Mother Daughter Widow Wife Read online

  That night, as she was falling asleep, Alice texted Emergency Services. It’s not an emergency, she clarified, but if he would like to see her again, she would be amenable.

  He would like to see her, he wrote. Alice proposed a picnic.

  ELIZABETH

  Benjamin liked to say that every great romance was allowed one sentimental cliché. Ours was Paris. Our city of light and love, our made-palatable-for-the-public origin story, our foundational narrative from which all rationalization and raison d’être derived—and the dirty truth is, I hated it. From le jour premier, even. It was gray, drizzling, we were drizzling with sweat, the apartment was six elevator-less flights up, less of a bargain than it had seemed from the ground. Our suitcases were heavy. Our flight was a red-eye. We were cranky, filthy, hot. The apartment smelled like someone else. Benjamin’s back ached. Because of the plane, he said, and the suitcases. Because you’re old, I thought, and so is your body. My heart ached. Because I made my choice and now I have no job no home no friends no exit, I thought. Only this and only you. Every day, I thought, this is a mistake. I thought, Paris, je te deteste. Mon amour, je te deteste. The pillows were flat. The bed was soft. The sun never set. Benjamin never noticed. Benjamin refused gloom, and why not, Benjamin was free. No more job, at least for the year. No more wife, forever. No unmowed lawn, no unschmoozed donors. No more fucking his mistress in secret. Benjamin was a conquistador, free to seize what he wanted, which was wine, cheese, work, me, work again, more. He was on Rumspringa. He was so fucking happy. He was hiding a ring in his dopp kit. I didn’t know.

  Paris shuts down in August. He promised everything would change come September, and it did. In September, we stood midday in the mouth of a bar, in a gang of slack-jawed strangers, in nausea and disbelief, in the wrong language, in the wrong country, in extremis, watching the world end on live TV.

  Even at home, Benjamin pointed out, we would have been watching on TV, just as later we would watch the war. Our air would not have smelled of fuel and flesh; our skies would have remained clear. Distance was distance, he said; it made no difference how far. He also said, when I cried at night or refused to attend a dinner at the Eiffel Tower, because now I recognized a target when I saw one, you don’t understand. These things happen. You’re still so young. I would think, but never say, you’re so fucking old.

  He worked. He was on fire with work. I did not work, had no work. Had given up fire for him. Not for me, he always insisted, that’s not what I wanted. But what he wanted was me, with him. In Philadelphia, when he was in Philadelphia. In Paris, when he was in Paris. And in these places, there was no work for me to do.

  He worked; I walked. As I walked, I recited to myself the two lines of poetry I’d memorized in AP French, all that remained. Il pleure dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville. It rains in my heart like it rains on the city. This did not seem melodramatic that September. Across the ocean, it was raining people. Across another ocean—or maybe a continent, I wasn’t exactly sure, was the thing, and even when I checked the map I forgot within days—it was raining bombs. In Paris, it rained rain. Benjamin made us new expat friends, who declaimed about terrorism over wine and steak tartare. Stiff upper lip, they said. Keep calm and carry on. The thing about Americans, even the Americans would say, having proven themselves superior by getting out.

  I walked. Paris was dirty. Hot, at first, then a damp, soul-deflating cold. Paris was a cliché of itself. The men did smell and smoke and grope. The women did pedal home with basketed baguette and stiletto-wrapped feet. There was an unholy quantity of cheese.

  When I tell the story of Paris, I say September 11 broke my heart, then Benjamin and Augustine knit it back together. Truth: Paris broke my heart and Benjamin did, too, because both were old and broken down, both had baited me with a fairy tale and switched it up with constipation. Augustine knit me back together with myself. She had nothing to do with Benjamin and that, though I could never say so, was the point.

  “You ever think about her?” I’d asked him once, a few months after Wendy Doe remembered herself and left us, when we were still fucking in his office after hours, door locked, lights off, guilt lighting our way.

