Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  I kneeled beside her. “De Max was feeling sorry for himself. Are you all right?”

  “I still have pains, low down.” She placed a hand on her belly, just above her pubic bone.

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “In the morning.” Leaning her head against the wall, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Was he good tonight, de Max?”

  “Yes, he was good. But when I went to his dressing room afterwards he was all alone. He was drinking. He wouldn’t let me go.”

  Claude nodded. This was a side of de Max she seemed to know.

  “I made some drawings,” I said.

  “Show me.”

  I opened my sketchbook and turned the pages for her.

  “There’s something rather wolfish about him, isn’t there,” she said, “now that he’s older.”

  “Yes,” I said. “There is.”

  Our doctor’s diagnosis was inconclusive, but Claude’s stomach pains did not go away. If anything, they became more acute. No one had an explanation, though. That winter, I took her to see a surgeon Monsieur Schwob had recommended. The surgeon had been a friend of Claude’s uncle, Marcel, and had also, coincidentally, studied under my father. Following a number of examinations and tests, which were carried out over a period of many months, he informed us that Claude was suffering from ovarian cysts, and that she would benefit from surgical intervention. She might also need a hysterectomy, he said. When Claude provided her father with details of the diagnosis, he became distressed, and insisted that she seek a second opinion, but the second opinion proved more or less identical. In the end, we all agreed that Marcel’s friend should perform the surgery.

  Arriving at Claude’s bedside on the day after the operation, I saw tears in her eyes.

  “They took my ovaries, my womb—everything,” she said. “I will never have children.”

  “But you didn’t want children,” I said gently, “did you?”

  She looked away from me, towards the window. “I don’t know. I suppose not.”

  Whenever she talked about her childhood, she would describe it as an ordeal. She would never put anyone through something like that, she would say. What’s more, she found the whole idea of procreation ideologically unsound. She had been impressed by Havelock Ellis’s two-volume work The Task of Social Hygiene, in which he warned of the dangers we would face if the planet was overpopulated. She didn’t necessarily want to have children, but she didn’t want to be told that she couldn’t. What had upset her, I decided, was the abrupt and brutal removal of a possibility. She couldn’t stand any form of diminishment.

  While in Jersey the following summer, Claude and I learned that Bob Steel had got married. Though we didn’t receive a wedding invitation, two slices of cake wrapped in tissue paper and tied with pink ribbon appeared at our hotel in St. Brelade’s Bay. It was an ambiguous gesture. We were being included in the event, but only at a distance. I also thought we were being warned. I saw Mrs. Steel’s hand in it. The news of Bob’s marriage came at a time when Claude was vulnerable—she was still recovering from her hysterectomy—and on our return to Paris she tried once again to kill herself. I had been delivering a portfolio of drawings to a local theater, and when I walked back into our apartment I found her on the floor next to the bed, her pulse weak, her breathing shallow. She was wearing a sleeveless striped top and a pair of shorts with a belt. Her toenails were silver. I lifted her and carried her down the stairs. She was a dead weight, but not heavy. Three in the afternoon. The street was quiet and warm and curiously still. Inside my head, though, things felt chaotic. Frenzied. Someone was viciously crossing out whatever had been written there. A car stopped for us, and we were driven to the nearest hospital, where doctors pumped Claude’s stomach and administered some oxygen. When she regained consciousness she gave me a rueful smile, as if she had been in the know about the outcome all along. Sometimes I wondered if her attempts on her own life might not represent a convoluted form of vanity. She wanted to vanish for long enough to be missed, but she didn’t want to vanish altogether. After all, if people really want to die, don’t they jump off bridges or throw themselves in front of trains?

  It was in 1926, I think, that Claude and I traveled to England, visiting London, Oxford, and Parsons Mead in Surrey, where Claude had gone to school. We spent our last weekend at the seaside, in Brighton. On the day we arrived, Claude’s hair was cut short, with a side parting, and the proprietor of our hotel, a brittle but enthusiastic spinster called Miss Flett, assumed she was my son. Claude immediately slipped into the role she had been assigned, asking if the football results had come in yet.

