I MOVED in with Julien for a while until I could find my own place. Into an old duffel bag went an assembly of sentimental things: the never-ending Australian novel that previously held court by my bed, the videos of my parents, the camcorder, photos of Anne and Camille, slipped out of pewter frames. I purposely left a lot of necessities in the house, seeding reasons for me to get back inside it.
When I told Julien what had happened, our previous quarrel was forgiven. After ten days of sleeping on his couch and washing the dishes from the limited variety of pasta recipes that I made us every night, I was able to discuss WarWash with him without feeling like he was being condescending, or going out of his way to knock me down. I could see where he was coming from—his gallery was an ongoing dinner party, and I wanted to show up with an unpredictable, drunk guest who was probably going to break things. After reiterating that he and Azar Sabounjian had “history,” he told me that it still might be worth my trying there. That I had his blessing if I did.
We didn’t talk much about Anne-Laure. Those first weeks I kept my thoughts and fears inside my head, where they could shapeshift to suit that day’s particular outlook. The truth was, talking to other people about our separation made it feel too real. Safely harbored in my memory, the things that she and I had said to each other could be analyzed any number of ways, and positively, even. If I talked too much about it, it would become clear how bad things were.
After days of unreturned phone calls and e-mails sent to addresses which turned out to be spam, I finally found a small apartment through the classifieds, that French stalwart of shabby real estate, De Particulier à Particulier. A widower was temporarily letting out his writing office while he took a cathartic cruise on the houseboat he and his wife used to live in, on the Seine. He was traveling to Amsterdam, and then he’d see. He said he had another friend interested so if I got back together with my wife, to simply call him. He told me he hoped I would.
The apartment was an architectural impossibility: a fourteen-meter-square duplex on the sixth story of a narrow building in the tenth arrondissement. The first floor consisted solely of a table that was built into the wall, two benches, a sink, and a stovetop with two burners. The staircase had been designed to maximize space, with each step imitating the shape of a single foot. The only closet space was built beneath this staircase with a curtain to hide your mess. Upstairs, there was a triangular-shaped slab of wood in the corner of the room and a stool: this had functioned as the fellow’s writing desk. To the left, a futon, and in front of this, a double window that opened out onto the roofs. The bathroom was only a little larger than your standard airplane loo, and it was designed Swedish style with no separation between the shower and the shitter. When you showered, the water went everywhere, and then—eventually—it went down the drain. The owner had kindly left a squeegee for me to use after each shower, and he reminded me not to leave any electronic appliances out while I had the water running.
There was a shelf above the bed where I put some books and photos, and a freestanding hanging rack to the side of the window with just enough room for a couple of pants and shirts. I had to keep my coat on the back of the front door. There wasn’t room anywhere else for something bulky. It was a rickety building, and my next-door neighbors were forever sautéing things in fish sauce, a condiment that managed to permeate each of the apartment’s cracks, but there was good, creative energy in the space, and I was grateful to be there. It was reassuring somehow, to live somewhere so small. I felt enveloped, bolstered. And terribly alone.
It was already the new year—January 15. The holidays had come and gone without my taking part in them. In the week after I left our house on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, Anne and I had had painful, silence-filled discussions about Christmas and New Year’s. Even though we’d agreed to talk to Camille, to tell her that her mom and dad were taking that most vague and disconcerting of relational options, the infamous “break,” Anne thought it might be too much for her to spend Christmas without her father. We agreed that I could go out to Brittany for the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth and stay in a hotel, but then the Bourigeaud seniors overturned our plans: they’d decided on a destination Christmas in Marrakesh for everyone except me. “They thought a change of scenery would be good for us,” said Anne over the phone. “I’m sorry.”
And so I’d spent the holidays with my parents back in dear old Hemel Hempstead. When you’re crashing your parents’ friends’ annual pre-Christmas Christmas rasher party without your wife and daughter, you can’t get a lot past people. The dinner party was at Tabatha Adsit’s house, a neighbor down the road, and in between courses of bacon-wrapped cabbage and bacon-wrapped goose and bacon-wrapped everything, I had to repeat over and over again that I wasn’t divorced.
“We’re taking a break,” I explained, passing along a spinach salad covered in imitation bacon bits. “We’re taking some time off.”
“Oh, it never works, Richie,” said Rufus, Tabatha’s husband. “You remember back at uni?” He looked around the table. “We used to do that all the time. I mean, basically you’re saying you want to sleep with other people, and then maybe you do, and then you’ve screwed the pooch.”
“Rufus,” whispered Tabatha. “Leave it.”
“Well, I hope you two work it out,” he said, dumping salad on his plate. “She was a lovely girl.”
