Breathless (21 page)

Suddenly, I thought, yes, kill me, please. You. Of course, to make a movie work for me, I had to bracket what didn’t fit, including catastrophes of world history. But I didn’t need a whole script, just a point of departure, two people who don’t belong together.
Hiroshima Mon Amour
was mainly about heat and skin. A conflagration.

My skin was on fire, and I was all skin.

The Carpenter and the Lady

W
HEN
H
ANS WAS WORKING IN
the new space and I was playing helper, I would press myself tightly against his chest the minute Jim left for teaching. We would resist as long as we could, holding in our breath, leaning into each other in a kind of game, kissing, grinding our bodies in the doorways, tempting each other until we gave in and went to lie down in the back room, always keeping an ear open for footsteps. The room was at the opposite end of the horseshoe-shaped apartment, but the front door slammed loud enough for us to hear people coming and going. I finally asked Joe, Hans’s helper, to call out when Jim came home.

We never actually made love in the little room, but we often took off our shirts so that our bodies could touch. Once Jim came home unexpectedly early and I pulled on Hans’s sweater by mistake. Hans swiftly tucked his tee shirt into his jeans and we hurried out to meet Jim. He looked at us askance, criticizing Hans for not being at work on the beams
in the front part of the apartment, and me for not supervising the renovation. It wasn’t his fault, I said. I had asked him to see about building me a desk.

“What’s wrong with the dining room table?” Jim asked in the exasperated tone that had come to characterize our exchanges since work on the apartment had begun, right after my parents’ summer visit. From the beginning of our relationship, Jim would never admit to worry about financial matters or about his chances of success, but over the last months his mood had radiated tension, and I absorbed it daily as the renovations dragged on. This shared but unspoken anxiety, combined with the repeated failure of my attempts to get pregnant, embittered our life together.

I was caught in two interlocking triangles, Jim, my parents, and me, and Jim, Hans, and me. The figures did not belong to the same geometry, but they expressed the same problem. My parents had provided serious key money, and had it not been for their fancy connections, we would never have found our fabulous address. I was now newly indebted to them and, at the same time, committed both to the marriage and to making the school dream come into being, thus justifying my parents’ investment in us. It was easier to quarrel with Jim over the renovation dramas than to confront the emotional abyss we were circling in our very expensive space.

The sweater was inside out and I knew I was flushed, my face red from rubbing against the edges of Hans’s sharp stubble. I could feel Jim’s eyes studying the seams of the sweater.

Jim said nothing. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I knew he was much too enamored of our intellectual bond to imagine me having an affair with a carpenter he paid ten francs an hour, however “artistic,” as he put it when he wrote to my parents to report on the progress of the renovations. Snobbery was on my side.

I felt like a prisoner waiting for the jailer to leave in order to exercise a furtive pleasure within my cell. I yearned to be alone with Hans without the anxiety of interruption. We were paying rent on the old apartment, but Jim still went there occasionally to pack up his remaining books. I would have loved to take Hans to the Pont-Royal, where I had
spent an afternoon with Jonathan. Or bring him late one night to the legendary Grand Véfour around the corner for a romantic
souper
, sitting in a deep booth, thinking of famous lovers in history whose stories figured in the nameplates above the booths. I missed the borrowed comfort of luxurious settings. Instead, we walked over to the rue Saint-Denis, near the huge food market, Les Halles, where prostitutes worked the streets day and night. Hans was initially shocked by my solution. I agreed that it was kind of creepy (
déclassé
was the word that came to mind—but I couldn’t use that word with him). In the end, I was
la patronne
—who was he to disagree?

The rue Saint-Denis was lined with seedy hotels and bars, bistros open late at night and early in the morning for the workers from the market as well as the prostitutes and their customers.
Les filles
, blonde hair teased high on their heads and cascading down the sides in imitation of Brigitte Bardot, perched on stiletto-heeled pointy-toed shoes or boots, their legs exposed under miniskirts, leaned provocatively in the doorways and in front of the hotels. They called out to the men passing by, inviting them with their eyes, bodies, and words: “Tu viens? Tu m’amènes?” Some of the men walked right past the girls looking straight ahead or hanging their heads, the married ones, presumably, as if they hoped not to be seen (but by whom would they be seen if not by someone equally guilty?); the bolder ones overtly cruised the merchandise. In a flash, a decision would be taken, a sum decided upon, and the couple would vanish from the sidewalk.

