by Richard Ford
He sat thoughtfully in the silence she was affording him for just this purpose. He certainly needed to offer a response. He needed intelligently and forthrightly to answer her charges and demonstrate sympathy for her embattled position. But also he needed to stand up for himself, while offering a practical way out of this apparent impasse. Much, in other words, was being asked of him. He was, it seemed, expected to solve everything: to take both positions—hers and his—and somehow join them so that everything was either put back to a way it had been or else made better so that both of them were happier and could feel that if life was a series of dangerous escarpments you scaled with difficulty, at least you eventually succeeded, whereupon the plenteous rewards of happiness made all the nightmares worthwhile.
It was an admirable view of life, Austin thought. It was a sound, traditional view, absolutely in the American grain, and one that sent everybody to the altar starry-eyed and certain. It was a view Barbara had always maintained and he’d always envied. Barbara was in the American grain. It was one of the big reasons he’d been knocked out by her years ago and why he knew she would be the best person he or anyone else could ever love. Only he didn’t see at that moment what he could do to make her wishes come true, if he in fact knew anything about what her wishes were. So that what he said, after admitting he was sorry to hear what she’d already said, was: “But I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. I wish there was. I’m really sorry.”
“Then you’re just an asshole,” Barbara said and nodded again very confidently, very conclusively. “And you’re also a womanizer and you’re a creep. And I don’t want to be married to any of those things anymore. So.” She took a big emptying swig out of her glass of gin and set the thick tumbler down hard on its damp little napkin coaster. “So,” she said again, as if appreciating her own self-assured voice, “fuck you. And good-bye.” With that, she got up and walked very steadily and straight out of the Hai-Nun (so straight that Austin didn’t wonder about whether she was in any condition to drive) and disappeared around the bamboo corner just as another fat lick of yellow flame swarmed into the dark dining-room air and another hot, loud sizzling sound went up, and another “Oooo” was exhaled from the dazzled diners, a couple of whom even clapped.
This was certainly an over-response on Barbara’s part, Austin felt. In the first place, she knew nothing about Joséphine Belliard, because there was nothing to know. No incriminating facts. She was only guessing, and unfairly. In all probability she was just feeling bad about herself and hoping to make him responsible for it. In the second place, it wasn’t easy to tell the truth about how you felt when it wasn’t what someone you loved wanted to be the truth. He’d done his best by saying he wasn’t sure what he could do to make her happy. That had been a place to start. He’d sensed her opening certitude had just been a positioning strategy and that while a big fight might’ve been brewing, it would’ve been one they could settle over the course of the evening, ending with apologies, after which they could both feel better, even liberated. It had gone like that in the past when he’d gotten temporarily distracted by some woman he met far from home. Ordinary goings-on, he thought.
Though women were sometimes a kind of problem. He enjoyed their company, enjoyed hearing their voices, knowing about their semi-intimate lives and daily dramas. But his attempts at knowing them often created a peculiar feeling, as if on the one hand he’d come into the possession of secrets he didn’t want to keep, while on the other, some other vital portion of life—his life with Barbara, for instance—was left not fully appreciated, gone somewhat to waste.
But Barbara had stepped out of all bounds with this leaving. Now they were both alone in separate little cocoons of bitterness and self-explanation, and that was when matters did not get better but worse. Everyone knew that. She had brought this situation into existence, not him, and she would have to live with the outcome, no matter how small or how large. Drinking had something to do with it, he thought. His and hers. There was a lot of tension in the air at the moment, and drinking was a natural response. He didn’t think either of them had a drinking problem per se—particularly himself. But he resolved, sitting at the teak bar in front of a glass of Beefeater’s, that he would quit drinking as soon as he could.
When he walked outside into the dark parking lot, Barbara was nowhere in sight. A half hour had gone by. He thought he might find her in the car, mad or sleeping. It was eight-thirty. The air was cool, and Old Orchard Road was astream with automobiles.
