He’d become faithful. Even though, fifteen years earlier, he had declared to Joséphine that he would never respect such a stupid commandment, that he wouldn’t castrate himself, and that he would remain free to satisfy his passing desires, he’d stopped having affairs. Joséphine was the only woman he kissed, the only woman he slept with, the only woman he made love to, and he was happy about it.
Why?
Because I’m lazy!
He burst out laughing, then remembered he had just quoted himself. In one of his plays, a character exclaimed, “Fifteen years! That’s not love, that’s laziness.” During the performances, he had noticed with dismay that nobody found the line funny, except him—he hated noticing that kind of thing because, determined as he was to write for an audience, he had caught himself red-handed being selfish.
Yes, there was an element of laziness in his fidelity. Being a seducer required time and energy; as soon as he glimpsed the possibility of a flirtation with a woman, he was immediately aware of the enormous number of obligations involved: coming up with splendid turns of phrase, phoning, booking hotel rooms, devoting meals and outings to the mistress of the moment, making up plausible excuses for Joséphine; yes, you had to charm, coax, conceal, fantasize. What bothered him was not so much that lying was dishonest, but that it was tiring.
Why go to such lengths, and for what? A little fleeting pleasure. A convoluted affair that would end because he loved Joséphine and would never leave her. The truth was, he abstained because he’d lost the craving. It had been a long time since he’d last had the energy to alter his behavior because he liked the look of some gorgeous woman. He might fancy her briefly, but it would never lead to anything.
In all, he had cheated on Joséphine only three times. Three adulterous episodes, all concentrated in the first two years they were living together. In the ensuing thirteen years, he hadn’t tried again. At the time, he’d been striving to show that he was superior to the choice he had made: monogamous by contract, the newlywed wanted to convince himself that he was still independent. No doubt because he’d kept the habits of his previous, very debauched lifestyle. Having now become the perfect husband, the only woman he touched was Joséphine.
He stretched until he shook. The twenty-year-old Baptiste wouldn’t have wanted to meet the forty-year-old: he would have found him lackluster and conventional. On the other hand, the forty-year-old Baptiste would have explained to the twenty-year-old that he no longer needed to go to bed with the whole city because he, at least, was capable of creating something.
On his computer, after complex maneuvers aimed at preventing all access, he opened the file containing his diary. In these secret pages, he liked to reflect on the basis of his vocation. Two clicks later, he found the relevant text:
I’ve had two existences in my life, one sexual, the other literary. However, both have served the selfsame purpose: to discover my contemporaries. Each time, I would embark on a novelistic exploration: a sexual one with my body, and a literary one with my pen.
My youthful existence was sexual. When I came of age, even though my ambition was to write, I would fail, barely able to get to the bottom of a page; in addition, when I reread myself, I found the results to be shallow. I would have started to believe that I ought to give up this vocation if a few promising bits of text here and there hadn’t stopped me, and especially if I hadn’t read À la recherche du temps perdu, that successful book that encourages failed writers: in it, Marcel Proust presents a narrator who aspires to a literary career but doesn’t achieve it, and yet everybody accepts the seven volumes of the book as a great work that finally came into being after all that fruitless trial and error.
If I couldn’t write, I used sexuality as a means of novelistic investigation. I would follow a woman whose eyes I’d liked; intrigued by a scarf or a handbag, I would start tailing a passing woman in order to discover her personality. I loved to wake up in a strange room, an artist’s loft, a lawyer’s apartment, and let my eyes wander over the accessories—photographs, books, posters, ornaments, furniture—that would draw out the story, and then imagine what I couldn’t see, or ask questions over breakfast or during the days that followed.
I had a reputation as a heartbreaker, but a kind one. I must have been “kind” because I was interested in the women I picked up. I was also a “breaker” because I didn’t want the relationship to last once I’d satisfied my curiosity. As for a “heart,” I didn’t have one. I was seduced, charmed, interested; but in love—never.
I didn’t waste my time; firstly, because I had fun, got a lot of pleasure out of it, and—I hope—gave some as well, but mainly because I stored in my memory the details that now allow me to write.
The moment I met Joséphine, everything changed: I loved her, and I started writing. She revolutionized me. A new life began, my life as a writer and a husband. Nowadays, if I sometimes escape our apartment or our relationship, it’s a function of our apartment and our relationship; it’s here, at this desk, that I invent lives. If I flirt with women virtually, then as soon as I switch off my computer I join Joséphine and give her a kiss.
And Joséphine will read these novelistic escapades.
When it comes down to it, writing suits marriage.
Baptiste approved of the page he had typed two years earlier. And yet a kind of sadness colored his judgement. Was it not too irremediable? Would all the adventures he experienced from now on spring only from his mind? Would he never again be surprised by reality? By other people? By one person in particular?
Of course, he enjoyed some enviable advantages: the blossoming of his vocation, the germination of his talent, the fertility, the accolades, the repeated successes. Yet beneath all the gilding, wasn’t something being stifled?
He decided to add a new paragraph to his text:
Success depresses me. Sometimes I miss the inconsistency, the energy, the fire, the impatience that led to it. In achievement lies concealed the bereavement of desire.
