“Okay,” she said, her lips pursed. “But Iraq?”
“I know. It’s a little out there. But something’s about to break.”
“Right,” she said, “but you can’t just use Iraq for Iraq. What’s your angle on it?”
I slumped against the window, knowing she was right.
“I’m not saying it’s not a good idea, though,” she said, turning to me. “I think it would be good—great, actually—to get back to that kind of stuff. It’s just that you’ve been doing these key paintings for so long, it just surprised me.”
My heart lifted. After all, doing something unexpected was the point.
“Plus, the show did well. It’s the right time to take a chance.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, putting my hand back on her leg. “But Julien says I have a ‘brand’ now. He said—he pretty much came out and said that he wouldn’t sell anything of mine that wasn’t crap.”
“So find another gallerist.” She shrugged.
“I’d feel like a traitor.”
I watched her wince. And my heart fell. As with so many things I’d said over the past couple of months, this word took on a threatening dimension once it was out of my mouth. Traitor. Betrayal. Philanderer. Adulterer. Every word had a second meaning, each sentence held a trap. When I tried to quiet the disparaging voices in my head and have a normal conversation, I just wrapped myself deeper into a sticky web of errors. My words were never right.
Anne reached for the volume knob on the radio. I’d lassoed myself into a corner. The sound of other voices filled the car.
• • •
By the time we reached the Raoults’ house, we’d recouped our losses. Anne and I are good at parties. Parties are our thing. With a wineglass in her hand and one leg crossed over the other and her pillowy French lips painted with a smirk, Anne is at her most beautiful when she’s being entertained.
Synneve Raoult was a Swedish stylist who was trying to start a mail-order sock company for men called TOOB. We spent the cocktail portion of the evening looking at her design samples while she bemoaned the state of creative entrepreneurship in France.
“I can’t get a loan,” she said. “From anyone. They just don’t want you to start things here. They want you to follow.”
“Not that different from Sweden,” said her husband, Thierry, holding up a yellow-and-navy-striped sock.
“No,” she said, “but at least there, when I was making clothing, the designers would put it in their store on consignment. Here, you need an LLC, a patent.”
“And a thousand photocopies,” said my lady on the couch.
The Swede and I burst out laughing. You can’t know the Kafkaesque levels of ineptitude that the French government is capable of until you try to secure that holy grail of naturalization, le titre de séjour. There are support groups for immigrants who have lost their will to live because of the incompetence they were exposed to within the walls of the French prefecture. I myself once waited four hours in a communal lobby with the air quality of an underground bunker only to be told that I had made the unforgivable error of showing up with four black-and-white photocopies of my British passport instead of five. The prefecture’s public photocopier only took five-cent pieces, a denomination that is never used in France, and no, absolutely not, Madame would not make change from my five-euro bill, nor would she entertain my suggestion to use the staff photocopier, even when I offered to pay extra. No, I would have to exit the building in order to make the fifth photocopy elsewhere and come back for the next available appointment in four months. Vive la France!
“I like this one,” I said, holding up a white pair covered in pastel-colored polka dots.
“I know,” said Synneve, smiling. “If I ever get this thing off the ground, I’m hoping to introduce French businessmen to a sense of humor. You Brits always have great socks.”
Dinner was roasted salmon and boiled beets and a chicory salad with walnuts and blue cheese. The wine was Beaujolais, mercifully, from a vintage that did not taste like dried bananas. Thierry, a marketing executive, regaled us with tales of his new client, a German “eco” limo service trying to conquer the French market with their fleet of hybrid luxury vehicles that ran on vegetable oil.
“The only problem,” he said, “is that you arrive smelling like a vat of fries.”
Anne countered with the recent updates on her pregnant alcoholics, and we passed the bottle of wine around, weighing the aesthetic ramifications of having a pregnant drinker icon on the back. By the cheese course, talk turned to my own projects, and Thierry apologized for not being able to make it to my show.
“It was a great turnout,” said Synneve, passing me a block of Comté and a knife. “But, Anne, you’re a better woman than I am!”
The temperature in the room went from mild to tropical. Or at least it rose significantly underneath my blazer.
“They’re all about ex-lovers!” said Synneve, getting up to pour more wine. “They’re all about . . . keys, right? Places you used to live?”
I avoided Anne’s eyes, but I could feel them on me, like a crocodile resting in the water, sizing up its prey. “Not exactly,” I said, handing off the cheese plate. “They’re places I used to have keys to, yeah, but they’re not all ex-girlfriends.”
“They’re mostly ex-girlfriends,” said Anne, carving off a wedge.
“Well,” said Synneve, “like I said, I’d be too jealous. A painting of another woman’s bed!”
“Oh, yeah, no,” said Thierry. “You’d go nuts.”
“They’re all women from the past,” I repeated.
Synneve burst out laughing. “Well, obviously! I mean, you’re not going to go and . . .” She reddened.
Anne drained her wineglass and filled it with water. She drained that, and filled it up again. No one else budged.
“Do you guys want to move into the living room?” Synneve attempted. “Have some fruit and cognac?”
