I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (23 page)

What Ngendo was doing was sitting under an old towel in our basement, leading our mismatched Tupperware and rusting tennis rackets and storage bags of old clothing toward a higher plane of life.

Julien tossed the card over. “It doesn't sound like they're going to sue us, so that's something. And here's whatever from your mom.”

“Speaking of letters,” I said, taking my mum's envelope from him, “I know I asked you to toss it, but I was wondering if, by any chance, you might've not listened and—”

“You think that I don't know you?” Julien asked, rising. “Know you by now?”

He singsonged his way into the back room and emerged with a manila envelope marked
Miscellaneous
.

“Lisa's last letter?” he asked, proudly pulling out a yellow envelope.

“I'm getting rid of it. It's going in the wash.”

He nodded, unconvinced.

“I'm serious. That's why.”

“Good,” he said, handing it to me and folding his arms. “Tar it.”

“And, Julien?” I said, putting the letter in my bag. “Thank you for Azar. I mean, you recommended me, and—”

He cluck-clucked his way through the end of my sentence as the French are wont to do when a conversation gets too cuddly.

“Just do some more oil paintings for me somewhere down the road? Before you become famous?

“Okay,” I said, smiling. “I'll have my people get in touch with yours.”

We embraced, and I left feeling caffeinated with pleasure that our friendship seemed intact. My life didn't feel right without him.

With it going on eleven o'clock, the filth had cleared from
the Parisian sky, the birds were back, and the weather was almost balmy—I decided that there was no use in turning the reading of Lisa's last letter into an occasion. I could very well incriminate myself on any pigeon-shit-coated bench.

Although I couldn't help picturing Lisa seated as she wrote out my address, with just the right amount of flourish at the
R
and the
H
, seeing her handwriting on the front of the envelope no longer moved me into paroxysms of torrid daydreams as it once did. Usually, I was ritualistic with these readings, touching the outside of the envelope as if searching for braille, thumbing it, sniffing it, opening it carefully with the cap of a Bic pen. But this letter, this last one, wasn't sticking to my heart. It registered with me elsewhere, aggravating the tension in my shoulders, registering as a dull thud just beneath my forehead. For the first time, it didn't feel exciting, it just felt wrong.

The beginning of the letter was as I remembered it when Julien read it to me over the phone.

Dear Richard,

Yesterday, I passed a gallery and there was a photograph in it that made me think of something you might do. Or it made me think of you. I guess that's the same thing. I know you don't care much for photographs, but this was of a battered sailboat in a cornfield. There was a scarecrow in the boat. It didn't look composed either, it looked like the world had grown around this boat. It was in black-and-white. Beautiful. I wish we had seen it together so that I could have heard what you thought of it. So that we could have talked.

So, scarecrows were a thing now. I'd seen quite a lot of them popping up in installation videos and short films. This was probably because they were fucking creepy. I'm glad we never got to
have the conversation Lisa desired. I have absolutely nothing to say about a scarecrow in a boat.

I suppose it's inevitable. Here it is: I miss you. Dave and I have set the date for our wedding: July 21. Now that it's set, though, it feels definitive. It makes me miss you. I'm sure you can understand this better than I can, as I've never been married. It feels like a good-bye. I mean, it
is
a good-bye, obviously, and it has been, it's just, what do I do with the missing part? What do I do with the part of me that does miss you, that falls asleep at night sometimes dreaming of a parallel life?

As I contemplate this next adventure, I have to say that I feel grateful to have had an experience that will keep me warm. Something illicit, you know? Something naughty? All this being said, I hope that you are able to rehabilitate things with your wife. I wonder, I can't help but wonder, do you think we'll ever see each other again? I want to. I already want to. I am going to make a terrible wife.

And the letter ended there, signed
love
. But I felt no tingling. No heat. At that moment, I felt nothing but disappointment for my predictable ex-lover. A game player. A manipulator. She wasn't what she was.

No. I felt it in the pit of me. I was never, ever going to see Lisa Bishop again. Not even by accident. I felt it in my soul. There was a part of me that wouldn't be surprised if she called off the wedding—if my imperviousness made her try to get me back. But I knew it, I really
knew
it—even if Anne wouldn't forgive me—I wasn't ever going back.

