“Thank you,” I say. “We’ll talk later.”
Once I am off the phone, Hannah and I smile at each other. Alexandre will always need to believe that he has arrived at his decisions alone.
She says, “Well, it only took him an hour.”
“And eating dinner alone.”
She chuckles. Right now we are two, against his one. It’s always like this with three; and can shift in a second. All this feels familiar, if dangerous.
“Claude, would you stay here with me for a while?” she asks me, “That is, if you haven’t anything better to do? I’m going back to England tomorrow, I’ve a ticket on Eurostar, so this is the last time we’ll be together, until—whenever it is.”
“Of course,” I say, and stretch out beside her on the vast white-quilted bed this hotel has provided. “Do you know when it will be, by any chance?”
“I think some time next year. It rather depends how this horrible thing progresses. I also need to know when you’ll be free.”
“I’m nearly retired.” I tell her. “Two more semesters. Next year can be all yours.”
“Good. That’s settled, then.” She stretches her legs, wiggles her toes as if to test that she still can. Then, “Are you involved in making any more films? I never even asked you what you’re doing, I’m sorry. Illness tends to make one so self-absorbed.”
I tell her it seems as if I’ve already retired from filmmaking, though they have sent me off each year to conferences, the Society for Cinema Studies; I even gave a paper once. And they do even show my short films from time to time. “I suppose I have a small reputation in that world, at least.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Well, nothing is quite what we imagined it would be, is it? But I do miss being involved in it, with other people, being in that sort of hum of activity, making something together.”
“You wanted it so much, I remember.”
“Yes, but I had no idea what it really was or what it demanded. Not until I jumped in with both feet. You know, success isn’t what we thought—it’s more evasive, it’s less spectacular. It’s not solitary. It’s more like a sort of love affair. I feel it when I catch myself watching, say, the Wallace Stevens film, or Susana. I think Susana is my favorite.”
“Hmm. You shouldn’t stop, Claude. You’ve still got loads of time.”
That she says this to me now matters more than it might have in different—normal—circumstances. “Any more in that bottle? There’s no reason not to get rat-arsed now, is there?”
I pour the last of the champagne. “To you,” she insists.
I say, “To us.”
Outside, the sky darkens after the late sunset. Swallows swoop once again between buildings. Noise comes up from the street: there’s a siren wailing far off on the boulevard. Life goes on, Paris goes on, in spite of terrorist attacks and soldiers strolling the streets with machine guns, in spite of the turmoil that we hear about daily: with all its flaws and disappointments and the messes we make, it’s still a lovely world. And all the contradictions we have been through are true, and yet there is something—something—that may be as brief as four notes of a silly song, that links us and always will. Her glance of complicity as she raises her glass to me. Her raised eyebrow, as I answer only, “Perhaps.”
Before I leave, she says, “Claude, you know that feeling we had at the end of the summer holidays, that term was going to start and we were going to be sent back and there was absolutely nothing we could do to change that? Well, I feel like that now. I want the holidays, but not the going back. I can choose now. I’m not at anyone else’s command.”
Running away, someone has said, or written, is a prelude to suicide. True or false? Hannah was always an escaper. I wanted to run away, but never enough. I thought of outcomes. I knew I’d be sent back.
“School,” she says, “it was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Hmm. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that,” I say. “We seem to have turned out all right.”
“Have we? How do you tell? But Claude, no, it was that bad. It was cruel.”
I put the empty champagne bottle beside the wastebasket, I lay a hand on her outstretched leg. “Yes, you are right. It was.”
“I’m going back home tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll wait for Phil there. I’ll tell him. It’s not going to be easy, but I will. Then, can I call you? Where will you be?”
I give her my cell phone number, to avoid having to say where I will be: my ticket to the US has not yet been changed. Will I stay on in Paris? I don’t yet know.
“Tell me, what was the best moment of your life, the one you’ll always remember?”
“I think—the best time of my adult life was when I went all the way to Sundance, to the film festival, you know it’s out near Salt Lake City, with mountains all around it? I took my film Susana there, and Robert Redford asked all the directors to his house. That was amazing. But the best of all was seeing it screened there. Sitting in the dark with all those other film people—everyone there is obsessed with film—and seeing my film with them.”
“So, it was worth it?”
“It?”
“Your going to America. Your pursuit of your dream.”
“Yes. There were very hard times, but I was doing what I wanted, what I had to do. And you?”
“I don’t have an actual scene, or moment. I never wanted to make anything that much. Maybe I’ve missed out on something important. But you know, those early days at the house in France, when we were building it. When the twins were little. Doing it together, Phil and me. That was a good time. It was what we needed, to do that together. Or when we brought our first book out. I’ve had a lot of good days, and very few hard ones, well, until now. Though nothing ever really lived up to those times we traveled together, the three of us—you know? It may sound pathetic, but there was something—some promise, something waiting just ahead of me—that I never really had.”
