Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  No, I’m exaggerating. Because I remember that right back in February he left a message to say he was “hitting Paris” for a few days and asking if I’d like to meet for a drink. I told him, because I had to, that I was off to Milan for Fashion Week, shame. I also asked why he was coming to Paris, whether it was for his upcoming trip. He said yes, he and his buddy Joe were leaving soon, they were just arranging the last formalities, passports, vaccinations. He was disappointed not to be meeting me, but it would keep till another time.

  No no, nothing. It’s just that…you see, an expression like “hitting Paris,” for example, the words “hitting Paris” would usually wind me up. But with Chris, even if I noticed it (I couldn’t help myself), it gave me a sort of erotic satisfaction, as if our languages—our tongues, ha!—were merging, entering into a tender physical battle. I made a point of calling instead of sending written messages, to avoid alerting him to these differences, but my desire for him was rooted in them, it fed off them. Rather as you can fall in love more quickly with a foreign accent, an unfamiliar intonation. You’re a tourist in love, you’re trying to find someone different who’s from somewhere different, and you find them first through language. By the way, have you met Michel? The fat little bald guy who always has a dictionary under his arm? Apparently he’s been here forever. He studies etymology. Hebrew in particular. At lunch yesterday he told us that “amen” means “I believe it.” Wonderful, isn’t it? We should end all our sentences like that, especially when we talk about love: amen. I love you. Amen.

  Okay. Despite the pleasures afforded by what was in fact a fictional connection with Chris—I say fictional but you have to understand there was also some truth in it, it was a real connection, and it did me good—in spite of that, I was still suffering because Joe had lost interest in me. The thought that he was soon leaving without even calling me again was unbearable. So I plucked up my courage or my craziness, whichever you prefer, and the next week I sent him a text. He replied right away, hi you, I’m going on a long trip, if you want one last good time it’s midnight tonight at your place. I said yes, I did want.

  I hadn’t seen him for several months. He was handsome, tanned, sea-salty, excited about his trip, he was already not really there. Joe lives like everyone else, in the moment, but what makes him different from all the rest is that he takes pleasure not from the present itself but from his certainty, in the present, that the future will make him happy. His present is a present, a gift because it’s a constant projection toward a heartwarming tomorrow. His present is glorious because it’s wall-to-wall with prospects. So when we slept together that evening, I was making love with a ghost; he was already on the beaches of Goa, surrounded by teenagers who saw him as a hero, he was trading precious stones, getting together a trance group that made him famous, becoming a surfing champion, what do I know…that’s Joe all over: he lives happily today on things that will never happen. Joe’s the opposite of what I was saying earlier: he never faces up to his own inabilities, ever, he’s in constant denial of failure, that’s why he’s not unhappy. He has no doubts, he’s a sort of fundamentalist of life. At least this anticipatory enthusiasm kept the more negative waves away from me: I didn’t exist either. He just about mentioned, as he closed the door on his way out, that I should go back to my husband. My life—he seemed to think with one last pitying look at my apartment, my books, and my face—my life wouldn’t mean much now that his was going to be so wonderful on the far side of the world. Being happy isn’t enough, you also need other people to be unhappy: it’s a recognized formula.

  But what I could get out of his visit had changed, I soon realized that. I still liked making love with Joe but I was thinking about Chris. It was ironic: I’d met Chris in order to have news of Joe, and now I was talking to Joe to get news of Chris. And I learned something that dampened my mood that evening: Chris had a girlfriend, a twenty-year-old already separated from the father of her six-month-old baby. He’d met her on the beach three months earlier, but they didn’t see each other much because she lived in Bordeaux and Chris wasn’t going to travel all that way to “hear some other guy’s baby screaming—not dumb, our boy,” Joe said. At least he didn’t meet her on Facebook, I thought, as Joe told me the story—I was so thrown that I clung to the tiniest positive detail; I wanted our relationship (“our relationship”!) to be different. But at the same time I couldn’t criticize Chris for multitasking on the love front because what we had wasn’t love, just friendship—virtual friendship, at that. “How are things, my new friend?” he’d say, or “Lots of love, mystery friend.”

