Pretty Things

by Virginie Despentes

  He detaches his first name from the rest of the phrase, as if putting it in quotation marks. Pauline wonders what’s gotten into them, appending their work to their names so spontaneously.

  Philippe slides his hand down her back, a clammy and possessive caress, a show of familiarity. She reflects for a second, then asks him, “We’re close friends then, you and me?”

  He chuckles. As if she had just tickled him. She takes his wrist and removes it roughly. “You’ll stop touching me if you want us to stay pals.”

  He wrings his hands, flashes a little embarrassed smile, falters a bit, “This is new . . .”

  He throws a glance for help at Nicolas, who’s now absorbed in the menu, two fingers on his forehead, very concentrated. The big idiot standing there is disarmed, like a kid whose mother just smacked him and he doesn’t understand why. So he stays there next to the table, thinking of something to say to resolve everything, but coming up short.

  Pauline ends up offering, “It’s time for you to leave.”

  “But what did I do?”

  He no longer tries to put up a front, to pretend to be the kind of guy who brushes things off. His face shattered, he’s sweating from forehead to chin, the vulnerable wounded man. That makes her angry, she shakes her head, gestures to Nicolas, and reprimands, “It didn’t even occur to you that he might be my boyfriend, and that I don’t want someone to paw at me like I’m some whore right under his nose?”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “You’ve gone and fucked everything up. Are you happy?” Genuinely furious.

  Nicolas clears his throat, isn’t sure whether to burst into laughter. Waits for the guy to leave, his back as stooped as his chest had been puffed up when he arrived. Nicolas says, “He must have really liked her. He looked completely destroyed.”

  “Yeah, right. I’m sure it must upset him to no longer be able to jerk off like a hog between her tits. Did you see how he was staring at my chest?”

  He admits, “Pretty successful for a first impersonation, but it would be better to show some tact from time to time. It’s important not to insult the whole world. Also, I’d appreciate it if you could manage to sort yourself out without involving me in your lies. I don’t especially care to get my ass kicked.”

  But actually, he was fairly pleased by it, the way she gestured to him while asserting roughly, “Hands off my man’s property.” It was stupidly comfortable to assume the role.

  Not far from them, a guy seated on a stool is staring at her intently, his sights also set on her cleavage. Pauline feels him and squirms, surly.

  In a depraved, but also kind of friendly way, Nicolas is excited, to see her subjected like this to all their gazes and wanting so badly to escape. As sexy as she was stubborn, it gave her a pretty vibrant charm.

  He changes the subject.

  “You weren’t scared?”

  “I’m used to it. All my childhood, I had the chance to play this game. Almost every week someone would stop me in the street thinking I was her. She didn’t tell anyone she had a twin. So people couldn’t have suspected that the same person was actually someone else.”

  Nearby, the three girls are reading their horoscopes, letting out big screams that turn into fits of laughter. They laugh as if putting on a show, to prove that they are there and can do as they like.

  Then Pauline asks the only question that truly interests her. “So, did you see the people from the record labels?”

  “Three meetings yesterday, two today. My cell phone has been ringing nonstop . . . man, I’m good, it’s insane how good I am.”

  “So?”

  “They’re going crazy. They all want us to sign. I said, ‘Okay boys, but we can’t sign everywhere . . . So what’s your offer?’”

  This makes her laugh. She can tell he really likes it. He’s ready to launch into a detailed explanation of what he saw and what they said. She cuts off his momentum, “So how much?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “They gave you an amount, didn’t they?”

  “Stop acting like an animal, it’s like you haven’t eaten in two months. Why does the idea of the advance get you so worked up? That’s not the only thing that matters.”

  “For me, it’s only about the advance. I want to know how much these bastards are willing to blow when they get all riled up.”

  “A lot. It’s driving them crazy to compete for the same thing. Everyone wants you at any price. I think we can get around a hundred thousand.”

  “All at once?”

  “It’s not a guarantee, okay? It’s doable, eventually, if we’re lucky, if they stay this excited—and especially if you decide to come with me.”

