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Although the fact that our student visas were running out would have forced our hands either way, Anne and I decided to move back to Paris after grad school because it seemed like an easier and more affordable place to raise a child than the American east coast.

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I would have been grateful for an emergency vehicle at that point so me and my conical structure could sink into the ground. Christ on crutches, was it possible to be so detrimentally wicked? And had she actually depicted a smiley face after the word faithful, or was I going mad?

            What a wench! I mean, the nerve! White tiles? Good sex? As if I cared about her stupid kitchen! Or her weekends in the country! As if I gave a shit whether her new man drinks coffee or tea! But no, Dave drinks both! Dave is versatile! He can have a cup of coffee and only hours later sit down and metamorphose into a tea drinker! Well, blimey! What a modern, modern man!

            And where the hell did she come off lecturing me about creativity? Last I checked, the International Herald Tribune was full of spelling errors, substandard word play, and second-rate writing, and The Daily Mail was a semi colon away from smut. And just what was she photographing in London on the weekends? The bobbies in their helmets? A double decker bus?

            Granted, there was no mention of The Blue Bear or of my show at the Premier Regard, but I’d changed my mind about her. A woman so desensitized to my feelings that she pens letters about her home renovation was capable of purchasing a painting I originally did for my wife. If, as a genuflection to the healing process, I hadn’t erased Lisa’s number from my cell phone, I might have actually phoned the demoness to find out for sure.

            If Lisa was going to be out of my life, she needed to be out, not this half-ass situation in which she sent me handwritten letters with the interest level of a To-Do list. Maybe I should give up drinking? Maybe she should give up writing me for God’s sake! She said she didn’t love me, but her actions proved the opposite. Women! Intent on our destruction, they leave us no escape.

            I folded the letter back into the envelope and waited for a hearse to haul away the sordid remnants of my morning. No emergency vehicle came, and no funeral. It was just another grey beginning to a grey Parisian day, one in which I was going to have to find the courage to tell my wife that The Blue Bear sold.

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On my walks, I sought out fleeting moments. Intimate little poems. A man’s hand on a door and a woman passing through it, the man watching just two beats longer than he needed to to admire her as she walked by. And then his hand on her back, the revelation that he knew her. That he often had the opportunity to admire the mundane entrances and exits of her life.

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I cut back to Harold and Rosie, fast-forwarding to a moment when Rosie had become emotional about something she’d admitted, and Harold pulled her up into his arms for a long hug. Harold’s ass was pressing against the wooden table in his green corduroys and Rosie had forgotten to take off her apron; it was riding up her bust. The angle I had filmed them from captured the slack under their necks, and Rosie’s cheeks were red and her hair was huge and messy, and they couldn’t have given a flying shit that I was there.

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With my parents’ section almost finished, I had moved on to the footage of Harold and Rosie. I put my headphones on and pressed the black arrow in the center of my computer, and the frozen frame of Harold’s kitchen came to life.

            “Is there anything you’d want to change about her?” asked my voice. On screen, Harold shifted uncomfortably in a wooden chair, and Rosie started to laugh.

            “He’d like me to lose two stone, I think!”

            Harold blushed. “No, no,” he said. “Nothing.”

            “Oh, come on!” said Rosie, flicking him with a hand towel that had been sitting in the middle of the table. “I know there’s stuff! He wants me to be blond, maybe?”

            She placed her hands under the clouds of her pitch black, curly hair and struck a pin-up pose. 

            “And definitely, two stone.”

            “You’re going to get me in trouble, mister,” said Harold. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

            “Oh, I’ll have a go at it then,” said Rosie, “If you’re going to be a coward. My Harold has horrid feet! I’m sorry love, but you do! They’re flat and long and his toe, that one there, it stretches out past his big toe!”

            “In many cultures, that’s a sign of wisdom.”

            “It’s a sign of ugly feet in mine!” said Rosie, stretching out her legs. “I’ve got lovely feet myself, lovely plump toesies with a nice, firm arch.”

            “That’s true,” said Harold, touching her sweater. “She has a lovely arch.”

            I put the film on pause, and cut back to the edited version of the film I’d done of my parents. I fast-forwarded seventeen minutes in.

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What Rosie had been talking about before she had to pause was the first time they filed for life insurance.

            “Standard questions, obviously, do you smoke, how much do you drink—and I just got, do you remember, you found me in the kitchen, crying?” Rosie looked at her husband, then the camera. “It was something about filling in our ages. You know, I’m older than him by twelve years, actually, and I was sitting there, filling the whole thing out and I realized there wasn’t a question on that form, on any form, that I couldn’t answer. I realized that we—we really had the same life. That we’d been the same person. I don’t know, that he really was my very closest friend, and I was sitting there with a ballpoint and that stupid form, and it just made me cry.”

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We docked in the same port town where my parents used to take me on vacation to snack on Yarlsberg cheese cubes and “sunbathe” under cloudy skies. With it coming on November, the beaches were deserted, except for the people waiting on their loved ones in the ferry, and old couples, strolling slowly, stooped and sweatered.

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            “Do you remember the nightlights?” she asked, referring to something I’d made while she was pregnant to illuminate her frequent nighttime trips to the toilet. While we were still living in Providence, my mother used to send me care packages filled with Crown Prince kipper snacks. The empty tins were everywhere, accumulating monthly in oil slicked piles at the bottom of the trash. With a little nautical rope and miniature red Christmas bulbs, I was able to fashion a series of maritime “red light” district nightlights for her that we still had somewhere in our Paris basement.

            “Yeah,” she said, looking past me. “Maybe you should wash those.”

            I was determined not to pick at her verbal barbs.

