Why didn’t he just say he’d slept with Therese? What was it in him that fought so hard against this? That it wasn’t true? He had had no trouble lying otherwise, when it was to avoid conflict. Why was he finding it so hard now? Because otherwise he was making the world only a little more pleasant whereas now he would be making himself look worse than he was?
He suddenly remembered how his mother, when he was a little boy and had done something he shouldn’t, would give him no peace until he confessed the bad desires that had driven him to the bad deeds. Later he read about the ritual of criticism and self-criticism in the Communist Party, in which anyone who’d deviated from the party line was hammered at until he repented of his bourgeois tendencies—it was what his mother had done with him and what Anne was doing with him now. Had he sought his mother in Anne and found her again?
So, no false confessions. Break it off with Anne. Didn’t they fight far too much? Wasn’t he sick of her screaming at him? Sick of her spying into his laptop and his telephone and his desk and his cupboard? Sick of her expecting that when she needed him, he’d have to be there for her? Wasn’t Anne’s intensity too much for him? Lovely as it was to sleep with her—did it have to be so weighted with feeling and meaning? Mightn’t it be lighter, more playful, more physical with someone else? And the traveling—at first there had been a certain charm to spending three or four weeks in the spring at some college in the American West and the fall at a university on the Australian coast, and in between several months in Amsterdam, but now it was actually a chore. The rolls with fresh herring you could buy from street stalls in Amsterdam were delicious. But beyond that?
He passed the foundations of a stable or a barn and sat down. How high in the mountains he was! In front of him a slope covered in olive trees tilted downward toward a flat valley, behind it were low mountains, and behind those was the plain with its little towns, one of which was Cucuron. On clear days could one see the sea from here? He heard the chirping of cicadas and the bleating of sheep, though he was unable to spot them when he looked. The sun rose higher in the sky, warming his body and releasing the scent of the rosemary.
Anne. Whatever it was that was wrong with her—when they made love in the afternoon, first in the bright daylight and then again as dusk fell, they couldn’t get enough of looking at each other and touching each other, and when they lay side by side, exhausted and satisfied, talking came quite naturally. And how he loved to watch her swim, in a lake or in the sea, compact and strong and as supple as a sea otter. How he loved to watch her playing with children and dogs, oblivious of herself and the world, given over to the moment. How happy he was when she focused on a thought he’d had and lightly but surely touched on the point where he’d got carried away. How proud he was when they were together with his friends or hers and she dazzled with her mind and her wit. How safe he felt when they were holding each other.
He was reminded of a report about German, Japanese, and Italian soldiers in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. The Russians tried to indoctrinate their captives and also induct them into the ritual of criticism and self-criticism. The Germans, accustomed to leadership and robbed of it, went along with the ritual; the Japanese preferred to be killed rather than collaborate with the enemy. The Italians played along, but didn’t take the proceedings seriously, cheering and clapping as if they were at the opera. Should he too play along with Anne’s criticism and self-criticism session, without taking it seriously? With laughter in his heart, should he admit whatever she wanted to have admitted?
But admitting it wouldn’t be the end of things. She would want to know how it could have come to that. She wouldn’t rest until she’d found out what was wrong with him. Until he’d seen it too. And the insights thus won would be put to use again and again as explanations and accusations.
10
Only now did he notice how far he’d walked and how long he’d been sitting on the wall. On the way back he kept expecting at every bend of the path to find the road beyond and his car standing there, but there would be another bend and then yet another. When he finally did reach the car and looked at his watch, he saw it was noon and he was hungry.
He drove further into the mountains and found a restaurant in the next village with tables out on the street and a view of the church and the town hall. There were sandwiches, and he ordered one with ham and one with cheese and wine and water and a café au lait. The waitress was young and pretty and took her time; she calmly enjoyed his admiration and explained what kind of ham she could fetch from the butcher around the corner and what kind of cheese she had. First she brought the wine and the water, and before the sandwiches reached him he was already a little drunk.
He remained the only guest. When the carafe of wine was empty, he asked if there might be a bottle of champagne somewhere in the cellar. She laughed, gave him a pleased and conspiratorial look, and when she bent forward to clear the plates from the table, the neckline of her blouse revealed the top of her breasts. He looked after her and called, “Bring two glasses!”
She laughed. Pleased that he stood up and pulled the chair out for her. Pleased that he popped the champagne cork with a bang. Pleased that he clinked glasses with her. Pleased that he asked such careful questions about what life as an attractive woman was like in a godforsaken mountain village. In the summer she helped her grandmother in the restaurant. Otherwise she studied photography in Marseille, traveled a lot, had lived in America and Japan and published already. Her name was Renée.
“I close up between three and five.”
“Do you take a midday nap?”
“It would be the first time.”
“What could be nicer at midday than …”
“I know what could be nicer.” She laughed.
She looked at the time. “Today I’m closing the restaurant at two thirty already.”
