I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (25 page)

I assured her that I had, and joined her by the machine, close enough to touch her. A groom and bride in front of a toxic cake.

“Oh,” she said, pointing at my cuff. “You've got tapenade on your shirt. Or, um, gas?”

I scratched my nail against the stain while I struggled for something to say.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I have to tell you something.” I watched her swallow. “I don't know how long I'll stay with Camille tonight. I mean, we'll stay for the drying portion. But I, uh, have to tell you something else.”

Her tone gave me goose bumps. It wasn't like Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud to use colloquial interjections. “What?”

“Well, I went on a date, Richard. Or, two dates, actually. I guess.”

My limbs were noodles. The din around me swirled.

“We didn't say anything about
dating
,” I gasped. “I thought we were just giving each other space!”

“Well, nothing's
happened
yet. I mean, you know.”

“You went on two dates!”

“I was just trying.” She looked nervously around us, and when she spoke again, it was a whisper. “I feel like I have to know.”

“Anne,” I said, reaching for her. “Please. It's Thomas, isn't it. It's that guy.”

To my horror, she blushed.

“It's not important who it is. But I felt like I should tell you.”

“But did you have to tell me
here
? Christ on crutches,” I said, faltering. “I'm going to be sick.”

“I'm not
doing
anything. I just needed a nice time.”

“How many nice times?”

She swallowed. “I shouldn't have said anything.”

“No!” I said. “Yes. No! We need rules about this! I literally had no idea that . . .” I noticed a man watching us. I glared and he fell back into conversation with the people he was with. “I just didn't
think that we were at this point,” I whispered back. “I wished that you had said something earlier. I don't know what this means.”

“I'm not sure you get any input on what I do or don't say. Or when. Listen,” she said, flustered. “It was wrong for me to tell you here, but it's also not a big deal. Yet. I just wanted you to know that I'm not sitting around making pros and cons lists. To really work through this, I have to know . . . I have to know my options.”

“I can't hear this,” I said. “I can't take this right now.”

“I know,” she said, taking my hand. “I'm sorry. I guess I just felt, when I heard you call out that letter . . .” Her fingers were cool. My palms were sweaty. I wanted to collapse.

“Let's pretend I didn't say anything,” she said, giving my hand a tepid squeeze. “You can throw my little confession in the wash.”

“Please don't sleep with him,” I begged. “Please.”

She could have countered by saying that I had no right to ask her such a thing, but instead, she pulled away from me—crossing the room to gather up Camille and disappear out of sight.

The extent to which I'd misjudged our progress astounded me. With the positive energy and buzz around the opening, I thought we'd have a talk that night, that maybe she'd say she missed me, that we could do dinner alone soon. And when she'd said she couldn't stay long at the show with Camille, I'd been so far gone in positivity that I thought she might suggest that I stop by the house after the opening, and that maybe—sweetest maybe—things would progress in such a way that I'd never make it back to my apartment. In a state of profound disbelief and disappointment, I started transferring the slick mess out of each machine to the body bags.

Azar made a second announcement, this one for the drying
portion, which drew a larger crowd. Humans are always keen to gape at devastation.

Alice was on hand to help me operate the engraver. As I hung each item, she punched a description and the donator's name onto a dog tag, which I draped around the peg to hang over the corresponding thing. Most everything had survived, curiously, although the photographs and posters had become barely recognizable surfaces of gasoline and ink. The stuffed animals were horrifying, which meant they looked like art, and Lisa's letter had been reincarnated into a ball of greasy pulp. If I had a pair of fake teeth to add to it, her final missive would have looked like a teratoma.

The drying portion was a protracted process involving latex gloves and the careful transfer of the ruined articles into giant bins. As soon as something was hung, it started to drip. A boon I hadn't thought of before was that all of the soiled articles looked like they were dripping blood. Even before I was finished, the cameras started going off behind me. One person even hooted. I thanked the faceless cheerleader for restoring a small fraction of my pride.

Several people in the audience had donned protective face masks, spurring the photographers to take pictures of the crowd. While I was answering some questions for a Finnish journalist, Anne came up and announced that they were heading home. Camille was at her side with her nose pinched.

