The Light of Paris(85)

She lowered her head into his lap and wept, and he stroked her hair and murmured to her in French, and she didn’t even try to understand. It was all ending, all falling apart, and she felt herself sliding down the endless precipice toward the life she did not want, had never wanted, and everything she grabbed at on the way down in a desperate attempt to stop herself came away in her hands.





twenty-three





MADELEINE


   1999




I had never thought Phillip would come for me. I had been doing my best to push him out of my mind. I knew that wasn’t a mature way to deal with problems, nor an especially effective one: no matter how much I pretended he didn’t exist, he stubbornly insisted on doing so.

When he arrived, I was up in the attic, shifting around the last of the boxes, covered in dust and dirt and the funk of forty thousand years, trying again and again to forget the feeling of Henry’s body against mine, our kiss, the way he smelled, the way he felt. It didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t deserve it.

My mother was sitting downstairs in the parlor, reading the newspaper, so when the doorbell rang, she was closer, and I ignored it, until I heard the sound of talking in the foyer, filtered up two staircases.

Is it terrible to admit I didn’t even recognize my husband’s voice? I only heard my mother talking to a man and with a little wisp of happy hope I crushed as soon as it came to life, I thought it might be Henry (although I should have known it wasn’t; my mother sounded far too pleased to see him). I lifted a box onto my hip and carried it downstairs, and there was Phillip, standing there holding my mother’s hands and smiling that perfect smile at her, and I nearly dropped the box, my face flushing hot with guilt.

I had been making such an effort to put him out of my mind that the fact of him seemed completely foreign; to me, he looked less like the man I had promised, in front of God and pretty much all of Magnolia society, to love and cherish for the rest of my days only to betray him with a moonlit night and a kiss, and more like a stranger. A handsome and well-dressed stranger, but a stranger nonetheless. I didn’t want to face him, I didn’t want to talk to him. I felt like waving at him and going back to wrestling with the boxes. Later I might paint. At the library I’d found a book of old photos of Paris, and I wanted to try painting them, wanted to capture the light my grandmother had been so in love with. Frankly, what I really wanted to do was drop everything and actually go to Paris, but that didn’t seem particularly practical.

I suppose it would make a better story to say Phillip’s and my reunion was like a movie, that tear-jerking music swelled in the background and we rushed into each other’s arms (politely stepping around the table so we didn’t knock over the flower arrangement), and all was forgiven, even the parts we would never talk about.

But it didn’t feel like a romantic moment. It felt weighted with guilt and confusion and surprise and distance. So basically I stood there in the hallway, looking at my husband curiously, as though I were an anthropologist and he were a previously undiscovered tribe, until he asked, “Aren’t you going to say hello?” and I pulled myself out of my twitching mind and walked over to him (bumping into the table on the way, though it turned out the flower arrangement was way too heavy to knock over) and gave him an awkward hug, and he bent to kiss me except I was already pulling away, thinking he wasn’t the last person I had kissed, so he got the edge of my mouth, and if we had been actors in a romantic movie, we would have been fired.

In retrospect, “What are you doing here?” was probably not the most welcoming thing I could have said. It wasn’t meant to be accusatory. I just honestly couldn’t think of why he was there, and if there was any edge to my voice, it was because it had been sharpened on my shame.

“I thought I’d come see how things are going here,” he said. And then, pointedly, “You haven’t been returning my calls.”

I winced, thinking guiltily of the cell phone, which, as far as I knew, was still marinating in the water at the bottom of the vase, about two feet from us. “Sorry.”

“And of course I wanted to check on Simone,” he said, turning toward my mother and shooting her one of his patented dazzling smiles.

“Oh. Nice,” I said. And oddly, the thought that floated through my mind was one of relief. Well, went the logic somewhere deep in my lizard-brain, at least he’s not here to see you. That takes some of the pressure off.

But of course he was there to see me. I was the one who had married him, and here he was, charging in on his white horse to rescue me. Or, more likely, to rescue himself. That was more Phillip’s style. He would never let me go, no matter how unhappy he was. It would make him look weak, or wrong, or out of control. No, he would rather maintain his image and keep me in check, even if it meant he would be stuck with me for the rest of his life.

“You’re a mess. What have you been doing, cleaning the gutters?” he asked, his gaze skimming over my clothes. I looked down at my outfit, which was pretty much the same one I had been wearing when Henry had come to pick me up for First Friday, and brushed off my shirt a little.

“Moving boxes. It’s dirty work,” I said, and my shoulders slumped as I felt myself moving back onto the familiar battlefield that was my relationship with Phillip. This was real life. I’d been on vacation, that’s what it was. That’s why everything had felt so easy and free. But you don’t get to stay on vacation forever. At some point, you have to go back to work.