by Abha Dawesar
“Tu peux jouir?” she asked, her eyes closed in a grimace.
“Avec toi,” he replied, grabbing her shoulders and then her breasts.
“A dix. Un, deux, trois, quartre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf.”
“Dix,” they both said. Prem exploded inside her. Valérie fell over his chest.
“It was the first time in my life,” Valérie said.
“The third in mine,” Prem said.
“Non, c’est pas vrai!”
“Si. It’s only in the movies that people come together all the time.”
Valérie promised to pass by after school again that week. She arrived with her story and some bonbons to go with his afternoon tea. They made a different kind of love, wiser. After she had left, he read her story about him. It was in French. It began:
Since antiquity the likes of Alcibiades have hankered after Socrates…
In Valérie’s story the main character was called Raj. He was a man made of words. She wrote that she had been seduced in the best possible way by him. He, the séducteur, had played no role in the seduction. She had described his body—the signs of age on his person, his wrinkles, the lines on his face—without shyness. Everything aged except words and art. The Venus de Milo and the words of Plato remained young. Inside his aging flesh, because Raj was made of sentences, he remained young. When they made love, the heroine felt it was his words and his hands that made love. And his hands, even wrinkled and old, had the knowledge of touch, an ageless knowledge. He was capable of loving a woman in the way in which she most needed to be loved.
Valérie didn’t call or come over the weekend. Prem read the story several times and went to bed in tears on Sunday. He was falling in love with Valérie. He was already in love with Julie. He didn’t know if he would ever see her again. He cried because he could not imagine any sixty-five-year-old man in the world who could have been happier than him and because like everything else this too would end, change, move on.
Midway through the week he got a phone call from Valérie saying that she and Julie would both come. He bought a box of macarons from La Durée and listened to a Ravi Shankar record to hold his impatience at bay.
They graciously accepted the tea he brewed and smacked their lips after popping in the first macarons.
“Julie, are you doing okay?”
“I wanted to say au revoir before you left. I can’t see you again.” She seemed sad.
“I don’t know when I’m leaving. Are you angry about the press? I’m sorry. I should have anticipated it and been more careful.”
“It’s not because of the publicité.”
“Then what is it?”
She looked away from him at the window, her eyes distant, betraying nothing.
“It is sad to see death. The death of love,” she said.
“Julie.” He came toward her painfully, struggling to push away what he had learned. He touched her upper arm. She put her hand on his for a second and then removed his hand.
“Désolée je ne t’aime plus.” There were tears in her eyes, but she blinked them away.
Feeling old and befuddled, Prem looked at Valérie. She averted her eyes.
“Et toi?” he asked, stepping toward her though he knew the answer already.
“I killed it. This weekend.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She sniffed.
“On se casse,” Julie said, rapidly grabbing Valérie’s hand. She looked afraid, as if she would love him again if she stayed.
“Please stay and talk to me. Let Julie go if she has to,” Prem said, imploring Valérie.
“I’m going with her, Prem,” Valérie said, wiping her tears.
At the door Julie turned around and said softly, “I’ll keep some beautiful memories.”
Prem heard the door shut and watched from the window as they left the building. Then he went to his dining table, which looked ridiculous with its ornate wooden legs, its polished silver tea set, its china, and its box of lurid-colored macarons. He tugged ferociously at the tablecloth till it all came crashing down.
“Mais moi, je vous aime toujours!” he screamed.
A few minutes later he called the housekeeper for the building, saying he probably owed her one thousand francs for some damage in the dining room. Could she send someone to clean the mess? Then he went to meet Pascal.
“I’m brokenhearted. I’m heartbroken. My heart is broken.”
“I’m sorry. It was them?”
“Yes. I’m going back to New York tomorrow if I can. I have to get out of this pain.”
“You will.”
“Not soon enough.”
“Do you remember when you first came to Paris? You were worse than this. You left New York to escape Vedika.”
“Now I am leaving Paris to escape Julie and Valérie. Valérie and Julie.”
“At least you had the chance and good health to enjoy them,” Pascal said. “You haven’t been cut open for the removal of an inflamed vestigial organ.”
“Sorry. You’ve been a true friend.” If Pascal had flirted with one of the girls, everything might have ended differently.
“No. I’ve been jealous. But I never wished that you didn’t have them.”
Prem laughed. The love that women gave was there in art. But that of friendship was only in Pascal. A hundred visits to the Maillol Museum could not replace his friend.
For the next ten years it was Pascal who roped in the girls. Without his appendix restraining him, Pascal was like a satyr, he was Pan. Prem finished Paris a Halfway House in New York. Then he used the fragments of his heart to write Sisters in the Louvre. He insisted that Patriots publish the painting featuring Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister on the cover. It was the tragedy of two sisters who loved the same man and were unable ever to enjoy him. Eros divided them repeatedly until there was nothing left; the small pieces of love had become thinner than dust mites, flimsy, weightless.
