Paris Ever After: A Novel

by K. S. R. Burns

  When the door swings open I see why he wasn’t waiting for me downstairs. He overslept. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Jetlag.” He wears a sheepish smile, a pair of white cotton boxer shorts, and nothing else.

  My cheeks and chest go oven hot.

  Here’s the scenario I was expecting: William greets me at the door, jacket on and ready to go. He apologizes for running late and laughs at me for climbing six flights of stairs for nothing. Then he escorts me to a nice café for a nice breakfast of buttery croissants and hot café crèmes, after which we set out on another ramble around Paris. Eventually we talk about the things we need to talk about. We settle the things we need to settle. We do the right thing. For Catherine. That’s the way it was supposed to go.

  Surprise.

  “Sorry.” He steps back, holding the door open for me. “Come in.”

  I pause. No one knows I’ve come here—not even Manu. I didn’t call him last night, even though he asked me to, and he didn’t call me. No doubt he was busy with Sophie. How quickly the beautiful life I lived this summer with Margaret and Manu has faded into soft-focus, like a dream. Now I’m wakened from that dream and facing the reality that I’m five months pregnant. I have no real job. I’ve been living in a foreign country with no papers—Margaret’s promise to help with a residency visa probably won’t happen now. Why should it? Margaret has Sophie back. She has her real daughter.

  “Ames? Are you going to just stand out there?”

  William yawns, still barely awake. I straighten my shoulders and walk past him into the room. The bed is unmade, but nothing else is out of place—no clothes or shoes are strewn about, no potato-chip bags or empty water bottles litter the floor. The only non-shipshape element is William’s battered canvas briefcase, lying on its side and spilling out a half-dozen plain manila file folders. That must be what he tripped over on his way to the door. Typical of William to bring along work stuff on a personal trip.

  The door clicks shut behind me. I move a few feet farther into the middle of the room, where I stop and slowly turn around. William stands about a yard away, his arms dangling at his sides, seemingly unembarrassed to be next-to-naked in front of his estranged wife. Sunshine streaming through the one window gilds his bare skin gold and divides his face in two so that half is illuminated and half is in shadow. His smooth chest swells as he takes a long deep inhale. I realize I can hear the wild clatter of my own heartbeat, and I wonder if he can too.

  A full five seconds tick by. Yes, I count.

  When I get to number six, I hold my arms out to him. “Hey,” I whisper. He doesn’t pause. He steps forward, grasps my forearms, and pulls me into him.

  Somehow, we move from the middle of the room to the bed. Somehow, my sandals fall from my feet, my loose dress is swept over my head, and William’s boxers slide down his legs.

  Somehow, my body unfolds beneath him. The echo of my soft “Hey” hangs in the dusty air over our heads. No other words enter my brain. My arms and legs and all my other parts perform without specific instruction from me. I am pure instinct, pure desire.

  OK, for one tiny instant, just as he lowers himself onto me, I do waver. I do wonder if this is happening too quickly, too easily, too unthinkingly. But then the sensation of William’s warm firm mouth closing over mine drives away that thought too. It’s been so long.

  Too long.

  He falls asleep immediately afterwards. As usual. It’s all I can do to keep from laughing out loud. William is predictable. He’s a known quantity. Except for the scratchy new beard, our lovemaking was the same as always—familiar, comfortable, like slumping on the couch to watch a favorite movie or re-read a familiar book from childhood. I lie flat on my back beside him, my body still thrumming, and listen to the rumble of his light snore. In a little while he’ll wake up. Maybe we can go again. I’d like that. Now that I’ve come this far, I see no reason to deprive myself. It’s been, as I say, a long time.

  Meanwhile, I wiggle my toes and look around. When I was staying at this hotel last April, my room was decorated entirely in variations of red. The walls, and even the ceiling, were covered with a wallpaper design of scarlet cabbage roses the size of dinner plates. The carpet was a dark fuchsia. The sheets were the color of steamed salmon, and the duvet cover was printed with enormous crimson poppies. It was a riot of reds and pinks.

