Summer Lies (8 page)

He wanted to walk in the same place he’d walked that morning, but didn’t find the spot. He stopped at another one, got out, couldn’t decide about walking again, but sat among the bushes, plucked a blade of grass, propped his arms on his knees, and put the grass between his teeth. Again he was looking out over slopes and low mountains into the plain. His longing wasn’t swirling around Renée or around Anne. It wasn’t about this woman or that, but about continuity and reliability in life itself.

He fantasized about giving them all up, Renée, who didn’t want him anyway; Therese, who only liked the bits of him that were simple; Anne, who wanted to be conquered but not to conquer herself. But then he’d have nobody left.

He’d tell Anne that evening what she wanted to hear. Why not? Yes, she’d always take what he said and make use of it later. But so what? What harm could it do him? What harm could anything do him? He felt invulnerable, untouchable, and laughed—it must be the champagne.

It was too early to drive back to Cucuron and Anne. He stayed sitting and looked down at the plain. Sometimes a car passed, sometimes it honked. Sometimes he saw something flash down on the plain—the sunlight catching the window in a house or the windshield of a car.

He dreamed about summer in the village in the mountains. He and Renée or Chantal or Marie or whatever she would be called would move up there in May and open up the restaurant, not for lunch but just for guests in the evening, two or three dishes, simple country cooking, local wines. A few tourists would come, a few foreign artists who’d bought old houses and renovated them, a few locals. Early in the morning he’d drive to the market for supplies, early in the afternoon they’d make love, in the late afternoon they’d go to the kitchen together and prepare the food. Mondays and Tuesdays they’d be closed. In October they’d close the restaurant, lock the shutters and the door, and drive back to the city. A gallery or a bookshop? Stationery? Tobacco? A shop just open in winter? How would that work? Did he even want to run a shop? Operate a restaurant? They were all empty dreams. Love in the early afternoon was what counted, no matter whether it was in a town by the sea or a river or in a village in the mountains or on the plain.

He looked down at the plain and chewed his blade of grass.

He reached Cucuron at seven, parked the car, didn’t find Anne outside the Bar de l’Étang, and went into the hotel. She was sitting in the loggia, a bottle of red wine on the table and two glasses, one full and one empty. How was she looking at him? He really didn’t want to know. He looked at the floor.

“I don’t want to say much. I slept with Therese and I’m sorry and I hope you can forgive me and we can put it behind us, not today, I know, and not tomorrow, but soon, so that we can stay good to each other. I love you, Anne, and …”

“Won’t you sit down?”

He sat down, went on talking and kept looking at the floor. “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. I hope I haven’t already lost you because of something so insignificant. I understand that it’s really significant to you, and because of that and because I should have known it, it should have been significant for me too and I shouldn’t have done it. I understand that. But it really is insignificant. I know that …”

“Settle down. Do you want …”

“No, Anne, please let me say it all. I know men keep saying, and women say it too, that a little infidelity is meaningless, that it just happens, that it’s a fleeting opportunity, or loneliness, or alcohol, that it leaves nothing behind, no demands. They say it so often that it’s become a cliché. But clichés are clichés because they’re true, and even though infidelity is sometimes something different—often it is nothing, and that’s how it was with me. Therese and I in Baden-Baden—it was meaningless. You may …”

“Can you …”

“In a moment you can say whatever you want to say. I only want to say that I understand if you don’t want someone to whom a little infidelity means nothing. But the part of me to which a little infidelity means nothing is only a small part of me. The larger part of me is the one to which you mean more than anyone in the world, which loves you, with which you have been together for years. And before Baden-Baden I never …”

“Look at me!”

He looked up and looked at her.

“It’s fine. I called Therese and she confirmed that nothing happened. Perhaps you want to know why I didn’t believe you and yet I believe her—I can tell better from a woman’s voice whether she’s telling the truth or lying than I can from a man’s. She felt you weren’t honest with her or with me, and if she’d known how long you and I had been together and how close we were, she wouldn’t have wanted to see you so often. But that’s another story. In any case, you didn’t sleep together.”

