Early Warning

Before coming, she practiced saying, “I am fifty years old and, however pointless your life is, mine is more pointless,” but comparisons were not allowed. Maybe “I am said to exist, but I doubt it”? When she had said that to Dr. Smith, whom she hadn’t seen now in ten weeks, he told her she was acting “grandiose.” As far as she could tell, you were supposed to talk about specific incidents—“I lay in bed yesterday morning, after my sons left, on my back, staring at the ceiling, and thought of nothing”? Not even a drink. “Last week, I overheard a woman say she had stopped drinking, no problem, but then she was up in the middle of the night making popcorn, and so she gave up corn, and it was killing her.” Maybe the others, she thought, should know this? Next to her, Jean stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Jean, and I am an alcoholic. I just want to thank my sponsor, Mary here, for answering the phone at two-thirty-five a.m. Sunday morning. I was upset, and she talked to me for fifteen minutes, and then I went to sleep. Mary, you are a saint and a half; I am very grateful.” Everyone smiled and nodded. Andy stared across the table at Mary, who did have a very kind face, and Mary made eye contact, and then, almost without even thinking about it, Andy stood up and introduced herself, and what she said was “I haven’t had a drink since the Kent State massacre, which I think is when I started to wake up from a twenty-year walking coma, and I absolutely do not know why or what is going on. But I do know that my son disappeared in July for six days, and then he returned, and even though I do not believe in God or magic or anything, really, I am deathly afraid to touch the bottles, even to throw them away.” She fell silent. The others looked at her, and Bob said, “Any reason is good enough, as long as it works.”

1971

WHEN FRANK SUGGESTED that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different — maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.

Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement — from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe, being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly — keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.