17. Alberte
Alberte
I bought this book today because apparently I have become the sort of man who requires somewhere to speak when the person he has spent nearly eighteen years speaking to no longer seems particularly interested in listening.
That sounds melodramatic.
Henri would say so.
He would lift one eyebrow, take the glass from my hand before I could spill wine on something expensive, and tell me that I have always possessed a remarkable talent for turning ordinary dissatisfaction into Greek tragedy.
Perhaps he would be right.
He is right often enough that I have learned to distrust my own indignation whenever it stands opposite his certainty.
Still, I bought this book.
I nearly left it behind at the shop because journals seem like something meant for adolescent girls with secret crushes or dying men hoping posterity will find wisdom in the final arrangement of their thoughts.
I am neither. I am thirty-eight years old, perfectly healthy, moderately successful, and have spent the better part of my adult life beside the most brilliant man I have ever known.
There should be nothing to write that I cannot simply say aloud.
That is the problem.
There used to be nothing I could not say to Henri.
Once, I knew everything.
Not because he reported to me, and certainly not because he has ever tolerated the suggestion that he requires anyone’s permission, but because sharing things was simply what we did.
A new theory occurred to him at two in the morning, and I heard it before breakfast. A grant was approved, and he appeared in whatever room I occupied with champagne before the formal letter had cooled from the fax machine.
Someone irritated him at the university, and by dinner I knew the offense in such detail that I could have reconstructed the conversation word for word.
When we were younger, even our silence felt shared.
I could sit across from him for an entire evening without speaking and still know where his mind was wandering because eventually he would look up from whatever he was reading and say, “You know what I have been thinking?”
I always did.
Or believed I did.
Lately, I know less.
Meetings occur that I hear about afterward.
People visit Le Mas and leave before I am introduced.
Decisions are made, and I learn of them only after they become facts.
There is always an explanation.
Henri is busy.
I cannot be included in everything. I know that.
I am not a child demanding to accompany him into every room.
And yet I miss being wanted in the room.
There.
That is uglier than I intended.
But perhaps ugliness is what these pages are for.
I miss when Henri looked for me.
That is the simplest truth.
There was a time when he seemed almost incapable of experiencing anything without my witnessing it.
He would come into the laboratory simply because he had not seen me for several hours, lean against the bench while I worked, irritate me by touching things I had carefully arranged, then act offended when I told him to leave.
Now entire days pass in which our paths cross only because we sleep in the same bed.
He comes in after midnight.
I wake when the mattress shifts.
Sometimes he kisses my shoulder. Sometimes he does not.
In the morning he is already downstairs by the time I dress.
This is what happens to people after eighteen years, I suppose.
Familiarity.
Routine.
The quiet erosion of urgency.
No one can remain young forever.
Still, there are moments when I look at him and feel an almost embarrassing ache for the man who used to sit on the floor of my university room because I owned only one chair, eating terrible takeaway and correcting my chemistry notes even after I told him repeatedly that I had not asked for help.
He was insufferable.
I adored him.
I still do.
That is another thing I need to put somewhere, because lately even saying “I love you” to Henri feels strangely vulnerable, as though I’m confessing something he already considers established and therefore no longer needs to hear.
Last week, I asked what was in the locked cabinet in his secondary office.
He laughed.
I thought he was teasing me.
Then he said, “Nothing that concerns you.”
I laughed too.
I wish I had not.
Something about my own laughter humiliated me afterward.
I asked again that evening.
He said I was being ridiculous.
I told him I did not like him keeping things from me.
He replied that privacy and secrecy are not the same thing.
Perhaps they are not.
But we never used to require the distinction.
I asked whether he trusted me.
That finally irritated him.
He said, “After all these years, you are really going to ask me that?”
I apologized, and by bedtime, somehow I was the one reassuring him.
I can see the absurdity now that I write it.
There is freedom in paper, apparently.
Paper does not sigh.
Paper does not tell me I am tired or jealous or oversensitive.
Paper does not kiss me halfway through a difficult sentence and make me forget that I was angry.
That last one feels unfair.