  He did not, he said. She was a subject that didn’t pan out, a dead end. There was nothing left to think about. This was not entirely dissimilar from the terminal ease with which he’d archived his first marriage.

  “It disturbs me that you think of her like that,” I said.

  “It disturbs me that you don’t.”

  We tried not to talk about her again. Maybe that was why I didn’t tell him about Augustine from the start. Because she was Wendy’s before she was mine.

  Augustine. Wendy’s Augustine, my secret, my small piece of home. Benjamin had laboratory space in the Salpêtrière, which, two centuries after Pinel and Charcot, was still warehousing misery. This was Paris, where everything was recycled. What had been a workshop for flawed knowledge manufactured on the bodies of broken women was now a modern hospital complex the size of a small town. Gurneys and white coats, but also courtyards, cafés, libraries, plaques. When I tired of Paris proper, I made the city of Salpêtrière my own. I sat where Augustine had sat, and tried to imagine her, imagined Wendy imagining her. A body inhabited by a woman, narrated by a man.

  I asked the Salpêtrière for access to their archive, and because I belonged to Benjamin, they agreed. With my pidgin French and pocket dictionary, with Charcot’s own bookshelves watching over me, I began.

  I’m going to tell her story, I told him eventually, tentatively. Four months after I’d started, once I was sure. I told him over dinner at our favorite café, the one at the base of Mouffetard. By that point, we had a favorite café, along with a favorite boulangerie and fromagerie and pharmacie and an inside joke about the counter guy at our local tabac with his polished handlebar mustache, and ongoing arguments about the best flavor of Berthillon, the sunniest, most scenic spot in which to lick it along the Seine. It was April in Paris, and Paris was somehow becoming home.

  “Like a novel?” he asked, indulging.

  “No.”

  “Like a biography?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He laughed. “Next you can write a history of lab rats.”

  We walked home along the road with a Baudelaire poem inscribed on a long stone wall. I took his hand. I’d told myself I was keeping Augustine a secret until I was sure. But also, I knew there was a chance that he would make me feel like she was worthless—that so, by extension, was I. He had. And maybe this is love: I still took his hand.

  I always told the story that I had abandoned science because I wanted to be a writer, but this elided the reason I wanted. It was in Paris that I understood science belonged to him. It was his world, which meant if I didn’t find something that belonged to me outside his domain, then his world would be the entirety of mine. Augustine made it safe to give the rest of myself to him. So I took his hand, and I took him home, which by April smelled like lavender and Parmesan and us.

  * * *

  After the dinner with Nina, I took Benjamin’s laptop into my bedroom, which had once been our bedroom. I locked the door. Then I finally opened his in-box. I didn’t do this because of what Nina had said about there being other women before me, not entirely. Benjamin had sworn I was the first, but he’d sworn that twenty years ago, before we’d made any promises to each other. If Nina was right, then so what. So what, he’d told a lie to a version of me he barely knew, so I wouldn’t take him for a cliché. So what, he’d made a cliché of me. I’d live.

  It wasn’t that. Or not just that. It was the suggestion that I didn’t—not then, but now—know him as well as I’d thought. I knew which brand of toothpaste he liked best; I knew the sound of his breathing when he was pretending to sleep; I knew he preferred booth to table, window to aisle, oat milk to cow’s; I knew the weight of him and the taste of him; I knew everything I’d learned over all those thousands of days and nights, but if I knew him so well
, what did I have to fear from his emails? Nothing, I decided. So I opened one.

  * * *

  Elizabeth is flaneuring, he kept telling the people we met in Paris. Mon amour, le flaneur, sic. He said it like he was proud of me, which is how I knew he wasn’t.

  In the beginning, I paid attention. Searched for offerings: Did you know the Hebrew name of God is inscribed on the towers of St. Sulpice? Have you seen the homeless man dressed as a pirate on the corner of Odeon and St. Germain? I found him a wall inscribed with a poem Baudelaire could have written just for him. J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans… I memorized the best lines for him, recited it like a proud child. C’est une pyramide, un immense caveau / Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune. / Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune. I have enough memories for a thousand years, my brain is a pyramid, a mass grave of the dead—he liked that. I liked, I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon.

