The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  My husband and I were childhood sweethearts. This was back when I believed that the love poems he wrote me were about me, rather than about his need to write them.

  I believed the poetry. I believed the kisses. I believed the sloppy eagerness of my own heart. We married, and for a while I was the happiest I’ve ever been. But when the children came and I, necessarily, turned my attentions to them, Victor felt rebuffed and disappeared into his work—a work that could absorb all of him if he let it.

  That’s the simple explanation. But really, it’s another lie.

  I lost my desire for Victor. I found his kisses repulsive, and his constant need to be in my bed was not my need.

  But I am married to him. I have a duty and a contract, and nothing justifies the betrayal of my wedding vows. It doesn’t matter that I have lost my desire for my husband. This is the natural state of any marriage, and I should just accept it. Why can’t I just accept it?

  When I’m down on my knees in the church, worrying a line of prayer from my lips, I feel disgust for my actions and a desperation to remedy them. But I never feel that God hears me or understands. I never know what to do to absolve my sins. I just rise and go back to my family.

  Each time I meet with Charles, my situation becomes more intolerable, and I become more miserable because of it.

  As a girl I ran after my sister through the woods. I climbed trees. I made a lance out of a sapling and speared a grouse. I was as tall and strong as any boy. This is what Victor and I had in common when we were young, a longing to express ourselves physically, a need to be active and in the world.

  I am still that same being, and it is clear to me that I must do something about my situation. God is not going to help me. Charles cannot do anything. He has asked me to leave my marriage. That is the most he can do. The choice is mine to make. I must leave Charles, or I must leave Victor.

  There is no point in lying to myself anymore.

  But to leave Victor, I will probably have to leave my children, because how could I afford to support them? My sister is sympathetic, and she might take us in for a while, but I have four children. She will not be able to house us for long. And really, how can I leave my children? How will God forgive that sin? Demanding as they sometimes are, I love them absolutely.

  Most nights, after my little ones are in bed, I walk through each of their rooms, watching them sleep. They are all so beautiful. And when one of them has a dream and twitches or cries out, I run to comfort him without thinking, as I run to comfort them through every day. It is impossible to imagine not being attached to them, not being available to respond to their every need.

  But I do imagine this. I lie in my bed after I have visited my children’s rooms. Victor likes to work late, is always working late, and so I lie in my bed alone, imagining Charles there beside me. There could be no sweeter pleasure than waking up with him every morning, than turning over in the night to touch his soft skin.

  So slowly, over time, I make myself believe the impossible: to be with my lover, I have to abandon my children.

  I tell myself that they are my husband’s children as well. He has formed a special bond with Léopoldine, and Charles and François-Victor will learn to be men from him. They need to remain with him. I could leave them in his care, and he would look after them. He does love them.

  So that is what I will do. I will take my baby, Dédé, with me, and I will leave the older children with their father. One child I can manage. One child I can bring with me to Charles. Dédé is much too young to abandon. She still has such need of me. The others are more independent, and they become more independent with every day.

  I make this decision, and I tell no one about it. Not Charles. Not even Julie. It sickens me to think that this is what I will do, but I know I will do it, just as I plunged the sharpened stick into the breast of the grouse. Feeling badly about it didn’t stop me from killing the bird. I have the sort of courage that a soldier has, and mostly it is useless to me. I would be good in a duel—better than Charles, who is constantly being challenged—but of course no woman is ever required to fight a duel. No, my courage will never be offered up to heroics, but only to the reprehensible act of forsaking my children.

  I make my decision and I await my opportunity to act, and as it turns out, I do not have to wait long.

  Victor comes home one evening and announces that we are moving. The landlord is evicting us because of all the controversy surrounding Hernani.

  “I’ve found us an apartment,” says Victor after supper. “On rue Jean Goujon. It’s very spacious and bright. You’ll love it.”

  “That’s the other side of the river.”

  “I have to be near the theatre. Now more than ever. It’s very important. You know that.”

  Victor is always telling me what I know. Once I used to argue with him about this, but now I can’t be bothered. He’s clearly made up his mind. The apartment is already rented. He’s had packing cases delivered and had told the children that we’re moving.

  It will be very difficult to rendezvous with Charles if we live across the river. It’s difficult now, when we live two doors apart.

  “When?” I say.

  “The beginning of the month.”

  That’s in just over a week.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

  “It happened so quickly. I didn’t know before this.”

  We are standing by the window in the sitting room, the window that overlooks the garden. Outside, the children are playing some game that involves racing at top speed around the pond. It is time to call them in for bed, which is why I went over to the window in the first place.

  Victor is standing beside me. He’s not looking out into the garden, but rather is staring down at his hands resting on the window ledge. I look down as well. His hands are broad, ink-stained, the nails chipped and dirty. These hands write the words that keep us all alive. They are also the hands that wrote the play that is forcing us to move across the river.

  Victor slides his right hand towards my left hand, tentatively, like a cat slinking up on a bird.

  “It will be an adventure, my darling,” he says.

