Pauline is sitting in front of the TV. She doesn’t think much. She made a genuine effort to panic: Everyone will see this and think it’s me. In the end, it’s not so bad. Especially since Claudine performs so convincingly.
She lets it play. Against all expectations, it reminds her of things from when they were kids, foolish memories that she never thinks of but that have remained intact.
Claudine was great at gymnastics. On the balance beam and the uneven bars, she used to do incredible things. They were little girls at the time. She would wear the school T-shirt, canary yellow. She was like a fairy, doing really complicated routines, the little girls staring at her. She always wore barrettes. Their mother didn’t want for her to have long hair, it was too annoying to maintain. She would cry every time they brought her to the hairdresser. And insisted on wearing barrettes. When she mounted the balance beam, she held herself instinctively straight, like a great athlete. She still had the body of a child, flat chest and little legs, but she showed off like an adult. And she had the right to; in one go, she launched herself, turned in the air, back flip, landed again on her feet, impeccable form, as if she had just whistled a little tune.
The friend in question has arrived, they’re all in the bedroom. True to their word, they put it in all her holes. When she orgasms, she’s beautiful. Even if their words are ugly, even if they don’t treat her well, even if they have disgusting faces. When she orgasms—and it’s hard to believe that she’s faking it—she is truly beautiful. Her face lights up, relaxes, her eyes look elsewhere, a sort of laugh, or else she’s about to start crying. She is nicely framed; in moments, she attains something like happiness.
They had a dog, when they were kids. As soon as they were alone, Claudine would shut it in a room. She would wait behind the door until he cried before she opened it. Then, she would get angry, give him a nasty beating, she hit him so much the dog would wail. Then she would close the door again, threatening him if he made a sound. The puppy, terrorized, didn’t protest anymore. So she would go console him, taking him in her arms, he would be trembling all over, and she would kiss him everywhere. “My poor darling.”
She used to punish all her dolls. When they had gone too far, she would tear off an arm, lecturing them maliciously, “You see what we do to girls like you? You don’t want to learn, huh?” Then she would tear off a leg, “You’ll end up learning your lesson, you’ll see.”
After, she takes off with the two guys in a car. Pauline didn’t follow where they’d said they were going. She looks elegant, in a black suit, even though she’s naked underneath.
They arrive at a club. There are a lot of teenage girls dancing, naked beneath their dresses, which are quite short. Claudine goes onto the dance floor, courageously shakes her ass. That, she doesn’t do so well. She has no idea how to move.
As soon as they were old enough to go to parties, her sister would only dance to slow songs. Pretty early on, she abandoned all activity not directly related to seducing boys. She didn’t read, nor did she have friends, nor did she do gymnastics, or anything other than please. She did it so well, it would have seemed ludicrous, dull, to bother with anything else.
Certain boys among them never recovered. Wrote her unbelievable letters, sometimes several years after she had let them court her. She would look at the envelopes, recognize the handwriting, and throw them away immediately, overwhelmed. “Why is that guy so clingy?”
And on top of it all, it was a tiny little town, she was the jewel of the neighborhood.
Still on the dance floor, she starts to do things with a girl, shimmying right up next to her, sticking her boobs out toward hers. It’s the tantalizing redhead. Pauline recognizes her immediately, tries to think of her name: Claire. The one who put her hand on hers and wanted her opinion on everything.
They go at it, in the middle of everyone, there’s a big circle around them, people are touching themselves. Mostly men, a lot of them.
Claudine never had a girlfriend. She was suspicious of other girls, and the opposite was even worse. She would say that she didn’t like them: “They’re all bitches.” She couldn’t stand for another girl to be as pretty as her. Apart from very famous actresses, preferably dead ones. As if it negated her; she needed to believe that she was the only woman in the world. The only one capable of triggering that kind of excitement in men.
For several minutes, there’s nothing very pornographic about it—they kiss and touch each other, caress and say words the viewer can’t hear, words that make them laugh, they bite each other a little and stare at each other, eyes gleaming. Then they take off their clothes and finger each other, go crazy over each other’s breasts.
The redhead must have thought Pauline was acting cold the other night, given what they’ve shared. She’s even prettier than in real life, her body looks good on TV. Pale, long. A sorceress. She’s also beautiful when she orgasms, it’s even moving to see them do it opposite each other, they make each other come with their fingers, one against the other, they don’t break eye contact, until their eyes close as they start convulsing.
What was she thinking while she was doing that? While she was doing that and just before and just after, too? Did she watch herself? Did she feel proud? Did someone tell her that she was beautiful, more than ever, within that surrender?
Did she remember how adamant she was as a little girl? “You should never sleep with a boy who hasn’t asked you to marry him. Otherwise he won’t respect you anymore. Even if you really, really want to. He has to wait and marry you. Otherwise no one will want you anymore.” But that was before she got her start. Rapidly, she changed her tune. “To hold on to a guy, you have to tell him he has a big cock and that he made you come like no one else has. You have to scream in his ears, not be afraid. Even if you’re bored. Have to scream, scream, and after, he’s nice like a little lapdog.”
