by Mandy Berman
Ash was fired from Columbia shortly following the controversy.
She envied his transparency, his fearlessness in telling this story. He seemed unconcerned with being found out—or, perhaps because he’d already gotten off scot-free legally, he felt he had the liberty to write about the events. And at the same time, she wondered: Where was this girl now? Where was her critically lauded novel?
She knew how much cognitive dissonance was at play here: despite understanding the unfairness and inequality and sexism involved in this scenario, thinking of him with this seventeen-year-old only made her desire him more. She was learning that attraction didn’t discriminate—that often, in fact, it bloomed in the most perverse of circumstances. Was it possible to be both a feminist and to want a man who was bad for women?
She went back to the main search results for Oliver Ash and clicked through his Google images. There was the headshot of him standing in front of a dark backdrop, all sexual intensity, one too many shirt buttons undone, a swath of chest hair peeking out from the open collar. Then there was the “mid-convo” shot, him on a panel somewhere, dressed in jeans and a button-down and in the middle of pontificating, hands in the air as he made a particularly compelling point. And then, one of him smiling, rare among these pictures. He was caught in a conversation at some literary party, wearing a black blazer and a tie and holding a plastic cup filled with red wine, and his interlocutors—two twentysomething women—were facing him, rapt, undoubtedly charmed.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten the last email? It dawned on her that she had sent it shortly before the Thanksgiving break, and that he may have been busy with travel. Was it possible he had read it and then forgotten about it, meaning to respond later?
If he was interested enough in her, wouldn’t he have remembered?
Where would he have even gone for Thanksgiving, with his family so far away?
She resisted the temptation to write again. Perhaps he would never respond to her email. Perhaps there was freedom in this. After all, she had a class with him in the spring. Perhaps it would be best to keep things professional between them from now on, pretend she had never sent it, start things fresh.
She ought to put the book down, she knew. She ought to finish her papers and study for French. As if the novel were a magnet pulling her into its force field, she reopened it despite her best interests, and kept reading:
She asked me to turn off the lamp. In the darkness of the bedroom of my rented apartment in Morningside Heights, she approached and took her seat next to me on the bed. She reached out, not unceremoniously, into my lap, resting her hand on the top of my boxers. Reason had told me, all my life, that this wouldn’t fix things. Today was not really any different. When I entered her she inhaled sharply, like a man gasping for his last breath.
12.
DECEMBER IN BERLIN: a cold, oppressive chill over everything. The kind of cold that permeated the layers you wore in a failed attempt to preserve your own heat. It wove itself beneath down feathers and knit cashmere and rested on bare skin, chilling you from the inside out. And the sun? It had been out for eight hours at the beginning of the month, seven now. By the time Simone picked Henri up from school, it was already descending for another long and dark slumber. In Paris, at least there was a liveliness to the cold: the sun stayed out a bit longer, and there was a moisture in the air and a wind over the Seine that made you feel things were still moving, still alive. The winter of Berlin was ceaseless, unwavering. So dead it might as well have not been a season at all.
* * *
—
On Friday morning, Simone called Henri’s school and lied, saying he was sick. Then they got on a bus headed to Tegel airport.
On the bus, they talked about what they would do the first weekend Papa was back: go ice-skating at the Sportpark, walk through the holiday markets at Alexanderplatz, go out to nice restaurants and let Henri stay awake past his bedtime. They would spend a week in Paris over Hanukkah to see Danièle and Alex and Simone’s mother, and they would celebrate Dani’s pregnancy together. Simone felt foolishly hopeful: she knew that things with Oliver had soured recently, but figured their relationship would fall into place when she saw him in person again. He would be with them for four whole weeks. And she felt the break from work might be good for her mental space, might allow her to return to it with new vigor. Oliver was always useful to discuss work with; maybe he would offer some elucidation on her project, which had more or less come to a standstill. She imagined long nights talking at their kitchen table over wine, like the old days.
Inside the small airport, they waited at the arrivals gate.
“What time is Papa getting in?” Henri asked. His big eyes were brimming with expectation. She checked her watch.
“Any minute now,” she told him.
Travelers began to stream through the arrivals gate from the flight from Munich, where Oliver had had a connection: an old German couple in khakis, a pair of American college students in oversized backpacks. A whole slew of languages as they waited: Spanish, Italian, Dutch, so many of the speakers under the age of thirty. Berlin had become such a destination, she was realizing during her time here. It was a strike against the city for her: she wanted a place to feel like the place it was, not an amalgamation of the people who had come from wherever else to try to make the place their own. This was what was so unique about Paris: although it was a metropolitan capital, it retained its Frenchness, stubbornly so. No matter how many Americans moved there, Paris would always be itself. She didn’t feel that Berlin could claim the same.
“Where is he?” Henri asked, looking up at his mother. It had been several minutes and several dozens of passengers now; the crowd was beginning to thin.
