Without Her Read online

  “I love it when you laugh,” he says. “Why do you always laugh?”

  “Because it’s always such a lovely surprise.”

  I don’t ask him if other women laugh after orgasm, or cry. He doesn’t ask me if other men have made me laugh with pleasure too. We don’t include our other lives and lovers, if there are any, and I rather suspect that these days for him, as for me, there are not. (There’s a third wife, somewhere in the background, and an ongoing saga of difficult and expensive divorce.) He doesn’t ask about my life in the US—that country he views with suspicion, mostly from afar. My time in California, he refers to as “your hippie days.” He came to see me a few times in New York, which he considers worth visiting: there are museums, there are landmarks that even the French, with their immense superior store of cultural monuments, can respect.

  After we have done what we mostly do these days and have slept for a few minutes, in the middle of the afternoon here in Paris once again, we wake and roll to lie on our backs and I tell him, “Apparently Hannah has disappeared.”

  “Really? How do you mean?”

  “Philip called me at work. It’s why I’m here early. I’m supposed to be rushing south to help him find her.”

  “People don’t disappear these days.”

  “I know, it’s hard to believe. But he says she left home in England and came to Paris and never arrived at the house.”

  “Perhaps she too has someone to see in Paris?”

  I haven’t thought of this. “Hmm. I doubt it, somehow.”

  I’ve always suspected that one summer, long, oh long ago, Hannah and Alexandre may have had an affair. I’ve never asked him; it would be outside the bounds of our relationship, and, anyway, I doubt that I would like to hear the answer. It could have been during that summer that she was in Paris alone, when I for some forgotten reason had had to go home to England. Had my mother been ill? Did I have to work? These details of life slip from the mind after forty years or more; and what remains only is a series of unreliable memories. Hannah sitting on the side of a bed, her long hair hanging down; something in the air, in yet another shared hotel room, something she would not tell me. A catch in Alexandre’s voice—young Alexandre, with his long shaggy brown hair and his same quick upward glance. A silence. An unexplored possibility.

  “What do you think has happened?” he asks me now.

  “I’ve no idea. Either she just wants some time away from Philip—you know how he fusses—or, I don’t know, perhaps she’s ill, or something happened to her.” I want to ask him, “You didn’t see her, did you?” Surely, they have not been in touch with each other for years.

  He says, “She didn’t contact me, if that’s what you are thinking.” Like this, the shortcuts in our talk, the questions that somehow, not asked, answer themselves. It’s all right to have this kind of conversation after lovemaking, when the sails of the world go slack and you are becalmed; not before.

  “No, I didn’t think so, after all this time.”

  He says, “Who do you think she knows here, now?”

  “I don’t know. So many of our friends are dead, or have moved away. The Lenoirs, you know, Madeleine and Sylvain? But they spend the summers in the south, anyway. They’d be gone by now. She has a friend at the Sorbonne, teaches English, a woman called Simone. But, most people will be leaving soon, won’t they?”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “Well, first of all, try to calm Philip down. He’s probably got the French police or even Interpol combing Europe for her now. Then, I don’t know.”

  He says, “The strange thing is that now it is almost like a crime to go missing, even for a few days. We are supposed to keep in touch, always; we can be tracked down, by our mobile phones, our computers, everything we do is watched. So, to disappear is more of an effort, more of a plan. I would say, it’s almost impossible.”

  “Yes, it seems she didn’t take her phone with her. That’s a tracking device in itself.”

  “Yes, exactly, if it was deliberate.”

  “But,” I say, “why?”

  “Who knows? At our age, there is less of life left to us. Perhaps she wanted to do something she could not tell Philip about. Claudie, you know her best, think; what would she do? What would you do if you were her?”

  “That’s just what Philip thinks. I know her best because I’ve known her longer than anyone, so I should be able to guess at her motives. But I can’t. We live such different lives, now. I only see her once a year, if that.” All at once, I am exasperated. Why, once again, are we spending our time talking about Hannah? And, why do I mind—since I brought up her name in the first place?

