Authors: Christine Sneed
“Do you guys have paint-by-numbers in France?” asked Jayne. “I used to do those when I was a kid.”
Laurent looked at her over the top of his newspaper. They were in the kitchen, sunlight muted by the sheer white curtains, he at the table eating a piece of buttered baguette while she flitted about, sponging off the countertop next to the sink. Someone was whistling outside in the courtyard; it sounded like a Journey song Jayne’s sister used to sing in a falsetto to make her laugh. Jayne heard corny 1980s pop songs, played without a trace of mockery as far as she could tell, everywhere in Paris, songs that she had been taught to deplore in grammar school by the boys she’d had crushes on.
“What is paint-by-number?” he asked.
“I guess you’d say it’s a kind of toy,” she said. She was going to tell him about André and could not quell her nervousness. “You fill in a picture with different colors according to a numbered code.”
“Oh, yes, I have seen those. You are like a vacation tour with everything scheduled in advance.”
“Kind of, yes.” She paused, her anxious mind registering that the whistler was moving away, taking the Journey song with him. “Laurent,” she said.
He glanced up again from
Le Figaro
, the headline trumpeting more funding for TGV train lines. “Yes?” he said without curiosity.
It looked for a moment, unbelievably, as if he would laugh after she told him what had happened in the back office with André. Something shone out from Laurent’s eyes and then abruptly was gone—it had the startling gleam of mirth.
“I am more annoyed that he told you first about the vernissage than I am that he kissed you. I wanted to be the one to tell you about the show, mais alors, sa bouche. He can never keep his mouth closed.”
“I’m sorry about what happened,” she said. “I felt ashamed that he thought he could do it at all.” Saying this now, she wondered if this was a lie. She’d felt embarrassed, but shame had been harder to locate in the tangle of conflicting feelings that had assailed her.
Laurent did not reply for several seconds and turned the crinkling pages of his newspaper before setting it down next to his crumpled breakfast napkin. “You are a beautiful woman, Jayne. Of course he wants to kiss you. He also believes that I was seeing his ex-wife for a time. He will always be seeking revenge against his imagination.” He put a hand on her forearm. His fingers were disconcertingly cold; she nearly recoiled.
“Were you seeing his ex-wife?” she asked.
The brief rogue glint appeared again in his brown eyes. “Not really,” he said.
“Were you?”
“We were never a couple,” he said.
Who else should I know that you slept with! she almost snapped. Instead, she said, “What about Sofia? Is she your mistress?” She tried to laugh, wanting to make a joke of her doubt, but the sound came out choked.
“No,” he said. He looked again at his newspaper, one hand on the crease, ready to return to its oily, ink-shedding pages. “She is my friend.”
“Is she pretty?” She knew the answer, having already studied the half dozen photos she had found of Sofia online, but wanted to know what he would say.
His expression didn’t change. “Yes.”
“Prettier than me?”
“Jayne, please.”
She said nothing and stared into the sink, at the drain basket with its bloated bread crumbs.
“You are different,” he said. “I do not compare you to each other.”
“I’d like you to introduce us.”
“I am sure you will meet her if you stay here long enough.”
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.
He pursed his lips. “No, of course not. Do not do that, Jayne.”
“Do what?”
He sighed. “Jump so quickly to suspicion of me.”
She looked at him, his furrowed dark brow, his gaze now turned away. She was disgusted with herself, but her jealousy of Sofia in that moment was almost unbearable.
“I’m sorry about André,” she said softly.
Laurent shook his head. “I know that you were his victim.” He paused. “Am I correct in thinking this?”
“Yes, of course you are.”
He regarded her dispassionately. “Good. Then that is that.”
She nodded but said nothing.
Unattributed, anonymous
… The people mentioned here will no doubt know who I am if they take the time to read what I have written, but any person who does not know me, I am thinking, will probably not regret this fact. These pages are an attempt to explain how I have so far chosen to live. It is similar to what I intend to ask my artists to compose for me after their work has been exhibited at Vie Bohème. Long after their paintings or sculptures have been sold or packed away into storage, long after the closing date of their shows, there should be something left—just as a diary remains after someone dies, whether the dead like this or not.
