“With your looks I’m not surprised that this is a problem for you,” the minister said.
“You would have us channel our natural urges into work, into production, into the state. Your policies of denial, of suppression, are fascist.”
Natalie knew Cohn-Bendit was an opportunist, but now she was grateful for him, for his audacity.
“If you have such problems with sex that you can’t be silent, if you are so inadequate that you must interrupt a public speech marking the occasion of the opening of a swimming pool, but must interject something unrelated—”
Cohn-Bendit gestured toward the swim teams in their seminakedness.
“For us the issue is always present. Unrelated? Really?”
“Why don’t you jump in the pool to cool off? Go ahead. Sink to the bottom?”
“You want me to jump in?”
“If you are so full of sex problems then you should jump.”
“Fascist.”
“Child.”
They had everything trapped behind glass, had everyone cornered, but Natalie had a hammer. “I’ll jump,” she said. She stepped forward and pulled her wool sweater off over her head. She unbuttoned her skirt and let it drop. She stripped down to and then out of her underwear, making a point of unhooking and then tossing her bra by the side of the pool like a stripper might do it, with a bit of a flourish, and then she jumped. She grabbed her legs and made a cannonball as she went into the pool. She splashed the minister of youth affairs and Danny Cohn-Bendit both.
When she bobbed back to the surface she saw that Gerrard was undressing too, as were two others from their group, both girls from Natalie’s dorm. A fellow student from Gerrard’s sociology class, not with Les Détournés but just a spectator, started to undress along with them.
“Everybody in,” the sociology student said. He jumped in without taking off his glasses.
In a moment nearly all of the students were in the pool, naked and splashing. The girls’ swim team was swimming below the surface like seals.
The newsmen were taking pictures, but they stepped back for a moment in order to protect their cameras.
“This is finished,” the minister said.
“I concur,” Cohn-Bendit said. He was the only student still fully dressed and dry. “It is finished for certain.”
14
On March 22, 1968, there were about a hundred or so of them huddled underneath the glass awning on the north side of the administration building and Daniel Cohn-Bendit spoke there in front of the double doors. He said the building represented the omnipresent eye of the university bureaucracy, that the stench of the university system was so overwhelming that the students could no longer take part, that they could no longer even passively take part. But before he’d finished the students from Les Détournés pushed past him and opened the doors.
This was how they occupied the building: The doors weren’t locked so they just walked in.
Gerrard sat next to Natalie on the tile floor on the fourth level. He leaned over to her and showed her a detourned Luc Orient comic that he’d been working on. The comic was originally titled The Secret of the 7 Lights, and Gerrard didn’t change this, but the adventure plot had been replaced with metaphysical talk about dreams. The hero Luc Orient argued with his girlfriend Lora and his mentor, the Indian professor Hugo Kala, about whether they could watch their lives on television.
“There should be no delay between what we do and what appears on the screen,” Luc said.
The three characters were studying a color television set where the picture hadn’t quite come in. The device was only picking up abstractions, and Lora objected.
“If we watch our lives in real time then nothing can happen,” she said. “It’s just a regress.”
Luc Orient looked puzzled inside the comic book frame.
Natalie didn’t see the point of his derailed version of the comic, but she had to admit that Gerrard had been taking Debord’s instruction to derail his studies to heart. Natalie never saw Gerrard in class anymore, but had met up with him a few times at the library. Gerrard spent hours there altering newspapers and cutting up magazines.
Gerrard caught Natalie’s hand and pulled her close.
“What happened to your friend with the Citroën convertible?” he asked.
“She feels it isn’t ethical,” Natalie said. She scooted away from Gerrard and then stood up and tried to find a better conversation than the one she’d just read between Luc Orient and Lora, but ended up with philosophy students who were debating Hegel, which was pretty much just the same conversation again. Gerrard followed her anyhow. He stood next to her and listened to the conversation for a moment before offering his opinion.
