Breathless (23 page)

“Think about it,” he added abruptly, “and come back at the end of the week. I have an opening Friday afternoon.” I wanted to say no, but I thought about how the psychiatrist in
Suddenly Last Summer
vindicates the rebellious girl. Maybe he would rescue me. Too bad he didn’t look like Montgomery Clift.

F
RIDAY HE RECAPPED MY HISTORY.
I wanted to marry David. My parents disapproved, and then suddenly I had to get away from him. I went to France. Then I wanted to marry Bernard. And as soon as my parents gave me a chance to bail out, I did. All they had to do was ask.

He paused long enough for me to guess what was coming. I knew my story too.

I take the leap and marry Jim. To my surprise, my parents go along with it after the fact. And just as it looks as though this wasn’t the worst possible choice I could have made, I destroy the situation by having an affair with another, even more unsuitable man. I created the crisis because I couldn’t handle their approval. It was all part of the same pattern. Could I see that?

The doctor looked at me with a flicker of self-satisfaction. I recognized a variant of Jonathan’s analysis: creating a crisis. I asked if he had ever heard of structuralism, of Roland Barthes. Wasn’t that the same thing, looking at the structure of the stories instead of getting caught up in the details? Seeing the pattern of the narrative, whatever the content. I decided that was not the kind of answer he had in mind. He didn’t seem very impressed by anything to do with French ideas.

He went on, retelling my past according to his theory. It wasn’t about the men; it was about the men in relation to my parents. I hadn’t learned how to separate. I get as far away from my parents as I can by choosing unsuitable men. To break their hold over me, I have sex with my parents’ friends. But that doesn’t work either. So I try to make my life resemble theirs, turn Jim into my father, pretend I’m a housewife like my mother, model my home on theirs. When that fails, I turn against my own choice and return home. First the good daughter, then the bad daughter. Whatever the story, I’m a daughter, not an independent person.

As the doctor was talking, I could feel a
crise
coming on. It was embarrassing to have someone you didn’t know seem to know all about you. On the other hand, I couldn’t see my way forward. Was going backward the right direction? When I returned to his office later that week, I was still skeptical.

Was this what psychiatrists did? Make you feel ashamed and
stupid? I had everything backward. Cause was merely effect. I didn’t want to get pregnant because I wanted to remain a child, my parents’ and Jim’s. I had an affair to avoid getting pregnant. That had a weird kind of logic, assuming, of course, that what I thought I wanted was the opposite of what I
really
wanted. In my unconscious, if I believed in the unconscious. Did I? The last thing I wanted to hear about was about my relationship to my parents. I could see the part about the pattern of repetition. I just couldn’t imagine his solution to the current crisis: sitting in his office—not to mention lying on the couch—three times a week while living at home. But my time was up again; the doctor was already ushering me out. Clearly, I wasn’t serious about solving my problems or I’d be doing exactly what he advised, signing on for analysis with him.

Despite her long-standing disdain for psychiatry, my mother was enthusiastic about Dr. Mendelsohn’s recommendation that I return home.

“Y
OU DON
’
T LOVE YOUR HUSBAND
,” the doctor had said at the first session.

Maybe I didn’t love my husband. Maybe I didn’t want a husband. It was hard to know. I knew I wasn’t happy, but was being unhappy the same thing as not loving someone? How could you tell?

While I was in Manhattan, my husband was writing to my parents twice daily, in addition to writing to me. He dated our crisis from taking over the new apartment. I wrote back to Jim and said I wouldn’t decide anything until I returned to Paris. I wanted to believe what he said in his letters. That he wanted to try.

I almost didn’t recognize Jim from the sweet and compromising tone of his letters. How would our life be better? We’d take more vacations. We had stopped traveling after we married. He would be more organized about finances (not that I had any idea of how much money we did or didn’t have). He would pay me for the classes I taught. He would encourage me to get a doctorate (and have Hans make finishing the study and the shower a priority). He would not yell at the workers. He would be
nicer to my friends. In a word (many words, as always, once he put pen to paper), he would be a changed man, the man he wanted to be, the man I thought I had married.

