Elle

by Philippe Djian

  “That’s what I’m doing,” she says, cutting me off. “Next is the stereo and after that the DVR.”

  I smile because, after killing the dog, the television was what my father went for, throwing ours out the window, and our troubles started right at that moment, because the neighbors weren’t happy having such a bad-tempered fellow in their midst, someone so estranged from their values, who spoke of holing up in Brittany as soon as unrest broke out in the streets of the capital, and who made the sign of the cross on the foreheads of children he passed on the stairs, and who asked him?

  I call Richard to make sure he hasn’t forgotten to do the shopping for the next day, and he immediately picks up our previous conversation. “Listen,” I say, “save your breath. Marry her if you want to, I couldn’t care less.”

  “Are you fucking tripping or what?”

  “Or don’t marry her, I couldn’t care less.”

  “Do not make a scene tomorrow. Don’t do something we’ll all regret. Let’s not start fighting over her, all right?”

  “I’m not fighting with you, Richard. I didn’t call you to listen to you whining over the phone. Do whatever you want. Don’t feel you have to tell me anything at all. You’re free to do as you please. I don’t see why I have to keep telling you that. I invited the girl to make you happy. Is that clear? Can we talk about something else now? Are you done with this?”

  “You can’t reject my work and at the same time keep me from having my own life. That’s a lot for me to take at once.”

  “Just don’t show up too late. I won’t be able to do everything myself. Will your girlfriend help us?”

  I let him get off the phone. His stubborn denial that he has a serious relationship with this Hélène Zacharian is now frankly ludicrous.

  I spend part of the afternoon sorting through the countless screenplays cluttering up the bookshelves in my office and piling up on the floor in precarious dirty white towers. But Anna and I will not let anyone else do the reading and, whatever I may have implied, I still experience the same emotion, the same thrill each time I read a first page, with the thought that it might be something exceptional, or even relatively good.

  Anna pokes her head in toward closing time and takes a quick glance around. She congratulates me on doing a chore she’s going to have to do herself pretty soon. “I just spoke to Vincent,” she goes on. “I swore I wouldn’t say anything, but do you know about his debts?”

  I am already sitting down, so all I can do is squeeze the armrests on my chair and lean forward. “What are you talking about, Anna? What debts?”

  She doesn’t really know. He isn’t really saying. It’s pretty vague. She gives him money. It’s nothing at all that she gives him money—she’s his godmother—she’s thrilled she can be of use to him, she tells me as we ride the elevator down from thirty. “This is a total shock to me,” I say.

  He’s only twenty-four. I didn’t think you could have real debt at twenty-four. All of a sudden, I feel like he’s much older than he is, struck by an affliction that normally doesn’t occur before thirty, or not without some serious bad luck. How did he manage to get into debt? The word itself sounds to me like some shameful malady. Drugs? Girls? Gambling? Anna makes me promise I won’t get unduly alarmed but just be vigilant. “Fine,” I say, “but could you explain to me what that means exactly? Considering that he doesn’t live with me and tells me off as often as he possibly can. What exactly do you mean by vigilant? Give me an idea of what I can do, in your opinion. Enlighten me. He tells you more than he tells me, Anna. I’m the last person he would confide in, you know that very well. I’m his mother. I’m the woman who tossed his father out of the house. I’m the most horrible thing in the world.”

  We walk together in the crisp air for a few minutes, silent, arms linked, then we go into a bar and order up some daiquiris. “I want to pay you back,” I tell her. She says no. Not just out of her generous spirit but because she wants to keep up this special relationship they have, which she worked to achieve right from the beginning. I let her nurse him a couple of times when we were still in the hospital and they used that to establish a mysterious, exceptional bond, which can still be felt today, a direct bond, which of course doesn’t depend on me in the least. I can still see her wiping away a tear and watching it land on Vincent’s forehead while he suckled her shamelessly and I was young then and that image really got to me. I was glad that my son and I could ease her suffering, and I would do it all over again, but it annoys me a little that she knows things before I do, that she knows what’s going on in the family before I’m even informed, that she works out certain problems instead of me.

