Hélène Zacharian. I fill out an accident report in this woman’s name. “She’s a girlfriend,” he tells me, “not my girlfriend.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
I sign the accident report and put it in the glove compartment while he watches me with his irritated, tearful eyes. I take pity on him, I smile. I come up for a few minutes and he calls me a cab. Meanwhile, he makes some cold compresses out of Kleenex. I take a quick glance around and, although there is no item of clothing, no object that would reveal a woman’s presence, I can feel a woman lives here. Or at least spends significant time here. I would even go farther. She was here only a few hours ago.
I learn more from Vincent, who doesn’t seem to mind telling me about his father’s new companion. He exaggerates his surprise. I didn’t know? How is that even possible? Only five minutes ago, he had been wearing a yellow shirt, dark blue pants, and a red cap with a McDonald’s logo screwed down tight on his head. I watched him from the sidewalk, cleaning the tables, stacking the trays, as if wandering around in the rubble. I had to look away. A cool wind comes whipping down the avenue like an invisible flame.
I’ve just come from a meeting with a writer who agreed to write a screenplay based on his novel, after making a quick calculation. An interesting guy that I’ve decided to keep an eye on.
To hear Vincent tell it, they’ve been together for a few weeks and she’s much younger than he is. “I don’t understand why he never told you about this.”
It’s both strange and very clear to me—and to him, of course.
There are two floors between us. Hélène Zacharian works on the thirty-second floor, at Hexagone. AV Productions is on thirty. Vincent thinks we could have a meal or two together, might as well, but that doesn’t make me laugh.
How’s Josie? She’s fine. She’s enormous. She’s gained sixty-five pounds, maybe more. She can hardly move anymore, she just lies around in front of the TV. I touch his arm and ask him if he’s really sure about this. He gives me a look of disdain and pushes my hand away, like it was something hideous. Ungrateful child that I carried inside me, that I made myself from scratch, that I plucked from nothingness!
I’m a little peeved at being kept at bay, especially since I wasn’t expecting it. I’m a little troubled by the idea that Richard might start over. Oh, now I’m demoralized for the rest of the day. I make an attempt with Anna but turn down her invitation when she tells me that Robert is back. That sick exercise he and I indulge in regularly in front of her, not giving ourselves away—an exercise that he says “adds spice” to our relationship—is now absolute torture for me.
Night comes and I try to work for a while, or watch a movie, but I give up. I can’t concentrate. I go outside. I smoke a cigarette but stay near the door, carrying my Guardian Angel. It’s December and it’s no longer chilly, but for the first time really cold. Night is black as ink, the sky is clear, the crescent moon as thin as steel wire, and dull. It’s late. The silence and dark around me feel threatening. But that threat is alluring, keeps me up, electrifies me to the core. Actually, I think I’m crazy. I think I want him to be there, lurking in the shadows. Want him to leap out at me and fight, so I can measure myself against him, with all my strength, kicking, punching, biting, grabbing his hair, tying him up naked next to my window. Lord, how could I have such horrifying thoughts?
If I were a normal woman, I’d stop paying my mother’s rent and have her move into the house with me. My accountant, who is an unpleasant-looking man with shifty eyes but who has always given me good advice, says I should think carefully about the future, and he’s the one who gives me the idea about Irène’s rent. After thinking it over, that’s what I would probably do if I were a normal woman, who thought logically, but logic has nothing to do with this. I simply do not have the energy I would need to live with her—much less the patience, the desire, or the will. I shake my head. I realize that nothing will ever be easy again, that the best years are behind us, that we have very definitely left our glory days behind. Now it’s time to seek security, reduce expenses, save, and so on. But sometimes it’s better to die than to live half a life, in sort of a state of permanent frenzy and madness. I tell him I’ll think about it.
