I Am Having So Much Fun Without You

by Courtney Maum

  Lisa had never been jealous of Anne-Laure. Selfish, yes, and flighty, but vindictive, she was not. There was no reason for her to do something as manipulative as buy a painting that I’d done for my pregnant wife, but at the same time the coincidences seemed too outlandish. A buyer from London. A buyer named Dave.

  Lisa and I had still been seeing each other when I was finishing the paintings for the Premier Regard show—she loved the whole idea of it, assigning more meaning to keys as objects than I did. While Anne more or less turned a blind eye to my two-year dip into the commercial art pool, tolerating it as you would the “let me do a play for you!” phase in a young child, Lisa genuinely liked the key paintings. She helped me feel like I wasn’t selling out so much as providing the public with a set of experiences they could connect to. More than a piece of metal to be inserted into a lock, she got me thinking about the passage keys grant to places that can’t be reached with the aid of a locksmith, or by a letter with a stamp, and how the taking away of keys sometimes denies access to the truly physical: bellies, buttocks, closed eyelids, toes. Mind you, she gave me this little pep talk six weeks before asking for the key to her apartment back because she was getting married, she was moving, just like that. Sitting there on the cold concrete, I reconsidered her character. Maybe she was calculating enough to have orchestrated the purchase of the bear.

  Lisa’s stationery was petal yellow with her name letter-pressed in green. This stationery always struck me as out-of-characterly plutocratic. Even my own wife didn’t have monogrammed stationery, and she had a flipping de in her maiden name.

  September 18, 2002

  Dear Richard,

  The letter started, as most letters addressed to me did.

  It’s been seven weeks now since I’ve arrived in London. Isn’t that nuts? I haven’t even unpacked all of my bags yet, I’ve mostly been concentrating on the bedroom and the kitchen, which Dave is letting me redo. I’m going to use a lot of white tile, even for the walls, like that restaurant I told you about in Stockholm. Remember?

  I think of you often and I wonder if you are okay. You were in very bad shape when I left Paris. So panicked. So urgent. I guess you’re still mad at me for leaving, but one day you’ll realize what a useless emotion anger really is. Honestly, what you were trying to hold on to with us would have perished in the holding. Don’t turn into one of those expats who thinks that artists need to suffer in order to be creative! There’s so many of them in Paris. They all have thinning hair and navy boat sweaters and, now that I think of it, a lot of them are named Greg.

  Anyway. Back in college, I had a writing teacher who told me that writing should be fun. Back then, I didn’t believe him (I was reading lots of Plath), but it’s true that once I started working, I had so little time for my own writing. When I did sit down to do it, I often thought, What a shame that this isn’t fun! Until I changed my tone a bit. Which reminds me! It looks like the Independent is going to run the design column that I pitched. Can you believe they took an American? It’s curiously well paid!

  I’ve been trying to work on my own stuff twice a week, and on weekends, I go in town and take photographs. Or I go out in the countryside and take photographs. Dave is so organized, he’s inspiring me to get organized myself. Every morning he wakes up, has a cup of black coffee, reads one or two articles, and then shuts himself in his office until five o’clock, when he comes down and has a tea. He keeps on working for an hour or two until he’s done for the day. Got goose bumps yet? I know how much you hate routine. His creative process is an organized one. But does that mean it’s boring? I don’t know, it’s up for argument; but I’ll tell you something, Richard, stability—when tossed in with the right amount of love, respect, passion (and a little bit of sex!)—is better than you think. I hope, for your sake, that you’ve learned how to live your life a little better. Maybe you should try giving up alcohol for a while. Maybe you should try being faithful!! : ) I’m happy, Richard. Are you?

  Always thinking of you,

  Lisa

  Like always with Lisa’s letters, once I finished reading them, I was left with a seasickness of conflicting emotions. Pleasure, because she’d written, and disappointment, because her letters never amounted to what I really wanted: a confession that she missed me, that she’d made a mistake in leaving, that she wanted me back.

