FIVE
A TACITURN SPINSTER WITH tea-stained teeth, Isabel Tweed was senior wordsmith at Putterly Publishing, her first and only job since coming down from Oxford (medieval studies, a thesis on the Venerable Bede). She managed her far-flung order of scribes with care and respect, as long as they obeyed the rules of genre and met their deadlines. Tweed had little tolerance for the clever turn of phrase, even less for the stench of irony. Action verbs ruled. Nouns assisted. Adjectives and adverbs might bloat a first draft, but must be gone when the glue was dry. Putterly paid by the word.
Characters were less important than plot, though Tweed kept an eye on gender balance which she referred to as “the sizzle.” She once ventured that all of Piers’ female characters were the same woman. He hotly begged to differ, pointing out that each had a unique name, face, body shape and perfume. He insisted the feminine protagonists in his nine published novels were discrete individuals drawn from live sources, hard research. When it came to writing women, the Putterly style did not encourage cribbing from other scribes or populating books with shadows from the author’s past. The genre favoured concrete reality. Piers went hunting in the streets of Avignon and put the tab on expenses.
By trial and error he had perfected the art of unobtrusive observation. He spent hours, sometimes days, in carefully selected cafés and bars, lingering over an expensive meal if the plot required a sophisticate, haunting dives if it did not. Never was a man more attentive to a woman’s choice of dress, her natural beauty and comportment, potential, the mixture of strength and vulnerability revealed by her aura than was Piers Le Gris at work.
He scribbled adjectives in the margins of a folded newspaper, details of how she held her shoulders, the breadth and duration of a smile, the angle and length of the neck, each fold and curve abetting speculation on the shape and density of her breasts, the dusky geography below. Surreptitious observation led inevitably to acts of mental striptease, a small indulgence he permitted as a break from taking notes. And why not? It was hardly an imposition. The subject continued to eat and chat with friends, unaware, though sometimes he detected a faint blush, a quick knowing glance his way. And from these hints, a theory arose: attractive women are instinctively attuned to appreciation, even when it is launched from a distance by a man bent over a newspaper.
Only once had he veered from his dedication to strict anonymity, a deviation from policy dictated by circumstance. It began with a stack of blank pages, The Faithful Husband (titled ironically), his first foray into domestic felony. According to the plotline, a man storms into a married woman’s life and several chapters later drives her to violence. He had no trouble picturing the man, but the woman was vague.
One day, sifting through a pile of mail on the dining-room table, he had stumbled upon a marketplace flyer and paused to peruse the classifieds, his eyes lighting on the offer of a large oak bookcase, Louis XIV–style. As he savoured the order this treasure might bring to his overstuffed office-cumbedroom, his eyes drifted downwards toward the personals column: badly married woman seeks affection, discreet liaison. The dialectical leap from order to its antithesis being instinctive, he picked up the phone and punched in her number.
In the weeks before they met, he dreamed of her every night. So fully did la femme mal mariée enter his imagination that he broke another rule and began to create her on the page from thin air. She was small and soft with red hair, lavish lips, striding through his plot with a confident swagger, delectable and eager. Meanwhile, practical problems plagued the real-life encounter — her dentist, a visiting aunt, Easter.
When the day finally came, he paced the parking lot outside the Porte St. Michel and walked straight past the tallish woman in a raincoat who was leaning against a silver Peugeot. She came striding over and shook his hand. “Bonjour, Chanelle.”
A woman seeking sex names herself after perfume? He liked the choice of pseudonym, was tempted to steal it. Smiling, she held up the car keys. He hadn’t driven a car in years. He rarely ventured outside the medieval walls of Avignon except to cross the Boulevard St. Roch en route to the train station. “Oh no,” he said. “You drive. It’s your car.” She shrugged and turned away.
Their destination was an unknown suburb called, somewhat ominously, Les Angles. Angles worried Piers. He would have preferred angels. He had hoped for a quaint Provençal village full of cheerful children and crusty gents in berets playing boules, an exotic location for a thriller-in-progress. As he folded his lanky frame into the bucket seat, inadvertently squashing a loaf of bread, his thoughts hung onto the official purpose of this mission. In a few moments he would face the task of removing this substantial woman’s clothes.
As they glided over the Pont de l’Europe, he observed her from the corner of his eye, noting a lean, efficient face, carefully made up, faintly enthusiastic. She was not the woman he had imagined. Burying his hands in his pockets, he gave his notebook a squeeze and wondered where to start.