  William’s room is a requiem in brown. The sheets and bedspread are tan, the curtains are taupe, the furniture is muddy mahogany, and the carpet is a faded cinnamon. The walls are upholstered floor to ceiling with the same carpeting as the floor. I have never seen carpeted walls before. But then, before last April, I’d never seen a wallpapered ceiling.

  Brown. My least-favorite color. Even now, as relaxed and gratified as I am, the drabness of the room tugs at me, tamps down my buzz.

  William stirs. His face is turned away, but I can tell he’s awake.

  “Hey,” I say, nudging him with my foot. “Isn’t this room driving you crazy?”

  “Huh?” He twists around to stare at me, the muscles of his back rippling. “Whaddaya mean?”

  “You know. The color.”

  He frowns.

  “Your room is the color of dirt.” I hold up a corner of the dun-colored sheet and wait for him to laugh.

  “Oh.” He rolls away. “Never noticed.”

  Obviously, he didn’t. The room is clean and cheap, and that’s all he cares about. I tell myself it’s not important, because it’s not, and play my fingertips across his satiny skin. William has a particularly beautiful back, broad with a narrow waist, lean but not gaunt, and well muscled. The valley of his spinal column is absolutely smooth—no bumpy vertebrae mar its perfection. Some women look at men’s butts. I look at their backs.

  His shoulder twitches, and I think he’s about to roll over to face me—I prepare to welcome him—but instead he sits up and swings his legs off the bed. “Just a minute,” he mutters. Halfway to his feet he sits down again, and to my disappointment, reaches for his boxers and slips into them before heading to the bathroom.

  As he always does, he closes the door behind him. We’re not the kind of married people who feel free to pee within sight or sound of each other. Kat and I, on the other hand, were always too busy chattering (usually about nothing) to completely close the bathroom door. I had to make a real effort to get into the habit when I married William.

  Margaret would say that’s a big part of what marriage is—making an effort. Adapting. Compromising. At times it’s seemed harder than it should be. But how would I know? My main example was my parents’ somewhat dysfunctional marriage. My brief romantic relationship (yes, there was that) and then deep friendship with Kat was one of those lightning-bolt, once-in-a-lifetime things where everything feels easy and right and relaxed, as if touched by a sorcerer’s wand. I know nothing about how ordinary non-magical couples function.

  One thing I do know is this bed, despite the fact that the sheets are hideously brown, is ten times more comfortable than Manu’s clic-clac. I feel contented, calm, sated, and drowsy. “Count your blessings,” Dad always used to say to me. Well, maybe I’m learning to do that. Maybe—just maybe—this will be my last Sunday morning in Paris. Lying here, so snug, so relaxed, I’m coming to think this could be the right thing. It can work. If we make it work.

  William takes his time in the bathroom, giving me the chance to fan my hair over the pillowcase and arrange the top sheet so it lies smoothly over my body. My baby bump makes a nice visible mound this way. For years I used to lie on my back and admire how flat my stomach looked when I was supine, at least during my thin times, and perhaps I’ll do so again someday. But right now, I treasure the delicious roundness and firmness of my growing belly. Right now, it’s my most fetching feature, which is why I was a little disappointed when my dress first came off and William’s eyes didn’t go straight to my abdomen, as I expected. He did take care not to put too much weight on me, true, but the whole time we made love he kept his gaze fixed on the w
all above the bed.

  I tip my head back to peer up at said wall, but there are no pictures or posters or even flyspecks to attract anyone’s attention. The nightstand is bare, too, except for William’s phone, which I now reach for. We may not be the kind of married people who leave the bathroom door open, but we’ve always felt free to check out the pictures on each other’s phones. Now’s my chance to examine the shots he took of us together in front of Notre-Dame yesterday. I don’t feel I’m doing anything wrong or underhanded when I type in his password. We’ve always shared our passwords.

  Odd. I expected the pictures from yesterday to be the most recent ones. I know he took at least three. Yet the last photo to appear is of William standing in front of the bakery with the red-and-white-striped awning. I fold a pillow in half, prop up my head, and proceed to scroll. William beside the window of a wine shop. William in front of a florist’s. William holding a croissant. These are all from Thursday, the day after he arrived in Paris. The ones he took of us yesterday in front of Notre-Dame aren’t here.

