Dallas Buyers Club

They make love three weeks after their first meeting. Pax invited Emi to come out for a drink after the session reserved for the company’s most senior employees (they’ve formed six groups, which will be trained one at a time over the following weeks). Since some of them—friends of Christian P.—had a negative attitude towards the training, Pax felt they should make some adjustments right away, and Emi immediately agreed to meet.

Together they choose a terrace surrounded by trees. It’s almost empty and there are blankets on all the chairs. The outdoor heat lamps cast a red glow on them, enhancing the intimate atmosphere. The waiter is discreet when he takes their order. Pax will have a Martini, Emi a glass of Sancerre. She hesitates—it’s been so long since she’s been to a bar or a café. She doesn’t know the rules. With no habits to fall into, she has to improvise. He gulps down half his glass at once, but she drinks slowly, sip by sip, like someone edging cautiously down a poorly lit path.

They finish the changes quickly and the conversation drifts. Emi asks Pax about his profession. She’s not interested in his talent, his ability to slip into someone else’s skin, the different roles he’s played, films he’s been in, or even the highs and lows of the ego roller coaster. She wants to know more about how he handles the intermittent nature of his job, the uncertainty.

“How can you live with such . . . instability?” she asks, choosing her words carefully.

Pax thinks about his answer. When he chose his path at the age of seventeen, he had no idea what lay ahead. He was convinced that he’d soon be a star. He had a pure—read naive—vision of what it meant to be an actor. He thought it was all about the work, about art, or even genius for a select few. And he thought he was pretty talented. His secondary school drama teacher had described his final performance as “memorable”. At the time, Pax was still considering studying law, but that one word gave him the courage to stand up to his parents, who were worried about his future.

Not long after, a friend who was in the same theatre classes as Pax suggested the comment may not have been a compliment. The teacher was known for his sarcasm and overuse of irony. Pax could have been unsettled by this revelation, but he somehow managed to blunt the impact by ending their friendship. Would a real friend suggest such a thing? Would a real friend call his talent into question? And even if he did, wouldn’t a real friend keep such deeply hurtful suppositions to himself? Ironically, the scene in question had been from The Misanthrope, a play in which hypocrisy plays a major role. Pax had delivered his lines with a certain flair that day: “What, I, your friend? Go strike that off your books. / I have professed to be so hitherto; / But after seeing what you did just now / I tell you flatly I am so no longer / And want no place in such corrupted hearts.” In the end, rather than slow his progress, the insult propelled him forward.

But Pax doesn’t realize any of this. It would be hard for him to admit that he made such an important decision out of pride. Even so, he still occasionally Googles the name of that “friend” to make sure he’s still forgotten (he had his time in the spotlight twenty years ago in a musical), that his career is dead and cannot be resuscitated.

Pax doesn’t know how to free himself from his past. He often looks back at his youth and berates himself for being so blind. He didn’t know he needed to cultivate his image and build a network to have a successful career. He didn’t notice the walls rising up around him. He didn’t make the right friends, something that catapulted others—who weren’t necessarily any better than him—to stardom, with all the accompanying tabloid fame. He accepted whatever roles were offered to him because he had to pay his bills, because he was flattered someone was interested, and because he saw it as a chance to gain experience. He played in trivial productions, wasting his time, because he had forgotten that while great roles reveal talent, talent cannot make any role great. He neglected the importance of kindling desire, that fleeting combination of rarity, quality, and ambition. As a result, he developed a reputation as an entirely unexceptional actor, and prestigious casting directors pushed his applications aside with disdain. Pax Monnier, no thank you. His disloyal friend’s allegation turned out to be quite prophetic.

That said, Pax has rarely been out of work. He knows how to get the job done, and his regular, reassuring form of beauty is in high demand in television. TV series love to promote familiar faces viewers can easily identify with. And his distinctive voice has brought in quite a few voiceover contracts. So he may cry tears of rage and hate when he learns he’s not even longlisted for illustrious projects, and now doubts he’ll ever gain widespread recognition and glory, but he’s never had to deal with the anxiety of failing to make ends meet. His earnings dipped only once, when the series he starred in was cancelled after thirteen seasons. Happily, that was precisely when Elizabeth asked him to join Thea & Co.

