“I have never been so unhappy in my life,” my wife says when we’re near the top. “It’s not just the cancer, I was unhappy before the cancer. We were having a very hard time. We don’t get along, we’re a bad match. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” I say. “We’re a really bad match, but we’re such a good bad match it seems impossible to let it go.”
“We’re stuck,” she says.
“You bet,” I say.
“No. I mean the ride, the ride isn’t moving.”
“It’s not stuck, it’s just stopped. It stops along the way.”
She begins to cry. “It’s all your fault. I hate you. And I still have to deal with you. Every day I have to look at you.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to deal with me if you don’t want to.”
She stops crying and looks at me. “What are you going to do, jump?”
“The rest of your life, or my life, however long or short, should not be miserable. It can’t go on this way.”
“We could both kill ourselves,” she says.
“How about we separate?”
I am being more grown-up than I am capable of being. I am terrified of being without her, but either way, it’s death.
The ride lurches forward.
I came to Paris wanting to pull things together and suddenly I am desperate to be away from her. If this doesn’t stop now, it will never stop, it will go on forever. She will be dying of her cancer and we will still be fighting. I begin to panic, to feel I can’t breathe. I am suffocating; I have to get away.
“Where does it end?”
“How about we say good-bye?”
“And then what? We have opera tickets.”
I cannot tell her I am going. I have to sneak away, to tiptoe out backwards. I have to make my own arrangements.
We stop talking. We’re hanging in mid-air, suspended. We have run out of things to say. When the ride circles down, the silence becomes more definitive.
I begin to make my plan. In truth, I have no idea what I am doing. All afternoon, everywhere we go, I cash traveler’s checks, I get cash advances, I have about five thousand dollars’ worth of francs stuffed in my pocket. I want to be able to leave without a trace, I want to be able to buy myself out of whatever trouble I get into. I am hysterical and giddy all at once.
We are having an early dinner on our way to the opera.
I time my break for just after the coffee comes. “Oops,” I say, feeling my pockets. “I forgot my opera glasses.”
“Really?” she says. “I thought you had them when we went out.”
“They must be at the hotel. You go on ahead, I’ll run back. You know I hate not being able to see.”
She takes her ticket. “Hurry,” she says. “I hate it when you’re late.”
This is the bravest thing I have ever done. I go back to the hotel and pack my bag. I am going to get out. I am going to fly away. I may never come back. I will begin again, as someone else—unrecognizable.
I move to lift the bag off the bed, I pull it up and my knee goes out. I start to fall but catch myself. I pull at the bag and take a step—too heavy. I will have to go without it. I will have to leave everything behind. I drop the bag, but still I am falling, folding, collapsing. There is pain, searing, spreading, pouring, hot and cold, like water down my back, down my legs.
I am lying on the floor, thinking that if I stay calm, if I can just find my breath, and follow my breath, it will pass. I lie there waiting for the paralysis to recede.
I am afraid of it being over and yet she has given me no choice, she has systematically withdrawn life support: sex and conversation. The problem is that, despite this, she is the one I want.
There is a knock at the door. I know it is not her, it is too soon for it to be her.
“Entrez,” I call out.
The maid opens the door, she holds the DO NOT DISTURB sign in her hand. “Oooff,” she says, seeing me on the floor. “Do you need the doctor?”
I am not sure if she means my wife or a doctor other than my wife.
“No.”
She takes a towel from her cart and props it under my head. She takes a spare blanket from the closet and covers me with it. She opens the Champagne and pours me a glass, tilting my head up so I can sip. She goes to her cart and gets a stack of night chocolates and sits beside me, feeding me Champagne and chocolate, stroking my forehead.
The phone in the room rings, we ignore it. She refills my glass. She takes my socks off and rubs my feet. She unbuttons my shirt and rubs my chest. I am getting a little drunk. I am just beginning to relax and then there is another knock, a knock my body recognizes before I am fully awake. Everything tightens. My back pulls tighter still, any sensation below my knees drops off.