Ideas of Heaven Page 17

  But I had made her happy, nonetheless. It did seem so. She lay with her head on my chest and said, “So nice, so nice.” She did not want to be touched further, but she kissed my knee for a long time, as if I needed thanking. She said she had been thinking of me since the goat chase, and we sat up in bed holding hands, though I could not stay much longer.

  EDMÉE FOUND REASONS to come to Paris as often as every two weeks, but she said she told her fellow farmers nothing. She would call me at school when she arrived, and I’d go to meet her at her friend’s building; its stained marble frontage and khaki hallways became beloved spots to me. I never met the friend. The weather went from fall to winter, and in that drafty room Edmée and I swam toward each other on the swirled sheets, with the radiator in the corner rattling like applause.

  “Every time I come back to the farm,” she said, “Yéyé and the others can tell something very good has happened to me. They act differently. They run around in circles.”

  “They’re goats,” I said. “They’re never sane.”

  “You don’t know them,” she said.

  I let her tell me. They were highly resourceful animals, quite able to deceive and plot and play tricks. Most farms slaughtered the females by the time they were eight, but hers was going to let them live out their natural span of fifteen. I did not altogether see how someone like her had come to take such an interest, but she said that only showed my limit, my bookishness. She was always bringing me twigs and branches from the country—oak and beech and chestnut, which I examined and admired, bare and brown though they were. It pained her when I said I could not take them home with me.

  She ran the goat operation with two women friends from school and two men who were a couple. The five of them were in each other’s company more than they could like, and in that monotony Edmée had her loneliness. Once I gave her a Walkman radio with headphones—a waterproof one—that I thought she might wear while she was with the herd. I think she found it a useless and amusing present (what did I know about her chores?), but she crowed and threw her arms around me nonetheless. I really could do very little that displeased her.

  IF SYLVIE GUESSED, she gave no sign. I didn’t think she guessed. I never stayed later with Edmée than I meant to, or ate a meal with her, or saw her on the days I had to pick up Marc from school. Marc had become involved in a feud between factions of boys in his class, and Sylvie and I spent our suppers suggesting peace strategies to him, views more enlightened than he’d listen to. Sylvie and I were united in this. We had our conferences (while Marc did his homework) about whether race and skin color were factors in these schoolyard hostilities (he said no, but all his friends were from Algerian and Tunisian families) and whether the boys should be left to settle it themselves, a conclusion we reached together after much back-and-forth.

  But at night in the bedroom with Sylvie, I must have seemed distant or depressed. When any caressing began between us, I could not follow through. I saw her beauty as I had always seen it, I was never anything but attracted to her, but I could not be a man who was intimate with two women’s bodies. So it seemed. And Sylvie didn’t ask me any questions or voice any accusations. She was too proud and probably unwilling to know. It was a kind of modesty in her, a prudence. When she saw I did not want coaxing in bed, she turned away but she kept her hand on my hip to remind me she was my friend.

  AND EDMÉE WAS sadder each time we said goodbye to each other in that pale blue room. As I stood pulling on my pants, I saw her features blur and grow tearful and I thought, I’ve become a man who can’t be bothered with a woman’s weeping. I bent down and held her against me to comfort her, but what help was that when I was the cause?

  There was no way for us to go on. Nothing but damage could come from it. Quite soon it became unbearable. I never told Sylvie an outright lie, but I lied sometimes to Edmée, so she would not know I was going off to buy Sylvie a present or to meet her at her campus. I was becoming wily and hollow from pretense. And no one said anything, so perhaps I was good at it.

  I went to Bernard’s apartment and phoned Edmée in the country, and we had our talk. “So soon?” she said. “I thought we would have more time.” While she was crying, she said that of course she had known I would stick to my marriage and my family (neither of us used Sylvie’s name), my being that sort of man was what she had first admired in me. It was a terrible, sentimental conversation. Both of our voices broke the whole time. I praised her loveliness and her fineness, and everything I said sounded false, though it was true. We had to stop talking so that words could mean something again in our mouths.