So emotional instability, perhaps. Technical, practical and financial instability however, no. But why destroy the illusion?

“Well, instability is the biggest challenge,” he lies. “Everyone knows that art demands sacrifice, but the rewards are worth it. We live intense parallel lives and get to rub shoulders with great talents!”

He segues into Don’t. Since the beginning of the conversation, he’s been feverishly awaiting an opportunity to talk about shooting the film, to drop the names that are guaranteed to impress two or three generations. He knows Emi isn’t a movie lover or into film stars, but he can see she’s enjoying learning about a new field. He watches as her posture softens, her shoulders relax, and her chin drops slightly. If he knew her better (but does anyone really know her?), he’d realize just how momentous this shift is. Emi Shimizu has just unlocked an armoured door that has been sealed for over a year. Her entire being splits open as Pax enthusiastically talks about Sveberg’s brilliance and mood swings, then about “Matthew’s” style and panache. He describes his “relationship” with the actor, praising his wisdom and quoting him from memory: “If it’s happiness you’re after, you’ll be let down a lot, and you’ll often be unhappy. But joy is something else entirely.”

If the quote had come from anyone else, the conversation would have ended right there. Emi would have seen it as a terrible cliché, one of those trite truisms that are spouted again and again by “well-being professionals”. But since it’s Matthew McConaughey, that changes everything: Alex was sixteen when they went to see Dallas Buyers Club. She can no longer remember why she went with him—a friend of his must have cancelled at the last minute. She regrets the fact that her memories are so muddled. She wishes she had recorded every detail of their time together, wishes she’d thought to take a picture of her son that day, and every other day until 23 September last year. She wishes she had preserved all his expressions and his unmaimed face. The images and feelings she had thought were permanent, the ones that prompted waves of indescribable love, year after year, but have now begun to fade, replaced by reality. Now all that’s left are fragments floating aimlessly through the abyss of her memory, which only rarely come to the surface, summoned by a sound or a word. And that is what’s happened now: McConaughey. She sees herself walking down the street with Alex, hears the timbre and tone of his voice, his enthusiasm about the actor’s talent and the deep meaning of the story. Ron Woodroof, the violent, macho, homophobic cowboy who gets AIDS and finds out he only has a month to live, but decides to fight, to go on a lone crusade against pharmaceutical lobbies, on a quest for treatments other than AZT. Woodroof has to give up on the world he thought he knew, but his struggles teach him about humanity, tolerance and respect—and help extend the lives of thousands of people, including himself.

As they walked, Alex picked up the pace, driven by a sense of euphoria. It suddenly seemed like anything was possible, like everyone could shape their fate if they were strong enough. Emi admired her son and in that moment, she loved him more than anything. They haven’t been to the cinema together since. The opportunity never presented itself—the stars have to align to get a teenager to go out with his parents.

Then the universe created a black hole.

“My son really likes Matthew McConaughey.”

“So you have children?”

Pax has been dying to ask this question. He’s wondered about Emi Shimizu’s family a hundred times. Since he divorced Cassandra’s mother, whom he once loved as much as he hates her now, he hasn’t had any real relationships. Whether the women he sees are married or not, mothers or not, doesn’t matter as long as they bolster his faith in his sexual prowess. They all seem identical to him, figures in a crowd: tall or short, blonde, brunette, ginger, curly hair or straight, thin or curvy, light or dark skin; they all dress, walk, think, speak and live in the same way—the way magazines and social networks tell them to, erasing all meaningful differences. He jumps from one to the next without getting attached. It would have been easy to leave his usual milieu to find something new, but he never dared. He met them all on sets, in television offices or production firms, popular restaurants or cafés, places he heard about from friends or that popped up on his phone. He preferred to keep swimming through this disappointingly homogenous aquarium, blending perfectly into the shoal of male actors with his carefully tended three-day beard and fashionable suits. He knowingly engaged in these mediocre relationships to punish himself for the failure of his one real relationship, for which he blames himself. But for the past year, for other reasons, he hasn’t been with anyone at all.

