Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  I felt more and more cornered by this dangerous proximity, I couldn’t keep this up indefinitely, finding excuses not to meet, so I invented a new snag. I “admitted” to him that I sometimes spoke very quietly because I lived with someone, with a…well, I didn’t live alone. At first he thought I meant a roommate, but I told him it was my boyfriend. He took the hit, his voice sounded thicker which constricted my heart. “For a long time?” he asked. “No,” I told him. “And things are already not good between us. He’s very jealous, very suspicious.” Chris agreed with me wholeheartedly, emphatically: he couldn’t stand jealousy either, it was a despicable emotion, and truly loving relationships should be based on trust. “I’m not like that at all,” he said. “And do you have anyone?” I asked. “No, I’m single,” he replied with a vehemence tinged with reproach. I’d guessed as much: someone called Audrey, twenty years old with one child, a supermarket checkout girl in Bordeaux, had recently disappeared from his list of friends. He’d broken up with her. He was all mine.

  I know, it was the perfect opportunity to end this impossible affair. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Every time I took a step toward breaking up with him, I’d take one step back to win him over again. I needed to hear his voice, to know what he was doing. I needed to feel loved by him. He’d replaced Joe, and if I lost him I’d be alone. He was proof that I existed. You know, the sad thing is, well, the sadly banal thing, tragically banal, is that this fake admission of a rival actually strengthened the connection between us. Chris thought he was jealousy-free but he was riddled with it. With the sort of jealousy some would call homosexual, no, infantile, Oedipal, would you say?—Can you shed any light on that?—either way, it was as if introducing another man into the frame sharpened his desire, his urge to conquer. Jealousy is three-way love, isn’t it?

  From then on, because they were secretive, clandestine, our conversations took an erotic turn. Sometimes I’d hang up with no warning (my son was having a nightmare) and Chris would send a concerned, almost anxious message on Facebook, a lover’s message. He shuddered at the thought that I might stop calling him, or someone could force me to stop, he was consumed with fear of losing me, but I realized this only afterward. I reveled in these conversations made all the more intimate by the secrecy surrounding them, I looked forward to them, longed for them. Of course sometimes doubts would creep in, feelings of disappointment. I was used to more intellectual connections with men, I was one of those people who wonder how anyone can live without reading Proust. Just talking about the weather rather than whether life was worth living, about TV series rather than the sheer power of desire, all surface and no depth—that was new for me. Well, it was the same with Joe, but his physical presence changed everything, sensuality dispensed with words, people never miss Proust when they’re making love. So sometimes I’d hang up and promise myself I’d never call him again because he would never have a body. But I wanted him more and more fiercely, his voice and the image I had of him had me in their clutches. I dreamed of stroking the parts of his body I could see in his photos: his neck, his shoulders, his mouth. Then the conversation would start up again on Facebook.

  One evening he asked me for my phone number, I resisted, saying my partner—whom I’d baptized Gilles—couldn’t bear him calling, but he insisted, he’d be careful, he’d call when I was traveling, or only when I said he could, but he needed this sign of trust from me, he felt excluded, felt he didn’t exist in my life, he needed to have some part of me. I didn’t want to give him my number because I was afraid Joe might see it one day, work out that Claire Antunes was me and tell Chris. That was what I dreaded most. So the next day I bought a little phone with a cheap sim-only contract, two euros a month for two hours of calls, unlimited texts, and a number only Chris would know. When I didn’t have my children with me I told him he could call, saying either that I was on a business trip or that my boyfriend was away. Chris became a witness to both my “conjugal” problems and my faithfulness: I didn’t want to meet him, I explained, because I was afraid I’d fall in love with him and therefore cheat on Gilles. Chris said he understood (he understood everything!), but I should be honest with myself. “I’m convinced that one day our lives will be connected,” he wrote. It was a discreet way of saying he loved me, and I liked that discretion, that restraint. He was waiting, he had faith in the future, in us, he wasn’t trying to take power. “Let’s learn each other,” he often said, “there’s plenty of time.” It felt good, restful, turning to him, not being under any pressure. No pressure from him, I mean. Because I was putting myself under pressure. My life revolved more and more around this relationship. I was neglecting my teaching commitments, feeling frustrated with my students, and my children complained that I wasn’t really there. I was living for a happy ending that I knew was utterly impossible, I was torn in two, I was going crazy.

