I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (7 page)

“Oh, no!” She laughed from the kitchen. “It's a job perk at the
Tribune
. The office gets them sent over and I smuggle them out.”

Oh, God. A journalist. She'd tell everything to the press. Tomorrow I'd have my face splashed across the paper:
MARRIED MAN CAUGHT IN CULINARY TRYST WITH SMALL-­TITTED AMERICAN
.

She appeared in a doorway with a recipe book in one hand and a whisk in the other, a whisk that appeared to be covered in a riot of cream cheese. “Could you come in here and open the wine you brought?” she asked, coquettishly. “My hands are . . . full?”

My stomach dropped. I still had time to get out of there, to choose flight over fight. An attractive woman had asked me to open up a bottle of wine. It was a simple request. A turn of a corkscrew. No one had actually screwed anyone. Yet.

I followed Lisa back into the kitchen, my guilt and fear dissipating with the bobbing demilunes of her spectacularly tight ass. She was wearing a cream-colored wrap dress that showed off her lithe figure in the most tantalizing of ways. She had cinched the dress with a brown leather belt, underneath which was a camisole of soft pink silk. On her feet, she wore brown Moroccan babouches of the same leather as her belt. Simple. Lovely. I realized I'd neglected to ask if she'd wanted me to take
my shoes off when I came in. But fuck it. If I was going to make a life-changing error, I sure as hell wasn't going to do it in my socks.

Lisa showed me where the glasses were and leaned back against the counter to watch me get them. I put the glasses down and set about opening up the bottle, wondering if I should kiss her now, later, or never? She was leaning back on her elbows; it would be perfect—I'd heave her up onto the counter, I'd pull aside her panties, we'd make love right there in the kitchen with all the lights on and the shades up. Oh, Lisa. Beautiful Lisa with her long, auburn hair and mod bangs and the freckles on her cheeks. Lord, don't let me do this.

“Shall we?” she asked, nodding toward the wine. “I'll be out in a second.”

I went back into the living room and poured us two large glasses. Lisa followed with the edible equivalent of interior decoration—she'd coordinated the main course with the living room. On matching square white plates sat two beds of black pasta with rather large dollops of white cheese and a ring of basil leaves and red pepper in a decorative circle around the plate rim.

“Chiaroscuro,” she said happily. “Squid ink pasta with ricotta.” I was beginning to think that she was playing a joke on my digestive system. Or maybe with my libido. I mean, we weren't actually going to fornicate after eating noodles soaked in the liquid escape mechanism of a squid?

During dinner, we talked about the safe stuff: films we'd seen, books we'd read, a new wine bar that just opened up in the area. Finally, I got around to asking her what had brought her to France in the first place.

“A man, of course.” She shrugged. “I met him at Columbia. He taught poetry. It's okay,” she said, smiling. “You can roll your
eyes. You should. He was a Dadaist.” She topped off my wineglass, then hers. “I'd just finished the grad program in journalism and I didn't have a job yet. Yves—that was his name—he got a job at the Sorbonne. So I decided to follow him over here. When I think back on it, he never really
asked
me to, I just assumed he'd wanted me to. I assumed wrong.” Her lips shifted into a frown. “It turned out he
really
had a thing for students.”

“But you stayed.”

“Well,” she said, “I stayed for a while. I started at the
Tribune
as an intern, but it was shitty work. You know, stapling, making coffee. And it was impossible to move up. All the good jobs went to the staff of the
New York Times
who got transferred to Paris. I didn't know anyone, really. It's hard to make friends here. So I moved back to New York.” She took off one of her moccasins, moved her foot in circles, and put her shoe back on.

“I spent a couple years freelancing for different publications until I finally got the same crummy job at the
Times
that I'd had at the
Tribune
: staple girl. But things move quicker in New York. I pitched a comeback column for the style section: the comeback of the shaving brush, the comeback of the flat. It was popular. You know, I moved up. And eventually there was an opening at the
Tribune
in Paris, and I thought, Hell, I'll try Paris again on my own terms. And I moved back.”

“Still handy with the stapler?”

She laughed. “No, I do the culture page and once in a while I do the nightlife reviews for the Sunday issue. New bars, new clubs, what's in, what's out . . . of course, it's all geared toward wealthy expats, so what's in is actually quite out, if you know what I mean.”