Prem received a letter from Valérie when Paris a Halfway House was released. She loved the book. She had stopped writing and was going to apply to Sciences Po. A year later he got an invitation to attend Julie’s wedding. He sent a polite response saying that he was indisposed due to the release of his new book. When Sisters in the Louvre came out, Cavalier told him that Valérie too was married. Pascal saw Julie on a street near Place des Vosges once and told Prem on the phone that her skin looked all the worse for the sun it had been getting on the Côte d’Azur. Would he even recognize them if he saw them?
The Maillol girl on the Lille Terrace at which Prem had been staring was only a little older than Julie or Valérie had been when he met them, but her youthfulness was preserved. Valérie’s story was right—everything aged except words and art. Love both aged and died.
“Did you miss me?” Maya asked, coming close and sitting on the ground beside him. She was at ease again and looked up into his face.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” Prem said.
“I’m sorry you look troubled,” Maya said, getting up immediately. She refused to be upset by Prem bristling.
Prem pointed diagonally to the floor below them. “I want to see the Courbets in that open hall.”
“Let’s see them then.”
Prem went to L’origine du monde, hanging at eye level, and stared at the dark pubic hair in the painting and the crack that reached all the way into the sheets.
Maya frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What?”
“I’ve always remembered this painting as being huge. I thought it was the same scale as one of these immense Courbets.” Maya pointed to a wall-sized Courbet hanging nearby.
“Are you sure you were thinking of this painting?”
“I remember it exactly. Exactly. Down to the last detail,” Maya said. Tom had told her that when he went down on her, he often thought of this painting.
“Did you see everything else you wanted to see?”
“No. I want to see paintings from Manet’s pre-Impressionist phase on
this floor, but I can come back.”
“Go see it. I’ll wait.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. You’ll tell me about the one you like best.”
“In that case, I’ll be back soon.”
Maya walked rapidly, stopping only a few times for any length. Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola from 1868 hung beside a Manet from 1863, Olympia, which featured a black woman holding a bouquet for her naked mistress on the bed. The mistress was modestly painted with barely visible nipples and a hand covering the entirety of her sex. In the Zola painting, his desk was scattered with books: the most prominent was titled Manet. A black and white painting was tacked above Zola’s desk. The painting within the painting above Zola’s desk was a black and white rendition of Manet’s Olympia. The one hanging just beside the Zola in the museum. She walked back to the hall with Courbets. This time Prem did not look lost in his own world. In fact, he walked to her as soon as he saw her.
“You have to see one thing here,” she said excitedly. “Manet paints Zola looking at another Manet, and in front of a book titled Manet. Manet as a painter of writers and of paintings within paintings.”
They crossed the corridor. Maya pointed to the portrait of Zola.
“Zola defended Olympia when it caused a scandal.” Prem pointed to the book titled Manet that sat beside Zola in the portrait. “Zola claimed in there that Olympia was effectively the flesh and blood of the painter and that he could read Manet’s personality in it.”
“You’ve read the book in the painting?”
Prem nodded. “According to Zola, Manet decided not to lie, he made us know Olympia. He gave us a girl from the times, one we might see on a Parisian sidewalk.”
“I even like the black and white Olympia in Zola’s portrait.”
“It’s distilled, a little like looking at a love affair after it’s over. You have a different perspective and what was important and what was noise becomes much clearer.”
“Were you thinking of a love affair that’s over when you snapped at me on the terrasse?” Maya asked.
“Did I snap at you? I’m sorry.”
“You said, ‘Don’t look at me that way.’”
“The last person to look at me that way was sixteen when she seduced me.”
“One of the underage French girls? You were all over the press with that one.”
“No one got the story right. They were the ones who discarded me.”
“I wasn’t being critical.”
“Let’s leave.”
Outside the Seine was gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine. They shielded their eyes and walked in the other direction to a café on St-Germain-des-Prés.
Maya ordered a chèvre salad and Prem a steak, rare.
“I’m depressed. Orsay made me exuberant at moments, then very depressed.”
“Me too. I spent an hour moping about those teenagers.”
“Was I gone that long?” she asked.
“Why were you depressed?”
“Painful memories.”
“You could talk to me a bit more openly.”
Prem brought a smile to Maya’s face with his remark.
“I associate some of those paintings with my past. Actually I had a moment in the room with van Gogh that made me feel that two epochs of my life had just collided. Some time ago, when I was very miserable, one painting haunted me. It symbolized my utter wretchedness. And at that same time reading your book tided me over possibly the worst crisis I have ever experienced.”
“Which painting?”
“The one of van Gogh’s room in Arles.”
“Which book of mine?”
“The Smell of Wet Mud.”
“I’m glad, Maya.”
“Huh?”
“I’m glad something I wrote served as a palliative.”
Maya was silent.
“Are you thinking about it still?”
She shook her head.
“I have to do this once. May I?”
“Do what?”
“Gush.”