Meanwhile, in the video, she’s on her knees, things have heated up. With her friend the redhead, they set about giving head to all the guys, one by one. The men approach, they wait their turn, patiently. Pauline tries to count them, but they fill the entire screen and there are still some out of frame. And they suck, and they suck, thighs spread nice and wide so the camera doesn’t miss a thing.
Claudine had never fallen in love. Instead, she fell into business: What are you going to give me to have me? And no one, ever, hooked her. Except maybe Sébastien. What did she have to gain from that, his coming and doing things, if afterward she didn’t even try to use it to hurt her twin? While rummaging through the cupboard, Pauline found little notes scattered around, loads of little lines. About someone she waited for every day but who came only rarely, she would lean out the window and look to see if he was coming. And when he does arrive, he’s ashamed, and she can never say to him, “Stay with me, I need you.” In one note, she recounts how he asked her if she would really do it, be with him for good. She responded that she didn’t know, and he said, “Well, I know. I couldn’t be with you. You would screw me over, I’m sure of it,” and she decides that he’s right.
She and her sister had been face to face, searching for what the other had that she so painfully lacked.
Now it’s turned into a marathon performance. Pitiful to watch. She’s soaked with sweat and sperm, how many times has she sucked and jerked off and sucked and jerked off? The redhead continues too. They both seem worn out, they try to pretend otherwise, remain all cheerful. They’re exhausted, it’s obvious, it’s odd. And the guys continue to slide in, glide into their mouths, most of them can’t even get hard, it doesn’t stop them from going.
It continues like that for a while. Pauline fast-forwards until the end. They both end up on the bar, and the guys spray them with champagne. Shower. They cling to each other while waving like queens on parade.
She gets up, looks at the time, she’s running late for the meeting. She thinks of everything she has to do before leaving. The right stockings, shoes with heels that aren’t daggers, and what is she goin
g to wear today, and how she should have exfoliated but she doesn’t have the time, she needs to wash her lackluster hair, and she definitely needs to put on makeup because she has unbelievable dark circles under her eyes. She starts to shuffle around, move heaven and earth to be both presentable and not too late.
It reminded her of Nicolas. It comes back to her these days, desire for him to be there. In front of the video, arousal spreading, she would have liked for him to be there, she would have liked to do it with him.
She sits down again. Where the hell did she put her Bénard pants she was wearing when she arrived, and the shapeless sweater that went with them?
THE BIG BOSS is making a scene, almost as if she’d cheated on him. He asks, “But what are we going to do?”
“It’s difficult to deny it.”
“So what do you propose?”
“Have to own it.”
Martin is almost in mourning too. They broke his doll. The publicist is appalled. “It’s really bad for your image, really bad.”
“Look around, boys. Everybody does it now, that’s what you need to realize.”
“You think this is funny?”
A little bit. Now, their idea of the singer, all fresh and vibrant—they can shove it up their asses.
Martin announces, exasperated, “We have to cancel the Élysée.”
“Are you crazy?”
“There’s no problem, boys: this is kickass publicity.”
The big boss is really sulking. She bets that what bothers him most is that he’s never seen her like that, like the Claudine in the video; with everything he did to her, he never made her come like that.
THE WOMAN AT the newspaper kiosk next to Nicolas’s place knows that he knows Claudine well, so when there’s an article about her, she waves him over.
The first few times, it put him in a violent tailspin to see her in the papers. An explosion of missing her. To know, to be able to see, that she still existed somewhere, but that it was happening out of his sight.
Over time, he got used to it, now he reads the papers meticulously. He has fun classifying the photos: Pauline or Claudine? She must have found some of her dead sister and given them to the photographers. He always knows which is which.
Otherwise, it didn’t astonish him all that much, that she was on the cover of so many magazines. It had a much greater impact on the newspaper seller, for whom he became a hero within a few weeks because he “knew the singer.”
Today, she waves him over with such vigor that he suspects something has happened. She’s all shaken up. “For your girlfriend,” and hands him a pile of newspapers. He flips through and understands. The video of Claudine. A while back, that had been her latest craze: doing porn. “It opens doors to everything.” But after the first film, she had bailed on all the meetings and stopped talking about it.
He had watched it at a friend’s house, not even a hint of an erection. That was how sacred their friendship had been.
That’s even how he differentiates Pauline from Claudine in the photos: whether he gets hard or not.
The kiosk lady is wholeheartedly on her side.
“How disgusting, bringing out things from the past to harm her. Who knows what she was going through to end up doing that . . .”
But it’s clear that she’s very disappointed.
“Are you going to the after-party?”
“Yeah, I think I’ll stop by.”
He had received an invitation to the concert. The first sign from her since that night at Place d’Italie. The concert hall is jam-packed, mainly young girls with piercings everywhere.
Now that the porno is out, Claudine-Pauline is poised to become the muse of all the bad girls. She’s handling all the fuss quite well.