I hug her for a long moment then, feeling her body frail and small in my arms. I stay with her till midnight, hug her goodnight, and then walk through still-warm streets to my hotel near Odéon, just down from the restaurant called Les Editeurs, where they are stacking chairs before closing. I need to be alone for at least the next few hours, so I don’t call Alexandre—or anyone. The habit of telling people where one is gets tiring: I like to let myself into a hotel room and think, nobody knows where I am. Perhaps this is my own form of escape.
I think as I walk along the emptied street, that she has been envious of me—perhaps always—and that I have had something that she has not. It is not, was not, Alexandre, it was my passion for something, for film, the way it has allowed me to be single-minded, the way it has filled my life. But Alexandre stood in its place, that time, there for the taking. She wanted what I had: he was the nearest substitute.
In my room, I kick off my shoes, take off my clothes, lie face down on the bed in the welcoming cool of air conditioning. The curtains are drawn. A wrapped chocolate lies on my pillow. I get between the smooth cool sheets of this twenty-first-century hotel room that I will pay for with an American credit card, and sleep.
19.
In “L’Avventura”—the film I showed my students earlier this summer, the one I first saw with Hannah at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge—we first see Claudia as she sets off from her father’s house to meet Anna and her lover, Sandro, to go to the island. She goes to the house where Anna and Sandro are making love. She has to wait for them. She wanders around the house. Claudia is blonde, she is Monica Vitti; Anna is brunette. Sandro is one of those handsome but essentially ordinary-looking slicked-down Italians. He has none of the pathos and wit of Mastroianni. Claudia has to wait some time, while Anna and Sandro are together in another room. Then they all set off to meet their other friends and get in the boat to go to the island, where Anna will disappear. On the island, Sandro gets
more and more irritated by Anna, and complains to Claudia. Anna has become more demanding, even irrational, he says. They are obviously on the point of breaking up. Then suddenly, Anna is not there. She has disappeared. You turn a corner and the person walking just ahead of you is gone. They search the island, daylong and into the evening, in their pale Italian summer clothes, their espadrilles, their mid-twentieth-century haircuts. The boat waits. Nobody eats anything or even drinks any water, although the boat-owner’s wife sits on the boat drinking coffee. The others roam across the island calling Anna’s name; they interrogate an old peasant who lives there; they grow disenchanted, even bored, and gradually they begin to give up. Sandro is with Claudia; in searching—or pretending to search—for Anna, they have become close. You can pretend to be doing something while actually doing something quite else. They are in collusion; yes, they are relying now on not finding her. You, the audience, see him watching her, Claudia, closely. You see that they will have an affair. That they want to be together and alone. Without her.
This is the film that we all saw nearly fifty years ago. Anna and Claudia at one point borrow each other’s clothes; are they trying to become each other? I asked my students about this. But girls are always trading clothes, they said. They exchange shirts. At one point they put on similar wigs. This is before the island. And I remember that in the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, where Hannah and I saw the film, people began to leave, flipping up their seats as they went with an angry bang, streams of cigarette smoke following them out of the cinema. We stayed, still mystified but unwilling to leave simply because nothing was happening, because there was no plot, because the searchers even seemed to be giving up the search and returning to the ordinary aspects of their lives; because we weren’t used to the new cinema, in which mysteries were not solved, endings were left in the air, and you had to argue furiously with your friends afterwards about what was really going on. We stayed because we wanted to understand.
It was the era: the very edge of a welcome newness, a mark of being hip, or with-it, or cool; yet it was what still annoyed us, because we didn’t get it, really, we felt left out. Was there really a period between 1960 and about 1980 in which people came to accept that mysteries could exist without solutions? That life went on, carrying you with it, all endings out of sight? We who grew up at that time breathed in this idea; it entered us and never let us go.
I think of my class in Virginia, and how it creaked and shuffled around me that last afternoon like a ship beginning to break up. I heard the incipient wreckage begin, the dismissal, the scattering into the world; I would not have them for more than minutes now. Students are like nuts about to split open in the sun; you never know where and how far the seeds inside may shoot. Into another era, perhaps, in which nothing will be recognizable to them as they age; in which what matters, once again, is not the outcome but the procedure. It may come back to them, then. They may remember an old movie, black-and-white, on an old-fashioned screen in the afternoon, and a teacher who told them that life has no neat endings. That the mystery cannot be solved; more, that people do not even want to solve it.
In the late morning after a long sleep, I put on lipstick and go to meet Alexandre. We’ll have lunch, on this last day in Paris before I leave. After that, who knows? I can no longer imagine us in a hotel bed together, after the conversation in the Café de Flore. Something has shifted. I’m about to find out.
We meet in a small bistro on a corner of boulevard Raspail, near where he works. This lets me know that lunch will probably be a short interlude between work hours; is what I feel relief? It’s too crowded, but then everywhere is too crowded between noon and two around here. We push through, one after the other, to find a table. As always in Parisian restaurants, other people are so close that we can hear their conversations and they, ours, although we all pretend that this isn’t so. There is a general unfolding of napkins and placing them on knees, a hovering of waiters, an opening of menus; all this after discreet two-cheek kisses that take place as the second arrival at a small round table greets the first, who half stands to allow this. Water jugs appear, and baskets of bread, and wine lists, and we are so caught up in all this that we only manage an amused glance at each other, eyebrows raised, as we settle at our table, I hooking my jacket across the back of a chair, he following me in doing the same—it’s warm in here, but at the outside tables we wouldn’t be able to hear each other for the traffic, and the car fumes these days are intense. Lunch in Paris. Lunch with my lover. How many of these couples are lovers, I wonder. Many of them are men, colleagues I think rather than lovers, but it’s sometimes hard to tell.