“Good.”
They stood up and took the champagne with them. He followed her through the dining room and the kitchen. His head was swimming from the champagne and the prospect of sex, and as Renée climbed the dark staircase in front of him, he could have ripped the clothes from her body right then and there—but he had the bottle and the glasses in his hands. At that moment Anne and her quarrel went through his head—wasn’t there a principle that if one is condemned for an act one has not in fact committed, one cannot then be punished as and when one actually commits it? Double jeopardy? Anne had punished him for something he hadn’t done. So now he was allowed to do it.
Renée laughed a lot in bed too. She laughed as she took out the bloody tampon and set it on the floor next to the bed. She made love as functionally and skillfully as if she were playing a sport. Only after they were both exhausted did she become tender and wanted to kiss him and be kissed by him. The second time she held him tighter than she had the first, but afterward she soon checked the time and sent him away. It was four thirty. Her grandmother would be back soon. And he wasn’t to come back; in three days her time in, what had he called it, her godforsaken village in the mountains, would be over.
She accompanied him to the staircase. From downstairs he looked up one more time: she was leaning against the banisters, and in the darkness he couldn’t read the expression on her face.
“It was lovely with you.”
“Yes.”
“I like your laugh.”
“Get going.”
11
He would have liked a summer storm, but the sky was blue and the heat hung in the narrow street. As he got into the car he saw a Mercedes pull up outside the restaurant and an old couple get out. Renée came through the door, greeted them both, and helped them carry groceries into the house.
He drove slowly in order to keep Renée in his rearview mirror for a little. He was suddenly overwhelmed with a powerful longing for another life, a life with winter in the city by the sea and summer in the village in the mountains, a life with its own unchanging, reliable rhythm, in which one always drove the same routes, slept in the sam
e bed, met the same people.
He wanted to walk in the same place he’d walked that morning, but didn’t find the spot. He stopped at another one, got out, couldn’t decide about walking again, but sat among the bushes, plucked a blade of grass, propped his arms on his knees, and put the grass between his teeth. Again he was looking out over slopes and low mountains into the plain. His longing wasn’t swirling around Renée or around Anne. It wasn’t about this woman or that, but about continuity and reliability in life itself.
He fantasized about giving them all up, Renée, who didn’t want him anyway; Therese, who only liked the bits of him that were simple; Anne, who wanted to be conquered but not to conquer herself. But then he’d have nobody left.
He’d tell Anne that evening what she wanted to hear. Why not? Yes, she’d always take what he said and make use of it later. But so what? What harm could it do him? What harm could anything do him? He felt invulnerable, untouchable, and laughed—it must be the champagne.
It was too early to drive back to Cucuron and Anne. He stayed sitting and looked down at the plain. Sometimes a car passed, sometimes it honked. Sometimes he saw something flash down on the plain—the sunlight catching the window in a house or the windshield of a car.
He dreamed about summer in the village in the mountains. He and Renée or Chantal or Marie or whatever she would be called would move up there in May and open up the restaurant, not for lunch but just for guests in the evening, two or three dishes, simple country cooking, local wines. A few tourists would come, a few foreign artists who’d bought old houses and renovated them, a few locals. Early in the morning he’d drive to the market for supplies, early in the afternoon they’d make love, in the late afternoon they’d go to the kitchen together and prepare the food. Mondays and Tuesdays they’d be closed. In October they’d close the restaurant, lock the shutters and the door, and drive back to the city. A gallery or a bookshop? Stationery? Tobacco? A shop just open in winter? How would that work? Did he even want to run a shop? Operate a restaurant? They were all empty dreams. Love in the early afternoon was what counted, no matter whether it was in a town by the sea or a river or in a village in the mountains or on the plain.
He looked down at the plain and chewed his blade of grass.
12
He reached Cucuron at seven, parked the car, didn’t find Anne outside the Bar de l’Étang, and went into the hotel. She was sitting in the loggia, a bottle of red wine on the table and two glasses, one full and one empty. How was she looking at him? He really didn’t want to know. He looked at the floor.
“I don’t want to say much. I slept with Therese and I’m sorry and I hope you can forgive me and we can put it behind us, not today, I know, and not tomorrow, but soon, so that we can stay good to each other. I love you, Anne, and …”
“Won’t you sit down?”
He sat down, went on talking and kept looking at the floor. “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. I hope I haven’t already lost you because of something so insignificant. I understand that it’s really significant to you, and because of that and because I should have known it, it should have been significant for me too and I shouldn’t have done it. I understand that. But it really is insignificant. I know that …”
“Settle down. Do you want …”
“No, Anne, please let me say it all. I know men keep saying, and women say it too, that a little infidelity is meaningless, that it just happens, that it’s a fleeting opportunity, or loneliness, or alcohol, that it leaves nothing behind, no demands. They say it so often that it’s become a cliché. But clichés are clichés because they’re true, and even though infidelity is sometimes something different—often it is nothing, and that’s how it was with me. Therese and I in Baden-Baden—it was meaningless. You may …”
“Can you …”
“In a moment you can say whatever you want to say. I only want to say that I understand if you don’t want someone to whom a little infidelity means nothing. But the part of me to which a little infidelity means nothing is only a small part of me. The larger part of me is the one to which you mean more than anyone in the world, which loves you, with which you have been together for years. And before Baden-Baden I never …”
“Look at me!”
He looked up and looked at her.
“It’s fine. I called Therese and she confirmed that nothing happened. Perhaps you want to know why I didn’t believe you and yet I believe her—I can tell better from a woman’s voice whether she’s telling the truth or lying than I can from a man’s. She felt you weren’t honest with her or with me, and if she’d known how long you and I had been together and how close we were, she wouldn’t have wanted to see you so often. But that’s another story. In any case, you didn’t sleep together.”
“Oh!” He didn’t know what to say. In Anne’s face he saw hurt, relief, and love. He ought to get to his feet, go to her, and hug her. But he stayed sitting down and just said, “Come here!” and she stood up and came to sit on his lap and lean her head against his shoulder. He put his arms around her and looked out over her head at the rooftops and the church tower. Should he tell her about his afternoon with Renée?
“Why are you shaking your head?”
Because I’ve just decided not to tell you about the other little infidelity this afternoon … “I was just thinking that we almost …”
“I know.”
13
They didn’t say any more about Baden-Baden, or Therese, or truth and lies. It wasn’t as if nothing had taken place. If nothing had taken place, they would have felt free to fight with each other. But they were taking care not to bang into each other. They moved cautiously. They did more work than they had at the beginning and by the end she had completed her essay on gender differences and equal rights, and he had his play about two bankers sitting trapped in an elevator for a whole weekend. When they had sex, each of them remained a little reserved.
On the last evening they went again to the restaurant in Bonnieux. They watched from the terrace as the sun went down and night came. The deep blue of the sky darkened to absolute black, the stars glittered, and the cicadas were loud. The blackness, the glitter, the noise—it was a festive night. But their imminent departure made them melancholic, and on top of this the star-strewn sky reminded him of moral law and the hour with Renée.
“Are you still holding it against me that I didn’t tell Therese more about you and you more about Therese?”
She shook her head. “It made me sad. But I don’t hold it against you. And you? Do you hold it against me that I suspected you and used blackmail? Which is what I did, I blackmailed you, and because you love me, you allowed it to happen.”
“No, I don’t hold it against you. It makes me anxious that things escalated so fast. But that’s something else.”
She laid her hand on his, but instead of looking at him, she looked out across the countryside. “Why are we this way? … I don’t know what to call it. You know what I mean? We’ve changed.”
“Changed for the better or for the worse?”
She took her hand out of his, leaned back, and looked at him sharply. “I don’t know that either. We’ve lost something and we’ve won something, haven’t we?”
“Lost our innocence? Won some kind of sobriety?”
“And if sobriety is also the death of love, and without some faith, pure and simple, in the other person, things can’t go on?”
“Isn’t truth, which you said you need as the ground beneath your feet, always sober?”
“No, the truth I mean and the one I need isn’t sober. It’s passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free. If you don’t notice it at first, you will after a while.” She nodded. “It can really torture you. Then you curse and wish you’d never encountered it. But then you realize it’s not torturing you, what’s doing the torturing is whatever the truth is about.”
“I don’t unders
tand.” The truth and whatever the truth is about—what did Anne mean? At the same time he was wondering if he should tell her about Renée, now, because later would be too late. But why would later be too late? And if later was okay, why have to do it at all?
“Forget it.”
“But I really want to know what …”
“Forget it. I’d rather talk about how things are meant to go from here.”
“You wanted some time to think about getting married.”
“Yes, I think I should take some time. Don’t you need time too?”
“Time out?”
“Time out.”
14
She didn’t want to talk about it. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing she could name. Nothing she would want to talk about between the two of them and a couples therapist.
The food came. She ate enthusiastically. He felt queasy, and poked around the dorade with his fork. When they were lying in bed, she didn’t push him away but she wasn’t hungry for him either, and he had the feeling she didn’t need time anymore, she’d already reached a decision and he had already lost her.
The next morning she asked if he’d mind taking her to the airport in Marseille. He did mind, but he took her and tried to say goodbye to her in such a way that she’d see his pain as well as his readiness to respect her decision, and would remember him fondly and would want to see him again and have him too.
Then he drove through Marseille, hoping he’d suddenly see Renée on the sidewalk, but knew he wouldn’t stop. On the highway he thought about how life in Frankfurt would be without Therese. What he would work on. The contract for a new play that he’d been hoping for hadn’t come. He could set to work on the outline for the movie producer—but he could do that anywhere. Nothing, in fact, was pulling him toward Frankfurt.