The Twoweeks Page 20

  Then one morning I bumped into Guillaume at the bookstalls, and what a pleasure it was to see him. A familiar face, a friend, a diversion from my binary bind. I might have looked him up if I’d known how. But I had no address for him (he never stayed anywhere for more than a few months, in any case) and he had never had a phone.

  He still didn’t. His principles remained firmly in place. No car, no phone, two meals a day. Half of any money he earned still went to charity. The trust fund, yes, he supposed it still existed. It was somewhere, in someone’s capable hands. Someday he would accept his share of the family wealth, just so as to give it away responsibly.

  Guillaume had not spoken to his parents since turning twenty. He was in touch only with Marianne, his younger sister, whom I had met briefly and liked enormously. A beautiful sprite, with a mischievous smile and merry green eyes, Marianne had grown up and was now at the Sorbonne.

  “In the system but okay,” he told me. “She is what you would call pre-med.”

  “So what would I call you?”

  “Still nothing,” he shrugged. “As you can plainly see.”

  I could see he was a good deal more than that. Apart from being extremely handsome and (for a Frenchman and an ideologue) surprisingly amusing, he was an utterly dedicated human being. His “job,” which he performed without a scrap of sanctimony or self-congratulation, was to help his fellow man. As we sat at a sidewalk café, under a translucent awning that ushered the rain past our table like a shower curtain, he reaffirmed all of this in his matter-of-fact fashion.

  True, one could never cure the world of irreducible, Biblical truths. One disease gave way to another, one war ended and another began. Indeed, there were 20 wars going on as we sat drinking our coffee, he assured me, and most citizens were unaware of 19 of them. The newspapers could only handle one at a time. Alone among men I have known, Guillaume could be forceful, even unequivocal, without being aggressive. It was almost a parlor trick.

  On the other hand, he went on, it was so easy to help people every hour of every day. To bring food to a hungry family; to help a man find work; to translate documents or fill out forms for refugees; to tutor children; to volunteer time at the health clinics. Sadly it was all one could do, fortunately it was also the best thing to do. There was, he stated, no morally sound argument against it.

  I stayed with him that night. Not that I was in thrall to his ego-free virtue, much as I did admire it. I knew it was for real. It may have been good old Catholic guilt (combined with a lifelong distress at his father’s guilt-free greed) that had spurred him in the direction of saintliness, but a saint is a saint is a saint. If all Guillaume had to eat was a Hershey bar, he would either split it with the next hungry person he saw or give the whole thing away and go hungry himself.

  No, I stayed with him because it might please him and because it cost me no additional sin to do so. Guillaume was my other transgression; Ian knew about him. He had been surprised that July afternoon, and no doubt dismayed. (Betrayed so casually.) I so wished I could have lied to him. Denied the obvious, to protect him. Why did I feel a need to wound him with my honesty?

  “So that’s how you spend your time while I’m holed up in the carrels,” Ian more or less snapped, as he more or less glared at me.

  To Guillaume, though, he was polite. He extended a hand (thankfully, did not offer a mocking version of the bilateral air kiss) and said with just the slightest twist of the blade, “Is it okay if I call you Bill?”

  Guillaume, confused, blushing (he blushed easily, didn’t believe affection between human beings could be wrong, hoped there were no hurt feelings), said, in English, “Sure, why not?”

  I blush easily too, and was above all embarrassed to have slept with him. I hated that Ian could see me as such a clichéd type, the unsophisticated American girl who goes abroad and takes to bed the first handsome European who comes along. Spare me the thirty worst movies that hinge on this scenario.

  My embarrassment should have been the least of it. I was guilty of a cruel and careless act, likely the result of too much free time on too nice a day in Paris. Neither of us had been unfaithful and the understanding was that neither of us ever would be. To be honest, I felt Ian would have been within his rights to strike me. I almost expected it. Would I not have struck him, had our roles been reversed?