Alexandre, settled, puts his elbows on the table, leans towards me. “Bon.” It lets me know that we have arrived. We smile into each other’s eyes, as we often do, he a little more questioning than usual, I giving back my acceptance. “So—how did you leave our friend?”
“All right, I think. I stayed till nearly midnight, then went back to my hotel, I just needed to sleep.” His slight nod tells me that he has understood, isn’t—or is trying not to be—hurt. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know sooner. It was one of those times, when, you know, you just have to be completely available.”
“I understand.” In here, he looks so much like other men of his age, it’s almost hard to remember that he is the one I have been making love to all these years, that our lives are this much entwined. People of our age become invisible; but not, surely, to each other.
“Alex.”
“Yes?”
“She says it’s to be next year. That we’ll all go, and you and I will come back.”
“All right.”
“You’re really all right with it?”
“Listen, Claudie. I said I will do it if she still wants it, at the time. She may change her mind.”
“Knowing Hannah, I very much doubt it.”
“But there is always room for doubt.”
The lawyer again, I think. I dare to place my hand on his, which is on the table. I just lay it there lightly, not so much a caress as a contact. Then the waiter appears, and asks us if we have decided, and I withdraw my hand and Alexandre asks, what is the pièce du boucher today, and the waiter says, filet de boeuf, and we both choose that, for simplicity, and the terrine first and a bottle—you can drink, yes?—a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. There, that’s done. My hand is back in my lap. But he’s seen: I want the connection, I’m claiming him, I’m not letting him be one more anonymous suited Frenchman in a restaurant full of them. We matter to each other, still.
“Yes,” I say, “there is room for doubt, things can change, but we need to be very sure that we will be available.” I’m saying, don’t let me down; and he gets it, he reaches out and takes my other hand, the one playing with my wineglass, and holds it in his own warm, firm grip. We have the habit of touch; it still feels easy. Yet I know that I can’t let it all go this easily, what he did with Hannah all those years ago, and the lie of omission that has kept it fresh and painful in a way that surprises me. It’s as if their collusion has kept it fresh; even if they never saw each other, never talked of it, again. Does death really eliminate everything else, make it unimportant? Alexandre believes that the body—and in this case, the hand briefly, warmly gripping mine—can stand in for words, taking their place with a lack of accuracy that I sometimes find irritating, false, and then ultimately, compelling. Sex, touch, to remove the need for words; now, I find this too easy an assumption. He has used it, probably too often. I look at our joined hands, their nails, the hair on the back of his, there on the white tablecloth; then I withdraw mine.
He makes an almost exasperated face, blowing out his cheeks. “Let’s eat our lunch in peace first, and then, I would love a long afternoon with you, it is after all your last day, and who knows where we will be when we meet again, at an airport in Switzerland, in some discreet suburb, in a clinic where everything smells of disinfectant, and death.”
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So, this is not just a quick lunch in between a morning and an afternoon of work. He’s taking the afternoon off. But do I want him to? Where do we go from here? The wine comes, he tastes it, offers it to me. The plates of meat arrive, with their garnish of roasted vegetables. Everything begins to feel more normal, as it always seems to when you begin eating and drinking in France; as if Hannah is nowhere in the vicinity, and the clock may even be turned back, to a time in which we have not yet had cause to doubt.
The afternoon develops a little strangely. We walk after lunch along the boulevard in the direction of the Bon Marché department store, where there is a little park with green benches. Here we sit for a few minutes under the plane trees and I think, with a newly sharpened awareness, he has something more to tell me. In the past, we would have both smoked cigarettes; it would have given meaning to sitting here, it was possibly why people did it, to invest these small spaces in life with meaning. Today, we just sit and watch pigeons land, and a woman at a nearby bench reach into her bag to feed them. Men in white shirts go past, their ties loosened and jackets hooked over their shoulders in exactly the same way as Alexandre’s. Some are smoking. There’s a well-dressed young mother with a child with a doll’s pram, preventing her daughter from picking flowers.
Alexandre says, “You still have your hotel room?”
“Yes, till tomorrow.”
“You aren’t seeing Anna again?” He always has difficulty with that H.
“No. She’s going home and so am I.”
“Can we go to your hotel?”
“If you like. Do you want to?”
In answer, he pulls me up off the bench, and his expression is hard to read: a decision made, one way or another. There was a question—is it now that we end this, or do we continue?—and he has answered it for himself; and because I haven’t yet answered it, because I am slower than he is in nearly everything, I simply follow him once again, where he has decided to go.
Without Her Page 18