I sat down in the living room and Lisa emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a plate of oysters. Oysters, I thought. That’s a bit much. Maybe she was one of these beautiful unhinged types who was going to stalk me and ruin my family life and career, like Dolores in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. But when she placed the oysters down, I reprioritized. What I really had to worry about was food poisoning.
“I know they look outrageous,” she said, having caught the look I gave her shellfish. “And you don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to, but it’s this special recipe I picked up from this Japanese place I like. You’re not Jewish, are you?”
The creation in question involved warm oysters stuffed with sautéed shallots and buttered algae—algae—topped with sour cream. I was simultaneously apprehensive and intrigued.
“Take a sip of wine first,” she suggested. So I did.
Her little concoction turned out to be so delicious, I slurped down four of the six oysters on the plate, a gluttonous faux pas I hoped she would attribute to her fine cooking rather than poor upbringing on my part. After the oysters, she brought out a bowl of rocket tossed with large slivers of Parmesan cheese on black plates.
“I normally eat with chopsticks,” she admitted, passing me a fork and knife. “But I didn’t know if you’d be into that. I’m crazy about everything Japanese. It just seems more . . . intimate, you know?”
As I wasn’t eager to eat my salad with a stick, I didn’t say much by way of a response, but nodded as if she were expressing a fundamental truth that can’t be disagreed with.
“Have you been to Japan, then?” A logical follow-up on my part.
“No . . .” She cut a sliver of Parmesan in half with her fork. “But I’d like to go. But not to Tokyo, to someplace in the countryside. Like Kyoto? Have you been?”
I shook my head, because I was chewing. “So,” I said, after a forced swallow. “Shall we get the where-are-you-from and where-am-I-from thing out of the way?”
“Poughkeepsie,” she said, laughing. “In upstate New York. Do you know it?”
I told her I did, which surprised her, and explained that although I was born in England, I’d spent two years at RISD—and one long weekend I went up and down the Hudson visiting the museums and small galleries with my then-girlfriend. I did not mention that this girlfriend was now my wife.
“So, is that what you do now? Art?” She put her plate back on the table and crossed her right leg over her left. Those legs. Those legs! She was built like a dancer, very long and lean with high, taut ballerina tits that did not appear to be restricted by a bra.
“Art is what I try to do, yes.”
“Well, this is a good place for it.” I knew that smile. That smile was an undecided one that said, Your work could be total shite but I have no way of knowing, so I’ll just go get the main course now. Which is what she did.
While she fussed in the kitchen, I had a look about the room. I started with the stack of English magazines piled up in the defunct fireplace. The left side of the pile was almost entirely composed of New Yorkers. The right side was a rather eclectic mixture of old AD magazines, several Elles, three or four Marie Claire Cuisines, and a hefty stack of Herald Tribunes.
“Does it cost a lot to get these New Yorkers sent over?” I asked, kneeling down in front of her collection. The minute I said it, I realized I shouldn’t be going all MI6 on her periodicals. Women can be touchy about personal space.
“Oh, no!” She laughed from the kitchen. “It’s a job perk at the Tribune. The office gets them sent over and I smuggle them out.”
Oh, God. A journalist. She’d tell everything to the press. Tomorrow I’d have my face splashed across the paper: MARRIED MAN CAUGHT IN CULINARY TRYST WITH SMALL-TITTED AMERICAN.
She appeared in a doorway with a recipe book in one hand and a whisk in the other, a whisk that appeared to be covered in a riot of cream cheese. “Could you come in here and open the wine you brought?” she asked, coquettishly. “My hands are . . . full?”
My stomach dropped. I still had time to get out of there, to choose flight over fight. An attractive woman had asked me to open up a bottle of wine. It was a simple request. A turn of a corkscrew. No one had actually screwed anyone. Yet.
