What the Light Touches

18 ROBOTIC LOVE

18

R OBOTIC L OVE

Never had the people of Montmartre, la Villette, and a part of the arrondissement of l’Opèra wanted the sun to come out more. They’d spent the whole night without light, and those who lived in apartments where the heating depended on electricity were freezing. Dawn was expected to come at seven thirty, but any setback was possible in Paris during those strange, strange days. The day began with fog—impertinent and stubborn—and until the sun shone through the window and warmed them up a bit, they continued chattering their teeth. At least in rooms with windows, people could see, and there was a smaller risk of bumping into something in your path.

The light from the interior courtyard delayed in penetrating Roger’s room. He was woken by the vibration of his phone, which he’d laid on top of his open suitcase on the floor. He’d plugged it in to charge, hoping that, during the night, electricity would have returned. It was the best way to test it.

When he opened his eyes, he hardly recognized himself. He hadn’t worn socks to bed in years. But not even the bedspread and a blanket on top of that were enough. In fact, at midnight, he’d woken up to put on socks and the first sweater he could find in his brother’s wardrobe.

He let the phone ring for a bit before it stopped. Seeing that it began again to ring thirty seconds later, he finally looked to see who was calling.

“Hey, toga man. Good morning. Can I know why you’re calling so early?”

“Early, you say? It’s eleven in the morning in Toulouse. Is it different in Paris?”

“What’s up, Marcel?”

“Nothing. All good.”

“You seem ... euphoric.”

“Yeah. The judgment’s been called. Well, it hasn’t been called, but it’s been filtered down to me. That’s France for you—money talks.”

“And?”

“We won the case. And we don’t even have to cover the costs.”

“Oh man, that’s great. Congrats. I’m happy for you.”

Roger pretended to be happy without knowing what the case was about, who Marcel’s client was, what they’d been accused of, or why the judge had taken so long. All he knew was that Marcel had called him one day to tell him he was going to Toulouse, that he’d be gone from Paris for a couple of weeks, maybe more, and that he was leaving Roger his room, which had already been paid for, if he wanted to come work on his photography project funded by the Girona art school.

Marcel continued. “You know what that means?”

“You’ll get a raise?”

“No.”

“They’ll make you a partner at the firm?”

“For now, not that either. I wish. It means I’m coming back to Paris.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“No way, Marcel ... Tomorrow? What world do you live in? Haven’t you seen we’ve been locked up at home? That we can’t even leave?”

“It’s not that big of a deal.”

“No. No. I swear. No one can go anywhere here. We haven’t had power since yesterday. The snow is blocking the exits. It’s incredible. Surreal. It’s not that they’re keeping us from leaving. There’s no way of even trying. I’m sure you’ve seen it. There’s no metro, no public transportation, no anything. Even if you wanted to, you can’t come back.”

“Roger ...”

“What?”

“I know you as well as if I’d given birth to you, tete . You don’t want me to come to Paris.”

“That’s not it.”

“What’s wrong? You haven’t finished your work yet?”

“I’ve left one thing unfinished. That’s true.”

Marcel opened up a second line of investigation. “You’re in love ...”

“Yeah, with the cactus. What do you want me to—”

“But the room is mine, okay? By the way, is everything okay with Barbara?”

“Resigned, you know, just like everyone else. Locked up. No choice.”

“Nice lady, too. She does her own thing. Doesn’t bother ...”

“Yeah.” Roger was looking for the right word. “She’s great.”

“This whole time I’ve been staying at a hotel near the Palais de Justice in Toulouse. Three stars, comfortable, small. I can’t complain. But I want to have my things, my wardrobe. What the hell. And I have to go back to work in Paris. Roger? Can you hear me?” he asked, noticeably confused by the silence over the phone. “Hello? Roger?”

“I think ... Why don’t you go see Mom for a couple of days? Until all this shit melts, and the mayor gives us permission to return to normal life. How long has it been since you visited Fontclara?”

“Listen, how about we do this? I’ll get myself updated on everything going on in Paris. It’s been days since I’ve even glanced at a newspaper, what with this hell of a judgment and final arguments, and I’ll take a look at when I can head back. Keep thinking about what you want to do with your life. We won’t be sharing my bed.”

“Obviously not.”

They hung up.

Shit.

He would have liked a nice hot shower to wake himself up and stamp out the cold, but the hot water tank was depleting, and this joke of a situation had gone too far.