I finally chose the Saint-Denis because it looked like the Hôtel du Nord. At the reception desk, we had to show our passports (police checks were universal), but when we paid cash, without a second glance we were given a room and a key—the old-fashioned kind with the long stem and big brass marker. We walked up the stairs and saw other couples coming down. It was just a hotel, after all, even if rooms rented by the hour.

The room was sparsely furnished and lacking in charm, but the sheets didn’t appear soiled. The sink had taps with hot and cold water, as did the bidet; the toilet was down the hall. So, no, it wasn’t the Pont-Royal, but privacy was the luxury we craved. Besides, we were used to
touching while still covered with the sawdust of the apartment, fingernails spotted with paint, skin pale gray with plaster. The first hour we barely moved, exhausted from getting ourselves onto a bed behind locked doors. We lay there quietly, breathing each other in.

I wondered fleetingly if D.H. Lawrence was right, after all: intellectual women think too much for their own pleasure. The lyrics of “If I Were a Carpenter and You Were a Lady” ran around the borders of my brain. I tried to resist the banality of the categories, but he
was
a carpenter, and I was, at least in comparison to him, a lady—albeit a middle-class lady. For once, though, I wanted to be just a body. I did not want to think, neither about the present nor about the future, and especially not about songs, even sung by Harry Belafonte.

Making love with someone your own size, I was discovering, offered a special thrill that made up for the downside, if you thought being with a man who was short was a drawback, which I have to confess that I did. The symmetry made for a good fit, a match that seemed to eliminate a sense of domination, or maybe the need to find the fit in the first place.

Whatever the explanation, if I needed one, there was something between us that day that resembled the workings of a delicate watch: steady intricate movements, the quiet rhythm of things enmeshed. We found an unexpected kind of peace on the rue Saint-Denis, almost an indifference to our own pleasure. Just to be inside the room represented a respite from struggle, the struggle to be together. Inside the room, the effort was behind us: it was stolen time and time out of time, too.

Irish Coffee

T
HE AFFAIR WITH
H
ANS HAD
put something in motion, but I had no idea where it was going or what the consequences would be. I didn’t know what to do—beyond the practical step of going back on the pill, secretly. The more obsessed I became with Hans, the more I withdrew from Jim in my mind, the more he wanted to have sex with me. And I couldn’t refuse without getting questions I didn’t want to answer. I was trying to get pregnant, wasn’t I? We had to have sex for that, didn’t we? I was having sex morning, noon, and night. Writing home in December, dropped in among the usual reports of the social whirl and the household developments, I reported my decision to continue the fertility tests with Dr. Hirsch: “It’s not that I’m dying to have a kid—far from it at this point—but I’d like to think that everything is all right.” My period was two weeks late. I tried all the old wives’ remedies I had ever heard about: boiling myself lobster red in the tub and jumping off the bed. I would stare in the mirror to see if I looked different—some people said you
could tell by the eyes—and endlessly counted backward and forward on my fingers like Jean Seberg’s Patricia in that scene in
Breathless
when she coolly tells Belmondo that she might be pregnant. But unlike Patricia, I was hoping to figure out that it was impossible. What if Jim was sterile, as he thought he might be, and the father of the baby was Hans?

One night, when we were sitting in the living room having Irish coffee, I told Jim I was thinking about having an abortion if I turned out to be pregnant.

“But why?” The space between his eyebrows took on the deep grooves that meant he couldn’t bear his own thoughts. It was actually an expression that I loved, the other side of his shouting, the sensitive-man face. The flow of the Irish whisky, warmed by the coffee and sweetened by the thick heavy cream floating at the top of the glass, added to my sense of confusion. Nothing made sense anymore. Didn’t I enjoy sitting here with my husband, drinking Irish coffee made by him, looking at our books that had started overflowing the shelves? Why couldn’t this be enough? Or the beginning of enough?

