The woman warrior returns!” Jett called as I stepped through the gate. “Come, have a celebratory drink.”
I’d been in the States for three weeks, promoting my novel. I’d returned to Aubais that afternoon, and after spending a few hours with the kids, I drove to Jett’s place. She lived in a maison de village, a two-story house with windows opening onto a flower-filled courtyard. It was April. Honeysuckle climbed a trellis and daffodils bloomed in clay pots. It was six o’clock, time for an aperitif. Jett sat in a chair by a fountain. She pushed another chair in my direction.
“Miss our local nectar?” Jett asked, pouring me a glass of wine.
“More than you might imagine,” I said, taking a long sip of rosé. I was exhausted. I’d hit nineteen cities in three weeks, had given readings in bookstores, interviews on television and radio. I’d been on so many flights and slept in so many different beds that I hardly knew where I was from one day to the next. We had a babysitter at the house to assist while I was away, but I’d asked Jett to drop by as well, to check in on things.
“I stopped by to make sure the place hadn’t burned down.”
“Well, it might as well have. It’s a disaster,” I said. “Laundry everywhere.”
“Typical man,” Jett said, sipping her wine. “They’re like children. Thank goodness I do not have that headache. Actually, children I wouldn’t mind. Children develop.”
I laughed and drank, happy to be with Jett. She didn’t seem to have any inhibitions. She did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to do it. There were times that I wished I could be more like her. Jett had been urging me for many months to take a lover, even offering the use of her house for the purpose. I had never taken her up on the offer. But in New York I’d met a man I will call Jack at a book event, and we spent a night out on the town together. This guy was a big sexy mess, a writer and musician (yes, I have a type) with a mop of curly blond hair, huge blue eyes, and cherubic lips. Although I didn’t actually have sex with Jack, I was unfaithful to my husband in every real sense of the word. I had willingly—joyfully, in fact—picked up a man in New York City.
“About bloody time!” she said when I’d finished telling her about Jack. “I’m only surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
“Really?” I said, realizing I hadn’t put up such a good front after all. “You thought it would happen?”
“Oh, my dear,” she said, touching my knee. “Nikolai has had this coming for ages. He has a beautiful wife and does nothing at all to take care of her sexually. He doesn’t make an effort.” Jett leaned back in her chair. “I think it’s fantastic, simply wonderful, that you let your hair down on your book tour. Lord knows every male writer who’s been on a book tour has had an affair.”
“Well, I didn’t actually have an affair,” I said, just to clarify.
“Wait, wait. I’m confused: Did you sleep with him?”
“It didn’t actually get that far,” I said. “Although I’m sure it would have if we’d had the chance.”
“Oh, my,” Jett said, looking stricken. “What a disappointment. Well, will you see him again?”
“We’re on different continents,” I said, taking a final sip of my wine. “Not very practical.”
“Being practical,” Jett said, her black eyes meeting mine, “is your biggest flaw.”
“Actually, I think I should just tell Nikolai about what happened,” I said.
“What?” Jett shrieked, nearly spitting out wine. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Nothing else has worked for us,” I said. “Moving here didn’t change things, the renewal ceremony didn’t change things, being financially secure hasn’t changed things. A beautiful house hasn’t changed things. Maybe this will shake things up. He might start to value me a little if he thought he could lose me.”
“Darling, listen,” Jett said, taking my hand. “This is not the kind of thing you should disclose to your husband.” She looked me in the eye. “Believe me, I applaud you. It was high time you did something for yourself. I would even say you should have gone further and that you should try to stay in touch with this fellow. Every Frenchwoman worth her salt has a lover or two. But this idea that you have to be transparent is only going to make things worse. Besides, how do you know he’s not doing the same?”
The village church bells chimed. It was seven o’clock. Time for Alex and Nico to have dinner. Usually the kids called when I was away, but my phone had been silent. I dug in my bag, looking for my phone, but it wasn’t there. I checked my jacket. It wasn’t there either. It was most likely in the car, on the passenger seat, where I sometimes threw it when I climbed in. I stood, grabbed my bag and kissed Jett good-bye before heading out to the car.
