Happy Are the Happy

by Yasmina Reza

  Pascaline Hutner

  We didn’t see this coming. We never imagined things could fall apart this way. Never. Not Lionel, not me. We’re alone and confused. Who can we talk to about it? We ought to talk about it, but a secret like this – who could we tell it to? We ought to be able to discuss it with people we trust, with very compassionate people who wouldn’t so much as suggest that they found anything humorous in it. We don’t tolerate the smallest hint of humor on the subject, although we’re well aware, Lionel and I, that we might laugh about it if it didn’t involve our son. Actually, given the slightest inducement, we’d probably laugh about it in company. We haven’t even told Odile and Robert. The Toscanos have been our friends forever, despite the fact that it’s not so easy to maintain a friendship between couples. An in-depth friendship, I mean. In the end, the only truly intimate relationships are those between two people. We should have seen one another in twos, separately, just the women or just the men, or maybe even one of each (assuming that Robert and I would have managed to find anything to talk about in private). The Toscanos make fun of our mutual devotion. They’ve developed a certain attitude toward us, a kind of permanent irony that makes me tired. We can’t say a word without them reacting like we’re the very image of a congealed couple, suffocated by well-being. The other day, I made the mistake of saying that I’d prepared a turbot en croûte for dinner (I’ve been taking cooking classes, such fun). A turbot en croûte? Odile asked, as though I’d spoken in a foreign language. —Yes, a turbot cooked in a fish-shaped crust. —For how many people? Just for the two of us, I said, for Lionel and me, just for us two. Just for the two of you, that’s scary! Odile said. Why? asked my cousin Josiane, who was with us. I could cook a turbot en croûte just for myself, she said. Just for yourself, all right, that takes on another dimension, Robert said, upping the ante. Cooking a turbot en croûte, a fish with a fish-shaped crust, just for yourself alone, that rises to the level of tragedy. As a rule, I play dumb to keep things from going downhill. Lionel doesn’t give a damn. When I talk to him about it, he tells me the Toscanos are simply jealous, other people’s happiness often seems somehow aggressive. If we were to describe what’s happening to our family, I don’t see how anyone could be jealous of us. But confessing the disaster that’s befallen us is so hard precisely because we’re such paragons of domestic felicity. I can just imagine the snide remarks people like the Toscanos would make if they knew. Let me back up a little and explain. Our son Jacob, who recently turned nineteen, has always loved the singer Céline Dion. I say always because this passion dates from when he was still a little boy. While riding in a car one day, the child heard Céline Dion’s voice on the radio. Love at first sound. We bought that album for him and then the next one, the walls of his room got covered with posters, and – like a million other parents, I suppose – we found ourselves living with a little fan. Before long we were invited to concerts in his room. Jacob would dress like Céline in one of my slips and lip-synch her songs. I remember him unspooling some of the cassette tapes everybody had back then and using them to make himself a hairdo. I’m not sure Lionel thoroughly appreciated the show, but it was very amusing. At the time, we already had to put up with Robert’s teasing – he’d congratulate us on our tolerance and open-mindedness. But it was very amusing. As Jacob got older, he gradually stopped being satisfied with merely singing like Céline; he started speaking like her and giving interviews to absent interviewers in a Canadian accent. He’d do Céline, and he’d do her husband René, too. It was funny. We’d laugh. Jacob imitated her to perfection. We’d ask him questions, I mean, we’d talk to Jacob and he’d answer as Céline. It was very amusing. It was really very amusing. I don’t know what went wrong. How did we go from a childish passion to this … I don’t know what to call it … to this derangement of his spirit? Of his very being?… One evening when all three of us were at the kitchen table, Lionel told Jacob he was tired of listening to him and his Québécois clownery. I’d made salt pork and lentils, a little dish my two men were usually crazy about, but this time there was something sad in the air. It was like the feeling you get when you’re alone with someone and the other person withdraws into himself and you see that withdrawal as an omen of abandonment. Jacob pretended not to know the meaning of the word clownery. He replied to his father in Québécois French, declaring that although he’d been living in France for some time, he was a Canadian woman who had no intention of disavowing her origins. Raising his voice, Lionel said Jacob’s act was getting to the point where it wasn’t funny anymore, and Jacob answered that he couldn’t keep up this “squabbling” because he had to protect his vocal cords. After that awful night, we started living with Céline Dion in Jacob Hutner’s body. We were no longer called Papa and Maman, but Lionel and Pascaline. And we no longer had any relationship with our real son. At first we thought we were dealing with a temporary crisis, one of those little delirious phases teenagers go through. But when Bogdana, our cleaning lady, came and told us that Jacob had very graciously (she was on the point of finding him too good-natured for such a major star) requested a humidifier for his voice, I sensed that things were taking a turn for the worse. Without saying anything to Lionel – sometimes men are too prosaic – I consulted a magnetic therapist. I’d heard about people being possessed by entities. The magnetic therapist explained that Céline Dion wasn’t an entity and that therefore he wasn’t in a position to disengage her from Jacob. An entity is a vagabond soul that attaches itself to a living person. The therapist couldn’t liberate a boy