Cocktails, Caviar and Diapers

by Duke, Renee

  Each time had been such a concentrate of passion that she still couldn’t forget it. She couldn’t copy it with her husband nor even imitate the incredible closeness they had had.

  Still, lunch this past week was good, close with many friends. A gentle way to let her down although she knew that he had been completely happy with her at the moment. She must not telephone him now to see if he had really cared or just had a passing interest.

  How many times would she have thrown over everything for him? Could he guess at this wildness in her when he said “You have no juste mesure–no measure in the way you feel. The French admire Pascal and logic, they do not believe in thinking the way you do.” A whole area of her mind was not grown up. She must judge it and hold it up to ridicule.

  He made her so happy, his eyes danced with hers, she could look at him anywhere and the joy would bubble up. This look must be good for others. Evans had fallen in love with her again because she had gotten back in the habit of looking happy.

  Talking about his work, architecture, fascinated her, a field she had always loved. She lived vicariously what she should have done. The lights were soft in the room and they looked at his model of a client’s apartment. “There is a curve of wall like the stairs to my apartment! Are you going to set in mirrors?”

  “Yes.” He had touched her, glad that she felt intuitively what he wanted to do. That was the fifth time they had seen each other and the memory was golden in her mind.

  “I must count back,” she thought. There was the first lunch and then the second time he measured the rooms of the house and I stared blindly at architectural houses, so light-seeming, so troubled inside. Is he deceived by my outside? Do I trouble him?”

  Then there was the time he called in the middle of the night and she was so tired.

  “I’ll work, finish the house and cradle you to sleep,” he said.

  He called twice as he worked and that evening he came to see her.

  He had loomed in the door, dark turtleneck sweater, dark raincoat–they’d bought it together at a rummage sale–dark hair and eyes piercing her and she saw him as if for the first time.

  Then she had decided, right there, that she never would have anything more to do with him. He had known that, she was sure, and swung to the challenge.

  She was outraged at herself and knew then that she would see him as long as he cared to see her. Later, they had gone to the café for coffee. She looked back at that night with disbelief. “I looked horrible and he didn’t care. I really don’t know him. I care to be young with him, how I wish we were the same age. All these years, I should have been in France, young, made mistakes, met crazy people. Now I would be happy. I would know more.”

  And when was the next time she saw him? A lopsided contact and she thought then that he would soon be bored and that, honestly, she would be bored too.

  Why hadn’t her husband left her alone? She would never have seen Etienne again. He had nagged her and been jealous and she had gone with Etienne in the car to pick up some material.

  She’d been stiff and unnatural and bored. Yes. Bored. Etienne had felt something wrong and said that he was worried. Why hadn’t she spoken to him truthfully? After the car ride, he telephoned and she blurted it out in a rush, “I can’t see you again. He has people watching me. The situation is horrible. Let me call you when I can see you.”

  While she was skiing with her husband he came into her mind more than she thought possible and she could hardly stand it there. She had to get back to Paris to be near him. Then she realized she was a fool. She had made herself love him, she had insisted she lose him and she had compromised her life by staying with her husband.

  I could go on and on. At least I can talk to myself on paper, now. I hate the slowness of life now I have no control of it. I’ve changed. No, it’s another focus on my life. I am no different but I’ve been pushed through another phase of my life.

  When the long days without Evans began I was lost and sad.

  Now he’s back and I’m lost and sad and still looking.

  Chapter 11: Rain

  1967

  So I’ve given it all up. There’s a party in the country and I’m not asked. I haven’t been a wallflower since the age of thirteen. Now, instead of going to the ladies room to powder my nose, over and over, to powder my nose, I’m staying home with the children. A good mother. A divorced mother, however.

  Evans is handsome, a good business man with many contacts and a promising bachelor. Dinner before the ball; the high beamed ceiling of an old French country house, ladies slowly moving among the flickering lights of candles, diamonds glittering on dresses bought, not borrowed, from Dior.

  What did we ever talk about? After a dinner filled with small politeness, the ladies would cluster by the coffee, talking with animation of a world not real to me. I would feel large, American, overbearing and earnest. Yet these women were like me. Their heart would stop too as they watched their husband come in laughing from having cigars and brandy in the other room and bend over the charming woman across the way. In their hearts they were the same but each let the other alone, throwing imperceptible life lines to their closest friends.

  Now there are no more cocktail parties, rushing out of the house in a cloud of perfume with a desperate last hug from the child I’d see so seldom. There’s no reason to go to the hairdressers for hours and then go again in the middle of the week, to be perfect. No need to take a long nap in the afternoon to be fresh for the evening. No, be honest, Andrée, start being honest. The only reason you slept is because you’d gently started to sleep at the end of the dinner party. So much wine, so much food, so few people that cared.

