I let a considerable amount of time pass by consulting the pleasantly bistro-like menu. In the end I opted for a small pot of Burgundy snails (six) with garlic butter, followed by pan-fried scallops in olive oil with tagliatelle. I hoped to sidestep the traditional surf-and-turf dilemma (red wine vs white wine) by choosing courses that would allow us to have a bottle of each. Claire seemed to be thinking along similar lines, declaring her desire for bone marrow and toast with sel de Guérande followed by a monkfish bourride à la Provençale with aioli.
I was worried that I would have to express myself in personal terms and tell her my life story, but that didn’t happen because as soon as she had given her order, Claire launched on a lengthy narrative designed to summarise the twenty or so years that had passed since our last meeting. She drank quickly and thirstily, and it swiftly became apparent that we would need two bottles of red (and also, a little later, two bottles of white). Nothing had worked out for her after I had gone, she had looked for roles in vain, and the situation had finally become a little strange when property prices in Paris doubled between 2002 and 2007, and the increase had happened even faster in her district: Rue de Ménilmontant was becoming more and more hip and a stubborn rumour had circulated that Vincent Cassel had just moved there, soon to be followed by Kad Merad and Béatrice Dalle; having coffee in the same establishment as Vincent Cassel was a considerable privilege and that rumour, which no one denied, prompted another leap in prices, so in around 2003–2004 she realised that her apartment was earning much more than she did every month and she absolutely had to keep it as selling it now would have meant property suicide, so she came up with desperate solutions such as getting involved in the recording of a series of CDs by Maurice Blanchot for France Culture; her trembling intensified, she looked at me with crazy eyes and literally gnawed on her marrow bone, and I gestured to the waiter to speed things up.
The monkfish bourride calmed her down a little, and coincided with a more tranquil moment in her story. Early in 2008 she replied to an offer from the Job Centre: the organisation suggested setting up theatre workshops for the unemployed, the idea being to restore their self-confidence, and while the salary wasn’t huge, it came in regularly every month, and that was how she had been making her living for over ten years now; she was part of the furniture at the Job Centre and the idea, she could now say with hindsight, was far from ridiculous; at any rate it worked better than psychotherapy, and it was true that a long-term unemployed person inevitably turned into a little mute and huddled being, and that theatre, and especially the vaudeville repertoire for some obscure reason, gave these unhappy creatures the minimum social ease required for a job interview. In any case she could have got by on that modest but regular salary, had it not been for the problem of service charges, because some of the co-owners – drunk on the dazzling gentrification of the area around Ménilmontant – had got it into their heads to make truly crazy investments: replacing the digicode with a biometric system of iris recognition had been only the prelude to a sequence of insane projects, such as replacing the paved courtyard with a zen garden with little waterfalls and granite blocks imported directly from the Côtes d’Armor, all under the watchful gaze of an internationally famous Japanese master. Now she had made her decision, reinforced by the fact that after a second, shorter burst in around 2015–2017, the Paris property market had finally settled down for a lengthy period; she was going to sell up, and she had in fact just contacted her first estate agent.
She had less to say about her love life: there had been a few relationships, and even two attempts at cohabitation. She managed to muster enough emotion to talk about it, but she still couldn’t hide it: the two men (both actors, more or less as successful as she was) who had imagined sharing her life had been less in love with her than they had been with her apartment. In the end I was perhaps the only man who had really loved her, she concluded with a kind of surprise. I stopped myself from disillusioning her.
In spite of the disenchanted and frankly sad nature of this story, I had enjoyed my scallops, and bent with interest over the dessert menu. The frozen Vacherin with raspberry coulis immediately grabbed my attention; Claire opted for profiteroles with hot chocolate, a classic; I ordered a third bottle of white wine. I was really starting to wonder whether, at some point, she was going to say to me, ‘What about you?’; you know, the things you say in those situations, at least in films and even, it seemed to me, in real life.
