Authors: Christine Sneed
Colin is planning to attend. Jayne’s phone revealed this fact on the day I read the long thread of their clandestine communications. I am still trying to decide if I should tell her that I know about him.
Sofia will also attend; it doesn’t surprise me that she is curious about Jayne. I think, under different circumstances, they would like each other quite well. Maybe even under these circumstances, but I have to doubt it.
The
Intérieurs intimes
opening is on March 21—the same day that Beethoven, one of my favorite composers, debuted his Quartet no. 13, op. 130, in Vienna in 1826. It is also the day on which, in 1859, the Scottish National Gallery opened in Edinburgh. Jayne was especially pleased by this latter coincidence. “That museum is still open,” she said. “It seems like a good sign, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “If you are looking for a sign.”
“Oh, of course I am. I think we all do. Don’t you?” She smiled, but her dark eyes were clouded with doubt. Why was she so worried, I wondered. Her work would attract attention. She would make her former teacher proud, and her parents, who would not be able to attend the opening but planned to come to Paris in early April, when her mother would have her spring school vacation.
“I don’t think I look for signs,” I said. “If I did, it would mean that I am waiting for something to happen, yes?”
She regarded me. “I suppose it would.”
“I am happy with things as they are,” I said, but even as I said this, I knew that I didn’t mean it, not fully.
Something I have begun to notice with increasing frequency: why is anger so often the first emotion we reach for?
I heard Jayne murmuring in her sleep a few nights ago, after we had gone out to see an American movie that we argued over in the taxi on the way home—she thought the female lead, who was having an adulterous affair with her brother-in-law, was treated much more unfairly than the brother-in-law by their respective spouses and most of the film’s other characters. I thought they were equally miserable by the time the movie ended—both had been forced out of their houses and were in the process of getting a divorce. He had more money, and his parents were still speaking to him, but I wouldn’t say that he was any happier than the woman was. “He might be just as unhappy,” said Jayne, “but he’s not as badly off. She lives in a shithole apartment and never gets to see her kids and can barely afford to eat and pay her rent!”
Did it bring back memories of your own awful apartment in New York? I almost asked, but knew she was talking about something else.
Very early the next morning, she startled me from a sound sleep when she called out, “Where is it?” At first I thought she was awake and talking to me, but when I looked over at her, her eyes were closed and I could see that she was still asleep. In the morning she had no memory of this outburst.
“Where is it?” she repeated, bemused. “I have no idea what I meant. Have I done something like this before?”
“No,” I said. “Not that I’ve noticed. Have other men told you that you talk in your sleep?”
A peculiar look crossed her face. She was deciding if she should lie, I realized, but I didn’t understand why; I hadn’t asked her to tell me who it was, or what she had said. “No,” she murmured, brushing away the hair that clung to her sleep-creased cheek. “But I once accidentally hit someone in the face.”
“I hope you won’t do that to me,” I teased.
“Me neither.”
“Did he hit you back?”
She blinked. “No. Thank goodness.”
“Well,” I said. “I hope you didn’t hurt him too badly.”
“He was fine. After he got some stitches.”
“What?”
She laughed, her voice croaking. “I’m kidding. I didn’t hit him hard at all. It just woke us both up. But we did break up not long afterward, for other reasons.”
“I guess he was afraid he’d wake up one night and find you standing over him with a knife.”
“Ha-ha,” she said.
“Or a baseball bat.”
“That’s not funny. Things like that freak me out,” she said. “I watched too many scary movies when I was a kid, I think.”
“I could put you in a straitjacket before we go to bed, if you’d like me to,” I said.
She sat up, her body rigid, her expression one of unequivocal distaste. “That’s so creepy, Laurent. How can you say something like that?”
“I am only kidding, Jayne. But how could I resist? You’re like Jeanne-Lucie. She is easily frightened too. The things her brother would say to her when they were children. If you think I’m bad—”
“Poor Jeanne-Lucie. You and Frédéric were so hard on her. She’s told me stories.”
