What she was holding up was the image of a pregnant woman lifting a huge wineglass to her face with an interdictory red slash across her bulging belly.
“Vulgaire, non?”
I blinked.
“So you’re defending pregnant drinkers?”
“Pfff,” she said, slipping her scarf across the chair back. “I’ll be defending the wine. You can imagine, there’s a heritage to the label, it carries the image of the chateau, the name of the family, it has a date—an important year—and then, underneath this? A pregnant belly? We’ll win.”
With this, she drank more wine.
“And you, my little chicken, did you have fun in school?” She ran her hand through Camille’s hair. “Are you not going to forgive me because I misidentified your lemur?”
Camille indicated that she was indeed holding a grudge about this by remaining hard at work on her zebra lemur tail.
Anne took the cap off of the glue stick, dreamily bringing it up to her nose. “Well, what about you, artist? What’d you do in school today?”
“Well, apparently my countrymen are forty-five minutes away from obliteration by mustard gas. And, um, I ran into Patrick Madsen.”
It was undeniable. She brightened. “Oh, yeah? I remember him!”
I stood, then stomped my way into the open kitchen, hollering news of the Danish goldenboy over my shoulder as I did. “He’s into plagiarism now. He’s doing this show where he’s just going to be sitting there, reading someone else’s novel. An entire book of questions. They’re not even his.”
Anne followed me into the kitchen, leaning over the salad bowl to poke at the greens while I checked the pasta. “The Interrogative Mood?”
I closed my eyes. I had a sudden urge to shove my fist into the boiling water on the stove.
“I love that book,” she continued, almost cooing. “Somewhere, I have it. I think it’s in the—did I never make you read it? There’s this one section in particular, it starts with a potato—”
“There’s something else, actually,” I said, my voice quieter. “The Blue Bear sold.”
I regretted the way I’d announced it the second the phrase was out.
“It sold?” she said.
“It sold,” I repeated. I couldn’t bear to look at her face. I turned around and dumped the pasta into a strainer. “To a man in London, actually. He was at the show but no one met him. Odd, right?”
“It sold.”
I finally turned around. My worst fears were confirmed: she was dragging her finger around the rim of her wineglass, distracted. Hurt.
“It actually went for ten thousand euros.”
“Of which you’ll get five.”
I bit my lip. “Yeah.”
“Well, I guess that’s good news, then,” she said, trying to cheer up. “A successful show.”
“Anne.” I flinched. “I’m sorry. I thought it wouldn’t go.”
“Well, that’s a very curious way of going about it.” She walked her jacket over to the coat tree in the corner, making a great fanfare out of the administrations of hanging it up. I followed and tried to embrace her, but she bristled at my touch.
“I thought that we agreed on it.”
“You’re right,” she said. “We did. But I guess . . .” She looked over at Camille, at a loss for words. “Well, anyway, it’s done now. The whole thing, it was a good show, Richard. I’m sure all the others will sell, too.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
“Of course,” she said, pushing past me. “Let’s just have dinner. It looks nice, by the way.”
I said thank you, and she said you’re welcome, and we continued about the evening too leaden with disappointment to be anything but polite.
• • •
Anne and I have been married over seven years now and I’ve cheated on her once. Depending how you look at it, this is either a very impressive or a highly repellent ratio. Either way, there is a façade around my indiscretion that is starting to fall apart. I said it happened one time. But it lasted seven months.
My father cheated on my mother once. My parents had been married for four years. For about three weeks, my mother had been complaining that she’d been receiving a series of phone calls in the evenings from a person she referred to as “the hang-upper.” She confronted my father about these phone calls, and, remarking that he turned the color of a squashed beet, began to suspect that he was having an affair. She found out with whom at a cocktail party in honor of a friend of my father’s who had just been promoted to the board of directors of a prestigious university. My father, magnificently inebriated, left Mum by the punch bowl claiming he was going to “pop outside for a ciggy,” but when a half hour passed with no sign of dear Dad, my mother went off in search of her Georgie and found him snogging Margaret Babcock from the Salisbury PTA in the cloakroom.
She left the party immediately and went to her mother’s, where she stayed for three weeks straight without returning any of George’s phone calls or opening the wrapped offerings he left in the mailbox. On the twenty-third day of her exile, she returned to the house with a large brown bag of groceries and began cooking dinner. When my father came home that evening, he was greeted with a pot roast and a stony demand from my mother that he sever his relations with Miss Babcock, apologize to their circle of friends about his lack of taste and conduct, and that if he ever dipped his hand into another person’s proverbial basket again, he would rue the day he developed an X and a Y chromosome. And P.S., she was pregnant.
My mother loved my father, and my father couldn’t live without my mother. My parents are a preposterous ensemble, but they’re right together and my mum knew that and so she forgave him. I don’t think that this is the case with Anne. I don’t think that she will ever forgive me for my affair with Lisa. The fact that she refuses to talk about it and that I don’t have the guts to force her to has made that kind of forgiveness unreachable—buried beneath an ever-rising wall of resentment and distrust.
