Elle

by Philippe Djian

  She takes Vincent’s hands in hers. “Poor darling,” she says. “Our love lives aren’t going very well right now.”

  “Have a sip of my toddy,” he says.

  “Robert? An affair?” I ask weakly.

  “And get this, it’s been going on for years.”

  “Fuck, that sucks,” offers Vincent.

  “What do you say to that?” Anna asks me.

  “Listen, I’m flabbergasted.”

  “I couldn’t get over it either. I had to sit down.”

  “Of course,” says Vincent in sympathy.

  I get up to poke the logs and straighten out the fire. No one ever thought that she and Robert had the perfect marriage and that they loved each other deeply, but she doesn’t seem too terribly upset by his betrayal.

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t affect me,” she says to underscore the nuance, “but it’s not affecting me that much. Since yesterday, it’s like there’s this stranger walking around the place. You can just imagine how good that feels. A man I don’t recognize at all.”

  I nod. I turn around and go make more toddies. When I come back, Vincent has just finished jotting down the address of a lawyer. The snow is falling, the fire is crackling. He goes upstairs to make sure the baby is fast asleep while I do the pouring.

  “I should be glad he didn’t give me a disease or something,” she says with a sigh.

  “Are you hungry?” I ask. “Have you eaten?”

  I relax a little when I learn that she has no idea who the woman is and isn’t interested in finding out. “I don’t know,” I say, “but maybe in the end you’re right. I’m really sorry, you know?”

  “You don’t need to be sorry. I’m fine. Life is full of incidents like this.”

  I raise one arm and she comes over and nestles at my shoulder. A few minutes later, when Vincent comes downstairs and sees this, he smiles a little. Anna raises her arm and he nestles at her shoulder. We don’t speak. We look toward the fire. Then I leave them, I go up to bed.

  At times I have wondered, when he wasn’t quite old enough to shave and then again later on, if certain things happened between them. But I have never been sure about it and this morning does nothing to change that. I don’t know if they slept together or if she slept on the couch and I guess I never will know because no matter how closely I watch, hoping they will tip their hand one way or the other, I notice nothing out of the ordinary, only the little affectionate gestures they have exchanged since he was born, which don’t tell me anything I don’t already know.

  Vincent goes out to buy what he needs for the baby and when I come back downstairs Anna is clutching him to her breast like a fragile treasure, leaning her face toward him and dancing him around so easy and lithe, so tenderly and affectionately, you would swear she was at the very least his mother. But knowing the tragedy she lived through twice, the frustration like an open wound that never heals and only deepens, I keep my distance, not getting involved, and when Vincent gets back and they think they’re alone, I watch their eyes, watch for the slightest brush of a hand, the detail that might give them away, but they are exceedingly good at this. It’s practically laughable.

  What does turn out to be ludicrous, however, is the duo they form, hovering over Édouard as if they were his parents, a couple of head cases teaming up. I say I’m going out for a while, but I’m not going anywhere.

  It’s a nice day, the snow creaks and cracks under my rubber boots. Taking a walk is the best thing in the world. When I get to Patrick’s, he’s out in the garden, in shirtsleeves, clearing the snow. When he sees me, he stops and motions to me, friendly as you please. “Hello, how are you?” he calls out with a big smile.

  “Fine. And you?”

  He leans his elbow on his shovel and looks up to the sky, still smiling. “I’m all inside out,” he finally says.

  “Really?” I ask warily. “You would go that far? Inside out?”

  I am thinking, nodding my head. “We’re going to have to talk, Patrick.”

  “I know, of course,” he says, bowing his head.

  “We’re going to have to talk very soon, you know. You’ve given me a big problem, Patrick.” We look at each other intensely for a moment, then I break it off by briskly turning around. I walk away a few steps, then I stop and turn back toward him. “Just so you know, I am, too. I’m inside out, as you put it.” With that, I start walking again, catching my breath as I go along.

