by Marie Ndiaye
“You can pick it up as soon as the money’s in my account,” he said, casually kicking one foot toward the SUV.
“You’ll have it the day after tomorrow,” the man said.
He blew on his forelock, flashing a practiced, perfect smile. How charming and slim he was in the blue mountain light! A master skier, obviously, able to cut pure, complex lines in the snow, like his signature’s long, self-assured strokes.
Richard Rivière had planned to offer him a cup of coffee in the apartment if the deal went through, but now he didn’t feel up to it. Suppose Trevor appeared in his old pajama bottoms, holdovers from his teenage years, and possibly bare chested, his hair unkempt; suppose he spoke to the customer with that irritating way of giving a caustic turn to the most ordinary words, having already judged you too dull-witted to notice the sarcasm, the scorn—between his exasperating stepson, whose every supercilious little maneuver he knew all too well, and this man who to his deep shame intimidated him, Richard Rivière had lost all confidence in his ability to stifle his accent.
What cruel joy Trevor had felt, one evening when they were celebrating his mother’s birthday and Richard had drunk a full bottle of champagne, on hearing his stepfather wisecracking with a Toulouse accent! Weeks afterward, Trevor was still forever shouting Merci bieng! and erupting into a mirthless laugh, hard and triumphant, as if he’d finally put his finger on the most contemptible thing about Richard Rivière.
The man drove off in the strange, battered little car he’d come out in—not his, he’d immediately made clear, but on loan from the garage while his own was in the shop.
Wasn’t it odd, Richard Rivière mused, that a man so obsessed with his appearance should go putting around in such a ridiculous car? Or was that merely the sign of an elegance too self-assured to care what others might think? If so, why was the man so bent on informing him that it wasn’t his car? What did he care if Richard Rivière was surprised?
His inexplicable dejection faded, and for a few minutes, as he stood in the parking lot of his building, he congratulated himself on selling the SUV.
In the distance, the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds.
Now he could see only the pink and brown roofs of the old town below him, only the gentle green slopes halfway up the mountains, like the hills between Langon and Malagar, where, some Sunday mornings, he used to go walking with his daughter Ladivine.
How much better he felt with the snow out of sight!
But that relief led his memory, suddenly roused and enlivened, to bring back old images of long drives with Clarisse Rivière, early in their marriage, leisurely jaunts through the vine-covered hills in their old 304, the top down, both smoking and talking, he thought at the time, in his happiness, in the bliss of a young man deeply in love, with a sweet, innocent frivolity—or his walks on those same roads with his serious, attentive, very young daughter, starting from just behind their house, and so exquisite sometimes was the feeling of the child’s hand in his, of the forthright, benevolent sun, of the child’s limpid, upturned gaze, that he would have wept with gratitude and trembled in terror had he not held himself back lest he frighten the girl.
Such memories did him no good.
Colleagues his age, even his wife, however luckless with her children, seemed to love reminiscing about their days as young parents, when their joys were stronger and deeper than now, they said fatalistically, now that their job was essentially to resist as best they could those charmless children’s demands for money or favors and fight off their own disappointment.
Richard Rivière was not at all disappointed at the young woman his little girl had become. In his eyes, she was an entirely successful adult.
And the two children she’d brought into the world, whose pictures she often sent him, those two little Germans he’d never seen, seemed two perfect little human beings themselves.
He had nothing to regret but his own agonizing unease. Because he could no longer bear to see his daughter Ladivine, nor even to think about her for long.
He himself found this scandalous. What kind of a father was he?
He wasn’t much good in that way. He was no good at all, now, in that way.
But how could it be helped?
Every meeting with his daughter, every phone call, every daydream about his child, brought him back to the awful feeling that the three of them had lived an existence deformed by something huge and unnameable, hovering over them but never taking shape or fading away, making of their life a hollow travesty of life.
It began four or five years after their wedding, and he was convinced it had nothing to do with the child or with him, but with Clarisse Rivière.