I had a bad night, mulling over the day’s events, thinking about the fact that Richard met a woman, about Robert’s return, about the absurdity of the couple Vincent and Josie have formed, about the nauseating relationship I have with my mother, and those horrible thoughts that go through my mind when I think of my attacker. What a moribund, ghastly night, one that a handful of pills could do nothing to change. All this to say that I would have preferred to begin my day with something other than a visit from my accountant, telling me that times are hard, Europe is still on shaky ground, and the future looks bleak. But that’s not all. No sooner do I pop an aspirin than Robert slips into my office and closes the door behind him, carefully, a finger on his lips. “Excuse me, Robert, but…” I was going to explain that I have a lot of work to do and that this isn’t a good time, but in a flash he’s all over me, going for my lips. I have said that he’s a good enough lover, but I must admit that I’m not a fan of those wet kisses, his ramming his tongue into my mouth with all the delicacy of an ill-tempered teenager. When I do manage to separate our mouths, he opens his fly and tells me I can touch it. “In that case, stand over the trash can,” I say.
Toward noon, after a mind-numbing meeting with the head of programming at a cable channel—who only last month was still a midlevel exec at L’Oréal and who thinks that Mad Men is a documentary about a psychiatric hospital—I decide it’s time to go snoop around Hexagone.
Hélène Zacharian and I do indeed work in the same office building, only two floors apart, and she is a ravishing brunette with bright eyes who works at reception. I think I’ve seen her in the elevator a couple of times. I think I should be worried. “I’m Richard’s ex,” I tell her, sticking my hand out across the frosted glass countertop, a big smile on my face, trying to seem as cheerful as I possibly can.
“Oh, nice to meet you. This is so great,” she answers, shaking my hand warmly.
“We should meet one of these days,” I say. “At least Richard won’t have to introduce us now.”
“Right, of course. Whenever you want.”
“Well, let’s say next week sometime. I’ll work it out with Richard, don’t worry about a thing.”
I take the stairs back down because I don’t want to wait for the elevator while she watches. My heels click nervously on the concrete steps of the emergency staircase as I beat my hasty retreat.
Let’s be truthful: She’s about fifteen years younger than me and she’s every bit as fine as I feared.
For as long as my mother refused to move, we were subjected to every last vexation, every torment in the world. I was already twenty—my father had been in solitary confinement for five years, having been labeled “Monster of the Aquitaine” for slaughtering seventy children in a seaside resort day camp—when I met Richard. He is the only one other than Irène who really knew me young, but he is also the one who changed my life, who, any way you slice it, saved my mother and me. And I’m suddenly afraid to lose all of that.
This is the first time in my life that I feel like I could lose Richard, and that takes its toll. Anna holds me to her shoulder for a moment, kisses my forehead, orders us each a croque monsieur, a salad with Abruzzo oil, and bottled water.
Later we go to the movies, then she sees me home, and all of a sudden she wants to have a last smoke outside my door before she goes. We turn up our collars, smoke with our gloves on. I tell her she kept this evening from veering morose. She answers, “Good, you owe me one.” I look up at the sky, all lit up with stars tonight. “I was raped, Anna. It happened almost two weeks ago.”
Without looking away from the firmament, I wait for her reaction, but it doesn’t come. Maybe she’s dead or all of a sudden she’s gone deaf or she isn’t listening. “Did you hear me?” I feel her hand closing
around my arm. Then she blanches, turns to me. Petrified. Holds me close. Both of us stock-still. Deathly silent. Profoundly stupid. I can feel her breath on my neck.
We go inside. She tosses her coat on the couch. I light a fire. We stare at one another once again. Then she catches her breath and doesn’t ask me how I feel. She knows. Of course. She tells me I shouldn’t have waited so long to tell her and I try to explain what a state of uncertainty I had found myself in, and naturally I had tried to bury the whole thing at first. “Oh, listen,” I say, “it wasn’t that simple. I wasn’t really in pain. It wasn’t like it was Patrick Bateman, all right? I was perfectly capable of closing my eyes, never mentioning it to anyone. It was the easiest way. I didn’t know what to do, you know?”