“Oh!” He didn’t know what to say. In Anne’s face he saw hurt, relief, and love. He ought to get to his feet, go to her, and hug her. But he stayed sitting down and just said, “Come here!” and she stood up and came to sit on his lap and lean her head against his shoulder. He put his arms around her and looked out over her head at the rooftops and the church tower. Should he tell her about his afternoon with Renée?

“Why are you shaking your head?”

Because I’ve just decided not to tell you about the other little infidelity this afternoon … “I was just thinking that we almost …”

“I know.”

They didn’t say any more about Baden-Baden, or Therese, or truth and lies. It wasn’t as if nothing had taken place. If nothing had taken place, they would have felt free to fight with each other. But they were taking care not to bang into each other. They moved cautiously. They did more work than they had at the beginning and by the end she had completed her essay on gender differences and equal rights, and he had his play about two bankers sitting trapped in an elevator for a whole weekend. When they had sex, each of them remained a little reserved.

On the last evening they went again to the restaurant in Bonnieux. They watched from the terrace as the sun went down and night came. The deep blue of the sky darkened to absolute black, the stars glittered, and the cicadas were loud. The blackness, the glitter, the noise—it was a festive night. But their imminent departure made them melancholic, and on top of this the star-strewn sky reminded him of moral law and the hour with Renée.

“Are you still holding it against me that I didn’t tell Therese more about you and you more about Therese?”

She shook her head. “It made me sad. But I don’t hold it against you. And you? Do you hold it against me that I suspected you and used blackmail? Which is what I did, I blackmailed you, and because you love me, you allowed it to happen.”

“No, I don’t hold it against you. It makes me anxious that things escalated so fast. But that’s something else.”

She laid her hand on his, but instead of looking at him, she looked out across the countryside. “Why are we this way? … I don’t know what to call it. You know what I mean? We’ve changed.”

“Changed for the better or for the worse?”

She took her hand out of his, leaned back, and looked at him sharply. “I don’t know that either. We’ve lost something and we’ve won something, haven’t we?”

“Lost our innocence? Won some kind of sobriety?”

“And if sobriety is also the death of love, and without some faith, pure and simple, in the other person, things can’t go on?”

“Isn’t truth, which you said you need as the ground beneath your feet, always sober?”

“No, the truth I mean and the one I need isn’t sober. It’s passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free. If you don’t notice it at first, you will after a while.” She
nodded. “It can really torture you. Then you curse and wish you’d never encountered it. But then you realize it’s not torturing you, what’s doing the torturing is whatever the truth is about.”

“I don’t understand.” The truth and whatever the truth is about—what did Anne mean? At the same time he was wondering if he should tell her about Renée, now, because later would be too late. But why would later be too late? And if later was okay, why have to do it at all?

“Forget it.”

“But I really want to know what …”

“Forget it. I’d rather talk about how things are meant to go from here.”

“You wanted some time to think about getting married.”

“Yes, I think I should take some time. Don’t you need time too?”

“Time out?”

“Time out.”

She didn’t want to talk about it. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing she could name. Nothing she would want to talk about between the two of them and a couples therapist.

The food came. She ate enthusiastically. He felt queasy, and poked around the dorade with his fork. When they were lying in bed, she didn’t push him away but she wasn’t hungry for him either, and he had the feeling she didn’t need time anymore, she’d already reached a decision and he had already lost her.

The next morning she asked if he’d mind taking her to the airport in Marseille. He did mind, but he took her and tried to
say goodbye to her in such a way that she’d see his pain as well as his readiness to respect her decision, and would remember him fondly and would want to see him again and have him too.

Then he drove through Marseille, hoping he’d suddenly see Renée on the sidewalk, but knew he wouldn’t stop. On the highway he thought about how life in Frankfurt would be without Therese. What he would work on. The contract for a new play that he’d been hoping for hadn’t come. He could set to work on the outline for the movie producer—but he could do that anywhere. Nothing, in fact, was pulling him toward Frankfurt.

