That Day I had returned to Paris after a long absence. All the circumstances of my life were so altered since the time I had lived there, and I had been more ofter to New York than to Paris in the intervening years. But that day, in the evening light over Les Invalides, I began to gestate this narrative of love, loss and libido.
JUDGEMENT OF PARIS
I
CHRISTIANA
The Gare du Nord after London was not what I expected. When I had first arrived in Paris as a schoolboy to meet my pen-friend as part of an exchange programme called en famille, I’d arrived in the Gare St. Lazare. That was in the sixties and for me a personal belle époque. Then the smell of Paris was a perfume I couldn’t get enough of. The smell of the petrol fumes, the Gitane cigarette smoke, the garlic-infused body-odours in the Metro, the eau de Javelle in the bathroom, the heat over the gravel paths of the parks: it all smelled better than gardens of roses and lilacs. Then south London had that soot-sharp smell that recalled the peasoupers and it still permeated the carriages of even the electric trains of the Southern Region. The smell and the sound of Paris was for me erotic. It took little to arouse my erotic interest, but Paris was the only erotic stimulus that wasn’t a woman or the thought of one. Unlike London’s smell, it was glamorous and not everyday: a perfume, not something to hold your nose against. Even the strong, rather stagnant smells rising from the Seine out in the western suburb of Sartrouville on hot, slow days, I recall with nostalgia, though at the time I distinctly remember being faintly nauseated by them.
I had unconsciously brought the expectation with me that I would step out of the Eurostar and find myself back in the Paris of little Renault 4CVs and Peugeot 403s crackling over the cobbles of the Concorde putting out their exquisite exhaust aromas, of drifts of Gitane smoke and agents policiers blowing whistles at the traffic, while fine food smells drifted seductively over the pavements. Huh! Instead - a dirty subway, drifters and beggars, a run-down feel and Euro-standard signage as seen in London.
We decided against the Metro, came out, took a taxi, and the driver welcomed me back when I gave him the address of our hotel. I felt close to tears! He took me for a Parisian! He had heard me speaking English to Elaine my New Yorker wife, but then French to him, and he had assumed I was a French expat. I suppose some part of me is, but I will come to that, inevitably, in time.
We had come to have a holiday with a high school friend of Elaine’s, Mona, with whom she had reconnected recently. Mona came to Paris as often as she could and knew it well. I wasn’t too keen on her husband, but we would rub along, because it suited both of us that our wives were pleased to be together.
But for me something else was happening that I couldn’t share with Elaine largely because I did not realise quite what it was, and anyway, it needn’t matter to anyone but me. The first instance was the moment I found myself streaming with tears as we strolled, while waiting for our restaurant table to be ready, out onto the Invalides. The sun was low, and it was a warm, still evening. The light touched the gentle, grand roofs of the monumental buildings on either side of the boulevard and triggered in me an overwhelming feeling of love for the place, for what it had been for me in my adolescence, and I felt that despite the miserable arrival into the Gare du Nord, the Paris I remembered was still to be found. It had been there all along, and I had not known. I had been elsewhere. It was me who had gone away, not it.
But what did all that really mean? Twice already today I had had tears in my eyes, just to be back in a city I had not revisited all the years since I had returned to live in London and subsequently to visit twice a year, most years, not Paris, but New York. I had even felt I had recovered a self that was really, deep down, in some irrational but nonetheless true way, French, quite as much as I was manifestly English. I realised was speaking French to myself as I tried to articulate what was going on.
After dinner, back at the hotel, Elaine turned in. She had spoken to her friend Mona to arrange to meet in the morning. I said I would go for a stroll, and I returned to the terrace of the restaurant where we had eaten dinner and I sat with a drink. And then I found myself thinking of Chrissy, a girl I had known for all of one night years ago: I mean literally one single night from first meeting at a party early evening to parting the next morning after a breakfast at Les Halles and a stroll to her apartment door. After which I had never seen her again. I had not expected to think of her. I had not remembered her, as I recall, in all the years since, at least twenty years. Yet this unexpected effect of returning to Paris had brought her to mind of all the people I had known and been close to in my years in France. And she was not a Parisienne, not even French, but a girl over from Rhodesia, as it was called then.
