Summer Lies (6 page)

He didn’t fly to England with a contract for a treatment or a screenplay in his pocket as he’d hoped. Nonetheless the producer had invited him to write an outline for one or another of the pieces of material they’d discussed. Was that already a success? He didn’t know, he was totally ignorant of the world of film. But he was in a good mood as he sat in the plane and in a good mood when he arrived.

He didn’t see Anne and called her. An hour from Oxford to Heathrow, an hour at the airport, an hour to get back—she had to finish an essay and had stayed at her desk. Surely he didn’t want her to have to spend the whole evening working. No, that’s not what he wanted. But he thought she could have started the essay sooner. He didn’t say so.

The college had provided her with a small duplex apartment. He had a key, opened the door, and went in. “Anne!” He climbed the stairs and found her at her desk. She stayed seated, wrapped her arms around his stomach, and leaned her head against his chest. “Give me another half hour. Then we go for a walk? I haven’t been out of the house for the last two days.”

He knew it wouldn’t be a half hour, unpacked, settled in, and made notes on his conversation with the producer. When they were finally walking through the park by the Thames, the sun was already low, the sky was glowing a deep blue, the trees were throwing long shadows on the shorn grass, and the birds had stopped singing. A mysterious stillness lay over the park, as if it had fallen out of the bustle of the everyday world.

For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Anne asked, “Who were you with in Baden-Baden?”

What was she asking? The night in Baden-Baden, the phone conversation the next evening, the little lie, his bad conscience—he’d thought all that was behind him.

“With who?”

“What makes you think I …”

“I called Brenners Park-Hotel. I called a lot of hotels, but in Brenners they asked if they should wake their honored guests.”

Which side of the bed had the telephone been on? At the thought that she might have told them to put her through, he panicked. But she hadn’t told them to put her through. How did they speak in Brenners Park-Hotel? Should we wake our honored guests? “Our honored guests—they say that whether it’s a question of more than one person or just one. It’s an old-world form of expression that high-class hotels consider distinguished. Why didn’t you ask to be put through to my room?”

“I’d had enough.”

He put an arm around her. “Our verbal misunderstandings! Do you remember when I wrote to you that I wished we could smoosh up together and you thought I wanted to schmooze with you and talk all sorts of stupid gossip? Or when you said to me that in principle you’d come to our family reunion, and I thought you were saying ‘basically, yes,’ when all you meant was that you’d think about it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me that you were in Brenners Park-Hotel? I asked them if they were full and they said yes. So you must have booked ahead. Other times you tell me where you’re spending the night when you know in advance.”

“I forgot. I booked weeks ago, and just got into the car on Friday and didn’t look at the paper stuff with the address and the time of the performance and the reservation till I got to Baden-Baden. Because I was late getting there, all I had time to do was check in and change my clothes: I couldn’t call you. After the play and the party I didn’t want to call and get you out of bed.”

“A four-hundred-euro room—you don’t normally do that.”

“Brenners is special, and a night there is something I’ve dreamed of for years. I …”

“And the fact that you made a booking for this old dream of yours is something you forgot? Why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not lying to you.” He told her about the stress of the last weeks, about the various other things that had slipped his mind, even things that mattered to him and he would have liked to have done.

She was still mistrustful. “Brenners was your dream, and you get there so late and leave so early that you have no time to enjoy the hotel? It makes no sense!”

“No, it makes no sense. But then I haven’t been making much sense to myself these last few weeks.” He went on talking about stress and pressure, contracts and appointments, meetings and phone conferences. He talked himself into a picture of his life in the past weeks that was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded, and that Anne had no right and no cause to disbelieve. The longer he talked, the more certain he became. Wasn’t it outrageous that Anne mistrusted him baselessly and unjustifiably and had doubts about him? And wasn’t
it laughable that she was knocking herself out about a night with a woman he hadn’t had sex with and didn’t even feel really close to? Knocking herself out in a park that was filled with the warmth of summer and the still of the evening and lay spellbound under the light of the first stars?