Meeting Emi Shimizu sparked something new in him. Would he have been able to appreciate the full extent of her beauty if he hadn’t first fallen so low? He was drowning when she came into his life. She was completely different from every other woman he knew—powerful and yet vulnerable. After just a few work sessions spent at a desk, discussing choices of words and gestures, and subconsciously sharing their opinions on life’s difficulties, he was convinced that she would pull him out of the mire that was suffocating him. Now he wants to make sure she’ll never let go of his hand again, that he means as much to her as she does to him. But is she even single?

“I have a son. He’s twenty. And you?”

“My daughter is twenty-four. I’ve been divorced for years,” he quickly explains.

“Me too.”

They breathe deeply as they both imagine parallels between their stories. In reality their paths are dissimilar, if not complete opposites. Their marriages weren’t based on the same premise and didn’t end for the same reasons. Alex’s father, Christophe, fell in love with a family, a clan—the noisy world of mechanics and the glorious queen who reigned over it. He was one of those falsely rebellious young men, a lazy opportunist. He was laid-back and charming but spent most of his time haunting the cafés around the Sorbonne rather than attending his classes there, where he met Emi. He dreamed of travelling to the United States, of seeing the world, and had pinned a poster from Vanishing Point (featuring the dazzling Gilda Texter perched naked on a red-and-white Honda CB350, her hair in the wind) to his wall. The first time he ever came to the dealership and got a glimpse of the poster of Sonia on her 750 was a revelation. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be part of that family, which was so much more exciting than his own. His parents were mortgage brokers who lived a quiet life in their three-bedroom apartment in Paris’s 17th arrondissement—the nice part, they always specified, as if there were an invisible border protecting them from another less tasteful neighbourhood—and a little house on the sea in Dinard. They had, of course, purchased both of them well below market value. He imagined himself riding a powerful motorbike like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider (a film Sonia showed him) and convinced himself he was attracted to Emi, whom he watched carefully when he wasn’t focused on his future in-laws. He convinced her, too. She’d only had one boyfriend, at the age of fifteen, with whom she’d done little more than kiss. She was uncomfortable with her short stature and nearly flat chest at a time when the five-foot-ten-inch Eva Herzigova was on every billboard with her smoky eyes and heaving breasts. Her time in secondary school had made her distrustful (several different boys had charmed her and taken advantage of her naivety to get discounts on their mopeds), and her first years at university hadn’t been much better. She’d felt lost in the crowded lecture theatres, where, after spending an hour and a half on the train, in the metro and on a bus, she always had to sit on the stairs for lack of any free seats. She would have liked to make friends, to be a part of the noisy groups that ran down the corridors laughing, but she didn’t know how to go about it. Christophe came into her life at just the right time, standing behind her in an endless line as they waited to finalize their enrolment for the semester. He was instantly drawn to her Asian features, the way she held her head, and her enigmatic grace. Our fate often hinges on the little things: Emi’s file was incomplete. She needed an envelope in a particular size, and Christophe just happened to have an extra. He swapped it for her promise to have coffee with him. Emi had chosen to study psychology, despite a bitter confrontation with her father, who considered the social sciences to be an incomprehensible oxymoron. Christophe was studying law and political science. He delivered stirring utopian speeches with an elegance and charm that soon earned him Sonia’s attention (and a fair dose of suspicion from Izuru). Their relationship followed the usual course. Christophe’s parents invested in a studio and let them live there. It was tiny, but had a lovely balcony that faced south, where Emi planted and tended to evergreen shrubs and seasonal flowers. She’d just received a first in her master’s degree in psychology when she found out she was pregnant. Christophe had repeated a year twice, more interested in his passionate but fruitless discussions about the state of the world than in studying for exams. He had only just managed to pull it together and earn his bachelor’s degree. He saw Emi’s pregnancy as a way out. He officially gave up on his studies and joined his family’s brokerage firm. Emi was no longer quite so in love, but she couldn’t say it out loud. Since they’d moved in together, she’d felt freer than she ever had before. On Sunday she sometimes let Christophe visit Sonia and Izuru on his own while she studied for her exams and savoured the solitude, the silence filled with her thoughts and dreams that intertwined deliciously. She thought the baby would fix things. Though the child wasn’t planned, he had been wanted since the beginning of his existence in utero, and that kept growing while her love for Christophe silently faded away.

