CHAPTER 12
Diane was in the bathroom, taking off her makeup. Antoine had turned on the record player and, seated on the floor, was listening to, though not really hearing, a concerto by Beethoven. Diane could see him in the mirror, and the sight made her smile. Antoine was always sitting down right in front of the turntable as if it were a campfire or a pagan statue; it did no good whatsoever to explain to him that the sound came from those two fancy loudspeakers at the far ends of the bedroom, and that they shot each note straight toward the center of her room right where her bed was — he still just plunked himself down by the turntable itself, as if spellbound by the spinning of the glowing black disk.
Having carefully removed her daytime makeup, Diane put on her nighttime makeup, so well calculated to conceal wrinkles without deepening them. Letting her skin breathe without makeup at night (as all the women’s magazines recommended) was no more an option for her than letting her heart breathe. Those days were long gone. She considered her looks crucial for holding onto Antoine, so she wasn’t going to compromise one bit of her current beauty in the hopes of stretching it out into some blurry, uncertain future. Certain temperaments — in fact, the most generous ones — harvest only the short-term pleasures and burn all the rest. This was Diane’s philosophy.
Antoine was nervously listening to the soft noises emanating from the bathroom. The tearing-out of pieces of Kleenex and the rustling of Diane’s hairbrush largely drowned out the violins and the brasses of the orchestra. In five minutes, he was going to have to get up, undress, and slide in between these wonderfully luxurious sheets, right beside this exquisitely groomed woman, in this incomparably elegant bedroom. And yet it was Lucile he craved — Lucile, who always would fly into his flat, flop down on his landlady’s flimsy bed, flick her clothes off in a flash, and later flee in just the same way. Lucile was his ever-elusive, ever-fugitive, ever-welcomed one. She never settled down, she never would settle down, he never would wake up at her side, she would forever be just a fleeting presence in his life. What’s more, he had wrecked her evening and now he felt his throat tightening up, in the intense despair of a teen-ager.
Diane emerged from the bathroom in her blue negligee and gazed briefly at Antoine’s back and the nape of his neck, blond and straight, not letting herself read the least trace of hostility into either of them. She was tired, she’d had a bit to drink, which was unusual for her, and she was in a good mood. Without any seductive intentions, she was just hoping that Antoine would talk to her, laugh with her, tell her of his childhood. She had no way of knowing that his mind was racing, obsessed with his presumed moral obligation to make love to her, nor did she expect that he, quite unfairly, believed her incapable of wanting anything but his physical self. And so, when she sat down near him and looped her arm through his in a friendly fashion, his unspoken reaction was, “All right, all right — give me a second” — a boorish thought, and one quite distant from his usual style. After all, even in the dreariest of his prior affairs, he had always treated lovemaking with a certain respect, had always preceded physical contact by a short period of meditation.
“I adore this concerto,” said Diane.
“Yes, lovely, isn’t it,” replied Antoine, with that politely disdainful lilt of someone lying on the beach to whom it has just been pointed out how blue the Mediterranean is.
“The party worked out pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”
“Real fireworks,” said Antoine, and he stretched out on his back on the carpet, eyes closed. In this position he seemed huge, and eternally alone. The tone of his own words echoed in his brain, sarcastic and nasty, and he couldn’t stand himself. Diane was sitting there immobile, “old and handsome, and painted and fine”. Now where had he just read that phrase? Oh, yes — in the diary of Samuel Pepys.
“Were you very bored?” She had stood up again and now was walking around the room, righting a drooping flower in a vase, running her fingers over a fine piece of woodwork. He could see her through his eyelashes. She loved objects, she loved these damned objects, and he was one of them — he was a masterpiece in her museum, he was her young gigolo. Oh, not really, of course — and yet he was always dining with her friends, sleeping in her apartment, living her life. Yes, he was a fine one to judge Lucile! She at least had the excuse of being a woman.
“Aren’t you going to answer? Were you that extremely bored?”
Oh, her voice. Her questions. Her negligee. Her perfume. He couldn’t take it any longer. He flopped over onto his stomach, putting his arms over his head. She kneeled down next to him. “Antoine… Antoine…” There was such desperation, such tenderness in her voice that he turned over once again, to face her. Her eyes were a little too bright. They stared at each other and then he turned his head, beckoning her towards him. She made an awkward and timid little motion towards lying down beside him, as if she feared she’d crack, as if she’d been hit by a spasm of rheumatism. And he, precisely because he didn’t love her, felt desire for her.