Sometimes those Langon years seemed so artificial that he wondered if that life was real, and not merely a dream he’d had, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
He’d been happy enough in those days, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it, because the memory of that happiness was tainted by a sense of unreality, almost perversion, that blotted out all the rest.
Perhaps there was no ill intent behind that perversion. But if he believed that he’d unwittingly loved, lived with, procreated with a simulacrum, dimly sensing it and finding it deeply repellent, what did it change that that imaginary woman wasn’t responsible for her state?
For so he thought. Still today, he held Clarisse Rivière blameless.
Whereas he, Richard Rivière, had let himself drift through that counterfeit life because he felt weak and helpless, and then in a way he’d woken up, and revulsion, a sort of horror, of fear, drove him far away, far from Clarisse Rivière.
He was ashamed that he hadn’t gone to Ladivine’s wedding, that he’d never met his son-in-law or his grandchildren.
Less because he feared a face-to-face meeting with Clarisse Rivière, as Ladivine thought, than because at the time he was terrified of seeing his daughter. What was she made of, he couldn’t help asking himself, this child born to Clarisse Rivière? Even more than her mother, Ladivine reminded him of the life they’d once led, and those memories left him deeply confused, unsure if he himself had actually lived it or had only passed through an interminable dream, an insincere, fabricated dream.
He could bear only the memory of his child’s first years, and the first years of his marriage with Clarisse Rivière. Nonetheless, such memories did him no good.
—
He tiptoed into the apartment, trying to make out which room Trevor was in—his bedroom, most likely, since he could hear computer sounds through the door.
Relieved, he made for the kitchen, only to collide with the young man, who was lurking in the hallway. He started and cried out in angry surprise.
“What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. Meditating.”
And Trevor let out a little laugh, but Richard Rivière scarcely noticed, so often did the boy snicker and cackle for no reason.
Putting on a thick southwestern accent, Trevor asked, “So, you sell that heap?”
“Could be,” Richard Rivière answered coldly, brushing Trevor aside with one hand.
Unwittingly, his fingers sank into the young man’s limp, bulging belly through the T-shirt, and he gave him a taut, uncomfortable smile.
Trevor had gained so much weight since moving back that Richard Rivière couldn’t help feeling embarrassed and sad for him, which he did his best to conceal—when his fingers chanced to graze the boy’s flabby flesh—behind an awkward display of sympathy.
He felt no trace of affection for Trevor, only those waves of pained, morose pity at the sight of that young man of twenty-two imprisoned in his bloated body, he who, Richard Rivière remembered, was once a slim, agile teenager.
However dour and forced, that pity made him more patient with Trevor’s crass ways.
He walked into the kitchen, and through the half-open window saw his SUV in the parking lot, and the spot where just a moment before he himself had been standing, contemplating the mountains half hidden by clouds.
Now those clouds had cleared, and he saw the mountains’ glistening peaks, the triumphant, seemingly indestructible sharpness of their snow-covered flanks.
He saw himself, too, standing there in his expensive clothes, a fine-looking figure in every way and yet studying the dress and the manner of the man in the raspberry socks with an insecure, already defeated eye, and despite the relaxed, distant air he tried to put on at such times, that man must have known he was being looked at and envied or, worse yet, secretly idolized.
Disgusted with himself, Richard Rivière slammed the window shut. And since Trevor had followed him into the kitchen and he realized he wouldn’t be having the quiet, solitary lunch he was hoping for, he lost his temper, and shouted:
“A hundred times your mother’s asked you not to leave this window open! We’ve already had one burglary, she did tell you that, didn’t she?”
“Probably shouldn’t have bought a place on the ground floor, then,” said Trevor with his eternal smirk, shifting his weight from one leg to the other as if making ready for a fistfight.