Given the way the evening had gone, I would normally have had to refuse to ‘have one more glass’ at hers, and even now I wonder what led me to accept. Perhaps it was partly the curiosity of having another chance to see that apartment where I had, after all, spent a year of my life; but I must also have started wondering what I had seen in her. There must have been something to her besides sex; or perhaps not – it was frightening to think that maybe there had in fact been only sex.
Her own intentions, in any case, were unambiguous, and after offering me a glass of cognac she tackled me in that direct way that she had. Filled with goodwill, I took off my trousers and my pants to make it easier for her to take me in her mouth, but in truth I had already had a disturbing premonition, and when she had chewed away on my inert organ for three minutes with no result, I felt that the situation risked degenerating, and I confessed to her that I was taking antidepressants (‘massive doses’ of antidepressants, I added for good measure), which had the inconvenient effect of entirely suppressing my libido.
The effect of those few words was magical: I immediately felt that she was reassured, clearly everyone always prefers blaming the other person’s antidepressants rather than their own rolls of fat, but a flicker of sincere compassion passed over her face, and for the first time that evening she seemed to be interested in me when she asked me if I was going through a period of depression, why and since when.
I then produced a simplified story of my last marital misadventures, telling her more or less the truth about everything (apart from Yuzu’s canine adventures, which I thought contributed little to the overall tale); the only notable difference was that, in my story, it was Yuzu who had finally decided to go back to Japan, ultimately yielding to the demands of her family, and presented in that way the whole story became quite lovely: a classic conflict between love and family and/or social duty (as a 1970s liberal would have said), a bit like a novel by Theodor Fontane, I explained to Claire, even though she probably didn’t know who he was.
The Japanese girl gave the adventure a certain exotic prestige in the style of Loti – or maybe Segalen, I get them mixed up – either way, she was plainly very pleased with the story. Taking advantage of the fact that I could see her sinking into womanly meditations which a second glass of cognac had aggravated, I discreetly got myself dressed again, and just as I was fastening my fly I found myself thinking that it was the first of October; the last day of my lease on the apartment in the Totem Tower. Yuzu would probably have waited for the final day, and at that moment she was probably on the flight taking her back to Tokyo; perhaps the plane was already beginning its descent to Narita airport and her parents were standing behind the barriers in the arrivals hall, with her fiancé probably waiting near the car in the car park; everything was written and now everything was coming to be, and perhaps it was for that very reason that I had called Claire. Until a few minutes ago I had forgotten that it was the first of October, but something in me, probably my unconscious, had not forgotten – we were living in the grip of uncertain divinities, ‘the path that those girls made us take was entirely fallacious, I should add that it was raining’, as Nerval probably wrote somewhere; I hadn’t often thought about Nerval lately, but he had hanged himself at the age of forty-six, and Baudelaire too had died at that age; it isn’t an easy one.
* * *
Claire’s chin was now resting on her chest and snores rose from her throat; she had clearly blacked out and in principle I should have left right then, but I was comfortable on the enormous sofa in her
open-plan space, and I was filled with an extreme weariness at the thought of crossing Paris again, so I lay down and turned on my side to avoid seeing her and a minute later I fell asleep.
There was only instant coffee in this prison, which was already a scandal in itself – if there wasn’t a Nespresso machine in an apartment like this, then where could there be one – well, I made myself an instant coffee, the day shone faintly through the shutters and in spite of all my precautions I bumped into a few items of furniture; Claire immediately appeared in the kitchen doorway, her short and semi-transparent nightgown barely concealing her charms. Luckily she seemed to be thinking about something else and accepted the glass of instant coffee that I held out to her – fucking hell, she didn’t even have any cups – and a single sip was enough for her to start talking immediately; it was funny that I lived in the Totem Tower, she said (I hadn’t mentioned the fact that I had recently moved into the Hôtel Mercure), because her father had begun the project, as the assistant to one of the two architects; she hadn’t known her father very well and he had died when she was six, but she remembered that her mother had kept a press cutting in which he justified himself in response to the controversies that the construction had generated: the Totem Tower had been listed several times among the ugliest buildings in Paris, though never rising to the heights of the Montparnasse Tower, which regularly featured in surveys as the ugliest building in France and, in a recent survey in Touristworld, as one of the ugliest in the world, just behind Boston City Hall.