I followed Lisa back into the kitchen, my guilt and fear dissipating with the bobbing demilunes of her spectacularly tight ass. She was wearing a cream-colored wrap dress that showed off her lithe figure in the most tantalizing of ways. She had cinched the dress with a brown leather belt, underneath which was a camisole of soft pink silk. On her feet, she wore brown Moroccan babouches of the same leather as her belt. Simple. Lovely. I realized I’d neglected to ask if she’d wanted me to take my shoes off when I came in. But fuck it. If I was going to make a life-changing error, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it in my socks.
Lisa showed me where the glasses were and leaned back against the counter to watch me get them. I put the glasses down and set about opening up the bottle, wondering if I should kiss her now, later, or never? She was leaning back on her elbows; it would be perfect—I’d heave her up onto the counter, I’d pull aside her panties, we’d make love right there in the kitchen with all the lights on and the shades up. Oh, Lisa. Beautiful Lisa with her long, auburn hair and mod bangs and the freckles on her cheeks. Lord, don’t let me do this.
“Shall we?” she asked, nodding toward the wine. “I’ll be out in a second.”
I went back into the living room and poured us two large glasses. Lisa followed with the edible equivalent of interior decoration—she’d coordinated the main course with the living room. On matching square white plates sat two beds of black pasta with rather large dollops of white cheese and a ring of basil leaves and red pepper in a decorative circle around the plate rim.
“Chiaroscuro,” she said happily. “Squid ink pasta with ricotta.” I was beginning to think that she was playing a joke on my digestive system. Or maybe with my libido. I mean, we weren’t actually going to fornicate after eating noodles soaked in the liquid escape mechanism of a squid?
During dinner, we talked about the safe stuff: films we’d seen, books we’d read, a new wine bar that just opened up in the area. Finally, I got around to asking her what had brought her to France in the first place.
“A man, of course.” She shrugged. “I met him at Columbia. He taught poetry. It’s okay,” she said, smiling. “You can roll your eyes. You should. He was a Dadaist.” She topped off my wineglass, then hers. “I’d just finished the grad program in journalism and I didn’t have a job yet. Yves—that was his name—he got a job at the Sorbonne. So I decided to follow him over here. When I think back on it, he never really asked me to, I just assumed he’d wanted me to. I assumed wrong.” Her lips shifted into a frown. “It turned out he really had a thing for students.”
“But you stayed.”
“Well,” she said, “I stayed for a while. I started at the Tribune as an intern, but it was shitty work. You know, stapling, making coffee. And it was impossible to move up. All the good jobs went to the staff of the New York Times who got transferred to Paris. I didn’t know anyone, really. It’s hard to make friends here. So I moved back to New York.” She took off one of her moccasins, moved her foot in circles, and put her shoe back on.
“I spent a couple years freelancing for different publications until I finally got the same crummy job at the Times that I’d had at the Tribune: staple girl. But things move quicker in New York. I pitched a comeback column for the style section: the comeback of the shaving brush, the comeback of the flat. It was popular. You know, I moved up. And eventually there was an opening at the Tribune in Paris, and I thought, Hell, I’ll try Paris again on my own terms. And I moved back.”
“Still handy with the stapler?”
She laughed. “No, I do the culture page and once in a while I do the nightlife reviews for the
Sunday issue. New bars, new clubs, what’s in, what’s out . . . of course, it’s all geared toward wealthy expats, so what’s in is actually quite out, if you know what I mean.”
“And the professor?”
“Ugh,” she groaned. “He’s still at the Sorbonne. The last Dadaist in Paris.”
She fell silent. I fell silent. I looked down at my plate in panic. If there was a cheese course, I had thirty, maybe forty minutes to decide whether or not I was going to make an unpardonable mockery out of my wedding vows.
“There’s no dessert,” said Lisa, looking straight at me. “Coffee?”
Oh, but I had much less time than that.
Lisa reappeared with a tray bearing two cups of espresso, a saucer of milk, and a cup of brown sugar. When she placed the tray down on the coffee table, a little bit of milk sloshed out of the saucer. All of the sudden I knew that this was it. Neither one of us was going to be drinking any coffee.
