We went all around our apartment and she asked me whether she could have a small study next to her bedroom: “It will be my little corner … You could only come in if I invited you; you know I have a fierce need for independence, Dickie. (She had been calling me Dickie since hearing a young lady in England hailing a young man by this name.) You don’t know me yet, you’ll see, I’m terrible.”
She had brought champagne, cakes, and a bouquet of asters. With a low table, a couple of armchairs, and a crystal vase, she improvised a charming homely scene. We had the most cheerful, tender evening meal. We were alone and we loved each other. I do not regret those times, although they were fleeting. Their last chords still resonate within me, and if I listen very carefully and silence the noise of the present, I can make out their pure but already doomed sound.
. VI .
Nevertheless, it was on the very morning after this supper that I have to register the first knock to send a fine crack through the transparent crystal of my love. An insignificant episode but one that prefigured everything to come. It was at the upholsterer’s, where we were ordering our furnishings. Odile had chosen curtains that I thought expensive. We discussed this briefly, very amicably, then she demurred. The salesman was a good-looking fellow who had energetically taken my wife’s part and had irritated me. As we were leaving, I caught sight in a looking glass of a glance of understanding and regret exchanged between this salesman and Odile. I cannot describe how I felt. Since my engagement I had subconsciously developed an absurd conviction that my wife’s mind was now linked to my own and that, by constant transfusion, my thoughts would always be hers. The concept of independence in a living being by my side was, I think, incomprehensible to me. Still more so the concept that this being might conspire against me with a stranger. Nothing could have been more fleeting or more innocent than that glance. I could make no comment, I was not even sure of what I had seen, and yet I feel it is to that moment that I can trace the revelation of jealousy.
Before my marriage, not once had I thought of jealousy, other than as a theatrical emotion and one worthy of utmost contempt. I saw Othello as a tragic jealous figure, and Molière’s George Dandin as a comic one. Imagining that I might someday play one of these characters, or perhaps both at once, would have seemed quite ridiculous. I had always been the one to abandon my mistresses when I tired of them. If they were unfaithful to me, I never knew it. I remember when a friend told me he was suffering from jealousy, I replied, “I can’t understand you … I simply wouldn’t be able to carry on loving a woman who didn’t love me …”
Why did Odile make me anxious the moment I saw her surrounded by male friends? She was so gentle and even tempered but, I could not say how, she created an aura of mystery around her. I had not noticed it during our engagement or our honeymoon because our solitude and the total intermixing of our two lives at the time left no room for any mystery, but in Paris I immediately perceived a distant, as yet undefined danger. We were very close, very tender, but—as I want to be honest with you here—I have to confess that as early as the second month of our married life I knew that the real Odile was not the one I had loved. I did not love the one I was discovering any the less, but it was with a quite different sort of love. In Florence I believed I had met the Amazon; I myself had created a perfect mythical Odile. I was wrong. Odile was no goddess made of ivory and moonlight; she was a woman. Like me, like you, like the entire unhappy human race, she was divided and multiple. And she too doubtless now realized I was very different from the besotted man who had walked beside her in Florence.
As soon as I was back in France, I had to take a serious part in running the factory in Gandumas and the office in Paris. My father, who had considerable parliamentary commitments, had been overrun with work in my absence. When I met with them, our best clients were quick to complain of being neglected. The business quarter was a long way from the home we had rented on the rue de la Faisanderie. I soon realized it would be impossible for me to return home for lunch. If you add to this the fact that I had to spend one day a week at Gandumas and that this hasty journey was too tiring to allow me to take Odile with me, you will understand how our lives were immediately separated against our will.
On my way home in the evenings, I felt happy knowing I would soon see my wife’s beautiful face. I liked the furnishings with which she had surrounded herself. I was not accustomed to living among lovely things, but it seemed I had an innate need for them, and Odile’s taste delighted me. In my parents’ house in Gandumas, too many pieces of furniture accumulated over three or four generations cluttered salons whose walls were hung with fabrics in blue-green tones, featuring crudely drawn peacocks wandering between stylized trees. Odile had had our walls painted in soft single colors; she liked bedrooms to be almost bare, with great deserted plains of pale carpeting. When I went into her boudoir, I felt such an acute sense of beauty that I found it obscurely disturbing. My wife would be lying on a chaise longue, almost always in a white dress, and beside her (on the low table of our first supper) stood a narrow-necked Venetian vase bearing a single flower and sometimes some scant foliage. Odile loved flowers more than anything, and I in turn was learning to love choosing flowers for her. I learned to follow the changing seasons in florists’ windows; I was happy to see chrysanthemums or tulips appear once more, because their strident or delicate colors gave me an opportunity to solicit from my wife’s lips the happy Odile smile. When she saw me come home from work with a crisp-edged white paper package in my hands, she would jump up happily: “Oh! Thank you, Dickie …” She admired them, enchanted, before becoming serious and saying, “I’m going to arrange my flowers.” She would then spend an hour finding the correct vase, stem length, and lighting to ensure a single iris or rose curved as gracefully as possible.
