I Am Having So Much Fun Without You (9 page)

Orange Floral Couch, circa 1953: understuffed and sagging, this vintage lime-and-orange couch is nevertheless a persistent source of delight and comfort for the Haddon family household, especially for George Haddon, who smokes cigars in it after victorious Arsenal games. Evidence of this tradition in the form of burn holes is viewable on the northwest arm of the couch, closest to the side table, where Edna Haddon keeps a dish of salted cashews at all times.

“Sherry?” my father asked, standing by the empty bookshelf he used as a bar.

“Sure,” I said.

“You want cheese or something, Frenchie?”

I laughed. “No, Dad.” He handed me a small glass. “This is great,” I said.

“So!” he said, settling down in the recliner near the TV. “What's new? Anne told me you had a lot of success with your last show?”

Ever gracious, Anne was faithful with the Sunday check-in calls. When her parents weren't in Brittany, we followed the French tradition of having long lunches with them each Sunday in the Parisian suburbs, and Anne would use the time between the meal and dessert to call my family, passing the phone from Camille to me. Because it was always Anne who made the phone call, she was usually the one who presented a summary of the past week, and a glimpse of the week ahead. She was astonishingly considerate, my wife.

“Yeah, quite a few of them have sold, actually, for pretty good prices. And then I've got that mess,” I said, gesturing to the garage, where my car was now parked.

“I see,” went my father, as if that explained everything. “So how long will you be here?”

I reached for my glass. “Well, it depends, actually. I'm supposed to deliver the painting on Tuesday, but I'm hoping that I can move the appointment earlier, as I'm already here.”

“I thought you came because they needed it earlier?”

“Right,” I said, gulping down the drink. “But then they, eh, moved the appointment back.”

My father frowned. “I see. Well, I can't keep up with you. And how's Anne?”

I scratched the back of my neck. “She's good. Tired, over
worked, you know. She's got a new case. These new mums out in Lille who didn't know that you're not supposed to be slogging back wine while you're pregnant, so they're lobbying for a massive logo of sorts, right on the bottle.”

“Are they mental?”

I almost spit out my sherry. “What?! No, Dad, they're not
mental
, they're just . . . I don't know what they are, actually. They're just not informed.”

We drank our sherry and listened to the clanks and plunks of my mother putting away the dishes.

“So no more kids, then?”

“Jesus,” I said, getting up to pour us more sherry.

“You know, I think we might have had another, is all I'm saying,” said my dad. “But by the time we felt like it, you were seven. Camille's what now, five?”

“Yeah, five.”

“Well, it's now or never, I think. My siblings, we all have a two-year difference, which is no difference, really. But then you look at your mother. Five years between her and Abigail—and they hardly talk.”

“So it's already too late for us, is what you're saying.”

My dad knitted his brows together. “Possibly.”

I sighed and sat back down. The sherry had warmed me, as had the stew that was still settling in my guts. I wanted at that moment to come clean to my father, to ask him for advice. After all, he'd cheated on my mother all those years ago, and although I never really understood how far it went, it had probably gone far enough for him to have an opinion on what I should do. But then my mum appeared in the doorway, wiping down a plate.

“So if you're free tomorrow, love, I was thinking we could show you the new things they've done around Gadebridge? It's really the nicest little park.”

Claiming tiredness from the long journey, I kissed my parents good night and said that rain or shine, a trip out to Gadebridge sounded very nice, indeed. And then I shut myself in my small bedroom and sat down under the
Dirty Harry
poster, put my head into my hands, and endured the tight throat and nasal-drip condition that heralded a cry.

It was strange—or at least, among the people we knew, it was an anomaly—that I, an only child, had married another only child. It was even odder for Anne to be an only child, and French. Proper bourgeois families, especially if religious, get up to as many as five Barbour-jacket-wearing offspring. But Anne's mother had suffered secondary infertility when she and Alain tried to conceive after Anne's birth. It was a taboo topic, apparently a source of profound guilt and shame, as the two of them always wanted a large family. I'd asked Anne whether her parents had ever thought about adopting, and she said her mother was for it, but her father thought it embarrassing—like parading around a banner communicating to the public what did—and couldn't—happen in your bed.

And it's true that Anne and I had discussed having another child, about three years ago, but Anne's career picked up, then mine did, and we lost time basking in the fact that we were busy and successful, with a child who kept us busier still. Despite the exemplary maternity-leave benefits for women in France, I don't think Anne was ready, or could even envision slowing down. And time passed. And I met Lisa. And even more time was lost. And now, it's true what my dad said, a five-year difference would be a lot. And plus, impregnation seems improbable. You have to have sex for that.

