The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  Now I lean my head on her shoulder. She still smells of the outdoors, hasn’t taken on the musty perfume of the church. I feel weak with longing.

  In the orchard, if we are lucky, we are able to hold hands, to manage several kisses while walking through the groves of trees. In the hotel, we can be entirely ourselves, without clothes or pretence or observers. The church has more privacy than the orchard, but it is the house of the Lord and comes with his attendant laws. In the orchard, we can pretend that we are courting. In the hotel, we can pretend that we are married. In the church, we know that we are sinners.

  That knowledge does not entirely encourage romance.

  Do lovers always suffer an impediment to their love? Is that what keeps love sweet and strong—the circumstances that would force the lovers apart make them cleave together more keenly? Will we end up poisoning ourselves, like the lovers in Victor’s wretched play? What other choice will there be? We cannot be together, and yet we cannot be apart.

  “We should pray,” Adèle says without conviction.

  But we don’t pray. I lift my head from her shoulder and take her face in my hands, kiss her deeply and passionately. The church recedes, disappears. There is only the mix of our breath, the feel of Adèle’s skin, our kiss. Love is a kind of attentiveness, I think. And yet, love also renders the world outside the lovers invisible, without consequence.

  Adèle breaks away first. “I want you so badly,” she says. “I’m not to be trusted.” She entwines her fingers in mine. “I will think up a lie for tomorrow. We must go to the hotel for the afternoon. Can you get away?”

  I am meant to be at the newspaper tomorrow, but I will work up an excuse not to go. Perhaps I will be ill. I do feel ill.

  “Yes,” I say. “Can you manage to escape for a whole afternoon?”

  “I must.”

  The thought of the pleasures of the hotel room makes me squirm on the hard wooden bench. Adèle tightens her grip on my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For causing you pain. For not marrying you instead of Victor.”

  “But you didn’t know me when you married Victor.”

  “I’m sorry anyway.”

  This is what happens in the church. Prayer and wish are entwined, and it becomes impossible to pry them apart. There is a strong need to confess.

  “You wouldn’t have had your children,” I say, “if you had married me.”

  “I love you more than my children,” says Adèle. Her words resound through the empty church, and we are both shocked into silence by what she has just said.

  It strikes me that Adèle has more courage than I do. I have been looking at our future through the filter of my character. I would do better to regard it through the filter of hers. If she can say a thing like that, then she is capable of more than I supposed. She is capable of more than I am. She will have the strength to find a way for us to go forward.

  IT HAS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE to meet with Adèle. There has been an outbreak of cholera in the city and it is unwise to leave one’s house, as the streets are full of infection—these same streets whose raw sewage caused the outbreak. It is said that two thousand people died on one day alone last week. Hearses prowl the avenues, more numerous than horse and cab. All manner of wagons and carts have been pressed into service to carry the hapless dead to the overcrowded cemeteries. Grave-diggers are reportedly jumping on the corpses to squash them down and make room for the freshly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in the haste to halt the spread of the disease, people are being buried alive.

  The pianist Liszt is apparently playing Beethoven’s funeral march in the salons of Paris. There are funeral processions day and night. I lie in bed and listen to the horses’ hoofs on the cobblestones, the creak of wagons loaded with bodies rolling past my windows.

  It is too dangerous to go out. The Cénacle has suspended its meetings.

  I would risk my life to walk the small distance between my house and the Hugos’, but I cannot risk Adèle’s life. So I wait—two weeks, three—each day a torment, each night an unspeakable agony. I wait for the epidemic to rise and crest, burst its banks, and finally subside.

  WE USE AN INEXPENSIVE, rather sordid hotel to avoid the moral judgment of the proprietor, but I fear we suffer it anyway. It has been my observation that people like to feel superior, that it is a natural inclination to want to feel you are better than someone else. So when we sign the hotel register as man and wife, there is invariably a raised eyebrow or a moment’s hesitation before we are handed the brass fob with the key on it. Our time of assignation doesn’t help. We always come to the hotel in the afternoon and leave in the early evening. Lovers are betrayed by the hours they must keep.

  I ask for a room on a high floor at the back, as far away from the street as possible, because it is quieter and more private. Also, the higher floors are less popular because of the climb up the stairs, so it is unlikely that we will have neighbours.

  The wooden stairs have shallow dents in them from years of footsteps shuffling up and down. Some days I find this a comfort—that some of those feet will have belonged to other lovers, that Adèle and I are not the only ones who have used this hotel to rendezvous. But other days I find this depressing. All those years. All those people moving up and down the staircase, moving through the rooms of this hotel. Their love unremembered.

  Sometimes, when we are lying naked in the bed of our rented room, I think of all the other couples who have been in the room for the same purpose. What happened to them? What happened to their love? I wish there were a private registry of the lovers who frequented each room, a listing of two names—names that were not permitted to be joined together in any other circumstance. At least something would then remain to remind us of the lovers, to remind us that they loved.

  Adèle and I contribute to this private registry by signing our names in each of the rooms we stay in. Our joined signatures, small and discreet, behind a picture or under the washstand. Charles and Adèle. Invisible, but there nonetheless, if you choose to look.

