The Life Room (17 page)

We left the cafe and stopped first at a wine and cheese store and then a market, and a butcher, all on the same street. Stephen bought garlic, peppers and tomatoes, and soft leaf lettuces; beef and sausages, fresh pasta, a loaf of peasant bread, wine, and cheese. He fondled one red apple after another from a pyramid of apples until he found four that were to his liking. He took me to a drafty artist’s studio that he had rented for the month. In the main room was an old pine table he used for a desk. On top were stacks of papers and a laptop. I imagined him working at night at the desk, his inspiration the grandness and history of the city. The kitchen was tiny. I couldn’t find the refrigerator. He cracked open fat cloves of garlic, then chopped onions and sautéed them with olive oil in an old rusted sauté pan. He made a rich Bolognese sauce of such brilliance it smelled as ancient as the city. He uncorked the bottle of wine and we drank while I watched him cook. He moved around the kitchen gracefully, theatrically. He tucked a dish towel into the waist of his pants. I watched him chop the vegetables intensely, but with precision, then move to stir the sauce. Occasionally I looked at my watch, aware of the time passing. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. Around him you were swept up with him, into his passion; even the way he cooked the meal seemed orchestrated, practiced, a way of roping you in closer. I knew I had to be careful as I watched him. He was impetuous, impossible to live with but impossible to turn away from. But as I began to get loose from the wine I told myself to stop worrying. What harm were we doing? He seemed different than when he was a teenager. More sure of himself. Steadier. For a while I considered that perhaps he had matured. That he was a capable, responsible journalist.

“How’s married life treating you?” Stephen said, once we’d sat down on the two unmatched wicker chairs that surrounded a small café table. He cut me a piece of soft brie and spread it on a crust of bread.

“We’ve been married almost eleven years.” I pictured our breakfasts reading the Sunday paper, the boys racing their cars across the table knocking over the cereal boxes, but the image faded in the Paris light. “Is there anyone in your life?” I asked.

“There was someone once. A long time ago.” Again his response seemed practiced. He spun the tin ashtray that sat in the middle of the table with his finger. “I’ve always been attracted to sad women.”

“Everyone has their pain.”

“Hers is different. It sits inside her. You can see it in her eyes. She has these enchanting eyes,” he said, staring into mine. “The sadness. It doesn’t move. It’s amazingly seductive.”

“Maybe it’s your own pain you see when you look at her.” He was still spinning the ashtray. “Don’t you miss it?” I asked. “Being in a relationship?”

“I miss the struggle.” Then he stopped the ashtray and looked up. “What about your husband?”

“Michael is one of the happiest people I know.”

“It doesn’t get on your nerves? The happy stuff?” He fidgeted with the cell phone he’d placed on the table. Then he got up. Found a fat white candle burned almost down to its center and lit it.

I realized that though I was hungry, and though the Bolognese sauce was rich and satisfying, I couldn’t really eat. Most of the pasta sat on my plate untouched.

“It’s pretty quiet in my house,” he continued without waiting for a response, watching the flame from the candle dance inside its wall of wax.

My eyes studied the details of the fleur-de-lis design on the Provençal wallpaper crackling and fading on the kitchen wall. Stephen looked as if he was thinking about what I had said. Everything I said seemed to make him curious, as if he were reading between the lines for clues. It was that keen interest and curiosity and attention that compelled me.

“So your marriage is good?”

“Yes,” I said. “My marriage is good.”

He looked at me more deeply, as if he doubted what I’d said.

“We’re different,” I said, wondering why I felt I had to defend my marriage to him, and left it at that.

He reached over the table with his fork and from my plate twirled a ribbon of pasta onto his fork. “You’re not letting this go to waste, are you?” He consumed the rest of my pasta with relish. Then he took his hand and licked his two fingers and picked up the crumbs on the table with them and put them in his mouth, not wanting to leave anything untouched.

“I don’t think you’re really happy,” he said. “You can’t fool me.”

I looked back at him, surprised by his words.

“I know you, Eleanor. I was the first.”

He didn’t look away from my face, and as he stared, he cut into the loaf of peasant bread with a sharp knife and accidentally sliced into his finger. Instinctively, I jumped up and grabbed a dishtowel to press against his finger. “Are you okay?” I said, nearly taking his finger and sucking it to stop the blood like a mother might do.