  I’m thumbing backwards through the images, again thinking how uncharacteristic it is for William to take so many selfies, or any selfies really, when I come across a close-up of a woman I’ve never seen before. My thumb halts, poised in mid-air over the touchscreen. She’s more a girl than a woman, and is wearing a tight white T-shirt, a purple Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, and a wide relaxed grin. I sit up straight, wrapping the sheet across my chest.

  This is certainly one of William’s co-workers. It has to be. The office is where he spends all his time. Work friends are the only friends he has. A group of them must have gone out for a team-building baseball night. But further scrolling doesn’t reveal other images of other baseball-hat-wearing colleagues. Only more pictures of this girl.

  Many more pictures. She’s super pretty, with masses of long blonde hair, almost-black eyes, and fair skin. Her eyebrows are fashionably thick and as black as her eyes, which makes me think the hair color can’t be real, but the overall effect—very light hair, very dark eyes and brows—is appealing. Arresting even.

  I zoom in on one of the close-ups. She has a flawless complexion and could be twenty-five, thirty, or fifteen. It’s impossible to tell. The dimples in each cheek make her look younger than maybe she is, as do the freakishly white teeth. The whole effect is what Kat would call “excessively pert.” In this particular photo, her expression is not only pert, but saucy and provocative. Not the look of a co-worker.

  I press my lips together and swallow back whatever is rising from my stomach. “What do you really know about this guy?” Kat asked me more than once between the holiday party where William and I met and the brilliantly sunny March day when we so hastily wed, me pregnant and overwhelmed and drunk with love. “Don’t you ever wonder why such a hunk of man sandwich hasn’t already been snatched up?”

  No, I never have. “He’s an introvert,” I assured her, and myself. “He’s an engineer.” One über-focused on his job. I never worried about him cheating on me during his frequent business trips. William’s the kind of guy who would rather stay home working on a jigsaw puzzle than go out to a party. That’s the face he’s always shown to me.

  The photos of this girl go on and on, and so do I. I can’t help it. But when I come to one where she’s standing in a kitchen, my scrolling stops for good. Because it’s my kitchen, and she’s wearing one of my aprons. Nothing else. Her left hand is propped on the smooth curve of a bare hip. Her right is gripping a spatula, my favorite lightweight super thin stainless-steel spatula that was a birthday gift from Kat, and using it to make a mock military salute. She is smiling a wide, wholesome smile. If she weren’t topless, she’d look like a USO entertainer from a World War II poster.

  William has been quiet in the bathroom all this time, but now the toilet flushes. I take the last thirty seconds while he washes his hands to click over to his text messages, where I see his current text thread is with someone named Samantha.

  Her most recent text to him was:

  Tell her today. Do it, do it.

  Before that it was:

  You can get through this! Be brave.

  Before that:

  I miss you! ☺

  And before that:

  When are you coming home? ☹

  William’s replies are, if possible, even more nauseating:

  I love you, pumpkin.

  Miss ya babe. ♥

  Don’t fret. ☺

  Coming home soon. ♥♥

  “What are you doing?”

  That last one wasn’t a text. That was real-life William, standing at the foot of the bed. He’s still wearing only his white boxer shorts but no longer looks like a golden god. His skin is pasty white, except for two spots on his cheeks, which are scarlet. The only warm color in the room.

  “Give it,” he says, holding out his hand.

  I don’t. I sit perfectly still, pressing the phone between my palms like a tortilla. It’s strange. All our best and worst moments have been in hotel rooms. Our four-day honeymoon in a San Francisco hotel was a high point and felt magical. Our child, my child, was conceived in the Phoenix business hotel we ended up staying in the night Kat died. Our fraught chair-throwing encounter last April, at the Paris hotel where William booked a room when he followed me here, exposed the cracks in our marriage.

  And now here, at the good old Hôtel du Cheval Blanc, the cracks have deepened into chasms.

  “Who is she?” I ask. Just to see what he says.

  “She’s nobody,” he mumbles.

  I snort and toss the phone to the floor. “Seriously? You have a lot of photos of nobody.”