  At what time did I start to compromise? I can skip getting a girl’s body instead of a boy’s … there are plenty of women who have done all that a man could do. If I had been a man I would have compromised the same way. Supposing I had been a man; I would have married a girl, fought and squabbled my way to middle age, tried to find myself, come back again to the wife and kids. I would have searched the same way and at the age of fifty found myself with the same problems.

  It has nothing to do with sex, the liberation of the sexes, but the liberation of each and every one of us from the games we find ourselves playing. We could never quite face all that truth about ourselves, stayed alone until we found ourselves, found that others exist on the planet with the same problems and tried to do something about them. Each one of us are totally and definitely and even horribly responsible for ourselves and the condition we find ourselves in.

  You have to isolate exactly what you are sitting in and then do something so that you can be what you would have liked to have been all along. We all would like to be decent, happy, loving our children and our neighbor. We’d like to be left in peace to look at trees and grass and flowers or go rushing out into the cement world and tackle it head on and conquer it. We would all like to have telepathy with others, understand them, to be able to be on a higher wavelength.

  We strive to be big and then we find that we were better off small children. As small children we were at least able to drown ourselves in caring for our dog or cat or a little patch of flowers. I used to walk in the marshes. Long flat, stinking marshes with broad rivers, changing constantly and I would just walk, humming to myself, not thinking.

  Well, I like to think but introspection is something else. The awful headache of introspection, I associate it with too many pieces of candy and sad thoughts.

  What have I always been sitting in? Dependence on others and their points of view, need for reassurance from many people who think I’m terrific. If my ideal state were to be in a state of pure existence, a nothing or a tremendous something, whatever way feels the best, what would I do?

  When it’s all boiled down, it’s a question of personal honor and being true to what I really feel I want to do, to think, to have.

  Then, I’ve established this as a basic premise. Alright, what do I want to do? What do I think? Wha
t would I like to have?

  What I think; direct impressions of a real world around me, seeing the real part of people and ignoring their games effect on me or looking at them admiringly and having fun.

  What do I want to do? Help myself to see clearly through writing and talking with others, creating with my hands, helping others to do the same.

  What do I want to have? Material security, enough so that worry about rent and food and clothes does not interfere with my thoughts, enough money from the things I do to live well, have fun, be able to move around the planet, talking and working with people.

  I guess I want to live as much as I can, take each moment for what it’s worth and enjoy it.

  Live, alive, creating.

  Twenty years to decide that Evans and I were through, to let him end it because I lacked the spine to end it myself. Can I complain of being mistreated? I mistreated myself by compromising on each outraged thought. I’ve been lucky, the boys are with me, we are together. Only my inability to make decisions holds me back from taking the world in my hand.

  It takes no time at all to decide if you have integrity. If you respect yourself there’s only one way to turn. Start respecting yourself, Andrée, if you can decide where you’re at anyway. Stay and make it happen like you did once before or flee.

  Where to? Not London, I have to have money in the bank to cover my whole stay, proof I won’t be a charge on the faltering English economy. Not Switzerland, I’d be bored to death in a life more bourgeois than Belgium. The south of France is tempting but I’m tired of the French. Germany? I could learn the language and so could the boys but there’s a heaviness there, even in Munich. Holland is too close to Evans.

  Denmark? Why not? We all like it, it’s new and strange but the people are closer to the Americans. Even my mother-in-law says so. We can sail and bicycle and walk where there were once Vikings. I can explore archeology, study Scientology. Why not Denmark?

  Time to set the table for the children’s supper. Wheeling the low tea tray the long distance from the kitchen to the dining room, the wheels catch in the old floorboards as usual. The phone rings, interrupting my clumsy pushing.

  “Andrée.”

  Sudden command, dear Evans.

  “Andrée, I want to talk to you about the children.”

  Talk on, oh lord and master. I’m sure that whatever you say will not be nice. They are, after all an extension of myself ... and of him. He must be feeling pain.

  “Oh.”

  “Andrée, are you listening?”

  “What else?”

  “Andrée, I don’t like your attitude.” Would that I could say what I thought about his.

  “Andrée, the children’s manners are frightful, I want you to watch them more carefully.”

  “Okay.”

  He hates sloppy English, I can’t say kids and okay and talk in incomplete sentences. Bloody English teacher. How did I ever stay mixed up with this man? He probably feels the lousy same way about me. What a pair. What a lousy situation. I’m training to be a loser.

  “I want you to buy Matthew some other color suit than that bright blue corduroy. I was humiliated to pick him up looking like that, and taking him to the St. Johns’ for dinner.”

