I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

by Courtney Maum

  Anne shifted in her seat. And then she shifted again. “Well, my father said nothing, obviously. Or rather, he sort of pounded me on the shoulder the next morning and said, ‘Oh! You’ll work this out!’ You know, soldier through.” She put her napkin on her lap. “As for my mother, well, we talked about it.”

  I waited expectantly.

  “We talked about it. That’s it.”

  “And Camille?” I asked, clenching my hand into a fist.

  “We have to talk about that,” she said, leaning back to make way for our tomato tartares, which consisted of fine tomato slices covered in chopped tuna and parsley, with an unsightly dollop of what looked like canned salsa sitting on top. Anne pushed her plate away and reached for her wine.

  “I don’t know what to tell her,” she continued, “but we have to tell her something. My parents never said anything to me, but I’d listen to them fight at night, and it was bad.”

  “But we don’t fight.”

  Her face went tight. “What do you mean, we don’t yell in front of her? I’m going to tell you something. The silence is worse.”

  “I told my father,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  She snapped her head up. “You did?”

  I nodded. “I mean, not in so many words, but . . .”

  “And what’d he say?”

  I dethroned the mound of salsa with my fork. “That I’m a fucking idiot. He loves you.”

  If this had been a movie, I would have said that I loved her, too, but it wasn’t a movie, it was a chain steak-house restaurant, so instead of a romantic declaration, we got Antoine.

  “Everything A-OK?” he chirped.

  “You can take this,” said Anne, motioning to her plate.

  “Was it not satisfactory?”

  “I’m just not very hungry.”

  “The wine is very good!” I said, tapping my finger against my glass. I felt bad for the poor bloke.

  When he left, Anne slumped back in the booth.

  “I see no way out of this, Richard. I really don’t. I have thought about this and thought about this, and when I’m not thinking about it, I’m thinking about the fact that I’m not thinking about it. It’s driving me insane. I’m sick from it. I can’t eat. The only thing I have is work, and even there I’m losing focus.”

  “But don’t you think, is there no way that we can just, I don’t know.” I realized there was no way to say what I wanted to say without sounding like an ass.

  “What?” she said. “Just forget it? Pretend it didn’t happen?”

  I pushed my fork around my plate.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said, leaning in. “And you look at me when I say this. You think I think monogamy is a walk in the fucking park? It’s not great, Richard, and I’m not even sure that it’s natural. You think I don’t have nights where I feel like I’m getting into bed with my brother? You think I don’t get what you did? Because I fucking do, let me tell you. I get it. The difference here—” Her eyes welled up, she balled up her napkin. “The difference is that you lied. And you loved her. You didn’t just get your rocks off, you fell—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” she yelled, slamming her hand on the table. “I read the letters,” she hissed, talking quieter now. “And you were going to leave us. And I can tell you that if it wasn’t for Camille and the fact that I’m so fucking crazed with work, we wouldn’t be here. You’d already be out. There is no reason for me to forgive you. Nada. You haven’t given me a reason, and I don’t see you giving me one now. You know what you could have done, Richard? You could have told me when you met her. I don’t know when it happened and I don’t know where it was, but I’m guessing there was some kind of buildup, some moment when you could have said, ‘Anne, I’ve met someone, and I’m attracted to her. And I have doubts. And I’m bored. And I need a fucking break.’”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, pushing my plate away. “That it would have been all right?”

  “I’m saying that we could have talked about it. I’m not as sheltered as you think. I don’t know what I would have felt at that moment, but I know that we could have talked about it, and that hearing about it then, when it was an interest instead of after the fact, it would have left us with a chance. Because I would have understood you. Because I’ve felt that way myself.”

  She patted her eyes with her humongous red paper napkin while Antoine came up hastily to swoop my plate away.

  Anne waited with her lips pursed until he was out of sight. “But what have you left me with instead?” she said, her voice cracking. “I mean, really? Have you thought about it? You had a love affair. You had . . .” She faltered. “You had a fucking life with someone else. And I’m supposed to forgive you? What do I get out of it? What do I get out of forgiving you? If I was someone else, anyone else, we’d already be divorced.”

  “I know,” I said, quaking. “I know we would.”

  “And sometimes I even want to do it! I want to just say, ‘Fuck it,’ and move on. But you’ve changed everything. You’ve changed us. We were lucky, Richard. What we had was really, really good. And you fucked it.”

  Antoine reappeared with two plates heaped with steak and all the fixings steaming on a plastic tray.

  “Good God,” Anne muttered.

  “Antoine, I’m sorry. Could we, ah, get those to go?”

  The good man didn’t bat an eye.

  “But of course. Would you like a sauce sampler to go as well?”

  “What the hell,” I said, throwing my napkin on the table. “Sure.”

  • • •

  We left the restaurant with our resolutely un-French doggie bags with an even less French hippo on the front. Anne was marching quickly and I had to work to keep up with her. When we reached the taxi stand at the corner of Rue Montmartre and the Boulevard Poissonnière, I slowed. But she kept going.

  “You don’t . . . ?” I called out, gesturing toward the taxis.

  “Walk.”

