by Ketty Rouf
“Nothing, nothing. Is that all?”
“Think so, yeah. See, just bullshit. I told you. Obviously, I didn’t take it the least bit seriously. You’re too intelligent; you’d never do something like that. You’re not the type to play that card; you aren’t a . . . well, you know.”
I’m offended by his way of thinking. So offended that, absorbed in my own concealed anger, I don’t see him leaning toward my face. I barely avoid a kiss. “Forget it,” I tell him simply. There’s no flutter in my gut, my thoughts motionless in my head, a flat ECG.
12
My greatest success of the year unfolds right before my eyes. Before the start of class, the students rise and stand up straight, unmoving and silent, waiting for permission to sit down. These past few weeks I’ve taught the lesson in a silence broken only by their questions. The students have filed up one by one at the end of each class to hand me the homework that didn’t get done over the course of the year. I’ve taken on the additional workload happily. It’s the grand finale of the fireworks show, the unhoped-for cap on a school year that ends today. The big day is here, but the thrill of it is muted. I’m relieved, but not happy. And yet I’ve always been delirious with joy on the last day of school, even more so as a teacher than I was as a student. Not today.
I never have an actual lesson during the last class of the year. We talk, we improvise a little party, we say nice things that erase the memory of the other, less nice things that have often marred our exchanges. Ten more minutes. I can’t stop glancing at my watch. These last few moments aren’t even the best part; that comes the next day, when the relief is so immense that you feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from your shoulders, like you’re floating among the clouds, soaring in the great blue yonder. I’ve already stowed away the sheet of paper they filled with little notes and words of affection, like a goodbye letter, a trophy to be framed, to remind myself that all is not lost, that I’m a good teacher in the end. Thank you, Madame, you’ve taught me to like thinking . . . Bye, Madame, I’ll never forget you . . . I hope we’ll see each other soon, I’d like to continue with philosophy, can I contact you for some advice? . . . Thank you, Madame, you’ve helped us, and that’s priceless . . . Drawings of hearts. It’s all so sweet, always touching when all they remember is the happy ending. I remind myself of that, too, so I don’t descend into mawkish sentimentality, don’t make the mistake of believing they really never will forget me. We promise to see each other, to organize a get-together, maybe lunch, after exams. The students say it every year. And then they forget.
I slip out after having wished them the usual things, happiness, success, good health. I look one last time at Hadrien. I’m forcing myself to pretend he’s just another student. That’s what’s hard to swallow.
Back in the teachers’ lounge, I empty my pigeonhole. There’s a note from the janitor asking me to stop by and see him. Before I do, I send Fleur a quick text. After the trip to Marseille, she went to Miami with Rebecca to dance in some trendy club. I’ve gotten a few photos of the two of them in bathing suits, always very sexy, lying on the beach, smiling widely. Fleur loves going to the United States; it makes her feel like an outlaw—it’s illegal to work there without a green card, but a lot of clubs look the other way. This kind of professional tourism is well known, it’s why you can’t travel with platform heels and stage outfits in your suitcase, or you risk being sent back before you even leave the airport. Fleur explained the whole thing to me with a certain pride, as if her trips were missions she’d had fun carrying out. I know she’s worked in New York and San Francisco. She usually goes once a year, twice at most. She might even be back in France by now.
In his office, the janitor gives me a big hug and wishes me nothing but the best, says, “I’m so happy for you. The 16th arrondissement, it’ll change your life.” He hands me a little package. I slip it into my bag, keeping it to open on the bus.
Inside the red wrapping paper are a letter and a black four-hole punch. My snort of laughter makes the lady sitting next to me jump. I can admit, now, that I was hoping for one last letter from Hadrien, but I never expected him to give me a present. What floors me is the thoughtfulness of this young man. He remembered. It hadn’t been a ploy to get his attention: I genuinely couldn’t figure out how he’d punched that pattern of holes in his papers. I was only familiar with two-hole punches, which always result in a frustrating and hopeless struggle to make the holes in your paper line up with the rings in your binder. He hadn’t laughed at my befuddlement, only assured me that four-hole punches did exist. He must have remembered the sorry state of my binders.