  I WAS NOT better after this either. For a while I was worse. I lived in torment as if I were still torn between two lovers; yet I did not really consider undoing my choice. But I might as well have been with Edmée all day. The flavor of her was in the Battle of Agincourt, she was folded into the Edict of Nantes, and the Tennis Court Oath had her scent in it. I liked teaching more than I had once expected to, but my days now seemed very long, and I could not always remember why I was standing in front of the room.

  At home I slept a good deal, when I could. It was a terrible labor for me to lead a double life, and I wasn’t even really leading it anymore. I didn’t see how other people managed to move at all under the burdens of their duplicities—and perhaps they did have to work hard. The world was full of lies and disguises. I could tell how weary everyone was all around me.

  IN AUGUST, Sylvie went away to Venice for three weeks, to read some crumbling records about the Polos for a book she hoped to write. Marco Polo had brought back a Tartar slave from Asia, whom he later freed in his will, and Sylvie wanted to see about him and about the market of foreign slaves in Venice. I stayed home with Marc, who was out playing with his friends most of the day, though he sometimes consented to walk around the empty August streets with me. Both of us slept late, a thing Sylvie always hated.

  With Sylvie gone, I was afraid of the temptation to phone Edmée. I woke up every day at ten-thirty with this fear in the room like a fog. But the weeks of solitude had a different effect. I read books in the living room with the blinds drawn and ate my picnic lunch alone under a tree in the Jardin des Plantes, and then I went home again to our apartment, with its heavy quiet and its overgrown palms. I missed my wife.

  And it was really Sylvie I missed, not some notion of her. When Sylvie arrived from the train station, I saw her in our doorway and I was wild with delight to have her in front of me, right there, still there. She was putting down all her luggage, unlooping it from her shoulders, and it seemed a miracle that she was doing this so that she might wrap herself around me. “Ouf,” she said, pressed to my chest. “I think I must’ve been gone for decades, like the Polos.”

  “Too long,” I said. Our son was hopping around like a rabbit.

  She had brought him a gaudy souvenir gondola, black plastic splashed with gilt. Later she said to me, “I wish you’d been with me in Venice.” She said this in bed, and it meant (I thought) that the gorgeous, encrusted, overladen beauty of Venice in the fetid August vapors—as she described it—had been so sexy as to wound her slightly without me. “Home is good too,” I said, somewhat stupidly, but any tender statements between us had the right effect just then.

  MY TIREDNESS DID not leave me, I saw that it might never leave, but Sylvie and I were companions to each other again. We debated what to do about Marc’s balky homework habits, I came home with funny tales of what my students said about Napoleon. We were back to being lovers—back to the rewards of requited love—and back to being people who consulted each other on color matches in clothes or the meanings of current events.

  Sylvie thrived in this stage, it seemed to me. For all that was unspoken between us, there was great relief in our house, a tacit gladness. And Sylvie at her ease was splendidly articulate, quite something to talk to. Her writing went well, refreshed by the flowing waters of our chatting and expounding and holding forth at home. Even Marc, who was becoming broody and
picky, could not conceal his enchantment with his mother, and he still endured her kissing his face whenever she wanted. Almost whenever.

  WE HAD TWO good years like this, and the sense to savor them. Sylvie was doing so well with her Polo project that she got ready to mount another research trip, this one much farther away. She wanted to go to Yangzhou in China, the city Marco Polo claimed he’d governed for the Khan for three years, though no Chinese record showed it. But communist workers in the 1950s had uncovered tombstones clearly identifying Italians who died in Yangzhou in the fourteenth century, maybe a community Polo had once led. Sylvie’s only chance of seeing those tombstones was to wangle some sort of invitation from a Chinese university, and she made repeated visits to the embassy of the People’s Republic, to guilds of Asian history scholars, and even to French Maoists, of which there were still a few. Marc was not pleased that she wanted to go anywhere and kept telling her she would have to eat fried locusts and drink snake wine if she went.

