by Nina George
Catherine had pierced ears, but she wasn’t wearing earrings. (‘His new girlfriend wears the ones with the rubies now. Shame, really: I’d have loved to cast them at his feet.’) She sometimes touched the hollow of her throat, as though searching for something, maybe a necklace that the other woman was now wearing too.
‘And what are you up to at the moment?’ she asked.
He described the Literary Apothecary to her.
‘A boat with a low-slung belly, a galley, two sleeping berths, a bathroom and eight thousand books. It’s a world apart from our world.’ And an arrested adventure, like any moored ship – but he didn’t say this.
‘And the king of this world is Monsieur Perdu, a literary pharmacist who writes prescriptions for the lovesick.’
Catherine pointed to the parcel of books that he had brought her the previous evening. ‘It helps, by the way.’
‘What did you want to be when you were a little girl?’ he asked before his embarrassment could get the better of him.
‘Oh, I wanted to be a librarian. And a pirate. Your book barge would have been exactly what I needed. I would have solved all the world’s mysteries through reading.’
Perdu listened to her with growing affection.
‘At night I would have stolen back from evil people everything they’d tricked the good ones out of with their lies, leaving a single book that would cleanse them and force them to repent, turn them into good people and so on – of course.’ She broke into laughter.
‘Of course,’ he fell in with her ironic tone. That was the only tragic thing about books: they changed people. All except the truly evil, who did not become better fathers, nicer husbands, more loving friends. They remained tyrants, continued to torment their employees, children and dogs, were spiteful in petty matters and cowardly in important ones, and rejoiced in their victims’ shame.
‘Books were my friends,’ said Catherine, and cooled her cheek, which was red from the heat of cooking, on her wine glass. ‘I think I learned all my feelings from books. In them I loved and laughed and found out more than in my whole non-reading life.’
‘Me too,’ murmured Perdu.
They looked at each other – and then it simply clicked.
‘What does the J stand for?’ asked Catherine in a huskier voice.
He had to clear his throat before he could answer.
‘Jean,’ he whispered. The word was so unfamiliar that his tongue collided with his teeth.
‘My name is Jean. Jean Albert Victor Perdu. Albert after my paternal grandfather, Victor after my maternal grandfather. My mother is a professor, and her father, Victor Bernier, was a toxicologist, a socialist and mayor. I’m fifty years old, Catherine, and I haven’t known many women, let alone slept with them. I loved one. She left me.’
Catherine studied him intently.
‘Yesterday. Twenty-one years ago yesterday. The letter is from her. I’m scared of what’s in it.’
He waited for her to throw him out, strike him or look away. But she did none of those.
‘Oh, Jean,’ she whispered instead, full of compassion. ‘Jean.’
There it was again.
The sweet sound of his own name.
They looked at each other; he noticed a fluttering in her eyes and felt himself growing softer too, letting her enter and understand him – yes, they pierced each other with their gaze and their unspoken words.
Two small boats on a sea, both thinking they’d been drifting alone since they’d lost their anchors, but now …
She ran her fingers fleetingly across his cheek.
The caress struck him with the force of a slap – a wonderful, marvellous slap.
Again. Again!
Their bare forearms brushed as she set down her wine glass.
Skin. Downy hairs. Warmth.
It wasn’t clear which of the two was more startled – but both of them immediately realised that it wasn’t the strangeness, the sudden intimacy and the touch that was startling.
They were startled by how good it felt.
11
Jean took a step until he was standing behind Catherine and could smell her hair and feel her shoulders against his chest. His heart was racing. He laid his hands incredibly slowly and extremely lightly on her slight wrists. He embraced her softly and ran his thumb and fingers up Catherine’s arms in a circle of warmth and skin.
She gasped, a tightly clasped birdcall of his name.
‘Jean?’
‘Yes, Catherine.’
Jean Perdu felt a tremor run through her whole body. It came from her very centre, below her navel, a trembling and a rolling. It spread like ripples on water. He hugged her from behind, holding her tight.
Her body was shaking, betraying the fact that it had been a long time, a very long time, since she had been touched. She was a bud trapped inside a calloused husk.
So lonely. So alone.
Catherine leaned back gently against him. Her short hair smelled good.
Jean Perdu touched her even more lightly, just stroking the tips of the little hairs, the air above her bare arms.
It’s so wonderful.
More, begged Catherine’s body. Oh please, more; it’s been so long, I am thirsting. And please, no, not so hard. It’s too much, too much. I can’t stand it! How I’ve missed it. I could cope with missing it, until now. I was so hard on myself. But now I’m cracking, I’m trickling away like sand, I’m vanishing. So help me – carry on.
Can I hear her feelings?