“WHAT THE FUCK is this?” Nikolai said, pushing my phone in my face.
I’d just walked through the gate, returning from Jett’s place.
“What. The. Fuck. Is. This?” he said again.
After the Red Suitcase Incident, I’d suspected that he snooped around on my phone when he had the chance, just as I suspected he went into my computer. Up until recently I had done nothing that could have raised his suspicions, and yet I felt that he was watching me, sifting through my messages and my browsing history and my phone log and my text messages. I had no hard proof of this, but only the strange feeling that something in the order and arrangement of my privacy had been rearranged whenever I left Nikolai alone at home.
Now that there was something incriminating to find, I had been careful. On my way back to France, I’d cleaned out my phone. I looked through the messages, meticulously deleting anything that could have been damning, especially the messages between me and Jack.
“Are you going to answer me?” he said, shaking the phone at me. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Don’t talk to me like that!” I said, stepping close and lowering my voice to a whisper. “The kids might hear you!”
I beckoned for him to follow me, and we walked to the ancient well. I felt a sudden urge to jump into its wide, deep mouth and disappear.
“I want details,” he said.
“Details?”
“Details. About what happened on your book tour.”
I reached for my phone, but he pulled it away.
“Give me the phone,” I said, stepping closer to him.
“I know everything,” he said, giving me a triumphant look.
“Everything about what?” I replied, making another grab for my phone. He held it over his head. “There’s nothing to know.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re a liar.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
“I am talking about this,” he said, and pulled up a message I’d written to Jack.
I met Nikolai’s trembling, enraged gaze. I said, “What in the hell are you doing snooping through my phone?”
This was not the reaction he had expected. “That isn’t the point.”
“It is exactly the point,” I said. “You were spying on me. What kind of relationship is this anyway? You say I’m a liar, but you’re the one sneaking around. It explains why I’ve never trusted you. You’re a spy!”
Nikolai blinked, blinked again, his skin flushing red. “Don’t try to turn this around on me,” he said.
“This would never have happened if you’d respected my privacy.”
“Who is Jack?”
“Tell me how you got into my phone, and I’ll tell you,” I said.
Nikolai said, “I know your passcode.”
“How?”
“We were both born in 1973,” he said.
“Oh,” I said dumbly. I had not chosen the most cryptic of passcodes. “But how did you . . . ? There were no messages in my phone.”
“You didn’t think to empty your trash folder,” he sneered.
“You’re right,” I said, getting mad. “I wouldn’t think to empty my trash folder, because I would never expect that my husband was a spy and that I would need to hide every last thing from him!”
“Who is Jack?”
“Why does it matter?”
“It matters, that’s why it matters.”
“I met him in New York,” I said. “And we went out together.”
“Out?”
“And he invited me to a bar, and I went,” I continued. “And drank a little too much. And that’s it.”
“That’s it?” he said, his voice rising in disbelief. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What else happened?” he demanded. “Specifically.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is,” he said, “did you fuck him?”
“No,” I said. My response was immediate and confident. I wasn’t lying. We hadn’t been exactly chaste, but we hadn’t rented a room either.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“I’m telling the truth.”
“You’re such a good liar that you believe your own lies.”
“I did not have sex with Jack on my book tour,” I said. “Not him or anyone else.”
“What about in the bathroom?” he asked, holding up my phone with the message on the screen. “You refer to locking yourselves in the bathroom.”
I knew then which message he had found. In it I told Jack that I was thinking about the day we’d spent together, how we’d walked through the East Village, gone to a bar, and locked ourselves in a bathroom. I wrote that I was thinking of leaving my husband, and that I loved him (Jack, not my husband), and that I wanted to see him again. It was the kind of romantic bullshit that was my signature at the time: naïve and girlish and filled with visions of escape. I was wrong to have written this letter, not only because I was married to Nikolai, but because it wasn’t true. I wasn’t in love with Jack. I didn’t have the strength to leave Nikolai. I was sad and disappointed and worn out from trying to be happy, and so I reverted to my old standby belief that falling in love could make everything better. I had gone off with Jack in New York because I’d wanted to feel loved, even if it meant doing something childish, like locking myself in a dirty, graffiti-stained bathroom with a guy called Jack. Even if it meant writing an inauthentic love letter to a man I hardly knew.
