Breathless (25 page)

The next day, a second photograph arrived in postcard format. I’m looking away from the camera into the far distance, in the pained-heroine mode I thought made me look sultry. Jim pleaded again for the recipe. Two days later, I received a third picture, this time cut up into twelve fragments that he had carefully glued to a piece of 8-by-11-inch cardboard. The pieces of the photograph were slivered like shards of a broken mirror, the trees growing upside down. In the margins between the scraps of my mutilated body in the landscape, Jim had placed the letters spelling “barley” in English and
“orge”
in French. The photograph was accompanied by a mock-heroic history of the grain, “Notes toward a Definition of Barley.”

Mark thought the cut-ups looked like the work of a psycho.

“He’s playing detective with the photographs,” I explained. “Like the guy in
Blow-Up
, looking for clues to an unsolved crime. He’s trying to get back to the way things were between us when I cooked for him.”

“Did you ever wonder why the most important thing about you is your mother’s recipe for barley pilaf? But that he begs for it by putting you in a sexy pose?”

“It’s a pun. ‘Orge’ for ‘orgy.’ Jim’s like my parents. He doesn’t believe in the unconscious.”

Mark couldn’t understand why I maintained contact with a man who hadn’t cared enough about me to call the doctor when he saw me drifting into a coma.

“He didn’t care if you died.”

“I didn’t either.”

The stream of photographs reminded me of the flurry
of pneus Jim
had sent me after the job interview for ELF and the letters he wrote to me while I was in New York during our second anniversary. It was
impossible to have a face-to-face conversation with Jim that got anywhere. Whenever I approached a difficult topic, he would fall silent. He would blink his eyes slowly, as though a door was closing. On paper, it was just the opposite. Not that the flow of words brought me closer to the truth—about the degree, about why he couldn’t return to America, about the money. In his letters to my father, he had sketched a poignant self-portrait of the dutiful if bereft son-in-law that had briefly convinced my father that a sane denouement to our drama was still possible. In the postcards to me, he played the sulky husband left behind to earn a living while the wife vacationed in the south of France, as if we were just another bourgeois family—minus the two children, of course.

Jim kept writing to me—and to my father—because we were still involved in the story of the marriage, even if the marriage was over. We were caught up in the rhythms of an epistolary novel, where the characters continue to correspond while saying that they are not going to write anymore because they have nothing to say. The last word, until the editor intervenes, is always just another invitation to respond.

“We now have a modus vivendi of sorts,” I wrote. “We both have our ‘freedom’ but remain friends.”

Had we ever been friends?

Leaving Jim the apartment, my lawyer-father believed, was a serious error: “He has the apartment and you are kicking about; he is using the car and you are using the subway; he has a bank account and you are without your own funds (not even the equivalent of what his teachers got but which you did not, as his teacher); he is not living up to his marital obligation of support. In New York, if he were to tell a Judge that he had no money to pay he’d be laughed at—you pay—beg or borrow or go to jail. If you can’t get money, at least get your freedom via divorce or annulment
at his cost
.”

As usual, my father had the facts right: I was living out of a suitcase, while Jim had the huge apartment paid for by my parents. Jim had access to the company bank account, and I was reduced to getting handouts from home. But the indignation felt wrong. Would the hypothetical Judge make the same decision if he knew about my sidebar with the
carpenter? Would my father? But then, I couldn’t tell him about the suicide attempt either.

I was drowning in a sea of stories that would never get told.

Mark admired the rhetorical flourish, antithesis, and chiasmus with which my father laid out the situation. My father, whom Mark had started calling Papa K., insisted on connecting the dots, showing me how to understand life in the “real world,” beginning with rule number one, which he had invoked when I told him belatedly about our deal for the book: “There is nothing wrong or immoral in looking out for your own interests.” Couderc had continued to be evasive about when we could expect to be paid. He was waiting, he said, to hear from the publishers in New York about the American version of the book. Mark thought Couderc was capable of rejecting the preface to justify not paying us for the work we had already done; he turned out to be right. Everything I disliked about my father’s approach to me was what Mark longed to see in a threatening letter to Couderc.

“He should have been
your
father.”