When he understood that she was avoiding him, the bubble burst and he dropped back down to earth with a crash. It quickly became unbearable, as soon as he saw a girl, to compare her to Pauline-Claudine and feel the absurdity of a life spent without her.
He was feeling things that he thought only other people felt. That hunger for someone, excluding all the rest.
And his desire to fuck became even worse after having done it. She smells like sex to him.
The light goes out, the typical shrieks in the front rows; it’s the intro. A film is projected on the big screen stretched behind the stage. He recognizes Claudine right away, tapping away on the Minitel.
Pauline waits until she’s giving head to make her entrance.
She’s dressed like the day she arrived in Paris. But she’s less timid onstage.
Whistles of approval in the audience, the girls seem to like it.
And then it begins. He’s moved hearing her voice, and finds it insufferable to still be so far from her.
“SHE SURE KNOWS how to put on a show, huh?”
“Apparently she takes herself for an artist. She’s putting her record label through hell.”
“Especially because she doesn’t even know how to sing.”
“In any case, as long as she doesn’t launch her own fashion line . . . Did you see what she was wearing?”
Most of the people at the after-party are talking about things other than the concert. But Nicolas’s neighbors are absorbed in their discussion. He’s at the bar, he miscalculated his move, is standing where the bartender never comes.
There’s a murmur when she arrives—“There she is, there she is”—heads turn, people spread the news. Nobody cares, in fact, but it’s still her party and she’s on TV sometimes, so they want to see what she actually looks like in person.
She’s holding the redhead from the film by the waist, they’re both beaming. Visibly wasted, a feverish arrogance.
People surround them, compliments, she smiles at everyone and nods her head, shakes hands.
The big boss bounces around her, makes sure everybody knows: “She’s marvelous! Marvelous!”
Finally, Nicolas manages to get a drink. He stands in a corner to down it in peace. He’s amused by his own suffering. Has to make an effort not to intervene, push everyone away, and shout, “That woman is mine, there’s only the two of us, back off!”
She vanishes from his field of vision, carried away by a sea of morons.
He sets his glass on the bar and heads toward the exit. When he hears her calling his name he’s thrilled. She takes him by the arm and follows him into the street. People follow her. “What are you doing?” She signals that she’ll be right back.
Face to face, they don’t have much to say to each other.
“I thought the concert was really good. More hardcore than grunge. But really good.”
“You’re wrong. It was really grunge. What’s new with you?”
“Still nothing. And you, your new life, it’s going well?”
“I’m a storm unto myself, seriously. Did you see that mess around me? I didn’t know I liked it, but fuck, I adore it.”
“I can tell, yeah.”
That douchebag Martin comes looking for her, doesn’t even take the time to notice Nicolas.
“Guess who’s here, downstairs?”
Overexcited. It must be someone important. Pauline says before leaving, “I’ll call you, so we can see each other?”
“If you have nothing better to do, go ahead.”
“HI, HELLO, IT’S Claudine. Any chance you’re free?”
“Now, even when you call me you don’t say your real name? Have you totally lost it?”
“No, it’s just a habit. Am I interrupting anything?”
“It’s fine. I borrowed a console, I was in the middle of killing some Russians.”
“I’ve never played video games.”
“I play a little every day.”
“Can I come see?”
“Today?”
“Yeah, or whenever you want.”
“Well, I’m not super booked. Now works, tomorrow too.”
“I’ve never been to your place. Where is it?”
“Move over, you’re taking up
all the space.”
“Stop making up excuses for why you always lose.”
“I don’t always lose, what are you talking about? I’ve won plenty of races.”
“You won once at the beginning because you got lucky and since then you keep rolling in the grass or driving straight into walls.”
“That’s bullshit. Let’s play again.”
He pushes Reset, sits back down. She declares, convinced, “I’m going to destroy you.”
End of four races; she came in eighth every time. She says, “I’m sick of this game. It’s for little kids. Is there something else we can play together?”
“In James Bond we can chase and shoot at each other.”
“Let’s see.”
She looks outside, it’s night. She suggests, “Want to order pizza?”
“With everything you shove up your nose you’re still hungry?”
“Yeah. I shove some up my nose every day and I still eat sometimes.”
“You’ve gotten really fucking skinny.”
“I eat a little less than before. Actually, sometimes, I’m hungry, but it’s impossible to eat. So, let’s order a pizza?”
When she arrived, at the beginning of the afternoon, it wasn’t very easy at first. Nicolas racked his brains to find a question to ask her or something to tell her. The apartment seemed so small, and the silence so heavy.
Out of desperation, Nicolas had offered, “You want to play?” Out of politeness, and figuring she couldn’t take off before at least half an hour had passed, she accepted.
They started a race and forgot to be nervous.
There’s something battered about her, a sad side she didn’t have before.
He thinks only of lying down on top of her. He wants the heat of her, he wants her to open all her doors to him.
Pretty Things Page 16