  His jaw twitches, and I know his brain is operating at maximum capacity, assembling the pieces of what has just taken place. William is good at puzzles, and he’s a devotee of game theory. For a fleeting instant I wonder if he left the phone on the nightstand on purpose, hoping—or perhaps knowing—I would pick it up and browse through the photos.

  Thereby relieving him of the burden of having to “do it,” as Samantha said.

  “She’s a friend,” he says. His eyes are like dull dry black stones.

  “Oh, you can do better than that, William. How did you meet?”

  He grabs a pair of jeans and starts to pull them on. I can smell the cheap hotel soap he used to wash his hands. His customary vanilla scent has been completely obliterated. “She’s from Minnesota.”

  “Minnesota?” It’s the last thing I expected him to say. “Do you know her from there?”

  “No, but Granddad does.”

  “Granddad? Are you kidding me?” I can’t imagine what William’s grandfather, whom I adore and respect, could possibly have to do with this next-to-naked person cavorting in my kitchen.

  “She’s the grandniece of one of his buddies. She wanted to move down to Phoenix. Get a job. Granddad asked if she could stay with us till she got settled.” William delivers this information in a robot-like fashion. Facts and data.

  “Stay with us?”

  He scoops up the phone from the floor, stuffs it into his back pocket, and doesn’t answer.

  He doesn’t have to. I get it. William didn’t want to admit to his grandfather that we were separated, so he let this random girl come down to stay. The two of them were alone together in the house. One thing led to another, I expect under the influence of booze. That’s when William is his least guarded and most impulsive self. We were both more than a bit tipsy when we first met at that holiday party.

  Still, I’m seized with the unhealthy compulsion to hear every last excruciating detail. “Tell me the rest, Will. Are you sleeping with her?”

  An amazingly stupid question. Of course he is. Her bare boobs in my kitchen testify to that. No wonder he ignored every single one of my calls, texts, emails, and postcards all summer long.

  He strides over to the armoire and pulls out a shirt. Good power move, William. Soon you’ll be fully dressed, and I’ll still be sitting here wrapped only in
a wrinkled brown sheet. Bravo.

  “Let me go at this another way,” I continue when he just stands there, holding the shirt and staring at the carpet. “How long has this pathetic little fling been going on?”

  He glowers. “I don’t like how you’re talking, Amy.”

  “You don’t like how I’m talking? I don’t like how you’re acting! When were you planning on telling me? About—her?”

  As I speak these words I put the last pieces of the puzzle together. William came to Paris to finish what he started last April, when he told me he never wanted to look at my face ever again. He probably even brought along divorce papers for me to sign.

  But finding out about Catherine threw him for a loop. Hence our tourist day yesterday. Hence the sex that happened here today. But all this time the excessively pert Samantha was texting and calling and putting the pressure on.

  “Are you in love with her?” I ask.

  It’s another stupid question. Of course he is. Or thinks he is.

  He shrugs into his shirt, buttons it, and tucks it into his jeans. “Christ, Amy, where do you get off sounding so high and mighty? You haven’t given me the time of day for literally years! All you ever cared about was yourself. And Kat.”

  I look away. It’s true that when Kat got sick I poured all my time and energy and love into her. For three intense and painful years. But she was dying. And then she died. You’d think William would get that.

  “People at work were right about you,” he adds.

  “What? What people?”

  His mouth twists into a sneer. “You don’t think the whole company wasn’t onto your wonderful ‘friendship’ with Kat?”

  He uses air quotes around the word “friendship.” William never uses air quotes. At least he never used to. Barely ten minutes ago, this man I suddenly don’t know at all was in my arms. In my body. I shudder.

  “Phoenix is a small town, Amy,” he says as I sit there, clutching my sheet. “You probably don’t remember, but someone from work knew you in college. Or knew of you.”

  I glare at him. Phoenix isn’t a small town, but I do recall that Jennifer, Robert’s wife—possibly soon-to-be ex-wife—went to ASU around the same time I did. She might have remembered that Kat and I were a couple for a while, and she might consider this a juicy-enough bit of gossip to pass on.