Drancy, June 8, 2006
Dear Madame,
This year was by far the best one I’ve ever had at school, and that’s not because it was the last one. It’s because of you. I’m writing to you one last time to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for everything. I didn’t understand why we had to study philosophy, but I get it now. It’ll stay with me for the rest of my life. I also asked you how it works. Living. I remember that. Do you remember? That was when you talked to me about Descartes, and, like him, you told me to study the great book of the world. I’ve reflected a lot about that great book of the world. But I’ve also read Spinoza, and I bought Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. It excited me so much—philosophy, and experience, and the rest. All of it. And you, especially. I feel like I’ve learned a lot by watching you live. You’ve mentored me so well, because in your letters you showed me that philosophers’ thoughts can help us understand life.
I’ve been studying Spinoza really hard for the exams, and I learned this phrase by heart: “Do not mock, do not weep, do not wax indignant. Understand.” That’s what I’ve done with you. I know you were dancing nights—maybe you still are—but you’re so different from the other teachers, and most of the adults I know, that it doesn’t shock me. What an example of freedom. You amaze me. I’ve watched you a lot. You’re very beautiful, Madame. I hope you will always be yourself.
Our paths are diverging, but please know that I’ll always keep you in my heart.
Affectionately,
Hadrien
P.S. About Anne, by the way—we had a bumpy reunion, but we’re good friends again now. Maybe something will happen.
Hadrien’s letter makes me feel pain, and deep relief. Jo is saved; Rose Lee wasn’t her demon. The other memory comes back to me: it was pouring rain that day, and when Hadrien asked me the question—“How does it work, living?”—I’d been tempted to answer with a trite “I don’t know, nobody knows.” But I loved this student, so profoundly different from the others, and so I owed him all my intellectual honesty. The injustice of love. I hadn’t just talked about Descartes that day, the experience of life and of the self. I also said that living means wanting to live. It means acting. Acting as if. Like a game. Like the child who doesn’t see the disparity between the world and its own senses. As if we aren’t born to die. Were you ever a child, Hadrien?
I remember perfectly now.
“We aren’t born to die.” He repeated that phrase over and over, that day. “Living means acting as if we aren’t born to die.”
13
I walk the nocturnal streets, but I’m not simply wandering anymore. The Parisian summer night is a source of pleasure even in the aimlessness that has seized me with the end of this school year. Just as I hail a taxi, my phone rings. It’s Poppy, crying on the other end of the line at three o’clock in the morning. I can’t understand anything she’s trying to say. I hear her say Fleur’s name, and “Don’t you know what happened? It’s horrible, Rose . . . Rose, where are you?” My thoughts of the school year just past, and Hadrien, and his last letter are wiped from my mind at a single stroke. I ask the driver to take me to Dreams.
The lights are just like I remember, and the girls with their perfect bodies, but I don’t recognize any of them. Where are my friends? I’m heading toward
the dressing room just as Poppy comes out. She flings herself into my arms and sobs. Everything’s happening too fast. Where is Andrea? Where are the others? And Fleur? Where is Fleur? Poppy’s crying hard, but her words carry over the music, go beyond the night. Something in me stops living.
Fleur is dead.
Poppy is shaking, her eyes swollen from weeping. She gasps for breath.
Fleur is dead.
I push Poppy away. Fleur’s face floats in front of me. I feel the punch in my gut, rising up and exploding in tears and screaming, and the pain is so intense that I don’t even know where I am anymore. My only desire, strong as instinct, is not to exist.
Fleur is dead.
“No,” I say out loud. “She’s not dead. She wasn’t sick. She’d gotten really involved in the nights, but she was doing fine. My Fleur.”
She didn’t think she was lost. Was she? Why didn’t I sense it? Why didn’t I do anything? I never tried to figure out a reason for her absences, those long stretches when I didn’t hear from her. I just thought, Oh, that’s just how it is; that’s how these night-people are. They lose track of time, but sooner or later they pop up again. Fleur isn’t forgetting about me. But I . . . I forgot about her, for fear I would get lost again in my passion for the night.
“It was a whole thing with the drug squad,” Poppy says. “They came here. Can you believe it, Rose?”