He didn’t tell Barbara about his call with Marcel. She’d heard on the radio that people would maybe be allowed to circulate the city in two days. Maybe. If it didn’t snow again, of course, and if the temperatures rose a bit and helped melt the blocks of ice that turned blacker each day. “Maybe”: the flake’s adverb. And that is if the town hall finally managed to work the machines that clearly weren’t prepared for precipitation of such great magnitude or duration, which had been punishing Paris in the middle of an era of human vanity. The extreme meteorological phenomenon had become a reality check for everyone.

“Did they say anything on the radio about when we’ll get the electricity back?”

“Not until they fix the tower that fell.”

“It’s embarrassing. I thought these kinds of things happened only in my country.”

“I’m worried about the fridge and the freezer. Either we eat everything that’s been thawing or ...”

“But how are we supposed to cook? We can’t.”

The very minute the domestic despair had set foot in Barbara’s apartment, the lights went back on. Suddenly, like a miracle. The way angels arrive, without anyone hearing them. Suddenly, all the technology in the house was up and running. The oven, the computer next to the window, the phone chargers. The microwave clock, at 00:00, celebrated the return of the electrical current with intermittent flickering.

“I’m going to shower first,” Roger said, pleadingly.

“I didn’t know it was a competition. But I have to start working now that the computer is back on.”

Roger conceded that he could wait. In the end, he didn’t have anything to do. And plus, he knew the apartment was Barbara’s, and he was only a tenant in the room, and for free, on top of it all.

Under the hot water, Barbara got rid of the cold that had settled inside her bones. She was in no rush to leave the stream of water rinsing out the soap and her ideas. She dried her hair with the blow dryer for a change, and, after three days of having not done so, she dressed like she was leaving the house, with black jeans and matching boots and, on top, a green button-down blouse. She let the back of the shirt hang low, like a loincloth over her pants. She tucked it into her pants from the front, casually.

She was comfortable around the house all day. It was only in the evening, once she lit the two candles and saw Roger sitting on the sofa awaiting the nightly story, that she took off her boots. Barefoot and massaging the soles of her feet, she picked up the narrative surrounding the events of her marriage with Maurice.

“Our apartment in Arles had four bedrooms. The one with the queen bed was the biggest and had one of the two bathrooms in the house. The guy from the real estate agency who rented it to us called it a suite: ‘3A has four bedrooms, one of which is a suite.’ The advertisement made it sound nice. Maybe the space had its pretension, for sure, but for me, ‘suite’ was a word that had the connotation of a certain luxury. And our bedroom was a functional space, and that was it. We slept there, we showered there, we got dressed there, and with increasingly less frequency, we made love there. He preferred nights, and I preferred lazy weekend afternoons.

“The room in the back, the only one that didn’t face the street, was the junk room. There we stuffed our seasonal clothing, suitcases, the ladder, the ironing board, and all the bulky things that would have been a nuisance anywhere else or weren’t for everyday use. After that, in the two small bedrooms that were for kids if we ever had them, there was a small desk for each of us. We also split that in half. He wasn’t the type to bring work home, but he did accumulate a ton of paperwork, which he had organized in different colored boxes to separate the receipts for the house, the car, and the bank statements he had saved his whole adulthood, just in case. The liar’s little boxes. He had it all nicely labeled so he knew where anything was at any given moment. He never threw anything out. He stored his writings in a big safe in the corner of his desk. It served as a chest of drawers, on top of which he placed a framed photo of us next to one of his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. He was the only one who knew the combination to the safe. I remember he told me when he first bought it, and he showed me how to turn the lock however many times to the right until I heard a click and however many times to the left until I heard the final click. If I ever wanted to safeguard my nice rings, I would’ve had to ask him to open it for me. Looking back now, I very much doubt he would have let me see what he kept inside.

“My desk, on the other hand, was a refuge of half-read books. I had nice lighting, an ergonomic chair for people who spend hours in front of a screen, and a computer dating back to the fall of Rome. I didn’t spend much time there, because I was mostly at the company office. When you begin working somewhere new, you want to immerse yourself in the business. You’re curious about everything. You want to volunteer for any task, and you never leave on time. If there’s anything Maurice and I had in common, it was that we were both in some ways workaholics, and we were lucky to be happy doing what we did. We were never in a rush to get home.

