I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

by Courtney Maum

  Cautious under pressure, I outlined my design first in chalk. It wasn’t very complicated: the word I plus a heart symbol plus a drawing of a donkey: I LOVE NE. I’d decided to do the entire thing in hot pink. If you’re going to go large, go the full monty.

  I was just adding the bow the donkey always had around its tail in Anne’s zine when I felt someone behind me. Instead of finding some bourgeois old lady with a snappy little dog, I was face-to-face with the billed cap and navy sweater of a French gendarme.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he began.

  I gulped. “Bonjour.”

  “May I ask you what you’re doing?”

  “Yes,” I said, putting the lid on the spray paint. “This is my house.”

  “This is your house?” he asked, pointing. “Do you have identification?”

  I fumbled through my wallet.

  “Mm-hmm,” he said, looking at my permanent resident card. “I see. And do you own the sidewalk, too?”

  I looked down at the article in question.

  “Um, no.”

  “Then may I ask why you’re defacing it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s for my wife. Our anniversary. Her name is Anne? You see, the donkey, âne?”

  “Do you paint a lot of donkeys?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Do you often paint this animal?”

  “Well, not really. I mean, sometimes, with my wife. I’m an artist.”

  “I see,” he said, writing something down. “And is your wife an artist as well?”

  “No,” I said. And then, not wanting to disparage her, I said, “Well, she does cartoons?”

  He wrote something down again. “Sir, if you’d be kind enough to come with me.”

  “Come with you?” I repeated. “Where?”

  “To the commissariat. I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

  “Don’t you just . . . I imagine you just fine me?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “You’ll get fined. But I have a few questions about your recent activity in this area.”

  “Activity?”

  “Yes,” he repeated. “Your other work.”

  “I’m sorry, you can’t just force me to come in for questioning.”

  “You’re defacing public property, actually, so I can.”

  “Will it take long?” I asked, looking at the house.

  “Will it take long?” He laughed. “You might have asked yourself that before you did this to the street.”

  • • •

  And that is how I found myself in the local branch of the French police station in a dusty office with a guard—an actual guard—on a folding chair outside.

  As it turned out, they wanted to investigate my involvement with a new group of graffiti artists called the Jackasses that had been painting wounded donkeys in visible places throughout Paris.

  “We think they’re English-speaking,” said Paul, the cop who brought me in. “Because donkeys? Democrats? They’re painted with gun wounds, except they’re dripping oil. You know anything about this?”

  I know that I felt suddenly envious of these upstarts, and not a little embarrassed about my hot-pink donkey half finished on the street. Someone had jumped on the Iraq art bandwagon first.

  “The Jackasses have defaced a lot of public property,” he continued. “We’d be very inclined to be lenient with anyone who could help us find out more about them.”

  “I wish I could help you,” I said. “But this is a mistake. A ridiculous coincidence. My wife, whose name is Anne, used to do these drawings of donkeys because back in college, you know, âne, Anne?”

  “You’ve mentioned that, yes.”

  “So I was just . . . we were in a fight, sir. I was just trying to set things right. She’s coming home from a trip today, and I wanted to surprise her.”

  “And where was this trip?”

  “Brittany. To her parents’?”

  He nodded. He wrote something down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shifting my weight in the chair. “Am I actually in trouble?”

  He looked over the stack of papers on his desk. He’d photocopied my passport, my ID card; he’d printed out the home page of Julien’s gallery, which currently featured the glossy, noir-styled photograph of a latex-covered Catwoman being sodomized by a glowing Jedi saber.

  “Do you know a lawyer?” He folded his hands on top of his desk.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “Yes.”

  He pushed a heavy black phone across the desk to me. He picked at something in between his teeth. And then he said, “I’d call.”

  • • •

  Anne arrived two hours later in a business suit she couldn’t have been wearing when she left her parents’. It was what I called her “va-va-voom” look: a rather low-cut cream blouse with an attached tie, a navy blazer, and a matching pencil skirt with four-inch, open-toed snakeskin heels. I actually watched the officer blush when he caught sight of her walking toward us.

  “Hello, Officer,” she said, putting out her hand. “Chéri,” she said turning to me, all light and sweetness. “Ça va?” She kissed me to the side of my lips.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to wipe the happy shock off my face. “I’m fine.”

  “Is this your lawyer?” asked the cop.

  “Yes,” I said. “And wife.”

  “Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud, Esquire,” she announced, handing him a card. “And I brought you these, sir.” Out of her briefcase, she removed a stack of magazines: the zines she’d self-published back in college. “As you can see, it’s been a private joke between us for some time.”

  The man flipped through the first copy.

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re really good at drawing.”

  “With all due respect, Officer, what exactly is the charge?”

  He closed one book and picked up another.

  “Defacing public property, organized misconduct. But the second one would be dropped if it turns out you’re not part of this group.”

  “Well, I can assure you, sir, we’re not,” she said, pointing to the books. “This was just a little misstep on my husband’s part. It’s my understanding, however, that he used water-based paint. As soon as we get home, we’ll wipe the whole thing off. It won’t happen again.”