And of course, there is the sex. Or full stop thereof. By the time we hit our wood anniversary at five years, we were down from making love maybe three times a week to three times a month, but that was still good, really—that was still great. Looking back, it was probably my physical distance that tipped her off to a disturbance in the natural order of things. In my mind, it felt unimaginably cruel to seek satisfaction from a body that had stood by me for so long, that had borne our child. The logic is preposterous, but I thought it was more respectful to avoid touching Anne until I was weaned off of my addiction to touching someone else.
For a long time, I was an idiot. We stopped making love the first night I slept with Lisa. In the weeks that followed, I remember thinking that the fact that Anne wasn’t reaching for me was a godsend. I never asked myself why she wasn’t asking for affection, why her normally electric libido had gone radio silent.
Things would have been different if she had stopped me at the start. If the night I had come home stinking of the orange-blossom oil Lisa used on the ends of her hair (an odor that I had previously expressed distaste for when it was squirted upon my head by a waiter in a Moroccan restaurant before the main course), if Anne had said end it, right now and here, end it before it’s really started, I think I would have done so. I really think I would. Instead, she stayed silent while I prattled on about the couscous place I’d gone to with Julien with orange-blossom soap in the loo, and we both turned on our sides that night, away from each other, and feigned sleep.
How much did she know? Or think she knew? In her job defending total wankers, I knew how Anne approached them: Tell me just enough. And so it was with Lisa and me. From my behavior, my distance, the cease-fire of our sex, Anne knew just enough to suspect that I had met somebody else.
But this was Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud: a fille de, a lawyer, a citadel of pride. She didn’t cry and she didn�
�t scream, she didn’t voice suspicion or flog me with barbed words. Instead, she deprived me of her Anne-ness: her humor, affection, love. And she took away her body, leaving only the physical interactions of a conjugal Robotron: her hand touching mine as she passed me a bag of groceries, my fingers sponging the inside of a wineglass that had touched her lips. In social situations, we still played the fine couple, but at home, and in our bedroom, each of us was just a body familiar with the other person’s body, filling up the refrigerator with the requisite things each body needed, simply sharing space.
In my fuck-addled decision-making center, I saw Anne’s war of silence against me as a sign of her reluctant acceptance of the situation. Her denial, the pride that kept her from confronting me, made it easy for me to pretend that nothing much had changed. After all, she was from the capital B of bourgeois families—sometimes I allowed myself to think that she was actually okay with the situation, that after seven years of marriage, this was just the way it was.
And just as it was characteristic of Anne to be too proud to confront me, it was also like her to reach a point of saturation, to say enough’s enough. When Lisa broke up with me, I wasn’t able to effectuate the clap-on, clap-off transition between home turf and mistress-land that I had been able to when I was oversexed and happy. I started to pine. I started to mope. I started to play a lot of kill-yourself-already music like Radiohead and Pulp while doing splattered-paint pieces like a third-rate Jackson Pollock. I wore sweatpants with dress shirts. This is Paris, where even the homeless circulate in proper pants.
And so it was one Friday, about three months ago, when Anne knocked on the door of my studio. It was early evening. I was drinking Guinness. Out of a can. I was thinking about Lisa. I was thinking, Why? I was thinking what could this toff Dave possibly have that I didn’t. I was thinking about him fucking her. I was wondering how many times Lisa said she spent the past evenings alone, writing. How many times she’d lied.
Anne came into the center of the room and turned off the indulgent music eking from the speakers.
“I’m taking Camille with me to my parents’,” she said. “I don’t want you to come.”
I was sitting on the floor with a paintbrush in my hand, my navy sweatpants splattered with the orange stuff I’d been flinging all afternoon. Anne looked at the painting, at the Guinness, and then she looked at me, huddled on the wooden floor like a pathetic beanbag. There weren’t any sounds to distract us, the music cut off, the neighbors silent, the business hours for bird-singing long since over. It was the oddest feeling sitting there, wanting to cry and hold her and knowing that I couldn’t. I wanted to apologize for everything I’d done, but at the same time I wanted to tell her what I’d been through with Lisa. She was my wife, after all. She was my best friend.
“Goddammit, Richard, look at me.” Anne was glaring at me with something very close to hate. It cut me through the gut, and I started to whimper. Who am I fooling? I had seven hundred milliliters of stout in me. I started to sob.
“Don’t you dare cry in front of me! You don’t have the right!” Her chin was trembling and I had to hold my breath in to keep from crying harder.
“We’ll be back by ten o’clock on Sunday,” she said, speaking slowly. “And when we get back, whatever this is”—she circled her hand through the air—“it’s over.”
She held her fist to her lips to stop herself from crying. “I’m not going to forgive you. Don’t you think for an instant that I’m going to forgive you. But you’re going to forget this. You’re going to forget this, and on Sunday night you’re going to tuck Camille into bed and on Monday morning we’re all going to sit down at the fucking breakfast table and she’s going to tell you about her weekend and I swear to God, Richard, you better be in shape. You better fucking be here, all of you, and come down off of this—”
She reached down and grabbed the beer can by my feet and made as if to throw it in the direction of my painting, but something made her hesitate, and she stood there for a moment, her eyes filling up with the tears she had tried so hard to fight.
