She hiccups a bit more laughter. That look of his… All of Arnaud is in that look. That face leaning in. And that cologne of his, their past, their whole history together is coming back…
‘What’s that purple stuff you’ve got on your eyelashes?’
She opens her eyes wide.
‘You matched your eye make-up with your outfit? That is particularly vulgar. Vulgar in the extreme.’
A slow afternoon at Monsieur Bihotz’s. He’s weeding the moss in the corner of the garden; she’s complaining about not going to the sea.
‘If there was a tidal wave,’ says Bihotz, ‘we’d be very glad to be living here.’ He stands up, red, sweaty, wearing a bucket hat on his oval head, on top of his huge body: she sees a dick, a big, shiny dick tied up in gardening gear.
She must be sick.
When she was little, they used to trace their fingers along the contour lines on road maps, imagining the sea rising everywhere, bays in plains, fjords in valleys. How could she have been interested in such silly stuff ? She has no idea.
At lunchtime he cooks rabbit. But why not cat or dog? He waited until she wasn’t around so he could kill it without her crying and carrying on. Without her chaining herself to the hutch like those militant anti-abortionists who chain themselves to operating tables (so Rose’s mother told her).
Madame Bihotz used to break their necks on the corner of a table. She doesn’t want to know how he does it. He’s having one of his bad days. And he’s carrying on with that mystical stuff, as Rose would say. He says: ‘Sometimes I get the feeling people get me mixed up with the Boursenave kid. Sometimes I get the feeling people think I’m the village idiot. I live very differently from the way they do, with their pathetic imitation bodies.’
Your problem is that you didn’t manage to hook up with Delphine’s mother.
She always needs to torment him. She couldn’t care less about him, even less than her parents! But as soon as she manages to upset him, to wound him, it’s like she’s frightened he won’t love her anymore. But there’s no way he could stop loving her. And when she thinks it through like that, all by herself in her own mind, it’s amazing how adult she feels. It’s so much easier than when she speaks. Much easier than if she has to explain herself. For example, with Arnaud. (With Bihotz she manages, sometimes.)
‘And you, Solange,’ he says suddenly (with the same speedy repartee as her), ‘did you manage to hook up with Arnaud?’
Fair enough. She’s amazed he remembered his name. Since the wedding, she dials his number a hundred times a day. Without lifting up the receiver. 23 57 01. Then she goes numb. She stays sitting in front of the telephone.
Bihotz is drinking a beer in the kitchen and she gets one too. He looks preoccupied, he wouldn’t notice anything. It can’t be Delphine’s mother who’s put him in this mood. He’s taken off his gardening gear and underneath he’s wearing his wolf T-shirt, a T-shirt that her father (or Georges, or Arnaud) would never be seen dead in, the same T-shirt as the fireman. That was so long ago.
It’s sunny in front of the window and her eyes are half-closed.
Billie Jean. Hard lips, groping hands. The wolf, his neck craning in the direction of Milord’s disco ball. Time is a tiny mirror drifting off the disco ball, approaching, spinning. Sequins and bass guitar. Lips, hands, Billie Jean. And that unbelievable gesture, that finger jammed in there—she can hear her own voice. Stop, please. It hurts a bit. Remembered voices, remembered bodies, all merging together. She has to stop the cursor from moving, stabilise time and find herself a body to kiss again (in the past she used to call it going out with a boy).
Bihotz gets another beer.
Try again. Lips, hands. Shut your eyes. Has it worn out? Can time wear out, from passing, from remembering, like records, does time leave dust motes that get in your eyes? She feels weak, dizzy. (So sappy, her father would say, sniggering.)
I really like your T-shirt.
‘Why can’t you say tu?’
Why would I use the familiar form with you?
‘I really like YOUR—familiar form—fucking T-shirt. And call me by my fucking first name.’