  Today we have been given a room on the fourth floor. The narrow stairs curl up and up. We have to walk in single file. We struggle up, pausing for breath at each landing. By the time we reach the room, we are hot and irritable. I fling the door open. Adèle stumbles across the threshold.

  In the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the rooms on the higher floors have lower ceilings than the rooms on the first and second floors. But the ceilings are timbered, and this makes up for their lack of height. This room, like all the others we have stayed in, has a bed against one wall, a washstand against another, a small desk, and a window that looks down over the roof and courtyard of the Collège Royal Saint-Louis.

  Adèle collapses on the bed, still struggling for breath. It occurs to me, rather meanly, that she’s grown stouter as of late. I stare moodily out the window, not feeling very loving. And yet I have waited an entire month for this afternoon in the hotel.

  “Well?” says Adèle. She has propped herself up on her elbows, stares across the room at me. “Are you going to stand there all day?”

  Perhaps I love Adèle better in absentia? There is nothing finer than imagining our time together in this hotel room, but now that we’re actually here, I feel paralyzed by my expectations. Why is love so difficult, so changeable? Why am I caught so easily in its tides and currents? Why can’t I steer the craft of my own desire?

  “I am a boat,” I say to Adèle.

  “What?”

  “I am a dark boat cast down the dark length of the river.”

  She giggles. “You are an idiot,” she says. “Do I have to come over there to make you love me?”

  Adèle’s body and my body are similarly plump. We are just over thirty, but our figures are decidedly middle-aged. Adèle’s figure has not been helped by giving birth to five children. (Of these, four are living, one having died shortly after he was born.) My figure is not helped by my predilection
for sweets and my aversion to exercise. Adèle said once that we look better clothed, and I would have to agree with her. But that said, there is something wonderfully liberating about removing my clothes in the middle of the afternoon to lie naked with my lover in a rented hotel room.

  It puts me in a better humour, for one thing.

  We lie on our backs, naked, holding hands tightly, as though we are survivors from a shipwreck, floating on a makeshift raft over the stormy seas while waiting to be rescued. We are too shy to look at each other, too shy to give full expression to our desire. We have waited so long to be together like this that the fact we are actually here takes some getting used to.

  “If you could change one thing in this room,” says Adèle, “what would it be?”

  “The room itself,” I say. “I would have it be our room in our house, not a room in a hotel.”

  “How would you decorate it?”

  “New wallpaper.” The flowered wallpaper in this room is so old that it is flayed into strips in places. “Better furniture. A four-poster bed with a curtain around it so we could block out the world.”

  “But if it was our room, we would have no need to block out the world.”

  This seems so impossible to me that I cannot properly imagine it.

  “Flowers,” I say, continuing with our game. “I would fill it with bouquets of fresh flowers.”

  “I would make it much larger,” says Adèle. And then, remembering the climb up the staircase, she adds, “And I would move it down a floor or two.”

  The streaky light from the window catches the dust drifting through the air. The bed linens feel scratchy from overzealous washing. I roll over on my side and Adèle rolls over as well, so we are facing each other.

  “I am writing some poems about us,” I say. “About our love. About you.” I say this tentatively because I know that she has often been the subject of Victor’s love poetry, and that she tires of being his inspirational material. “Do you mind?”

  Adèle strokes my cheek. “No,” she says. “Make use of me, sweet Charles. Make use of me.” She slides her hand down to my chest, down my stomach, down through the patch of hair surrounding my sex.

  And here, right here, I must stop the story for a moment.

  It is now that I must tell you my secret.

  I WAS NOT ALWAYS a writer, as I said. When I was a young man, I trained as a doctor, went for four long years to medical school, studied anatomy and dissection with the same avid attention I now turn to reading and writing.

  I think I first became interested in medicine because I wanted an explanation for my body. I wanted to unlock the mystery of myself. My mother, when I was young and she was bathing me, had simply said that all men were different in that area. When I found the answer in the medical library, in the study of a corpse who had the same condition as me, I lost some of my interest in becoming a doctor and left the academy before I was fully qualified.

  I believe that every man and every woman has a secret, and life is first about naming that secret, and then about making peace with it. Adèle’s secret is me—or rather, it is the fact that she is unhappy in her marriage to Victor. Victor’s secret is his desire for a noble birth, which is at odds with his other desire, to express the sentiments of the lowest common man through his writings.

  My secret is more visible than both of these—more visible, and more complicated.

  I have the sex organ of a man, although it is very small and incapable of becoming erect. I have the sex organ of a man, but on the underside, I have what resembles the sex organ of a woman. The medical texts refer to the condition as hypospadias, an affliction that is linked to hermaphrodism.

  Mine is a more extreme case than some, and there is no cure for it. I was born with this condition and I will die with it, and in between I must find a way to make peace with it.

  I cannot impregnate a woman. I cannot have what the doctors would call “normal” relations with a woman. But I have finally found a woman who does not want this normality anyway. Adèle is sick of being impregnated by Victor. She wants love without complications, and strangely enough, the complication of my body is the simplest of joys for her. She wants both Charles and Charlotte. More important, she desires both Charles and Charlotte.

