Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  It had started snowing again. The snowfall killed any distance and perspective around the lake and made the world look four foot deep. A voluminous grey nothing hovered outside the window of Frank’s office as he opened his computer. For the first time in months, his inbox was Heide-free. The urge to unblock her was tremendous. If he did, he wondered, would a number of unreceived emails get delivered all at once? Would he find anxious notes, asking what happened and was it something I said? Eventually he would have to write to Heide. Right now, though, he knew that scorning H’s feelings was part of his atonement.

  In his inbox was an email from the Dubai client for whom he had done a chalet renovation. From the outside the chalet was a pastoral Alpine postcard, but on the inside it was all poured concrete and severe angles. The client was renewing his invitation for Frank to visit Dubai and meet prospective chalet owners. ‘Bring your wife,’ the client had said. The image of Joan flying business-class to Dubai and being met at the airport by a chauffeur with a sign with their name on it filled him with reassurance. He told the client that he and his wife accepted the invitation, and would send over some possible dates to see if they were agreeable. After he replied to the client, Frank opened up an essay he was writing on the logic of branches in Friedrich’s work.

  Frank saw each branch as a silhouetted finger, pointing to some other, more exceptional corner of the landscape. Branches were roads on a map. Boughs and twigs spelled a route to a certain perspective. The flayed stump of an alder drove the gaze downwards to a mossy ravine. A fallen trunk was a footbridge over a bog, leading one to a better vantage point. The steadying sapling on the cliffs of Rügen permitted a closer look at the drop. Like any other ‘bor’ searched for on a map, the heart of the painting was a thing to be reached. Bor as heart: the idea pleased Frank no end.

  The idea that obstructions were in fact revelations also filled Frank with hope. He thought of the obstructions in his own life. He thought of the revelation that was Heide, only to realise that maybe she was an obstruction, too. He thought of the hours he had spent writing to her – how the activity had slotted into his life, as uncomplicated as a legitimate hobby, as stubborn as a young bamboo. How stupid had he been not to realise that he’d redirected all his conversation towards one person – that he’d stared so closely at the branch he’d missed the setting sun.

  Frank realised how much he’d shrunk back. He peeled a Post-it note from the pad and wrote the word ‘Romanticism’, and next to it an arrow pointing to the word ‘monasticism’. A monkish isolation was safer than a romantic one. He would fall back on that.

  But then again, none of his relatives seemed to see him either. Living under the same roof as someone, checking up on their check-ups – that didn’t mean shit. That wasn’t the same as a person seeing you, really seeing you. No one in this family understood him. And for all their accusations against him, none of them actually cared what he had to say. He could help with essays. He could be entrusted with anger. He could lend money. But no one ever asked. Friedrich had been misunderstood in his time, too. The best thing about Heide’s letters was that they gave Frank a reason to respond. The mirror quality of his relationship with H was not lost on him.

  He peeled another yellow square off the pad and wrote JOAN in the middle of it. Was Joan the pine tree in a copse, or was she the wide open sky? Had he been led to her, or had she led him to something else? The circle was dizzying. And anyhow, who could ever tell for sure where the heart stood?

  *

  ‘Did you just wolf-whistle me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick. ‘Your ass looks great in that skirt.’

  ‘It’s not a skirt. See? It’s a two-tone dress.’

  Lois pulled at the fabric to illustrate her point. Nick was lying on their bed, reading a geology book he had pulled from the shelves in Frank’s office. He thought that it didn’t matter what type of garment it was, as long as it made her ass look great.

  ‘It makes your ass look like a soft, billowing pillow.’

  ‘I found it in the basement. I bought it for New Year’s. In 2000.’

  ‘It fits perfectly.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said, implying ‘no kids’.

  Lois put on some mascara she had taken earlier from Joan’s bathroom. The mascara was navy-blue and clotted, like the beach tar that stuck to their sandals in Brittany. In the bedroom across from hers, Finn and Maya had fallen asleep together after lunch. Downstairs, Cole, Frank and Gitsy were watching The Fearless Vampire Killers on television, and in the kitchen Joan was condensing leftovers into her leftover Tupperware in the kitchen. Simon was moping around the basement.

  ‘Do you wanna go to the bowling alley for a drink?’ asked Nick. ‘We could take the dog.’

  ‘Let’s go just the two of us,’ Lois replied, evening the cranberry lipstick smudge on her lips.

  ‘Even better,’ said Nick.

  They walked out into the night and into the gentle snowfall. The snow crunched where they packed it down with their boots. They took the stone driveway to the shortcut through the garden of some neighbours who had also added their name to the petition. They emerged onto the small, shrub-lined road that snaked down to the main road. The windows of renovated barns and rendered houses glowed from the light and activity within.