“I know. It's like a gas station,” I said, going to ruffle Camille's hair and then stopping myself when I realized that my gloved fingers were covered in gunk. “But what'd you think?”

Camille was too distracted by the Finnish journalist's conspicuous lack of eyebrows to compliment her dad.

“I'm sorry for interrupting,” said Anne to the journalist, “but
we really have to go. Congratulations, Richard.” It came out sweet and sad.

“Jesus, will you call me?”

Anne looked embarrassed that I'd asked this out loud. “Honey, say congratulations to your papa?”

The minute Anne and Camille pushed their way out of earshot, the journalist was on me. “Is that your wife?”

I watched Anne kiss the people she knew in the crowd good-bye.

“Well,” I said, peeling my ruined gloves off. “She was.”

22

BY ALL
the benchmarks that the art world possessed, the show was a success. I got great press in
Text zur Kunst, BOMB
magazine
,
and
Art Forum
,
along with a lengthy write-up from Lisa's former employer, the
Herald Tribune.
I was even contacted for an interview with
The New York Times
,
for which I had to have a professional head shot taken for the first time in my life.

By mid-April, the situation in Iraq had become an absurdist, ghastly mess. When the bronze statue of Hussein fell, massive looting started and continued unhindered by the foreign forces there. In a crystalline revelation of its international priorities, the United States sent troops to guard the Oil Ministry and nothing else, leaving Iraq's National Museum to be stripped bare of its “cultural inheritance”—the inheritance of something foreign and thus unimportant, belonging as it did to the great dark realm of the “other.”

According to the news reports, it was mayhem in the streets: looters running barefoot with used office chairs and desks, ceiling fans and smashed computers piled on top of donkeys. A
reporter from the Associated Press claimed he saw a group of men wheeling a hotel's grand piano down the street. The news reports seemed almost giddy with the magical realism of it:
just
look at what they're taking!
Everything laced with visual contradictions between “there” and “here.”

There: car bombs; dusty basements stockpiled with foreign-­purchased weapons; journalists dying in hotel bars three minutes after ordering a Schweppes; terror and confusion only worsened by long periods of silence.

And Paris? My Paris? Phone calls from Azar that my installation was going to sell. Three different potential buyers, possibly a fourth. Articles and sound bites that I was some kind of soothsayer. Overexcited, underexposed bloggers claiming that a little-known Englishman was “the new face of French art.” I should have been happy, proud of myself, even. But in those first weeks of too-warm, overpollinated April, I felt like the new face of despair.

Anne had rebuffed all my attempts to discuss the trajectory of our marriage, along with my passive-aggressive inquiries into her “dates.”
Time
,
she kept telling me. She needed more
time.
But with my installation over, I had nothing but time, and even though I knew that forcing her to talk through things when she wasn't ready would backfire, it was getting harder and harder to stay quiet.

And then, as if things weren't glum enough,
The Blue Bear
returned. Claiming it would be bad for his business karma to store a painting that had already sold, Julien asked me if I wouldn't take it. I wanted to call Anne to talk about it, to see if she didn't want it—or at least, would store it—in our much larger house.
Her
larger house.

But I didn't want the painting to arrive at la Rue de la Tombe-Issoire in defeat, a pitiful reminder, a deflated balloon.
I had visions of her instructing deliverymen to carry it down to the basement. I saw her head cock as she watched them maneuver it down the stairs, I saw her going down there later and covering it up with a sheet, her face filled not with regret, but resignation. And what if
he
was there? The faceless dater? The man who was wining and dining and romancing my wife? What if they had a drink after the delivery van left, and he asked her about the painting: why was the bear blue? She would pour wine for both of them and laugh, or shrug her shoulders. She would say it didn't matter. That she couldn't remember. That it was just this thing she had to store in the house.

And so I told Julien to deliver the damn thing to my flat. It arrived in a white van one morning, driven by a surly Greek who equated “art handling” with the literal dumping of the article onto the street, followed by an über-succinct text message:
HERE
.

Getting a 117 x 140 cm painting up one of the narrowest staircases in Paris was no small feat, but fitting it into my 14m2 apartment was a tour de force of space management.