• • •
Fruit and cognac are good for warming the throat and belly, but they can’t heal a hurt heart. On the drive home, I took the driver’s seat and Anne spent the entirety of the ride staring out the black windows of the car.
The only person I told about Lisa is Julien. I never talked about her to any of our friends, and while this was a good move for the integrity of our couplehood and Anne’s pride, it also meant exposing ourselves to the verbal faux pas of people who weren’t in the know about the leaky state of our union.
Once home, we liberated the babysitter and I waited in the bedroom while Anne checked on our sleeping daughter, kissed her dreaming face good night.
When Anne came in, I was sitting on the edge of our bed with my clothes still on.
She shut the door behind her and turned away to take off her necklace, to unbutton her blouse. On nights like this, after we’d been out in the adult world with good food and friends, I dreamed of going to her, running my hands up the back of her silk shirt, raising my hands under it to finally cup her breasts. I’d come close to trying, but every time I’d stop myself, convinced that she’d let me know when she was ready for physical reconciliation. That it would be disrespectful, violent even, to try to touch her first.
Anne took off her shirt and replaced it with a long-sleeved cotton top to sleep in. She used the bathroom. I used the bathroom. When she got into bed, after a short bout of reading, both of us fell into our ritual of feigned sleep, but that night the charade seemed to go on even longer than usual. My wife was right there next to me, a living, breathing bridge, and I could feel it in the space between us, the magnetic energy that might have been kindled through a single touch. But I didn’t dare touch her, and she didn’t move a limb. During the day, we were able to make small steps toward peace through our words and actions, but at night, there was no one there but us, no one to rely on or disappoint or use except each ot
her, and the fact that we—that I—was incapable of physical communication made me feel like all our other efforts were in vain. On nights like these, I was a castaway on a vast and steel-blue ocean with no land in sight and no birds flying above, just the sound of thick, cold water slapping up against a boat.
6
THAT NIGHT, unable to sleep, I snuck into my studio and rifled through the place where I hide Lisa’s letters under my dried-up watercolor paints. I pulled out the second one she had sent. A long-term fan of Kierkegaard, she wrote mostly about Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard’s true love whom he deserted in order to devote his life to God.
On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd. But this movement I cannot make. As soon as I want to begin, everything reverses itself, and I take refuge in the pain of resignation. I am able to swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical hovering.
A wife in the bedroom, a lover’s letter in hand. Mystical hovering, indeed. This letter was an entreaty to reimmerse myself in my life with Anne, to move on, as it were. But this request to forget her was undermined by the fact that she had taken the time to sit down and write me in the first place.
If I had not had my depression, marriage to her would have made me happier than I had ever dreamed of becoming. But being the person I unfortunately am; I must say that I could become happier in my unhappiness without her than with her.
That’s how I feel about us. About you. I am happier missing you than if I hadn’t left. What would have become of us if we’d really done it? Severed things with other people? Moved in with each other? Married? You think you could have handled the guilt, but I don’t think so. I never saw a future with your little girl playing in some rented, second room. It would have killed us, ruined everything we had. I think we were meant to be exactly what we were. Lovers. It’s a silly word, it’s a supermarket romance term, a bodice-ripper placeholder, but it’s true. People are goal-orientated, they like their efforts to turn into something: a promotion, a marriage proposal, a sold painting hanging on a buyer’s wall. I liked our journey. I loved it. I also loved that it didn’t go where habit would have had it go.
You don’t plan on adultery. Looking back, there might have been a certain availability about me when I met Lisa, but it wasn’t something I planned. Things weren’t even bad between Anne and me. I wasn’t unhappy. I was lucky with my home life. But I was disconnected. Numb.
There was something that happened on the day that I met Lisa, but it’s only in retrospect that it feels important: at the time, it was just another example of the physical negligence that had set in around year five of my marriage. I was in the bathroom with Camille, my shirt off, having just taken a shower myself, setting her up with a Noah’s ark of floating animals for a morning bath. Anne was taking her on a girls’ day, which meant I would get back to being a real guy just as soon as I bathed and powdered and dressed our little girl.
This shouldn’t sound like it’s going to, but I was looking at Cam’s fanny. Just as a body part, mind you, an organ in the bath. I was thinking of the last time that Anne and I had bathed together—on a weekend trip, of course, the marital bathroom having long become a desexualized place of his and her toothpastes and roll-on deodorants. It had been years, literally, since we’d shared a bath at home. And this lack of physical connection with my own wife so contrasted with the multitude of times when I’d gotten down on my knees to cleanse my daughter’s body that when Anne came in to remind me yet again about their estimated time of departure, I was filled with the urge to grab her with my soapy hands and toss her in the water, ruin her posh clothes.
But I didn’t. Instead, I pushed a plastic sea lion toward a plastic floating iceberg while Camille forced a mermaid doll to dive up and down, and Anne grabbed a bottle of perfume and sprayed some behind each ear, and when she turned around again, freshly fragranced, I watched her eyes take us both in. I saw real love there for a moment, true warmth and affection, and I thought that it would happen, a spontaneous embrace, but then Camille’s mermaid made a calamitous dive that sent sudsy bathwater all over the floor, some of which splashed onto Anne’s suede boots and the moment was ruined. And when they left, I felt like a very small boy in a too-big house who just wanted to be loved. Touched. Kissed.
