Crimes of Winter

by Philippe Georget

  She rose without a word and left police headquarters. It was time for her to go back to the room in the women’s shelter where social services had sent her. There she would find other battered women. They were real victims. Not sluts . . .

  Gilles emerged exhausted from this interview and he waited until he had left headquarters to read Claire’s SMS. She was just asking him to buy bread if he came by the house before going out for the evening. He replied that yes, he needed to take a shower and change his clothes, and that he would buy bread on the way if there was any left. There was nothing exciting in that, much less romantic, but Claire had shared messages like that one with no one else, he was sure of that. Should he be happy about it? He no longer knew. If little everyday habits constituted a couple’s DNA, didn’t that explain the significance of parallel love affairs?

  CHAPTER 36

  I’m delighted to finally meet you. Julie has told me so much about you.”

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “From time to time . . .”

  “You’re at it already.”

  Julie took her girlfriend by the neck and reassured Gilles:

  “Marina is teasing you, she can’t help it. I even wonder if she isn’t a little jealous. Sit down, make yourself at home.”

  Sebag crossed a thick carpet that muffled his steps and sat down on a fuchsia-pink couch with comfortable cushions. On his right, an ethanol fireplace radiated an exquisite warmth into the room. For a few seconds, he indulged in the contemplation of a yellow flame with bluish gleams that was silently dancing in its glass bubble.

  “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” Marina said. “That was a gift that Julie gave us one Christmas. The only thing we regret about our move to the South is that we use it much less here than we did in Paris. I could spend whole hours in the dark watching this fireplace.”

  For the moment, it was he, Gilles Sebag, whom the young woman was observing attentively with her dark, shining eyes.

  “Have I passed the exam?” he finally asked.

  A dimple appeared in Marina’s right cheek. For hardly a fraction of a second. Then it disappeared in a smile.

  “Excuse me. It’s a déformation professionnelle.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a physical therapist. And I can’t help examining people the first time: I study their bearing, their posture, and I try to discern their imbalances.”

  “What’s your diagnosis?”

  “Your weak point is your back, isn’t it?”

  Sebag nodded.

  “Remedy?”

  “Massages, loosening up, modification of the running posture, and probably . . .”

  “What would you like to drink, Gilles?” Julie suddenly interrupted.

  “Do you have whiskey?”

  “I think we have some left. You wouldn’t prefer some fruit juice? We make excellent cocktails.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “I can offer you a blinker: whiskey, grenadine, and grapefruit juice.”

  Gilles smiled at his young colleague’s insistence on selling him her fruit juices.

  “The blinker will be fine. I like the name.”

  Before disappearing into the kitchen, Julie looked sternly at her girlfriend. Which only increased Sebag’s curiosity.

  “What were you saying before Julie so abruptly cut you off?”

  “It wasn’t important.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “Well, if you insist . . .”

  “Can we say ‘tu’ to each other?”

  “If you insist.”

  “I insist.”

  “Regarding saying ‘tu’?”

  “And the rest, too.”

  Marina looked at the flame in the fireplace before making up her mind.

  “Before attending a school of physical therapy I got a master’s in psychology, and I like to connect the two disciplines. I think that many of our physical problems come from our psychological weaknesses. Sometimes it can be the other way around, but it’s rarer. For instance, an anxious person has tense muscles and stiff joints, and he will be subject to cramps and tendinitis. A depressed person holds himself badly, he has low shoulders, a slightly curved back and neck. The posture is often imperceptible to the untrained eye but it is sufficiently marked to produce headaches and lumbago . . .”

  Sebag nodded.

  “So according to you, I belong to the depressed type, is that it?”

  Marina sucked in her lips.

  “I spoke too soon. Julie has often told me how . . . how intuitive you are in your work and I was trying to show you that I can be intuitive too. But I spoke before thinking, I’m sorry.”

  Julie was already coming back with a tray full of colored glasses. She put a blue lagoon in front of Marina, a blinker with orange tones in front of Gilles, and kept for herself a margarita with lime-green reflections.

  “Do you serve your aperitifs in accord with the tastes of each person or only to compose a colorful tableau?” Gilles joked.

  “Both, Lieutenant.”

  She leaned over to whisper in his ear:

  “I didn’t tell Marina anything about what you confided in me. I promise.”

  He replied with a nod and a movement of his eyelids that meant “not to worry.” Julie grabbed a large cushion, put it in front of the coffee table, and abruptly sat down on it. The cushion adapted to her form and turned into a pouffe. Gilles asked Marina questions about her work. After practicing in retirement homes while she was living in the Paris area, the young physical therapist had realized one of her dreams when she arrived in Perpignan: she was now working in a private clinic specializing in sports injuries. She was no longer working with stiff, tired people who were condemned to gradually lose their mobility—from the bed to the armchair, then from the armchair to the bed, as the song said—but with healthy, muscular bodies that she helped get back in shape for future exploits. In particular, the members of the USAP rugby team passed through her expert hands one after the other.

