Tall and scraggly, Xavier brings along his regular working face. He talks about some experiments, of biology as a provocation toward skepticism. He looks at his tobacco-stained middle finger. Pierre asks him:
“Does it ever happen to you, all at once thinking about things completely different from what you’ve been thinking?”
“Completely different is a working hypothesis, that’s all,” Xavier says.
“I feel pretty weird these days. Maybe you ought to give me something, you know, some kind of objectifier.”
“Objectifier?” Xavier says. “There’s no such thing, old buddy.”
“I think too much about myself,” Pierre says. “It’s stupid.”
“And Michèle, doesn’t she objectify you?”
“Right, yesterday it so happened that …”
He hears himself talking, sees Xavier looking at him, sees Xavier’s reflection in the mirror, the back of Xavier’s neck, sees himself talking to Xavier (but why do I have to think there’s a glass ball at the bottom of the banister), and from time to time notices how Xavier’s head moves, a professional gesture that looks ridiculous outside a consulting room when the doctor doesn’t have on the white coat that sets him on another level and confers other powers.
“Enghien,” Xavier says. “Don’t bother about it. I’m always confusing Le Mans with Menton. Probably due to one of your schoolteachers back in your childhood.”
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Pierre’s memory hums.
“If you aren’t sleeping well, let me know, I’ll give you something,” Xavier says. “In any case, these fifteen days in heaven should settle you, I’m sure of that. There’s nothing like sharing a pillow, it clarifies ideas marvelously; sometimes it even gets rid of them, which is very restful.”
Maybe if he worked harder, if he tired himself out more, maybe he should paint his room or make the trek to the university on foot instead of taking the bus. If he had to earn the seventy thousand francs his parents sent him every month. Leaning on the railing at Pont Neuf, he watches the barges going by underneath and feels the summer sun beating on his neck and shoulders. A bunch of girls laughing and playing, he can hear a horse trotting; a redheaded cyclist cruises past the girls with a long-drawn-out whistle, they laugh even harder, and it’s as if the dry leaves were coming up to meet his face and were eating it in one single horrible black bite.
Pierre rubs his eyes, straightens up slowly. There’d not been any words, not even a vision; something between the two, an image decomposed into so many words like dry leaves on the ground (that came up to hit him smack in the face). He notices that his right hand is shaking against the railing of the bridge. He makes a fist, fights to control its trembling. Xavier will already be too far away, useless to run after him, add one more illustration to this senseless catalogue. “Dry leaves,” Xavier would say, “there are no dry leaves on Pont Neuf.” As if he didn’t know that there were no dry leaves on Pont Neuf, that the dry leaves are at Enghien.
Now I’m going to think about you, sweetheart, only about you all night. I’m going to think only about you, it’s the only way I’m conscious of myself, to hold you in the center of myself like a tree there, to loosen myself little by little from the trunk, which sustains me and guides me, to float cautiously around you, testing the air with each leaf (green, we are green, I myself and you yourself, trunk full of sap, and green leaves: green, green), without being away from you, not letting the other thing come between you and me, distract me from you, deprive me for a single second of realizing that tonight is swinging towards, into, dawn, and that there on the other side, where you live and are asleep, when it will be night again we’ll arrive together and go into your house, we’ll go up the porch steps, turn on the lights, pet the dog, drink coffee, we’ll look for a long time at one another before I take you in my arms (hold you in the center of myself like a tree) and carry you to the stairs (but there’s no glass ball at all) and we begin to go up, climb, the door’s locked, but I have the key in my pocket …
Pierre jumps out of bed and sticks his head under the cold-water tap in the bathroom. Think only about you, but how can it be that what he’s thinking is a dark, stifled desire in which Michèle is no longer Michèle (hold you in the center of myself like a tree), where he can’t manage to feel her in his arms as he ascends the stairs, because he’s hardly taken the first step, has seen the glass ball and is alone, he’s going up the stairs alone and Michèle is upstairs, locked in, she’s behind the door not knowing that he has another key in his pocket and that he’s on his way up.
He dries his face, throws the window open all the way on the early morning freshness. A drunk is conducting a friendly monologue in the street, swaying as though he were floating in water as thick as paste. He’s humming, going and coming back and forth, completing a sort of suspenseful and ceremonial dance in the grey light that bites into the cobblestones, the locked-up doors, little by little. Als alle Knospen sprangen, the words draw themselves onto Pierre’s dry lips, they adhere onto the humming down in the street which has nothing to do with the melody, they come like the rest of it, they adhere to life for a moment and then there’s something like bitter anxiety, holes that tip over to show through pieces that hook onto anything else, a double-barreled shotgun, a mattress of dry leaves, the drunk dancing a kind of stately pavane, with curtsies that turn into tatters and stumblings and vaguely mumbled words.
The cycle roars out the length of the rue d’Alésia. Pierre feels Michèle’s fingers grab his waist tighter every time they pass a bus close or swing around a corner. When a red light stops them, he throws his head back and waits for a caress, a kiss on the hair.
“I’m not afraid any more,” Michèle says. “You ride it very well. You have to take the next right, now.”