“That bathroom thing isn’t what you think it is,” I said finally.
“What do two people do when they lock themselves in the bathroom together?”
“Do you really want to know what happened in the bathroom?” I said. I hated being interrogated, even when I deserved it. “Because it is not what you think.”
“I want to know,” he said.
“We snorted coke together.”
He stood, silent and in shock, his mouth agape. “You did drugs with some random guy in a bathroom?”
“Yes,” I said, as if testifying. “That’s correct. We locked ourselves in the bathroom of a bar and did cocaine. Quite a lot of it, actually.”
I’d been right: Nikolai had not expected that I, who could barely tolerate cigarette smoke, who didn’t like pot and got tipsy after a glass of white wine, would do anything of this nature. I watched him trying to reconcile this information—this new version of me—with the image he held of me. He was trying to understand how the woman standing before him was related to the one he’d married. And he was right to be confused. I was not the woman he’d married. The woman he’d married was an idealistic twenty-eight-year-old so in awe of him that she’d followed him blindly into the abyss. The woman standing before him was a disillusioned and unloved woman whose last bit of hope had disappeared.
“It’s so stupid,” he said. “Not even you could make that up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I felt alone. I was angry and sad. I just wanted to feel something. I don’t know why I did that. I wish I could take it back. We’re so unhappy. We’re like strangers. We don’t even talk to each other anymore.”
“So that was your revenge?” he said. “Going off with some guy?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t plan it,” I said. “It just happened.”
Which was true and not true. While meeting Jack had been a random encounter, I’d been the perpetrator, the active agent who’d made it all happen. I had wanted to feel something intense and sexual and romantic, something that would help me forget my unhappy marriage, and I had targeted Jack. At the time it felt as if I’d just floated into the situation, but I had not simply floated into Jack’s arms. I was lonely and disappointed and looking for someone to make me happy. I was proving to myself—through concrete and unambiguous actions—that I was fearless enough, and beautiful enough, and young enough to have a fling if I chose to do so. If you had asked me at the time if this was my intent, I would have sworn up and down that it wasn’t. I would have said that I loved my husband and adored my marriage and that leaving it was the last thing I wanted. But it wouldn’t have been true. The truth was that I dreaded my life. The truth was that I was running from the dream I’d made. The truth was that I wanted to destroy the dream. But I couldn’t allow that truth to be true.
AFTER THE FAILED renewal ceremony and my book-tour tryst, the narrative that we were “starting over” died and a new practicality took its place. I no longer believed that I could re-create what we had lost. I accepted the reality that our relationship was broken and that it was unlikely I could fix it.
Instead of fixing us, I tried to see marriage in a different way: Our relationship was not about love, it was about family. It was not about creating a better marriage, but digging in and protecting what was left of the one I had. I began to see myself as the mechanism in a family machine, one designed to raise two children and provide an environment for work and health. The family machine needed to function, and discussions of love were inefficient and irrelevant. There could be contentment in this version of marriage, and for a while I found comfort in this weird way of seeing things. My work, my kids, and my home kept me going. And while this caused less frustration and heartache, in giving up on love I abandoned that precious thing that had motivated all my actions: hope.
On weekends I would pack up the kids, and the three of us would leave Aubais, going to Nîmes or Montpellier or Paris, leaving Nikolai at home. That I was replicating a pattern—taking off rather than being strong enough to confront the problem head-on—didn’t occur to me. I just wanted out of there. I wanted to feel good again. I wanted to feel the sun on my face, eat a picnic lunch with the kids, and be happy for a few hours. I didn’t care where we went, just so long as we were away from the toxic zone of our home.
