If I went back to the gallery now, it would be close to noon when I made it to the markets for the tsunami of errands Anne had entrusted me with before the next day’s departure, which meant that they’d start to run out of the things we needed during the lunch rush, which meant that Anne would have my head. It really was a toss-up: confirmation of my infidelity in writing, or a dearth of car snacks. I decided to carry on.
Besides, I felt good about our vacation. We were good beside the sea. The weather would be balmy, not warm enough to swim yet, but mild enough to take beach walks with our shoes off, to watch Anne’s parents’ ancient Newfoundland root about for sticks. To help Camille gather seashells. To be a family again.
And Cam just loved her grandparents’ house, and Brittany in general. The sharp wind off the ocean that pinkened all our cheeks, the deep sleep the sea air pushed us into. She loved the rambling stone house, the rickety staircases. She loved their rheumy dog. We would be fine. It would be healing. We just had to get there.
The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind of activity with me fetching and gathering and noting things we might forget on whatever scrap of paper I had near me when Anne called. The next day, a Wednesday, marked the start of a two-week vacation, but for the first week of it, Anne would be working remotely from her parents’ home, getting ready for her pretrial. Accordingly, she was going to be at the office late that night, and was panicked that she wouldn’t have time to pack. She dictated a preliminary list of must-haves to me from her office so that I could start packing for her.
“Bar soap,” she said. “My parents only have lavender. And my black slacks that are hanging near my— Oh, and a one-piece, maybe? Do you think you’ll swim?”
The truth was that we didn’t need to be having the conversation. As I puttered around our bedroom, my hands moved automatically toward the things that formed her Anne-ness: a collection of poems by C. D. Wright that she always kept on the nightstand. A Chanel paperweight in the shape of a white rose. Her perfume, Rouge Hermès, which she only wore at night because she thought it vulgar to wear perfume during the day. A framed picture of Camille holding up a crayfish that she traveled with everywhere, even when Camille was with us. The black trousers she requested. Her favorite collared shirts. The rain boots she always took to Brittany for walks along the ocean. This awful, fleecy headband that she’d had since our time in Providence that she liked to wrap around her ears when we went walking. (French people have two great fears in life: drafts and wind. Drafts get you in the inside of your house, and wind gets you while you’re out. Both are to be avoided at all costs.)
I put Anne’s belongings on the bed so that she could review what I’d included, and then I stuffed my own bag with the dress shirts and the corduroys and the femmy socks that Anne’s parents liked to see me in.
The next day saw me even more at odds and ends. Both my women had half days—Anne ran out at 8 a.m., a whirling dervish of reminders and don’t-forget-to’s, and I trotted Camille down the street to school so that she could be restless and excited and entirely unproductive somewhere other than in our house.
Julien’s delivery guys showed up at 10 a.m. to deliver The Blue Bear, and the minute they left, I started transferring our luggage from the house into the car. You can’t travel light with women. I’ve spent years now cohabitating with this species, and it’s impossible, you can’t. At some point in the evening, Anne had snuck off into the kitchen and added even more “emergency items” to the Haddon family tote bag: Yahtzee, sun hats, chocolate cookies, a head massager—for most of the year, Anne was the picture of economy and good taste, but a single trip to her parents could unleash the anxious urbanite within her who felt comforted by things.
A final round to ensure that the light switches were all facing downward and the stove burners turned off, and I had finally finished. It was just after eleven. I’d pick Camille up at school and make it to Anne’s office on time by noon, which meant I’d score big points with Anne, which meant we’d have a pleasant drive to Brittany.
And we did. By some miracle of reverse congestion, all the traffic in Paris was heading south. Camille and I actually had to idle on the curb outside Anne’s office, a blue-moon occurrence in the history of trips like this. Usually, Anne would already be waiting on the sidewalk, one high heel tapping, arms crossed, her face saying, You’re late.
We got to Anne’s parents’ house a little before five. As was their custom, Mr. and Mrs. Bourigeaud were already outside when we arrived, waiting for us to get out of the car, kiss them, and be done with it so that they could get to the real prize: Camille.
I couldn’t help it—every time I drove up to that stately beach house, I forgot how Mr. Bourigeaud had more or less forced me to take a translation job in the basement of the very law firm he and Anne toiled in so that I could “earn my keep,” or how Anne cried the night he canceled a special dinner with her when she’d passed the European bar because he had to work late. Screw it, I wanted him to like me. I wanted to be in.
“Anne, ma chérie! T’as l’air fatiguée!” Anne’s mother, Inès, swept her up in the traditional French welcome composed of two cheek kisses and an observation of what is physically off about you. On this day, Anne looked “tired.”