Eventually the energy ran out of the argument the way a car runs out of gas. Like a car it faltered, juddered, faltered again, and came to a stop. The two of them went out to dinner and made plans. Did they have to spend the weeks when Anne could come to him in Frankfurt? Couldn’t they go to Sicily or Provence or Brittany, rent a house or an apartment and write with their desks next to each other?

In the apartment they took the mattress off the worn sagging bed frame, laid it on the floor, and made love. In the middle of the night he was woken by the sound of Anne crying. He took her in his arms. “Anne,” he said. “Anne.”

“I have to know the truth, always. I can’t live with lies. My father lied to my mother, he cheated on her and he made promise after promise to my brother and me that he never kept. When I asked him why, he got mad and yelled at me. During my entire childhood I never once had solid ground beneath my feet. You need to tell me the truth so that I’ve got solid ground beneath my feet. Do you understand? Do you promise?”

For a moment he thought of telling Anne the truth about the night in Brenners Park-Hotel. But what a drama that would produce! And would the truth outweigh the fact that he’d lied to Anne for a whole hour, no, two? And wouldn’t a belated acknowledgment about the night with Therese give it more
weight than it actually had? In the future, yes, in the future he’d tell Anne the truth. For the future he could and would promise her that. “It’s all fine, Anne. I understand you. You don’t have to cry. I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”

Three weeks later they drove to Provence. In Cucuron they found an old, cheap hotel on the market square where they were able to rent the big room with its big loggia on the top floor for four weeks. They wouldn’t be served breakfast or dinner, and there was no Internet, and the beds were made only haphazardly. But they got a second table and a second chair and could work side by side in the room or on the loggia, just as they had pictured it.

They began assiduously. But as the days passed, work seemed less and less urgent and less and less important. Not because it was too hot; the thick walls and ceilings of the old building kept the room and the loggia cool. Work—she was writing a book on gender differences and equal rights, and he was working on a play about the financial crisis—just didn’t fit. What did fit was sitting outside the Bar de l’Étang by the rectangular walled village pond, drinking an espresso and gazing into the plane trees and the water. Or driving into the mountains. Or discovering new varieties of grape at a vineyard. Or laying flowers at Camus’s grave in the cemetery at Lourmarin. Or strolling through the town of Aix and catching up with e-mails in the library. The stroll would have been nicer without the e-mails, but Anne was waiting for confirmation about a job and he for a contract for a play.

“It’s the light,” he said. “In this light you can work in the fields or the vineyards or the olive groves, and maybe you can
even write—about love and childbirth and death, but not about banks and stock exchanges.”

“The light and the smells. They’re so intense! The lavender and the pines and the fish and the cheese and the fruit in the market. The thoughts I put into my readers’ heads—what are they compared to these smells?”

“Yes,” he laughed, “but with these smells in your nose, who would want to change the world anymore? Your readers are supposed to change the world.”

“Are they really?”

They were sitting on the loggia with their laptops in front of them. He looked at her, astonished. Didn’t she want to change the world, and didn’t she write and teach so that her students and readers would want to change it too? Wasn’t that why she had refused to make compromises and tailor her career to the requirements of various universities? She was looking out over the roofs, and there were tears in her eyes. “I want a child.”

He stood up, went to her, squatted down by her chair, and smiled at her. “That can be arranged.”

“How would it be supposed to go? Given my life, how can I have a child?”

“You come live with me. For the first few years you stop teaching and concentrate on your writing. After that, we’ll see.”

“After that no university will invite me to come. They invite me because they know I’ll be available. And I’m not as good a writer as I am a teacher. I’ve been working on my book for years.”

“Universities will invite you because you’re a great teacher. And so that they don’t forget you in those first years, maybe it’s no bad thing if you write a couple of essays instead of the book. You know, in a couple of years the world is going to look quite different again, and there will be new professional possibilities and new courses of study, and that means new jobs for you. So many things are changing so quickly.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Everything is also being forgotten so quickly.”

He put his arms around her. “Yes and no. Didn’t you tell me the dean at Williams invited you because the two of you were in the same seminar twenty years ago and she was so impressed by you? People don’t forget you that quickly.”