What had Anne said? If you encounter the truth and it tortures you, that isn’t what’s torturing you, it’s whatever the truth’s about. And it always sets you free. He laughed. Truth and whatever the truth is about—he still didn’t understand. And that the truth sets you free—maybe it was the other way around and you had to be free in order to be able to live with the truth. But nothing spoke against trying out the truth anymore. Somewhere up ahead he’d leave the highway and take a room in a hotel, in the Cévennes, in Burgundy, in the Vosges, and write about it all to Anne.

Sometimes it felt as if this had always been his life. That he’d always lived in this house in the forest, by the meadow with its apple trees and lilacs, and the pond with its weeping willows. That he’d always had his wife and daughter around him. And always received their farewells when he went away, and their happy greetings when he came back.

Once a week they stood in front of the house and waved goodbye to him until his car was out of sight. He drove to the little town, collected the mail, took things to be repaired, collected whatever had been repaired or ordered, visited the physical therapist to do exercises for his back, and shopped at the general store. Once there he would stand for a while at the counter before the drive home, drinking a coffee, talking to a neighbor, or reading the
New York Times
. He was never away for more than five hours. He missed the company of his wife. And he missed the company of his daughter, whom he didn’t take along, because she got carsick.

They heard him from a long way away. No other car took the narrow, rutted road that led to their house through a long, forested valley. They would stand in front of the house again, hand in hand, until he made the turn toward the meadow, Rita tore herself free of Kate and began to run, and flew into his arms almost before he had time to switch off the engine and
get out of the car. “Papa, Papa!” He held her, overwhelmed by her tenderness as she wrapped her arms around his neck and nestled her face against his.

On those days Kate belonged to him and Rita. Together they unloaded whatever he had brought from town, did things in the house or the garden, collected wood in the forest, caught fish in the pond, pickled cucumbers or onions, baked bread. Rita, full of family happiness and exuberance, ran from her father to her mother and from her mother to her father and just talked and talked. After supper the three of them would play, or he and Kate together would tell Rita a story that they’d worked out while they were cooking.

On other days Kate disappeared in the morning from the bedroom to her study. When he brought her coffee and fruit for breakfast, she would look up from her computer with a friendly smile, and if he had a problem to discuss with her she made an effort to understand it. But her thoughts were elsewhere, as they were when the three of them sat around the table at lunch or supper. Even after Rita’s good-night story and good-night kiss, when she came to sit with him and they listened to music or watched a movie or read books, her thoughts were with the characters she was writing about.

He didn’t let it weigh on him. He was happy—just knowing she was in the house, seeing her head at the window while he was working in the garden, then hearing her fingers typing on the computer keyboard while he was standing at the door, having her opposite him at supper and beside him in the evening. Feeling her, smelling her, hearing her breathing in the night. And he could not expect any more of her. She had told him she could live only if she was writing, and he had told her he accepted that.

Just as he accepted that he was alone with Rita day in, day
out. He woke her, washed and dressed her, had breakfast with her, and let her watch and help with the cooking, the washing and cleaning, the gardening, the repairing of the roof and the heating and the car. He answered her questions. He taught her to read, far too soon. He romped around with her even though his back hurt, because he knew she ought to romp around.

He accepted the way things were. But he wished they were together more as a family. He wished the days with Kate and Rita were not a part of life only once a week, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow too.

Does all happiness yearn to be eternal? Like all desire? No, he thought, what it yearns for is continuity. It yearns to endure in the future, having already been happiness in the past. Don’t lovers fantasize that they already met as children and were drawn to each other? That they played in the same playground or went to the same school or spent their holidays in the same place with their parents? He didn’t fantasize about any early encounters. He dreamed that Kate and Rita and he had put down roots here in defiance of every wind and every storm. Forever and ever.