  Josie refuses to have coffee with us, even though I’ve relegated Anna to my office so they won’t run into each other and I’ve opened an excellent box of chocolates and left it out on the table. She explains that she was very angry and that only my quick phone call to let her know what was going on prevented a report to the authorities for kidnapping, breaking and entering, assault, and who knows what else. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to sit down and have a pleasant chat about what happened. I understand completely. This speaks well for her, but I can’t tell her that.

  “Think of him, both of you,” I say. “Think less about yourselves and more about him. Be smart. Try to find some common ground.”

  She sniggers. “Should’ve tried that sooner.”

  “Okay, okay,” says Vincent with a sigh.

  “Not what I call an apology.”

  There is apparently a problem with the zipper on the fluorescent green snowsuit that we’ve stuffed him into and that immediately turned him into a little butterball—though the mother is herself a two-hundred-pound woman wrapped in a horrid silvery-turquoise down coat, so a certain balance has been struck.

  I try to reason with her. “Let him accept this job,” I say. “This is no time to be messing around with that. There’s a season for this and a season for that. You know it, Josie.”

  “Stay out of it,” she says.

  “Stay out of it,” says Vincent.

  I don’t say a word. I give a good, firm tug on the zipper and it comes unstuck.

  We watch her leave. “She’s not as inflexible as all that,” I say. “Time is on your side. In three days, she’ll be on her knees.”

  “No, don’t bet on that,” he says, while she disappears around the first curve and into the bluish woods. “She’s surprised me more than once. She might surprise me again.”

  Anna stays for a while after Josie leaves. I’m sure she heard everything but she pretends she hasn’t, cocking her head and listening carefully to Vincent’s version, trying to take the temperature of things. Anna is an expert. Josie is a delicate piece to handle if you’re not very aware of Vincent’s feelings for her. But is he himself aware? That’s the heart of the problem, his dogged and perhaps unconscious uncertainty, that’s what makes this so difficult, and Anna does well to get herself up to speed because it appears that Josie’s stock is not quite as low in Vincent’s esteem as we thought it was, that he’s not quite as indifferent as he says he is, that we might just find ourselves in an awkward position as soon as the wind turns if we don’t get constant updates.

  On her way out, I see her to the door and she’s pulling her gloves on when she whispers, without looking at me, “Get ready for pain.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “It means get ready for pain.”

  She kisses me goodbye and she’s off, leaving me with this riddle.

  The next day at the office, I get a moment alone with her and I ask her to explain. I say, “I thought a lot about what you said on your way out yesterday.”

  “She’s going to hurt us. I can feel it. But there’s no way to avoid it. She’s going to wind up hurting us, I know it.”

  We smoke a cigarette. “Starting a week with gloomy thoughts like that. It’s so depressing.”

  “Yes, I know. What can I say?” She sighs. “It’s like a revelation. I can just feel it coming.”

  I watch Vincent as he comes over to the coffee machine. I watch him eating at lunchtime. I watch him at closing time. But I don’t know what I’m looking for.

  In any c
ase, I’m thinking about asking him if he’s planning on staying at the house for any length of time. I’m afraid he’ll take it wrong, but his presence does make certain things a little complicated—like having a secret liaison, for example.

  I was thrilled that Josie threw him out and I have thoroughly enjoyed his company these past few days, enjoying every minute he spent at the house with me, liked him eating there, washing there, sleeping there, calling to me from down the hall, roaming around in his bathrobe, thundering down the stairs, clearing the snow out front, not being just a visitor—and I was happy he was here for a host of other reasons, but then there was the incident in the laundry room and since then I’ve been wanting to lead my life as I see fit, far from prying eyes. In short, I would rather he weren’t here but here he is, he’s underfoot now, and I can’t see Patrick again for three days—Josie finally allowed Vincent to babysit two evenings a week.