  I turn from the window before he can touch me.

  “I must call the children in for bed.”

  I sit on the edge of Dédé’s bed after she is tucked in and ready for sleep. She is excited about the move, keeps wanting to ask me questions, to talk about it.

  “Will there be flowers over there?” she asks. “Will there be cats?”

  “It’s the other side of the river, not the other side of the world,” I say.

  “Will there be apples?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will I have a bed?”

  “You will have this bed. We will load it into a cart, and it will travel across the river and be set down in your new room.”

  Dédé laughs delightedly and clutches my hand. “Can I lie in it when it is on the cart?” she asks.

  “Shall we pretend?” I say. “Move over.” I slide down beside her on the narrow bed and she rolls into my arms. “There would be stars above us. Bright stars. Close your eyes and tell me when you see them.”

  Dédé squirms in my arms. “I see them! I see them!”

  “And the cart would be bumpy over the cobblestones.” I gently rock her in my arms, back and forth, back and forth. “The night air might be chill, but you would be tucked up so warm in your bed.” I tighten my arms around her. “You would be so safe and warm.” I continue to rock my daughter, closing my eyes as well, imagining the sharp stars above us and the dank smell of the river, the yellow lick of lamplight on the bridges.

  Dédé’s breath opens into sleep, but I stay with her on the bed, keep her in my arms. She is so light and small, more like a bird than a child. My little one. My treasure.

  I am a selfish woman to want more than my children. It should be enough to care for them, to love them like this. For every other woman, it would be enough. Why is
n’t it enough for me?

  I open my jewellery box and shove its contents into a carpet bag. I put the letters from Charles in there as well, and some of the gifts my children have given me—drawings, a swan feather, dried flowers. I take the pencil portraits I have made of the children, and some of the first poems Victor wrote to me, when we were newly in love.

  I will send for my dresses. I will send for my cloaks. I will send for the carpets and tapestries that belonged to my family. I will send for the few sticks of furniture that are my own. I will send for my books and paintings.

  Downstairs, Victor packs for the family. I can hear him crashing things into the packing crates. Upstairs, I take only what I can’t bear to be parted from tonight, for I have made up my mind that I will leave after Victor has gone to bed. I will carry Dédé from her slumber and we will walk the short distance to Charles’s house. She has fallen asleep on the story of moving, and she will wake up to find that it is true, although it will not be the move she had imagined. Still, I will make sure that there are flowers and apples and cats for her in her new life.

  I will send for her bed.

  I don’t hear the door, but I do hear the voices. Victor’s booming voice and then the fainter, more feminine voice of Charles. I stiffen, and my breath comes fast and shallow. I can’t hear what they’re saying, so I drop the carpet bag on my bed and creep from my bedroom into the hallway. I move slowly down the corridor, my feet finding the boards that don’t creak, until I am standing near the top of the stairs. From this spot I can hear everything perfectly.

  At first I think that they are talking about the play, because this is what they often talk about—Victor is always enlisting Charles to give an opinion on his writing—but I realize quite quickly that they are not discussing literature. No, Charles is telling Victor that he and I are having an affair.

  My legs buckle. I lean against the wall. I can’t believe he is doing this. Why is he doing this?

  The voices float up to me, as though Charles and Victor are in a play and I am sitting in the balcony, having paid handsomely for a ticket to this theatre.

  Charles is boasting. Victor is scornful. Charles offers proof. Victor is confused and bewildered. Charles is penitent. Victor is outraged. Charles tries to take back what he has said. Victor won’t let him.

  It has all the heightened emotion of any good drama, all the elements of a drama that Victor might have written himself.

  I remember the first time I met Charles. He came to visit Victor and me on rue de Vaugirard, when we lived above a joiner’s shop. Victor had invited him round, was ecstatic about his visit because Charles had given his poems a wonderful review in the Globe. Victor felt that he’d found a champion in the press, someone to review his work favourably and advance his reputation. He practically threw himself down the stairs when he heard the knock at the apartment door.

  I don’t remember what we ate, or the time of year, or whether I was pregnant yet with my first child. I don’t remember where we sat, whether there was a fire, if there was rain at the window, what I was wearing, how much wine we drank. It is strange how the details can fall away and yet the feelings remain.

  I had two feelings that night. The first was one of relief. If Victor had a friend to talk poetry to, then he would have no need to be constantly discussing it with me. I had initially been flattered that he valued my opinion so highly, but then I saw him have the same discussions with his friends, with my sister’s husband, with the fishmonger and the lamplighter. It was a discussion he was having with himself, except that it helped Victor to be able to have his inner conversations out loud. Like all his other listeners, I was required merely to hear his ideas, not to comment upon them. And if there was someone else willing to take my place in this, so much the better.

  Later, Charles remarked on my silence during that first evening—how I had said not a word to him when he came for supper. It was not that I intended to be rude, or was uninterested in his company, but rather that I was so grateful he was engaging Victor in conversation, and that I feared anything I said would snap that thread. For the first time since we had married, I could have my own thoughts and not have to be reacting to Victor’s. I could sit over my needlework and muddle through my feelings, think about the events of the day or about my life so far, anticipate the pleasures of the evening, when, after our guest had departed, my husband would take me to bed.