When he drove home, all the lights were off and Barbara’s car, which she’d left at her office when he picked her up, was not in the garage. Austin walked in through the house, turning on lights until he got to their bedroom. He opened the door gingerly, so as not to wake Barbara if she was there, flung across the top covers, asleep. But she wasn’t there. The room was dark except for the digital clock. He was alone in the house, and he didn’t know where his wife was, only that she was conceivably leaving him. Certainly she’d been angry. The last thing she had said was “fuck you.” Then she’d walked out—something she hadn’t done before. Someone, he understood, might conclude she was leaving him.
Austin poured himself a glass of milk in the brightly lit kitchen and considered testifying to these very moments and facts, as well as to the unpleasant episode in the Hai-Nun and to the final words of his wife, in a court of law. A divorce court. He featured himself sitting at a table with his lawyer, and Barbara at a table with her lawyer, both of them, eyes straight ahead, facing a judge’s bench. In her present state of mind Barbara wouldn’t be persuaded by his side of the story. She wouldn’t have a change of heart or decide just to forget the whole thing in the middle of a courtroom once he’d looked her square in the eye and told only the truth. Still, divorce was certainly not a good solution, he thought.
Austin walked up to the sliding glass door that gave on to the backyard and to the dark and fenceless yards of his neighbors, their soft house lights and the reflection of his own kitchen cabinets and himself holding his glass of milk and of the breakfast table and chairs, all combined in a perfect half-lit diorama.
On the other hand, he thought (the first being a messy divorce attempt followed by sullen reconciliation once they realized they lacked the nerve for divorce), he was out.
He hadn’t left. She had. He hadn’t made any threats or complaints or bitter, half-drunk, name-calling declarations or soap-operaish exits into the night. She had. He hadn’t wanted to be alone. She had wanted to be alone. And as a result he was free. Free to do anything he wanted, no questions asked or answered, no suspicions or recriminations. No explanatory half-truths. It was a revelation.
In the past, when he and Barbara had had a row and he had felt like just getting in the car and driving to Montana or Alaska to work for the forest service—never writing, never calling, though not actually going to the trouble of concealing his identity or whereabouts—he’d found he could never face the moment of actual leaving. His feet simply wouldn’t move. And about himself he’d said, feeling quietly proud of the fact, that he was no good at departures. There was in leaving, he believed, the feel of betrayal— of betraying Barbara. Of betraying himself. You didn’t marry somebody so you could leave, he’d actually said to her on occasion. He could never in fact even seriously think about leaving. And about the forest service he could only plot as far as the end of the first day—when he was tired and bruised from hard work, his mind emptied of worries. But after that he was confused about what would be happening next—another toilsome day like the one before. This had meant, he understood, that he didn’t want to leave; that his life, his love for Barbara, were simply too strong. Leaving was what weak people did. Again his college classmates were called upon to be the bad examples, the cowardly leavers. Most of them had been divorced, strewn kids of all ages all over the map, routinely and grimly posted big checks off to Dallas and Seattle and Atlanta, fed on regret. They had left and now they were plenty sorry. But his love for Ba
rbara was simply worth more. Some life force was in him too strongly, too fully, to leave—which meant something, something lasting and important. This force, he felt, was what all the great novels ever written were about.
Of course, it had occurred to him that what he might be was just a cringing, lying coward who didn’t have the nerve to face a life alone; couldn’t fend for himself in a complex world full of his own acts’ consequences. Though that was merely a conventional way of understanding life, another soap-opera view—about which he knew better. He was a stayer. He was a man who didn’t have to do the obvious thing. He would be there to preside over the messy consequences of life’s turmoils. This was, he thought, his one innate strength of character.
Only now, oddly, he was in limbo. The “there” where he’d promised to stay seemed to have suddenly separated into pieces and receded. And it was invigorating. He felt, in fact, that although Barbara had seemed to bring it about, he may have caused all this himself, even though it was probably inevitable—destined to happen to the two of them no matter what the cause or outcome.