“And the professor?”

“Ugh,” she groaned. “He's still at the Sorbonne. The last Dadaist in Paris.”

She fell silent. I fell silent. I looked down at my plate in panic. If there was a cheese course, I had thirty, maybe forty minutes to decide whether or not I was going to make an unpardonable mockery out of my wedding vows.

“There's no dessert,” said Lisa, looking straight at me. “Coffee?”

Oh, but I had much less time than that.

Lisa reappeared with a tray bearing two cups of espresso, a saucer of milk, and a cup of brown sugar. When she placed the tray down on the coffee table, a little bit of milk sloshed out of the saucer. All of the sudden I knew that this was it. Neither one of us was going to be drinking any coffee.

No one in my life has ever come on to me like Lisa Bishop. She walked over and sat down on me, just lowered herself on my lap like a naughty koala. Tossing her long hair behind her shoulders, she cocked her head and cupped her hands around my face.

“Richard,” she said quietly. “I find you very attractive. It isn't good.”

“No . . .” I answered, my heart engaged in somersaults. “It isn't.”

Well, fuck it. Being there in the first place was already a crime. I might as well make the bloody best of it. Clearing my mind of everything but lust, I pushed the rest of her hair behind her shoulders and slipped my hand behind her neck. I pulled her toward me and we started kissing, slowly. Her mouth tasted like vanilla, her tongue was soft and warm. She spread her legs farther apart and pushed herself against my erection. I moved my hands to her breasts, kneading them and stroking her nipple between my forefinger and my thumb. She let out a soft moan and pressed her cheek against my forehead. She began to stroke my hard-on from the outside of my clothing, which made me
feel like a teenager again, getting me more excited still. I moved my right hand beneath her dress and teased my way toward her panties. They were silk, and they were loose. I moved them to one side just like I'd been dying to do in the kitchen, and put my fingers inside of her. She sucked in her breath and began kissing my ear and my neck with perverse abandon. Well, that was the end of it—I have a very sensitive neck that proved to be preposterously responsive to her hot, little tongue.

She pushed herself harder against me. I was touching her and kissing her and it felt so right and so fantastic, I moved straight from gobsmacked-level rapture to now-I-can-die.

There wasn't any music playing, the CD she'd had on had ended, and the sounds of us moving on the couch and of us touching each other were unbelievably intense. I had to have her. Immediately. I began to unzip my fly but she stopped my fingers. She licked her hand and stroked my cock with her wet palm. She started lowering herself down to suck me off but I eased her back up and kissed her.

“I can't wait,” I whispered near her ear. She took me in her hand and eased herself on top of me again. She started sliding down, then up, teasing me brutally, the pleasure of her nakedness against mine too much. I put my hand on the small of her back and thrust myself inside of her: she gasped. We started moving together, and bloody hell, it was divine. I moved my left hand over her backside. I grabbed her naughty arse and pressed her down on me. She sucked in her breath and responded by kissing me fully with her tongue. With my right hand I was holding her panties to the side and touching her clitoris, and when I looked down I could see myself moving in and out of her.

“I'm gonna come, I can't . . .” I held her tighter.

“I want to come with you.” She took me fully within her,
grinding against me in a circular motion. She began to touch herself with her right hand. I could feel her touching herself there, and it felt like she was touching me each time I thrust inside of her. It was too much. Much too much.

“Lisa . . .” I sighed.

She moaned and held me tighter, pulling my head to her chest while she writhed her way through her enviably long orgasm. With me still inside of her, she lowered her head to my shoulder and kissed me softly on the neck.

“Hey,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” I answered, floating.

She responded by kissing me on my nipple with a flash of her wicked tongue.

“Let's do it again, England,” she whispered, slipping off her underwear.

 • • •

Lisa made me happy. She made me feel capable and desired and potent and alive. She brought me back to my body: to the appreciation of my legs, my working hands, my strong back, my cock. She turned sex back into a play form, instead of the confusing, dark thing it had become with my wife. A diversion. A confession. An action standing in for something else.