During that period I began imagining various endings to my story with Nikolai. All of them relied upon a magical escape, some fantasy that would change my life. In one fantasy I found the hidden Templar gold under the fortress. It was not hidden in the cuve below the kitchen, not even close. The Templars had been too clever to put it there. It was at the bottom of the old well, tucked into a corner of the old olive press. The well had been abandoned long before we moved in, maybe even before the age of modern plumbing. The first time I looked into it, I dropped a stone, listening for water, but the stone hit chalk. It was dry, but that didn’t mean it was barren: The treasure must be down there, waiting at the bottom. I had read in the Midi Libre a few months before that a couple in the village of Millau had discovered a stash of gold coins in their basement, a pouch secreted away during the French Revolution, when the rich were hiding their savings before losing their heads. The Templars had been the victims of a plot by the king, and many of them were murdered on a single night, Friday, October 13, 1307. Those Knights spared death were tortured until they confessed crimes they hadn’t committed. But the Knights Templar had been made of strong stuff. Not one of them had disclosed the true location of their gold in La Commanderie. Their treasures had stayed hidden. Waiting for me. I would find their gold and buy myself a new life.
And so it went: I dreamed of unrealistic solutions to my unhappiness. I could live in that delusional state of mind for a while, but at the strangest moments, when I was taking the kids to school or buying baguettes at the boulangerie, the truth would hit me: I am alone. Married, with two children, but utterly and completely alone. My father was dead; my mother was far away; my husband and I were cogs in a family machine. In these moments I would stop, take a breath, and close my eyes, feeling the prick of loneliness pinch and disperse through my body. A depth would open in my heart, a funneling darkness so deep, so insatiable, that everything—the kids, the house, the car, my work, faith, everything—fell inside, leaving just me. I wanted to fill this darkness. I wanted to surround myself with curtain walls and bulwarks, with layer upon layer of armor. I wanted to build a wall so thick that nothing, and no one, could touch me.
IN FEBRUARY 2012 my friend Diana invited me to join her for a ski trip to Austria. Nikolai didn’t ski and didn’t like airplanes, so he stayed home with our new nanny, Sveti, a Bulgarian woman in her fifties. Yana and Ivan had interviewed Sveti in Bulgaria and sent her to help us with the kids, believing that this could ease our growing marital problems. It was an open secret that Nikolai and I were desperately unhappy. Anyone who stepped into our home could feel it. And so Sveti arrived, like a savior from the east. She was kind to Alex and Nico and became a reliable driving companion for Nikolai. With her arrival the dynamics of our marriage shifted. I could ask Sveti to help me with laundry or cleaning, instead of expecting my husband to lend a hand. If I needed help with the shopping or the laundry, Sveti was there. If I couldn’t make dinner, Sveti stepped in. Finally someone had my back.
We met Diana and her two boys near Innsbruck, at an alpine lodge tucked between two steep mountains. Great bristling pines splotched the white slopes green. The views from the ravine were stunning, majestic, with snowcapped peaks and wooden chalets. We took the gondola up the Stubai Glacier to the heights of the Alps, where the air was so cold and clear it seemed as if I’d never really breathed before. While the kids learned technique with instructors, Diana and I took long runs, stopping to warm ourselves at ski stations, picking the kids up late in the afternoon and going back to the hotel for dinner.
Diana and I spent a lot of time talking on the chairlifts. She lived in London and was in the middle of a bitter divorce. She had been separated from her husband, Joseph, for over a year, and she’d just learned that he’d become involved with one of their nannies. Diana’s husband was fifty; the nanny was twenty-five. Diana had been keeping me up to date about the proceedings with weekly calls, and the situation was not improving—they were spending tens of thousands of pounds in legal expenses and were locked in a stalemate over custody, alimony, the liquidation of their Kensington apartment, the boys’ school fees, retirement accounts, life insurance, division of stocks, and maintenance.