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The guest room in our house, like many guest rooms in other houses I suspect, is hardly used by guests. On rainy days, Camille likes to play with the random assembly of knick knacks we keep in a trunk at the foot of the bed: unorganized photographs in envelopes; two Polaroid cameras; an awful blanket that Inés gifted us with after a trip to Peru when she was into everything yak; a poncho from that same trip that Anne wore once to make her mother happy and was rewarded for her efforts with an angry neck rash; a small army of stuffed animals that Camille no longer plays with; and three pairs of worn-out New Balance sneakers that I can’t bear to throw out.

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            Outside, I folded the towel to use as padding under my knees, got down, and started scrubbing. I didn’t know whether to acknowledge the surge of happiness coursing through my body or to re-establish the levels of anxiety and desperation that had defined my central nervous system over the last few days.

            What would I need if I had read those letters? What would I be feeling? Would I want some kind of balls-out confession, or would I want, as Anne seemed to, to be left alone?

            Years of co-habitation with a lawyer had taught me that you could often find clarity to a problem by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Anne cheating on me. It was unfair and probably naïve and not a little bit condescending, but my mind wouldn’t let me go there. Every time I made a small advance in the scenario in my head, there was something there to stop me. Where would she find the time, for one? And it would have to be someone outside of our social circle. But Anne didn’t go gallivanting around photography exhibits all day. She worked.

            I scrubbed extra hard in circles around the donkey’s tail. Anne was a defense attorney, used to dealing with men who lied. The fact that I couldn’t imagine her cheating on me meant that I didn’t want to, because I couldn’t handle it if she did. I scrubbed and scrubbed, each push of my hand accompanied by a self-defacing mantra. Can’t take his own medicine. Tit for tat.

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Before that, during University, I fell in with a local chap named “Moose” whose thing was reverse graffiti: at night, he’d sneak into the city’s tunnels and passageways where he’d use a high-pressure washer to clean away the grime and muck in order to reveal his designs. He’s had a bit of success now, and gone the other way. Last I heard of him, he was going to reverse graffiti a giant swoosh for Nike on the back of the South Bank Centre building for the “Best of the Best” advertising awards conference.

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Just before I reached the golf course by their house, I saw a dead rabbit on the side of the road. I spent the remaining three minutes of the drive deciding that there were lots of bunnies hopping around the green, lots of opportunities for passing cars to kill them, and that I shouldn’t take the creature’s demise as a sign that I, too, was minutes away from having my organs crushed.

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            The very first photo was a Haddon/Bourigeaud montage. We hadn’t had a professional photographer at the wedding, and we’d forgotten to take one of our two families with the happy bride and groom. Inès was the first one to realize this, and she was also the least hungover, so she forced us all to regroup for a photo after breakfast.

            Both my mother and Anne’s thought it would be nice if we got into our wedding clothes again, but everyone else agreed that this was a bit creepy, so the photo I was looking at was a late-day assembly of heavy-lidded relatives with Anne and I, looking game, but also nauseous, together in the middle. Her family was on the right, mine was on the left. We were the bridge.  

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            Growing up, each summer us Haddons used to pack up our blue station wagon and head off to Poole-in-Dorset, where we spent about two weeks “sunbathing” beneath overcast skies and snacking on watermelon-cheese cubes concocted by a middle aged widow named Penny Hamilton who used to rent the house right next to ours.

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 “Exactly. I heard you had a show recently, too?”

            I tossed the crumpled pastry bag towards one of the useless blue trash bags the city had put into place after 9/11. With no guard around it, it shifted in the wind, turning its back on my wad of paper, which went careening to the ground.

            “Yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal, really. Actually, I have to go see about it now. Something’s sold, I guess, and—”

            “I get it,” said Patrick, slipping back on his helmet. “You were always a busy man. It’d be great to really catch up, though, hear more about what you’re up to. We could go for a coffee, or hell, our kids could have a playdate?”

            I smiled at him, weakly. “Seriously?”

            He shrugged. “If someone approached you saying, ‘Lead me to the music’ how would you respond?”

            I blinked. He blinked back at me. He shrugged. “It’s from my show.”

            “Oh,” I said, pushing a laugh out. “Cool.”

            “Okay, buddy,” he said, starting his scooter. “I’m gonna shove off, but I really would love to hear from you.”

            “Will do,” I said, watching him circle around me and ease his scooter to the pavement.

            And off he went. Godamn Patrick Madsen who was so generous and wholehearted I couldn’t even hate him and his rip-off show. Back at RISD, he’d majored in kinetic animation—for his sophomore evaluation, he’d imbued the heads of four taxidermied boars with recordings from the film version of “Roe vs. Wade” that were only activated when a woman walked past. For his thesis show, he wired and grooved a series of his German grandfather’s photographs from the Second World War so that they could actually be played on a record player. The sounds that came out of the photographs were terrifying, scratched. He won a grant award for that, which he used to study robotics and engineering in Osaka, Japan. And now he was doing performance art. If I hadn’t felt like enough of a hack for making a sell-out show of accessible oil paintings (scenes viewed through doorways? Jesus.) I certainly did, now.   

Lost paragraph from a memoir, maybe

For decades, on a daily basis I have squired myself off to some poorly insulated corner to “write,” an act that—with very few exceptions—has been requested of me by no one. Think about this for a moment, think about the phantasmagorical levels of delusion it takes to be a writer, or any creative person, really, who thinks they have a “gift.” In spite of the endless form letters and form e-mails and returned manuscripts and unreturned phone calls that signify yet another rejection, we keep on going with these stories and these novels and these long-form essays and (god help us), poetry because we tell ourselves that someone, somewhere cares whether we write.