Her eyes are prickling. She has a lump in her throat. She takes another beer, he doesn’t say anything. She no longer knows what day it is out there, outside. The days unfold with no other purpose than to carry her, like a train, towards a destination where she will finally be free. She hates it when he’s nasty. When he pretends nothing’s wrong. Pretends not to see her. She goes over and sits in his lap, straddling his knees.
Stay calm, Monsieur Bihotz. She places her lips on his lips. It’s not at all like it was with the fireman. She suddenly feels extremely happy. Stay calm, it pops out from between her teeth while she concentrates on kissing him again.
He stays so calm he’s like a log of wood. The only part of him that’s moving is right there, in his work overalls, it’s getting bigger.
She sits back a bit and looks at him. His eyes are closed and his mouth is half-open. She knows him so well that she can’t see him, can’t see him objectively. The wolf is moving up and down on his chest. The enormous moon on the T-shirt folds and unfolds, the material splitting into little flakes. He washes everything too hot, at 90 degrees. She settles against his belly, peels off a piece of the moon, and wiggles her hips slowly.
‘Stop,’ he says. His dick sticking up like a pyramid under his overalls. His eyes still shut. If he opens them, she’ll stop. If he keeps them shut, she’ll keep going.
She pushes her skirt to the side so she’s more comfortable. All she needs is a gentle movement, rub-rub, her panties on his pants, fabric on fabric. He pushes her away, his two hands out in front, the wolf flattened and the moon in quarters.
‘It’s not possible!’ he screams, as if he was denying a terrible untruth. ‘It’s not possible.’
As if I’ve never done it, she argues. There’d be no more talk about it anymore—she can already imagine herself full of a new self-confidence, a new girl altogether, a woman, an experienced woman, wearing black eye shadow on her bedroom eyes.
‘Don’t tell me that you did it with that imbecile,’ groans Bihotz. ‘Don’t tell me that.’
He looks so ‘mystical’ that she wonders if this is actually serious (is he referring to that disease where you die in two years?). In any case here’s her chance not to lie to him, to be kind by telling him the truth, the whole Truth:
I’m a virgin.
The word sounds odd, pompous (Holy Mary in her tube dress with her arms raised over the church), but come on, it’s the truth, technically she is as she came from her mother’s womb, he can check if he wants to.
He looks fed up. ‘You just told me you had already done it.’
I’ve never done it! That’s what I said.
She cuddles him and he goes silent. His shaved cheeks are soft, he smells of washing powder. She rubs herself slowly on him, it feels really good. He’s going to start talking again, she kisses him, she kisses his eyelids, so that, most of all, he’ll keep his eyes shut, she thrusts her hips forward, she holds him tight with both arms, gripping hard, she’s the Bionic Woman, he lets out a groan but the sensation is irresistible, amazing, as good as when she masturbates—when she slides her fingers near the hole and she strokes around and around, when it gets very wet—and sure enough the whole area is soaked. He can’t possibly move now, watch out, she is hugging him tight and the bumps in the fabric are in just the right places and she’s rubbing herself and her breasts are rubbing against the wolf, speeded-up images flash in front of her—the river and Arnaud and the Chinese screen and the disco ball and her father in the Alpine sports car—then nothing, whiteness, blankness and the whole entire world, she opens her eyes again and there’s Bihotz sitting under her.
She stands up and unsticks her underpants from between her legs. This time, he looks dead. His dick is still making a pyramid shape under his overalls, a darker shape now that it’s wet, right there.
It was so fast,
maybe he didn’t notice anything. She gives him a kiss, he opens his eyes. Would he like another beer?
She wants to be kind to him from now on. A solemn resolution: from now on she’ll never say another nasty thing to him; she’ll set the table and all that sort of thing; she’ll never lie to him again (or only to stop him worrying); she’ll make sure she only sneaks out at night when she’s sleeping at her mother’s house.
‘It’s not possible,’ repeats Bihotz.
He goes out to feed the chickens, even though it’s nowhere near their feed time. She can see him weeding, on his knees with his spray. He’s always said it was his way to deal with stress—like that time when he had to go to the beach with her and the girls from Paris and Rose and her mother. It all seems impossibly far away, all those things they did together.