The summerhouse is lost among dozens of houses that look much the same on a hill just beyond Clamart. The word “summerhouse” for Pierre sounds like a hideaway, an assurance that everything will be quiet and isolated, that it’ll have a garden with wicker chairs and, at night, maybe a firefly.
“Do you have fireflies in your garden?”
“I don’t think so. You’ve got such odd ideas.”
It’s hard to talk on the motorcycle, you have to concentrate on the traffic, and Pierre’s tired, he got only a few hours of sleep toward morning. He’ll have to remember to take the pills Xavier gave him, but of course he won’t remember, and besides, who’ll need them? He throws his head back, and grumbles when Michèle is slow in kissing him, Michèle laughs and runs her hand through his hair. “Just cut out the nonsense,” Xavier had said, clearly disconcerted. Of course it’ll pass, two tablets before bedtime, glass of water. How does Michèle sleep?
“Michèle, how do you sleep?”
“Very well,” Michèle says. “Sometimes I have nightmares like anyone else.”
Right. Like anyone else, except that when she wakes up, she knows she’s left the dream back there, without getting it mixed up with the street noises, friends’ faces, something that infiltrates the most innocent occupations (but Xavier said that everything’d be all right, two tablets), she’d sleep with her face buried in the pillow, legs drawn up a little, light breathing, now he’s going to see her like that, hold her sleeping like that against his body, listening to her breathe, defenseless, naked, when he holds her down by the hair with one hand, and the yellow light, red light, stop.
He brakes so violently that Michèle screams and then sits very quietly in back, as if she were ashamed of having screamed. One foot on the ground, Pierre twists his head around and grins at someone not Michèle, and stays lost in the air, smiling. He knows that the light’s going to turn green, there’s a truck and a car behind the motorcycle, green light, a truck and a car behind the cycle, someone begins to lean on the horn, twice, three times.
“What’s the matter with you?” Michèle says.
The driver of the car, as he passes them, hurls an insult at him and Pierre pulls out slowly. Where w
ere we, he was going to see her as she is, naked and defenseless. We said that, we had gotten to the exact moment when he was seeing her sleep defenseless and naked, that is to say, there’s no reason to imagine, even for a moment, that it’s going to be necessary to … Right, I heard you, first to the left and then left again. There? That slate roof? There are pines, hey great, what a nice house you have, garden, pines, and your folks gone off to the farm, I can hardly believe it, Michèle, something like this is almost unbelievable.
Bobby, who’s met them with a loud volley of barks, saves face by sniffing conscientiously at Pierre’s pants as he’s pushing the motorcycle up to the porch. Michèle’s already gone into the house, raises the blinds, goes back to get Pierre, who’s looking at the walls and finding that none of this resembles what he had imagined.
“There ought to be three steps here,” Pierre says. “And this living room, but of course … Don’t pay any attention to me, one always figures on something other than … even the details, the furniture. Ever happen to you?”
“Sure, at times,” Michèle says. “Pierre, I’m hungry. No, Pierre, now listen, be good and help me out; we’ll have to cook up something.”
“Sweetheart.”
“Open that window, let the sun in. Just stay steady, Bobby will think that you’re …”
“Michèle …”
“No, now let me go up and change. Take off your jacket if you want, there are drinks in that cabinet. I don’t know anything about liquor.”
He sees her run off, climb the stairs, disappear around the landing. There are drinks in the cabinet, she doesn’t know anything about that. The living room is wide and dark, Pierre’s hand caresses the newel post at the bottom of the banister. Michèle told him, but it’s like an irrational disappointment, all right, there’s no glass ball then.
Michèle comes down in old slacks and an unlikely blouse.
“You look like a mushroom,” Pierre says with that tenderness every man shows toward a woman wearing clothes much too big for her. “Aren’t you going to show me the house?”
“If you want,” Michèle says. “Didn’t you find the drinks? Wait, never mind, you’re helpless.”
They take their glasses into the living room and sit on the sofa facing the half-open window. Bobby leaps about hoping for attention, then lies down on the rug and watches them.
“He took to you right away,” Michèle says, licking the rim of her glass. “You like my house?”
“No. It’s gloomy, middle class, and stuffed with abominable furniture. But you’re here, with those terrible pants on.”
He caresses her throat, pulls her against him, kisses her on the mouth. They kiss each other on the mouth, the heat of Michèle’s hand burns into Pierre, they kiss one another on the mouth, they slide down a little, but Michèle moans and tries to untangle herself, murmurs something he doesn’t get. Confusedly, he thinks that the most difficult will be to cover her mouth, he doesn’t want her to pass out. He lets go of her abruptly, looks at his hands as if they weren’t his own, hearing Michèle’s quick breathing, Bobby’s muted growling from the rug.
“You’re going to drive me out of my head,” Pierre says, and the extravagance of the words is less painful than what has just happened. A compulsion, an irresistible desire to cover her mouth so that she won’t pass out. He stretches out his hand and strokes Michèle’s cheek from a distance, he agrees to everything, to eat whatever there is, yes, he’ll have to choose the wine, that it’s very hot next to the window.
