The Blue Hour Read online

  But instead of going inside and getting my checkbook and solving the problem on the spot (as I had done on several past occasions), I simply told the collection guy:

  “You’ll need to speak directly with my husband. He’s at the Gold’s Gym on Manor Street—which is about five minutes from here by car. Ask for him at the reception desk: they know him.”

  Repeating the address of the gym again I excused myself and closed the door. As soon as I had ascertained that the collector had pulled off down the road in his car, I went into our bedroom, packed a small weekend bag, called my old college roommate, Ruth, at her home in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, and asked if I could use her foldout sofa for a few days. Then, after leaving Paul a note—If the wine debt isn’t somehow paid off by the time I am back late Tuesday night the marriage is over—I got into my car and drove the eight hours south to the city I had always promised myself I would one day call my own. I deliberately kept my cell phone off all weekend. I never went online and spent the next four days trying not to bore Ruth with the cocktail of anger, guilt, and sadness that was coursing through me. Ruth—a professor of English at Brooklyn College, divorced, no kids, single, disappointed in love, wickedly funny, and hyper-cultural (“High art is God’s apology for men,” she noted at one point between the three plays, two concerts, and two art exhibits we saw when I was there)—was, as always, a great friend. She steadied my resolve when I broached the idea that perhaps I should check in on Paul, see how he was bearing up.

  “When he landed himself in debt nine months ago,” she asked, “what did you do?”

  “I dug into my retirement fund and found the ten grand to get him out of trouble.”

  “What did he promise you in return?”

  “You know very well what he did. He admitted that he’s got a sad pathological compulsion when it comes to spending, spending, spending . . . and he promised to curtail that destructive impulse.”

  “An impulse that is corroding your marriage. It’s all so sad.”

  Ruth was aware of the fact that, when I met Paul three years earlier, I was thirty-seven and entering that last lap of possible fertility. Within six months of declaring love for each other, and talking about the wondrous possibilities of a shared future together, I delicately raised the fact that I did not want to pass through life without becoming a mother; that I was entering the now-or-never phase. I knew that I was bringing a certain degree of pressure to our relationship, and said that I would perfectly understand if Paul felt this was all too much too fast. His response astounded me.

  “When you have met the love of your life, of course you want to have a child with her.”

  Yes, Paul was a great romantic. Such a romantic that he proposed marriage shortly thereafter, even though I told him that, having been in that institution once before, I wasn’t anxious about a return visit. But I was so swept up in the wonder of finding love at my age, and with such a talented and original man, and in Buffalo (!), that I said yes. He did say that, though he realized time was of the essence, we needed at least two years together before becoming parents. I agreed to his request, staying on the pill until eight months ago. At which point we seriously began to “try” (what a curious verb) for a baby. We went about the task very robustly—though sex was, from the outset, one of the aspects of our marriage that always worked. It wasn’t as if we were having to motivate ourselves into making love every night of the week.

  “You know, if I don’t get pregnant naturally, there are other options,” I said six months later when nothing had yet happened.

  “You’ll get pregnant,” Paul said.

  “You sound very certain about that.”

  “It’s going to happen.”

  That conversation took place ten days before the debt collector arrived on our doorstep. As I headed south in my car toward Brooklyn, my cell phone off, my piercing sadness about Paul was underscored by the realization that he was my last chance at having a baby. And that thought . . .

  Ruth splashed a little more wine into my glass. I took a long sip.

  “He’s not your last chance,” she said.

  “I want a baby with Paul.”

  “That’s a definitive statement.”

  Friendship is always a complex equation—especially a friendship where it had been agreed early on that we would never sugarcoat things; that we would speak what we felt to be the truth.

  “I don’t want to be a single mother,” I said. “If I can get him to just accept that he has certain obligations . . .”

  “Paul had problems with money before you. Even though you’ve tried to organize his personal finances, he refuses to play smart. At the age of fifty-eight, he is not going to have some sort of epiphany and transform himself. He is what he is. Which therefore begs the question: Can you live with his ongoing recklessness?”

  All the way home that question nagged at me. We project onto others that which we need and seek at a given moment. Life, they say, is a great teacher. But only if we are truly willing to shake off the illusions and misnomers within which we dwell.

  Love, however, always muddles clarity of vision. And a life without love is a bit like the balance sheets over which I gaze every working day: far too concrete, too reasoned. And my love for Paul was as bound up in his recklessness as in his talent, his intelligence, his ardor for me.

  When I got home, it was just after six p.m. I saw his car parked out front of the nineteenth-century Gothic place we’d bought together two years ago. When I entered the house I was startled to find that order had descended upon chaos. In recent weeks Paul had started treating our home as a happy dumping ground. But in the days I had been out of contact, not only had he divested the house of his mess, but all windows glistened, all wood surfaces were free of encroaching dust and smelled of lemon polish. There were fresh flowers in several vases. And I could smell something pasta-esque in the oven.

