I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (18 page)

17

ANNE AND
I spent the next day avoiding each other completely. The legal task force had returned: Thomas and Selena and an older gentleman named Jacques whom I'd met at the company's holiday parties. They picked up where they'd left off, camped out in the living room amid a shantytown of documents and books. On my trips down to the kitchen, I gleaned tidbits of their conversation. Legal jargon that gave me no indication if they were making any headway against the pregnant winos:
admissible evidence, failure of consideration, declaratory judgment.

I spent the day holed up in my studio, sketching. At some point in the middle of the night, I'd finally had a solid idea for an Iraq project—a personal way in. Startled from a bad dream, or perhaps still in one, I'd been stewing over the donkey graffiti artists, which made me think of an old friend of mine, a burly fellow who went by the street name Didactic, who had recently become something of a celebrity in England for fathering the concept of reverse graffiti. I remembered going on a mission with him through the Greenwich foot tunnel that
runs under the Thames and leads (rather appropriately, given the tunnel's filthy state) to an area called Isle of Dogs. He'd brought along his power washer, a regular bottle of dish soap, and a shoe brush. Once we'd taped his plexiglass cutout to the wall, we set about washing the area around it so that when we were finished, and the cutout was removed, we had reverse-graffiti'd one of the psychedelic eyeballs that Didactic was known for at the time.

Even though it was after five in the morning, we went back to his place for breakfast, and I remembered that he changed out of his dirty clothes and threw them, along with the shoe brush, into the clothes washer. I remembered asking him if the shoe brush didn't melt, and didn't all of the street guck get all over his clothes? While he fried us eggs and rashers, he shrugged and said that all the nasty stuff just went out with the water.

Which is where I got the idea to wash symbolic articles in gas. Petrol was more carcinogenic, more toxic surely than street grime, but then again, so was war. Before dawn, I started scribbling ideas out in the guest room, and it was these excited thinkings I spent the morning working on in my studio while my wife toiled one floor below me with her legal eagles.

The trick, I thought, was to wash
things
in oil, not clothing. The absurdity of such an endeavor echoed the ever-mounting irrationality of the search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq. Both a purging and a cleansing, the objects I would wash would have a link to both my British and American pasts.

What I'd do, I thought, was set up two machines: one of an American make, and one British—if I could still manage to find one now that Thatcher had all but abolished British manufacturing. The articles that went into each machine would have some tie to that respective country. As for the oil? The oil would be foreign.

To the public, it would read as a commentary on fruitless endeavors and wasted energy, energy as both physical and combustible matter, a pillaging of resources, a costly waste of time. To me, it would be a sentimental inventory of my past mistakes.

I could call it
WarWash
. Sardonic and polemical, with a nostalgic bent thrown in. Certainly, there was a lot left to figure out, and it would be a battle to find a gallery willing to show work using hazardous materials, but having stumbled on something on which I could apply my passion, I felt some life in me return. I was certain I was on the right track. Certain this was worth trying.

With my confidence bolstered, I put the rest of my energy into creating an itinerary for the next night: the night Anne said we could be together, when she'd have time after her case. Even though she said she didn't want to do dinner, in the private confines of my studio, I allowed myself to think of it as a date.

Arranging an evening with your wife dedicated to a discussion of your extramarital affair is not an easy task. I ran the gamut of our special places: Aux Lyonnais, a wonderland of oak and beveled glass where they were such fans of aspic, I wouldn't be surprised to see the cutlery served
en gelée
; Naniwaya, a Japanese cantine where the shared tables would prohibit intimate conversation; La Régalade, for which I needed to reserve two months ago, and had not.

After combing through my memories, magazines, and outdated restaurant guides, I decided that stilted and formal wasn't what we needed. I needed to make Anne
laugh.
I picked out three places—appetizer, entrée, dessert—and then I called my dad.

“Do I bring it up or does she?” I asked, after explaining my plan.

