There ensued a string of indistinguishable, unfocused days, full because they were so totally empty, tumultuous because they were so serene, with her spirit essentially drifting in an interval of time without start or finish, without landmarks, without purpose. She found herself reliving her old student days, when she had regularly cut classes at the Sorbonne, tasting once again that flavor of flaunting the law that for so long had been forgotten. There was simply no way to compare the free time that Charles had given her and the free time that she was stealing from Antoine. And what better souvenir could one hope to retain from one’s adolescence than that of an endless little white lie foisted on others, on the future, and often on oneself ?
To what extent was Lucile fooling herself in courting disaster so blatantly, in flirting so dangerously with the chances of infuriating Antoine, of jeopardizing his trust in her, of sparking a showdown in which they would both be forced to face the truth: that she would never, in fact, be able to live that normal, balanced, and comfortable life that he was offering her? She knew very well that in sweeping this whole mess under the rug right now, she was not committing herself to dealing with it seriously in the long term. Something inside her was terribly determined, but she couldn’t figure out what it was all about. The truth was, she was determined to do precisely what she enjoyed, and nothing else, but this is a difficult thing to admit to oneself when one supposedly loves someone else. Night after night she came back to Antoine’s warmth, his laughter, and his body — and there was not one moment when she had the feeling that she was deceiving him. Life without Antoine was no more imaginable for her than life in an office. And the latter was seeming, with each passing day, less and less plausible.
As it grew colder, she slowly fell back into her sedentary lifestyle. Each morning she would rise with Antoine, go downstairs to have a coffee with him, and then, on occasion, would accompany him over to his publishing house, from which she would take off — ostensibly to rejoin the salt mines of Le Réveil, but in actual fact to retreat to their little den. There she would undress, crawl back under the covers, and doze till noon. In the afternoon, she would read, listen to records, smoke a lot, and then, six bells having struck, she would remake the bed, remove all traces of her presence, and sally forth, heading for the little bar in the Rue de Lille to meet up with Antoine, or else, twisting irony’s knife just a bit more, she’d go to the bar near the Pont-Royal and wait there until eight o’clock, at which point she would return, looking frazzled, to the Rue de Poitiers where Antoine was waiting for her, full of sympathy for her overworked plight. When he kissed her, she would melt in the tenderness of his embrace, his compassion, and his douceur — all without the slightest sense of remorse. After all, she did deserve sympathy — sympathy for her willingness to so radically complicate her life, all for the sake of this very inflexible man. It would have been so simple to tell him, “I’ve quit my job,” and thereby to free herself up from the burden of her daily charades. But since the charades made Antoine happy, might as well keep them up — and truth to tell, at times she considered herself a saint.
And thus, the day when Antoine stumbled upon the truth, Lucile was completely thrown.
“I called you three times this afternoon,” he told her. He’d flung down his raincoat onto the chair without kissing her, and now was just standing there facing her, motionless. She smiled at him and said, “I had to go out for a good two hours. I guess Marianne didn’t tell you.”
“Indeed she did. And what time was it that you left the office?”
“By now it must be at least an hour ago.”
“Oh?”
There was something in that little “Oh?” that made Lucile uneasy. She looked up but Antoine wasn’t looking at her.
“I had to meet someone right by the Réveil office,” he said very quickly. “I called to tell you that I’d come by and say hi. You weren’t in at the time, so I went there right after my meeting, at 5:30. Voilà.”
“Voilà,” she echoed, her mind somewhere else.
“It’s been three weeks since you last showed your nose there, Lucile. And they never paid you one red cent. I…” Up till that moment he’d been almost whispering, but now, without warning, his voice grew louder. In one brusque gesture he ripped his tie off and threw it at her. “Where in the hell did this new tie come from? And all those records? Where did you have lunch today?”
“Please,” said Lucile, “don’t yell at me… I mean, you don’t think I went out and walked the streets, do you? Don’t be ridiculous…”
The slap caught her so much off guard that she didn’t budge, and for a second or two that reassuring little smile that she’d grown so used to putting on remained frozen on her face. But then she felt her cheek growing hot, and reflexively she lifted her hand to touch it. This childish gesture only infuriated Antoine even more. Being an easy-going type, he suffered from long and painful bouts of anger, far more painful for the punisher than for the victim.
“I don’t have any idea what you’ve been doing, but I do know that you’ve been lying to me nonstop for three weeks now.
That’s all I know.”
A silence ensued. Lucile was thinking about the slap, and wondering with a mixture of anger and amusement what one does in such circumstances. Antoine’s fury still struck her as all out of proportion to the situation.
“It’s Charles,” said Antoine.
She looked at him in confusion: “Charles?”
“Yes, Charles. All these ties and records, all your new jumpers — your lifestyle…”
At last she was catching his drift. For a split second she felt like laughing, but then she caught sight of his haunted face, so ghostly pale, and in a flash she was overcome by a terrible fear of losing him.
