Stifling Folds of Love

by John Brooke

  ‘Where the racquet meets the ball. The middle of the face.’

  ‘Ah, the sweet spot.’ Thanks for the information.

  ‘And keep low. Bend those knees.’

  ‘Got it…merci.’ Claude prepared to hit.

  ‘Do you want to hit with us?’ Rose Saxe was smiling as he searched for an excuse. ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘We’re just going to rally. You obviously need the practice as badly as we do.’

  ‘This is fine,’ said Claude.

  Rose Saxe grasped the chain-link fence with painted fingers. ‘I insist.’ Adding, ‘We should get to know each other.’ And, with a sympathy he was meant to hear: ‘I’m sure you could use a friend at a time like this.’

  Claude Néon heard it loud and clear. The gleam in her eyes was grotesque. ‘Well,’ sighing, ‘you’re very kind.’ He gathered up his stuff. ‘Just let me use the, uh…the facilities.’ That was what they said at this place.

  ‘Mais oui…We’re on court six — behind the pool.’

  ‘Be right with you.’ Claude jogged off toward the men’s locker-room door.

  Would Rose Saxe be his friend? There was no way he could imagine it and he had no wish to. Her unctuous offer signaled the end of his forbearance. Claude did not bother to change out of his whites. He knew the boys from Strasbourg working the planque would be camped by the gate where he’d gone in. He calmly snatched a floppy-brimmed tennis bonnet from an open locker, pulled it down to a suitably anonymous angle, went upstairs and made a furtive dodge through the club’s more formal areas — indeed, he walked straight through the dining room and out the back door to the patio (where he’d sipped drinks with Aliette Nouvelle one fateful night), vaulted the hedge and hit the street running, heading for the source of the problem: that connard Tommi Bonneau.

  Although he still carried his racquet, Claude was not thinking of pulverizing Bonneau with it. Not at all. He would confront the man and demand an apology. If it came to blows, he would fight, damn it! but with his fists — a private citizen having it out with a public prick. Consequences? Of course he considered it, he wasn’t completely crazed — not yet. A break and enter? an assault? What of it? One way or the other, they were going to get him. And they…Gérard Richand, Michel Souviron, Norbert Fauré, even Aliette Nouvelle, would judge him. Oh yes. But it would be a judgement Claude Néon could understand, if not respect, because it would come from his world. Enough of this bullshit on the back pages. Claude Néon would act according to his impulse and, if need be, tell his story to the court of assize… The exiled cop ran on, adrenaline building.

  There was no reply at the front door at 33 Rue Pontbriand, so he kicked it in.

  Breaking rules, cutting loose, Claude was experiencing an incredible palpitation in his breast as he entered. ‘Bonneau!’ Calling into the darkness, ‘It’s Néon. Come out and face me!’ …No sound. He took five steps, gently pushed on a door. ‘Bonneau!’ A dim light glowed in a room off the hall outlining odd, large shapes. ‘Bonneau?’ Flipping on a light. The weights and training machines in the dining room gave Claude pause. Under the baggy coat, behind the druggy eyes, the gossip’s wiry body must be mostly muscle. Should he get out? No. A B&E would be easily deduced and would mean the last of his credibility. Worse, a petty charge would be a waste of all he had suffered.

  What do the English say? In for a penny, in for a pound. Bugger off, fear!

  If there was to be a valid case of Néon versus Bonneau, he would have to bring it to a head.

  But Claude was now feeling slightly different about the racquet in his hand.

  Across the hall he found piles of books, an empty bird cage, a bullet-sized hole in the window, a menu from the Rembrandt on the messy desk…copied, perhaps fifty times, pages scattered on the floor. Ornate, mannered handwriting, like from another century. Claude couldn’t figure it, so he left it and made his careful way to the back. ‘Bonneau?’ Through the kitchen… Claude flipped another wall switch and stepped into a photography studio. He stood amid lights on stands, power boxes, wire and feeds, and photos strewn on tables. ‘Bonneau!’ Claude began to snoop, opening drawers, sifting through images. He studied Pearl Serein: eating, dancing, raising a glass, shaking an outstretched hand. Here was Pearl climbing the stairs after the banker’s funeral. She was looking back as if wondering, Why are you doing this to me? That questioning look was a constant. In another drawer were many birds, extreme close-ups showing fixated eyes in tilted heads. It was unsettling, the seemingly sad look of a bird’s incomprehension. In the bottom drawer there was a collection of drastically over-exposed faces, each as lost as the face on the Shroud of Turin.

