Claudette is bearing down on us in a Paris park: hair tucked up into a felt hat with a wide brim, white-framed sunglasses with peaked corners, a silk kimono jacket. She carries some kind of tortoiseshell-clasped bag. I smile, despite everything. This is her idea of a disguise, her interpretation of incognito. She has no idea how startling, how eccentric she appears. People see her, look, then look again, and it’s hard to tell if they half recognise her or if they just need to get another look at the mad lady in the insane clothes.
I stand, I watch her, my wife, love of my life, as she comes towards me. I open my arms, I step towards her. Here she is, my beloved, my heart.
‘Don’t fucking kiss me,’ she says, serving me a blow in the centre of my chest.
Ari chooses this moment to call to Marithe. His mother says something, fast, to him, in French. Ari shrugs, says something back, and I curse myself, not for the first time, for not learning their secret language.
‘Um,’ I say, ‘English, please?’
Claudette rounds on me. ‘You!’ she cries. ‘You don’t get to say what language we speak, we will speak in any way we bloody well like. You don’t get to make any sort of demand around here at all. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I say meekly, thinking at the same time that I can tell she’s been with her mother. She’s been discussing me with Pascaline, who’s never really liked me, who takes any opportunity to fill Claudette with all kinds of anti-male, anti-American, anti-Daniel propaganda. Claudette gets a certain look in her eye when she’s been engaged in a mother-daughter marital dissection. It happens every time. It only takes me, what, a day or two to win her back round.
Ari swizzles the stroller towards the playpark in the trees. He looks at me and winks. ‘Bonne chance,’ he says.
That, I understand.
‘Hey,’ I say to his back, the thought only occurring to me now, ‘how come you’re not in school?’ I turn to his mother. ‘How come he’s not in school?’
Claudette removes her sunglasses, finds it too bright, replaces them. ‘Well, that would be because I signed him out.’
‘To come here?’
‘To come here.’
‘Claude,’ I say, in a measured tone, ‘that’s not a great idea. It’s only a matter of weeks until—’
‘Listen,’ and the glasses come off again, used this time to stab emphasis into each word she utters, ‘I will sign my son out of his school if and when I want to, without permission from his part-time, so-called stepfather.’
I sigh. ‘OK,’ I say. I sit myself down in a chair. ‘Maybe we should try to talk this out like adults.’
My wife chooses that moment to turn her back on me and walk away, which I take as my cue to follow her.
I catch up with her on a path winding under the gnarled, leafless branches of plane trees. We stand there together and I tell her everything.
Almost everything.
The other woman, for my sins, I leave out.
I tell her about hearing that radio programme, my friendship with Todd, my relationship with Nicola, the bleak afternoon in a London clinic, the wedding party, the state of her, me taking off, the scramble to the airport, the return to Brooklyn, the letter I wrote and how I didn’t hear anything back from her, how this broke my heart, how I schooled myself to discard my love for her, to dig it out of me, how I was so consumed, as if by fire, by the loss of my mother, the one person – until Claudette – who loved me with a ferocity so unquestioning, so complete, that after it had gone I felt unmoored, insubstantial, as if I myself had ceased to exist. Not, as I said to Claudette as we stood there, that this is any excuse. A girl died. And it was my fault.
It would return to me, every now and again, the sight of her there, lying on the ground in the cold air of the morning, the way Todd didn’t look at me when he said: she’s fine, go, Daniel, run. I carried the image within me, like a virus dormant in the bloodstream, and it would flare up at odd moments. I might be working, cooking, eating, driving, teaching, and I would suddenly be distracted by a flash of forest, a vision of the loch, firelight through trees. I would push it from me, tell myself that the woman had rejected me, hadn’t wanted me, had disregarded my letter. I couldn’t let any other interpretation in, you see. I couldn’t let the possibility that I was at fault, that I had done something so wrong intrude into the life I had found, the life I had chosen that day at the crossroads. I inoculated myself against all of it by marrying Claudette, by moving to Ireland, by having kids with her – or I’d thought I had. I’d thought I was safe from the fever, the spread of it. I’d thought I had it contained, thought I’d be able to protect them from it, I’d thought I could keep it from them, from our door. The mind is a powerful, persuasive tool: we all know that.
Claudette, love of my life, mother of my children, keeper of my house, listens. She turns her face, obscured by her ridiculous sunglasses, towards me. She shifts her tortoiseshell handled bag from one arm to the other. When I have finished, she says nothing. She stands before me, the lenses of her sunglasses giving me back a doubled, miniaturised, blackened version of myself. I have no idea, at this point, which way she will go, what will happen next. I don’t think I breathe.
She murmurs my name, Daniel, almost to herself, and she lifts her arms, she puts them around me and she holds me to her, in the middle of a path.
My relief at her touch verges on indescribable. I don’t think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair, as I dive inside her coat and press her form to mine. What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.
‘What a terrible story,’ she is saying. ‘Daniel, I can’t believe you never told me that before. You didn’t need to keep it to yourself.’