  He picks up on this thought. “All right, enough about Hannah. How long are you here? How much time do we have?”

  “I have a train south tomorrow morning. Ten-thirty at the Gare de Lyon.”

  “Ah. That’s good. I have something early this evening, but after dinner I can come back, if you like, we could even spend the night together.”

  Even though I warned him that I’m only here for less than twenty-four hours, he has something, someone, some place to go for dinner?

  “All right. Come back here after your important dinner.”

  “Claudie, it isn’t that, believe me, but I said I would have dinner with my son.”

  “Ah. How is he?” His son, Dominique the ex-drug addict. He hardly ever sees him, I know that.

  “Better. But still fragile. You know, I can’t let him down at the last minute.”

  Yes, I do know that. And I have known, over the years, the agony of Alexandre, the guilt, the trying to make amends, the fights with his former wife, whose side Dominique always took, and finally the boy’s struggles with drugs, painkillers, cocaine.

  I’m doubtful about spending the night with him, even after all this time. Will we sleep? Will he snore, and kick? The sleeping habits of people our age are often disruptive. Will I spend the night wide awake with jet-lag, haunted by memories of boarding school? Enough time has passed, surely, for this not to be an issue. Sleeping with your lover in a comfortable French hotel is after all not very similar to lying awake in a dormitory in an English boarding school. And I can always ask him to go home in the small hours; he doesn’t live far away.

  “All right.” We are already reaching for our clothes, which are all mixed up on the floor and on the nearest chair, and this makes us laugh, because we have done this so many times before. He wriggles into his shirt, I do up my bra. The undressing was so swift, we flung our things away from us like teenagers, and now we have to sift, separate, collect. He picks up his watch that has lain with a handful of euros on the bed table. I strap on my Swiss beauty. When he ties his shoes, he puts one foot after the other on the chair and pulls the knot tight. I have watched him do this so many times; all my life, as it sometimes seems. Does this make up a marriage of sorts, a repetition over the years, an intimacy that has no home and no address, just this sharing of moments, memories, places to which we will never return? We have known each other since we were nineteen, and now we are on the edge of old age. He flattens his white hair with my brush. “Do I look respectable?”

  “As respectable as you ever do.”

  “Don’t tease me, Claudie.”

  “Why not? Haven’t I earned the right to tease you? After the life you have lived, you have no right to look respectable. But yes, you look like a dear old prof. de lycée, with that jacket and that briefcase you tote around. Nobody would ever dream what you get up to.”

  If I’m fluent in French still, it’s because of him. A true Frenchman of his generation, he’s never felt the need to learn other languages. One day, he says, he will learn better English; it’s after all the language of the Internet. I don’t say, it has been my language too, since we first met.

  He likes the vision of himself that I’ve given him—the wide bo
y, the man about town. He likes the disguise, the pretense, the getting by. “Bon, I must go. Till later then. Nine o’clock?”

  I watch him go, as I have watched him so many times. Once, I used to cry as soon as he had left the room, clean from a quick shower, rushing home to his wife and child, or back to work, back into his life. A night together used to seem so impossible. Now, I don’t cry. I smile. It is, after all, quite an achievement, what we have done together in secret over the years. When I am not with him—which is most of the time, ninety percent of my life at least—I think about how we live this love affair of ours, and at times could almost believe that I have invented him. But what I live with him is deep, subterranean, a seam of passion and pleasure that exists nowhere else in my life, as I am almost sure it does not in his. We have invented this together, this way of meeting throughout decades, this lovemaking that goes straight to the point. It’s not always yearly; there have been times when we have not met for two, even three years; when I lived on the West Coast, the distance meant we met infrequently. In New York, we stayed in a hotel in Washington Square and watched people’s dogs in the little park, and ate bagels that he pronounced tasteless, and even visited the Statue of Liberty. But the conversation our bodies have been having eliminates time and place, as it insists on its own reality. Bagels or croissants, the Statue of Liberty (who started out in Paris after all, he says), hotels in New York, pigeons on Parisian windowsills, once even a fleeting few hours at an airport, I forget where, when one of us was passing through. The décor hardly matters, as the passage of time hardly marks us. It has seemed to me like magic, as well as heartbreak; a juggling of what we are allowed of time and space in one lifetime, tossed up into the heady air.