  Why? What was the point of these? Claude Néon knew next to nothing of photography.

  Calling again, ‘Bonneau!’ But less so. The hot energy of vengeance was fading.

  Going into the darkroom, turning on the red light, he stood within licking distance of a picture of Aliette Nouvelle. It was attached to a clothes peg, hanging from a string. She was serene, composed as if for a portrait. Claude Néon was stopped dead by the image of her face. Staring at it. Remembering that face, close up — far closer than the enigmatic face of Pearl Serein. This was a face he was truly coming to know. To love? That serious face. A cop face. And the rest of her. Beautiful. Fun. Thinking, God, what an ass I am. What a complete and utter fool… And so Claude Néon restarted — rebooted, as it were, much like a computer after it crashes. The portrait of the inspector caused Claude’s heart to pick up and refind its original pace, bringing the energy in his body back into alignment with his anger. He hated the thought of Tommi Bonneau controlling her, placing her, urging her to smile and taking that picture.

  Claude was thinking honor.

  Wrong: It was possession. Pure envy. A surge of bitter jealousy.

  But emotional semantics made no difference to Claude’s heart. It worked. Angry adrenaline surged. He considered wrecking the studio. He could kick the place to pieces, like a bag of dirt or a door. It wouldn’t be a problem. It would feel good… No. Claude decided to take a picture of himself instead. This would be the better way of talking to Bonneau.

  There was a camera and a bracket holding four lights fixed to a tripod, placed in the middle of the room facing a stool. Claude knew enough to check the focus. Clever cop, he took a glass jar with a spoon in it from the darkroom and set it on the stool, went behind the camera and looked: a couple of gentle turns of the lens, the spoon protruding over the rim of the jar was perfectly seen. He left everything else as it was, reckoning Bonneau knew his business. Removing the jar and placing himself on the stool, Claude turned at an angle, just as they’d told him to do for his official portrait. He adjusted his stolen tennis hat and held the cable-release trigger down behind his hairy knee to keep it out of the shot. Raising his chin, Claude smiled a Fuck you smile and pressed the button.

  A quiet pop was transformed into a crackly hissing sound, echoing behind his eyes.

  Claude wanted to shut his eyes, the better to see this hissing in the dark.

  To look at a sound? Claude’s sense of sight and sound seemed to combine and merge with the feeling in his chest; he wondered for an instant if it was a pinprick hurting or a burning buzz that was piercing him to the core. But only for an instant. Then wondering stopped. He knew he needed something to fix on. His eyes were demanding it, his mind registering an anterior confusion it had never experienced, and that sound factor — continuing, indistinct, roiling, a whirlpool, drawing him in — it hurt. Stung. And there was this countervailing inability to take his eyes away from the strobing pulsations encircling him, keeping him there, inside a fence of light. But it did not occur to Claude Néon to be frightened.

  Commissaire Claude Néon held himself rigid in front of the light. Flashing. Flash after flash after flash after flash after flash after flash…a series muffled explosions. And the sound: Was the sound purely imaginary? Not to Claude. ‘God!’ Like nothing he’d ever felt, lost in the green-white pulsing in his mind… Yes, but
envy and jealousy are green, glory and enlightenment, white. Exclusive; no logical connection. No time to understand it. The combined effect sent Claude Néon thrashing around Tommi Bonneau’s studio, gasping, grasping, smashing into everything, whirling in a maelstrom of searing, burning, blind confusion. God, it hurt! Now he was scared.

  And seduced? Fighting a malevolent urge to keep going deeper, plunging mind-wise into the relentless green/white halo, Claude Néon battled, thrashing through a field of unseen objects, bouncing off walls, desperate for control — then suddenly free of it as he threw himself at open air and crashed through the glass door in a shattering crescendo of chaotic force.

  He staggered ten steps, felt his hands on a metal gate, pushed, pulled — was he howling? — and found himself in a grungy back lane. Not that he could see it. Claude fell against the fence, rabid fingers clasping for purchase, the inner halo fading enough for vague shapes to sketch outlines in corners of his mind. His heart was racing like a train, like nothing he’d ever felt, and he pounded at his heaving breast, ape-like, desperately willing breath to flow through in torrents. More! More! His senses told him breathing was the only thing that could give it a shape that he could hope to ride… He breathed, he breathed…Vomited once. And breathed.