“I’m fine.” I was standing over him, so close I could smell the scent of his body and the heat he generated. I was holding his hand, pressing the towel tightly against his finger. He looked into my eyes and lifted his head up as if he wanted to kiss me. “But you can still hold my hand.”

The moment passed and I walked away thinking how protective of him I felt—just as if he were one of my boys.

Stephen made espresso in a tin espresso pot on the burner of the stove. He mentioned that an agent in New York had just taken him on and that the novel he had written was close to getting picked up by a publisher. The agent was getting him magazine assignments, too. “I may be spending a lot of time in your city,” he said, almost a taunt, tipping the candle and letting the wax make white droplets onto the tabletop.

“That would be nice.” I didn’t take him seriously. I had listened to his dreams and fantasies before, but I was never sure how real they were. He said his life was in turnaround. He reached his open palm in the air and held it there for me to give him the high five. “We’ve done it, Eleanor. Two misfits from the Midwest. Did you think you’d ever make it out of Chicago?”

I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. I looked at him questioningly.

“Our pasts. We’ve escaped, Eleanor.”

I thought to myself,
Do we ever?

He described his novel scene by scene. “It takes place in Alaska. It’s about snow. It’s a cold book. It’s about a man who can’t let go.”

I couldn’t follow the logic to the story and my mind drifted. I found it difficult to concentrate on his exact words, to stay focused when he talked. When I looked at him carefully I told myself that I wasn’t attracted to him. He was solipsistic. Self-indulgent. Provocative. Everything he said seemed to serve his own purpose. He talked the way he cooked, in a whirlwind of drama and emotion. “All I have is my work,” he said. “I’m a shallow man, Eleanor.”

I didn’t know if I believed him. It seemed as if he felt what he did was vastly important. It cloaked how fragile he seemed. “I can’t really be with a woman, until I’m on track.” He looked at me. “I’m getting there,” he said. His pants and shirt were perfectly ironed. He looked studied, like he had put too much emphasis on his exterior, and it bothered me despite how clearly attractive he was. There was something still unformed about him, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it disturbed me. And why wasn’t he married or in a committed relationship? What he said about work sounded like an excuse. He had said he wanted children, talked about how much he loved them when he asked me about my boys, told me that his best friend in Colorado had two, a boy and a girl. “Man, when I see those kids I think about what I don’t have and it spooks me.”

“You could have a child if that’s what you want.”

He looked at me strangely, as if it had never occurred to him, or that no one had been bold enough to say it.

“I have to stay focused,” he remarked flatly. He fidgeted in his chair, leaned it back and forward, making it creak as it rocked.

He realized he was talking too much about himself. He stopped. I noticed the mattress on the floor and the blanket curled at the end where he slept. I saw myself in his eyes’ reflection. I felt myself being sucked in closer, as if the rest of the world outside us had vanished. The sound of the Citroëns whirling around the corner from outside his window, the chatter of French conversation through the narrow street as people walked past, dissolved. I thought how we can have so many lives depending on the person we are with, and briefly wondered what that life would be like with Stephen, imagined the two of us living in the drafty studio, face to face with each other, inside the dramatic
moment
as once I had imagined the two of us together, both working on our own creative endeavors.

He asked me what I was working on. I said a study on infidelity, to make it simple.

“Is that something you know about?”

I saw him look around the room and his eyes landed on the unmade mattress.

“In
Anna Karenina
. You know, Tolstoy.”

He looked at me sheepishly. I saw the face of the boy I had once been drawn to but never quite understood. It was still underneath the facade he presented, and being with him, as uncomfortable as I felt, made me ache for the restless, passionate part of myself I had forgotten. As I write this I wonder if it’s going to end, this desire for something more, or is it simply being in Paris that has awakened it and once I’m home it will be forgotten, and I find myself resenting Stephen, briefly, for having revealed to me this forgotten world.

“We could do it, you know,” he said, his eyes again grazing on the mattress, and then he looked back down to the chopping board where he was peeling the apples to sauté with brown sugar and cognac. His entire body engaged in the endeavor.

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Are you trying to put the moves on me?”

