I take the elevator up to our floor, wishing I’d stopped for a bottle of champagne. Maybe the news will miraculously cure his aching head and we can go to one of our favourite bistros, La Tablier Rouge, for a long lunch instead. They have the most charming wine cave where customers can select natural or biodynamic wine to have with their meals. It’s cosy, unpretentious and serves hearty French fare.
When I exit the elevator on our floor, I take my keys from my handbag. As I go to open the apartment door, I hear a burst of laughter. How can that be? Ah, I’d forgotten it’s Helga’s day. She’s our new perky young housekeeper. Admittedly she barely speaks an iota of French or English so we use charades to communicate, which often makes us double over with laughter when things are misunderstood. That said, I’ve been meaning to cancel the cleaning service until our finances are back on track, but I haven’t had the heart to do it. Helga usually stays longer than necessary, as if the job is important to her. I’d hate to take away part of her income while the cost of living is so exorbitant these days.
If they’re laughing, that must mean Francois-Xavier feels better, so a double celebration might be imminent. The idea makes me smile as I push open the door, frowning when I don’t see either of them in the living room.
I throw the keys in the trinket bowl and follow the sound, not so much laughter now, as more of a… moan? My heart hammers, hoping they’re moving a heavy piece of furniture and not the alternative. But, when I push open the bedroom door, I’m met with a sight that is so disturbing I freeze. Unable to take my eyes away, and unable to run. Worse, they don’t notice me for a full minute. When they do, he pushes her away and yanks the sheet up to his chin, like that’s going to help matters. She’s left abandoned on the bed,my side of the bed,completely naked.
I blink and blink and still the vision doesn’t clear. I wait for Francois-Xavier to speak. For Helga to offer me an excuse in her native language, but nothing comes except a blinding rage that builds inside me and shoots upwards to my mouth. ‘YOU LIAR! YOU PIG!’
All his previous excuses flash in my mind as I put the timeline together. Every ‘migraine’ was on a day Helga ‘cleaned’. How did I not see that?
Did she even clean? Have I beenpayingher to sleep with my husband? For some reason that makes the duplicity even worse.
‘Get out, both of you!’ I scream. Right now, Helga doesn’t need charades or translation; she picks up her discarded clothes from the floor and dashes past me.
Francois-Xavier puts his hands up in surrender and says slowly, ‘I’m not going anywhere. Let’s have an adult conversation about this.’
My eyes widen so far I worry my eyeballs will fall clean out of their sockets. ‘An adult conversation about you sleeping with our housekeeper, while you’re supposedly bedridden with a “migraine”?’
How could I be so stupid? It’s been right under my nose this entire time and I had no clue.
He has the audacity to give me a lopsided smile. ‘It didn’t mean anything. She’s just a distraction.’ I have the urge topummel him until I picture myself in a jail cell. I weigh up the satisfaction of such a deed that will result in me living on poor quality jail food for a decade or more and decide it’s probably not worth it.
‘How can you be solaissez-faireabout this?’ The anger slowly recedes and is replaced by sadness. Heartbreak. My dream man is just that. A dream. A fairytale.
‘I’m not, I’m just being honest.’ Francois-Xavier slides the sheet down, exposing his chest, and taps the side of the bed Helga just exited.
‘You cannot be serious?’ Is he for real? ‘How long has it been going on?’
My husband shrugs as if I’m asking a question as mundane as what the weather is like. ‘A few weeks.’
‘A few? How many?’ He gets a cagey look in his eyes. ‘Since she started?’ Three months!Everyone warned me about Francois-Xavier’s flirtatious side but I insisted it was just his playful French personality. I’d found my Prince Charming. More like PrinceHarming.
He twists his lips into a petulant pout. ‘You’re always working; writing and worrying.’
Shock builds inside my brain, making it hard to focus. ‘This ismyfault?’ Do I even know this man? Did I ever? ‘The migraines, the back spasms; they were a fiction the entire time?’ He has the grace to blush, at least. It’s unnerving how convincing he’d been about his pain. If he could lie so easily about that,andHelga, what else has he lied about? I don’t wait for an answer from him. ‘You need to leave.’
