Breathless (16 page)

“I said we were divorcing,” he answered evenly, looking at me as if I were slightly retarded, and reaching for the bottle of Jameson sitting on the cupboard in the corner of the living room.

“That’s not true. I remember that conversation very well. Do you think I would have moved in with you if I had known you were still married?” Having an affair with a married man was one thing. An affair had its rules, its excitement, and its cachet. But a man who was married without being married was another. He was availably unavailable in what was supposed to be a relationship, not an affair.

“Why are you arguing with me? I said I want to marry you.”

“What can that possibly mean if you are married to someone else?”

“I’m not
really
married to someone else.”

“That’s not what the letter says. It’s not what
she
thinks,” I objected, pointing to her words on the page. “She wants to buy you a bathrobe!”

“It doesn’t matter what she thinks. What matters are my intentions,” he said with that air of total conviction that makes you believe it’s safe to walk on the newly frozen ice, and pouring himself another glass of whisky.

“But what did you say to her to make her think you were going back to her?”

“I didn’t want her to feel bad, and I didn’t want her to make problems for the divorce, so I let her think we might get back together once the separation was official.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Look, the point is, she’s not coming back here. She’s living with a Negro plumber,” Jim added, as though that solved the problem.

“But when are you going to tell her?” I kept on, unconvinced of the plumber’s existence. Like the husband in
Gaslight
, who drives his wife insane by making her doubt the evidence of her senses, Jim had the knack
of making me feel that I lacked the capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality, despite the words in the letter.

Jim finished his whisky and walked out, letting the heavy door slam behind him. I could hear the concierge muttering in the courtyard, where all sounds were magnified, about the bad manners of “les américains.” I thought about going back to my room, but I was hoping Jim would return. I finally fell asleep on the bed with my clothes on. When I woke up at midnight in the empty apartment, I scrawled my rage in lipstick on the bedroom mirror like Elizabeth Taylor in
Butterfield 8:
“Live alone, sleep alone, fuck alone,” I ranted in dramatic script. Then I washed my face and took a taxi to my room.

That wasn’t the first time Jim had just vanished without an explanation. From the beginning, he would disappear for short periods of time, often on Sunday afternoons. He didn’t seem to know—or wouldn’t tell me—where he had been or what he had been doing. The disappearing act was worrisome, but my desire to make the story turn out well made me repress what I couldn’t incorporate into the weave. The surface reality of the narrative I was spinning about our life as a couple—seeing friends, eating in great restaurants, going to the theater, traveling—was sweeping me along. The story had gathered momentum. What would happen if I stopped now?

Early the next morning, Jim knocked at the door of my room. He was standing in the hallway, looking sheepish, with a huge bunch of red roses. He would make the divorce process official that summer, he said, only a few months away. When I didn’t answer, Jim knelt on the floor and laid his heavy head on my knees. I smoothed his forehead, wishing my fingers could decipher the secrets stored there, and at the same time feeling afraid to discover what else the lines might be hiding.

A Million Magic Fingers

W
E DECIDED TO MARRY IN
Switzerland. Jim explained that the requirements of French bureaucracy would bring unwarranted attention to his previous marriage, and that would only delay things—not that there was any pressing reason not to wait until the summer, when in theory the waiting period for the decree in Boston would be over officially. But after the drama with the letter, Jim wanted to prove his good faith, and I wanted to believe him. In Geneva, the only requirement for a civil marriage was a passport: no blood, no documents. Your word stood in for your history. I took Jim at his.

We informed my parents of our Swiss wedding plans by mail as we left Paris, too late for them to respond or intervene. I knew it was cowardly of me to elope. I also knew that if I gave my parents advance notice, they would want to talk me out of it, urge me to come home, or at least wait for them to arrive. I still remembered the effect of my mother’s question about Bernard: “Are you sure you want to marry
this boy?” I had been trying to forestall that question by going on the offensive. “I know how you feel, but I must let my feelings dominate. I’m old enough to act according to my own instincts—and if I am wrong, to take the responsibility, consequences of misguided judgment. Please don’t start making dire predictions and wringing your hands.” This time, I didn’t want to be talked out of my desires. “I’m really in love!”