  I imagine that many people might think that meeting a man once a year to have sex with him in a hotel room does not constitute a relationship: that we have made nothing, only repeated a compulsion that does not suit our age or status. But lived from the inside, there is our reality, and it’s different from this. I can’t say what goes on inside Alexandre’s head and body, of course; but there is something that has been created over the years: a trust of the body, a being present to each other. There are the gaps between actions, the in-breaths between the out-breaths if you like, the silences in between words, the inaction between actions, the stillness at the center of life, felt in the beating of two aging hearts. This, the silence, the stillness, the belief in coming together, the showing-up, the being there, all this has created a third thing, as a marriage does, or any long connection between individuals. It has made us both less and more than our individual selves. Alexandre and I know each other, in the Biblical sense and beauty of that word.

  I never thought for more than a few postcoital hours about marrying him, even when we were both free. He worked in Paris, became a lawyer, wore suits. He married other women. None of the marriages seemed to work for long, although he always started out hoping they would; but in some conventional French way, he believed in marriage. It was respectable, it gave him weight. Love, sex, was something else. And I, living in America, pursuing my dream of filmmaking—well, I had chosen this life over the settled one that marriage seemed designed to provide, even if it rarely did. I could not imagine myself married to him, living in Paris, being a foreigner who would always be seen as inferior to all the French cinéastes who already existed in such numbers. It was simply not a possibility that either of us could entertain.

  We don’t discuss it much—our relationship, that is. Our emails to each other are usually short; we used to write real letters, or more often cryptic messages on the backs of postcards whose fronts were to convey their coded meaning: a Bonnard bathtub nude, a phallic chimney somewhere, a satisfied-looking cat. The email era eliminated our use of postcards, but echoed their brevity. All we really wanted to know was, are you still there? Increasingly, as you age, you want this question answered—are you here, in this world, on the planet, breathing in and out? I see his e-address in among the lists when I switch on my computer early—emails from France are always written in the American night—skip immediately to his Claudie, chérie, his mon amie, his t’embrasse tendrement, his je t’aime—and know that he wrote it to me at the end of his evening, before taking off his clothes and lying down with a sigh, alone or not, I never could guess, on his bed, in his apartment, in the sixth arrondissement, in the city we inhabit together that is part geography, part make-believe; as we are part-history, part-dream.

  5.

  Hannah is in my mind now, of course, and if I start running through my store of memories of us together as I sit alone in the bar downstairs after Alexandre has left, it’s because the raw anxiety has been there since I heard Philip’s voice on the telephone. What has she done? Is she lost, in danger, hurt, or simply on another escapade? I sip my Campari and think, where are you, Hannah? What is going on?

  We were Claudia and Hannah, Hannah and Claudia, from those early days. The club of two, the snobby intellectuals, the not-good-sports. We wore the label together, where it would have been intolerable to wear it alone. We walked about with our green school cloaks pulled around us as if we had swords under them, we bent our heads in deep conversation as we marched round the games field, stopping to pause at the fence at the very limit of the school grounds and look out at bare trees, raw fields, sodden grass—and then on again, in our heads, in our books, in the desperate fantasy that made up for the reality we were in. In summer, we lounged on grass, reading, always reading. I tried to get a tan, she lay in the shade. We pulled our school hats down over our eyes, slouched when we walked, wore our school uniforms as slant as we could, socks dragging down over ankles, skirts hitched high. Hannah and Claudia. Teachers sighed and raised their eyebrows, but since we both got such high marks in class, there was not much they could say. Except, on occasion, that our attitude was letting down the school.