  “I consider him like my son,” she says. “You know that. I helped him out, that’s all. It’s between him and me. It’s done.”

  “You’re his spiritual mother. You’re not his bank.”

  She gets up to get us two more daiquiris.

  “There is another possibility,” she says when she gets back. “Meaning Josie.”

  She looks straight at me, her bright eyes locked on mine, burning right through me.

  When she says “meaning Josie,” she’s implying Josie might be the source of Vincent’s problems. “I helped him out the first time just after they met. I’m not sure that’s a coincidence. That’s what I’m getting at.”

  I use a straw to drink without breaking eye contact. Then I deliberately let her hear the horrible noise of sucking at the bottom of the empty glass.

  I’m not jealous of Vincent’s girlfriends and I haven’t been for a long time. In fact, I sort of pity the poor dears, having to deal with such a foul-tempered person—unless I have an exclusive on his bitterness and resentment. I can’t rule that out. Anna says she’s not jealous either and contends that the negative judgments she keeps making about the poor dears do not emanate from any preconceived notion. But she is always quick to denigrate them, or kick them, at every opportunity. “I don’t call that being jealous,” she says. “I help him to open his eyes, which isn’t the same thing. Because when you get right down to it, he still doesn’t have the slightest idea. He’s still just a child.” I’m not sure Vincent is still just a child. I would even say he stopped being one the day he refused to hold my hand on the way to school. But the fact that he’s stupid enough to move in with a two-hundred-pound woman and hurriedly recognize her child, which is not his, is ample proof that he has the mentality of a slightly retarded teenager who eschews any reasonable attitude.

  “I think Josie is at the root of what’s wrong,” she says. “I’m not jumping to conclusions, you know? I don’t want to look like I’m defending him no matter what, but I’ll tell you one thing, Vincent did not have this kind of problem before he met her. You draw your own conclusions, Michèle. You decide if it’s my imagination.”

  “I don’t know. I’m listening. I’m thinking.”

  “First of all, tell me. Do we know who the father is? You don’t know? That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? Anything is possible. Something really horrible, perhaps.”

  She reads too many screenplays, that’s for sure. That is why she hunts down every possible avenue, all the ramifications. But I still have the feeling Anna is right, and I’m relieved at the thought that Vincent is not on the front line of this. This is much better. I was already imagining that he owed money to a bunch of Hells Angels or the senior executives of an investment bank.

  The first thing I notice when I get home is the light on in my bedroom window. The curtain is floating softly in the breeze. I stay in the car for a moment, inspecting the area, bathed in pools of public lighting. But there is nothing stirring. There is no light on at the neighbors’. Everything is absolutely quiet and calm. And so am I, surprisingly, although “absolutely” is overstating it just a little considering that I’m gripping my can of pepper spray so tightly in my fingers that I can feel pain shooting up into my shoulder.

  I unlock my front gate, wait a few seconds before I open it. Then I put one foot fo
rward and, seeing that nothing special happens, the other foot as well. Adrenaline courses through me like lukewarm juice. In the time it takes to get to my front door, there is sweat on my brow and I’m short of breath.

  I put my ear to the door. I hear nothing. I take out my key.

  Inside, the alarm is activated. I turn it off. Nothing downstairs. I go upstairs—I know the sound of every step, which one groans, which one crackles. I make no noise at all.

  The door to my bedroom is open to the dark hallway. I go inside, my heart pounding. The bed is all undone, the covers thrown on the ground. My dresser is open, my panties strewn around. On the bedside table, the screen on my cell phone is lit up. I move toward it.

  And that’s when I discover the disgusting, slimy, stinky stain on the sheets, with which someone obviously wiped himself—accompanied by the message, “Oh, sorry! I just couldn’t wait!” kindly posted on the screen.

