Breathless (24 page)

With a faint smile, Jim showed me the detail of the cabinets—how cleverly Hans had attached them to the supporting beams. I remembered Hans standing on the ladder, trying to get the doors to hang properly. Suddenly, silently, Jim tossed out everything the cabinets contained: the grains tumbled onto the floor; rice hit the windowpanes; cans and bottles rolled across the floor, scattering wildly. Then he carefully removed the Majolica collection from the shelves and, picking up a crowbar, pulled the cabinets down from the walls. I stood there, frozen in witness, while he dismantled what had been the center of our life. Finally, Jim walked out of the kitchen into the sitting room and tried to pry up the floorboards that Hans had so carefully fitted together. When the boards resisted, he started cursing, flailing, kicking whatever stood in his way. I could tell that he wanted to kick me, too. Instead he pushed me ahead of him into the bedroom. It was almost as though we both remembered at the same time the scene in the borrowed apartment at the Place Saint-Michel. He threw me down on the mattress.

Notre Dame

D
ESPITE WHAT
J
IM HAD SAID,
Hans was still working on the apartment. A few days after the scene in the café, we received a cheerful postcard from Tangier, where he and Ingrid had gone for vacation. Hans rehung the cabinets and repaired the damage to the floor when he returned, without asking for an explanation. I knew from Leo that Hans was afraid of Jim, but he needed the job. Even I continued teaching classes when Jim insisted. That’s how it was.

One Friday evening, when Hans was finishing up, Jim announced that the three of us were going out to dinner—he was feeling affluent, he said, with new clients on the horizon. We drove to a restaurant not far from the apartment. Over couscous Jim and Hans talked about the renovation, what still had to be completed: the new toilet in the front entrance, the lighting throughout the apartment, the carpeting in the classroom spaces. The meal dragged on as Jim piled merguez sausages
and vegetables onto his plate and finished a second bottle of Algerian wine. I pressed Hans’s foot under the table.

After dinner, Jim announced that we would accompany Hans home. On the Île Saint-Louis, Jim abruptly stopped the car as though he had just thought of something. He said he wanted to smoke his cigar while looking at the back of Notre-Dame, his favorite view in Paris. When he climbed out of the Austin, Jim turned his head and told Hans to bring his toolbox. As the three of us walked toward the Pont de la Tournelle, the bridge connecting the island to the Left Bank, I saw in a flash what Jim had in mind. I knew his passion for puns. We stopped at the river’s edge. Jim took the toolbox, opened the latch and, one by one, dropped Hans’s precious tools into the dark currents of the Seine below, beginning with the screwdriver.

It was like a one-act play, a pantomime in which none of us had speaking parts. Director and actor, Jim had cast Hans as Abelard, the intruder into the house who is castrated for seducing the master’s daughter; never mind that I was his wife, not his daughter. The little scene had required only a few minutes to unfold. Hans missed the reference but got the point. Jim relit his cigar, appearing satisfied with the performance. After a while, he said he would walk home and told me to drop Hans off at his hotel. In an almost friendly voice he suggested that Hans take a couple of days off from work, get some rest. “You look tired,” he said. Hans nodded.

I still hadn’t figured out how to turn the car lights on or put the Austin into reverse, but I delivered Hans to his hotel in Montparnasse, steering in the dark. We sat in the car across the street from the hotel entrance, cut off from each other and lonely in the aftermath of our humiliation.

Overdose

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, J
IM
drove to Sancerre to replenish our stock of wine. He woke me to find out where I had left the car. I had pulled in straight in front of the police station on the little square opposite our building, jubilant at having escaped the trial of parallel parking.

I was completely alone for the first time in more than a year. It was a Saturday, and the workers would not be coming in. I made a pot of tea and took it to the back room. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while, drinking the tea and smoking. I could still feel Hans’s presence in the room, his hands on my jeans. The intensity of the eastern light outside the courtyard window meant that spring had finally come to Paris. It wasn’t a warm, sunny New York spring but the bright, chilly May weather that makes French people run outside with their coats open and turn their faces hungrily to the sun. “There is little I can tell you about the emotional scene,” I had written home after the long Easter break. “Jim has been trying hard, but the old frictions are still there—neither
of us can change that. I have no doubts about my plans to separate from him. The only thing that makes me a little sad is the idea of leaving Paris—it’s so beautiful now—cabs are cheap and cafés everywhere—and one feels safe.”