I tried hanging it behind my bed, but it only fit if I tilted it ninety degrees so that it was in the shape of a diamond. It almost fit behind my clothes rack except for a delinquent curve where the right side of the wall folded into the back wall of the bathroom. I even attempted to hang it on the ceiling of my dining room slash kitchen, but there was something discomforting about having it above my head. Finally, I decided to hang it on the wall just to the right of the stovetop. This wall also curved, causing the painting to wobble back and forth each time the front door was opened or closed.

It didn't look good there. It looked awful in my flat. It dominated what little space there was, and plus, it was absorbing all of the malodorous cooking fumes from my fish-sauce-loving
neighbors. And yet I felt comforted to have my old friend back. It seemed appropriately pathetic that it had made so many useless journeys only to end up in a glorified hovel with tired, old me. With two more weeks of exposure to the neighbors' abuse of condiments, the fissures of the canvas would take on the odor of an unwashed sexual organ, an olfactory essence that would stay with the painting for the duration of its life. This, too, felt appropriate. After all, I felt like I was emanating something putrid myself. The damp heat of aimlessness. The soured odor of defeat.

The time passed. And passed, and passed. Young men whizzed about on scooters in collarless jackets and the lilies bloomed. I found a café to have coffee in the morning where I could stand at the counter and listen to the regulars discuss the scores from the previous night's games. I'd listen to the waiters complain about the things that had or hadn't arrived from the Rungis Market for the midday lunch service, complain about the fact that even the Americans were no longer leaving tips.

And I started pity-watching the
Witness
videos again. My parents, the Gadfreys, the Adsits, their recorded happiness, in loops. After my morning coffee, I'd lope around the Canal Saint-Martin area where the neighborhood's graffiti artists sprayed their tags underneath the street artist Invader's famous ceramic space aliens, looking for another direction in which to take my filming, something that had nothing to do with romance.

But I couldn't help it. Morning after morning, I found myself stealing images from lives that weren't mine. I didn't actually film people—I'd become too depressed to find the energy to use my camera again—but mentally, I cataloged their joys, storing them like cathartic shots of serotonin for the times I felt the worst. In the evenings, especially, when I had nowhere left to roam, when I literally
longed
to watch Cam's nose crinkle
with concentration as she squeezed toothpaste onto her alligator toothbrush—it soothed me to think back on the random moments of contentment I'd witnessed that day, to know that there were people out there having so much fun.

On these walks, I sought out fleeting moments. Intimate little poems. A pair of women's sandals left by the canal. The cork to a champagne bottle rolled beneath a bench. A child sleeping against her father's shoulder. A woman's finger pressing the wet spot on his T-shirt where their child had drooled. A balloon in the shape of a dog discarded in the grass. An older woman breaking off baguette pieces for family members on a blanket. A passed bag of dark figs. A young couple leaving a movie theater, their hands going up to shield their eyes from the daylight at exactly the same time. All of these walk-by-and-you-miss-them moments that constituted other people's lives.

It wasn't healthy to back up this sentimental voyeurism against the videos I'd filmed in England, but that's exactly what I found myself doing, night after night. In between the words spoken and the false complaints lobbed—deep sighs about wet towels, too much baking soda put into homemade crusts—in these films, there was the omnipresent palpability of these couples' hard-won love. The irrefutable proof that other people were happy, and I was very sad.

In effect, what I had done with these videos was to film a giant absence—the more I watched the footage, the more I realized that Anne and I weren't there. If someone asked us questions about our relationship, Anne would turn away. We were losing each other. I had lost her. I have lost my wife.

 • • •

Near the end of April, I finally got my daughter to myself due not to the fact that she missed me, but rather to canceled
sleepovers: most of her girlfriends had the flu that preys on tiny citizens at the change of each season.

I'd planned a parade of activities for us that weekend, each one designed to fill up my emotional Camille bank so that I missed her less viscerally during the week, as well as provide her with happy memories she could overshare with her mother when she got back. In this way, my innocent daughter unknowingly fulfilled two roles: therapist and public relations specialist.