  With that figurative letter in hand, I could recoup some dignity and control. I could write back “no.” But what happened with these letters, these catalogs of her coffee and tea-drinking fiancé, the white tiles of her new life, was that they left me jealous and distracted. It was calculating of her really: because the letters left me wanting more from them than I was getting, I still wanted her.

  I had to ask Lisa to stop writing me, but I lacked the courage to ask. What would a future be like without the occasional proof that she’d existed? That, for a bottled moment, she’d adored me back? I owed it to Anne-Laure to cut off communication with Lisa. I’d promised her that. But I needed it—I really needed it—this secret line to something private. One day soon, I’d get in touch with Lisa and tell her to stop writing. But in the meantime, along with other home improvements to my marriage, I had to find the decency to tell my wife that The Blue Bear had sold.

  3

  I CERTAINLY can’t blame the French education system for the problems in my marriage. In fact, I’d say that the French make it almost too easy to have a life when you’re a parent. State-subsidized spaces in the neighborhood nursery are every citizen’s right, and the public school system is gratis. The cafeteria serves a cheese course, classes run till 4:30 p.m. (and that’s without extracurriculars), and most schools run on a six-day program, with half days on Wednesdays for elementary school students and Saturdays also, once your kid’s in middle school. That’s right, in four short years, my daughter will have school on Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to lunch. Now, in theory, yes, that means one can’t go running off on a weekend getaway if one can’t get a sitter, but it also means that one can start doing something outrageous on a Friday like knock back a bit o’ port.

  Sometimes I think that I wouldn’t live in France if I hadn’t married a native, but it probably isn’t true. I spent two years at the École des Beaux-Arts exchange program in Paris and two more years in the graduate painting program at RISD in Providence, and although I had more fun in America, I never could have afforded to have a broken wrist set, and I sure as hell would never have coughed up what those people pay for their childrens’ higher education. If Anne and I already have rows over our vacation and recreation fund on her fancy lawyer salary and my less fancy artist one with a daughter in a free school that serves her duck casserole and Reblochon before naptime, I can only imagine what would happen if we had to dole out fifty grand a year so that Cam could get felt up on a pool table littered with plastic Solo Cups by some imbecile named Chuck.

  And yet. And yet. Sometimes I feel that Anne and I lost something that was essential about us—to us, even—when we left the States. We were foreigners studying in what was admittedly a strange land where the customs and mores never ceased to provide us with fodder for private jokes. Everything delighted us. We were insouciant and pompous. Anne started taking hip-hop ballet classes and wearing linen trench coats. She stocked canned snails in my pantry and empty shells in my freezer “just in case.” On weekends in Boston, she’d make me stand in crowded places and report back on whether I agreed with her about how clean people smelled. “Like mangoes,” she said. “American girls always smell like fruit.”

  And she was my best critic. As talented as—if not more talented than—I as an illustrator, she had a built-in bullshit detector that served as a barometer for my graduate thesis show: an interactive series of pop-culture Russian dolls that depicted the rise or fall of cultural figures. For instance, in one set, the largest doll showed a painting of American women working on a factory floor during World War II. Under that, an image of a t
wo-car garage, followed by a milk carton, then a stalk of corn. The smallest doll represented Martha Stewart. In another set, I’d shellacked newspaper clips of union protesters throughout Britain, and underneath that, an illustration of a British-made Gloster aircraft and so on and so forth with icons of the former British manufacturing industry until you came to a small doll representing Margaret Thatcher.

  When we first moved back to Paris, I was still doing pop-culture politico work like this—or rather, I was trying to in between changing nappies and running out to Franprix for overripe bananas. But sometimes, you just get really tired of keeping up the pretenses. It’s like making small talk with the stranger seated next to you during dinner at a wedding. You’re firing through the appetizers and first round of drinks, no problem, but by the time the chicken Marsala arrives—gelatinous and tepid—you think, Lord help me, I’ve got nothing left to say. Without realizing I was doing so, I slipped into time-out mode. With my art. My wife.

