Paris, He Said (4 page)

“What do you mean?” she asked, staring at him. She felt the first steely hint of a bad headache. “Are you saying that you plan to go out with other women even if you’re not bringing them home?”

He shook his head. “No, that is not what I am saying. Maybe it is my English, the way I am trying to express this.”

“You speak English just fine,” she said. It was dizziness that threatened her, not a headache. She could feel the months they had spent together, she with the warmly embraced belief in their exclusivity, crumbling away. “Tell me what you mean,” she said. She wondered who was waiting for him back in Paris. Because now it seemed as if someone was.

He took his time replying, as though he really did need to find the right words. “You are getting upset over nothing,” he said gently. “I know I did not say this properly. What I mean is that I do not want you to worry when we are not together. I was once close to a woman who always assumed I was seeing someone else if she could not reach me on the phone or if I had an appointment in the evening for the gallery that went longer than I expected. She was very jealous, and it was a shame, because she had no reason to doubt my feelings for her.”

She didn’t reply. If he was telling the truth, and he seemed to be, she felt embarrassed for jumping so quickly to the worst conclusion.

“But I will not be a prison master either, Jayne. You are free to come and go as you like. You do not need always to tell me where you are going or who you are seeing.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?” she said. “What would I have to hide?

“Nothing, I am assuming, but I am not going to ask for a detailed list of your every move.”

“And you’ll expect the same from me where you’re concerned.”

“Yes, and I do not think that is unreasonable. You must not worry about me, Jayne.”

How confident was she supposed to feel about this arrangement? How badly, she could hear Liesel asking, a cynical but concerned edge in her voice, did she want a show at Vie Bohème? Then she heard herself say okay and saw him nodding in approval.

“This will be something nice for both of us,” he said. “We don’t need more reason than this.”

“But you do understand that it is a big deal for me to move overseas.”

He touched the top of her hand. “Yes, of course.”

“You might want me to leave after a week.”

“I won’t. What you are wondering is, what if you want to leave after a week? You are free to stay for six days or six thousand. As long as you would like to.” He paused. “Barring the unexpected. Chaos, I am speaking of. Other than that, it is up to you.”

Or Eros, she thought. The two forces did not seem so different to her.

“All right,” she said, letting him take her hand and press it to his lips.

“Do not worry that there are other women,” he said. “I have never brought up Colin, have I, even though you have told me that he has called you and sent you e-mails?”

“That’s true,” she said. “But he’s not a threat.”

His gaze did not waver. She wondered for a second if she was telling the truth and didn’t allow herself to blink.

“I know he isn’t,” Laurent finally said. “That is why I do not ask about him.”

She had not intended to for it to happen, but she’d ended up in bed with Colin on the night she broke up with him. She did not tell Laurent, nor did she think he needed to know; it had happened only a few days after their first night together, and they hadn’t made any commitments to each other yet. On the valedictory night with Colin, she was morose and moody; he kept asking what was wrong until she confessed that she wanted to see other people. Hearing this, he sat up suddenly in bed, a stricken look on his face with its dark smear of whiskers. His pale chest rose and fell erratically as he stared at her, and she had the urge to hide her face against his shoulder but knew it was selfish to try to draw comfort from the person she was hurting. She could not meet his eyes and rose from his bed, groping for her clothes, saying lamely that she was sorry and she understood if he would not want to talk to her again, but he shook his head.

“Maybe we should just take a little time off?” he asked. “What if we talk again in a few days?”

“Colin,” she said quietly. “I think I need more than a few days.”

“I know that my work cuts into our time together. And that I probably like sports too much. I used to get in fights with a girl I dated in college about it.” He let out a laugh that sounded like a knife scraping a table. “I could play a little less basketball,” he said hopefully. “Instead of two nights a week, I could just do one if you wanted me to.”