  As the door slammed behind me, Paul emerged from the kitchen, looking just a little sheepish. He couldn’t make direct eye contact with me. But when he did once look up in my direction I could see his encroaching sadness and fear.

  “Smells good,” I said.

  “I made it for you, for us,” he said, dodging my gaze.

  “How did you know I’d be home tonight?”

  “Called your office. They told me you’d be back at work tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I came back. But . . .”

  He held up his hand.

  “I sold all the wine.”

  “I see.”

  “I found a guy here in town. Big-deal collector. Offered me six thousand dollars for my cellar.”

  “You have a cellar?”

  He nodded, looking so much like a little boy who had just been caught out in a very big lie.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “You know that shed behind the garage? The one we never use?”

  The “shed” was something akin to a bomb shelter, with two folding steel doors that lay flat to the ground. When we were in negotiation to buy the house we naturally had the shelter opened for us, and found a damp semilined cave. As the house already had a renovated basement, we simply put a lock on the shed doors after we bought the place and left it unattended.

  Or, at least, that’s what I’d thought.

  “How long have you been building up this wine collection?” I asked, sounding most reasonable.

  “A while.”

  He came over and took me in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I don’t want apologies. I just don’t want a repetition of all this financial mess again.”

  “And I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Then don’t. Because I do want you, us.”

  To Paul’s credit he became industrious again after the wine debt incident, spending all free nonteaching hours on a new series of lithographs. It was the first time that Paul had settled down to serious creative work in over two years. Though his gallery owner in New York was enthus
iastic, the general downturn in the market and Paul’s lack of visibility over the past few years had meant that the sort of prices he could demand had shrunk decisively. Still, he did manage to find a buyer, and though Paul was disappointed with the negotiated price, part of him was clearly thrilled with the fact that he still “had the chops” when it came to his art. After paying off most of his credit card debts, he then took me out to dinner at a very upscale (for Buffalo) French restaurant. He ordered a far too expensive bottle of Pauillac, telling me that his gallerist had another client interested in a new series.

  “The buyer is willing to plonk down fifty percent up front—so that should be another ten grand to me in a couple of weeks. What’s a bottle of Pauillac compared to ten grand?”

  I’m not that into wine. Still . . . why not celebrate? Especially since Paul was making good on paying off all his debts. When we got home that night, he lit candles in our bedroom, put on a CD of Miles Davis playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and made love to me with the ferocity and sensuality that only he could bring to the act.

  My first husband, Donald, had always had issues in the intimacy department. He was a superbright, endlessly anxious man; a journalist on the Buffalo Sun Times who covered local politics and was widely considered to be one of the great specialists on municipal corruption in the state. I was just out of college, having done a stint on a paper in Madison, Wisconsin, after getting my BA from Minnesota. I was very pleased to have landed the job on the city desk of the Sun and was immediately in awe of this five-foot-six-inch whirlwind and old-school journalistic muckraker. Donald was committed to Buffalo. I was so smitten with him that I too became committed to Buffalo. But the sex—when it happened—was, at best, perfunctory; at worst, it flatlined.

  “Not good at this, never been good at this,” he whispered the first night we slept together and he had what could be politely described as “performance-related issues.” I reassured him that this was something that happened to all men from time to time, that it was no big deal, that things would come right. The truth is . . . even when he was able to complete the act, it was never satisfying. He was endlessly anxious, caught up in his fears about appearing inadequate and inferior, and no amount of reassurance on my part could assuage such ingrained self-doubts. But I chose to overlook the fact that our bed became a sort of metaphoric cross upon which Donald crucified himself. By the end of the first year of our marriage, our lovemaking (if you could call it that) had dwindled down to twice a month. I suggested that Donald seek counseling. He agreed and then refused to go. Our problems deepened further. Though he remained brilliantly engaging company, that crucial part of our married life went into permanent decline.

  But I continued to reason that, given even more love and support, all those intimacy issues would vanish and our marriage would steady and . . .

  It is extraordinary, isn’t it, the way we convince ourselves all will be well in a relationship that we privately know to be doomed? In the case of my marriage to Donald, the end came the evening he showed up late from the newsroom with eight whiskies too many in him, and informed me, “The fact is, even if I did get counseling or go to my doctor and let him prescribe me something, all the little blue pills in the world wouldn’t stop the repulsion I feel every time you come near me.”

  As soon as this line was uttered, I snapped my eyes shut, trying to tell myself that he had not said what he had just said. But when my eyes opened, there was a strange little half-smile on Donald’s face. The sight of him, quietly enjoying the hurt and confusion now ricocheting within me, led me to the following uncomfortable truth: he said all that because he knew, once uttered, we would pass the point of no return.

  “Now you can really hate me,” he finally whispered.

  “I just pity you, Donald.”

  I asked for a meeting with our newspaper’s editor in chief the next morning. I told him that, if the paper was still offering the voluntary redundancy packages that had been mentioned some months earlier during a wave of cutbacks, I would be willing to accept one.

