“I’m not this wild woman who has all these affairs. I just like what I like. Frederick likes what he likes. Mostly we like each other. But every now and then we get bored.”
It sounds so simple. Reasonable even.
“So what is it that you like?”
She rolls onto her side then, facing me. Her forehead pressed against mine. “I like you.”
It sits there for a moment between the two of us, her proclamation. Effortless. Casual, almost. Could it be this easy?
I allow my lips to brush against hers. Before kissing her, deeply. She tastes like sex and linen and berries. Like love, like honey. She tastes, I realize, like me.
“I like you, too.”
XXI.APRÈS.
LOS ANGELES.
JUNE. 2015.
If I thought being intimate with a woman would not be followed by the usual rush of emotions, anxiety, and second-guessing that I’d typically experienced after being with a man, I thought wrong. Maybe it was the strict Jamaican upbringing, or maybe I was just wired differently, but even at the age of forty-five, I found it difficult to view sex with someone new as a casual thing. Even when we were both married to other people. Post-Napa, I was immediately twenty-five again. Wondering how long to wait to call or text her. Or if she would call or text first. And whether what had happened between us was a onetime thing. Or if it would continue.
I don’t hear from her for three days.
She and Frederick head to their place in Aspen for the holiday, while the kids, Fran, and I road-trip to Laguna to spend the long weekend at the Montage, and for the entirety of our getaway I pretend we have a normal, functioning marriage. François and I indulge in the spa, lounge at the beach, sip margaritas poolside. We even have sex. With the kids in the adjoining room of our suite, completely unaware (we hope). And while the act does not hold the excitement and mystery of discovery that it did with Anouk, it is still respectable.He knows the shortcuts. He knows precisely what I like, how, and at what intensity. After fifteen years of lovemaking, I have no secrets left.
Until now.
“I missed you,” he says later, much later, when we have both drifted off and then awoken again in the middle of the night. His hand finding mine beneath the covers.
“I missed you, too.”
“Thank you for coming here with me.”
“Who would say no to Laguna?”
“No. To America,” he says, soft.
He still hasn’t articulated it, the real reason the kids and I are here. Not because he couldn’t bear to be away from us for long stretches of time, but because he wasn’t certain he could handle the distance plus the temptation. Because there was less of a chance of his fucking up and falling into one of his actresses once again if his family was just a short ride away.
When he slept with Élodie (or when hesaidhe slept with Élodie) in September of 2012, it was during the Venice Film Festival. An event I would have happily attended had I not had to stay behind in Paris while the kids started a new school year. It happened more than once during that week. Not that he’d shared the specifics, but just that in coming clean, that November night at the Vietnamese restaurant, he’d slipped up and used the plural.
“We didn’t plan it, Cecilia.Je te promets,” he’d said, earnest. His hands gripping mine. “There had been so much tension on set, because she was juvenile and difficult to work with. But I knew,carrément, that she had this character inside of her, and I managed to pull out this performance. And then in Venice, she got all this attention, because everyone fell in love with the film and they fell in love with her and it was magical. And we just got caught up in the adulation, and celebration of our art. And those times it happened, I feel like it was just a…” He’d searched for the word. “… a release. But I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you.”
And so somehow, he had gotten it into his head that keeping us close—keepingmeclose—would curb his appetite for infidelity. He had not, up to that point, put it in so many words. But he did not have to. It was in the silences. The things he dared not say.
As we lay there, staring at the ceiling, not saying things to each other, I thought of my conversation with Victoire de Fleury during our photo shoot in Paris. Her advice about our time in America and viewing it as an adventure. About not being afraid to try something new, unexpected. About thinking of it as a gift for all of us. About using it for my art. And it dawns on me then that I might be less riddled with anxiety regarding the situation with Anouk if I did not allow myself to view it as a burgeoning love affair, one in which I might once again be hurt, but instead regard it as a release, an adventure, an inspiration for my art. A muse. Like Anouk’s friends at that first dinner in Paris. The painter and the ingenue. A symbiotic relationship if ever there was one.
It might serve me better to imagine us as that.
On the ride back to LA, while the kids are tunedin totheir iPads in the back seat and Fran navigates 405 traffic and listens to Coldplay, I text her.
Hey there. Heading back from Laguna. Hope Aspen was lovely. Adult company maybe this week?
It takes her less than a minute to respond.
Absolutely.
“What are you smiling about?” Fran asks, his eyes never leaving the road.