  But there were voices.

  ‘I’m so sick of this.’ A woman, nearby, very bitter.

  ‘It’s drugs!’ proclaimed a man. ‘You! You’re a drug addict!’

  Claude Néon believed he saw the shape of a fist, a face, another fence?

  The woman said, ‘I’m calling the police.’

  ‘No!’ Claude Néon took offense. He could not see himself reeling, shaking insanely, specks of blood from shattered glass flowering around his hairy knees and staining the skinny shoulders of his shirt, looking worse than stupid in a floppy tennis hat. ‘I’m a cop!’

  ‘Bullshit! It’s drugs!’ The man commanded, ‘Hurry! Call the damn police!’

  Claude refused to be reduced to a common B&E. Fathoming a semblance of direction, if not mental equilibrium, he ran. The tower in the distance, rising like a twinkling shadow behind persisting echoes of the green/white light, receding, receding and receding but not diminishing, that was his direction and he ran toward it. But where?…Where, Claude? A memory of an argument about her dream somehow surfaced in his boggled mind. Bonneau at the top of the world, bouncing on her board in moonlight? Still half-blinded, Claude Néon aimed himself at Pearl’s building, twinkling in the distance. The highest point. And a figure spinning in the sky above it?

  Whether that was his boggled eyes playing tricks, or indeed, his boggled mind, it was the logical place to head for on the logical path Claude was suddenly on. And running felt exactly right. It brought the rest of him in line with the out-of-control train pounding in his heart, pulling him through a seamless green-white plane, demanding that he move.

  Logical? B’en, there is no logic in any of this, Monsieur Commissaire.

  This is a wild, angry, alpha fantasy. Please don’t get these elemental things confused. Mm?

  All right, fuck it, an instinct then. It’s where I’m headed. The highest point. Point final.

  ‘On roule!’ screamed Claude, speeding through the evening streets, this manic energy expanding, building on itself, a heightened buzzing in his inner ear.

  43

  Feeling Sage-Like

  In the sixth century, Chang Seng-yu was famous for his dragon paintings. He is said to have left the eyes of the dragon untouched up to the last moment because as soon as the eyes were painted, the dragons would fly away! Just so, the way to the heart is through the eyes. And Tommi Bonneau ran lightly, swiftly across Alsatian rooftops, etched against indigo and fading clouds. He leapt…effortless, feeling sage-like. How could he not be feeling sage-like with all that light pulsing through his heart?

  Tommi knew he was just a gossip columnist. Fun, but non-essential. His words would always be nearer the back page than the front. His pictures too. He lived with that — bore the scorn of so-called serious people. Pearl was an ideal that had to be served. After all, Diderot said, Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things. Tommi did what he could to make the people see. His gentle readers. He would never know if they did. He hoped they did. In an instant, we see all. But the moment of perceiving is the most personal — the moment of truth found in the eyes’ interaction with a flash of light. Tommi’s pictures captured the moment in the eyes of Pearl Serein. Shopping. Dancing. Hitting a tennis ball. Tommi’s camera captured the eternal thing, the light that lasted. It was there. Tommi’s words were merely decoration. Like a gilded frame. His pictures of Pearl said all there was to say. The crux of it was light.

  The light of immense desire, said Dante.

  Control of light is key to how incisive an image can be. Cartier-Bresson pronounced a link from eye to heart, but he never used a flash; in fact the master was opposed. Thrusting a subject in the limelight is a sure way to destroy it. Well, the master lived in far less literal times. Electronic manipulation of light enables the photographic eye to delve deeper through surfaces and layers, to strike closer to the essence. Tommi’s inquiries, his reading and painstaking experiments, everything told him he was getting close to the source: the juncture of the physical and the metaphorical in the light. The poetic link was electricity.

  But does the heart have a surge protector?

  Pearl fails at love. And then again. And the light of immense desire is refracted, grows vague.

  Perfect love casts out fear. Tommi felt the temple he had built shake as one heart failed, then another. Heart after heart after heart, a daisy chain of failure, something essential in love’s design gone wrong. Tommi goaded Pearl, teased and dared her to be braver, to follow her heart to the desired end. Searching for the source of imperfection, he challenged each of Pearl’s failed men.

