What's Mine and Yours(43)
He would calm himself, and they’d go on, their little domestic life unspoiled. He might have been ambitious, but it was clear to him that all he really needed was her. Noelle was his key to a good life.
There were other women only when he was away. A caterer he took back to his hotel room at a convention in Rio. A curator at a Manhattan gallery who lived in a loft with plum-colored walls. A graduate student at a lecture he gave in Chicago. A painter at an artists’ colony in Maine.
They didn’t mean anything, except that, without Noelle, there was no way to steady himself. No one had ever usurped her place in his heart. He had called her, returned to her, always. But there was something new in what he was doing with Jemima. He was gallivanting with her around the city as if he belonged to her. And he was ignoring his wife. It was repulsive, even to him.
Maybe he was trying to beat the universe to the punch. He’d ruin his own life before it got snatched away from him. But even to see his motivations that way was too generous. Maybe he merely wanted to punish her. Noelle had broken their first, most vital promise: to live well, to never look back. To go beyond what should have been possible for either of them. She had let herself sink, and he couldn’t follow her down. If he fucked Jemima, if he sent Noelle to voicemail, maybe she would hear: You won’t take me with you.
The performance space was in a converted church not far from the Sorbonne. It had high ceilings and gilded walls, dusty velvet chairs. There were five hundred seats, which, Jemima was careful to point out, meant more people would see his work during opening week than likely had over the entirety of his career.
When they left, Jemima looked triumphant. She slid on her sunglasses, waved good-bye, and sauntered off nonchalantly, as if she knew she’d see him again; he wasn’t going anywhere.
He sat on the church steps to collect himself. The day was warm and windy, and he itched in his clothes. He clicked through his phone history, saw the string of unanswered calls from Noelle, and then nothing from her over the last few days. She had too much dignity to keep chasing after him when his silence had made plain that he wanted to be left alone. He knew it was petty to avoid her, but it would have undone the purpose of the trip to answer. Her sadness would hook him, drag him back. He hadn’t invited her along precisely to avoid her obsession with the miscarriage. Her presence didn’t soothe him anymore; she unwound all his efforts to maintain equilibrium. He would return from a run, and she would assail him with her theories: Her baths had been too hot; her cortisol levels were too high. She should have taken more fish oil; she should have avoided caffeine. He would emerge from a dark room, his evening meditation, his mind clear, and find her staring blankly at the TV, still wearing her clothes from the day before. He’d turn to her in bed, reach for her waist, to find her quivering, weeping noiselessly.
For all his daily terror at the thought of losing Noelle, it had never occurred to him the baby might be lost. It was a sign of how all his luck, the good life he didn’t deserve, had twisted his mind—he had expected everything to be fine. It was one of the things that had first attracted him to Noelle: her understanding that life was unfair, brutal, and all you could do was treasure the good when it came along, while it lasted. And yet, he had taken their lot for granted, pictured it all unfolding easily. She would grow larger, give birth; they’d welcome and watch over their child. He had no fantasies about being a father; he was certain he wouldn’t know how. But to grow with Noelle, to change with her and undertake an adventure, felt natural, as if it were a life they were entitled to. He might have been more like Jemima than he wanted to admit.
Nelson tucked away his phone. He wasn’t ready yet to call her, and he hadn’t made up his mind about the play. He didn’t know whether Noelle was ready for him, or if he would go home and find only more of the same. He did pity her that she was still in Golden Brook. It was impossible to be home and not to grieve, remember. But here, there was so much beauty to turn to, so much more to consume his attentions. Bridges and rivers and narrow cobbled streets, wine and beignets, gardens and moonlight, and sex, Le Génie de la Liberté.
He headed for the metro to Belleville. He wanted to find a park he had been to once as a student. It had been full of black and brown Parisians, and he’d felt himself blend in, disappear. It was one of the remarkable things about traveling while black. There were places in the world where he could be anyone. He could be Brazilian, Jamaican, Dominican, a black Londoner, an African émigré to France. And there were places where it was impossible: Austria, the South of France, but also Boston, parts of North Carolina, near where Noelle’s family lived. Places he had felt even more acutely that he was on display, being watched for a misstep. But not here, not today.
He surfaced and asked around for the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. He stopped in a grocer’s along the way to pick up peaches, a bottle of wine, seeded bread, and Camembert. Before long, he found the park, its sloping greens and muddy lake, the jagged outcrops of white rock overgrown with vines. At the top of a hill, he could look down on dozens of couples spread out on blankets, their limbs tangled up as they kissed or read or slept in the sun. The view was what he had needed.
Nelson uncorked the wine. He poured a few drops into a plastic cup and let it sit without tasting it. He bowed his head. Then he poured the wine out on the grass, refilled his cup.
That first summer he’d spent here, his scholarship had paid for the art history class, the airfare and dorm, everything except what he’d need day to day. He had eaten just like this—baguettes and rationed cheese. He bummed wine and weed off his classmates. He walked a dozen miles a day to avoid the metro fares. He scrounged together entrance fees to as many museums as he could, resolved to walk around and take pictures when he couldn’t afford a ticket. His classmates went out for escargot and duck, the forty-euro dinners they’d deemed indispensable to the experience. Nelson ate falafel with hot sauce, butter and sugar crêpes, sheets of ham he washed down with white wine. He ate by the Seine; he ate on park benches; he ate squatting on a curb in the Marais. He wrote Noelle postcards in his stilted French. He masturbated and thought of her breasts and tried to intimate this whenever he borrowed his roommate’s cell phone to call her—she was back in North Carolina, miserable under her mother’s roof again, and sometimes she snuck away to the bathroom, and they’d touch themselves in tandem. After she came, he’d raise his voice and talk about all the things he’d seen that day, mostly bookstores and gardens, anywhere that was free, then he’d wipe his hands and return the phone without looking at his roommate, and go back out into the night alone, taking long-exposure photographs of birds and graffiti, children climbing into fountains, the stained glass of the cathedrals, the river lapping at the stones.