TV SPECIAL
A television crew arrived from Paris to film a live broadcast from the museum for a weekly show that went out at midnight. Because Luc’s paintings were still up in the main exhibition space, Barbara, the directrice, asked him to appear. The other guests were the painter who had painted Woman Met in Martinique, Who Left Me, a local wine producer and Luc’s friend, the poet and musician Pablo Baroja, together with his band.
Pablo’s face was always twisted with worry, as though he had a stomach ulcer or was about to miss a train. He wore a frock coat and top hat, and all the band members had that look of the really fashionable people at the university, the ones who say little, shave less and are incredibly skinny, despite the fact that they eat fried foods and french-fry sandwiches and drink spirits straight from the bottle. Their music was based on Catalan folk and dance tunes. Their instruments were all somehow ragtag—pipes that wheezed, tiny quarter-sized pianos with strings missing, a homemade violin. They made a noise like a thrown-together street ensemble, and yet the overall effect was surprisingly sonorous. Luc called it “Oops, I almost made music music,” and it suited his feeling that beauty was always the product of a mistake.
The whole thing was only just this side of a circus. The presenter was completely distracted by a woman in the audience, Carla, who had recently married a nice English boy with a private-school background, who had put her through “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” and “Jerusalem” at the wedding and had allegedly beaten her up in a last-ditch attempt to get her to mend her foolish ways on the honeymoon. She was quite unaware of the presenter’s agitation, and sat there winding her hair around her finger and admiring her shoes. I saw all this live as it went out on TV, because Luc hadn’t wanted me to attend the show in case it put him off. Duncan had come down to my apartment with his VCR so I could make a tape to send to my parents. The moment Luc opened his mouth, the tape flew out of the slot and slithered off across the floor. “My God!” Duncan shouted. “Catch it. Quick! Stuff it in again.” We missed the whole of Luc’s interview and had to explain later that a technical fault of an unforeseeable nature had come between Luc and his presentation on film to his future possible in-laws. The credits rose over a shot of an unlikely combination of people—Gigi and Catherine, with Stefan between them—bobbing up and down with their hands high in the air, performing the sardane, the Catalan dance, outside the museum entrance, even though it was by now one o’clock in the morning. I found Luc leaning against the wall of the museum, clutching the white clockwork rabbit that played percussion in Pablo’s band. The TV presenter was trying to persuade Carla to come back to his hotel for a drink even as she climbed onto the back of another man’s motor-bike. Stefan caught me in the street and said, “Were you there? Did you hear what he said? Did you hear what Luc said? He’s such an arrogant shit.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, “but here he is, why don’t you tell him yourself.”
I explained about the broken tape.
“Never mind,” Luc said. “All this, it’s only tourist rubbish.” Later, when we were alone, he said, “That was a bit of a coincidence, wasn’t it, the business with the tape? It must have just been a coincidence.”
“A coincidence of what?”
“That it breaks, and just when you need it.”
“It’s not going to break any other time,” I said. “Not when it’s just sitting in a closet. There’s no point making an issue of it. That sort of thing happens all the time.”
“Not to me, it doesn’t,” he said. “It may to you,” though of course it didn’t, and I’d only said it to make him feel better. His mother had made a tape anyway.
“Can I send that to my parents then? Can’t we make a copy?”
“Forget it,” he said. “These things happen for a reason. It’s too late now. Just don’t bring it up again.”
STEFAN 2
Stefan and Colette, his partner, were open with each other about their respective liaisons and often discussed them in front of their teenage daughter, who found her parents hopelessly naïve, politically and sentimentally. When the lycéens went on strike for longer or shorter hours, or better teaching, Heloïse was the only pupil in the entire school who refused to go on strike. As Gide says, when fish die they rise to the surface, belly up; it’s their way of falling. In that respect she was not a disappointment to her parents. When she was a tiny child, Stefan used to take her to see violent films at the cinema during the afternoon, thinking she would grow up inured to violence and able to face the world without the slightest fear. Instead she had to be carried screaming from the cinema every time. Even now that she’s grown up she runs out the minute someone unsheathes a knife.
When they first arrived in the village, Colette was busy setting up her osteopathy practice and was usually late coming home at night and tired. Stefan would have spent the day walking in the hills with his daughter on his back, or remodeling the four stone walls they had bought, which had once been the tripe shop, and still had the word “Triperie” painted on the outside. Now it’s like a ship inside. Everything is either glass, steel or wood. There is no furniture; everything was built in to fit the house. Stefan says when you move on you should take nothing with you. He must be infuriating to live with. He had so much repressed revolutionary energy that when Colette returned in the evening he was always bursting to go out, while she wanted an early night.
Shortly after they moved in they were invited out to dinner at one of the modern houses on the hill just beyond the village, where the bourgeoisie had room for their swimming pools and outside dining areas and saunas. The host was an academic at the local university. His wife had been his research assistant, had raised their two children and was now lounging around, looking after her body and preparing dinners.