  I brought him beignets and hazelnut pralines. A lush leather-bound edition of the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. An overpriced wooden train for Nina that he said was too young for her, and anyway too heavy to bring home. And anyway, he didn’t have to say she doesn’t know you exist, and once she does, she will hate you, the way her mother hates you, and this is the closest you will get to motherhood. When he flew back to the States to spend Hanukkah with his daughter, there was no one to pay attention for, so I walked only to walk. I walked for motion, for the escape from thinking about spending Christmas alone, which I was not supposed to care about, since, as he pointed out, it wasn’t even our holiday. Hanukkah was for children. He’d secured permission to visit only on the condition I stay away. Nothing was stopping me from going home to my own family, he pointed out, like that wasn’t him. Like I could afford it. Like three months after September 11, I wasn’t still afraid to fly. You’re not a child, he said. She is.

  I stopped pretending I was walking to or walking for. I walked so I wouldn’t have to stay still. I read Virginia Woolf on the haunting of winter streets, slippage into the solitude of city dark until we are no longer quite ourselves, until we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers. I tramped. I shed. I walked toward away. This is how I remember it, at least. The movement. The drift. Tireless legs, taut calves, pain-free, ever-enduring feet. I was so young, and felt so old, like all my decisions had been made. On Christmas, he called. Transatlantic, expensive, so I should know he cared. He whispered, je t’aime, and I wondered who was listening.

  * * *

  He’d archived every email; he was a memory hoarder. And I knew which names to look for, of course. His best and brightest students were always, somehow, young women. He was known for this, the great champion of the female brain. There were those I’d gotten to know, worshipful girls we’d taken to dinner or hired to housesit while we were away, girls who’d ventured into the wilds of academia, slayed the tenure beast, sent us occasional Christmas cards featuring the children they’d finally dared to have. These didn’t interest me. It was the girls I’d only met once or twice, in passing, girls he’d gushed over for a time—their promise, their possibility, their extraordinary potential—girls who’d ultimately disappointed him. Switched fields, dropped out, burned out, failed, in myriad ways, to live up to exceptional expectation. The brain, as ever, was a miracle of contradiction. I’d filed away the names, which meant I must have known, but somehow, I had allowed myself not to know.

  I already miss you, he wrote.

  If this project slams into a dead end, it will still have been worth it, because it brought you into my life, he wrote.

  I’ve never met a mind like yours, he wrote. It makes me feel alive.

  There were no incriminating photos, no love letters, no explicit references to physical contact or romantic rendezvous. That would have been more tolerable, maybe, than the intimacies he’d allowed himself. Confessions, moods, anxieties I’d assumed he shared only with me—and worse, those he hadn’t. Moments that had struck him funny; strange dreams that had startled him awake. Worries about the past; complaints about the wife. Those were, of course, the most incriminating. The most familiar. I recognized the tone he took to bemoan his marriage, half guilty, half wounded, poor Benjamin held hostage to a life partner who made him feel increasingly alone. I’d heard it before. How else would I have given myself permission to fall in love?