“And you, Richard!” she said, pulling me into her heavily scented embrace. “You look thin. He looks thin, non?”
Alain offered to help with our bags and then scoffed at how many of them there were.
“You could have hung this here, you know,” he said, trying to undo the mess of bungee cords holding the bear down. “We have plenty of room.”
“We were thinking he’d go on Tuesday, to deliver it,” said Anne, ignoring her father’s sudden possessiveness about a painting he’d never liked.
“It’s a shame you have to go such a long way on your vacation,” added Inès.
“Sounds very queer to me,” said Alain, still fiddling with the cords. “You certainly do let people in the art world walk all over you!”
Not just in the art world, I thought, taking Camille’s hand and starting for the house.
• • •
I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth.
In France, great wealth is spent within the family, on the family. It’s not shown off, but rather spread about to make the lucky feel comfortable, and safe. Consider the ways the two countries approach the practice of inheritance. In America, when you die, you can leave your money to whomever, or whatever, you want. You can leave millions—as has been done before—to your bichon frisé.
In France, the estate has to be passed down the bloodline in equal parts, and you can’t leave anyone out—even the bad apples. If you have two children, say, and one of them is a drug addict who every three years shows up to say he’s changed and then cooks heroin on your sterling silver and nicks all your cash, this sod’s getting as much as the picture-perfect daughter who’s been looking after you for years. It’s an imperfect system, but it informs the way the wealthy live.
The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with seven bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in y
ellow Hummers during high-gas-price months because if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laissé aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go. Still, I’ll always prefer an untamed British garden to a curated French one. I like letting myself go.
The Bourigeauds’ house was at the end of a dirt road running on the west end of a public golf course. There were five houses on the road, each of them bordered on one side by maritime pines and conifers, and on the other side, the turquoise sea. Built upon a cliff, the stone house managed to be charming, despite its dramatic views. Nestled in the middle of two acres of oak and beech and hornbeam, there was an expanse of grass and reeds that effectively functioned as a front lawn, beyond which was a jagged cliff of porous rock dropping to the sea. In America, the border of the property would have been gated to keep children and sleepwalkers and drunkards from dropping to their deaths, but there was no division here between safety and stupidity: you had to draw those lines yourself.
• • •
Another custom of the Bourigeauds’ was an arrival walk. They were big believers in moving the old legs after a journey—that the salty air would open your appetite and gift you with deep sleep. Today, however, Anne said she wanted to stay home and unpack. I knew what this meant, of course. It meant that she was going to hide away in the guest bedroom and check her umbilical cord of a smartphone to see what was happening at work.
So I set out with Alain and Inès and Camille and their giant canine, Balfus, on the walking path that ran along the outskirts of the cliffs. Only five steps in, and I felt elated. Even through her cotton gloves, I could feel the warmth of my daughter’s hand in mine, which I absorbed with her excited babbles about seahorses and kites. Ahead of us, her grandparents moved confidently up the sandy route they had taken hundreds, maybe thousands of times before, with Alain bending down from time to time to pluck a thistle from his pants and to pat his happy dog. The sea—immense and multicolored—I’d never tire of its beauty. High tide was coming in along the coast, the water moving in an orchestrated cascade of frothy, rolling waves. I swung Camille up onto my shoulders so that she could spot the stone lighthouse on Cap Fréhel.
The walk, if we’d done the whole loop, was a two-mile jaunt that wove up and down the cliffs before finishing in a set of woods near the entrance to the town of Saint-Briac, but we’d only gone halfway before deciding to turn back. We all agreed that it would be nice to have a cocktail, and to do the full walk in the morning, with Anne.
We were taking off our layers in the mudroom when Anne burst in, a chimera of tousled hair and red eyes and seriously pinched lips.
“Jesus,” I said, slipping Camille’s coat off. “What’s wrong?”
Anne knelt down brusquely and put her hands on Camille’s shoulders. “Did you have a good time, darling? Run up to your room, sweetie. I got everything unpacked.”
Then she stood up and yanked me close to scream-whisper, “I have to fucking talk to you.”
“Can you look after Camille for a little while, maman?” she asked, louder, loosening her grip on my wrist. “I just have to deal with a little thing at work.”
And with that, she stomped out of the mudroom and pounded up the stairs.
I looked at her parents and shrugged. “She really needs this vacation.”
Alain nodded his head, slowly. “So it appears.”
I took my leave and started up the stairs after her, trying to guess what alarmist e-mail or phone call she had received. Some emergency at the office, an entreaty that there was no one, no one who could handle it but Anne. How quickly could she make it back to the capital?
