Breathless (26 page)

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
I
VISITED
Dominique in her apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens. Dominique had always seemed to me the epitome of Parisian stylishness. She didn’t look like a professor—she made a point of never dressing like one, she had told me one day, a rule I’ve tried to follow. A beaky nose kept her face from being perfect, but her tall, slender body exuded sexiness. She wore Guerlain’s “L’heure bleue,” a musky, powdery perfume that permeated her clothes, clung to her scarves, and made me dizzy. You could almost taste the scent in the air. I asked to try some. Dominique, who was in her early forties, said I was much too young for “L’heure bleue.” We sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment on the rue Racine and drank shots of Johnny Walker Black Label. We almost finished the bottle as I told her about the accident. She laughed about the dress and said I should wear slacks more often.

“You were right about Mark. He told me he preferred the company of women but was attracted to men. He said it was his neurosis. What does that mean?”

“It means you shouldn’t have slept with him.”

“He accused me of self-deception, of not knowing my feelings. He had analyzed our time together in his mind, and the only thing he could think of that he had done wrong was to let himself get into a position where I could hurt him!”

“Did you really think he was going to be honest with you?”

We finished the bottle. I could feel that I didn’t want to leave and that Dominique didn’t want me to either.

“You look adorable sitting there. You tempt me, but you’ve been through too much today. Another time.”

We kissed goodnight. I walked back to my hotel room, past the closed iron gates of the Luxembourg Gardens, past the deserted square in front of the Pantheon, wishing I had stayed to be comforted, and taking in—maybe not quite—what Dominique had just revealed to me. Adorable. Another time?

Staying would have been a turning point, but I had missed the turn.

The next day I made grim faces in a Photomaton in case we needed proof of injury for the car insurance. I drew a self-portrait with colored pens to show my parents what my eyes looked like: violet lids with yellowing circles under them. I couldn’t figure out how to show the lump. Later in the week, I met Jim at the Coupole to discuss the car insurance. The driver was claiming it was my fault.

“My fault!” I put my head in my hands. Maybe it was.

The Minotaur

F
ROM THE LITTLE HOUSE HE
had rented on the Turkish coast, Mark dithered endlessly about meeting me in Greece. I could tell from his letters how much he enjoyed keeping me dangling. I finally booked my flight without knowing. Once I got to Athens, I was relieved to learn he wouldn’t join me, after all. Except for the permanent shadow operations of the young Greek men, who were relentless in their pursuit of foreign women on their own, I was happy to be without a companion.

At Knossos, the guide explained the legend of King Minos and the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth. While he was asking us to imagine the vanished civilization from the arrangements of the fragments that remained, my mind drifted back to the apartment Jim and I had bought with so much hope for our future. Could history be reconstructed from the floor plans he had sketched? I was beginning to think that my first mistake was a literary one. Lennie and George never get the ranch. That
was the whole point. Jim and I both knew how the story turned out in the novel. The ranch should have remained a metaphor; we had been much too literal. Whatever else, ancient ruins put the present mess into perspective, which didn’t make it any easier to bear. I seemed to have moved inward in ever tighter circles, instead of out into a discernible line that I could follow on the horizon.

What eluded me was a pattern in the carpet, except the one proposed by Dr. Mendelsohn. Here in the land of Oedipus I couldn’t help thinking about our sessions. I was tired of talking about my parents and me. It was enough that I had to deal with them in the present by letter. I didn’t see why everything should be explained by some archaic, universal family psychodrama—about a son, no less. True, my life thus far had been a series of miserable failures; was the only way out to dig deeper into that dark material?

Back at Hotel Iraklion after the tour, I lay on my bed and went through the mail. Like the chorus in a Greek play announcing future woes and lamenting errors past, each letter that I opened brought me fresh expressions of disapproval, except from Jonathan, who had plans to reappear in Paris and take me out to dinner. He wanted to see my suntan. I wrote back to warn him he was going to be disappointed; I had already started to peel. Getting tan, I explained, figuring he’d like the analogy, was just the objective correlative of my self-defeating efforts at self-transformation. Trying to be someone else, someone, precisely, who tanned and didn’t just get burned. The traces of the accident were taking longer to disappear than the doctor had predicted, and I still had very dark circles under my eyes.

