I cannot believe how fast time is passing and how I am always busy although I am stuck in this little village with few friends, no social engagements, no cultural events, no dining out, no travel, and no leaving the house from 6 pm to 6 am seven days a week. But simple living demands a lot from each individual. Cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, clearing up, showering, brushing teeth, deciding what to wear, dressing, paying bills, doing one's income tax... and on it goes. For the last week, I have also been putting together presentations on the fall/winter collections of European designers for the store - difficult without seeing and touching - working from line sheets and photographs, and supervising repairs on a friend's house as he is locked down in England.
And then there's my novel that causes me the most grief and I am such a painfully slow writer that I fear that I will die before I finish. Is this how I want to spend my last days, I ask myself? Every day when I wake, I worry that this may be my last day on earth. Do what makes you happy, I whisper to myself.
Susan wants to live long enough to see my book published. She likes me to read bits and pieces to her but when I do, I find myself thinking it is crap and who would want to read such fiction. And yet, underneath the self doubt is a confidence that I can write well and, in large part, this is due to you, my readers who applaud my efforts.
I read somewhere that we lead small lives if we keep to ourselves so I've decided to begin publishing my novel here just in case I don't make it to the end or if I die too soon. So here is the prologue but you must understand that it may change as I get further into my story.
Three Hundred Days of Indulgence
Prologue
The Frenchman knelt and lowered his head to my feet, kissing one foot and then the other. Je baise ton pied difforme de sorcière. Ta signature diabolique, he said, stressing every syllable, pausing every few words so I might understand his language. He rose, wrapped his arms around my waist and spun me round, singing, “I am yours. I am yours.”
The man was crazy. My hammer-toed feet were diabolical. I had hated them all my life until this mad Frenchman knelt and declared that they belonged to a witch. He was the sorcerer, the magician. With a turn of phrase, a slight of hand, he transformed the way I looked at myself. Early in our relationship, I had sent him a picture of myself from Venice. I thought myself drab in a long floral skirt and bulky black pullover but knew he would like the mask on my face. He noticed only my eyes, staring out through holes on either side of the hooked beak. My look was one of rebelliousness he had written. My life was a defiance of normality, of morality. Non, décidément, tu ne ressembles pas aux autres femmes.
I should have laughed when he wrote that I was unlike other women but instead I felt as if I had been handed a rose. Never mind that he had announced more than once that he loved women, all women. His wife had put it less delicately: “He’ll fuck anything that wears a skirt.” But that was later, when frightened by the intensity of our affair, she blamed me for seducing her husband. I was not the seducer.
I was a dutiful daughter until I discovered Simone de Beauvoir. Her love and lust for Sartre and others, astonished and excited me though I found it difficult to reconcile the bookish-looking woman in photographs with the seductress who lived her life in cafes and bars drinking and arguing; and who managed somehow, with so much alcohol and sex, to write a weighty body of literature. She refused marriage because she felt the institution steals a woman’s autonomy. After reading this book, I swore I would never marry.
Then I fell in love and moved in with my boyfriend. Before the year was out, I’d agreed to marry him. If only I had suggested to the boyfriend who listened carefully and applauded my ideas, what I later suggested to the husband. After five years as man and wife, I proposed that we live separately like Beauvoir and Sartre. He rolled his eyes and told me not to be absurd.
Several months later, I packed my bags and moved across town. It’s easy to write in one sentence that I left him but the leaving was painful, full of self-doubt and recriminations. I turned into the kind of person I hate – a spineless liar who snuck around and found an apartment, before telling her husband she was leaving. Fifteen months later, my husband left a love letter on my doorstep. I returned to him. Fifteen years later, I packed my bags again but instead of crossing town, I crossed an ocean. I was giving myself a year, I told him, to study an old passion of mine - the French language. I had no idea, when I said “passion” that I would fall into bed with a Frenchman and learn more about myself than the language. I had no idea that I was granting myself three hundred days of indulgence.