick the top item—a crisply starched blue Oxford button-down—out of the bag onto the none-too-clean carpet. It lands on its side but stays folded. I stoop to pick it up, bringing it to my face. Like everything associated with William it smells of vanilla, an aroma I’ve always found to be fatally irresistible and one of the main ingredients to the recipe that has brought me to this point—married, pregnant, and now betrayed. I take a good long whiff, rubbing the smooth cool cotton against my cheek, and turn again to the open window.

  “Do it!” Kat would say. “He deserves it.”

  Yeah, he kind of does. So I shake open the shirt and hurl it skywards.

  Unlike the scarf, however, the shirt doesn’t flutter and billow, as if yearning to take flight. It drops like a rock. It lands awkwardly, sprawled with one sleeve on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. It looks like someone’s dropped laundry, and, as I watch, a bicyclist veers to avoid it. Pitching Samantha’s Hermès scarf out the window was poetic. But sending William’s Oxford shirt to plummet to the street was pure prose.

  I guess that’s the difference between silk and cotton, between Hermès and Lands’ End, between Paris and Phoenix.

  nineteen

  I step back and shut the window. I won’t be flinging out any more items of clothing today. It’s not worth the bad karma, and after the initial thrill, it doesn’t make me feel much better.

  If only I could talk to Kat. Sometimes I forget she’s gone forever. I’ll be walking down the street or sipping a cup of tea, everything normal, and I’ll realize as if for the first time that Kat is dead. That she’s never coming back and that I’ll never talk with her again. How could such a horrible thing happen? It feels so wrong.

  Catherine stirs beneath my ribs. Yes, sweet child. I do remember I’m not totally on my own. You’re always here with me, inside me, and in four short months, you’ll make your entrance into the world. It’s exciting. Also terrifying.

  Straightening my shoulders, I cross the room to my tote bag, still lying beside the bed where I’d dropped it, and hook it over one arm. I hop around on one foot to strap on my sandals because I don’t want to sit down on the bed, which smells like sex.

  That’s everything. I can go now. But on my way to the door I slow to look down at my wedding ring. It’s a thing I do quite often. Not just because it’s beautiful, but because it represents what I thought was a lifelong commitment. Yes, I’m sounding so old-fashioned, but my dad stayed true to my mother when things got tough. He even remained faithful to her after her death, though perhaps he may have acted differently if he hadn’t been in a wheelchair. From the outside, you never know what a marriage is like.

  I pull off the ring and massage the indentation on my finger. It’s probably significant that I’ve never taken it off. And that now my hand looks bare without it. Empty. Catherine, who so often seems to be trying to communicate with me, remains still. If she could speak, what would she say?

  I think I know. Of course I know. Catherine would want what all children want: parents who love each other.

  The ring glitters in the palm of my hand. It’s simple, one tiny diamond, but it was William’s mother’s, the only thing he has that belonged to her, and it would be horrible if I lost it. One thing I’ve really learned is that losing things—parents, friends, homes, jobs—is way too easy. So I slip the ring back on, and then—without giving myself any more time to think—I open my tote bag and take out my phone. Maybe it sounds crazy. But it may not be too late for our marriage.

  Because here’s the thing: William is Catherine’s father. This is an empirical truth, like the speed of light or the circumference of the Earth. No one can change this truth, not William, not me, certainly not the excessively pert Samantha. We can agonize and agitate. We can argue for our various desired outcomes. We can deceive, like William and Samantha. We can dither, like me.

  But the fact is—and it’s the biggest, fattest, scariest fact of them all—I need to get my act together and seriously start to build a life worthy of Catherine.

  Whatever it takes.

  He picks up on the fourth ring. “Yeah?”

  “Will. What are you doing?”

  “Walking.”

  When William’s upset he needs to take physical action. “Are you coming back?”

  “Back?” His voice is raspy, and I can’t help wondering if he’s been on the phone with Samantha, telling her everything that’s happened and receiving instructions. “Back where?”

  “To your hotel room.”

  “Oh.” He clears his throat. “Are you still there?”

  “Of course I’m still here.”

  I struggle to sound calm. Mature. He doesn’t need to know I’ve spent the last thirty minutes crying and throwing his stuff out a sixth-floor window.

  “We need to talk,” I add.

  “Yeah. I know.” His tone is mild. Which isn’t surprising. William never stays mad for long. Anger is a waste of energy, he often takes pleasure in telling me. It consumes resources that could be used on things like work or baseball.

  “I’ll wait here for you,” I say, needing to place a palm on the wall for support. Possibly it would have been better to arrange to meet at a café or in a park, on neutral ground, but at the same time I don’t want to talk in public. Our conversation is not going to be easy. The image of Samantha in my kitchen wearing only an apron—one of my aprons—has been burned into my brain. I don’t know what it will take for me to forgive William.


  I only know I owe it to Catherine to try.

  So I return to the bathroom, splash cold water on my face until it looks less puffy, finger-comb my hair, and apply an extra-thick coat of apricot lip gloss. Back in the bedroom, I gather up the sheet I’d dropped earlier and make the bed, then sit down on the brown carpet to repack the suitcase. Eventually he’ll notice the scarf and one of his shirts are missing, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

  I’m positioning a stack of shirts into the center of the bag when I spot a tin box tucked into a side pocket. It’s William’s first aid kit.

  An actual smile comes to my face as I pull out the tin and cradle it in my hands. This is the first aid kit William carried with him in his daypack on that long-ago Saturday we drove up to Sedona for a picnic. The fateful picnic that resulted in my first, unsuccessful pregnancy, the pregnancy that started it all. After a leisurely lunch of cold chicken and kale salad, we hiked among the red rocks, jumping from boulder to boulder and laughing like idiots.

  When I inevitably slipped, badly scraping both knees, William whipped out this tin and bound up my wounds. I was touched. Since Dad died, only Kat had made me feel so cared for. So safe. In the three years since college I’d dated nothing but needy jerks and loser man-boys. I never thought I’d find anyone as capable and decent and adult as William. Maybe all we have to do is make the effort, as Margaret would say, and he and I can find our way back to that early infatuation and grow it into something real. Bigger and better than before.

  I clasp the first aid kit to my heart. Perhaps even now William is deciding to get his act together and start behaving more like the man his granddad raised him to be. Like an officer and a gentleman. After all, he’s been yearning to start a family since day one of our relationship. Sure, he’s confused, angry, resentful, and probably embarrassed. But when he gets past that, he might realize what he has with Samantha is a ridiculous rebound thing.