After this, though, the evening would often become peculiarly sad, like on sunny days when the shadows of huge clouds take the world by surprise as they envelop everything. We had little to say to one another. I tried often enough to talk to Odile about my business, but she had no interest in it. She had exhausted the novelty of listening to me describing my youth; my ideas did not change much because I had no time to read, and she was uncomfortably aware of this. I tried to bring my two closest friends into our life. Odile instantly disliked André Halff, whom she found sarcastic, almost hostile, and indeed he was so with her.
“You don’t like Odile,” I once said to him.
“I think she’s very beautiful,” he said.
“Yes, but not very intelligent?”
“True … There’s no need for a woman to be intelligent.”
“Anyway, you’re wrong; Odile is very intelligent, but it’s not your sort of intelligence. She’s intuitive, concrete.”
“You could be right,” he said.
It was different with Bertrand. He tried to have a deep, confidential friendship with Odile and found her rebellious, defensive. Bertrand and I could happily spend an entire evening sitting together, smoking, and putting the world to rights. Odile preferred to spend the end of the day at theaters, cabarets, or amusement parks. One evening she made me spend three whole hours roaming around between shops, fairground rides, raffles, and shooting galleries. Her two brothers came with us; Odile always had fun with these two spoiled, boisterous, and slightly unpredictable children.
“Come on, Odile,” I said toward midnight, “haven’t you had enough? Can’t you see that it’s rather ridiculous. Surely you can’t actually enjoy throwing balls at bottles, going around in circles in fake automobiles, and winning a boat made of spun glass on the fortieth attempt?”
She replied with a quote from a philosopher I had told her to read: “What does it matter if a pleasure is false, so long as we believe it is real …” And, taking her brother’s arm, she ran off toward a shooting gallery; she was a very fine shot and, after hitting ten eggs in as many shots, went home in good spirits.
At the time of our marriage, I believed that, like me, Odile could no
t bear the social scene. This was not the case. She liked dinners and balls; as soon as she discovered the dazzling animated group that revolved around Aunt Cora, she wanted to go to avenue Marceau every Tuesday. My only desire since our marriage had been to have Odile to myself; I could rest easy only when I knew that so much beauty was perfectly contained within the narrow confines of our home. This was something I felt so powerfully that I was happier when Odile, who was always fragile and often laid low by exhaustion, had to keep to her bed for a few days. Then I would spend the evening in an armchair beside her. We would have long conversations together that she called “waffling,” and I would read to her. I quickly learned what sort of book would capture her attention for a few hours. She had quite good taste, but in order to please her a book had to be both melancholy and passionate. She liked Dominique, Turgenev’s novels, and a few English poets.
“It’s strange,” I said. “Someone who doesn’t know you well might think you frivolous, and yet deep down you like only rather sad books.”
“But I’m very serious, Dickie; perhaps that’s why I’m frivolous. I don’t want to show everyone what I’m really like.”
“Not even me?”
“Well, you, yes … Remember Florence …”
“Yes, in Florence I came to know you well … But you’re very different now, darling.”
“We mustn’t always stay the same.”
“You don’t even say anything kind to me anymore.”
“People don’t say kind things to order. Be patient; it will come back …”
“Like in Florence?”
“Well, of course, Dickie. I haven’t changed.”
She held out a hand to me and I took it, then another great “waffling” began about my parents, hers, Misa, a dress she had ordered, life. On these evenings when she was tired and gentle, she really was like the mythical Odile as I had conceived her. Kindly and weak, in my power. I was grateful to her for this languor. The moment she felt stronger and could go out, I was confronted with the mysterious Odile again.
She never told me spontaneously, as many chatty transparent women might, what she had done in my absence. If I inquired about this, she would reply with very few, almost always vague words. What she told me never allowed me to picture at all satisfactorily the succession of events. I remember one of her friends telling me long afterward (with that harshness that women have toward each other), “Odile always embroidered the truth.” This was not true, and at the time I felt indignant about the comment, but when I thought about it later I could easily see what it was about Odile that might give this judgment some weight: the nonchalant way she described things … her contempt for precision … If, surprised by an improbable detail, I questioned her, she would shut down like a schoolboy when an insensitive master asks questions beyond his scope.
One day when, unusually, I was able to come home for lunch, Odile asked the maid for her hat and coat at two o’clock.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” I asked.
“I have an appointment with the dentist.”
“Yes, darling, but I heard you on the telephone; your appointment isn’t until three. What will you do until then?”
“Nothing. I’d like to go there slowly.”
“But, my child, that’s absurd; the dentist lives on the avenue de Malakoff. It will take you ten minutes to get there and you have an hour. Where are you going?”
“You do amuse me,” she replied and went out.
After dinner that evening, I could not help asking her, “So what did you do between two and three?”
She tried to joke at first, then, because I pressed the point, she got up and went to bed without saying good night. This had never happened before. I went to ask her forgiveness. She kissed me. Before leaving the room, when I could see she was pacified, I asked, “Now, do be kind and tell me what you did between two and three.”
