I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (20 page)

“I'm saying that we could have
talked
about it. I'm not as
sheltered as you think. I don't know what I would have felt at that moment, but I know that we could have talked about it, and that hearing about it then, when it was an interest instead of after the fact, it would have left us with a chance. Because I would have understood you. Because I've felt that way myself.”

She patted her eyes with her humongous red paper napkin while Antoine came up hastily to swoop my plate away.

Anne waited with her lips pursed until he was out of sight. “But what have you left me with instead?” she said, her voice cracking. “I mean, really? Have you thought about it? You had a love affair. You had . . .” She faltered. “You had a fucking
life
with someone else. And I'm supposed to forgive you? What do I get out of it? What do I get out of forgiving you? If I was someone else,
anyone
else, we'd already be divorced.”

“I know,” I said, quaking. “I know we would.”

“And sometimes I even want to do it! I want to just say, ‘Fuck it,' and move on. But you've changed everything. You've changed
us.
We were lucky, Richard. What we had was really, really good. And you fucked it.”

Antoine reappeared with two plates heaped with steak and all the fixings steaming on a plastic tray.

“Good God,” Anne muttered.

“Antoine, I'm sorry. Could we, ah, get those to go?”

The good man didn't bat an eye.

“But of course. Would you like a sauce sampler to go as well?”

“What the hell,” I said, throwing my napkin on the table. “Sure.”

 • • •

We left the restaurant with our resolutely un-French doggie bags with an even less French hippo on the front. Anne was marching quickly and I had to work to keep up with her. When we reached the taxi stand at the corner of Rue Montmartre and the Boulevard Poissonnière, I slowed. But she kept going.

“You don't . . . ?” I called out, gesturing toward the taxis.

“Walk.”

We cut through the Grands Boulevards past the imposing structure of the Paris stock exchange and spilled out onto the Boulevard de l'Opéra, all gussied up with lanterns for the night.

“Walk,” she said again, crossing the street even faster.

We passed the Hôtel du Louvre, where we'd sometimes started our erstwhile evenings out with a glass of champagne, and then crossed through the palace gates to the museum.

Everyone who has been or lived in Paris has their favorite place, and Anne-Laure's was the square court of the Louvre. Beyond the polemic pyramid addition, through a nondescript passageway, lay a much smaller, more intimate courtyard with a fountain that never worked. At night, the stone sculptures of the former kings and ministers who inhabited the palace are lit up from below, and the roofline glows with a fearsome troupe of gargoyles, caught forever in midscream.

The edge of the fountain was cold beneath our legs—freezing, actually—when we sat. I reached into our doggie bags and produced a sheaf of paper napkins, offering them to Anne to sit on, but she declined.

We stayed without speaking for a while, taking in the stonework that looked pink here and ochre there from the lights. Without the throng of tourists ant-farming their way through the palace's exterior corridors, the courtyard was ro
mantic, ludicrously so. A year ago, we would have held each other, we would have kissed and laughed about the city's self-conscious beauty. No woman possessed more confidence in her appearance than Paris. But that night we just sat there, hoping for the interruption of a sight or sound to break up the loveliness that we couldn't share.

“If I could take it back, Anne,” I said finally. “If I could have not done it—”

“But you did.”

I stared down at my hands. “I really miss you,” I said quietly. “I miss us.”

She crossed her legs and rubbed her upper thighs with her hands, trying to warm them. “You haven't
been
here for months, now. It's been half a year. Just going through the motions.”

“I don't want it to be like that,” I said. “It's my fault. But I'm back. I promise you, it's over. It's been over a long time.”

“Because she left,” Anne said. “Because she left you. Otherwise, it would still be going on. Or you would have left with her.”

I stared through the passageway toward the glass pyramid that was lit up like a yellow Rubik's cube, dropped from some far-off galaxy into the night. I tried not to let it cut me, the fact that even Anne knew that Lisa hadn't loved me back.

“It's true, isn't it?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her looking at me. “You would have left.”