It didn’t help that people were conjugating everything in the past tense. Every time someone had something nice to say about my wife, they spoke as if she were dead. We always liked her. She was so beautiful. You two seemed so happy.
And then, of course, there was public concern about Camille. People wanted to know what we were telling her, wanted to explain how damaging a situation like this could be for a child if we weren’t clear about it. I replied that it was impossible to be clear about something that we weren’t clear about ourselves. Most often, this response got me a reminder not to be selfish. That this wasn’t about us.
The truth was that Camille was confused. Terribly so. It was heartbreaking to see. Upon their return from Brittany, I got to the house before Inès dropped her off, and Anne and I made sure to have all the emotional buffers on hand: her favorite kind of sparkling cider, two napoleon pastries, and a surprise school-night sleepover with her best friend, Marie, arranged later that week. Since she’d spent the last part of her vacation alone with her grandparents, I was anticipating a big-girl version of my little daughter: an energized bunny filled with stories of the things she’d seen and done without us. This led me to wrongly assume that Camille would be too distracted to make much of our announcement that Daddy was going to be leaving for a while. But vacation was one thing, home was another. And home was a house with both Mommy and Daddy inside.
Neither Anne nor I knew how far we should go to make our five-year-old “get” it. Anne’s opinion was that if we told her the real truth, she’d grow up resenting me, and might not trust other men. And though this line of thinking was more generous than I deserved, I was none too eager to one day have a spiteful adolescent writing angsty poems about me, so I agreed to reiterate the vague message that we were “spending time apart.”
Having told some people—most importantly, Anne-Laure—that I was moving forward with WarWash, I should have spent the holiday week at my parents working hard on sketches and a pitch. But once there, I was pulled back into an incubator of nostalgia and self-centeredness. Everything was starting to overlap and I was worried that the project was going to become too much about me and my marital problems when, shit, in order to be credible and timely, it needed to allude to the actual, horrid things taking place in Iraq.
Accordingly, to offer myself an outlet for my overflowing sap, I started up with the camcorder again. With it being the holidays, the Haddon house was filled with the comings and goings of couples of all shapes and sizes, except for the divorced. The desire to document these well-enough-adjusted people came from a perverse place, but it made me feel better to get out of my own head and into the lives of others. Somewhere in between their stories of financial hardship and shared memories, their advice on navigating flatulence and bad breath, was a deeper message about making love last. They were happy to sit across from each other at dinner every night, comforted by their shared bed; these clockwork rituals hadn’t made them run screaming into another person’s arms, and I thought if I recorded them, some answer would rise up through the footage to help me learn why not.
I decided to call this side project Witness, and by inflating my own case a little—a lot—I was able to convince some of my parents’ friends to participate in my documentary about married love “for a gallery in the States.”
The first couple to rise to the occasion was the Adsits, our rasher-dinner hosts. I filmed them back-to-back in their living room, as I had done with my own parents, and afterward, Tabatha admitted that she hadn’t had such a good time in years. Apparently, she’d had a laundry list of irritations molding away inside of her, just waiting for someone to come along and ask her what drove her nuts about her mate.
Despite his garrulousness on the subject of my own marital troubles, Rufus Adsit stayed recalcitrant during his filmed portion, the clever man. He said he loved Tabatha’s cooking and that she made a good bed with perfect hospital corners. When I asked when he first realized that he loved her, he blushed scarlet red. “She was very nice to my parents,” he managed. “She was very natural in the home.”
In addition to my parents’ other closest friends, the Bainbridges, I also called up Harold. It was harder to lie to him about the purpose of the film; we’d shared a man stroll, after all. Right away, he knew that this had something to do with my wife.
My interview with Harold and Rosalyn Gadfrey lasted aeons—I had to do it over two sittings. Despite having two children with Rosalyn, and sharing nearly twenty years of marriage, Harold was still besotted with her, and her with him. It was difficult for me to get them to share what bugged them about each other.
Rosalyn: “He leaves his socks balled up in the dirty hamper.”
Harold: (hands up) “Guilty as charged!”
Rosalyn: “Well, he does snore a bit, but you get used to it, don’t you? It’s sort of like the ocean.”
Harold: “My Rosie loves the beach!”
I got hours of film. Tapes and tapes. I had four interviews so far, all happy couples, all from Hemel Hempstead, all heterosexual, all white. Not exactly a sociological slice of life. I could have turned it into something bigger, traveled into London, interviewed other people there, but when I finished with the Gadfreys, I felt like I had enough. In the beginning, listening to other people’s gripes kept me sane. But as I rewound the tapes and watched the marital confessions from the privacy of my too-short childhood bed, I saw that they weren’t complaints as much as confessions of how much these people loved each other. Confessions about the sacrifices they’d made and continued to make in order to live the life they’d decided on, to make each other happy. By the end of the sessions, I wasn’t inspired or comforted, I was jealous. And very, very sad.