Her father takes her for a drive, in the Alpine sports car that reappears, metallic blue, in a screech of brakes in front of Bihotz’s house. Bihotz is flabbergasted (no, Bihotz has now got his weeding face on). Her father takes her driving to the marina; he would have liked to take her to the sea but it’s already tight time-wise. I promise, next time.
She remembers when she was little and he spoke to her about the end of all the animals. And of how Clèves would vitrify when the bombs came.
Does he want to tell her something? Like in films when they meet in a visitor’s booth in prison, except a booth with scenery passing by, a gear stick and a handbrake (or like in a confessional).
‘Make the most of the car, because your mother is going to make me sell it.’
She’s got to say something but her mind goes blank. They’re used to driving in silence. They actually get on best that way.
‘Blah blah blah blah,’ he adds, oddly, as if he was speaking to himself in a primitive language, the language of some desolate country with yurts and nomads. And he’s shaking his head, like a yak or a camel.
She should be able to explain to him what’s happening to her: that her brain stops just when she wants to speak. Like getting bogged in the snow.
As soon as she got into the Alpine, she was overwhelmed by an indescribable sensation. Azzaro for Men. Somebody must have given it to her father. The interior of the car is so choked with the fragrance it’s like inhaling Arnaud straight, Arnaud’s dissolved body filling her mouth, her nose, her lungs, running through her veins and pounding between her thighs.
She tries to form words with her mouth. But they burst like bubbles and she’s left with a feeling of blankness, a wrinkle that smoothes out as soon as it appears, that fades as soon as she thinks it.
Perhaps that’s what he’s feeling himself. It’s in his silence. In his cologne. It’s harmony that words would destroy. They understand each other so well.
Lætitia has invited her to go over and revise maths together. She goes through the gate, rings the bell at the main entrance, and Delphine’s mother opens the door: Mademoiselle is upstairs. (She must have been told that Solange was calling in at the chateau.)
Lætitia’s room is on the top floor; there are posters but also real pictures, paintings with frames. It’s another blue bedroom (if, in fact, the one she was in with Arnaud was blue), the arrangement is the same: a king-size bed opposite the window, an ensuite, a balcony over the river with a view down to the swimming pool. Lætitia is lying right where Arnaud was; her little black-clad feet are pushing back the bedspread and she’s snuggling up in the sheets as if she was cold.
Arnaud, Arnaud, that’s her disease, she can’t stop thinking about Arnaud, she’s been infected and her whole brain, her body, is full of him. She’s got to tell Lætitia what’s going on.
I went out with Arnaud, I hope that’s okay with you.
‘Why wouldn’t it be okay with me?’
He told me you two had something going.
‘In his dreams. But it’s true that we are quite close. We have the same moral standards; he has high moral standards, he’s a very clean-cut guy. And very perceptive when he wants to be.’
Yes, he’s a good guy.
‘He’s someone you can really talk to. People think it’s cool to diss someone else. Well, actually it isn’t; with him you can talk properly about others. Did he say stuff about me to you?’
No. And about me to you?
‘All he said was that you were a bit young. But he didn’t say it in a nasty way. He told me it was a bit like you were playing with yourself.’
An avalanche of snow is about to freeze her brain.
That old joke. I just unleashed my sensuality on him. That’s what frightened him. When I want to be, I’m a total nympho.
‘It’s true that his problem is that he doesn’t accept his own desires. You have to guide him. He never takes the initiative. He’s like, so phobic.
Anyway, once you’ve seen his mother, you get why he’s messed up.
‘You know, I don’t like people badmouthing others, and if I happen to have done nasty things to other people, I didn’t mean to. But I really don’t trust myself now…’
Why?
She’d like to keep talking about Arnaud and clear the debris from the avalanche but she has to be polite, especially on her first visit here.
‘I used to be good all the time but I’ve got repressed feelings, buried very deep, which keep coming up—and you can’t do anything about it if they overwhelm you. Take Delphine, for example, I know for a fact that she says horrible things about me, but she’s just too much, and I’m no Good Samaritan.’