  To her credit, Anne never asked that I start working on more conventional projects. I put the pressure on myself. Or rather, I felt pressure coming from Anne’s family and transformed this into pressure upon myself. At that point, Anne was still studying for the requisite exams that would allow her to practice law in Europe. Aside from small amounts I made selling paintings in group shows and a laughable hourly rate I got from a translating job Monsieur de Bourigeaud found me in his firm, we weren’t really making money. Oh, we would be, soon enough, or rather, Anne would be, but in the beginning, Anne’s parents took care of us, even providing the down payment on our house.

  Now, as a lower-middle-class lad from Hemel Hempstead, this kind of silver-spooning shouldn’t have sat well with me at all. And at first, it didn’t. Anne and I saw ourselves as comrades-in-arms, well educated and levelheaded, yes, but still intrepid. We wanted to do things our way. We hadn’t needed anyone’s help before this, and we didn’t see why we needed it then.

  That changed when we started visiting the flats that our paltry savings could afford us: heartless, one-room studios on the sixth floors of charmless buildings in neighborhoods where you wouldn’t want to walk alone at night, and all this while Anne was seven months pregnant. In such a place, I wouldn’t have been able to store my art equipment, let alone do any painting, and Anne began to have nightmares in which she found herself welded not just to the baby, but to the walls of the apartment, terrified that she’d be a homebound mum forever, with no way back out.

  And then one Sunday, after lunch at their home in the wooded suburbs of Le Vésinet, her parents took us to visit a small town house in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris: three stories with a tidy plot of land in the back, just big enough for a garden, and an unfinished work space on the second floor that could function as a studio. As I walked through the light-filled area of the largest private work area I might potentially ever have, I found myself hoping that Anne would swallow her pride and accept the blue blood coursing through her like a prodigal daughter coming home.

  And she did. She caved. We both did. We accepted the Bourigeauds’ financial help and started our new life. Due to a mind that is more pragmatic than mine, Anne never felt guilty about accepting her parents’ cash. Instead, she repaid their generosity by being the very best mother, daughter, and lawyer that she could be, while I let the shame of such a handout build inside of me until it made me feel like less of a man, less of an artist, less than everything I had one day hoped to be.

  It was around this time that I started looking for representation in Paris. Although I’d had several pieces from my thesis work along with some of my former installations exhibited in group shows around Europe, I couldn’t find a gallerist willing to give me my own show. Apparently, I wasn’t coming at the political-­pop angle in the right way. My work wasn’t loud enough, it wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t neon pink. Others told me that there wasn’t enough cohesion among my various pieces, or that there was too much of it, to come back and visit when I was “known.” Of course, you couldn’t “be” someone without getting your own show, and you couldn’t get your own show if you were a nobody. Feeling despondent, I nevertheless forced myself to visit the last three galleries on my list, one of which was the Premier Regard run by Julien Lagrange.

  When he looked through my portfolio, he fixated on a photograph I’d slid near the back, a section most people never got to because they’d already decided that I didn’t have that “thing” that they were looking for. But Julien was interested in The Blue Bear, the one painting that had nothing to do with all my other work, the one painting that was schmaltzy.

  “Do you have other ones like this?” he asked.

  “What,” I said, “like, awful?”

  He laughed. “No, depictive. Accessible. From the same point of view?”

  I said I’d messed about with other scenes viewed through a keyhole, but it wasn’t a direction I’d pursued because it was amateurish and sappy.

  “Yeah,” he said, drumming his fingers on the photo. “But this, I could sell.”

  He explained that due to the success of a British nautical painter he represented called Stephen Haslett, he had a solid clientele of British and American expats who liked to buy art that looked romantic in their new homes.

  “They don’t go for the modern stuff,” he said. “These are the kind of people who come back from holiday with Provençal tablecloths and salt. Anyway, if you could put together a set of key paintings, I could give you a show.”

