The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  Victor has no subtlety.

  But as it turns out, it is a good thing that all the utterances are at such a fevered pitch, otherwise they would be drowned out by the hissing from the Classicists. Practically every speech is interrupted by boos and jeers, and then by the applause and cheering of Victor’s bohemian friends. The actors often have to stop, mid-monologue, to let the noise from the audience subside before beginning their lines again.

  I try to pay attention to what’s happening on the stage. I try to listen to the words, watch the frantic, sometimes farcical actions of the characters. I know that Victor will question me about everything later, and I had better be able to give him some firm opinions. But the truth is that I don’t care about the lovers. When Hernani tells Doña Sol (again) of his devotion to her, I want him to shut up. Their relationship is too passive. She is nothing more than a glorified servant, never challenging him, always available to him. She shows much more spirit with Don Ruy Gomez. I think theirs would be a better marriage.

  Maybe because I am in love, other lovers appear fraudulent. Only Adèle and I know the exquisite happiness of true love. Only Adèle and I are fully worthy of its blessing.

  That, or Victor can’t write a good drama.

  “The heckling makes the play seem more interesting than it is,” whispers Adèle in a quiet moment. I squeeze her hand. We are always in such agreement, as though what I am thinking in my head is, in fact, a conversation with her.

  At the end of the first act, Hernani declares his desire to kill his rival for the love of Doña Sol.

  “My vengeance will guide my dagger to your heart,” he says. “Without a sound, it will find its mark.”

  “Do you think Victor suspects?” I whisper to Adèle.

  “Guesses,” she says.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “When you suspect, there is evidence. With a guess, there is only instinct.”

  Hernani’s speech sends a shiver of apprehension through me nonetheless.

  At the intermission, we dare not leave our seats in the balcony for fear of having to do battle as we make our way along the aisle. There are people yelling on the stairways and down in the lobby. Their voices lift up to reach us. The circular lobby is its own stage, decorated with pillars, all the stairways leading away from it like spokes fanning out from the hub of a wheel.

  I turn in my seat slightly so I can look at Adèle. She has turned in her seat to look at me. Sometimes we do this for hours at a time. We cannot seem to get enough of each other. Every little thing is fascinating.

  “I love your ears,” I say. I can just see the lobes hiding in her hair. They look like pearls.

  “I love your eyes,” she says.

  “I love your eyes.”

  We go on like this, sotto voce, until the unruly audience members have clambered back into their seats and the lights have mercifully dimmed enough that I can run my hand up the inside of Adèle’s thigh, the material of her dress whispering in protest.

  She takes my hand in the dark and raises it to her mouth, licking each of my fingers slowly and deliberately.

  I feel faint, and with my other hand, I grip the armrest of my seat to keep from toppling over.

  The curtain goes up. The ridiculous action begins again.

  The audience appears more spirited after the intermission. I realize they have probably been drinking to fuel their fighting ardour. I suddenly worry about our position near the balcony railing. What if a riot breaks out? We could be thrown over the railing or trampled to death in our seats. These days, whenever Parisians gather together in a public space, it seems that there is the danger of a riot. I look around nervously.

  Hernani gives another tiresome speech about his undying love. A Classicist in the dress circle hurls a cabbage at the stage. Hernani gambols adroitly out of the way. The cabbage lies centre stage, and there is a moment when all the actors regard it, as though it possesses miraculous properties, as though it is an oracle they have sudden need to consult.

  “Behold the holy cabbage,” I say to Adèle, and she giggles.

  Hernani continues with his speech, and Doña Sol, with her back to the audience, kicks the cabbage. It rolls slowly, solemnly across the stage and disappears into the wings.

  The audience applauds, and even I find myself grinning. Perhaps this is what I will tell Victor: that the actions of the crowd add drama to the play, that the throngs keep the action passionate and spirited. It is not a distraction to have the hecklers; rather, it is an enhancement.

  Don Ruy Gomez wants to marry Doña Sol to regain his lost youth. He is sympathetic because of this, but towards the end of the play, he becomes more and more demonic. It has to be thus, I suppose; he has to be blamed for the fate of the lovers. First, Doña Sol, chained to her destiny as the old man’s wife, takes poison, and then Hernani kills himself in response.

  “Why doesn’t she just run off?” I say, annoyed at Victor’s churlishness in killing the lovers. And then something else occurs to me. “Do you think I am meant to be Gomez?”

  “If you are anyone, my sweet,” Adèle says reassuringly, “you are Doña Sol.”

  There is a rush on cabs at the front of the theatre after the play, so we decide to walk partway home. I tuck the fact of the lack of cabs away in my mind to be used, if need be, to explain to Victor why we took so long to travel back to Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

  Adèle slides her arm through mine. “At last,” she says. “We are free of Victor at last.”

  But we will never be free of Victor, I think. Even this, our wonderful night together, has all been in service to Monsieur Ego Hugo. I will take Adèle home and then spend hours sitting up with Victor analyzing every moment of the evening’s performance. I don’t know that I can bear this.

  “Do you really love me?” I ask, meaning, Would you do anything for me? Would you leave your family and begin life again with me?