I was teaching at Paris IV and Sorbonne and living with my first wife rue des Moines in the 17th arrondissement in a tiny apartment furnished from old cafe tables and chairs we had brought in from the street where they had been put out to be taken by such as we were: lecturers, students, marginal people…Helena was hankering after the countryside, and was unhappy in the city. Our marriage was both happy and miserable. At least that was how I was. I was happy to be married to Helena. We felt close, harmonious and complementary. We did a lot together, and we had constructed what today we would call a narrative of ourselves, in which we saw ourselves as creating a sort of shared moral purpose that confronted all manner of false consciousness, hypocrisy, shallowness, conformity in others. Looking back at it, it amounted to our confirming to each other that we were in possession of an awareness of integrity that few others could claim. That was the happy bit, since it shored us up against what would eventually reveal itself to be our limited ability to engage with the coarse necessities of the world. We were in it together, and that made each of us happy. But the fact of being happy does not exclude the possibility of at the same time being miserable. What the roots of Helena’s unhappiness were I spent a lot of time trying to discover, because I could see that she, like me, was, under it all, miserable and a discontent. Not that we talked of such things. For my part it was easiest to attribute my miserableness to my inability to find satisfaction in my literary research, indeed to continue to persuade myself that it was even a worthwhile piece of work I was dogged by all hours of the day and night, all days of the week. Not that I spent so much time actually doing the work so much as being hounded by the gloomy guilt at not getting on with it. I was nonetheless industrious at all sorts of work that was not my research. I taught, read, sketched and painted, and I wrote short poems, not all of which were about my miserableness, at least not directly. I suspected a good deal of Helena’s misery was caused by my misery about my failure to get on with it, the thesis that is. And not just an empathetic misery. Hers, I suspected, but hardly dared admit to myself, was also stoked by a smouldering disappointment that the bright, dare I say brilliant? young graduate she had married was not meeting her only half-acknowledged expectations: was turning out to be a bit of no-show, a damp squib.
And that’s before we get to the bedroom. Or else it is, in my case at least, how the bedroom scene is leaching into all the other rooms I found myself wandering about miserably in all day long. And it certainly is why Chrissy from Rhodesia comes into my life and leaves it almost at once, but not before lodging herself hidden away inside me, only to reappear unbidden but curiously welcome as I sat on the restaurant terrace, the sun slipping away in a honey-coloured sky, back in the city of mirrors after two decades.
Somehow I had managed with no effort and mostly unconsciously
to convince myself, or rather to be convinced,- how handy the passive voice! - that if only it was better in bed with Helena, the renaissance sonneteer I was supposed to be editing and and returning from obscurity to his rightful place in the cannon, alongside Ronsard, Du Bellay, Peletier du Mans, and the Pleiade figures, my poet would resound in the ears of Academia and mine along with his. I was, however, alarmed, increasingly, that not only was I likely soon to be older than he had been at his early death in 1555, but that his erotic verses, which complemented, even spoke to his platonic love sonnets, suggested he had had more going on in his bedroom than I had in mine. The erotic verse was where my Pleiade poet was at his most innovative and interesting. That was the lost world I wanted to recover. The sonnets weren’t at all bad, but there were enough unrequited loves in print already, and there was too much of the contained and exquisite sonnet and not enough raunchy couplets in my own life as it was.
Or was it my envy of the dead poet putting an unconscious brake on my rescuing him from obscurity? Was there a sabotaging envy spiting me? Did I actually want him to be as obscure as I was likely to remain if I didn’t get on with it and write my damned thesis? It didn’t cross my mind then, but it does now. Whatever was or wasn’t going on the effect of both our miserablenesses was for us to agree to a separation. I did indeed agree to a separation, but I didn’t want to have to be agreeing to a separation, but Helena was out ahead of me, so without really agreeing to a separation, I acquiesced, a word that sounds how I felt, somehow quiesced, gently tucked away quietly, though there was a blaze raging inside me.
“It’s just till I sort myself out, Lew. I need to be by myself. You have your work here, but I need to find something for myself.”
“Yes”
“You’ll be better off for a bit without me dragging you down, I know you will, Lew.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be able to catch up with your old friends.”
“Yes. What friends?”
“You know, Brigitte and her brother…”
“Guy?”
“Yes, Guy!”
“Yes, I will. It’s true.”
“So you’ll be fine.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. I can look after myself.”
“Of course you can. But will you?”
“What?”
“Look after yourself.”
“Yes. And will you?”
“Of course I will!”