  “Not right away.”

  “You have to come, they have to get hard, and I’m not the one who’ll do that for them.”

  “You could make a bit of an effort, you know.”

  He turns to one of his favorite topics: how they’ll spend the advance. What equipment, what studio, what sound engineer, what saxophonist. Every time they see each other he talks about it for hours, as if he were constructing a house and didn’t want to make a mistake in the plans. As if he had been waiting for this for a long time.

  She nods her head now and then, asks some questions: “What does an extender do?” “And who else has he played with?”

  Even she’s surprised that it’s already happened; she feels neither shame nor compassion. Without any hostility at all, she’s going to throw everything away. This album that he clings to so much. She has absolutely no intention of recording it. She dreams only of the advance and of hiding away somewhere to wait for Sébastien.

  Nicolas can go on repeating, “One hundred thousand sounds enormous, it is, but for the music industry it’s not even . . .” He makes her laugh. She’s already picturing herself on the beach, Sébastien there with her.

  SUMMER

  HEAT, AND NO MATTER WHAT SHE WEARS, IT’S always too much.

  Every Saturday, the chaos on the street reaches extravagant heights. Regularly distracted by distant rumbling, Pauline comes to sit at the window, sidewalks exploding with color, people who walk slowly, stop, recognize each other, find themselves in a group of five or six at the corner of a building, shopping bags at their feet. And sometimes they come to blows, lose themselves in arguments, it can last a long time.

  Just now, a particularly furious commotion, immediately she stations herself to see what’s happening. A police car stops on rue des Poissonniers, two cops lead away a woman who was selling fabric on the hood of a car, people gather around, not happy, the woman doesn’t want to be pushed around. The cops are nervous, even though there are already about ten of them, they feel like assholes anyway, hostile neighborhood, with too many people on the sidewalks. A glass is thrown from one of the windows. Pauline watches the street empty out, people distancing themselves slowly at first, then running, she knows from the stinging that they dropped tear gas, she closes the windows. It stinks all through the surrounding streets, that nasty odor of a fearful cop turned dangerous. In two minutes twenty of them show up, blue uniforms banding together, still not reassured but arrogant all the same. A guy with his kids comes to complain, all upset, they can’t do that; they just hurl abuse at him. Pauline waits for the smell to fade before reopening her window and leaning outside again, like a lot of neighbors, and like a lot of them, she’s watching the pigs below, wishing that someone would do something so that they’d be gone for good.

  Lying on her stomach, she goes through her sister’s mail.

  Every morning, the super slips a few envelopes under the door. It’s surprising, so many letters. Some are long, others simple notes, some of the handwriting is elegant, some gnarly or clumsy, some turns of phrase are touching, others are idiotic and make you want to laugh. But all the letters speak of love; they spoke to her sister of nothing else. And not only sex, as Pauline had imagined. Lovers or suitors, she’d amassed a nice collection.

  The same woman who
used to brag, “I know this guy, I earn this much, I go to this place,” had omitted an entire facet of her life, never boasted, “If you knew how much they adore me,” and yet that’s really the only thing she could have boasted about however she liked. In a closet, Pauline found large cardboard boxes full of these letters, words of love or hostility, a lot of unopened, buried envelopes. Piled on top of each other, this blaze of lovers takes on strange accents, different handwritings. But certain passages, down to the last line, are the same, from one man to another, the same refrains appear, “And you won’t be better off with anyone else,” “You are afraid of love, you shouldn’t be,” phrases and then promises and tender threats, “I’ll break down your door if you don’t answer me,” and stacks of harsh reproaches, “How can you do this to me,” or else pitiful, “If you knew the state you’ve put me in,” or menacing again, “You played me, now that I see you for what you are, I promise you, you’ll pay.”

  And there’s nothing chaste about these letters, even if they rarely admit it, her legs are magnificent, or else it’s her eyes, then comes her chest or else her grace or her hair, then it’s her hands that fascinate, bewitch, if not her strength or her fragility. Some of them evoke her warm pussy, treasure buried between her thighs. Nostalgia for that palace. She really knew how to hook them.