  I didn’t believe him, but we stayed in touch. In fact, rather quickly we became friends, which is a hard thing to do in a country where people consider everyone they didn’t go to elementary school with a stranger. Julien kept bringing up the key paintings, and I kept replying that I found his proposition beneath me. The problem was that I wasn’t working on anything else. Aside from its joys and unparalleled weirdness, parenthood had me in a fathomless, sleep-deprived, creative rut. I could barely manage to squeeze oil paint onto a palette—I wasn’t in any frame of mind to do cutting-edge art. Plus, I was keen to get out from underneath the Bourigeauds’ golden thumb. I was ready—eager, even—to experience what it felt like to be commercially successful. The Blue Bear had been a nice experience for me, cathartic. Would it be so wrong to keep on painting tableaux seen through doors?

  The creation of the key paintings was effortless. Meditative, even. Once I had a go at Julien’s proposition, I found I couldn’t stop. Having been corporally bound to one woman for so many years, exploring moments from my past relationships felt like a release. In hindsight, the nostalgic fugue state that catapulted my process was probably one of the reasons I was primed to meet Lisa when I did.

  In addition to being a sentimental hat tip to ex-girlfriends, the show was also a salutation to my erstwhile twenties. The subject of School Days, for example, is a stall of lime-lined urinals in an abandoned elementary school that had been reappropriated as a squat.

  R’s Kitchen shows an overloaded sink that belonged to a New Zealand finger painter who liked communal nighttime Rollerblading and piercing people’s ears. I am happy to say that I left that relationship with my distaste for both in-line skating and the smell of rubbing alcohol intact.

  Pet Lover shows a mudroom back in Providence, and underneath the raincoats there’s a kennel with no dog. But the real subject is an American girl named Elliott, the last woman I dated before meeting Anne.

  And there were others, sixteen of them in total. But as much as they cast a glimpse into love’s beginning, the paintings chosen for the Premier Regard show offer a still life of love’s end. And the sale of The Blue Bear represents the saddest end of all.

  • • •

  By the time my wife got home that night, I had a pot of cream-and-cracked-pepper pasta bubbling on the stove along with a green salad with Roquefort and red pears, and an open bottle of Chinon breathing on the counter. My guilt over having received another of Lisa’s le
tters coupled with the fact that I had to tell Anne about The Blue Bear had encouraged me to make two of my wife’s favorite dishes. I’d even purchased pistachio éclairs.

  I was sitting at the dining room table when Anne came in, working alongside Camille on the arts-and-crafts obsession that had consumed her the past year: origami animals. Perhaps due to her half-Breton heritage, she was inordinately fond of making origami crabs, but tonight, for a school project, she was folding monkeys.

  Leather briefcase in hand, Anne bent down to kiss Camille while simultaneously running her finger across the flat nose of the paper primate that our daughter was hard at work on.

  “That’s beautiful, honey,” Anne said, holding it up. “Is it a baboon?”

  “It’s a lemur,” Cam replied, grabbing her glitter glue stick.

  “Obviously,” I said, winking at my wife, who snubbed my chummy body language by drifting into the kitchen, returning with a wineglass to accompany the bottle on the table.

  “And what about that, then?” She took off a high heel and massaged the ball of her foot through her pink stockings while inspecting my mess of koi paper and Scotch tape.

  “It’s a turducken. A chicken inside a duck inside a turkey.”

  Camille scrunched her nose at her mother. “Gross.”

  “So?” I asked, raising my wineglass to meet Anne’s. “How go things in the world of Savda and Dern?”

  “Ugh,” she groaned, sinking into a chair behind Camille. “It looks like I’ve got a new case: these pregnant women in Lille. They’ve come together to file a lawsuit against wine label makers.” She reached for the Chinon. “In America they have a warning saying women shouldn’t drink during pregnancy because of birth defects. But we have nothing. People don’t want to think about defects when they are drinking wine. But these women, they all had children born with fetal alcohol disorders. So they want a label. And a logo. Look.” She reached for Camille’s crayon and a piece of paper. I watched her long fingers push the stubby crayon across the page. “Like this.”