by Jane Delury
She wanted to save him, she told me, and she wanted a child. She was already in her forties, and the chances seemed close to none. The summer after they met, she got pregnant. They came to the estate and Hugo started his research on Koto.
“He took meeting me as a sign that he should write this book,” Olga said. “What were the chances that a scholar of francophone literature should end up with a woman from a town immortalized by one of Madagascar’s greatest poets?” She laughed. “I can see from your face that you are skeptical. Yet I’m sure you know about the meanings one makes when first in love. Coincidences become destiny.” Her eyes seemed darker, her face longer, more mysterious. As she let out a sigh of smoke, I saw what Hugo might have found in her, at least when they first met. “Beginning the book was difficult for him,” she said, “and so is the middle, and so will be the end. The fact that he’s drinking again so much is not surprising. But we have Élodie now. And we must do our best for her.”
“Ça va aller,” I said. If there was a better expression than “It will be all right,” I didn’t know it.
I thought, maybe, that this evening meant that Olga would loosen up about everything, including Élodie. She didn’t. The next morning, she said Élodie had been up twice during the night with the cough, so we should stay inside again. She’d taken Élodie to the doctor while I was in Paris, and in addition to the morning drops for her weak lungs, there were new drops in her evening chocolate, vitamin tablets to chew, and a blood sausage as an afternoon snack to give her more iron.
For the next few days, Olga went up and down the stairs with boxes, while I sat on the floor of Élodie’s room hooking train tracks under the bed for the new routes she designed. I taught her how to make a cat’s cradle with a piece of twine. We colored and drew. We read books in the library. “Tell me a story,” she would say, her head on my lap. Outside, the expanse of the grounds and the forest, the ability to move, had made me imaginative. Here, in the dim library, my mind shrank. I disappointed Élodie, I’m sure, with my stories, but she never let on.
Hugo came back from the conference with stubble on his cheeks and lavender sachets for Olga and me. Olga sniffed hers and said, “One more thing to pack.”
“Don’t be cross,” he said. “I had to go.”
Élodie sat on his lap playing with her present, a cicada made of tin that whirred its wings when you pressed a button on its back.
“The more sun they get, the louder they sing,” Hugo told her.
“Mistral,” I said.
“The wind?” Olga asked.
“The poet,” Hugo said.
“Il veut voler,” Élodie said.
“We’ll help him, then.” Hugo pinched the cicada between his fingers and swooped it up and down, past Élodie’s ear, over her head, then over mine, making her laugh. I saw that Olga was observing me.
Over the next week, Hugo was in his study before breakfast, and he ate his dinner there on a tray. I’d see him at the window when I came back from my bike rides, which I stretched across the afternoons. I picked daisies and buttercups for Élodie and we wove flower chains at the kitchen table. Mostly, I wanted our time together to move faster. Meanwhile, Olga rolled up rugs, sorted clothes, wrapped frames and knickknacks in newspaper. She finished the library. Her organizing and packing had a faster pace. The renters would come for the keys at the end of the month, and then the Boyers would be off to Boston.
One morning, I woke up early and came downstairs, feeling sweaty and grumpy. During the night, I’d stripped off my clothes, run a towel under cold water, and plastered it on my body to cool down. I missed air conditioning.
“You’re awake,” Hugo said from the doorway of his study. He was dressed as he’d been the night before, his shirt unbuttoned so his chest hair showed.
“I was hot,” I said.
He wobbled. He’d been drinking. “This is nothing. Try Tunisia in summer. Come, would you?”
I’d never been in his study. Columns of books stood all over the floor, and jam jars filled with fountain pens lined a shelf. “I use a different one each day,” Hugo said of the pens. “It keeps the thoughts fresh, or used to.” He pointed at the pages of his book manuscript, open on the desk. The paper glowed with the colors of the rainbow, spilling over the tight march of Hugo’s handwriting.
I held my hand over the paper. My palm turned scarlet. “How?” I said.
“Look more carefully.”
