Chapter XL. Broken.
XL.
brOKEN.
LOS ANGELES.
The morning after the groping-politician revelation, I awake clammy, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. And before I can make it fully to the toilet, I vomit all over the bathroom floor. The pretty ceramic tiles desecrated.
“Oh, Cile,” Francois laments, on his hands and knees, helping me mop up my sick. “Do you think it’s the flu?”
“I don’t know,” I say, trembling.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?”
I look at him, oddly. I cannot recall the last time we had sex. Apparently, neither can he.
“Maybe it’s stress,” he says, eventually. “About the show. Get back in the bed. I’ll take the kids to school.”
I do as I’m told. But I know. Deep down, I know.
Two days later when I am feeling somewhat stronger, I show up at Anouk’s unannounced.
“What are you doing here? Why didn’t you text?”
“Because I had to see you in person.”
She greets me in the atrium where Ames has left me, looking, I suspect, like something that the cat dragged in. Sneakers, sweatpants, my hair in a messy bun. And not intentionally so. This time, I am not offered water.
“You don’t look well.”
“I’m not.”
“Is it work? Are we still on track for the opening?”
“It’s not work. We’re still on track, yes.”
Just then, Frederick, the infamous Frederick, emerges from the kitchen, in a gray-and-orange cycling kit, with a stalk of celery in hand. “Who’s here? Oh. Hello, Cecilia.”
We have never officially met. We have never been in the same room. We are fucking the same woman and yet we have never exchanged a word until now, and all of it feels unbearably surreal.
“Hello. Frederick.” I move to shake his hand but am thwarted by the celery stalk, which he awkwardly shifts.
Anouk’s eyes flit between the two of us. Her expression unreadable. Disappointed, perhaps. Confused. I imagine I still look dazed, messy. He looks like a silver fox with a billion dollars and a cycling habit.
“I was just making some green juice. Can I interest you in one?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Anouk shakes her head, as if irritated. Shifts her weight from one bare pedicured foot to the other.
“Okay, well, let me know if you change your mind.” He smiles, and then turns to leave.
“Come,” she says, taking me by the wrist, and leading me across the atrium and into the office she and her husband share.
It’s all greige on greige. Right down to the picture frames.
There are a dozen or so photographs throughout the space.
Two photos of Sacha, a few family shots (skiing in Aspen, boating in the Mediterranean, trekking in Nepal), a couple Ironman competition captures.
But the majority are formal-looking photos of Frederick and Anouk—on red carpets, at galas, with the Obamas at a state dinner for Francois Hollande.
The billionaire donor and “the glamorous wife.”
She pulls the door closed before leading me to the Roche Bobois sofa.
“I’m glad to hear things are still on track. I spoke with Keely, and she’s very excited.”
Keely is the curator from the Hammer Museum.
In addition to multiple studio visits, she’s taken the initiative to familiarize herself with many of my past projects, including the Fitzgerald Series, a group of conceptual pieces I’d exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2013.
And Portrait d’une Femme and Portrait of a Man, a diptych that was part of my final project at the école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
“She’s been wonderful. And the work I did in New York is great. Lots of discussion on beauty and age, beauty and race, beauty and culture, et cetera. It opens up the conversation.”
“Great.” She smiles.
“But that’s not why I came here.” I steel myself, realizing that these next moments might change everything.
She nods, folding her long legs beneath her.
She’s in yoga attire. Spandex that clings and accentuates just how perfectly proportioned she is, still, on the cusp of forty.
Her stomach flat. Her ass and thighs and calves still firm.
I wonder when mine stopped being so. Forty-two, perhaps?
Forty-five? Was it all of a sudden, or a slow unraveling?
“Why didn’t you text?” she asks, lowering her voice. “I would have told you that Frederick was home. What’s going on?”
My eyes flit to the window, the view of the circular drive and front garden.
The tennis court off to one side. The cluster of olive trees.
The well-manicured shrubbery. This contemporary museum on the hill.
She was so protected here. In her multimillion-dollar fortress. Who was I to come in and upset it all?
“Something happened with Didier. In Cabo, on that shoot.”
It takes a moment to register, and I see it for a second, a flinch, and then she recovers, giving me nothing.
“I know something happened, Anouk.”
“I blocked it,” she says, eventually.
“You what?”
“I blocked it. Or at least that’s what the therapist said right before I quit.”
“I didn’t know you were in therapy.” I am stunned. For all her mindful-awareness preaching, she has never mentioned therapy.
“I’m not. I quit.”
“Why did you quit?”
Anouk shakes her head, her shoulders. A desire to shake it all off, I imagine.
Her focus shifts to the far wall. There’s a painting mounted there.
Soothing, meditative. Tiny gray dots on white.
Some kind of contemporary abstract pointillism.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets. Even the million-dollar art here is color coordinated.
“Because I didn’t want to know,” she says.
“I didn’t want to remember all the details.
Because I have a thousand incidents like what probably happened with Didier.
And if I start unburying them all, I won’t recover.