Thank God Nikolai and I are not going through that, I thought whenever I heard the gruesome details of Diana’s divorce. The “thank God I’m not them” sentiment was something I felt every time I heard about a nasty breakup. They were everywhere, these couples who fought like savages over property or summer visitation. A friend had just told me the story of a woman who had pounded up her own face with a brick and gone to the police to report that her husband had beaten her. I heard another story of a man who not only took his wife’s engagement ring back but stole all her jewelry, every piece, and dumped it into the river. Such people made my parents’ divorce, which I had always considered the nastiest separation in the history of all separations, look pleasant.
These stories put my marriage in perspective. Nikolai and I might have been struggling, we might have been unhappy, he might have had a fling with one of his students, and I might have gone overboard on my book tour, but we were educated, civilized adults. Even if we ended up separating, we would never resort to such mean and vengeful fighting. We would talk things through. We would be compassionate and understanding, logical and calm. He’d been a Buddhist monk, after all, and I was determined not to repeat the mistakes my parents had made. We would be different. Of that I was sure.
Late one night the kids and I came back to our hotel room to find a red light blinking on the phone. There were three or four messages waiting from Nikolai. It wasn’t that unusual. There were always messages waiting from Nikolai, as well as dozens of text messages and missed calls on my cell phone. Since my book tour, he’d begun interrogating me whenever I left the house, asking me who I’d met and what we did. He wanted a confession from me, a remorseful admission of guilt. But I had nothing to confess. Other than the fact that I no longer loved him.
When I called back, Nikolai answered on the first ring. His voice was anxious.
“Where were you?” he said. His breathing was loud and irregular, as if he’d been running.
“At dinner,” I said. “There’s a buffet between seven and nine. Just like last night.”
“I called ten times, and you didn’t answer.”
“We were skiing all day,” I said.
“What about the kids?”
“They were skiing, too,” I said. “We came here to ski. They’re in ski school every day, learning.”
“I don’t understand why you guys left,” he said.
“Yes you do,” I said, exasperated. “We’re skiing in Austria with Diana.”
“What’s so special about Austria? Why can’t you ski here?”
“Because there’s no snow in the south of France,” I said.
“Then why didn’t you let me come with you?” He sounded like a child who hadn’t been invited on a playdate. “Why did I have to stay behind? I wanted to come.”
I was trying to keep my temper. “You were welcome to come with us. You said you didn’t want to come. You don’t ski. You hate flying.”
“You tricked me into staying here,” he said. “You’re always finding a way to take the kids and leave me behind. Who’s with you? A man?”
“You know I’m here with Diana,” I said. It was getting exhausting, having to defend myself at every turn, but some part of me must have felt I deserved it, because I didn’t hang up. I listened. I tried to reason with him. This was the price I must pay to keep my life from falling apart. I felt I owed it to Alex and Nico to hold on as long as humanly possible, to endure, as if marriage were a marathon. One thing I’d learned from my childhood was that sometimes, when things are bad and it didn’t seem like I could endure another day, holding on would get me through. My life had become an endurance test: How much could I bear before I broke?
“Who else did you meet there?” he asked, his voice lowering to a whisper. “Austrian businessmen? Friends of Diana’s?”
“You’re not serious,” I said.
“London stockbrokers? Hedge-fund guys? I know the kind of men Diana likes. Tell me. Is she setting you up with someone? Who’s there with you?”
“You are being totally ridiculous,” I said. “You know I’m here with the kids. Diana is here with her boys. It’s a family vacation. That’s all.”
“I don’t trust you,” he said. “Not after New York.”
“New York has nothing to do with it. You’ve been paranoid and jealous since the minute we met. What happened in New York just gives you an excuse to act like a psycho,” I said, glancing over my shoulder to see if the kids were in earshot. They were. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”
“Put Nico on the phone,” he said.
I gave the phone to Nico. She sat on the bed and answered a series of yes-or-no questions. I could only imagine what he was asking: Is your mom alone? Does she leave you in the room alone? Is there a man there? Does Diana have a boyfriend?
I began bracing myself for the fight that we would inevitably have when I got home. It would go something like this: It might have been out of line to call me so many times, and his calls might have been accusatory and paranoid, but it was my fault. I had left him to go to Austria, and so I was to blame for making him feel abandoned. I should apologize for putting him through hell.