Everything had changed for Christophe as well. He was stuck in a terrible dilemma: he refused to leave this family (or rather Sonia and the garage, where he liked to spend entire days), but he was tired of Emi. Her relative success highlighted his failure. He’d not only given up on his studies, but also turned his back on his ideals—all that was left of them was the Vanishing Point poster, which now hung in the loo. Most people would have identified these changes as the usual transition from adolescence to adulthood, which dampens so many revolutionary spirits, but Christophe felt belittled and worthless. His libido was at an all-time low. Like Emi, he hoped it was only a phase. He ignored his desire when a delightful tingling sensation took hold of him as he met with a pretty client one warm spring day. Something between him and Emi had broken, but instead of ending their relationship, they let themselves get carried away by their circumstances. They got married right after Alex was born. Emi selected a short excerpt from Nuptials by Albert Camus to be read at the wedding: “Weddings often end this way—entire lives pledged to each other through an exchange of mint sweets.” The attendees found it adorable—entire lives! No one thought about how terrifying those two words could be. Emi and Christophe were married for fifteen years. Their sex life was nearly non-existent, but no one ever would have guessed it. They lived together peacefully, leaving each other alone and tacitly accepting the possibility of extramarital affairs. They moved into a bigger apartment and raised their son together. He was a happy, easy-going little boy, whose early gift for maths and physics delighted his maternal grandfather. Christophe had a few flings, but nothing meaningful, until a new financial advisor named Pauline began working at the firm. She sparked new ambitions. That same year, Sonia and Izuru sold the dealership and went to live in the south of France. They of course had no idea, but this decision tipped the scales. Christophe finally felt he was free of an imaginary contract and told Emi he wanted a divorce. She asked him to wait until Alex had finished the school year. They hired the same barrister—the father of one of Alex’s schoolmates. He was a funny, educated man who instantly fell under Emi’s spell. Before the ink was even dry on the divorce papers, he took her to dinner. Like Christophe before him, he was in the right place at the right time. He was married and had no intention of leaving his wife, which was ideal for Emi, who was in no hurry to commit. They saw each other for six months. She fell for him and was surprised to find she lusted after his body, his smell, his voice. She came in his arms and couldn’t believe she had mistaken pleasure for an orgasm all those years. He suddenly mattered to her—enough for her to struggle with him ending their relationship. Luckily her inner shield protected her from any real sadness. Emi doesn’t know it, but she could have fallen truly in love, like her parents had, if he hadn’t ended it. This unexpected episode taught her that with Christophe, she hadn’t experienced even a sliver of what a woman might hope to feel. Neither the physical ecstasy nor the emotional passion. Her affair with the barrister sowed a seed in her that has been growing silently ever since, a powerful longing, which she suppresses for fear of what it might become. She began hiding behind Alex, devoting most of her time to him even before the assault, and even more so now. But she’s still a wild field made fertile by years of lying fallow. Her misfortunes have only pushed back the life force growing within her, which is now poised to erupt.

 

In many ways, Pax Monnier has followed the opposite path. There were fireworks when he first met Sara, a new student in his acting class. Her short hair was dyed bright red and she had a biomechanical tattoo on the back on her neck. Though that sort of thing is common now, at the time it lent her a sensual warrior allure that made her stand out. Pax looked a bit like Joe Strummer and was always wearing a leather jacket he’d decorated with the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope album cover. Their passion knocked them both sideways—nothing else would ever equal its intensity. They weren’t teenagers any more, but they weren’t quite adults either. With their fiery personalities, they kept playing the impassioned heroes they embodied on stage in their real lives. They loved, hurt, betrayed, left, humiliated and challenged each another again and again, trapped in the vortex they’d created. It was a spectacular form of catharsis that was far beyond their comprehension. Then Sara, who followed her every whim (she later discovered she was bipolar; fortunately lithium helped her to manage it), decided to quit her acting and foreign language studies for a job in a big travel agency, where she would travel the world on the lookout for new hotels to market. Pax got a recurring role in a primetime TV show. They got married when they were just twenty and twenty-two years old, without any family or friends, on a beach on Kythira, the birthplace of Aphrodite. This was Sara’s idea—she was more invested in building their legend than in living it. Things could have become calmer between them since Pax was always working (the hours were awful) and Sara, who had grown her hair out to return to her natural colour—a golden blonde her clients found more reassuring—was away for two weeks every month and spent much of her time at home struggling with jet lag. They saw one another so little that they should have spent that time enjoying one another’s company. Instead, their mutual jealousy grew, trapping them in an endless cycle of confrontation and reconciliation.

