This Must Be the Place (40 page)

A group of park workers in waterproofs and waders arrive and start dipping large fishing nets into the pond. I don’t know what they’re looking for but Marithe abandons her newly hired sailboat and goes over to watch. She’s always loved a bit of filth: algae, mud, manure, anything will do. Beside me, Ari is removing his chestnut-leather gloves and laying them one by one across his leg. I’ve got to hand it to him: Ari is one stylish boy. I’m not sure quite how this happened: his mother scrubs up well, as we know, but most of the time she dresses like a maniac. The house looks like a garage sale crossed with the bottom of a birdcage and I struggle along sartorially. Somehow, from this messy brew, this tall, elegant child emerged, looking like a model for avant-garde tailoring. I sometimes wonder if it’s his Scandinavian genes coming through: that pared-down aesthetic of his, the clean lines of him.

If there has been one bone of contention in my marriage with Claudette, it’s that Ari has no contact with his father. It’s against nature, it’s wrong and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t sit easily with me. The boy has a father, living and breathing, in Stockholm, and he doesn’t see him. I’ve had this out with Claudette, time and time again, but she always says the same thing: he has no interest in Ari and we have to protect Ari from that.

You see, Claudette will cry, sitting up in bed, he knows that if he wants to see Ari all he has to do is get in touch with Lucas. He knows that. He’ll get in touch when he’s ready and apparently he isn’t ready yet … I will usually interrupt at this point to say, but he ought to be given another chance, another opportunity, I don’t think he’d give you away but he might want to see his son, he might just need us to reach out to him, and also Ari might want it but be afraid to suggest it.

Claudette won’t be moved and the few times I’ve approached Ari with the idea he has smiled his enigmatic smile and shaken his head.

It’s nothing to do with you, Claudette says, if I raise the subject, and I have to admit she’s mostly right. Drop it, she tells me. And so I do. Until the next time I can’t keep it in.

‘So,’ Ari says to me now, as we sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg, ‘what did you do?’

‘What?’ I say, startled. ‘Nothing.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Ari says. ‘That’s why … that’s why …’ The utterance nose-dives off a cliff. Ari shakes back his fringe, passes his cigarette into the opposite hand, suddenly, poignantly childlike again. We both know his speech has closed up on him, like a trap.

‘Tap it out,’ I murmur, keeping my eyes on the pond, on Marithe, who just might decide to vault over the wall and into the pond, if history is anything to go by. When Ari was a kid, I’d offer him my palm to use as a drum, a beating board, something to take it all out on. He would smack my hand with his fist, often painfully hard, until he could gain a rhythm that loosened the words so they could make their way out from wherever they’d been trapped. ‘Come on,’ I proffer my palm, for old times’ sake. ‘Tap it out.’

Ari ignores my hand. I see his ankle jiggling up and down and, in a moment or two, he’s able to go on. ‘That’s why we’re in Paris, that’s why Claudette is clearing out the cupboards—’

‘Uh-oh,’ I say.

‘Are you seeing someone else?’

‘Ari,’ I say, hurt, ‘I would never—’

‘That’s what she thinks.’

‘I know she does. But she couldn’t be more wrong. You have to believe me. It’s just … it’s hard to explain.’

‘Well,’ Ari stands, crushing his cigarette under his boot, ‘you’d better start trying because here she comes now.’

Claudette is bearing down on us in a Paris park: hair tucked up into a felt hat with a wide brim, white-framed sunglasses with peaked corners, a silk kimono jacket. She carries some kind of tortoiseshell-clasped bag. I smile, despite everything. This is her idea of a disguise, her interpretation of incognito. She has no idea how startling, how eccentric she appears. People see her, look, then look again, and it’s hard to tell if they half recognise her or if they just need to get another look at the mad lady in the insane clothes.

I stand, I watch her, my wife, love of my life, as she comes towards me. I open my arms, I step towards her. Here she is, my beloved, my heart.

‘Don’t fucking kiss me,’ she says, serving me a blow in the centre of my chest.