  * * *

  But I’m telling it wrong. Paris in the springtime was everything the song promised; love was everything every song had ever promised. Paris was lying naked in a shaft of sun feeding each other Nutella-smeared baguettes; Paris was a precarious perch on the hillside beneath the Sacré-Coeur, grass whispering against bare feet; Paris was wine-sodden dinners and rose bouquets bought off wandering women, street violinists bowing Beatles songs on foggy bridges, tangerine gelato and truffled cheese and raspberry kir, sunsets over the Seine, sunsets over the Luxembourg Gardens, sunsets over the Pompidou, sunsets over the Eiffel Tower, an ungodly quantity of sunsets, each more undeniably romantic than the last. Paris was the commutation of terror—fear that Benjamin would abandon me seamlessly replaced by the fear he would be killed in some gruesome fashion, here on the cusp of our happily ever after. I imagined ever more baroque calamities, Benjamin crushed by the doors of a Metro, Benjamin blown sky high by a sewer explosion, Benjamin concussed by the gigantic Foucault’s pendulum he loved to stand beneath. Benjamin killed in a rain of fire, airplanes or bombs or whatever else might plausibly fall from the sky. I had never let myself love anyone so much. I had always been enough for myself, I had made certain of that. I had filled up all available space. Benjamin colonized me as if I’d been uninhabited, and by the time we left Paris, it felt as if I had. The cradle rocks above an abyss, Nabokov wrote in the memoir of memory I’d read that year, or at least pretended to, still trying to convince Benjamin I was the woman he imagined me to be, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. That would be our life together, that crack of light. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for. In Paris, I understood: the person I’d been before him, the one who could be whole without him, had no doubt existed, but she was a mystery to the person I’d become. Someone who, without him, could only be broken.

  * * *

  Before he loved me—or at least before it occurred to me he could—he told me all about her. The wife.

  Her intellectual spark had gone out. Her curiosity about the world had warped inward, toward the baby, the home, the self and its sartorial accoutrements. She wanted to own him and his choices, tether him to the mundane. All the things she’d loved most about him—his expansiveness, his drive toward intellectual conquest, his insatiable need for more—now threatened her. She was content to endure: motherhood, marriage, life. She insisted he be the same.

  I’m not interested in ENDURING, he wrote. I want more.

  * * *

  Benjamin had his own story about Paris. He had his vedette gliding over the Seine, ring lodged in palm as Bastille Day fireworks burst overhead. I let him tell the story often enough that he assumed it belonged to both of us. What belonged to both of us: the ride to the airport, my hand trembling in his, my bags stuffed with chocolate, wine, the first three chapters of what would become a book, an extra Xanax in case fear erupted into panic once I forced myself onto the plane. The diamond on my finger. In the airport security line, they made us take off our shoes. As the plane lifted off, I imagined the crash, the obituary, his obituary of course, with a dead fiancée footnote, and the resulting indignation got me through to cruising altitude. Then there were only the eight hours of flight time to endure, and the customs tribunal, and the baggage carousel, and the taxi line, and the hour in rush hour traffic, and the return to the suburbs and the rest of our lives.

  Benjamin would remind me that memories self-reinforce, that
each retrieval of a memory further blurs the edges of reality. The way you tell yourself the story changes the story. That discovery might have been his legacy, if the NYU team hadn’t beaten him to it. Instead, it was a cautionary tale for us both. For him: never let yourself be distracted from what really matters, lest you spend the rest of your life wondering exactly how narrowly you’d missed your Nobel. For me: remember that the past happened the way you wished, and eventually you’ll believe that it did.

  ALICE

  She told him she didn’t need to know his name. He overruled her. Now she knew his name was Zach. She called him Z; he still called her Anonymous. They picnicked between mossy gravestones, forgotten plots carpeted with weeds. The old state mental institution was now shiny private property. He liked that. They met at midnight, as seemed appropriate for a cemetery picnic. She brought pizza and a blanket. He brought condoms and a bag of chips.

  She had not yet been to her mother’s grave.

  She tried not thinking about her mother, shrinking the universe to a party of two. Boy, girl; food, sex; dirt, stars. Maybe that was how she would punish her mother for leaving, for erasing herself, once and again. Alice would find a way to erase everything her mother had impressed on her, every prudent scrap of fear and loathing. Maybe this was already under way, or how else could she be meeting a strange man in the woods and saying, as the pizza got cold, oh god, yes, please. It was less painful this time, somewhat.

  “At least you didn’t cry,” he said, not meanly.

  He tasted saltier than Daniel and his crotch smelled like a department store. He called her beautiful—several times during and once after—and she wondered whom he saw when he looked at her. She was still zipping and buttoning when he aimed his camera lens at her. No, she told him, and closed herself safely into her sweatshirt. Not going to happen.