In his reply to Jim’s letters, my father noted his son-in-law’s failure to send me money in New York on our anniversary and expressed his expectation that Jim would adopt a “responsible and sensible approach,” whatever our future turned out to be.

My Father Plays Detective

B
EFORE
I
RETURNED TO
P
ARIS
, my father revealed that he had started doing research on Jim. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee after dinner.

“Why didn’t you ask me what you wanted to know?”

“Because you believe everything he tells you. And obviously the guy is incapable of a straight answer.”

My father loved straight answers.

“And then there was all the shilly-shallying to get us the details about his diplomas for the wedding announcement in the
Times.”

“I told you we didn’t want an announcement.”

“Why not? If you weren’t hiding something.” For years my parents had been convinced I was hiding something from them. Of course I was. Do you voluntarily offer information to the FBI?

Finally, my father dropped his bomb. “Jim doesn’t have a BA,” he said, as if he had discovered that Jim had served time in prison. “He never
graduated from college. I’m sure all the other diplomas he says he has are completely fabricated.”

While my father left the kitchen to get his briefcase, I sat at the table torn between incredulity and relief. I didn’t think Jim was hiding anything behind his beard (my mother’s theory) besides a weak chin, but I knew—without knowing—that he was consumed by secrets. If I hadn’t found the letter in his pocket, would I ever have known he wasn’t really divorced yet? Maybe he had been married to someone else before her. Where did he go on Sunday afternoons? What happened to the money that came in for ELF? Was he or wasn’t he an alcoholic? I should have known Jim could lie about anything, given the way he charmed potential clients about the school’s future (I guess the school was real enough in his head). I tried to figure out whether I cared, whether the missing degree mattered.

Putting the reply from the Registrar’s Office on the table, a document that he had obtained by posing as a future employer, my father asked, “If he could lie about something as basic as a college degree, what else do you think he has lied to us about?”

Everything made a new kind of sense. Jim’s pedantry was the show-off knowledge of an autodidact. All the reading and the ravenous consumption of facts were the flip side of the lie. He had built an entire identity in Europe from the missing diploma. He must have smooth-talked some bureaucrat into giving him a French degree equivalent to the fictitious American BA and then kept trading one credential for another, the degrees from Madrid and Perugia my parents included in the wedding announcement. Jim couldn’t speak Spanish. I almost admired the fraud. It was like a Patricia Highsmith novel—minus the murder. No wonder Jim said he could never make it in the States.

“It might be grounds for annulment,” my father concluded, pleased with the idea.

“We’re not talking about divorce yet.”

I wanted to see Jim again, away from the harsh realities of New York, in the gray zone of our life together in Paris.

The Confession

“G
OOD FLIGHT, SANE RECEPTION
. J
IM
met me at Orly wearing his black suit and carrying red roses,” I wrote as soon as I returned to Paris. “He’s lost weight and looks good. Jim is being reasonable—for him.”

On the drive from the airport, as we threaded through traffic in the little green car we had fallen in love with on the honeymoon and that now had begun to fail part by part, I told Jim I wanted us to have separate rooms for a while. He nodded. When we got to the apartment, I put my bags in the little back room.

“I want you to sleep in the bedroom. I promise I won’t wake you.”

“That’s a promise you can’t keep.”

I was too tired to insist. What difference could one more time possibly make? Jim woke me at five.

“Just this once.” I closed my eyes and waited for him to finish.

Later that morning I suggested we go downstairs to the café across the street to discuss the situation over coffee. I thought Jim would control
himself in a public space, especially in the local café where he had a reputation to maintain—the counter at which he had his morning coffee and late night cognac. If nothing else, Jim believed in appearances. The American professor and his charming wife.

We chose a table in the back, away from the crowd of men standing at the counter. Jim beckoned to the waiter and, as if nothing had changed, ordered for both of us. “Un thé pour madame, et une tartine beurrée.” Just an espresso for him and a glass of water—the water to show me he was serious about losing weight. The waiter didn’t understand English, but we waited for him to leave before speaking.

