‘Would it be too much if I asked you to read him a story?’
I look at her in surprise.
‘I know he’s a bit old for it, but since his father, no one’s ever … Never mind,’ she decides, changing the channel. ‘It’s too late anyway.’
I get up, rest a hand on her shoulder to keep her from stopping me. Sébastien is lying on his stomach, calves sticking up, absorbed in a comic book. Monsters and soccer stars paper the walls. He says I can sit and check out the books if I want; he doesn’t mind. I walk up to a small aquarium sitting on a shelf, with two ratty fish and three pathetic pebbles in a decor of algae.
‘Hey, you’ve got achlaia.’
He raises an eye, asks what that is.
‘A bisexual algae. When it reproduces, it gives the fish magnificent colors.’
‘Then this one’s junk. See how brown they are?’
‘That’s because the filaments aren’t touching. In achlaia, puberty is triggered by contact with the other sex. Yours are going to remain children their entire life if you leave them like that.’
I plunge my fingers into the dirty water, push together the pebbles to glue the pale-green blades together between them. He has left his bed, listens to me with a curious face while staring at the bowl.
‘Until they’re in each other’s presence, they’ll have no identity. But after that, they can change to suit whoever they meet, become male or female depending on the attraction …’
‘So you’re saying my algae are homos?’
‘Transsexual. The advantage they have over humans is that they can change sex as often as they like. It depends on who they’re in love with.’
‘I thought they were dead.’
‘They were just waiting for you to pay attention to them.’
At the doorway, Muriel watches us leaning over the aquarium. There are tears in her eyes. Sébastien turns around and she disappears. He gets back into bed, asks me how I decided to go into my field.
‘The blue leaves.’
‘The what?’
I’m just as startled as he is. I don’t know why I said that, or what those words mean. There are no blue leaves in nature. Except in certain conifers, but those are called needles.
‘Did you already know when you were my age?’ he pursues.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Wow, you’re lucky. I don’t know what I want to do. Everything’s blocked off, anyway.’
I give him a small smile of understanding, solidarity; I approach the bed, then hesitate. I don’t know if you still kiss a boy that age goodnight. He holds out his hand, I shake it, and leave the room repeating the two words in my head. Blue leaves … The liquid sound calls up hazy images, scraps of voices that blend together, fall short.
I join Muriel in the living room. She is sitting on the floor in front of the dark television.
‘He seemed to like that. I don’t know what you were telling him …’
‘Whatever came into my head; the result is what counts. The algae in his aquarium are just ordinary mold, but from now on he’ll look at them like potential couples, teenagers trying to find themselves.’
My frankness shocks her, or my tact.
‘Are you making a special effort for me, or are you always like this?’
I answer with an indecisive sigh.
‘You never had any kids?’
‘No.’
She stands up, saying that’s a shame for them. She looks at the time.
‘Do you have a place to sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Want the couch?’
‘Thanks.’
She goes into her room, comes back with a pillow and a blanket. I haven’t moved.
‘Is everything all right, Martin?’
‘I’m not sure. I’m wondering about a lot of things.’
‘Me too.’
We look at each other, disarmed. She sets down the pillow, spreads out the blanket. She comes toward me. I take her in my arms, and we try to forget the rest.
Liz kisses him, gently pushes him back. Under the parading numbers in lights, she gives a little wave of goodbye, the promise of a next time. She moves away. He straightens his glasses, goes to climb into his limousine parked next to the curb. His head explodes and he falls backward.
I wake up with a start, blink, look around me. I’m in a mauve room; a ray of light is coming through the window shades. Voices echo in the next room.
I pull up the quilt, which smells of lovemaking and fabric softener. I roll over on my stomach, dampen the noise in the crook of my elbow, my ear pressed into the pillow. The night was violent and tender, so strong and at the same time so simple … We were like two kids stifling their cries of pleasure because of the parents. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever known, and yet I don’t feel any different; something comes back together inside me, falls back into place after years of contortions. I liked sex with Liz because it made her into another woman; she overcame her coldness, her anger, listened only to her body. She forgot herself when making love. Muriel, in giving herself, finds herself again. I discovered her to be carefree, playful, and tender, as she would be all the time if life gave her a little breathing room. She’s a damaged woman who repairs herself by loving, not a spoiled child who breaks her toys and wastes away. One week away from my daily routine and I no longer recognize myself: I feel completely removed from my choices, my concessions, my pretexts. I have been married to someone who is totally incompatible, counting on the nights when our bodies spoke to bridge the distance between us the rest of the time; to me, this seemed the true path of love. But it’s easier to show love directly to someone who’s close to you.
That said, I don’t know who I’m going to find this morning, what Muriel is awaiting me across that wall. Maybe mornings after make her as melancholic as the return to normal life after two days of absurdity. I don’t know if we’ll pretend, if we’ll simply not mention it, if we’ll say we made a mistake, or if we’ll want more. The morning following lovemaking is also a first time.
