Chapter Nineteen Just French
Nineteen
Just French
Thanks to the constant stream of emails from David, each night I fell asleep full of new ideas and images and questions. By the side of my bed were stacks of books—C. S. Lewis, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens. I felt happy to be alive. There was something about all of this that felt like paradise. Still, paradise was not my only home.
The day before my trip, while Nate was out with friends, Paul and I took a long walk. He told me how he wanted an open marriage to work even though he was struggling with the intensity of the relationship I had with David. The solution he’d come up with: he wanted to go all in on the embracing-the-world action, which might involve his doing things like online dating and going dancing in nightclubs, something he missed that I never wanted to do. He asked me if I could see the beauty in that.
Frankly, I could not see the holiness in what felt like hedonism for its own sake. I tried to be a good sport and to ask questions rather than sharing my discomfort, but the conversation quickly grew tense. We began discussing the online-dating question with a commitment to dialogue rarely seen outside of model UN.
“I mean, I need to do something ,” he said. “When you’re off with someone else I can’t sit idly by.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “Have you tried it?”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” he said.
“Okay, so let’s play this out,” I said. “Say you’re really doing this. Are you going to start running around with much younger women? What age will you set as the low end?”
“Half my age plus seven is the rule.”
“What rule?” I said. “Says who?”
“Everyone,” he said, as if I were an idiot for not knowing.
As we were fighting our way down the sidewalk, Paul accidentally tripped me.
“I had to walk in front of you because that guy was about to bump into me!” he said as I regained my footing.
“When someone falls down, you say, ‘Are you okay?’ first!” I shouted. “Only then do you start making excuses!”
We kept walking and talking in circles. After about three hours of this, I became so overwhelmed that I asked to take a break and be alone for a bit. He said, “You always do that—bail just when we’re about to have a breakthrough.”
I didn’t like to think of myself that way, so I agreed to keep walking. But a few blocks later I said I really did need a break. He said, “Just a bit more.” A couple of minutes after that I yelled, far louder and shriller than I meant to, “I said I needed a break !” and threw my keys on the ground.
People eating brunch at an outdoor café looked up in alarm. I picked up my keys and stormed off. Paul later said everyone looked at him like he’d hit me. We avoided each other for the rest of the day. That morning I’d felt good about everything. By the time I went to bed he was at a show with a friend, and I was wishing he’d stay gone.
Veronica said it was time to set some clear boundaries, to give each relationship a meaningful shape: “Paul is your husband. David is your second half. Nothing should make you turn your back on a soulmate if you’re lucky enough to find him. If you have the capacity to maintain both relationships, why wouldn’t you? Here’s a question to ask yourself: What do you know for sure?”
“I know I don’t want my kid to come from divorced parents,” I said. “I love Paul. I am in love with David. If my father died then I’d want them both at the funeral.”
“What you want is not so insane,” she said, “just French.”
Veronica added that the key was to be honest and open about the reality and our expectations. So, to say to Paul, for example: “We’re ride-or-die. We’ve been together a long time and really worked out how to be with each other. This relationship has value. You’re my best friend, we have a great family, we sleep together. I have another man in my life, and you can have people on the side too. And we also have to treat each other with respect. For instance, you have to call me if you’re going to be out late. I can learn to be okay with you having a girlfriend, but not with you being unreliable.”
I said I wasn’t sure if I could tolerate his having other partners.
“You could handle it,” she said. “If he was respectful and kind about it, it could be okay. One thing, though, that’s good to keep in mind, is that love is infinite but time and energy aren’t.”
She recalled a time in college when she’d had two boyfriends at the same time. They both sat in the waiting room when she had her wisdom teeth out. When she looked back on that, she remembered feeling very loved. “It was messy and everyone cried a lot, but I’m not sorry. I don’t think love is bad, ever. I’ve known you since we were eight. You’ve been looking for this kind of spiritual connection your whole life. You raised your child. You took care of everyone else. Now you get to be happy.”
My eyes filled with tears so quickly that I thought back to Zoo , one of the first things David and I read together. In that book the character weeps “not out of sentimentality, but the way windows weep in a room heated for the first time in many weeks.”
In the prior weeks, there had been days when I’d thought maybe I should not go to California after all. It would be better for everyone if we stayed on the astral plane. Then the next day I’d found myself at the library so undone by longing for David that I could not concentrate. I’d been coursing with energy for as long as we’d been talking, but something had changed. Ever since I’d booked my trip I’d been half there in my head—sitting with him on a couch, feeling his weight beside me, my hand unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. And then the day came.