  The age difference? How do you mean? Oh, between him and me? No, I thought you meant between Chris and his girlfriend, with him being thirty-six and her twenty: a sixteen-year gap, quite something. But of course, that’s not what you’re interested in. No, what you’re asking is whether the age difference between Chris and me—twelve years—was a problem, is that it? If it were the other way around you wouldn’t even ask: if I were Chris, aged forty-eight, in love with a thirty-six-year-old woman, it wouldn’t matter at all, wouldn’t even cross your mind, I’m sure of it, you wouldn’t even have picked up on it. You see, right there you have every woman’s tragedy, one of our day-to-day tragedies, and you don’t even seem aware of it, when this is your job, after all, the human soul is your job. Or perhaps it’s because you’re young and you think of all mature women as your mother—in which case, you need therapy, Marc.

  But while we’re on the subject, you men do make me laugh with your Oedipus complex which you serve up in every possible guise. Killing your father to marry your mother? Hah! You need to come up with a different myth to show what really goes on: a man who kills his wife and sleeps with his daughter, now that would be more accurate, much more accurate. There’s what I have to say on that subject. But tell me, why should a woman over forty-five gradually withdraw from the living world, rip the thorny prick of desire from her flesh (ah, the prick! Did you hear that, Doctor?), let’s say the thorn then, why should women rip out the thorn of desire when men can start over, have more children and reinvent their whole world until they die? The injustice of it consumes us from a very early age; long before we experience it, we intuitively know it’s there. There’s something unlimited about men (and I don’t mean their intelligence), something that doesn’t threaten to close down on them, you get a sense of it even with little boys, and sometimes with very old men. I saw Jean-Pierre Mocky on TV the other day, he was boasting that he was still fucking at past eighty, “I can still get it up,” he said, leering at the girl next to him, an actor young enough to be his great-granddaughter. And the audience clapped. “I can still get it up, amen.” Can you imagine an eighty-year-old woman saying on live TV that she gets wet eyeing up some teenager. How embarrassing that would be. The truth is it’s unacceptable. Men, on the other hand…the world belongs to them more than it does to us—time, space, the streets, the city, work, thought, recognition, the future. It’s as if there’s always another stage for them, a whole different backdrop they can see if they tilt their heads or stand on tiptoe—it’s over our heads, quite literally. For example, I personally have never felt I filled a man’s whole horizon.

  My sons? When they were little, a bit. But they’re teenagers now, they’re six inches taller than me, so obviously it’s all over my head.

  No, not my husband, never! It’s just…he was so confident he was the only future I had. “Woman is the future of man,” yeah, right! You have to be kidding…or maybe in the plural, women. Like milestones along the way. Or millstones…

  The difference is all men have a future. Always. A future without us. Men die younger. Maybe. But they live longer. I read somewhere that on dating Web sites the watershed between forty-nine and fifty is an abyss for women, they get swallowed up by it. At forty-nine they get an average of forty visits a week, at fifty they’re reduced to three. And yet nothing’s changed, they’re the same, just a year older. You must know that sketch, I can’t reme
mber who did it, about the expiration date on canned food: “best before March 25, 2017.” What exactly happens inside that can on the night of March 25? We women are all cans of food. We become unfit for consumption overnight. And if I’d put the truth on my fake Facebook page, used a real photo of me, Chris probably wouldn’t have accepted me as a friend. At least he wouldn’t have wanted an intimate friendship with a forty-eight-year-old woman.

  Of course I can’t be sure. I didn’t dare go with the truth, and that’s what caused the disaster. Instead of laughing in the face of this injustice, instead of defying it, I interiorized it, I submitted myself to it more than any man would. It’s too late now.

  You’re sweet, trying to make it up to me. You’re actually digging yourself deeper. I know, I don’t look it. I know men can find me attractive. Do you find me attractive, Marc? Are you not allowed to say?

  Thank you.

  Actually, why thank you? Why do I need this?

  Why do I give a damn whether people find me attractive?