No one in my life has ever come on to me like Lisa Bishop. She walked over and sat down on me, just lowered herself on my lap like a naughty koala. Tossing her long hair behind her shoulders, she cocked her head and cupped her hands around my face.
“Richard,” she said quietly. “I find you very attractive. It isn’t good.”
“No . . .” I answered, my heart engaged in somersaults. “It isn’t.”
Well, fuck it. Being there in the first place was already a crime. I might as well make the bloody best of it. Clearing my mind of everything but lust, I pushed the rest of her hair behind her shoulders and slipped my hand behind her neck. I pulled her toward me and we started kissing, slowly. Her mouth tasted like vanilla, her tongue was soft and warm. She spread her legs farther apart and pushed herself against my erection. I moved my hands to her breasts, kneading them and stroking her nipple between my forefinger and my thumb. She let out a soft moan and pressed her cheek against my forehead. She began to stroke my hard-on from the outside of my clothing, which made me feel like a teenager again, getting me more excited still. I moved my right hand beneath her dress and teased my way toward her panties. They were silk, and they were loose. I moved them to one side just like I’d been dying to do in the kitchen, and put my fingers inside of her. She sucked in her breath and began kissing my ear and my neck with perverse abandon. Well, that was the end of it—I have a very sensitive neck that proved to be preposterously responsive to her hot, little tongue.
She pushed herself harder against me. I was touching her and kissing her and it felt so right and so fantastic, I moved straight from gobsmacked-level rapture to now-I-can-die.
There wasn’t any music playing, the CD she’d had on had ended, and the sounds of us moving on the couch and of us touching each other were unbelievably intense. I had to have her. Immediately. I began to unzip my fly but she stopped my fingers. She licked her hand and stroked my cock with her wet palm. She started lowering herself down to suck me off but I eased her back up and kissed her.
“I can’t wait,” I whispered near her ear. She took me in her hand and eased herself on top of me again. She started sliding down, then up, teasing me brutally, the pleasure of her nakedness against mine too much. I put my hand on the small of her back and thrust myself inside of her: she gasped. We started moving together, and bloody hell, it was divine. I moved my left hand over her backside. I grabbed her naughty arse and pressed her down on me. She sucked in her breath and responded by kissing me fully with her tongue. With my right hand I was holding her panties to the side and touching her clitoris, and when I looked down I could see myself moving in and out of her.
“I’m gonna come, I can’t . . .” I held her tighter.
“I want to come with you.” She took me fully within her, grinding against me in a circular motion. She began to touch herself with her right hand. I could feel her touching herself there, and it felt like she was touching me each time I thrust inside of her. It was too much. Much too much.
“Lisa . . .” I sighed.
She moaned and held me tighter, pulling my head to her chest while she writhed her way through her enviably long orgasm. With me still inside of her, she lowered her head to my shoulder and kissed me softly on the neck.
“Hey,” she whispered.
“Yeah?” I answered, floating.
She responded by kissing me on my nipple with a flash of her wicked tongue.
“Let’s do it again, England,” she whispered, slipping off her underwear.
• • •
Lisa made me happy. She made me feel capable and desired and potent and alive. She brought me back to my body: to the appreciation of my legs, my working hands, my strong back, my cock. She turned sex back into a play form, instead of the confusing, dark thing it had become with my wife. A diversion. A confession. An action standing in for something else.
I didn’t think I’d continue on with it. I thought that it would end with our symbiotic sex that one night. But no. That’s a lie, actually. I knew once we were finished that it would happen again and again, and that I’d put as much energy into nurturing this new relationship as I would keeping it a secret from my wife.
And I was good at it, God help me. You don’t put any thought into whether or not you will be until it happens, but I turned out to be a standout failed monogamist. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt grateful for my wife. Grateful for my daughter. Grateful that the one thing lacking from our perfect family circle was being supplied by someone else.