“Hiding something like that from me. Christ.”
“Besides Richard, you’re the first person I’ve told.”
“You tell Richard about it and you don’t tell me. Come on, explain that one!”
I walk over and sit down next to her and we watch the fire take, the flames leaping up toward the purring chimney. With each passing second, I am sorrier that I let Robert come on to me and that I hadn’t ended the affair. I think what a price there would be to pay if she ever found out, and I tremble by her side. I think what a coward I’ve been, what an absolutely horrible example I’ve set. And I shiver all over until she rubs my back and says again and again, everything’s all right, there, there, as if I were about to break down and sob.
Anna told me that I had screamed without stopping from the moment they admitted me in the wee hours until late that evening when I finally gave birth—freed my body in one last excruciating torment of the relentless creature that had resided within it and persecuted it by twisting my bladder, for example, night and day, or else starving me or depriving me of cigarettes.
She was in the next room and she had just lost her child, and my screaming would have driven her mad, she told me, if she hadn’t wound up getting up and coming to keep me company. I had spaced out my moaning and we spent a few hours together and later she told me that the trauma she went through would be a tiny bit easier to bear because of the child I would bring into the world, compensation for hers.
This morning, Josie found blood in her underwear and they rushed to the hospital, where I joined them with coffee and croissants I bought at the cafeteria. She appreciates me coming and, if I’m going to keep an eye on a situation that Vincent doesn’t seem to be in control of at all, I don’t want her to see me as her enemy.
“If it’s now, she’s early,” Vincent explains.
“Vincent,” says Josie, “your mother can count.”
It doesn’t take much to get the measure of a couple’s state of affairs. One remark, sometimes one glance, one silence, and it’s all very clear. With that, a nurse comes to take Josie away and Vincent tells me he’s decided to recognize the child. And I immediately think, Why give birth to such idiots? I had sworn to myself that I would no longer weigh in about this life they were starting together, but I just can’t help myself now.
“Do you ever think? Do you know what you’re committing to? It’s a prison sentence, Vincent. You’re walking into prison. Don’t look away, my son, look at the reality. Do you hear me? It’s a cage. Those are chains. A prison.” I give up, wave him off, before he even opens his mouth to answer. He has already looked daggers at me, gone pale. A vein has pulsated on his forehead. I am the worst thing that ever happened to him.
Josie comes back on a gurney and, looking grave, tells us she is going to give birth within an hour. I meet Vincent’s eyes for a second before he runs to Josie, and the look in those eyes is one of a scared child. And I in no way want to reassure him. I’m convinced they won’t last long. Living in this city requires having at least a little money, which they obviously don’t have, so it won’t take long. The only thing is, the life they get back to will be a little bit more complicated than it had been to start with, a little harder to disentangle, but you can’t go back, what’s done is done.
I wouldn’t want to be in Josie’s shoes. If I think about the ordeal she’s about to go through, I might get sick. When some women tell me that the experience of giving birth was like having an orgasm, I laugh right in their faces. I have rarely heard such gibberish. It’s like listening to some throwback to another era, brains fried by sunshine and acid flashbacks. A thousand deaths. That’s what I went through to have Vincent. A thousand deaths, and not a thousand delights. Let’s be serious. Let’s not be afraid to tell the truth.
It’s a beautiful day, cold and bright. The air smells good. A good day to go for a walk around town, and I keep to the busy streets. I send Vincent a message to ask if he needs anything, but his terse reply means he hasn’t softened.
I try to call him several times that afternoon but he doesn’t answer. Then I have a long session at work with two writers on a series who experience every cut I request, every correction, every drop of red ink as a personal assault, a blow below the belt, an affront to their genius. One of them even winds up pounding his fist on the desk and walking out into the hallway and slamming the door. When he comes back, he seems to have calmed down and we continue to the next problem, which doesn’t take too long to emerge.