  Each one takes her for himself, it’s a given: she was made for the one writing to her. He wants her more than the others, he knows her, he can tell she needs him. And there are dozens like that, spread out over years, they are sure of that fact: she exists for them. And one by one, better than the others, each of them knows how to make her happy.

  One phrase always reappears: “Why be afraid of happiness?” They are incapable of understanding why she would refuse such a blessing, to belong to them and to let them have their way with her. Incapable even of imagining that perhaps they disgust her, that they pile up like this, that perhaps she has good reason to be wary, that they always employ the same lines, from one man to the next, and always the same doggedness.

  For some of them, perfectly candid, there is that drive to “have her,” to be able to show off to all the other men in the city, so that they know who’s boss, the one who’s screwing the best broad, so that they get hard for him through her.

  For others, just as candid, almost like she’s their present, is that drive to transform her as they please, to turn her into their lifelong dream.

  For all of them, in bursts, there’s that stirring impatience, that obsessive imperative desire, to have her near them. There are lovely words, magnificent constructions concerning their love, sublime compliments. Each man sees his Claudine, describes her, magnified. Some of their projections are rather beautiful.

  And others that are more sordid. And others that are too naive, they’re exasperating.

  But none of them, in the two days since she’s gone through her mail, had the slightest suspicion that his missive might be filed away with so many others.

  These cardboard boxes filled with letters imbue them with a particular tone.

  Reading them all in one go, and seeing several arrive each day, slid under the door, and hearing certain voice-mails left by certain men, Pauline imagines her sister as being assaulted from all directions. And these burning attentions that she aroused so frequently surrounded her in her solitude even more definitively than indifference.

  That sadness, Pauline grasps for the first time, to be so desired, and to desire no one.

  Someone rings the doorbell. Pauline approaches quietly, verifies through the peephole that it’s Nicolas, and opens the door.

  He asks, “What would you have done if it wasn’t me?”

  “I wouldn’t have opened the door. It happened yesterday actually. A guy I had never seen.”

  “He didn’t hear you come to look?”

  “He did. I talked to him through the door, I said I wanted to be alone. He insisted, I told him I didn’t have the keys, that I was locked inside, that he had to go. He kept insisting, so I insulted him, majorly, he took off.”

  Seeing the time, Nicolas proposes, “Let’s go and buy groceries while it’s not too crowded?”

  “I don’t feel like it. Let’s order pizza.”

  “I’m sick of pizza, that American food is too greasy. You should get out a little, it’ll do you good to get some fresh air. Then I have a lot of stuff to tell you.”

  He’s already standing up, he’s waiting for her to follow him.

  Through the door of the supermarket, it’s a little bit colder. A kid is crying, standing in a shopping cart, next to him his father is pretending not to hear him.

  Nicolas tells Pauline what happened that morning at the office of the label they signed with.

  A well-dressed gentleman is clumsily trying to fill a bag with apples; he must not be very good with his hands.

  A woman fondles some apricots, grimacing.

  Another woman sniffs the containers of meat, displaying a similar skeptical disgust.

  A kid offers his Coke from KFC to everyone who passes.

  Nicolas chooses the register that seems to have the shortest line.

  Pauline asks for a simple confirmation, “So it’s all good, they’re going to transfer everything into the account? When do you think we’ll get it?”

  “No, in the end we decided to do it over multiple transfers. Otherwise we risk blowing it all at once and then we’d regret it.”

  He delivered this bullshit in a tone of utter confidence.

  “You didn’t actually do that, did you?”

  “I did. It’ll be spread out over nine months, that way we can rest easy for a while. That amount seems enormous, but it goes so fast . . .”

  A very old hunchbacked woman talks to herself behind them. Her cart is filled with cat food and chocolate puddings of all kinds. She is annoyed about something, she grumbles, her white hair looks like cotton candy.