  Oh! At that point I’d been separated from my husband for a year already. I left him just before I met Joe, with no remorse or scruples, I knew he had a replacement woman or would have one soon enough, as he always had, in fact he remarried. You know he’s one of those men who “love women,” as people say. A nice way of saying he doesn’t love a single one. He wanted me to stay with him, though, but I really didn’t like his arguments. “You’ll age and soon no one will want you,” he said. “You still have…what? Two, maybe three good years? Because guys couldn’t give a fuck about mature women. And you can write your theses and articles, and go to the gym, you can stay brilliant and trim, it doesn’t mean a thing if your license plates don’t have the right date. Whereas I’ll still be here even when you’re ugly, flabby, and wrinkled, and you can thank me for not leaving you.” The narcissism of pity, do you know that one? And he was three years older than me! The skin on his chest starting to sag, his pubic hair going gray, his scalp showing through his hair. Because I can do that too, can’t I, make him look like a pathetic, aging specimen! But this was about my dying light. He was burying me but offering me a first-rate funeral. The apotheosis of hate when the gravedigger expects you to thank him for digging your grave. But I didn’t feel like being dead. If he’d said “I love you” I would have stayed. Well, maybe not. What’s love without desire? What is it? How do you do it? Tell me that. I didn’t want to be dead, that’s all, even with pretty flowers on my grave.

  There. Do you understand a bit better now? Do you see how a woman in her forties with a professorship (I’m saying that for your statistics, you do have forms to fill in, right?) can end up in a straitjacket in this mess? Just because she didn’t want to die?

  “Go die”: that’s what the whole world tells women to do in more or less explicit terms. And incidentally literature echoes the theme. You need only read Houellebecq—you must have read some of his stuff? That makes you the only one…—or Richard Millet: I remember in one of his novels a woman decides to die at forty. Forty: it struck her (or him!) that that was when a woman lost her looks and, therefore, might as well commit suicide. And she does it! And here’s what’s horrific about the book: the narrator, her lover, stands by all through her death throes as if this is somehow inexorable, programmed, as inevitable as his dwindling desire for her. What else could he do but sadly acknowledge her decline—I’m asking you? As for Houellebecq, we’ve all heard his song. The premature collapse of women’s erotic potential is inescapable because “uneducable” men have judged them only by physical criteria “for millennia,” whereas women, who are “educated,” can be attracted to wealth, power, and intelligence. And why not educate men? Why are we condemned to insignificance by the very people who claim to pity us? Go die, that’s the only advice men have for women, when it comes down to it—it has to be said. Go die, scram, make way for the young, make way for men. Women are everlastingly excluded, second-rate human beings.

  Aha! The perfect excuse! Is that all you can come up with? Yes, you have every reason to blush. You remind me of what I was told as a child: you eat your supper, think of all the little Biafrans dying of starvation. Yes, okay, YES, OF COURSE, there’s worse somewhere else. Let’s say it’s more or less metaphorical—but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s real, go die, a real instruction. I realize that. Do you think that’s any comfort to me? That I should be happy to be a French woman because women are dying in other countries? But how can I live here when women have their bones broken over there? Did you hear what that guy said, that Hamadache, I’ll never forget his name, it’s got the word “mad” right there, he said, “Women should be banned.” “I’ve come to this conclusion,” that’s what he said, “women should be banned.” Mind you, we had that here in France too, a guy in the late nineteenth century, in the days of Huysmans and the Goncourt brothers and every flavor of misogynist, a doctor, I don’t remember his name, but his professed ambition was to “eradicate the bug with its hair in a bun.” It’s a more amusing formulation, but it doesn’t make me laugh—not at all.

