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 explained. “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 people 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.”
“From here?” I said.
“That’s right, from London. It doesn’t matter where you are; luminous radiation has a tremendous range.”
“Although you might want to tell us if you travel very far away,” added Dave. “Or somewhere that is too populated, like China.”
“So I need to tell you when I’m going on vacation?”
“You don’t need to do anything,” said Dave, shaking his head. “We just need to know if you feel open to the possibility of being tapped into. You know, from time to time.”
“Will I know it’s happening?” I asked.
“Some people get headaches.” Dan shrugged. “But that’s actually a good sign. A higher-order type of thing.”
I felt exhausted, depleted, and entirely spaced out. The fact that I couldn’t call Anne to laugh about the fact that this emotionally loaded painting had ended up with a couple of triple-level vegans made me feel almost incapable of meeting the world outdoors.
“Would you like a baby as a parting gift?”
I gaped at Dave, confounded. He held up his glass at an angle as a response. “A culture starter? So that you can make your own kombucha?”
“That’s very kind of you,” I managed, “but I have to take a ferry back. It might, uh, spill.”
They mumbled in agreement that a boat would be no good. We all hugged again, and I found my shoes. Before I put them on, I cast a final glance at The Blue Bear in the corner.
“Excuse us,” Dan said, following my gaze. “You must want to say good-bye.”
I was surprised to realize I did. At the threshold between still owning it and never seeing it again, I felt flush with a deep sense of loss and sadness.
I walked across their living room toward the sentimental assembly of light and shade and color that captured an emotion that I didn’t know how to get back. I stared at the painting for quite a while, hoping for an answer. But the only thing that came was the numbing disappointment of having nothing happen.
“Thank you for having me,” I said, turning toward them. “I hope that you enjoy it.”
And with that, I tied my shoes back on, slipped into my coat, and walked out into a world with no snake god holding it together, where everything I’d needed to help me find my place had come suddenly undone.