I stuffed the letter into the tote with the things I'd taken from my house and ripped open the white envelope from my quirky mum. I was surprised to feel my throat clench when I
pulled out a magazine image of a lemon tart with a purple Post-it note attached.

Darling,

Daddy told me what happened with Anne-Laure. Please, I hope that you don't mind. I know you'll think this is silly but there is something about the bitters and the tartness and the sweet—most people opt for apple, but there is something special about this one. The meringue isn't half as difficult as you'd think to make. I just thought you might have a go at it for her. Anyway. Pie.

Love,

Mum

You love people. They disappoint you. But sometimes, they don't. They just keep loving you, right through it all, waiting for you to wake up and appreciate them. To say, “I love you. I've always loved you back.”

21

MARCH.
A month to get through. Marching. Marching on.

By the beginning of the month, I had all the materials I needed for my exhibit along with a real crisis of space. I hadn't thought of this when I was putting my pitch together, but constructing two separate 10m2 platforms in a 14m2 apartment was a mathematical impossibility. Not to mention that I had to hand-paint a 6 x 9-foot flag.

With Anne and Camille on yet another state-sanctioned vacation until the end of March, my studio at the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire was sitting empty, but Anne didn't offer up the use of it and I didn't ask. It wasn't my finest moment, but I finally had to apprise Azar of my situation at home. He was glad to hear about it—thought it added pathos to my brand—and said I could use the still-unfinished back room of his gallery as my studio and build the installation there. Airing my domestic laundry in public proved to be well worth it—it did me good to leave the house.

Several weeks before the opening, Azar sent out a press re
lease to his contacts and to current clients of mine at the Premier Regard gallery—a generous gesture of Julien's, seeing as I finally found out why they didn't get along. It turns out it had nothing to do with any poncy art-world bollocks; no one poached an artist from the other person, or anything like that. Rather, they'd both studied art history at the Sorbonne, where they were pitted against each other for the highest marks, but partly because Azar's family was stricter, and partly because France maintains a barely concealed enmity toward men of Middle Eastern descent, Julien had a lot of success at parties, and Azar had more success in school.

It was a silly rivalry, and it should have been behind them, and Julien's sharing of his contact list went a long way to make this so. The press release was sent out with an open call for mistake-­themed objects, and accordingly, once I'd built the platforms and made headway with the fused British and American flags, most of my time was spent weeding through donations.

People certainly do respond energetically when asked about regrets. Each morning, Alice would greet me with a trash bag full of “walk-bys,” things people had left during the evening on the gallery steps. Most people seemed to view the show as an occasion to roast ex-lovers: we got heaps of love letters, hate letters, real estate listings for homes that went up for sale after a divorce, happy photographs that clearly didn't make the proprietor happy anymore; lots of photos of half-clothed couples, sleepy-eyed in bed.

I tried to find things that skewed toward the political, but they were few and far between. But all this started changing by mid-March, when the political shit truly hit the fan. After failing to convince Blair's government that an Iraq invasion had no sound mandate in international law, and therefore wasn't legal, our deputy legal adviser of the British foreign office, Elizabeth
Wilmshurst, resigned. And then, only a handful of days later, despite the fact that WMDs were never found and that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom had the United Nations' support, the U.S. led a surprise invasion of Ba'athist Iraq. The war had officially started in an unofficial way. War.

The protests that had been under way in cities around the world tripled in fervor, with massive marches, strikes, and walkouts in Paris, London, Tokyo, Moscow, America, and Canada, with over three million people gathering in Rome. The fervor and the sheer number of protests—over 2,500 demonstrations by March—led the
New York Times
to write “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”

In the largely Arabic neighborhood around my apartment, American flags were routinely burned. Most Europeans were familiar with the stereotype that Americans are naive, stubborn, and immensely patriotic, but except for those of us who have dined with them in restaurants and tolerated their requests to have everything but the main protein on the side, we hadn't witnessed it firsthand. But America's backlash against France's position on Iraq was illogical and vitriolic. College friends from RISD started sending me snapshots of dinner menus, circling replacements of the word
French
with
Freedom
: Freedom fries, freedom toast. Gourmet supermarkets caved to public opinion and stopped selling conspicuously Gallic products such as foie gras and certain cheeses. Many wine shops took French bottles off the racks. Tourism declined, with Paris slipping from the second-most-popular destination for American tourists to the seventeenth.