  We cut through the Grands Boulevards past the imposing structure of the Paris stock exchange and spilled out onto the Boulevard de l’Opéra, all gussied up with lanterns for the night.

  “Walk,” she said again, crossing the street even faster.

  We passed the Hôtel du Louvre, where we’d sometimes started our erstwhile evenings out with a glass of champagne, and then crossed through the palace gates to the museum.

  Everyone who has been or lived in Paris has their favorite place, and Anne-Laure’s was the square court of the Louvre. Beyond the polemic pyramid addition, through a nondescript passageway, lay a much smaller, more intimate courtyard with a fountain that never worked. At night, the stone sculptures of the former kings and ministers who inhabited the palace are lit up from below, and the roofline glows with a fearsome troupe of gargoyles, caught forever in midscream.

  The edge of the fountain was cold beneath our legs—freezing, actually—when we sat. I reached into our doggie bags and produced a sheaf of paper napkins, offering them to Anne to sit on, but she declined.

  We stayed without speaking for a while, taking in the stonework that looked pink here and ochre there from the lights. Without the throng of tourists ant-farming their way through the palace’s exterior corridors, the courtyard was romantic, ludicrously so. A year ago, we would have held each other, we would have kissed and laughed about the city’s self-conscious beauty. No woman possessed more confidence in her appearance than Paris. But that night we just sat there, hoping for the interruption of a sight or sound to break up the loveliness that we couldn’t share.

  “If I could take it back, Anne,” I said finally. “If I could have not done it—”

  “But you did.”

  I stared down at my hands. “I really miss you,” I said quietly. “I miss us.”

  She cros
sed her legs and rubbed her upper thighs with her hands, trying to warm them. “You haven’t been here for months, now. It’s been half a year. Just going through the motions.”

  “I don’t want it to be like that,” I said. “It’s my fault. But I’m back. I promise you, it’s over. It’s been over a long time.”

  “Because she left,” Anne said. “Because she left you. Otherwise, it would still be going on. Or you would have left with her.”

  I stared through the passageway toward the glass pyramid that was lit up like a yellow Rubik’s cube, dropped from some far-off galaxy into the night. I tried not to let it cut me, the fact that even Anne knew that Lisa hadn’t loved me back.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her looking at me. “You would have left.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” I snapped. “No. And I know what the letters say. What they make it sound like. And it’s true that there was a point when my real life didn’t seem real. There was a moment when I did think,” I said, glancing up, but she was looking away from me, her face tight, her fists curled, “I did think, like an idiot, that I would go. But I know now that it isn’t true. If it had actually come to that, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t actually want to. It was like I was possessed.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked, her eyes flashing. “Thank her? Should I be grateful to this person who didn’t want you back? She must have been pretty fucking special.”

  “She wasn’t,” I said, twisting my pants between my fingers. “She just, at the end of the day, she just wasn’t you.”

  Then, the guttural sounds of Anne crying. The kind of weeping that comes from an unopened place within where comfort cannot reach.

  “Even now my mind is going. I can’t get it to stop,” she managed. “Where? Why? What did she look like? Was she gorgeous? How did she . . . kiss? And the fact that you made love to her, imagining you, and I don’t even know what to imagine.” She held her breath. “I can’t get it to stop. To forgive you, I’d have to have no love left for you at all. Which would make it . . .” She put her hand to her head. “You’ve . . . you’ve ruined us. You’ve totally ruined us,” she said, crying harder. “For nothing.”

  “Anne, I love you,” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her to face me. “I love you more than anything in my whole stupid life and I’m sorry that I made such an awful, painful, incredible mistake and that I kept on making it. I am going to be sorry about this for the rest of my life. But I have never, never been so sure about us. For us. I can’t . . . I can’t be me without you. Please.”

  I took her other hand. “I knew it the fucking minute I saw you in that stupid bar with your cousin. You are . . . a more-than person, Anne. Goddammit. You are more than a best friend and a wife, you’re more than beautiful, and if I hurt you it’s maybe because I’ve always known and been ashamed of the fact that I am less than you, and always have been.”

  Her chin trembled. In my hands, her skin was cold. “I will do whatever it takes to prove to you that it will never happen again.”

  She bit her lip hard as a tear fell down her cheek. For the first time since I’d reached for her, she squeezed my hand back. “But what do you do about the fact that it happened? What do you do about that?”

  I started to cry. “What do I do?” I said, dropping her hands. “What do I do? I don’t know what to do. I did it. I can’t make you love me back.”

  “But I do love you,” she cried. “But I can’t get past it! I can’t! I’m so angry and I’m so sad and I’m embarrassed and ashamed and I’m furious at you. I hate you, and at the same time I just want to go back. And I don’t know what to do either,” she said. “I just don’t.”

  I looked up at the sky and the buildings and the gargoyles and the sculptures. I looked out at the pyramid and the stupid, spinning carousel in the park beyond. And beyond that, beauty. More beauty everywhere. Lights and boulevards and thoroughfares and people going places and people coming back. And it was sitting there in a place that had been a safe place for us, a place that had always been calming and right, that I realized that if I really loved her, I had to let the decision to stay with me be hers.

