Isabelle in the Afternoon Page 4

  ‘Do you have brothers, sisters?’

  ‘An only child.’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘It’s a strange condition, being the one and only by-product of all their years in bed. Tell me why it was so sad for you. Being their only child.’

  ‘I never indicated …’

  ‘No need to. It’s very much there in the way you carry yourself.’

  ‘I’m that obvious?’

  ‘To a fellow sufferer like me, yes. It is one of several things that I sensed about you that first night in the bookshop: a lonely young man, and not just because he’s by himself in Paris. A deeper sort of loneliness. One that he has known, perhaps, since childhood.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Except:

  ‘And you got that from just our first conversation?’

  ‘Are you offended?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘But your tone. You sound shocked.’

  ‘Shocked that you read me so well so fast.’

  She leaned over and kissed me.

  ‘Now tell me why it was so lonely.’

  This was the last thing I wanted to recount, lying naked next to her among the contorted sheets. But some voice within me hinted: dodge the subject and you will lose some crucial intimacy between the two of you.

  So I told her about Mom and Dad and growing up far too normal in Indiana and knowing that my future was elsewhere … especially after my mother’s death. She listened in silence. When I finished she slid her arm around me, bringing me closer.

  ‘My world may have been dissimilar to yours. But your childhood – that is familiar territory for me. I, too, lived there, but with a mother as detached as Papa. Entrenched only in herself.’

  *

  Mid-February. Our fourth week together. New snow. Then a desolate week of rain. I learned a new word: glauque. Grim. Bleak. Isabelle had a cold. A constant cough that turned into a baritone hack.

  ‘I must give these up,’ she said, stubbing out a Camel Filter into the ashtray balanced on my naked chest. We were in bed. It was 18h00 according to her European clock. Our twice-weekly event. Always five until seven. Always with a three- or four-day interregnum. The rules. Her rules. I never challenged them. Not since that first morning-after phone call, when I over-hinted that waiting four days to see her next struck me as interminable. Her cool response let it be known: These are the frontiers. Accept them or be gone.

  I accepted them. Fastening my lips anytime I felt an expression of love reaching them. Even though I was just that: in love. Wanting nothing more in the world than her. Thinking: we are ideal. On every level.

  She knew this. She got the romantic turmoil swirling within me. She liked it. Because it compounded my passion with her. But once, when I did start to admit the state of my heart – whispering ‘Je t’aime’ – she put a finger to my lips and whispered back:

  ‘Arrête.’

  That was another rule: we could refer to each other as lovers, but we were not ‘in love’. Even though in bed it was never sex, it was always making love.

  I abided by the rules. I posed few questions about her life. I found out she was translating a novel by an Austrian writer who specialized in what she described as ‘fractured narratives’. I glanced often at her crammed bookshelves – the volumes in five languages, so many writers about whom I knew nothing. Big gaps in my limited cultural education that I now wanted to fill.

  ‘I’ve read so little fiction.’

  ‘Then start now.’

  *

  The next day, armed with her list, I went to Shakespeare and Company and bought novels by Dreiser and Flaubert and Zola and Sinclair Lewis. Now I had another component to my very open days. I set myself the task of reading at least two novels a week. Isabelle was my literature professor. I learned all about Flaubert’s obsessive rewriting of Madame Bovary and how it was the first novel that had ever tackled the subject of domestic boredom and the corrosiveness of marriage.

  ‘Most people marry for love,’ she said. ‘Then they wake up years later and find themselves trapped in the sameness, the listlessness, of long-term conjugality.’

  ‘But of course, that isn’t your story.’

  A tightening of her lips. I knew my comment would cause this response. I still made it. Because some weeks into our romance – she preferred the word aventure (which, I discovered, was one of several French synonyms for ‘affair’) – I still knew nothing of her life beyond these afternoon rendezvous. Or about her husband. All conversations were steered away from him. The unspoken third party.

  ‘I am talking in generalities,’ she said. ‘Anyway, one of the great truths about Madame Bovary is that Emma is not very bright and fails to recognize at the outset that Charles, the small-town doctor she’s marrying by virtual arrangement, is a bore.’

  ‘What’s your husband’s name?’

  A pause. Then:

  ‘Charles.’

  *

  So now he had a name.

  Some days later I discovered his profession: investment banker at one of the financial houses in Paris. Divorced. No children as his ex-wife couldn’t conceive. A most elegant fellow: cultured, highly literate, well connected, discreet. He met Isabelle in 1969. She was in her twenties. Writing her dissertation at the Sorbonne. Just ending a relationship with a ‘Maoist biker’ named Edmond.

  ‘Everything about Edmond was extreme. His politics. His view of sex. His anger at everything established in the world. An interesting year – but his aggression became dangerous. One day I simply decided: no more. Suddenly he became a very little boy. Crying, pleading, begging for another chance. The aggression, the radicalism of his perspective … it was all a façade. And neediness is such an unattractive attribute in a man.’

  Was she dropping a hint?

  ‘And then, in a radical volte-face, I fell for a man of finance.’