  Adèle stops me in the street, takes my face in her hands. “I couldn’t love you more,” she says. “You set me free. And I especially love you, dear Charles, because you never make undue demands on me.”

  We walk along the Seine. The river is oily in the moonlight, flexing between its banks like a wild thing. Aside from a few men fishing by lantern, we are the only people walking the cobblestoned streets. It is very dark. I am a little nervous about thieves, and am glad that I am carrying a small mother-of-pearl dagger concealed on my person. Mother, who is more afraid of thieves than I am, insisted upon it.

  Adèle pokes me in the ribs. “You’re not listening to me,” she says.

  “Forgive me. I was thinking of how to describe the river.” A river I have seen so many times that my familiarity with it seems to lift it beyond description.

  “Don’t become like Victor,” warns Adèle. “He never listens to anything I say either.”

  I bristle at the comparison. “I am nothing like Victor,” I say.

  Adèle giggles. “That sounded exactly like Victor,” she says.

  I am in a bad humour by the time we get into a cab at the Pont Neuf.

  But Adèle reaches across me, pulls down the window blinds so we’re hidden from the driver and the people on the streets. She squeezes my knee. I grab for her breasts. We fall clumsily into each other, our first kiss missing completely.

  My churlishness vanishes. The rock of the cab is the sway of our bodies is the rhythm of my heart rocking in its carriage of bone. The invisible streets pass by. Adèle is undoing the buttons on my trousers. I have forgotten my words for the river. I am only here. And love opens me.

  THERE IS AN ORCHARD in the Jardin du Luxembourg where we like to walk. Sometimes we have the children with us, but I prefer it when we are alone, when we are not worried about whether an errant touch or a stolen kiss will be reported, innocently enough, to Victor.

  There are hundreds of apple trees in the orchard, and we like to play a game with the names of the different varieties, grouping them into categories. Often we choose a cat
egory before we get to the orchard.

  “Animals,” says Adèle today.

  It is a beautiful late-spring afternoon. We are blessedly without the children today. We walk between the trees languidly, our hands brushing against each other, the heat from our two bodies the same temperature as the air that surrounds us. Adèle looks to the left and I look to the right, reading the names written on the tags at the base of the trees.

  “Dog’s Snout,” I say triumphantly.

  “Sheep’s Head,” she says.

  It takes a while to find another animal name. I pull her off the path, kiss her deeply. She runs her hands down my back. Someone wanders past and we break apart.

  “Mouse,” she says. “Cat’s head.”

  “Mermaid,” I say.

  “A mermaid isn’t an animal.”

  “It’s half-animal.”

  “Half—fictional animal.”

  “Miller’s Thumb,” I say.

  “That’s a man.”

  “Man is an animal.”

  Adèle strokes my arm. “You are hopeless,” she says.

  We walk through the orchard. We move through other subjects.

  “Love,” says Adèle.

  This time I’m the one who wins.

  “Perpetuelle,” I say. “Fail Me Never. Open Heart. Everlasting.”

  She is left with First and Last, and the rather dubious Neversink.

  “Never sink,” she says, dramatically clasping me around the waist. “Float, my sweet darling. Float! Float!”

  We pause before the label on a slender tree.

  “Why would you want to eat an apple with that name?” I ask.

  The tree bears the tag Great Unknown.

  “Maybe it’s a description of the taste,” says Adèle.

  “Surely they could be more specific than that.” I imagine this apple-namer as a man of melancholy nature, someone who has lost faith in words and yet is still expected to attach them to meaning. But who would propose a name like this? Wouldn’t they just ask someone else to name the apple more appropriately?

  “I wish we could eat one,” says Adèle. But the blossom has just faded, and the apples aren’t yet growing on the tree. We won’t be able to taste the Great Unknown until the autumn.

  We walk in silence for a while, although I keep looking at the names on the trees. We have just over an hour before Adèle has to return home. This is not long enough to go to the small hotel where we sometimes manage an entire exquisite afternoon—if we are lucky. Our life together is broken into different locales, depending on how much time we have to spend. The geography of our love corresponds absolutely to the clock.

  Increasingly, I feel despair when I think of our future. I don’t know how we are to resolve this problem of not having enough time together. Some days I entertain the idea of telling Victor. Would friendship be able to triumph over adultery? On the days when I am feeling happy and optimistic, this seems entirely possible. On the days when I despair, like today, I fear Victor would kill me if he knew of his wife’s affair with me. Certainly he would challenge me to a duel, and since he is more robust, a better sportsman, and likely to be filled with moral outrage and vitriol, he would probably kill me with his first shot.

  “I wish that we had time to go to our hotel,” says Adèle. “Or that we could be naked here, under the trees.” She squeezes my hand, and I manage a smile. Each time I drift away from her, she manages to snag me back, and I am so grateful for that, so grateful for her. I mustn’t poison what we have by thinking of the future. I close my eyes briefly. I can smell the last of the blossom, a perfume so clean and sweet that it is hard to imagine anything more perfect.

  The names of the apples that I like best are the simple names. I find them more profound than the poetic ones, because I imagine the simple titles bear witness to the places or the circumstances where the apples were first found.