  Not surprisingly, he was far more restrained, limiting himself to a few cutting remarks, the worst of which (“I suppose Little Miss Poet was out gathering experiences?”) he seemed to find amusing. He let go of it; he let it go. So for a while at least, embarrassment could trump guilt in my hierarchy of self-flagellation. I could face my husband more readily than I could face myself.

  This time around, when neither guilt nor embarrassment figured in, depression would trump distraction. Guillaume was just one man too many, on one too many wet afternoons, and I proved unequal to the occasion. Unwilling. I had set myself a goal of cheering him up and fell well short.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked me softly, in English.

  All I could say was, “I’m not. I’m not crying.”

  “You don’t like your Billy any more?” he said.

  “I do,” I said. “Very much.”

  And then I cried some more, doubling his confusion. How could he possibly know how irrelevant he was, when we were such friends, were—his favorite word—compatriots. He saw us in common cause. Artists, he contended, give humanity a gift every bit as valuable as food and shelter.

  Guillaume’s assurances notwithstanding, I don’t know what I was giving humanity besides a big pain in the backside. He cried too when I said we should leave it at that, one evening for auld lang syne. (The Scots were still with me.) I had persisted in believing I was nothing special to him—just an American girl who said yes—until he confessed he had tried all that year to paint my picture. He was not a painter, he simply wished to have an image, life-sized at that.

  He went so far as to enlist Marianne’s boyfriend, who was a painter and who produced a large portrait on the basis of such police-sketch-style details as they could reconstruct. Guillaume had almost no furniture in his current room—a bed, a chair, a table, none of which he owned—but the big painting was there.

  “This is you, no?” he said.

  I could only hope not, as I gazed upon the sister I never had, on the worst hair day of her life. Still, it would have been even creepier if the thing did look like me.

  Shortly after parting ways with Guillaume, I ground to a halt. My energetic rambles became perfunctory walks, my meals (consisting of the smallest pellet that could sustain me) were better suited to an astronaut than a gastronome, and the poems were getting lousy. Because it depressed me to write badly, I stopped writing.

  I also stopped sleeping at night, for fear of more house calls from Tiny Nurse. More than once she had left the bedside of her ailing father in John O’ Groats and come to mine in John O’ Dreams. These dreams were so powerful and realistic that I would wake in a sweat. Shaking uncontrollably the last time, I sat up and ran tests (recite the Ten Commandments) to reassure myself I had not slipped onto the roster of the acute insane.

  This was no joking matter. Absent sunshine, absent companionship, absent the ability to bail myself out by writing a decent line of verse, how long before I too was materializing at dim-lit tables in windswept coaching hotels like Tiny Nurse? I thought of Boris Karloff’s grave-robber Gray (in the original 1945 Body Snatcher) dropping by to say an insidious oppressive hello to his “old friend Toddy McFarlane” in a tavern which scant moments earlier had been the vision of coziness. I was constantly alert to the boundary line where comfort meets terror at the door, where sanity stares across a table at madness.

  Naps felt safer. Tiny Nurse would not expect to find me asleep before nightfall. Sliding under the blankets at four o’clock, I would read myself to sleep and those moments, with a page of my novel giving way to oblivion, were invariably the sweetest of my day. Hours later, I would take myself
(and my book) to the Café Soleil for a glass of wine and a bowl of onion soup.

  As soon as they unfurled the awning the next morning, I would be back at the Soleil for a bowl of coffee and a boule. As I say, astronaut chic, French style.

  At times I blamed Ian for those aimless days and endless nights; blamed him for sending me away and siccing those scary little women on me. At the ragged mental edges of my chronic fatigue, it seemed that Tiny Nurse and Mrs. Cameron might well be in Ian’s pay. Always seeking to be fair, I blamed Cal too, for taking me off the rails and leaving me in a ditch. He should have kept his big mouth shut and left well enough alone.

  In more lucid moments, I understood I had only myself to blame. Though my world was far wider than Mrs. Cameron’s, I had been sheltered from the vicious winds that battered and shattered Tiny Nurse. I was comfortable with Ian, and better than that I was happy. All I needed to do was not alter course. Such a simple prescription and yet I was unsure how to fill it.