inhabited by someone who sang in Las Vegas every night, he said, and he advised me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. The word psychiatrist stuck in my throat like a cotton-wool plug. A certain amount of time had to pass before I felt capable of uttering that word at home. Lionel proved to be more realistic. I would never have been able to get through this trial without Lionel’s stability. Lionel. My husband. My own. True to himself, never pushy, never inclined to devious ways. One day Robert said Lionel was a man on the lookout for joy, a man in search of happiness, but happiness of a “cubic” kind. We laughed at this roguish remark, and I even gave Robert a little slap. But all things considered, he had a point: cubic. Solid. Upright on every side. We got Jacob to see a psychiatrist by persuading him that the doctor was an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The psychiatrist recommended a stay in a private hospital. I was shattered when I saw how easily our child could be manipulated. Jacob strode cheerfully into the mental clinic, convinced that he was entering a recording studio, a kind of studiohotel reserved for stars of his stature so they wouldn’t have to go back and forth every day. When we stepped into the bare, white room on that first morning, I came near to falling at his feet and begging his forgiveness for such treachery. We’ve told everybody that Jacob has left the country to do an internship abroad. Everybody, including the Toscanos. The only person in on the secret is Bogdana. She persists in baking him Serbian cakes with walnuts and poppy seeds, even though he never touches them, for Jacob no longer likes what he used to like before. He remains normal physically, he doesn’t imitate a woman. His condition is something that goes much deeper than mere imitation. Lionel and I have wound up calling him Céline. In private, we sometimes even refer to him as “she.” Doctor Igor Lorrain, the psychiatric physician who’s treating our son in the clinic, tells us that Jacob’s never unhappy except when he watches the news. He’s obsessed by the arbitrary nature of his good fortune and privileged status. The nurses talk about taking away his television because he cries straight through all the evening news programs, even stories about a harvest wiped out by a hailstorm. And there’s also another aspect of his behavior that worries the psychiatrist. When Jacob goes down to the lobby of the clinic to sign autographs, he first wraps several scarves around his neck so he won’t catch cold. He has his world tour to think about, the doctor jokingly explains (I’m not crazy about that doctor). Jacob positions himself in front of the revolving door, convinced that the people who enter the ho
spital have traveled great distances just to see him. When we arrived yesterday afternoon, he was at his post. I could see him from the car before we turned into the parking lot. He was visible through the glass panels of the revolving door, bending down toward a child, looking absurdly friendly, and scribbling something in a little notebook. Lionel knows my silences well. After parking the car, he looked at the plane trees and asked, is he downstairs again? I nodded and we hugged each other, unable to speak. Doctor Lorrain tells us Jacob calls him Humberto. We’ve explained that he probably takes him for Humberto Gatica, his sound engineer – well, I mean Céline’s sound engineer. Which is logical enough, if you think about it, because both of them look like Steven Spielberg. In the same way, we’ve heard Jacob call the nurse from Martinique Oprah (as in Oprah Winfrey), whereupon she starts wriggling as though she feels flattered. Today was such a difficult day. First he said to us, using that pronunciation I’ll never be able to imitate, you don’t look very happy at the moment, Lionel and Pascaline. I have a lot of empathy for other people, and it upsets me to see you like this. Would you like me to sing something to cheer you up? We said no, he needed to rest his voice, he already had enough work to do with cutting his records, but he insisted all the same. He sat us down side by side, just the way he used to do when he was little, Lionel on a stool and me in the leatherette armchair. And then, standing in front of us and demonstrating a fine sense of rhythm, Jacob sang us a song called “Love Can Move Mountains.” When he was finished, we did what we used to do when he was a little boy: we burst into loud applause. Lionel put one arm around my shoulders to keep me from weakening. Evening came, and as we were walking down the corridor on our way out of the clinic, we heard people calling out to one another in Canadian French. Hey, David Foster, take a look at this! Has Humberto come down yet? Ask Barbra! That one should go on a two-year break, too! Then we heard them laughing, and we realized that the nursing staff was making fun of Céline and her entourage. Lionel couldn’t take it. He went into the room where the laughter was coming from and said in a solemn voice that sounded silly even to me, I’m Jacob Hutner’s father. There was a silence. Nobody knew what to say. And so I said, come on, Lionel, it doesn’t matter. And the nurses started mumbling apologies. I tugged at my husband’s sleeve. Disoriented, no longer sure where the elevator was, we went down some stairs that echoed under our footsteps. Outside it was nearly dark and raining a little. I pulled on my gloves and Lionel headed for the parking lot without even waiting for me. I said, wait for me, my own. He turned around, squinting through the raindrops, and I saw how very small his head looked and how thin his hair was in the light of the streetlamp. I thought, we have to return to our normal life, Lionel has to go back to his office, we have to stay cheerful. After we got in the car, I said I felt like going to the Russian Canteen and drinking vodka and eating piroshki. And then I asked him, who do you suppose Barbra is? Barbra Streisand, Lionel said. —Yes, but in the clinic. Do you think she’s the head nurse with the long nose?