I always assumed that Lisa wanted me to leave my wife. I spent a lot of time wondering why else would she be with me, and not enough time asking her why she actually was. And why was she? For the sex, she finally said. The novelty. The fun. And this from an American, a journalist, a woman endowed with neither the prudishness of her countrywomen nor the ethics of her trade. This isn’t how things are supposed to work when you’re a cheater. Lisa was supposed to go all fatal attraction for me. She was supposed to want to meet my kid and dream about being a fab stepmum who was a taller, brighter, wilder version of Anne. What she wasn’t supposed to do was casually drop over a light lunch of nigiri sushi that she was leaving me for a cutlery designer from London, a prissy toff named Dave.
“Good Lord, he doesn’t go by ‘David’?” I remember asking with a cough.
“No.” She stuck her chopsticks into the center of the wasabi, two stakes through the heart. “He’s very nice.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is, with a name like that.”
“Please,” she said. “You’re not winning any originality awards with ‘Richard.’” She sighed and pushed away her sushi. “Are you seriously going to say that you’re surprised?”
My jaw dropped, answering her question. “When did you even meet this person? When did you have time?”
“You’re married, Richard. I have lots of time.”
She got the check and we took a walk around the Seine while she prattled on about how she’d done a piece on him for the Herald Tribune lifestyle section. Purportedly, he was the first culinary arts designer to introduce the plastic spork to take-out restaurants in England, although the validity of this claim was currently being challenged by a Norwegian upstart named Lars.
“It’s a pretty stressful time for him,” she said, fussing with her scarf.
When a woman you have cried against postcoitus tells you she’s leaving you for a man whose claim to fame is the conjoining of a soup spoon and a fork, you wait for the ringer, you wait for the joke. What you don’t wait for is a second revelation that she’s leaving you to get married.
By this time we were seated on a concrete bench by the Seine, its gritty surface speckled with broken green glass, accompanied by the acrid smell of urine.
“I thought you didn’t like marriage,” I said. “I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“It’s funny,” she said, flicking a piece of glass onto the ground. “Everyone says when you know, you know. And it’s true. Something just clicked. It’s all very calming, really. It’s not half as dramatic as it was with you.”
I looked at her incredulously to see if she hadn’t gone and sprouted a demonic windup key between her shoulder blades.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked, pulling my hand against her face. “You know it wasn’t going to last with us, even if it’s been great.” She kissed the inside of my palm with her nasty mouth half open, so her kiss was wet. “And it has been great.” She started kissing my fingers. I pulled my hand away.
“You’re serious.”
Her hazel eyes got big. “I am,” she said. “I’m leaving. I’m moving to London in two months.”
I stared at my sneakers. I stared at the Seine.
“I’m crazy about you,” she continued. “You know that. But this has to stop. If I waited any longer, it would probably ruin your life.”
Twenty-nine years old to my thirty-four with no idea that I’d been having to sleep in the guest bedroom of my own house because the energy she’d filled me with, this fucking yen for life, the desire at every hour of every single day to be inside her, had made me a walking dead man in my home life, that I had entire days where I couldn’t remember what I said to my own daughter on our walk to school; that at gunpoint I couldn’t recall my wife’s outfits from the past week—from the past night—that I drank more than I used to and I ate less than I used to and I never, ever dreamed that we were done.
There wasn’t much more to it—I saw Lisa four more times before she left for London and we never had sex again. After double-timing me for I don’t know how long, she felt self-righteous, almost evangelical, about being engaged. She said she’d gotten it out of her system, the cheating, and that she was truly looking forward to being a good and dutiful wife as if she was embarking on some kind of vision quest, my God.
And then she left me. Left me unsure whether to want her back or hate her, left me with the missive that I shouldn’t try to win her back, but could she keep in touch with me—from time to time, could she write. Left me with the mother of my child demanding that I put an end to whatever was numbing my insides, and the fact that I didn’t get to do that, that I didn’t get to choose, that I wasn’t the one who finally manned up and said “end this,” has made it that much more difficult to find my way back into my life.
• • •
As I was wiping a deluge of pastry flecks off of my pullover, getting ready to head to the gallery, a man in purple high-tops and a yellow helmet pulled up next to the news kiosk on a beat-up scooter.
“Richard!” he yelled, flipping up his face shield. “I thought that was you!”
Just when I thought my spirits couldn’t get any lower, my submarine heart took a dive. I wiped my buttery fingers on my jeans and stretched my hand out to greet his in an amalgamation of a fist bump and a punch.
“Patrick,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“Good, good! I was just on my way to my new studio, in Bercy? And at the red light I was like, is it or isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in years!”
“I know, man,” I managed, with a “whatever” shrug. “Offspring.”
“Oh, yeah? Me, too.” He took off his helmet. “It’s good to see you! I kept thinking I’d run into you somewhere, but . . . I don’t know. Have you been traveling?”
“Not much. You?” I said, preparing myself to resent every answer to every question I was about to ask. “I thought you moved back to Denmark?”