Michèle has her own way of eating, mixing the cheese with the anchovies in oil, the salad and bits of crabmeat. Pierre drinks white wine, looks at her and smiles. If he married her, he’d drink his white wine at that table every day, and he’d look at her and smile.
“It’s curious,” Pierre says. “We’ve never mentioned the war years.”
“The less we talk …” says Michèle, cleaning up her plate.
“I know, but memories come back sometimes. For me it wasn’t too bad, after all, we were children then. Like an endless vacation, totally absurd, and almost fun.”
“It was no vacation for me,” Michèle says. “It rained all the time.”
“Rained?”
“Here,” she says, touching her forehead. “In front of my eyes, behind my eyes. Everything was damp, everything felt damp and sweaty.”
“Did you live in this house?”
“At the beginning, yes. Later, during the occupation, they took me down to my aunt and uncle’s in Enghien.”
Pierre doesn’t see that the match is burning down between his fingers, his mouth opens, he jerks his hand and swears. Michèle smiles, happy to be able to change the subject. When she gets up to fetch the fruit, Pierre lights the cigarette and inhales as if he were suffocating, but it’s already passed, everything has an explanation if you look for it, Michèle must have mentioned Enghien lots of times during their talks at the café, those phrases which seem insignificant and are quickly forgotten, and later turn out to be the subjects of a dream or a fantasy. A peach, yes, thank you, but peeled. Ah, terribly sorry, but women have always peeled his peaches, and no reason for Michèle to be an exception.
“Women. If they peeled your peaches for you, they were as stupid as I am. You’d be better off grinding the coffee.”
“Then you lived in Enghien,” Pierre says, watching Michèle’s hands with the vague distaste that watching a fruit being peeled always gives him. “What did your old man do during the war?”
“Oh, nothing much, we just lived, hoping that it would all be over soon.”
“The Germans didn’t bother you at all?”
“No,” Michèle says, turning the peach with her wet fingers.
“It’s the first time you’ve mentioned to me that you lived in Enghien.”
“I don’t like to talk about those days,” Michèle says.
“But you must have talked about it once,” Pierre says argumentatively. “I don’t know how I knew, but I knew you lived in Enghien.”
The peach falls onto the plate and pieces of the skin stick to its flesh. Michèle cleans the peach with a knife and Pierre feels the distaste again, starts grinding the coffee as hard as he can. Why doesn’t she say something? She looks like she’s suffering, busy cleaning the horrible runny peach. Why doesn’t she talk? She’s full of words, all you have to do is look at her hands, or the nervous flutter of her eyelids that turns into a kind of tic sometimes, all of one side of her face rises slightly, then goes back, he remembers once on a bench in the Luxembourg gardens, he noticed that the tic always coincides with a moment of uneasiness or a silence.
Michèle is preparing the coffee, her back to Pierre, who uses the butt of one cigarette to light another. They go back into the living room, carrying the porcelain cups with the blue design on them. The smell of the coffee makes them feel better, they look at one another, surprised by the period of silence and what went before it; they exchange a few casual words, looking at one another and smiling, they drink the coffee distractedly, the way you drink love potions that tie you forever. Michèle has partly closed the shutters and a warm, greenish light filters in from the garden and wraps around them like the cigarette smoke and the cognac that Pierre is sipping, lost in a mild loneliness. Bobby is sleeping on the rug, trembling and sighing.
“He dreams all the time,” Michèle says. “Sometimes he barks and wakes up all at once, then looks at all of us as if he’d just been in great pain. And he’s not much more than a puppy …”
The pleasure of being there, of feeling so good in that moment, just to close the eyes and sigh, like Bobby, to run his hand through his hair, once, twice, feeling the hand in his hair almost as though it were not his own, the delicate tickle as it touched the back of his neck, relaxed. When he opens his eyes he sees Michèle’s face, her mouth half open, her face white as a sheet. He looks at her, not understanding, a cognac glass is rolling across the rug. Pierre is standing in front of the mirror, he sort of likes it, his hair
parted in the middle like a silent-film star. Why does Michèle have to cry. She isn’t crying, but hands over the face always means someone’s crying. He pulls them apart roughly, kisses her on the neck, searches for her mouth. Words are born, his, hers, like little animals looking for one another, a meeting prolonged with caresses, the smell of siesta, the house empty, the stairway waiting with a glass ball on the newel post, bottom of the banister. Pierre would like to lift Michèle into the air, run upstairs, he has the key in his pocket, he’ll go into the bedroom, stretch himself out upon her, feel her shiver, begin sluggishly to undo ties, buttons, but there isn’t any glass ball on the newel post, it’s all far off and horrible, Michèle there beside him, so far away and weeping, her face crying between the wet hands, her body that breathes and is afraid and rejects him.
Falling to his knees, he puts his head in Michèle’s lap. Hours pass, a minute or two goes by, time is something filled with whips and spittle. Michèle’s fingers caress Pierre’s hair, and he sees her face again, a smile peeping through, Michèle’s fingers are combing his hair, it sort of hurts him when she pushes his hair back, then she bends over and kisses him and smiles.
Blow-Up and Other Stories Page 24