Our combined teaching schedules that spring meant we had time for only one night in Geneva—the night before the wedding. Jim reserved a room at the Victoria, one of the fancy large hotels overlooking Lake Geneva. When we checked into the room, he put the Veuve Cliquot we brought from Paris in the bidet and ran the cold water to keep it cool. After making a toast, Jim lay down on the bed. I lay down beside him. We were both exhausted from the long drive. The beds were fitted out with a device called “A Million Magic Fingers,” designed, we thought mockingly, for weary businessmen. Press the button, the directions over the headboard explained, and the mattress would vibrate for five minutes. Why not? Jim pressed the button and, lulled by the activity of the million magic fingers, immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Once launched into operation, the machine would not shut off, no matter what I tried. I was too humiliated to call housekeeping for help. What if they saw the champagne bottle in the bidet? As I listened to Jim snoring, I rehearsed the magic fingers story for my parents—they would recognize themselves in us, in saving the cost of the champagne and the ice bucket—but why did I want to tell my parents about my wedding night? Not that it was my wedding night, since we were doing it all backward, as they would not have hesitated to point out. I remained wide awake until morning, vibrating to the sound track of my marital future, and wondering what my parents would say when they found out that we had eloped.

After the brief ceremony in City Hall, Jim was handed our
livret de famille
—a slim, hand-sewn booklet, with a burgundy, leather-like cover and gold writing. The little book is the record from which all other official records are constructed. It shows not only your current status—who is married to whom—but additional pages are also provided for all
future events: births, deaths, everything that affects your civil status. A final, blank, last page titled
“Chronique de famille”
was dedicated to family events outside the official categories. Our pages remained blank, though standing in the office of the deputy mayor, we fully imagined that they would be filled in. Getting married makes you a family. The
livret
is a little book from which you start the official narrative. I was ready.

My friend Hannah, who was doing research for her dissertation in Paris, had come to Geneva by train in order to be our witness at the town’s City Hall. In the picture taken by the local photographer, who waited for the couples as they left the official ceremony, we are standing awkwardly on a marble floor in front of a huge symbolist mural, designed to fit the curves and arches of the public space. I am wearing a fitted, dark blue mesh dress and my hair is piled high. My chignon, resembling a small challah, had been braided that morning at the hairdresser and sprayed for eternity. I’m carrying a beige purse and wearing matching beige sling-back pumps. Hannah is wearing a wine-colored suit and a white blouse. Our skirts are knee length, our stockings sheer. Jim stands stiffly between us in a dark three-piece suit. The expression on our faces is as hard to read as the enigmatic smiles of the toga-clad figures in the mural behind us.

After the ceremony, the three of us stopped for an elegant lunch overlooking Lake Geneva, but I spent the entire meal
en crise
, stretched out on the soft leather banquette with intense cramps, occasionally sipping mineral water, while the two of them polished off the champagne and toasted our future.

Hannah took the train back to Paris. Jim and I returned through the mountains. Looking at the snow from the dazzling vistas of the Mont Blanc, Jim sketched our brilliant future. First, we would move to a wonderful apartment with central heating. He would have a language school with the latest techniques developed in America. The school would be so successful, it would have franchises, like Berlitz—or, as long as we were dreaming, Volkswagen. Why not take advantage of what capitalism had to offer, as long as you treated the workers properly? Or he’d sell the idea of the school to some big capitalist, and we’d retire to the countryside on the proceeds of the sale. When I wasn’t
teaching for him, I would stay home, wash the socks (by then, someone else would be washing the socks), and look after the children. I’d translate famous novels into English and make lots of money, too. The extravagance was Irish, I figured. But as far as I could tell, it worked. He had just signed up three new companies.