  River. Sunrise. Field. Day. Sunset. Star. Hunger.

  “If you could name an apple,” I ask Adèle, “what would you call it?”

  I think she will pick a flowery name, something poetic that makes a tangle in the mouth. But she answers swiftly, as though she had thought of the question long before I asked it.

  “I would call it after you,” she says.

  “Charles?”

  “No, not Charles,” she says. “Your other name. Charlotte.”

  I ARRIVE FIRST and take a seat near the back of the church. It is afternoon. The building is empty except for me, and my slightest movement echoes loudly in the cavernous chamber. The pew is uncomfortable, and when I shift on the hard wooden bench, the rustle of my skirts can be heard throughout the vaulted room.

  When our time is short and the day is a good one, Adèle and I meet in the orchard. When our time is short and the weather is inclement, we meet in the church. Today it is rainy and cool outside, and the unheated church feels damp. So much easier to believe in God when the sun is shining and the stained-glass window shuffles its colours over the grey stone and dark wood interior.

  I like arriving first. I like the anticipation of waiting for Adèle, the sound of the heavy doors creaking open, her quick footsteps on the stone floor. I like watching her walk down the aisle towards me, her face flushed from hurrying. That first moment, when she looks for me and finds me, is a moment I never tire of witnessing. That moment of recognition is one of the most satisfying in life. The instant a lover seeks you out. The instant of understanding something, of working out the answer to a problem that has been puzzling you for some time. The moment when something suddenly becomes clear.

  This church is not the closest one to Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Adèle and I live. We cannot risk going to the church in our own neighbourhood. It is not that we fear meeting Victor—he is rarely inside a church—but more that we fear meeting someone who knows Victor and Adèle. And that church is the one in which Victor and Adèle were married. So we frequent this modest church, many streets away, where we are fairly certain we will not be discovered. But even then, we take precautions. We come in the middle of the afternoon, when the church will be empty. And I come dressed as a woman.

  You might think this is the secret I was referring to earlier, but this is not it. Dressing as a woman to rendezvous with Adèle is simply strategy. Two women in a church are not given a second thought, a second glance. Two women can sit close together on the same pew, can walk down the street with their arms linked and arouse no suspicion. They will not be thought of as lovers. They will merely be two friends who are out enjoying the city together.

  I borrow my mother’s clothes. As she lives, temporarily, with me, it is not difficult for me to take a dress or two from her wardrobe and return them before she has noticed their absence. I look remarkably like my mother, with my high forehead and my delicate features, and I make a convincing woman. Sometimes I wonder, if Victor did see us together, whether he would be able to tell that his wife’s new friend was, in fact, his old friend. It is tempting to put this to the test, but part of my being a convincing woman is that I act the role with confidence, and I fear that I would lose my nerve in the presence of Victor, that I would falter, and that he would discover my true identity.

  I like being a woman. There is a freedom in it that I find a relief. No one is going to challenge me to a duel. If I say something out of turn, I will be ignored or forgiven for my outburst, not expected to pace twenty steps into the undergrowth with a loaded pistol. I like walking on the inside of the street, not out by the gutter, which runs with sewage. I like being helped up into a cab, having doors held open for me, having men doff their hats to me in the avenue. I like the whisper of my skirts, the feel of them in my hands when I gather them up in a knot to step over a muddy patch of ground. I look much better in a woman’s hat than I do in a man’s. My small hands were made for soft leather gloves that button up the forearm with tiny pearl buttons.

  Often I prefer being Charlotte to Charles, and the surprising thing is that I think Adèle prefers this to
o. With Charles she has to feel the guilt of adultery, the shame that she is cuckolding her husband, breaching her marriage vows. With Charlotte, she can pretend that theirs is simply an innocent friendship. She is sometimes much more lighthearted with Charlotte.

  There is the heavy toll of the church door swinging shut. I turn in my seat and see Adèle. She stands there for a moment at the back of the church, with the last bit of light from the day outside fleeing behind her. She is dressed in dark colours, as she frequently is when she meets me here, as though simply to enter the church is an act of mourning.

  It does not take her long to find me in the dim interior. She hurries up the aisle and slides into the pew where I am sitting, hurling herself towards me with a recklessness that I find so touching. All my words dissolve to feeling and it takes ages for them to struggle back into shape.

  “Charlotte,” she says, “you look so lovely. I have missed you so much.”

  We haven’t seen each other for five full days. The separation has seemed eternal.

  “Charlotte,” she says, “I want you so badly. I could take you right here, right now.” She runs a hand across the front of my dress, and a small moan escapes my lips.

  At first when we met in the church, we spent some of the time in prayer. Adèle is more religious than I am, and she believed that by increasing her devoutness, she would alleviate some of the guilt she felt at having an affair. By praying more, by praying harder, by having prayer be a large part of our relationship, she would be forgiven the sin of adultery. We would kneel together in the pew, heads bowed and hands clasped in front of us. I don’t know what silent words she offered up to God, but I know I prayed, with all my strength, that she would leave Victor and come away with me. I feared that our prayers were cancelling each other out. She was probably asking to fight temptation. I was begging to have her yield to it.