She moved over to the open space, and to my slight alarm returned two minutes later with a photo album that threatened to form the basis of a lengthy life story. During the far-off 1960s, her father had clearly been a flashy kind of man-about-town and photographs of him in a Renoma suit, leaving the Bus Palladium nightclub, left no doubt about that; in short, he had led the life of an affluent young man in the sixties; he looked a bit like Jacques Dutron and had gone on to become an enterprising (and probably a bit corporate-minded) architect throughout the Pompidou and Giscard years, before dying at the wheel of his Ferrari 308 GTB on his way back from a weekend in Deauville spent with his Swedish mistress, on the day of François Mitterrand’s election as president of the Republic. His already quite decent career could have taken a new leap – he had many friends in the Socialist Party, François Mitterrand was a president with plenty of building projects and there was little to keep him from reaching the highest level of his profession, but a thirty-five-tonne truck swinging into the middle of the lane had decided otherwise.
Claire’s mother missed her husband, who had been flighty but generous, who had also given her quite a lot of freedom, but most importantly she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone with her daughter; her husband might have been a swordsmith, but he was also an affectionate father who played quite a large part in looking after their child, and she didn’t have a single maternal fibre, not a single one, and for mothers it’s either you dedicate yourself to them entirely and forget your own happiness in devoting yourself to theirs, or else the opposite happens, and they become only an embarrassing and soon hostile presence in your life.
At the age of seven, Claire was placed in an all-girls’ boarding-school in Ribeauvillé, run by the Congregation of the Sisters of Divine Providence – I already knew that part of the story and there weren’t even any croissants, not even a pain au chocolat, not a thing; Claire poured herself a glass of vodka, there you had it, she started straight off at seven in the morning. ‘You ran away at the age of eleven…’ I cut in to shorten her narrative. I remembered her escape, it was a powerful moment in her heroic gesture, her conquest of her independence; she had hitch-hiked her way back to Paris, it was risky and anything could have happened to her, and more so in that she was seriously starting to, as she put it, ‘develop an interest in cock’, but nothing at all did happen to her, and she took this as a sign. I sensed in that moment the coming of the dark turn in her relations with her mother, and had the courage to demand that we go out to a café for a normal breakfast: a double espresso with some bread and jam, and perhaps even a ham omelette. I was hungry, I said plaintively, I was really hungry.
She put a coat over her nightgown; they were bound to have anything we needed on Rue de Ménilmontant and perhaps we would get to see Vincent Cassel sitting at a table over a hazelnut latte, but in any case we had got out of the apartment and that was a start – it was already an autumn morning outside, windy and crisp, and just in case this all dragged on I had taken the precaution of inventing a doctor’s appointment mid-morning.
To my great surprise, as soon as we sat down Claire returned to the story of ‘my Japanese girl’; she wanted to know about her and she had been struck by the coincidence of the Totem Tower. ‘Coincidences are winks by God’ – was that Vauvenargues or Chamfort? I had forgotten, or maybe it was La Rochefoucauld or nobody at all – either way I could expatiate at length on the subject of Japan, I had already tried. I started by saying subtly: ‘Japan is a more traditional society than we sometimes think,’ and then I could go on for two hours without risk of being contradicted, and in any case nobody knew anything about Japan or the Japanese. After two minutes, I realised that talking was more tiring than listening – human relationships in general caused me problems, and more particularly, I had to agree, relationships with Claire – so I passed the baton of the conversation to her. The decor of this café was pleasant but the service was a bit slow, and we dived back into Claire at age eleven while customers gradually invaded the café, all of whom looked like casual theatre workers.
Straight away Claire found herself struggling with her mother, a struggle that lasted almost seven years, a fierce struggle based above all on perpetual sexual competition. I already knew some of the highlights, like when Claire, having discovered some condoms when rummaging in her mother’s handbag, had called her an ‘old slag’. I was less aware (though I soon discovered it) that Claire, putting her money where her mouth was in a way, had set about seducing most of her mother’s lovers, using the simple but effective technique that I had seen her use with me. I was even less aware that Claire’s mother, counter-attacking with the more sophisticated means that a mature woman gradually learns from reading women’s magazines, had for her part set about getting off with Claire’s boyfriends.
