I felt cheap and trampy as I put my clothes back on.
“D’accord,” he said and hung up.
He looked over at me, then at his feet. “She’ll be here tonight,” he said, pocketing his phone.
“What?”
“Chloe. My wife. She’s on her way here now.”
“Here to Cannes?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“But . . . why would you bring her here? This is our place.”
“When she saw my plane ticket she asked if she could come. I couldn’t say no.”
I stood. “Well, great. Have a good time,” I said, not meaning it.
“I’m sure we won’t,” he said, “but thanks. I wish I was spending the night with you.” He began rearranging things inside his briefcase.
“Liar.”
He turned back toward me. “What?”
“I mean, you don’t have to lie to me if you’d rather be here with her.”
“Why would you think that?” he said.
“Oh, maybe because you invited her here?” I was on a roll now. The storm was building.
“Well, I’d much rather be with you,” he said.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Then why did you invite her?”
“I didn’t—I told you, she invited herself.”
I was thinking less about what he was saying than about how my words must sound to him. I could feel myself sliding into that sinkhole of unmitigated jealousy, looking for a way out and finding none, ready to unload a surplus of pent-up bile.
“And you couldn’t have made some excuse for why she shouldn’t come? Jesus. How often do I get to see you like this, Thomas? Once a month?” Don’t fuck it up, Halley, I thought. Don’t fuck it up, Halley, don’t fuck it up, Halley.
Now he was getting angry too. “Oh, really? What excuse could I have made? Since you’re the expert on my marriage.”
“I’m sure you could’ve come up with something,” I said. “This is bullshit—she gets to see you every goddamned day, and what do I get? Scraps.”
He took a deep breath. “Look, she’s not stupid. I can’t just come up with random explanations out of the blue and expect her to believe them. It was hard enough getting her to wait twenty-four hours instead of coming over on the same flight as me. You and I almost didn’t get to see each other AT ALL! Why can’t you be glad about the night we just got to spend together?”
“Because we could’ve easily had more!”
“Well, if that’s the way you choose to see it, fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t invite her, I wanted to spend the time with you. It didn’t work out this time. There will be other times.”
“Fine,” I said. I picked up my purse, turned, and left, letting the door slam closed behind me.
But the second the door closed I regretted all of it. Give it back to me, I thought. Rewind the clock. I’ll do it better, I promise.
29
October and November were much the same. Rousseau and I had our up and down moments. He didn’t have a chance to visit again, but we still talked almost every day. I tried to be satisfied, and became incrementally more jealous and disillusioned in the process. Part of me ached to go home to Ohio. I missed the orderliness of American life. The easy availability of tacos and peanut butter and my favorite brand of toothpaste. Fall had always been my favorite time of year. The silent macabre of nature winding down was a relief after the forced perkiness of summer. I could almost taste the apple cider frothy with spice, feel the crisp chill in the air and the crackle of acorn caps underfoot. The trees in the woods behind my parents’ house would be all fiery oranges and reds. My dad would walk into the kitchen in his house slippers at dawn, sit at the table and drink his morning coffee to the oo-wah-hoo-hoo-hoo of mourning doves. When I was a kid I thought their coo was just the sound the earth made, like a great mournful sigh coming out of the ground.
But I also knew I didn’t really want to go back, that being there would always pale in comparison to the memory of it. The truth of it was that the only place I ever seemed to want to be was somewhere else.
By December the urgency of our looming deadline pushed us to the brink of madness. Darren and I confined ourselves to our separate condos and worked and worked. Gus, Max, and Lauren traveled to important meetings. Only twice did Darren have to disrupt his work to hop on a plane and deliver something from The Backpack to Gus. I spent the days in a state of distracted tenacity, staring at phone and computer as if they were about to speak to me, as if I was going to miss something, the anxiety of one trying to wrap her arms around a noisy world and mistakenly believing it was possible to perceive it all at once. How much lovelier life must have been before phones and email. Before computers and electricity. Before humans decided it was necessary to fabricate a whole universe and then spend their lives maintaining the fabrication. Back when it was acceptable to spend eight hours a day foraging in the woods and contemplating infinity. Instead, I was slowly becoming my laptop. Soon I would sprout keyboard digits and power cord arms.
One particularly frosty evening I abandoned the proofreading of banquet event orders to buy apples at the supermarket and make a pie. The mindless tasks of peeling and slicing, grinding fresh cinnamon, rolling out buttery dough and crimping the edges, were cool water on the sauna stones in my head. My condo filled with sugary autumn smells. I listened in on two conference calls and then took the rest of the evening off. I cooked my favorite dinner—garlic green beans and mashed potatoes—and started watching a romantic comedy on my laptop. I had just finished eating a warm piece of pie with vanilla gelato when Rousseau called.
“Hey beautiful,” he said easily. “How are you?”
“I made my favorite dinner,” I said. “I feel really good.”
“It makes me so happy when you’re happy. It brightens my day.”
