You’ve never even slept with a girl, never even touched one.
To sound nastier, she’d have to say tu and not vous. Virgin. Faggot. Prick. The ruder, the funnier.
‘What would you know?’
I’m always here.
‘Not all the time.’
Stop the bullshit. At your age it’s totally embarrassing. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. If I were you, I wouldn’t even dare leave the house.
He stops under a tree and she’s a bit frightened again. He cuts the motor and silence descends. There’s a strange vibe coming off him, as if he doesn’t quite inhabit the same time zone as her, as if he knows things she doesn’t know. And what she wants is to drive fast, to go towards something, in the future, further away, the sea.
I mean, you never go out. You can’t live like that. Even my mother says it—and my mother adores you. She says life is passing you by.
He leans over, takes her cigarette between his thumb and index finger, throws it away. Everything goes very slowly and she doesn’t utter a word. They look at each other. He grabs her shoulders with both hands and she feels small and very strong. He leans over, a thread of vapour separates them, time suspended in tenderness. But he sits back. Starts the engine again. The music blares.
Rising through the darkness, broken only by the beam of the headlights, is a glow that is neither sunset nor dawn, but the airport.
‘There’s something you need to know.’
As if she didn’t already know everything.
One day she saw a porter, in a train station. The only time she’s taken a train. It looked like begging was part of his job. She couldn’t care less about her father. She never wants to work. Ever.
‘You are in love with your father.’
She bursts out laughing. That’s what he wants to tell her?
‘You haven’t thought about things enough. There are connections between things, connections that you might not have seen. It’s what’s called the butterfly effect. When a butterfly flutters its wings in China, there are repercussions as far as Clèves. It’s the same thing in your life. Things that happened a long time ago or that your grandparents did or even people who lived during the Middle Ages but who are linked to you through pathways that you could not begin to imagine. It’s the same thing with your father. And you have to work on this, very methodically, free your mind of it. Otherwise, you know what will happen? You’re going to throw yourself on the first guy who fronts up. All because you’re in love with your father. It’s the inner tyrant.’
The in-her what?
‘The inner tyrant.’
She’s laughing so much she’s crying. Her head out the window, breathing big gulps of balmy air.
‘It’s like your father’s inside you and is masterminding you. He makes you do things but you don’t even realise. It’s very, very common, especially for girls. You internalise your inner tyrant so much that you become your own inner tyrant.’
Like a tapeworm?
‘A what?’
If you swallow one that’s in bread that a pig has pissed on, afterwards it makes you eat things you don’t want to eat.
There’s an awkward silence.
It’s something I read. Anyway, it might be true.
He’s big, hairy, familiar and, watching him drive, she thinks that yes, amazingly, he does have something of her father about him. Or her father has something of Bihotz about him. Now she’d like to apologise. For having made fun of him.
What would you have wanted to do—for a job?
She’d like to have a serious conversation and another cigarette.
‘If what?’
I dunno. If you had worked.
‘What do you think I’m doing with you?’
It’s not a job.
‘Well, what do you think it is?’
I don’t know. A mission?
He laughs. It’s funny how talking to him makes her more spiritual, as if she knows he’ll always approve of her.
There’s a plane on the runway. It’s the Caravelle flight to Paris. People are walking under the wing and they could be wearing hats and trench coats like in the olden days, or pink suits like that woman trying to protect her blood-drenched husband in the convertible. They’ve been leaving for Paris forever, boarding in the timeless night-time.
‘What’ll we do? Will we get on? Go to Paris together?’
She laughs.
Through the automatic glass door she thinks she glimpses her father, straight ahead, behind an Air Inter counter. In his uniform and cap. The door opens him up into two and vaporises him at the edges, then he comes together again, scarcely disturbed at all, resuming his conversation with a flickering air hostess. It’s him, it’s her father. Her father is an air hostess—she realises she’s always known it—whatever you call the men, steward, ground steward, at the check-in desk.