  Miss Flett turned to me. “Such a chirpy fellow—and his English! Like he was born and bred.”

  On our first night we found a restaurant that overlooked the beach. The rain fell steadily, and small waves collapsed against the gray-and-orange shingle. I had never seen a sea that looked quite so exhausted.

  Claude consulted the menu, two frown lines between her eyebrows, then leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “You haven’t had anything all day.” I shook my head. “I worry about you.”

  “Tobacco’s a food.” She blew smoke sideways and watched as it flowered against the window. “Don’t make a scene. Please.”

  I looked away.

  One of the drawbacks of traveling with Claude was that she was able to find excuses for not eating. At home in Paris, I would put a wide variety of dishes on the table. This allowed her to choose what she wanted while still feeling she was rejecting most of what was being offered. Also, I would give her a plate that was smaller than mine, which would make her think she had taken less than I had. It was sleight of hand on my part, but it worked. She would eat without realizing she was eating. When we were abroad, though, or even in a restaurant, she became too aware of the food. It reinforced her aversion, her disgust. And she could always claim—and often did—that there was nothing on the menu that appealed to her.

  “You go ahead,” she was saying brightly. Cigarette slanting from one corner of her mouth, she picked up the menu again. “Why don’t you try the mussels? They’re bound to be good.”

  “You’re so thin,” I said. “You’ll waste away.”

  I knew from past experience that this was the wrong thing to say, but sometimes I just couldn’t help myself. I had watched her dressing for dinner. Her suit trousers were falling off her hips, and her ribs stuck out below her breasts.

  “Nonsense.” Her chin jutted in defiance. “I’m in excellent shape.”

  The waiter came. I ordered the mussels.

  She had always been hard on her body. I want to change my skin, she wrote once. Rid myself of the old one. That evening in Brighton, she told me she had turned her back on food when she was very young. Being at home had frightened her, she said. The time she woke in the dark to feel what she thought was rain landing on her face. Her mother bending over her. Her mother’s tears. Or the time a slow black tongue of blood pushed under her bedroom door…She wasn’t sure if she was remembering or imagining. The border between the two became so thin, like the transparent, wrinkly membrane between two layers of an onion. Starving herself seemed to simplify the world. Remove her from whatever might be happening. Also, she thought it would make her beautiful—or acceptable, at least. She thought Toinette would love her more.

  “I’m sure she loved you, Claude,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But not in a way I understood.”

  We drank beer, warm and brackish, the color of tea with no milk in it. I ate the mussels, which were good, just as she had predicted. She told me not eating had seductive side effects. She liked the lightheadedness. The visions. It was like being a saint.

  Listening to her, I couldn’t think of anything to say that she wouldn’t have an answer to. There was a moment wh
en she brought her eyes up from the table and told me that her body was a page on which the lack of food would write its story. Her face was almost evangelical. She saw the starved version of herself as yet another incarnation, and it was obvious from the clear, steady look she gave me that she wanted me to feel proud of her.

  By the time we paid the bill the rain had stopped. A black shine to the lanes. A ticking, tapping world. Claude had drunk on an empty stomach, and I had to support her as we walked back to our hotel.

  Later that night, I woke suddenly. The room was cold, and light spilled from the bathroom. There was a choking sound, and then a splattering. I got out of bed and pushed the door open.

  Claude looked up at me, eyes glistening with tears. “I don’t feel very well.”

  I stayed with her until she had finished being sick. Afterwards, I cleaned the bath and washed her pajamas in the basin. Claude was asleep again by then.

  Dawn. A seagull stood on the windowsill, in profile, like a famous person on a coin. Claude lay in the bed next to mine, one arm draped over her eyes.

  “I think that beer was bad,” she said.

  I made a noncommittal sound.