Part of my job as
lectrice
at the Sorbonne was to spend several hours a week in the language laboratory, tuning in on students and correcting their pronunciation. I also made tapes for the listening library. That winter, I had been asked to record passages from
Of Mice and Men
. As George and Lennie, the cowboy heroes of the novel, move from job to job, George holds out a vision of the future for Lennie, a comforting story about getting off the road and settling down. They will buy a little place of their own with rabbits, and Lennie will tend the rabbits. Lennie likes George to describe what it’s going to be like when they get the ranch. I choked up whenever the rabbits appeared on the page. Whenever Jim talked about the future, I pictured getting the ranch and I choked up.

Like Lennie, I loved hearing the story.

B
EFORE LEAVING FOR
G
ENEVA, WE
had debated how to tell our families. Since Jim’s mother didn’t believe in divorce, there was no point in alerting her. Maybe with enough time, she would adjust to the new reality of Jim’s unorthodox life when there was no choice about it. He would have to explain it to her in person. I had been very fond of Bernard’s mother. What good did that do? She wasn’t the person I was going to marry. I wasn’t in any hurry to find out if I would like Jim’s mother. Nothing he had told me about her pointed in that direction. If she was anything like my father’s mother, whom she uncannily resembled in photographs, knowing her would not be an unmitigated pleasure.

Despite their more emancipated airs and their college educations, my parents would say no to the marriage, for Jewish reasons as primitive as the Catholic ones but disguised as secular and pragmatic. My mother couldn’t get past the beard. My father was skeptical about Jim’s track record as a breadwinner. “You can do better,” they had concluded after
meeting Jim in Provincetown. That I could do better had been the line since David. I could always do better. Could I?

Jim and I agreed that we should write separately to my parents. I shamelessly began my letter with the cliché, “By the time you receive this letter . . .” And I went on to outline all the many, equally unsatisfactory, ways we could have chosen to apprise them of our desire to marry: a letter from Jim asking permission to marry me; a telegram the day of the wedding itself; getting married in secret and trying to persuade them after the fact, and then, if all discussion were to no avail—announcing it as a fait accompli.

Jim’s letter put himself utterly in the wrong, anticipating my parents’ concerns, looking ahead to meeting on new terms, and forming a new family. He couldn’t now ask permission to marry me, but he would like to ask for their acceptance of the fact of our love and marriage. “Your letter was incredibly stupid,” my mother wrote (her default judgment). “Fortunately, Jim’s letter was really beautiful.” We did not tell them that I had drafted the letter Jim signed.

They were more resigned, finally, than outraged. At least I wasn’t moving to North Africa. Jim was presentable. He looked like an academic. Cast in the right tone—“not bad for a first marriage,” one of their friends quipped—I had done something impulsive, something romantic that could be folded into an amusing narrative. Once they had absorbed the shock of the elopement, my parents decided to put a good face on the marriage. They ordered engraved wedding announcements for their friends and sent enough biographical details to the newspapers to make us read like a glamorous international couple. Maybe they even believed it.

Vin et Fromage

O
UR MARRIAGE HAD BEEN CELEBRATED
in the “strictest intimacy,” as the phrase on our own wedding announcement worded it. The expression was literally true: only my friend Hannah and the local photographer had witnessed the ceremony in Geneva. When ordinary life resumed in Paris, Jim organized a small wine-and-cheese party in the tiny living room of his apartment, on a Sunday afternoon.

As usual, I cleaned the house, and Jim did the shopping. It took him a week to complete the cheese buying, covering Paris by scooter to hit his favorite neighborhood markets on the right day, planning the purchases so that each cheese had the correct amount of time to reach perfection when served. Jim chose thirty cheeses (most of which he had tasted in their official home, the location that gave them their pedigree—the coveted government seal of authenticity,
appellation contrôlée
) and thirty bottles of wine (same story), each cheese paired with the appropriate wine, and almost as many kinds of bread.
The day of the party, Jim rose especially early and wrote little cards in his neat Catholic school penmanship, identifying the name of every cheese and every wine. The centerpiece of the
vin et fromage
was a ripe Neufchâtel, Coeur de Bray, a cheese from Normandy shaped in the form of a heart paired with a burgundy called Saint-Amour. Jim never could resist a pun. Saint-Amour was the wine he chose to toast our guests.