“Yes.”
Oh yes, I thought, you will look after yourself, all right. In fact all this is about you looking after yourself, only why not here? Why not with Me? But I knew the answer to that and that if I actually framed the answer in words, it would all be over for me.
Because it was about the bedroom, and that was not to be mentioned. What I wanted to say, was saying inside, was: And how am I going to manage night after night alone without you in the bed beside me, and without making love to you for how many weeks? She wasn’t even mentioning an end-date! It just wrote in even bigger capital letters the sentence, which is also an ace pun, ‘sentence’: YOU NEED SEX: I DON’T, with the corollary, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MANAGE WITHOUT IT LIKE ME.
It was during the separation when Helena went to work as some kind of house-help in the Fens with a brewer and his family, while I continued in the little appartment rue des Moines, that I was able to formulate clearly, and for once and all, the strangely symmetrical asymmetry between us. I wanted sex with a woman whom I enjoyed being with, but was no longer head over heels in love with, (we were married for Goodness sake) but whom I loved and who was there. She, on the other hand, didn’t want to have sex with a man she enjoyed being with, and whom she loved, and was there, but wanted to be head over heels in love with someone, anyone, unavailable, who was married to someone else, and with whom she imagined, I supposed, she would have amazing sex of a somewhat spiritual intensity. Now here is the complication: what I thought of as good sexual relations and what my wife thought of as same were in reality two quite different entities. This has its own history and I may have to return to it. For the present, suffice it to say, for her it wasn’t what it was for me.
So there I was, a grass widower they call it, in Paris, in my twenties, with time to spare and enough income from my ridiculously few university teaching hours to live modestly but free of any financial worries. And also I could be quite anonymous. I wasn’t going to run into anyone who knew me as the husband of Helena, since she had barely shown herself to anyone except the occasional visitors from home. I wanted to know what it meant to stay faithful under the circumstances I found myself in. There were a number of people I could catch up with, people I had known from my earliest visits to the city and also some names people had given us to look up from St Andrews where I had registered my research, but which Helena had been reluctant to do. I’m not sure I thought of these as truly friends, but then that was something else I had to work on: friendship, that is, as distinct from people I knew and got on with in some way.
I didn’t exactly panic at finding myself going home to an empty apartment and with untold solitary hours at my disposal, hours in which I would, pretty certainly, not be getting on with my thesis. But I behaved with that sort of exaggerated calm and determination that you see in people who are staving off some potentially overwhelming hysteria, or confronting an existential threat, or about to be sent down for a life sentence. In no time at all, after no more than a day or so, I felt as if I hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks. It didn’t help that the University was on strike again - I had been enrolled somehow in the attractively-named Cellule Picasso of what was a communist, I think, university lecturers’ union, so I didn’t even have my students to talk to. Never mind Cellule Picasso: here I was in Cellule Lewis Morrison, hermetically sealed from the world, a solitary electron deprived of its proton, waltzing without a partner.
Today there are no end of ways of getting in touch with people, email, facebook, WhatsApp. Then we didn’t even have a phone in the apartment. I felt the emptiness congealing round me, and couldn’t summon up the initiative to go out to a cafe and try phoning some of the small list of Parisian numbers in my phone book. Most of the numbers in it were for mutual friends, that is friends of Helena that had come as a sort of social dowry when we married. And they of course were all in Scotland or England.
No internet or mobile phones, then, but we did write letters and postcards, and before I had had my first letter from Helena, an invitation arrived from Brigitte, the sister of my schooldays pen-friend, Jean-Paul. She was a medical intern and she invited me to join her with Guy, her younger brother, visiting from somewhere in Normandy, where he worked at something to do with yachts, for an evening in an Algerian restaurant she knew to eat couscous.
These were precisely the ‘friends’ Helena had instanced as people I might see while I was on my own. I thought it was a bit sinister, at first, but couldn’t see how she could have contrived it. She only mentioned them, I decided, because I had talked about them recently when telling her of my first visit to Sartrouville and Paris as a schoolboy. How much I had told her I can’t remember, but I would have left out a good deal such as the fact that as a thirteen year old I had had a rather yearning and hopeless crush on Anne-Marie, my pen friend, Jean-Paul’s, and Brigitte and Guy’s, older sister. I remember Anne-Marie as being in a sort of religious coma much of the time, clutching her white missal with little bookmarks of saints and bleeding hearts and adorations, exuding purity, duty and gentleness. Looking back I am amazed I had fallen for her the way I undoubtedly did. She was a bit dumpy, a bit too sensible and dutiful, far too old for me, possibly as much as 16, but she was very bright and I suppose I imagined in her a more sensuous young woman waiting to be released by my ardent love. At the same time I was being seduced by the catholicism that enveloped her, being a sucker for the Latin Mass myself.