  She lifted her arm away from her eyes and looked at me. “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You’re angry with me. You’ve got that look.”

  “A little. But mainly I’m tired.” I rolled over, onto my side. “Let me sleep.”

  Why did she always insist on drinking, even though she knew she wasn’t capable? Why didn’t I stop her? It seemed to me that she was trying to kill herself, but couldn’t decide whether to do it quickly or slowly. There were times when I wished she would get it over with. Moments later, though, I’d be on my knees, my face pressed into her belly, the belly that no longer contained a womb. Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t ever leave.

  When Claude’s father died, his body was shipped to Paris to be cremated, as he had requested. A few days later, we took the urn that held his ashes to the columbarium in Père-Lachaise. It was early April, but the wind had a cold metallic edge to it; I could still smell winter in the air. Shortly before his death, Monsieur Schwob had rewritten his will, and he had left his entire fortune to his second wife, my mother. Though Claude, Georges, and I would continue to receive our monthly allowances, Georges was incensed. The rift that had opened up between father and son at the time of the divorce had only deepened with the passing years, and Georges saw the new will as an insult and a violation. During the journey to the cemetery, his face was white, and I couldn’t tell if it was grief or fury. Probably it was both.

  Afterwards, as we left the columbarium, Georges’s wife, Madeleine, fell into step with me and asked whether she could count on my support in challenging the will. Claude and I would stand to profit, she assured me. In fact, she said, we would be rich. I told her I had no intention of challenging the will. She swung round and blocked my way, and a loose strand of hair blew across her mouth, as if the wind thought she should not speak. Small sharp pimples stood out on her forehead.

  “It’s because Madame Malherbe is your mother,” she said, “isn’t it.”

  I refused to rise to the provocation. “The assets were Monsieur Schwob’s, to bequeath as he saw fit—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—”

  “Also,” I went on, “my loyalty is to Claude, and she respects the wishes of her father.”

  “Georges will never respect his father’s wishes. Never.” Her lips looked bloodless, numb. “The moment we get home, he will be starting legal proceedings.”

  Later, when I told Claude what Madeleine had said, she developed such a severe headache that she took to her bed. Though she didn’t get up for almost a week she found it hard to rest. Her sleep was interrupted by nightmares, and by the wayward beating of her heart. My heart frightens me, she said. I gave her whiskey and sedatives and sat next to the bed, her hand in mine. Claude had genuine problems with her health throughout her life, but she was also a notorious hypochondriac, and it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between imagined ailments and real ones.

  Now Monsieur Schwob was gone, my mother pleaded with me to return to Brittany, but I found myself making excuses. It was Claude I was thinking of. She wouldn’t have been able to stomach the idea of moving back. It would have signified the closing of a circle—another kind of death. The decision haunted me, and when Claude was feeling stronger I traveled down to Nantes. Summer had come, and the streets were bright and hot, but I could smell the river in the shadows. The daughter of a bookseller, my mother had always found comfort in literature. I read to her from some of her favorite novels—Balzac mainly, and Zola—and the words often made her cry, though they were not, in themselves, particularly sad. Her stoical nature, which had seen her through the deaths of two husbands and a son, seemed to have forsaken her, and she could no longer find any hope or glitter in her life. The dark setting was all there was. Back in Paris, I would sometimes glimpse an old woman at a window high up in a building, and I would think of my mother, looking out over Place du Commerce, uncertain how to fill the hours. It would be another eight years before she died peacefully, in her sleep.