Stefan went alone and found himself sitting next to the hostess. The other guests were all people with money and jobs. He decided he must have been invited along because of his supposed intellectual credentials.
All the women were dressed extremely provocatively, he said, and the conversation was full of double entendres and references to group sex. He found it all rather overwhelming, although he never could resist a sexy bourgeoise rubbing her knee against his under the table. Sensing the mood of the evening, he told a story about his friend Noel, who worked selling fruit over the phone from an international market in Perpignan. A woman he spoke to daily, but whom he had never met, called him one morning and asked him to meet her the following day in a hotel on the road to Narbonne. She was a buyer for a supermarket chain in Marseilles. She gave him the address of the hotel, a highway inn, with entry codes and no bars or service, just vending machines. He drove to the rendezvous with an open mind, and found the fruit buyer in a completely darkened room, in bed, ready to receive him. He has never seen her face, but he knows her voice and touch and smell. They meet like this once a year, on her birthday. The rest of the year they speak on the phone, but never directly allude to what, for each of them, is a source of immense, grateful happiness.
Most of the guests left, more or less drunk, but when Stefan started to say goodnight, the host said no, they were enjoying his company far too much, it was time for another drink and then a dip.
The hostess led him out to the pool, which was sympathetically lit and warm, even though it was now past midnight. In the water, she wrapped herself around him and he thought, I’d rather do this somewhere dry. He pulled her out of the pool and began to lead her back into the living room. As they picked up their towels, he noticed the husband watching them from what was clearly their bedroom window, right above the pool. Each of them, in their different ways, he guessed, got something out of her humping the local revolutionary not-quite-terrorist on the sofa bed after dinner and a refreshing plunge in the pool.
He lay on the sofa with his eyes clamped blissfully on the old-fashioned light fittings, which he said were curiously out of keeping with the contemporary decor, as though they had forgotten to update them. S
he was just about to pounce on him when the husband stormed into the room with a camera and fired off a shot with a flash. The wife bucked her head up and shouted, “Run!” Stefan fled into the garden, grabbed his clothes from by the edge of the pool and vaulted over the gate. Afterward he said, shamefaced, “I don’t know why I did that. It was as though I had been programmed all evening to behave like a lover to an adulterous bourgeois hostess.”
When he got home he woke Colette and told her the whole story. He said, “I feel very compromised by this running away thing. Why did I do it? It’s against all my principles. I’d better go back and explain.”
Colette said, “I would leave them to it for tonight. Maybe do something about it in the morning.”
Not long after Colette had left for work the following morning, Stefan received a call from the wife. She said her husband was out of his mind with rage. Stefan said he’d thought he was doing him a favor. You must be joking, she said. He’s sending your wife a print of the photo. “Oh good,” Stefan said, “I was hoping we’d get a copy. Colette was curious to see your furniture; she’s interested in that sort of thing because we don’t have any at home.”
Later that day Stefan got a second call. This time it was the husband, asking him to meet up at the café. Stefan agreed, but on the condition there would be no embarrassing post-cuckold scene. The revolution may not have been an unqualified success, he said, there may be ground still to cover, but I think we can consider certain little victories were not in vain.
Over a beer, the husband said he had reconsidered the events of the previous evening. He was deeply sorry for any irritation or embarrassment, and he felt that Stefan had taught them something as a couple. Would he now kindly teach them a little more and do them the honor of joining them both that evening in their pool. And Stefan’s wife, of course, as well, if she was in the mood. He felt that he and his wife had perhaps only paid lip service to the social developments of the previous ten to fifteen years, and it was time for them to consider some radical changes to their lifestyle. He also said that if Stefan had misread the situation the night before, it must have been because he and his wife were unconsciously willing something like that to happen.
“You don’t say,” Stefan said. He didn’t have much time for the unconscious.
“So what did you say?”
“For heaven’s sake,” he said, “I’m not some kind of gigolo. I’m not going to take a woman because her husband offers her to me for the good of her political education!”
“Oh,” I said, rather disappointed. “So what did happen?”
“I screwed her behind his back,” he said. “I’ve never been into group sex anyway. I know I should, but I just go limp whenever it comes up.”
He was always trying to drum into me that love affairs were dangerous because people who believed in love always thought they could make their own rules. In this respect, he said, Luc was lethal. You should always be suspicious of those who had no aspirations for society as a whole. There was no system to their seductions. There was safety in complexity; the people to watch were those who talked about simplicity and truth.
MARIE-LOU
I wasn’t the only girlfriend of an ex-lover that Gigi dressed. There was also Marie-Lou, who taught at the local dance school. Marie-Lou had been born in the village to a daft Spanish mother, who was all hairspray, tottery shoes and fake mantillas bought in the cheap tourist shops in Le Perthus, and a French father with an angry nose and a stoop, who’d been in the army and fought the Algerians. They moved to Nice when Marie-Lou was seven.