Overcome with nostalgia, he continued:
Must one choose between living and writing? In my own way, albeit without his genius, I am reproducing Proust’s journey: to live and then to write. Why should the second activity banish the first? If I wasn’t able to create while exploring the world through sexuality, what is stopping me, now that the artist is born, from picking up the torch again? I sometimes wonder if I haven’t cleaned myself up too much, become too settled. I have put the unexpected, the imagination aside in order to dedicate myself, like a bureaucrat, to my work as a scribe.
He stopped, disappointed by what he sensed about himself between the lines. Ten minutes earlier, he had thought of himself as a happy man, and now he was allowing melancholy to spread through him like a cancer.
Resolutely, he closed his diary and returned to his chore, the article on Fidelity. As soon as the title appeared at the top of the page, he fled. No, not today! Why did I accept this stupid project? An encyclopedia of love!
He picked up the brush that was on his desk, not to brush his hair—which was short and thin—but to rub the palms of his hands and calm his anger.
He’d always refused commissions, and now an enthusiastic, skillful Parisian publisher had suggested he compile a subjective, personal encyclopedia all about love. The haphazard aspect of the task—articles organized alphabetically—had struck him as providing a respite from his novels and plays, which he always constructed with meticulous precision. It’ll give me a break, he had thought presumptuously. And yet this damned book had proved to be really tough work! He found it hard not to have his usual plot and characters to carry him through; the absence of likable or dislikable people, and of a narrative structure, terrified Baptiste.
Joséphine came lightly toward him and leaned over his shoulders. “I’m so hungry I could eat a whole cow,” she murmured into his ear.
It was her way of telling him she had enjoyed maki
ng love to him that morning.
“A cow or a bull?” he replied, pretending to be offended.
“Ooh, isn’t Monsieur touchy!”
“I love you.”
He spun around, grabbed hold of her, sat her down naked on his lap, and kissed her at length. Having not yet left the land of sleep and its sense of abandon, she collapsed in his arms, and her mouth offered no resistance.
After a kiss accompanied by much purring, she sprang to her feet. “Right, while you scribble away, I’ll make us a substantial snack. OK?”
She left without waiting for an answer. Baptiste watched her walk away into the depths of the apartment, her slight figure unchanged after fifteen years, just as white as ever, a cross between those of a fairy and an elf, almost androgynous, which some considered too thin but he adored.
“Pâté, ham, sausage!” she shouted from the kitchen.
Joséphine always announced what they would do together, although with no intention of imposing it. She reigned naturally, never imagining that Baptiste might wish for a different kind of daily life. If anyone had demonstrated to her that she was being a tyrant, deciding the timetable, the meals, the decor, the invitations, the time and place of their holidays, she would have stared in disbelief. Living with an artist, she considered it her duty to save him from chaos, keep him away from all that was humdrum, organize his material life; besides, Baptiste had never raised the least objection.
He tried to focus on his new article. Fidelity . . . What if he were to write a poem about Joséphine? A poem in praise of a happy relationship that replaces and surpasses all others? A poem about passionate love . . .
He was interrupted by a coughing fit. No, the lyrical muse wasn’t suited to his dry pen. He would get lost in the absurdity of hyperbole.
Idly, he grabbed the stack of envelopes in front of him. Apart from official mail, there were four fan letters to boost his ego.
The last envelope, which was eggshell yellow, looked different. Inside, there was a brief message:
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
Baptiste examined both sides of the sheet, then reread the two sentences.
His heart began to throb, and he was overwhelmed with emotion: something was happening in his life.
His temples on fire, he felt like dancing around the table, shouting out loud, opening a bottle of whiskey, celebrating this dramatic turn of events.
Feverishly, he examined the envelope, trying to determine where it came from: it had been posted the day before, in the neighborhood. No other information.
Suddenly, he felt a chill: his eyes had just reread the hand-written address. It might have been his, but the letter wasn’t for him. He had inadvertently opened Josephine’s mail.
4
Who’s a lovely boy, then?”
Ève was talking to the parakeet that had landed on her window. Plump in its yellow-green plumage, a little shy, the bird had delicate black lines that formed a mask around its beak and its dark eyes.
“Oh, look, you’ve put some makeup on. How lovely you are!”
The parakeet puffed out its throat, quivered, and danced from foot to foot, clearly sensitive to flattery. It had no idea that Ève would have paid the same compliment to a sparrow, a swallow, a butterfly, a ladybug, a stray tomcat, or any other creature that ventured onto the window boxes on her balcony, because Ève thought everything was lovely: Brussels, her neighborhood, her building, the square with its birds, her apartment, her furniture, her cat Barbouille, her various lovers.
