I crossed the room, flipped the lock and pulled the sliding door aside, and there he was. The sight of him filled my body with electric light.
“Oh my god, you scared me to death.”
“Oh,” he said. His face sank and he leaned against the door jamb.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “I thought you were joking earlier.”
I took his hand and tried to pull him inside, but he resisted. He was soaked, and drops of water ran down his temples and stuck on the ends of his hair and to the lenses of his glasses. The door was still open and thin slivers of rain like millions of tiny needles misted the tile floor.
So many questions ran through my head. “Would you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Stop it,” he said. “This isn’t the way I pictured it would be. Give me a minute.”
It was surreal, seeing him here like this. I stood next to him, watching his face. Then I reached out and touched his arm, pulling him toward me into a hug so full of feelings that it took my breath away. It had been weeks since I’d had a real hug. I was becoming a companionship camel. When I was full, I didn’t notice I was full. It didn’t occur to me that I might someday be empty. But when I was empty, I began to fear deep in my bones that I would never be full again. I began to notice how loneliness sent me burrowing into myself in ways that magnified all other feelings. Sadness became depression, happiness became exuberance, and fear became terror when there were no friends, no family, no normal life to temper them.
Rousseau’s embrace was magic; I could barely catch my breath. His hair dripped on the side of my face, and the warm wet of his clothes dampened my front.
“I just . . .” he began. “This is stupid, I know. I’m sorry.”
I closed the sliding glass door behind him and we sat down across from each other at the dining room table.
“How did you get here?” I asked, running my fingers nervously over the knotty polished wood.
He hunched over, elbow on the table, and rested his forehead on his hand. “I took the last flight from Paris.”
“Does Chloe know where you are?”
“No,” he said. “I’m supposed to be in Milan for the weekend.”
“Wait, what? You’re lying to your wife now?” I was simultaneously angry and curious and elated about it. What we were doing was wrong; I knew it was. And, for god’s sake, I could get FIRED. But he was here, and he was mine, and I wanted him with dizzying fire.
“I can go, if you want me to,” he said.
“Right. Back to the airport at almost midnight in the pouring rain,” I said. He looked up at me, a little mortified, and I realized I was being harsh.
“Where’s your bag?” I said, more gently.
He nodded toward the wall behind me. “I left it by the front door. When you didn’t answer I thought maybe you weren’t home. Sorry for scaring you.”
I gave him an indulgent look and moved toward the door.
“What were you picturing?” I asked, turning back to him.
“What?”
“You said this wasn’t the way you pictured it would be. I was just wondering what you were picturing.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
We were awkward together. I was still so anxious around him. In person we were practically strangers, no devices there to mask the distance between us. In person he was still the Thomas Rousseau, and I was still a Level 2. I had imagined him in so many different ways since San Francisco, and none of them were quite true to life.
I opened the front door, and he took his bag from where it was parked on the sidewalk. He carried it upstairs and put it on the floor in my bedroom, which was dark and stuffy and smelled faintly of perfume. He didn’t turn the light on. I stood in the doorway while he removed his belt and his wallet, peeled his wet shirt and jeans off, and tossed them to me. I carried them downstairs to the laundry room, the image of him in a t-shirt, socks, and black Hugo Boss boxer briefs burned on my retinas. Before I put his jeans in to dry, I checked the pockets and pulled out the stub of his plane ticket. I tucked it into the front pocket of my capris.
When I returned to the bedroom, Rousseau had cracked open the doors to the balcony so the blustery wind could blow in. He was sitting shirtless on the side of the bed, facing the open door. The muscles in his back shifted as he leaned on his hands.
“I see why you like this place,” he said, watching the storm.
I stood against the wall, thinking. What now, Halley Faust? Rousseau was forbidden fruit. Sure, I had daydreamed about him, but the daydreams were cloudy and girlish, not the flesh and consequences there in front of me. We were standing on the edge of an abyss, both of us knowing we were going to tumble over from the momentum set in motion months before. I understood in that moment that the torment and excitement of resisting temptation might be more gratifying than actually succumbing to it. Up until then there had been curiosity between us, and no small amount of anticipation, but our exchanges were still simple and innocuous. We could still sleep at night. As I began to undress, knowing what was about to happen and wanting it to happen, part of me wanted him to resist me, wanted to wake up in a bed that was still safe and good, knowing we had not bent the fragile elements to our temporary pleasure. But I also wanted to see him fall, to savor the inextinguishable humanity of something grand and beautiful falling apart.
My phone rang, and we both turned to look at it. The number on the caller ID belonged to the Dayton office. It was like they had some kind of morality radar.
“Sorry, I have to take this,” I said. I picked it up.
“Halley, I have a message from the president,” Jamie Aaronson said.
I wondered if she started all of her phone calls that way, just to make sure people paid attention.
“Jamie,” I said, “this isn’t a great time.”
“Oh, sorry, did I interrupt something? Tell Gus I said hi.”
