Breathless (22 page)

“So, little fish,” Hans said, “maybe you won’t come back; maybe you’ll bring me to America?”

I was startled by his seamless leap into a new narrative. I wondered whether Hans had contemplated this possibility before I had. It wouldn’t have been the first time that romance was entangled with immigration.

As we left the building, Jim suddenly emerged from a doorway across the boulevard. He had followed us to the apartment, he said, and had been waiting for us to come out. He looked like the statue of the Commendatore in
Don Giovanni
who appears onstage in the finale like a god out of a machine. Exuding repressed operatic rage, Jim pulled out the pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather and looked at it theatrically.

“You were up there for two hours and fourteen minutes.”

“We were talking.”

Jim paused briefly as if considering with an open mind the plausibility of our having spent two hours talking. He always did a very good imitation of being reasonable. But he slipped the watch back into his vest and forced us to go back upstairs. When we got to the apartment, Hans opened the door with his key. Jim looked around, counting the cigarette butts in the ashtray and sniffing for my perfume. He motioned us to walk in ahead of him like guilty children being returned to the scene of the crime. He pulled back the covers on the rumpled bed, and inspected the sheets, which were doubtful, as the French say about linen that is not entirely pristine. It didn’t seem to occur to Jim, as I pointed out, that he might have been looking at the sheets that belonged to the owner.

After a while, Jim apologized to Hans, shook hands with him man-to-man, and asked him to leave. Hans hesitated, but Jim waved him off.
When he heard the door close behind Hans, Jim opened his belt and lowered his pants. “If you didn’t fuck Hans, fuck me now.” When the pounding was over, we left the apartment quickly without changing the sheets. Once outside, I climbed back on the motor scooter in silence; to say anything would have been to acknowledge what had happened between us.

This was not a story I could tell my parents, of course, or even my girlfriends, but I wrote about it to Jonathan Alterman, who had assumed an avuncular role in my life, and who enjoyed long typewritten letters. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing, I said, but I couldn’t stop doing it. I wasn’t in love with Hans, but I couldn’t continue with Jim, either. We were sinking huge amounts of money—not even ours—into renovating an apartment, but we couldn’t talk to each other without blowing up. France was hard on foreigners. It was exhausting to spend your life in translation. Maybe we’d be better off looking for work in the States, but Jim had made it clear that the only thing he had going for him was being an American in France.

It was the sex; it wasn’t the sex. Maybe you couldn’t expect marital sex to be a turn-on. I wanted to have a child with Jim and take the next step toward settling down. I didn’t want to have a child. I couldn’t try to get pregnant if I wasn’t sure whose baby it would be.

Jonathan had returned to live in the States. His own life was a mess, he admitted when he wrote back. He was involved with two women and couldn’t make up his mind which one to marry. But as usual, he had advice for me. “A psychiatrist would say,” he wrote, “that you were telling Jim something by letting yourself get caught; being caught is irrelevant to the reasons you’ve given me for having a lover. But I’m not a psychiatrist.” No, he wasn’t a psychiatrist, even though he enjoyed analyzing my situation, but he thought I should make a trip to New York and see one. He had a name for me whenever I was ready.

Why Is It So Hard to Be Happy?

A
FTER MONTHS OF BRAGGING TO
my parents about my wonderful life in Paris, I announced that I had decided to spend spring vacation in New York. It would mean missing my second wedding anniversary, but I had to take advantage of the dates. “I’m kind of tired, I think,” I wrote home. In Paris everything slowed down during Easter. “I need a change of scene,” I added, without explaining why. I suspected that Hans was the symptom, not the cause, of my exhaustion, but I was not sure what disease I was suffering from, nor would I ever broach this with my parents. “I’m so thin,” I wrote home giddily, “that my old clothes don’t fit, my dresses look like tents.”