“I wouldn't have,” I snapped. “No. And I know what the letters say. What they make it sound like. And it's true that there was a point when my real life didn't seem real. There was a moment when I did think,” I said, glancing up, but she was looking away from me, her face tight, her fists curled, “I did think, like an idiot, that I would go. But I know now that
it isn't true. If it had actually come to that, I wouldn't have done it. I didn't actually want to. It was like I was possessed.”

“What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked, her eyes flashing. “Thank her? Should I be grateful to this person who didn't want you back? She must have been pretty fucking special.”

“She wasn't,” I said, twisting my pants between my fingers. “She just, at the end of the day, she just wasn't you.”

Then, the guttural sounds of Anne crying. The kind of weeping that comes from an unopened place within where comfort cannot reach.

“Even now my mind is going. I can't get it to stop,” she managed. “Where? Why? What did she look like? Was she gorgeous? How did she . . . kiss? And the fact that you made love to her, imagining you, and I don't even know what to imagine.” She held her breath. “I can't get it to stop. To forgive you, I'd have to have no love left for you at all. Which would make it . . .” She put her hand to her head. “You've . . . you've ruined us. You've totally ruined us,” she said, crying harder. “For nothing.”

“Anne, I
love
you,” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her to face me. “I love you more than anything in my whole stupid life and I'm sorry that I made such an awful, painful, incredible mistake and that I kept on making it. I am going to be sorry about this for the rest of my life. But I have never,
never
been so sure about us.
For
us. I can't . . . I can't be me without you. Please.”

I took her other hand. “I knew it the fucking minute I saw you in that stupid bar with your cousin. You are . . . a more-than person, Anne. Goddammit. You are more than a best friend and a wife, you're more than beautiful, and if I hurt you it's maybe because I've always known and been ashamed of the fact that I am less than you, and always have been.”

Her chin trembled. In my hands, her skin was cold. “I will do whatever it takes to prove to you that it will never happen again.”

She bit her lip hard as a tear fell down her cheek. For the first time since I'd reached for her, she squeezed my hand back. “But what do you do about the fact that it happened? What do you do about that?”

I started to cry. “What do I do?” I said, dropping her hands. “What do I do? I don't know what to do. I did it. I can't make you love me back.”

“But I
do
love you,” she cried. “But I can't get past it! I can't! I'm so angry and I'm so sad and I'm embarrassed and ashamed and I'm furious at you. I hate you, and at the same time I just want to go back. And I don't know what to do either,” she said. “I just don't.”

I looked up at the sky and the buildings and the gargoyles and the sculptures. I looked out at the pyramid and the stupid, spinning carousel in the park beyond. And beyond that, beauty. More beauty everywhere. Lights and boulevards and thoroughfares and people going places and people coming back. And it was sitting there in a place that had been a safe place for us, a place that had always been calming and right, that I realized that if I really loved her, I had to let the decision to stay with me be hers.

“Anne,” I whispered, touching her hand again. “I'm going to go.”

“You're going to
go
?” she repeated, wrapping her arms around herself.

“I mean I'm going to
go
,
go. I'm going to leave.”

She turned to me, her eyes bright in the darkness.

“Really leave?”

I tried to keep my chin from trembling. I nodded yes.

“I don't want to force you, or make it harder for you with my presence, or with Camille, I don't want you to decide we stay together because of her. I want it to be you, Anne. I want this to be about us.”

“But we can't—” She caught herself. “So, we're separating?”

My throat felt full of shards. “I don't know. Maybe?”

She smoothed her hair back and rubbed her legs again. I put my arms around her to warm her, and she didn't pull away.

“I don't know what else to do,” I said, my face against the dried-flower smell of her hair.

“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

“I really fucking love you,” I said, holding her tighter. “I do.”

She pressed her face against my shoulder. I could feel her tears through my shirt. We sat that way for minutes, absorbing the silence of the present, the last hours of darkness before our unknown future would begin.

