Elle

by Philippe Djian

  I can’t help thinking that there may be some relationship between the attack I have just endured and my father’s actions—just as we always wonder, my mother and I, each time we go through some ordeal. We wonder because we experienced it, we were on the receiving end of more than our share of spitting and blows, just because we were his wife and his daughter. Overnight we had lost all our relationships, all our neighbors, all our friends. As if we bore the mark on our foreheads.

  We experienced the anonymous phone calls, got called names in the middle of the night, received the obscene letters through the mail, our trash cans spilled outside our door, the words scrawled on the walls, the pushing and shoving at the post office, the small humiliations in the shops, the shattered windows. Nothing can surprise me now. No one could swear that all the embers have been snuffed out, that there isn’t someone in a corner somewhere cooking up the next thing that might befall us. How could we believe in chance?

  That very night, I get a text. “I thought you were really tight, for a woman of your age. But hey.” I fall over backward, breathless. I read it two or three times, then I answer: “Who are you?” But there is no reply.

  I spend my morning and part of my afternoon reading screenplays. They are piling up on my desk. Maybe there’s a clue to be found in that as well, I think, some young writer I shot down and who hates me more than anything.

  On the way, I stopped at the gun shop and got myself some red-pepper spray cans, for the eyes. The small size is very practical and can be used several times. I used to use it all the time when I was younger. I was very quick and I had no fears about taking public transportation. I was very agile. I had learned over the years. I know how to dodge someone, I could run pretty fast, I could get around the block in under two minutes. That’s no longer the case. That’s over. But fortunately, I no longer have any reason to run. I could even take up smoking again. Who would care?

  I put aside my dreary reading in midafternoon.

  There is nothing worse than that feeling of stupidly wasted time when you close a bad script. One of them flies across the room where I work and lands in an extra-large trash can exclusively reserved for that purpose. Sometimes that wasted time is painful. Sometimes it gets so bad you want to cry. At about five p.m., I think of my rapist again because at that time, forty-eight hours earlier, he used the fact that I was busy with Marty in order to burst through my door like some demonic jack-in-the-box.

  Then all at once I realize he must have been watching me. Waiting for the right moment. Watching me. And for a moment I just sit there, speechless.

  I go into the office, check my mail, my phone messages. I make a few calls, delegate a few tasks. Anna comes to talk to me, and toward the end of the conversation, she says, “I got to say it, you don’t look right.”

  I act like I can’t get over it: “Don’t be silly! I mean, just look at this gorgeous day, all this sunshine!”

  She smiles. Anna would probably be the right person to talk to, if I decide to talk. We’ve known each other for so long. But something is preventing me. This thing with her husband?

  I go to the gynecologist. I do the necessary tests.

  Vincent calls me to ask if I would at least cosign the lease. I am silent for a few seconds.

  “You were so unkind to me, Vincent.”

  “Yeah, I know. Shit, I’m sorry. I know.”

  “I can’t give you that money, Vincent. I’m trying to build a retirement fund. I don’t want to depend on you later on. I don’t want you to pay my way. I won’t be a burden.”

  “All right, I get it. Mom. At least cosign the fucking lease.”

  “Don’t just come to me when you want something.”

  I can hear him smashing the receiver against something. As a small boy he already had a temper. Just like his father.

  “Mom, would you please just fucking say yes or no.”

  “Stop saying ‘fuck.’ What kind of talk is that?”

  We make an appointment with the landlord. Economic uncertainty and stagnation have reached such proportions that a simple transaction like renting an apartment has become an outpouring of mutual distrust. Birth certificate, driver’s license, pay slips, certificates, photocopies, promissory notes, papers, handwritten letters, religion, and countless other precautions on the part of the lessor in order to protect against the chaos that may follow. I ask if it’s a joke, but it’s not.