I felt the distance between our bodies. Turning around, I saw a bottle of rum on the windowsill. A beam of sunlight trapped inside projected a prism onto the desk. “It’s mocking my words with its beauty,” Hugo said. “I think I’ll have to quit for the day.”
“You could also move the bottle off the windowsill,” I said. I meant to tease him, but the words came out hard, not coy.
Hugo laughed softly and went back to the chair behind his desk. “Tu es si américaine,” he said.
Two weeks later, he was no longer trying to hide his drinking. He’d be at breakfast, holding Élodie on his lap, teasing Olga, dunking his croissant into his coffee, and in the afternoon, the car would be gone to the café. Olga dealt with it as you would deal with a child. One night, at dinner, Hugo fell asleep at the table, and she shook him awake, gently, then helped him upstairs.
“What is wrong with Papa?” Élodie asked when Olga came back.
“Papa is playing,” Olga said.
The spell between Hugo and me felt broken by that moment in his study. Now I noticed his untucked shirts, his crooked bottom teeth, the ridged surface of his nails. And as if he knew that he’d shown me too much of his weakness, he no longer tried to flirt or smiled at me in the same way.
A week before I left for Paris for good, when I returned from my bike ride, he came again to the doorway of his study.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“I hit a tree.”
I was out of breath and still shaky. I’d rounded a turn by the pond and misjudged the space between two trunks. I’d gone over the top of the bike and scraped my cheek on a tree root. Hugo leaned toward me. I thought he would kiss me. Instead, he folded me in his arms. He smelled sour and sad. I made myself stay until he released me.
“Olga will take care of that wound,” he said. “Elle répare tout.”
In the bathroom upstairs, Olga dabbed a cotton pad of disinfectant on my cheek. Élodie’s cough had cleared, but the evening before she’d developed a fever, and Olga said she’d been up with her all night.
“I’ll take her to her doctor in Paris today,” she said, her eyes bleary and steady. “We’ll stay the night. I won’t mind if something happens with Hugo while I’m away.”
At first, I thought I’d misunderstood, then I took a step back. “How can you say that?”
She looked up at me with that face I thought so plain and doughy.
“I’d rather he do that than drink.”
“Je ne suis pas une pute,” I said.
“I’m not saying you are.” She shrugged. “I see how Hugo looks at you, and I see how you look at him. I am only telling you that it is all right if you want to.”
“I don’t. And I thought you loved him.”
She smiled at me, wearily. “Silly girl,” she said. “What can you possibly know about love?”
At breakfast the next morning, Olga, Hugo, and I pretended that nothing had happened. Olga left with Élodie for Paris and Hugo shut himself in his study. After riding the bike to Benneville along the buzzing nationale, I spent the afternoon reading at a café. I ate an early dinner at a pizzeria on the square and rode back to the manor at dusk to find the house empty and Hugo’s car gone. The next day, and for the rest of the week once Olga and Élodie returned, the three of us ignored one another as best we could. We lavished attention on Élodie, played word games with her at dinner, smiled at her as she drew at the table with her pencil set. If I’d been relieved to leave for Paris once before, I was even more so the day I returned the bike to the potting shed
for the last time, and packed my bags. I never wanted to see that forest or that house again.
In front of the manor, I kissed Élodie and Hugo on the cheeks, and then Olga drove me to the train station.
“Bon…” she said as we stood on the quays, an expression that can be translated as “Well, then,” and which means “There is nothing more to say.” “Merci pour tout,” I said. I didn’t kiss her goodbye. The train doors opened. It all felt, I thought by the time I reached Paris, very French, very European, like something in a film by Godard.