• • •
When I returned to Paris after the holidays to my Tiny Tim–sized abode, horrid January was upon us with its holiday markdowns and its tattered storefronts. I couldn’t sit about sniffling at other people’s recollections forever. I had to move forward with WarWash. Make something of myself by making stuff again.
My first choice for new representation remained Azar Sabounjian—one of the most intimidating gallerists in Paris. Elegant and frank, he was a major force behind the revitalization of contemporary art in the capital, repping heavy hitters like the British photographer Martin Parr and the controversial American photographer Larry Clark. With my C-level status, it would be a long shot for me to even get a meeting with Azar, much less a private show. But for the long-term health of my self-confidence, I had to try. I also had to test out my idea in a Laundromat that was far enough out of the way that I wouldn’t be recognized if I blew anything up.
My destination was a crumbling building called the Lavo-Magick! on a long street that ran along the border between the twentieth arrondissement and the Bagnolet suburbs, referred to in French as la banlieue, and commonly followed by the modifier chaude, meaning dangerous, meaning (in racially charged code speak) that its residents are neither affluent nor white.
I’d come equipped with bits and bobs to sacrifice: Goodwill T-shirts, a Rod Stewart cassette tape, inconsequential photographs, an old IKEA catalog, and a quart of oil.
When I arrived at the Lavo-Magick!, I saw that I had competition—deviant customers had passed this way before. The storefront was covered in tags and graffiti, and there were iron bars across the two windows facing the street. A puddle of urine lay fermenting on top of the pavement, and a plastic bag of clothing lay next to that. On the other side of the cement steps leading into the Laundromat was an old—as in petrifying—pile of dog shit.
The inside wasn’t as bad as the exterior led me to expect. Except for a couple of tags and intersected initials on the walls, the Laundromat was clean of both graffiti and piss. There were four fold-up orange chairs in the corner, and four corresponding washers and dryers, which was kind of sweet. One chair per machine.
Fearful that someone might come in soon, I stuffed my objects and clothing into a washer and shut the door. For the first time, it occurred to me that my little experiment might do irreparable damage to an actual person’s store. Or, at the very least, the person who used washer numero quatro after my dark passage was probably going to find their textiles covered in hot sludge. I checked my wallet—thirty-five euros in cash and a two-euro coin. I had a permanent marker in my bag and a scratchpad. I’d leave an out-of-service notice. And some cash. No, not cash, no way of knowing who would pick it up. I’d look up the contact info of the Lavo-Magick! once I was home. Make a donation of some sort. With a good-luck glance to the ceiling, I opened up the detergent compartment and poured in a couple lugs of gas.
As I sat there watching my discarded goods whirl away into oblivion, I wished that I could get in touch with Anne. I longed to have her beside me to witness forty-two minutes of Rod Stewart ballads being washed away in oil. But you lose the opportunity to share the good things when you do something bad. That was the worst of it maybe, or it was at that moment. Wanting to reach out and make my wife laugh and not having the right to. Not being able to make her smile anymore.
After twenty minutes, a tired-sounding beep signaled that my “clothes” were ready. I opened the door and peered inside. The steel container wasn’t as gloopy as I thought it would be—I’d imagined that a mixture of gas and water would have caused the concoction to congeal in oleaginous globs on my belongings, but this wasn’t the case.
The cassette was in bad shape—sorry, Rod. The shirts looked like they’d been used to slough off an afterbirth, but strangely, the smell was not unpleasant, a mixture of car exhaust and prune juice. The catalog had gotten the worst of it—it was a battered, pulpy mess, and when I saw the little balls of magazine paper wadded up inside the steel drum’s grid, I felt pretty certain that between this and the addition of a hazardous material into the otherwise sanitary space, the poor washer might never work again.
I scribbled the out-of-service message I’d planned on and tried to suppress the guilt inside my heart. It hadn’t been that much oil. It might, quite literally, come out in the wash. I could put the Lavo-Magick! in the acknowledgments page of the exhibition booklet, if there was one. I could give them some art.
Feeling moderately better once my hand-scrawled sign was on the washer, I took out my mess and transferred it to a dryer, thus preparing to demolish yet another machine.