She never saw life’s unpleasant features. For instance, she hadn’t noticed that there was no elevator in her building, or that the exotic birds were soiling Place d’Arezzo. Nor had she noticed that Barbouille was an unhinged, hysterical, tyrannical feline who tore the upholstery and stained the furniture with her urine when Ève was out—she would merely ask Mabel to clean up and regularly change the curtains, cushions, bedspreads, and armchairs. Nor had she conceptualized the fact that what she called her love affairs could be given a more derogatory word: in fact, all the gentlemen who adored her were elderly, well-off, and gave her a lot of money . . . The thought that she might be a high-class prostitute never even crossed her mind. Once, though, when this reproach had reached her ears, she had tossed her splendid blonde curls in astonishment, concluded that the woman who had insulted her must be deeply unhappy, and almost felt sorry for an unfortunate creature so depressed as to make her odious and vulgar.
Ève couldn’t fathom nastiness. And since anything that threw her had to be the result of nastiness, she would shrug, turn a deaf ear to criticism, and continue down her path of wonder. Why should she waste her time trying to know what couldn’t be known? After all, she wasn’t stupid!
The sun was warming the trees on the square and the birds were murmuring like gurgling water.
“What a lovely morning!”
She had made up her mind. To celebrate this lovely morning, she would go to the lovely market, then have lunch on a lovely café terrace with a lovely female friend.
Even though she shopped every day, Ève never ate at home, in keeping with two imperatives: the first was that an honest woman must fill her fridge and cupboards; the second was that an elegant woman must eat out, with a female friend at lunchtime, and in the company of a man in the evening. Even though these were mutually exclusive, Ève would have felt she had failed if she hadn’t accomplished both these duties. This contradiction was fortunate for Mabel, her Filipino cleaning woman, who would end up taking away, just before its expiration date, the food Ève had bought and not used.
“Who shall I call?”
Throughout her life, no matter which city she had lived in, Ève had gathered a flock of female friends around her. What was a female friend? A lovely girl not quite as lovely as Ève, made up since dawn, fashionably dressed, not too taken up with work, delighted to go out, available at lunchtime even though she had the appetite of a sparrow, a kind of occasional sister with whom you could chat about clothes or boys. A notch above the female friend was the good female friend, the one you could have a drink with in the bar at around seven, all the while letting men try their luck. Above that, there was the great female friend, the one you could tell your romantic and sexual adventures in detail, the comforter who, at no matter what hour, would come and sleep over whenever your lovers hurt you, let you down, or deserted you. As for the best friend, that was a temporary model, the one you could tell absolutely everything for a moment, then never tell anything again.
The telephone rang. “Hello? Sandrine here. What are you up to?”
“I’m doing the housework,” Ève replied, immediately moving three empty ashtrays.
“Shall we have lunch together?”
“I was just about to suggest that.”
“At Bambou’s?”
“Great! Bambou’s at half past twelve. Big hug, darling.”
“Big hug.”
Overjoyed at having made a start on filling her schedule, Ève went to the bathroom, hoping Hubert Boulardin had finished his ablutions. “Are you ready, dear heart?”
“Come in, I’m doing up my tie.”
“I’ll wait.”
She hated coming in on a man while he was getting ready, which was such a mundane, unerotic situation, a true passion killer. So she stuck to a rule: they had to wash and dress out of her sight. Perhaps unconsciously, in her eagerness to lend poetry to her life, she wanted to avoid seeing her more mature lovers in the cold light of day, while in her bedroom, with a few candles and lace curtains, she could imagine they were better-looking than they were.
Hubert, who was sixty, opened the door with an affable expression on his face, cleanly shaven and dressed in a made-to-measure three-piece pin-striped suit.
“You look so handsome.”
Flattered, he thanked her with a quick kiss.
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She stepped into the marble bathroom, slipped off her silk dressing gown, and appeared naked before him. It took his breath away.
She looked down at her perfect, smooth, suntanned body, stuck her bottom out, and shoved her breasts forward. “Do you like my new polish?”
Overwhelmed, Hubert didn’t understand what she was talking about.
Raising her right foot onto the tips of her toes, so as to show off her slender ankle and rounded calf, and arching her back even more, she pointed at her golden toenails. At that moment, she knew she was the replica of a pinup, the kind of fantastical Venus whose picture men used to display in their trucks or their lockers in the 1950s.
Hubert looked at the tiny mother-of-pearl marks on her flesh. “Very nice . . . original.”
“So you like it?”
“Yes, I love it.”
“I’m glad.”
He tried to come closer. She immediately exclaimed in a husky, frustrated voice, “I’m so miserable! My breasts are far too large.” She cupped them in her hands, her mouth curling into a sullen pout.
He almost fainted. “Your breasts are magnificent.”
“No, they’re too big, too round . . . ”
Each adjective excited her lover even more.
“ . . . too firm . . . ” she went on, “too pointed . . . ”
He was growing increasingly red.
“See, I look ridiculous,” she insisted, turning to him.
“You’re crazy! I must be seeing things!”
“You know, Hubert, I only like flat women. Totally flat. I’d have loved to look like that catwalk model . . . what’s her name again? . . . Nora Slim.”
She had deliberately mentioned the name of a certain professional anorexic, an elegant ghost with rings under her eyes and bones that showed through, loved only by a few teenage girls, fought over by fashion designers because they liked to create a stir, but repellent to men who considered women sexually tempting creatures.
The Carousel of Desire Page 3