  Ten days later—with one year’s salary in my bank account—I got into my car and drove north to Montreal. I’d decided to learn French and live in a city that hovered somewhere between a European and new-world sensibility. It was also cheap. I found a small apartment in the decidedly francophone confines of the Plateau. I went to daily French lessons at the Université de Montréal and worked hard at mastering that challenging and intricate language. My proficiency improved considerably when I started having an affair with a man named Thierry, who ran a used record shop on the rue Saint Denis and was intermittently trying to write the great Quebecois novel. His charms and reasonable sexual prowess—especially after Donald—were subsumed by unapologetic laziness. After a year I was able to renew my student visa. As my prowess in French grew, I began to hatch plans about perhaps moving to Paris and working out some way of landing a carte de séjour and reinventing myself professionally as . . .

  This was the dilemma. What was I going to do next in my life? I set up an appointment at the French consulate in Montreal and found myself facing a very petit fonctionnaire who discouraged me from even thinking about finding work in Paris without a European passport or a French husband. My Canadian student visa allowed me to take on work for the length of my sojourn there at the university. I found a temporary post as an administrative assistant in a firm of bilingual accountants—and started finding myself fascinated by the world of numbers. I knew that, by retraining as a CPA, I was landing myself in the world of other people’s narratives that I said I would dodge once I left journalism. Nonetheless, after eighteen months in Quebec, I decided to recross the American frontier and enter a CPA course in Buffalo. Privately I knew why I had run back there. Buffalo was safe. Buffalo was the only place, to date, where I had put down roots. No longer being at the newspaper meant that my chances of running into Donald were slim. I still felt a deep lingering sadness about the end of the marriage, coupled with the thought that I should have been able to change him. In Buffalo I had some good friends and many contacts—so there was also the prospect of being able to set up my own small accountancy firm and have enough people to reach out to as prospective clients.

  Just to prove that I was a responsible young woman, I found a job with a local CPA while doing the two-year accountancy course. This allowed me to take what was left from the redundancy money and buy a nice apartment in an old Victorian-style house outright (Buffalo is so cheap), and even renovate the kitchen and bathroom while furnishing it with funky secondhand items. When the time came—and I was indeed an official Certified Public Accountant—I had seven initial clients who joined me on the day I first opened my office.

  Then, two years later, Paul walked in.

  “I wonder: Is this all a mistake?”

  His words as we landed in Morocco. A journey that was his idea, his surprise—and one that he sprang on me just two weeks after he had cleared a significant portion of his debts and had sworn off compulsive spending. I’d just come home from my biweekly yoga class to find Paul at work in the kitchen, the aromas of North Africa wafting everywhere. Approaching him at the stove I gave him a kiss. “Let me guess: a tagine?”

  “Your powers of observation are formidable.”

  “Not as formidable as your culinary skills.”

  “Your self-doubt is touching, but not founded in fact.”

  As always Paul’s lamb tagine was splendid—he made it with preserved lemons and prunes; a recipe he’d learned during the very formative two years he’d spent in Morocco in his midtwenties.

  That was back in the early 1980s—when, after graduating from Parsons in New York and trying to make an early go of it as an artist in the then-still-demimonde world of lower Manhattan, he decided that a radical change of scene was required. Through the careers office at Parsons he learned that an art school in Casablanca was looking for an instructor in drawing. A two-year contract. Three thousand dollars a year, plus a little apar
tment near the school.

  “They told me it was probably the best art school in Morocco,” he said during one of our early dinner dates. “But that wasn’t saying much. Still, they said it would give me the chance to live somewhere exotic, escape the workaday world, travel, and get a considerable amount of my own work done under that white-hot North African sun.”

  So Paul quit his job and took the cramped overnight flight to Casablanca, and hated everything about the place on sight. In no way resembling the fabled, mythic city of the movie, he described it as sprawling, concrete, ugly. The art school turned out to be second-rate, the staff demoralized, the students largely untalented.

  “I had very few friends at the beginning—outside of a Franco-Moroccan artist named Romain Ben Hassan, who was a talented abstract expressionist as well as a budding alcoholic. But it was Romain who got me a French teacher and forced me to speak with him all the time in the language of everyone around me. And it was Romain who got me to stop feeling sorry for myself, and let me into his social circle of local and expatriate artists. He also forced me to get on with my own work.”

  By the end of his first year, Paul had found a life for himself in Casablanca. He had a circle of fellow artists—Moroccan and expatriate—with whom he hung out. He had one or two students whom he thought promising. Most of all he worked rigorously on an amazing portfolio of lithographs and line drawings that chronicled his quarter of Casablanca. Though the art school wanted him to stay on he used this portfolio—which he called “The White City”—to get himself a gallery in New York and to start looking for teaching work. While on a three-week break between school terms, he headed south to a walled seaside city called Essaouira. “Like going back to the Middle Ages and landing yourself in the ultimate artist’s colony.”