As Nico answered her father’s questions, Alex shot me a sad, knowing look, one that said, Of course Daddy wants to talk to Nico and not me, and my heart sank. Neither of us fully understood then that Alex was lucky to be spared that kind of attention. In some ways Alex’s invisibility was a shield.
NIKOLAI MET US at the airport in Montpellier. I stacked the suitcases onto a cart and shepherded the kids through the terminal and out to the Citroën station wagon. Nikolai peered at us from the driver’s seat, his eyes shaded by his black porkpie hat. He said something in Bulgarian, and Sveti jumped out of the car to load the bags into the back. Of course, I thought, shaking my head in exasperation. Let the nanny carry the luggage. I had come to resent him for his unapologetic dependence on women, his reliance on me and his mother and Sveti. In my resentful state of mind, I translated this as a lack of masculinity. I would focus on every little thing that bugged me, mentally picking apart his flaws. Sometimes in the heat of a fight, I ridiculed him openly, calling him a pussy or a loser. I was mean and petty, trying to humiliate him, to make him feel how much I resented him. Such hazing rituals had become more regular chez nous, and although he did his share of name-calling, I was the Queen of Ridicule. I ripped into him and then ridiculed him for being wounded. There was no warmth or tenderness possible in this kind of contest. When I hurt him, I never actually felt that I’d won. In fact, I felt, at those moments, like the biggest loser on the planet: I might have scored the point, but I was losing the match. Real love could never live in such fierce conditions.
The kids and I helped Sveti with the bags, and when we’d shoved everything in, Sveti returned to the front seat of the car. I slid in with the kids, the three of us pressed together in the back. As we pulled away from the airport and drove onto an access road near the highway, Sveti glanced back at me with concern. She said something in Bulgarian, and Nikolai pulled the car over.
“Sveti says you should sit in the front seat. That’s your place.”
“No, that’s fine,” I said, realizing that it was in fact rather strange for the babysitter to sit up front with my husband while I sat in back with the kids, but then again everything about our family’s situation had become unnatural in the past years. “I’ll stay back here,” I said. And in truth I would rather have stayed in the back with Alex and Nico anyway. I loved spending time with them. It was the least stressful and happiest part of my life.
But Nikolai, perhaps feeling Sveti’s disapproval, insisted that I get in the front seat. I untangled myself from my children and took my place by Nikolai. Now that we were all in our proper seats, Nikolai began his first round of questioning.
“How was Austria?” he asked, glancing in the rearview mirror at Alex and Nico.
“Amazing!” they said in unison.
“So did you ski?” Nikolai asked.
“Of course!” Alex said. “We skied every day.”
“That’s ah-MAAA-zing!” he said in an over-the-top Mister Rogers voice.
“I went down a black run,” Alex said, his pride evident.
“A black run?” Nikolai exclaimed, his enthusiasm tangible. “Ah-MAAA-zing!”
“And I lost Stinky in the airport,” Nico said.
“What?” Nikolai said, his eyes wide with fake incredulity. “You lost Stinky?”
Stinky was Nico’s favorite stuffed animal, a hippo she slept with every night. Nico sat up on her knees, straining against her seat belt, the emotions of the experience coloring her voice, and said, “It was terrible! I left him at the play area in the airport, and we didn’t know he was gone until we were on the plane! And Mama had to run out past security to get him! I thought I would never see him again!”
“It’s a miracle we didn’t miss our flight,” I said, and it was true: I’d barely had time to get back through security before they closed the door to the plane. Nico loved Stinky so much that we all lived in fear of the day we actually lost him.
“It’s like in New York,” Nikolai said. “When she left Stinky in Central Park.”
“Did I lose Stinky in Central Park?” Nico asked, amazed.
“You were about four years old,” Nikolai said. “And we went to the Central Park Zoo. When we were driving away, you let out a shriek, and we realized that you’d forgotten Stinky on a park bench. I turned the car around, drove as fast as I could back to the park, ran to the bench, and rescued Stinky. You were so happy!”
