Belonged?
To other people!
For almost three weeks now she had been searching, getting up at dawn while continuing to work, going to bed with the chickens, eating like a bird and falling asleep disappointed. It was wearing her down.
Mathilde sighed.
But what had she expected?
And the hell was goddamned Cupid up to now?
Well, fatso?
What was this crap?
All the places she had believed in and been inspired by, all the advice and recommendations, all the smoke signals sent from one service door to the next, all the “Good luck!”s and “You say there were rings on the blade? That’s Japanese. If I were you I’d start with the Japanese restaurants . . . ”, all the good leads and false hopes, all the meager descriptions and huge questions (“Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for a chef, but . . . uh, I don’t know what he goes by, but he’s a bit . . . uh . . . pudgy . . . does that tell you anything?”), all the wide eyes and regretful headshakes, the spread hands, the polite sending of her back behind the ropes where they shooed the riffraff, this whole upside-down life, these early mornings and continual disappointments . . . all of it, all, all of it was in vain.
Mathilde was faltering.
Where the hell was he? Did he really work in this neighborhood? Maybe he was an amateur chef, or worked in a school cafeteria or a company restaurant? Or was he just a bullshitter with a bunch of knives? Or a gentle dreamer with no follow-through of his ideas?
And why hadn’t he ever called her back? Because he was disappointed? Annoyed? Bitter? Amnesiac?
Because he didn’t know how to read?
Because she wasn’t his type, or he thought she was still hung up on the shitty poet?
Mathilde wavered.
Did he even exist? Had he ever existed?
Maybe she had dreamed it all up. Maybe the letter had been out of its envelope for years. Maybe somebody else had read it way before this. Maybe . . .
Maybe she’d been fucked over by words . . . again.
Speaking of words . . . it was on this street, years ago—she’d forgotten, but it came back to her just then, that her budding writer had turned pale one winter evening.
Pale and deeply emotional because he had seen, in the distance, the silhouette of an old man rushing through the revolving door of the hotel across the street. He had gone white, clutched her arm, and been silent for a long moment before repeating, several times and in every possible ecstatic tone: “Bernard Frank? Was that Bernard Frank? Oh my God . . . Bernard Frank! Don’t you get it? It was Bernard Frank!”
No, she didn’t get it; she was cold and she wanted to get the metro, but to seem as moved as he was she had said:
“Do you want to go in there? Say hello to him?”
“I couldn’t. Besides, that’s a luxury hotel. I couldn’t even buy you an olive.”
And for the whole trip home he had gone on and on about how brilliant and cultured the man was, the amazing books he had written, his style, his coolness, his elegance, blah blah blah.
Excitement, mumbo jumbo, yip-yapping, and excessive verbiage of the noble savage, Act II, Scene 3.
She’d listened to him babble with one distracted ear, counting the number of stations left before they got home, and at some point he had added that the man in the white scarf had been best friends with Françoise Sagan, that they had been young, rich, and beautiful together; that they had read and written and danced and gambled and partied together . . . thinking about that had put him into a dreamy state, she remembered.
In a tunnel under the earth on an icy November evening, she had pressed her nose to the window so she wouldn’t have to look at his glassy-eyed reflection and had thought about what it must have been like to party with Sagan . . .
That had spoken to her, yes, and now she regretted not having been daring enough to follow him into his luxurious cocoon. Friend of the Gatsbys . . .
Hand in hand, silently, they had dwelt on their doubts and their dreams and their regrets in the bowels of line 9.
And Bernard Frank had died the next day.
Hello, heartache.
Mathilde hit the brakes.
The luxury hotels. She’d forgotten the luxury hotels.
She got off her bike, watching the ballet of concierges swarming around sublime luxury cars in fiscal paradises. Leaning on her handlebars, dumbfounded, she recognized once more the cleverness and all-powerfulness of life.
Because he was there.
Of course he was there.
Behind that grand cut-stone façade, in that exorbitantly-priced hotel on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, maker of miracles and patron saint of gourmands.
He was there, and words, she had to admit, had called the shots again. They had introduced her to him, and they had sown discord between them, and now they would reunite them.
It was true. Literature tore things apart, and she wasn’t always right.
She recognized her faults with relief, and the destructive love of her youth exonerated her at last: it didn’t matter if he had used them with more tenderness than he had loved her. He had kept his promise.
* * *
It was almost seven o’clock. A bad time for kitchen reunions.
She’d come back.
She moved away, comforted, and, leaning on old Jeannot, admired her smile in every window on the street, all the way to the corner of the Rue Royale.
Of course it was overpriced, and not always in the best taste, and sometimes hard to carry, but so what. She thought it was beautiful.