  Yes, I thought of it, of course I did. It was even a recurring daydream: I’d meet him in a café, in the street, me, the forty-eight-year-old Claire, and he’d fall in love with me—with me and not someone else. Why not, after all? But to achieve that I needed to be rid of the twenty-four-year-old Claire, or I needed him to be rid of her, because I didn’t think he could so much as look at another woman while he was in the passionate state we’d reached. For him to love me, for my face to replace Katia’s, he had to lose all hope of meeting his perfect young e-pal. So Claire Antunes, my avatar, had to die in order for me to come into his life. And comfort him in his grief. You have no idea how often I pictured the rest of the story, or the possible rest! One time I even tried to act out my dream. Chris was coming back from Lacanau, he’d told me what time he would arrive at Montparnasse Station, I’d invented some job out of town, as usual. And on a whim, with no premeditation, at the appointed hour, I put on a pretty dress and went to wait for him on the platform. I hung back slightly, I was planning to follow him but didn’t really know what would happen, I needed to see his real body moving somewhere that wasn’t just one of my daydreams. I suddenly saw him walking along the platform, carrying a big traveling bag, looking tired and lost, really lost, like a child who’s been sent on a journey alone. Then, just as I was hastily improvising what might happen next, a man stepped toward him, a man who looked both gruff and kind, and he took one of the handles of Chris’s bag—his father, he would tell me later when Claire Antunes revealed that she’d been there, at the station, that she’d lied when she’d claimed she was out of town. I was touched by seeing him for real, handsome but vulnerable, incredibly vulnerable, I remember thinking that, amazed to see his father waiting for him, at thirty-six years old, just to take him back to the suburbs. And I should have thought about that a bit more, realized how weak he was. But I was blinded by my need for him to be strong, all I wanted to see was the conqueror.

  Things could have been so different.

  I didn’t have time. Chris didn’t give me time to orchestrate my arrival on the scene. Besides, he didn’t even notice me that day. I made sure I walked past them, him and his father, neither of them saw me, I know they didn’t, Chris looked right through me like a window. No hint of intuition in the air, nope. The meeting stayed in the realms of imagination.

  But the whole story’s written down, you know. In last year’s writing workshop here, Camille suggested we work on the theme “Changing the Premise.” The idea was to take our own experience as a starting point, a disappointing, unhappy or tragic experience (all of us here have plenty, and spectacular ones at that, you must have lots of grist for your mill), the idea was to imagine a different version, a new development, a possible ending, to invent a narrative that would reorient the actual course of our lives. You can imagine how I threw myself into that project! First of all, I missed writing. I don’t mean academic writing and articles for conferences. I’ve never understood where I get the energy—which I’ve had for years—to research the most insignificant things and produce reports on them as if the whole world will be transformed or become a better place: the d
ate on a letter from La Rochefoucauld to Madame de Lafayette, the supernumerary comma in a Henry James manuscript, Victor Hugo’s propensity for assonance using the syllable -ance. The fear that that shows, when you come to think of it! What an escape from real life! No, I mean personal writing, the process of giving outward expression to things imprinted inside us—writing to describe our experiences, our dreams and longings, using a net made up of words to catch them like a writhing fish. Have you ever tried, Marc? Of course it’s often disappointing: the contrast between the story inside your head and the one you actually—painfully or otherwise—bring into the world can be terrible. A fish is always more beautiful undulating in the current than gasping in the wind; its scales shine more brightly in the river than in the mesh of a landing net. But while you’re tracking it, you’re happy. Well, I’m not sure “tracking” is the right word, it’s got too much of the hunter about it. It would be better to stick to fishing metaphors. Writing is like fishing—angling, coarse fishing—it’s quite physical, but the main thing is the waiting. An active, alert sort of waiting. The feeling that if you wait in the right way, if you know how to wait, listening out for the tiniest quiver of the line, the smallest tremor, you won’t be disappointed, it’ll bite. Writing is like love: you wait, and then it bites. Or not, as my son would say. Except in love we’re often the fish. Aargh, I’m getting tied up in my own fishing line. So anyway, in the workshop I wrote the story as it could have happened if I’d had the nerve. I imagined what could have happened between Chris and me if I’d dared to introduce myself to him—without admitting I was his mysterious Facebook friend, no, I couldn’t have gone that far, I’d have been too afraid, too ashamed—just to introduce myself as me, a new acquaintance. I let myself get carried away in my dreams, it was wonderful, oh it was so wonderful.