I only let them go at sundown and they are in a horrible mood. I can’t get over their monstrous egos, how sure they are of their own value, considering they are most often mediocre, almost never good. We part ways in the parking lot, murmuring vague goodbyes, and one of them—a blond guy about thirty with sharp, angular features and stringy hair—wears a smile strange enough to make me think that there, he could be a guy like that, someone I’ve treated poorly, whose work I disparaged, some guy whose intelligence, superiority, quality I have questioned. Especially coming from a woman. Night has fallen. I wouldn’t want to be alone with him in the middle of a field.
Vincent finally calls me from a phone booth—his minutes all gone—when I’m passing the Louvre in heavy traffic. The Place de la Concorde is an ocean of red lights with wavy interior currents, slow and mysterious.
“Jesus, Mom! It’s a boy!” He screams into my ear, delirious with excitement.
“Fine, Vincent. But it’s not your boy. Don’t lose sight of that.”
“I’m incredibly happy, you know? Incredibly happy.” He’s breathing hard, like he was jumping rope.
“Did you hear me, Vincent?”
“What? No, what did you say?”
“I said he’s not really yours, Vincent. That’s all I’m saying. So how much does he weigh?”
An icy silence on the other end of the line. “Well, whose is he if he’s not mine?” he asks suddenly, with a very marked change of tone. I can feel the storm coming, no mistake about it, but nothing can be done. “Is he yours?” he asks in a hiss. “Whose is he? The pope’s?”
“He’s his father’s, I guess. And you’re not his father, Vincent.”
I know what he’s doing. He’s banging the receiver against a wall or something else. A gesture of pure rage. This is not the first time he’s dabbled in the art. He has confided to me that it’s not exactly the telephone he wants to smash in such moments. “Vincent,” I told him, “I can’t wait for the day when you lift a hand to me.” Then we drank to one another, because we were in a good mood that night and we managed to have a sense of humor about ourselves and keep it simple. I’ve hidden nothing from this boy about the hell into which his birth once threw me, but I have never told him what mind-boggling love I felt for him—and I still love him, I guess. Vincent is my son, though with time everything warms over. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about having to nurse him. But then what happiness he gave me, what a sense of fulfillment he provided—such a new and unexpected sensation—what never-ending joy there was in being a mother. That is, up until the first girls appeared on the scene.
It was conceiving this child that saved me from the psychological shipwreck my father had dragged me into. Vincent brought me back to life, such a marvel, so dif
ferent from the inconsequential lout who is part of my life now, the one who’s about to become the father of a child who isn’t his, after marrying the mother. This kind of thing works out well maybe one time in a thousand. And who is going to tell him that, if not me?
Certainly not Richard, who seems to have other priorities right now. I admit I’m not quite as indifferent as I should be with regard to this new life he’s building for himself without even bothering to let me know. Oh, I know he’s not obliged to tell me anything, but we lived together for twenty years and I slept with him for twenty years, I ate across the table from him, we shared a bathroom, a car, computers, anyway…So I don’t know, I don’t know if he owes me anything at all, I don’t know if I deserve to be kept up to speed about his plans, I don’t know if I’m anything but a piece of dog shit for him, well, sometimes I wonder. So certainly not him, not the guy who always came down on the side of his son as our relationship went south and whose movie projects were invariably put on hold.
Despite this, I call him to talk about it and he tells me, “I’m at the hospital.” My blood courses through my veins and I nearly ram into the car in front of me, but he adds, “I stepped out for a smoke. Vincent doesn’t want to talk to you.”
I feel I should be there, not here. Richard’s presence on the scene makes me feel guilty. “I want to be sure we’re on the same page here,” I say. “I’d like you to use this opportunity to talk to him, make him realize he shouldn’t be rushing into things, making lifelong commitments in a hasty manner. Hello. Can you hear me?”
“I don’t think there is any right way to make lifelong commitments.”
Elle Page 4