  On his way out, Vincent says he wants to buy me a drink and we go into a bar. He orders a Hawaiian beer and a glass of South African dry white wine. We toast the fact that he is now the proud tenant of a six-hundred-square-foot three-room apartment with southern exposure and a small balcony, for which I have cosigned the lease.

  “You realize what this means, Vincent. You have to step up. If you don’t pay your rent it will fall to me, and I won’t be able to keep it up for long. Are you listening to me? This is not a game, Vincent. And I’m not only worried about you. I’m also thinking of myself and of your grandmother, whose rent I also pay, as you know. Vincent, they are very uptight nowadays. They won’t let you get away with anything. They can have your account frozen in no time, sue you, and the court costs would be entirely yours to cover. They will send assessors to inventory your possessions. They will humiliate you, and that’s not all. Always keep in mind that men who speculate on rice and wheat already have so much blood on their hands, they’re not worried about spilling a little more.”

  He looks me over a moment, then smiles. “I’ve changed, but you don’t see it.”

  I would love to believe him. I would love to take him in my arms and smother him with grateful kisses. But I’ll wait and see.

  There’s a meeting in my office. There are about fifteen of them. It’s been a few months now since we started having these fairly tense weekly meetings, because their work is worthless ever since they got back from vacation. Nothing original or powerful in the slightest has been suggested to me and, once I’ve given them high praise and expressed my unbridled admiration for their exceptional writing talent, their downcast faces disgust me.

  There are about ten men. Perhaps he is among them. Perhaps I denigrated one person’s work in particular without even realizing it because everything I read blurs into a mass of mediocrity. But I don’t notice anything. Not one glance I could truly say belonged to the man who blithely violated me. Not long ago, I was still certain that, even if he kept his mask on, I could spot him if I were around him, that my entire body would start shivering, that my entire being would bristle. Now I’m not so sure.

  When everyone gets up to leave, I go out with them, mixing with them, brushing past them on purpose in the narrow hallway, vaguely apologizing for the accidental contact. But I can feel nothing. I recognize no smell, no cologne as I pass discreetly from one to the next, exhorting them to give me the best of themselves next week if they’re interested in keeping their jobs—and no one kids around with that anymore—but otherwise no, I don’t feel a thing, not even the slightest spark.

  I finally speak to Richard about it. About my appalling misadventure. He goes pale, then he gets up to pour himself a drink.

  “Do you think I’m especially tight?” I ask him.

  He lets out a long sigh and sits down next to me, shaking his head. Then he takes my hand in both of his and doesn’t say another word.

  If ever I had deep feelings for a man, it was for Richard. And I did marry him. Even now, through the little things—like when he takes my hand or tries to meet my eyes with just a hint of worry, when from within an ocean of mutual incompatibilities some tiny islands of affection still emerge, some pure understanding—I can still clearly perceive the echo of what we meant to one another during those few years.

  Aside from that, we hate each other. Well, he hates me. His inability to sell his screenplays and his having to stoop to working on horrible television movies and stomach-wrenching TV programs, with assholes, is apparently partially my fault. I don’t do the right thing, if you listen
to him. I have never lifted a finger, never made use of my relationships. Right from the start, I’ve been totally, lamentably going through the motions and yada yada. No one gets out of this alive. The breach gets wider and wider.

  I’m unable to write a screenplay myself. I don’t have that talent. But I know how to recognize a good one when I see it, and I have nothing to prove in that respect. I’m well known for it. If Anna Vangerlove weren’t my friend, I’d have already sold out to the Chinese and their freaking headhunters. It just so happens that Richard has never written a good screenplay, and I should know. I should know all too well, I guess.

  “I wouldn’t say you’re tight,” he blurts, “and I wouldn’t say you’re not tight either. You’re somewhere in between, as far as I can make out.”

  There is a message hanging in the air, but I don’t want to sleep with him now. We have allowed ourselves the odd parenthetical tumble, but this is rare. Wanting to at the same time doesn’t happen every day after twenty years in each other’s lives.