“I’m sure he’s coming,” Simone said, though her son’s worries began to permeate her. Was there a chance he wouldn’t come? The last she’d heard was a text from him in Philadelphia, telling her that he was boarding the Amtrak train that would take him to the airport in New York, for the first leg of his flight.
She felt Henri’s hand unclasp from hers then, and she watched him run, her eyes following until they found Oliver, whom Henri had spotted several seconds before she had. Henri was running full speed ahead, past the gates that said “Zutritt Verboten,” though there was no security guard there to stop him. In a seamless motion, as if they had choreographed it beforehand, Oliver knelt down and opened his arms to his son, who bounded into them.
She waited, and with Henri still in his arms, Oliver looked up at Simone. He stood and carried his son as he walked toward her with intention. As if he’d choreographed this, too, he moved Henri over to one hip and used his free hand to cup Simone’s face and kiss her, the three of them finally all in one place.
* * *
—
That night was one of the wilder ones they’d had in a long time. During some interlude between sleep and sex, Simone asked Oliver to describe to her someone he was attracted to in Pennsylvania. He knew that this turned her on, but it often made him uncomfortable, especially now, when he was surrounded by students in America. He was, she knew, trying to be careful.
Only, she liked to feel jealous, a kink that he’d never fully understood; she liked feeling the sting of envy that preluded even greater desire. When he was all hers, and she knew he was all hers, that need to have him faded, however slightly. This was part of what she had found tedious about her relationship with Ariel, and what Ariel was never able to understand: he saw his endless loyalty and stability as virtues, while she saw them as turnoffs. She could not imagine a life with someone that was so predictable, so lacking in variability.
In fact, Simone had initially been attracted to Oliver’s sharp edges, his less-than-perfect past, his potential to be unpredictable. As she first read Dispatches from a Half-Breed, the scenarios of him with that girl excited her. She always knew there was a chance that something like th
at could happen again—despite his protestations to the contrary, his attempts to be a reformed man—and the danger inherent in that hooked her. To her chagrin, he was often self-conscious about the past, and didn’t want to talk about it, partially because it had done so much to stall his career.
“I can’t,” he said now.
“Come on,” Simone said.
“I’m trying not to think that way.”
“No other professors, even?”
He shook his head. “Slim pickings.”
This disappointed her.
“Describe a girl to me,” she pleaded. “Any girl.”
Finally, he assented.
Simone was still on her stomach, and Oliver kissed the back of her neck, and began to describe a girl: Asian, thin, with dark hair, big breasts, long legs. He kissed the small of Simone’s back.
“Tell me what you want to do to her, and then do it to me,” Simone said, and he did.
* * *
In Paris they cooed over Danièle’s growing bump and lit Hanukkah candles and drank champagne and ate pasta with shaved truffles that Alex had procured. The men smoked cigars on the balcony in Danièle and Alex’s home, an absurd four-bedroom in the Marais, even though it was freezing out. Her mother had a new boyfriend—she always had a new boyfriend—whom she’d met at mah-jongg. She was sixty-six and he was seventy-nine.
“Think he can still keep it up?” Simone whispered into Danièle’s ear at dinner. Danièle swatted her sister on the arm, laughing.
They told Henri he was going to have a baby cousin, and Henri asked, “Can babies play?” and when Oliver responded, “Not in the way you like to play,” Henri became immediately uninterested. Danièle worried that the age difference, six years by the time the baby was born, would be too wide for them to ever have a relationship.
“We’ll be back by then,” Simone said, letting them both indulge in the excitement of her return. They’d signed a one-year lease on the place in Berlin, and would return to Paris in June, just in time for her niece or nephew to be born. Oliver would have little time to spend in Berlin by the time he got back from Buchanan in the spring, and she suspected he might feel sour about this, with that vague idea for a novel that took place in the city, which he’d told her so little about. For Simone, moving back to France was nonnegotiable. He’d gotten to run away to America for a year; now it was her turn to choose.
* * *
—
After Joséphine and her new boyfriend went home for the night, Simone and Oliver put Henri to bed (the apartment was big enough that Henri got his own room) and settled into their own master guest room at Danièle’s, since their Paris apartment was being rented out. They got undressed and under the covers and read novels. Simone put one hand on Oliver’s chest, mindlessly playing with the tuft of hair as she read. She was deeply content. She had been expecting that the transition might be bumpy, but he’d been back for two weeks now, and they’d yet to have a fight. So far, the time together had been peaceful and romantic, and she was both relieved and suspicious about that.
“This is nice,” he said, as if reading her mind.
“I know,” she said. “I sometimes forget how easy it is for us when we’re together.”
He didn’t say anything. His jaw was clenched.
“What?”
“Please don’t make me feel guilty.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Maybe I’m already feeling guilty and projecting that onto you.”