He looked at me soulfully and then went back to the orchestration of the dessert, taking an apple in his hand and, with the knife, slipping off its skin. I was stunned by the boldness of my words. “I’m always putting the moves on you,” he said, doing a sort of Fred Astaire turn in the middle of the kitchen. “You know me. It’s just that . . .” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence. I wonder what would have happened had I not questioned him. Had I simply waited and not broken the moment. Would he have tried to make love to me?

“What?” I said.

“It’s just that I’ve always found you so incredibly compelling.”

I rose to find the bathroom. It was off the kitchen.

“Hurry up,” he said.

I stared at myself in the tarnished mirror that hung over a small, cracked porcelain sink. My body was speeding up, moving ahead of myself. I needed to calm down. Was I the mother of my sons, wife to a doctor, a respected professor, or a woman on the cusp of forty, completely unknown to herself, who has kept her true desires locked up in a suitcase, the contents now spilling over? Or maybe I was just responding to the situation at hand. Wouldn’t any woman suddenly alone and face to face with a man she’d once been attracted to feel the same? Did I want him, or was it simply the intimacy of his company that made me feel for a moment that I might have, had I not been married? I told myself not to get drawn in again. You’re not that person anymore. He’s self-absorbed. Unstable, I told myself. It occurred to me that my life must have seemed charmed to him, that for the first time I had the edge.

When I came out of the bathroom he was serving the cooked apples on small, mismatched, chipped plates. I thought to myself that it was wrong to be in another man’s apartment in a foreign city and I wanted to flee. “I need to go soon,” I said.

We ate the dessert in silence. I watched how Stephen savored each bite, how it seemed as if his insatiable appetite was sublimation for something I could not name. When we finished he piled our plates into the discolored sink.

“Do you need help?” I stood up.

“From you, Eleanor.”

“I meant the dishes.”

He said he didn’t want to waste our last few hours together cleaning up. He wanted to go out again. To see more of Paris.

How vivid everything was in his presence. How alive and disordered everything felt. How wonderfully unsafe. The wine made everything around us seem as if it were coated in a soft film. I had to take his hand to keep my balance.

We walked again; it felt good to be out of the dim studio and in the freedom of the Paris air. And once outside, away from the intensity of being in a private space alone together, I felt I could trust him again. It was my last day in Paris and I wanted to buy something to take home with me. I had already bought presents for the boys and a beautiful shirt for Michael. We passed the shop again where I had seen the pitcher with the painted buds ready to break into blossom, sealed in the porcelain clay.

“It’s delicate like you are.” He shook his head as if something disturbed him, as if he were thinking of something he didn’t want to say. “It looks vulnerable. But its constitution is sturdy. You have to have it.”

“Do you think so? It’s expensive.” I had checked the price the day before and had been contemplating whether to buy it.

“Not when it is something you have to have. Not if its beauty possesses you. You can’t walk away from something like that.”

He bounced in front of me and opened the door to the shop. “Remember the woman I told you about? She’s soft and open like you, Eleanor. She’s cautious, but she still cares about me.”

“You’re not over her, are you?”

“She’s still in my life,” he conceded. “At least she is now.” He looked at me and gave me a smile that was more like a question.

I bought the pitcher. It was expensive but Stephen was right. It didn’t matter. It had already begun to represent something in my life as I suppose all objects finally do for the person that possesses them.

On the way back to my hotel we stopped along one of the bridges across the Seine and stood in an alcove overlooking the dirty water. Stephen leaned against the stone wall of the bridge and I stood next to him. I didn’t know how to hold my body. I looked at him more carefully. I saw him watching me, too. The tension made us both uncomfortable. The desires that had been with us so long ago were magnified. His eyes stopped on my eyes, my lips, then traveled to my neck. As he watched me I felt the brush of his lips on my skin, the warm heat traveling up my spine, though he hadn’t touched me. I looked at his hands. His arms were open, resting on each side of the wall next to him, and I felt drawn in the empty space his arms made but I couldn’t move. I felt awkward and turned my body away. I reached in my bag and took out my sunglasses and put them on, though the sky was already darkening. He had beautiful, textured hands; the dexterity, sensitivity, and depth of personality was apparent in his long fingers and hard knuckles, and I thought of his hands even as I turned from him.