“It’s got nothing to do with Charles,” she blurted out. “It’s Faulkner. No, listen — I’ll explain it all to you. The money came from the pearls — I sold them.”
“But you had them on just yesterday…”
“They’re fake — take a closer look. All you need to do is bite them, and…” This just wasn’t the moment, though, to suggest to Antoine that he should sample her pearls with his teeth, and she felt it clearly — nor was it the time to bring up Faulkner. She was turning out to be far more skilled at lying than at telling the truth. Her cheek felt like it was burning now.
“I just couldn’t take that job any more…”
“After all of two weeks…”
“Yes, after all of two weeks. So I went to this jeweler’s named Doris in Place Vendôme, and I sold them my pearls and I got a cheap copy of the necklace made for me — that’s all.”
“And so what did you do all day long all this time?”
“I went for walks, I stayed at home — it was just like in the old days.”
He was staring intently at her and it made her want to look away, but everybody knows that looking away in this kind of situation is a surefire sign of prevarication, and so she forced herself to stare back at Antoine. His yellow-eyed gaze had turned somehow darker, and in the midst of all her turmoil it occurred to her that anger made him more handsome, which was a very unusual quality.
“Why should I believe you? You’ve been telling me nothing but a pack of lies for three weeks straight.”
“Because I have nothing more to confess,” she said wearily, at last daring to look away. She leaned her forehead against the windowpane, absent-mindedly following a cat as it sauntered down the sidewalk in a nonchalant fashion that belied the biting cold outside. She went on, in a calm voice: “I had warned you that I wasn’t cut out for… for anything of that sort. Either I’d have died of boredom or I’d have gone out of my mind. I was really unhappy, Antoine. That’s the only possible thing to hold against me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about any of this before?”
“Oh, you were just so pleased to see me working, to see me caught up in ‘real life’. And also, I was a pretty good actress!”
Antoine stretche
d out on the bed. He had spent two hours in profound despair and jealousy, and now he felt exhausted as a result of his impetuous fit of pique. He believed her, he knew that she was telling the truth, and this truth struck him as being simultaneously reassuring and yet also indescribably bitter. She was alone, and she would always be alone; for a moment he even wondered if he mightn’t have preferred it if she’d been unfaithful to him instead of lying to him. He uttered her name in a far-away voice: “Lucile… Don’t you trust me at all?”
No sooner had he said this than she bent down and kissed him first on the cheek, then the forehead, then the eyes, mumbling that she loved him, that she loved no one but him, that he was crazy and silly and cruel. He let her say all this, and he even smiled at it a little; he was totally desperate.
PART FOUR
L’Hiver
CHAPTER 21
One month went by. With Antoine’s blessing, Lucile had returned to her old ways, but even so she felt uneasy replying “Nothing” — always just “Nothing” — when Antoine got home from work and asked her what she’d done. The truth was, he asked the question reflexively, without any resentment, but he did ask it every single evening. And every so often, she could make out in his eyes a sense of confused sadness, and a certain distrust of her. He made love to her in an intensely focused frenzy and wildness, but afterwards, when he was lying on his back and she was hunched over him, she had the distinct feeling that he was looking at her without seeing her, that he even saw, instead of her, a boat bobbing on the ocean, or a cloud at the mercy of the wind — something moving, in any case, something that was slowly drifting towards oblivion. And yet he had never loved her so strongly, and he told her so. At such moments she would lie down tightly against him, close her eyes, and fall silent.
It’s often said that people forget the power of language, but people also forget how powerfully silence can convey craziness, outrageousness, and absurdity. Lucile watched as shards of her childhood floated by behind her closed eyelids, and she saw the faces of certain men appear and disappear, the most salient one being that of Charles; sometimes, for no clear reason, she would see, in her mind’s eye, Antoine’s tie on Diane’s rug, and other times the tree at the Pré-Catelan would loom up before her, for no reason. And all these memories, rather than pulling together coherently into a pleasantly vague unity that she had once so gaily called “my life”, now remained just a scattered and troubling jumble of images, in her new and less happy state. Antoine was quite right, after all, to ask: What was going to become of them? Where were they headed, what was their destination? And this small bed, which once had been the most magical boat in all of Paris, was now turning into an endlessly drifting raft, and this small room, once so familiar to her, was turning into a remote and abstract background. By forcing her attention onto the specter of the future, he had, it seemed to her, closed the door to any future between them.
One morning in January she woke up with a violent bout of nausea. Antoine had already left without waking her, as he often did these days, as if she were recovering from some illness. She went into the bathroom and, not to her great surprise, threw up. The stockings that she had had to wash the night before were drying on the radiator, and it was while she was idly gazing at them and thinking to herself that there wasn’t a single other pair in her chest of drawers and that their bedroom was just as cramped as this tiny bathroom was — in short, that she simply couldn’t afford it — that she decided not to keep Antoine’s baby.
