Chapter One: So, How Did We Get Here?

Let's start at the sort-of beginning.

This was once the laundromat of my village, a ramshackle appendage built over a natural spring that’s very cool in the summertime. An obvious place for cocktails.

Normally the first question that comes to mind when you read that somebody fled somewhere is, where did they flee to?

In my case it was a pasture in the middle of a forest I knew nothing about. But before we get into the grass-fed meat of that decision, some background is in order.

For 15 years, life as a Paris correspondent for cashed-up American glossies had been good to me. Expense account dinners of microgreens and interesting wine, five star hotel testing, scavenger hunts in landmark gardens to launch next year’s eau de whatever. It was fun and fancy and it kept me on the move. I had a cute one-bedroom in Montmartre, where my new boyfriend started spending a lot of time when it wasn’t his week with the kids.

It took me forever to find somebody who liked me as much as I liked him. He felt like an achievement: articulate, good-looking, good taste, a mellow sense of humor, a close family, no drug addiction and an amicable and not-too recent divorce. The kids came over too sometimes, a dreamy football-obsessed boy and a hilarious pistol of a girl, still toothless when we first got together. They were smart and saucy and they loved my cats, Penelope and Fred, who even kind of tolerated them. And they loved me. I liked his parents. My life was full.

And then the shit began to mount and I didn’t have the internal tools to make it not suck. Perhaps you’ve heard that my industry cratered. No longer mostly paid for by a monthly magazine, as my throat tightened, Paris started to feel less exciting and more vexed. I knew it too well by then and the locals’ reflexive shittiness was no longer perversely charming.

Stress is hard, and it didn’t help my couple life, which was already turning south when we decided to put our combined assets together to buy a place in a villagey part of the 20^th arrondissement near the kids’ school. It was a four-story 1920s townhouse with high ceilings, unobstructed east-west exposure, and a back terrace with mature jasmine and honeysuckle vines. It was the deal of the century and we barely survived the gut renovation.

This was the view from our bedroom window, so you can see the appeal. But then…

That evacuation pipe was early 20th century terra cotta with a massive crack that had been slowly seeping into the ground floor since 1980-something. Metaphor.

Shacking up was an emotional Trojan horse filled with opposing ways of handling a mutual fear of intimacy. The fights grew in number and temperature, and we were Oscar and Felix when it came to how we went about it, so nothing ever advanced. He was a screamer who would say anything in the moment, no matter how insane or abusive. I was emotionally constipated and held grudges, dropped withering remarks and then walked out without a word. (The Hotel Tonight app on my phone got quite a workout in the years between 2016 and 2020.) Obviously we stopped having sex entirely.

The hurricane of our discontent had me in shock a lot of the time. We both traveled for work—he’s a production designer for movies—so we took solace in each other’s absences. When he was home I walked on eggshells to avoid another blowup, and shuttered myself in my office complaining of nonexistent deadlines. One nice detail of living in a big house is you can literally hide out, but everybody knows you’re there, so it doesn’t make for a great atmosphere, especially for kids.

And the kids were the best part of the arrangement. By a factor of 20 million. They were little iconoclasts who still somehow respected my stepmotherly authority. I intervened on their behalf when their father unjustly lost his cool, mouthed off when I thought their school was being too punitive, which it almost always was, and taught them about Mel Brooks and Mexican food. They were fascinating and snuggly little bunnies. I still have the voice recordings of our random road trip discussions on my iPhone, which I would take on the sly. (I play them back for them all sometimes now. They can’t believe the tiny squeaks that came out of their mouths while going bare-knuckled over whether it was “Frankenshteeen” or “Frankenshteyn.”) Their mother let me join the co-parenting team with respect and generosity, and the whole adventure was one of the best of my life.

We were a good team, she and I. It was on my watch when the boy got busted for shoplifting some iPhone earbuds at the nearest mall—a rite of passage for middle class tweens, even if we all must agree that the petty criminal impulse is to be crushed immediately. My ex was out of town so I fished the boy out of mall security on my banged up red Vespa, and since my French has never been solid enough for high-pitched authoritarian lectures, once we got home, I made him write me a long essay explaining exactly when he got the idea and why, how it felt to do it, how it felt to get caught, and what he thought his punishment should be.

(My fellow members of the journalism trade, you’ll recognize this as the classic who-what-where-when-why-how. Though with that punishment proviso at the end, I guess I was asking for more of an editorial than straight reportage.)

His mother came over after work to correct his grammar and spelling mistakes, in literal red pen. (She had one at the ready; love her.) She then made him rewrite a clean copy, before finally administering the grounding. It takes a village, as the lady who had just lost the presidential election once said. Even better if the village has a top editor who values punctuation.

