It was the first, her first as a book passeur, thought Juliette, feeling the chosen book through the thick fabric of her bag—but had she chosen it? She was already breaking the rules: she didn’t even know the title of the book, didn’t know whose hand would pick it up and turn it over, perhaps to read the back-cover blurb; she had neither followed nor observed her target, hadn’t planned the moment when they’d meet, or matched the book and its reader with the care that Soliman had insisted was essential.
A female reader. It would be a woman, no question. Men don’t read in the bath. Besides, men don’t take baths; they’re always in a hurry, and the only way to get them to sit still is to plonk them down on a sofa in front of the Champions League semifinal.
At least that was what Juliette had gleaned from the behavior of her previous three boyfriends.
“I know,” she said out loud. “I’m making generalizations. That’s why I screw up every time.”
She was making generalizations again. But she had to admit that she tended to jump to hasty conclusions, usually optimistic, from the smallest detail that she found attractive: this one’s little steel-rimmed spectacles, that one’s arms held out, hands cupped to hold a puppy or a baby, and the third one’s lock of hair that kept tumbling across his forehead and obscuring his intense blue gaze. In those tiny details, she thought she read intelligence, kindness, humor, dependability, or a power of imagination that she believed she herself lacked.
She plunged her hand into the bag with a frown, still talking to herself: Joseph had broad shoulders beneath the chunky knit sweaters he liked to wear, but his strength was limited to his ability to crush a walnut in his fist; Emmanuel felt sorry for the birds that flew into high-voltage cables but didn’t call when she had the flu; Romain couldn’t bear being teased even gently, and when they ate out he split the bill down to the last cent.
She had been in love—or thought she had, which boiled down to the same thing—with each of them. For the past six months, she’d been single. She had also thought she wouldn’t be able to cope, and was surprised now at how much she was enjoying her freedom—the freedom that had so frightened her before.
“They can all get lost,” she grumbled, closing her fingers around the chosen book—no, the book that had in fact forced itself on her.
The book was fat, dense; it fitted nicely into her hand. That was a plus. Juliette slowly retreated, her eyes glued to the near-black cover, with a glimpse, on the spine, of the hazy ruins of an English manor house.
Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca.
“They’ve put in an offer!”
Chloe flung her bag onto her desk, turned to Juliette, and pointed a mock accusing finger at her. “The girl made a beeline for your book. Luckily, because she was looking a bit pissed off. I won’t bore you with what she said about the living room, or the kitchen. But then, suddenly…”
She mimed wonderment, raising her eyebrows, her eyes wide and her mouth making an O.
“You get the picture. She goes into the bathroom—I must say I pulled out all the stops: soft lighting, the plant, a white bath sheet draped over the back of the chaise longue, you couldn’t see the rust or the damp patches or anything. He started saying that it was mad, all the wasted space, but she wasn’t even listening to him. She went over to the bath and then”—Chloe was jumping up and down, her fists clenched, and went on excitedly—“I’ve never seen anything like it! She picks up the book, begins to leaf through it, and says: ‘Oh, Rebecca, my mother used to love that old film with … now who was it? Grace Kelly? No, Joan Fontaine.’ And she starts reading. She can’t put it down. I didn’t even dare breathe. He says: ‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ and she goes: ‘We could have a walk-in wardrobe,’ and smiles. And I promise you, she asks me: ‘Is this your book? Can I keep it?’ And she plops herself in front of the mirror, a gorgeous baroque mirror I found in a thrift store last weekend, she fusses with her hair, like this”—Chloe mimed the girl’s movements, and Juliette saw her eyelashes flutter, her face soften, become transformed, haunted by a sadness that was unlike her, that seemed to have been plastered over her laughing features like a Japanese Noh or a carnival mask—“and she turned to him and said in a strange voice: ‘We’ll be happy here … you’ll see.’”
The estate agency closed at 6:30 P.M. At midnight, Juliette was still sitting on the wooden floorboards, which had long since lost their varnish and were worn down to wide, putty-colored stripes. Refurbishing this office, where clients never came—the girls had a Perspex table in the shop, which they took turns sitting at during the day, smiling affably under the glare of the recessed lighting—had been utterly out of the question since the New Year’s party three years earlier, when Monsieur Bernard had knocked over a bottle of premium dry cider in the narrow passage leading to the window. The sparkling liquid had run into the cracks in the floor, leaving a yellowish aureole. It was on that stain, long since dried out, that Juliette was sitting cross-legged, the books arranged in a fan around her.
Seventeen books. She’d counted them. Held them, sized them up, flicked through them. She’d inhaled the smell of their folds, peeked at the odd sentence, words as appetizing as sweets, or sharp as blades: With this he leapt up and made a bed for Odysseus nearer the fire, throwing sheep and goatskins over it. Then Odysseus lay down again, and the swineherd covered him with a big thick blanket, that he kept there for a dry covering after a fierce storm … My face was a meadow grazed by a herd of buffalo … He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling … It is discovered. What? Eternity. In the whirling light of sun become sea … Yes, thought Rudy, ambitious men with powerful legs planted firmly on the ground, without the least gracious bending of the knee … Dinner jacket, vast dusks, the thirst for time, a meager moonlight, verbiage, dell, light …
So many words. So many stories, characters, landscapes, laughter, tears, sudden decisions, hopes, and fears.
But for whom?