“I don’t mean to make you feel guilty. You’re here now, and it’s nice, is all I meant.”
“Sorry,” he said again.
“Why do you keep saying sorry?”
“Huh?”
“Do you have something to be sorry for that I don’t know about?”
“No.” He seemed offended that she asked. “Nothing, other than the fact that I’ve been away from my family for four months and that I’m going to be away from them for another four.”
“You’re here now,” she said again, though she suddenly felt annoyed that she had to be the one comforting him about the distance.
“It’s just lonely,” he said.
“It’s lonely here, too.” She thought about losing three babies, and wanted to scream at him: You don’t know anything about loneliness!
“At least you’re with our son.”
She sat up in bed fully now, head on the pillow propped against the headboard.
“And whose choice was that?”
“No, not this again.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You are not going to spin this into it being all my idea, like you weren’t the one who encouraged me to go.”
He was speaking entirely in English now, and she in French, which always felt like an obvious metaphor for their discord.
“Because you have no agency, right? You can’t make a choice and take responsibility for it. God forbid.”
“What do you want me to do? You want me to not go back in the spring?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“You sure would miss the money I plunk into our joint bank account every two weeks.”
“I don’t need that money. Save it for your bar tabs in America. My fellowship pays fine on its own.”
He didn’t say anything in response to that. He opened his book again and pretended to read.
Had he always been so inattentive to her feelings? She could have sworn that he hadn’t. She could have sworn that in the beginning, he listened. Maybe the thrill of a new person after four years of Ariel, plus the pregnancy and all the excitement wrapped up in new parenthood, had distracted her from actually paying close attention to who Oliver was.
She knew how it looked that she was with him. She knew it made her seem naïve, even to her own sister, to be with someone who had a less-than-perfect track record when it came to women. Because on paper there was so much about him that she might have hated, had he not been Oliver. The issue was that there was a disconnect between Oliver-on-paper and Oliver-to-Simone. His Oliverness—at least at the beginning—could not be distilled into a reputation or a news item, or really any words at all. Some might have suspected it was sexual chemistry that kept a smart, accomplished woman like Simone with him, but that wasn’t the thing, not entirely. It was more like this: the person you wanted, the person you needed, wasn’t necessarily the same as the person who was correct. Ariel had been correct. But she didn’t need Ariel.
Oliver was the father of her child. She could not intellectualize her way out of that, as much as she tried to. It was innate or primal, which sounded like bullshit, but it didn’t feel like bullshit. Single motherhood, she was understanding this semester, was nearly impossible. And when she saw the way that Henri looked at Oliver as he got off the plane at Tegel, it made her feel that pull toward her husband all the more powerfully, as if her son were still inside her, his needs still determining hers.
Perhaps, she was beginning to realize as she lay on her side of this gigantic bed, her husband was not hearing her when she said that she was lonely, too. Henri’s needs alone could not sustain a marriage. Not if her needs stopped being met altogether.
“Good night,” she said, and turned her back to him. The bed was so big that when he tossed and turned tonight, as he was wont to do, she wouldn’t feel him move, wouldn’t wake, not once.
* * *
—
In the morning, she found herself alone. She walked into the kitchen to find Danièle arranging breakfast for Henri, croissants and baguette and butter and jam. He was sitting patiently, expectantly, at the table.
Simone wrapped her arms around her son and kissed him, and then did the same to her sister.
“Where’s Oliver?” Simone asked.
“He left for a walk about thirty minutes ago.”
“A walk? It’s freezing outside.”
Simone made herself a coffee and walked over to a window in the living room. She sat sideways on the arm of a reading chair and peered down at the street below. The sun cut over the tops of the old buildings of the Marais, the muted limestone of the Beaux-Arts homes and the burnt red brick of a sixteenth-century mansion across the way, now serving as a museum or a government building. The freshly washed streets gleamed.
This was her home, this neighborhood; it was where she had grown up, back when it was not so heavily gentrified, still only the Jewish quarter of the city, where Ashkenazim from the pogroms had come for refuge, as Simone’s paternal ancestors from Austria had in the late 1800s. In the case of Danièle and Alex, though, and even Oliver, whose apartment had also eventually become her own, living here as Jews had become incidental, not intentional. Danièle and Alex blended in among the rest of the bourgeois of the Marais now, indistinguishable from the other bankers and the independently wealthy gallerists and artists and expats who had settled in the area. Oliver had moved here because of its Jewish history, but also because he had money: by the time he arrived, in the late nineties, prices were already on the rise.
Now the neighborhood was filled to the brim with expensive galleries and boutiques, so sanitized and commercial; it was a far cry from the Marais she had known in the seventies, an insular community where they knew everyone, where Simone went to school with the children of her family’s butcher and doctor and pharmacist, and went to synagogue with all of them, too. Her home was becoming a sanctuary for the rich, and she worried that she and her sister and their husbands were part of the problem.