  Obviously, even then I had to choose between several possible endings, happy or otherwise. You’ll see. I might give it to you to read one of these days, when I’ve finished it. My relationship with Chris, in novel form. It’s one way of getting the two of us to live together, of animating our ghosts, our virtual bodies, our silent souls, our unspoken words. Camille likes what I’ve written.

  The greatest thing about the workshop is that afterward we’re going to play a version of that game they call Exquisite Corpse—sorry for the choice of words, given the circumstances, but that’s what it’s called, Exquisite Corpse, you really should read more, Marc, this is ridiculous. A surrealist game, then. Except that in this instance, once our stories are finished, what we’re going to do is pass it along to the next person so he or she can add a chapter or a page, a different ending. Something we can’t see ourselves. Another person’s fiction projected onto our own. Each person’s dream dreamed by another dreamer. I like the idea, the idea that we don’t write everything, that we also get to be written. That things can be seen differently. That things can happen differently.

  Why outside? I can’t, not outside. I just can’t. I’ve tried. I always came back real soon, I was brought back. My kids are kind. But you can’t wait, outside. People live, outside. I don’t have anything left to live. I’m not living, I’m waiting for life.

  Writing? Yes. Waiting, writing: it’s all the same.

  But I can’t. Don’t you understand anything? What sort of relationship could I have with another man? I want him.

  For fucking, you mean? Don’t worry on my account: if anyone wants a fuck it’s just as easy here as on the outside. If you want it.

  No.

  No.

  I don’t know.

  No.

  You don’t know anything about it.

  No.

  Leave me alone. I’m tired.

  I watched you walking over then, across the grounds, you looked like a cop. Or a crime prevention officer. The way you stopped to talk to people. You looked as if you were running an undercover inquiry. When everyone actually knows you, if you see what I mean. It’s like in inner-city ghettos: when you talk to people, they only tell you what they feel like saying. They lie, too. They want peace.

  So what’s your question, then, inspector?

  Ah! Death. Of course, death. That’s what you’re asking. “That is the question.”

  Some evenings I could hear so much fear in Chris’s voice, at the thought of losing me, so much that I always ended up reassuring him: things were going really badly with Gilles, he was jealous, bad-tempered, I didn’t know what to do. “Leave him,” he told me. Yes, but where would I go? I didn’t have enough money to rent somewhere on my own, I explained. Chris didn’t reply, unhappy that he couldn’t offer me anything, that his financial situation was even worse than mine. At this point I felt guilty—me in my comfortable two-bedroom apartment on the rue Rambuteau—playing up my “precarious” circumstances on the phone.

