I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (2 page)

And so I find myself in a kind of love lock: pining for the wrong person, grieving beside a woman whose body I can't touch, being given a second chance I can't find the clarity to take.

Once upon a time, I was very in love with Anne-Laure, and—incredibly—she was in love with me. And sometimes, it still comes at me, the sight of her, my dark-haired, sea-eyed beauty, a woman I have built a life with that I don't deserve. And I will think, Deserve her. Get back to the way you were in your apartment in Rhode Island, class-skipping together naked under a duvet, laughing about how many pillows Americans like on a bed; back to the woody Barolos she brown-bagged to BYOB dives; get back to her intelligence, her daringness. Get back to the French in her, timeless, free, and subtle. Get back to the person faking sleep beside you. Reach over, beg, get back.

Impossible as it is, I know that Anne still loves me. And when I catch myself looking at her across a room, atop a staircase, coming home from work with a shopping bag full of carefully chosen things, everything comes flooding back and it makes me fucking ache because I can no longer connect these memories that feel so warm when I think about them to what we're cur
rently living. Somewhere down the line, it got hard to just be kind, and I don't know why, and I don't know when, and when I see all of the reasons to be back in love with her again, I want more than anything to be swept up in the tide of before. Somewhere in the losing of my love for Anne, I lost a little bit of my love for everything else. And I don't know what I'm waiting for to get those feelings back. Nor how long I—we—can wait.

2

NEAR THE
end of September, Julien called to tell me that he had mail for me, and news. After walking Camille to school as I did each morning, I bought an elephant ear at a neighboring bakery and ate it standing behind a news kiosk, biding my time for whatever awaited me in a scented envelope.

When Lisa said she was leaving me, she asked if she could write. The paradox of her request always makes me think of the Serge Gainsbourg song “I Love You, Me Neither.” Lisa Bishop even looks like Jane Birkin, the little minx. In any case, because I'm an idiot slash glutton for punishment, I said yes. I said write me at the gallery. I said never at my home.

When I tried to imagine what these letters would be like, I had visions of me clue-searching for evidence that Lisa missed me, that she felt she'd made a mistake. I expected that when she finally did get married and was thus exposed to the libido-numbing administrations of conjugal life, that the letters might increase in volume and in temperature, that they'd be lurid, sexy things. In my fantasy world, I wrote her back, keeping a message-in-a-bottle thing going at the gallery, keeping my (now
only intellectual) dalliances far away from home.
I miss you back. I'm empty. But you're right, it had to end.

In reality, however, Lisa's letters have been so disheartening, I haven't responded. I've thought about writing her to ask her to stop writing, but there's something so terribly childish about that, so very “sticks and stones,” I haven't done that either. Besides, sticks and stones
have
broken my bones, and words have also hurt me.

I don't mean to be churlish about it, but you spend seven years on top-notch behavior only to finally give in, falter, seriously fuck things up, the least your accomplice can do is have the decency to love you back.

I always assumed that Lisa wanted me to leave my wife. I spent a lot of time wondering why else would she be with me, and not enough time asking her why she actually was. And why was she? For the sex, she finally said. The novelty. The
fun
. And this from an American, a
journalist
, a woman endowed with neither the prudishness of her countrywomen nor the ethics of her trade. This isn't how things are supposed to
work
when you're a cheater. Lisa was supposed to go all fatal attraction for me. She was supposed to want to meet my kid and dream about being a fab stepmum who was a taller, brighter,
wilder
version of Anne. What she wasn't supposed to do was casually drop over a light lunch of nigiri sushi that she was leaving me for a cutlery designer from London, a prissy toff named Dave.

“Good Lord, he doesn't go by ‘David'?” I remember asking with a cough.

“No.” She stuck her chopsticks into the center of the wasabi, two stakes through the heart. “He's very nice.”

“Oh, I'm sure he is, with a name like that.”

“Please,” she said. “You're not winning any originality awards with ‘Richard.'” She sighed and pushed away her sushi. “Are you seriously going to say that you're surprised?”

My jaw dropped, answering her question. “When did you even meet this person? When did you have time?”

“You're married, Richard. I have lots of time.”