It was a frightening time, a noisy time—I lived only two blocks from the Place de la République, the center of the protests—and yet I'd never felt more proud of my adopted home.
Pompous and grouchy though they might be, I had always found the French to be resolutely fair. Their refusal to participate in a war they considered unfounded moved me. They'd stuck to, but chosen not to use, their guns.

But that didn't mean that it was an empowering time to be alone. I thought constantly about Anne and Camille, but it wasn't about their being safe: I knew they were, they were in Brittany, a region literally furrowed with bunkers in which, if things got
really
real, they could squirrel away with a month's supply of pastries and Anne's favorite board games. It just seemed inconceivable that we weren't together. It had been so long now, the unanswered questions made my mind spin.

Anne was a pragmatist, but she wasn't cold. There were certain roles I'd played in our relationship that could be carried out by others, paid for in the form of babysitters, plumbers, or take-away food, but there was no stand-in for love. I mean, yes, she could be throwing herself into the raising of our daughter, or she could have got a cat, but there was no replacement for a warm body on the other side of the pillow unless there was a new body in our bed.

Ever since I'd seen Thomas at our house that Friday and found proof of his flower delivery, I'd vowed that I wouldn't act territorially, like a dog peeing on a hedge. He'd been at our house for work several times before and I'd seen him there again. On paper, there wasn't anything unusual or troublesome about it. But off the paper, when you realized that Anne-Laure and I were deciding between marital remission or abatement, this young man's presence agonized me. In the mornings, I imagined them interacting at work, agreeing—why not?—they could step out for a quick lunch. I saw the way Anne smiled over her glass of white wine, and I saw him sitting back, his arm stretched out across the booth, his posture a little too comfortable, a little too relaxed.

But Anne wouldn't do it. Would she? It had never been her way before, tit for tat. Especially with a colleague. She was too professional, too ethical, too ambitious for that. Or so I kept telling myself when I woke up in the middle of the night, having dreamed another dream in which I came around a corner in my own house to find them kissing hungrily, her unbuttoned blouse falling off her shoulders, his hands on her pale breasts.

The only tranquilizer for my doubts and anxieties was my exhibition. Any television viewer who had seen the we're-coming-for-ya glimmer of blood thirst in Bush's eyes could have guessed that an invasion would take place, but we had no way of knowing that it would happen ten days before the opening. Azar called me regularly to let me know that it was horrible—the coming sacrifices, the untimely deaths—and also that it looked like we were going to get a
lot
of press: everyone on his who's who list of Parisian media had RSVP'd yes.

Despite the good news about the guest list and the political timing that nearly guaranteed that the VIPs would come, I was plagued by the feeling that things could still unravel, that this incredible opportunity could come undone. All alone in the political hotbed that was Paris, I felt like my immediate future hinged upon the success of the
WarWash
exhibition. I knew better than to think like that—it wasn't as if Anne-Laure was going to take me back just because I scored a show in a cool gallery, but at this point, it couldn't hurt. I wanted to surprise her with the breadth of the exhibit. I wanted to show her that I was capable of re-becoming the artist—and the husband—I once was. I wanted to show her that not only had my regime changed, but that my regime was desperate.

 • • •

Happily, the day of the show corresponded with the general theme of April in Paris: rejuvenation and rebirth. The streets were ripe with the smell of vendors selling lily of the valley, and handsome couples walked side by side with half-eaten baguettes poking out of cloth bags. It would be a beautiful evening, warm and pleasant, the first day in a long time with no rain.

At my apartment, I spent a long time picking out my outfit. I'd never prepared for a show without Anne: it was my first time rallying solo in ten years. I settled on the beat-up denim shirt I'd been wearing all day, fitted navy trousers, white sneakers. I added a blazer for good measure. The look, when finished, was one part schoolboy and two parts I'm-going-to-celebrate-Brett-Easton-Ellis's-birthday-on-a-yacht.