Ari chooses this moment to call to Marithe. His mother says something, fast, to him, in French. Ari shrugs, says something back, and I curse myself, not for the first time, for not learning their secret language.

‘Um,’ I say, ‘English, please?’

Claudette rounds on me. ‘You!’ she cries. ‘You don’t get to say what language we speak, we will speak in any way we bloody well like. You don’t get to make any sort of demand around here at all. Understand?’

‘Yes,’ I say meekly, thinking at the same time that I can tell she’s been with her mother. She’s been discussing me with Pascaline, who’s never really liked me, who takes any opportunity to fill Claudette with all kinds of anti-male, anti-American, anti-Daniel propaganda. Claudette gets a certain look in her eye when she’s been engaged in a mother-daughter marital dissection. It happens every time. It only takes me, what, a day or two to win her back round.

Ari swizzles the stroller towards the playpark in the trees. He looks at me and winks. ‘
Bonne chance
,’ he says.

That, I understand.

‘Hey,’ I say to his back, the thought only occurring to me now, ‘how come you’re not in school?’ I turn to his mother. ‘How come he’s not in school?’

Claudette removes her sunglasses, finds it too bright, replaces them. ‘Well, that would be because I signed him out.’

‘To come here?’

‘To come here.’

‘Claude,’ I say, in a measured tone, ‘that’s not a great idea. It’s only a matter of weeks until—’

‘Listen,’ and the glasses come off again, used this time to stab emphasis into each word she utters, ‘I will sign my son out of his school if and when I want to, without permission from his part-time, so-called stepfather.’

I sigh. ‘OK,’ I say. I sit myself down in a chair. ‘Maybe we should try to talk this out like adults.’

My wife chooses that moment to turn her back on me and walk away, which I take as my cue to follow her.

I catch up with her on a path winding under the gnarled, leafless branches of plane trees. We stand there together and I tell her everything.

Almost everything.

The other woman, for my sins, I leave out.

I tell her about hearing that radio programme, my friendship with Todd, my relationship with Nicola, the bleak afternoon in a London clinic, the wedding party, the state of her, me taking off, the scramble to the airport, the return to Brooklyn, the letter I wrote and how I didn’t hear anything back from her, how this broke my heart, how I schooled myself to discard my love for her, to dig it out of me, how I was so consumed, as if by fire, by the loss of my mother, the one person – until Claudette – who loved me with a ferocity so unquestioning, so complete, that after it had gone I felt unmoored, insubstantial, as if I myself had ceased to exist. Not, as I said to Claudette as we stood there, that this is any excuse. A girl died. And it was my fault.

It would return to me, every now and again, the sight of her there, lying on the ground in the cold air of the morning, the way Todd didn’t look at me when he said: she’s fine, go, Daniel, run. I carried the image within me, like a virus dormant in the bloodstream, and it would flare up at odd moments. I might be working, cooking, eating, driving, teaching, and I would suddenly be distracted by a flash of forest, a vision of the loch, firelight through trees. I would push it from me, tell myself that the woman had rejected me, hadn’t wanted me, had disregarded my letter. I couldn’t let any other interpretation in, you see. I couldn’t let the possibility that I was at fault, that I had done something so wrong intrude into the life I had found, the life I had chosen that day at the crossroads. I inoculated myself against all of it by marrying Claudette, by moving to Ireland, by having kids with her – or I’d thought I had. I’d thought I was safe from the fever, the spread of it. I’d thought I had it contained, thought I’d be able to protect them from it, I’d thought I could keep it from them, from our door. The mind is a powerful, persuasive tool: we all know that.

Claudette, love of my life, mother of my children, keeper of my house, listens. She turns her face, obscured by her ridiculous sunglasses, towards me. She shifts her tortoiseshell handled bag from one arm to the other. When I have finished, she says nothing. She stands before me, the lenses of her sunglasses giving me back a doubled, miniaturised, blackened version of myself. I have no idea, at this point, which way she will go, what will happen next. I don’t think I breathe.

She murmurs my name, Daniel, almost to herself, and she lifts her arms, she puts them around me and she holds me to her, in the middle of a path.