“I know you’re having an affair with Hans.”

“I’m not discussing Hans. I want to talk about how we can get through the next few months with as little damage as possible.” Was Dr. Mendelsohn right that I didn’t love Jim? Looking at him across the table, at the soft creases around his eyes, I could see that he was suffering. I felt compassion for him, but I also felt the same kind of certainty I had when breaking up with David. I just could not go on.

“So you’re leaving?”

“I guess so. I interviewed for a teaching job in a high school. I hope I don’t get it. But whatever happens, I’m not going back until August. I have to finish the book.”

“When did it start with Hans?”

“Please stop obsessing about Hans. He’s not the problem. You are.”

“How can I be the problem? I still love you.”

“It’s not about love.” I paused before asking my father’s question. He had harped on Jim’s financial failures. “Is there enough money to finish the renovations?”

Jim shrugged and looked sullen. “What difference does it make?” We had spent hours in this café since getting the apartment. It was exactly the kind of place Jim loved. The list of wines was inscribed in chalk on a blackboard above the counter, along with the sandwiches—the
rillettes
and
saucisson sec
Jim considered authentic enough to eat. While the waiter unloaded the breakfast tray, I prepared to tell Jim about my father’s research, as he called it. I knew that whatever bonds of love remained would be broken beyond repair when I did.
But to assuage my guilt about Hans, I needed to put Jim in the wrong. I lit a cigarette.

“I know about the BA. My father wrote to the registrar.”

Jim said nothing. His hooded eyes filled with rage. I would pay for this. I just didn’t know how or when.

He went back to his line of questioning about Hans, exactly as though I had not exposed the fabulation.

“When did it start?”

“Hans is not the point. Even you know that.”

“I agree. Hans is going back to Germany next month with Ingrid. They’re having problems with their papers. He won’t be working for us much longer.” I experienced a strange sense of relief.

“Tell me, please,” he continued, “tell me, I just need to know. After that, it won’t matter,” he said, taking my hand in his.

I had been over this with Jonathan. I had been over this with Leo. Both of them had lectured me: no matter what he says, don’t admit anything. I knew they were right, especially considering how volatile Jim could be, but they were men, and besides there was some part of me that
wanted
to tell, to get it over with. That must be how they get criminals to confess, I thought, when there’s no real evidence. After a while, you just can’t stand the questions; you tell the truth out of despair or boredom.

All I had to do was say no. But I said yes. I said yes, thinking that I was going to leave anyway, that maybe he would stop obsessing if he knew. Maybe it would make it easier for us in the end. Maybe I owed him the truth. Maybe I wanted to hurt him for how things had turned out—for messing up the ranch. I didn’t need a session with a psychiatrist to know that I preferred to blame other people for my mistakes.

The minute the word came out of my mouth, I knew I had made the wrong choice. Jim’s face reddened with rage. He threw some change on the table and motioned with his head in the direction of the staircase that led to the apartment.

As we climbed the four flights of stairs, I tried to read the expression of his back. I could tell that he was weary. I could also tell that nothing would stop him from enacting his anger. I wished I had turned
around and gone back to the café, gone to stay with Monique and Alain, but I kept following him, the way a kid dumbly submits to paternal punishment—even fetches the strap hanging in the closet—awaiting her doom, convinced that it is as inevitable as unjust. We walked down the long hallway, where I had spent intense hours scraping the layers of wallpaper and where the exposed beams that extended floor to ceiling now almost glowed between the rough, white surfaces. We turned right into the living area, where the parquet had been repaired, and into the kitchen. I hadn’t realized how much had been accomplished while I was in New York. That part of what Jim had told my father was true. The place was coming together. I looked around the kitchen, at the rustic table that fit so much better here than it did in the previous apartments. Why was I giving this up? Wasn’t this my space too? Why was I leaving it all to Jim, who would still be living in his cold-water flat in Montparnasse if it weren’t for me?