Richard Rivière sometimes told himself that with any other overweight, jobless, lonely young man, stuck living with his mother and stepfather like Trevor, he would see this derision and childish defiance as nothing more than the sad effect of a difficult situation, and if they just tried to give him a hand, even love him a little, show some interest and faith in him, then he would drop that tiresome insolence, that whole mechanism of aggression and immediate, unctuous denial Trevor had put in place on his return.
Richard Rivière knew all that, he knew a case study of such a young man would have filled him with almost unlimited understanding and indulgence.
So why, he often asked himself, could he not give the real Trevor the gift of his sympathy and encouragement?
He chided himself for this when he was alone, vowing to change his attitude toward his stepson, even impatiently looking forward to seeing him again so he could put those good intentions into practice.
Then Trevor was there, ever the same, neither more nor less awful than he recalled, and a sort of cold stupor fell over Richard Rivière, a strange dismay at his inability to feel any emotion for the boy but squeamish pity before his misshapen young body.
The idea of devoting himself to Trevor’s rescue, and especially of feigning warm feelings for him, suddenly struck Richard Rivière as preposterous and indecent.
Because it was obvious that Trevor didn’t like him, and wanted no part of his support or solicitude, and even, for some mysterious reason, looked down on him.
That didn’t shock Richard Rivière, didn’t anger him, but it did make him wonder.
How could he have become the target of Trevor’s disdain when he’d always taken pains to bare nothing of his inner self to his wife’s difficult children? How could anyone despise him when they knew him as little as Trevor did?
Deciding to act as though he were alone, he made an omelet without asking the young man if he wanted any. It pained him to feel rude, but Trevor always refused what he was offered.
Why was he standing there, watching him?
He sat down and began to eat, then glanced at the boy’s face, unable to help it. He knew Trevor found it hard to stand up for too long, and yet he’d not moved since he came into the kitchen and leaned against the wall by the door.
He was surprised to find the young man looking faintly ill at ease.
Again and again he ran his hand through his ratty strawberry-blond hair, and his pale little eyes, as if pushed deep into his abundant flesh, darted this way and that, avoiding Richard Rivière’s. Below a pair of broad bright-pink boxers that came down to midthigh, his legs were purplish and swollen.
“Well, sit down,” Richard Rivière snapped.
He pushed away his empty plate. He was so on edge that he’d scarcely realized he was eating.
And now the omelet was eaten, shoveled in without awareness or pleasure, and it was almost one o’clock, and he had to be at work in forty-five minutes.
Still, he’d sold the car. Why couldn’t he be happy?
Trevor stood where he was, shrugged, and said, very hurriedly:
“So I saw on TV…that trial, you know, that trial, it’s going to be starting soon. The lady who got killed…that was your wife?”
“You know it was, don’t you?”
He was breathing quickly and heavily. Trevor’s face went blurry, as if he were seeing it without his glasses.
He mechanically raised one hand to his eyes, feeling the lenses, suddenly tortured by the little pads pressed to the sides of his nose. He tore off his glasses, rubbed his eyes.
He was breathing heavily—pathetically, he couldn’t help thinking. Was that why Trevor looked down on him? Because, at bottom, he was pathetic? But who was Trevor to judge, with his huge legs, his puffy little feet, his fat, spongy breasts?
“I think I do, yeah,” Trevor was saying. “I mean, you never said anything, but…well, you know, I could guess.”
“So why are you asking?” He sighed.
“Um, just to be sure.”
For once, Richard Rivière couldn’t help noticing, Trevor had neglected to mask his unease behind a sarcastic, moronic, or arrogant front. His face bore an almost childlike expression of respectful, intimidated interest.
Rather than feel moved or simply indifferent, Richard found a savage rage burning inside him, because it was Clarisse Rivière’s murder that had brought about this change in the boy. That’s the one thing that excites him, he thought, feeling his own furious, savage excitement, but also suspecting that Trevor was not so much excited as shaken and, in his dull way, frightened.