She had but 40,000 francs left, and she was pregnant. After a long fight, life had finally caught up with her, and now she was in a fix. Life was becoming for Lucile what it was for her Métro-riding companions, and what writers so often depicted it as being: a world in which irresponsibility does not go unpunished. Antoine loved her and he would be only too willing to don the expectant-father hat, were she to tilt her portrayal of the situation in that way. If she were to say to him, “Something sweet is coming our way,” he would take the unborn infant as a joy, of that much she was sure. But she didn’t have the right to say any such thing. This child would strip her forever of her freedom and would not bring her happiness. Moreover, she knew she had deeply let Antoine down, and she had brought him to that point in an affair of the heart where every tiny act arouses suspicions of some sort. And so he would most likely believe that this accident was premeditated, although it certainly hadn’t been. She loved him too much, or perhaps not enough — but whatever, she didn’t want this child, she wanted only Antoine, joyful, blond, yellow-eyed, free to leave her. The only thing that could be said to be truly honest in her attitude was that, in totally abdicating all responsibility, she also refused to saddle anyone else with it.
This was hardly the moment to start daydreaming about Antoine Junior, three years old, scampering about on some beach, nor about Antoine Senior sternly correcting his son’s homework. Rather, it was the moment to open one’s eyes and to compare the size of this little room to the size of a crib, or the wages of a nanny to what Antoine brought home. It just didn’t add up. Sure, there were plenty of women who would have made it all work out, but Lucile wasn’t one of those. Nor was this the moment to get all distracted in thoughts about herself.
And so, when Antoine got home, she explained to him that she was “in a certain way”. His face went momentarily ashen, but quickly he enfolded her in his arms, murmuring in a dreamy voice, and she felt her jaw tightly clenching in an idiotic fashion.
“Are you positive that you don’t want to keep it?”
“All I want is you,” she replied. She didn’t even broach the topic of money, fearing she could easily humiliate him. But he, on the other hand, while tenderly stroking her hair, was thinking that, were she so inclined, he could easily and passionately love having a child with her. But her nature was always to retreat — in fact, that was why he loved her — so he could hardly resent her for this central aspect of her nature. Still, he made one last attempt. “You know, we could try out the marriage thing… We could move to a new place.”
“But where would we go?” she asked. “You know, I think having a kid is incredibly demanding. You’d come happily home from work only to find me totally frazzled and in a lousy mood, and it would be…”
“So how do other people manage, then, in your opinion?”
“They aren’t like us,” she replied, and pulled away from him. What this meant was: “They’re not fiercely committed to being happy.” He had nothing to say in reply. That evening, they went out and drank themselves silly. The next day, he planned to ask a friend of his for an address.
CHAPTER 22
The intern’s face was stiff and ugly, filled with contempt. She couldn’t tell if it was contempt for himself or for all the women whose sufferings he’d relieved, after a fashion, these last couple of years, to the modest tune of 80,000 francs apiece. He performed this service at their own homes, using no anesthesia, and he didn’t come back if it turned out badly. He was scheduled to meet with Lucile the next evening, and she was trembling with fear and disgust at the mere idea of seeing him again. Antoine had borrowed the 40,000 francs that they didn’t have from work, which had not been easy, and luckily for him, he hadn’t gotten to see the great intern, since the latter, either out of some twisted moral principle or out of prudence, refused to meet “the guys”. The alternative had been some Swiss doctor near Lausanne, but for that, one needed 200,000 francs up front, not to mention the expenses of the trip. That was out of the question; she hadn’t even said a word about it to Antoine. The place was just too upper-crust. Not for her, the clinic, the nurse, and the shots. No, she was going to submit to this butcher, do her best to get through it alive, and, in all likelihood, be in wretched health for months thereafter. It was too stupid, too gruesome. And she, who had never before had second thoughts about her silly self-indulgences, now remembered with bitter regret her old pearl necklace, sold prematurely. She could just see herself winding up like the heroine of The Wild Palms, nearly dy
ing of blood poisoning, with Antoine going to jail.
She paced back and forth in the little room like a caged animal, looking at her face and her slender body in the mirror, imagining herself disfigured, diseased, distressed, stripped forever of her brash young healthiness, which in large part lay at the root of her joy in being alive — and she started growing furious. At four o’clock she gave Antoine a call, but he sounded weary and troubled, and she just couldn’t muster the courage to tell him of her fear. The truth was that at that moment, had he simply asked her to, she could easily have decided to keep the baby after all. But he seemed alien to her, unable to help her in any way, and all at once she felt a terrible yearning for someone, anyone, who could protect her. She felt very sad at having no female friend to whom she could turn for advice on these strictly female matters, to whom she could at least address her burning questions on crucial details that were terrifying to her. But she didn’t know any women — indeed, her sole female friend had been Pauline. And as she softly spoke that name, she reflexively thought of Charles — Charles, the memory of whom she had squelched, since it gave rise to a lingering sense of remorse, since his was a name that could still make Antoine suffer. And in a flash, she knew for certain that she was going to ask for his help, that no one could keep her from doing so, that he was the sole human being on earth capable of doing something to make this nightmare go away.
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