  I had just finished going down on her. A post-coital desire to bury my head between her legs. She didn’t object. On the contrary, during our last time together she had let me know how, when I moved down on her, she liked the lips parted and stroked with my tongue, how she responded best to a slow, deliberate, up-and-down movement. I was a fast learner. At first, she was a little hesitant about telling me what made her open up. I told her she should tell me all.

  She taught me not to rush. How to hold back until she had climaxed. The way we had to intuit each other when entwined. The moments when to be full throttle; when to exercise a gentle touch. She asked me about my experience before her. I admitted it was limited. In high school there had been a girlfriend named Rachel who came from a very Baptist family and discovered she was crazy about sex as soon as we had our first experience of it together. ‘You know I love you – and the fact that I did it with you means just that.’ But we were seventeen. We were a typical Midwestern pubescent couple: sex in the back seat of her soldier brother’s Buick. Sex in a six-dollar-a-night motel we discovered across state lines in licentious Illinois. A pregnancy scare. A demand that I commit to her. Me fleeing to the state university in Bloomington, and Rachel ending up at a teachers’ college where she found herself ‘with child’ courtesy of one of her professors. Rachel had a son and became the wife of a man twenty-three years older than her.

  ‘At least I’m not that old,’ Isabelle said.

  ‘What’s your age?’

  ‘Don’t you know that is a forbidden question?’

  ‘Not when we’re sleeping together.’

  A pause. Her lips tightened. Then:

  ‘I’m thirty-six.’

  ‘You are in no way old.’

  ‘You are being too kind. And now I am changing the subject, fully aware that I stupidly brought up the age difference between us.’

  ‘I like the fact that you are older.’

  ‘I like the fact that you are younger.’

  ‘How old is your husband?’

  She reached for her cigarettes. And said:

  ‘You still haven’t told me about you
r other lovers.’

  ‘At college I was too busy studying to have a steady girlfriend.’

  ‘But you slept with women during the past four years.’

  ‘Three or four. There was an economics major named Elaine who wanted to get serious with me.’

  ‘But you wanted to flee entrapment?’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘What about my husband?’

  ‘His age?’

  ‘Fifty-one.’

  ‘So he’s fifteen years older than you … and I’m fifteen years younger.’

  ‘Happenstance.’

  I learned how they met – at a dinner given by a mutual friend.

  ‘You know the expression un coup de foudre? What you Americans call “love at first sight”. That was myself and Charles at that initial dinner. A few weeks later he left his wife, found us an apartment.’

  ‘You still love him?’

  She scowled at the directness of my question. But still answered it.

  ‘Yes, my love for Charles is still there, still deep.’

  ‘Then why do this?’

  ‘A life needs many rooms, many compartments.’

  ‘Like the one you have with a conveniently single, younger man like myself?’

  ‘Why the angry tone?’

  ‘I never thought of this as a compartment. An arrangement.’

  ‘Nor do I. I was simply explaining that—’

  ‘I am, metaphorically speaking, a room. A place you can enter to get what you want without the messiness of commitment, and then close the door on it.’

  ‘Samuel, please …’

  ‘Please what? Accept your “rationalist” approach to what we have?’

  ‘And what is it that we have?’

  ‘Love.’

  ‘You are confusing passion with love. Passion is something we create magnificently together. I long for these hours together. For your touch. For feeling your desire, your need for me. As I hope you feel my desire, my need for you.’

  ‘You’re everything I have ever wanted.’

  ‘But you know so little about me.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘We have no day-to-day life.’

  ‘Because you keep our times together regulated. Twice a week, two hours, no more.’

  ‘I am married. I have a day-to-day life with someone else. A life I do not plan to disrupt. You have never lived with anyone, have you?’

  I shook my head, knowing that my inexperience in such matters was about to be held up in front of me; a mirror that would force me to stare back at the petulant, jejune lover who was overstepping many boundaries right now, the principal one being wanting more when I already had so much with Isabelle. It’s the way in most matters intimate. They cannot ever simply be kept to the erotic enjoyment of one another. After a certain juncture they must have greater meaning. The prospect of a future must be attached; passion for passion’s sake cannot be enough. I had yet to work out this very human need for commitment and possession. Isabelle was way ahead of me here.

  ‘When you eventually have a domestic relationship, you will see how your life together changes. No matter how deep the love, the quotidian arrives. You wake up next to each other, day in, day out. The lust you once had for each other quietens. Because it loses its newness, its amorous immediacy. And if you have children …’

  ‘Why don’t you have children?’

  ‘That’s a conversation for another time.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette, pulled back the duvet, got out of bed, her lithe body – which I now knew so well – illuminated by the flame of the candle on the little table where she ate lunch. She opened the door to the tiny bathroom and removed a simple gray terrycloth robe from a hook within. Slipping into it, she announced:

  ‘I have a reception I need to be at in less than an hour.’

  ‘So you want me to leave?’

  ‘I think we got ourselves in over our heads today,’ she said.

  ‘By which you mean I started getting possessive.’

  ‘By which I mean, if you cannot accept that within the limits imposed on this there is much wonderful mutual pleasure to be had together, if you must insist that you “need more”, then I have to end this now.’

