It was not very complicated to subdue Jacquie. I needed only to give no hint of anything when I returned to her place for more dictation. She was expecting an onslaught in due form, and probably had cutting responses ready, but I left her hanging. That confused her. Annoyed her. Which made her seem younger. More aggressive. She dropped her superior airs. On my third visit she was at the end of her tether. I grabbed her. She slapped me, scratched my face. I just laughed. I punched her in the mouth. We rolled on the floor.
I lie. Okay, I am lying. It didn’t happen like that.
I don’t have to lie now. My life has gone on and I can afford to tell the truth because I have achieved great self-mastery.
“Cut out your boring little tricks,” Jacquie said after a little while. “Let’s see if you are any more amusing in bed.”
She looked at me with eyes whose color now escapes me, if I ever knew.
The fact is that no maneuvering was needed. My usual tendency was to underestimate myself and overestimate the other person. But Jacquie was ready and willing. True, she always had a little lopsided smile from when we first came to know each other until we screwed, a smile that sometimes came back later also. She thought I was a weirdo, and I certainly am a weirdo; but she did not attach any special importance to me, and that is where she showed her limitations. I was perhaps not fabulously special, but I was more special than Jacquie, who was nothing but a little modern girl with ready-made ideas, an intellectual snob.
Be that as it may, we started sleeping together.
We never saw Anne. Jacquie made sure she was never there when I visited her place. This did not bother me. You don’t chase two broads at the same time.
Later on, Jacquie would say I was not fit company for her daughter. What a laugh that was. It was fine for me to lay her, Jacquie, but not for me to see her daughter—for moral reasons, according to her.
Really, excuse me while I laugh.
A first piece appeared in The New Informer. I realized that Jacquie wanted to present me as a plaything of circumstance. Oddly I felt no resentment. It was just her way. And what did I care, so long as it paid?
Jacquie was surprised when I told her that her article was fine.
We then cooked up another version of the same text, more thoroughgoing and complete with academic annotations, for Hourgnon’s monthly Contemporanéité.
We went up to Paris once to talk to the editors of that journal. I had never visited Paris and, oddly enough, it was only then that I realized it. I toured the city. Jacquie was blasé about this. We went to Trocadéro, to visit the Musée de la Marine and the Musée de l’Homme, and to the Palais de la Découverte. Jacquie gave up halfway through: she thought it was all a pain in the ass.
For my part, though, I was fascinated and don’t mind saying so. To see the riches civilization had created was amazing, but at the same time, so was the poverty of existence. When I say poverty of existence I am not talking about commodities. I myself, for instance, had everything I wanted—car, dishwasher, and all that. Or at least I had everything I needed. Stuff to show off to girls picked up and electrical appliances for convenience on the rare occasions when I had to eat at home. By “poverty of existence” what I mean is the degree to which life is shit. It is astonishing how shitty life is.
Anyway, as I say, Jacquie gave up. She went off to the Champs-Élysées to see some people. I stayed where I was, looking at prehistoric arrowheads, then went and played with a rather amusing contraption, a sort of circle of rails with a miniature locomotive on them. To begin with, when you set the track in motion, the engine failed to keep pace with it. Then, by virtue of friction, it sped up and started to turn in tandem with the rails. And by the time the circular track came to a stop the locomotive had accelerated so much that it continued to roll along the now stationary rails.
I cannot recall the faintest thing about whatever principle this device was designed to demonstrate, but I do remember what a gas it seemed to me. I could hardly stop operating it, and did so only when a big crush of people built up, all eager to have a go.
After that I paid a visit to the planetarium and listened to a commentary while watching stars moving around on the dark screen of the dome. I was not exactly happy, but I was certainly at peace. I stayed till the end; they could have kept the show going as long as they wanted.
But it did end, and so off I went, crossed the river, and climbed up the Eiffel Tower by the stairs. I felt really goofy. At the top I treated myself to a big feed. Damn it, I had plenty of shekels. The flunkies in the restaurant were very slow: no matter how loud you shouted, they wouldn’t shake a leg.
With my belly full, I hurried to the four o’clock meeting at Contemporanéité.
Hourgnon I saw for five minutes, not about business, but in the lobby. Jacquie had grabbed him by the coattails, and we chatted for a few moments. He had an ugly mug, I have to say. So much so that you could barely understand how come he enjoyed such popularity among schoolgirls. Because excuse me! A master thinker? Boarding school kids reading him under the covers? Vast influence on youth? Always mentioned in the dreadful questionnaire in old Mother Biniou’s almanac as the writer with influence over almost half of the nation’s young people. And that wasn’t all. Think of the man’s claim that Malian socialism was determined by the fact that Mali had no access to the sea. Still, he was no joke.
He came close to patting me on the cheek right away, then Jacquie put a word in his ear about what I was, using the familiar form of address, and he sized me up with a sharp glance as one might a piece of meat. A clicking sound issued from his nasal passages. He was quite sure that with time the rebel without a cause before him, namely me, would, in his terms, have his consciousness raised. He tried to talk to me about it briefly. I didn’t understand a word he was saying, nor did I care to, and I farted noisily in hopes that he would punch me in the face and we would have a bit of fun. But no way: he moved off shaking his head philosophically. Naturally Jacquie was outraged at my behavior, but she dared not chew me out, for now we were in the presence of a member of the “editorial board” (I ask you!) who was chatting with us. He too seemed eager to get rid of us as quickly as he could. So I took pleasure in delaying our departure. I made a few remarks to him. That he had bad breath. That he looked Jewish. He behaved exactly as though I did not exist.
Still, he was obliged to give me a few sidelong looks when we got around to money matters, because I had no intention of getting screwed and threatened to take my stories elsewhere if they didn’t cough up. Which I was thinking of doing in any case. We would need to make only a few changes. Such ideas have made headway in my mind over time. If I am here tonight sweating with fear, and I am not ashamed to say so because I have good reason to be scared, and without so much as Eddy’s piece—if I am here sweating, I say, it has a good deal to do with thoughts I’ve been having about money. Great oaks from little acorns grow.
Anyway, with the contract signed, we returned quietly to Rouen that evening and set about rehashing a text on the basis of Jacquie’s notes and fresh details, true or false, that I kept coming up with: a text with the tone needed for Contemporanéité.
By five o’clock in the morning we were done.