  A terrible scramble in Pauline’s head. Spread out over nine months . . . She hadn’t imagined for a second that he would have such a stupid fucking idea. He’s smiling at everyone, there’s champagne in his cart.

  “What were you thinking doing that without asking me?”

  “I discussed it with the boss this morning, he told me it was for the best. Since it was in our interest, I decided to—”

  “It’s amazing how subservient you can be . . . I swear, now that I know you, I have a much better understanding of why everything is going haywire—shit.”

  When she gets angry like this, she starts spinning around, fidgeting with her fingers. She looks around everywhere to avoid looking at him, like she’s afraid that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from hitting him. She gets like this sometimes; he doesn’t really understand where it comes from. She scares him a little when she gets so worked up, and it really pisses him off that he’s forced to put up with it. So he waits for it to pass, for her to stop PMSing. She stammers another few insults, then decides, “Anyway you can go fuck yourself with your stupid fucking ideas, I’m not going to do them any favors, I want my money up front and all at once. Tomorrow, you’ll go and change the contract.”

  “Well, while we’re at it, you can just shove it up your ass.”

  She sees that she’s gone too far, gently changes tactic, “Shit, Nico, why did you do that without asking me?”

  “Listen, sweetheart, all you had to do was come with me. It’s been three months now that I’ve been dealing with these creeps on my own because madame doesn’t deign to accompany me, three months that I’ve been in negotiations and on top of that I negotiate on my own, and today what I did you don’t like. If I’m too much of a fucking idiot, you shouldn’t have dragged me into this.”

  While speaking, Nicolas places his groceries on the belt. The cashier is always chipper, today he’s singing a song by Lio. He brandishes a saucepan and asks his colleague if she knows how much it is.

  Pauline murmurs, “I’ll let you pay, I’ll wait for you out front.”

 
On the sidewalk, she wants to light a cigarette but can’t find her lighter. A guy passes and says hello to her, she looks away. She wants to avoid crying because, after all, it might look suspicious.

  She walked into this supermarket ten minutes ago. She was walking on air, everything was in place. Everything had unfolded as planned, like in a dream, a little more added to their payday. Nicolas had increased the offers, had handled it like a champ. Everything should have been transferred into an account opened specifically for that, supposedly it was more practical . . .

  He arrives, hands full of bags. Timid smile, he hopes that she’s calmed down. He’s always conciliatory. As soon as she gets angry, for whatever reason, he takes it as a sort of hiccup, a thing that’ll pass.

  She holds out her hand to help him carry the bags. “Give me half.”

  He refuses. “It’s fine, leave it.”

  She walks behind him, doesn’t say another word. Nine monthly payments. It doesn’t seem like anything anymore. Sébastien will get out in less than three months. It’s funny how just one piece of news can make everything fall to pieces. Two, three words strung together incorrectly and everything is wiped out, destroyed.

  Leaning against a wall, a man with gray hair is yelling into his cell phone, the whole street can hear him, he’s bright red from anger, maybe he’ll explode all over the sidewalk.

  THE FAN OSCILLATES back and forth; Pauline always sits in front of it, enjoying its caresses.

  Fifth beer she’s taken from the fridge, she feels a little less out of sorts. She will find a way to change that ridiculous clause. It’s like anything else, just a matter of patience.

  Nicolas cuts onions into super-thin slices, like he saw the professional chefs do with garlic on Goodfellas. Every little thing takes him hours. She refrains from making any comment, since it’s nice of him to prepare the food to begin with. But that doesn’t stop it from annoying her, such ludicrous slowness to cut up three vegetables.

  “We have to find a manager, for the concerts. Have you ever been on tour? I have the most intense nostalgia for being in a van. The kind of thing you don’t appreciate until you have some distance. In the moment, mostly you think about how long a drive it is, how your seat is uncomfortable, and it’s always the same asshole who speeds up just to cut you off. But years later, all that comes back to you are the hilarious memories, the stupid games you played.”