I thought about how much I wanted to sleep, how little I wanted to deal with Jim, even Hans. I thought of the work on the book that had to be done with Mark, packing up, sending things back to New York: leaving. Did I fit Dr. Mendelsohn’s portrait of me: a girl doomed to repetition? How exactly was I supposed to change that? The tape of our last session kept playing in my head. Do you see a pattern here? I took a Valium with my tea, hoping to tune out the voices. You don’t love your husband. I swallowed another Valium. I was starting to feel drowsy. When was Jim coming back? Probably the next day. Maybe he hadn’t told me. It didn’t matter. I started inserting the suppositories Dr. Finkelstein had prescribed for my cramps; this was a use of the medication unforeseen by the drug manufacturers. Then I popped a few more little yellow pills, alternating with the codeine Philippe had given me—just in case. I fell back on the bed. As I began to feel the muscle relaxants finally moving through my bloodstream, weighing down my limbs, I reached for the half-empty Jameson bottle that I had taken from Jim’s bedside table. That would push me over the edge of consciousness, I was sure. I propped myself up on one elbow and managed a few sips.

J
IM WAS STANDING ON THE
threshold of the little room. I thought I could make out Mark standing behind him. Mark had insisted on seeing for himself when for two days in a row Jim had told him on the phone that I was sleeping.

“She appears to be alive,” Jim said to Mark with the wintry smile he had begun to adopt when referring to me.

“How long has she been lying there like this?”

“I have no idea,” Jim answered, looking bored. “She’s not my problem anymore.”

When Mark realized that I couldn’t sit up by myself, he called
SOS Médecins. I heard him explaining the situation over the phone. “Overdose” was one of those fetish words that had entered the discourse via
franglais
.

“Stand up, please, madame,” the young doctor said. I hadn’t moved for two days. Mark pulled me to my feet. “Can you stand by yourself? If not, you will have to have your stomach pumped. Suicide is against the law in this country, you know. You could have killed yourself,” he added, in case I had missed the point.

I tottered briefly and fell back on the bed. Why wouldn’t they all go away and let me sleep?

“You are the husband?” the doctor asked Mark, practicing his English, and disconcerted by Jim’s indifference. Mark said yes—no point trying to explain Jim. The doctor told him to take me to the
cabinet to
see whether I could urinate. When we returned, the doctor was examining the remains of the suppository wrappers and bottles that had contained the medication. He shook his head. Addressing Mark, and ignoring me as if I were an annoyance he couldn’t wait to erase from his busy schedule, the doctor explained that I should be encouraged to eat, exercise, and spend some time in the sun.

The overdose had been my last idea. It wasn’t exactly an idea, of course, more like a surrender to the sense of failure I had been trying to ward off all that year. The marriage plot had collapsed, as had the quest for freedom that had brought me to Paris in the first place. I had come to the end of a road, the path that had taken me to the city of my dreams.

I was immobilized by disappointment.

For a few days in May, I walked with Mark, leaning on his arm like an old lady, through the arcades of the Palais-Royal where Colette spent the last years of her life, writing and being cared for by her third and much younger husband. As we made our way slowly around the square, Mark talked to me about the future—his intellectual ambitions. I marveled at his sense of entitlement, at his conviction that the world was there for the taking.

His anticipation was matched only by my dread.

“Why don’t you come with me to the south of France?” Mark
proposed one afternoon. A friend had offered him the use of a house. In the 1950s, when property in France was still cheap, Anthony had come into a small inheritance and acquired a farmhouse high up in the hills behind Saint-Tropez. For a considerable sum a neighbor rented part of the land for his vineyard. A one-room shack came with the property and Anthony invited friends to stay there when he was in the mood for company.

“The doctor said you should spend some time in the sun,” Mark pressed me. “We can make some progress on the book,” he continued patiently, as though speaking to a slow child.

“I don’t know. What’s the point?”