  The officer bit his lip. “I’m sure you can understand,” Anne continued, looking toward a framed photograph of a woman and a child on his desk. “The things we do when we fall out of grace with our wives?”

  “Lord, yes,” he mumbled.

  “And I’d be sure to follow up with the minister of health to let her know what a good job you, personally, are doing looking after the external sanitation of our city.”

  His eyes lit up.

  “If you have a card?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, patting his pocket. “Here!”

  Anne slipped it into her briefcase and treated him to a magnetic smile. Like magic, he softened; his posture relaxed, he even had the gall to put both hands behind his head before realizing how inappropriate this position was.

  “Well, I suppose Madame de Bourigeaud, if you could assure us that it won’t happen again—”

  “You have my word.”

  “We could let him off with just a fine. But the minute you get home, you have to clean it up.”

  “Consider it done,” she said, reaching out her hand. “And thank you again for your hard work.”

  “And you for yours.”

  Anne shifted her winning smile to me. On cue, I stood. We walked out of that office like we were heading into the sunset, but once we hit the paved courtyard, she promptly dropped my arm.

  “I have to return the rental car,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion.

  I bit my lip. “So, you went home first? To get the
books?”

  “Obviously,” she said, smoothing out her skirt. “I needed evidence.”

  “So did you see it?”

  She stopped in her tracks. “You know that this isn’t what I meant by needing to focus, right? Me picking you up in jail?”

  I nodded. “But . . . you saw it?”

  She looked into my eyes. She looked more tired than angry.

  “One thing at a time, Richard. One thing at a time.”

  • • •

  When we got home, Anne made me kill the donkey. Telling me to wait in the kitchen, she came back from the laundry room with a scrub brush, a small towel, a pail, and an ultratoxic, all-purpose French elixir called white spirit.

  “I appreciated the gesture,” she said. “I did.”

  And then she handed me the pail.

  While the hot-pink paint bled into the pavement crevices, I let myself imagine that Anne had been pleased by what she found. A donkey signifier, a graffiti wink. More original than a box of chocolates, even if it had almost landed me in jail.

  But by the time I got my scrub brush onto the donkey’s unfinished tail, my thoughts turned to the Jackasses, these anonymous miscreants who had gotten on the political art train before me. For weeks, I’d been searching for a personal way into an Iraq project, but for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t either carcinogenic—like boiling British and American food items in petrol—or Matthew Barney–level ambitious, like restaging the swimming portion of the Olympics in a pool of blood. But I wasn’t Matthew Barney. I was a sorry, soppy wanker washing a pink donkey off the street, no closer to a killer art project or winning my wife back than I had been that morning.

  After I was done scrubbing away my unfinished valentine, I went back into the house and found the duck I’d made earlier reheating in the oven and a fresh salad laid out. I put away the cleaning supplies and stood at the foot of the staircase, where Anne had left me a note.

  R—I need to eat in my study. Too much work to do.

  I put sheets in the guest room. Friday, we can talk.

  “DINNER?” I shouted up the stairs in the direction of her office. “Friday? Anywhere you want?”

  A minute later I received a text message from her.

  No, Richard. Just talk.

  • • •

  The guest room in our house, like many guest rooms in other houses, I suspect, is hardly used by guests. On rainy days, Camille likes to play with the random assembly of knickknacks we keep in a trunk at the foot of the bed, but it’s otherwise used as a neutral, time-out space when either Anne or I have a reason (insomnia, rancor, sickness) not to share the marital bed.

  Against the far wall, there was an ancient television that only played VHS cassette tapes propped up on a credenza, inside of which lay a veritable treasure trove of bad taste: Crocodile Dundee, Mannequin, Adventures in Babysitting, and of course, the film that laid the ground rules for all French romantic comedies with sound tracks featuring a synthesized guitar, Sophie Marceau’s big breakthrough, La Boum.

  When Camille was still a baby, on the nights when the umpteenth bottle warming and the rocking and the relentless lullabies emanating from her wind-up teddy bear had left us past the possibility of going back to bed, we would come into this room together and climb under a down blanket and watch the beginning of an old film. Anne finds cinematic schlock calming. After fifteen minutes of Andrew McCarthy (the sensitive sculptor whose work the world just doesn’t understand) and Kim Cattrall as a reincarnated ancient Egyptian running around a suburban mall together, I’d feel Anne’s weight increase against me, purring, fast asleep.

  Looking through those movies we’d watched so many times almost made me capitulate to the magnetic force I felt, pulling me out the door, across the hallway into Anne’s study, where I could hear her working still. I wanted to get up and go to her, insist that we get into the hard stuff, except that I knew her working style. I had seen her compartmentalize her relationship with her father and other emotional distractions so that she could get work done. If I interrupted her now, if I forced her into a discussion that would only hurt her further, she wouldn’t be able to sleep that night, and would be even angrier at me in the days to come.