Halfway through the stay, Mark and I finished the preface. We celebrated the end of our collaboration by smoking some of the grass that Leo had given me to use when he came to see me in Paris after the overdose. Good stuff, he had promised, very clean. Better than Valium, baby. I didn’t think anything was better than Valium. Mark rolled the joints with care, making them tight and slim. We were stretched out on top of the bed on the sleeping loft, passing the joint between us, thinking of the people we could enlist in making trouble for Couderc, if he betrayed us. We reviewed the list of senior colleagues at the Institute.

Suddenly, Mark leaned over and kissed me, very tentatively, on the lips.

“Hey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Why not?” Mark said, picking up the roach with tweezers and taking a last puff of the joint. “We said we’d see what happened.”

“That was in the abstract.”

“You don’t find me attractive,” Mark said, with the slightly accusatory tone he adopted whenever I didn’t go along with his wishes. It was the other side of his sweetness.

“That’s not what I meant.” I paused, thinking about Dominique’s warning. “You have a great body. I told you that.”

“So what’s the problem, then?”

“I’m not ready. It’s much too soon.”

Mark slipped his hand under the miniskirt I had been wearing for our sunbathing sessions.

“Why don’t we just see what happens,” he said, moving his hand slowly up my thigh. I was stoned enough to lie back down. Maybe Mark was right. Who could say what would happen? This wasn’t the worst beginning. He slipped off his shorts and made his way inside me quickly after that, as if he wanted everything to be over as soon as possible.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, relieved to have him next to me in the bed and not inside of me.

“I need more encouragement.”

“I told you I didn’t think I was ready. Besides, you are incredibly wide.”

Mark took the size comment as a compliment.

“Do you know what Dominique said when I told her I was coming down here with you?” I asked, lighting a cigarette.

“No, what?”

“That you were homosexual.”

“Did she tell you that she was lesbian?”

“She didn’t have to. So are you?”

“I prefer the company of women,” Mark said, after a pause. “But I’m more attracted to men.”

“So you’ve slept with Anthony, I suppose.”

“Everyone sleeps with Anthony.”

None of this was supposed to count. After all, we were free. Mark refused to believe that being “more attracted to men” could possibly have played a role in what happened between us in bed. Arguing with Mark was like arguing with Jim when he was feeling wounded—his mind was locked into a position of righteousness to which he had thrown away
the key long ago. With Jim, I couldn’t help knowing the hurt was there behind the anger. I didn’t know Mark well enough to guess the path back to the pain, and he had no intention of going there with me.

Mark had planned an odyssey for himself for the rest of the summer, sailing from Marseille to Istanbul, and then finally moving on to Israel, with maybe a stay in Greece, on his way back to Europa, as he liked to say. He was thinking of going to the island of Seriphos, where friends had offered him a house. I could meet him there for a few days.

We parted at the local train station. Mark was taking a train to Marseille and I was returning to Paris.

“You should go to Greece, even if I don’t,” he said, frowning as we stood on the platform, waiting for his train. “It will be cheaper than the hotel in Paris.”

“Jim needs me to be there. We have business to deal with. The car. It’s complicated.” I shrugged, knowing I could never make Mark understand why I felt I owed Jim something.

“You enjoy feeling guilty,” he said, boarding the train and pleased at having the last word.

The Crash

“I
HAD NEVER KNOWN THIS
,” a woman in one of Colette’s novels says of a new lover, “the intelligent joy of the flesh that recognizes its master.” I flushed when I read that sentence. On the train back to Paris I copied the lines into my diary. I was still trying to come to terms with the irruption of desire that had fractured my marriage.

Yesterday in the restaurant
—
a troubling couple. The woman’s face reflected the ardor
—
the word does apply here
—
of devouring attentiveness that I know to have been mine. I was fascinated
—
wanting to look
—
and disturbed by what I saw. I recognized the basic and animal-like quality of her attachment
—
it was mine
—
it still haunts me
—
and were I to see H. again
—
it still would be there, I’m sure. His face
—
the hollows, the lines
—
were always (and remain) so infinitely moving. I can’t help feeling sad
.