“She lived through it all just fine,” I said.
“Barely.” Jayne gave me a scolding look. “Has she told you her idea yet?”
“What idea?” I asked, sensing controversy.
“She wants to go to New York with me after
Intérieurs intimes
opens. We’d go for four or five days, see a couple of plays, visit a few museums, do some shopping. She said she could get Anne-Claire to help Daniel take care of Marcelle while she’s gone. And Martin too. She said he’d help out.”
“How nice of him,” I said, dryly. “Is she paying for everything?” I wasn’t sure why, but I did not like the thought of my girlfriend and my daughter on the loose together in New York.
Jayne hesitated. “No, I don’t think so. I’d pay for my share.”
“You would?” I asked, interested. “How?”
“With my savings,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “You don’t have to sound so sarcastic.”
“I’m not being sarcastic,” I said. “I’m just a little surprised that you two have been talking about traveling together. Especially when I’d think your show that’s opening in a few weeks and the arrival of your former teacher and your parents soon after would be more than enough to occupy your thoughts right now.”
“It is occupying my thoughts,” she said. “But I miss my friends in New York. I’d like to see them this spring if I can. When I couldn’t get together with Liesel and Melissa over the holidays, I told them I’d try to come in April or May.”
“Then I suppose you should go. As soon as you can arrange it.”
“Laurent,” she said. “Please don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
She didn’t reply. It was almost eight thirty, and I hadn’t yet gone out for my newspaper and morning espresso. My mood would only deteriorate further if I waited much longer. “You do what you want to do,” I said. “You and Jeanne-Lucie can go to New York whenever you’d like. But your parents are coming soon too, aren’t they? You must be here for that.”
“We’d go after their visit. Mid-April, probably.”
“I’ll help you pay for the trip,” I said.
She must have heard the sigh in my voice because she shook her head. “I have money saved. You don’t have to pay for any part of it.”
She said this, but knew that I wasn’t likely to permit it.
It bothered me more than I let on that my daughter and Jayne were considering flying across the Atlantic together, but Jayne must have guessed this. It also bothered me that when Frédéric called and Jayne answered the phone, he liked to talk to her for several minutes, and it was usually she who had to suggest passing the phone to me. From the next room, I could hear them talking, she laughing at almost everything Frédéric said. When had my son become such an entertainer? With me he was sometimes sulky, replaying in his mind our unresolved disagreements, I imagined, probing ancient wounds to see if they still throbbed. He could have called my mobile too, but he stubbornly preferred the landline. Frédéric and Jayne had met in early August when he came to Paris for a weekend with his wife and daughter, a week or so before Jayne’s sister and her two girlfriends from New York descended on us, each of those two visits lasting for six days, Jayne’s mood pensive and a little glum after their visits ended. She spent more time alone in the study painting, making up, she said, for some of the hours she had lost while entertaining her guests.
And then she had her first rendezvous with Colin—at the end of August, I think it was, but of course I didn’t know this until the winter afternoon when I broke my own rule of not invading another person’s privacy (because I know how it feels to be the one whose e-mails and call logs have been looked at with increasingly furious eyes, assigning blame, assembling clues without being able to see the whole picture).
What would Jayne have found out about me, if she had known where to look? If she still wanted to look—that impulse should be considered first. Would it be worse to live with a lover who isn’t ever concerned that you are thinking of someone else when you lie together in your sanctioned bed?
Before anyone judges me, I hope she (or he) will think of all the things she has done in secret. The purchases made on a tertiary credit card and buried in the closet or hidden in the trunk until she could no longer keep herself from wearing the new shoes or the new dress or serving dinner on the new porcelain plates the night that guests were dining with her and her family? How many times has she passed judgment on a friend with a guilty conscience but in her most harshly honest moments realized that she wished an attractive and passionate man would come to sweep away her boredom and to look with lust upon the body her husband began to ignore after their third year together? Or perhaps once or twice, maybe more, on a business trip or on a vacation with college friends, she met an attractive stranger and spent the night with him, and all it truly meant was that someone still desired her.