The house was a newly built split-level bungalow surrounded by high brick walls, with a yard and a swimming pool. Chanelle locked the iron gate, picked up a bag of groceries, and led him inside a cool, orderly sprawl of bright rooms furnished in sleek, self-assembled pieces. Photos of family celebrations decorated the walls; men’s and boys’ shoes cluttered the hallway. A warren of domestic routine soaked in the fruity smell of family life, the house made him aware of how thoroughly accustomed he had become to the gloom of rue des Griffons. He sat uneasily on the lemon sofa, sipping Scotch while Chanelle chattered from another room.
A few moments later she returned, dressed in lace lingerie, a yellow that complemented the interior decor. Her tanned legs dominated. If his panic was obvious, she seemed not to notice. A take-charge personality, she put little store in conversation, for which he was grateful.
Afterwards, Piers accepted a glass of water and offered to take a bus home, but Chanelle said she had to stop by the dry cleaners anyway, and could just as easily run him back across the bridge. Her tone was neutral, her mind already on dinner.
In a subsequent thriller published under the Putterly imprint, the man whose advances led a badly married woman into a life of murder and clandestine activity took her savagely that day, beginning in the drawing room, a rough embrace conducted with her back against an oak bookcase, a priceless heirloom, circa Louis XIV. While they tore madly at each other’s hungry bodies, a crystal vase hit the marble floor and splintered into a thousand pieces, first casualty of a passion charged with the fury of too many delays. She was lithe and light and easily hoisted. He was tough and sure, more adept with hooks and snaps than any man has a right to be. When it was over — and it was over quickly — he gathered her into his arms, carried her across the debris of broken glass and into the bedroom, a dark, masculine chamber with a hard mattress and barren walls where they lay together in a careless angle across the marriage bed, oblivi ous to the creak of antique boards and groans of pleasure until every moment of the dangerous delay had been exhausted, and nothing remained of their lust but the knowledge that it could never be cured, only calmed by frequent surrender.
By the time he transformed his first afternoon with Chanelle into nighttime prose, there was no trace of the first awkward fumble on her cheery home-office sofa. By the time the book was finished, she had begun to find excuses. Their Tuesday afternoons stretched from once a week to once a month, and finally not at all.
Chanelle Lambert had been vacationing in New Orleans when she came upon The Faithful Husband in the living room of her bed and breakfast. A ragged paperback left on a stack of newspapers, the salacious cover drew her attention. When she caught the author’s name, her first thought was, there must be another Piers Le Gris. Could there be two? The photo on the back cover left doubt intact — a shadowy profile of a man’s face all but hidden under a black fedora, pulled low over a beguiling half-smile.
Armed with a dictionary, she tackled the first chapter.
The scene of the murder was the inside of her home. Once the truth hit, she stopped pausing over unfamiliar words and raced ahead. The yellow walls could have been anyone’s walls, but the moles on her breasts, her thighs, her noises — page after page of dead-accurate detail bent to the services of cheap crime and punishment. It was thrilling. She returned to France with a shopping bag full of Putterlys written by a man she thought she knew, determined to find him and pry out the truth.
It was three in the afternoon when the phone rang. Piers was asleep. Mistaking the unfamiliar clang for a caller, he ambled sleepily towards the door but there was no one there. The muffled noise persisted. By the time he located his cell phone under a pile of clothes, Chanelle was on the verge of hanging up.
“It’s me,” she said. “… Remember?”
“Of course,” he stammered. Charlotte? Chantal? Her voice sprang from the pages of The Faithful Husband, though he could not remember her name. “I’ve been travelling in America,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “How have you been?”
“Chanelle!” he said, hitting the mark. Her laughter evoked the scent of cigarettes, lipstick, a powerful perfume. He pictured her hand on the stickshift, the pert no-fooling profile as she fixed her attention on the task of driving him home. Standing with his ear pressed against a familiar voice, he knew he wanted, nay, desperately needed to be driven outside the medieval walls, past suburban sprawl, through locked gates and taken into a warm home-office hide-a-bed by a mature, available woman who had already known him naked. No dreams, no novelty, certainly no research. Where the lemon-flavoured nest had once filled him with impatient longing for the bachelor comfort of his avocado sanctuary, the prospect of flight from the same now filled him with joy.