  I had nothing but desire for Victor in those days.

  The second feeling I remember having that night was curiosity. Who was this young man who wanted so badly to make a friend of my husband? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He looked a little like a bird, with his hooked nose and high forehead—like a bird of prey. And like a bird of prey, he was intent on his target. He wanted Victor to like him. He fawned and fussed, laughed a beat after my husband started laughing, repeated the same words back to Victor a few minutes after Victor had said them. How agreeable he was being! How friendly!

  What did he want?

  I asked Charles this once, when we were lying in bed in our hotel room, limbs entwined. Be honest, I said, because I felt that around his own ambitions, he was not always truthful.

  I believed him a genius, he said. I wanted him to help me become a better poet.

  But this was not all. The feeling I had that first night was a feeling I sometimes had later on, once Charles and I were lovers. It was faint then, came to me like a whiff of stale perfume carried by the breeze.

  What I felt that night was that Charles did not just want to please Victor, but rather that he wanted to be Victor.

  Had I just exchanged one man for a lesser version of the same man? Was I merely a trophy to be flourished and fought over in this contest between Charles and Victor? Was everything really about literature after all?

  This is partly why I prefer Charlotte. She would not confess our affair to Victor. She would keep it secret. She would keep it sacred.

  The shouting has subsided. The voices are quieter. There is the clink of glasses. Now Charles and Victor are talking. They are drinking wine.

  I walk back along the hallway towards my bedroom, not caring if they hear the creaking floor. I push open the door, sit down heavily on the edge of my bed. There is the carpet bag with its precious sentimental cargo—all that hopefulness I felt mere moments ago.

  Would life with Charles really be different from life with Victor?

  I put my head in my hands and weep.

  By the time I hear his heavy tread on the stairs, I have stopped my crying. When he steps through my bedroom door, I am sitting up straight, composed, my hands folded demurely in my lap.

  Victor has had all his emotion with Charles. They have fought and talked and drunk wine, like lovers in a spat. By the time he comes to me, he is spent. He stands there in the doorway, a shadow framed by shadow.

  “You will end this,” he says. “I will not be shamed by your behaviour for one more instant.”

  He doesn’t wait for my reply or even for my acknowledgment that I know what he is talking about. It is not a discussion. He takes it for granted that I have been eavesdropping. He turns and walks back down the hallway, back down the stairs. In a few moments I can hear the noises of his resumed packing.

  Once when I was running towards Charles at the Jardin du Luxembourg, he grabbed me, in full flight, before I collided with him, and asked me if I was running towards him or simply fleeing Victor. Perhaps it was both.

  When I was a girl, I had the ambitions of a boy. I could run and jump and ride a horse. I was good at drawing and good at writing. When I fell in love with Victor, I attached my ambitions to his own, craved his successes, wished for him to be a great artist. My own desires fell away when we married, when I became pregnant, when I had my four sweet children.

  I didn’t think they would ever come back.

  But somehow, my ambitions have returned as a single drive, as the force that compels me to love Charles and Charlotte and not Victor.


  When I rush towards Charles along the gravel path of the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I ran out into the meadow as a girl, chasing after my sister through the long grass, I am not in flight. I am hurtling headlong, with no way to stop the momentum I’ve gathered.

  And what I want, what I long for, is not to escape so much as simply to arrive.

  Charles

  THE HUGOS HAVE MOVED. I have not seen my beloved in weeks. Despite Victor’s order that I end my affair with his wife, I have no intention of doing so. The brief notes that Adèle has managed to send me reassure me that she has no plan to end the affair either. But we have encountered great difficulty in seeing each other as of late. Victor does not leave Adèle alone for a moment. I have had to write secret letters to her and leave them, under the name Madame Simon, at the Poste restante. She has sent letters to me by foot messenger, often using the same dim-witted girl who used to board with the Hugos. And despite his avowal that our friendship would not be affected by my love for his wife, Victor always treats me awkwardly when we meet. Thankfully, this is not often, as he has been kept busy with his change of residence and his new book about the Cathédrale Notre-Dame.

  In the absence of my beloved Adèle, I write poems for her. I want to document our love. I don’t want to forget a moment of it—not a word, not a touch. The book is to be called Livre d’amour, and I have used real names, transcribed things that Adèle has said, noted our meetings in the church and named the hotel, the Saint-Paul, where we rendezvous for sex. I have disguised nothing. It is my heart laid bare.

  But I will never have the volume printed, so I am safe to confess anything I want. The pages are my companion. The words carry my memory of love. They are for me, and for me alone—although I might be persuaded to show some of the poems to Adèle, if she insists.

  It is a tragedy that this secret book contains my best work. I have always wanted to be a great poet, and here I must admit that I think Victor is a great poet. It is only his plays that I object to so strenuously. His verse is beautiful.