“Everybody has a double consciousness,” Gerrard said. He looked sane and calm, but he went on. “It’s probably because we’re all cartoon characters reading about ourselves and our adventures with Tintin.”
Natalie was tired of his game, and when they occupied a conference hall on the eighth floor she tried to find a place to sit where there wouldn’t be room for Gerrard. She squeezed in next to a young man in a rumpled trench coat and a sweater vest. He seemed surprised that Natalie wanted to sit right up next to him. She squeezed in between him and the bench’s armrest, but this was all to no avail because Gerrard just sat in the aisle. He started humming and then softly singing a pop song to himself, under his breath. Gerrard was off key as he sang Johnny Hallyday’s song “Smoke Covers My Eyes.”
“All changes into dream now,” he sang. “I remain there.”
Natalie was pretty sure she didn’t want Gerrard anymore. Her friends in Les Détournés felt that he was unstable, untrustworthy, and worse, while Debord had seemed to sanction him, Natalie no longer saw how he fit in with her project. Derailing Sagan’s book, living it, was about realizing the goal of free love. As bad as it was to read the book, living it was a way to realizing the philosophy it contained, but there was nothing free about sleeping with Gerrard. Being Gerrard’s lover came with a price.
She’d dreamt of Gerrard in New York City and in her dream they’d been living together in an art deco loft, an uncluttered space, modern and clean. They were newly married and Natalie was alone in their new home. She walked up the stairs from their minimalist off-white living room with wall-to-wall carpeting and an off-white vinyl sofa to a sunlit bedroom that contained a flat white mattress and nothing more. She crossed the bedroom and found a bathroom with a silver-walled shower already filled with steam. The knobs for the hot and cold water were made of glass.
After bathing she wrapped a white towel around her body and stepped back into the nearly empty bedroom. The room was cool, air conditioned, and when she let the towel fall away her body felt cold.
Next thing she knew she was with Gerrard and they were eating ice cream together in front of a perfectly white refrigerator. She took a spoon and worked out a frozen bite, and was disappointed that the ice cream didn’t taste like anything. He’d promised her oranges and cream and instead she was eating something blank. It was nothing. And when she woke up she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still there, still in America. Even worse, the dream had made her orgasm. The tasteless American ice cream had made her climax.
Gerrard was still talking to the philosophy students and she wanted him to stop, but Gerrard didn’t look at her. Finally she leaned over to him and whispered in his ear.
“Shut up, please,” she said. “Shhhh!”
One of Natalie’s friends, a boy named Rene, stepped up to the lectern. He was tall and neatly dressed, his blond hair perfectly combed, and he held his curled fingers up to his eyes, seeming to inspect his cuticles, and then cleared his throat.
“Les Détournés cannot find common ground with Stalinists.” Natalie agreed as the cute boy suggested that the five or so known Stalinists should leave. He said it coolly, with a nonchalant indifference, and it was just right that way.
But Daniel Cohn-Bendit stepped up next to him at the po
dium, his unruly red hair and freckled face looked coarse when juxtaposed against the face and hair of the ultra-leftist. Still Cohn-Bendit smiled at the Les Détournés member, nodded as if to agree, and then waved his left hand over the crowd. Cohn-Bendit appeared to be blessing the students in the first row.
“Those who were Stalinists are no longer Stalinist,” Cohn-Bendit said.
“What?” the Les Détournés member sputtered.
“We’ve transcended those divisions and usual ideologies.”
“How did we do that?” the cute boy asked him. “Just a moment. The Stalinists should leave. If they won’t leave we will.”
“Those who were Stalinists are no longer Stalinist,” Danny said again. He smiled and smiled as the Les Détournés members in the audience started to move. Natalie stood up too, but wondered at how the group had moved from interrupting professors to disrupting the occupation. Still, she stood up to join her friends, and Gerrard started to stand up also.
Natalie turned to him. “Stay,” she said.
“What?”