She got the check and we took a walk around the Seine while she prattled on about how she'd done a piece on him for the
Herald Tribune
lifestyle section. Purportedly, he was the first culinary arts designer to introduce the plastic spork to take-out restaurants in England, although the validity of this claim was currently being challenged by a Norwegian upstart named Lars.

“It's a pretty stressful time for him,” she said, fussing with her scarf.

When a woman you have cried against postcoitus tells you she's leaving you for a man whose claim to fame is the conjoining of a soup spoon and a fork, you wait for the ringer, you wait for the joke. What you don't wait for is a second revelation that she's leaving you to get
married.

By this time we were seated on a concrete bench by the Seine, its gritty surface speckled with broken green glass, accompanied by the acrid smell of urine.

“I thought you didn't
like
marriage,” I said. “I thought you didn't believe in it.”

“It's funny,” she said, flicking a piece of glass onto the ground. “Everyone says when you know, you know. And it's true. Something just clicked. It's all very calming, really. It's not half as dramatic as it was with you.”

I looked at her incredulously to see if she hadn't gone and sprouted a demonic windup key between her shoulder blades.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked, pulling my hand against her face. “You know it wasn't going to last with us, even if it's been great.” She kissed the inside of my palm with her nasty mouth half open, so her kiss was wet. “And it
has
been great.” She started kissing my fingers. I pulled my hand away.

“You're serious.”

Her hazel eyes got big. “I am,” she said. “I'm leaving. I'm moving to London in two months.”

I stared at my sneakers. I stared at the Seine.

“I'm crazy about you,” she continued. “You know that. But this has to stop. If I waited any longer, it would probably ruin your life.”

Twenty-nine years old to my thirty-four with no idea that I'd been having to sleep in the guest bedroom of my own house because the energy she'd filled me with, this fucking yen for life, the desire at every hour of every single day to be inside her, had made me a walking dead man in my home life, that I had entire days where I couldn't remember what I said to my own daughter on our walk to school; that at gunpoint I couldn't recall my wife's outfits from the past week—from the past
night
—that I drank more than I used to and I ate less than I used to and I never, ever dreamed that we were done.

There wasn't much more to it—I saw Lisa four more times before she left for London and we never had sex again. After double-­timing me for I don't know how long, she felt self-­righteous, almost evangelical, about being engaged. She said she'd gotten it out of her system, the cheating, and that she was truly looking forward to being a good and dutiful wife as if she was embarking on some kind of vision quest, my God.

And then she left me. Left me unsure whether to want her back or hate her, left me with the missive that I shouldn't try to win her back, but could she keep in touch with me—from time to time, could she write. Left me with the mother of my child demanding that I put an end to whatever was numbing my insides, and the fact that I didn't get to do that, that I didn't get to choose, that I wasn't the one who finally manned up and
said “end this,” has made it that much more difficult to find my way back into my life.

 • • •

As I was wiping a deluge of pastry flecks off of my pullover, getting ready to head to the gallery, a man in purple high-tops and a yellow helmet pulled up next to the news kiosk on a beat-up scooter.

“Richard!” he yelled, flipping up his face shield. “I
thought
that was you!”

Just when I thought my spirits couldn't get any lower, my submarine heart took a dive. I wiped my buttery fingers on my jeans and stretched my hand out to greet his in an amalgamation of a fist bump and a punch.

“Patrick,” I said. “How's it going?”

“Good, good! I was just on my way to my new studio, in Bercy? And at the red light I was like, is it or isn't it? I haven't seen you in years!”

“I know, man,” I managed, with a “whatever” shrug. “Offspring.”

“Oh, yeah? Me, too.” He took off his helmet. “It's good to see you! I kept thinking I'd run into you somewhere, but . . . I don't know. Have you been traveling?”

“Not much. You?” I said, preparing myself to resent every answer to every question I was about to ask. “I thought you moved back to Denmark?”

“I did. For a year. But once you've been in the States, everything feels kind of rigid, don't you think? I just finished a residency in Texas, actually, at the Ballroom Marfa? Brought the wife. The kid . . . oh, here!” he said, reaching into his back pocket. “I just came from the printers actually, so . . .” He waited
as I examined the flyer in my hand. “I've got a show coming up at the Musée Bourdelle. Performance art, if you can believe it.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, my stomach tightening.

“Yeah, it's pretty . . .” He shifted his weight on the scooter. “Have you ever read
The Interrogative Mood
by Padgett Powell?