“You failed at being a husband,” she said as she put the can back down beside me. “You better try and do a better fucking job at being a father.”
• • •
My life had been illuminated by Lisa, made more vivid by her presence. I couldn’t imagine letting go—really letting go of her—without losing a rekindled sense of self.
But I loved Anne-Laure. And I needed her. Everything, from the herd of midseason coats crowded in the mudroom to the glitter-pencil penguin drawings curling up beneath the magnets on our refrigerator door, every object in our household was part of our ongoing tale. And I couldn’t have our story come to an end because of a woman who didn’t want me. I had to make things right.
That entire weekend, I didn’t leave the house. I stayed inside, tending a precious fire of nostalgia, surrounded by the smells and keepsakes of my safest home, forcing a promise that I would get over that godforsaken American. And that if I couldn’t, I’d try even harder to make my wife and daughter believe I had.
4
I NO longer love her. But oh, how I loved her. That bald-headed Chilean minstrel sure had it right. Current feelings of confusion put temporarily aside, I can readily admit that when I met Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud, she was not only the most beautiful woman south of College Hill that evening, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, period. Anne-Laure was immaculate. She wore underwear so delicate it could only be hand-washed and she had perfect nails and lustrous, onyx hair that she’d never tried to highlight, a trend that she considers vulgar and base. When I met her she was one of those bourgeois girls you dream about tying up and saying nasty things to. And she was French. I had never been with a French girl and I couldn’t help fantasizing about her whispering all sorts of nonsense in my ear about rabbits and cochons and other farm animals the French are fond of evoking in the bedroom.
I met Anne in a predictably named martini bar called Olives in Providence. I had just started at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I was immersed in a short-lived love affair with the medium of bubble tape and Saran Wrap as a metaphor for the misguided conscience of the modern consumer. Anne was toiling as an office paralegal in a major Boston firm and was in Providence for the weekend visiting her cousin Esther, who was entering her second year as a grad student at Brown University.
Back then, I had a lot more confidence in both my artwork and my physique than I have now. Unlike Paris, the sun shines in America—I wasn’t quite so pasty. I had American friends so wealthy, they’d grown up with more than one fridge. I was doing well in school: the teachers found my work provocative and the women (and some of the men, actually) adored my accent. I had a lot of just-so dress shirts—faded at the elbows, a little scuffed around the collar, “just so” in that they suggested breeding, but only up to a point—and the kind of floppy, untamed mass of sandy-brown hair that drives women with any kind of maternal instinct mad. They need to mess about in it, rumple you up. So this is what I was bringing to the table when I saw Anne at Olives.
Now, I do not hail from the island of the blind. I know what it looks like when two women are engaged in superficial conversation, leaving both physical and metaphorical room for interruption, and what it looks like when two women are actually enjoying each other’s company, totally engaged. It was clear that I was dealing with the latter case at Olives. But a woman like Anne comes along once in a decade. Manners after miracles.
I watched the pair in conversation for a while: the cousin was a gesticulator and a fast drinker of appletinis. At one point, Esther stood and made the “watch this for me?” gesture at her behemoth of a purse (a girlfriend-to-girlfriend exchange that has always confused me, because it insinuates that your friend would have done otherwise—put it up for sale or something while you were in the loo), and I seized my chance.
I imposed myself grandly between An
ne and the bar and offered to buy her a second round of whatever she was having.
“Actually,” she said, “my third.”
“Ah!” I grinned, thinking all was green-lit. “What’ll it be, then?”
She stuck a toothpick through her last remaining olive and looked up—or rather, squinted—at my beverage upgrade offer.
“I’m fine, actually,” she announced.
“Really?” Every bit of gray matter in my prefrontal cortex was telling me not to say anything about her melted-butter accent. Meanwhile, my downstairs soldier was rising to attention: She’s French, she’s French, she’s French.
“Yes, well, I’m here with a friend, actually, and she’s going to come back, so you’ll probably have to buy her a drink also, and then we’ll have to let you stay with us because you bought us drinks, and we’ll have to make small talk, and at some point, my friend and I will pretend we have this ‘thing,’ but really, we’ll just go across the street to another bar so that we don’t have to continue talking to someone we don’t know.”
Oh, she was a tough one! But I was too far gone already, starboard to the wind. In my mind, she was already straddling me with her creamy, Frenchy thighs and I had my hand under the silk thong riding up between her ass and her ridiculous Tiffany bean necklace was slapping against my chest hair and I didn’t give a fuck about her friend, I wanted Anne for mine.
“À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.”
Now, I’m not one for spoken poetry, and my memorization skills have been compromised by a casual interest in pot, but it just so happened that I’d recently done a shadow-box piece for my mixed-media class in which I’d cut pyramid pictures out of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, filled the bottom of the box with sand, and Krazy Glued plastic G.I. Joe soldiers into place so that they were facing the pyramids, against which I’d silk-screened a line from the French poet Rimbaud: In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Page 4