Charles had departed for New York, alone, and his trip had shrunk down to just four days. Lucile, in her topless car, roamed the ever-bluer streets of Paris, waiting for the arrival of summer. She could already feel it in every fragrance in the air, in every glint of light on the Seine; she could already sense that familiar old smell of dust, trees, and soil that would soon engulf the Boulevard Saint-Germain at night, with its tall chestnut trees silhouetted against the pink sky, almost totally blotting it out; and those streetlamps, always lit too soon, annually made to lose face when, switching over from their wintertime role of cherished guides, they would become semi-parasites in the summer — caught between one day’s night, which never would quite grow dark, and the next day’s dawn, already champing at the bit to spread itself out all over the sky.
The first of her free evenings, Lucile hung around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and there by chance she bumped into some friends from her university days and the first couple of years thereafter. They excitedly hailed her like a ghost from the past, and she rapidly started to feel the part. Once they’d gotten beyond a few jokes and shared memories, though, she saw that they were all caught up in their jobs, their material belongings, and their girlfriends, and that her carefree existence annoyed them more than it entertained them. It showed that you could break the money barrier just like the sound barrier. Once you’d crossed it, every word uttered would only reach you after a delay, coming to you a few seconds too late.
She declined their invitation to have dinner at their old hangout, the bistrot on Rue Cujas, and instead went home at 8:30, somewhat depressed. Pauline, glad to see her, cooked her a steak in the kitchen, after which Lucile lay down on her bed, with her window wide open. The evening light on the rug was fast receding, the street noise was growing fainter, and she recalled how, two months earlier, she’d been awakened by the wind. Not a languorous and heavy wind like this evening’s, but a cheeky, quick, eager breeze, which had insisted that she wake up, much as this wind was urging her to drift off to sleep. Between the two, there had been Antoine — and so much life had been lived.
She was supposed to have dinner with him the next day — alone together, the first time ever. And that worried her. For once, she was more frightened that someone would find her boring than the reverse. But then again, she felt so richly fulfilled by life, she was experiencing such a sweet sensation, lying on this bed and sinking gradually further into the shadows, she was so taken with the idea that the earth was round and life complex, that she had the feeling that nothing could harm her in any way.
There are certain moments of perfect happiness — often moments of utter solitude — which, when recalled in life’s bitterer periods, can save one from despair, even more so than the memory of times spent with friends, for one knows that one was happy all alone, for no clear reason. One knows that it is possible. And thus happiness, which can seem so tightly linked to someone who has made you suffer — someone on whom you were once profoundly, almost physically dependent — reveals a very different face, now looking like a smooth, round, solid object, no longer tied to anything specific, now floating within reach (far off, to be sure, but definitely reachable). And this memory is more comforting than the memory of any happiness shared with a former lover, for now you look back on that affair as a blunder you made, and now the happiness it gave you seems to have been based on nothing at all.
She was supposed to show up at Antoine’s place at six the next day. They would take her car and would go off for a dinner somewhere in the countryside. They would have the whole night to themselves. She fell asleep with a smile.
The gravel was crunching under the waiters’ feet, some bats were swooping around the lights on the terrace, and at the next table, a couple with very pink faces was wordlessly gulping down an omelette flambée. They were fifteen kilometers outside of Paris, it was a bit chilly, and the lady who ran the place had solicitously wrapped a shawl around Lucile’s shoulders. This was one of a thousand similar small inns that offer adulterous or simply weary Parisians an almost failsafe privacy as well as fresh country air. The wind had done a good job of messing up Antoine’s hair, and he was laughing. Lucile was telling him about her childhood, a happy childhood.
“… My father was a lawyer. He was just crazy about La Fontaine. He would walk along the banks of the Indre river reciting his fables by heart — and some years later, he himself took to writing fables — while adapting the roles, of course. I must be one of the very few women in France who can recite word for word a fable called L’Agneau et le Corbeau. Don’t you feel lucky?”
“I’m very lucky,” replied Antoine. “I know it. But go on.”
“He died when I was twelve, and just at that time my brother was stricken by polio. He’s still confined to a wheelchair. My mother dedicated herself to him with an all-consuming passion, as you might expect. She won’t leave his side. I think she’s sort of forgotten about me.”
Lucile abruptly went silent. When she’d first come to Paris, she had sent some money each month to her mother, with great difficulty. But for the past two years, Charles had taken over this burden, without ever so much as mentioning a word about it to Lucile.
“Well, my parents hated each other,” said Antoine. “They stayed married only because they wanted me to have a home. But believe me, I’d much rather have had two homes.” He smiled, reached out across the table, and squeezed Lucile’s hand.
“Do you realize — we have the whole evening ahead of us, and the whole night!”
“We’ll take it easy going back to Paris. The top will be down, and you’ll drive slowly because it’s chilly. I’ll light your cigarettes for you so you don’t have to let go of the wheel.”
“We’ll go slowly because that’s what you like. And we’ll go dancing. Then, we’ll go home to our little bed, and tomorrow morning, you’ll finally find out if I drink coffee or tea, and how much sugar I take.”
“We’re going to dance? But we’ll run into people we know!”