Cassandra was born of this tidal wave of love and violence. The little girl spent much of her childhood trying in vain to tend the wounds her parents inflicted on one another. They often apologized to her for the terrible things they said, unable to wait for her to fall asleep before they began to fight. They would sit at the foot of her bed and cry, and she would console them, embarrassed by their distress. Things only worsened as the years passed. The rise of online travel sites threatened the future of Sara’s agency, which cancelled her trips and saddled her with monotonous administrative tasks to cut costs. Pax was fighting to remain relevant amid a flood of younger actors with better social networking skills. He watched, terrified, as irreverent, crowd-pleasing American series became the norm thanks to downloading and then streaming. In their respective fields, Pax and Sara both became victims of the digital revolution, which others seemed to embrace with such ease. They were only forty, but they already felt old and out of place. They were afraid, and fear is the gateway to madness. Cassandra was twelve years old when she walked in on a fight that had turned physical. Rage won out over reason that day. Her parents were gripping each other so tightly that she was afraid the veins in their arms might burst. They moved slowly, like wrestlers in the ring, their faces contorted as they threatened revenge and suffering. They were completely disconnected from the outside world, fully immersed in the nebulous network of intense emotion where crimes occur. They didn’t hear or see their daughter begging them to stop, pulling on a belt, a sleeve, a collar, trying to drag them apart. A foot slipped (no one ever knew whose), sending the three of them to the floor like a single monolithic monster. When Pax and Sara stood up, Cassandra lay dizzy on the tiled floor in the kitchen, her forehead covered in blood. The physical wound wasn’t serious—a dozen stitches and a scar that faded quickly—but the event marked the end of their marriage and of their family as they knew it.

It’s been twelve years now, including four which looked like trench warfare; a strange, silent war during which Pax and Sara stopped all direct contact. But children are resili-ent, like the weeds that somehow thrive in cracks in the pavement, and Cassandra managed to grow up relatively unscathed. She quickly realized that nothing would ever bring her parents back together and she felt relieved. All she wanted was calm. Her father never spoke her mother’s name again, and she learned to compartmentalize. Now Pax is like scorched earth, nourished only by an occasional summer shower, but deep down lies a layer of viscous mud left behind by recent events. An underground stream quietly irrigates the ground from below. Despite the dry, desert-like surface, life could blossom once more.

 

Tonight, Emi and Pax are a little drunk. They want to believe they are alike, and they manage to convince themselves they are. So many relationships are founded on misunderstandings. One of them doesn’t know what love is; the other has only ever experienced the worst possible version of it. She’s reserved and introverted; he’s a talkative extrovert. Never-theless, they are drawn to one another, comforted by their perception of a shared fate, though neither of them knows just how right they are. Convinced they’ve covered the basics (neither of them is otherwise engaged, both of them are open to the possibility of a new relationship), they discuss politics, then Emi’s Japanese roots, and Pax’s less exotic heritage (he was born in a small village in Champagne). He slips in a few jokes and she smiles. When the waiter explains his shift is ending and hands them the bill, Pax asks Emi to come to his place for dinner. She accepts, and he promises pasta, claiming he has a talent for Italian cuisine.

Dinner will have to wait. They kiss as soon as they walk in the door, then slide to the rug, making no effort to reach the bed or even the sofa. They undress impulsively, throwing their clothes across the room as if ridding themselves of their painful pasts—at least for an hour or two. Their bodies fit together so perfectly that they can already feel this will be more than a one-night stand. They’re still naked, their limbs intertwined, satisfied and exhausted when Emi whispers, “I have to tell you about my son. I have to tell you about Alex.”