  They crossed the main road into the deserted supermarket car park and across to the bowling alley. As they approached, they picked up the purr of the bar’s blue neon sign. Lois pushed open the door. The bowling alley was bathed in a lonely white light and smelled like cooking oil. Music from the jukebox bounced off the carpeted walls, quieter than the noise of rolling balls. There was no one behind the bar. A party of four were playing on one of the alleys. Three people sat at a table, smoking and laughing. When Lois walked up to the bar, one of the men got up from the table to serve her. He continued talking to his friends from there. Lois ordered two beers and two shots of whisky, and joined Nick in the window. The bartender went back to his friends.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ said Nick, as they downed their shots. ‘Something weird happened last night,’ he said, fiddling with the shot glass.

  ‘What’s that, then.’

  ‘Tara tried to kiss me.’

  ‘My brother’s girlfriend tried to kiss you.’

  ‘Ex. His ex-girlfriend.’

  On the lanes, someone scored a strike.

  ‘Wait,’ said Lois. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. It was weird.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t want to embarrass her.’

  ‘So you thought you’d just embrasse her instead.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Did you kiss her?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘What do you mean, not really?’

  ‘I mean, I didn’t initiate or respond, but for a second her lips were on my face, so no, not really.’

  After she and the Historian kissed, Lois had tried to recall who, of the Historian or her, had initiated the kiss. They were standing side by side near a metal fence, by one of the defunct piers at the end of 14th Street. The Historian was chewing gum, like he always did. He leaned into her and stopped, his minty breath hovering an inch from her mouth. She didn’t move, knowing full well that in this case, immobility was an invitation.

  Mentally exhuming the kiss in the bowling alley gave her a sudden headrush – an immediate, drastic yearning for that yearning of a couple of years ago, when his hand had come to rest on her hip. Warm hand, cold breath. What was she even doing standing by the water with him, on a morning in November when she should have been at home or at work, like a normal person.

  ‘What was she even doing at the house?’ she asked.

  ‘The dog was in their garden.’

  Lois drank from her glass.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you that—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘OK.’

  A couple of months ago, Lois was walking down Fifth Ave
nue when she thought she spotted the Historian at some distance ahead of her. She trailed him for five blocks, and when he turned a corner she sprinted to catch up with him. But it wasn’t him. Nor did it happen just once.

  ‘Maybe we could go home now and have sex and you can slap my face and tell me how disappointed in me you are,’ Nick ventured.

  Lois took some coins out of her pocket and put them on the table. Nick followed her out of the bar. The fire door slammed shut behind them. The snow was falling much faster and thicker, a stream of tiny dry crystals that had already erased their earlier footprints. Lois thought of Tara leaning in to kiss Nick, and her mouth filled with the taste of mint.

  ‘You’re such a dog. I didn’t know you were such a dog.’

  She pulled out Simon’s leash from her pocket.

  ‘Here, dog. Maybe I should keep you on a tighter leash.’ Lois walked over to Nick and tied Simon’s leather leash around his neck gently, folding his shirt collar back over it. ‘I mean, if you can’t be trusted not to go snogging my brother’s girlfriends.’

  ‘Ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Sorry – ex-girlfriends.’

  Nick was standing underneath a lamp post, the snow spiralling down the orange shaft of light and falling on his hair. Lois took his cheeks in her hands and kissed him on the lips. He tasted like nothing. Like nothing at all.

  ‘I’ll walk you home.’

  Nick fell to his knees and crawled back up the road, on the frozen dirt, the icy grass cracking under his knees. Lois pulled at the leash, forcing him to hurry up.

  When they reached the house, everyone had gone to bed. Simon was standing by the box of dog biscuits. They ignored him and went upstairs. Nick peeled Lois’s clothes off and sniffed her skin, running his nose along her like a dog. She smelled of something, but not exactly of herself.

  11. Boxing Day

  THE STAR AT the top of the Christmas tree blinked erratically at Joan, like a stuttering relic from a less dysfunctional time. In four or five days, Joan would remove all the ornaments and roll them up in the yellowing kitchen towel whose job was to keep them safe for another year. Joan always took the tree down before the 30th, sometimes the 31st, not wanting the new year to land among last year’s props. She considered leaving the tree put this year, relinquishing the responsibility of according their lives with the calendar. If she did, she wondered how long it would take Frank to notice. Would he mention it two weeks from now, when half the needles had fallen off, and the tips of the branches pointed to the floor under the weight of the decorations? Or would he not say a thing until February, when the branches were brittle and the tree looked like the corpse it had been for a while? Perhaps he wouldn’t say anything at all, and it would be Wim who noticed, when he came home for Easter, that the Christmas tree was still up.

  Joan wondered how long it would take him to notice her absence, if she left one morning. Would he miss her at lunchtime, when Simon barked for his afternoon walk, and nothing materialised on the kitchen table, or at night, when the desire to say something unimportant to furnish a silence that didn’t matter would become too hard to ignore.

  In the kitchen, Lois was making Nick’s family recipe for clam dip. Joan poured herself a sherry and walked over to the office, Simon in tow. She looked into the piano room, where Gitsy was busy putting Calico Critters in among Joan’s figurines. There was a monkey in a priest’s habit, a whole cat family and a pair of unaccompanied baby panda twins.

  She closed the door to the office. Simon, who preferred to move between rooms but was now stuck in there with her, lay down on the twined rug.