I’ll never be able to function. So I say, ‘Okay, I was young. I didn’t know better.
I didn’t know I could say no. And now I do, and it won’t happen again.
’ But I can’t go back and say no in the past, can I? ”
The room is deathly quiet. I can hear the two of us breathing, feel my pulse thrumming in my temples.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
It has taken me twenty years to say these words. I don’t know that she will forgive me. I don’t know that it matters. I just know that it needed to be said.
She turns back to me then. “How are you so sure something happened?”
It takes a minute.
And I realize she still doesn’t know. She still hasn’t made the connection.
“Because I was there.”
“In Cabo? On the shoot? Yes.”
“Not just on the shoot, Anouk. I was there. Right beside you. Until I wasn’t.”
She is still looking at me, searching for something in the recesses of her mind. And I see her almost find it. Almost. “You were there? You left?”
I nod, slow. “I left. I’m sorry. He sent me away, and I should have known what he was doing. I should have stayed and protected you. But I was … I don’t know. Young, I guess. That’s not an excuse, I know … I’m sorry.”
“You remember it?” She is nonplussed now. Piecing it together. Or not. But realizing I’ve kept this from her. I have kept it from her all this time.
“Some. Not all. I didn’t see anything. He sent me away, and when I came back it was over. And I think you were in shock, but he wouldn’t let me talk to you. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Anouk. I’m sorry.”
“You knew this??? All along, you knew this?”
“Not really. No. I’d forgotten. Or I guess I blocked it. And then it started returning in bits, in dreams, and I couldn’t be certain what was real and what I’d made up. But this tape in the news. It triggered something.”
For a second, Anouk says nothing. Her face reddens, and her eyes threaten to brim, but she manages to hold it back. With the exception of that one day in Cabo, I have never seen her cry.
“I don’t understand. You knew something. Even if you didn’t know all. You knew something. And you never mentioned it.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, but hearing myself say it for the umpteenth time feels somehow empty. Even to me.
“I think maybe you should leave, Cecilia.”
“Anouk—”
“I think that would be best.” She stands. Tall. Taller than me. “I need some time to digest this.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
It takes everything I have to make it out of their modern museum of a home without falling apart.
I’m not even at Sunset before I pull over, and vomit at the side of the road.
Like some amateur rock star the morning after a regrettable night of debauchery.
At some point I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror.
Tears and snot and sick, and I marvel at how it is I got here.
And how, if ever, I would come back to myself.
For three days Anouk doesn’t respond to my calls or texts. The entire time, I remain in bed. I blame it on a virus, and Fran and the kids allow me my space. To wallow. To grieve.
Twice at night, I awake to a coyote baying, and I use what little energy I can gather to head out to the courtyard and call Leelou’s name.
As if she will come home. As if she somehow just took a wrong turn and had been hiding near the creek all this time.
I am just as tempted to call out for Anouk.
Knowing the gesture will be equally futile.
I keep picturing her face, distraught, bewildered.
Trying to piece together the puzzle. To reconcile what happened to her all those years ago and realizing that if I’d said something, done something, perhaps it could have been prevented.
At the very least she would have had a witness.
An ally. And to make matters worse, I’d been such an integral part of her life these past twenty months and had never once brought it up.
I am wracked with guilt and shame and regret, and I have no one to unburden me.
And maybe that is my cross to bear. Maybe this is what Francois felt in that year or so following his affair.
Maybe this is why he caved that night at the Vietnamese restaurant and told me about his transgression.
Did it ease his pain? Did he sleep more soundly then? Did destroying me lighten his load?
And if I’d had the option, would I have rather not known?
In the end, I decide, it doesn’t matter. I could have done something. I should have done something. I did not. And that is what she will take with her.
And even though that shoot with Didier was what led to her booking the Dea di Varenna fragrance campaign.
Even though it led to her face being plastered on billboards across multiple continents.
To numerous magazine covers, and advertising campaigns, and appearances on everything from David Letterman to The Tonight Show.
Even though it led to her marriage and the life she has now, I am certain that if she could have avoided the humiliation and indignity of that day at the beach, she would have.
On Friday, a full week after the release of the groping-politician tapes, I head back to the studio. I had spent enough time in bed convalescing, watching mindless television, and licking my wounds. Anouk would reach out when she was ready.
Or so I hoped.
I allow the frustration to feed my art. The selected photos that are not a part of the slideshow, those that I’ve put aside to be mounted in the anteroom—large-scale images of pristine faces—I destroy strategically.
Burning the edges of one, folding and crumpling another, tearing one into myriad pieces, dipping yet another in acid.
All to be reassembled and affixed against white mountboards and placed in white frames.
There’s something very powerful in the act of taking something beautiful and destroying it. I’ve become good at it.
I don’t hear from Anouk for another nine days, when she texts out of the blue:
Hi. Just seeing your messages. Was on a 12-day ayahuasca retreat in the Peruvian . Thought I told you I was going. Sorry.
I have no appropriate response to that. So I leave it alone.