Henri does not manipulate me simply because he knows how easily affection disarms me.
At least, I do not think he does.
God, what a strange sentence to write about someone I know better than anyone alive.
Maybe that is why I bought this.
Perhaps I only need somewhere to preserve my own version of events before Henri explains them to me so persuasively that I forget what bothered me in the first place.
That sounds worse.
I keep doing that.
Writing a sentence, reading it back, realizing it contains an accusation I did not know I intended to make.
Maybe tomorrow I will tear these pages out.
Maybe this entire exercise is self-indulgent nonsense.
But tonight I am at the cottage alone because Henri said he needed the house quiet for meetings. He did not tell me with whom, even when I asked.
And now I am sitting at my kitchen table, listening to rain against the windows of a house I once bought because I wanted somewhere that belonged to me rather than to Henri, writing in a book like a lonely teenager and wondering when exactly I began needing permission to remain in the place where we built our life.
Tomorrow I will go back.
He will probably kiss me when I arrive.
I will ask how the meeting went. He will say fine. I will ask who attended. Perhaps he will tell me. Perhaps I will decide it does not matter.
I want us to be how we were before.
I keep thinking there must be some combination of patience and affection capable of carrying us backward, as though a relationship is a path one can simply retrace if one remembers where the wrong turn occurred.
I do not know where ours was.
Maybe there was no wrong turn.
Maybe I am only frightened because I can feel Henri moving somewhere I cannot follow, and I have spent so much of my life following him that I no longer know what it means to be left behind.
That is enough for tonight.
If nothing else, I suppose I have discovered why people keep journals.
Sometimes you need one place where no one can interrupt you before you understand what you were trying to say.
* * *
24 February 1996
I have decided that melancholy is useless if one does nothing with it.
This is the conclusion I reached after rereading my first entry and realizing I sounded like a widower mourning a man who is, in fact, alive, sleeping beside me most nights, and still irritating me with extraordinary consistency.
Henri has not vanished.
We have not ended.
Nothing catastrophic has occurred.
We have simply allowed ourselves to become lazy with one another.
That is fixable, surely.
Eighteen years should make a relationship sturdier, not less worthy of tending, and perhaps I have been unfair in expecting the intensity of our beginning to perpetuate itself without either of us doing anything to preserve it.
When we were young, we had no choice but to make room for each other.
Everything was new. Every conversation felt urgent because we had not yet heard one another’s stories a hundred times. Every touch seemed to contain some discovery.
So I am attempting something.
This evening, I asked Henri to come to the cottage with me.
No work.
No staff.
No visitors.
No telephone, if I can convince him to leave the damned thing alone for six consecutive hours.
Just us.
He looked surprised. That hurt more than it should have. Then he smiled and asked if I was trying to seduce him.
I said yes.
He laughed.
God, I had forgotten how much I love making him laugh when it is real.
Not the polite sound he makes for donors or the dismissive little breath he gives when someone says something he considers stupid.
His actual laugh.
He agreed to come, so I have spent an absurd portion of today planning dinner.
I bought wine we drank during our first year together, or at least the same region and vintage family—I am not sentimental enough to have preserved the exact bottle.
I bought bread from the bakery he prefers. Olives, cheese, pears.
He was nearly an hour late.
I had already begun rehearsing an argument by the time I heard his car outside, but then he entered carrying flowers.
Henri has not brought me flowers in years. They were completely inappropriate for February, expensive and obviously purchased somewhere between Le Mas and here, but I did not care.
For nearly two hours, we spoke about nothing important.
That may have been the best part.
He complained about a colleague in Montpellier who misused a term during a presentation. I told him he was insufferable. He said competence should not be considered an unreasonable expectation in academia.
After dinner, we danced.
It was ridiculous. There was no music at first because the radio would not cooperate, so Henri hummed a tune for us. I felt twenty-one again, and I remembered believing that loving Henri would be the great adventure of my life.
Perhaps it still is.
Maybe adventures simply become quieter after enough years.
I feel foolishly hopeful.
Perhaps that is all I wanted from this journal—to embarrass myself privately until I remembered that relationships do not repair themselves through observation.