I took George Whitman of Shakespeare and Company up on his offer and for the next month was a Tumbleweed, one of a group of young expatriates who lived and worked at the store. I slept in the bed with velvet drapes near the children’s section. I read the required book a day, and wrote in my notebook, fragments I thought well tuned and compelling. By the time the linden trees along the Seine had rusted, I’d enrolled at the University of Paris and found an apartment—a former maid’s room—in the fourteenth arrondissement. On New Year’s Eve, at a discothèque, I danced to ABBA with the man who would become my husband. After two years of romance and sex and long conversations on his clic-clac, I moved into his larger apartment in a building with peeling shutters and a rackety elevator that I found charming. He finished his PhD in literature and started to teach. I took the CAPES and found a position at a high school. I wrote and abandoned two chapters of a novel. I tried poetry instead, and mailed my first efforts abroad to literary journals, hoping that the foreign stamps would help my chances. The first baby came.
Sometimes, in those early years of marriage, I’d regret my answer to Olga. What harm would it have done if I’d slept with Hugo? It would have been the last wild act of my life before I fell in love and committed to monogamy. Should I have been so offended by Olga’s proposition? And what had offended me, really? She’d been onto me, to my attempts at banter with Hugo, to the way I tilted my head toward him, to my desire to be desired. She was smarter than I thought. Sometimes, when my husband and I made love, I’d imagine he was Hugo. It was a fantasy that returned more often after our second child was born.
One afternoon when my younger child was three, I ran into my advisor from Boston University while waiting for my husband in front of his office. My advisor was at the university for a conference. He said he’d wondered what had happened to me. I told the story that already was starting to feel like fiction—how after that summer in Benneville I hadn’t wanted to go back to the United States and so I stayed on in France and then met my husband, how wonderful it was to live in Paris, how I liked teaching at the lycée, how I had published a few poems in journals he would never have heard of, although he said that he had.
“I meant to apologize to you,” he said. “I always felt that I had a part in the Boyers’ plan even though I was in the dark when I suggested the position to you.”
I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he told me. The department at BU had been surprised when Hugo and Olga arrived in Boston that August of 1992 and Élodie immediately started treatments for leukemia at Children’s Hospital. Élodie, he said, was only in the beginning stages of the disease. When she had been diagnosed in Paris the previous spring, Olga did research and learned about a new treatment with minimal side effects and good outcomes offered in several American hospitals. Hugo approached French literature departments in those cities.
Olga and Élodie used to come by the department offices, he said, and, aside from Élodie’s baldness, you wouldn’t think that she was ill.
“She was such a happy child, as you must know,” my advisor said.
The treatments were successful and the cancer in remission by the following year. Hugo, though, fell apart. His drinking worsened. He came to class incoherent. “He never finished the book on Koto.” After a few years, the department had let him go, but my advisor helped him to find a position at Syracuse, “a real step down, with a bad teaching load.”
“I had no idea that she was so sick,” I said, although already I saw that I had, saw all of the clues I’d ignored because my attention was elsewhere.
“They wouldn’t have wanted you to know, either, I suppose,” my advisor said, “since you might tell me. Olga told me later that they wanted to get to Boston and secure health insurance. She feared the arrangement could fall through.”
My husband came out of his office after my advisor had left. I didn’t tell him about that conversation. I remember, distinctly, inhabiting the moment in that smoky hallway when I could tell him or not tell him, and choosing not to. I kept it to myself, along with glances exchanged on the street, a walk alone on the quays of the Seine, a concert in the Sainte-Chapelle that I slipped into alone. I was practicing the art of deception that I would need to have an affair.
When I look back now, it was a simple story, a crude and common one. But at the time, every moment of my day shimmered. I was returning home from school on the Metro, a sack of student papers between my ankles, when the man next to me asked my name. He said he’d seen me before on this train. He was a cartoonist for a political magazine with a name everyone now knows. He told me I seemed sad. “Tu as l’air triste,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you.”
There is probably a joke about a cartoonist picking up a woman on a train, but I found the drawing beautiful. In a few lines, he showed me to myself: I was someone pensive and deep and experienced, someone with so much she wanted to say that her mouth bowed. Later, he told me that talking to me that day was the boldest act of his life. He said that if I hadn’t stared at him directly in the eyes, he never would have. I have no memory of having done so, and that doesn’t sound like the woman I was when I boarded the train that afternoon, although another woman walked off with that torn-out drawing in the pocket of her raincoat, a phone number scribbled on the back.