She burst out laughing. But later in the night I heard some noise, turned on my light, and went to her room to find her crying softly. Why was she crying? With shame or concern?
She answered my questions: “Be careful about this. I love you very much. But beware: I’m extremely proud … I have it in me to leave you, even though I love you, if there are more scenes like this … I may be in the wrong, but you will have to accept me as I am.”
“Darling,” I said, “I shall do my best, but you too must try to change a little. You say you’re proud; could you not occasionally overcome your pride?”
She shook her head obstinately. “No, I cannot change. You always say that what you like about me is how natural I am. If I changed I would no longer be natural. It is up to you to be different.”
“My darling, I could never be different enough to understand what I do not understand. I was brought up by a father who always taught me to respect the truth and precision above all else … It’s the very way my mind works … No, I could never say with any sincerity that I understand what you did today between two and three o’clock.”
“Oh, I’ve had enough!” she said bluntly. And, turning to one side, she pretended to sleep.
The following morning I was expecting to find her displeased, but, quite the reverse, she greeted me gaily and seemed to have forgotten everything. It was a Sunday. She asked me to go to a concert with her. They were playing Wagner’s “Good Friday Spell,” a piece we both liked very much. As we emerged, she asked me to take her somewhere for tea. There was nothing more touching than Odile when she was happy, glad to be alive; she gave such a powerful impression of being made for happiness, that it seemed criminal not to give it to her. Looking at her that Sunday, so animated and dazzling, I could scarcely believe our quarrel the previous evening had been real. But the more I came to know my wife, the better I understood that she had a capacity for forgetting that likened her to a child. Nothing differed more from my own nature, my own mind, which noticed, accumulated, and recorded. That day, life for Odile was a cup of tea, hot buttered toast, and cream. She smiled at me and I thought, “What truly divides people could be the fact that some live mostly in the past while others only in the present moment.”
I was still suffering slightly but was incapable of resenting her for long. In my head I upbraided and lectured myself, swore I would no longer ask pointless questions, would have faith. We went home on foot, across the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Elysées; Odile inhaled the cool autumn air with delight. It seemed to me, as it had in Florence in the spring, that the russet-colored trees, the shifting gray and golden light, the happy bustle of Paris, the children’s boats whose sails leaned over the large pond, and the flexible spray of the fountain in their midsts—everything was singing the Knight’s theme in unison. I kept repeating a sentence from Rondet’s Christian Manual to myself, one I liked very much and that I had grown accustomed to applying to my relationship with Odile: “Here I am before you like a slave and I am ready to do anything, for I want nothing for myself, but for you.” When I succeeded in conquering my pride like this and humiliating myself, not before Odile but to be more precise before my love for Odile, I felt pleased with myself.
. VII .
The person Odile saw most often was Misa. They telephoned each other every morning, sometimes talking for more than an hour, and went out together in the afternoon. I was in favor of this friendship, which kept Odile occupied without danger while I was at work. I even enjoyed seeing Misa at our apartment on Sundays and, more than once, it was I who suggested this friend accompany us when Odile and I made little two- or three-day trips. I want to try to explain the feelings that guided me in this, because they will help you understand Misa’s unusual role in my life. First, if, as in the early weeks of our marriage, I still wanted to be alone with Odile, it was now more out of a vague fear of what new friends might bring than for positive pleasure. I loved her no less, but I knew that exchanges between us would always be limited and that she would accept truly serious, in-depth conversations only with listless goodwill. On the other ha
nd, it is fair to say that I was developing a taste for the slightly mad, slightly sad, often frivolous, and always gracious chattering, the “waffling” that was Odile’s real form of conversation when she was quite natural. But Odile was never more herself than with Misa. When they talked together, they both displayed a puerile side, one I found very entertaining and touching too, in that it showed me what Odile might have been like as a child. I was delighted one evening while we were staying in Dieppe when they argued like children, and Odile ended up throwing a pillow at Misa’s face, crying, “Beastly girl!”
I also harbored more unsettling feelings, the sort that must appear every time circumstances rather than love cause a young woman to be involved in a man’s daily life. Thanks to our journeys and thanks to Odile’s own familiarity that permitted my own, I found I was almost as initimate with Misa as with a mistress. One day when we were discussing women’s physical strength, she challenged me. We wrestled for a moment; I tipped her over, then stood up, slightly ashamed.
“Really, you’re such children!” said Odile.
Misa stayed on the floor a long time, staring at me.
In fact she was the only human being Odile and I received at home with equal pleasure. Halff and Bertrand hardly came anymore and I did not miss them much. I very soon felt the same way about them as Odile did. And when I listened to her talking to them, I experienced a strange duality. Seeing her through their eyes, I felt she treated serious subjects with inappropriate levity. But at the same time I managed to prefer her flights of fancy to my friends’ theories. I was ashamed of my wife in front of them but proud of her in front of myself. When they left, I would think to myself that, in spite of everything, Odile was superior to them in her more direct contact with life and nature.
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