Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  “I’m the same age I was last night,” I wailed through the windshield.

  In the supermarket where we stopped to buy provisions, he walked along the aisles ten feet ahead of me, not turning around once, letting me push the shopping cart like the more-than-fifty-year-old housewife I’d become in the space of a three-minute single. He just tossed a jack for an mp3 player into the cart. “Do you like tomatoes?” I asked, suppressing my humiliation once again. “What shall we eat this evening?”

  “You’re the one shopping,” he replied contemptuously. Then, because I kept asking, he said, “I’ve never seen anyone less like a woman.” Even my housewife status had evaporated. He joked with the girl at the checkout while I put the credit card in the machine. She had a tattoo of a crocodile on her wrist, he smiled and showed her his, birds with their wings spread open, “You’re going to gobble me up,” he said. Then he walked out without helping me carry the bags. In the parking lot he opened the trunk and watched me put the bags in.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  In Boulogne I went to pick up the keys to the house from the owners, he didn’t come in with me, and when the couple saw me to the door, he barely acknowledged them, as if he were just a paid driver, waiting, leaning on the hood in the sunshine. A subtle smell of decomposition wafted up from the embankment. “Okay, I’ll drive now,” I said, walking around the back of the car, “I’d like to see what’s so special about this DS.”

  He snapped his hand toward the ignition and took out the key. I raised my eyebrows. “No way are you driving,” he said, crossing his arms; a blood vessel bulged in his neck.

  “And why not?” Tears were gathering at the back of my eyes, probably the light. “Because I don’t let anyone drive my car, that’s all.”

  I laughed. “Your car? YOUR car? May I remind you that I paid for this car? And I like driving too.”

  “Maybe you do, but you won’t be driving now. Anyway, it wouldn’t be legal, you’re not a designated driver.”

  “Great! Well, that’s not a problem, I’ll call the agency and ask them to add me. Pass me the receipt. That was a bit much! Did you really think I’d spend two weeks here without driving? And be completely dependent on you? And your moods?” I took out my cell phone, he didn’t move, just stared off into the distance, as if he couldn’t hear me. “Do you have their number? Hand me the receipt…”

  “I won’t give you the receipt, and you won’t be calling the agency.”

  “Oh really? And why not?” My voice was strangulated, as if I had a hand to my throat.

  “Because I don’t want my name to be associated with yours.”

  “It’s just so I can drive, you know, it’s not to publish the banns of marriage.”

  “We’re not together,” he roared. “Do you get that? We. Are. Not. Together! I don’t love you and I’m not with you. Get it?”

  What a dick, I thought. “Yes we are. Look, we’re both here, together,” I said mischievously, and in that moment I lightly swiped the keys from his hand and started to run. He followed me around the car and I laughed. “We’re no longer together but you’re still chasing me,” I crowed between peals of laughter, I still wanted to believe we could get out of the situation like that, by laughing about the lack of love, or I wanted to give the owners of the house their money’s worth, they could have been watching through their white lace curtains. I ran down the street so they could no longer see me, Chris caught up with me, I’d miscalculated his lack of humor, he rammed me against a wall, grabbed my wrist with one hand and with the other tried to prize open my fingers that were holding the keys. I was still laughing but he was hurting me, on a level with my eyes I could see his biceps swelling dangerously, dangerously, I thought. Danger, I thought

  “Camille, give me back the keys now.” I struggled a little to show my strength, because I’m strong too, I was strong, I wanted him to see that, I clutched those keys in my fist, they dug into my palm, my back burrowed into the wall as if it wanted to disappear into it. Chris kept up the pressure, my fingers were giving in to his, “You’re hurting me,” I said, “stop.” I flailed my arms to escape his clutches, he caught me by the wrist again, raised my hand high and immobilized me by holding it tight like a referee in the boxing ring, and with that gesture which announced me as the winner he won. I let go of the keys for fear of hearing my own bones break. He went back to the car, and so did I, he walked like John Wayne, we climbed in without another word and drove to the house, with me telling him the way in a GPS voice.