The only sounds coming from her mouth were variations on his name.
Jean. Jean! Jean?
Catherine let herself fall back against him and surrendered to his hands. Heat coursed through his fingers. He felt as if he were hand and cock and feeling and body and soul and man and every muscle at the same time, all concentrated in each fingertip.
He touched only what he could reach of her bare skin without moving her dress. Her arms, which were firm and brown where they emerged from her sleeves; he encircled them repeatedly, and moulded his hands to them. He stroked her nape, dark brown; her throat, delicate and soft; her magnificent, sweeping, hypnotic collarbone. He did this with the ends of his fingers, the tip of his thumb; he followed the contours of her muscles, both hard and soft, all with the tip of his thumb.
Her skin grew ever warmer. He felt the muscles swelling underneath, felt Catherine’s whole body gaining in vivacity, suppleness and heat. A dense, heavy flower emerging slowly from its bud. A queen of the night.
He let her name roll off his tongue.
‘Catherine.’
Long-forgotten emotions shook off the crust of time inside him. Perdu felt a tautness in his lower abdomen. His hands had a better sense now not only of what they were doing to Catherine, but also of how her skin responded, how her body caressed his hands in return. Her body kissed his palms and his fingertips.
How does she do that? What’s she doing to me?
Could he carry and lay her down where her trembling legs would be able to rest, where he wanted to explore how her skin felt on her calves and behind the backs of her knees? Could he conjure further melodies from her?
He wanted to see her lying there in front of him, eyes open, their gazes interlocking; he wanted to touch her lips with his fingers, and her face. He wanted her whole body to kiss his hands – every part of her body.
Catherine turned around, eyes the grey of rain-laden storm clouds, wide, wild and turbulent.
Now he lifted her up. She melded herself to him. He carried her into the bedroom, rocking her gently on the way. Her flat was the mirror image of his own. A mattress on the floor, a clothes rail in the corner, books, reading lamp – and a record player.
His own reflection greeted him in the high windows – a faceless silhouette. Upright, though. Strong. A woman in his arms – and what a woman.
Jean Perdu felt his body shaking something off. An emotional mustiness, a blindness about himself. A desire to be invisible.
I am a man … again.
He laid Catherine on the simple bed, on the smooth white sheet. She lay there, her legs together, her arms by her sides. He stretched out on his side facing her, watched how she breathed and how her body trembled in certain places, like the after-tremors of tiny earthquakes under the skin.
In the hollow of her throat, say. Between breast and chin, below her neck.
He leaned over and placed his lips on the trembling. That birdcall again.
‘Jean …’
Her pulsations. Her heartbeat. Her warmth. He felt Catherine streaming into him over his lips. Her scent, and how his muscles contracted. The heat she was radiating caught a flame in him.
And then – Oh! I’m dying! – she touched him.
Fingers on fabric, hands on skin. She had run her hands up along his tie and burrowed under his shirt.
As her hand made contact with his skin, it was as though a very ancient sensation was rearing its head. It was spreading, filling Monsieur Perdu from inside to outside, and rising higher and higher, into every fibre and cell, until it reached his throat and took his breath away.
He didn’t move, so as not to disturb this wonderful, awe-inspiring, absolutely captivating sensation; he held his breath.
Lust. Such desire. And even more …
But he forced himself to breathe out slowly, as slowly as possible, so as not to betray how paralysed with delight he was, and not to potentially unsettle Catherine by his overwhelmed stillness.
Love.
The word bubbled up inside him, along with a memory of this feeling; he noticed water filling his eyes.
I miss her so much.
A tear rolled out of the corner of Catherine’s eye too. Was she weeping for herself? Or for him?
She withdrew her hand from his shirt, then unbuttoned it from bottom to top and took off his tie. He sat up, half over her, to make it easier.
Then she put her hand behind his neck. She didn’t press. Or pull.
Her lips parted to form the tiny slit that said, ‘Kiss me’.
He traced Catherine’s mouth with his fingers, running them again and again over the various textures of softness.
It would have been easy to carry on.
To bend his head and bridge the remaining distance. To kiss Catherine. The game of tongues, turning novelty into familiarity, curiosity into cupidity, happiness into …
Shame? Unhappiness? Arousal?
Reach under her dress, gradually unclothe her, first her underwear, then the dress – yes, that’s how he’d do it. He wanted to know she was naked under her dress.
But he didn’t do it.
For the first time since they had touched, Catherine had shut her eyes. At the very moment her lips were opening, her eyes closed. She had shut Perdu out. He could no longer see what she really wanted. He sensed that something had happened inside Catherine; something was lurking there to do her harm.