Fleur, dead from having forgotten that she was holding on to life, from having desired a perfect world, from getting too upset when things weren’t just so. Dead from wanting to live in that uncomfortable zone where desire risks burning too hot, burning itself out. Dead from indifference. I don’t care, she said, and men swarmed between her thighs, and women, too. She didn’t want children. What point is there in giving life when it always ends in death?
Grief surges and breaks over me like a tidal wave, and I am nothing, nowhere, and it lashes me inside and outside and, like a slap, I see Fleur’s smile, her real one, the one she wore when she opened the door and, just from that smile, I knew she had conquests to tell me about. She told me intimate little details about her lovers’ bodies, their little flaws, the tongue they slipped into her mouth, the closeness, the sweet words, the disgusting things.
Sitting in the dressing room, I stare at her locker. Under her name, she’d drawn a flower and stuck a photo of the two of us. I didn’t know that photo was here.
Andrea approaches, strokes my cheek.
No words. There are no words for this.
She hands me the large pair of wire-cutters I’ve seen her use occasionally in the past, when a girl didn’t show up or get in touch for at least six months. That girl’s locker had to be opened and emptied, so someone else could use it. Tonight, she’s given me the job of opening Fleur’s locker.
“We wanted to open it with you,” Poppy says, still hiccupping with sobs. “There might be some of her stuff still inside, and we could share it, don’t you think?”
The padlock gives a dry snap as it breaks, and the locker opens. Mascara, nail polish, tweezers in an open makeup kit. A few stockings hang from a little rod. Her stage outfits are in a black velvet bag. I empty the bag’s contents onto a table in a cascade of sequined fabric, garters, bras. Fleur’s perfume rises from the pile of clothing like a gust of cold wind, blurred memories stinging my face. It’s too hard.
Poppy pulls Fleur’s favorite dress out of the pile, a sparkling thing with a plunging neckline.
“This one is for you, Rose.”
She knows I love that dress. I went starry-eyed whenever Fleur wore it. Fleur, a music-box ballerina in her little case of light. Fleur, an ethereal femme fatale, distant and lascivious. When she appeared on the stage, it was like a sudden eruption of flame, a magic trick, cries of wonder swirling around her. I press the dress to my nostrils, wanting to suffocate myself on the perfume that wafts from it. I feel as if her body is there, physically, in her scent, and the pain lessens. I want to wear it. I take off my clothes and slip it on as Poppy takes possession of a red dress, Iris a black one. Rebecca tries on a bra.
Mélisse hands me a pair of heels.
“I want you to wear something of mine, too. Take these heels, I want you to have them.”
Poppy opens her locker and takes out a small box.
“These’ll look great on you,” she says. “False eyelashes, brand new.”
It was Poppy who made me up on my first night here. The memory is so vivid, like it happened yesterday. I sit down in the same spot in front of the mirror and let Poppy work on me. She deploys the false lashes, and glue, makeup brushes, blush, lipstick, and then makes herself up, too, next to me. At last she smiles, takes my face in her hands, pressing her lips to my lips and leaving a trace of her smile on my mouth. Thank you, Poppy, so young and so strong.
Now Iris comes near and gives me a pretty black velvet ribbon, which I tie around my neck. Andrea does my hair, adding some life to it with a curling iron. Rebecca gives me a new garter, very delicate, the way I like them. I try on the heels Mélisse gave me, and it comes back in an instant, the desire to sway my hips. I look at my legs in the big mirror, and then I go upstairs, to the main room, to find Fleur. She is there, at the bar. I can see her ordering her first drink, a gin fizz or a vodka tonic. Her scarlet lips gleam. Fleur drinks, crosses her legs, her garter glittering in my tear-filled eyes. She dances with the night, a dark light among dark lights. We often used to leave together after work. She’d text to make sure I got home safely. “Write me,” she would say, and I would write, “Are you home yet, my Fleur? I’m home.” “I took the bus,” she would write back. “Couldn’t get a taxi and all the better, because this way it’s free. I’ve got this, babe.”
Fleur didn’t always go home. I knew that.