Much later, unable to sleep, I padded into the living room and—against my better instincts—pulled out Anne and my wedding album from the bookshelf. This second wedding, the
one the Bourigeauds insisted on, took place about a year after our first one, at their place in Saint-Briac. Although both weddings were by the seashore, that is where the similarity between the two events ends.

Seeing as how we hadn't invited any relatives to the Cape Cod edition, our French wedding was the first time that Anne actually met my parents. My father liked her the minute he saw her, but my mother seemed uncomfortable around her, ill at ease. It happens a lot with Anne—the dark hair, her boyish hips that make her endless legs look even longer, the way she carries herself with a dancer's posture—a lot of people peg her for a cold person before giving her a chance. It's true that she's choosy socially: she's economical with her words. I can see how other people find this haughty, but the truth is that she's shy. And although she's good with bourgeois small talk, when it comes to keeping up with someone awkward like my mum, Anne's at a total loss. I remember after the wedding, when I asked her what she talked about with my mother, she covered her eyes with her hands like a little girl. “Oh my God,” she said. “The weather.”

Anne was disappointed by her first encounter with my mother, and she didn't know how to carry forth with such an outcome. Being a traditionalist, she'd hoped to get on splendidly with Mum, because that's what daughters-in-laws
did
. She'd filled her head with visions of weekend visits to my parents' and long walks with Edna, the two of them exchanging giddy little intimacies, my mother telling her an indicative story about me when I was younger, and Anne smiling and saying that I hadn't changed at all. Walking arm in arm back into the house, like queens from different countries, teasing their menfolk who would, of course, be chatting around the fire. Lunch would be prepared. We would all break into song.

Anne's debut with my father went a great deal better. He and Anne had already spoken on the phone several times while I was still at RISD, and Anne had even sent some postcards from Cape Cod after our first wedding, sprinkled with phrases like
I can't wait to meet you
and
your almost-daughter, Anne.
After the reception in France, my father yanked me aside and whispered, “Good God, Richard, she's gorgeous.” He let out a faint whistle as he watched my new bride interact with his own wife on the deck. “And you know, she'll stay that way, too. It's in their constitution. Not like the English, God help us.” By this time, Anne had come up between the two of us and was standing at my father's side. He threw his arms out and gave her
an embrace in the French tradition, kissing her eagerly on both sides of her face, twice.

“I'm so happy for the two of you,” he exclaimed, ratcheting things up to a bear hug.

“I know!” she said, slightly crumpled. “So am I!”

It was a lovely dinner, carried out mostly in English, which Alain and Inès spoke with accents made even more attractive by the copious amounts of wine served. My parents, of course, were completely smitten by the house, and also by Anne's family, whom they found just as warm and hospitable as could be. I remember that meal well, much better than the reception, which was a whirl of handshakes and embraces and too much white wine. I remember how happy Anne seemed to have us all together. I remember thinking, At some point, this will be us. We'll have a child and the child will marry, maybe in this very house. And I remember feeling real love for my parents, real love for my mother in her ridiculous turquoise tunic and my father in his favorite silk bow tie, which, I knew from watching him tie it as a child, had a small hole in the back of it, near the tag.

The guests started filtering out around four in the morning, but rather incredibly, my father was still up, gesticulating over a final glass of port with Alain de Bourigeaud. I went up to the two of them, raised my glass to Alain, thanked him for the perfect night. My father suggested a stroll, just a wee walk to get the bad stuff moving through him before he called it a night.

“You two go,” said Alain, smiling. “I'm going to do a tour of the border there, make sure no one's fallen off.”

My father tossed his arm around me, and we headed for the back of the house, toward the country road. He was heavy-footed, his arm leaden on my shoulder. It had been some time, a decade, maybe, since I'd seen him that lashed. But it was a good drunk, a joyful one, and I was glad to be there with him, glad he liked my wife. Glad that I was entering the type of family that he could be proud of.

“Ah, Richard!” he cried. “What a night. What a party! I'll tell you something, I think she's just great.” He chucked me under the chin with his free hand. “A little frosty in the beginning, but that's the French in her! And God, but she is clever! But listen, son,” he said, pulling me closer as we stumbled onto the road. “She's most terribly in love with you. You can feel it when you talk to her, it's lovely. But listen, I want to tell you something.” He clutched my shoulder. “Listen. Don't forget her.”