I didn’t reply.
“I just called to tell you that Anthony has decided he will be the one to announce the Tantalus launch in the DEVO booth. Please have everything ready for him.”
“I can’t. Gus already said he’s doing it.”
Jamie didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Halley. Anthony is the president. He trumps Gus. If Anthony wants to be the speaker, he’s the speaker. Just make the arrangements.”
“Alright. Gotta go,” I said, and hung up.
I silenced the phone and put it back on the nightstand. “Sorry about that,” I said.
While I’d been talking, Rousseau had stretched out on the bed with his hands behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling like we were two bunkmates at summer camp about to have our nightly chat, and it began to dawn on me, the complete absurdity of all this. Thomas Rousseau was in my bed! How did I get here? I began to laugh. The laughter gurgled up out of me from some untapped place and it just kept coming and coming. Soon Rousseau was laughing too, but neither of us knew exactly why.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’ve finally lost your mind.”
I could barely catch my breath. “What are you doing here?”
He propped himself up on an elbow and studied me with curious amusement. There was that same shameless certainty he’d had in San Francisco, watching me to see what I’d do next. But it was his humanness that disarmed me. It was there in his eyes, some lost thing he searched for with the earnestness of a child. I quieted. He moved toward me, pausing an inch from my skin, like he’d done that day in the elevator. I inhaled the rich damp smell of him. He closed his eyes when he kissed me, as if willing the world to stop existing as he knew it.
We sank into each other then: a slow, agonizing shipwreck. I saw in an instant that forbidden love is a force that destroys everything. This wasn’t the peaceful, selfless love that happy people talked about. This love was like drowning, gasping for breath wh
ile sinking deeper and deeper into blackness. We wanted to be so far inside of each other that we could never be separated again, our embodied isolation dissolved by fusion. That ferocious, insatiable appetite for him, all of him, ran through every cavern of me; we craved each other like two starving heathens. Could that even be called love? It seemed like more. It was something bigger, more profound. Something written into the cosmos millions of years before we were born.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I stared at the walls and the ceiling blanketed in shadows. At the faint light coming through the balcony window. The air outside was peaceful and I wanted to melt into that peace, become a part of it. But it was just outside my reach.
22
In the morning we drove to Cannes with the windows down. The summer sky was clean. Our fingers touched on the arm rest. I parked where I always parked, on the Croissette down by La Roseraie, and we walked. We passed crepe stands and gelato stands, arcades and carousels, squatty Peugeots and Smart cars crammed together in an endless train. Chubby old women sat on blue enameled chairs with dogs on leashes, looking at the sea. The bright turquoise water sparkled in the sun. The marina was lined with low concrete walls where a few tourists sat eating ice cream cones. There were monstrous yachts parked side by side like an inventory of surrogate penises. Big. Bigger. Biggest. We watched the tanned, white-polo-shirted boys who leaned out from their virtual planets, wiping saltwater droplets from pristine hulls with cloth diapers while their Arabian and British and Russian employers tried on Chanel sunglasses in town. I still wanted to live in their world. Surely these people never felt pain.
Rousseau took hold of my hand. I smiled at him, and then I smiled at this, at us. Us. The idea of it filled me with repressed glee.
“I had another grocery store debacle yesterday,” I said, chuckling.
“Jesus, you need a Sherpa.”
“I’m afraid I’m becoming my father.”
Rousseau laughed. “I know the feeling,” he said. When he looked at me his eyes warmed, crinkling at the edges. There, in the sunshine of his gaze, I was my favorite version of myself.
“Really?” I said. “I didn’t think you had parents; I’ve always assumed you were hatched from the head of Zeus or something.”
“Nope, I’ve got real parents. They live in Normandy now, and I am more like my father every day. Just give in to it. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.”
“You probably have really amazing, cool parents.”
He stared at the ground. “You might be surprised.”
“Well, mine are not cool. So, for me, becoming them is kind of an emergency. All my life, my number one goal has been to not be like them.”
“What are they like?”
I thought about this for a while. “I don’t know. I guess they’re just . . . ordinary. They don’t ever try anything new; they just eat the same meals and watch the same TV shows over and over again.”
“And you were the abnormal one because you wanted to get out of Dayton. Or did you want to get out of Dayton because you wanted to be abnormal?”
“Maybe both?” I said.
“Maybe both.”
“It makes me feel like a jerk to say it out loud. It’s just . . . ordinary people don’t make history. Nobody ever writes stories about ordinary people. I just want to do something special. Something . . . exceptional. Otherwise, what is life but a big hamster wheel, and what are we doing besides going through the motions?”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Rousseau smiled and swung my hand in high arcs back and forth, and I felt it acutely in my bones, the sense that certain people have born into them a direct line to your soul. I’d lived with my parents for eighteen years and they’d never seen me the way he saw me. Their lenses had bent me this way and that, projecting onto me visions of what they thought I ought to be, not because they didn’t look, or because they were shallow or ignorant about the world, but simply because some mechanism in their souls was calibrated to see someone else, while Rousseau’s was programmed for mine. I could see how crass I’d always been, shouting to be heard among none who could, because here was someone who listened so thoroughly that I barely had to whisper a word, move an inch, and he understood.