  “It is quite a color, Evans, but he loves the suit and the color is marvelous with his eyes. At least his hair was tamed for once.”

  “Andrée, you must do a better job or I will have to discuss it with the lawyers.”

  What does he want for children? Mechanical dolls? My rib cage is fluttering. My cheeks are on fire. There goes that dagger in the stomach feeling again.

  “Evans, the children are happy and healthy, they’re good children.”

  An act of courage is needed. If I don’t move, I may let my children be insulted and reviled or worse yet, make them think that it is dangerous to move and act. I can’t be reasoning the way my lawyers and my mother want me to reason all the time. I am myself. If another thinks I’m silly and a fool, so be it. I have abilities and I must never let the children down. I must never let them think it’s difficult to change, impossible to act without due consideration. If I consider too much in advance, I take the adventure out of living. I must come to life.

  “Andrée, your behavior is peculiar.”

  “Andrée, answer me.”

  But I did answer, it wasn’t the right answer. Or it was the right answer that bothered him. For some strange reason, my upper arms are trembling, my legs weak.

  I think I’ll change my name. All those that love me, call me by my new name. I thought divorce would handle this. Will he ever stop telephoning me, lecturing me, punishing me for his leaving?

  “Evans, will you be taking the children this weekend?”

  “Why? A new boyfriend?”

  “I’m having a birthday party for Randall, we’re going ice skating at the Palais de Glace. I thought we might have a family birthday party the night before.”

  “Really, Andrée, I don’t think that will work at all. I’ll send my secretary over with a present.”

  “I don’t think the boys want to see her, they want to see you.” Actually, this doesn’t seem true but I’ll preserve the myth for all of us … at least until the divorce negotiations are over.

  “Well, I shall be going out to the country early. The St. Johns are having a dinner Friday night before the ball, you know how superb their dinners are.”

  “Ah, yes. Jeanne hasn’t called me since we separated.”

  “Really, Andrée, Jeanne would call but you know, she is Catholic and she really can’t speak to you, now that you are divorcing me.”

  “Christ, Evans, how antique can you get?”

  “Andrée, your swearing must stop, it will give the children bad habits.”

  “Oh, don’t be … oh, have a good time, give my best to anyone who asks. Goodbye.”

  Well, well, I should have never installed this phone at great cost. It was a bit stinky in the telephone by the toilets at the café up the street. Smelly and noisy and on my terms.

  So many lives to watch over. I think I’ll break the news to the mob scene tonight.

  “Sean, close the shutters, the rain is coming through the cracks in the windows.”

  Shut out the street and blot out France with the typical French gesture of closing the shutters. No more living other people’s lives. If we do the same thing, it’s because it’s convenient.

  Randall’s big sad eyes turn to me, sad, with never a sad thought on his mind. “Mummy, let’s work in the studio room upstairs on Saturday after school. I have some new geometric designs. Why don’t you paint Sally?”

  Sean shakes his thick black straight hair out of his eyes with a world weary laugh.

  “Mon pauvre con[32], she’ll never make it up those five flights of stairs.” The Irish au pair is a loss, I don’t know why I have her, anyway.

  “I’ll paint her as a lost girl in the big purple chair,” I say. “From the window she’ll see Notre Dame and then she’ll know she’s in Paris.”

  “Elle est conasse[33].”

  Ah, Sean, how well French serves you.

  “Don’t say that word too often, Sean, The boys will copy you and Evans will say I swear. Anyway, English at the table.”

  “English, English,” chants Duncan, banging the lid of the high chair up and down. He really is too big for it.

  “My God, shut up, I shall go mad, yes, I’ll go mad!” I say, bursting out laughing. They’re more fun than the parties.

  From here I can see my bed, moored like a Viking ship in the middle of the shinning wood floor. A strange channel, not too close to the shore. I see faint green circles under the boy’s eyes. The foul air of Paris. The clean air of Denmark.

  “Why don’t we move to Copenhagen?” My heart thuds at my braveness.

  “Copenhagen, wow!” Sean drops the world weary pose.

  “Remember camp? ‘Wakey, wakey rise and shine’!”

  “Let’s go, no more French school!”


  “Yes, yes! Let’s go to Denmark. I’ve been kept in at recess for the whole month and I have no bon points. Who wants the old pictures anyway? I want to speak English in school. Do they speak English ...” Matthew bubbles on, but he’s ready to follow.

  “Sean, do you think you’ll miss your friends?”

  “Well, I can come down and visit Daddy if I do. It’ll be an adventure. Let’s give it a try. See some new broads too!”