It lasted a year. I’m aghast when I look back at myself: sitting at the breakfast table stirring the children’s hot chocolate, talking to my husband about taking the car in for service, and then, a few hours later, lying on a hotel bed with my legs spread wide. What I did was wrong. Unforgivable. Sometimes, though, I think that I will never feel as alive as I did during those months of wickedness. Suddenly I didn’t know who I was, and it was exhilarating. I became, at forty-two, that girl again, in a city, not a forest, on foot, rather than on a bicycle. I was twenty years older than she was and just as naïve and reckless and unthinking. Anything seemed possible. A single life could split into many. Who knew what the future held? An apartment over a river? Trips to countries I’d never seen? What we were doing was impossible; still, maybe, just maybe, we would end up together.
One afternoon, I was on the sofa, grading papers, the television murmuring on low volume when a special broadcast announced the attacks at Charlie Hebdo. I felt the same terror I’d felt when the dog showed up without my father. I had no one to call. I didn’t know if he was in the office—we knew each other’s days only vaguely, not as you know the days of your spouse. I paced the apartment, from the children’s bedroom to the kitchen, telling myself to stay calm, watching the news, turning on the radio too. Somewhere, his wife was calling or being called. She knew where he was. I didn’t. I spent an agonizing hour before the phone rang. He’d been on a plane to Munich. I asked if he had called her first. He said no. I didn’t believe him.
We met at a hotel a few days later. I cried and explained how I’d felt in that hour. “Je ne le supporte pas,” I said—I can’t stand it. Not only that hour, all of it: lying next to my husband at night, listening to him breathe, the waiting for phone calls, the secret email accounts and deleted texts, the fabricating of last-minute meetings and dinners with friends, the rotten deception. He touched my cheek. He said he felt more lost than ever. Escaping death had made him want to be with me more, but it had also made him want to avoid being cruel to his wife.
“Tout a l’air si fragile maintenant,” he said. Everything seems so fragile.
In the weeks after the attack,
he was afraid, couldn’t draw, sketched instead, didn’t like that, tried to paint. “I’ve lost my sense of irony,” he said. “What’s a political cartoonist without that?” I told myself that I wouldn’t go back to him, and then I did. The hotels we stayed in afternoons were filled with tourists with cameras and guidebooks and matching luggage. He and I had no bags. It was the same thing that we’d been doing for months; now it felt sordid. Now I cried with him as I cried with my husband, my head turned to the wall. Still, under the misery, was that feeling of being alive. This pain and guilt, this cork in my throat, this self-condemnation, seemed better than the fog of boredom, the certainty of what was around the bend.
Then, as happens in these stories, his wife found out in a cavalcade of clichés: my Metro card in his pocket, a credit card charge for a hotel, and of course not only that, but everything she knew about the change in the tide of their intimacy. He called me one night from a telephone booth. My husband was giving the children their bath. From down the hall came splashing and laughing.
“Elle sait tout,” he said. She knows everything.
I said, “Comment?”
“I had to tell her. She’d figured it out.”
“C’était qui?” my husband asked after I’d hung up, and I—who had become so good at lying—said, “Un faux numéro.”
I heard nothing for weeks. I felt grief like I hadn’t known since my father died, an endless hole under my feet. There’s a church down the street from the apartment my husband and I owned, with the thumb of Saint Anthony in a gold box. I only know Saint Anthony from the plaque under his relic, and I am not Catholic. During those weeks, though, I stopped in the chapel on my way home from work, kneeled in a pew, my head on my arms, and sobbed. I wish I could say that I was crying from guilt, but no, I was crying for him.
He called me again a month later, to say that he was sorry. He had perspective now. He loved his wife and always would. She was a femme superbe, and she had forgiven him. He hoped that I could come to love my husband again. If, he added, before hanging up, his wife ever came across me, could I do him one favor? He’d told her that he’d started to see me after the attack. He had framed our affair around that crisis. He’d confessed without confessing.