  But sometimes I was also frustrated by his inertia. He was living with his parents also because he didn’t want to look for work. He’d lived off Joe for a while, and now he could have found a job waiting tables or something. But he didn’t want to. “I’m devoting myself to my art, I don’t want to waste my talent,” he’d say between drags on his cigarette—I could hear him exhaling the smoke, it titillated me having that tiny access to his body; maybe he was smoking joints, I asked him one evening, he was indignant, no, he’d stopped all that, he was clean. One time he was dismissive of a photography job I found for him on the Internet. I’d sent him the link on Facebook, it wasn’t fantastic, weddings, family ceremonies, but still, it would have gotten him out a bit. But no. He was acting out the part of the impoverished artist for his own benefit: impoverished, forsaken, and noble in his destitution. He wanted to be Depardon or no one. Meanwhile he spent a lot of his time watching American TV series online, so really nothing special. His unwillingness also proved that he wasn’t prepared to do absolutely anything for me, to win me over. It’s also what convinced me I could break up with him without too many misgivings, you see. Sometimes I got confused, wondered what I was still doing in this mish-mash, this mash-up of several lives. How did I ever think…?

  To be honest, I really didn’t know what to do anymore. If I came up with a ploy to “dump” him gently—and that would mean dumping myself too, dumping the young woman in me—he talked to me on the phone in such a velvety voice that I lost all my resolve. He described the things we’d do when we were together. He would massage me slowly when I came home tired in the evening, he would cook me pasta carbonara, his specialty, we’d go for drives in his “clapped-out but cool” Citroën DS—she’s an old lady, he said, she’s forty-five years old. And I blushed privately at my end. He never said anything more explicit, never, for example, made cheeky references, and certainly nothing overtly sexual. I didn’t know whether he was afraid of scaring me off or just wasn’t that interested in sex. That hypothesis bothered me because, as far as I was concerned, some evenings his voice alone was enough to liquefy me, I’d hang up in the grips of unmentionable longing. Once or twice I commented on how many pretty “chicks” had liked the posts on his wall, he replied reassuringly that this was standard for a photographer, models are always scouting for possible shoots. So I thought maybe he wanted to show me that he didn’t see me as a quick fuck but something altogether different. And that was right. One evening he posted a video of Patti Smith singing “Because the Night Belongs to Lovers”—wonderful song, do you know it?—and out of all the possible quotes from it, he chose to make his comment: “Love is an angel disguised as lust.” I listened to it and thought, if love’s an angel then it’s sexless. I felt sad but also reassured: even if there were only words between us, we were still lovers.

  He was coming in from Sevran to spend the evening in Paris more and more frequently, and it grew harder and harder for me to justify my refusal to meet him. “We could just have a coffee, couldn’t we? A decaf,” he joked. “I know your man’s not cool but still. With a job like yours you must see a lot of people, don’t you, surely some are even photographers, aren’t they, so why not m
e?” When I avoided him he’d say, “It’s because you know that the minute we meet, everything will become clear. Clear as Claire can be. I’m absolutely sure we were made for each other, and you know it too, deep down, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

  Clear as Claire can be, oh yes, I thought ironically. Very clear indeed. Clear as spring water. But this was hurting. I put up the best defense I could: “You say that because you like the way I look, you think I’m pretty. But you don’t know me. Maybe I’m lying to you.”

  “But I do know you,” he retorted, very sure of himself, very steady. “It’s nothing to do with how you look, that shows you don’t know me. I don’t give a damn about that. What matters is who you are. I like who you are. I’m in love with your soul, I can hear it in your voice, in your words. All the same, though,” he added, in response to the silence at my end, “I desperately want to take you in my arms.” And that simple phrase, “take you in my arms,” made me weak at the knees, it floored me.

  I couldn’t do it, no. I couldn’t do it. But one day I posted a song for him on YouTube, a Catherine Ribeiro song called “De la main gauche”—I was supposed to like good French songwriting, after all. I really wanted him to listen carefully to the lyrics when she says,

  So this is my distress

  This is the truth that’s hurting me

  I never had an address

  Nothing but a fake ID.

  But he…Excuse me? Are you kidding? Fine…If you like. It’ll give us something different to think about. I warn you, I don’t always sing in tune, especially unaccompanied.