Mind sex, as we called it, wasn’t all that bad. What we lacked in physical performance we made up in narrative depth. We explored more of our subterranean interests. We were willing to say more deviant things in each other’s ears. There was something of science fiction in our intimacy. Didn’t all the scientists predict that in the future we would cease to have physical sex and be satisfied purely by the direct stimulation of our erogenous neurons using electronic stimulation? Marie-Anne and I decided that, as Sartre and Simone had been pioneers of the contemporary swinging culture, she and I were at the forefront of the kind of sex people would be having thirty years from now. At some point, she said, she would write a book about our experiences. It would be entitled Mindtimacy. Perfect for the virtual age.
Still, there were issues. Chief among the challenges of mind sex was that it was entirely reliant on conversation. When something created a mental barrier between two people it was impossible to appeal to physical connection to overcome that distance. Silence forced us to float away from one another. Each of us in separate quarters. Alone. Dissatisfied. Resentful of the other for withholding orgasms.
That was where we found ourselves now.
* * *
Being banished to the living room meant that I had plenty of time to become familiar with my surroundings. The first thing I did was reorganize the kitchen, reshelving everything from pots to wineglasses. Then I went through the bookshelf and familiarized myself with every book upon it. No more surprises. Next I set my sights on the two drawers underneath the television, which were filled with all sorts of film and music that we hadn’t gotten around to. I took all the music, burned it onto our hard drives, and discarded the vast quantities of CDs. At last I moved to our film library, most of which was composed of DVDs that Marie-Anne had brought over from her Charleston home, simply sweeping them into a suitcase and dragging it over when her mother told her to clear everything out.
I had never gone through the collection before. I was surprised by it. It contained almost nothing from Hollywood. Many of the films had come down to Marie-Anne from her father. There was a lot of Italian neorealism. There was some early Polanski, including his first work, the taut and tense exploration of infidelity, Knife in the Water. Then I got to the bulk of the films. Almost all of them were French art-house flicks from the fifties to the eighties. With plenty of time to burn, I blew through them. It was an aspect of Western cultural history I hadn’t consumed before. My favorite among these, from a cinematic standpoint, was The Battle of Algiers, about the French occupation of Algeria. Raw and violent. I liked it despite its overtly political flavor.
But it wasn’t the most intriguing film in the collection. That mantle belonged to a mid-seventies film starring Isabelle Adjani. It was called L’Histoire de Adèle H. The container it came in contained a note from Marie-Anne’s father addressed to her mother: This is the actress that Martin Ryerson said you looked like. Take a look. I think the resemblance is uncanny. The note had been written with a ballpoint pen, one that was short on ink so that some of the letters were without color. Marie-Anne had never mentioned her mother resembling any actress, so I figured she was either unaware of the film’s existence or would never bring it up with me. I decided to go ahead and watch it.
In the film Adjani plays the second daughter of the novelist Victor Hugo. She spends her life chasing an indifferent British man around the world, subsumed in her love for him, destroyed in the end by the inability to attain him. The story wasn’t what was compelling. Most of the magic of the film lay in Adjani. She really did look like Rasha Florence Quinn. Not identical twins by any means, but similar enough to be long-lost sisters.
My initial impulse was to hide the film, because if Marie-Anne were to see it she would probably suffer another bout of sadness.
The trouble was that I had underestimated my own reaction to Adjani. She struck me as immaculate. I found myself obsessed with Adjani’s mouth. The way it curved downward at the edges, with that perfect lower lip like the hull of a prophetic ark or the arc of a perfect plot. Her eyes were compulsive. Peals of pain running across her pupils. A thorn jammed inside an iris. A knot in the cornea that couldn’t be cut. Her body was like a tree, progressively twisted and gnarled by the gravity of her love. Adjani started stalking me, stealing upon me when I was sleeping, an uncontrollable apparition. Beauty. Every time she prodded my conscience I wanted to draw out the film and watch it again. That’s precisely what I ended up doing. I tucked the film underneath the cushions of the sofa and proceeded to watch it whenever I was eating. The only time I withheld watching was if Marie-Anne was at home. There was no need to subject her to her mother’s doppelgänger.
Seeing Adjani on repeat aroused in me all the dormant thoughts of Mrs. Quinn. I thought about the first time I had seen her. It hadn’t been at the steakhouse in Buckhead, but a few months earlier, at our graduation at Emory. Marie-Anne and I had agreed that graduation wasn’t the right time to tell our parents about each other. I had been with my parents and Marie-Anne had been with hers, just a few yards away, sharing a close embrace with her mother, who was wearing a printed sundress with a parasol hat in purple and had a champagne flute in her left hand. While Marie-Anne had been holding her mother close she had peered over a shoulder, given me a wink, and pointed to her mother’s back and mouthed the words My mom! in my direction. Then she had planted a big soft kiss on her mother’s shoulder and given me a thumbs-up. There had been something vulnerable in Marie-Anne’s need to make sure that she was linked to her mother at a moment like that. I had gone away from graduation equating Mrs. Quinn with the ability to unlock the deeper levels of my then-girlfriend’s vulnerability, and with a separate wish; namely, to one day be close enough to Marie-Anne that she would want her mother to experience affection from me as well. Obviously that moment had never materialized. The next time I saw Mrs. Quinn had been at the announcement of our engagement. From then on she’d been nothing but a conniver and enemy against me. Against us.
The revival of the memory was upsetting. What kind of woman was Rasha Florence Quinn that she couldn’t see how much Marie-Anne felt for her? How could she undermine her daughter’s matrimonial decision? The only rational explanation was that Mrs. Quinn knew exactly how much clout she had with her daughter, that she was fully aware how weak Marie-Anne was in front of her, and she simply felt no remorse in taking advantage of it. Until now I had never let myself dislike Mrs. Quinn, believing that if I let rancor toward her settle into my spirit, then Marie-Anne would somehow manage to see it and be hurt by my judgment. But something about conceiving of Mrs. Quinn as Adjani, observing her from a third-person perspective, made it easier to let my resentment turn belligerent. I could conceive of her in all sorts of unflattering ways and not feel like I was insulting Marie-Anne. I could let myself imagine violating her, slapping her, for the punishment she had inflicted on my wife. You are a petty, petty woman, I wanted to get on top of her and scream. You have no idea how much suffering you’ve inflicted.
The next time I watched L’Histoire d’ Adèle H., I paused it during an inappropriate scene. Then, aghast by what I had done, I hid the film underneath the sofa cushion.