If this were a YouPorn film it would have had a sequence along the lines of ‘Mom teaches daughter ’, but the reality was less funny, as it so often is. The croissants arrived quite quickly but the ham omelette took longer and arrived just as Claire was reaching the age of fourteen, and I finished it before she celebrated her sixteenth birthday; I was wide awake now, and feeling quite well and suddenly I felt as if it would be possible to bring our meeting to a quick end by summing up in an intense and happy voice: ‘And then on your eighteenth birthday you left and found a job in a bar near Bastille and a room of your own, and then we met, my love – I forgot to tell you but I have an appointment with my cardiologist at ten o’clock so big kisses and let’s speak very soon’; I had already put a twenty-euro note on the table, I hadn’t given her a chance. She looked at me strangely, a little beaten, when I left the café with a big wave of my hand; I fought down one final compassionate impulse for a couple of seconds, then swiftly headed down Rue de Ménilmontant. Purely automatically, I turned off down Rue des Pyrénées, maintained a steady trot and in less than five minutes I was at Gambetta Métro station. Claire was clearly fucked, her alcohol consumption wasn’t going to stop rising, and very soon it wouldn’t be enough any more and she would add drugs, in the end her heart would give out and she would be found, having choked on her own vomit, in the middle of her little two-bedroom flat with a courtyard on Boulevard Vincent-Lindon. Not only was I unable to save Claire, but nobody could save Claire now, apart from certain members of Christian sects perhaps (the ones who give, or pretend to give, a warm welcome, as brothers in Christ, to the elderly, the disabled and the poor) whom Claire wouldn’t have been able to bear, she would
fire their brotherly compassion right back at them with her eyes; what she needed was ordinary conjugal affection and more immediately a cock in her cunt, but that was precisely what was no longer possible for her; ordinary conjugal affection could only come now together with sexual satisfaction, it would imperatively have to fall under the heading of ‘sex’ which was closed off to her now and for ever.
It was certainly sad; however for a few years, before sinking once and for all into alcoholism, Claire must have been a relatively flamboyant forty-something, perhaps even comparable to a cougar or a MILF, a childless MILF, admittedly – either way I was sure that her pussy had remained wettable for a long time, so come on, she hadn’t had that bad a life. By contrast I remembered three years ago, when immediately before falling into the clutches of Yuzu, I had the unfortunate idea of meeting up with Marie-Hélène again. I was going through one of my many periods of sexual apathy and I probably planned just to make contact, not to get laid, or circumstances would have had to be truly propitious, and that seemed very unlikely with poor Marie-Hélène. I was expecting the worst when I rang her doorbell, but the reality was somehow even worse than I had imagined; she had fallen victim to some kind of psychiatric crisis – bipolar or schizophrenia, I can’t remember which – and she had been horribly diminished by it. She was living in a high-security residence on Avenue René-Cory, her hands trembled constantly and she was literally afraid of everything: of genetically modified soya, of the Front national coming to power, of small-particle pollution … She fed herself on green tea and flax seeds, during my half-hour visit she spoke only about her disability benefits. I left again with a desire for large draught beers and rillette sandwiches, aware that she was going to remain like that for a very long time, at least until the age of ninety, and would probably outlive me by a long way, getting more and more shaky, more and more dried up and fearful, ceaselessly creating problems with the neighbours when in fact she was already dead; I had been led to stick my nose into a dead woman’s cunt, to repeat the telling expression that I had read I can’t remember where, probably in a novel by Thomas Disch, a science- fiction author and poet who had had his moment of glory and was now unfairly forgotten, who hid killed himself one 4th of July, partly it’s true because his partner had just died of AIDS, but also because his income as an author simply no longer gave him enough to live on and he wanted to bear witness, with the symbolic choice of that date, to the fate that America kept in store for its authors.
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