Other times we’d walk down the Champs, holding hands. Sometimes she would dance, fluttering like a butterfly around me while I just gazed at her, captivated. I didn’t understand her joy, all that energy she had, enough to dance like a butterfly in the street at five o’clock in the morning. But I would grasp her hand and feel as if my heart were about to explode, that all this intoxication would last forever.
I liked asking her, “What will you do after all this? Do you have plans for the future?” She never wanted to answer, just shrugged her shoulders and kept dancing, like a child lost in daydreams, somewhere up in the clouds. Once, just once, she deigned to give me a reply.
“This is all I really love, you know. It’s incredible to be onstage, to dance almost nude, to wear clothes you’d never wear otherwise. Life after this is just ugliness, because you turn normal.”
Fleur, my Fleur, you will never turn normal, never leave the night, the crazy life, the wild laughter and your intoxications. You’ll dance naked forever.
Poppy comes up beside me and says in my ear, “Fleur’s with us. I know she’s glad, up there, that you’re here with us, wearing her dress.” She’s handing me her glass just as the DJ’s velvety voice announces the next girl onstage. I jerk awake, there, deep in the heart of the night: Rose Lee, next. Rose Lee, that’s me. Poppy keeps her hold on the glass and is about to nudge me in the direction of the stage, but my feet, my legs, my chest, my whole body is already heading for the transparent surface of the platform. I do it, drawn by the irresistible desire to move, to let the sadness fly away with the notes of the music, and it sings inside me, it sings on this stage where I am gliding on my own sorrowful thoughts. The heart is a bloom . . . Shoots up through the stony ground . . . it’s a beautiful day . . . Sky falls . . . it’s a beautiful day . . . Don’t let it get away . . . I love this song by U2, and the DJ knows it. The girls come near the stage, call the customers, stubbornly determined to banish their grief with elation. I want to dance with them. They and I are a single female body flooded with overwhelming emotion, too much to carry without the help of the stage lights. Poppy wraps her arms around me, Mélisse rests one hand o
n my ass while the other caresses my cheek, Iris kisses me on the lips. Being here, on this stage, sweeps away the fear, erases the pain. Rebecca steps onstage with us, too. I can see it now, she’s lost forever the air of being a nice little girl. Her gaze is serious, powerful. She has dyed her hair strawberry blonde. I watch her dance; her movements have become smooth and supple, she has learned sensuality the way you catch a disease. She has it now, and she’ll have it forever.
We form a circle, Poppy in the middle. She slips off her dress, curves her back forward to make her breasts droop, clenches her buttocks so the cellulite stands out. She plays at making herself ugly, sinking into the joke to mimic homeliness and fatness, her body flaccid, her skin sagging, a hideous grimace on her face. She waddles like a duck, my beautiful Poppy, and I burst out laughing, because she is talented, without shame, laughing and making others laugh. Now our tears are from laughing too hard, and we are radiant, and one . . . two . . . three . . . we all take off our bras at the same moment and shimmy our shoulders, fast, faster, to make our breasts jiggle, side to side, up and down. Rebecca helps hers along with her hands; the fake ones won’t move by themselves. Poppy looks over at Andrea, who is standing near the bar, watching us. She has abandoned her role as censor tonight; her face is gentle. She smiles, and I know she is moved. She nods yes to Poppy. Men are approaching the stage now, timidly, a few hands outstretched, holding money. But we almost don’t even see them anymore, all these astonished customers who are surely thinking, Where the hell are we? What’s going on?; we don’t reach for the money they toss at our feet. We are completely naked, but it’s only for ourselves and no one else; we’ve shed our vanity, we’re lighter for having wept tears black with mascara, and this is a sublime moment, perfect. Death, no, we do not acquiesce; that’s why, dangerously, we’re dancing without any clothes on now, even our G-strings have joined the pile of stage outfits we have tossed all around us, on tables and chairs. Poppy grasps the pole, a firm, solid line stretching away in a vertical horizon to which she clings and climbs, higher and higher, up to the ceiling. Every eye in the room follows her as she flips upside-down, legs bent, grip sure, and descends slowly, turning around and around the pole. She is an acrobat, a whirlwind. She slows down and then speeds up, and her body is the central axis of the perpetual movement of a star. We watch her, like the dream of a summer night.