“Maybe I should have realized that was a sign. If you’re not dying to go home and take off your shoes, say hi, and be with your partner, something is wrong. If you decide not to have kids—because, ‘Barbara, we’re fine the way we are’—that’s another sign the road ends at a cliff. I didn’t know how to pick up on all those things at the time. That was one of his favorite phrases: ‘We’re fine the way we are.’ He said it whenever we talked about taking the next step, going after it, because I was starting to get older ... Just imagine it, I got married at thirty-one, and by thirty-three, I started to think I was getting too old to have a child. Today they’d practically give me a prize for having a kid so young. We didn’t have one, because he lathered me up with another lie. It wasn’t that we were fine the way we were, like he said, but rather that having a child together would have meant a permanent link to me. And he, from what I would see later, had ties somewhere else for quite a while.

“I wanted to discuss it with my friend Mireille. We agreed to go out shopping one Saturday afternoon like we’d done so many times before, and between the stores, I invited her for a Sacher torte at a pastry shop we loved.

“‘Maurice and I are going through a phase right now that ...’—I didn’t know how to define it—‘it’s not boredom.’

“‘Routine, maybe?’

“‘No. It’s a robotic love. I’ve been thinking about it, and if it’s robotic, it’s not love,’ I said.

“‘You’re always playing with words and adjectives. You can tell you’re well read.’

“‘Yeah, I’m in the industry. But do you get what I mean, or no?’

“‘From what you’re telling me, it’s nothing that hasn’t happened to every couple in human history, Barbara.’

“‘That’s a shitty consolation, then.’ She unsettled me, but I continued. ‘So, it happens to you and Robert too?’

“‘Oh, of course.’

“We were silent for a long moment. She ate, and I searched for the concept, looking out the window. I grasped it, more or less.

“‘Everyone knows how that stuff works in marriages, Mireille. I watched my parents, until ... In the end, I’ve seen so many couples who go from ecstasy to plodding along forever ... and they resign themselves to it. I already know all that. I’m not naive.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“‘I think that Maurice and I have gone too quickly from passion to cohabitation, from love to friends, and from friendship to roommates.’

“‘Roommates ... with the benefit of sleeping together on weekends.’

“‘It’s not that.’ I stabbed my fork into the slice of Sacher torte I was sharing with Mireille. ‘I think there’s something else.’

“And then, in a rampage, I shared the squash story. Ever since Maurice had taken the reins of his father’s insurance brokerage, he’d decided that Fridays would be intensive workdays. They wouldn’t stop for lunch, everyone would stay until three, they’d leave earlier, and that way, the employees could feel like they’d started the weekend early. It was a pact of good faith with employees; it’s always good to keep them happy. That was Maurice’s motto. Knowing I didn’t leave work until seven in the evening, he took advantage of Friday afternoons to play squash. He was a good player for an amateur. He had a knack for sports. He’d taken tennis lessons when he was young, and when squash became a thing, he signed himself up, because he could play even when it rained due to it being indoors and, overall, because he always had the theory that you could work off all the week’s stress after playing for an hour. Squash tests your limits. It’s like an intense bomb to the heart. And, of course, you’re able to de-stress and get rid of a bad mood by swinging the racket and slamming the ball against the glass. He always came home exhausted, and when he took out his dirty clothes from his bag, you could wring out his shirt and pants because they were absolutely soaked.

“‘Eight days ago,’ I told Mireille, ‘I left work to take a couple of packages to the post office near the courts where Maurice plays.’ Because it was Friday, I figured he’d be on the court from five to six, and I could surprise him. As much of a show-off as he was, I thought he’d be happy I went to see him play. I entered the club confidently without stopping at reception. The only person there was taking court reservations over the phone. I waved at her, but the woman didn’t even see me pass. The eight courts looked occupied. There were four on the ground floor, and four more on the second. The ringing of the balls hitting rackets resounded throughout the whole space. Sometimes, you’d hear a shoe braking suddenly on the parquet floor or the yell of a player working his ass off to save a point. I did not find Maurice or anyone I knew on the bottom floor. I went up to the second floor. The lights of three of the courts were on. It looked like a men’s club. There wasn’t a single woman on any of the courts. It was 5:45 p.m. according to the digital clock in the hall. My husband wasn’t on the fifth or seventh or eighth court. The sixth court was empty, with the door open and the fluorescent lights turned off. I went back down to the ground floor to make sure I had seen correctly and that Maurice wasn’t playing in any of those four games. Then, I thought maybe they had taken the sixth court, he’d won the game early, and he was now in the locker room, showering after his victory. I waited for him at the bar. For fifteen minutes. Then for half an hour. I was there until seven. But no one appeared. I went back to reception. The woman was on the phone again, and I waited.