  I look up and I am briefly lost in contemplation of the curtain dancing at the open window.

  Richard gets there in the early afternoon, arms full. I myself got out early to buy the nuts and starters, the dessert and wine. I’m bringing in some wood for the fire when he beeps the horn.

  I can see at a glance that he’s going to be charming and helpful with me, and I think he has made the right decision, I think he knows me well. Because in fact it is a little hard to welcome the woman who’s taking my son and the woman who’s taking my husband at my table at the same time, to put it melodramatically, even though I am trying to be as broad-minded as possible. I know I’m going to have to relax, I’m going to have to find something to do with this stress that I woke up with early this morning, right when I opened my eyes, and that hasn’t left me since. Bringing in the wood is one of the things that is supposed to calm me down, because it’s so heavy. Richard got a good deal on some one-meter logs from the Landes region, which had been devastated by the hurricane, but moving them around is no picnic.

  He carries in the groceries and immediately comes back outside to help me. It’s a fine, cold day.

  “I’ll come by to see to the garden,” he says, “soon as I get some time. I’ll come by with my tools.”

  “No, it’s fine. Just leave it all alone.”

  “Once a year, I don’t mind. As a favor to you.”

  “It’s not doing me a favor. I can’t seem to explain that.”

  “If you get a guy in, he’ll charge you an arm and a leg, Michèle. Think for a second.”

  I look at him. “Actually, if you really want to,” I say, “you could clear out the gutters, too.”

  He peels the vegetables while I take care of the meat. It’s still early, but he pours me a drink. He says, “I think you’re looking well lately.” I don’t know how he finds that note of sincerity, how in the world he makes it sound true. He’s the man who slapped me and he’s the one who comes running if I’m being threatened or if I’m just feeling blue or I’m terribly tired. He’s losing his hair, sure, but he’s still a good catch.

  “I’m not mad at you,” I say. “I actually don’t understand what gives me certain rights. It’s reflexive, a leftover from when you and I were together. It’s not conscious. Don’t pay any attention.”

  “I didn’t say a word when you went out with that violinist.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t play dumb. He was married with three kids, he had all the requisite qualities. But you can’t say as much, right? You pick a single woman with no children, right? If I’m not mistaken.”

  “I didn’t pick anything at all. I ran into her on your fucking elevator, if you really want to know.”

  “That’s how you go about it? You run into girls on fucking elevators?”

  “Look, I swore I would never argue with you again. I want us to remain on good terms.”

  “We are on good terms.”

  “Great. And I would like it to stay that way after this evening is over. I would like us to be on even better terms after this evening.”

  “You mean sort of like brother and sister? Is that what you have in mind? That we wind up being the best friends in the world?”

  “Well, more or less. Something powerful, in any case.”

  I sort of nod. “And you thought that by having an affair with this girl, you were working in that direction? You thought you were doing the right thing?”

  “I didn’t think anything, Michèle. Quit it.”

  “You pick nothing, you think nothing. Isn’t life beautiful?”

  He clenches his teeth and goes back to his contentious peeling of a Roseval potato. I inwardly salute his efforts at self-control, praying he won’t bite his tongue.

  My mother arrives on the arm of a man my age whom I immediately identify as this wonderful Ralf person she has told me about. “She talks to me about you so often,” he says. I manage a smile. My mother is wearing a short black leather skirt. She has so much makeup on that I shiver for a second as she passes the pressure cooker, afraid the steam will melt it and make it drip all over my bouillon. I’m being mean. She’s not wearing any more makeup than usual. I tell her to sit down with her friend while Richard and I get things squared away in the kitchen.

  “Promise you’ll kill me,” I say, while she strides exuberantly toward the fireplace, hips swinging—well, as much as she can swing them. Ralf toddles along behind.

  She hasn’t always behaved like this. She got off on this tangent gradually, as we lived through that horrible life after my father committed a massacre in a kiddie beach club while the parents were out surfing. She finally figured out that she had no other means of survival because she was not made for work. And this is what’s left at seventy-five, the caricature of an aging seductress. That’s all that’s left. A hag. I’m exaggerating. “Kill me at the very first sign,” I say.

