I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (16 page)

15

WHEN I
was living in Providence, I was friends with a group of graffiti artists who called themselves the Danger Five. Esoteric more than dangerous, they specialized in re-creating scenes from children's books that possessed some undercurrent of horror. One of the scenes they painted the most often was from Richard Adams's
Watership Down
showing the runt rabbit, Fiver, on his hind legs in front of a barbed-wire fence, preparing to run across the field to warn his family that the warren was in danger from the humans moving in.

Being more or less respectful of those that carry badges, I've never dabbled in graffiti myself, but that would change this morning. I wanted to have a clear message waiting for Anne's return.

With most people still on holiday, including many cops, I felt relatively confident that I could execute my plan without being arrested. On my way home from the paint shop, I bought all of the fixings necessary for a champion duck confit along with a veritable buffet of Anne's favorite cheeses and this obscenely priced pear juice that she liked. And flowers: three bunches of
delphiniums and two of freesia. Our house would look and smell like new beginnings. Our house would smell like spring.

My plan was to adopt an air of entitlement. I figured if I just started graffiti-ing the middle of the sidewalk outside our house, any passerby would think I had the right to do what I was doing. That's the way things go. If you do things in plain sight, people don't interfere. It's when you get all surreptitious that the trouble starts.

Cautious under pressure, I outlined my design first in chalk. It wasn't very complicated: the word
I
plus a heart symbol plus a drawing of a donkey:
I LOVE
ÂNE
.
I'd decided to do the entire thing in hot pink. If you're going to go large, go the full monty.

I was just adding the bow the donkey always had around its tail in Anne's zine when I felt someone behind me. Instead of finding some bourgeois old lady with a snappy little dog, I was face-to-face with the billed cap and navy sweater of a French gendarme.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he began.

I gulped.
“Bonjour.”

“May I ask you what you're doing?”

“Yes,” I said, putting the lid on the spray paint. “This is my house.”

“This is your house?” he asked, pointing. “Do you have identification?”

I fumbled through my wallet.

“Mm-hmm,” he said, looking at my permanent resident card. “I see. And do you own the sidewalk, too?”

I looked down at the article in question.

“Um, no.”

“Then may I ask why you're defacing it?”

“It's . . . it's for my wife. Our anniversary. Her name is Anne? You see, the donkey,
âne
?”

“Do you paint a lot of donkeys?”

“I'm sorry, what?”

“Do you often paint this animal?”

“Well, not really. I mean, sometimes, with my wife. I'm an artist.”

“I see,” he said, writing something down. “And is your wife an artist as well?”

“No,” I said. And then, not wanting to disparage her, I said, “Well, she does cartoons?”

He wrote something down again. “Sir, if you'd be kind enough to come with me.”

“Come with you?” I repeated. “Where?”

“To the commissariat. I have a few questions I'd like to ask.”

“Don't you just . . . I imagine you just fine me?”

“Oh, don't worry,” he said, smiling. “You'll get fined. But I have a few questions about your recent activity in this area.”

“Activity?”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Your other work.”

“I'm sorry, you can't just force me to come in for questioning.”

“You're defacing public property, actually, so I can.”

“Will it take long?” I asked, looking at the house.

“Will it take long?” He laughed. “You might have asked yourself that before you did this to the street.”

 • • •

And that is how I found myself in the local branch of the French police station in a dusty office with a guard—an actual guard—on a folding chair outside.

As it turned out, they wanted to investigate my involvement with a new group of graffiti artists called the Jackasses that had been painting wounded donkeys in visible places throughout Paris.

“We think they're English-speaking,” said Paul, the cop who brought me in. “Because donkeys? Democrats? They're painted with gun wounds, except they're dripping oil. You know anything about this?”

I know that I felt suddenly envious of these upstarts, and not a little embarrassed about my hot-pink donkey half finished on the street. Someone had jumped on the Iraq art bandwagon first.

“The Jackasses have defaced a
lot
of public property,” he continued. “We'd be very inclined to be lenient with anyone who could help us find out more about them.”

“I wish I could help you,” I said. “But this is a mistake. A ridiculous coincidence. My wife, whose name is Anne, used to do these drawings of donkeys because back in college, you know,
âne
,
Anne?”

“You've mentioned that, yes.”

“So I was just . . . we were in a fight, sir. I was just trying to set things right. She's coming home from a trip today, and I wanted to surprise her.”

“And where was this trip?”

“Brittany. To her parents'?”

He nodded. He wrote something down.

“I'm sorry,” I said, shifting my weight in the chair. “Am I actually in trouble?”

He looked over the stack of papers on his desk. He'd photocopied my passport, my ID card; he'd printed out the home page of Julien's gallery, which currently featured the glossy, noir-styled photograph of a latex-covered Catwoman being sodomized by a glowing Jedi saber.

“Do you know a lawyer?” He folded his hands on top of his desk.

“Oh, man,” I said. “Yes.”

He pushed a heavy black phone across the desk to me. He picked at something in between his teeth. And then he said, “I'd call.”

 • • •

Anne arrived two hours later in a business suit she couldn't have been wearing when she left her parents'. It was what I called her “va-va-voom” look: a rather low-cut cream blouse with an attached tie, a navy blazer, and a matching pencil skirt with four-inch, open-toed snakeskin heels. I actually watched the officer blush when he caught sight of her walking toward us.

“Hello, Officer,” she said, putting out her hand.
“Chéri,”
she said turning to me, all light and sweetness.
“Ça va?”
She kissed me to the side of my lips.

“Yes,” I said, trying to wipe the happy shock off my face. “I'm fine.”

“Is this your
lawyer
?” asked the cop.

“Yes,” I said. “And wife.”

“Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud, Esquire,” she announced, handing him a card. “And I brought you these, sir.” Out of her briefcase, she removed a stack of magazines: the zines she'd self-published back in college. “As you can see, it's been a private joke between us for some time.”

The man flipped through the first copy.

“Wow,” he said. “You're really good at drawing.”

“With all due respect, Officer, what exactly is the charge?”

He closed one book and picked up another.

“Defacing public property, organized misconduct. But the second one would be dropped if it turns out you're not part of this group.”

“Well, I can assure you, sir, we're not,” she said, pointing to the books. “This was just a little misstep on my husband's part.
It's my understanding, however, that he used water-based paint. As soon as we get home, we'll wipe the whole thing off. It won't happen again.”

The officer bit his lip. “I'm sure you can understand,” Anne continued, looking toward a framed photograph of a woman and a child on his desk. “The things we do when we fall out of grace with our wives?”

“Lord, yes,” he mumbled.

“And I'd be sure to follow up with the minister of health to let her know what a good job you, personally, are doing looking after the external sanitation of our city.”

His eyes lit up.

“If you have a card?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, patting his pocket. “Here!”

Anne slipped it into her briefcase and treated him to a magnetic smile. Like magic, he softened; his posture relaxed, he even had the gall to put both hands behind his head before realizing how inappropriate this position was.

“Well, I suppose Madame de Bourigeaud, if you could
assure
us that it won't happen again—”

“You have my word.”

“We could let him off with just a fine. But the minute you get home, you have to clean it up.”

“Consider it done,” she said, reaching out her hand. “And thank you again for your hard work.”

“And you for yours.”

Anne shifted her winning smile to me. On cue, I stood. We walked out of that office like we were heading into the sunset, but once we hit the paved courtyard, she promptly dropped my arm.

“I have to return the rental car,” she said, her voice devoid of emotion.

I bit my lip. “So, you went home first? To get the books?”

“Obviously,” she said, smoothing out her skirt. “I needed evidence.”

“So did you see it?”

She stopped in her tracks. “You know that this isn't what I meant by needing to focus, right? Me picking you up in
jail
?”

I nodded. “But . . . you saw it?”

She looked into my eyes. She looked more tired than angry.

“One thing at a time, Richard. One thing at a time.”

 • • •

When we got home, Anne made me kill the donkey. Telling me to wait in the kitchen, she came back from the laundry room with a scrub brush, a small towel, a pail, and an ultratoxic, all-purpose French elixir called white spirit.

“I appreciated the gesture,” she said. “I did.”

And then she handed me the pail.

While the hot-pink paint bled into the pavement crevices, I let myself imagine that Anne had been pleased by what she found. A donkey signifier, a graffiti wink. More original than a box of chocolates, even if it had almost landed me in jail.

But by the time I got my scrub brush onto the donkey's unfinished tail, my thoughts turned to the Jackasses, these anonymous miscreants who had gotten on the political art train before me. For weeks, I'd been searching for a personal way into an Iraq project, but for the life of me, I couldn't come up with anything that wasn't either carcinogenic—like boiling British and American food items in petrol—or Matthew Barney–level ambitious, like restaging the swimming portion of the Olympics in a pool of blood. But I wasn't Matthew Barney. I was a sorry, soppy wanker washing a pink donkey off the street, no closer to a killer art project or winning my wife back than I had been that morning.

After I was done scrubbing away my unfinished valentine, I went back into the house and found the duck I'd made earlier reheating in the oven and a fresh salad laid out. I put away the cleaning supplies and stood at the foot of the staircase, where Anne had left me a note.

R—I need to eat in my study. Too much work to do.

I put sheets in the guest room. Friday, we can talk.

“DINNER?” I shouted up the stairs in the direction of her office. “Friday? Anywhere you want?”

A minute later I received a text message from her.

No, Richard. Just talk.

 • • •

The guest room in our house, like many guest rooms in other houses, I suspect, is hardly used by guests. On rainy days, Camille likes to play with the random assembly of knickknacks we keep in a trunk at the foot of the bed, but it's otherwise used as a neutral, time-out space when either Anne or I have a reason (insomnia, rancor, sickness) not to share the marital bed.

Against the far wall, there was an ancient television that only played VHS cassette tapes propped up on a credenza, inside of which lay a veritable treasure trove of bad taste:
Crocodile Dundee
,
Mannequin
,
Adventures in Babysitting
, and of course, the film that laid the ground rules for all French romantic comedies with sound tracks featuring a synthesized guitar, Sophie Marceau's big breakthrough,
La Boum.

When Camille was still a baby, on the nights when the umpteenth bottle warming and the rocking and the relentless lullabies emanating from her wind-up teddy bear had left us past
the possibility of going back to bed, we would come into this room together and climb under a down blanket and watch the beginning of an old film. Anne finds cinematic schlock calming. After fifteen minutes of Andrew McCarthy (the sensitive sculptor whose work the world just doesn't understand) and Kim Cattrall as a reincarnated ancient Egyptian running around a suburban mall together, I'd feel Anne's weight increase against me, purring, fast asleep.

Looking through those movies we'd watched so many times almost made me capitulate to the magnetic force I felt, pulling me out the door, across the hallway into Anne's study, where I could hear her working still. I wanted to get up and go to her, insist that we get into the hard stuff, except that I knew her working style. I had seen her compartmentalize her relationship with her father and other emotional distractions so that she could get work done. If I interrupted her now, if I forced her into a discussion that would only hurt her further, she wouldn't be able to sleep that night, and would be even angrier at me in the days to come.

Without Anne's alarm to push me into consciousness and with Camille still away, I slept later than I'd planned to. When I woke up, I could hear people in the house. After making the bed and getting rid of any evidence that I was sleeping in the guest room, I showered and put effort into dressing like a man incapable of infidelity, which in my case meant: khaki pants.