“‘Excuse me, can I pay for Maurice Papin’s court?’

“She looked at the map of the courts and reservations and stuck out her lower lip.

“‘What court was it?’

“‘I think number six. Court six at 6 p.m. Super easy. Maurice Papin ...’

“‘No.’

“‘Or maybe it was under his friend’s name ... Maybe they paid already?’

“‘No. Court six canceled today. They called to say they couldn’t come.’

“‘Oh, you’re right, they couldn’t come today. It’s true. I’m sorry. Thank you so much.’

“‘No problem,’ she responded as she handed a folded towel to a member who’d just entered.

“At seven, I headed home like I’d come from work, and I tried to act as if nothing had happened. It was impossible. I was going crazy for an hour. He came home at eight, like he usually did on Fridays. He’d showered. He was wearing the same cologne as always, a l’Eau d’Issey for men I’d given him, which had a unique smell on his skin. The same one as always. Nothing more, nothing less. He told me he was hungry. Or starving, maybe he said, I can’t remember. He always came home hungry from squash.

“‘While you set the table, give me your bag and I’ll put your clothes in the washer,’ I told him.

“He gave it to me without hesitation. It was the same bag as always. A black Adidas bag with the handle of the racket sticking out. I had given it to him the year before for Christmas. I unzipped the bag, my pulse racing at two hundred beats a minute. I was overly cautious at the risk of my imminent discovery. I was the police about to seize ten pounds of cocaine in airport security. My excitement was at a peak. Anything could go wrong in a second. Once I took out the racket, I removed two crumpled socks. A damp towel. And a sweaty shirt, pants, and underwear. I sniffed them. They were soaked, but they didn’t smell. I held the shirt up against the light. The sweat stains were, more or less, where they should have been if someone with Maurice’s body had played squash at maximum energy for sixty minutes. Sweat on the chest, the belly, around the armpit. I put it all in the washing machine, and I turned it on so he wouldn’t hear me cry.

“Mireille listened to the whole story without dropping her jaw. When I finished, she said, ‘That’s all weird, Barbara. Maybe they play at another facility?’

“‘In Arles? How many squash courts are you aware of?’

“‘I don’t know.’ And then she said something that made me think. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to him?’

“‘Because I’m stupid,’ I was going to say.

“‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all week. Maybe out of fear? Out of fear of losing the part of Maurice I still have. Of course, it must be that. Or out of fear of failing a common project we’d taken on, hoping it would succeed. Out of fear of knowing the truth. Out of fear of thinking I’m living with a liar who is so sophisticated he’s created alibis with criminal precision. With the coldness of a serial killer.’

“‘It’s not that serious, Barbara,’ she said.

“‘No, of course not. I hope not ... You know why I don’t say anything, Mireille? Because I love him.’

“After that, out of a matter of survival, we continued at home as if nothing had happened. The opposite even. He went back to being affectionate and in a good mood, and doing nice gestures like he had in the past. Suddenly, he was lighting scented candles in the bedroom, or he’d show up at home with half a dozen oysters for us to share—with a bit of ground pepper, which is how I like them even if it makes me sneeze. I still had that nagging feeling, but I have to admit that when he wanted to, he knew how to act. He continued the weekly squash games at the exact same hour. One Friday, he came home with a black eye, because a ball had hit him right in the face. The blue faded slowly, and when I asked him what had happened, he made a joke I didn’t like at all. ‘My wife hits me,’ he said, laughing. The second time I heard him say it in front of some neighbors on our floor, I asked him to please never repeat that. And he would laugh all over again.