My father was enjoying his role as paterfamilias. The name of the monster in the labyrinth was obvious. He followed the money, and the money provided the thread out of the maze. Jim not only had failed to make good on the business and to provide for me as husbands are meant to do, but he had presented himself to my father as someone he wasn’t. My father had reluctantly accepted the fact of his daughter marrying a non-Jew. His generosity of spirit should have been rewarded, not betrayed. Fueling his anger about the loss of the money—the money he had loaned us for the apartment, the money he thought Jim owed
me—was something deeper, if unacknowledged, including to Jim, the man who had conned Mr. Just-Give-Me-The-Facts. The best my father could hope for now was to keep others from knowing what he knew: “Don’t sound off unnecessarily to anyone. After all, it’s no one’s business but our own.” I translated his anxiety back into the Yiddish word I heard in everything he said, even if he couldn’t bring himself to give voice to the shame—the
shonda
that Jewish families dread having exposed to the world at large.

Shame. First my sister had shamed the family by living with a Negro. Andrea said he was Puerto Rican. A Puerto Rican Negro might even be worse. Now I was getting divorced. Where would it end? What would people say? This time the word my father wanted was not in Yiddish, but German: schadenfreude, joy in the suffering of others. People would enjoy pitying my parents. I felt bad about the money—and guilty. I doubted Jim would ever pay my father back. It would be years before I could do so (not that they wanted the money from me, mad and disappointed as they were). But I hated the immigrant subtext of keeping it all in the family. Don’t tell; don’t tell anyone. It made me want to shout it from the rooftops, like Jane Eyre, declaring her right to exist. “Anybody may blame me who likes.”

For once, my mother, who usually led the charge in the assaults on my character, stayed out of the fray, letting my father treat me as an incipient legal case. I could see my name on one of his long manila folders, maybe even one of those brick-colored accordion containers that were the repository for the mysteries of his practice that had haunted my childhood. “I’m reserving my annoyance for when I see you” was point number three out of eleven in a two-page letter telling me how to conduct the rest of my life: “It’s a tolerable world if one takes Polonius’s advice. Just memorize that philosophy.” I did not want to hear from Polonius, whom my father never saw as the pompous character he was. I was angry at my father for not guessing how hard it all was.

“You must remember that I live daily, hourly, constantly with guilt and worries about the future. It’s not easy to be me right now,” I replied. “The accident was the finishing touch. Knowing how fragile my mental health is, how can you seriously
plan
to take a critical position?” Why
couldn’t my father try to see the situation from my point of view, I wondered, instead of spouting clichés from Shakespeare, probably culled from
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
, which was where he found most of his maxims? His favorite line from Polonius’s recommendations for getting along in what he always called the real world, “To thine own self be true,” was taken up by Mark in a fancier, Sartrean gear: “You cheat yourself of the truth the better to cheat others.” I made another note in my diary for Dr. Mendelsohn, whom I had reluctantly decided to see when I returned to New York. He said it was important to put labels on things. I filed this under Superior Man Syndrome.

The truth was, I didn’t know what the truth was. And the legends didn’t help. Unlike my father, I couldn’t so easily identify the monster at the heart of the labyrinth. I couldn’t slay the monster like Theseus, no more than I could offer a thread to a rescuer like Ariadne. The monster, I often felt, was me.