  My sex is no bigger than a working man’s thumb. Adèle can completely cover it with her hand. It lolls against her palm, and she strokes it gently, as though it is her strange, small pet.

  The dust swirling about the room seems to be broken bits of light. Adèle runs her tongue over my nipples. I arch my back. One of my hands is in her hair, and the other reaches back to touch the tattered wallpaper behind the headboard. If I keep my hand on the wall, it seems possible that I will keep myself from floating up off the bed, that I will keep myself attached to earth.

  Adèle lowers her mouth to my sex. It fits so comfortably. I try to stop from crying out, and then I don’t, and my wails fill the small room and overflow into the hallway, out through the window and into the blue bank of the sky.

  What breaks from me in love is sorrow. Waves of it roil over me, and when I lie beached on the bed afterwards, I feel that I have been made new again, that I have been washed clean.

  Adèle lies back on the sheets. Her hands grip the top of the headboard. I have a hand on her breast, for balance really, although I am pretending otherwise, tweak her nipple absent-mindedly whenever I remember. My other hand is inside her. She has her eyes closed. Her breath is ragged. The bed knocks rhythmically against the wall as I fuck her.

  What is a man? What is a woman? Is it the sex, the clothes, the customs? I am never more of a man than I am in this moment, and yet there are many who wouldn’t call me a man at all.

  You just have to be committed to a position and maintain it throughout. That’s the other secret I know. Commitment begs surrender.

  “I won’t let Victor have me,” says Adèle. We are wrapped around each other. I have one of her legs between my own. Her hands are on my back.

  “He can’t be happy about that.”

  “I couldn’t bear it. I tell him that it’s because I can’t get pregnant again, that I don’t want to have any more children.”

  The sun at the window has changed. There’s a smoky quality to the light. It must be late afternoon. We will have to leave this room soon, make our separate journeys back to Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

  “That can’t last,” I say, meaning that this can’t last, that these moments we have are not enough to weigh against Adèle’s life with Victor. We will disappear like all the other lovers who have used this small room. Our love will not be remembered.

  But I couldn’t be more wrong.

  I TRY TO LUNCH with Mother every day. This isn’t always possible. Sometimes I must attend meetings at the newspaper, but most days I manage to leave the Globe offices at noon and return by two o’clock.

  Luncheon with Mother is both reassuring and infuriating because it is always the same. Not the food, but the routine.

  I have a key to Mother’s new house on rue du Montparnasse, and I let myself in rather than waiting for the housekeeper to open the door for me. The housekeeper is old, older than Mother. I have pointed out, repeatedly, that perhaps this is not such a good idea, but Mother will have none of it. She is fond of her elderly housekeeper. Her elderly and mostly deaf housekeeper. This is another reason why I don’t ring the bell to Mother’s house, but instead let myself in with my own key.

  I shake out my umbrella, if it is raining, and put it in the umbrella stand in the hall. I remove my coat and hat and hang them on one of the wooden pegs above the red embroidered bench. I go upstairs. Mother likes to sit in the sunny room at the front of the house on the second floor, and I know that I will find her there. Invariably I meet the housekeeper, either in the foyer or on the staircase, or sometimes in the upstairs hallway. Because she is mostly deaf, she doesn’t hear me and I often startle her. Then she shrieks. Sometimes she drops whatever she is carrying. The housekeeper’s
shriek announces my arrival, and Mother shuffles out of her sitting room to reprimand me.

  “Must you,” she says, as though I am four years old and have been pulling the tail of the housecat.

  My upsetting the housekeeper upsets Mother, and my being scolded by Mother upsets me, so we always sit down to lunch in a foul temper. The first course is eaten in silence. But eating improves both of our moods, as does a glass of wine, and by the second course, lamb chops, we are ready to converse. I always think I have given up trying to impress Mother, but it never appears to be so.

  “My reviews are becoming even more popular,” I say. “I get so many letters about them that it’s hard to respond to all my admirers.”

  Mother’s eyes glaze over with boredom.

  I try shorthand.

  “I’m very popular,” I say. “More than ever.”

  “Did you notice whether the baker on the corner has that nice bread I like in the window?” asks Mother. “He doesn’t make it every day, and I’m never sure which day he does make it.”

  I spend a moment separating the meat from the bone on the chop.

  “Tuesday?” says Mother. “Or is it Wednesday? What day is it today, Sainte-Beuve?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Oh, perhaps it’s Thursday, then.”

  “It is Thursday.”

  “The bread, the bread. Perhaps he makes it only on Thursdays.”

  It is a great shame that my father is dead, that he died before I knew him. I have to believe that he was possessed of a brain, and that my intellect comes from him. There is nothing remotely intellectual about Mother. Nobody was ever so obsessed with the trivial and the meaningless as Mother. And yet she is all I have. I stab at my potatoes. There seem to be bits of dirt on my lunch, as though the food was dropped and then hastily shoved back onto the plate. Perhaps the housekeeper is losing her eyesight as well as her hearing.

  I look over at Mother. She’s finished her food already and is picking at something on the tablecloth. She is a much better eater than I am, altogether more robust. I suddenly feel like weeping and have to dab at my eyes with my napkin.