But the second time Mark asked, I said yes. When I told Dominique, a senior professor and Couderc’s colleague, what we were planning, she looked at me skeptically. She was friendly with Mark and had known me since my days at Middlebury summer school.

“Another man? Already?”

“But he’s like a brother,” I said, “and we’re going to work.”

I sometimes thought Mark could have been my brother. We had the same kinky hair and long, oval faces. One of the uncles on my mother’s side, the one who had made money in the coffee and tea business, was called Rothberg. The name gave our physical resemblance a resonance it might otherwise have lacked. Besides, the fact that Mark had braved Jim’s hostility made me want to trust him enough to embark on three weeks of tête-à-tête in the country.

“Ma chère,” Dominique said, unpersuaded, “you’ve just left your father; don’t start with your brother.”

The idea of a literary partnership appealed to me. Maybe I was starting something. I hoped it wasn’t about sex. I prepared a little suitcase I kept under the bed in the back room, ready for my escape. In early June I met Mark at the Gare de Lyon. The skies were still gray in Paris and we shivered on the platform waiting for the train south.

Three Weeks in Provence

T
HE FARMHOUSE LOOKED OUT OVER
sloping terraces and the vineyard below. A shortcut—a narrow winding path made up of rough white pebbles—connected the main building to the guest quarters, where Mark and I had set up shop. The road sign for the hamlet seemed to point toward an abandoned dovecote, a perfectly round tower of stones with a tiny window at the top. The shack, as Anthony referred to it, was actually a small stone building tucked away behind the dovecote and set deep into the side of the hill, with a long flight of rough-hewn steps leading down to the entrance. The room had a primitive fireplace and a sleeping loft. In early June it was hot during the day, but at night it was cold enough to need a fire.

Mornings, we worked at the long harvest table under the sleeping loft. Later, we baked in the sun, reading novels or writing letters, the radio tuned to France-Musique. We were happy to be far from the crowds of tourists already flocking to the Riviera, with our serious
books and the local herbs with which I lavishly perfumed our
omelettes aux fines herbes:
thyme, sage, and rosemary that grew wild. The rosemary reached the size of small bushes. It was the land of the
bouquet garni
. In the early evening, Mark would walk our letters over to the big house, leaving them for the postman and picking up our mail after a chat with Anthony. On his way back, Mark would stop and buy fresh eggs from one of the neighbors, an old woman who kept a few chickens in her backyard along with a friendly goat. Every few days Anthony drove us to local markets, where we stocked up on cheese, bread, and olives.

The rituals of our daily life in the little stone house reminded me strangely of the honeymoon weeks in Ireland. The landscape was less green in Provence, of course, and there were no vineyards or olive groves in Connemara, but the narrow pathways, the proximity of the sea, and the isolation all brought images of that pastoral interval back to me. The geography was the least of it, I suppose. Hidden away from the world with another man whose supreme values were books and food, I relived the endless summer hours in Ireland with Jim reading and listening to Radio Caroline—when the ranch was still the dream.

After the violent episodes in Paris, I had been afraid to let Jim know how to reach me, but in one of those hopeful gestures that experience should have taught me to resist, in the end I gave him my address. I didn’t think he would hunt me down in the
maquis
. Jim wrote almost daily, as if we were merely separated by distance. What was I reading and thinking? my husband wanted to know. Jim had spent time in the south of France before he met me, and his letters included recommendations for the best
tomates provençales
, the best coffee—complete with hand-drawn maps and arrows pointing directions to a newsstand in Sainte-Maxime where you could buy the daily
Herald Tribune
. If we had no future together, the past impinged almost daily on the present, the endlessly proliferating details of our separation: the car that he wanted to unload, classes for me to teach when I got back to Paris, plans for selling the school now that I was leaving. He promised to send money as soon as he made some.

Instead of a check, I received a series of black-and-white photographs of me taken during the honeymoon. In the first one, the Austin
is parked along the side of the road and I’m posing on top of a picnic table, leaning back on my elbows in classic girly calendar mode, with my back slightly arched. I’m looking back over my shoulder at the camera with a mocking smile as if to say, “I know this is ridiculous.” Jim had cropped the photograph of his pinup wife wearing her new push-up bra and mailed it in the form of a postcard: on the back, a message demanding my recipe for barley pilaf.