The Light of Paris(80)

“Did you resent her?”

“At the time, probably a little. She certainly resented me. She said I was holding her back. But it wasn’t that. Or it wasn’t only that. We wanted different things.”

A car drove by on the street out front, and quiet fell again. In the city, the noise was a perpetual unwelcome guest. Even in our condo, well above the street, there was an unrelenting blur of noise underlying everything. I had learned to tune it out, but if I stopped and listened, it came flooding back, and it was startling to realize how constant it was. Here I felt like I was a hundred miles from any distraction, the way the night and the stillness fell heavy and soothing around us.

“You know,” Henry said thoughtfully, stroking his beard, “it took me a long time to leave her. I didn’t think I had a good enough reason. I thought we needed to be fighting all the time, throwing things, crying.”

“I’m pretty sure it does have to be that way if you want to get a divorce in my family. I need to have a good reason if I’m going to upset the country club register.”

“It is enough. Being unhappy is enough.”

“Is it? Happiness is so transitory. I could be happy today and unhappy tomorrow. And it’s affected by so many things out of your control—the weather, the traffic, other people’s behavior.”

Henry was shaking his head. “That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about good moods or bad moods. Sure, those blow over with the weather. But whether you are happy deep down, whether you wake up and have to summon up the energy just to get out of bed, or whether you feel like every day is an opportunity, that’s different. That doesn’t change because of a thunderstorm or someone cutting in front of you in line.”

“I guess,” I said, though I was strangely unwilling to concede the point. I had been sure for so long my unhappiness didn’t matter, had held it underwater for so long in an effort to drown it, that my entire life seemed like a waste of time if it actually did matter in the end.

“Well, let me ask you this. Why did you marry him?”

“My parents wanted me to.” And then I paused. “And I was afraid no one else would want me.”

Henry’s eyes went wide, but he said nothing.

“I was living alone. I had my own job. I supported myself. But I was kind of a metaphorical burden. It was hard for my mother to tell her friends I was almost thirty and still single when all their daughters were married already, and having children, most of them. My failure to follow the plan made her look like a failure as a mother, and that was uncomfortable for her.”

“You sound so forgiving.”

“It’s not her fault.” I shrugged. “She was raised with those expectations.”

Henry looked at me with those wide hazel eyes, serious and intense. “I think you’re too hung up on what everyone else thinks, and you haven’t given enough thought to what you think.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said, bristling slightly. “Was it easy for you to leave your relationship? Did you wake up one day and decide it wasn’t for you? Just walk out?”

“Of course not. I agonized for—well, frankly, for years. In hindsight I know I waited too long. I knew long before I let myself know, if that makes any sense.”

“So why are you rushing me?” I asked. “And besides, just because it was right for you doesn’t mean it’s right for me. Maybe Phillip and I are meant to be together. Maybe I need to stop being so self-absorbed and worrying about my feelings and pull myself up by my bootstraps and recommit.”

“It’s possible,” Henry said. “Do you love him?” he asked.

I sighed, a long and slow exhalation into the night. “I don’t know,” I said. It seemed disloyal to say I didn’t. And how do you know if you love someone? Someone you’ve been with for that long? Phillip was just a fact of life.

“Did you ever?” he asked gently.

“Of course,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. It was an unfair question to ask anyone who has become disenchanted with a relationship, who is angry or sad or broken, because of course they won’t be able to remember what it felt like when they were in love. Hindsight is 20/20, et cetera. I could see clearly that I had been attracted to Phillip, to the same things that attracted everyone to him—his charm and his chiseled features and his perfect hair and the way he had of offering the perfect toast for any occasion. And I knew I had felt relieved by his proposal, that part of my attraction had been gratitude, and that I had been in love with the idea of marriage and family and finally, for once, fitting in and doing what I was supposed to do rather than endlessly letting people down. But we had hardly known each other. I had loved the image he presented to me, but he had held me at arm’s length, and our engagement had been short, and then, finally, when he had what he wanted, a woman with a social pedigree who would let him criticize her when he felt small and the money to rescue his family’s business, and we had begun to live together and been unable to hide our true selves, I had come to realize I didn’t love him, and most days I didn’t even really like him, and to be brutally honest, he probably felt the same way.

That was all my fault, wasn’t it? One more in a string of Madeleine-shaped failures. And why should I put my mother through that much humiliation at the Ladies Association over something as trivial as my own happiness? I thought of all the money—the money my father had given to Phillip to rescue the business, the money they had spent on the wedding. I thought of all the people who had come, all the gifts, the endless thank-you notes, all the people who would have to be told. All the people who would say, “I knew it wouldn’t last,” who had looked at my plainness and Phillip’s glow and raised an eyebrow, all those people who had seen the years before go by without my getting married and tutted and said of my mother, “That poor woman,” as though I had been living off their largesse instead of supporting myself.