He went to the bar cart in the den, poured some scotch into his milk, and came back and sat in a kitchen chair in front of the sliding glass door. Two dogs trotted across the grass in the rectangle of light that fell from the window. Shortly after, another two dogs came through—one the springer spaniel he regularly heard yapping at night. And then a small scruffy lone dog, sniffing the ground behind the other four. This dog stopped and peered at Austin, blinked, then trotted out of the light.
Austin had been imagining Barbara checked into an expensive hotel downtown, drinking champagne, ordering a Cobb salad from room service and thinking the same things he’d been thinking. But what he was actually beginning to feel now, and grimly, was that when push came to shove, the aftermath of almost anything he’d done in a very long time really hadn’t given him any pleasure. Despite good intentions, and despite loving Barbara as he felt few people ever loved anybody and feeling that he could be to blame for everything that had gone on tonight, he considered it unmistakable that he could do his wife no good now. He was bad for her. And if his own puny inability to satisfy her candidly expressed and at least partly legitimate grievances was not adequate proof of his failure, then her own judgment certainly was: “You’re an asshole,” she’d said. And he concluded that she was right. He was an asshole. And he was the other things too, and hated to think so. Life didn’t veer—you discovered it had veered, later. Now. And he was as sorry about it as anything he could imagine ever being sorry about. But he simply couldn’t help it. He didn’t like what he didn’t like and couldn’t do what he couldn’t do.
What he could do, though, was leave. Go back to Paris. Immediately. Tonight if possible, before Barbara came home, and before he and she became swamped all over again and he had to wade back into the problems of his being an asshole, and their life. He felt as if a fine, high-tension wire strung between his toes and the back of his neck had been forcefully plucked by an invisible finger, causing him to feel a chilled vibration, a bright tingling that radiated into his stomach and out to the ends of his fingers.
He sat up straight in his chair. He was leaving. Later he would feel awful and bereft and be broke, maybe homeless, on welfare and sick to death from a disease born of dejection. But now he felt incandescent, primed, jittery with excitement. And it wouldn’t last forever, he thought, probably not even very long. The mere sound of a taxi door closing in the street would detonate the whole fragile business and sacrifice his chance to act.
He stood and quickly walked to the kitchen and telephoned for a taxi, then left the receiver dangling off the hook. He walked back through the house, checking all the doors and windows to be certain they were locked. He walked into his and Barbara’s bedroom, turned on the light, hauled his two-suiter from under the bed, opened it and began putting exactly that in one side, two suits, and in the other side underwear, shirts, another pair of shoes, a belt, three striped ties, plus his still-full dopp kit. In response to an unseen questioner, he said out loud, standing in the bedroom: “I really didn’t bring much. I just put some things in a suitcase.”
He closed his bag and brought it to the living room. His passport was in the secretary. He put that in his pants pocket, got a coat out of the closet by the front door—a long rubbery rain jacket bought from a catalog—and put it on. He picked up his wallet and keys, then turned and looked into the house.
He was leaving. In moments he’d be gone. Likely as not he would never stand in this doorway again, surveying these rooms, feeling this way. Some of it might happen again, okay, but not all. And it was so easy: one minute you’re completely in a life, and the next you’re completely out. Just a few items to round up.
A note. He felt he should leave a note and walked quickly back to the kitchen, dug a green Day-Glo grocery-list pad out of a drawer, and on the back scribbled, “Dear B,” only then wasn’t sure what to continue with. Something meaningful would take sheets and sheets of paper but would be both absurd and irrelevant. Something brief would be ironic or sentimental, and demonstrate in a completely new way what an asshole he was—a conclusion he wanted this note to make the incontrovertible case against. He turned the sheet over. A sample grocery list was printed there, with blank spaces provided for pencil checks.
He could check “Les Autres,” he thought, and write “Paris” beside it. Paris was certainly autres. Though only an asshole would do that. He turned it over again to the “Dear B” side. Nothing he could think of was right. Everything wanted to stand for their life, but couldn’t. Their life was their life and couldn’t be represented by anything but their life, and not by something scratched on the back of a grocery list.