I took her to the zoo nestled in the center of the Jardin des Plantes, which would have been depressing had I not had a five-year-old in hand. While staring at the monkey cage, all Camille saw was furry, alert beings who used their hands and feet in the same way that she did, who hugged their little ones the way that Anne and I hugged her. She didn't see the unkempt cages, the unraked piles of hay soiled with urine; she didn't see how the baboon had lost too much of his fur from stress, or how the mother kept rubbing her back repeatedly—unnaturally—against the bars.

I took her for a lemon butter crepe at Le Train Bleu, the most beautiful restaurant in Paris, if not France. Perched on the second story of the titanic Lyon train station, the space was a gilded celebration of arched ceilings, frenetic molding, champagne buckets, and glitz. Surrounded by elderly couples, businessmen, and Eastern European eye candy, I couldn't have been happier to be there with my little girl. Well, I might have been happier if her single fold of wheat flour hadn't set me back fourteen euros, but I was pretty happy, still.

We went to the movies:
Finding Nemo
. I took her to McDonald's and made her promise not to tell her mom. I bought her a pair of green-and-white ballerina flats with ladybugs on the toe tips. I caught myself staring at her while she was eating, asking questions. She looked so much like her mom.

On Sunday afternoon, my final act as wonder dad was a pony ride through the Jardin de Luxembourg on the miniature Shetland horses Indian men kept lined up near the tennis courts. There was a sharp wind cutting through the imported palm trees in the park, and when we got back, Camille was exhausted. Anne was coming for her at six, and as it was only four o'clock, I set her up in the bedroom for a nap, promising myself I'd wake her after an hour so that she wouldn't throw a tantrum when her mother tried to put her down at her regular bedtime that night.

I went downstairs to the small table that had been doubling as my dining area and editing room, although I wasn't actually getting any editing done. Over the past weeks, I'd been toying with the idea of turning the interviews into some actual form of art, editing them in a way where I wove them in and out with unrelated content, but I hadn't had the heart to cut anything yet. I just kept watching the films in their entirety. It was embarrassing. A sappy drug.

I sat down and cut to the first film I'd done of my parents and chose one of my favorite parts, seventeen minutes in.

“What's your favorite memory of Dad, Mum?” went my voice.

She was chewing on her finger. “I don't know,” she said. “Just one?”

“It's difficult, isn't it?” said my father, beaming. “I'm such a lively man!”

“Let me see now,” she said, still biting. “When I told him I was pregnant, he wore a pillow to work. Under his jumper. You remember that?”

My dad laughed. She continued: “And then there was a, remember, we were coming back from our honeymoon in Italy? We were in this small plane, just a ten-seater, really, and there was all this turbulence. It was awful.”

My father was nodding in agreement.

“And it just got worse and worse. And your father, whenever we've taken a plane together, when it gets bumpy, he holds my hand. So it was getting terrible, we had two seats next to each other, and there was this narrow aisle and just one seat to our right with this young girl in it, remember? She was sixteen or seventeen maybe, and she was terrified. I think it was her first time flying. She kept rocking back and forth. And your dad just reached across the aisle for her hand. He didn't ask or anything, he just took it. You remember? And we sat like that, the three of us, until the turbulence passed.”

“That was a tough plane ride.” My dad coughed.

“That's it?” My voice again. “That's your favorite memory?”

“It was a very kind moment, Richard,” said my mother. “When I get angry with him, I like to remember how he made that girl feel safe.”

There was a long period of them not speaking. My mother drummed her fingers on the table. My father watched her hand. I felt suffocated by the anaconda crush of it: silence. Silence. Silence.

All of a sudden there was a knock on the door. The Jesuits again. I put the film on pause but I didn't get up; I decided to see how long it would take them to give up and go away.

The knock became more insistent. I switched the video on-screen to the one of Harold and Rosie. I didn't need a bunch of adolescents from the Society of Jesus catching me red-eyed, viddying my own parents.

Another knock. “Richard?” went a woman's voice. “It's me.” Warmth flooded through my body when I realized it was Anne.

I jumped up and undid the flimsy latch that masqueraded as a lock.

“Hey!” I said, surprised.

“Hey.”

“Did you want to come in?”

She cocked her head. “It's five.”