The kids and shared real estate are why I started to insist on couple’s counseling, even if I feared there wasn’t much point. I turned out to be right. We had only been at it for a few sessions when I found out he had a girlfriend on the side. He met her while filming a TV movie halfway across the country. She was 15 years younger than him, had a dyed red fauxhawk, not much of a job, and two of her own kids, one who was quite young. I did not discover this in the trusting confines of a therapist’s office, but when he left his non-password-protected cell phone face up in the kitchen while he was out playing tennis with a friend, and the thing positively exploded with kitty heart emoji text notifications from a name I didn’t recognize. He hated emojis. WTF?

Self-explanatory

I clicked on the string and stepped straight into a pile of smirking coiled poo. My hands shaking, I scrolled through three months of slovenly, inarticulate love notes and almost vomited twice before the Earth finally stood still: I had stumbled onto the selfie he sent her about a month before, in front of the wallpaper in our bathroom that he had just hung, by the looks of the date. I thought he put the paper up to surprise me when I got home on Valentine’s Day from a reporting trip in Switzerland, but she saw it in place before I did, under very differently-oriented conditions. It was Clarence House’s Tibet pattern, the one with big blowsy looking tigers howling at a navy blue background. My retired mother, who was 78 at the time, had hand-carried a dozen rolls of it in her suitcase from Los Angeles, where she still got her old interior designer discount.

Ain’t love grand?

Ignorance was bliss. (That’s me, not him. I hope that’s clear. If you look closely, you can see the alignment of the paper to the tiles is a bit off-kilter. The bastard.)

Even though the heifer would never move out of what I imagined was a miserable McMansion on a roundabout where she lived with one of her baby daddies, she held too much sway over my ex from afar. The basicness of his middle-aged self-delusion felt almost as bad to me as the devastating emotional wound. Almost.

He wouldn’t leave her, even as a long distance sidepiece, so I left him. In spirit anyway, because then it took almost two years to sell our house. The pandemic hit right in the middle of it.

You can either imagine how fun that was, or you can read all about it in a piece I wrote for Air Mail that ran in March, 2020, in real time, in the full flush of our glorious confinement. The site is paywalled but I believe you get your first one free. (Or, hey, subscribe to us all! Subscriptions all around!)

That piece has an up ending, as does the larger story with my ex. It turns out that being stuck together for months is a good way for an escapist like me to finally close something down the right way. I.e., not angry and wounded and ghosting. Even if sometimes I would still like to slug the guy, we have become friends. The WhatsApp text string I set up for his ex-wife, the kids, him and me continues to get a lot of action. He became my number one long-term cat sitter and when I need a place to stay in Paris, I’ve always got one. We’re good now. Despite everything that happened, I did not lose my family, and I have us both to thank for it.

The full picture of my finances back then was ugly. Freelancers can get mortgages in France if they can show that over the last three years they consistently made four times their monthly repayment. I had had two past years so bad I could barely contribute to groceries, so I’d have to find a new apartment with only the capital I took out of the house sale. After six years in 2,000 square feet with two terraces in a neighborhood where François Hollande lived a block away and frequently glad-handed at the Saturday market, it was going to be one tenth of that and somewhere miserable, if I was lucky.

The defeat was too humiliating, and I desperately needed a win. We can all reflect later on how weird it is that I framed it as winning and losing. Stress and trauma don’t usually bring out the best in us. It was my friend Sasha* who said, “You’re sick of Paris anyway, what are you doing? Go get a place in the country and a tiny studio in Paris. Normandy makes sense, it’s easy to get to and not too hot.” She told me to look west past the Vexin forest—anything closer would feel like a depressing Paris suburb, when the point was to majestically land somewhere else that really was somewhere else. It vaguely felt like exile, and it definitely felt unjust, but boo hoo. I would boldly remake my life surrounded by nature and it would be glorious. In theory.

I spent the next twelve months jerking off to real estate listings all over Haute and Basse Normandie. There was one in particular, early on, that sent me: a two-story, ivy-covered stone cottage with an attached barn and a path from the house that led straight into a national forest. The forest was called Réno Valdieu. It had an important ring to it.

The one that got away.

The pandemic still hadn’t yet hit, so I rented a car and went out to meet the real estate agent in this area called Le Perche.

Please pop back over next week, when we will begin to marinate in the first slurry of country porn. That house didn’t pan out but it was the first step.

(*Sasha isn’t her real name. She doesn’t mind one bit if I reveal her identity, but the same is not going to be true of everyone else in this serialized adventure, so I’m going for consistency, and a diminished threat of lawsuits.)

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