I have heard that men regret the chances they’ve missed, whereas women regret the ones they took that did not turn out so well. There are exceptions, I am sure, but it seems to me that the women I know who have alluded to such a thing do wish they had behaved more chastely. Men, without much variation, seem to wish the contrary.
Have I gone off to undisclosed rooms and taken Sofia into my arms during the months that Jayne has lived with me?
Have I gone off to meet a visiting Fabienne in her hotel near the Hôtel de Ville, her miniature greyhound, Fiona, locked away in the bathroom while I am naked in the clean white bed with her equally naked mistress?
Have I ever thought, No, I will not, but at the last minute changed my mind?
Have I gone off with any other woman whose name Jayne has never heard me or anyone else, as far as I know, mention?
Have I had any regrets about these choices, these opportunities?
One other question, some variation of which we never stop asking:
What will happen next?
Laurent suggested, cajoled, and finally insisted that I write down some of my impressions after the opening of
Intérieurs intimes
. I was skeptical when he gave me the assignment; wasn’t our work supposed to do the talking for us? It felt similar to the times when I was told as a child to think over something I’d done that had upset someone else (such as stealing my sister’s Barbie doll and throwing it into the street), even though I knew that Laurent hadn’t made the request to punish me. He was handing me a chance to relive the event, he said, to see myself as both artist and spectator. I hadn’t been very disciplined about writing anything but e-mails in a long while, and so this extended artist’s statement, of a kind, wasn’t an undertaking that felt second nature to me.
He was passionate about it, though, and said that he and André planned to start asking each of their artists to record their thoughts within a week or so after a vernissage, no matter how many or how few shows the artists had already had. Our remarks should be something like a hybrid of exhibition catalog copy, an artist’s statement, and a diary. Coincidentally,
journal intime
is the French term for diary—so close to the name of our show, which I didn’t really like at first, because it made me think about the actual interiors of a body—the blood and veins and laboring organs—but the name has grown on me.
“Do you want me to do this in some formal way? Or should I just write down thoughts as they occur to me?” I asked Laurent.
“Just write something true,” he said. “You can interpret my instructions in any way that you want to.”
“Maybe I could draw my impressions instead of writing them down.”
He shook his head. “I want your words, Jayne. Eventually we would like to put together a book, after we get enough of these statements or whatever it is that we call them.”
“It does sound interesting.”
“You will be a star, Jayne,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes, of course it is,” I said, pretending to be serious before I laughed.
“Why do you make a joke of your ambition?” he asked. “It isn’t a joke.”
I paused. His irritation was obvious, his mood a sudden cloudburst. “I’m not,” I said. “Not really.”
At first I tried to think of my essay/artist’s statement/diary mash-up as I would have an assignment for an art history or theory of art course. I thought I should try to sound like someone who contemplates every brushstroke before she makes it, even if this isn’t always how I work. I wanted my response to sound like me, though, not as if I were talking from behind a magic velvet curtain or calling down prophecy from the top of some snowcapped holy mountain.
Laurent had more advice when I came out of the study after another false start and gave him a dirty look. “Just tell the truth,” he advised.
“As I see it, you mean,” I said, tired and irascible.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “How else?”
This didn’t happen to me when I was in shows in the past, not as it has this time: I’ll be going about my daily business—putting on my shoes, combing my hair, eating an apple while looking out the kitchen window—when I remember that my work is hanging in a gallery a few miles from where I live. It is being subjected to the critical, sometimes hostile stares of the strangers who enter the space and stand in their high heels, on their bowed legs or flat feet, before my paintings, thinking that they could do what I’ve done. Or maybe, more generously, thinking the opposite: they wonder where my ideas come from, how I choose my subjects, and how I learned to paint a face that looks more brooding and melancholy on the canvas than it probably would in person. Equally disorienting is that I am responsible for this relationship, as short-lived as it might be, as glancing an impression as my work might leave on the gallerygoer.