She felt guilt roiling in her chest. Why wouldn’t he simply let her go, or else force her out the door, half clothed and contrite? She would have preferred this to his sweet, futile efforts to make her stay. “I don’t think you need to—I don’t—”

“Let’s not decide anything now. Let’s talk in a week,” he said, his face gray in the dim room; he was trying to smile, but his lips were trembling. She couldn’t look at him.

“All right,” she said softly. “In a week or so.”

What she did not say as she finished dressing in the darkened bedroom with its miniature basketball hoop on the back of the door, her eyes on his moon-white, mournful feet, was that she had already met someone else, and this man was so at ease with himself, so thoroughly charming and in command each time she’d been out with him. Colin often told her to decide what they should do when they went out, and if she insisted that he choose a restaurant, they sometimes spent an hour texting back and forth before they ended up in one of the same three places they always went to because they were both half starved by the time they finally made up their minds. Laurent also knew how to make money and spend it luxuriously; he knew to put his arm around her and pull her close, as if sheltering her from splashing cars or strong winds, as they walked from the cab into the restaurant and later when he summoned another cab after dinner. He reached for her hand across the table while they waited for their server to appear, and again as they waited for dessert, something Colin had never thought to do, or had been too shy to do.

There was also the fact that being in bed with Laurent was like riding a boat through a storm—she wanted alternately to hold on and be tossed into the waves. Afterward, it felt as if she’d been washed ashore, naked and dazed, mutely euphoric.

In the year before Jayne met Laurent and moved to Paris, she experienced a number of more or less commonplace events that, like new neighbors who incrementally grew more intrusive and obnoxious, began to encroach on her peace of mind in a way that she realized might before long become unendurable.

Her anxiety flooded out in a feverish verbal stream one evening in an e-mail to her sister. Jayne had just returned home from seeing a movie with Colin, one with a profane talking bear, a movie so brainless and obvious that she had left after the first hour and walked home alone while Colin stayed in the Union Square cinema to watch the remaining hour. Her sister saw a lot of movies too and worked as the assistant to the owner and CEO of a small record company that seemed always to be wobbling on the edge of bankruptcy, which was due in part to the owner’s habit of signing musicians who made little money but ran up large bills for producers, engineers, and studio time.

What if I died tomorrow?
Jayne wrote to her sister.
What if you died tomorrow? What do you think people would say about you? What would you
want
them to say about you? Why am I living in a city I can’t afford and spending large portions of my never-to-be-repeated life on dumb jobs I can barely get out of bed for in the morning? I came to New York to be an artist, and all I’ve done so far is watch other people do it instead.

Instead of answering the e-mail, her sister called and left a long-winded message, which Jayne didn’t listen to until the next morning because she was up late arguing with Colin about why he hadn’t left the stupid bear movie too and had let her go home alone to write furious e-mails to Stephanie. “Existential crisis” was the term her younger sister repeated three times in her rambling voice mail. “Cliché” was another, though Stephanie laughed a little as she said it, apologizing for making light of Jayne’s bad mood.

Some of the events that Jayne connected to her increasing sense of disquiet:

–    One Saturday afternoon in late September, she’d gone with Kelsey to a free lecture at the New School titled “The Ideal and the Idealized: Sex and Love in the Age of Instant Celebrity,” which was held in an austere, overwarm auditorium. Dozens of people huddled in chairs with poor lower-back support and peered warily at the speaker, a media critic known for her brilliant, pitiless screeds on contemporary sexuality and societal selfishness, and who spoke with frightening fluency about Facebook, pornography, and personal ads.
More people than ever before are spending their lives alone, whether they want to or not. Despite our supposed connectivity, we have never been more miserable and closed off … The obscene number of choices, of immediately available pleasures, have made us, paradoxically, restless and dissatisfied!
Jayne left feeling as if she’d sustained repeated blows to the back of her head. Though much of what the speaker said was old news, and spoken in a tone of practiced gravity, her words nonetheless burrowed into Jayne’s consciousness like a poisonous tick that could not be dislodged. She went home and sulked in her light-deprived bedroom, her neighbors upstairs pounding around as if practicing for a
Stomp
audition. At frequent intervals, she heard them shouting with laughter. Feeling murderous, she made herself leave the apartment again for a yoga class. She would be late, but if she didn’t go, she knew that she would march upstairs and scream at her neighbors; both Drew and José were twenty-six, but they resided within what seemed an interminable adolescence. They were probably already drunk and would laugh in her scowling face before suggesting she join them in their sock- and trash-strewn apartment for a threesome. They had done this before, to both her and her roommate, and to the overly talkative, middle-aged widow who lived next door to them.