I had almost finished
The Shackle
, a love story that happened to be set in the Riviera, when we left Provence. “To speak of love is to speak of the future,” the heroine says before she gets caught. The French moralists were filled with aphorisms on this subject, but they usually weren’t uttered by a woman. Unfortunately, my life wasn’t a novel—by Colette or anyone else. And I couldn’t stay in a story without a future.

I dreaded seeing Jim, but we had to deal with the car. The Austin had given us problems from the beginning, even on the honeymoon. Neither of us wanted it anymore. The car’s breakdowns had come to represent the failure of the marriage. The symbolism was too obvious for either of us to miss.

We met at the café downstairs from the apartment. It felt a little like returning to the scene of the crime, but then all of Paris was heavy with memory, including the car that had marked our arrival as a couple on the rise. Jim was waiting for me at his usual table in the back. Seeing him at a distance, I remembered meeting him for my second interview at Ruc, when he had hired me to work for him four years earlier. He hadn’t changed very much, I thought, physically at least, and yet everything else had. We couldn’t figure out how to greet each other, and settled on the
bise
, feigning French civility, kissing the air.

“What do you want to do with the car?”

“I’ll take it to the Austin dealer, let them fix it and then sell it for whatever they can get.”

“What about your business trips?”

“I’ll go back to renting.” Jim looked weary. “I still have the scooter for Paris.”

The Austin dealer was located outside Paris in a suburb reached through the
boulevards périphériques
, the heavily traveled roads that encircle the city. Jim would rent a car from an agency near the apartment. I would follow in the Austin. Once we had left our ailing car in the garage, he would drive me back to Paris in the rental.

We met in front of the café the following day.

It was tricky enough getting out of the city, but once we entered the fast-paced circuit of the outer boulevards I started to panic. I gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead as I tried to follow Jim’s
lead. I was afraid of losing him as he changed lanes, weaving in and out of the speeding traffic. A car passed me on my right and honked insistently. Then something happening on my left caught my attention and I turned my head slightly. A Peugeot moving in the opposite direction had jumped the dividing line and was heading rapidly, unswervingly, toward the little green car my parents had bought us. It just kept coming, like an action shot in a B-movie chase. I closed my eyes, braced my arms against the steering wheel, and pushed the brake to the floor. At that moment, in the fraction of the second it took the thought to form, the words of the cliché appeared like a balloon over the head of a cartoon character: “My life is over!” Calm spread through my body like the rush of a Valium drip. Then the crash shocked me back into ordinary consciousness. I opened my eyes, looked at the cars around me, and saw myself planted in the center of a five-car pileup. The front end of the Austin was completely smashed in, the fenders crumpled like used Kleenex. I saw myself sitting there, wedged neatly between the seat and the dashboard, intact. I had smashed my forehead against the steering wheel, but I was able to move.

How could it have happened? The story started to emerge from different witnesses, all gesticulating and shouting. The Peugeot’s steering wheel had locked as the driver was trying to pass the vehicle in front of him. The car became a ballistic missile aimed involuntarily at a vulnerable target. A traffic cop threaded his way through the wreckage and carefully reached in to extract me from the front seat of the Austin, where I was still sitting, stunned. I looked down and noticed that the dress I was wearing rode up my thighs as I climbed out of the totaled car. I was wearing a spring dress for my dinner that evening with Dominique, a short, straight, wool shift in an orange-and-white houndstooth pattern I had chosen to show off my tan. It seemed frivolous to care, but I couldn’t help noticing. I knew Dominique would appreciate the detail when I told her about the accident.

As the policeman led me over to the ambulance, my mood swung from dazed to giddy. When I looked back at the pileup, I could not believe I had survived. On the way to the hospital for X-rays, I mentally scanned my underwear. The doctors in the crowded emergency room
were briefly interested in the egg-like lump that had popped out in the center of my forehead. A radiologist read the results and told me that I was very lucky. I should see my doctor for a follow-up when I got to Paris. Jim turned up at the hospital as I was being released and drove me back to my hotel. The insurance papers for the car were at the apartment, he said. He would be in touch. The loving persona of his letters to me while I was away in the south of France was gone. Now that I was present and real, I knew he was determined to punish me however he could, and I felt unable to blame him.