“I did. For a year. But once you’ve been in the States, everything feels kind of rigid, don’t you think? I just finished a residency in Texas, actually, at the Ballroom Marfa? Brought the wife. The kid . . . oh, here!” he said, reaching into his back pocket. “I just came from the printers actually, so . . .” He waited as I examined the flyer in my hand. “I’ve got a show coming up at the Musée Bourdelle. Performance art, if you can believe it.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, my stomach tightening.
“Yeah, it’s pretty . . .” He shifted his weight on the scooter. “Have you ever read The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell?
“It’s just a book of questions,” he continued, after my “no.” “A novel of them, really. Question after question. For example.” He adjusted his helmet under his arm. “‘Should a tree be pruned? Is having collected Coke bottles for deposit money part of the fond stuff of your childhood?’”
“You’ve memorized them?”
“No,” he said, with a laugh. “Just a couple here and there. They’ve got me set up in Bourdelle’s old studio, where I’ll be in residence for a week, sitting there with the book. Each person can come in one by one and sit with me, and I’ll just pick up with the questions from where I left off with the last person. Anyway,” he said, nodding toward the flyer. “You should come! I’m really excited about it.”
“Yeah,” I said, running my thumb across the heading. “I might.”
“Well, I’ve gotta run, but it would be really great to catch up some more, hear what you’ve been up to? Hell, our kids could have a playdate!”
I smiled at him weakly. “Seriously?”
“‘If someone approached you saying, “Lead me to the music,” how would you respond?’”
I blinked. He blinked back at me. He shrugged. “It’s from my show.”
“Oh,” I said, pushing a laugh out. “Cool.”
He eased his scooter back to the pave
ment with his purple high-tops, repeating that he really, really meant it. Coffee. Soon.
And off he went. Goddamn Patrick Madsen, who was so generous and wholehearted I couldn’t even hate him and his rip-off show. Back at RISD, he’d majored in kinetic animation—for his sophomore evaluation, he’d outfitted the heads of four taxidermied boars with recordings from the film version of Roe v. Wade that were only activated when a woman walked past. For his thesis show, he wired and grooved a series of his German grandfather’s photographs from the Second World War so that they could actually be played on a record player. The sounds that came out of the photographs were terrifying; high-pitched and scratched. He won a grant for that, which he used to study robotics and engineering in Osaka, Japan. And now he was doing performance art. If I hadn’t felt like enough of a hack for making a sell-out show of accessible oil paintings (scenes viewed through doorways? Jesus) I certainly did now.
• • •
When I finally arrived at the gallery, I found Julien comme d’habitude, his desk littered with single-use espresso cups, his ear glued to the phone. I tossed the paper bag with a croissant I’d brought him onto his desk and waited for him to finish up his conversation.
“Tout à fait, tout à fait.” He nodded while simultaneously throwing me a thumbs-up for the croissant. “It is a lot of yellow. Do you have good windows? It’ll look more sage-colored in natural light.”
He flicked a ten-centime piece my way so that I could get an instant coffee from the machine in the back. By the time I returned, he was done with his phone call and had started in on his croissant.
“People are weird about yellow. Too much yellow, they freak. These idiots want to put a five-meter painting in their kitchen because they’ve got this new table that—anyway.” He reached into a drawer. “Here.”
I had two letters. From the manic script on the outside of the envelope, I knew the first was from my mum. The second was from Lisa Bishop, evil colonizer of Englishmen’s hearts.
“Humph,” I said, sitting down to start with the envelope from my fellow Haddon. She’d never given me an explanation for it, but my mother had been sending weird news snippets and recipes to me at the gallery for years. She sent postcards to our house on the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, but the strange stuff she sent here. Whenever we saw her over the holidays, I considered asking her about it, but there was something beguiling about the irrationality of the arrangement that moved me to keep quiet.
The news snippets and recipes rarely came with a personal note, although once in a while she’d scrawl something beneath a heading. This particular post contained a double missive: a recipe for grape soup with the annotation We’ve tried it! and an article from that day’s Sun.
BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM
by George Pascoe-Watson
British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq, it was revealed yesterday.
They could thud into the Mediterranean island within 45 minutes of tyrant Saddam Hussein ordering an attack.
And they could spread death and destruction through warheads carrying anthrax, mustard gas, sarin, or ricin.
The 50-page report, drawn up by British Intelligence chiefs, says the dictator has defied a United Nations ban by retaining up to 20 Al-Hussein missiles with a maximum range of 400 miles.
It adds: They could be used with conventional, chemical, or biological warheads and are capable of reaching a number of countries in the region including Cyprus.
I tossed the clippings to Julien, a big fan of my mum’s taste.
“Have you been following this?” I asked.
“You can make soup out of grapes?”
“No, the conflict, you idiot. What do you think?”
“Makes me glad to be French, actually.”
I grabbed the paper back and searched for a new topic.
“I ran into an old friend of mine, from art school, earlier,” I volunteered, watching Julien open his checkbook. “Kind of an activist. But he’s doing performance art now.”