  It was a beautiful traditional stone house, spacious and cold. There were three bedrooms, one of which contained a child’s bed and another an old-fashioned cradle beside a double bed—I had something similar for my dolls back in the day. I rearranged the drapes just as I used to then, saw myself as a child. I put the sheets and pillowcases into the largest bedroom and put the food into the fridge. My wrist hurt and the index finger on that hand was red and swollen, I had at least two dislocated fingers. Chris was building a fire in the grate, I could hear him moving logs. The evening wind was up outside, it slipped under the doors with a keening sound like an injured dog, and the trees waved wildly in the gathering gloom. “I don’t think this is going to work,” I said, going over to him, “we can’t do this.”

  “Okay,” Chris replied, pushing the kindling around to put out the fire just as it was taking, “let’s go.” He jumped to his feet and the bulk of him frightened me.

  I backed away and said, “Not tonight, look, it’s already dark and there’s a storm on the way, it would be dangerous. Let’s stay the night here and we’ll see if it’s calmed down in the morning.” I meant the weather and us. The fire had reddened his cheeks, he had the flushed face of a lover.

  “Okay,” he said quickly, “okay.” He fanned the embers, then sat on the couch, facing me. I opened my laptop and he his, the Internet connection wasn’t very good, he put his earphones in and started clicking his fingers in time to music I couldn’t hear. After a while he stood up, rummaged in a cupboard, and flicked on the kettle. With a questioning gesture, he offered me a coffee, I shook my head, no. He made himself a sandwich, looking furious, then came around behind me to check the fire. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” I quickly closed my laptop. I’d been onto the Avis Web site to see if I could add myself as a second driver, but I didn’t want him to know. Once in my life I’d been physically afraid of a man, my husband in a fit of jealousy, wild-eyed, he’d slapped me with all his might, I ended up with a detached retina, but I was young and I thought it was the price a girl had to pay for being desirable, that it made men mad, that it was natural. I had to have laser treatment.

  Now it was the other way around: I’d become undesirable and the man couldn’t bear it, he felt belittled. It wasn’t natural, it was social—his image of himself in the world: a Brahman among the untouchables, I thought. Untouchable, I thought. Over fifty! Even though we were alone he was consumed with shame, his mouth pinched by it, he’d been betrayed, he’d been humiliated, I was there in front of him like a mirror, a visual display of his decline. The white drapes on the cradle glowed in the shadows, and I tried to understand: was it being with a woman who could no longer have children that suddenly appalled him? Some sort of mix-up men might make between infertility and impotence? A loathing of sterility? A subconscious fear of sleeping with their own mother? A fear that—conversely—young women wouldn’t have about sleeping with their fathers? They might even be looking for them. And the fathers too? Not afraid of sleeping with the daughters? But why? Why this asymmetry that was so universally accepted and validated? Why this superior caste for men?

  Basically, Louis, I was trying to behave as I usually do when disaster threatens: I drew on the power of reason, I countered my fear with ideas, I thought in order to ease the suffering, I used intelligence to bandage my wounds. But the system had its failings this time, I could tell. Intelligence wasn’t enough to ensure my safety, it made m
e see the truth in too harsh a light. Being put right is worse than being treated wrong, you’re no longer protected by any illusions, you’re left with nothing over your eyes to conceal the truth—no veil to cover its dazzling nakedness. The truth is what never changes, the thing we can’t influence. And realizing that is terrifying. So you have to drive the thought out and rally your whole body in your skin, reignite feelings of pleasure, try to compensate for unhappiness with life.

  “Look, there are some CDs…What sort of music do you like?” I put on a Manu Chao album and started dancing wildly, the chirpy rhythm leading me into oblivion, completely emptying my head. Chris might come and dance with me, I thought. Dancing is like sex—a way of getting closer without resorting to words. But he got up, exasperated, gathered his things, and went and shut himself in the back bedroom. The storm raged, branches smacked against the windows, the lights flickered, and I clung to the wind as I danced.

