I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (19 page)

I nodded. “I kind of barged in. I begged.”

“But why?”

“Because I
do
care about that painting. When I painted it, the way I was when I painted it.” I looked down at my sneakers. “The way
we
were.”

Her attention strayed to the bridge, where a fleet of winged horses presided over the passing cars and pedestrians above us.

“You remember how that bathroom always smelled like french fries?” she asked.

I laughed. The people we'd been house-sitting for in Cape Cod that summer had two children, and whether it was a proclivity for fast food so entrenched that it had literally become
part of the walls, or if it had been some cleaning product with a high percentage of canola oil, it was true, the bathroom had smelled like fries.

“I wonder what they're up to,” I said, thinking of Charles and Donna. Back then, we'd been such good friends. “We should get in touch.”

Anne looked away from me, and I felt the numbness that comes from having said the wrong thing. On both sides of us, the flesh- and beige-colored buildings of Paris passed us by.

“I want you to tell me one thing,” she said finally, pulling her coat tighter around her throat. “You didn't sell it to her? She really didn't buy it? That's not why you wanted it back?”

I felt pinpricks through my body. “I promise you, it wasn't. It went to two men, a couple.”

She looked unconvinced. “You promise?”

“I swear.”

“But she's in London?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Was she when this started?”

I shook my head.

“She was in Paris.”

“Yes.”

She bit her lip and looked away from me. She reached for a tissue from her purse, but just sat with it, wringing it between her hands.

“In Paris,” she said. “How long?”

My heart was caged. “How long was she in Paris?”

“How long did it last?”

I looked away from her toward the water again, the slope of the embankments, the weathered houseboats lined up against the Seine.

“Richard?”

“Seven months.”

Her face lost color. I thought I might be sick.

“But it wasn't—”

She held her hand up. She closed her eyes. “Don't.”

An older couple mounted the staircase and nodded hello before moving to the front of the boat to take their seats. The man took a camera out of his knapsack. The woman fluffed her hair.

“What did I do to you?” Anne asked. “What did we do?”

The wind made my eyes smart. I was already close to tears. “It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anything you did—”

“Of course it wasn't something
I
did. You did this. You.”

I looked down at the orange vinyl floor, cracked here and there and coated in grime. At the bow of the boat, the older woman changed positions, insisting that her husband take a photo of her in profile against the Seine.

“If you could have any idea how sorry I am to have hurt you.”

Anne closed her eyes. “Don't.
Don't
. There's nothing you can say.” She brought the tissue she'd been clutching up to her face. “It fucking makes me sick, Richard. Seven months.” She put her hand against her stomach. She actually looked ill.

“I'll get you something,” I said, rising because she, too, had taken to her feet.

“I need to be alone awhile,” she said, pushing me away. “I'm going downstairs.”

She walked quickly to the staircase, but I didn't go after her. Seven months. It was too long.

I sat down, trembling from the falling temperature and regret. Probably, when we docked, Anne would ask to go home. And she would have every right to. I was a fool to think we could solve this on a fucking
date
. I was a fool to think I could
solve any of the problems that I'd started. We were just digging deeper now, down through the silt loam, into the worms.

I had scheduled the next part of the itinerary for comic relief, but when we docked at the Maison de la Radio, a circular gray structure that looked like it was inspired by a Cold War diaphragm, I was mortified by my naïveté. If by some miracle, Anne hadn't already hailed a taxi, the least that I could reward her with was a confession that we were going to one of the city's top restaurants: something stupefyingly expensive and atmospheric, Le Tour d'Argent, or Jules Verne. Instead, I'd picked a twenty-four-hour steak house chain named Hippopotamus, a red, black, and gray temple of bad taste where the dishes were bottomless: you could eat as much steak and creamed spinach and roasted potatoes as you wanted.

When we'd first moved to Paris, when Inès's greatest joy was babysitting her new grandchild, we'd arranged decadent weekly date nights, pushing ourselves to make our evening as riotous and splendid as possible so that the happy fuel would last us through the gummy take-away dinners and predawn risings that characterized our life as new parents.

We went dancing, drinking—we've always loved to dance. When we got bored with one club, we went to another, knowing that inevitably we'd end up at Le Pulp, a gritty lesbian-run establishment in the Grands Boulevards district around the opera house. Here, we'd slug ourselves silly with tepid beer and dance to indie pop music until we were famished and dehydrated, ready to eat.

The Hippo chain by the opera was just a short walk from the Pulp, and even though the quality of meat was far from exemplary and the place was full of bloated men in metallic blazers who had pilgrimaged there from the nearby strip clubs, we loved the contagious charm of the provincial waiters and
the endless cuts of steak that would appear alongside a bowl of
frites
and sizzling vegetables as soon as we had ordered.

It was our little secret—our cheesy place. Now, with Camille older (and eating solid foods), Anne paid more attention to our diet. She was always reading labels, tracking down the provenance of our culinary choices. Our late-night trips to the Hippopotamus had become a ritual of the past.

But when I found her waiting for me at the bottom of the boat ramp, I decided not to lie. It was clear that she'd been crying, but she also had a look of pride back in her face. Her lips were freshly touched with lipstick, her posture was straight.

“So,” she said, her arms crossed. “What now?”

“If I said ‘Hippo Malin'. . . ?” My heart was beating wildly.

She shook her head, the faintest glimmer of a smile passing ephemerally across her lips.

“I'd say you're an asshole,” she said, shifting her purse on her shoulder. “But yes.”

 • • •

The Hippopotamus was packed—a good thing, as it allowed us a distraction while we sat at our table and waited for the menus to arrive. I felt completely anchorless. On one hand, the rhythms and habits of our last decade together were literally within reach, but on the other, there was this fucking iceberg between us and it was my fault that it was there, and both of us knew there was no way around the crash.