Somewhere beyond the torchlights that were still burning and the buzz of the alcohol and the music and the gorgeous guests, something inside of me wakened to this comment, wakened in the way you do from a dream that is unsettling, not right.

“What do you mean, forget her?” I asked. Behind us, I could hear cars crunching their way out of the gravel driveway and Anne's parents crying
merci
and
à bientôt
into the dark.

“I don't know, Rich. I've made some mistakes with your
mum, you know. And there were times when I wanted to go off and leave, to find something better. But you know what? It doesn't
get
better. If you really love her, if you really, really love her, it won't get any better than this. But just try to remember that you
do
love her, you know, because it gets so easy to forget. I'd like to tell you that it's all a romp in the hay and that you'll never want another girl, but I know you, and of course you will, but just, just try to remember . . . okay?”

“Remember
what
,
Dad? Why are you telling me this?”

He stumbled over a sprinkler head and grabbed on to my arm. “Richy, just remember that what you have is
good
. And even though you don't think that matters, it does. Everything else comes after. And like I said, she's French.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, not knowing whether to thank him or fetch him aspirin. I rewired my brain to send his comments to the starboard of my cerebral cortex, where they could be harbored, and forgotten, and not ruin my night.

We made it about halfway up the road before my dad got sick. I rubbed his back as he heaved against the neighbor's bushes.

“Good Lord,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “I haven't done that in years!” He turned around with a big smile. “Do we need to do something with it?”

I flinched at the celebratory pile in the dark. Then I started kicking clumps of pine needles onto it with my dress shoes until the noxious mound was out of sight.

9

I REMEMBER
the moment I decided I wanted to ask Anne-Laure to be my wife. For some people, the realization probably builds gradually, but for me, I was as sure in a single moment as I was ever going to be in my life.

It was because of a toy-filled chocolate egg. It was a weekend, a warm weekend in Providence, and we were on our fourth date—except the use of the term
date
is anachronistic because with Anne studying in Boston, she had to come down for entire weekends at a time. In the beginning she stayed with her cousin Esther, but once I learned to be a bit handier with the mop and the broom, she started staying at my place.

It was one of those early weekends when simply being in each other's presence could occupy us for hours, when her every gesture seemed contagious and new. Her smile contained multitudes. Her hair held constellations. The mere act of her pointing out something that she found funny struck me as a gesture of extreme import and grace.

I'd pick her up from the train station and she'd be in these
outfits.
Silk camisoles, silk blouses, wide-legged pants. I don't
think I saw her with her shirt untucked for months, except, of course, when we made love. And bloody hell, when that happened did the good-girl walls come down.

On that particular Sunday, she'd suggested a bike ride out to Barrington beach and promised me a picnic. We met at India Point Park and biked twelve miles until we reached our destination, an elegant, narrow stretch of rocky beach along the coast. In common Anne fashion, she had everything prepared: a blanket, towels, a small umbrella just in case, and a cooler full of treats.

In tiny jars and Tupperwares, an array of perfect things: peppered herrings, deviled eggs with paprika-spiked mayonnaise, wasabi peas, curried chicken salad, chilled grapes—all things that she had managed, in the time- and space-defying way that Anne has, to prepare in the three hours between our rendezvous at the park and the moment she'd left my bed.

And then she took out a final container of something gelatinous and yellow, grinning as she set it down.

“Pineapple Jell-O?” she said, slightly embarrassed.

I started to laugh.

“It has real pineapples in it!” she protested, pointing to the jiggling chunks. “Or, okay, canned. But still. You wait and see how well it goes with the chicken salad.”

We sat on that lovely beach as the seagulls shit around us, getting progressively sunburned, stuffed, and happy. We got sleepy on the two bottles of rosé I'd brought and fed each other grapes and hypothesized about what would have happened if Manet's famous painting
Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe
had featured a naked man instead of a woman. And then she told me it was time for the real dessert.

From inside the cooler, she pulled out something wrapped in a cotton napkin and twine.

“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Surprise.”

I unfolded the napkin to reveal two chocolate eggs in the white-and-orange foil that had been both a reward and a catalyst for many actions in my youth.

Anne started laughing and plucked out the one she wanted. “They're my absolute favorite,” she said. “If you get a better toy than me, though, you have to trade.”