My relief at her touch verges on indescribable. I don’t think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair, as I dive inside her coat and press her form to mine. What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.

‘What a terrible story,’ she is saying. ‘Daniel, I can’t believe you never told me that before. You didn’t need to keep it to yourself.’

‘Well,’ I mumble into her coat collar, ‘it’s never been something that I—’

‘That poor girl,’ she exclaims, pulling away, her face creased with distress. ‘She died how long after you left?’

‘A few months,’ I say. ‘Five, I think Todd said.’

‘And she’d been ill before, with anorexia?’

‘Yes. When she was younger. She seemed fully recovered when I met her. I mean, you would never have known.’

Claudette looks at me, her head on one side. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she says, pushing her hands up inside their opposite sleeves, ‘is why you should feel such guilt, why it’s thrown you into such crisis.’

‘Um,’ I say, casting my eyes up at the plane trees, ‘I don’t know.’

‘I mean, you went back to the States because your mother was dying. It wasn’t as if you were running away for nothing. Was it?’

‘I guess.’

‘But you said,’ Claudette frowns, perplexed, ‘it was your fault. Why? Why would you feel that? You wrote a letter. You tried. It wasn’t your fault she never received it.’

‘No.’

‘It makes no sense that you should feel responsible, when you …’ Claudette trails away. She looks at me for a long moment. This woman knows me better than anyone else in the world. She can read every expression, every inflection of my face.

‘You and she had split up before you went away?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘After the abortion?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

My mouth feels suddenly dry and I can’t look her in the eye as I shrug. ‘It was a long time ago. I don’t really …’

‘You must remember.’

I look about wildly, to find something that might distract her off this course. I take her arm. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘how about we walk to that bandstand?’

She allows me to fold my arm about her shoulders and we walk together along the path, but she cannot let this go. ‘Was it because of the abortion? Because you were angry she went ahead with it?’ She steps to one side so that my arm falls away. She turns to face me. ‘Or was it something else?’

I sigh. I rub my palm against several days’ worth of stubble. ‘Claude—’

‘Daniel,’ she interrupts me, ‘why do I get the feeling that there is something about this you’re not telling me?’

I see that evasion is useless so I give her the missing piece of the jigsaw. What other choice do I have? I come clean about the other girl, the teacher-training student, about Nicola finding us the next morning. And then I brace myself for the onslaught because Claudette has never taken this kind of thing lightly.

But she doesn’t say anything. She turns and walks up the steps of the bandstand, which is deserted, filled only with swirling leaves.

We sit on a bench. I am conscious of the wheels of Claudette’s mind turning, forming connections, assumptions, slotting things into their places.

‘So what you’re saying, Daniel,’ she speaks slowly, ‘is that you took your girlfriend to get an abortion and then you came back home and slept with someone else?’

I grimace. I have never heard myself presented to myself in such a way. ‘Well …’

‘Straight away?’ she persists. ‘The same night?’

I give something that is halfway between a nod and a shrug. ‘It might have been the following night. I don’t remember exactly.’

‘That was your response to the termination of your girlfriend’s pregnancy?’

‘Listen, I was …’ I scramble for words ‘… very young and … stupid and—’

‘Twenty-four’s not that young,’ she mutters.

She gets up, crosses to the other side of the bandstand and leans on the railing, her back to me. I grip the bench in something close to terror, wanting to close my eyes but not being able to, wondering, as she stands there, looking towards the fountain, if I am witnessing the beginning of the end, if this is it, the tipping point we all dread. Am I living through the moment when all the tiny lights begin to be extinguished, when her love for me begins to falter, shrink, lose ground? I have been through the demise of enough relationships to know such moments arise, but would I know how to recognise it when it came? Is this it? What have I done?

I say her name – Claudette, Claudette – and my voice comes out as a hoarse, desperate murmur. She bows her head; she doesn’t turn round.

It is possible, I think, as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down for ever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realise it until much later.

I won’t have it. I tell myself this. Such things only happen if you let them. It is feasible, surely, to head them off at the pass.