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.”
&
nbsp; 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.
CHAPTER 13
The airport at Orly was flooded with a cold sunlight that reflected off the high windows, off the silver fuselages of the airplanes, off the puddles on the runway, and sparkled in a thousand shining gray bursts that dazzled the eye. Charles’ flight was already two hours late, and Lucile was pacing nervously in the large hall. If something should happen to him, she wouldn’t be able to bear it; it would be her fault, for she’d refused to take this trip with him, and instead she’d cheated on him. As for that sad and resolute look that she’d been rehearsing two hours earlier, a look intended to warn Charles, even before she said a thing to him, that something was very wrong, it was now drifting over, without her suspecting it, into a look exuding anguish and compassion. And that was the look he saw as he emerged from customs.
He flashed her a warm and reassuring smile that made her eyes brim with tears, then headed straight towards her, kissed her tenderly, held her for a moment against himself, and right then Lucile’s eye glimpsed a young woman shooting a nasty look of pure envy straight at her. Lucile was always forgetting how good-looking a man Charles was, since his tenderness was so totally hers. He loved her for what she was, didn’t make her account for herself in any way, didn’t ask a thing of her, and suddenly she felt a rush of resentment towards Antoine. It was easy enough for him to give her an ultimatum to make a choice and break things off with Charles — but one can hardly live two years with another human being without becoming deeply attached. She reached for Charles’ hand and held it, not letting go of it. She felt as if she now had to protect him, not quite remembering that it would be from her own self that she’d be protecting him.
“I felt so lonely without You,” said Charles. He smiled, tipped the porter, showed the chauffeur his suitcases, all with his usual aplomb. It had been a good while since she’d noticed how simple and effortless everything was with him. He opened the door for her, walked around the car, sat down next to her, took her hand again, almost shyly, and said to the chauffeur, “To the apartment,” with the voice of a man who is overjoyed to be returning home again. But Lucile felt caught in a trap.
“Why did You miss me, what do You see in me still?” Her voice was despairing, but Charles smiled as if she were merely teasing him.
“You’re everything to me — You know that.”
“I don’t deserve such feelings,” she protested.
“Oh, that notion of ‘deserving’, You know, when it comes to love, well… Say, I brought You a lovely gift from New York.”
“What is it?”
But he didn’t want to tell her, and they gently argued all the way home. When Pauline spied them, she whimpered in great relief, since to her any airplane trip at all was a life-threatening risk; then, together, they all unpacked Charles’ suitcases. He’d brought Lucile a light-colored mink coat, the same gray color as her eyes, silky and soft, and as she tried it on, he laughed as merrily as a little boy. Later that afternoon, she telephoned Antoine to tell him that she had to see him, that she hadn’t had the courage to break the bad news to Charles.
“Well, I won’t see you until you do,” said Antoine in a very peculiar voice, and abruptly hung up on her.
For four whole days, she didn’t see or hear from him and, still reeling from her anger, did not suffer from it. She deeply resented his having hung up on her so crudely. She hated any type of rudeness. But the truth was, she was very nearly certain that he would call her back. They had become too entangled that night, they had gone too far together into love’s mysteries, they had become two disciples of one single cult, and now their cult had taken on a life of its own, independently of the whims of either of them. Antoine’s mind might well be hostile to her, but his body was now her body’s friend, it needed hers to feel whole, it missed hers. Their bodies were like two horses that were great companions, separated temporarily by a tiff between their owners, but that would wind up galloping off together into sun-drenched climes of pure pleasure. Any other ending struck her as impossible. She couldn’t imagine how people could hold their own passions at bay; she had never understood any need or reason for doing so. And in the self-indulgent climate of post-Louis-Philippe France, she had a hard time conceiving of any superior moral principle to that of heeding the call of one’s own hot, churning blood.
Most of all, she resented Antoine for not having let her explain herself. She would have told him about the plane’s delay and her anguish while waiting for it, she would have proven to him that she had acted in good faith. She would certainly have been able to stick to her resolve and to inform Charles of her decision that evening. But she’d found it so difficult to make up her mind, she’d struggled so hard to bring herself to the point where she could make the dramatic cutoff, that the failure of her attempt to do so now seemed to her a cabalistic omen. Insincere acts often bring out superstition in their wake. In the meantime, Antoine still hadn’t called and she was growing bored.
Summer was drawing nigh and soirées were starting to be held outdoors, and so one evening, Charles took her to some nondescript dinner party at the Pré-Catelan. In the middle of a very lively group standing underneath a tree were Antoine and Diane, and L
ucile recognized his laugh even before she saw him. She couldn’t help thinking, “Oh my, he’s laughing without me,” but nonetheless a joyful impulse drew her towards him. With a smile, she extended her hand, but he didn’t return her smile, merely bowing in the most perfunctory manner, and looking away. All at once the Pré-Catelan, so bright and verdant, took on a melancholy cast, and Lucile could see the futility of all these people’s lives, their impoverishment, the desperate ennui that pervaded this restaurant, this crowd, and her own life. If it weren’t for Antoine and his yellow eyes, his little den of iniquity, and the few moments of truth that she knew three times a week in his arms, every last detail of this troubled and falsely jolly social set would feel like it was the pathetic creation of some third-rate set designer. Claire Santré looked utterly hideous this evening, Johnny looked ridiculous, and Diane half-dead. Lucile recoiled from her in shock.
“Don’t go running off, Lucile,” intoned Diane in an imperious voice. “That’s a lovely dress You have on.”
Lately, Diane had taken to lavishing little compliments like this on Lucile, thinking that doing so would demonstrate her total self-confidence. But it just made Johnny smile, and even more so Claire, to whom Johnny had finally “confessed” all that he knew. Naturally, their little circle had all been let in on the news, and so now, at the exact moment when Lucile and Antoine were standing there next to each other, confused, ashen-faced, and greatly upset, people were looking at them in that half-envious, half-ironic way that is generally reserved for new lovers. Lucile, stepping back towards Diane, said, in a lackluster voice, “I just got this dress yesterday, but I think it might be a little too chilly this evening.”