I sucked in a breath. It annoyed me, his statement. Without skipping a beat it seemed to throw me back to the depths of my emptiness, because I didn’t feel happy when he was happy without me, and clearly that made him a better person than I was. All I could feel about his happiness was envy and resentment and fire. His upbeat tone, as if everything in the world was grand, seemed to trivialize my suffering, make light of it as if it were nothing, as he giddily had his cake and ate it too. I wanted him to be as miserable without me as I was without him. I wanted him to be as hungry for me as I was for him. I wanted to hear “I can’t live without you,” not “La dee da, I’ve got it all.” His happiness implied that I should be happy, despite everything. That it was my choice, it didn’t have anything to do with him. See how easy it is for you to be happy, Halley?
When I opened my mouth, though, none of that came out. Instead I said, “I thought you were going to call me yesterday.”
“I was planning on it, but I got busy,” he said, still unaffected.
“Well, I waited all evening,” I said.
He sighed. “Come on, Halley, I can’t pay attention to you every minute.”
Here we go again, I thought. “Do you know how many minutes you don’t pay attention to me, Thomas? I’m not a robot, I have needs, you know.”
“Can we please not do this tonight?” he asked. “We were having a perfectly nice conversation just now.”
My face flushed with anger. “Is there ever a good time to do this? I can’t be perky and bright all the time.”
“How about fifty percent of the time?” he snapped.
Ouch. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“Jesus Christ, why are you being so difficult? Why do you have to ruin this?”
“Because this isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” I shouted. “When people like us find each other, we’re supposed to find a way to work it out!”
The fear was there now, and the disbelief. How could I keep failing at this when I was trying so goddamned hard? And yet, the hard
er I ran, the faster Rousseau seemed to recede before me. Slowly but surely I was losing hold of the whole infallible world of my dreams. A world where hard work always led to success, where people who loved each other overcame all obstacles. A world that made sense.
“I don’t understand how you can keep walking away from me,” I said pleadingly. “How can you? Knowing that life will never be as good.”
“I’m not walking away from you,” he said placidly. “But I can’t just uproot my whole life all of a sudden.”
“All of a sudden? We’ve been doing this for months!”
“Yeah, and I’ve been married for fifteen years! I need time to think about it!”
“That’s ridiculous! What is there to think about? What is more time going to change?”
“You said from the very beginning that you were going to be satisfied with this. Was that all just bullshit?”
“Oh, of course! I just said all of that to lure you in! All along, this has all been one big fucking trick. Surprise!”
I heard myself, the bitterness in my voice. I didn’t want to be like this, I really didn’t. I wanted to be on his side. But I also wanted to stand up for myself and be heard, and there never seemed to be a correct way of being. I was supposed to be assertive, I was supposed to be submissive. I was supposed to be sweet, I was supposed to be sexy. Don’t put up with any bullshit, do anything for love. Be ruthless, but be nice about it. Take a hint and bail, give it my best effort. Be myself, but follow others’ advice. I wanted to say all the right things, but what were the right things? Rousseau and I understood the challenges of each other’s lives, but there was no way for either of us to get what we wanted without someone getting hurt. And so we continued to find ourselves at this endless stalemate.
“Halley, I can’t think about this right now,” he said.
There was a hard coldness in his voice that I’d never heard before and could hardly believe. It frightened me more than anything he’d ever said to me before.
“I’m sorry,” I replied quickly.
“You know, you think when you get older you’ll have everything figured out, but it isn’t like that. I’m just as clueless about all this as you are. I’m not the conqueror you think I am, moving through life always knowing what to do. I’m just taking things as they come.” He paused, then sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could just go back to my old mediocre life again.”
His voice was weary, as if he’d aged twenty years in the last twenty seconds.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know why I insist on prolonging the status quo with Chloe. I think it’s because, to tell you the truth, I’m too much of a coward to make a change. If you want to know what I really think, that’s what I think. I’ll probably never leave Chloe. And if I ever do, it’ll be so far in the future that you and I will have already been to hell and back by then. If we do end up together, it’ll be because you did the heavy lifting to get us there. And won’t you be so bitter and fed up by then that we’ll end up with some cancerous thing instead of the happiness you envision?”
The fear was now spraying my insides at full nozzle. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” I said. “We can have a great life.”
“Maybe I don’t need to have a great life,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, and I would spend a long time thinking about it. Maybe it was that he’d begun to believe life was supposed to be dissatisfying. And dissatisfaction was familiar. It was comfortable. In dissatisfaction, there was always the future to look forward to. In happiness, we had only to lose, but in unhappiness, we had only to gain.
Then again, maybe he was just tired.
“Okay,” I said. “I can do the heavy lifting then, like you say. We’ll just keep doing this until you’re ready to change things. If that’s the only way to preserve this, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
“Look at us,” he said. “We’re tearing each other apart.” He was silent for a few long seconds. “What if the only way to preserve this is to end it?”
My stomach lurched. “That doesn’t make sense. What does that mean?”
