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The drinking too much was quiet in its way and yet, without causing physical disturbance, was violent enough. I would start around midday, innocuously, with a glass of wine and graduate pre-dinner to scotch or bourbon. It was a problem I didn’t know I had until I was nearing the bottom of a bottle and so to avoid that feeling I would buy several bottles at once. The new complexion-challenged boy at the corner liquor store asked if I was having a party. I got into my car and started crying. But I didn’t stop drinking. Instead I spread my purchases over a wider area, knowing the while how pathetic I was.
What was wonderful was that the sex was tender, that we kissed, that we were slow, that we were a little clumsy, a lot clumsy when it came to the condom, my clumsiness and the object itself making me self-aware, embarrassed, a bit ashamed. But that faded when she kissed me. I imagined in the middle of it all that I would be less ungainly, a bit more graceful in bed the next time. I loved being inside her and somehow felt I was not experiencing it fully, that the moment was getting away from me, that it was all rushed, but it was not, time was what time is, its own pace. She moved and she didn’t move, every sound was sweet to me. I didn’t know where her hands were most of the time, but I did know they pleased me. She might have had an orgasm, but I didn’t care.
interesting change of tense in that quote
I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.
“Do you like it?”
“Did you make this?” I asked.
“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”
“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”
It was either in the yard, the kitchen, or the car, but Linda asked me a question so disturbing that where it was asked was unimportant. She asked, “If you could keep something like this from me, what other secrets are you hiding?”
Let’s say it was in the car, because there is no escaping a conversation made in an automobile. “I have no secrets,” I lied.
“No?” She laughed. “You’ve got one the size of a building in our yard.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“I never asked you about Paris,” she said.
“That was ten years ago.”
“What was ten years ago?”
“Paris,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you have to be there?”
“That was ten years ago.”
She looked out the passenger side window. She hardly spoke to me after that. There were no accusations, there was no screaming, there was nothing, not even sighing. She yawned. The kids noticed the distance between their mother and me, but didn’t address it. How could they have? I thought that my, in my mind, ancient, infidelity had finally come home to roost. Metaphors are like oil paints: when you work wet they can get away from you.
I toyed with the idea of
The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.
There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula. Back in Philadelphia I discovered bad dreams and fitful sleep. I locked myself away to explore those abstractions. My isolation wore well as I was an artist and artists were supposed to be moody and at least occasionally reclusive. The paintings I made I could just barely look at. I drank. When I emerged from my bed, so to speak, and went to my studio and revealed my paintings at my review, no one said a word. My professors, one after another, quietly, privately gave me nods of approval, then backed away as if something was wrong with me. They had no idea.
“I was so angry with you,” she said.
“I know.” I was pleased she had used the past tense. “I screwed up.”
“Not just about April,” she said. “I’ve been angry for years. You’ve just never been here.”
I listened. Before I might have become defensive, perhaps even hurt, but not now. She poured the tea. She was thirty years older than she was when we first met. She was slightly heavier. Her face was interestingly lined. Her hair was mostly gray. She had never been more beautiful than she was as she poured that tea. And I loved her. I understood that I had always loved her and I was so sad that I had never allowed her to feel that love.
“Here’s a question for you,” I said. “You find the perfect skipping stone.” I picked up a flat rock. “Say this is it. Imagine that this stone is beautifully flat, that it’s Payne’s gray in color, just like this one, oval but not egg-shaped. It’s made for the art of skipping.”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s perfect. Do you throw it or keep it?”
“You throw it,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes.” She took the stone from me. “You can keep it until you die and then you’ll never see what it can do.”
“What if you mess up the toss?” I asked. “It just goes splash into the water. No skip, not even one.”
“How is that different from dying with it in your pocket?”
I looked at the water.
“You don’t agree?” she said.
“No, I agree completely.”
“So, what’s the point of all this?”
“About this baby thing.”
interesting that i didn't save this the first time i read the book. i think about this passage a lot, maybe not in the literal sense but in terms of courage in the abstract
At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.
interesting that i didn't save this either!
“Why are you here with me?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Victoire, you are a beautiful young woman. Men are drawn to you. Men your age. I’m an old married man. I have two children. I live in another country. I can offer you nothing.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“How is any of that not true?”
“First of all, I don’t want anything from you. Except you.”
“That’s my point. You can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not going to leave my wife and children.”
“But I do have you, don’t I? You are right here beside me, eating the same croissant, looking at the same overstated church. We lie in the same bed, breathe the same air.”
crazy that i didn't save this either omg