He went on breathing in noisy little gasps, rubbing the inflamed wings of his nose with his thumb and index finger, making the pain even worse. But so terrible was the gnawing hurt in his heart that this other pain was almost a relief.
He wanted to snuff out the boy, see him disappear from the kitchen, where he’d just spoiled his lunch, from the apartment, bought with a loan in his own name and no one else’s, and finally from his life, perpetually poisoned, he thought, by Trevor’s presence.
There was nothing he wanted less than to talk about Clarisse Rivière with Trevor. The mere thought of it sickened him.
When Clarisse Rivière was murdered, three years before, Trevor was still living in Switzerland, and neither Richard Rivière nor Clarisse, Trevor’s mother, ever told him what had happened, nor Clarisse’s other two children, twin brothers in their thirties who drifted from city to city in the south of France, so rarely heard from that Richard Rivière was always stunned to remember that they existed.
Those few years together, temporarily free of Clarisse’s three wearying children, were the one happy period of Richard Rivière’s life in Annecy, and now he missed it bitterly, as if he’d been perfectly happy in those days.
He hadn’t, but he never expected to be, never even hoped to be, and so that sedate existence with an agreeably ordinary woman seemed the best he could wish for, and he enjoyed what he thought of as his good fortune, the bland, restful, soothing pleasure of a halfhearted attachment, of a daily routine without turmoil or upheaval.
Then Trevor came back from Switzerland, where he’d failed to start up a modest computer-repair business with two friends. That project had struck Richard Rivière as nebulous in the extreme from the start, and because he had serious doubts about Trevor’s skills, given his uselessness when any little thing went awry with the family computer, he saw the young man’s shamefaced, bitter return as simply one more in a logical series of very predictable defeats.
And among his own defeats, thought Richard Rivière, was Trevor’s return.
He wasn’t particularly surprised that he had to endure this ordeal, oh no. He might well be forced to go on living with Trevor for years to come, maybe till he died.
Sometimes he rebelled at that prospect, as now, wishing he could expunge the young man from his life. And yet secretly he’d acc
epted it as fitting punishment for everything he’d failed to grasp in the past, when Clarisse Rivière was alive.
Now and then he wondered if the sight of Trevor’s decline, that ruined body, that panting breath, those endless jeers, was intended to test him: What would he do this time, faced with such obvious signs of distress? What would he fail to grasp now?
But he rejected that suspicion, wearily telling himself that he’d never promised to love or protect this young man. And hadn’t he been punished enough as it was, accepting that his life had turned so unpleasant, accepting that it might never be any more serene or agreeable, accepting that he was irreparably guilty of betraying Clarisse Rivière?
That he accepted, yes, but he admitted it to no one. He’d sensed that his daughter Ladivine blamed herself, and wanted him to blame himself. He refused. He thought he’d be taking the easy way out, seeking consolation for his shattered soul, if he gave in to the temptation of mutual despair and shared tears. He was bitterly sorry he couldn’t give Ladivine that gift, an admission of his guilt, but he thought it ignoble to give up any part of that guilt. It was his fault and he knew it, so why seek to lighten the punishment?
He wanted to be alone with his remorse, with his difficult days. He didn’t want to suffer less. He wanted what he deserved.
What poor Ladivine thought she had to feel guilty for was nothing.
He believed he’d told her that one day on the phone, unless he’d thought it but never said it; he no longer knew.
What could you possibly have done, so far away, with your children, your own life to lead? Could you have prevented your mother from seeing that guy, from spending time with whoever she pleased?
How he hoped he’d said that! He vowed to call her that evening and make sure, and ask how the vacation had gone, if she’d met the Cagnacs, if she’d had a little fun in that country he’d suggested.
He felt an odd hope stirring inside him, the hope that she might have something to tell him. Because he’d made several visits to that country, though in the beginning he knew nothing about it, had never been told of it, ostensibly to look into the market for imported cars, but in truth cars were the last thing on his mind.