–    A nuclear power plant had melted down, disastrously contaminating the nearby ocean and the land on which it sat. More proof that the world could not possibly be an endlessly renewing and self-mending resource.

–    Close friends from high school and college had gotten married or announced their plans to marry suitors who, in a few cases, they had known less than a year. Jayne had other friends who were already married, one of them within eight months going through a rancorous divorce, but the more recent weddings and engagements seemed more serious, more adult and deliberate. Some of these friends had also earned enough money as lawyers, software engineers, or café owners to buy not one but two homes in desirable cities and oceanside resorts. She didn’t think it was envy she felt so much as self-lacerating regret at having neither the kinds of interests nor the ambition to earn for herself what these friends already had.

–    Jayne’s father tripped on a rolled-up newspaper in the driveway, fell on his face, and broke one of his front teeth. The newspaper was there every morning, but on this day, Mr. Marks was carrying a big watermelon that he’d grown in his garden, one he planned to share with his coworkers, and did not see the paper because the watermelon was blocking his view of his feet. Up until then, her father had seemed to Jayne all but invincible, even after her mother admitted to deep-rooted feelings of restlessness, which she finally confessed to over the winter, when Jayne was newly in the thrall of her romance with Laurent and more insulated from unhappiness than usual.

“We’re not getting a divorce,” Jayne’s mother had assured her. “But after so many years together, you have to expect that one of us is going to want a change of scenery from time to time.”

“What does that mean?” asked Jayne.

“I don’t know yet,” said her mother. “We’ll see, I guess.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” said Jayne.

Her mother paused. “No, I suppose it’s not.”

Her father’s injury, his clumsiness, his ensuing depression, all seemed to underscore the illusoriness of his life’s permanence, of her mother’s, of Jayne’s and her sister’s lives too. About his wife’s midlife crisis, as he called it, his voice tinged with irony, he would not say very much to Jayne or her sister. “Your mother doesn’t want you girls in the middle. We’re keeping it between her and me,” he said, dogged and embarrassed. “And our therapist. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve hit some potholes on the road.”

Jayne was surprised to hear that they were seeing a therapist. “Mom got you to go?” she asked.

Her father’s laughter was caustic. “No, Mom did not. I got her to go.”

–    Most of an island in the South Pacific, inhabited for centuries by a small, peaceable population of fishermen and their families, had been submerged by rising water levels. The islanders were forced to flee to New Zealand, whose officials did not want to offer them asylum because they had troubles of their own—strained public aid and health-care systems, general agrarian woes. Jayne had understood this, but still thought it unkind and unfair. Why was a country as big as New Zealand, at least compared to the beleaguered, submerged neighboring island, being so ungenerous? Surely there had to be some mercy in the world. It was Australia that eventually agreed to help the islanders, but they were vague about how long they would be able to offer these homeless people food and shelter, something that Jayne woke up very early in the morning worrying about more than once, unsure why these strangers were so often in her thoughts when plenty of people were suffering within shouting distance of where she was lying in her bed, with its twisted sheets and coffee-stained comforter.

She could foresee bigger, more populated islands flooding, their bewildered inhabitants fleeing for their lives. No one was mentioning the other living creatures on these islands either. Who knew where they were going, other than to a watery grave?