  Evening. I drink a tall glass of gin and I tell him to come over. I show him in and tell him to pour himself a drink. I feel a little on edge. This isn’t such a simple matter.

  “This isn’t such a simple matter,” I tell him. “When you think about it, you’re nothing but a disgusting little rapist, you raped me. Do you realize what you did to me? Do you think I can forgive you for that?” He sits down and buries his face in his hands.

  “Oh, no, don’t you dare!” I say to him, very annoyed. I light a cigarette.

  I start pacing up and down and he looks up. I pick up my coat. “Let’s go outside,” I say. “Let’s get some air.”

  It’s very cold, the moonlight is welcoming. We don’t go far, we stay right outside, standing side by side in the night air. “The air really smells good, don’t you think? Say something. Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you sure? You’re only wearing a shirt.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Can you put yourself in my shoes?”

  I don’t look at him, but the fog from his breath enters my field of vision. “What am I supposed to do with you?” I ask. “Help me out, tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  I sneak a peek at him and I can tell he doesn’t know any better than I do. I can see he’s trying to figure it out, too, that he would like to understand better, but it’s hopeless.

  “I can’t do anything otherwise,” he says after a moment.

  “I got that,” I say. “I’m not blind.”

  Then he belabors the point, loud and clear: “I can’t get it up otherwise, you understand?”

  Now I look right at him, then I shrug and look elsewhere. “This is insane,” I say with a sigh.

  I keep looking at the sky for another minute or two, then I suggest we go back inside and get warm.

  I have to wait two more days to see him again, wait until Vincent has another evening with Édouard so I’m free and we do it again. We have a drink to kick-start things, then he promptly jumps me and we are quickly rolling around on the floor, our savage battle begun. He tears off my clothes and I scream. I punch him, for real, with my fists. He puts his hands around my throat, hits me, possesses me, and so forth.

  Over the weekend, I buy a batch of cut-rate lingerie.

  After thinking it over, we decided to throw that AV Productions twenty-fifth anniversary party and Vincent is taken away from his not-too-strenuous archiving work and given a much tougher, time-consuming task—which leaves me suddenly and magically free for a few evenings because he’s knocking himself out all day long, running all over the place, from the printers to the suppliers, solving a mountain of small problems that never seem to end, never losing his cool. And so he’s falling asleep in the car on the way home and he goes straight upstairs to his bedroom and his evening is over while mine, so to speak, has just begun.

  I lie down and read for a while—I don’t like all of David Foster Wallace, but it’s often fantastic—while I wait for him to fall asleep. I go past his door to make sure. If there is no ray of light coming from underneath, no sound from within for a minute or so, I tiptoe away and go outside.

  I cross through the garden to the curb, cross the road, stroll out in the open, past the few bushes heavy with snow sparkling in the moonlight, hands in pockets, alone, hearing a bird call, smiling because the idea that Vincent might wake up and realize I’m gone is almost sweet as candy. Then I go up to the house with the lighted windows and the smoke rising from the chimney.

  Patrick thinks that when we’re in the cellar, I can scream my head off all I want and we’ll never wake the neighbors. That’s reassuring to me because I have no idea how I would explain screaming like I was going to have my throat cut, or how on earth I could be playing such idiotic and perverse games at my age.

  I haven’t taken the time to think about it. I don’t have a minute to myself, and when I miraculously manage to see Patrick we’re much too busy with our deviant encounters to take stock of what we’re doing and I put off really thinking about it. Probably out of fear that it might be indefensible—I can’t count that out.

  No one could possibly believe that I don’t get pleasure out of these terrifying charades, as twisted as they are—but I never denied it, I never said it was platonic. I feel like I’ve awakened from a long slumber and I realize just how much being with Robert had become a tiresome and indifferent affair toward the end.

  I’m aware that things cannot remain this way forever, that we’re going to have to talk about this soon, but there is also the fear that if we do talk it could all vanish in a single breath, and that fear is petrifying. When I begin to retrace my steps on the way home, happy, aching and sore, having practically lost my voice, he offers to see me to my door. But I would rather leave as I arrived, on foot, using the cold of the night to bring my body and my mind back to normal temperature.