We decided to go for pizza and wine. There was a restaurant by the old port called La Pizza, a paper tablecloth kind of place. We sat outside facing the marina and watched the boats in their cerulean still life. The air had already begun to sizzle, but there was a breeze. I listened to Rousseau place our order in perfect French and tried to memorize what he’d said, although I should have written it down because it faded almost immediately. We shared a carafe of cold Cote de Provence. Then our pizzas came in huge crescents bigger than plates, Rousseau’s a napolitaine and mine a margherita. The waitress recited the requisite “bon appétit” before retreating.
“So what was your grocery store debacle yesterday?” he asked.
I told him how I’d reached for someone else’s cheese at Le Clerc.
He seasoned his pizza with olive oil and took a big bite. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Well, I’d just had a conversation with my dad about how he got slapped by the Sam’s Club sample lady for taking too many samples, so I was mortified.”
Rousseau laughed. “The one off of 75? My neighbor used to work there.”
I tried to picture that. Rousseau as a kid in a working class American neighborhood. It didn’t compute. “It still amazes me that you grew up in Dayton,” I said.
“Why?” he said. “Do I seem pretentious?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that people who are really accomplished always seem to be from New York or London or Chicago, someplace like that. Almost all of the people I know from Dayton are still there doing the same boring things they’ve always done.”
Rousseau looked amused, then thoughtful. “You never know where you’re going to find someone you like, could happen anywhere. That’s the only thing worth living for, in my opinion.”
After lunch we stopped at a fromagerie for some cheese to take home. Old men played Pétanque on dirt terrains near the Palais des Festivals. We strolled through a street market and looked at cheap paintings of the seaside. I could already imagine our life together, the unbearable joy of getting to walk with him like this anytime I wanted. The idea of it was as surreal as waking up to find out I was the queen of England, but now that I’d gotten a taste of it I couldn’t fathom not having him. The horizon—that not-quite-describable conglomeration of dreams I was currently pursuing, the reaching of which would bring about supreme and everlasting happiness—shifted focus. This—being here, in this place, with him—this was the very definition of exceptional.
“So, now that you know all about my dad,” I said, “you have to tell me about yours. How are you like him?”
Rousseau grimaced and withdrew. I wondered if I should change the subject. Then he said “My father has never been faithful to my mother. I used to hate him for it, as a kid. And now here I am, doing what he did, and it doesn’t seem like such a crime anymore.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. We walked along silently for a while.
“Did something happen between you and Chloe?” I said. It was something I’d been curious about for months but had never been able to ask.
The question seemed to snap Rousseau back to the present. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” I continued nervously, “you must have loved her at some point, to have married her. Did it just fade over time?”
“No, not really,” he said. “I mean, I still feel pretty much the same way about her that I always have.”
“Oh,” I said with an ache. “Then . . . why are you doing this?”
I wondered, as I often did, what she looked like. What she might be doing at this very moment. Sitting at lunch, probably
, unsuspecting and missing him. Flames of guilty darkness licked at my feet.
Rousseau stopped to gather his thoughts.
“I don’t know how to explain it.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Here,” he said, “I’ll give you some backstory. Imagine you’re a guy in his last year of university. You’ve been dating the same woman for about a year, and you’re having fun with her, she’s a nice person. There’s nothing wrong with your relationship, per se, and it’s not like you’re an expert on relationships anyway. You decide you want to lock this thing down because you’re about to start working eighty hours a week. You want to have a family someday, and there are no guarantees you’ll ever meet another woman you get along so easily with.”
We walked along slowly, both looking at the ground in front of us. I feared what he was going to say, feared it would sting, and I couldn’t look at his face.
“So,” he continued, “you propose, she says yes, and you get married. Life is stable, but somewhere in your mind is this . . . itch. There’s just a sort of constant dull sense that something is missing. You work and you have kids, and there are high points and low points. You try to give your whole heart to it. You refuse to admit to yourself that it feels . . . I don’t know, empty somehow. You wake up every morning hoping to feel full, hoping you’ll look over at her next to you and see the thing you’ve been looking for. That’s what keeps you going, the hope that tomorrow morning will be different. For fifteen years. Eventually you convince yourself you’re never going to find it, that this is all there is, which kind of kills you inside. This is as good as it gets, you tell yourself. And then one night . . . you’re sitting at a dinner table in San Francisco, talking to this woman you’ve just met, and there it is. That indescribable thing you’ve been looking for your whole life is right there in front of you. It makes you want to start your life all over again.”
He paused and looked me in the eye. “Do I care about my wife? Of course. But I never have felt and never will feel about her the way I feel about you.”
The Insatiables Page 14