  I look at him and shrug. Sometimes holding a hand is not enough—this man still has a lot to learn.

  He stares at me with a sort of grimace. “I didn’t get scabies,” I say with a chuckle. Now I wish he would leave. The sun is setting and the leaves all lit up. “It might have been much worse. I wasn’t crippled or disfigured.”

  “In any case, I can’t get my mind around how you’re taking this.”

  “Really? How should I take it, then, in your opinion? Would you like to see me moan and groan? Should I go off to a retreat, get some needles stuck in me, go see a shrink?”

  The surroundings are silent, the sun skimming the ground, the light oozing all around. Whatever else happens, down here on earth things are still as beautiful. And so the horror is complete. Richard wasn’t losing his hair when we separated, but for the last two years he sure has. There’s a little clearing on the top of his skull, glowing a gentle pink, when he bends over to kiss my fingers.

  “If you’ve got something to ask me, Richard, do it quickly. Then leave, because I’m tired.”

  I go out on the veranda, to enjoy the dusk. I’m surrounded by neighbors, lights shining in the windows of their houses. Our small street is generously lit, our gardens and yards have practically no shade. But I don’t go out too far, I keep my guard up. I have known that state for a long time. At first it was nearly permanent. Then it faded and largely disappeared when we moved. Being constantly aware, ready to dodge the danger—not to answer, just get out of there as quickly as possible, leaving any pursuers in the dust. I know all about it.

  Hardly four days have gone by. I light a cigarette. Now I can better see how things happened. I went to open the door, in the back of the house, when I heard Marty meowing. I was wondering why that idiot cat didn’t just go around to the front. I imagine the man had picked him up in order to get me outside. And that’s exactly what happened. I put my book down and I went outside.

  On the other hand, I have no memory of the purely sexual part of the assault. I was living with so much tension—a tension that was in actual fact the sum of all the tensions I had endured up until that moment, in trying to escape the pack of howling beasts my father had unleashed—I must have had a mental disconnect, recording nothing of the actual act. So I can’t say a thing about it. I can’t know how my body reacted. And I can’t know what to do with this suffocating rage and fury.

  I am neither torn nor bruised. I’m a little irritated, but that should go away. I don’t practice anal sex at the drop of a hat, so naturally I bled a little, but that’s not very serious. It’s slight. I have no image of it. The content of the text message, however, the tone—that irony, that familiarity—and the derogatory turn of phrase make me think this is punishment, obviously linked either to my work or to my father’s hellish deeds, delivered by some person who knows me.

  Aside from my cheek, rendered presentable by a smattering of face powder and a touch of blush, I do have some ugly marks on my arms and wrists—where he pinned them with his bare hands to the ground. Enormous bracelet-shaped bruises, which I hide with long sleeves. But that’s about it, thank God. At least I’m not obliged to wax poetic about the origin of an eye completely swollen closed, or a broken tooth or crutches or worse, like some more unfortunate souls. At least I can decide for myself what scope to afford what happens next, indeed if I wish anything to happen at all. In fact, I’m unable to join them. I can’t fit into their vast procession. I won’t wear that as a badge, as the mark of belonging to some entity. And I will not lose my position in the bargain. I have no time to be distracted. I must bring all my energy to bear. I didn’t steal the job I now hold, but I have also become aware of just how tenuous it truly is in this wave of layoffs that has hit. No one is immune, anything can happen. Some turned their heads for just an instant and lost everything. There you have it.

  My mother is on about my father again. She’s looking at Christmastime and points out that these are probably his last lucid moments. I hang up without answering.

  I go home. I lock the door behind me. I check the doors, the windows. I go up to my bedroom. Marty jumps on the bed, stretches, yawns. For home, I chose the Guardian Angel model, with the incapacitant agent. Each time you spray, six milliliters of active ingredient are blasted into the air at over one hundred mph.