  I didn’t want her to go either. Even if I didn’t think of Edmée so much anymore, I couldn’t have said that she was absent from my mind. Why did Sylvie need to take herself away when we were doing so well? These times were precious. But I would have been ashamed to keep her from going where she wanted. I had never been that sort of husband.

  Sylvie was dogged in her visits to the Chinese embassy. This single-mindedness was her one advantage, and she knew it. When she wasn’t back in time for supper one evening, Marc said, “Does she enjoy waiting in their hallway?” We were both irritated, hungry for dinner and tired of waiting for Sylvie to come home. It was the last night we had to be something as small and easy as irritated.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO Sylvie never seemed likely to me. I had to be told more than once in the first call from the police; different people had to get on the phone to keep telling me. I couldn’t get any of it to fit what I knew of the world. She walked down the steps of the Chinese embassy and the earth cracked in two and swallowed her up. It was not the first bomb to go off in Paris—there were others in those years, in a shopping center, in an art gallery, in a bookstore—set by pro-Iranian or North African groups. Perhaps this particular blast of death was a mistake, not meant to explode where it did. Marc clung especially to the idea that someone killed his mother by mistake. I heard him say that to his cousins; I think he was attached to this irony, in those first days. For myself, I wanted to think that the bomb had gone off in an instant, that Sylvie was walking down the steps, thinking dreamily of Yangzhou and its network of canals and stone bridges, and her life was over before she had time to be afraid.

  LATER, A FRENCH official told me the explosive could have been placed by Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim group who lived in China’s northwest (Marco Polo met them). But no one ever claimed Sylvie’s bomb. So perhaps it didn’t achieve its purpose. This was not so long after Lockerbie either. When she first heard what had happened, Sylvie’s mother said, in her tears, “The whole world’s going to blow up. That’s what they want. It’s going to be nothing. Now that it’s all tied together.”

  The city of Paris was hideous that week, with its spring rains and its bleary lights and its honking noises and Sylvie dissolved into the watery dimness. No place could have been more enraging to walk in. I knew that Marc felt this too. And we couldn’t finish any task without being stopped by a friend’s phone call or a journalist’s knock or our own lapses into vacancy. Everything interrupted us, and this sense of intolerable interruption had to do (we came to realize) with being cut off from Sylvie. We were still in mid-sentence. I especially had not said half of what I meant. And Sylvie, as everyone pointed out, wasn’t going to get to China, or write the rest of her book, or watch Marc leave childhood.

  SOME OF MY students came to the funeral. It pleased me to see them there, dressed up and solemn in the church. Their expressions were so changed I almost didn’t recognize a few, in their suits and slicked-down hair. I wanted to ask the Chinese kids (who had probably never been Buddhists) or the Cambodians (who probably still were) what they thought about reincarnation. I was interested now in the notion that Sylvie’s lifetime wasn’t meant to be complete in itself. Naturally, she hadn’t finished—how could she have? (Unlike my son, I didn’t want the whole thing to be a mistake.)

  The priest who was my mother’s cousin came from Lyon to officiate at the funeral. I took Communion with the others, but I didn’t pray for Sylvie, not that week and not later. I was so horrified at the half-lies in the last years of our marriage, I had a great dread of tainting my mourning with falsity. I didn’t go again to church. I wanted to honor Sylvie by as strict an honesty as I could practice. Perhaps it was backwards of me to be so scrupulous now. Yves was disappointed—not even lighting a candle? not saying any prayers at home?—however, being Yves, he said I should do as I felt.

  Marguerite told me she was praying every day for whoever set the bomb. Marc, on the other hand, said he hoped the murderer fried in hell. He was only thirteen, and half the people I knew said the same thing in some way (I didn’t). “We don’t even know who did it,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “A Muslim, right?”