I made an appointment to see Dr. Hirsch. I needed to tell him that my period was late and that I wanted to go back on the pill if I wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t understand why I would start back on the pill now, when I was trying to find out why I hadn’t gotten pregnant after eight months of trying. Part of what I told him was the truth, or at least, what I had told Jim—and my parents. The doctor convinced me to do one more fertility test before deciding. He had some questions about my hormonal balance. In the meantime, I left with a sheaf of prescriptions: a urinalysis, an endometrial biopsy, and a new prescription for the
pillule
. I desperately wanted to know what was wrong. Maybe the Tunisian abortion had done me irreparable harm. It would be better to know. It might also be better to be pregnant. Fate would decide. Or my hormones.

After the urine test in a fancy laboratory off the Champs-Élysées, I went home and sat on the bed, waiting by the phone for the lab to call, crumpling the ribs of the corduroy bedspread my mother had made for us. The lab said they would be able to give me the results before dinner. I was supposed to meet Jim on the other side of town for an
evening of music with Philippe, who had become fond of Jim and me as stand-ins for my parents, I sometimes thought, now that Philippe and I weren’t sleeping together. It was an important dinner because Jim said he had a record company connection, and Philippe wanted to record two of the Schubert impromptus. The phone rang at the end of the afternoon. “I’m sorry to tell you, madame. The results were negative.” I made the woman repeat her words. The relief that coursed through my body when I heard the words delivered a clear message about one thing. At that moment, I did not want to be pregnant, even if it also meant that there was something wrong with my body and that I might never have a child.

At the Gare de l’Est, I took the metro to Saint-Germain. It was a direct line, so all I had to do was sit there for thirty minutes, enough time to come down from my high. I began to wonder if I had ever really wanted a child, or if I had just been trying to copy my friends, be like everyone else: you get married; you have a child. End of story. Seberg’s character seemed quite unshaken by the possibility of being pregnant and not being sure who the father was. Maybe she’d write a best-selling novel about a girl—Patricia Franchini—who comes to Paris, falls in love with a gangster, gets pregnant, denounces him to the police, and becomes a famous novelist. But this wasn’t a movie.

By the time I arrived at Philippe and Anne’s apartment I had a violent headache. Philippe pulled me into his office and gave me a codeine pill. “Take another one when you get home, if the pain continues,” he said, pressing an almost-full bottle into my hand. He looked inquiringly into my eyes and stroked my hair. The situation that had caused my headache was the sort of thing he would have understood, but I was not in the mood for confiding. When we left, Philippe offered us aluminum Venetian blinds Anne didn’t care for that he had received as a gift from a patient. Jim accepted them for the new apartment, making all the predictable puns about jealousy and
jalousie
—the word for blinds in French. “We’ll see you back here at the r
éveillon,”
Philippe said, kissing me on both cheeks and shaking Jim’s hand. “New Year’s is very soon.”

My Grandfather’s Watch

I
TOLD
H
ANS THAT WE
would have to be very careful for a while, even though the immediate danger had passed. “Whatever you want,” he would say, with that “I’m just a worker” detachment of his, but I didn’t want him to feel discarded now that the boss’s wife had had her fun. Talking was impossible at the ranch (even Hans called it “the ranch,” and with everybody in jeans and speaking English, it sometimes felt like a small-scale urban version of one). I wanted him to know how confused I was about everything. I wanted to feel him close to me when I explained that I was hoping to go back to New York over Easter vacation. I didn’t know what would happen after that.

One day in late March, an old girlfriend of Hans loaned us her studio, near the Place Saint-Michel. We met there in the early afternoon. The small space was tucked under the eaves, with dark exposed beams that Hans had refinished. The windows of the studio looked out over the crowded square. We lay down on the bed, staying on top of the covers.
I had missed his touch and longed for him to caress me. Instead, we just held each other for a while without talking, listening to the traffic. The buses sighed and groaned on the boulevard below, pausing before crossing the Seine. We pressed our bodies tight against each other until we were breathing with a single breath. It seemed perverse not to make love now that we were alone, but I was afraid that if we started, I wouldn’t be able to stop.