  ‘I’m thinking of getting my own place,’ she told him. ‘Like Sue. You know – a two-bedroom apartment in one of those converted barns.’

  She took a small stack of sheets out of the printer and sat down at the desk. To her left was Frank’s laptop, sitting closed on top of a pile of books about German Romanticism and that service station chapbook Lois had sent them last year. To her right was the near-empty shoebox of photos. The pictures of the kids had been divvied up, and all that remained were photos of Joan seen through Frank’s eyes, and vice versa.

  Dear Frank, she wrote at the top of the page.

  Simon’s jaw yawned open and dropped a ladder of drool onto the rug. Here it was. Saint Joan’s act of renunciation. He, for one, was expecting it.

  *

  Dear Frank,

  Remember when you wrote those letters to me, the summer I went back to England? That was the summer you wrote to me every day. I remember tearing them open, and rushing to get past the ‘Dear Joni’ to make sure we were still one another’s, and that you weren’t breaking up with me because some German girl had decided to return to the Alps after all.

  Those letters were the tonic of my summer. The more you missed me, the more I became obvious to myself. They were so romantic that even the postcards had to be sealed in an envelope. I try to recall what letters I sent back – how I presented myself to you back then. Or perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I was only there in your letters, and perhaps, in the same way, you found yourself in mine.

  Every letter seemed to add a layer to the rubbing of me: adding more detail, making each part more obvious, perhaps a little darker.

  I remember trying to intercept the letters before anyone else got to them, for fear I would come across as believing I was better than them, with my exotic boyfriend who pined for me in the French Alps. I loved the daily delivery (sometimes there were none for a few days, and then a stack of them all at once that would need to be opened chronologically, based on the postmark), but I could sense that for my family it was all pyrotechnics.

  By July you promised me the future, again and again. I struggled with the idea that I was a fraud – like I must have somehow lied to you about my worth or appeal. But I kept these thoughts to myself. I still have every one of those letters somewhere. It’s the one part of our marriage where the only version I held onto was yours.

  I was never much of a writer.

  This is the third such letter I’ve written to you. I tore up the other two almost immediately. The first one I wrote after the miscarriage, or as I like to remember it: the simultaneous dismissal and eviction. I felt like one of those men who leave the house every morning and then spend the rest of the day in their car, in a supermarket car park, because they can’t bring themselves to tell their wives they were fired.

  You, however, had somewhere else to go to process what the world doled out – a place away from us and our contract. Like an immaterial country house. That was your first retreat. Before that, I used to think of us as two yolks in one shell.

  I wrote the second one two months ago, when I found out you’d been writing to an ex-girlfriend you hadn’t spoken to in thirty-five years. The same one that had me scared, thirty-four years ago, that my happiness was at her whim. What got to me wasn’t even the writing (and yes, I read your correspondence), it was something you said about regret.

  I never wanted to be part of anyone’s regret, Frank.

  For thirty-five years I’ve watched you exercise your power of choice. Over the years you’ve chosen your clients, where you go for lunch, if and when you’ll join me and the kids on holiday. Jobs, structural changes to the house, what to obsess over, how much time to devote to dead German painters, if and when to pay our taxes. Who to declare undying devotion to, who to include in your pre-twilight regrets.

  It is true there are some things I got to choose. New shoes for the kids, summer camps, what to make for dinner, which time slot for the parent-teacher conference... And you. I chose you.

  Writing to you today, I am aware it isn’t just about a German woman who never had your children. I am opening a vent on the exhaustion I can and have contained for years. It exhausts me to watch you exist so far away from us. These days, if I want to share something with you, I am put off by the sheer distance between us. For years now you’ve been living in a ‘bor’ of your own making: an ill-defined grotto no one really c
ares about that doesn’t even exist in reality. You can’t see that all this is the symptom of a family man who has taken a giant step out of the circle, and is unable to name the place he’s chosen to hide out in.

  For a long time I felt stupid that I was content with what was obviously so lacking for you. I felt like I had what I needed, and wanted, in you, the children. I made your bunker cosy, I watched the children while you moved into your parallel universe. I fought alongside you, but it was always your kingdom.

  It’s not that you don’t need me – I can see that you do. But you need me like you need an anchor. I don’t want to be an anchor. I want to be lighter than that.

  You are as in love as you are obsessed. You pore over paintings of man as a speck in mountain majesty. You stare at invisible swamps and holes in the ground, as if they were part of your reality. And today you’ve become one of the observers you study. You’ve become a thesis in dissociation.

  We are the wings of the diorama, Frank. You’ve always felt alone with us, and you think you’re together with ghosts. You’re winding your heart up over some woman in Hamburg, and you’re not getting a check-up on the heart we need down here, in the real world.

  You are scratching at the surface of the surface of another planet, Frank.

  I will start looking for a place after the children leave. I want a small place, higher up in the mountains. Because, as it turns out, I love the mountains as much as you do. I never knew that. I’m going to find a better view of these mountains, Frank, and it will be my view.

  Joan/Joni