“So, are you thinking Hippo Malin?” I asked cheerfully once the menus arrived.

Under the heading
For the love of meat
, the Hippopotamus had a variety of prix fixe menu options, and our favorite, the preposterously named Clever Hippo, consisted of either an
appetizer and an entrée or an entrée and a dessert for nineteen euros.

“I don't know,” she said, turning a plastic-coated menu page. “I'm not very hungry.”

I looked at her, and longed for her, and wished that I could simply reach out and take her hand and make everything all right.

“Please, Anne,” I said softly. “Please order the Clever Hippo.”

She looked up, clearly astonished to see that my earnestness was genuine, but said nothing else until the waiter arrived.

“Welcome to Hippopotamus!” Our young attendant had lightly spiked hair and reeked of Drakkar Noir. “My name is Antoine. Can I get you two started with one of our signature cocktails?”

“I think we're ready to order, actually,” said Anne.

“Wonderful. What can I get you?”

“I'll have the Hippo Malin menu,” said Anne, keeping her eyes on the table. “With the tomato tartare and the Hippo steak.”

“Excellent choice. And you, monsieur?”

“I'll have exactly the same. Rare?” I looked at Anne for confirmation. “Both rare.”

“Faultless! And are you aware of our new Beef Effects?”

“I'm sorry?” said Anne.

Antoine opened up her menu to a page near the back. “On our new list of Beef Effects are highly favorable options for guests of all persuasions. Have you just been to the cinema?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

He turned the page. “Well, you might appreciate the Beef Effect
Gourmand.
You can have unlimited sauces for your steak.”

“But isn't that always the case?” asked Anne.

Antoine shut the menu. “And will you be drinking wine?”

“Please,” said Anne. “The Côtes du Rhône.”

“Very good!” he said, gathering our menus. “I'll get your carpaccios right out.”

“A for effort,” I said, when he was gone.

“You get five euros off if you've just seen a movie,” she remarked, raising her eyebrows at the Beef Effect Cinema option. “Not bad.”

We sat in silence and drank from the carafe of water on the table, waiting rather conspicuously for our bottle of wine. When it arrived, we waited until Antoine had left again to pour ourselves much larger portions than he'd originally served.

We raised our glasses but did not clink them together. The service at Hippopotamus was excessively efficient. We didn't have a lot of time.

“Can I ask you if they said anything?” I asked, tracing the outline of the French map on the paper tablecloth. “Your parents, when I left?”

Anne shifted in her seat. And then she shifted again. “Well, my father said nothing, obviously. Or rather, he sort of pounded me on the shoulder the next morning and said, ‘Oh! You'll work this out!' You know, soldier through.” She put her napkin on her lap. “As for my mother, well, we talked about it.”

I waited expectantly.

“We talked about it. That's it.”

“And Camille?” I asked, clenching my hand into a fist.

“We have to talk about that,” she said, leaning back to make way for our tomato tartares, which consisted of fine tomato slices covered in chopped tuna and parsley, with an
unsightly dollop of what looked like canned salsa sitting on top. Anne pushed her plate away and reached for her wine.

“I don't know what to tell her,” she continued, “but we have to tell her something. My parents never said anything to me, but I'd listen to them fight at night, and it was bad.”

“But we don't fight.”

Her face went tight. “What do you mean, we don't
yell
in front of her? I'm going to tell you something. The silence is worse.”

“I told my father,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

She snapped her head up. “You did?”

I nodded. “I mean, not in so many words, but . . .”

“And what'd
he
say?”

I dethroned the mound of salsa with my fork. “That I'm a fucking idiot. He loves you.”

If this had been a movie, I would have said that I loved her, too, but it wasn't a movie, it was a chain steak-house restaurant, so instead of a romantic declaration, we got Antoine.

“Everything A-OK?” he chirped.

“You can take this,” said Anne, motioning to her plate.

“Was it not satisfactory?”

“I'm just not very hungry.”

“The wine is very good!” I said, tapping my finger against my glass. I felt bad for the poor bloke.

When he left, Anne slumped back in the booth.

“I see no way out of this, Richard. I really don't. I have thought about this and thought about this, and when I'm not thinking about it, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm not thinking about it. It's driving me insane. I'm sick from it. I can't eat. The only thing I have is work, and even there I'm losing focus.”

“But don't you think, is there no way that we can just, I
don't know.” I realized there was no way to say what I wanted to say without sounding like an ass.

“What?” she said. “Just forget it? Pretend it didn't happen?”

I pushed my fork around my plate.

“Let me tell you something,” she said, leaning in. “And you look at me when I say this. You think I think monogamy is a walk in the fucking park? It's not great, Richard, and I'm not even sure that it's natural. You think I don't have nights where I feel like I'm getting into bed with my brother? You think I don't
get
what you did? Because I fucking do, let me tell you. I get it. The difference here—” Her eyes welled up, she balled up her napkin. “The difference is that you
lied.
And you
loved
her. You didn't just get your rocks off, you fell—”

“I didn't—”

“Don't bullshit me,” she yelled, slamming her hand on the table. “I read the letters,” she hissed, talking quieter now. “And you were going to
leave
us. And I can tell you that if it wasn't for Camille and the fact that I'm so fucking crazed with work, we wouldn't be here. You'd already be out. There is
no
reason for me to forgive you. Nada. You haven't given me a reason, and I don't see you giving me one now. You know what you could have done, Richard? You could have told me when you met her. I don't know when it happened and I don't know where it was, but I'm guessing there was some kind of buildup, some moment when you could have said, ‘Anne, I've met someone, and I'm attracted to her. And I have doubts. And I'm bored. And I need a fucking break.'”

“What are you saying?” I asked, pushing my plate away. “That it would have been all right?”