  I blinked. Many times. I studied her face, half turned away from me. Tight, controlled, rational. A voice within me hissed: don’t lose all this through the stupidity of possessiveness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be sorry. On a certain level it’s touching. Sweet.’

  ‘Let me be direct here: I have no real life outside of this.’

  ‘You are here. In Paris, living here.’

  ‘And I have you. Twice a week. Which is wonderful.’

  ‘That it is.’

  I got out of bed. I came over to her. I put my arms around her, opening her bathrobe. I pulled her close, hard again. She stepped back, closing her robe.

  ‘I don’t have time,’ she whispered.

  ‘Your event is at seven. It’s just six now.’

  ‘And it’s taking place in the huitième. I will need half an hour to get there on the Métro, and a half-hour beforehand to ready myself.’

  ‘To wash away all trace of me – of us. He’ll be there, won’t he?’

  ‘By “he”, do you mean my husband? Charles? Yes, he will be there. The man getting the award is a long-standing friend.’

  ‘Why don’t you have children?’ I asked, speaking before thinking. The question came out like a shotgun blast.

  She rubbed a hand across her eyes. She turned and faced me.

  ‘His name was Cédric. He was born on the thirty-first of December 1973. Those first few weeks were absolute happiness, even the sleepless nights, the exhaustion, the relentlessness. Charles was devoted to him. Being a mother was all I had ever hoped for. Especially after growing up with parents who were uncertain about being parents; who were there but always elsewhere.’ She motioned to the cigarettes and her lighter, still on the cascading mess we had made of her bed. I went over and collected both, grabbing my jeans en route. As she lit up, I half dressed.

  ‘You’re putting on your clothes because you know what I am about to tell you.’

  I grabbed my T-shirt and pulled it over my head. Though she had spoken the truth – I did sense what was coming – I still said nothing. She fixed her eyes on mine. They didn’t waver as she said:

  ‘On the night of the twelfth of March 1974, I put Cédric to bed in his crib. I held him as always and whispered how much I loved him. He went to sleep moments later. My husband and I went to bed. We slept straight through the night. When I woke it was almost eight. Charles and I never rose that late, because Cédric was our natural alarm clock. But that morning there was silence. When I entered our baby’s room, he was lying there, in his crib, motionless. A small smile on his face. I will never lose sight of that smile, it will always be there until the day I leave this life. Within moments of picking him up, I was screaming. Because he was not breathing. Because he was not responding to my shrieks. Me begging him to answer me. Him not moving whatsoever. Because Cédric was dead.’

  Silence. Her eyes didn’t move from mine.

  ‘Sudden infant death syndrome. The police, the medical examiner who did the autopsy, the psychiatrist to whom I was sent when I began to plot how to kill myself – which I saw as the only solution to the massive, horrible pain that was drowning me – all the experts told me the same thing: I had done nothing wrong. Sudden infant death syndrome has no rhyme or reason. It was as if the Angel of Death just chose, at random, a healthy child and decided to snuff out its tiny life. Cédric was two months, two weeks, two days when he died. For the first two years after his death I became a virtual recluse. I lost fifteen kilos. Nothing the doctors gave me to sleep lasted for more than three hours. No tranquilizer took away the pain. Charles and I had several serious talks about me being institutionalized for a time. I will not say that there was a day when I turned a corner
, when I flipped a mental switch and the agony ended. The agony will never end. But I had no choice but to re-engage with life.’

  Part of me knew I should reach out for her hand. But another, more anguished part of me had a question swirling around.

  ‘And since this tragedy—’

  She interrupted me.

  ‘Have we been trying for another child?’

  That was the moment I expected her to look away. She didn’t.

  ‘Not yet. But as soon as you head back to America I am coming off the pill.’

  ‘Charles knows all about this?’

  ‘Charles is my husband. Of course we have discussed this crucial matter. It is what couples do, Sam.’

  ‘Thank you for this crucial insight.’

  ‘What’s with your petulant tone?’

  ‘Petulant? Petulant? Just like a little boy—’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘But it’s how you see me: the naive young man with a degree of sexual prowess. Someone you can see for a few hours here and there, then toss away as soon as you decide you’re ready for a new baby.’

  ‘My decision to see you – to have these precious moments with you – has nothing to do with my decision to try for a child again now. After Cédric’s death I decided I never wanted another baby because I could not stand the agony of possible loss again. So I went on the pill to ensure I would never get pregnant. Then I changed my mind.’

  ‘Especially as the American kid is coming to the end of his time here.’

  ‘How dare you be so simplistic,’ she said, anger now in her voice.

  ‘Simplistic? I’ve just been your interlude fuck, your “I’m still grieving” fuck. Now to be dismissed as soon as you decide—’

  ‘Where is your empathy, Samuel? Your kindness?’

  ‘You’d never think about having a baby with me.’

  She glared at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘Oh, so this is what this temper tantrum is really all about? It should be your sperm …’

  ‘I love you—’

  ‘You have no idea what love is, Samuel. Because you still have no idea about life.’