He had told Nadia that Pascale wasn’t asking to marry him. She felt she was much too young for marriage, but absurdly, not for a child. She said she had wanted a baby for the past two years, and she couldn’t think of a better father than Nicolas, and she fully expected their affair to peter out eventually. She didn’t expect or even want a long-term future with him, and he had risked his family and marriage for her and a moment of passion. He had allowed himself to be lulled into not worrying about her getting pregnant and gotten careless. Now, until after the baby was born and the affair ended naturally, Pascale wanted him to leave Nadia and live with her. At twenty-two, and given her casual, unorthodox, modern philosophies about life, she wasn’t a long-term prospect for him, and he wondered if she understood the forever responsibility of having a child. It wouldn’t be a baby she could cuddle forever like a doll, it would be a child, a person, with illnesses and problems, needs. It would have to have an education, and would become a troublesome teenager one day. She was only thinking of the present moment, and he had been unable to convince her what the future would look like. She was in no way prepared for what she had undertaken, and she assumed that he would be the responsible party, while she would be there to have fun with the baby, which he knew wasn’t how it worked.
She had grown up haphazardly herself. She had never known her father, or even who he was, had a mother who came and went after having her at sixteen, and a grandmother who had raised her and died when Pascale was seventeen. She’d been on her own ever since. And she assumed that any child would survive since she had.
Nicolas was willing to hold up his end with the baby since he had conceived the child with her, and he loved her to some degree, and Pascale insisted on having it. But he knew he would never love Pascale as he did Nadia. Pascale was ephemeral. Most of her charm and appeal were in how fey and childlike she was, but he couldn’t imagine her taking on the role of mother. Pascale didn’t pretend that she was going to love and stay with him forever. She had spoken to her mother, who had agreed to raise the child, since she was older now, and that way Pascale would be free to pursue her career and her life, meet other men, have other children, and do whatever she wanted. Pascale was a free spirit.
So he had thrown away his future and a solid life and marriage for something that glittered for an instant in the sunlight and blinded him briefly. And now he had to pick up the pieces of his shattered life every day. He couldn’t think about writing right now, couldn’t concentrate, and although he realized that his current anguish might make a good book one day, he didn’t want it to be a modern-day tragedy. He wasn’t ready to end the affair with Pascale, it wouldn’t be right with her pregnant, but more than anything, he didn’t want to lose Nadia and their marriage. So he was running between the two women, trying to placate both, begging Nadia’s forgiveness, so she wouldn’t give up on him before he had time to clean up his mess. He thought that he’d be able to ease out of the relationship with Pascale sometime after the baby was born, if Nadia didn’t divorce him first. And whatever Nadia did, he knew the affair with Pascale wouldn’t last, but the baby would.
Pascale wanted him around to play and sleep with, until they got tired of each other, which she fully expected to happen sooner or later. As she put it, you don’t choose a partner for life at twenty-two. But he had at twenty-six, when he’d met Nadia, and it had worked wonderfully for sixteen years, eleven of them married, until he ruined everything with the affair with Pascale. He was an interlude for Pascale, a chapter. Nadia was his life. He told her he realized that more than ever now. But extricating himself from Pascale wasn’t easy. She fully expected his constant presence now, at least until the baby came.
He and Nadia talked about it again on Friday night, after she put the girls to bed. Dinner had been strained, although Nadia was determined to put a good face on for the girls for as long as she could bear it, but it was becoming harder each day, knowing that Nicolas was still with Pascale, at least some of the time. She had inherited her mother’s stiff-upper-lip genes, never airing problems in the presence of others. Sylvie had asked her recently why she cried so much and was in such a bad mood, and she had said that some of her decorating clients were giving her a hard time. Sylvie had asked her then if she and Papa had had an argument. Nadia had smiled through her tears and denied it, and made an extra effort to seem cheerful and pleasant when Nicolas came home for dinner that night.
Nicolas appreciated what she was doing, and knew full well that another woman would have thrown all his belongings out on the street, although they both knew that many French women put up with their husbands having affairs and mistresses. It was part of the culture, even for some people their age. And many wives in France weren’t faithful either. After eleven years of marriage, many of the men they knew cheated on their wives regularly, and some of the women did the same. It wasn’t how either Nadia or Nicolas wanted to live, and wasn’t their vision of marriage. After his one earlier slip, Nadia thought that that was over for him, which made this all the worse now. This had blindsided her completely. She thought they were happy and settled forever, and now their whole life had blown up in their faces.
Nadia was having a hard time getting through it, and he felt terrible about that too. She looked tired and strained, had dark circles under her eyes, and had lost at least ten pounds, which she couldn’t afford. She looked sick. She was still working as hard as ever and taking care of their daughters admirably.
“I’ll spend this weekend at home. We’ll do something together,” he promised with a mournful look. Guilt was his constant companion now, whichever woman he was with.
“You can’t,” she said in a small sad voice. She knew she should be angrier at him, and at times she was, but most of the time, she was desperately hurt. Anger hadn’t had time to set in. At first she had been shocked and numb, and now she felt crushed by what he had done, living with it every day, as he went back and forth between the two women like a metronome.
“Why can’t I?” He looked panicked. So far Nadia hadn’t forbidden him to come home or spend the night, although she had threatened to, but she did make him sleep in their guest room now when he stayed, and warned him not to let the girls see it. She refused to share a room with him, and they had had no sexual contact since she learned of the affair after the Film Festival. And Nicolas wisely didn’t try to approach her.
“My mother is coming for the weekend. She’s arriving early tomorrow morning,” she said simply. He groaned.
“Oh Christ. Why now?”
“Why do you think?” Nadia gave him a dark look and he nodded.
“She knows, of course,” he said glumly, as they sat at the kitchen table.
“Obviously. The whole Western Hemisphere knows. It’s been in every tabloid in the world and on the internet. There are dozens of pictures of you with Pascale. We’re just lucky no one has told the girls yet.” But sooner or later, it would happen. His books were sold and successful in translation in many languages and countries around the world. And Pascale had already become famous with her previous film, which was why they had hired her for his latest one. So they were fodder for gossip around the world.