Seven Letters from Paris (3 page)

It was time to pick Chris up at the train station, both of us having agreed that sitting in Chicago airport traffic in rush hour would prove futile. On my way over, two police cars blocked my route. From the looks of it, a drug bust or car theft had gone bad—there were cops standing with their weapons drawn and a pissed-off criminal in baggy jeans ducking into the back of a cruiser. I sat in my car, nervous—and not because of the scene being played out in front of my passenger window. Ten minutes passed. My cell phone rang.

“Where the hell are you?”

“I'm on my way. There's been some kind of—”

“Jesus Christ, Sam. Just get here quick,” he said, and then the phone went dead.

The cops finally let me by. The trendy neighborhood was packed with cars. About a half a block from the train station, I took a right just after Wicker Park and called my husband. He was confused about where I'd told him I'd parked and wouldn't give me a second to explain. I blared the horn when I finally saw him, although something in me wanted to just drive away. He stormed toward the car. My quivering smile faded into a frown. Chris threw his suitcase into the back and crawled into the passenger seat, slamming the door. “Gee, don't look so happy to see me.”

“I was, but then—”

“Nice welcome.”

On the drive home, I could barely see through tears of anger and frustration. We fought the entire way. About what? It didn't matter; it never did. I pulled the Jeep into our parking spot and slammed my hand on the steering wheel, sobbing. When did he get so angry? When did I get so sad? Our marriage didn't start out this way. For a while, it was great.

He apologized. He'd lost his temper. He was tired. He didn't feel well.

I was tired of the excuses.

I was tired of the explosions.

I was just plain tired.

We made it upstairs to the apartment. From his bag, he handed me two bottles of Jo Malone perfume. Apparently, he'd spent an hour picking them out with the saleswoman in London. I was supposed to mix the dark amber with ginger lily and nectarine blossom with honey to customize the scent. He asked if I liked them. I sprayed my wrists and assured him I did.

I wiped my tears away and thanked him. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe there was something in this marriage that could be saved. Yet, if there was, why did my heart cloud up the moment I saw him? Why did I feel more like myself when he wasn't around? How was it that somebody could press all the wrong buttons, making you feel like half a person? How was it that I found myself pushing all the wrong buttons too?

I'd reached my tipping point.

Chris snored away, napping on his green overstuffed chair. I just stared at him, a bit numb, wondering who this man I was married to was. I didn't recognize him. How did I let things get like this? Snoring aside, it was almost as if I couldn't stand the way he breathed. I found myself having a “Black Widow” daydream, killing him off in a plane crash.

Not good.

Before Chris could meet his premature death, he woke up and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter. “I'll be back later. I'm working out and then I have a lunch meeting.”

Depressed, I lay on the couch, watching a plane soar by in the pale blue Chicago sky, listening to the birds chirping away. Freedom was hard to come by when this life weighed me down. I called up my recruiter to ask if any job opportunities had popped up.

“Sorry, Samantha,” she said. “The pulse in the advertising world of Chicago is dead. There's nothing right now, but I'm hoping things will pick up soon though. I'll call you the second I hear of anything.”

There I was, hoping to find work as an art director, a creative director, a designer—a job I no longer enjoyed, maybe never had. I'd fallen into this vocation because it was the game in which my dad had successfully played. He was a sought-out executive, and my father's stamp on the advertising world was the reason we moved around so much.

Tracey and I often joked that we'd been able to see a lot of the world because of my parents' moves—from Chicago to Boston, Boston to London, London to California, California to Virginia to Tucson then back to Virginia and back to California again. To think, I wasn't even a military brat like my mom had been. Nope, my dad was a Mad Man, an ad man.

Our family's relocation to the East Coast affected me more than most, taking place at the end of my junior year of high school while I was attending the Chicago Academy for Performing and Visual Arts for theater and voice. Although I stayed involved with the drama club after the move, it was in a suburb south of Boston at Cohasset High School where art became a part of my life. By senior year, my dreams had metamorphosed, and I'd decided to trade in arias and monologues for a sketch pad, paints, and pastels. Instead of singing “One” on Broadway, I would end up at Syracuse University, majoring in advertising design in a last-ditch effort to make my dad proud. Upon graduation, it didn't take long for me to understand this dream simply wasn't mine. Seventeen years later, I was an out-of-work designer who wanted to redesign her life.

I needed to get my head together, to focus and figure out exactly what it was I was looking for, so I decided to take Ike for a long walk. It was a beautiful, warm spring day, the sun was shining, and the birds chirped out sweet songs. The sidewalk was busy, filled with families—and babies.

They were everywhere.

Mothers walked by pushing strollers or holding toddlers' hands. A preppy dad wore a chic BabyBjörn carrier with a bouncing, blue-eyed baby boy in it, all smiles. It was almost a cosmic joke, the world reminding me I would be turning forty in a few months.

And I was childless.

Then, just to hammer this unfortunate fact into my head, a woman strolled past, accompanied by her toddler who sported an “I just learned to walk” grin on her drool-covered face and bumped into my knees. The little girl smiled a gummy smile, big blue eyes twinkling. My heart lurched.

My friends always asked when I planned to get pregnant, right after they'd scared me to death about the horrors of childbirth. Forgive me, but I didn't like being told that my nipples would turn large and brown and possibly dangle like little toes, my nose would widen, and I'd pass gas a lot, and not at the most opportune times. Sure, I understood “mommy weight” and morning sickness, but green discharge and incontinence?