I didn't think I'd continue on with it. I thought that it would end with our symbiotic sex that one night. But no. That's a lie, actually. I knew once we were finished that it would happen again and again, and that I'd put as much energy into nurturing this new relationship as I would keeping it a secret from my wife.

And I was good at it, God help me. You don't put any thought into whether or not you will be until it happens, but I
turned out to be a standout failed monogamist. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt grateful for my wife. Grateful for my daughter. Grateful that the one thing lacking from our perfect family circle was being supplied by someone else.

But now that Lisa has left me, the ease of what we had together hangs about like warm gunpowder after fireworks. Do I really want her back, or do I just want what we had? Our unchartered lovemaking. The absence of carved patterns and followed rules. The easy brightness of the new.

I put Lisa's letters back into the cabinet, no clearer on whether or not she was behind the situation with
The Blue Bear
, but certain that whatever she was doing, planning, or not planning, she finally missed me back. She would have spent enough time now in her posh house with her fancy spoon designer to learn that love wasn't as fun when it was predictable, when the game was fixed.

I've asked myself a hundred times since Anne confronted me in my studio whether, if I had it to do over, I would have gone up for that first drink with Lisa, accepted her invitation for dinner, allowed the whole thing to start. I don't know what this means for my future, but I don't regret my affair. I regret that Anne found out about it, and I regret that I hurt her, but to regret the entirety of the relationship itself would be to deny that I had real feelings for Lisa. Which I did.

I owe my wife much more than an apology: I owe her the difficult feat of falling back in love. But can we come back to love after an absence, or does it die from neglect?

It
does
die. It does wither. You can't even walk away from a meal on a table without it losing heat and changing, much less a plant, a pet, a marriage. I was an idiot to think that I could continue to see Lisa without it affecting my relationship with
Anne. Is the damage irrevocable? Or is there a way back to our past where we can build around the dark places until our mistakes are far beneath us, dead for lack of sun?

Anne is giving me a chance, and I lack the courage to take it. There's no undoing what I've done.

7

THE NEXT
day, after Anne went to work and I saw Camille off to school, I gathered up all of Lisa's letters and headed to the gallery, where Julien was in the middle of admonishing Bérénice over something she'd brought for lunch.

“She's got pickled cabbage in the storage room,” he whispered, out of earshot of her desk. “She says it's good for
colds.
”

“It is, actually.”

“Yeah, well, our printing paper smells like balls.”

I announced that I would deliver
The Blue Bear
to London. That I'd do it next week, during my
holiday.

“Great! We'll just settle on a day, then.” He started flipping through his agenda.

“But there's one thing,” I said, pulling out Lisa's letters and dropping them on his desk. “I spent all night going through these. You're probably right, that it isn't her, but I don't want to know until I have to. Until I'm there.”

“Well, it wouldn't be hard,” he said, reaching for one of the envelopes. “You've got the return address right there, and I can tell you where the painting's going—”

I slapped my hand down over the envelope to keep him from executing his intended task.

“Okay,” he said, flinching. “Whatever you want.”

“And can you hold on to those?” I nodded at Lisa's letters. “I don't want them in the house.”

“Sure. But you've actually got more mail.”

He went to the storage closet and came back with more contracts for sold paintings, another recipe from my mother, and a Halloween card from an expatriated American named Shelly Hampl who was both a client and a fan.

“She bought two key paintings, you know,” he said, pointing at the oversize card that began to cackle when I opened it.

There's a certain kind of American woman—a little doughy, white, divorced—who comes to Paris to reinvent herself, a process that usually sees her emerging far higher on the extroverted scale than she's ever been before. Shelly Hampl is one of these women. She's fond of saris, which she wears over ample jeans and pump-up Reeboks because, you know, in Paris
you just walk, and walk, and walk
. Not that there is anything wrong with her, per se. It's just that when you finally get a patron wearing pump-up high-tops, you hope they come accompanied by an entourage, a talent manager, and an Escalade.

After locating the tape measure from the rubble in Julien's desk, we went to measure
The Blue Bear
so that we could figure out how I could transport the damn thing to England. He promised me that his men would deliver it first thing in the morning, and after failing to convince me to purchase a ski rack for its transport, I gathered up my mail and the cackling Halloween card and kissed Julien good-bye. I was halfway home when I realized I'd swept up Lisa's letters along with everything else.