  Josie can still get through the front door but she has to turn slightly sideways and I do get the feeling she’s holding her breath. The baby is a beautiful purple thing. Cold air rushes inside with them. It’s snowing above fifteen hundred feet, and all that cold air is barreling down toward the plains. In a few moments, they have pink cheeks, and the collection of wine bottles is growing. We open the champagne Ralf brought and, one by one, everyone asks me who is that individual and I answer I don’t know and I don’t want to know.

  I will never allow my mother to marry this asshole, or any other.

  I hope this isn’t showing in my face, or not too much. I hope I can smile at him rather than frown when our eyes meet, because I don’t want to ruin the evening for so little, the dinner party I usually throw a few weeks before Christmas so I can bring together my family and a few close friends. I was married to Richard for twenty years and we always did this, at least once a year, and usually everything goes wonderfully well, except for a few inevitable clashes that can be managed or even choked off with a little goodwill and effort.

  A few glasses start going around, some beer. Anna and Robert bring wine. The coat racks are overflowing. The fire is crackling. Robert tries to meet my eyes but I avoid it. Then Patrick arrives. He’s alone, his wife couldn’t make it. “Nothing too serious?” I ask as I hand him a drink. I make the introductions. I tell them all how we met, when he was after a prowler, just a little while ago. My mother feels it’s important to have good neighbors.

  Vincent is deep in conversation with his father and I wouldn’t swear they’re not talking about me, saying bad things, each revealing the bone he has to pick. They’re so different, except for the temperamental side they often reserve for me. I think Vincent is now as strong as his father and that’s a fairly upsetting feeling for me, to think that I gave birth to a child now able to punish his father. Their jaw session takes place near the fire, so I see the reflection of the flames dancing on their faces.

  Sitting in the middle of the couch, Josie nurses, which for the moment distracts Robert.

  Finally, Hélène Zacharian rings the doorbell and Richard springs into action, like a roebuck. All present and accounted for.
And those who were getting impatient, who lifted the top off the pot for the umpteenth time to see what smelled so good, now turn their imploring gaze upon me. And all I can look at is Hélène, who has just arrived. Superb. The funny thing is, it’s like Richard is embarrassed about there being so many beautiful things lumped together in one person. Anna and I exchange a glance. I know she’s thinking the same thing I am, that the competition is stiff and unfair for women our age, that at times we might as well be dead.

  We sit down to dinner and Patrick sits next to me, saying I was very nice to invite him and he feels honored to be sharing a meal with such a great group of people. It feels a little ceremonious, a little pompous, but I accept his thanks without hesitation because, as he says this, he puts his hand on my arm and keeps it there—which no one in the room has missed.

  Robert, seated on the other side of the table, almost facing me, decides to close his eyes. And because I have no intention of provoking him, I stand up to serve, push my chair back. But my cheeks are red with the heat. Vincent gets up and walks around with the baby—whom they call Édouard-baby for some stupid reason—because Édouard-baby has started wailing in his bamboo–rayon fiber, washable diapers.

  Anna has started serving on the other side while my mother claps her hands to quiet everyone down so she can talk about how good it is to be all together with family and friends and blah blah blah. Her speech is always the same until she turns to welcome the new arrivals, in this case Ralf, Patrick, and Hélène—Josie, who according to some obscure strategy Vincent had wound up insisting on including at the last minute as his new girlfriend, had already been taken care of last winter. This always takes a few minutes, these little set pieces hosted by the old bag, which gives us time to serve. Perfect. Then she turns to Ralf and, although I’m not really watching her, something gets my attention, something shiny, and she takes this opportunity to announce her engagement to Ralf here.

  I burst out laughing. “Oh, sorry,” I say. “Excuse me, but how do you manage to be so ludicrous?”