His taxi honked outside. For some reason he reached up and put the receiver back on the hook, and almost instantly the phone started ringing—loud, brassy, shrill, unnerving rings that filled the yellow kitchen as if the walls were made of metal. He could hear the other phones ringing in other rooms. It was suddenly intolerably chaotic inside the house. Below “Dear B” he furiously scribbled, “I’ll call you. Love M,” and stuck the note under the jangling phone. Then he hurried to the front door, grabbed his suitcase, and exited his empty home into the soft spring suburban night.
5
During his first few dispiriting days back in Paris, Austin did not call Joséphine Belliard. There were more pressing matters: to arrange, over terrible phone connections, to be granted a leave of absence from his job. “Personal problems,” he said squeamishly to his boss, and felt certain his boss was concluding he’d had a nervous breakdown. “How’s Barbara?” Fred Carruthers said cheerfully, which annoyed him.
“Barbara’s great,” he said. “She’s just fine. Call her up yourself. She’d like to hear from you.” Then he hung up, thinking he’d never see Fred Carruthers again and didn’t give a shit if he didn’t, except that his own voice had sounded desperate, the one way he didn’t want it to sound.
He arranged for his Chicago bank to wire him money— enough, he thought, for six months. Ten thousand dollars. He called up one of the two people he knew in Paris, a former Lambda Chi brother who was a homosexual and a would-be novelist, living someplace in Neuilly. Dave, his old frat bro, asked him if he was a homosexual himself now, then laughed like hell. Finally, though, Dave remembered he had a friend who had a friend— and eventually, after two unsettled nights in his old Hôtel de la Monastère, during which he’d worried about money, Austin had been given the keys to a luxurious, metal-and-velvet faggot’s lair with enormous mirrors on the bedroom ceiling, just down rue Bonaparte from the Deux Magots, where Sartre was supposed to have liked to sit in the sun and think.
Much of these first days—bright, soft mid-April days—Austin was immensely jet-lagged and exhausted and looked sick and haunted in the bathroom mirror. He didn’t want to see Joséphine in this condition. He had been back home only three days, then in the space of one frenzied evening had had a big fight with his wife, raced
to the airport, waited all night for a flight and taken a middle-row standby to Orly seated between two French children. It was crazy. A large part of this was definitely crazy. Probably he was having a nervous breakdown and was too out of his head even to have a hint about it, and eventually Barbara and a psychiatrist would have to bring him home heavily sedated and in a straight-jacket. But that would be later.
“Where are you?” Barbara said coldly, when he’d finally reached her at home.
“In Europe,” he said. “I’m staying awhile.”
“How nice for you,” she said. He could tell she didn’t know what to think about any of this. It pleased him to baffle her, though he also knew it was childish.
“Carruthers might call you,” he said.
“I already talked to him,” Barbara said.
“I’m sure he thinks I’m nuts.”
“No. He doesn’t think that,” she said, without offering what he did think.
Outside the apartment the traffic on rue Bonaparte was noisy, so that he moved away from the window. The walls in the apartment were dark red-and-green suede, with glistening tubular-steel abstract wall hangings, thick black carpet and black velvet furniture. He had no idea who the owner was, though he realized just at that moment that in all probability the owner was dead.
“Are you planning to file for divorce?” Austin said. It was the first time the word had ever been used, but it was inescapable, and he was remotely satisfied to be the first to put it into play.
“Actually I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Barbara said. “I don’t have a husband now, apparently.”
He almost blurted out that it was she who’d walked out, not him, she who’d actually caused this. But that wasn’t entirely true, and in any case saying anything about it would start a conversation he didn’t want to have and that no one could have at such long distance. It would just be bickering and complaining and anger. He realized all at once that he had nothing else to say, and felt jittery. He’d only wished to announce that he was alive and not dead, but was now ready to hang up.