I put on my clothes and join Muriel in the kitchen. She is sitting at the table with an older man in a green windbreaker, who turns toward me and smiles warmly.
‘I’m Robert,’ he says. ‘Glad to know you. And sorry to wake you up. I needed the taxi for a regular. Twice a year I drive her to her cure in Le Touquet. It’s getting on seventeen years now.’
‘Sébastien, it’s twenty-five of!’ Muriel calls out.
She finishes filling out an application form, signs it, and hands it to her colleague. She tells me that she, too, though she’s not happy about it, is going to work for G7 Taxi – assuming they’ll let her keep her license and put her on the waiting list.
‘It’s nuts to stay independent,’ Robert insists, taking me as witness.
I nod, sit down. I see that life has taken over this morning, that the tender and unbridled woman from last night has gotten back into line. She serves me some coffee, asks if I slept well. I answer in a neutral tone.
‘I can get you a car tomorrow. Antonio’s going on sick leave ’cause he’s got the flu.’
‘His car’s a piece of crap.’
‘That’s the stuff!’ Robert grins, washing his hands in the sink. ‘Okay, I’m off.’
They kiss on the cheek. Sébastien sticks his head in, knapsack on his shoulder, and asks if I’ll be here tonight.
‘Fifteen ’til!’ his mother answers.
‘Need a ride to school, Seb?’
‘No, it’s cool, the guys are waiting for me. See ya.’
He slams the front door. Muriel’s phone rings; she answers, listens, asks Robert, who’s zipping up his jacket, ‘Eight-fifteen, Batignolles for Austerlitz. You on it?’
‘No prob.’
She jots down the address, leaning on the edge of the table.
‘I’m happy for her,’ Robert murmurs, looking me in the eye, crushing my fingers.
He hasn’t noticed the bandage and I swallow the pain with a
friendly grimace. She gives him the address, hands him back the keys to his car. He sticks the folded application in his pocket and promises he’ll pull any strings he can.
As soon as he leaves the apartment, Muriel jumps on me and holds me tight against her, breathes me in, kisses me, scratches my neck, holds me away to look at me.
‘Was it all right for you?’ she suddenly asks in a worried voice.
Without giving me time to answer, she drags me toward the bedroom, unbuttoning my shirt with a half-smile.
‘Your meeting is in an hour, it’ll take you ten minutes on the RER to Porte Maillot. That gives us forty-five minutes, if we’re reasonable.’
She pushes me onto the bed, strips off her sweats, lies on top of me.
‘You’re not the same man when you make love,’ she whispers in my ear.
She runs her tongue down my chest, slowly unbuckles my belt. Sound of an explosion.
She rushes to the window, rips aside the shade.
‘Robert!’ she screams.
Across the street, a car is engulfed in flames.
11
He is sitting behind a newspaper. The moment he sees me, he leaps from his armchair.
‘It’s all good, Martin. I have all the proof we need.’
Then he stops short, looks at me in alarm.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
I gaze steadily at him, trying to figure out his motive, to detect signs of a double-cross. Nothing: openness, energy, and the eagerness of a Boy Scout. Childlike eyes, receding hairline, hand on my shoulder.
‘Now, tell me everything.’
I sit down. He retakes his seat, leaning forward, his forehead wrinkled by my troubles. I’ve waited for this moment for so long: to be vindicated by someone who knows me. And yet a certain unease prevents me from opening up to this man, who is almost the same age as I, whose surface respect and obsequiousness strike me as more artificial than ever. He’s been scheming with the dean for years to take over my spot, and now this morning he arrives as my savior, with his character witness and pieces of evidence. I look for a suitcase next to him.
‘I rented a car at the airport,’ he says, anticipating my question. ‘I stopped at a friend’s place to shower and put the material somewhere safe.’
The bartender has come up to us, lets him finish his sentence before asking what we’d like. Rodney sends him away with an assertiveness I’ve never seen in him before.
‘So really,’ he says, ‘Elizabeth is claiming you’re not her husband? How do you explain that?’
‘I talked to her, alone, yesterday morning. The guy pretending to be me is forcing her to lie, making her go along with it. Or maybe she’s in on it, too, I have no idea …’
‘Ms Caradet didn’t say anything about that.’
‘I didn’t tell Ms Caradet everything. But she already knows too much – they’ve just blown up her car.’
He jumps, stares at me open-mouthed.
‘They’re out to kill us, Rodney.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘An hour ago.’
‘Is she all right?’
I nod. She ran to get her son from school and her daughter at the salon; they’re staying with a friend in a safe place. I made her promise not to use her cell phone.
‘I can’t believe Monsanto is that anxious to get you!’ he protests.
Apparently Muriel gave him a complete report.
‘Rodney … Does anyone else know you’re in Paris?’
‘A friend,’ he says, lowering his eyes.
‘Who?’
‘The guy who’s putting me up.’
‘Can you vouch for him?’
Vague gesture, little pout. He’s single. I’ve never heard about any relationship, but then I never took much of an interest in his private life.
‘Did you tell him what’s been happening to me?’
