Chapter 35 Consumed
CONSUMED
Michelle
Enough tears were shed. Enough emotions were spent. Enough time was devoted to all this space. Space sucked. Feelings sucked. Loving sucked. I left the gardens and walked into the gift shop, desperate for a book to help me get out of my head. Something to numb all these feelings in my chest.
I wandered past calendars and mugs with water lilies on them, and found a tall set of white shelves with books about art history, and coffee table books of Monet’s paintings, and a huge tome about the Impressionist masters.
I spotted a small sturdy paperback on the gardens themselves.
Opening it, I flipped through the pages, bursting with details about all these flowers.
How to grow tulips like Monet, climbing roses like Monet, even lilies like Monet.
Information, facts, details. Nothing more.
It was precisely what I needed. To blot out everything else.
I walked up to the cash register and bought the book, wishing my trip hadn’t come down to this moment.
But it had. Oh, it had. It came down to comfort in the form of a book about gardening.
I was the butt of my own joke, only nothing felt funny. Nothing felt right. Nothing felt good.
Jack
“You’re closed?” I asked the man in French.
“For lunch. Yes,” the man replied.
“But I just want to buy that blue perfume bottle,” I said, pointing through the window of the shop to the back wall.
“We will be open again in two hours,” the man said, tucking a newspaper under his arm, and taking a step away from the door.
“Can you just sell me that blue bottle now? I’ll be fast.”
The man shook his head. “No. I am meeting my wife for lunch. I have lunch with her every Saturday. Rain or shine.”
I placed my palms together. Suddenly, it felt vitally important to get Michelle the perfume bottle NOW. “I’ll pay you double. S’il vous plait.”
The man clapped me on the arm. “You can come back later. I will sell it to you then. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will regret it more if I miss lunch with my wife.”
The man turned and walked down the covered arcade and out into the Paris afternoon, that word trailing behind him like the last notes of a song fading out.
Regret.
This man would regret being late to lunch with his wife. And he’d chosen her over a business transaction.
I stumbled into the wall with the realization.
It was simple. It was so goddamn simple.
I’d let this regret define me. I’d dressed myself in it every day.
I’d come to rely on it, like a fucking crutch.
I needed to be that man walking away, content with the knowledge that he’d regret not seeing his wife for lunch.
Like a cloud rolling away to reveal the sun, I knew instantly what I’d regret more.
Not telling Michelle everything in my heart.
Every single thing I felt for her. Because it was no longer muddled.
It was no longer messy. It was as clear as the closed sign on the door.
It was as defined as the sapphire-blue bottle I wanted to buy for her.
It was as easy as having lunch with your wife on a Saturday.
Distance and muting weren’t the solution.
They were the essence of the problem. Already, in a few short hours of her being gone, I missed her so much it was driving me mad.
Insane with longing. Desperate with the need to see her.
If I couldn’t get my act together and just tell her how I felt—regardless of the risks, real or imagined—I’d lose her for good.
I couldn’t chance that.
I didn’t need an elaborate plan or a complicated strategy.
I needed to speak from the heart. The thing I was most afraid of doing.
My biggest fear was speaking the full truth about my feelings.
But I’d lose her for sure if I didn’t do more than try.
Trying was for other men. Trying was not remotely sufficient anymore. I needed to do.
Fully, completely, without reservation.
I grabbed my phone from my pocket and called Michelle. She answered on the third ring.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I’m standing in the doorway of the perfume shop, and I need to see you.
I need to talk to you. I need to tell you exactly what I should have told you the last time we were here.
I need to tell you in a thousand ways,” I said, because that’s all that mattered.
I needed to submerge myself in the words, to drown out all the other things I hadn’t said.
To start now, and start over, and start better.
To stop being so damn terrified of love.
There was silence. Only silence for what felt like an eternity, and in that span of time I simply had to wait for her.
“You do?” she asked carefully.
“I do. Where are you? Are you in your favorite part of Paris that’s not in Paris?”
I was rewarded with a small laugh. “I’m predictable.”
I shook my head. “No. I just listened. To everything. Will you be there in an hour?”
“If you’re coming, yes,” she said, and I swore I could see her smiling. I knew I was.
“I am. I’m coming for you.”
I doubled back to the hotel, calling the concierge along the way to request a car service stat, and then slid into the backseat of a black sedan that shot me straight out of Paris and along the road to Giverny. Nearly an hour later, the driver pulled up to the gardens, and I paid him.
“Do you need a ride back to Paris, sir?”
“Yes, but I don’t know when.”
“I’m going off-duty, but please call this number and we will send someone for you,” the driver said, and handed me a card.
I slipped it into my back pocket, thanked the man, and bought my ticket to the gardens.
I walked through Monet’s one-time house, then crossed into the lush landscape that had inspired the painter.
In all my time here in Europe, I’d never made it to these gardens.
It was a true paradise, an escape from city life, and I understood why this land had inspired so many works of art.
I scanned for her across the flowerbeds, a sea of petals in every color.
A central alley was covered by iron arches, roses climbing over the metal.
Weeping willows brushed the green ground with their branches.
I walked the perimeter, eyes peeled the whole time, and then the Japanese bridge came into view, its green wood slats rising over the lily pond.
The most beautiful sight in all the gardens was this bridge, but in my mind it barely compared to her.
She was resting her elbows on the bridge, reading a book.
I picked up my pace, walking across a path edged by orange and red and gold bursts of petals, then reached the bridge. She looked up when she heard footfalls.
“Did you know this garden displays two hundred thousand annuals, biennials, and perennials each year?” She held up the book. “I read it in here.”
“Did you know I started to fall for you when you told me why ‘Ode to Joy’ was your ringtone?” I asked, stopping in front of her, and gently closing her book.
She shook her head. “No.”
“I started to fall for you then because it said something about you. About who you are, and what matters to you. And I fell more the day you came to my office in your librarian outfit, and not because of how you looked or what you did. But when you sat on my lap, and you told me about how you once wanted to be a Broadway star. Except you couldn’t sing, dance or act,” I said, and I wanted to take her hand, to kiss her palm, to kiss her face.
But I had already won her with touch. I hadn’t earned her love with words yet.
“Why that?”
“Because it showed your sense of humor. Which is part of what I love about you,” I said, and every time I said the word love it was as if another small slice of regret sheared away.
“And you asked me about Aubrey and if I missed her, and that’s part of how I fell in love with you too.
Because you care. You care about your work, and your clients, and your friends, and your family.
And you cared about me long before I could even begin to try to deserve you. ”
“Don’t say that,” she said softly, her hand gripping the wood railing behind her.
“It’s true. Because you are so good with words and with talking and sharing, and I’m not. But I want to be. Because I want to deserve you. Like the night at the symphony, when you got mad at me.”
She looked down at her feet, red coloring her cheeks. Gently, I tipped up her chin.
“I fell for you because of that too. Because you weren’t afraid to tell me the truth. To tell me to stop playing games. To be blatantly honest about something as simple as wanting an orgasm.”
She laughed, and glanced away. “You’re embarrassing me,” she said, but she didn’t seem mad. “You make me sound so horny.”
“You are. And I fucking love it, Michelle. Like I love you. My god, I have to tell you how much I love you. I wasn’t going to sit in that hotel room and wait for you to figure out if you were going to spend the rest of the trip with me.
And I had to get my head out of my own ass and out of the past. As soon as I left the hotel, where else did I wind up but the spot where I should have told you in the first place how I felt? ”
Her lips curved up, and I was dying to kiss her. But words mattered more.