“It's just a book of questions,” he continued, after my “no.” “A novel of them, really. Question after question. For example.” He adjusted his helmet under his arm. “‘Should a tree be pruned? Is having collected Coke bottles for deposit money part of the fond stuff of your childhood?'”

“You've memorized them?”

“No,” he said, with a laugh. “Just a couple here and there. They've got me set up in Bourdelle's old studio, where I'll be in residence for a week, sitting there with the book. Each person can come in one by one and sit with me, and I'll just pick up with the questions from where I left off with the last person. Anyway,” he said, nodding toward the flyer. “You should come! I'm really excited about it.”

“Yeah,” I said, running my thumb across the heading. “I might.”

“Well, I've gotta run, but it would be really great to catch up some more, hear what you've been up to? Hell, our kids could have a playdate!”

I smiled at him weakly. “Seriously?”

“‘If someone approached you saying, “Lead me to the music,” how would you respond?'”

I blinked. He blinked back at me. He shrugged. “It's from my show.”

“Oh,” I said, pushing a laugh out. “Cool.”

He eased his scooter back to the pavement with his purple high-tops, repeating that he really, really meant it. Coffee. Soon.

And off he went. Goddamn Patrick Madsen, who was so
generous and wholehearted I couldn't even hate him and his rip-off show. Back at RISD, he'd majored in kinetic animation—for his sophomore evaluation, he'd outfitted the heads of four taxidermied boars with recordings from the film version of
Roe v. Wade
that were only activated when a woman walked past. For his thesis show, he wired and grooved a series of his German grandfather's photographs from the Second World War so that they could actually be played on a record player. The sounds that came out of the photographs were terrifying; high-pitched and scratched. He won a grant for that, which he used to study robotics and engineering in Osaka, Japan. And now he was doing performance art. If I hadn't felt like enough of a hack for making a sell-out show of accessible oil paintings (scenes viewed through doorways?
Jesus
) I certainly did now.

 • • •

When I finally arrived at the gallery, I found Julien
comme d'habitude
, his desk littered with single-use espresso cups, his ear glued to the phone. I tossed the paper bag with a croissant I'd brought him onto his desk and waited for him to finish up his conversation.

“Tout à fait, tout à fait.”
He nodded while simultaneously throwing me a thumbs-up for the croissant. “It
is
a lot of yellow. Do you have good windows? It'll look more sage-colored in natural light.”

He flicked a ten-centime piece my way so that I could get an instant coffee from the machine in the back. By the time I returned, he was done with his phone call and had started in on his croissant.

“People are weird about yellow. Too much yellow, they freak. These idiots want to put a five-meter painting in their
kitchen because they've got this new table that—anyway.” He reached into a drawer. “Here.”

I had two letters. From the manic script on the outside of the envelope, I knew the first was from my mum. The second was from Lisa Bishop, evil colonizer of Englishmen's hearts.

“Humph,” I said, sitting down to start with the envelope from my fellow Haddon. She'd never given me an explanation for it, but my mother had been sending weird news snippets and recipes to me at the gallery for years. She sent postcards to our house on the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, but the strange stuff she sent here. Whenever we saw her over the holidays, I considered asking her about it, but there was something beguiling about the irrationality of the arrangement that moved me to keep quiet.

The news snippets and recipes rarely came with a personal note, although once in a while she'd scrawl something beneath a heading. This particular post contained a double missive: a recipe for grape soup with the annotation
We've tried it!
and an article from that day's
Sun.

BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM
by George Pascoe-Watson

British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq, it was revealed yesterday.

They could thud into the Mediterranean island within 45
minutes
of tyrant Saddam Hussein ordering an attack.

And they could spread death and destruction through warheads carrying anthrax, mustard gas, sarin, or ricin.

The 50-page report, drawn up by British Intelligence chiefs, says the dictator has defied a United Nations ban by retaining up to 20 Al-Hussein missiles with a maximum range of 400 miles.

It adds: They could be used with conventional, chemical, or biological warheads and are capable of reaching a number of countries in the region including Cyprus.

I tossed the clippings to Julien, a big fan of my mum's taste.

“Have you been following this?” I asked.

“You can make soup out of
grapes
?”

“No, the
conflict
,
you idiot. What do you think?”