  For a long time now I’ve woken in the night in a muck sweat with a head full of horrible images—girls in Pakistan disfigured by acid attacks, with holes instead of eyes, their flesh deformed or destroyed by male loathing, women raped everywhere in the world, everywhere, and sometimes hanged for this “dishonor,” teenage girls with their throats slit, babies destroyed at birth because they’re girls. The statistics gnaw at my brain: forty-eight percent of the population is female, and falling steadily, against fifty-two percent male worldwide because we’re being killed, one hundred thirty million women excised, one young woman in three a victim of violence over the course of her life. I’m tormented by an unhealthy empathy for my kind, you know. Every night I howl with terror at the thought of being a woman. As I get older my own sex is becoming the cause of my insomnia. When that girl was raped and battered to death on a bus in India right in front of her boyfriend, I couldn’t get her out of my head for days—I could almost say “out of my memory”—the iron rod her attackers used to butcher her insides. I clamped my legs together at night in terror as I thought about it, I pictured the to-and-fro action they must have used to break her open, and the point when they threw her out of the bus like a garbage bag, and I went over and over the words one of them said after he was arrested: “We’d decided to kill a woman.” Not to have a good time, to fuck, to have a laugh. No: to kill a woman. Those words fill me with such disbelief, I can’t even describe it. I said them out loud in the dark in my bedroom and just couldn’t understand. It’s like the photos of the prostitutes killed in a brothel in Baghdad, twenty-nine women covered in blood, their heads between their knees as if to protect themselves from the attacker’s weapons with whatever pitiful means they had. It just hits me in the face and I have to stifle the sobs in my chest at the sheer tragedy of being a woman. You can go ahead and cite counterexamples like Doctor I-don’t-know-what-his-name-was, tell me pretty stories, Marie Curie, Marguerite Yourcenar, Catherine Deneuve, poor guy, he wracked his brains, found it hard, of course he did, you can’t get away from the truth: it’s a tragedy being a woman. Wherever you are. Always. Everywhere. It’s a fight, if you like. But because we lose it’s a tragedy. That’s why I hardly watch TV anymore, not the news anyway, I’ve stopped reading newspapers and magazines because I can’t bear to see myself treated like that, me as seen through all those women, all those victims. Women are condemned—by force or by contempt—to die. That’s a fact, everywhere, all the time: men teach women to die. From north to south, fundamentalist or pornographic, it’s the sole same tyranny. Existing only in their eyes, and dying when they close their eyes. And they do close their eyes, and you close your eyes too. You close your eyes to women’s fate. Obviously for us there isn’t the same level of violence, obviously. We don’t die of it, or not so much. That’s a hell of a step in the right direction, isn’t it? And I got lucky, very lucky even, it wouldn’t be right to complain, but that doe
sn’t bother me, I’m doing it anyway. I’m lodging a complaint, flagging up my demise. Have my death recorded, even if it’s just in “other news.” Because dying in your own lifetime is still an ordeal. You melt into the background, you become a silhouette, a nothing. Let me say it, at least, please, let me, listen to me. Indifference is another form of burqa—does that shock you?—another way for men to corner the market on desire. Another way to close their eyes. We’ve served our purpose, we’re no longer needed. Yesterday’s fantasy, today’s phantom. Do you think the comparison’s inappropriate? Well, I’m not exactly appropriate here myself. Here or anywhere else. I don’t belong anyplace. Do you know this one? “What supernatural power do fifty-year-old women get? They become invisible!” Oh yes, I’m shocking you. I can tell from that forced laugh. You think I’m so bourgeois. A little middle-class cow confusing her own fate with prostitutes and victims. A hysteric. That’s your diagnosis, isn’t it? Another one who thinks with her uterus. Is that what it says in your file? Or worse? Psychotic? Narcissistic? Paranoid? But you’re the bourgeois: the one with enlightened views about what’s normal, what’s abnormal, the difference between whore and hormonal. You don’t know anything, Marc, don’t go believing you do. What do you know about women, Marc?

  Sometimes I so wish I were a man. It would be restful.

  Here? You’re right, let’s change the subject, let’s keep it courteous.

  No. Here I’m seen. Everyone sees me here. So I’m staying. In Africa, I can’t remember which country it’s in, Rwanda, I think, when they say hello, they say “I see you.” Isn’t that wonderful! We count our likes on Facebook, we count the thumbs-ups on our profile photos, but the meaning’s the same. The thing is we don’t just want to be seen, we want to be seen in a good light. So we make ourselves younger, prettier, we big ourselves up. We resist erosion. We don’t want to melt into the crowd, we don’t want to get lost. I think that’s perfectly understandable.