“Well, she's already brought it up by finding out,” he said. “So you do.”

We stayed silent a long time.

“Good luck,” he said. “Do good.”

Before the legal team broke for lunch on Friday, I caught Anne in the kitchen.

“We can still go out tonight, right?” I said, touching her lightly on the arm. “I've made . . . arrangements?”

She swallowed, placed her hands on the counter. I was worried she had forgotten about the note she'd left me when we returned from the police station, or was going to back out. But instead—mildly, weakly—she said, “Okay.”

I sequestered myself in my studio for the rest of the afternoon, determining how to approach things. Around five, while the legal session was wrapping up, I showered and chose a semiotic outfit to change into in the guest room. Signs and signifiers: a gray cotton dress shirt that Anne said she loved my eyes in, a navy wool blazer she'd bought me on a trip to Burgundy one winter, the white Stan Smiths that she called “boyish.”

I sat down on the guest bed and listened to the shower go on in the next room. The team had departed, I'd heard them say good-bye. My guts were clenched. My left knee was bobbing up and down, a nervous tick I'd never been able to shake. I was as anxious as if I were being called to trial myself. Which I was.

Fifteen minutes after I heard her shower end, there was a knock on the guest room door. Anne had always been a fast dresser, much faster than me. To look at her, people assumed she spent hours preparing, pampering herself with different creams and potions in front of a vanity table, but she wasn't like that at all. She was an expert dresser. Like a musician, she had different registers: power outfit, seduction, family gath
erings, leisure. When I opened the door, I caught my breath. She'd gone with “Look what you risk losing, you fucking wanker”: navy Dries Van Noten cigarette kimono pants with a cream-and-rust-colored dragon slinking up the side, a pale pink double-paneled tank top made out of cashmere and silk with a vertiginous V-neck; black steel-toe and calf-hair booties that she'd gifted herself with after winning her first case. Over this, a thick felt coat the color of wet moss. Her eyes were lined with kohl, her hair was tousled, up.

“You look incredible,” I whispered.

She clutched her coat around her cleavage. “Should we go?”

In an effort to make the night feel different, I'd called us a cab. The car, sporting the logo of the only Parisian company that reliably showed up when called, was idling by the sidewalk when we locked the house. I gave him the address, the Pont de l'Alma, a stone bridge that connects the seventh arrondissement to the eighth. Anne looked at me knowingly before folding her hands in her lap.

“So?” I asked as the taxi edged us onto the Boulevard Raspail. “How's it going with the case?”

She contemplated me before answering. “You look nice,” she said.

Shocked, I managed a thank-you.

“The case is going,” she continued, taking a lipstick out of her purse. “Jacques is holding us back a little, he's very methodical. He doesn't trust our energy, I think.”

I wanted to suggest that maybe he was just too old, but I held my tongue.

“The problem with a case like this is that your common sense keeps kicking in and saying it's ridiculous—it's ridiculous to not know
not
to drink, it's ridiculous to not have
some
kind of role model around you, if not your family, at least the TV. I mean, it's not like these women were living in a hut somewhere. Lille's a major city. So we have to dig pretty deep to come up with a counterargument that isn't rooted in, well, scorn.”

“When's the trial?” I asked.

She sighed. “The Monday after next week.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. So, do I get to know where we're going, or is it a surprise?”

“You seem to have guessed the first place.”

I watched her face darken.

“Don't worry,” I said as her gaze strained out the window. “We won't be eating there.”

The Bateaux Mouches is a relatively old company that operates a fleet of tour boats around the Seine. They offer lunch cruises and dinner cruises with previously frozen, three-course dinners that are notoriously substandard, along with daytime and nighttime scenic trips. Whenever Anne and I take Camille for a walk along the river, at one point or another, the flat, white boats float by—the top level completely open, filled with happy tourists waving from their orange seats. At night, it's thrilling to see them pass under the city's most famous monuments, illuminating the stonework and the turrets with their dazzling web of lights, passing through Paris's watery spleen like a massive flashlight.