Brigitte, when I first began my regular stays with the family in Sartrouville, had been a rather gangly kid of a girl, fun, with a big nose and small pointy teeth. Guy the tall, laconic younger brother was a natural comic and could reduce the whole family, otherwise a rather staid bourgeois catholic family prone to icy atmospheres, to laughter, and often did, happily defusing the regular tensions between Madame and Monsieur.
Now Anne-Marie was forgotten, married and lost to banking. Jean-Paul, a lovely, modest, kindly lad, had disappeared into the Tarn and agricultural research of some sort. But here was Brigitte, become the tall, radical, charismatic feminist, who looked to me like some secular Joan of Arc or perhaps even a left-wing Saint Theresa, ascetic, intelligent, thoroughly turned on. Guy smiled down from his even taller height, benign and a little detached. Brigitte it was who filled my cigarette paper with hash, and it was there with the couscous, whose charms then and ever since have escaped me, that I smoked my first joint.
At this point I should say I realise I am making my way to the night with Chrissy, as it came back to me sitting on the restaurant terrace, by way of a rather long, meandering sequence of recollections. Yet the fact that I recall all this now is, I think, the necessary condition for remembering Chrissy, because, without these recollections, that night with her would never have returned to me and signified so much as it does.
The immediate connection I suspect is this: I was determined to be with another woman if I could not be with Helena. The invitation to couscous from the grown-up little sister Brigitte appealed not so much as the promise of ‘meeting a friend’ (as projected by my absent wife), as the possibility of being in bed with a possible lover, (as projected by me). What were the chances? As soon as I had inhaled the first few drags of hash, heard out the first few paragraphs of Brigitte’s astute and up-to-the-minute political analyses, watched her cross her long, thin jeans-clad legs, and absorbed the fraternally feminist vibes of her friendliness, I realised that here was someone I really warmed to, whose judgements I respected, whom I was really pleased to know and to have shared quite a long history from childhood to adulthood with, but who was more perfectly the sister I’d never had than a lover.
The latter part of the evening I spent at first giggling at Guy’s stories and then descending into a stoned catatonia which put me off hash for a very long time.
Elaine has often said, specially now we are getting on in years, that if anything should happen to her — the sort of euphemism we bandy about in our seventh decade — women would be queuing at my door with casseroles in no time at all. I’ve never really believed that, assigning the scenario to a New York Jewish stereotype, not something that transplants easily to South West London. Yet while I saw myself then, in my mid-twenties, as a floundering would-be academic with a shaky self-esteem that was not being actively shored up by a wandering wife, (and I was sure she would in no time be in relations that were more than contractual with the Brewer in the Fens, as he loomed in my imagination, refracted through the lens of what I knew to be Helena’s yen for older married men of modest education but practical heft,) nonetheless, though not bearing casseroles, women were at my door, or at least my postbox.
Very soon after the hazy couscous evening, a second invitation arrived, this one most unexpectedly from a married English colleague, whom I had found rather daunting, the wife of an affluent Parisian patrician. She spoke French more idiomatically than me, which riled me quite a bit. I could put it down to her having the advantage of speaking the language at home all the time, but it still rankled. She was beautiful, I could see, in a rather cool, blonde Anglo-Saxon way. I was surprised to receive the invitation, because I had had the sure feeling from our first encounter at the university that she saw me as socially inconsequential, which was not an unreasonable judgement, I could see, from her perspective, but also, less happily, so was it from my own. I discovered when the evening came, however, and I found myself in their large and expensively furnished apartment in the Cinquieme, that I’d been invited to make up the number of men at their party. Normally I would have preferred to have been chosen because I was interesting to meet, chosen for my conversation and, let’s say it, for my intellectually brilliant ideas. But under the present circumstances, it was actually most welcome that I had been chosen because I was a man! I was, there was no hiding it from myself, on the hunt.