In a series of frantic letters, Dr. Jim filled my parents in on what he labeled my
crise
, offering his diagnosis and the equivalent of the doctor’s long list of prescriptions. I had developed a cleanliness mania, he told them, taking showers all the time; I was exposed to a nasty
courant d’air
from the windows that didn’t close properly and now I had a cough,
aggravated by my smoking. I was too thin. The renovations were dragging on with no end in sight. The weather, the famous Parisian
grisaille
, was depressing; the sky was permanently gray. We should have taken a winter holiday in the snow. We should have gone to the mountains like everybody else, but the money wasn’t available. I needed days of sleeping until noon, rest. Maybe I needed a vacation from him. Above all, I needed to see them.

On the flight to New York, I wrapped myself in a blanket, stretched out across the seats in the middle row, and dozed my way across the Atlantic in a codeine-induced haze. Thanks to Philippe, I had an unlimited supply of drugs.

My parents had renovated their apartment after my sister graduated from college and moved out. The only place for me to sleep was on a small sofa bed in what had become the dining room (it had originally been the bedroom I shared with my sister, before I appropriated the maid’s room for myself). Camped out on the sofa bed, my first night back, with no doors separating me from the rest of the apartment, I felt like a guest who had already outstayed her welcome.

It was April in New York, alternately balmy and bitter. In a letter dated the day of our second wedding anniversary, Jim reminded my mother of a conversation they had had in Paris, the summer after we were married. Walking from the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where they were staying, toward our apartment, Jim pointed to the
auto-école
where I had learned to drive.

“Nancy got
her permis
on the second try,” he said. “She only missed it the first time because of parallel parking, but she won’t take the car out by herself.”

“She’s your problem now,” my mother had said to him then with a cynical laugh. He thought he had solved the problem, he wrote, in the good-son-in-law mode he had adopted with my parents. But two years later he had to recognize how abysmally he failed. He spiraled into a litany of abjection—his ignorance, self-delusion, rigidity.

At dinner, my mother read that part of the letter aloud. I was touched but also baffled by Jim’s extravagant show of self-knowledge. And I resented being passed along as a problem.

I
HAD ARRANGED TO MEET
Jonathan for lunch at a restaurant near the Museum of Natural History. I had come to feel at ease with him and somewhat detached, even though I couldn’t help remembering our scene at the Pont-Royal. Or maybe it was because I remembered the scene so well that I felt safe—beyond nostalgia, beyond temptation. He could be trusted, I thought, despite our history, to consider my case with the perspective of a journalist—unlike my parents. They had always believed my staying on year after year in Paris was a bad idea, and they had always had their doubts about Jim. Now, though, having me back so soon after the marriage could be embarrassing. How were they going to explain this to their family and friends? No one in their family had ever been divorced, and then there was the not inconsiderable amount of money they had invested in the apartment only six months earlier. In some ways, having me off their hands and in Jim’s—however inadequate a provider he might have turned out to be—had its advantages. Replying, when asked, that I was married and living in Paris carried a certain cachet, especially compared to my sister Andrea, whose East Village address could not be mentioned.

Jonathan ordered Gibsons for both of us.

“You sounded desperate in your letters,” he said, taking my hand across the table and raising it to his lips, a European gesture he managed to pull off without looking affected.

“I want to go back to Paris, but I can’t imagine going back to Jim.” That was the first time I had put my dilemma so succinctly. It was a kind of relief.

After reading the wedding announcement in the
Times
, Jonathan had sent me a note saying, “How nice that someone I remember fondly has found what she wants.” I remembered feeling surprised by the formulation then; it was painful to think about now, and even harder to explain. How had I lost so quickly what I passionately wanted only two years earlier? That was the crux of my misery, and that’s what Jonathan was after.