‘Well,’ I mumble into her coat collar, ‘it’s never been something that I—’
‘That poor girl,’ she exclaims, pulling away, her face creased with distress. ‘She died how long after you left?’
‘A few months,’ I say. ‘Five, I think Todd said.’
‘And she’d been ill before, with anorexia?’
‘Yes. When she was younger. She seemed fully recovered when I met her. I mean, you would never have known.’
Claudette looks at me, her head on one side. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she says, pushing her hands up inside their opposite sleeves, ‘is why you should feel such guilt, why it’s thrown you into such crisis.’
‘Um,’ I say, casting my eyes up at the plane trees, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I mean, you went back to the States because your mother was dying. It wasn’t as if you were running away for nothing. Was it?’
‘I guess.’
‘But you said,’ Claudette frowns, perplexed, ‘it was your fault. Why? Why would you feel that? You wrote a letter. You tried. It wasn’t your fault she never received it.’
‘No.’
‘It makes no sense that you should feel responsible, when you …’ Claudette trails away. She looks at me for a long moment. This woman knows me better than anyone else in the world. She can read every expression, every inflection of my face.
‘You and she had split up before you went away?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘After the abortion?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
My mouth feels suddenly dry and I can’t look her in the eye as I shrug. ‘It was a long time ago. I don’t really …’
‘You must remember.’
I look about wildly, to find something that might distract her off this course. I take her arm. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘how about we walk to that bandstand?’
She allows me to fold my arm about her shoulders and we walk together along the path, but she cannot let this go. ‘Was it because of the abortion? Because you were angry she went ahead with it?’ She steps to one side so that my arm falls away. She turns to face me. ‘Or was it something else?’
I sigh. I rub my palm against several days’ worth of stubble. ‘Claude—’
‘Daniel,’ she interrupts me, ‘why do I get the feeling that there is something about this you’re not telling me?’
I see that evasion is useless so I give her the missing piece of the jigsaw. What other choice do I have? I come clean about the other girl, the teacher-training student, about Nicola finding us the next morning. And then I brace myself for the onslaught because Claudette has never taken this kind of thing lightly.
But she doesn’t say anything. She turns and walks up the steps of the bandstand, which is deserted, filled only with swirling leaves.
We sit on a bench. I am conscious of the wheels of Claudette’s mind turning, forming connections, assumptions, slotting things into their places.
‘So what you’re saying, Daniel,’ she speaks slowly, ‘is that you took your girlfriend to get an abortion and then you came back home and slept with someone else?’
I grimace. I have never heard myself presented to myself in such a way. ‘Well …’
‘Straight away?’ she persists. ‘The same night?’
I give something that is halfway between a nod and a shrug. ‘It might have been the following night. I don’t remember exactly.’
‘That was your response to the termination of your girlfriend’s pregnancy?’
‘Listen, I was …’ I scramble for words ‘… very young and … stupid and—’
‘Twenty-four’s not that young,’ she mutters.
She gets up, crosses to the other side of the bandstand and leans on the railing, her back to me. I grip the bench in something close to terror, wanting to close my eyes but not being able to, wondering, as she stands there, looking towards the fountain, if I am witnessing the beginning of the end, if this is it, the tipping point we all dread. Am I living through the moment when all the tiny lights begin to be extinguished, when her love for me begins to falter, shrink, lose ground? I have been through the demise of enough relationships to know such moments arise, but would I know how to recognise it when it came? Is this it? What have I done?
I say her name – Claudette, Claudette – and my voice comes out as a hoarse, desperate murmur. She bows her head; she doesn’t turn round.
It is possible, I think, as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down for ever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realise it until much later.
I won’t have it. I tell myself this. Such things only happen if you let them. It is feasible, surely, to head them off at the pass.
I leap to my feet, I cross the bandstand in a few strides, I take hold of her from behind. She turns around inside my arms and I see that she will speak and, for a moment, I think she’s about to ask me something else, some other piercing, reducing question, and I’m quailing because it isn’t going to be a question to relish.
But she doesn’t. Claudette is nothing if not unpredictable.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she says, looking up at me, and her voice expresses a certain surprise, as if the sensation is entirely new to her.
No, I want to cry out, please know what to say to me, you always do.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ she says, with a devastating emphasis, ‘not only that you could do something like that but also that you never told me. You’ve never spoken of it, or her. You’ve carried this around inside you all this time. And you went running off like that because –’
‘I didn’t go running off,’ I cut in, tightening my hold on her. ‘I’m here. I’m right here.’
‘– you suddenly didn’t know how to handle the guilt.’ She looks at me, her face more puzzled than shocked. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she says again.
Claudette walks away. She leaves. But I won’t let her. She steps down from the bandstand in one jump and I’m right there with her. We make our way through the trees and I take her hand in mine, trying to communicate by touch alone that this is the way things are and will be, that we are together, that we are still the people we have always been.