  While I was in Nantes, with my mother, Claude shaved off all her hair and removed her eyebrows. Her hair had been cropped before, when she was studying at the Sorbonne, but this time it was more extreme. She looked like someone who had been ostracized. She looked alien. We took many photographs that year—Claude in a black swimsuit, Claude dressed as a sailor, Claude with an elongated head, like a reflection in a fairground mirror—and some of them acquired a fleeting notoriety, since they were featured in Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’s magazine, Bifur, and were admired by none other than Man Ray, but the images I found most powerful and unsettling were those in which she appeared as her father. We were copying a picture that had been taken in 1917, in which her father sat sideways-on to the camera, with his eyes lowered. She too sat sideways-on, with her eyes lowered. The light fell across the right half of her face in exactly the same way. She had the same sloping nose, the same bald head. The same air of resignation or acquiescence. In turning herself into her father, she was expressing the affinity she had with him and paying him a kind of homage, but she was also, paradoxically, articulating the very differences that had caused him so much anxiety and bewilderment.

  Henri Michaux had been traveling in the Amazon when Claude’s father died, but he came to visit us the moment he returned. Claude had met Michaux in 1925. He had read her book Heroines, and had admired it so much that he had written her a letter. During their first meeting, at La Rotonde, they had talked for hours, uncovering all kinds of common ground. They shared a propensity for what Michaux called “delicious isolation”; there were things they had both dispensed with, or had learned to live without. He asked her to teach him English, and she said she would. Though he disliked being photographed, he agreed to sit for her. With his dark eyes and his generous, expressive mouth, Michaux could be impassioned, mischievous, and scathing, all in the space of five minutes, and he quickly became one of the few people who was allowed to call on us without letting us know in advance.

  Settling on the sofa in our drawing room with his cherrywood pipe, he told us that his whole journey had been banal and pointless. He had walked in tropical rainforests and climbed fifteen thousand feet to the volcanic crater of Atacatzho, and he had felt nothing.

  He gestured at the floor beyond his feet. “I could have stared at this carpet for a year,” he said, “and learned more than I learned in South America.”

  I smiled. Michaux specialized in a kind of quiet melodrama. That might sound like a contradiction in terms, but somehow, in Michaux, the two existed side by side.

  “You heard about my father?” Claude said.

  He nodded. “Very sad.”

  Claude drew her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, as if she were cold.

 
“I wish my father was dead.” Michaux’s fingers hovered above the pouch of tobacco at his elbow. “In fact, I wish both my parents were dead.”

  “Henri!” Claude said. “You can’t say such things.”

  Lighting his pipe, Michaux sat back. He was smiling. He knew Claude well enough to realize how rare it was to elicit a conventional response. “Tell me honestly. Don’t you feel liberated, now your father’s gone?”

  She didn’t answer. She only shook her head.

  “I crave that sense of liberation,” he said. “I long for it.”

  “Are your parents really so terrible?”

  “I don’t usually talk about them.” Michaux puffed on his pipe, sweet smoke clouding the air. “Childhood is only interesting as an idea. The reality is savage. Unbearable.”

  “I feel the same,” Claude said. “But couldn’t you tell us something?”

  He sighed.

  He had grown up in Belgium, he said, with the flat land, the north wind, and the cold. His mother was grasping and dissatisfied. She was always trying to belittle her husband, and he chose not to defend himself. Instead he would bury his head in the local paper. Life was something to be “got through,” as he put it once.

  “I was ashamed of them,” Michaux said.

  It was like being a foreigner. His parents were people whose customs and expectations baffled him. He refused to speak, or even interact. He hardly ate. When he was seven, they sent him to a boarding school. Though relieved to be away from home, he could find no peace. Revolted by the food, he wrapped it in paper and buried it outside. Much later, in Brussels, when he encountered Buddhist teachings for the first time, he instantly understood what the Buddha’s closed lips signified. A kind of negation or self-sufficiency was being advocated.

  “Yes,” Claude said. “Exactly.”

  When he moved to Paris, Michaux went on, he decided to steer clear of the Surrealists. For him, automatic writing was a form of incontinence. He found it monotonous. But mainly he didn’t have the energy to belong to a movement. Though Claude and I knew he had a heart condition, he liked to present his weariness as a philosophical stance. Fatigue was a valid response to modernity. It also justified his failure to participate.