He takes his time untangling his body from the sheet. They’ll need to be burnt. A hot wash won’t be enough to remove infidelity from the thread count. Will I ever get the scent of betrayal out of the mattress? That can go.
‘Did you lie about reading romance novels too?’ That confession sealed the deal for me, a man who loved reading about love.Romantique!
He squirms like the snivelling snake he is but stays quiet.
I blink back tears, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, and instead make my voice icy. ‘I’ll give you an hour to pack your things. Leave your key on the kitchen counter.’
I rush from the apartment, stumbling blind down the avenue as tears finally fall. My mind spins as I try to process everything. Hadn’t we been blissfully happy? Didn’t we have it all: the romance, the intimacy, the mutual respect? The support, even when he acted on impulse recently and bought a rundown hotel in the 6th arrondissement without discussing the purchase with me. I’d hidden my shock and told him I’d help. It was my money he was spending, after all. My windfall from a few books that took off into the stratosphere. Even that I could forgive because he was a dreamer, a visionary, or so I’d thought.
In the cold light of day, the truth hits me with a force that almost bowls me over. He sold me a lie. He isn’t the man he claimed to be. Did he ever intend to work, to renovate the hotel that was bought by all those extra hours I sat stuck at a desk, bashing away at my laptop, trying to keep our heads above water? I’d wanted to stash my windfall for the future because what if my next book flopped? What if the earlier success was a fluke? And I let him talk me into all those bad ideas… because he bamboozled me with bedroom eyes and his Machiavellian ways. The devil!
What happens now? There are too many happy faces about, too many people rushing towards me, chitchatting excitedly while inside I die a little more. I duck into a café and find a secluded table at the back where I can regroup in peace. I hastily swipe at my face before the waiter appears and takes my order. He soon returns with a café crème and a carafe of water. I nodmy thanks, not trusting my voice to speak. If he asks how I am, I’ll probably burst into messy tears and confess my husband is a scheming, lying heartbreaker of the finest order. Not quite the done thing in a Parisian café.
I sip my coffee and regain my equilibrium. One thing is for certain: I can never forgive Francois-Xavier, so any chance of reconciliation is out. For him not to have one iota of concern about his actions is tough to fathom; or was it a ploy to downplay it? Either way, it’s killed the marriage. I can’t love a man like that.
Having never been married before, I’m not sure what the next best course of action is. Do I hire a lawyer, start divorce proceedings? Surely he’ll be fair when the time comes to divide our assets. After all, Francois-Xavier came to the marriage with very little, despite telling me otherwise in the beginning. We purchased our apartment just after our wedding, but he’s never paid anything towards the deposit or the mortgage itself. My savings are fast depleting too, with steep payments towards the hotel that’s been forgotten by him. I need to get my name off that mortgage as a matter of urgency and leave him to figure out how to finance it.
I cup my head as I remember some of the most fantastical career opportunities Francois-Xavier toyed with over our time together. He was going to work in the family firm – until admitting later he hadn’t actually studied law, so his role would be more in the public relations department. When that didn’t pan out, he admitted he found nine-to-five stifling. And I’d been understanding; working in a stuffy environment like a law firm did seem rather staid and not suited to my debonair, creatively minded husband. There was the art gallery idea after a spell of him pursuing a career as a painter. The rent for the gallery had been steep and the lease contract vague, so luckily the deal fell over before he tied us up in another expensive venture.
And most recently came the attempt at writing his own book, an espionage thriller. He managed one chapter before deciding he needed a change of scenery and complete quiet to write, even though he had no experience with such a thing. He took off for a month to the south of France and came back with the book scrapped and the grand idea of being a hotelier. And naïve me had been so happy to see him back wearing his cheeky smile that I’d encouraged him to investigate boutique hotels, presuming it wouldn’t pan out just like everything else.
