The Fortress Read online

  “Can I get you some water?” I asked. “Will that help?”

  He nodded.

  “Be right back,” I said, but as I turned to go to the house, he grabbed my arm. “Do you remember,” he said, looking me directly in the eyes, “when you made me go to therapy in Providence?”

  “Well, I didn’t make you go,” I said. “We both agreed to go. It was something we did together.”

  “And I told you that my therapist told me to stop coming?”

  “As I recall,” I said, “two therapists told you this.”

  “Right,” he said. “Well, I lied to you about that.”

  I blinked, taking this in. Of course I knew he’d lied about it. That two separate therapists would speak to such a complicated man for one hour and tell him never to come back again could not have been true. “You lied to me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I lied. My therapist didn’t tell me not to come back. I chose not to go back.”

  This, I realized, was a breakthrough. If he could admit this, maybe we could go to therapy together. There was an English-speaking therapist in Calvisson, just ten minutes from Aubais.

  “I chose not to go back,” Nikolai continued, “because my therapist told me I should divorce you.”

  “What?” I felt myself draw back, as if I’d been slapped. “Divorce me?”

  “She said that you weren’t good for me and that I should leave you. The sooner the better. But I didn’t want to leave you. You see, I know that we’re meant to be together—we’re destined to be together. I’ve known you for many lifetimes. I can’t live without you in this one. I wasn’t going to leave you. So I chose to leave the therapist instead.”

  I stared at him, not sure how to respond. “And what about the second therapist?”

  “I never went to the second one,” he said. “But she would probably have told me to leave you, too.”

  “Nikolai,” I said, “therapists don’t say things like that.”

  “Well, mine did,” he said.

  I was stunned by this revelation, partially because of when he chose to tell me—now, in the car, when he was most in need of help—but also because of the nature of the confession. Although he had admitted he’d lied, he was still not being fully honest about why his therapist would tell him to divorce me. What was behind such extreme advice? What had he told her? I wanted to believe he was trying to reach out to me, to be honest, but it seemed off somehow.

  “Can you give me a few minutes?” he said at last. “I just need to sit here for a while. Then we’ll go to Sommières.”

  I walked away from the Citroën, to the other side of the courtyard, and sat in the sun. I needed a minute to myself before I went to get the kids ready. Alex and Nico would take one look at me and know that I wasn’t all right, and appearing to be “all right” for them had become a priority for me.

  Some crows sat at the top of the cypress trees on the other side of the courtyard. The first time I saw the cypress trees, they appeared to be just one big twisted tree, a massive cone of green lifting into the sky. But after closer inspection, I saw that three trees had been planted close together and over the course of decades had twisted up into one another, branches locking and trunks melding. Now the center tree had died. We hired a specialist to come, to remove it and take the wood away. Impossible, he’d said. Take down one, and the others go with it. And so we’d left it standing.

  —

  WHEN AN HOUR had passed and Nikolai still hadn’t left the car, I called our new friend Jett to ask for help. I described the situation, summing up Nikolai’s ailment as digestion problems related to stress, adding that he had a history of panic attacks. Jett said she had some experience with nerves herself and offered to stop by the house. She arrived at our place with a bag of remedies, explaining that she alleviated her problems naturally, with over-the-counter treatments like Euphytose, Smecta, and valerian root. “Sometimes you just need to take the edge off, and everything feels better,” she said. As I made Alex and Nico dinner, Jett spoke to Nikolai, giving him various remedies and talking to him in a soothing, maternal voice. They spoke for more than an hour, and by the end Nikolai seemed better.

  Jett started coming over several times a week to talk to Nikolai. She would discuss his anxiety, give him pills and advice, and then stay to have a glass of wine with me. One day after she’d spent time with Nikolai, we sat out in the courtyard together. I opened a bottle of chardonnay and poured out two glasses and took a sip of the cool, mineral wine.

  “He looks good, don’t you think?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Looks exactly the same to me.”

  “He’s not in the car at least.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “He’s locked up in his office.”

  “But I’m sure it’s just a phase. He’ll get over this. I’m sure of it.”

  “It isn’t something you just get over,” Jett said. “I know what it feels like. I’ve been there. It isn’t easy to be a creative person. I think it might be best if I stop by to check in on him from time to time. I think it may help him to be around someone who understands his situation. And I won’t tell him to divorce you, like his therapist.”

  “Did he tell you about that?” Our communication had become so strained that Jett probably knew more about his feelings than I did.

  Jett smiled. “Unless, that is, you want me to suggest divorce?”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” I said, and it was true. I was beginning to wonder why I was holding on so tightly, why I didn’t just open my fingers and let it all slide away. But of course I understood the reasoning behind my loyalty. I had made a Faustian bargain with my husband: He would sweep away my unhappy past and make me a part of his exceptional world. In exchange, I would give him my heart and my future. I had benefited from the deal—I had a family. I loved my children, my home, and the career I’d made with his encouragement. I loved being married to a handsome, brilliant artist. That he wouldn’t make me happy was a part of the bargain I hadn’t expected.