  “I warn you, I’m leaving at eight p.m.” This curt sentence, lobbed from the bedroom doorway, stirred me from heavy sleep. Eight p.m., I thought, that gives us plenty of time for a reconciliation. The clock said 7:30—a.m. With another man, and if I’d had a better night behind me, I’d have said, “Come here, please, come to bed, let’s make love, come on, then we’ll see about later”—that’s what Circe suggests to the furious Ulysses, because the flesh can soften the mood—it’s the only thing to do, make love. But pasty-mouthed and puffy-eyed, I didn’t say anything, I gave a vague groan and buried myself under the duvet.

  Now I open my eyes and it’s 8:20, the house is filled with silence, the wind has dropped. I get up, a baleful glance at the scary mirror in the bathroom, a double layer of concealer under my eyes, a dusting of blusher, putting on makeup, pleasing, pleasing, pleasing, getting back to desire. I listen to the silence. Chris’s door is closed. It’s cold in the big living room, even the embers look frozen.

  I switch on the kettle at the breakfast bar, put two slices of bread in the toaster, pick up an empty packet of Camels. The front door is ajar. I walk onto the doorstep barefoot, the car’s no longer parked outside, he’s gone to the village for cigarettes, I throw away the Camel packet, the sky’s blue-gray, I turn on the radio, Oh you’ll see, you’ll see, that’s what love’s all about. The coffee percolates as slowly as the time. I knock on his bedroom door, open it, the room’s empty, his things have gone, all that’s left are the dirty utensils and the leftovers of his dinner on the bedside table. I’ll have to clean up, that’s what he wants when it comes down to it, for me to stick to my woman’s role. There’s a Tintin book on the bed among the rumpled covers. He’s on voicemail. I instinctively call Avis in Sevran and, shivering with cold, ask whether I could possibly change the rental contract. “Oh, but the gentleman has just called…I’ve already explained it all to him, he said he’d bring the car back at around three o’clock.” “Three o’clock…and what about the refund?” “We’ll give you a pro-rata refund to match your usage. So you hired it for ten days at two hundred fifty euros, you’re bringing it back today, we’ll count that as two days, we’ll reimburse the difference. If the car’s in good condition, of course.” “Why did you say two hundred fifty euros?” “That’s what you paid, madam.” “No, no, we paid three hundred thirty. Was there extra insurance?” The woman’s voice is less confident. “Um, listen, I have the invoice in front of me, there’s an all-inclusive offer this month for Citroën DSs, your husband, well, the gentleman paid two hundred fifty euros.”

  I tell her everything, spill out the whole story. She’s a stranger, but she’s a woman. She says “Oh yes” and “that’s terrible” and “I understand,” and this is all that matters right now: to have a woman understand, and agree with me that it’s terrible.

  “You’ve got through to Chris’s voicemail. I’m not here but leave me a message and I’ll call you back, and that’s a promise.” And that’s a promise. That was the last time I heard his voice—a pretty stupid voice, to be honest, I thought. My shame was more painful than the abandonment, because I had only myself to blame. He’d already blocked me on Facebook—I couldn’t even leave a private message, a bandaged thumb icon made the grim statement: “This link is no longer available.”

  And that’s a promise.

  The idea of resuscitating Claire Antunes didn’t come to me immediately. Don’t say I’m cynical, Louis, nothing was premeditated. My anger and contempt kept me going for an hour or two. Then loneliness moved in and the sense of abandonment nestled in the little cradle, I couldn’t take my eyes off it, it was empty and there I was lying in it, it was me there howling to the point of suffocation. When the stress became too much, I tried to get help from women who could explain or at least understand—women who knew Chris, up close or distantly. On Facebook I sent a private message to Charlotte, an ex he’d sometimes mentioned; to the actress we’d met together at the café that first evening; to two other girls who often liked his posts and whose names I remembered.

  To each of them I briefly described what had happened, I wasn’t asking for anything specific, just a bit of sisterly support, that was all, without having to draw them a picture. It was the first time I’d expected more of a woman than a man—the first time in my life since childhood, since my mother. Why strangers rather than friends? I don’t know. Perhaps the shame didn’t weigh so heavily with them. Two of them answered kindly, two blocked me—this link is no longer available. Alix, the actress, gave me her number; I called her.