  What is shut out at the door comes in through the window. Said Nietzsche.

  Alighting in Georges Pugh’s office window, Tommi had asked for the photo. ‘Georges, having a picture of Pearl half-naked when she’s got nothing to do with your life, this is a bit voyeuristic, no?’ Georges whimpered his refusal. Tommi took a picture…then took the picture. Was that why Georges had died? Or any of them? Tommi had worked hard to find a moment alone with these pretenders. These straw men whose hearts weren’t right. The moment of truth in a flash of light.

  Raymond Tuche had run like a frightened rabbit. Till they had their moment ‘Look, Ray! Look!’ It’s what artists are meant to do. Where’s the heart transcendent? It seemed Ray, who’d always mocked Tommi and his camera back at the Lycée, almost understood the message in his lights. Almost. Poor old fucked-up Ray. But Duteil the banker — staring into it, silent and sullen as a pile of money when Tommi relieved him of his portrait of Pearl. He had no idea. Nor did Gagnon, alone in his bed with Evolutionary Psychology, baffled, trying to understand how his golden-throated voice had missed the highest mark. Pearl’s heart. Wrong book, Jean-Guy. The poetics of Pearl is another story altogether. Smile, man! But he hadn’t.

  It had come down to a ‘maybe’ with Pierre Angulaire, a man who wanted to reduce Pearl to two hours of documentary. Two hours that could be re-cut and sold in smaller time-slots according to markets: When Tommi told Pierre that Pearl was a fiction beyond any commercial window, that his vision was never going to see the light and then demanded Pierre’s collected images, Pierre had smiled. A smile is recognition of a truth, no? Yes. A smile is a lot like light.

  Maybe Pierre had seen the light before departing.

  But Bruno Martel? Cowering, blubbering, consumed by his own victim-slanted therapy and run to ground. (Easy: up a garden wall, through a bedroom window.) What bullshit, Bruno, Pearl’s no victim. To approach love that way’s just grotesque. Look at the light, Bruno.

  And Didi Belfort had been embarrassing in his drugged-out tantrum, clawing the wall of the studio, pawing at Pearl’s serene smile, choking on it, whining like the bitter spoiled boy
he always was. ‘Why was I born, Pearl? Why was I born!’ Why, indeed, Didi?

  One thing was clear: set in motion, failure was ouroboric, relentlessly self-consuming.

  But their deaths were strictly their own. It was just a light. The worst a light might do was induce a man to kill himself. Like a mirror? Possible. A mirror will play hell on the face of failure. Having to confront the mediocre heart that can’t measure up. That was their problem. Empty faith…the great Faith is Love! Proclaimed Rimbaud. Those seven failed hearts bore out the diamond-hard bottom-line truth of it. Tommi had pictures to prove it. How could you blame it on a light? Light is life, investigative, always adding to the story. Not subtracting, like the dark…

  Tommi did not allow Remy Lorentz to cloud his reasoning; nor his sense of who he was.

  No way. He ran on across the rooftops, stoked, exultant, till he descended along precarious fire stairs and creaky back steps, down from the beautiful gloaming into the darkened street.

  The Rembrandt was empty. Willem van Hoogstraten was laying the next morning’s tables before heading off to Georgette Duguay’s drawing group when Tommi Bonneau entered through the kitchen door, insouciant, as if expected, camera bag slung over his shoulder. ‘I enjoyed your letter, monsieur.’ Willem bowed slightly, adjusted a knife. He stayed silent, as if he knew the best thing to do was act like a waiter. ‘Really. It touched me.’ Pulling a printed sheet from his bag, Tommi read aloud, affecting a sonorous basso that resonated in the pitched spaces of the empty room. ‘Sir, If I could, I would send a violet to Pearl Serein, with a note asking humbly to be forgiven. But I fear it is too late. Willem van Hoogstraten…A violet,’ mused Tommi; ‘that’s so good. The tone of regret. Soulful guilt. In fact, it’s beautiful.’ Speaking as a man who knew, he told Willem, ‘This is by far the best one we’ve received. My editor definitely agrees. The most heartfelt. And didn’t I just see it in your eyes that day I came in?’