Not having been able to make a career as a painter, and later, in a sense, having failed as a husband (though that failure was a joint effort), I realized a number of years ago that I needn’t also fail at retaining some claim on the past, of making sense of what has happened to me and what I have caused to happen.
For example, I am no longer young, and in recent months I have been thinking that there are few men and even fewer women whose lives and legacies have continued to be remembered in our modern age, to be celebrated or cursed: Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, Catherine the Great, Attila the Hun. Men and women who oversaw violent upheaval, who were responsible to a significant degree for millions of deaths and millions of liters of blood shed on their soil and the soil of countries they conquered or tried to conquer.
We have also Beethoven, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Manet, Picasso. Jonas Salk, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur. Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Gregor Mendel. Marie Curie too, yes, but our history has been dominated by men and their ways of seeing, unfair as this might be. I am, after all, the father of a daughter and a lifelong admirer of women.
What is the point of any life? This is what Jayne—not my daughter, but my girlfriend and protégée—has asked me more than once. She asked me this question not long after we met, when I was already smitten with her, more than I expected to be, and more than she expected too.
There is the old philosopher’s answer: The point is to be.
There is the pacifist’s: To live and let live.
There is the hippie’s: To love.
There is the Zen Buddhist’s: To be present.
There is Jayne’s answer, as it was at the time: To be someone.
There is another answer, maybe the best one: To be kind.
And another: To regret nothing (but that is impossible, no? Unless you have no conscience or else have been endowed with such a charmed life that no trouble ever enters through your front or back doors).
For years I have held on to love letters and old photographs. I have held on to receipts and IOUs and the occasional regret, but not too many. I have made lengthy notes, kept track, kept things straight, in my mind at least, if not always in body and deed. It might sound cold, but these pages are not meant to be read by my son or daughter. They would not be happy, I suspect, with what they would discover here, although no honest accounting of any mature life is without its shadows, its trapdoors and dirty cellar floors, its attic rooms with all the cobwebs and blind, floundering bats.
There is the chance, however, that I will decide to throw all these pages away and no one will ever read them, unless I die suddenly, but I don’t believe that I will. It might seem foolish to declare this here, but I have never been superstitious; ordinary life is not without its mysteries, of course, but to assume there are malevolent forces at work—something other than human beings in angry, destructive collectives, or dictators, or pillaging captains of industry—that, I have to believe, is a waste of time and energy.
Jayne has had many questions for me in the time we have been together—more than a year now, six months in New York, eight months in Paris. We have weathered changes of season—summer to fall, fall to winter. We have weathered visits from her younger sister and parents, from her friends Liesel and Melissa, with their floppy summer hats and bright red toenails and newly blond-streaked hair (both of them, and Jayne’s sister, Stephanie, too! It was comical, though comedy was not their intention, I do not think). During Liesel and Melissa’s visit in particular I had a headache more nights than not, the two of them, with Jayne, laughing and squealing so often, as my daughter Jeanne-Lucie had done at fourteen when she carried a torch for the actor Olivier Martinez and met him one afternoon when he appeared at Vie Bohème to look at everything with what seemed a discerning eye but then, to my dismay, he bought nothing.
We have also withstood visits from Jayne’s friend Colin, though she does not know how much I know of her outings with him. She left her phone at home one afternoon when she went out for a long walk, and I read the text messages he’d sent to her, at first inadvertently, the iPhone chiming on the table next to where I sat looking at e-mail on my phone, no code to lock her own against intrusive eyes, I discovered then (though this has since changed). Colin had written to confirm an assignation later in the week, and when I opened the text window, a long thread unspooled before me, many exchanges over several months, numerous unequivocal facts about their ongoing liaison. This man from her life in New York has been coming to my city for business, and for pleasure. I will admit that you should not come to Paris if you have no talent for pleasure. That his pleasures are taken with Jayne at his side, I am not so thrilled about this, but it is to me she returns every night, and she only sees him every couple of months. How much, realistically, can I expect from her? If you look at this state of affairs in a harsh, truthful light, she has been with him six, maybe seven afternoons out of the last year.