“I don’t know if it was two or three months after my conversation with Mireille, but Maurice began to behave unexpectedly. He started to act jealously toward me. Can you believe it? He’d say things he’d never said before. ‘Where are you going today?’ ‘Who are you meeting up with?’ “You’re home late today, huh?’ Suddenly, he started asking me about Samu. Obsessively. Samuel worked at Giresse and Trésor. His job had nothing to do with mine, but it’s true that we got along and chatted and sometimes had dinner together. Some days, if it was nice outside, we’d go to the park for coffee before returning to work. He was a copyeditor at the press, and sometimes he wrote reader reports. They’d send him an original manuscript from the headquarters in Paris, and after reading it, Samu would write up a three-page report. He’d summarize the work, give his opinion with critical commentary, and at the end, in bold, he’d say whether he recommended it for publication. It was a poorly paid job for so much responsibility. A good report could make a new author happy. A bad report, however, could ruin the life of an aspiring novelist who gave up at the first obstacle. Samu, who was older than I was, was an interesting man with a good sense of judgment and who knew a lot of things. We got along well. And so what? I never thought about him as anything more than a work friend. But Maurice became obsessed with him. Or maybe he just made it seem like he was. That’s what I thought later, when, on the very day, I put together the timelines of events over and over again. You know how Napoleon said the best defense is a good offense?

“It got to the point that one morning Samu came to work disoriented, nervous as all hell. He came over and said to me, ‘I think someone’s following me.’

“‘Who?’

“‘Someone. A private detective.’

“‘What makes you think that?’

“Maybe he’d read too many novels, but the truth was that someone in a hoodie and Reeboks had waited for him in the lobby of his house, entered the same bakery as he had to buy coffee to go, gotten on the same bus, and gotten off at the same bus stop. Too many coincidences. And he didn’t seem to be hiding himself.

“‘Where is he now?’

“We approached the window and pulled back the curtain to look out on the street. If the detective was on watch, we’d see him from the first floor of the building. Right as we put our noses to the glass, the hooded man took out his cell phone and shot a burst of photos. Just as we moved back from the windowsill and let the curtains go, the guy sprinted away. We lost sight of him when he rounded the corner.

“‘Am I right or not?’ Samuel asked, trembling. ‘What do you think he wants?’

“I couldn’t tell him. I kept it to myself. I knew insurance companies tended to work with spies. It’s pretty standard. I suspected it was a subtle sign my husband had sent me. It was a way of controlling me, of telling me he could know everything about me. I was simply waiting for the day Maurice lit the smallest ember at home in whatever absurd argument so he could use the picture he’d just taken like it was the winning card. Here, here’s the proof. The revelation. And I’d feel bad, trapped, about something that had more to do with him and his perverse head than me. But the setup never arrived. Right as I expected the collision to come, something worse happened. I decided to meet up with Mireille to tell her about the new incident and my husband’s strange and unexpected behavior. She was up to date on everything, and I preferred confiding in only one person.

“After listening to me, she told me it was all my anxiety. It was impossible for Maurice, the sweetheart, to hire a detective to follow my colleague, and she came up with a ton of arguments to get the idea out of my head. And then, it happened. My best friend, my childhood companion from whom I hadn’t been separated since I was little, like two peas in a pod, told me to relax and suggested an exercise that would make me feel better.

“‘You need to calm down and think. For example, think about something that’s made you happy today. Next, think about something that’s made you laugh in the past year. And then, think about the most magnificent place you’ve ever seen. Watch how it’ll help.’

“I stopped to look at her. She met my gaze with the same imbecilic smile she’d had as she made the suggestion. Our eyes connected. I said, ‘Yes, that’s an interesting game. I’ll try it. Thanks. Let’s see if the whole thing passes altogether. It’ll all be okay.’

“‘You’ll see that it will. Sometimes you make mountains out of molehills,’ she had the guts to respond to me.

“Suddenly, I put it all together. That’s how I felt. There was Maurice, and there was Mireille. My best friend and my husband. Both of them damned to hell at the same time. How had I been so dumb to not realize it? How had I been so mistaken, confiding in the person who had been tricking me for who knows how long? I looked at her, so sure of herself and her dirty little secret. I didn’t know what hurt me more. There couldn’t have been a better infidelity than the one they had pulled behind my back. I still don’t know how I didn’t strangle her. She was right in front of me, and I let her go. I preferred to wait for the right moment and prepare my trap so no one could ever again say it was all my imagination.

“Halfway through January, I told Maurice what I told him every year. I came up with a plan.

“‘February fourth is Mamie Margaux’s birthday. Should I go up to Paris alone, or would you like to come with me so we can make a trip out of it?’

“‘You should go, my love.’

“‘So should I buy a ticket for myself, then?’

“I asked him all this with my laptop sitting on the living room table.

“‘Go for it ... Tell her early February is a busy work season for me.’

“‘The same excuse every year.’

“‘It’s not a lie.’