  I left Richard before he discovered my affair with Robert Vangerlove, because I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I had to. Hurting Richard was never my intention. Actually, I think I was already so ashamed of sleeping with Anna’s husband because she was—and still is—my best friend. But it was either that or die of boredom, that or hang myself. One morning, there’s a Robert Vangerlove standing there, a perfectly ordinary and soulless man, a transparent man, with a slightly stupid smile on his face, and you say to yourself, “Why not?” You float. You spray yourself out in billions of indecision cells. That’s how you find yourself with an affair on your hands, a white man with a nascent belly, for the most part pleasant but dull, and you have no idea how to get rid of him. All right, so he’s not the worst lover in the history of the world, but there’s no more to it than that.

  He calls me up and he says, “Anna is away this weekend. Could we—”

  I cut him off. “Robert, I’m indisposed right now.”

  “You are? What do you mean? I’ll be around for a few days.”

  “I know, Robert. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Even with a condom?”

  “Right, I’m sorry. How was your trip? Did you sell a lot of shoes?”

  “The Italians are cleaning our clocks. I figure I’ve got another year, maybe two at the outside.”

  “Anyway, will you be around for the holidays? I don’t know yet myself.”

  “I have a hard time getting away over the holidays.”

  “Yes, I know you have a hard time getting away over the holidays, Robert. But that doesn’t matter. I know your situation. You know, I’m not a complicated person.”

  I hang up.

  It’s a miracle that nobody knows about him and me. In the course of a conversation, Anna confided to me that she had chosen an ordinary-looking man in order to have peace of mind. I made no comment.

  I’d like us to remain friends if we wind up breaking it off, but to be honest, I rather doubt it. I don’t really know him very well—sleeping with him didn’t teach me much—but I don’t think he would have a lot of time for me if I were just a friend. That’s the feeling I get. Richard never had more than a lukewarm relationship with him. “How did he go about seducing her, for fuck’s sake?” He asks the question regularly, especially when we’re coming home from a dinner party they attended and during which he made a vain attempt at flirting with her. “Oh, listen, that’s a mystery, Richard. You know that. Why do people wind up together? Look at us. It’s a total mystery, right?”

  That scene happened more than two years ago. One month later, we were separated and I could finally breathe. Alone at last. Free.
Free from a husband whose foul mood oppressed me, free from a son whose days were filled with who knows what, and hardly even a prisoner of my affair with Robert. There was no real urgency to put an end to that.

  What a revelation. As I look back on it now, I can say that solitude is the greatest gift, the only refuge.

  We should have split up sooner, instead of waiting. We were performing, each for the other. We were showing our worst aspects to one another, acting like lowdown, petty, obnoxious, small-minded, lost, and capricious people, as the situation required, and we really gained nothing by it. We may have lost a little self-esteem; he says so, and I agree.

  Leaving someone takes more courage than you might suppose—that is, unless you’re one of those zombies with burned-out brains, those simpletons one meets on occasion. Each morning I woke up and I couldn’t find the courage. And the last days all I did was moan. It took us a long time. Three days. Three long days and three long nights to tear ourselves away from one another, divvying up the furniture, the photographs, the films, the documents, the silverware.

  Sure, there was some yelling. A couple of things got broken. Richard took it very hard because he felt I had picked the exact worst time to throw that in his face. Those are his words. He was pitching his project. The biggest project of his life, as he told it, the one that would catapult him squarely into the realm of the elite, especially if Leo got excited about the role. And here I come with my bullshit and I saw his legs off. Those are his words.

  “Don’t try to make me feel guilty, Richard. Don’t start.”

  His answer was to slap me right across the face. I could have hugged him. “Thank you, Richard,” I told him. “Thank you.” Dawn had hardly broken when I got out of the taxi, handed the bag to the porter. I signed the card. I was escorted to the elevator. I smiled. I was going to sleep all alone in a king-size bed, after three days of fighting. Hallelujah. I wiped away a few tears of joy. My phone rang several times, but I didn’t answer.