As we emerge from the trees, I am thinking I will say something to this effect, to seal up or cauterise that moment in the bandstand, but suddenly the children are upon us and they are hungry, they are tired, they are wondering what is next on our Parisian itinerary and can they have a snack, a cake, a ride on the Métro, the loan of a phone, a box for their pet worm.
Down the Line
Nicola and Daniel, London, 1986
Daniel sits opposite Nicola in a café. Separating her from him is a precarious obstacle course of teapots, milk jugs, cups, saucers, sugar bowls, spoons, napkins, teetering arrangements of sandwiches and scones, a vase in which a single plastic carnation slumps, exhausted, to one side.
He wants nothing more than to reach out and take her hand. She has painted her nails a purplish black, the colour of the darkest grapes. He would like to touch that lacquer, tap his own nail against it, to press her fingers in his, to make her look at him, to say, is this what you want, are you sure, should we be doing this, it’s not too late to change our minds.
Nicola has her face turned away from him, her chin propped in her palm. Her grapeskin nails click against the table in a descending rhythm. Her hair conceals one eye: how she stands it, Daniel has no idea. He couldn’t bear it, would constantly shake it off his forehead, but it never seems to bother her.
‘So how was the interview?’ Daniel asks and his voice feels strange in his mouth, laboured, as if he hasn’t spoken in a long while.
Nicola pulls her gaze away from the building across the street, where she has been watching a woman with a bin-liner circling an office, reaching out to empty each and every wastepaper basket. Not a single person looks up at her as she does this. Nicola allows herself to focus on the man opposite her.
Daniel is looking at her, a searching expression on his face. He wants to know something but she isn’t sure what it is. Is she OK? Are they OK? Does she want milk with her tea, butter with her scone, jam with her butter? Any of the above could be spooling through his mind. Sometimes she thinks she can see the workings of Daniel’s mind as if they were her own; other times he feels as alien to her as another species.
‘The interview?’ she repeats.
She has almost forgotten: she was at the BBC this morning, on live radio, a pair of earphones clipped over her head, her lips close to a preposterously large green-headed microphone, answering questions about gender bias in academia which were being filtered to her from somewhere, while people behind a glass screen adjusted dials and switches, transmitting her words into the radios of Britain.
It was only half an hour ago but it feels as though it was something that took place in her distant past or possibly to someone else.
It had been her idea to pair these two activities into one day: the interview, which had been in her diary for weeks, and the abortion, which has been a recent and unexpected addition to her schedule. She is wondering now at the wisdom of this. She had not wanted to have what her GP delicately referred to as ‘the procedure’ in the town where she worked and lived. She might bump into people she knew in the waiting room, her students, perhaps; the attending surgeon would probably be someone she studied with; it was all too close for comfort. This was not something she wanted ever to refer to or discuss again. So she had booked herself into a clinic in London, making the appointment just after her interview. It had seemed the obvious thing to do. She recalls feeling a rush of organisational pleasure as she noted it in her diary, the two appointments listed there together, before remembering exactly what the second would entail.
Daniel, of course, said he would come with her because that was the kind of man he was, she had discovered. When he had first come onto her radar, raising his han
d to ask questions at the end of her seminars, appearing at her lectures, she had dismissed him as another introspective man-child. But she had, she is willing to admit, read him all wrong. There was something that set apart a man who had grown up among women – a strong mother and a clutch of sisters, in Daniel’s case – from a man who hadn’t. Men of this ilk were, in Nicola’s opinion, much more evolved and therefore made much better lovers.
He had gone to a gallery while she did her interview. What he will do during her next appointment, she has no idea. She hasn’t asked.
‘It was fine,’ Nicola says. ‘It was all done down the line, which isn’t my favourite way of doing it but, as the interviewee, one isn’t really given the choice.’
She sees, as she speaks, that Daniel doesn’t know what ‘down the line’ means. She also sees that he isn’t going to ask for clarification.
‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘good. When’s it going out?’
He takes a sandwich from the plate between them and crams it whole into his mouth. Nicola watches him as he masticates, this man, her lover, who has come from nowhere and assumed a position of residence in her life, who has inadvertently impregnated her. Mostly, the five years’ seniority she has over him doesn’t make itself felt; other times, she finds him surprisingly, touchingly youthful.
Did she, she wonders, forget to take one of those little sugar-coated pills? Did she miss out some crucial day? Did her chemically stalled ovary see its chance and let slip a minuscule gamete into her waiting, pillowy, elastic-sided pouch? How else could this have happened?
‘It’s gone,’ she says.
Daniel stops, mid-chew. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s gone,’ she repeats, then realises he has grasped the wrong end of the stick. ‘The interview,’ she clarifies. ‘It was live. All done and dusted.’
‘Oh.’ His face clears. ‘That’s a shame. I won’t get to hear it now.’
Nicola shrugs. ‘It’s nothing you haven’t heard me say before.’
Daniel swallows, leans forward and seizes the teapot by its curved handle. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I’d have liked to listen. You want some tea?’