That evening in Bonnieux they found a restaurant with a terrace and a wide view over the countryside. The large group of Australian tourists taking up most of the tables with their joyful chatter left early, and they were alone in the darkness. Under her astonished questioning gaze, he ordered champagne.

“What are we toasting?” She twisted the glass between her thumb and forefinger.

“Our wedding!”

She kept twisting it. Then she looked at him with a sad smile. “I always knew what I wanted. I also know that I love you. Just as I know you love me. And I want children and I want to have them with you. And children and marriage go together. But today’s the first time we’ve talked about it—give me a little time.” Her smile brightened. “Shall we drink to your proposal?”

A few days later they went to bed in the afternoon, made love, and then went to sleep. When he woke, Anne was gone. A note told him she’d driven to Aix to check her e-mails at the library.

That was at four o’clock. By seven he was surprised she still wasn’t back, and by eight he was worried. They had brought their cell phones with them on the trip, but switched them off and left them in the chest of drawers. He checked, and there they were. By nine he couldn’t stand it in the room anymore and went to the village pond where they parked their car.

It was standing where it always stood. He looked around and saw Anne; she was sitting at a table outside of the dark, closed Bar de l’Étang, smoking. She’d given up smoking years ago.

He went over and stood in front of the table. “What’s the matter? I was getting worried.”

She didn’t look up. “You were with Therese in Baden-Baden.”

“What gives you …”

Now she looked at him. “I read your e-mails. Booking a double room. Arranging to meet Therese. Your greeting afterward: It was lovely to be with you, and I hope you survived the trip okay and everything was fine when you got home.” She was crying. “It was lovely to be with you.”

“You went spying in my e-mails? And do you go spying in my desk and my closet? Do you think you have the right …”

“You’re a liar, you’re a cheat, you do whatever suits you—yes, I have every right to protect myself from you. I don’t get the truth from you so I have to find it myself.” She was crying again. “Why did you do it? Why did you do that to me? Why did you sleep with her?”

“I didn’t sleep with her.”

She screamed at him. “Stop lying to me, will you just finally stop lying. You take this woman to a romantic hotel and share a room and a bed with her, and you take me for a fool? First you think I’m too dumb to see through your lies, and now you think I’m so dumb I’ll let myself be talked out of the truth? You motormouth, you fucker, you piece of shit, you …” She was shaking with outrage.

He sat down facing her. He knew he shouldn’t care if windows opened and people looked out and ridiculed them. But he did care. Being screamed at was humiliating enough; being screamed at in front of other people was a double humiliation. “May I say something?”

“ ‘May I say something?’ ” she imitated him. “The little boy
is asking his mummy if he can say something? Because his mummy is always suppressing him and never allows him to say a word? Don’t play the victim! Just finally take responsibility for the things you say and do! You’re a liar and a cheat—at least you can admit it!”

“I’m not a …”

She struck him on the mouth, and seeing a revulsion in his eyes that shocked her, she kept on screaming. She leaned forward, her spit hit his face, and when he recoiled it only made her louder and more enraged. “You piece of shit, you asshole, you piece of nothing! No, you can’t say something. When you talk, you lie, and I’ve had it with your lies, which means I’ve had it with your talk. Do you understand?”

“I …”

“Do you understand?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what? That you’re a liar and a cheat? That you and other women …”

“I don’t have other women. What I’m sorry about …”

“Go fuck yourself with your lies.” She stood up and left.

At first he wanted to follow her, but then he stayed sitting. He suddenly remembered the trip in the car when a girlfriend revealed to him that she had other men besides him. They were driving on a winding road in Alsace, and after her admission he simply drove straight ahead off the road and onto a forest path and off the path through the bushes at a tree. Nothing happened, the car just stopped. He put his hands on the steering wheel and his head on his hands and was sad. He had no desire to attack his girlfriend. He hoped she’d be able to explain what she’d done in a way that he’d understand. That he could make his peace with. Why wouldn’t Anne have it explained to her?