Authors: Christine Sneed
I mumbled to André that this wouldn’t happen again, but all he said was “No, of course not.” He laughed and turned away to cut himself another piece of cake while I went to the bathroom to stare with fury and embarrassment at my messy hair and chewed-off lipstick. I had mostly sobered up by the time Laurent returned with more champagne, and I told him that I didn’t want another glass. André also declined, and with Nathalie already gone, there seemed no need for our party of three to continue. “I have dinner plans,” André informed us, looking entirely at ease with himself. “And I had better get ready to go.”
Laurent put the champagne in one of his desk drawers, and there it stayed until I noticed a couple of weeks later that it was missing. When I asked where it had gone, he told me that he had given it to one of his favorite clients, a thank-you gift for a recent purchase. He said this without looking at me, and I had trouble believing him but said nothing more. My immediate thought was that he had taken it to some other woman’s home to drink with her in her bed, the shades drawn against the gray afternoon sky. I still felt guilty for not telling him that André had kissed me again, and although I worried that André might report this news, with gleeful malice directed at me as much as at Laurent, I didn’t really believe that he would.
Nor had I told Laurent that, since the previous summer, I had seen Colin in Paris five times—on a Friday afternoon at the end of August, on two afternoons in mid-October, and twice more at the beginning of December. We met for only a few hours each time, but these meetings may as well have lasted several days considering the amount of time I spent reflecting on them afterward. One thing I learned is how quickly secrets accumulate once you start collecting them.
When I saw Colin last August, the first time since the previous February in Manhattan, when we were both cold and he was in a bad mood, we met for ice cream at Berthillon on Ile Saint-Louis, a place he had read about in his guidebook. (In the days before his arrival, I’d missed him even more. I kept remembering his sense of humor, his playful pranks. One of my favorites was a voice mail he’d left on my work phone:
I am calling to inform you that the extra-large polka-dot girdle you ordered has just arrived, and will be held in the Macy’s lingerie department for two weeks
.)
Quite a few other people had read about Berthillon in their guidebooks too, judging by the line that snaked out the shop’s door and around the corner. I knew this wasn’t his first visit to Paris, but I wasn’t sure how many times he’d been there before now. There were so many things I didn’t know about him, and it occurred to me then that we had spent most of the time we were dating talking about other people, or the cost of food, clothes, coffee, and rent, the difficulty of owning a car in Manhattan if you weren’t a millionaire, the movies we liked, the books I thought he should read instead of only buying collectible copies of, along with the feats he had performed on the basketball courts of his adolescence and early adulthood, courts he had played on with other aggressive, half-feral boys and men.
I had a little trouble breathing, which I had not anticipated, when I first saw Colin among the other tourists standing outside the ice cream store. He had a summer tan, and his expression was calm as he waited for me. I wondered if he’d expected to be stood up, and I knew that I didn’t deserve what seemed to be his still-strong feelings for me, especially after I’d ambushed him with the breakup the previous November, in order to be free to glide off on Laurent’s well-tailored arm.
Outside Berthillon, I didn’t wave or call Colin’s name; I wanted instead for him to find me at his side without having seen my approach—the idea of walking toward him, holding his gaze, or looking away in shyness, was too much to feel in that moment. It struck me later that compared to being with Laurent, it had been much easier to be Colin’s girlfriend, even if I’d sometimes been bored when he’d talked about sports or irritated when he’d been reluctant to go to a gallery or a new exhibition at the Met or MoMA with me. I hadn’t worried when we were together that I would say or do something foolish, or that he was interested in other women. If he did have a wandering eye, I’d never noticed it (though of course we hadn’t dated for very long).