  She wasn’t surprised, she knew his type, good-looking, narcissistic, and shallow, self-interested and weak, oh, my word, did she know them, she collected them even. She said I shouldn’t leave, after all it was my vacation too, I could enjoy the fresh air, the ocean, the free time, the house miles from Paris, I was lucky; she meanwhile was waiting tables to pay for her acting classes.

  I couldn’t leave anyway. The wind and rain had started again, the storm moaned at the windows. And where would I go? How? Because we were driving I hadn’t thought twice about bringing three bags filled with sheets, books, rain boots and walking boots. A parody of the bourgeois seaside vacationer, that’s what I was. With all that weighing me down, I couldn’t even reach the bus stop on foot, and that’s if there was one within five miles. The house was isolated, it was off season, almost all the shutters in the village were closed. I was alone.

  I stayed there, prostrate, all day, slumped on the sofa drinking tea. In my mind’s eye, I followed the car’s progress back to Paris. My thoughts now operated only like a forsaken GPS, all roads led away from me, all paths went nowhere. Then I played Manu Chao on a loop and danced till I was exhausted. I danced and my memory dismissed the past and all its attendant emotions. Now I had no parents or children, no house or home, I was godless and lawless. I was abandoned, in a state of abandon, banned from everything under the drapes of that cradle, the shroud of a tomb. I said things out loud, disconnected words that clattered like cannonballs chained to a convict’s ankles.

  It was only the next day that, with no news of any sort, I thought of resuming the conversation in Claire Antunes’s identity. She alone could now pick up the baton, taking over from me, taking over all of me, I would fade away, melt away, I could feel myself becoming no one and I liked it, I was turning into nothing and it suited me fine, but the pleasure I took in my own annihilation brought me up short, I needed to do something, anything to reestablish a connection, even if it was through the other woman in me. So I sent Chris a message from Claire’s Facebook: “Hi Chris, how are you after all this time? I’m still in Lisbon. But hey, I received a weird message on messenger, I’m forwarding it to you, it upset me, did you really do that? I can’t believe you did. Claire.” I attached the message I’d sent to some of his girlfriends.

  He replied immediately: “You’re right not to believe it, Claire. That woman’s completely crazy, she’s telling lies all over the place to get to me, but my friends just laugh because they know me, they know I couldn’t dream up all that garbage, you sho
uld block her right away otherwise she’ll poison your life. Real sorry to be back in touch with you because of that head case, but at least she did that for us. Let’s hear some of your news. How are you, bonita? Are you coming back to France? Beijos. PS did you notice, I’ve taken up Portuguese while I’m waiting for you.”

  I persisted: “But were you at the seaside together? Is that true? I know who she is, I read two of her books, I really like her work, she’s a great writer” (oh yes, Louis, I wrote those words).

  Him: “We’re NOT together. We went away to that house to work on a photo book project, she said she wanted to do a book with me but she was actually in love with me, it was an excuse to lure me to that house, but I got the picture, I’m not an idiot. When I saw what was going on, you can imagine I took my car and left, and that’s it. Does being a writer impress you, then? Not me, I like real people. And I can tell you she’s super nasty in real life, she told me some horrible stuff, she was completely hysterical and that’s something I can’t take, and so you see now she’s trying to bring me down with my friends. But forget about it, who gives a damn about her. Tell me about you, how are things? Are you happy? Do you still think about me?”

  Claire: “I’m okay. Sorry to go on about this, Chris, but I’m worried she’ll be in really bad shape, all alone in that house. You say she’s nasty but if I put myself in her shoes and if someone did that to me, I’d go crazy. You abandoned her there? And she says it was a car she rented, not your car. That you were together. And that you twisted her arm, that she’s going to file a complaint with the police. None of that’s true?”

  Chris: “Like I said, she’s crazy. Fuck it, this is ridiculous! Are you messaging her or something? You’ll have to choose, huh?! When I say it’s my car, that means it’s my car, okay? I’m just telling the truth, okay? Now do what you like, Claire, but I’m real disappointed, this is so not cool, I expected better of you.”