  Without Anne’s alarm to push me into consciousness and with Camille still away, I slept later than I’d planned to. When I woke up, I could hear people in the house. After making the bed and getting rid of any evidence that I was sleeping in the guest room, I showered and put effort into dressing like a man incapable of infidelity, which in my case meant: khakis pants.

  I came down the stairs slowly, assessing the smells and sounds permeating the house. Someone had made coffee, and I heard women’s voices—cheerful—coming from the living room. Certain that no one could sound that perky unless they were already caffeinated, I felt confident that I could get into the kitchen and back upstairs with a cup of coffee without coming into contact with any legal eagles.

  But when I hit the bottom step, I saw a tall man at my sink. Tall is an understatement; he was a fucking redwood. He had a mug of coffee in his right hand and he was staring out my window.

  Apparently endowed with supersonic hearing as well as supersonic height, he turned around before my foot hit the kitchen tiles.

  “Oh!” he said, putting his mug down. “Bonjour!”

  There were no real blonds in France; this chap had to be Belgian. With distinctly un-French enthusiasm, he came up and pumped my hand.

  “I’m Thomas,” he said. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  I scratched my head, easing into the connection of synapses and neurons that were sending messages to my brain that I wasn’t awake enough to deal with. Green eyes, full lips, a boyish flop of hair. This fellow wasn’t only taller and younger than me, he was perversely attractive.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said, staring at the mug he had been drinking out of. It was one of my favorites, a red one with the slogan Jacobsen does what you wish your mower would do written in white script. I asked, “Are you new?”

  “Relatively. I transferred from the Luxembourg office a few months ago.”

  “Hmm,” I said, piecing together why my wife, usually a broadcaster of interoffice movements, had not mentioned the arrival of young Thomas at Savda & Dern. “Are you a Luxembourger, then?”

  He nodded and made a gesture toward my coffee machine. “Can I get you some?” he inquired, reaching for a mug. I nodded, and watched the Ken doll serve me coffee.

  “I’m from Antwerp,” he continued. “Milk?”

  “It’s fine,” I said, reaching for it. It seemed strategic at that moment that I take my coffee black.

  “Oh!” said Anne, appearing in the doorway with two empty glasses and a mug. “We were going to get some more, also. Thomas, Richard, you’ve met? Thomas just transferred to Paris . . .”

  She said other things, I’m sure of it, but I was concentrating on her outfit, a slim-fitting rose-petal-pink cashmere dress that I’d never seen before, and on the fact that she wasn’t—in a breach with her normal sartorial policy—wearing it with a blazer. She also had on high heels, which, I was happy to note, were not new, but were still a trifle high for 9 a.m.

  Anne kissed me on the cheek and wished me good morning, thus kicking off the opening act of our happily married show. I responded in kind by offering to make more coffee (no need to wait for it, I’d just bring the whole pot out), and after doing this and meeting an equally attractive paralegal named Selena, I retreated to the kitchen to eat the croissants that Thomas had been such a dear to buy.

  The appearance of the Belgian shocked me into the realization of how rarely we interacted with fresh blood in gray Paris. In London, and certainly in the States, your circle of friends is an evolving, pulsating entity that can forever expand to incorporate people of all sexes and sizes because meeting new people is exci
ting, and it’s good to have replacements for your old friends in case you grow bored.

  But in Paris, we’re around the same people all the time. And none of them are single. In fact, if they aren’t related to us by blood, they are by lifestyle: married with one or two children, both spouses employed, most of their furniture from IKEA except that love seat there which they found during a weekend trip to . . . and onward.

  Convinced that lurking around the second floor like some kind of recluse would only worsen my anxiety, I checked with Anne to see if there was anything I could bring them back for lunch, accepted her response that they were intending to take a break at noon and go out, and—exhausted, fearful, itchy—I took off the fucking khakis and put on a pair of jeans and neon sneakers and ran the hell away from my house.

  16

  I HALF walked, half ran all the way to the sixth to the Premier Regard, where I was surprised to find Julien, an hour before the gallery opened, already inside.

  “You’re not much for the telephone recently, are you?” he asked, unlocking the front door for me.

  “Did they call you?” I asked, out of breath.

  “What, the people you tried to rob?” I followed him to his desk. “No,” he continued. “Which is why I’ve drafted an official letter of apology. But I was hoping you could write a side letter. Something heartfelt. If these people are such collectors, I’d like them to collect again from me.”

  He passed me his laptop so I could see what he’d written.

  Dear Sirs,

  On behalf of the team here at the Premier Regard gallery, we’d like to offer our heartfelt apologies for the mix-up that occurred last week.

  After over a decade in business, we pride ourselves on working with some of the most renowned names in contemporary painting along with a cutting-edge selection of up-and-comers from all four corners of the world. As you can imagine, being art lovers yourselves, some of the artists whom we work with also come with an artistic temperament that manifests itself in a variety of ways, sometimes not appropriate, sometimes off the canvas. We hope that you will excuse Richard Haddon’s recent and unscheduled visit to your home as proof of his unbridled creativity, that you will also excuse us for the many inconveniences this may have caused you, and continue to think of the Premier Regard gallery as a creative home away from home during any trips you might have to France.