Sitting alone at café tables in the sun, I obsessively rehearsed the collapse of the marriage in my diary: “Would things have been all right between us if I still had been working or was it H.? He seemed so necessary, but in other circumstances . . .” I trailed off, desperate for answers, looking as always to the heroines of my favorite novels. Would Emma Bovary have had the disastrous affairs that led her to suicide if she had held down a full-time job? Anna Karenina? No, married women had affairs and tried to kill themselves, if I was any example, because they didn’t have enough to do. And, my mother would have added had we debated the matter, because they didn’t get enough exercise. A couple of tough sets of singles would have absorbed the energy that was looking for trouble. The flaw in the analysis was that tennis (if I played, which naturally I didn’t) left my constant companions dread and its twin demon, longing, in place. Besides, I wasn’t looking for trouble, as my mother liked to say. I found trouble in place of what I was looking for. I had answered an ad for teachers of English and found a husband. I had hired a carpenter to convert our apartment into my husband’s school and succumbed to a literary cliché.

Now that I was almost sans husband, past the threshold of repair, my father was determined to get everything straightened out. This tactic
didn’t work with Jim, who thought in wavy lines and who refused in twisty prose to respond to my father’s direct questions. Learning how to manipulate French bureaucracy had made Jim an expert at evading the law. He had once boasted to Alain about having talked a tax collector into taking English lessons in exchange for an extension on his payment schedule. Far from feeling guilty or remiss, Jim expected sympathy from my father and complained to him that I was the one creating impediments to resolving our affairs.

My father could not fathom why I wasn’t helping in the campaign for a financial settlement. In his view, I was entitled to a substantial financial settlement, if not alimony. But I felt like Anna Karenina: I expected punishment, not economic reward.

Jim has his faults and his quirks BUT don’t forget
—
I broke up the marriage, I left, and until I did there was nothing objectionable (on any official scale) in his behavior. That we were short of money is not a crime. No law says he had to support me in high style. Things are finished between us, all right. I’ll do something legal about it when the time comes. But you know, from the European point of view, I was wrong. I left and created the state of tension that was responsible for subsequent unpleasantness. Which is to say: don’t be hard on him. Above all, wait
—
I’m a long, long way from needing my freedom on those terms
.

I wasn’t trying to absolve Jim of responsibility: he owed my father the money because they had made a business deal and I thought Jim should pay him back. I was trying to get my father off the case because I couldn’t explain why I felt guilty. As far as my father was concerned, in choosing Jim I had made an error of judgment, thus confirming his original view of the man. Fortunately, I had come to my senses. To explain how my unexpected discovery of sexual passion—my second error of judgment—had torpedoed the scheme he had bankrolled was not part of the analysis.

Despite the acrimony that had started permeating their correspondence, Jim and my father continued to write to each other. My father had
never confronted Jim with the lies he had uncovered at Easter time about the unfinished BA. I persuaded my father that it would only enrage Jim, increase his paranoia, to bring up the subject. Instead, they discussed the situation in the Middle East, man-to-man, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Jim announced that as a Jew by marriage, he needed to make clear, in case my father was wondering, that he was profoundly anti-Zionist. “I am
not
, repeat,
not
a Zionist,” my father echoed, as if bonding with his son-in-law. Jim devised a few suggestions for Israel’s future that included the merging of Israel and Jordan with King Hussein as president of the Republic. My father did not reply to Jim’s ideas about how to solve the crisis in the Middle East, though, infuriated by de Gaulle’s declared neutrality about the war, in the summer of 1967 he saved his shekels, as he put it, and, in a grand but useless gesture, boycotted France.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, dégueulasse?”

A
MESSAGE FROM
N
ATHALIE
,
MY
friend from the lycée days, was waiting for me at the hotel when I returned to Paris: “Jim has had a very serious scooter accident. Call me.” While I was in the south of France, Nathalie and Jim had started seeing each other. It was my idea, in fact, the last gasp of my eighteenth-century fantasies about manipulating other people into stories of my making. When I moved out of the apartment at the end of May, I took Nathalie to dinner and told her I thought she and Jim might do well together. He had that huge apartment. He always wanted a child. She had a child without a father.

“I find him really intimidating; he seems to know everything.”

“It’s mainly bluff. He makes it up as he goes along. Anyway, the only thing he really cares about is food.”

“That’s part of what worries me.”