Time: parallel lines of unequal width along an undulating, hazy ribbon. And there’s another dimension, which is not space, not airports or the sky, but a sort of pit, in which her father goes up and down—pilot, porter, a pea in a lift—yo-yoing in this secret passage, smuggled into the upper classes.
And a bit later, sitting in the J7, she sees him opening the door of the Alpine for the air hostess, she sees him as if for the first time, tall, svelte, elegant, almost like in an advertisement, a man who is her father, a man who calls himself her father, that man there in the car park.
Arnaud is supposed to be coming to pick her up on his moped. She’s waiting for him out the front of her place, between the two houses, holding a helmet Bihotz made her take that dates back to when he had a moped.
It’s four o’clock. Tea time. Her mother is at the shop. No chance Arnaud will catch sight of her. It would be embarrassing if he saw Bihotz, but she couldn’t care less about Bihotz.
A dramatic expression on her face, the helmet in her hand, standing in the sun, jiggling from one foot to the other in her black outfit (her father’s Polo and a pencil skirt and a little gold chain she bought at Dames de France and mascara and a black Borsalino hat she found in the cellar, never worn but classy in the most totally natural way). It’s the dramatic expression she’s practised in front of the mirror but perhaps it conveys the truth about her. She wore black because she’s dark and mysterious, and a little gold chain because she’s chic. What sort of girl is she really and which is cooler, to be damaged or dependable? Solange is dependable, Solange is in a bad way, Solange is very stable, Solange plays her cards close to her chest, Solange is perverse—it reminds her of the Martine magazines she read when she was little.
She’s in black because she’s on her own, an orphan, and because if there’s a leak, the blood will be less visible.
At 4.15 Bihotz is smoking on his front steps and calls out to say what a great spot it is for a breath of fresh air. The guy thinks he’s so smart.
This morning she read her erotic horoscope in one of her mother’s magazines. ‘Venus is in your sign and you will be ruled by your desire. Your partner, under the influence of Mars governed by Saturn, is likely to be amazed but no more than you would expect. Surprising combinations are not to be ruled out. You will be transformed into a powerful horsewoman and it will be Love itself that you be astride. Drunk with sensuality, overflowing with passion, you will not know which way to turn to satisfy your admirer. Ice is not your element and you will burn under the tender gaze of Love.’
‘Aren’t you hot in black?’
What a moron.
She’s going to smell sweaty. As she stands in the blazing sun the sanitary napkin fills up bit by bit and that’s going to stink too. What a drag. How many more years before she’s rid of it? Thirty at least. If not forty.
Love itself. Under the tender gaze of Love.
It’s going to take a while getting to the coast on the moped. She hasn’t said anything to Bihotz (that Arnaud lives so far away) and how is she going to manage with her hat? Helmet plus hat, she hadn’t thought about that.
>
Actually it’s worked out quite well. The bleeding. She won’t do it this time. According to Nathalie, you shouldn’t sleep with a guy the first time, or the second time, or the third time. From the fourth time on, okay. By then the guy has shown that he’ll pay the price. You’ve got to get him to respect you.
4.20. Still sitting out the front of his place, Bihotz is waving a piece of string while Lulu jumps at it like an arthritic cat.
She’s not sure whether Arnaud is the type to wait. She’s not sure whether she’s worth waiting for that many times. It’s hard to believe there are girls who are still virgins at twenty. How excruciating.
Bihotz shouts something else in her direction, waggling rabbit ears with his fingers.
Idiot.
On the other hand, Nathalie says that doing it while you’ve got it is the best form of contraception. Apparently the blood kills the sperm. Whatever, getting pregnant the first time you did it would be like losing at Russian roulette.
A faint buzzing in the distance, a moped, the noise gets louder and Bihotz yells, ‘HERE HE COMES!’
There he is. He’s here.
Hi, she says casually. He turns so she can give him a peck on both cheeks (a bad sign?).
