women plus something, or maybe minus something that made them different from the women we’d known and been raised by and been taught to worship, because, among so many things, they were everything that a man was not and could never be. Kalaj would understand. And yet now, strangely enough, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him either, because I was ashamed of him, because I was tired of him, because however much I was closer to him than to any of these people at this party, the distance between him and me was big enough to remind me, even when I missed him, that estrangement was carved into me with acid and barbed wire. I was no closer to him than I was to them.
Allison and I sat in the car outside my building. “Tell me what’s wrong?” she finally asked.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“I know something is wrong, very wrong, why won’t you tell me?” I hoped she wasn’t going to cry or make me feel sorry for her. I didn’t want to hate myself more than I already did.
I saw my building, and I saw my own reflection on the window of her car, and I thought of the train I’d have taken from Chestnut Hill and would probably still be on before changing at Park Square. Yes, there was plenty wrong, everything was wrong, but how could I begin to tell her when I didn’t know myself? What truth would I speak, when I didn’t even know the truth? “Is it that you don’t love me—or not enough—or not at all?” How to explain that I did love her, that of all the women I’d known, she was the one I would want to live with, and be loved by, and have children with. “I don’t want to give you up,” she finally said.
All I said in reply was “Sometimes I need to be alone.” I didn’t know I was going to say this until it had come out of my mouth.
“I thought we were happy.”
“We are.”
“Then what is it?”
I didn’t know. Like an actor who wants to sit alone in his booth after all the lights are out and everyone’s gone home, I wanted to take my time removing the makeup, the wig, the false teeth, the skin glow, the eyelashes, take time to recover myself and see the face, not the mask, not the mask again, always the mask again. I wanted to talk to myself in French, in my own French accent, speak as those who brought me into this world had taught me to speak. I was tired of English, tired of anything that didn’t smack of sea salt in the summertime and of the brine of foods prepared in our kitchens on those endless summer afternoons when the cicadas rattled like mad and time slackened and the sea beckoned, listless and sleek, through the windows of our bedrooms when we didn’t wish to nap but found ourselves lulled by the sound of the waves all the same. I was even tired of my make-believe Paris, tired of the screens I put up, tired of thinking I wore a mask, tired of longing for my face, tired of thinking it wasn’t the mask I was quarreling with, but the face—tired of fearing there’d never even been, might not ever be a face. Tired of fearing I was incapable of loving anyone or anything.
“I’m going to drive back home now. I’ll call you tomorrow. If you can’t tell me the truth, then I’ll know, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.”
She did as she promised. She called me once the next day. And then never again.
To Kalaj, when I told him what Allison had said, hers was all corporate ersatz-speak. But it was, and I knew it even then, the most honorable and most tactful behavior I’d witnessed in any woman in my life. She’d been candid and bold from start to finish. She knew what she wanted. I didn’t even know how to want, let alone what I wanted. I admired her.
As we said good night that evening, I caught myself already wishing she’d never call me the next day. I didn’t want to have the one-on-one postmortem I knew awaited us tomorrow. If to avoid that call I’d have to lose her to a fatal car accident on her way back to her parents’ house that night, so be it. I was ashamed of myself. But shame was just