“Gush away,” Prem said, easing back into his chair.
“It still feels strange sometimes to be beside you in person. I mean, for the past year your books have meant everything to me. After it ended with Tom, I discovered that as long as I was reading your books, I didn’t miss other human contact, life felt complete. Sometimes I thought to myself that it couldn’t be very healthy.”
“It isn’t.”
“I know. I know. But it was, it is, so agreeable.”
“Is it less agreeable now that you’re not reading me but are talking to me instead?”
“Of course not. But the full force of that hit me in the museum. You see, there I was looking at one of my most painful memories, and the person who had healed me was right there. But, and please don’t hold it against me for saying this, I thought that you weren’t the person who had healed me. You are now a person I know. But what healed me was the unknown writer. And the real you is as vulnerable as the real me.” She thought of how she had come running for Prem.
“Why should I hold it against you?”
“I can’t cope!” Maya pressed her fork into the wooden table with violence.
“Now, now, Miss Maya.”
“Sorry.”
“You alarmed me there for a second.”
“I’m having trouble with my writing. I can’t separate anything from anything anymore. I’m here in Paris to write, and I can’t write a word.” She groaned.
Prem reached his hand for hers on the table and stroked it.
“Talk to me from the beginning. I’m not sure I’m following too well.”
“Writing is so impossible. I’ve read so much of you to the exclusion of all else that on that simple plane I’m worried about your influence showing up. Then there’s the much larger problem that I’m trying to write about India without any connection to the country. My efforts are doomed. But worse still, my last trip to India, my notes, my memories, the details—those excruciating simple details that breathe life into a novel—are completely overrun with memories of your books. I was reading your books the entire time I was there, and I can’t begin to separate the experience of a place from what I was internally experiencing because of what I was reading!”
“Since when have you been having such a hard time?”
“Since I got to Paris. In New York I told myself it was hard to write while working, and so I applied for this fellowship. I have no excuses anymore. But it all just hit me, the role of your writing and now your presence.”
“Zola said that when he posed for the portrait he had the sense that Manet no longer knew that Zola was there; he drew him like he would have any other human, with an artistic attention he had never before seen. Once you put yourself to work, Maya, even my presence will not get in your way.”
“I don’t know. It’s one thing to see Vuillard take from Bonnard’s palette and Bonnard paint Vuillard’s portrait. They were friends, their influence on each other mutual. And Manet and Zola were not both writers. I’m truly stuck with you, Prem.”
“This is the life of a reader. And most writers are readers too. It happens to everyone.”
“Not like this. I look at my notebooks from India. Next to the date, the place, and the name of the guesthouse, I always noted the name of the book I was reading.”
“And you were reading nothing but me?”
“Correct.”
“People have gushed before, but this is a torrent,” Prem laughed lightly.
“That’s because you’ve corrupted me, your armies have invaded,” Maya retorted.
The waiter put their plates in front of them and refilled their glasses.
“Seriously, don’t worry so much. I’ve gone through my own literary obsessions: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, to name a few.”
“But they were dead!”
“So?”
Maya pushed her salad to the side and brought her palm to her forehead. It made a sound
. Prem pulled her hand away.
“The real problem is that I know you now. I haven’t adjusted to that. I wonder sometimes if it’s not your writing that is threatening to eclipse my style but that you are threatening to eclipse your writing in my mind.”
“I knew it,” Prem said, tapping the bloody steak on his plate with his knife. “I knew that the writer Prem Rustum would always win over me. I’m too real.”
“The opposite. You’re still not real enough for me. I feel like I’m in some dream. Anyway, tell me about your teenagers.”
“I felt like I relived the saga. It had the freshness of a raw wound.”
Prem looked at the meat oozing blood in his plate. It was dead, but it was still alive because it was vibrant, it had color. Love was like that. It died. It just switched off, as it had for Julie. I don’t love you anymore. But its death left bloodstains everywhere. He pointed to the steak in his plate still oozing blood. “To love is to bleed. But to bleed is a sign of life. Even if I am seventy-five, in some way, it consoles me to bleed.”
Maya stared at Prem’s steak. She was jealous of the girls. She wanted to be an Olympia painted from Prem’s flesh and blood or a Manet painting Zola, so absorbed in his art that he forgot the subject.
“I stopped bleeding for Tom very quickly. It makes me wonder if it was real love. Can’t love die a natural death?”
“If love dies without taking me with it one more time, I’ll join the living dead. I want to die while I am totally alive.”
“Please, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about the Louvre, about Sisters in the Louvre.”
“I don’t want to answer questions about those gamines.”
“I don’t care if you deflowered them in the Presidential Palace, as the rumors had it. It’s the only book of yours I brought to Paris. I think of it as a guide to art, to the Louvre.”
“I need to buy you some art books in that case!”
“It’s so personal. When I first read it a few months ago, I knew that I wanted to be in Paris reading it. I wanted to read the whole book while sitting in the Louvre.”