I stood next to him for a few seconds before he glanced down and found me at his side, and it was then that he let loose a great whoop of laughter. Several people turned to stare at us, their tiny, expensive ice cream cones dripping in the afternoon heat. Seeing Colin’s face relax into a smile of such pure joy, I laughed too and stepped into his arms. He held me hard against his white-and-blue-checked shirt for a long time, maybe inappropriately—but right then, his warmth and strength were more of a comfort than an erotic argument. He had been my friend for a year or so before we started dating, and seeing him again made me realize how much I’d missed him, that painting his portrait was a way for me to keep him near me, in a different way, one more immediate somehow than e-mailing or calling him. I also realized that I was probably more homesick than I’d wanted to acknowledge, more in need of the reliable comforts of the friends and routines and familiar places I had left behind in New York. What if I had stayed with Colin, resisted Laurent’s advances last November? I wouldn’t have come to Paris, for one; I wouldn’t have been offered a show at Vie Bohème either. But I might have been happy anyway; I might also have forced myself to start painting again in earnest and found my way into a New York gallery, if I’d tried harder than I had during the year or two after I’d moved up from D.C.
“Jayne, you look great,” Colin said softly, his lips touching my hair. “It’s so good to see you.”
I could smell the minty shoulder ointment he favored, his lime deodorant, along with the traces of some smoky cologne. My throat constricted with desire and misgiving.
“How tall you are,” I said idiotically, smiling up at him. “I forgot.”
He looked at me in silence before bending down to kiss my forehead. I didn’t remember him ever doing this when we were together in Manhattan. I stayed there in his arms, cheek pressed to his chin, not squirming or laughing; I was breathing in short, quiet gulps. When he leaned back to look at me again, he blinked as if dust had blown into his eyes. Then he turned away, embarrassed. I wasn’t sure what I felt; my conscience and heart were sending conflicting, strident messages. On that afternoon the sky was a vast seamless table of blinding blue light. People were milling around us, gingerly holding their hazelnut and raspberry cones, taking careful, greedy bites. It was discombobulating to be assailed by such strong feelings for Colin, stronger than any I’d had when we were still together. If I’d felt more confident about Laurent’s feelings for me and my place in his life, I have to wonder if I’d have responded to Colin in the way that I did that afternoon. Would I have been as interested in seeing him again when he came back a month and a half later, in early October? On that day, instead of meeting for ice cream, I went to his hotel and climbed directly into bed with him, almost as shy as if it were the first time, no agreed-upon pretense of a drink or a sweet beforehand. But this was still several weeks away.
“Let’s go inside,” he said that first afternoon outside Berthillon. With one long-fingered hand at my lower back, he steered me into the dark-paneled store and ordered us both three-scoop cones: bittersweet chocolate, pistachio, vanilla.
Watching him devour the melting ice cream after we were outside again—standing with several other couples and a German family of five, two parents, two teenage sons in black T-shirts and shorts, a younger daughter in a purple sundress, the sun easing into the west—I tried to turn back the abrupt, vivid memory of Colin’s wet mouth on my breasts, his hairy, forceful knee parting my legs. I remembered his uneven, strained breaths against my ear and had to look away, down at the street where a piece of scrap paper had lodged in a melted puddle of pale pink ice cream. How did we get here? I wondered. Where will we go?
“It’s delicious, isn’t it,” he said, wiping his ravenous mouth with a crumpled napkin, innocent of my careening, X-rated thoughts.
“Yes,” I said, too brightly. “It was nice of you to find the time to take me here. I’ll have to come back.”
“Are you kidding? I was really looking forward to it. Except that I thought you might bail on me.”
I shook my head. “You know I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “You were the one who used to cancel on me at the last minute.”
“I did?” he said, doubtful. “I don’t remember that.”
“When your boss had Knicks tickets. You remember, don’t you?”
“Oh,” he said, making a face. “That only happened once, I think. No, wait, maybe twice.”
“It’s okay, Colin. Water under the bridge.”
“No wonder you dumped me.” He smiled.
“Oh, come on. Let’s not talk about that.”
He touched my hand lightly before closing his fingers around my wrist. “Can I take you to dinner? Make it up to you?”
I laughed. “Right now? But I’m not done with my ice cream yet.”
“We could walk around for a couple of hours,” he said. “Work up an appetite.”
I remember my ears ringing, the sidewalk seeming closer when I looked down. It felt as if a window had been opened in my chest and the air blowing in was ransacking a carefully ordered room. What if I were the one to make the move, to say that I could think of another way to work up an appetite? I was pretty sure that I knew what his answer would be, though sometimes he could be shy. But I wasn’t going to do it—I wasn’t confident or brazen enough yet to do these sorts of things. Even if Laurent wasn’t going to ask any questions about where I’d been, or with whom, I wasn’t in the habit of sleeping with two men in the same day. It would take me a little while to realize that I would have sex with Colin the next time I saw him. This first, sunny meeting in August, the idea of being in bed with him again was a possibility my mind, like a frightened bird, kept darting away from.