I seem to think there had been a number of interesting people at the party, rather unexpectedly, considering that the hosts were prematurely middle-aged and bourgeois-conservative, in my eyes. I’m sure I wouldn’t be so deprecating about them if I met them today, as they were then, but I was more of a class warrior in those days. Nonetheless I can recall none of them not a single one, except for Chrissy, and she had been the one I most nearly turned my back on.
Short dark hair with a little wave in it, green eyes, not quite my height and wearing most incongruously yellow denim dungarees over a pretty white blouse and a burgundy silk scarf round her neck, speaking with a slight South African accent, as I took it to be, she somehow roused my antagonism from the moment she spoke. I can’t recall what it was, but possibly her accent and something she said which struck me as parochial and unenlightened made me want to condemn her from the start. But I was a male on the prowl, and that can be a dangerous thing to be. What she exuded aroused my aggression, but her person, the timbre of her voice, the sweetness of her, her attractiveness, drew that aggression into a sexual excitement which was satisfyingly and seductively sadistic. But I let our embryonic conversation stall and moved away. After this initial brief encounter, at some point I learned something of her history from a girl who was sharing rooms with her. She was from Rhodesia, and had found her way to having a study period in France. She had never before been away from home, and her flatmate had the impression that her parents had been against her leaving home on her own. Getting out of Rhodesia then under Ian Smith was problematic and she seems to have managed to add to a short holiday with relatives somewhere in Switzerland a more prolonged stay in France. The flatmate thought she was very unsophisticated and uninformed, but said she was gutsy. She had been talking about not going back when her visa or whatever expired.
Later I saw her standing on her own. There was nobody in the spacious high-ceilinged room I knew more than very slightly, nobody I was much interested in knowing better, and as she stood with a hand in her pocket, the other holding a glass of fruit juice, looking at the artwork on the wall beside her with her head on one side, I found myself wanting her physically, as simple as that. I went over to her. When she saw me, she smiled and said,
“I hoped you’d come and talk to me again. You didn’t even tell me your name. If I didn’t see you again, I wouldn’t even have had your name to remember.”
I felt myself melting inside. A real, physical sensation of melting warmly. It was as though she had embraced me and held me to her. I was unable to speak.
“So, tell me your name at least!” and she gave a laugh.
I was afraid of looking as gaping as I felt. I mustn’t mess this up, so I recovered myself and said as nonchalantly as I could.
“Lewis. My name’s Lewis.”
That smile again, as if she saw through me.
“Is that like Louis, like the kings?”
“No. Not like the Sun King, not me. Like a Scottish island. L-e-w…And you are?”
“My parents called me Christiana for reasons best understood by them. I’m called Chrissy. Please call me Chrissy.”
“I will…Chrissy.”
From there on we talked together until the party began to break up. What did I learn about her? I remember very little now in detail, but the sense of her remains, and the essence of her, as I experienced it then and which attracted me to her. She stopped being simply the physical object of my sexual desire: she grew into what we mean, I suppose, when we call someone our Beloved — though I find that sounds nauseatingly precious when I hear other people say it. All the same, when I think of Chrissy, as she was that night, then, yes, Beloved is right. The desire was there, stronger than ever, but the sadistic, rapacious impulse was drained away, and it was all about closeness and polarity and the electricity those make happen. We were electric, that night. The party ended, but before everyone went, we left together. We walked together all night long, stopping to sit on benches or lying on the stones beside the Seine. And I do not recall whether we kissed even once. It was a though it was one continuous embrace, but I suspect we in fact only walked arm in arm and held hands, or I put my arm round her shoulder. There are times when that is enough, and more than all the thrashing about. It does not cease to amaze me!
So who was this Chrissy that she should be present in me even today when others I slept with and enjoyed the company of,— and there were several before Helena returned to Paris, — when these others are shadows of shadows, barely even half-remembered names? What was the essence of her that has proved so resistant to the passage of the years? How can I hope to articulate something that is made up of countless individual, unique nuances, — as much the way they are said, — as much the timbre of the voice that says them, — as much the lips that utter the sounds. But at the heart of her was a spirit which I recognised as being what had led her flatmate to call her unsophisticated and uninformed, but which I experienced as a freshness, an openness. Her mind was uncluttered by all that cultural European noise which, by contrast with her colonial provincialism, her relative ignorance of the ways of the big cities, I felt, now, in her presence, dulled my responses and filled me with received opinion so much that I could not know for sure what I knew truly for myself about anything. I couldn’t even give her a decent answer when she asked what I thought was important about the subject of my thesis. I mean, I could rehearse the answer I had composed some time ago, when I had first set out on it. But I was damned if I could say what it was when she asked me now.