He paused, as if someone had just entered the room. “I need to go.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know yet how worried I should be. Our lives had become so cloudy lately that I could no longer tell clouds from sky. I wanted to keep talking, to figure it all out and make things right, to feel the rush of relief when we both stepped back from the cliff edge. But there would be no figuring it out tonight.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night.”
The silence after I hung up the phone was unbearable. I wanted to call him back, apologize a thousand times. I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my hands as if I could still turn it all around, still rewind the clock, as long as I didn’t take one more step forward. I didn’t move from that spot for hours.
30
The next morning, I awoke in a panic. The frustration fueling our fight the night before had, of course, disappeared entirely and been replaced with the fear that I’d destroyed everything. It was a physical fear, like waking up blood-covered to discover you’ve unconsciously murdered someone in your sleep.
I dialed Rousseau’s mobile from bed. It rang until his voicemail picked up. I put my phone on the bedside table, took a deep breath, and stood up.
I should have eaten something, but eating food was about as desirable a prospect as eating mud. Instead, I took a shower. My legs shook, and black spots blinked in front of my eyes as I stepped back onto the bath-mat. I leaned against the wall for a second, then slid to the floor, waiting for the spots to go away. I held my hand up in front of my face. It trembled silently, as if it contained every fear and every desire I’d ever felt. I was a drug addict, consumed by plots to get my fix of him, refusing to believe in the possibility that it was over. It couldn’t be over. With every inch that dream of him receded, my life seemed to lose a degree of importance.
I got in the car and drove to Cannes. I parked on the east end of the Croissette and walked. Everywhere I went reminded me of him, the places we’d been together all those months ago when everything was easy and bright. Everyone I saw looked happier than normal. The old men playing Pétanque. Kids screaming on the tinkling carousel. Dogs straining on their leashes to inspect passersby as their mistresses gossiped from those blue enamel chairs. The Francophilic tourists.
“Marcus, what if we just sell everything . . . we could afford a place here.”
“God, Janice, can you imagine how perfect it would be to live here? Paradise.”
“I don’t think I could ever get tired of this view. We could eat croissants every day!”
I was so tired of croissants that the thought of eating a croissant made me feel a little sick. “No,” I wanted to say, “take it from me, it won’t last.”
Dusk fell over Cannes and the glitterati emerged for their nocturnal recreations. I walked by the legendary hotels that loomed over me like giant white wedding cakes, the nightclubs loud with voices.
“Tu ne devineras jamais.”
“I am dying for a cigarette.”
“Où est Claude?”
“Did you see her shoes?”
Cheek kisses. Anonymous fingers holding glasses of champagne. Strobe lights. Cars booming music. Bright lights from a gelato cart where people stood in line holding fistfuls of cash. Teenagers on the beach taking selfies. Everywhere, cameras flashing. Millions of selfies. The air full of text messages, their electromagnetic waves like a plague numbing everything that was vibrant in the world. The closer I was to it, the more vulgar it became. I was an alien in a sea of logo-covered couture, the masses here to see and be seen worshiping at the altar of capitalism. Abundance was supposed to have given us the space to do more, be more, make the world better. Instead it had given us this. I wished a bomb would drop on us, something to snap us out of th
is, shake us all awake. The excess and the noise was an assault on my whole body. I wanted to spontaneously disappear without a trace.
A bum sat on the sidewalk with a paper coffee cup in his hand, which contained change that he jangled when people walked by.
“Tu es Americain,” he said to me as I passed.
I ignored him and kept walking.
Then he said in heavily accented English, “You should smile.”
When I didn’t reply, he laughed. It was that laugh that got to me—a laugh that said “You are nothing but a thing, here for my profit and amusement.” That was when I lost my shit.
“Oh yeah?” I said to him, wheeling around. I had no idea what was about to come out of my mouth. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you can just sit here on your stoop all high and mighty . . . telling people how to look . . . and what to do?”
People on the other side of the street glanced in our direction, but kept walking. The bum blinked up at me. He may not have even understood what I was saying.
“You don’t know anything about my life!” I shouted. “I could have said you need to get a job . . . or you need to take a shower! But I didn’t! I minded my own business, because I’m nice . . . I’m a nice person! Fuck you, I can frown if I want to!”
He laughed as I walked away.
I don’t know how many hours I walked, but the tourists and pedestrians thinned out and eventually there was almost no one. Just me and the quiet streets, the dark shop windows and the smooth lapping of the sea. A ball of misery sat in my empty gut like a cancer. I had a strange compulsion to reach down my throat and rip it out.
“Dear Celeste,” I wrote. “Please come to Paris next month. I need you. Please, I’ll do anything. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Love, Halley.”
Relationships like Rousseau’s and mine don’t begin and end neatly. Like sawing a leg off, the end came in ruthless hacks, one at a time and very slowly. Each morning the hope would build back up again, the possibility that everything might go back to the way it used to be. Hack. Every time I heard a sound I looked out the window, praying to see him at the door. But he never came. Hack. Hack.
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