“How in the world did you get these?” I asked, turning the famed concoction over in my hands. Kinder Surprises were famous across Europe, but in America, they'd been overtaken by the Cadbury egg, which, cream-filled though it was, did not contain the secret assembly-required toy that the Kinder version did.

She squealed when she saw what was inside hers, a tiny raccoon bandit. As for me, I got a knight with an old-time prospector's mustache.

“What the hell,” I said. “I've got the down-on-his-luck version of Yosemite Sam, and you've got a raccoon Zorro.”

She clutched the raccoon against her chest. “Mine's
perfect
,” she said with a smile so wide I felt drunker just for watching her. Dizzy with joy, I pulled her to the sand.

“I love you,” I said. It was the first time that I'd said it. She still had the raccoon bandit clutched between her fingers. “You're ridiculous. You're perfect.” I brushed her hair out of her face and stared into her eyes. She got me with her delight over this simple plastic toy. Got me with the care she put into the picnic, the things she'd done to transform a Sunday afternoon into a moment that would make me look at my life and realize that I wanted her with me, in it. Always.

How had I gone from those feelings—all-encompassing and complete—to growing distant from her, even taking her for granted? You love this one person, you love things about her
that make her stand out from the rest. And then time passes, and she morphs into other people: warden, marshal, mother, financial partner, friend. And you lose sight of the reasons that you loved each other initially, loved each other as lovers, not as friends. Eventually, you lose sight of the extraordinary happenstances that brought you together, and it's the bad things you start collecting like an army of plastic soldiers, ready to defend yourself against whatever's coming next. But the good things? The finest things? The goddamn magic moments? These things start to flicker. These things, you forget.

 • • •

The morning after I arrived at my parents', I called Julien at the gallery and bashed my mother's hopes of going out to Gadebridge because I got the green light: the buyers would accommodate an early arrival. I was on my way to London town.

I'd woken up that morning and assured myself it wasn't her, it couldn't be, that there was no way I'd be seeing Lisa at the other side of a door, but still, I paid more attention than usual as I got dressed. I didn't shave, because she didn't like me shaven. And then, as punishment for thinking she liked me better one way or the other, I
did
shave, and did a sorry job of it in my haste.

From the return address on Lisa's letters, I knew that the place I was going to didn't match up, although the postcode district was the same. I spent a considerable amount of time in M1 highway traffic inventing ways that the buyer could still be her—she had a rented office, maybe, she'd used the address of a neighbor—before I brought myself back into reality. It didn't matter. It couldn't matter. It. Wasn't. Her.

I double-parked in front of 5 Wells Rise and resisted the urge to honk. I checked my reflection in the mirror, and pulled
up, then pushed down, my socks. I took a slug of lint off of my pant leg, still thinking what if? What if nothing, Richard. Man the hell up.

I got out of the car and went up to the white town house. It was narrow and sleek, the kind of place Lisa wouldn't be happy living in. She liked her buildings dowdy, mossy, old.

I rang the bell and focused on my breathing. It either wasn't, or it was.

“Da-ave!” I heard a man's voice cry out. “Dave!”

I closed my eyes. My heart was speeding. After the turn of many door locks, the door swung partly open.

“Hi, there,” said a small man. “Yes?”

“I'm Richard Haddon,” I said. “The artist.” I nodded to the car behind me. “I've got your bear?”

“You made it!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Oooh, let's do something about the way you're parked. You'll throw your hazards on?”

A tall man came up behind him and reached out his hand.

“I'm Dave, by the way,” said the small one. “And this is Dan!”

Dan and Dave. Dave and Dan. Unless she was involved in a sexually unfulfilling triangle, I wasn't going to see Lisa Bishop today. I used the ten minutes it took us to liberate the painting from the Peugeot to talk my body out of interpreting this information as a blow.

Once the damn thing was off the roof and safely inside, Dan and Dave invited me to take my shoes off and join them for tea.

Their house was antiseptic, and I mean this in both an olfactory and an aesthetic sense. Fragrance-wise, it smelled of lemongrass, and all of the furniture—all of it—was white.

That isn't to say that their apartment wasn't cluttered. All of the available surfaces were occupied by art. Now, “art” is subjective, and at the risk of belittling my own projects, I should
probably say that I found their personal taste attractive. But I didn't. It was a mess.

There are any number of collectors. There's the new breed of interior-decorator types who don't care what it is or who painted it, as long as it's the right size and the color scheme goes with the carpet. Then there are the impressives, who care about the opposite: who painted it, and how much it cost. These are the financial fellows who think expensive art will get them laid. More likely, it's the size of the
domicile
itself that's getting them laid, it's the location in Notting Hill, or Tribeca, or what have you, but if it comforts them to think that a Rothko got their dick licked, so be it.