She straddles the luggage carrier, Bihotz yells something else (he’s tapping his head: the helmet), she jams her hat under her bum and sticks the thing on her head, she’s going to have flat hair, what was the point of teasing it. She looks behind her for somewhere to hold on, Arnaud calls out something to her, she puts her arms around him, at first loosely then (it goes fast) right up close, and the Borsalino flies off.
He brakes. Stops. ‘Lean into the corners. Can’t you feel it? If you don’t lean you’ll tip us over.’
She’s such an idiot.
Anyway, it was just an old hat from the cellar.
Corner after corner, and the insides of her thighs are really starting to chafe, but he stops suddenly in front of a house (they are nowhere near the coast). Arnaud kicks out the stand, clack, takes off his helmet and shakes out his hair, the light sparkles in his green eyes and he looks so mature.
They climb a staircase, a voice calls out, ‘Arnooooo?’
But he shuts the door. There are posters of Corto Maltese and of bands she doesn’t know, and an entire wall of Polaroids—him and a whole bunch of people.
He gestures to her. ‘Can you put on the record?’ He actually has a stereo in his room.
She concentrates on getting the stylus in the groove of the 45; it jumps.
‘Be careful!’
She starts again; that’s it.
He tries to play along with the solo on his guitar.
Anyway, she shouldn’t kid herself, they’re just going to have a hot chocolate or something.
There’s a knock at the door.
‘Yeeessss?’ (He imitates a woman’s voice, it’s so funny.)
A loose perm and a bat-wing shirt and two hands carrying a tray with two orange juices—that’s all she can see because Arnaud is blocking the doorway and saying, Yes, it’s Solange and yes, hello, ‘say hello, Solange’, hello, ‘hello, Madame’, hello, Madame, ‘you have to be told how to do everything’. He laughs and she laughs too and the phantom disappears.
He turns up the music and locks the door. Something about this gesture grabs her. That bolt in its cylinder: just the two of them, all by themselves.
She sips her juice without making a sound, so refined. He mumbles over his chords.
‘Fuck!’ He throws down the guitar. He stretches.
‘Look at the Ramones, or even Johnny Rotten, not one of them knows how to play. It’s energy, that’s what counts. Rebellion.’
He lights a cigarette. In his bedroom. With his mother just downstairs.
‘Rebellion. You know what? Rebellion (he puts on a serious voice) is a huge piece of commercial dishonesty. They lie, you buy. Open your eyes and you’ll see how lies are the basis of our society. Take my mother. Do you think that’s the real colour of her hair? It’s all social conditioning. And you’re conditioned, too—to want one thing and not another. You know what? You lie to yourself—you’ve been conditioned so much. All because why? So you’ll want to buy stuff. Stuff you don’t need. So that you’ll want to buy yourself, buy you. Okay, the Ramones, they’re for real. But not Johnny Rotten. Not anymore. No way.’
He opens a window, grabs a pair of jeans off the floor and waves them in the air. She gets that it’s to clear the smoke and she grabs a T-shirt and waves it around too.
‘As for my mother, perhaps that’s not even her real body. Perhaps that’s an alien conditioned to look like my real mother, who is wandering around somewhere after she’s been brainwashed…No kidding, it pisses me off that she won’t buy me a car. I’m eighteen in five and a half months, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life on a moped. It’s insane. Stop doing that with the T-shirt.’
He sprays perfume round the room and puts some under his arms. Azzaro for Men. It’s heavenly. Like a forest with sweetener added. Azzaro for Arnaud. He sits on the bed and pats the spot next to him. A cabin bed with drawers underneath. He smiles. ‘So do I have to do everything?’ He kisses her. He pushes her onto the crumpled sheets and blankets. He whispers in her ear. That he is shy and he needs some affection.
I have to go to the toilet.
He unlocks the door. Luckily there’s a basin and she washes herself without splashing too much water everywhere. There shouldn’t be blood again straight away. She wishes she could call Nathalie to ask what she would do now.
She’s got lines of some kind on her inner thighs. She’s never noticed them before. They must be stretch marks. It’s ridiculous. A ride on the back of a moped was all it took for the skin over her flesh to crack?