In my heart, I know I could have gotten over all my fears. I loved children. But with constant easy excuses, my fear always took the lead. The world was in shambles. Kids were expensive; we couldn't afford them. We needed to spend more time together. We wouldn't have a life anymore, wouldn't be able to travel, go out. What if the kid had birth defects? Things weren't stable enough. We were too old.

The fact of the matter was that if I had really wanted to have children with Chris, we would have had them already. I needed somebody to tell me what a wonderful mother I'd be, what a wonderful a woman I was—and Chris wasn't doing that for me. Shuffling my feet, I headed up to the apartment and straight to my lifeline: my computer. When Jean-Luc's name popped up in my in-box, I nearly fainted. Stupefied, shaking my head, quivering in my white Keds, I stared at his name for what seemed like hours, and when I finally garnered the courage to click the email open, I had to reread his message five times to make sure it was really him.

From: Jean-Luc

To: Samantha

Subject: Re: My Letter is Long Overdue

Dear Samantha,

As I wrote in my first letter, I don't know how to start this letter. Twenty years of memories are crashing into my head like waves. Twenty years exactly from now. How do I lay down words that have been sleeping, preserved somewhere, but a bit covered by the dust of the time?

Honestly, when I first saw your email, I didn't believe it was you, the pretty and joyful Samantha I let go away forever. I thought if I clicked on your blog link, I'd be sent to some porno site and get trapped. But like you did with me, I did a little research, and I Googled your name—a different last name than before.

I remember the platform at the Paris Station—Gare d'Austerlitz or Gare de Lyon? My brain is still a little foggy. We said our good-byes, but an adieu quickly replaced it. Of course, at this time, everything in my head was pushing me to climb onto this train, to carry on our love adventure in the South of France. I should have retained my ardor. A lack of courage? During the next nights and days, I blamed myself. I've blamed myself so many times.

Your message and the blog are like a stormy wind sweeping away the dust off my memory. Billions of words are coming through my thoughts, one pushing another. I too tried a few times to seek you out, to find a way to contact you, but life decided another way for us.

Don't blame yourself. In my head you were a princess (my American princess), and the accuracy of your narration is fantastic. I feel ashamed to not have back all these thousands of details of our story. Ashamed. I hope I'm not embarrassing you. I'm just putting words on this “white sheet” without discrimination even after twenty years.

I did not know how to start this message, and I'm still troubled to finish it. I am stopping now. Too many words to write. Too few fingers to tell them.

Hoping this first message will not be the last.

Take care,

Jean-Luc

Over the next week, a flurry of new letters began—one after the other, email after email. For the first time in my life, I didn't hold back and I completely opened myself up to him. It was easy to do behind a computer screen. My fingers flew across my keyboard, tapping away, revealing bits and pieces of my situation to Jean-Luc—what had gone right and mostly what had gone wrong. A bit reminiscent of an era gone by when war-torn lovers could only communicate through letters, we shared every hope, dream, and fear, every mistake. We accepted each other's faults, no fingers pointed, no judgments passed. Write. Point. Click. Send. I've got mail!

Our communication went into overdrive, and we exchanged three to four emails a day, some of them in French. Since I hadn't spoken a word of the beautiful language in over twenty years, I relied on Google Translate to help me out. Language barrier aside, I was communicating with somebody like I never had before. Like my husband and I never had.

I soon learned that Jean-Luc had never married the mother of his children, a ten-year-old boy named Maxence and a twelve-year-old girl, Elvire. Jean-Luc and Frédérique had split up in 2002, and in the midst of a midlife crisis, he took up with a younger woman he'd met while traveling for work—a relationship that was short-lived. He shared custody of the kids and visited them on the weekends until cancer took Frédérique's life in October 2006, one week before Max's seventh birthday. As a single dad, Jean-Luc's world spun around his kids. But he had recently married a very young Russian physicist, Natasha, who, instead of love, showed only tolerance for his children. He and Natasha had been in an on-again-off-again relationship for three years before he'd succumbed to the pressures of marriage. He'd thought the stability would change the strained relationship she'd had with the kids. Apparently, it didn't. She turned more manic, he fell out of love, and now he was in the process of filing for divorce.

In a way, it sounded like he needed me as much as I was beginning to need him. I wondered if there could be something more between us than this budding virtual friendship, especially after he'd described the exact color of my eyes without seeing me for twenty years, but I pushed the thought into the back of my mind.

While Jean-Luc had provided an anonymous support system of sorts and had given me a much-needed confidence boost, I wasn't leaving my marriage because of him. But what he represented—that something else, something wonderful, existed for me—was another story altogether.

He was hope.

It took me ten days to find my courage. First came a big fight with Chris, then two vodka martinis numbed all my fear. With my blood alcohol level hovering somewhere between bravery and foolishness, I finally told my husband what I should have told him many years earlier: “I want a divorce. And I'm taking the dog.”

Instead of fighting for me, Chris left for his father's house, and the cavalry came a-runnin', hoofs a-poundin' and horns a-blazin'.

“Tracey, please tell me I'm not a bitch.”

“Sam, you're
not
a bitch.”

“Am I doing the right thing?”

“You know you are. Now don't ask me again.”

Click.

“Jess, I'm leaving him.”

“Tell me when and I'll be there.”

“Next weekend?”

“Done.”

Click.

“Mom, can I come home?”

“I'm driving with you. When do you want to leave?”

“Jess is coming to help me pack. So not this weekend, but the next.”