  After the aperitif, they sat down at the table before a rabbit in mustard sauce that Julie had accompanied with vegetables: chard, tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms.

  Gilles congratulated her. “I didn’t know you had this talent.”

  “I can make only one or two dishes I was taught by my mother. Once I’ve made them all for my friends, I turn the cooking over to Marina, who is a real cordon bleu chef.”

  Julie had opened a Côtes du Roussillon Villages, a nice Haute Coutume 2010 by Catalan winemakers. Gilles savored the final spicy, almost vanilla note on his palate. In the concert of forks and knives, the conversation turned toward their current investigations. Julie had made hardly any progress on the burglaries in Bas-Vernet. However, they seemed to have slowed down after the vacation ended. Then Marina brought in a dessert she had prepared. On a dish with a wide rim, a custard licked the edges of an appetizing chocolate fondant. She took three small crystal glasses out of a wooden cabinet and set them down in front of the dishes before filling them with a coppery liquid with glints of emerald green. Banyuls grand cru from the Domain des Templiers, Gilles read on the label. He wasn’t crazy about sweet wines, but since he’d been living in Northern Catalonia he’d learned to like them with dessert. He used his spoon to cut off a chunk of the fondant. In the dish, dark cocoa sauce mixed with the yellow of the custard.

  “This is delicious,” he said appreciatively after a first mouthful.

  “I have to admit that I’m not unhappy with myself,” Marina said.

  Once the dessert was finished, she suggested they return to the living room.

  “Coffee, tea, herbal tea?”

  “For once, I’m going to avoid coffee,” Gilles answered. “I’m having trouble sleeping just now. Maybe it’s that . . .”

  “Tea, then? Green, re
d, black, or yellow tea?”

  “It’s like the cocktails, you serve them according to the colors?”

  “I can also classify them by country: tea from Thailand, tea from China, tea from Japan. Or a rooibos from South Africa, a very relaxing drink that aids digestion. Excellent for having beautiful dreams.”

  “Can it be smoked, too?” Sebag joked.

  Marina disappeared again into the kitchen and Julie resumed their shop talk. But was it really shop talk?

  “I heard about your action this afternoon. Really, you have no luck . . . It’s as if for some reason everything you do revolves around the same themes.”

  “However, I remind you that I arrested a young drug dealer before Christmas. So far as we know, conjugal problems were not involved in that case.”

  “But you left the rest of the investigation to the customs agents! Who knows whether an affair isn’t behind all that!”

  “Stop . . .”

  Gilles picked up the bottle of wine and summarily poured the last drop into his own glass.

  “And all of them go in the same direction: it’s always an unfaithful woman, never the other way around! I’m cursed.”

  “That’s the law of series, as they say. Or else a social phenomenon.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Manners change. Infidelity used to be mainly masculine, probably because men, by their work and their leisure, were more often away from home and also because it was considered less blameworthy. When a man had relations with prostitutes in a whorehouse, people didn’t even call it adultery . . .”

  Gilles understood that this spiel was in no way spontaneous. Julie was no longer talking shop. Not at all.

  “Manners change, yes, but slowly. Women are freer and, despite everything, it’s still often the man who’s hitting on women, making the first move. In short, women still have as many offers as they used to have, and let themselves be tempted more easily. A pretty woman often has too many options. Claire is a pretty woman. She cheated on you once, but did you ask yourself how many times she rejected the propositions men were making her?”

  Sebag had to recognize that he had never asked himself that question.

  “And you, Gilles, how often have you turned down propositions made by a woman?”

  The image of Elsa Moulin appeared to him. Other pretty faces he‘d also met in recent years. But he didn’t need to think long before answering:

  “Zero. I believe I could have had a few opportunities but I have never had any explicit propositions.”

  “And if you had, would you have resisted every time?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  Julie had led him where she wanted: to reconsider Claire’s conduct with more indulgence. Marina came back into the living room with three steaming cups.

  “What were you talking about?” the young physical therapist asked.

  “About infidelity in general, and about feminine adultery as a social phenomenon,” Julie replied.

  “Ah, I see . . .”

  She handed each of them a cup.

  “It‘s funny that you were talking about that tonight. I have a patient who is a lawyer specializing in divorce cases and she was just telling me that she has been literally swamped for the past few months. A veritable epidemic. She’s a jogger who runs races every Sunday and no longer has time to train during the week. The result is that she got injured two weeks ago.”

  Marina blew on her cup of tea.

  “And regarding social phenomena, she told me that right now a majority of couples are separating at the initiative of men. There seems to be a large increase in the number of cuckolds.”

  Sebag almost choked on his mouthful of herbal tea. It had a bitter taste. Julie tapped him on the back. Her gesture finished with a friendly caress.

  “We talked a lot about that while I was massaging her. About the why, the how, and . . .”

  Marina suddenly fell silent.

  “And?” Julie asked.

  “Uhh . . . I don’t know if we can talk about that after all . . .”