“‘At least it’s consistent, you’re right.’

“I continued to search for a plane ticket from Marseille to Paris, looking for the cheapest flight.

“‘How old is your grandmother turning?’

“‘Now, it’s better not to rush if I go by myself. I’ll go one day, sleep at her house, and return the next. That’ll make Mamie happier.’

“‘Of course. Good thinking.’

“‘I’ll print my boarding pass so I have it all ready. I leave on the fourth in the morning, and I’ll come back on the fifth after lunch. Okay?’

“‘Whatever you want, my love.’

“‘Yes, that’s better. That way I can stop by the company’s headquarters. It’d be good to show my face.’

“The printer spit out the two boarding passes. Departure and return. I picked them up and folded them.

“‘Look, how nice. This is great.’ I put them in my bag. ‘I have the tickets now, and I was able to score window seats on both journeys.’

“‘You really like to watch the clouds outside, Barbara.’

“‘It makes me feel like my parents are nearby. You know I get on planes only when I need to.’

“On the fourth of February, I came here, to this apartment, to congratulate Mamie. When she opened the door, she put on the same show she did every year. ‘What a surprise. You didn’t have to come, you have so much work.’ And then she hugged me and planted all the kisses she hadn’t been able to give me in the last few months. She loved the plant I brought her—I’d bought it at the airport—and the box of marrons glacés that I knew she’d go crazy for, with her sweet tooth. She still loves them now. That day, as you might imagine, my mind wasn’t on the flight or on dinner—we went out to eat bouillabaisse at la Mère Catherine—or on anything we discussed at the table. I wouldn’t be able to repeat a single thing we said that birthday. I was just thinking about what time I’d make the call. Just before I left the apartment, sitting right over here—I remember it like it was yesterday—I called Maurice from my phone. He picked up right away. I told him that Paris was fantastic, that I missed him, and in a quiet voice, I suggested he congratulate my grandmother.

“‘I’ll pass her over to you.’ And I gave the phone to Mamie immediately.

“Maurice did as Maurice does. He was charming. He excused himself for not having visited, he insisted he was sorry, and he commented I had told him that my grandmother looked younger every year. He lied, even about that. My grandmother returned the phone to me.

“‘See you tomorrow, Maurice.’

“‘See you tomorrow, little rat,’ he responded.

“The balls. My flight from Paris to Marseille was at seven in the evening. I was returning that night. After an hour of a lot of anxiety, I was at the Marseille Provence Airport. After two, I was back in Arles. I parked under the house in no time, the scene of the crime. Ground zero. If I had schemed as coldly as he had, if I had concocted it like him, I had only one exit. Be brave. There was no turning back.

“I entered through the lobby, got in the elevator, and went up to 3A. Our house. Until that moment, it was our house. I put the key in the lock. The scent of candles in the room, lights unusually dimmed, and the sound of water in the shower. We know the sounds of our homes with our eyes closed. The door to the bedroom was half open. Before entering, I saw the bed was undone and a pair of women’s shoes. I remembered them well, because we’d bought them together. I entered the ‘suite.’ I exhaled all the cold air in my lungs. I sat on the bed, and holding back my sobs, I heard them having fun. Two eternal minutes of torture. All my thoughts went rushing through my head. I concentrated the anger, the hate, the bile ... But I waited for them to turn off the water so I could say one thing.

“‘Maurice, Mireille ... I don’t want you to come out.’

“Silence.

“‘I don’t want to see you two ever again.’

“They didn’t listen to me. First, he came out, shouting to the high heavens that I was supposed to return in the morning. Then, Mireille stuck her head out, depressed, acting as though she would cry like a martyr. She ran to put on her underwear. Too late. I got up and left the room because I didn’t even want them near me. From the door frame, I gave them instructions with a force from an unknown origin. I’d never given so many commands, one after the other:

“‘Get dressed, get out of here, and then, do me a favor.’ Both of them looked at me fearfully. ‘Think of something that’s made you laugh in the last year. You’ll see how it’ll be good for you. But don’t you ever , ever tell me how long you’ve been laughing behind my back, do you understand? I don’t want to know.’

“‘But—’

“‘Shut up.’

“‘Barbara, I—’

“‘Shut up. You’re sons of bitches, the two of you.’

“And that’s how, on Mamie’s birthday, my marriage ended. But whatever. The worst is that it also ended my trust in people, even people who seem like good people.”