  “Anne,” I whispered, touching her hand again. “I’m going to go.”

  “You’re going to go?” she repeated, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “I mean I’m going to go, go. I’m going to leave.”

  She turned to me, her eyes bright in the darkness.

  “Really leave?”

  I tried to keep my chin from trembling. I nodded yes.

  “I don’t want to force you, or make it harder for you with my presence, or with Camille, I don’t want you to decide we stay together because of her. I want it to be you, Anne. I want this to be about us.”

  “But we can’t—” She caught herself. “So, we’re separating?”

  My throat felt full of shards. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  She smoothed her hair back and rubbed her legs again. I put my arms around her to warm her, and she didn’t pull away.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” I said, my face against the dried-flower smell of her hair.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

  “I really fucking love you,” I said, holding her tighter. “I do.”

  She pressed her face against my shoulder. I could feel her tears through my shirt. We sat that way for minutes, absorbing the silence of the present, the last hours of darkness before our unknown future would begin.

  18

  I MOVED in with Julien for a while until I could find my own place. Into an old duffel bag went an assembly of sentimental things: the never-ending Australian novel that previously held court by my bed, the videos of my parents, the camcorder, photos of Anne and Camille, slipped out of pewter frames. I purposely left a lot of necessities in the house, seeding reasons for me to get back inside it.

  When I told Julien what had happened, our previous quarrel was forgiven. After ten days of sleeping on his couch and washing the dishes from the limited variety of pasta recipes that I made us every night, I was able to discuss WarWash with him without feeling like he was being condescending, or going out of his way to knock me down. I could see where he was coming from—his gallery was an ongoing dinner party, and I wanted to show up with an unpredictable, drunk guest who was probably going to break things. After reiterating that he and Azar Sabounjian had “history,” he told me that it still might be worth my trying there. That I had his blessing if I did.

  We didn’t talk much about Anne-Laure. Those first weeks I kept my thoughts and fears inside my head, where they could shapeshift to suit that day’s particular outlook. The truth was, talking to other people about our separation made it feel too real. Safely harbored in my memory, the things that she and I had said to each other could be analyzed any number of ways, and positively, even. If I talked too much about it, it would become clear how bad things were.

  After days of unreturned phone calls and e-mails sent to addresses which turned out to be spam, I finally found a small apartment through the classifieds, that French stalwart of shabby real estate, De Particulier à Particulier. A widower was temporarily letting out his writing office while he took a cathartic cruise on the houseboat he and his wife used to live in, on the Seine. He was traveling to Amsterdam, and then he’d see. He said he had another friend interested so if I got back together with my wife, to simply call him. He told me he hoped I would.

  The apartment was an architectural impossibility: a fourteen-meter-square duplex on the sixth story of a narrow building in the tenth arrondissement. The first floor consisted solely of a table that was built into the wall, two benches, a sink, and a stovetop with two burners. The staircase had been designed to maximize space, with each step imitating the shape of a single foot. The only closet space was built beneath this staircase with a curtain to h
ide your mess. Upstairs, there was a triangular-shaped slab of wood in the corner of the room and a stool: this had functioned as the fellow’s writing desk. To the left, a futon, and in front of this, a double window that opened out onto the roofs. The bathroom was only a little larger than your standard airplane loo, and it was designed Swedish style with no separation between the shower and the shitter. When you showered, the water went everywhere, and then—eventually—it went down the drain. The owner had kindly left a squeegee for me to use after each shower, and he reminded me not to leave any electronic appliances out while I had the water running.

  There was a shelf above the bed where I put some books and photos, and a freestanding hanging rack to the side of the window with just enough room for a couple of pants and shirts. I had to keep my coat on the back of the front door. There wasn’t room anywhere else for something bulky. It was a rickety building, and my next-door neighbors were forever sautéing things in fish sauce, a condiment that managed to permeate each of the apartment’s cracks, but there was good, creative energy in the space, and I was grateful to be there. It was reassuring somehow, to live somewhere so small. I felt enveloped, bolstered. And terribly alone.

  It was already the new year—January 15. The holidays had come and gone without my taking part in them. In the week after I left our house on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, Anne and I had had painful, silence-filled discussions about Christmas and New Year’s. Even though we’d agreed to talk to Camille, to tell her that her mom and dad were taking that most vague and disconcerting of relational options, the infamous “break,” Anne thought it might be too much for her to spend Christmas without her father. We agreed that I could go out to Brittany for the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth and stay in a hotel, but then the Bourigeaud seniors overturned our plans: they’d decided on a destination Christmas in Marrakesh for everyone except me. “They thought a change of scenery would be good for us,” said Anne over the phone. “I’m sorry.”

  And so I’d spent the holidays with my parents back in dear old Hemel Hempstead. When you’re crashing your parents’ friends’ annual pre-Christmas Christmas rasher party without your wife and daughter, you can’t get a lot past people. The dinner party was at Tabatha Adsit’s house, a neighbor down the road, and in between courses of bacon-wrapped cabbage and bacon-wrapped goose and bacon-wrapped everything, I had to repeat over and over again that I wasn’t divorced.