  “No one knows that,” I said.

  On Marc’s first day back at school, he came home complaining the place was overrun with apes, he could hardly sit at his desk without puking. Wasn’t he glad to see his friends? “What friends?” he said. His classmates Malik and Abdallah had been at the funeral. He said they gave him the creeps, he wasn’t talking to them now. “Apes,” he said.

  At the end of the first week he came home bruised and dirty and I could see he’d been fighting.

  “Not this,” I said, “please.”

  He hadn’t let his old friends walk with him, he’d pushed them when they came near him. “It’s my own business,” he said.

  Sylvie could have talked to him. He might have listened to her, his favorite parent and the one whose looks he carried, on these delicate matters of hate. “You can’t be like this,” I said. “Do you understand that? Do you know who we are?”

  “Don’t yell at me.” He was weeping, in the midst of his sullenness. I needed Sylvie very badly to help me with this.

  “Where will this lead?” I said.

  “Nowhere,” he said.

  He wouldn’t talk any more to me, not about the fight or about anything. And he didn’t want to go to school the next day. I let him stay home while I was at work—he could sleep or watch videos or whatever he wanted—but we couldn’t do that forever.

  I sent him to Lille to stay with Yves and Marguerite before anything worse happened. Just for a few months. I didn’t know what else to do.

  HE SEEMED RELIEVED to go. But then I was truly by myself, and the apartment was a box of bare rooms. I kept seeing Sylvie out of the corner of my eye. When I was out walking in the street, I would catch her shape within the other shapes of the world, like a figure in a puzzle. Sylvie. Then I would remember and feel foolish, like a dog leaping for a stick no one has thrown. I saw why people believed in ghosts. Though I did not.

  My friend Bernard telephoned me every few days, and in the evening he came to take me out to hear jazz in clubs, a thing we hadn’t done since our twenties. I hated, with fresh indignation, the affectations of everyone sitting near us in those clubs—smoking, leaning toward each other, self-satisfied and imbecilic. But I was grateful for the music, when it was any good. It gave me a solace without language, the only kind I could stand. Bernard had a favorite trumpet player, an American he thought sounded like an updated Chet Baker, doleful and cool. His trumpet had a weary playfulness, slipping into sly turns and thoughtful pauses—just right, we thought. “Andre!” Bernard would shout. “More of that, please! We beg you!” Andre would give the shyest of bows.

  I would not say I enjoyed myself in those clubs but these were moments when I was not suffering. But often I wouldn’t go, I couldn’t stand being around people. I had lost my tolerance for ordinary conversation; the most harmless exchange of everyda
y insincerities kept appalling me. Who did I think I was? If I stayed in and kept myself away from all lying, from my own lies and from everyone’s, what did that prove?

  Marc called from Lille every night. His conversation was already more innocent, from being with his younger cousins. He had fished in a pond and run races up and down the pasture when the kids went to visit their Aunt Edmée in the country. Edmée had left the goat farm and was living with a veterinarian. They had horses, Marc said, had I ever been on a horse? He had been on one of their horses, Hubert the black one, an extremely smart animal.

  For almost three years, part of my mind had been dreaming always of Edmée. Were those years misspent? What was the point of all that longing? I supposed I was glad she had found a man to be with, though gladness was not my first feeling. How fascinated I had once been, watching her over and over in the cinema of my brain. What was the point of all that longing?

  I had a week left of school before the summer vacation, and on Friday I stayed in my classroom grading papers for hours, and then I went out into the balmy blue evening. On the corner by the news kiosk I saw Sylvie in a coral-red shirt, just a glimpse. It wasn’t Sylvie; I knew that. Was I going to be haunted all my life? When I first met Sylvie and I was smitten with constant desire, I used to walk around reminiscing about the night before, recalling her as vividly as anything actually before me in the world. But that haunting had had no sting to it; it had only been celebratory, a basking in retained heat.