  “Darling, look at you. You’re a mess. You look exhausted. You’re taking care of the kids, taking care of a husband who has gone into a tailspin, and meanwhile you have your own career to worry about. Something had better change fast, or you’ll be the next one locked up in that Citroën.”

  “It will change,” I said, taking a sip of wine. “That’s why we’re here. To change.”

  “Hmmm, maybe,” Jett said, raising an eyebrow as if she were a doctor examining a broken limb. “What about sex?”

  I looked away, embarrassed.

  “You mean there isn’t any of that happening either?” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, as if I’d told her that Nikolai and I ate raw pig brains for breakfast each morning. “That is the one thing I would not be able to live without. If that isn’t working, nothing’s working.”

  “You have a boyfriend?” I asked, realizing that she hadn’t mentioned anyone before.

  “Boyfriends,” she said, emphasizing the plural nature of the noun. “Boyfriends, love. I have one who comes on Wednesday and another on Sunday afternoon, and then there are the ones who call when they’re in the neighborhood, which gives things a more impromptu nature, which actually quite suits me, as I dislike planning. How many times a week do you make love?”

  “Well, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for intimacy with the kids around,” I said. “And the move has been exhausting for both of us. And there’s my book to edit, which is taking all of my time, and…you know. Life gets in the way.”

  “So how often? Once a week?”

  “Usually,” I said, too embarrassed to say that we hadn’t slept together for months.

  “Don’t you find it difficult to manage? All that pent-up sexual energy and so forth? I would go out of my mind.”

  “Sure,” I said, and it was true—I missed having a meaningful sexual connection with someone. I missed the easy, close affection Nikolai and I had shared in the first year we were tog
ether, before Nico was born. But it was gone, and I had no idea of how to find it again. Now we were like business partners, working to meet quotas. “We’ve been together a long time. Desire fades.”

  “If you say so,” Jett said, as if she didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was talking about.

  I sat up in my chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that now is the moment to do something really special, something symbolic to help us get adjusted to our new life here.”

  “I should say that moving to a medieval village in the Languedoc is quite good symbolism.”

  “I was thinking of a renewal ceremony,” I said. “We never had a real wedding. It might give us the chance to reconnect, if we renew our vows. We can just wipe out all of those problematic years. We can reboot.”

  “Reboot?” Jett said, her voice incredulous.

  “Why not?”

  “My dear,” she said. With her huge black eyes and her deep voice, there was something divinatory about her. She was a temple priestess with too much eyeliner, a forty-five-year-old single, childless, sun-ravaged sorceress. She stood, wobbled on her plastic sandals as she walked to the trash bin and tossed the empty bottle of chardonnay inside. “Do you really think that any man gives a damn about a renewal ceremony? It won’t change a thing. My advice: You want to reboot your marriage? Go to Barcelona for the weekend. I’ll watch the kids. Eat fabulous food, stay at a fabulous hotel and fuck his brains out. That’s all the renewal you need, darling.”

  —

  BARCELONA WAS THREE hours away from our village by car—far enough for a romantic weekend without the kids but close enough that we could get back to the village if Jett had trouble. I was excited about our romantic weekend, believing that Jett had made a very good point. How could we expect our marriage to work if we didn’t sleep together more often? Sex wasn’t just an accessory to a relationship. It was the center of who we were as a couple, something that held everything else together. While the attraction I had felt for Nikolai in the beginning had died, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be rekindled.

  The day before our trip, I drove to Montpellier, found a small lingerie boutique on an ancient street near the university where Rabelais had done his studies, and spent a small fortune on seductive ammunition: black lace panties, a matching push-up bra, a garter belt, and black silk stockings. The expense of my lingerie was in exact proportion to the intensity of my desire to make the weekend “work”—in other words, to have great sex and create a meaningful connection with my husband.

  Friday night in Barcelona, we checked in to a small hotel with views of the city. Instead of going out, I suggested we order room service and spend our first night in bed. I wanted to surprise him with my new gear.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Nikolai said promptly, and locked himself in the bathroom. I opened some cava and sipped a glass while I stripped off my clothes and slipped into my fancy underwear. With the lingerie in place, I stood before the full-length mirror and examined myself. The mirror didn’t lie. I could see very plainly that I had the healthy body of a young woman. And yet I was surprised. For the past years, I had begun to think of myself as old, like one of the village widows. I felt haggard, used up in a way that had nothing to do with sags or wrinkles. I was young in body but old in spirit. Without love my soul was shriveling.

  But the young woman in me wasn’t going under without a fight. I’d developed an active fantasy life over the past years. Sometimes I would meet a man somewhere, feel attraction to him, and then think about him later, even develop what I came to think of as a virtual crush: I would look him up online, exchange a message or two, remain distantly, electronically linked. These virtual crushes gave me the false sense that I had a circle of male friends, men who might actually want to cross over from virtual to real. There were a few times when this had happened and an actual friendship developed with one of my online acquaintances. There was Jonathan, a writer whom I met for dinner a few times in New York City. He came to one of my readings and accompanied me to a book party. There was another man, Brent, also a writer, a fun, die-hard bachelor who told me about all the women he dated. After the incident with the Russian Girl, I was more open to the idea of meeting men and was curious about how I would feel when I was with them. I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but I was opening myself up to the possibility of being with someone else.