“Well, come on, now,” replied Antoine curtly. “Do you really think I’m planning on spending the rest of my life hiding away?”
She didn’t reply, just looked down.
“You’re going to have to make a decision,” said Antoine gently, “but not tonight — don’t worry.”
She looked back up, so visibly relieved that he couldn’t help laughing. “I know very well that the slightest reprieve lets you breathe easy. You really live for the moment, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She felt totally at ease with him, totally natural; he made her feel like laughing, talking, making love — he gave her all she wanted, and that very fact frightened her somewhat.
She woke up early the next morning, and for a brief moment she felt disoriented when she first opened her eyes onto a messy room and a long arm speckled with blond hair, which kept her from moving. She quickly closed her eyes, flipped over onto her stomach, and smiled. She was next to Antoine, and now she knew the meaning of the phrase “a night of love”. They’d gone dancing and hadn’t run into anyone they knew. They’d come home to his apartment and they’d talked, made love, smoked, talked some more, and made love again, until at last daybreak found them on the bed, drunk on words and caresses, in that wondrous, exhausted period of grace that often follows overindulgence. Their ardor had been so intense that night that they’d almost felt they were dying, and so sleep had arrived like a miraculous raft onto which they’d hoisted themselves before fainting away, still holding each other’s hand in one last act of defiant togetherness. She gazed at Antoine’s profile, at his neck, at the little hairs that were sprouting on his cheeks, at the blue circles under his eyes, and it seemed inconceivable to her that she had ever been able to wake up anywhere but right beside him. She loved his way of being so nonchalant and dreamy during the day, and so powerful and precise at night. It was as if lovemaking awoke in him a joyous pagan that knew only one law — the irrepressible drive of sensual pleasure.
He turned his head towards her, opened his eyes, and gazed at her with the slightly hesitant, slightly baffled look of a baby, which so many men have when they wake up. He recognized her, smiled, and turned his body to face her. He drooped his heavy head, still warm from sleep, onto her shoulder, and she looked with amusement at his large feet that stuck out from the tangle of sheets at the far end of the bed. He sighed and mumbled something in a plaintive little voice.
“It’s amazing — in the morning your eyes are light yellow,” she said. “They look like beer.”
“What a poet you are,” he replied, and then, without warning, he sat straight up, grabbed her face, and turned it towards the light. “Yours are nearly blue.”
“No, they’re gray. Green-gray.”
“Braggart.”
They were now facing each other, both sitting up in bed, naked. He was still holding her face, looking very intensely at her, and they were smiling at each other. His shoulders were very wide and bony, and she slipped out of his grasp, pressing her cheek against his torso.
She could hear his heart throbbing wildly, every bit as wildly as her own. “Your heart’s beating like mad,” she said. “Is it fatigue?”
“No,” said Antoine. “It’s a mad ache they call la chamade.”
“What exactly is la chamade?”
“You can go look it up in the dictionary. I don’t have the time to explain it to you now.” And so saying, he lazily sprawled himself out all across the bed. Outside, it was broad daylight.
At noon, Antoine phoned his office, explaining that he had a fever but that he would be coming in later in the afternoon.
“I know I must sound like a schoolboy, giving such a lame excuse,” said Antoine, “but there’s no way I’m going to let myself get tossed out on my ass. It’s how I earn my bread, as they say.”
“Do you make a lot of money?” asked Lucile nonchalantly.
“Very little,” he replied equally nonchalantly. “Is that a big deal to you?”
She broke out in a laugh. “No, it’s just that I find money convenient, that’s all.”
“Convenient to the point of being a big deal?”
Taken aback, Lucile stared at him. “Why the sudden third degree?”
“Because I’m planning on living with you, which means supporting your lifestyle…”
“I beg your pardon,” said Lucile, abruptly cutting him off. “I’m perfectly capable of supporting myself. I worked for a year at L’Appel, a paper that went under a while back. It was actually quite fun, except that everyone was so depressingly serious and preachy, and also…”
Antoine reached over and covered her mouth with his hand. “You heard what I said. I want to live with you, or else not to see you at all any more. I live in this little hovel, I don’t earn much money, and there’s no way in the world I could afford to have you lead the life you’re leading these days. Do you hear me?”
“But… what about Charles?” blurted Lucile in a feeble voice.
“It’s Charles or me,” said Antoine. “He gets back tomorrow, right? So tomorrow evening, you come here — and for keeps — or else we won’t be seeing each other any more. That’s it. Voilà.”
He stood up and strode into the bathroom. Lucile started biting her nails and struggled to make sense of all this, but made little headway. She stretched her arms and closed her eyes. This had been bound to happen, she’d known it was in the cards — after all, men were all so horribly tiring. But now she had a day and a half to make up her mind — and prendre une décision was among the most terrifying phrases in the entire French language to her.
