I feel like saying: Yes, I did something I shouldn’t have done and yet I don’t feel the tiniest bit guilty, just afraid of being found out.
My husband gets home and, as usual, he kisses me, asks what kind of day I’ve had and what we’re having for supper. I give him the usual answers. If he doesn’t notice anything different about the routine, he won’t suspect that today I gave oral sex to a politician.
Which, it should be said, gave me no physical pleasure at all. But now I’m mad with desire, needing a man, needing to be kissed, and needing to feel the pain and pleasure of a body on top of mine.
When we go up to bed, I realize that I’m terribly aroused. I can’t wait to make love with my husband, but I must keep calm; if I’m too eager, he’ll suspect something is wrong.
After I shower, I lie down beside him, take the tablet he’s reading from his hands and put it on the bedside table. I begin stroking his chest, and he immediately becomes aroused. We make love as we haven’t done in a long time. When I moan a little too loudly, he asks me to keep the noise down so as not to wake the children, but I tell him I don’t want to, that I want to be able to express my feelings.
I have multiple orgasms. God, I love this man! We end up sweaty and exhausted, and so I decide to take another shower. He comes in with me and playfully turns the showerhead on my clit. I ask him to stop, saying I’m too tired, that we need to sleep and he’ll just get me all excited again.
While we’re drying each other off, I suggest going to a nightclub sometime—another attempt to change my routine at all costs. I think it’s then that he suspects something has changed.
“Tomorrow?”
I can’t tomorrow, I have my yoga class.
“Since you’ve brought it up, can I ask a direct question?”
My heart stops. He goes on:
“Why exactly do you go to yoga classes? You’re such a calm, well-balanced person, and a woman who knows what she wants. Aren’t you wasting your time?”
My heart starts beating again. I don’t answer. I simply smile and stroke his face.
I collapse onto the bed, close my eyes, and, before I fall asleep, think: I must be having the kind of crisis that comes after ten years of marriage. It’ll pass.
Not everyone needs to feel happy all the time. Besides, no one can be happy all the time. I need to learn to deal with the reality of life.
Dear Depression, please keep your distance. Don’t be nasty. Find some other person with more reason than me to look in the mirror and say: “What a pointless existence.” Whether you like it or not, I know how to defeat you. You’re wasting your time.
MY LUNCH with Jacob K?nig goes exactly as I imagine. We meet at La Perle du Lac, an expensive restaurant on the lakeshore that used to be good but is now owned by the city. It’s still expensive, but the food is awful. I could have surprised him and taken him to the Japanese restaurant, but I know he would think it was in bad taste. For some people, décor matters more than food.
And now I see that I made the right decision. He tries to show me that he’s a wine connoisseur; he talks about “bouquet,” “texture,” and “legs,” the oily drops that fall in rivulets down the side of the glass. In truth, he’s telling me that he’s grown up and no longer a schoolboy; that he’s learned how to behave and has risen in the world; that he knows about life, wine, politics, women, and ex-girlfriends.
What nonsense! We’ve been drinking wine all our lives. We can tell a good wine from a bad one, and that’s all there is to it. Until I met my husband, all the men I went out with—men who considered themselves “cultivated”—acted as if the choice of wine in a restaurant was their big moment. They all did the same thing: with great solemnity, they sniffed the cork, read the label, allowed the waiter to pour a little into the glass, turned it this way and that, held it up to the light, smelled the wine, rolled it around in their mouth, swallowed, and, finally, gave an approving nod.
After witnessing the same scene endless times, I decided to change my group of friends and join the college’s nerds and social outcasts. Unlike the fake, predictable tasters of wine, the nerds were at least real and made no attempt to impress me. They joked about things I didn’t understand. They thought, for example, that I really ought to know the name Intel because “it’s written on every computer.” I, of course, had never noticed.
The nerds made me feel like a plain-Jane ignoramus, and were more interested in pirating things on the Internet than they were in my breasts or legs. As I got older, I returned to the safe embrace of the wine tasters until I found a man who didn’t try to impress me with his sophistication or make me feel like a complete idiot with conversations about mysterious planets, hobbits, or computer programs that erase all traces of the webpages you’ve visited. After a few months of going out, during which we discovered at least one hundred and twenty villages around Lake Léman, he asked me to marry him.
I accepted without hesitation.
I ask Jacob if he knows any nightclubs, because I haven’t kept up with Geneva’s nightlife (“nightlife” being just a manner of speaking) and I’ve decided to go out dancing and drinking. His eyes shine.
“I don’t have time for that. Thanks for the invitation, but, you know, apart from the fact that I’m married, I can’t be seen out with a journalist. People will say your articles are …”
“Biased.”
“Yes, biased.”
I decide to take this little game of seduction a step further—it’s a game that has always amused me. What have I got to lose? I know all the methods, diversions, traps, and objectives.
I ask him to tell me more about himself, about his personal life. I’m not here as a journalist, I say, but as a woman and a former girlfriend.
I stress the word “woman.”
“I don’t have a personal life,” he says. “I can’t, unfortunately. I’ve chosen a career that has transformed me into an automaton. Everything I say is scrutinized, questioned, published.”
This isn’t quite true, but I find his sincerity disarming. I know that he’s mostly seeing how the land lies, that he wants to know precisely where he’s putting his feet and how far he can go. He suggests that he is “unhappily married,” and goes into an exhaustive explanation of how powerful he is, just like all men of a certain age once they’ve hit the wine.
“In the last two years I’ve had a few months of happiness, a few of difficulties, but most are just a matter of hanging in there and trying to please everyone in order to be reelected. I’ve had to give up everything that I used to enjoy—like going dancing with you, for example. Or listening to music for hours, smoking, or doing anything that other people deem to be wrong.” That’s absurd! No one cares about his personal life.
“Perhaps it’s the return of Saturn. Every twenty-nine years the planet returns to the same point in the sky that it occupied at the moment of our birth.”
The return of Saturn?
He realizes that he’s said more than he should, and suggests that it might be best if we went back to work.
No, my Saturn return has already happened. I need to know exactly what it means. He gives me a lesson in astrology: Saturn takes twenty-nine years to return to the point in the sky where it was at the moment we were born. Until that happens, everything seems possible, our dreams can come true, and any walls hemming us in can still be broken down. When Saturn completes this cycle, it puts an end to any romanticism. Choices become definitive and it’s nearly impossible to change direction.
“I’m not an expert, of course, but my next chance will only come when I’m fifty-eight and Saturn returns again. Although, if Saturn is telling me it’s no longer possible to choose another path, why, then, did you invite me to lunch?”
We’ve been talking now for almost an hour.
“Are you happy?” he asks suddenly.