18

I MOVED
in with Julien for a while until I could find my own place. Into an old duffel bag went an assembly of sentimental things: the never-ending Australian novel that previously held court by my bed, the videos of my parents, the camcorder, photos of Anne and Camille, slipped out of pewter frames. I purposely left a lot of necessities in the house, seeding reasons for me to get back inside it.

When I told Julien what had happened, our previous quarrel was forgiven. After ten days of sleeping on his couch and washing the dishes from the limited variety of pasta recipes that I made us every night, I was able to discuss
WarWash
with him without feeling like he was being condescending, or going out of his way to knock me down. I could see where he was coming from—his gallery was an ongoing dinner party, and I wanted to show up with an unpredictable, drunk guest who was probably going to break things. After reiterating that he and Azar Sabounjian had “history,” he told me that it still might be worth my trying there. That I had his blessing if I did.

We didn't talk much about Anne-Laure. Those first weeks I kept my thoughts and fears inside my head, where they could shapeshift to suit that day's particular outlook. The truth was, talking to other people about our separation made it feel too real. Safely harbored in my memory, the things that she and I had said to each other could be analyzed any number of ways, and positively, even. If I talked too much about it, it would become clear how bad things were.

After days of unreturned phone calls and e-mails sent to addresses which turned out to be spam, I finally found a small apartment through the classifieds, that French stalwart of shabby real estate,
De Particulier à Particulier.
A widower was temporarily letting out his writing office while he took a cathartic cruise on the houseboat he and his wife used to live in, on the Seine. He was traveling to Amsterdam, and then he'd see. He said he had another friend interested so if I got back together with my wife, to simply call him. He told me he hoped I would.

The apartment was an architectural impossibility: a fourteen-­meter-square duplex on the sixth story of a narrow building in the tenth arrondissement. The first floor consisted solely of a table that was built into the wall, two benches, a sink, and a stovetop with two burners. The staircase had been designed to maximize space, with each step imitating the shape of a single foot. The only closet space was built beneath this staircase with a curtain to hide your mess. Upstairs, there was a triangular-shaped slab of wood in the corner of the room and a stool: this had functioned as the fellow's writing desk. To the left, a futon, and in front of this, a double window that opened out onto the roofs. The bathroom was only a little larger than your standard airplane loo, and it was designed Swedish style with no separation between the shower and the
shitter. When you showered, the water went everywhere, and then—eventually—it went down the drain. The owner had kindly left a squeegee for me to use after each shower, and he reminded me not to leave any electronic appliances out while I had the water running.

There was a shelf above the bed where I put some books and photos, and a freestanding hanging rack to the side of the window with just enough room for a couple of pants and shirts. I had to keep my coat on the back of the front door. There wasn't room anywhere else for something bulky. It was a rickety building, and my next-door neighbors were forever sautéing things in fish sauce, a condiment that managed to permeate each of the apartment's cracks, but there was good, creative energy in the space, and I was grateful to be there. It was reassuring somehow, to live somewhere so small. I felt enveloped, bolstered. And terribly alone.

It was already the new year—January 15. The holidays had come and gone without my taking part in them. In the week after I left our house on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, Anne and I had had painful, silence-filled discussions about Christmas and New Year's. Even though we'd agreed to talk to Camille, to tell her that her mom and dad were taking that most vague and disconcerting of relational options, the infamous “break,” Anne thought it might be too much for her to spend Christmas without her father. We agreed that I could go out to Brittany for the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth and stay in a hotel, but then the Bourigeaud seniors overturned our plans: they'd decided on a destination Christmas in Marrakesh for everyone except me. “They thought a change of scenery would be good for us,” said Anne over the phone. “I'm sorry.”

And so I'd spent the holidays with my parents back in dear old Hemel Hempstead. When you're crashing your parents'
friends' annual pre-Christmas Christmas rasher party without your wife and daughter, you can't get a lot past people. The dinner party was at Tabatha Adsit's house, a neighbor down the road, and in between courses of bacon-wrapped cabbage and bacon-wrapped goose and bacon-wrapped everything, I had to repeat over and over again that I wasn't divorced.

“We're taking a break,” I explained, passing along a spinach salad covered in imitation bacon bits. “We're taking some time off.”

“Oh, it never works, Richie,” said Rufus, Tabatha's husband. “You remember back at uni?” He looked around the table. “We used to do that all the time. I mean, basically you're saying you want to sleep with other people, and then maybe you do, and then you've screwed the pooch.”

“Rufus,” whispered Tabatha. “Leave it.”

“Well, I hope you two work it out,” he said, dumping salad on his plate. “She was a lovely girl.”

It didn't help that people were conjugating everything in the past tense. Every time someone had something nice to say about my wife, they spoke as if she were dead.
We always liked her. She was so beautiful. You two seemed so happy.

And then, of course, there was public concern about Camille. People wanted to know what we were telling her, wanted to explain how damaging a situation like this could be for a child if we weren't clear about it. I replied that it was impossible to be clear about something that we weren't clear about ourselves. Most often, this response got me a reminder not to be selfish. That this wasn't about us.

The truth was that Camille
was
confused. Terribly so. It was heartbreaking to see. Upon their return from Brittany, I got to the house before Inès dropped her off, and Anne and
I made sure to have all the emotional buffers on hand: her favorite kind of sparkling cider, two napoleon pastries, and a surprise school-night sleepover with her best friend, Marie, arranged later that week. Since she'd spent the last part of her vacation alone with her grandparents, I was anticipating a big-girl version of my little daughter: an energized bunny filled with stories of the things she'd seen and done without us. This led me to wrongly assume that Camille would be too distracted to make much of our announcement that Daddy was going to be leaving for a while. But vacation was one thing, home was another. And home was a house with both Mommy and Daddy inside.

Neither Anne nor I knew how far we should go to make our five-year-old “get” it. Anne's opinion was that if we told her the real truth, she'd grow up resenting me, and might not trust other men. And though this line of thinking was more generous than I deserved, I was none too eager to one day have a spiteful adolescent writing angsty poems about me, so I agreed to reiterate the vague message that we were “spending time apart.”

Having told some people—most importantly, Anne-Laure—that I was moving forward with
WarWash
, I should have spent the holiday week at my parents working hard on sketches and a pitch. But once there, I was pulled back into an incubator of nostalgia and self-centeredness. Everything was starting to overlap and I was worried that the project was going to become too much about me and my marital problems when, shit, in order to be credible and timely, it needed to allude to the actual, horrid things taking place in Iraq.

Accordingly, to offer myself an outlet for my overflowing sap, I started up with the camcorder again. With it being
the holidays, the Haddon house was filled with the comings and goings of couples of all shapes and sizes, except for the divorced. The desire to document these well-enough-adjusted people came from a perverse place, but it made me feel better to get out of my own head and into the lives of others. Somewhere in between their stories of financial hardship and shared memories, their advice on navigating flatulence and bad breath, was a deeper message about making love last. They were happy to sit across from each other at dinner every night, comforted by their shared bed; these clockwork rituals hadn't made them run screaming into another person's arms, and I thought if I recorded them, some answer would rise up through the footage to help me learn why not.

I decided to call this side project
Witness
, and by inflating my own case a little—a lot—I was able to convince some of my parents' friends to participate in my documentary about married love “for a gallery in the States.”

The first couple to rise to the occasion was the Adsits, our rasher-dinner hosts. I filmed them back-to-back in their living room, as I had done with my own parents, and afterward, Tabatha admitted that she hadn't had such a good time in years. Apparently, she'd had a laundry list of irritations molding away inside of her, just waiting for someone to come along and ask her what drove her nuts about her mate.

Despite his garrulousness on the subject of my own marital troubles, Rufus Adsit stayed recalcitrant during his filmed portion, the clever man. He said he loved Tabatha's cooking and that she made a good bed with perfect hospital corners. When I asked when he first realized that he loved her, he blushed scarlet red. “She was very nice to my parents,” he managed. “She was very natural in the home.”

In addition to my parents' other closest friends, the Bainbridges, I also called up Harold. It was harder to lie to him about the purpose of the film; we'd shared a man stroll, after all. Right away, he knew that this had something to do with my wife.

My interview with Harold and Rosalyn Gadfrey lasted aeons—I had to do it over two sittings. Despite having two children with Rosalyn, and sharing nearly twenty years of marriage, Harold was still besotted with her, and her with him. It was difficult for me to get them to share what bugged them about each other.

Rosalyn: “He leaves his socks balled up in the dirty hamper.”

Harold: (hands up) “Guilty as charged!”

Rosalyn: “Well, he does snore a bit, but you get used to it, don't you? It's sort of like the ocean.”

Harold: “My Rosie loves the beach!”

I got hours of film. Tapes and tapes. I had four interviews so far, all happy couples, all from Hemel Hempstead, all heterosexual, all white. Not exactly a sociological slice of life. I could have turned it into something bigger, traveled into London, interviewed other people there, but when I finished with the Gadfreys, I felt like I had enough. In the beginning, listening to other people's gripes kept me sane. But as I rewound the tapes and watched the marital confessions from the privacy of my too-short childhood bed, I saw that they weren't complaints as much as confessions of how much these people loved each other. Confessions about the sacrifices they'd made and continued to make in order to live the life they'd decided on, to make each other happy. By the end of the sessions, I wasn't inspired or comforted, I was jealous. And very, very sad.

 • • •

When I returned to Paris after the holidays to my Tiny Tim–sized abode, horrid January was upon us with its holiday markdowns and its tattered storefronts. I couldn't sit about sniffling at other people's recollections forever. I had to move forward with
WarWash
. Make something of myself by making stuff again.

My first choice for new representation remained Azar Sabounjian—one of the most intimidating gallerists in Paris. Elegant and frank, he was a major force behind the revitalization of contemporary art in the capital, repping heavy hitters like the British photographer Martin Parr and the controversial American photographer Larry Clark. With my C-level status, it would be a long shot for me to even get a meeting with Azar, much less a private show. But for the long-term health of my self-confidence, I had to try. I also had to test out my idea in a Laundromat that was far enough out of the way that I wouldn't be recognized if I blew anything up.

My destination was a crumbling building called the Lavo-Magick! on a long street that ran along the border between the twentieth arrondissement and the Bagnolet suburbs, referred to in French as
la banlieue
, and commonly followed by the modifier
chaude
, meaning dangerous, meaning (in racially charged code speak) that its residents are neither affluent nor white.

I'd come equipped with bits and bobs to sacrifice: Goodwill T-shirts, a Rod Stewart cassette tape, inconsequential photographs, an old IKEA catalog, and a quart of oil.

When I arrived at the Lavo-Magick!, I saw that I had competition—deviant customers had passed this way before. The storefront was covered in tags and graffiti, and there were iron bars across the two windows facing the street. A puddle of urine lay fermenting on top of the pavement, and a plastic
bag of clothing lay next to that. On the other side of the cement steps leading into the Laundromat was an old—as in petrifying—pile of dog shit.

The inside wasn't as bad as the exterior led me to expect. Except for a couple of tags and intersected initials on the walls, the Laundromat was clean of both graffiti and piss. There were four fold-up orange chairs in the corner, and four corresponding washers and dryers, which was kind of sweet. One chair per machine.

Fearful that someone might come in soon, I stuffed my objects and clothing into a washer and shut the door. For the first time, it occurred to me that my little experiment might do irreparable damage to an actual person's store. Or, at the very least, the person who used washer
numero quatro
after my dark passage was probably going to find their textiles covered in hot sludge. I checked my wallet—thirty-five euros in cash and a two-euro coin. I had a permanent marker in my bag and a scratchpad. I'd leave an out-of-service notice. And some cash. No, not cash, no way of knowing who would pick it up. I'd look up the contact info of the Lavo-Magick! once I was home. Make a donation of some sort. With a good-luck glance to the ceiling, I opened up the detergent compartment and poured in a couple lugs of gas.