“We’re through,” she said. “You and I are finished. There is too much going on, too many important things.”
Gerrard looked at her, but didn’t respond.
“I can’t afford to be confused right now. So just stay here. I’m leaving and you’re staying.”
When Natalie went to join her friends in the hall she found that most of them were just sort of standing there waiting. One boy in blue jeans was carrying a guitar case and he looked disappointed.
“Had you been expecting to play?” Natalie asked him. He started to tell her about finger-style jazz and why it was radical, but Natalie lost interest quickly. Standing in the hall with nothing to do now, they’d exiled themselves.
Natalie looked back, turned, and opened the swinging door to the auditorium, and saw that Gerrard was still sitting in the aisle. He had his legs crossed and he sort of looked like he might be paying attention to what Cohn-Bendit was saying.
Natalie watched him for a moment more, wondering if he’d turn around and catch her looking.
15
Gerrard thought of Christopher Robin while he waited for the Metro train that would take him back home to Ménilmontant. He looked into the darkness to the west, at the dim red lights on the sooty wall, spaced at regular intervals and disappearing along the curve, and tried to think about Natalie instead. Simple heartbreak was a pleasure for him. It was like something out of a movie. If he concentrated he could still imagine himself at the centre of a romance, the lonely hero waiting for the train after losing the girl.
This was how he wanted to see himself, how he wanted to direct his thoughts, but after a few minutes of waiting, after enough time had passed for the scene to be mundane rather than romantic, his thoughts drifted away from Natalie with her short blond hair and bright brown eyes and onto the general pattern of his life. He remembered one embarrassment after another, like how he’d had a bloody nose in his fourth year of primary school.
He remembered turning in an algebra test splattered with blots of blood. The teacher had chastised him. She’d told him not to pick his nose in class, and made him stand at the front of the class with his finger in his nostril. The fact that he was guilty only made his punishment worse.
Gerrard was in the wrong book. He didn’t want to be in Bonjour Tristesse or Luc Orient, but in The House at Pooh Corner. He’d derailed the wrong narrative. The Metro train pulled up to him on the platform and he stepped onboard, put his suitcase down, and looked for a place to sit. He looked at each passenger, tried to catch each person’s gaze, but not one of them would look at him. The businessman in a thin tie and black blazer had slicked-back hair and a blank gaze that made him seem somewhat dangerous, while the blond girl in a modish checkered dress beside him had a face that seemed soft, but this only indicated how young she was in comparison to the middle-aged man she was with. She had been crying and she was looking down at her expensive shoes.
An old man across from him, a man with a receding hairline, white wisps above wire-rimmed glasses, whose flannel shirt was neatly pressed and clean, was the only one who reacted to Gerrard’s presence. The man’s eyes focused in on Gerrard, and he seemed to want to say something, but could not quite manage it. The man sat perfectly still, with a paper shopping bag between his knees, and stared at him.
“What is it?” Gerrard asked.
“You’re too young to know,” the old man said. “But there was a war. There was an occupation.” The old man took off his glasses and looked out into the dark, at the cement walls of the Metro tunnel. The old man had a black kerchief around his neck, and his trench coat was too big for him. He’d shrunk since he originally purchased the coat. “I’ve lived too long,” the man said. And Gerrard realized that the man was speaking in English.
Gerrard turned away from the old man. He didn’t want to look at him. Instead he tried to remember his father, to remember what his father had looked like, or the sound of his voice, but ended up thinking of Christopher Robin Milne and his toys instead. Gerrard remembered Milne’s stuffed animals, thought of a Hundred Acre Wood, a boy, and his bear. Gerrard remembered a photograph of the stuffed animals. They’d been put on display in a publishing house in New York City after touring America. He’d been six or seven at the time, and he’d cut a photograph of the toys out of a copy of Paris Match and hung the photo over his small bed.
The train moved along, clicking on the tracks. Gerrard was no longer sure if the old man was French or British, or if the old man had ever spoken at all. Gerrard looked out his own window, at the grey cement outside, then held his nose closed and looked at his watch. Until he looked down at it, he hadn’t even realized he was wearing a watch. Two minutes went by like that, and the train stayed in the tunnel. The same graffiti slogan about liberating humanity came into view again and then passed.
Gerrard thought again about Christopher Robin Milne, about the way he and his bear would always be in the Hundred Acre Wood, and how they would always be playing. In one of the stories Christopher Robin had been a knight or a king. He had made the bear promise always to remember him, even if he changed, even when he was a hundred.
Christopher Robin had lived through World War 2. Gerrard remembered reading that Christopher had been a soldier in that war. The boy from those stories had probably seen death up close. On the battlefield of history Christopher Robin had seen how it all goes, how everything ends. Gerrard looked at his watch and continued to hold his breath. He counted in his head: ten more seconds, and then twenty more on top of that.
Christopher Robin owned a bookstore in England. Gerrard had read that somewhere. He was probably married and probably owned a color television set.
Gerrard took his suitcase out from under his seat and opened it up on his lap. He removed a black-and-white composition notebook and a fountain pen from the inside pocket, and then closed the suitcase and left it in his lap. He started writing to Christopher Robin during that train ride. He looked up at the woman in the checkered dress and winked at her. Gerrard held his breath as he wrote and didn’t mind when the text shifted around on him:
“The vacuum cleaner in your bookstore, and the fresh air in the orange carpet, is nothing but what you find inside. The television is a woman who knows nothing but war. The television is in your bed.”
Christopher Robin Milne was a soldier in World War 2 and had seen the centre of his life blown away. What he needed, Gerrard realized, was to be reminded of the simple pleasure of doing nothing, of listening to all the things that he couldn’t hear, and seeing all the things that weren’t there. He needed, Gerrard decided, to be reminded how to be friends with a bear.
“Doing nothing is my favorite thing to do,” the old man in the trench coat said. Gerrard couldn’t tell if he was speaking French or English, but just opened his notebook, turned the page, and started again.
Gerrard wrote down the words: “Dear Billy Moon.”
16
After he’d read the letter from Gerrard, Christopher couldn’t sleep. It was a warm night in late April, 1968, and Chris stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed with Abby. She’d kicked off their checkered quilt and her nightgown had drifted up, exposing her hip. Christopher stopped to look, to pet her auburn hair before lying next to her and pulling up the quilt. Half-asleep, she reached over, stroked his cheek, and tousled his hair. Then Christopher turned onto his side, faced away from her, and stared at the time. He watched his Tymeter clock radio spin the seconds away. Sometimes, especially when he couldn’t sleep, it seemed his life was a mechanism just like a clock, a clock that ran anticlockwise. Christopher listened to Abby’s breathing, waited until he was sure she was fully asleep, and then sat up and turned on the radio part of the device. When he turned the dial, the first station to come in clearly was playing the sort of light pop music he couldn’t stand. He was thinking of trying his luck down the dial when Daniel opened the door and climbed up on the bed, crawled across his parents, and found a place across the width of the bottom of the bed.
Christopher turned off the clock radio, waited for Daniel to settle back into sleep, then got out of bed and quietly crossed the wood floor, steadying himself with his left hand on the rough stone wall of the farmhouse.
They’d been in the house since 1966, but Christopher still missed living above the bookshop. On Fairflax Place his insomnia had some usefulness. He’d crept downstairs and rearranged the books on their shelves, or filled out purchase orders, but now he was awake and there was nothing to do but wait for sleep.
Christopher’s feet were bare and the coolness from the stones crept into his hand and down his arm. He fetched a pair of slippers and a terrycloth robe, opened his closet door and removed a cardboard box, then made his way to the kitchen where he cracked a tin of biscuits, took the foil off a bottle of milk, and sat down at the kitchen island.
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 10