And it was that afternoon that I met her, January 12, 2002, at a photography exhibit called The Devil’s Playground at the Pompidou.
The Nan Goldin exhibit was one of three different shows I’d planned to see that weekend to cleanse myself of the post-Christmas conspicuous-consumption blues. The highlight of the retrospective was a slide show of photographs Goldin had shot of her friends in intimate situations. A naked couple playing with their child on a couch, a man washing his boyfriend’s hair in the bath, an attractive couple making out on the bed with all the windows open. It was exactly the kind of slide show that I needed at that moment: a proof that sexual intimacy exists.
Lisa had come into the dark screening room and sat beside me during a slide called Simon and Jessica Kissing in My Shower. I tried to think of something innocent, my daughter on a tricycle, Anne blowing on Cam’s hot chocolate to cool it down. But I was powerless against my reaction to the person by my side. I hadn’t even seen her and my entire body was alive. I could tell she was long-haired, long-legged, with restless hands and fingers. And she was alone.
When the slide show finished, I didn’t get up from my seat right away, and neither did Lisa. I stalled for time by concentrating on the credits as if they were crucial to my appreciation of the film. Who had done the lighting? Who was the key grip? What the hell’s a key grip?
I wanted to say something, but I hadn’t spontaneously said something to a female stranger in years. While I was going through a list of potential witticisms, she saved me from embarrassment by speaking up herself.
“Much more digestible than all her stuff on AIDS.”
“It depends how you look at it,” I blurted out in desperation, becoming even more anxious when she stood up from the bench. Before I had the chance to appreciate her genetic gifts in the light of the still-rolling credits, she said, “Why don’t we get a drink?”
A drink. A drink is just a drink. And what would be the harm, really, of seeking refreshment with a fellow art lover? They had been provocative photographs. There was quite a bit to talk about. Better to discuss them with someone who had actually seen them than try to recap them for Anne.
We went up to the museum’s sixth-floor restaurant, a pompous place called Georges that was famous for its egg-shaped eating compartments and the extra-long-stemmed roses jutting up from each table. There were nothing but windows all around. From our silver table, we had a spectacular view of the right bank.
Lisa ordered a cosmo, claiming that it was impossible to get a decent one in France.
“They’ve got something against red fruit here,” she said, running her finger around the glass. “You have no idea what I had to go through to find cranberries for Thanksgiving.”
“What’d you have to go through?” I beamed.
“Let’s just say I shelled out a half hour’s salary to get one pack. It’s ridiculous.” She dipped a finger in her drink. “Why don’t the French like cranberries? It’s such a useful fruit. I guess French women are too ladylike to get yeast infections.”
I laughed into my manhattan, near dizzy with the free afternoon before me. If I wanted, I could have a second one. I could have a third.
“So, Lisa,” I said, staring directly into her eyes, a tactic I had picked up from watching French men on the métro. “How about telling me the story of your life?”
“I don’t know, Richard,” she said, leaning closer. “How about telling me how badly an affair would fuck up your marriage?”
You can’t get much past an American. But then again, there was the ring. And the dead cell cast of seven years of marital fidelity on my s
kin. I was porous. Floundering. But we didn’t sleep together right away.
At the end of our cocktail-a-thon, Lisa left me her address, inviting me to her house for dinner later that week, an invitation that I accepted with every intention to cancel once I was back safely in my house. But then the days went by in their parade of mundanity, me walking Cam to school and coming home to work on those stupid, stupid key paintings, having nothing new to say to my wife at dinner and her having nothing new to say to me, and on the eve in question, it felt like, what was the big deal, really? It was just a meal! I was a grown man. I could have female friends I didn’t sleep with.
• • •
Until then, I’d never lied to Anne. I’d never had to. I got all of my weird shit out in my art. But on that Thursday, I heard myself tell her that I was going over to Julien’s to watch a soccer match. That we’d probably grab dinner. And I died a little as my trusting partner simply nodded, and said, “That sounds like fun.”
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen as I set out for the Étienne Marcel quarter with a bottle of red wine. Or rather, I knew what was supposed to happen, but I was still operating in a whirlpool of denial where I was more focused on spending an evening with a beautiful woman I didn’t know than the fact that with every step I took, I was making my way closer to having sex with someone else.
One seventy-seven Rue Montmartre was a five-story building with a large blue door and an inside courtyard with palm trees and two benches. There was no elevator. By the time I climbed the spiraling staircase to the fourth floor, I was winded, and as I’m not keen on audible panting by way of greeting, I waited several minutes before ringing Lisa’s bell.
When she came to the door, aside from a decisive firming in my tallyhos, our exchange was cordial: she cheek-kissed me, thanked me for the wine, put away my coat.
Lisa’s apartment was a two-level affair with an American-style kitchen and sitting room on the first floor and a staircase leading up to the bedroom, which gave out onto a little balcony with two folding chairs and three dirt-filled flower boxes. She never planted anything in those flower boxes the entire time I knew her. When I asked her why, she said that she didn’t want to feel guilty when they died.
I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Page 7