What to do with the pad? There’s a rubbish bin, of course, a ceramic frog with a lily-pad lid. But they’d know who put it there. She rolls it up tight inside some toilet paper. There’s no pocket in her skirt. She hides it in her fist. Pulls the chain—it’s decorated with a macramé cap. Flips down the lid—it’s also covered with a sort of tapestry material. The flush makes a hell of a noise.
She’s startled—the mother is right there, outside the toilet door.
‘I knew it wasn’t Arnaud. He never pulls the chain. Do you need anything? Is everything okay?’
Yes. No.
She goes back up the stairs, she’d like to run but that would be weird in front of the mother, and she’s frightened she’ll leak. She squeezes her hand tight over the pad, it barely sticks out at all.
Arnaud has put the record back on. He hugs her and she’d like to hug him too but she’s only got one free hand and there’s the helmet, right there—she’ll hide the pad inside, under the visor. She manages to do it by wriggling around and there’s a sort of quid pro quo, he kisses her on the nape of her neck, he lifts up her skirt and rubs his dick against her underpants. There’s blood. Shit, there’s blood. There’s definitely nothing she can do, but he already has his fingers in her underpants.
‘Don’t pull that trick on me again. You’ve actually got to do it the first time if you want to do it a second time.’
Fair enough. But it’s not that, it’s not that she’s never done it before—he must definitely not think that—it’s just that (watch out, she’s going to say it, it’s her turn, sad and serious) I am indisposed.
‘Indisposed for what? You mean like girls?’
He pulls his hand back as if it’s been bitten. He holds his bitten hand in front of him and unlocks the door again. She can hear the water running in the bathroom.
‘Arnooooo? Do you need anythiiiiing?’
She wipes herself with the sheet. Perhaps she should leave. Despite what her horoscope says. But if she goes home early, that would make Bihotz’s day.
Arnaud comes back with the same look he had when he stuck his moped on the stand even though they weren’t at the coast. A mature look. He locks the door again.
Fuck the horoscope. And fuck Bihot
z. She leans over, lets herself fall onto the bed, he follows her, it’s sweet, tender, they’re lying on their sides like teaspoons. A long cuddle. She tilts her neck so that he can kiss her nape again, he rubs himself against her buttocks. She feels so happy. It’s heavenly. All those painful years were worthwhile because of this single moment, this moment she was always destined for. That whole interminable past is emerging from an airless fog the colour of lake water and reeds, the slime of her infancy.
He sits up for a second to raise the volume, his dick is sticking out level with the record, as if he was playing it with the end of his penis. A musical penis. A penis with a stylus.
He lies down like a teaspoon again. She feels something really weird, something not at all normal but he hugs her very hard, she screams stop and he stops.
‘It’s best like that. The best thing to do. Since you can’t do it.’
Huh?
‘Don’t make me spell out everything. It’s annoying. We can, like, communicate without words. You girls have a very different relationship with your bodies. Straightforward. Whereas we guys need a bit more (he hesitates), a bit more time and tact from you. For example, people have been doing that forever. It’s a cultural given. In the old days the Greeks did it all the time because the girls wanted to stay virgins, and right now, for example, I’m not criticising you, but since you don’t want to, that is we can’t, anyway it’s easy, getting it to slip in I mean, so first you have to suck me and then it’ll go in by itself.’
So first she has to suck him. The record stops, she gets (he gestures with his hand) that she has to start the music again. Keeping the dick in her mouth, she grabs the arm of the record player and tries to aim for the right groove while balancing on an elbow, it’s not easy. ‘Come on,’ she hears, ‘get going, it’s killing me.’ She feels a hot trickle between her legs. It’s going to stain the carpet. Loose-perm is not going to be happy. The record starts up again, she’s going to end up knowing it better than ‘Billie Jean’, she should try to read the name of the band but it’s spinning too quickly.
All the Way Page 11