I stared at Nikolai, taking in his version of the story. The details of the situation were correct—Nico had left her stuffed hippo on a bench in Central Park, and she’d screamed at the top of her lungs when she discovered it was missing. Nikolai had indeed turned the car around and driven back to the park, but he’d been driving the car, and so it had been up to me to run into the park and retrieve the hippo. I’d played a significant role in saving Stinky, and here he was, taking all the credit.
“Nikolai,” I said, “that’s not how it happened.”
He gave me an odd look, part confusion, part annoyance. “Of course it is.”
“You didn’t go into the park,” I continued.
Nikolai looked at me as if I were crazy. “Yes I did,” he said. “I ran to the zoo and hunted until I found Stinky.”
“Where did you find him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean where was he?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking this over. “Where Nico left him.”
“You don’t remember,” I said. “Because you were driving. You stopped, and I jumped out of the car and went into the park to get Stinky.”
“That’s not what happened,” he said.
“Yes it is,” I said, absolutely certain that I had the facts right. But even if I didn’t have the facts right, I was fighting for credit, fighting to be seen, fighting to be recognized for my role as Stinky’s savior. “Stinky was sitting on the third bench from the zoo entrance.”
As we continued our drive toward home, I stared at the highway, going over the incident in my mind, replaying the sequence of events. It was just one small and insignificant episode out of thousands of small and insignificant episodes in our lives, an unmemorable and random incident, but suddenly it took on a greater importance. It became, all at once, the single frame in the movie that had captured the whole narrative. We were living together, experiencing our day-to-day lives in tandem, but we had totally disconnected experiences. We both thought we were the heroes of the story. We both remembered saving Stinky. My husband lived in one story, and I lived in a different one.
I glanced into the backseat and saw Alex looking at me with interest. He’d been there, in the car, sitting next to his sister, watching quietly as his parents reacted to her missing-hippo emergency in Central Park. He remembered what had happened, I was sure of it. I loved his perfect repose, the tranquillity of his watchfulness. I wasn’t going to ask him to report his version of what had happened with Stinky. Asking him to correct Nikolai or to correct me would be asking him to take sides, to contradict one of us. Any judgment he made would unsettle his equilibrium. It was that very suspension that kept him aloft between his parents, that weightlessness that protected him from us. And this fragile balance was the one thing too sacred to break.
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. It was such a stupid thing to argue about—who’d saved Nico’s hippo?—but this small, silly thing tipped a scale inside me. At home I grabbed my coat and walked through the courtyard. Aubais was warm compared to Austria, but I threw on my jacket anyway and headed to my car. The prospect of going back into La Commanderie and returning to my life with Nikolai there was too much for me. I fought back tears. This is what my life had come to: Even before I got home, I needed to leave again.
Driving would clear my mind. I got into my car, opened the windows, and turned on the French news. I pulled out into the village and drove down past the bulls. It was blue, blue skies for as far as I could see. I drove past an olive grove filled with barren trees. My eyes were brimming with tears, and I could hardly see, but I was driving faster and faster, taking the corners without slowing, daring fate to put me in harm’s way. Maybe it was for the best. If I were to die in an accident, no one could blame me for giving up on my marriage. I wouldn’t be a terrible wife. I wouldn’t have to explain my failure to my children. I could escape without making the hardest decision of my life: to leave.
In Sommières I parked by the Vidourle River and called Diana. She’d just made it back to London, and I could hear her boys running through the apartment, screaming and laughing in the background, and for the first time in all the years I’d known Diana, I envied my friend, truly envied her. Not for her expensive things or her apartment in Kensington or her fat maintenance check. I envied her freedom.
By the time I asked her to help me find a lawyer, I knew that I’d made up my mind. I was going to take a separate path. I was getting ready, packing my hopes and expectations away, and preparing for my journey out of there. The question was only how and when that path would materialize. In the meantime I would wait until the right moment arrived. I would camouflage my impulses. I would live my days as if I were the same woman I’d always been. But I wasn’t the same woman. I was a woman planning, scheming, waiting for the right moment to flee.