“Why do you need to eat?” he asked, caught in the theater of stupid assertion that was starting to become our marriage.
“Why do I personally need to eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Because, if I don’t eat,” I said angrily, “I’m going to throw up from drinking too much.”
When we got home, I hurled my purse across the kitchen floor. “I think maybe I should go see Earl,” I said. Earl was Earl Gray, a matrimonial lawyer whom everyone in town called Mr. Tea. I believed myself to be unafraid of rupture. My engagement to Daniel had been years long and full of breakups.
“Fine,” said Daniel, and we stood there, in the fluorescent light, greenish and out of our minds. I got sharp-tongued and judgmental, an unfortunate but necessary combination. In the beginning was the Word, and it was a reproachful one. “I can’t stand this,” I said finally, “not knowing what you do, with whom, what it means. I can’t live like this. It’s like living with a wolf in the cellar as a pet — except he’s not a pet, in fact he’s not even a wolf, he’s a nuclear power plant!” I was drunk. “One of those shoddily constructed ones!” I marched over and threw open the basement door in some kind of attempt at illustration if not proof. “How many other women have there been? I want to know the truth! The truth!”
He was still and silent and sorry for me. Then he said, “I can’t tell you the truth.” “What do you mean you can’t tell me the truth? Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d be shocked,” said Daniel. A look of bemused surliness came over him. “Not surprised—just shocked.”
I lunged. I swung at him with both fists, and he threw me off with such fury and determination that I stumbled backward, into the open stairwell to the basement, my feet hitting air, my whole body falling, pitching backward toward the wolf and the nuclear power plant, the world reeling, both slow and fast, a tiny rectangle of light with Daniel in it, and then just the dark space of the basement, the pummeling thud of the steps and my hip and head and shoes, scraping and sliding, and finally me at the cement bottom, on my side, in shock, saying “Whoops, wope, whoops.”
Perhaps there was some bit of expectedness, foreseeability, in it; even bad behavior must fall within some unconscious expectation in order for it not to seem monstrous.
Afterward, Daniel apologized and cried and visited me for hours every day in the hospital. Performing the sweet rituals that would keep us together; he knew I could not otherwise take him back. Once the penance is performed, at least at first, one has no choice. “Think of all those good, praying people who keep God around for the rest of us,” said Daniel, on his knees by my bed. “God has no choice; he must honor the rites; if it were just the rest of us riffraff down here, he’d be long gone. But he comes through because of the good ones. He honors the covenant, the vows. Think of yourself as God. Think of me as the moral mix that is all of humanity.”
“Oh, please.”
“Well, then, think of me as — what? I don’t know.”
“You know those cream puffs called Divorce?” I say now to Marguerite.
“I’ve seen them.”
“They’re so totally great. Can we get those around here?” Once, last year in Chicago, I was at a dinner party where a newlywed woman kept interrupting her husband to say in a theatrical whine, “Honey, can we get our divorce now? Now can we get our divorce?” I was the only one there who thought she was funny. I was the only one there who laughed every time. At the end of the night, she leaned forward by the door and kissed me on the lips.
“Sure! I know of a pretty good pâtisserie not far from here.” Marguerites walk is strong and loping, impossible to match. We stop at her pâtisserie, wildly order two Divorces, then sit outside at the neighboring tabac drinking panachés (half bière, half limonade) to go with them. “Isn’t Paris amazing?” says Marguerite. “Where else would you have something like a tabac, half bar, half office supply store? The thing about France is that from romance to food to whatever, they really know what goes together. Look at all the red and purple — look at the gardens and lobbies and scarves. Not every culture knows that red and purple go so well together.” She pauses. “Of course, it’s also a totally sexist country.”
“C’est dommage,” I say, my mouth full of Divorce. I mention the men looking around, the libidinous, headlit bath the Frenchwomen are swimming in.
“The worst thing, though,” says Marguerite, “is when a man walks by you in the street, sizes you up, and says, ‘Pas mal.’ Pas mal! You feel outraged in a hundred different directions.” She pauses. “For one, you expect a little grade inflation on the streets.”
I laugh in a giddy way. I’ve eaten too much sugar. Marguerite orders water—“Château Chirac”—(a Parisian joke everyone knows, apparently, because it is scarcely acknowledged as a joke). The waiter barely cracks a smile and then goes off to the kitchen. Château Chirac is no longer funny; it is water; it is what water is called; it is what water is. And it makes me wonder how many things have begun this way, as jokes. Love, adolescence, marriage, life, death; perhaps God is looking down saying, “Geeze, y’all, lighten up. This is funny. You’re missing the intonation!”
“I can’t give my heart away to anyone but you,” Daniel said to me in the hospital. “Not that I haven’t tried, of course. It’s just that when I do, the other organs start a letter-writing campaign.”
“Don’t be clever,” I said. “Don’t be like that now.”
“What is your favorite painting in all of Paris?” I ask Marguerite. The liter of water has come and we gulp it down. She looks refreshed.
“Let me think,” she says. She names Géricault, van Gogh, Picasso.
“All the Os,” I say.
“All the Os! Actually, at the d’Orsay, there’s a pastel of Madame Monet, with the ribbons of her hat all untied. That’s probably my favorite. She’s sitting on a bright blue sofa — the most beautiful blue you’ve ever seen — and she is looking straight out of the drawing, as if to say, ‘I married a painter, and I still got this sofa.’ I like that one. Very French.”
“Do you think the Venus de Milo looks like Nicolas Cage?”
“A little,” she says, smiling. “But you’ve got to remember: even with all her handicaps and shyness, she’s lived in Paris; she’s been gazed upon by Parisians for years, so she believes — a belief as good as gold — that she’s absolutely beautiful.”
“Absolutely beautiful?”
“Cute. OK. She thinks she’s cute. She thinks she’s so goddamn cute.”
“Don’t you hate that? Even in a statue, I just hate that.”
We wander off to other galleries, where Marguerite shows me what she likes: big, broad, energetic paintings. “Sexy ones,” she says.
At a show of collages — tiny, fussy, intricate little cuttings and pastings, ink squiggles, swatches of color — I go from one to the other, slow and fascinated, but Marguerite is bored. She comes up behind me. “See, I don’t really like these,” she says. “They’re not sexual.”