The gallery was a hub of activity when I arrived. Outside, two bartenders were smoking while a third wheeled several carts of sparkling water in on a cart. Azar was pacing around the reception area on his phone, and Alice was dealing with a paper jam in the printer.

“Do you think we need a release form?” she asked, waving with the hand that wasn't inserted in the traitorous machine. “I think we need release forms, but Azar doesn't.”

“They already signed one when they sent in their objects,” said Azar, his hand over the bottom half of his phone. “It was in the open call—by sending something in, you agree to . . . blah blah blah and such.”

Alice made a final pull at the jammed piece of paper before giving up.

“Everything's ready to go in the back,” she said, nodding toward the hallway. “It looks great.”

And blinking hell, it did. Although lighting hadn't been in my original proposition, Azar insisted that we theatrically stage the installation. Accordingly, an electrician had outfitted the ceiling with two giant spots illuminating the platforms along with uplighting around the baseboards in order to heighten the effect of a political debate.

And the flag looked fantastic. It was maybe my best work to date. It had been so long since I'd painted anything abstract, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to pull it off. But by applying the paint in scrims and using a squeegee, I was able to create a cross between a Jackson Pollock and a Gerhard Richter. I was really proud of it. If the installation didn't sell, Azar was planning on selling the fused-flag painting for fifteen thousand euros.

I looked through the American basket first. Next to my
Atkins Diet
book and the postcard of the Twin Towers was a gold-leaf, 1974 yearbook from Sharonville High in Cincinnati that a retired teacher had sent me with a note that read,
I always thought I'd be a writer. But you know what they say about those that can't . . .
Another teacher, also from America but now living in France, sent in a weathered blue T-shirt marked
COLUMBINE HIGH
. Shelly Hampl, the American fan with a proclivity for inflatable sneakers, handed over her son's collection of baseball cards with a note that only said,
He's gay now.
Other things that I'd selected from all the donations: a photograph of a toddler howling on a Santa's lap, surrounded by poinsettias and a banner that read
CHRISTMAS!
; a poster of George Bush holding a shovel; an expired U.S. passport; a blank SAT test form (which I probably could have sold on eBay for a fortune, but, you know,
art
); a mix cassette tape covered in rainbow stickers with a declaration in permanent green marker (
I love you, Cassie! 1999!!!
); a graduation cap with an
orange tassel and an engagement ring with a small hole where the stone had been.

A tisket, a tasket, in the British basket along with my mum's recipe for beef tongue and Alistair Parnell's stolen pea coat, I'd selected a beat-up copy of
The Wasteland
(not only is the title apropos, but T.S. was born in America and was later naturalized as a British subject, so well done, sender); a place mat with a screen print of Tony Blair on it; the Cadbury chocolate bar “Snowflake” that was launched at TV presenter Anthea Turner's garish wedding in 2000, ushering in a new decade of corporate-sponsored marriages; and an advertisement for the “Squidgygate Phone Line” that allowed the public to hear the entire thirty-minute, bugged conversation between Diana, Princess of Wales, and her close friend James Gibey about her possible dalliances for thirty-six pence a minute.

By the time I'd checked the power on both machines, rearranged some of the clothespins, and fiddled with the lights, the guests had started arriving. I could hear bottles popping and glasses clinking in the other room. When I joined them in the reception area, I recognized a well-known culture critic for the French newspaper
Libération.
He was engaged in conversation with a man in jodhpurs. And there was Shelly Hampl, who had already cornered Azar. I was just about to make my way toward her for a hearty session of glad-handing when a couple at the door caught my attention. Both were dressed in white with different-colored blazers, and one of them was carrying a small box. I couldn't believe it: it was Dave and Dan.

After a cursory
bise
with Shelly that of course turned into a hug, I greeted my Continuists.

“Gentlemen,” I said, grasping their hands. “This is a surprise.”

“I know,” said Dave. “And we don't do surprises!”

“We're in town for the spring openings,” said Dan.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “'Tis the season!”

Dave adjusted his grip on the white box. He looked around warily at the crowd. “There's actually something we wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Might you have a minute?”