  I poured a second glass of cava while Nikolai shaved. I heard the rattling of metal on porcelain, a pair of tweezers being placed on the sink. He must have pulled a few wayward hairs from his otherwise totally bald chest. He disliked chest hair and would pluck out every last one, but I didn’t mind it. There was something warm and comforting about a hairy man, like wrapping up in a cashmere sweater. I wished he would just finish up in the bathroom and come keep me company. Two glasses of cava in ten minutes, and I was ready for love.

  But Nikolai wasn’t finishing up. I heard the shaking of pills—the antianxiety remedy Jett had given him, most likely. Mineral water swished into a glass. There was a rush of water from the toilet flushing. What was going on in there? It was taking forever. I lay on the bed, feeling a bit woozy all of a sudden. I poured another glass of cava, a sure solution to dizziness, and waited.

  I stretched a leg into the air. The seam of the silk stocking stretched from heel to thigh, latching onto the garter belt. Sexy. I twisted around onto my back and wiggled my legs up into the air, stretching. In the mirror I looked like a dominatrix doing yoga, my body pinched and sculpted by wires and clasps.

  “Almost done?” I called at the bathroom door.

  “In just a minute!” Nikolai replied.

  There was a commotion in the hallway. A door slammed, and the people in the next room returned. We’d shared an elevator earlier, after we’d checked in. The couple had been speaking in rapid Spanish, and as the four of us crowded into the elevator, I’d secretly looked them over. The woman was dark-haired and sultry, dripping with gold jewelry, a big diamond on her finger, the man short and muscly with a nice watch, probably a businessman of some sort, someone who drank bourbon with the boys after work. I’d looked them over and made a mental profile of how happy they were compared to Nikolai and me. I played that game often, the couple index, comparing other people’s happiness with my own. My assessment in the elevator had been this: Recently married. Still in love. No kids. Staying in Barcelona for a long weekend after a business trip. They got an eight on the couple index. Nikolai and I were currently at three.

  Whatever their reason for being at the hotel, there was no doubt about how they intended to spend their evening. Within three minutes of their return, the panting and squealing began. Before I could refill my glass of cava, the businessman slammed Ms. Sultry against the wall and was pounding out a steady rhythm highlighted by high-pitched directions in Spanish.

  “Sí, sí!” she squealed. “Sí, mi amor!”

  He pulled her away from the wall, and I strained to listen as he threw her onto the bed. At least I imagined he’d thrown her onto the bed—it could have been the couch or even the floor. But wherever he’d thrown her, the noise only increased. The woman’s voice rose higher. There was a crack (the sound of his hand on her ass?) and a crash (a lamp hitting the floor?) and then more highly percussive screwing and shouting before it all came to a well-deserved, perfectly synchronized climax.

  We didn’t have sex like that, and in the past years our sex life had all but ceased. I wanted to change this, believing that if I could fix our lack of intimacy, everything else would fall into line. But it wasn’t so easy to “fix” the problem. I had lost desire for him. When he reached across the bed, his fingers were as welcome as a spider crawling on my thigh. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t be the way I’d been in the beginning. For a while I tried to disengage and sleep with him despite my feelings. These encounters left me empty, as if making love were a transaction, another chore to check off my list. Sometimes I wou
ld even mark a day in my calendar, reminding me that it was time to make love to my husband, a little star to prompt me. I had always believed that willpower and determination could get me through anything, but I came to see that desire is not about soldiering through. Desire is a complicated and deep and mysterious thing that two people create together. It cannot be forced into existence. At least I wasn’t capable of creating it once it had vanished.

  In Providence I had been determined to put our sex life on track. I speculated that our sleeping schedules—Nikolai went to bed late and I went to bed early—were keeping us apart. And so I decided to try something different. I asked Nikolai to go to bed at 11:00 P.M., which was late for me and early for him. I’d suggested this believing that if we spent half an hour, maybe an hour, reading or talking together before we went to sleep, we would sync into a kind of biological rhythm. Like female roommates who are on the same menstrual cycle, Nikolai and I would synchronize desire. Our sex drive would be aligned. We would find physical and emotional connection again. It was inevitable that we’d fall into each other’s arms. We were only inches away, two warm bodies under a single blanket.

  And so we went to bed together each night at 11:00 P.M. Once in bed, we touched feet and shared pillows, talked about the kids and work. For a while it seemed promising. Yet when Nikolai touched me, I pulled away. It was an instinctual, animal reaction, the kind of reaction the tongue has to bitter medicine: Sorry, I’m too tired, I would say. I turned off my bedside light and went to sleep. When he tried again, I reacted with the same violent refusal. I didn’t want him near me. Whereas once I had wanted his touch, now it repulsed me.