That night, lying alone, I talked to Nathalie for a long time in the dark. There, my French was perfect, and I had not yet seen my wife lying dead on a hospital gurney. I had never been maimed; my left arm was whole.
Nathalie and I sat outside at the Café des Phares, looking across the roundabout to the Bastille column as the evening traffic thinned out. We talked about Philip. I knew our conversation was pure fantasy, even while I too clearly heard it, because many of the events we discussed lay still in the future, which is now the past.
We laughed at the way Philip had transformed himself, under Angela’s sharp teasing, from an eager MBA grad with a fledgling microchip business to a would-be man of the world—complete with a taste for London tailoring and the occasional clichéd Brit inflection in his speech.
The waiter came a second time, saying monsieur/dame?, as he stood with one finger crooked in the pocket of his black vest. A group of young people went by, laughing on their way to the bars on the rue de Lappe.
Nathalie and I switched from Pernod to red wine and tried to guess how the first date had gone, back when Angie was an art student at Goldsmiths and Philip was a young entrepreneur visiting England in pursuit of foreign investors and corporate insurance from Lloyds.
“He acted, I think, a big baby,” Nathalie said.
“A big baby with a very active brain, full of ways to make money.”
“Yes, he was like that. Very fast in the head.”
After a two-year courtship, Philip and Angela settled as husband and wife in the U.S., where they spent the next ten years together—though not together enough. The company absorbed Philip day and night, while Angela puttered in larger and larger studios, getting nowhere with her career, in houses farther and farther away from New York. Finally, she found herself rambling around a modest Westchester estate while Philip was on the road—or “at work” in Manhattan, being swept along to gallery openings and dinners by the svelte, athletic Amanda Wingate.
Late in the process, Angela began to plead for a baby, in the mad hope of saving her marriage and, pathetically, binding Philip to his dependents, mother and child, with a sense of paternal duty if nothing else.
She and Philip had been married for five years when he first started to stray with other women out of town, eight when he took up with Amanda, ten when he walked out on Angela and their infant daughter.
“Still, Angela is fiercely strong,” Nathalie insisted. “It’s the other wife—Mandy, the spoiled one—who could not bear a desertion.”
“Claudia Silva would be hard for any woman to take.”
“Perhaps, but one has to expect such things in time.”
“With a man like Philip, yes.”
Nathalie breathed a long stream of smoke. “All men are like Philip,” she said. “Given the chance.”
I had learned long ago not to question Nathalie’s expertise on masculine failings and vices. In Philip’s case, she certainly had a long bill of particulars. As his wealth increased, Philip’s lovers multiplied, and the women in his life got successively better looking—a progression from cute to lovely to stunning. Remarkably, the age of his wives and lovers stayed more or less the same as his own years advanced. Angie was precisely his age, Mandy eight years younger, Claudia about a quarter of a century his junior.
Nathalie shrugged, and flipped the blue cigarette box in her fingers. “It’s banal,” she said. “Cruel and banal.”
No doubt, yet I reminded her that Philip had paid a steep price for his pleasures. Is there anything sadder than a man who longs madly for something, and suddenly gets it, only to discover that his dreams amount to the wreck of his life?
“You think he suffers now?” Nathalie asked.
“Many would.”
Her lips made a small puffing sound.
“Knowing Philip,” I said, “he probably has little choice.”
I saw the scene as though I had been there myself. When Philip came into the room, discovering Mandy’s body and seeing how the blood had run down her face and soaked into the brocade of her hand-stitched dressing gown, something inside him gave way. The break was at the center of his being, and he could not repair it. Claudia would try, poor girl, but what could she do?
In his murdered companion, her head thrown forward as if bowed in shame, Philip saw the demise of his best self and the end of the long partnership—mixing great passions and fortunes and hopes—that he once thought would preserve him from the worst ravages of passing time. His citadel, the walls he had built to repulse the uglier aspects of, well, everything, had been fatally breached. Age, disease, and death now rushed in on him, and all he could do was name them, one mundane assault after the other, as they afflicted his malfunctioning brain.
“What else could you expect?” I asked.
“A little discretion,” Nathalie said. “Philip could have kept quiet about his adventures, as politeness demands.”
“There comes a time, darling, when you can’t. When the whole histoire, even the worst, must be told.”
“For what?” Nathalie, her hair as dark as the night, looked away. “You said nothing to me when it mattered. Now I can barely hear you anymore.”
Her pale hand was steady as she finished her wine. “It’s getting very late.”
Then I knew I was coming to the end of my dream of Nathalie, because that is how all the visitations from my dead wife conclude.