  She was taking sideways glances at Gilles.

  “We also talked about women’s pleasure, sex, morality, and so on. It’s private, in fact. We still don’t know each other very well . . .”

  “OK, I know what we need then,” Julie said, getting up. “Indica or sativa?”

  Marina burst into laughter. Julie addressed herself particularly to Gilles: “I recommend indica. That variety of cannabis has powerful destressing properties.”

  Sebag stared at them one after the other.

  “Ah, OK . . . A little while ago when you were talking about herbal teas and teas, I thought I was in a delicatessen. Now I see that it’s a coffee shop27 instead. Why not, after all? That will remind me of my youth.”

  They had to wait for the joint Julie had rolled to circulate several times before Marina resumed the discussion.

  “So then . . . where to begin?”

  “At the beginning,” Julie suggested.

  She turned to Gilles:

  “I think this is going to be long . . .”

  Marina took a hit and closed her eyes a moment.

  “The first observation that can be made is that contrary to what people have believed or wanted to make others believe for centuries, women are made for love. And I’m not talking about romanticism but about physical love, about sex with a big S!”

  “Why a big one?” Julie joked. “Size is not as important as all that!”

  Marina didn’t allow herself to be distracted.

  “As I recall, men’s pleasure—and my memories are getting older and older—is a little spasm and it’s over. Whereas with us, it’s a wave, a storm, sometimes a tidal wave. The female orgasm has long frightened both men and women. That’s why it has been so repressed.”

  “Marina is a feminist,” Julie thought it useful to point out. “Her grandmother was even one of the founders of the MLF.”28

  “We don’t experience just one pleasure, or even two, as is too often thought, but dozens of kinds of pleasures. Some people compare a woman’s body to an Advent calendar with a multitude of windows that just have to be opened . . .”

  “Hmm . . . I love the chocolates. Merry Christmas!”

  “These windows open up one after the other as time goes by, and as a woman matures, gains confidence, and finds skillful lovers—male or female, of course.”

  “For her master’s in psychology, she chose the sexology option,” Julie broke in again, speaking to Gilles. “That was the area in which she got the best grade. On the oral, naturally.”

  Her blue eyes were reddening. Probably fatigue. After taking a long puff, she passed the joint to Gilles. Marina paused; she seemed to have lost the thread of her lecture. Gilles took hit after hit, hoping to hide behind a halo of smoke. He didn’t dare say anything. When women talk about female sexual pleasure among themselves, a wise man keeps quiet. Because he knows that if he speaks, he will at best be taken as pretentious and at worst for an imbecile. The two were not incompatible.

  Marina took another sip of herbal tea. Her eyes were red, too. Probably the chamomile. Or the valerian. Who knew . . .

  “So,” she concluded, “—and this is where the Athenians fizzled out—the longer that goes on the harder it will be for women to remain faithful! And since men, who remain incurable machos, are less inclined to put up with cheating than women are, the number of divorces is going to continue to increase. QED!”

  She laughed at her formulation, a thick, breathy laugh. Julie sent a second joint around and then got up to open a window. Sebag sank further into the cushions. As she sat back down on her pouffe, Julie said with alarm:

  “Really . . .You seem to have a lot of time to chat, you and your lawyer, during massages . . .”

  “In two weeks, she has already
had four sessions.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “And . . . uhh . . .does she still like men?”

  “Ha, ha, ha! For the time being, yes! She left her husband when she found out that he’d cheated on her. Which just goes to show that that happens in that direction too, sometimes. And after going through a difficult period, she’s now in full bloom. She’s having a blast!”

  She stopped long enough to giggle again.

  “Finally, she realized that her guy wasn’t such a good lay!”

  Gilles felt himself disappearing into the voluptuous couch. Soon he would go down body and soul. Despite the . . . fatigue and the chamomile. Or the linden. Marina went on and on. Her voice seemed to come from farther and farther away.

  “The other question that comes up is: can you experience a fully-developed sexuality with one and the same guide all your life?”

  The question should have struck Gilles. It barely grazed him.

  “All women have several partners during their lives,” Julie objected.

  “Lucky again! But in general, they have several experiences before they meet their ‘sister soul’ and after that, hang on!”

  “Uhh . . . You wouldn’t be sending me a subliminal message there, would you?”

  Marina caressed her partner’s cheek.

  “We never promised eternal fidelity, my love. And even if I don’t necessarily plan to cheat on you someday, I don’t consider ideal the prospect of never knowing anyone else intimately before I die.”

  Julie took her girlfriend’s hand and continued the caress, but she remained pensive and did not reply.

  “That’s precisely the big problem these days,” Marina went on. “How can sexual fulfillment be reconciled with life in a couple, with a family life? The old morality is no longer of much help to us. Each person has to find her own path.”

  “It’s very comfortable here at your place . . .”

  Gilles had said that without thinking. Had he really said it? He doubted it for a few seconds, long enough for Marina’s and Julie’s responses to reach him: