Before coming, she practiced saying, “I am fifty years old and, however pointless your life is, mine is more pointless,” but comparisons were not allowed. Maybe “I am said to exist, but I doubt it”? When she had said that to Dr. Smith, whom she hadn’t seen now in ten weeks, he told her she was acting “grandiose.” As far as she could tell, you were supposed to talk about specific incidents—“I lay in bed yesterday morning, after my sons left, on my back, staring at the ceiling, and thought of nothing”? Not even a drink. “Last week, I overheard a woman say she had stopped drinking, no problem, but then she was up in the middle of the night making popcorn, and so she gave up corn, and it was killing her.” Maybe the others, she thought, should know this? Next to her, Jean stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Jean, and I am an alcoholic. I just want to thank my sponsor, Mary here, for answering the phone at two-thirty-five a.m. Sunday morning. I was upset, and she talked to me for fifteen minutes, and then I went to sleep. Mary, you are a saint and a half; I am very grateful.” Everyone smiled and nodded. Andy stared across the table at Mary, who did have a very kind face, and Mary made eye contact, and then, almost without even thinking about it, Andy stood up and introduced herself, and what she said was “I haven’t had a drink since the Kent State massacre, which I think is when I started to wake up from a twenty-year walking coma, and I absolutely do not know why or what is going on. But I do know that my son disappeared in July for six days, and then he returned, and even though I do not believe in God or magic or anything, really, I am deathly afraid to touch the bottles, even to throw them away.” She fell silent. The others looked at her, and Bob said, “Any reason is good enough, as long as it works.”
1971
WHEN FRANK SUGGESTED that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different — maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.
Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement — from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe, being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly — keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.
In the meantime, since they had come in the winter, they were surrounded by French people, not tourists, and though Janet’s French was good, and people smiled at her and were helpful, Frank was a little nettled by Janet’s loud voice, Richie’s and Michael’s exaggerated movements, Andy’s endless observations. It was this last that was a revelation — Andy had always kept her thoughts to herself, except when she had been drinking, and she only drank at home. But now that she wasn’t drinking, she talked all the time — what an elegant building, is that really Napoleon, I thought he was short, oh, there were more Napoleons than the one, look at those horse statues on that pillar. The French didn’t stare at her, the kids didn’t seem to care (though Janet answered a lot of her questions), but it drove Frank crazy. The thing he couldn’t stop noticing was the way her mouth worked. All around him, Parisians hardly moved their lips, and their words issued forth in a liquid stream. Andy’s mouth was like the mouth of a puppet flapping, revealing the empty cavern within. For ten days, he felt as though his glance was shifting between her mouth and momentary glimpses of Lydia disappearing around corners, up steps, and over bridges. By that time, too, all five of them were expressing the opinion that two weeks was too long — you could only go to the Galeries Lafayette so many times, only appreciate so many paintings of the long, pale body of Jesus, his eyes closed, being taken down from the cross, or of a short man in a fancy outfit sitting on a small, bouncy horse. Janet thought they could have spent the second week in Nice; Frank wondered why he had forgotten about Rome; the boys wished they had gone skiing; and Andy wondered when she would ever get to Madrid.
The evening of the tenth day, Janet talked them into going over to the Rive Gauche and trying her favorite Vietnamese restaurant, a cheap place where she and some of her fellow students went every couple of weeks. Richie and Michael hated the food, Andy hated the toilette, which was a hole in the ground in a room with the lightbulb burned out. Frank thought that Janet used her chopsticks in a superior way after showing off about the menu. Then she wanted to take the Métro rather than a taxi, and Richie and Michael thought they would use the map and walk — either down the Quai d’Orsay and across the Pont de l’Alma, or over the Pont Neuf and then down the street where the tumbrels had rolled, taking the condemned to the guillotine. Janet said, “That would be the only thing you two know about Paris,” and Andy said, “Isn’t it a little dangerous?” as if the two of them could not take on any muggers in the city of Paris. Look at them — they even looked threatening. So they ended up walking, freezing to death. Back at the hotel, Frank went to bed, and got up a couple of hours later, and there was Janet in the living room of the suite, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over a book. When he came in, she glanced up and then turned her whole body away.
“That’s nice,” he said.
“Don’t take it personally, all right?” But she sounded irritated that he had even walked into a room he was paying three hundred a night for.
“I think I will,” he said.
“Fine, be my guest.” She lifted her book slightly. It was a Proust, in French, Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he thought was both shocking and pretentious. He must have harrumphed, because she looked up and scowled, and he reflected that she had always preferred Lillian and Arthur. In their family, she was a boarder who deigned to be supported in luxury, but she gave back nothing except a sort of I-told-you-so perfection of academic performance that was showing off rather than pleasing. He said, “What’s eating you?”
“Well, since you ask, I can’t stand how you elbow Mom out of the way every time you are walking along. It’s very rude. Men here actually have manners.”
“Oh, do they?” said Frank. “I didn’t notice.”
“No,” said Janet, “you didn’t.” She slammed her book shut. “But they notice you. I watch their heads turn.”