The memory of what it was like to be kissed by her husband? (And wasn’t that an awfully long time ago? And didn’t he already have a mistress then? And hadn’t he said things, terrible things even then, such as: ‘It’s disgusting when you’re ill’ or ‘If a man doesn’t want a woman in his bedroom any more, then the woman is partly to blame’?) Was her body recalling how much it had been ignored – no more tenderness, no caresses, no loving words? The memory of being taken by her husband. (Never so she got enough; he shouldn’t spoil her, he said. Spoiled women didn’t love the same way; and what more did she want anyway? It was already over for him.) The memory of the nights when she had doubted whether she would ever be a woman again, ever be touched again, ever be thought beautiful, ever be alone with a man behind closed doors?
Catherine’s ghosts were there and they had brought his to the party too.
‘We’re no longer alone, Catherine.’
Catherine opened her eyes. The storm in them had subsided from a silvery glint to a fading picture of surrender.
She nodded. Tears filled her eyes.
‘Yes. Oh, Jean. That idiot appeared at the very moment I was thinking, “At last. At last a man is touching me as I always wished to be touched.” Not like … well, that idiot.’
She turned on her side, away from Jean.
‘Even my old self. The stupid little submissive Cathy. Who always sought to blame herself when her husband was so repellent or when her mother ignored her for days on end. I must have overlooked something … neglected something … I hadn’t been quiet enough, not happy enough. I hadn’t loved him and her enough, otherwise they wouldn’t be so …’
Catherine was crying.
At first she cried softly, but when he wrapped the duvet around her and held her body tightly in his arms, his hand softly cupping the back of her head, her sobs grew louder. Heartbreaking.
He felt how, in his arms, she strode through all the valleys that she had flown through thousands of times before in her dreams. Terror-stricken that she would fall, lose control or drown in pain – but that was what she was doing now.
She was falling. Worn out by cares, grief and humiliation, Catherine was hitting rock bottom.
‘I had no more friends. He said they only wanted to bathe in his glory. His. He couldn’t imagine that they might find me interesting. He said, “I need you,” although he didn’t need me at all. He didn’t even want me. He wanted to have art to himself. I gave up mine for his love, but that was too little for him. Was I supposed to die to prove to him that he was everything to me? And that he was more than I would ever be?’
And then, as a final thought, Catherine whispered hoarsely, ‘Twenty years, Jean. Twenty years without living … I spat on my own life and let others spit on it too.’
At some point she started breathing more peacefully. Then she fell asleep. Her body went limp in Perdu’s arms.
She too, eh. Twenty years. There are obviously several other ways to ruin your life.
Monsieur Perdu knew that it was his turn. Now he would have to hit rock bottom.
In the living room, on his old white-painted kitchen table, lay Manon’s letter. It was a sad consolation to hear that he hadn’t been the only one wasting time.
He wondered briefly what would have happened if Catherine had met him at twenty-one instead of Monsieur Le P.
He wondered for a long time whether he was ready for the letter.
Of course he wasn’t.
He broke the seal, sniffed the paper, drank it in. Closed his eyes and lowered his head for a moment.
Then Monsieur Perdu sat down on the bistro chair and began to read Manon’s twenty-one-year-old letter to him.
12
Bonnieux, 30 August, 1992
I’ve already written to you a thousand times, Jean, and every time I had to begin with one and the same word, because it is the truest of all: ‘Beloved’.
Beloved Jean, my so beloved, distant Jean.
I’ve done something very stupid. I didn’t tell you why I left you, and now I regret both things – having left you and not saying why.
Please read on, do not burn me. I didn’t leave you because I didn’t want to stay with you.
I wanted to – far more than what is now happening to me instead.
Jean, I’m dying. Very soon – at Christmas, they predict.
I really wished you would hate me when I left.
I can see you shaking your head, mon amour. But I wanted to do what love thought right, and doesn’t it say do what is good for the other person? I thought it would be good if you forgot me in your rage. If you don’t grieve, don’t worry; don’t know anything about my death. Cut, anger, over – and move on.
But I was wrong. It won’t work. I have to tell you what happened to me, to you, to us. It is both beautiful and terrible at the same time; it is too much for a short letter. We’ll talk it all over when you get here.
That, then, is my request to you, Jean: come to me.
I’m so scared of dying.
But that can wait until you get here.
> I love you.
Manon
PS: If you do not want to come because your feelings aren’t strong enough, I’ll accept it. You owe me nothing, no compassion either.
PPS: The doctors won’t let me travel any more. Luc is expecting you.
Monsieur Perdu sat in the dark, feeling battered and bruised.
His whole chest contracted.
This can’t be happening.
Every time he blinked he saw himself, but as the man he had been twenty-one years earlier. How he had sat stiffly at this same table and refused to open the letter.