If I went back to the gallery now, it would be close to noon when I made it to the markets for the tsunami of errands Anne
had entrusted me with before the next day's departure, which meant that they'd start to run out of the things we needed during the lunch rush, which meant that Anne would have my head. It really was a toss-up: confirmation of my infidelity in writing, or a dearth of car snacks. I decided to carry on.

Besides, I felt good about our vacation. We were good beside the sea. The weather would be balmy, not warm enough to swim yet, but mild enough to take beach walks with our shoes off, to watch Anne's parents' ancient Newfoundland root about for sticks. To help Camille gather seashells. To be a family again.

And Cam just loved her grandparents' house, and Brittany in general. The sharp wind off the ocean that pinkened all our cheeks, the deep sleep the sea air pushed us into. She loved the rambling stone house, the rickety staircases. She loved their rheumy dog. We would be fine. It would be healing. We just had to
get
there.

The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind of activity with me fetching and gathering and noting things we might forget on whatever scrap of paper I had near me when Anne called. The next day, a Wednesday, marked the start of a two-week vacation, but for the first week of it, Anne would be working remotely from her parents' home, getting ready for her pretrial. Accordingly, she was going to be at the office late that night, and was panicked that she wouldn't have time to pack. She dictated a preliminary list of must-haves to me from her office so that I could start packing for her.

“Bar soap,” she said. “My parents only have lavender. And my black slacks that are hanging near my— Oh, and a one-piece, maybe? Do you think you'll swim?”

The truth was that we didn't need to be having the conversation. As I puttered around our bedroom, my hands moved automatically toward the things that formed her Anne-ness: a
collection of poems by C. D. Wright that she always kept on the nightstand. A Chanel paperweight in the shape of a white rose. Her perfume, Rouge Hermès, which she only wore at night because she thought it vulgar to wear perfume during the day. A framed picture of Camille holding up a crayfish that she traveled with everywhere, even when Camille was with us. The black trousers she requested. Her favorite collared shirts. The rain boots she always took to Brittany for walks along the ocean. This awful, fleecy headband that she'd had since our time in Providence that she liked to wrap around her ears when we went walking. (French people have two great fears in life: drafts and wind. Drafts get you in the inside of your house, and wind gets you while you're out. Both are to be avoided at all costs.)

I put Anne's belongings on the bed so that she could review what I'd included, and then I stuffed my own bag with the dress shirts and the corduroys and the femmy socks that Anne's parents liked to see me in.

The next day saw me even more at odds and ends. Both my women had half days—Anne ran out at 8 a.m., a whirling dervish of reminders and don't-forget-to's, and I trotted Camille down the street to school so that she could be restless and excited and entirely unproductive somewhere other than in our house.

Julien's delivery guys showed up at 10 a.m. to deliver
The Blue Bear
, and the minute they left, I started transferring our luggage from the house into the car. You can't travel light with women. I've spent years now cohabitating with this species, and it's impossible, you can't. At some point in the evening, Anne had snuck off into the kitchen and added even more “emergency items” to the Haddon family tote bag: Yahtzee, sun hats, chocolate cookies, a head massager—for most of the year, Anne was the picture of economy and good taste, but a single trip to
her parents could unleash the anxious urbanite within her who felt comforted by
things.

A final round to ensure that the light switches were all facing downward and the stove burners turned off, and I had finally finished. It was just after eleven. I'd pick Camille up at school and make it to Anne's office on time by noon, which meant I'd score big points with Anne, which meant we'd have a pleasant drive to Brittany.

And we did. By some miracle of reverse congestion, all the traffic in Paris was heading south. Camille and I actually had to
idle
on the curb outside Anne's office, a blue-moon occurrence in the history of trips like this. Usually, Anne would already be waiting on the sidewalk, one high heel tapping, arms crossed, her face saying,
You're late.

We got to Anne's parents' house a little before five. As was their custom, Mr. and Mrs. Bourigeaud were already outside when we arrived, waiting for us to get out of the car, kiss them, and be done with it so that they could get to the real prize: Camille.

