The Light of Paris(6)

Swirling around the drain of my emotions, I became angrier and more resentful, wishing I were at that painting class, wishing I were wearing something I could breathe in, wishing I were someone and somewhere else. When the men pushed their chairs back from the table, I shot out of my own seat so quickly I nearly knocked Dimpy, who was leaning forward to hear what one of the other women was saying, on her very pointy chin. As Phillip lingered, I danced my way toward the door, anxious to get in the car, to be in motion.

Phillip’s charm must have worked, because as we drove away, he punched the car ceiling and shouted with excitement. Teddy, apparently, had agreed to the deal. I closed my eyes and felt the wheels moving underneath me, pretended I was on a train heading somewhere far away, somewhere I had chosen.

But we only went home, and in the foyer, Phillip stepped up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist so his hands rested on my cookie-swollen belly and kissing the back of my neck. I stepped away with a shiver.

“Come on, Madeleine. I just made a ton of money. Let’s celebrate.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re never in the mood,” he said sulkily, and my face went hot with guilt. When we first met, I had found Phillip desperately handsome, but his looks had soon seemed austere and perfect as a marble statue, and his desire something animal and impersonal, completely unrelated to me. He would wake me in the night, pressing himself against me, and I felt not arousal but an offended fury, because his desire came from somewhere else, and there in the darkness, I could have been anyone. “How are we going to have kids if you’re never in the mood?”

Phillip began to stalk around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors. Finally, he huffed loudly, dropping a heavy-bottomed tumbler onto the counter so it rattled, and poured himself a drink.

I was still standing in the foyer, which was drafty and cool, and I reached into the closet for my sweater, wrapping myself in its comfortable warmth. I could smell myself on it—perfume, the illicit ice cream I ate when Phillip was out for the evening, NyQuil from my last cold.

“You’re not ready to have kids,” I said. Children were messy and inconvenient, and Phillip disliked both of those things, and once you had children, you would never be the most important person in the room, and Phillip really disliked that.

“It’s the next step. This is what you do. You get married and you have children. Everyone we know has kids. We’re the only ones.” He took an anxious sip of his drink. Phillip, always so conscious of what everyone else was doing, so worried about being left behind.

“Is that why you married me? Because it was the next step?” I asked. My feet hurt. I slipped out of my shoes, spreading my toes on the cold marble floor, looking for relief.

“Yes. I don’t know. It was time. We were both getting older. Both of our families wanted us to.”

“Right.” I turned and walked into the living room. It was dark inside, but through the windows, I could see the lights of the city stretching off into the distance, and the quiet blackness of the water. Phillip walked into the room behind me and flipped on a light switch, and immediately all I could see was our reflection: me wrapped in my sweater as though I were bracing against a storm, and him standing behind me, a faceless figure wearing an expensive suit and an impatient air.

“What do you want me to say? That’s your problem, Madeleine. Nothing is ever good enough for you. You’re never happy.”

“No,” I said, looking at us mirrored in the window as though I were watching a play. “I’m not happy.”

“You don’t even know how lucky you are.” He turned toward me, his mouth pulled down, and leaned back, draining the liquor in a single swallow.

Lucky. I thought of how the days were slipping through my fingers, how empty time went by. It didn’t feel lucky to live a life I had chosen but had never wanted. My fists were clenched, and I could feel myself shaking. I had been pushing down my anger, my disappointment, my irritation for years, and it seemed I couldn’t keep them inside anymore.

“How am I lucky, Phillip? How? Is it the way I never get do what I want to do? Is it the way you tell me I look fat when I so much as eat a cupcake on my own birthday? Is it that I live in this ugly place where I’m freezing all the time? Is that how I’m lucky?”

I knew I was risking something by speaking so plainly, but with a deep and desperate fervor, I wanted out. I wanted to pick my own clothes and decide my own schedule. I wanted a job and I wanted my own money and I wanted to paint and I wanted a house that didn’t feel like a museum, and I wondered how I had gotten to this place, where I had everything and still had nothing that was important to me.

Phillip scoffed, turned, poured himself another drink. “Most women would be thrilled to have a life like this. Expensive dinners, nice clothes, a professionally decorated home, a successful husband.”

“I would be thrilled, Phillip, if I cared about those things. But I don’t. I don’t care about fancy restaurants, or clothes, or interior decorators, and I don’t care . . .” I bit off the end of the sentence, my breath coming quickly. I don’t know what I would have said at that point; the words were bubbling out of me and I was filled with the kind of helpless, senseless rage that precedes an uncontrollable crying fit and doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful discourse.

“Then why,” Phillip asked, with a callous detachment, his eyes glittering, “are you still here? Maybe we shouldn’t even bother, Madeleine. Maybe we should just get a divorce.”