But when she pushed the door open to our guest bedroom, my life fell through the floor. The bed was covered in mail. Petal-yellow envelopes. I’d forgotten Lisa’s letters. I’d left them in my bag.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked, grabbing a stack off of the comforter. “You promised it was over! You said it was—” She started crying and sat down on the bed.
“How could you do this?” Her head was in her hands. “You can’t even—and she’s in London! This whole time . . . I’ve been so stupid. They need me to deliver it. You’re a fucking monster.”
I stared at the magazines, the contracts, her legal documents, the opened letters, the spread of evidence on the bed. She’d just been organizing, cleaning up, getting ready to start her vacation, unpacking my bag for me as she always did, and now I’d ruined everything.
“Anne,” I said, standing like an idiot in the middle of the room. “It isn’t what it looks like. I never wrote her back.”
“Like hell you didn’t!”
She started throwing mail at me: hurling one letter and then another, then sweeping all the mail onto the floor.
“Just stop it! I read them. All of them! You fucking loved her! And here I was thinking it wasn’t . . . that it wasn’t . . . I don’t know. That maybe you were tempted, but—” I watched her swallow. “And I had—people said, seven years, it happens. Just wait. It’ll pass.” She broke down into sobs. Every muscle in my body went rigid. I couldn’t breathe.
“You did this,” she said, looking down. “For so long.”
I was absolutely speechless. I couldn’t apologize. I couldn’t deny. All I could do was stand there as the weight of the pain that she was feeling moved throughout my body, pulled my organs toward the ground.
“You have to go,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “You have to—” She almost started laughing. The sound was sick and sad. “We just fucking got here.”
“Anne,” I said, taking a step toward her.
“Anne?” she repeated. “Anne. Anne. What? What do you have to say, Richard? It’s all here!” She kicked the letters on the floor. “‘You loved me too much, Richard. You were in very bad shape when I left!’ She knew you pretty well, huh? She knows you better than us!”
“That’s not true,” I said, steadying my hand on the bed’s cast-iron footboard. “She wasn’t—it wasn’t . . .” I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t talk.
“Oh, I know what it was now. I thought it was just a stupid fuck. But no, you had . . . you were having . . .” She bit her lip as a tear slid down her cheek. “You were going to leave us.”
“I wasn’t,” I whispered.
“Bullshit,” she said, sinking her head into her hands again. “It’s still going on.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “I swear.”
She stood up abruptly and punched me in the chest. She punched me again, harder, and then slammed both of her fists against me, pushing me backward.
“Just fucking stop it,” she shouted. “You fucking stop! I don’t believe you and I don’t trust you and I want you out!”
Tears sprang to my eyes as I grabbed one of her fists.
“I never wrote her back!”
“You just go to London. Go! I don’t know how we’re going to do this, I don’t have any fucking idea, but I want you out of this house and I don’t ever want to see you again!”
I held her wrist away from me and shouted, “I never wrote her back! I never even asked her to write me! And it’s not her in London!”
“Bullshit!” she said, hitting me with her free hand. “I don’t believe you anymore!”
All of a sudden there was a knock on the door.
“Everything all right?” Inès’s voice called out meekly.
I watched Anne’s face jerk into a mask.
“Everything’s fine, Mother, it’s just . . . a phone call. Can you take Camille outside?”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“We’re fine! Just take her outside!”
We both stood the
re fuming, literally expelling heat from our bodies, waiting until we heard Inès’s steps retreat down the hall.
“I can’t have this . . . with my parents.”
“I’m not going to London.”
“Well, you’re sure as fuck not staying here.” She walked away from me to gather up the paper shrapnel around the bed. “Go to her. Fuck your brains out. You still remember how?”
“I’m not going,” I repeated.
“Yes, you fucking are.”
“It isn’t her, Anne. Julien verified it.”
“Oh, right, the keeper of the flame! I like how you’ve been outsourcing your philandering to the gallery, by the way. You certainly have a knack for multitasking when it involves your balls.”
She stuffed letter after letter back into my bag along with my magazines and the idiotic recipe my mother had sent, and then she walked to the window and stared out at the sea.
“Anne,” I pleaded.
“You got a phone call,” she said, turning around. “From your gallery. You have to go to London. The buyers, it’s their schedule. And we fought about it, because we only just arrived. And you have to go right now.”
“But there aren’t any ferries.”
She laughed out loud. “I don’t give a royal shit about the ferry. You take the car, and you get out.”
“But, Anne,” I said. “We can’t. We need to talk. I have things I can explain.”
“You don’t need to explain anything. It’s pretty goddamn clear.”
“But we can’t just stop like this. We’re married.”
“You’ve got some fucking nerve,” she said, swallowing hard. “I’m going downstairs now, to tell them. In the meantime, pack your bag.”
I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Page 9