“Hmm,” he said, continuing to multitask.
“Does that sell?”
“Performance art?” He signed the check and slipped it into an orange-and-white envelope bearing the logo of France’s only telecommunications company. “Nope.”
“His will.”
“Why so glum, Haddon? Did you want my croissant?”
“No.” I sighed, pushing back from the table. “It was just that I was thinking. I need to shake things up.”
“What, like that?” Indicating the article in my hands. “Death and destruction? Something performative?”
I crossed my arms. “Well . . . yeah.”
“Can we do one thing at a time here?” He reached behind him for a manila envelope perched within risky distance of a vase. “I called you with good news, and you’ve brought me this.” He made an all-encompassing gesture in the direction of my face. “The Blue Bear went. Ten thou.”
I felt my heart slide down my ribs like something ill-digested. There was a faint ringing in my ears and my eye sockets felt punched. I’d managed to convince myself that no one would want that painting, that just like the well-intentioned visitors during the months after Camille’s birth, no one would “get it,” and that it would find its way back home.
“Rich?” Julien said, handing me the envelope. “It sold?”
“Right,” I said, startled. “That’s good. Great.”
“Curious thing, actually, as it went to a countryman of yours—someone in London. He was at the show, apparently. Bit of a strange bird. You know, blah blah blah, it’s a gift for his fiancée, blah blah blah, their house. These people, they tell you everything. I hear about their floor layouts, their children, the chevron carpet in the—”
I ripped the envelope open while Julien dribbled on. The contract stipulated the sale of The Blue Bear to one Dave Lacey from London, England.
“He specifically said it’s for his fiancée?” I said, looking up.
“Or his partner. Why?”
My heart clenched. “Lisa moved to London. Lisa has a fiancé.”
Julien rolled his eyes. “Well, his name isn’t Lisa.” He pointed at the contract. “It’s Dave.”
“But that’s just it,” I said, tracing my finger around the postmark on Lisa’s latest letter. “That’s his name. Did you invite her to the show?”
“Did I invite her— Richard. Come back to us on Earth. No, I didn’t invite her to your opening, I figured you’d be coming with your wife. Now, it’s a coincidence, I’ll grant you that, but I had a protracted conversation with this fellow and I’m pretty sure his ‘fiancée’ isn’t going to be walking down the aisle in a gown.”
“But same-sex marriage isn’t legal in England,” I protested, my head reeling with the reasons Lisa would have bought a painting of mine, and this one in particular.
“He talked to me about throw pillows. I don’t think this guy’s your man. And even if he was, it’s sold, darling. Can we be happy? Can we move on? This was a great show for you. Are you going to read that or not?”
I looked down at Lisa’s letter. I shook my head, not.
“Suit yourself, you flagellator. It’s over, but not done. Ah, another thing. I’m getting an intern.” He liberated a blue folder from beneath a slew of paperwork and handed it to me. “Which one? I was thinking about that Bérénice girl. Look, she’s from Toulouse.” He pointed at the printout with a pencil.
“She included a photo? That’s legal?”
“My thinking,” he said, ignoring me, “is that with a name like that, she’ll be very manageable. Girls from the southwest, they’re a bit dull, you know, but studious. They don’t get uppity about things like the Parisians. Like she’s not going to have a crying fit if I ask her to send a fax.”
“I can’t talk about this,” I sai
d, standing with my mail. “I need to think.”
“Yes, well, there’s not much to think about. The painting was for sale, it sold. That’s the way these things work, Richard.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He stood to embrace me with a peck on both cheeks.
“Take Anne out to dinner. Celebrate.” He took one look at my face before rescinding this suggestion. “Or rather, wait for the next one. You’ll see. They’re all going to go. Be happy about it, will you? Live in the now.” He walked me to the tall glass doors at the entrance. On the pavement, just to the right of the gallery, a small, untended Chihuahua was squeezing out a crap.
“And let me know if you try that recipe,” he said, pulling the door open. “I love anything with grapes.”
• • •
I had a place near the Premier Regard where I liked to read Lisa’s letters. Far from my house, but close to the gallery, I could trick myself into thinking I was reading business correspondence; a letter from a fan. In front of the Église Saint-Sulpice, there was a little square around a fountain that hadn’t worked in years. There were these mechanized cement columns surrounding the northern side of the square that slid below the pavement when an emergency vehicle had to come through, or when there was a funeral—in which case the emergency vehicle was a hearse. Reading them in the open, surrounded by nannies and panhandlers and nuns, allowed me to soften the signification of their existence. I was just a man on a conical structure opening up a letter. No harm in reading mail! But the truth was that as long as Lisa kept writing me, Julien was right about it: our relationship was over, but it wasn’t done.
Usually, I approached these reading sessions with the excited energy of a child, but today I felt anxious. Running into Patrick had extinguished the embers of my artistic self-worth, The Blue Bear had sold—an unretractable mistake—and it had possibly sold to my ex-mistress, leaving me feeling like I was at the end of both my creative and my domestic life.
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Page 2