  One evening, after an arduous day, Vincent tells me that things with Josie aren’t getting any better and that he’s thinking about going to court if he can’t obtain a more equitable arrangement for custody of Édouard.

  “For example,” he explains, “I could take him in the evening when I get out of work, then bring him back the next morning on my way in. I could feed him at night, wash him, put him to bed, then change him the next morning, comb his hair, give him breakfast.”

  I merely nod. What good would it do to point out the enormity and the absurdity of the task he’s about to take on? Is there the slightest chance he’ll listen to reason? We go for a drink before we go home. Anna joins us. This party is making her anxious, and Robert, who’s supposed to be staying at a hotel while things are up in the air, is constantly prowling around the apartment looking for a necktie or a pair of shoes he couldn’t take with him. “It’s exhausting,” she says with a sigh. “I guess he’s doing it on purpose.”

  When Vincent goes downstairs to the men’s room, I ask Anna not to encourage this crazy idea of Vincent’s that could land us with a newborn baby to take care of, not all day long but all night long, which is the worst bit. “Can you imagine, after a day like this, having to play nursemaid to an infant? Think about it, please. I don’t want that.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is, I don’t want that. I want to be able to go home and run myself a bath, nothing else.”

  “But this is important to him.”

  “I felt we had found a nice balance. Every other day is enough for me. Don’t ask me for more. Don’t bother. I need to have a couple of nights free, you understand? You have to keep a little space for yourself, you know that. That’s important, too.”

  “Listen, they could stay with me a couple of nights a week. I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “I think he isn’t going to make it. I think letting him believe he will is not helping him.”

  “We’re going to help him. We can make it work.”

  I don’t say anything. I drink my gin and tonic through a straw.

  That evening, I scream with every ounce of strength, I call for he
lp and thrash around like a wild animal and, in the end, Patrick rolls over on his side, sweating, out of breath, then lies there with his arms crossed and smiling up at the ceiling. He gives me a little whistle, as if to tell me that I played my role brilliantly, exceptionally well. I can see his nose is bleeding a little. Then he hoists himself up on one elbow and gazes at me, enthralled.

  Vincent does a good job of it, renting a houseboat near the Mitterrand Library, hiring a British DJ, and negotiating the rest with Chez Flo, getting each item at the best possible price. Everyone at the company thinks he’s great. He’s helpful, committed to his assignment, and we’re starting to think that hiring him is justified by more than an act of charity—well, I’m starting to think so, Anna says she never doubted it. But naturally there’s something wrong. His problems with Josie cast a shadow over everything, taking all the pleasure out of it. I have time to listen to him at length on the way home, so I know they are far from any agreement and things are getting hairy. In one sense that’s reassuring for me, because I see that my fears have been premature, but in another sense it’s worrisome, catching a glimpse of his dark expression by the greenish glow of the dashboard lights.

  I have always feared that my father passed something along to me, that I am nothing more than a cursed link in a cursed chain.

  “Tell her I want to see her, tell her I want to talk to her.”

  I swerve to avoid a cyclist teetering on a municipal bike rental.

  “Watch where you’re going,” he says after jumping out of his seat. “You’re driving a fucking car.”

  He drinks too much coffee.

  “You’re always so wound up,” I say.

  The day before the party, he’s still out running around, checking that everything’s been checked, that the cake will be ready, making sure there is no snowfall or transportation strike looming that might disrupt the evening. Then he calls Josie and I get the feeling they have started to quibble over scheduling issues and he walks away because the exchange is getting hotter, peppered with angry flashes, and soon all I can make out is the ordinary and predictable litany that is now their poor excuse for conversation, and then he vanishes down the emergency staircase, as if leaving a trail of flame in his wake.