When Marie-Lou was fourteen, and almost as tall as she is now, she went with her mother to Aix-en-Provence for the day to buy material for a dress for her eldest brother’s wedding. Her brother was a policeman who spent his time policing Algerians in particular, in the family tradition. Marie-Lou’s legs started at her mother’s shoulders. She wore a tiny tube top, wrapped around her breasts like a fan belt. Her mother had lashings of black hair that were swept up on the top of her head. As Marie-Lou grew, her mother dressed her hair higher, to keep just ahead of her daughter. The mother had been up all night trying to calculate how much material she’d need for the two dresses—Marie-Lou’s and her sister’s—and whether anyone would notice if she cut Marie-Lou’s on the nap and her sister’s across it. “I think we can get away with it,” she was saying, when she realized that Marie-Lou was no longer there. She turned and looked back down the street.
Marie-Lou was standing gracelessly, stranded on the pavement with her feet splayed, stomach muscles slack, mouth wide open, and her hands knotted and pressing into the small of her beautifully curved back. A man sitting at a café table thirty yards away had risen to his feet. A Moroccan street musician was playing something between a shawm and an oboe, doodling hypnotically with the end of it in the hot noon air. The man, a Turk, came toward Marie-Lou and held out his hand to her.
They danced to the music of the Moroccan shawm player till the streets had emptied. Siesta time. Marie-Lou’s mother was asleep at the café table under the awning. The Turkish dancer took Marie-Lou up to his room in the hotel above the café and released her new breasts from the elastic tube. She wriggled out of her cotton trousers and they danced some more. The bed creaked plaintively in the afternoon silence as they consumed, erupted and then lay trembling, still.
The man turned out to be a great teacher. He was from Istanbul; he had once run the dance conservatory there. He had a wife, and together they now ran an academy in Aix-en-Provence. Marie-Lou had been dancing since she was four. Lately she’d been thinking of giving it up because she only ever seemed to get taller. But the Turkish man liked that; he told her she must keep on growing, up and up. She should have no fear of anything; she could be as big as she liked. Let no ceiling stand in her way.
So Marie-Lou danced and grew, and the mother went home to Nice and said Marie-Lou would be back in a few years’ time. She lived with the man and his wife, and danced for both of them. She says they were like parents to her, except it was better than that because she got to sleep with them, too. Then one day, two years later, she met another man in a bar who sold carpets and took her home to his attic room, and she danced a carpet dance for him, which involved her getting wrapped up in a rug. She stayed with him for a week, then went back home to her Turkish parents, arriving one morning with a half-eaten almond croissant in a paper bag and throwing up on the staircase.
Her real parents had moved back to the village to be near the other daughter and her husband, an auto mechanic at the garage by the Devil’s Bridge. When Amelia, Marie-Lou’s daughter, was born, Marie-Lou’s mother, a Le Penist by temperament and conviction, felt a powerful love for the dark-skinned, black-eyed baby such as she had never felt for her own children, and she adopted her as her own. Marie-Lou was too young to cope, and she still had her career as a dancer to pursue. Amelia slept in her grandmother’s bed until she was nine years old. She was one of those grandmothers it was easy to imagine in bed, with her hair down her back and a night-dress that suggested she had not entirely renounced all sexual aspiration. Luc said her husband would lie like a wolf across the threshold, in his daytime clothing, through the night. Then Marie-Lou’s knees cracked and she came home to have them operated on. At that point she met Christophe.
Christophe was in his fifties. He had been born in Lyons, and his mother had left him with his father when he was two. Her name was never mentioned again, up to the moment his father died, two years earlier. Then Marie-Lou looked up all the people in France with Christophe’s family name, did some research at the births, marriages and deaths office in Paris, and came up with a list of one, a woman living in Lyons. One night she wrote the number down for Christophe. Ring when you’re ready, she told him and went off to put up the scenery for the next night’s performance of Pierrot et Columbine. Christophe drank two whiskies and picked up the phone. A woman’s voice, old and frail and frightened, answered. He told her his name. She hung up. Since then he h
asn’t tried again. But he and Marie-Lou have in common the feeling that they don’t quite belong to their parents.
Christophe studied theater and politics, so when 1968 came around he was well placed. He’d married an actress, a great beauty who had had small parts in Godard films, and was as strong as Moreau, as voluptuous as Bardot. She was a radical, too. When the revolution was over, Christophe trained to be a French teacher and was assigned to the village. His wife, who was expecting their second child, came, too. She was never happy there. While Christophe relished the life of a small town, adored by his pupils—among them Luc—politicizing them, leading them on demonstrations to the mairie to demand longer playtimes, or encouraging them to burn their copies of Racine, his wife sat at home with the babies and grew heavy with the fear of growing old and nothing ever happening again. When the children were in their late teens, she took their car and a bottle of bourbon up the mountain, and started back down with the manic bravado of an unskilled skier on a black run. The car plowed up seven trees before coming to a terrible, silent standstill in the cork forest, with seven hairpin turns still to go.
Instructions for Visitors Page 11