Then there are the obsessives. These are the people who are into one kind of thing. Mexican folk art, African sculpture, steampunk clocks—usually it's ethnic, or originates from a subculture of some kind.

My hosts, Dan and Dave, were none of the above. They were the worst types: the eclectics, the types who buy art because they like it, with no consideration as to how such or such an acquisition would harmonize with another piece. Whether a watercolor of four sheep grazing in a muddy field would look good besides a mixed-media sculpture of an electric guitar with a three-foot penis, for example.

I was standing in front of a velvet bowling ball encased inside of a giant bell jar when Dan brought out a tray of what looked—and I'm being kind here—like phlegmy seltzer, next to a large plate of dried algae.

“Shall we?” asked Dave, moving toward the center of the room, where a polar-bear skin ran underneath a glass table.

“Is that real?” I asked, toeing it with my sock.

“Goodness,” said Dan solemnly. “We're vegans.”

“It's made out of a synthetic fiber called aramid,” Dave ex
plained. “It's heat resistant. It will be the fiber of the future when the atmosphere is boiling and we don't have any skin. So you see, with the polar bear . . .”

They invited me to sit.

Dave and Dan were both sitting lotus-style with no socks on. There are few things more disconcerting than being in close proximity to a stranger's naked feet, except being asked by these same strangers to hold hands.

“Holy Danh,” Dave started, his dry palm in mine, “symbol of unity and wholeness, thank you for bringing Richard Haddon here to complete the circle of creative life. For you, eternal snake god, we put our tails in our mouth and thank you for being able to see things through from start to finish, and for holding together this beautiful world of art and health.”

I watched in disbelief as both Dan and Dave stuffed their right hands in their mouths and bit them. They remained that way for some time.

“Gggon!” mumbled Dave, his mouth full of hand flesh. He motioned at me with his free hand to join. “A snake symbolizes unity, eternity, especially when they swallow their own tails!”

What did I have to lose, really? I was in an international state of limbo with my wife, and soon enough, the world was going to overheat to the point at which it would burn off all my skin. I bit my wrist.

Afterward, his forearm glistening with saliva, Dave passed me a glass of fermented tea.

“Dan and I are pagan Continuists,” Dave explained. “We're completers of the circle. Like our snake god, we, too, try to be the belt around the world that keeps it from bursting apart. So when it comes to art collecting—”

“We need to meet the artist,” finished Dan. “It's very important to our belief system that the artist delivers the work himself.”

“Sometimes it's not possible, obviously,” said Dave. “Sometimes, the artist is dead.”

Daniel sighed. “When that happens, we call in a medium to contact him beyond the grave. We're really committed to this full-circle way of thinking.”

“It's the same thing with our diets,” said Dave, nodding toward the tray. “We only eat food that is multicellular and photosynthetic. Multicellular food contains cells that can only fulfill their self-identification process by reaching out and attaching themselves to other cells. So it is with algae. Same thing with kombucha.”

“Have you always been . . . Continuists?” I asked, peering into my glass.

“Oh, no,” said Dave, shaking his head. “I was born Catholic. So was Dan.”

“Yes,” said Dan, taking his partner's hand in his. “It's been quite a path for us. Are you an angry person, Richard?”

I took my first sip of the beverage. Effectively, yes, it tasted like a perfectly fresh seltzer that someone had used as a receptacle for their nasal drip. “I don't know.” I shrugged. “Sometimes?”

“You don't seem very angry from your wonderful
Blue Bear
.”

“Well, I painted that while my wife was pregnant. It was . . . a different time.”

“That's very kind of you to share that,” said Dan. “That's very intimate.”

I smiled. They smiled. I drank more bogey tea. After a while they let go of each other's hand.

“Dan and I have a question for you, Richard. We would like to ask permission to keep in touch.”

“Keep in touch?” I said, setting the glass down. “By, eh, how?”

“Energetically,” they both answered at the same time. “We work with an energy communicator to make sure that the peo
ple we are socializing with, the food that we are eating, and the objects we are surrounding ourselves with are all contributing positively to our vital cycles.”

“All we need is your permission for the energy communicator to check in from time to time,” continued Dave. “She'll never contact you physically, I mean, by phone or letter, but on a monthly basis or so, she'll tap into your aura.”