The truth is she’s a hick.
‘You can’t say that, it’s not like it’s her fault. But she is really annoying. I can’t tell her, and I never would tell her anyway, but she’s self-centred. And she’s got a big head.’
Exactly. She thinks she’s so great, it’s crazy.
‘It’s normal for her to talk about herself, and she does it endlessly, as if she’s the only person in the whole world. She can’t see beyond her own navel.’
According to Lætitia, Delphine is very sensitive, and that explains everything.
She’s a megalomaniac, adds Solange.
‘Megalomaniac?’
Yes, she’s always going on about her father who died or whatever and her working-class mother.
‘Domestic servant,’ corrects Lætitia. ‘Delphine is like my sister. My parents had a daughter before me and she died, Blue Disease. I think about her all the time, I imagine being buried underground and I say to myself: why is she rotting with the worms and my heart is still beating?’
Lætitia looks exceptionally beautiful when she utters these words, the extraordinary Blue Disease seems to be flowing in her veins; it’s obvious now why she always wears black. She’s smoking, and frowning.
What was her name?
‘Lætitia.’
Lætitia the same as you?
‘Lætitia d’Urbide. It’s my mother’s favourite first name.’
Veins in the shape of L and U pulse on her pale forehead. She reaches her arm towards the ashtray but the table is too far away and she tips back into the cushions as if it was too much effort, and that’s exactly what Solange wants—that style and that elegance—she tips back too, onto the pouffe, and sighs.
It’s really fantastic. You and I have so many things in common, as well as Arnaud. We understand each other so well.
Delphine’s mother brings in a tray with glasses and Coca-Cola. ‘Straws,’ demands Lætitia. They wait in silence for her return with the straws.
Lætitia is wearing a pencil skirt, patent leather court shoes that she flips on and off, a little black jacket that she removes because it’s hot, and a sort of body stocking in black lace, transparent across the shoulders and opaque across her breasts, with long gauze sleeves.
‘The difference between being girlfriends and being friends,’ Lætitia continues, ‘is that girlfriends get on really well together, whereas true friendship is stronger but potentially more destructive.’
That doesn’t frighten me. I can be really intense when I
want to be.
‘Are you still friends with Rose?’
She hasn’t changed at all and I have a lot. She’s a nerd, she doesn’t smoke dope, doesn’t take drugs or do anything.
‘There are things she just couldn’t understand. She is too…not intense enough. I have to think of my own interests and it’s something I just can’t accept.’
I so agree with you. She’s become frivolous, trivial. She’s got a Ciao, it’s the same as a moped but better.
‘I know. It’s frivolous, trivial.’
She’s a girl who doesn’t have the courage to be humble, to ask others for help. I’ve got too much self-respect to put up with that. I have to do what’s right for me.
‘She doesn’t know how to be in the background. She’s got too much personality. When you think about it, it’s just unrestrained personality. She always has to be the centre of attention. I’m hypersensitive. My mother’s always telling me. I could have ended up with a big personality too, but thanks to the fact that I’m hypersensitive, I think about other people.’
I so agree. At least you aren’t conventional. You’ve avoided all that image stuff. Not like Arnaud.
‘Yes. But sometimes not doing things like others gets to be so common it becomes conventional. Do you see what I mean? I imagine myself as I imagine others imagine me and I do the opposite. I don’t try to be different, I just am, because to be like others think you are, or to want to be like you think they think you are, is straight-out frivolous, trivial.’
For sure.
Lætitia is gesturing with her long gauzy arms in front of her face, and her bouffant hair smells incredibly good—expensive shampoo, expensive air held inside the puffy mass of hair.
‘My problem is that I’m so perceptive. The fact that I know where I am means I’m terribly lost. Because where I am is not pretty at all.’ As she says this, Lætitia seems to be on the edge of tears.
How could it be possible not to be happy with your lot in a chateau with a pool—
All the Way Page 13