  I could hope that only my marriage was wrecked, not my life. Relationships end all the time, people survive. Back home (and how wistfully I intoned the word “home”) on familiar turf, I might regain my footing. Walking the orderly, epicene alleys of the Bois, I idealized the early October day when I flew east, away from the sprawling sunlit forests just beginning to hint at orange and scarlet.

  The picture in my mind’s eye was dated. The grass is always greener on the other side of the ocean, but by now it was late November in New England and likely as gray there as here. Moreover, I would have to face Ian, have to field both his affection and his hostility. Half heartbroken and half disgusted, he would surely require coherent responses to the serious questions he had waited to ask.

  I considered fleeing to the west, beyond “home” to a new home in Southern California, where no one is expected to have coherent responses. I craved sunshine, after all, and Lynn Carruthers had been renting a cute cottage in Laguna Beach. Her life there was a constant postcard of sun and surf, or so it seemed from a distance. Lynn would take me in for a while. Laguna could become my home too. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been there; I knew its charms.

  But I had been there as a visitor. Now that it was to be my home, I found myself worrying that poetry might prove impossible there. Seriously, I could not dredge up the name of a single significant Southern California poet. Maybe this was simply ignorance on my part, but it occurred to me there might not be any.

  One had to go pretty far back (Joaquin Miller, Robinson Jeffers) or further north (Ferlinghetti, Snyder) to even start a California list. And there might be reasons for that. Through my mind like the unshakeable refrain of a catchy tune ran the lines of a Louis Simpson poem, one which stood as a weighty caution to any would-be Southern California poets:

  Here I am, troubling the dream coast

  with my New York face,

  bearing among the realtors

  and tennis-players my dark preoccupation.

  There was Florida. Florida was the Sunshine State, an entire state predicated on palm trees and warmth, but there it was again: who were the great Miami Beach poets? Who, for that matter, were the mediocre ones?

  Problematic as it might be, home to me was New England. My mother was born in Connecticut, educated in Massachusetts, died in Vermont. The line for me reads born Vermont, school Rhode Island, living Massachusetts. It did not matter if we liked New England; no such inquiry was ever undertaken. To “love the seasons” was our assignment, our lot in life.

  And maybe a poet requires winter. Robert Frost may have been born in (northern) California, but he was no kind of poet until he had absorbed New England and New England absorbed him. Might not the complete absence of winter explain the absence of poetry in Laguna or Miami?—if there was such an absence.

  East, west, south . . . north! Whirling in my mind, I pictured going to Maine with Cal, hunkering down at Hartley’s Cottages for a week of bad weather. Was Winnie willing to spare him for one more short stint? If so, I would see if Cal took over that cottage in winter the same way he had taken over my apartment in summer. See whether or not the two of us felt “right” there too, in a place where Ian and I had felt so wrong. Such an experiment could tell me a lot.

  Meanwhile, something told me I might be losing my mind for real, although, ironically, I took some comfort from the possibility. After all, everyone knows that crazy people feel perfectly sane—and I did not. Right there, in the paradox, was an argument of sorts for my sanity. I was capable of grasping at such straws.

  My father called me crazy when I passed up Princeton for RISD. Lynn called me crazy when I turned down the Hardwick Grant and went with Ian to Cleveland that summer. And Ian himself calls me crazy all the time, though with him it’s only a figure of speech. It means we disagree.

  None of those cautions had troubled me. I had my reasons for reaching those decisions. Now though, unable to decide anything, for any reason, I paid closer attention to the charge, even if (apart from the disdainful night waiter at Café Soleil) I was the only one making it. There was no shortage of substantiating evidence: I had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, stopped walking, stopped working. I looked like a zombie. At this point, Ian’s Someone-Else-Entirely would have fled down the street screaming at the sight of me.