  The school, I discovered later, was set up to be let down in due course by history itself. We were already in a sort of time warp. While outside, our contemporaries were buying 45s of rock bands and bopping away to Buddy Holly and Elvis, then the Beatles and the Stones, being teenagers, flirting with each other, watching Top of the Pops on TV and fighting with their parents, we were in here, just waiting to escape into that world and afraid that by the time we got there, it might all have vanished without warning. Our parents seemed to have abandoned us and were getting on perfectly well without us. My own parents, with my twin younger brothers and a new baby daughter to look after, seemed to have pushed me out of the nest to make room for their expanding life. Hannah’s parents, both busy doctors, had, it seemed, little time for their only daughter because they were and always had been obsessed by each other and their careers. They had always had trouble finding babysitters and now the school was her permanent babysitter, day and night, until Hannah, programmed to emerge from it nearly adult and independent, could find her own way. Our parents may well have had other thoughts about all this, and valued the education that they believed we were getting, but to us when young, the way they lived their lives, writing to us once a week to give us all the details of happy family life, in my case, or successful careers, in hers, made us bitter. The letters we received were both lifeline and torment: they were written at weekends, at the tail ends of weekends, so that we would get them by Tuesday at the latest. Darling Claudia (or Hannah), I do hope you are well and working hard. We’ve had a very busy time with the boys’ birthdays (or the new clinic) so this will be short. Everyone sends love. We miss you. (Ha, said Hannah, not enough, obviously.) Don’t forget Granny’s birthday, darling (or Dad’s professorship, darling); she (he) would love a card from you. With lots of love (hugs) from Mum (your Ma).

  On Sundays, which always felt like the worst day of the week, we had to sit down to write our letters to our parents, after church and lunch. It was the worst day, strangely, because there were no lessons, and lessons at least filled up time. There were services instead: early Communion (you had
to file down the street to the Abbey for this on an empty stomach, because God was insulted if you ate anything before His body and blood, like spoiling your appetite for a special lunch), then Matins for those too lazy or irreligious or interested in breakfast to go to what was simply called Early. Here you had the amusement of a possible, very brief flirtation, eyes only, with some boy from the Boys’ School who might be lounging outside the Abbey doors, reading his newspaper or pretending to; but Hannah and I, at this time, were scornful about boys in general and these—what she called Upper Class Twits—in particular. There was lunch, which was the high point of Sunday, because it was roast meat and potatoes (the same meat that would show up again on Monday and, more thoroughly disguised, Tuesday), and we could gorge ourselves for once until our waistbands cut into our stomachs. Letter-writing, which followed lunch, was an orgy of suppressed homesickness as we leaned our elbows on tables and doodled ink blots and contorted our minds into producing acceptable sentences that held no hints of our true feelings.

  Did they want to hear that I missed them, missed home with a raw pain that this forced letter-writing only exaggerated? I searched my mind for topics, came up with stilted phrases that must have made my parents wonder if it was even me who was writing them. I glanced over at Hannah’s, “Dear Ma and Pa,” and at her fat mottled fountain pen that squelched in her ink bottle before it curled blue Quink across paler blue Basildon Bond writing paper, and at the rounded deliberation of her letters. Her handwriting gave nothing away. It was just unusually large for an apparently small person, as if to conquer as much space as possible. We finished our letters, “tons of love,” “love from,” xxx and ooo, and signed our names and handed the unlicked stamped envelopes to the senior whose job it was to collect them and take them to Miss McKinley, whose job it was to read them—did she really, a grown woman, stoop to this?—and make sure that we had neither complained nor tipped into any unhealthy excess of homesickness. Some of the letters from younger girls had blots and stains; she must have known they were tears. Others—ours, Hannah’s and mine—simply said nothing but announced, surely, to any conscious parent, that what we were writing was censored. We became excellent at self-censorship, and this, I might say in passing, is a hard thing to unlearn.