But now that Lisa has left me, the ease of what we had together hangs about like warm gunpowder after fireworks. Do I really want her back, or do I just want what we had? Our unchartered lovemaking. The absence of carved patterns and followed rules. The easy brightness of the new.
I put Lisa’s letters back into the cabinet, no clearer on whether or not she was behind the situation with The Blue Bear, but certain that whatever she was doing, planning, or not planning, she finally missed me back. She would have spent enough time now in her posh house with her fancy spoon designer to learn that love wasn’t as fun when it was predictable, when the game was fixed.
I’ve asked myself a hundred times since Anne confronted me in my studio whether, if I had it to do over, I would have gone up for that first drink with Lisa, accepted her invitation for dinner, allowed the whole thing to start. I don’t know what this means for my future, but I don’t regret my affair. I regret that Anne found out about it, and I regret that I hurt her, but to regret the entirety of the relationship itself would be to deny that I had real feelings for Lisa. Which I did.
I owe my wife much more than an apology: I owe her the difficult feat of falling back in love. But can we come back to love after an absence, or does it die from neglect?
It does die. It does wither. You can’t even walk away from a meal on a table without it losing heat and changing, much less a plant, a pet, a marriage. I was an idiot to think that I could continue to see Lisa without it affecting my relationship with Anne. Is the damage irrevocable? Or is there a way back to our past where we can build around the dark places until our mistakes are far beneath us, dead for lack of sun?
Anne is giving me a chance, and I lack the courage to take it. There’s no undoing what I’ve done.
7
THE NEXT day, after Anne went to work and I saw Camille off to school, I gathered up all of Lisa’s letters and headed to the gallery, where Julien was in the middle of admonishing Bérénice over something she’d brought for lunch.
“She’s got pickled cabbage in the storage room,” he whispered, out of earshot of her desk. “She says it’s good for colds.”
“It is, actually.”
“Yeah, well, our printing paper smells like balls.”
I announced that I would deliver The Blue Bear to London. That I’d do it next week, during my holiday.
“Great! We’ll just settle on a day, then.” He started flipping through his agenda.
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“But there’s one thing,” I said, pulling out Lisa’s letters and dropping them on his desk. “I spent all night going through these. You’re probably right, that it isn’t her, but I don’t want to know until I have to. Until I’m there.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be hard,” he said, reaching for one of the envelopes. “You’ve got the return address right there, and I can tell you where the painting’s going—”
I slapped my hand down over the envelope to keep him from executing his intended task.
“Okay,” he said, flinching. “Whatever you want.”
“And can you hold on to those?” I nodded at Lisa’s letters. “I don’t want them in the house.”
“Sure. But you’ve actually got more mail.”
He went to the storage closet and came back with more contracts for sold paintings, another recipe from my mother, and a Halloween card from an expatriated American named Shelly Hampl who was both a client and a fan.
“She bought two key paintings, you know,” he said, pointing at the oversize card that began to cackle when I opened it.
There’s a certain kind of American woman—a little doughy, white, divorced—who comes to Paris to reinvent herself, a process that usually sees her emerging far higher on the extroverted scale than she’s ever been before. Shelly Hampl is one of these women. She’s fond of saris, which she wears over ample jeans and pump-up Reeboks because, you know, in Paris you just walk, and walk, and walk. Not that there is anything wrong with her, per se. It’s just that when you finally get a patron wearing pump-up high-tops, you hope they come accompanied by an entourage, a talent manager, and an Escalade.
After locating the tape measure from the rubble in Julien’s desk, we went to measure The Blue Bear so that we could figure out how I could transport the damn thing to England. He promised me that his men would deliver it first thing in the morning, and after failing to convince me to purchase a ski rack for its transport, I gathered up my mail and the cackling Halloween card and kissed Julien good-bye. I was halfway home when I realized I’d swept up Lisa’s letters along with everything else.
I Am Having So Much Fun Without You Page 8