‘No. I said I’d come to help out my boss, who was in some trouble, that’s all.’
‘I no longer exist, Rodney. They’ve made me disappear from the public record. They’ve erased my parents, my marriage. They’re making it look as if Martin Harris from Yale died three years ago, and that my social security number belongs to an electrician in Kansas.’
‘That’s insane!’
‘Unless it’s the detective I hired … Maybe they paid him off to say that.’
‘Let’s go,’ he says, standing up.
In front of the Sofitel, metal barriers prevent the cars from parking. Guards posted every twenty yards along Avenue des Ternes, red sash across their chests, await an official motorcade.
‘The president is due to arrive at three,’ Rodney whispers to me as we cross. ‘You should have seen the security at the airport. The entire police force is out today.’
Between the lines: my personal problem hasn’t exactly come at a convenient time. In Clichy, I saw the annoyed impatience of the cops inspecting the taxi’s remains. Right now, a torched car in a rough neighborhood isn’t their biggest concern. I let them keep their Molotov cocktail theory; I wasn’t about to get myself hauled off to an interrogation room by suggesting it was a car bomb.
I walk three steps behind Rodney, up to a short street running perpendicular to the outer boulevard. I look behind me constantly, checking out the passers-by, verifying the doorways, the porches, the cars. He opens the door of a minivan and I get in. I watch him pull out. We drive to the suburbs, beneath lampposts decorated with crossed flags. He throws me surreptitious glances while pretending to check the rearview. I don’t believe he has any doubts about me, but he seems to be wondering if I have any about him.
‘I admire you, Martin,’ he states, crossing over a bridge.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Your composure. Ms Caradet told me about your accident, the coma … And here you are, no different than before.’
‘You think so?’
I’m perfectly aware that this is flattery, but his reflection touches me, all the more in that he’s wrong. I no longer have anything in common with the repressed man who took refuge in plants to avoid life, who buried his human disappointments in vegetal passions. But I’ve suffered too much from the looks of others to stop pretending now.
‘What exactly did you tell the police, Martin?’
‘Who I was. But the other guy showed up holding a passport with my name, and they threw out my complaint. We have to start from scratch, including the murder attempts. What proofs have you got that I’m me?’
‘Profiles of you in the press, the tape of your interview on CBS, your parking pass at Yale, your diploma honoris causa from Bamako University, tax statements, telephone bills, expense reports, a photo of your parents … Whatever I could find in your desk.’
I frown.
‘A photo of my parents?’
‘Yes, and some of you with Liz.’
I nod, continue to verify in the vanity mirror that we’re not being followed. I have no memory of keeping personal photos in my desk drawer. He must have searched through everything.
‘We’re almost there.’
He has left the crowded avenue and is now driving through a residential neighborhood, where construction sites alternate with old stone houses in various states of dilapidation. The surroundings seem vaguely familiar; an image floats toward the surface but can’t quite get in focus. I don’t know how to situate it, what to relate it to. It’s as if my memory were working in a void. Or that it kept hitting an obstacle.
‘How long have we known each other, Rodney?’
‘A long time,’ he smiles.
I’d like him to be more precise, but he seems to be trying to skirt the gaps in my memory out of tact, whereas I’m testing his own. Something about him doesn’t ring true, but I don’t know what. It’s the same feeling as with Liz yesterday morning. And yet I know him so well. I wonder why I’m experiencing this defensive reflex, this strange distance …
‘Did you go to the embassy?’
I answer that they to
ssed me out.
‘And what about your colleague at the INRA? Haven’t you been in touch with him again?’
‘No – he believes the other guy.’
I’ve spied his reactions out of the corner of my eye. He looks relieved. But maybe he’s just making a show of optimism to raise my spirits. The car enters a traffic circle, makes a left, drives another hundred yards down a sloping alley.
‘Here we are,’ he says, pressing a remote door-opener.
The mini-van passes through a gate covered with yellowed wisteria. My gaze falls on the cracked stone pillar where the name of the villa is written: The Blue Leaves. A shock wave courses through my skull like a breaking dam as the car comes to a stop, an entire landscape forming. I close my eyes, press the back of my neck against the headrest, let the images fall into place.
‘Is everything all right, Martin?’
‘It’s fine, I’m just tired. It’ll pass.’
He falls silent. I open my eyes, recognize the graveled drive under the linden trees, the glassed-in steps he’s parked in front of, the motorcycle chained to a willow.
‘What an odd name, “blue leaves”,’ I say, with the casual smile of someone coming here for the first time. ‘What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe a writer used to live here, back when.’
The air is warm, the sounds muffled, the neighbors hidden by huge thujas that keep the neglected lawn in half-shadow. Our steps crackle on the dead leaves. Behind him, I climb the six steps to the terrace that I had hurtled down in the other direction. I rediscover how the door creaks as it scrapes on the floor tiles, the tint of the opaque windows against the black iron bars. And the smell, that mix of dampness and electric heating. The clanks of the expanding radiator above the ticking of the clock.
Unknown Page 12