I couldn't help it—every time I drove up to that stately beach house, I forgot how Mr. Bourigeaud had more or less forced me to take a translation job in the basement of the very law firm he and Anne toiled in so that I could “earn my keep,” or how Anne cried the night he canceled a special dinner with her when she'd passed the European bar because he had to work late. Screw it, I wanted him to like me. I wanted to be
in.

“Anne, ma chérie! T'as l'air fatiguée!”
Anne's mother, Inès, swept her up in the traditional French welcome composed of two cheek kisses and an observation of what is physically off about you. On this day, Anne looked “tired.”

“And you, Richard!” she said, pulling me into her heavily scented embrace. “You look thin. He looks thin,
non
?”

Alain offered to help with our bags and then scoffed at how many of them there were.

“You could have hung this here, you know,” he said, trying to undo the mess of bungee cords holding the bear down. “We have plenty of room.”

“We were thinking he'd go on Tuesday, to deliver it,” said Anne, ignoring her father's sudden possessiveness about a painting he'd never liked.

“It's a shame you have to go such a long way on your vacation,” added Inès.

“Sounds very queer to me,” said Alain, still fiddling with the cords. “You certainly do let people in the art world walk all over you!”

Not just in the art world, I thought, taking Camille's hand and starting for the house.

 • • •

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you're a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth.

In France, great wealth is spent within the family, on the family. It's not shown off, but rather spread about to make the lucky feel comfortable, and safe. Consider the ways the two countries approach the practice of inheritance. In America, when you die, you can leave your money to whomever, or whatever, you want. You can leave millions—as has been done before—to your bichon frisé.

In France, the estate has to be passed down the bloodline
in equal parts, and you can't leave anyone out—even the bad apples. If you have two children, say, and one of them is a drug addict who every three years shows up to say he's changed and then cooks heroin on your sterling silver and nicks all your cash, this sod's getting as much as the picture-perfect daughter who's been looking after you for years. It's an imperfect system, but it informs the way the wealthy live.

The French bourgeois don't pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don't build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it's in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It's the fearful who put money into houses with seven bedrooms and fifteen baths. It's the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months because if they're going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don't feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is
tu t'es laissé aller.
You've lost control of yourself. You've let yourself go. Still, I'll always prefer an untamed British garden to a curated French one. I
like
letting myself go.

The Bourigeauds' house was at the end of a dirt road running on the west end of a public golf course. There were five houses on the road, each of them bordered on one side by maritime pines and conifers, and on the other side, the turquoise sea. Built upon a cliff, the stone house managed to be charming, despite its dramatic views. Nestled in the middle of two acres
of oak and beech and hornbeam, there was an expanse of grass and reeds that effectively functioned as a front lawn, beyond which was a jagged cliff of porous rock dropping to the sea. In America, the border of the property would have been gated to keep children and sleepwalkers and drunkards from dropping to their deaths, but there was no division here between safety and stupidity: you had to draw those lines yourself.

 • • •

Another custom of the Bourigeauds' was an arrival walk. They were big believers in moving the old legs after a journey—that the salty air would open your appetite and gift you with deep sleep. Today, however, Anne said she wanted to stay home and unpack. I knew what this meant, of course. It meant that she was going to hide away in the guest bedroom and check her umbilical cord of a smartphone to see what was happening at work.

So I set out with Alain and Inès and Camille and their giant canine, Balfus, on the walking path that ran along the outskirts of the cliffs. Only five steps in, and I felt elated. Even through her cotton gloves, I could feel the warmth of my daughter's hand in mine, which I absorbed with her excited babbles about seahorses and kites. Ahead of us, her grandparents moved confidently up the sandy route they had taken hundreds, maybe thousands of times before, with Alain bending down from time to time to pluck a thistle from his pants and to pat his happy dog. The sea—immense and multicolored—I'd never tire of its beauty. High tide was coming in along the coast, the water moving in an orchestrated cascade of frothy, rolling waves. I swung Camille up onto my shoulders so that she could spot the stone lighthouse on Cap Fréhel.

The walk, if we'd done the whole loop, was a two-mile jaunt that wove up and down the cliffs before finishing in a set of woods near the entrance to the town of Saint-Briac, but we'd
only gone halfway before deciding to turn back. We all agreed that it would be nice to have a cocktail, and to do the full walk in the morning, with Anne.