Every time we pass one of these boats, Anne says the same thing: “Isn't it funny that I've never been.” It makes sense, of course. The Bateaux Mouches are something you do as a tourist, much like the double-decker bus tours in London or New York. But I felt sure that deep inside her, she was dying to go. So that night we would.

When we arrived at the small port by the bridge, I rushed around to open the door for her before paying the cab. Then I offered my arm to assist her down the steep boat ramp that was decidedly not made for women in high heels.

“Top level or the bottom?”

It was the first week in November, and at 6 p.m., the evening air had a biting chill. But still, she answered, “Top.”

I gave the attendant the tickets I'd bought online and we went up the short staircase to the upper deck, where it became clear relatively quickly that all the other tourists had opted to stay warm in the glass-enclosed level below.

Once the boat churned into action, kicking up the dirty green water into modest waves, Anne sat down on a bench and took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.

“What?” she said, with a defensive shrug when she saw me staring at her.

Anne and I had both been smokers when we met, but she gave it up when she was pregnant, and I, out of sympathy, did my damnedest to give it up, too. Later, when Camille was three or so, we started smoking again only at parties, pinching other people's cigarettes because buying our own would signal that we were back to our bad ways. About two years ago, we gave it up for good. Which made the unopened pack of Davidoff's on Anne's lap even more surprising.

“I've been really stressed,” she said, taking one out. Gesturing to the space between us, she said, “This is stressful. You want?”

Fuck it, I thought, we might as well be on the same psychosomatic page.

And so we smoked as the boat chugged its way toward the monuments both historical and recent: the Palais de Chaillot,
the tunnel where Princess Diana died, the Champs de Mars, the Eiffel Tower.

“Do you think, though,” I asked, pulling my scarf tighter around my neck, “that you'll win?”

I watched her pull elegantly on the cigarette. “I don't know. I felt sure we would. But now?”

“And who's this Thomas fellow? Is he good?”

She narrowed her eyes at me.

“What?” I said. “I can't help it.”

She exhaled a halo of gray smoke. “Try.”

And so I tried. We talked more about her case, both the sureties and the chances, before I told her about my ideas for
WarWash
: that I was going to ritually cleanse both my country and my own mistakes. In gas.

She ran her hand over the railing, stretched her fingers toward the water.

“So you'll be washing what, like old letters? The British flag?”

I decided to take the sting of her comment without commenting on it myself. “Yeah, basically. Some things that allude to the future, a lot of things from the past.”

She started fiddling with her wedding ring. Dark tendrils of hair danced around her neck, shaken by the wind. I longed to touch her face.

“The thing about this project, though, is that Julien won't take it,” I continued, stubbing the cigarette out under my shoe. “We had a fight about it, actually.” Anne raised her eyebrows, which encouraged me to go on.

“You know, he wants me to keep doing the same old, same old. But the oils—they were a fluke, really. An intermission.”

“So find someone who will, then,” she said. “Find another gallery.”

I stared at her, amazed. Where art thou, my pragmatist?

“The thing is, Richard,” she said, tossing her Davidoff into the Seine. “It's his business. He has the right to choose what he does and doesn't want to sell. And it would be good for you to have extra representation.”

“Oh no,” I said. “It would be incredible. But it's not going to be easy, pitching something made with gas.”

“It's the content that matters,” she said, shrugging. “People display noxious things—used tampons, dead animals—all the time. Most of the time, it's laughable. You just have to make it good.”

“So you think it's worth doing?” I held my breath.

She pulled her coat around her. “Of course.”

I wanted to ask her so many other questions.
Do you really think so? Would you love me more?
But instead, we both fell silent as we approached the majestic white-and-gold bridge that graced the entrance to the Invalides.

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “
The Blue Bear
. Did you really try and get it back?”