  I analyzed my reflection each morning, fearing I would see the final transformation, the sharp scary facial bones of Tiny Nurse blooming in my mirror.

  Something told me to go home right away and for once I listened. I managed to get on a plane eight days early, and although I hate flying, that flight was heavenly. I relaxed. I let go of everything. I positively devoured my dinner of phony mashed potatoes and tough-as-turtle Chicken Kiev. With my second complimentary glass of red wine in hand, I read and then I slept (dreamlessly) inside that brief safe corridor of air somewhere west of the Azores and east of East Boston.

  Back home it wasn’t raining, it was snowing.

  Or it had snowed. In the ensuing week of sunlight, the landscape was such a brilliant white that for days my face got locked in a squint. I was constantly off balance. The seasons were out of kilter too, as above the glistening meringue of snow still flew the yellow flags of late-hanging leaves, on birches and Bradford pears.

  From the minute I landed at Logan, things with Ian were tricky. Running through my mind as the plane taxied toward the terminal was the latest draft of my speech about our impending separation. Then I spotted Ian at the gate and my heart brimmed with unforeseen tenderness. I was uplifted by his familiar smile, nourished by his familiar embrace. I could hug him easily because I had always hugged him. I could make love that first night because we had always made love.

  Stunned by this turn of my emotions, I rendered no state-of-the-relationship addresses that night, or in the nights to follow. Nor, fortunately, did Ian debrief me on my travels. I was not ready to offer him a useful narrative, other than to say with a smile that his Someone Else initiative had been a fiasco. Where we stood in the wake of it went undiscussed.

  Discussion did not seem necessary until I had settled in and the days began collecting on us, like dust. Because as we went along without definition (one week, two weeks, three) it emerged that we had not made love a second time. At first no significance attached. The initial reunion carried us for a while, and after that we could fall back on jet lag and fatigue. Soon enough we could add the wearing effects of my job search—all that legwork, phoning, interviewing.

  “What did you have in mind?” I was asked by a Miss Grundy lookalike at a private school that had advertised for a remedial reading assistant. Hmm. Clearly, the correct answer was not Remedial Reading Assistant. Was I expected to submit my salary demands? My ground rules for classroom protocol?

  I never found out what they had in mind, as Miss Grundy was kind enough to provide an opening—the job would start immediately—and whatever anyone had in mind, whatever the job was, I used that opening to back out the door graciously and race over to the Patisserie where (in kee
ping with recent routine) I sat with my coffee, boule, and book until it was nap-time.

  What did I have in mind? I really was jet-lagged, and fatigued, and at the very least confused by the job search. Then I was sick for a week. The weary phrase “under the weather” gained fresh resonance. I might have been exaggerating this illness (who even knew?) but I was definitely under the weather. I had been under it for months.

  Christmas came bearing down on us, all sorts of plans and parties and visits demanded my attention, and when the smoke cleared after New Year’s it emerged that we still had not made love a second time. Not only that, a Thursday loomed. Ian had only one lecture to give on Thursdays. He would be on campus until noon. Even if he met a friend for lunch, he would be home by two o’clock.

  So it had become unavoidable: my cough was gone, the holidays were over, we would have to make love that afternoon. (The alternative was to define it as a problem and discuss it.) Why was this so difficult, though? I had cross-examined myself any number of times, on those nights when we slid past it in silence and stillness, pretending not to notice the disappearing moment. If I could make love with Julian or Franz, why on earth could I not do so with my husband?

  I could, of course, and I did, that Thursday afternoon. But the outcome of my self-interrogation came clear as we held each other sadly, immobilized, though the apartment was getting very cold. With those others, sex was unimportant. Though this had never been true for me at any time in my life before (and I was sure it would never be true at any time thereafter), it was true in Scotland. Sex was no different to me than having a beer with those guys, or not as significantly different as it should have been. Composed in equal parts of propinquity and momentum, it presented itself as a sociable moment of a sort one typically resists. If one does not resist, it might end up happening. That dynamic can be remarkably uncomplicated.