She told me she was sad that everyone told her about Rhodesia and South Africa and the attitudes of the European Africans when they had never been there or spent any time with the people, and were not interested in what she might tell them of growing up in that world. They just wrote her off, and all the white people like her. She was expected to learn from them, the French, the Europeans. They made it known, the way people do, that they had nothing to learn from her.
She had indeed quite quickly seen, being in France, how blinkered and bigoted the world view was that she had inherited from her family, but the people she grew up among also included dear, good, kind people whose lives, and children’s futures, in fact all they had worked for, felt increasingly precarious. They felt threatened, in danger, unwanted by Africa and Europe alike. Nevertheless she now felt she could not return, could not re-enter the cave, as she called it, having seen outside, and seen the distortions that come from living in it. Yet it was home. The only home she had. The cousins in Switzerland were as much in the cave as her Rhodesian family, and they had insisted she go home and not travel. They thought that was where she was going when she went to the airport and flew to Paris.
She still felt she was African, but now knew she would have to become European. But, as the only daughter of older parents who had lost two sons to violent deaths before she was born, the idea of abandoning her parents and her grandparents was as hard to countenance as re-entering, as she put it, the cave. She doubted she could even go back to say she was leaving. If she did, it might be made impossible for her to leave the country. She didn’t know, but she was afraid that is how it would work.
For all this she wasn’t the damsel in distress. I admired how clearly she articulated her predicament. She was lacking all self-pity, and I did not feel called upon to play the knight-in-armour, always a seductive pose, (for me at least, if not for the damsel in question: it’s the lazy way out for a man.) I just felt increasingly that night how much I just wanted to be with her, and I suppose I was beginning to feel a resonance in her predicament, since in a less dramatic or obvious way than her, I too had had to leave the cave my family had remained in.
We ended our night’s wandering by sitting at a table in one of the places where the workers at Les Halles went to eat onion soup, the gratinee des Halles, after their night’s shift. We ate our plates of soup lifting the strings of cheese and chewing them off clumsily, laughing at each other. Then we walked, tired but still electric to her building and there we parted ways. Did we kiss then? I cannot recall. And we never met again, because of something she had told me. We did not know we wouldn’t meet again. In fact we both felt, I’m sure of it, that we would. We must! But in the hours after, back in my apartment, I became overwhelmed with sadness over something she had said before we sat down to our one and only meal together and which turned me to lead. She had told me she was recovered now. She had begun to recover as soon as she had arrived in Zurich. It had been a wonderful release. Those were her words, ‘a wonderful release’. She had become anorexic, quite severely so, at home, and the reason she had been allowed to visit her cousins was because being with her parents, her doctor had suggested, was ‘blocking her recovery’. She admitting sewing this idea in the doctor’s mind, and was glad to find he had gone with it. All along I had had no sense of Chrissy being anything but really glowing with vitality. Her figure was trim, but she was not thin. In fact I was very taken by her shapeliness. It’s true she was small-breasted, like Helena, but that was something I liked.
But then she had said that her anorexia had made her infertile. She would not be able to have children. About her recovery, she said brightly,
“I’m so glad to be out of all that. I’m free now. It’s as if I’ve come out into the light.” Then, less brightly she said, “The only thing is, I won’t be able to have children…”
Her expression froze for a moment as she held my gaze. I said only,
“You seem so well now. I’m glad it’s over for you.”
“Yes, it is. Here I am!”
As I think of it now I can feel again my excitement when she said, “Here I am.” Those words have stayed with me. She was offering herself to me, and as if without the encumbrance of an unwanted pregnancy. After all, she knew I was married, and separated, and I hadn’t said whether the separation was final or not, but perhaps this would decide things for me.
And it did, the very next day, but not as I had expected. The only thing is, I won’t be able to have children. I found myself weeping in the empty apartment. I knew I must not see her again.
As I left the terrace, the light was almost out of the sky. It was time to go back to the hotel, and to Elaine. She would have called our children to let them know we were safely installed, and tomorrow we would meet Mona and Ellis and go to the Musee d’Orsay.