We both ordered hamburgers and another round of drinks. I knew I would regret the second Gibson. I was almost starting to regret the
lunch. There was something about Jonathan—Jewish men?—that never failed to irritate me, even though I was drawn to his intelligence. The way, I was thinking as I watched him take in my story, Jewish men seem to think they have your number—if you’re a Jewish woman—and that it’s their tribal obligation to bring it to your attention. David was the master of the move. Mark did too, even though we were only collaborating on a book. It was somewhat different with Jim, who was no less eager to prove that he knew more than I did in all areas. I sensed how important what he knew was to him, whereas intellectual condescension just rolled off his precursors in the genre like a little wave of entitlement. Still, I had no regrets about not having given Jonathan another chance when he came through Paris again and wanted to rewind the reel. “See what you’re missing,” he seemed to be saying with every question. I did. But I had not forgotten what happened in bed—and afterward.

I
HAD SCRIBBLED A LINE
from
Darling
in my diary. It was the scene when Julie Christie says to Dirk Bogarde as they look out over the Thames, “Why is it so hard to be happy?” Maybe it wasn’t about Jim. Maybe I just didn’t know how to be happy.

“I thought being married would make me happy. I guess I don’t like being married as much as I thought I would.”

“Nobody does.”

Hundreds of people were streaming past the plateglass window at the restaurant where we were seated, heading for a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Central Park. We could hear the crowds chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Why weren’t we outside joining the march instead of drinking Gibsons and talking about marriage? Everyone looked incredibly young. I felt old, too old to march. Besides, it was drizzling.

“You had an affair to create a crisis,” Jonathan said, after a while, as we watched the kids walking by.

“That doesn’t make sense. We had this incredible apartment. Things were starting to happen.”

“Ask a psychiatrist.”

We were back to that. Jonathan was the first person I had ever known who had seen a psychiatrist. My parents always ridiculed psychiatry. Some of their favorite jokes were about people they knew—friends, though they would never tell us which ones—who had spent years and money in analysis only to emerge utterly unchanged but complacent. They did the same destructive things they had always done but didn’t feel bad about it anymore. My mother played tennis with a psychiatrist and thought he was the most neurotic man she knew—also a very sore loser. I was dubious about going to see a psychiatrist myself, but I decided to make an appointment with Dr. Mendelsohn, Jonathan’s doctor. I had nothing to lose, and Jonathan claimed it had helped him figure out what he wanted to do: get divorced.

You Don’t Love Your Husband

D
R
. A
ARON
M
ENDELSOHN HAD AN
office on Central Park West. He sat behind his desk during the consultation, asking questions (sounding exactly like Jonathan) and listening sternly as I described my situation. I tried to be as entertaining as possible, which was always what I did when I visited doctors, but he was not amused.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Dr. Mendelsohn nodded indifferently.

I rattled on from there, telling the doctor about my previous boyfriends, gathering speed toward the denouement, as I described the narrative arc of the present disaster, from the money borrowed from my parents, to the renovation and the school and our hopes for its future, and then to the affair with Hans. Picking someone like Hans—someone completely impossible as a replacement, even as a lover—was crazy, I concluded.

You probably weren’t supposed to say you were “crazy” to a psychiatrist. That was his job. I stopped talking and waited for his response.

“You don’t love your husband.”

“How can you know that?” How could he know at the end of an hour what I had spent months analyzing in infinite detail?

“You don’t
sound
like someone who loves her husband.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, looking at me wearily as if he had heard it all before (which he no doubt had), “that if you loved your husband you wouldn’t be here.”

I stared back at him. Wasn’t this circular? Or if not circular, facile? What kind of logic was that? Had he never heard of ambivalence? The more I looked at him, the more I realized that he not only sounded like Jonathan (or vice versa) but looked like Jonathan. Another middle-aged (though he must have been older than Jonathan), overweight, smug, Jewish guy whose mother had probably loved him too much—as long as we were throwing clichés around.

What was I supposed to do?

“Stay here, live with your parents, and see me intensively—at least three times a week.”

His prescription was so arbitrary that I regained confidence in my own judgment.

“I’m working on a book with a collaborator. We signed a contract.”

Dr. Mendelsohn was unimpressed. “You can finish the book by mail.”

Nothing mattered except for psychoanalysis. How could he be so sure, when I wasn’t? It felt as if he were already losing interest in my case.