Or blow up a whole neighborhood. Only about a minute into the dryer cycle, my wife-free (and thus severely compromised) brain kicked back into business, suggesting that it probably wasn’t a great idea to combine dry heat and gas. A burning smell confirmed this and I shut the whole thing off, anxious that any moment a neighborhood watch group was going to come in and accost the idiotic foreigner concocting lab tests in their Laundromat.
I shoved the gooey lumps of stuff back into the bag I’d brought everything in, left a twenty-euro bill on top of the ailing washer as penance, and got the hell out of the Lavo-Magick! The fact that I hadn’t burned the place to its foundations seemed like magic indeed.
• • •
It took me four more days of preparation before I had the courage to call the Azar Sabounjian gallery. By that time, I had desperation more than courage. Camille had been invited on a weekend to Bordeaux with her best friend, Marie, which meant that I had three days ahead of me in which I’d be unexpectedly alone. I figured the time would pass less torturously if I had something to think about. If Azar turned me down, I could spend my weekend wallowing. If he accepted my ludicrous proposition, I could gloat.
I dialed the gallery, and when the phone started ringing, I missed not having a landline. What if there was one of those echoes you sometimes get with cell phones? What would I do then? After five rings, however, a receptionist picked up. I detected a British accent, although she was speaking in French, but I didn’t want to be overfamiliar with a person I didn’t know yet, so I asked her, in French, if I might speak to Azar.
“May I ask who’s speaking?” she said flatly.
An awkward question, as Azar had no idea who I was.
“A dissatisfied client of the Premier Regard gallery?” It was the first thing that came to mind, but it was a lousy thing to do to Julien. Reputation was everything in the Parisian art world—word would get around. But then again, by his own admission, Julien had a bone to pick with Azar. If I acted aware of their past history, it might help my case.
“May I ask what this is about?” the voice continued, apparently unfazed by whether I was dissatisfied or not.
“I’m an artist,” I fumbled. “I’ve had quite a few shows in the area, and I have an idea for an installation I’d like to talk to him about.”
“But you’ve never shown here?”
“No,” I said, swallowing, “But I’ve shown at the Atelier Buci and the Premier Regard—”
“I understand that,” she continued. “But we don’t just take artists on references.”
“I don’t have any references.” Too late, it was out. “I mean, I’m not intending to use these galleries as references. I just wanted to . . . pitch an idea?”
“I’m afraid that—” There was a long pause, and the sound of the phone being put down on a hard surface. I heard muffled voices in the background.
“Could you hold on, please, Mr.—”
“Haddon,” I supplied.
And so I held. After a modest eternity, a man picked up.
“This is Azar Sabounjian,” said a polished voice on the other line. “What can I do for you?”
It was all very well and fine to have a written proposition sitting on the table beside me; I’d forgotten to prepare something conversational to say.
“My name is Richard Haddon, and I’ve done several shows in the area—”
“Alice explained that to me, yes?”
“I have an idea for an installation that would be perfect for your gallery.”
“You’re familiar with my gallery?” I thought I heard him typing.
“Of course.”
“I see,” he said distractedly. “And where’d you say you’ve shown before?”
“Well, I’m from London originally,” I mustered. “So I’ve had some shows over there, and also in the United States and in Paris.”
“Where in Paris?”
“The Premier Regard, Espace 66, Atelier Buci—”
“Aha,” he replied, coughing. “So you know Julien?”
“Yes,” I replied, careful not to insinuate whether I considered knowing Julien a good thing or a bad.
“Has he sold your work?”
“Yes,” I said. “A lot.”
“So why don’t you do your installation there?”
“He doesn’t do installations,” I replied.
He snorted, which I took as a good sign.
“And what’s the installation about, exactly?”
“The situation between America and England in Iraq.”
“And you said you’re British.”
I admitted I was.
After a pause that seemed longer than it needed to be, he said, “I’ll tell you what, Richard. I like installations. I like international art. I like young art . . .”
I quivered. I was in my midthirties. Was I young, or was I old?
“I’m not a fan of unsolicited phone calls, but I fucking hate George Bush.” His words were crisp and clipped. “Look, why don’t you pop by the gallery, let’s see . . . Alice?” he hollered. “Friday the twenty-eighth?”
My response took all of two seconds to conjure. Thanks to the demolition of my marriage, I didn’t have a single Friday in my future with anything planned.
“I’ll give you ten minutes,” he offered.
“Ten minutes is good.”
“Come after lunch, then. Let’s say three?”
“Three o’clock,” I repeated. “Perfect.”
“Very good, then,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The dial tone blared its taunting singsong in my ear. Sweet fuck all, I thought, putting the phone down. The twenty-eighth was tomorrow?