I realized something else later, after he was asleep in his hotel room and I lay next to Laurent, wide awake after midnight:
My erotic history, if I ever took the trouble to write it down, probably wouldn’t fill more than half of a single-subject notebook. Nothing about it is impressive or intimidating or sordid, but it is incredible to me how much time I spent thinking about the boys I had crushes on before I knew anything about how their bodies worked. How much time I spent worrying before I started having sex that the condom would break or the pill would fail, and I would end up pregnant and ostracized by my gossipy classmates, a disgrace to my parents and family, my life never again the same more or less steady ride toward something good and meaningful it had formerly seemed to be.
Despite these fears, of course I went ahead and lost my virginity anyway, and in a different sense, my life never
was
the same again. I didn’t get pregnant, and even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have been the first girl in my high school that this had happened to. I know too that, growing up only with a sister, I was curious about my friends’ brothers, especially their older brothers.
Slinking past their bedrooms, their doors locked and festooned with posters of surly-looking rock stars, I wondered what they were doing in there, their stereos sometimes playing so loudly we could hear the bass thumping throughout the house; who were they thinking about, and did they ever think about me, but I was sure that they didn’t, at least not until I was sixteen or seventeen and less gawky and flat-chested than I’d been before they’d left for college. When they returned home during breaks, they seemed to keep their visits as short as they could without permanently offending their loving, harried mothers. I felt what must have been awe for these boys’ private lives, for their new sideburns and hard biceps and messy rooms and deepening voices, for what I believed to be the constant sexual uproar and suspense they lived in, and, as I later imagined it, for their shy infatuations with girls they wanted to protect almost as much as they wanted to undress, bookish girls that their macho friends would have teased them about savagely if they’d been privy to these more soulful boys’ private feelings.
I think sometimes about the immutable fact of our bodies—how inviolably strong and resilient we believe ourselves to be when we are sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, how each of us, with our egos and animating consciousness, is walking around in an envelope of bone and sinew and skin that to a significant degree determines how the rest of the world responds to us.
Your beauty or plainness or homeliness—your eyes, your hair, your voice, your sadness, your feet, your hands, your nose, your thoughts, your fears, your fragile happiness. There are quiet parts in each of us that can only be gestured toward with light and color and shadow. This is one reason I am trying to be a painter. I think I understood this for the first time as we were organizing
Intérieurs intimes
. If a painting is going to be good, if you are going to remember it after you no longer stand before it, it has to hint at its subject’s inner life, whether this subject is a middle-aged woman or an elm tree or an empty room.
In the last year and a half, I have gotten so many of the things I have hoped for. Laurent keeps asking me how it feels. He has a quality that I haven’t given him enough credit for, not until now—he genuinely wishes people well. He wants to be a force for good, for pleasure too; he wants to make people happy. I have never known anyone quite like him. It is a kind of compulsion, I think, this desire to see everyone so happy, to have them look upon you with favor, with affection, possibly love. What was his childhood like? What determined that he would go in this direction rather than another?
Because it seems to me that it is easier for most of us to be selfish, to turn in rather than out. You risk less disappointment that way, I have to think; by not giving so much, or anything at all, you can’t reasonably spend your time wondering what you will get back. Laurent does wonder what he will get in return—I know that he does; he might not expect anything tangible, but those grateful, adoring gazes, those thank-yous, how important they are to him. He wants to be the godfather, the rainmaker, the prince. I get jealous sometimes, of course, and in my worse moments, cynical—What sins is he atoning for? I wonder angrily. Where are the balance sheets he must be keeping? And why does he now have two cell phones, along with the landline at home, not to mention an office phone? He claims that the second cell phone is simply an indulgence—a newer model of the iPhone he has had since I’ve known him. He is too lazy to change his number over and transfer all the data from one phone to the other, he says, but will get to it at some point. I offered to do it for him, but he did not accept my offer.