If you are practical in this manner, even about perceived betrayals, maybe they are not so hard to live with.
This was one way my ex-wife and I tried to justify ourselves when we did something that upset the other. An hour or two with someone else, here and there. Why should this matter as much as it always ends up mattering? Why is the body such a faithless, straining beast? But that second question belies a bias—that it is wrong to please the body, and also, that what pleases the body, in my experience, sometimes ends up hurting some other body.
If you look at your life, you see that it is filled with routine tasks and obligations—with phone calls and dishwashing and cooking, with tooth brushing, showering, driving, dental appointments, food shopping, standing in line, typing, walking, waiting at stoplights, opening umbrellas when it has just begun to rain. How not at times to submit to temptation, to an occasion to veer off from the rote and responsible?
I for one do not want to die thinking about the beautiful women I had a chance to be close to but turned away from. No one who loves women would want to die that way. Because surely that is a miserable fate, perhaps the most miserable.
This is not to say that I am leaping every hour from one bed to the next. Nonetheless, if an attractive opportunity presents itself, I think you are indeed a fool to turn it away. I do not mean every opportunity. Only the best ones. I see the libidinous glint in my son’s eyes too. He should understand me better, being in possession of his own blunt instrument of passion and occasional dishonor. He thinks I am the one who deserves the blame for his mother’s and my divorce. Not true. Anne-Claire, like many beautiful women, had more admirers when she was younger than she knew what to do with.
Some of Jayne’s questions for me, ones she has asked sometimes with a catch in her voice:
What were you doing in Paris during the six days that I was waiting to fly here from New York?
What is between you and Sofia?
Who are the other women in your life that I haven’t met, besides your daughter and ex-wife?
Who was the woman who went with you to the nudist beach in Italy?
Why do you not go home more often to see your sister and the vineyard where you grew up?
What do you get from the artists you support, other than a pledge to continue making work?
What took you so long to get home tonight?
What happened between you and André’s wife?
How many other women have lived here with you before me?
What do you really think of my paintings? My future as an artist?
What are the real reasons you asked me to move to Paris with you?
And again, always: What is the point of any one life?
Those are the frames and the following are the pictures that fill them.
If you have money or uncommon good looks, if you are healthy and good company, if you attract the kind of attention that other people alternately envy and admire, you possess the sort of advantages that may permit you to enjoy a happy life. Even so, permission is not the same as a guarantee. Money and a handsome face make things easier, but this does not mean that easier is always better or enough. I am not claiming to have lived through terrible hardship or to have failed at finding love and friendship. But I have enjoyed some of the advantages noted above, and have lived contentedly for most of my adult life in Paris, first alone in a two-room apartment in the attic of a bookstore on rue Gay-Lussac, and later with Anne-Claire in a five-room apartment on rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève when she was still at the Sorbonne and I was painting the canvases I succeeded in hanging on few people’s walls but our own. Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie were born on this sloped street, with its disheveled students streaming in and out of the universities and lycées on the adjacent avenues and boulevards and narrow, crowded passageways.
We lived in the fifth arrondissement for several years before moving to a larger and sunnier apartment in the sixth near place Saint-Sulpice, a building with a concierge who stood for hours most afternoons in the courtyard doorway, waiting for her husband to return from the antique postcards and stationery stall they ran with their grown son at the
marché aux puces
near the Porte de Clignancourt. She was also there to watch the tourists and delivery boys and residents coming and going, her greying hair combed and curled against her pink-rouged cheeks, her fingers stained from many daily cigarettes. This was Madame Latour, whose real surname was Lasky, which I learned after a year or so of living above her and her family, when a letter meant for her was mistakenly placed by the postman in Anne-Claire’s and my mailbox.