Circling the Porte St. Michel parking lot for the tenth time, he leaned against the wall, attention focused on the search for her car. He checked the time. He’d waited half an hour. Maybe she’d had an accident. Maybe her watch had stopped. His mind festered with excuses.
Taking out his cell phone, he retrieved her call and pressed redial. A male voice answered on the second ring. He hung up, waited a few moments, and tried again. When the same man answered, he felt obliged to speak.
“Sorry … I’m looking for … Chanelle.”
“Ah, oui. Chanelle.” A mocking tone. “May I tell her who is calling?”
Piers said nothing. The man let the phone drop. She picked it up immediately, her voice a rainbow of signals including affection and unease.
“Where are you?” he shouted in a hoarse whisper.
“At home, of course. Where you called.”
He stumbled. “I meant, why aren’t you here?”
“Where?”
“The parking lot. Porte St. Michel.”
“I was there yesterday,” she said tartly.
“Oh dear. Isn’t today Tuesday?”
“It is not.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to see you. I, ah … Could you come into town? For a drink?”
She hesitated. He pictured the husband looming in the background, wondered what she would say to explain his call. Recalling The Faithful Husband’s gory end, he shivered, then reminded himself: this is life – a bleak genre featuring many unfinished sentences and dial tones, relatively few murders.
He had never met Chanelle outside the trajectory of parking lot and pull-out sofa. As he made his way along rue de la République toward a rendezvous he hoped would launch a new chapter in their affair, he conjured up an image of her pillaresque legs, the thighs especially. Magnificent, impeccably taut, they seemed to run all the way to her waist; she favoured a style of panties that accentuated their length. He tried to recall her smile but the face he saw was the face from his book, a figment that had starred in his dreams for months.
The Bar Américain was almost empty. He took a window table. Surveying the wine list, he paused momentarily at the high end, wondering if the rendezvous might not be classified as research and therefore a Putterly expense, then rejected the idea as guaranteed to doom the rendezvous, and ordered an unpretentious bottle of Côtes du Rhône with two glasses. In a department store across the street, the house detective kept his eyes fixed on a young Arab who had slipped from ladies’ lingerie into kitchenware without the slightest hint he belonged in either. A former discothèque bouncer ill at ease in a suit, the detective knew he looked out of place amid the rows of pastel sweaters and beauty products, but he carried a clipboard and hoped to pass for management. When the kid ducked behind a display of candles, the detective slid over for a better look. Just then a young woman came up and asked him something about a certain brand of shampoo. She had dark wavy hair and carried a backpack. She was cute and stood awfully close and in the few seconds it took him to respond, the kid got away. In the end, she didn’t buy the shampoo.
Mouloud caught up with Magali outside the store. She was standing on the corner, staring straight ahead, as though she didn’t know him. He whipped a foolish teddy bear out from under his jacket and offered it to her, a prize to prove he could play her game. She rolled her eyes and walked away.
“See, we make a great team,” he said.
“You’ll get caught,” she warned as they dodged traffic to cross the street. “Your father will send you back to Morocco. You’ll be banished forever.”
“No way! Nobody tells me what to do.”
“Ha! We’ll see about that. You’ll get caught. You’ll get caught. You’ll be gone,” she sang, snatching the teddy bear away and throwing it up in the air. He was sure that if she kept on with this spectacle he’d soon feel the hand of a cop on his shoulder. Outside the Bar Américain she tossed the bear so high it landed on the sidewalk. Mouloud scooped it up and stuffed it into his bag. As she leaned against the window of the café, scowling, he wondered what he could do or say to make her listen.
Then she turned and waved to someone inside. A man waved back.
“See, I do know people. I’m not alone in the big city,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “I don’t need protection.” Her joking tone was unusual, the embrace too. He was sure she did it for the man inside.
“Who is he?”
“Piers Le Gris, a writer. He lives at Auntie’s.”
Mouloud peered through the window. For a moment he had both faces in view: his own reflection and the dim outline of an adversary. He recognized the man inside as the same one he’d met on the stairs the first time he’d visited Magali’s room in Avignon. He remembered the glowering look. Like the house on rue des Griffons, it gave him the creeps. How could she bear to go back there every night? Someone had died in that house, he was sure. The walls reeked of death. The so-called writer was dripping in it. Even the aunt was weird. He’d seen her on the street one day and followed her home. She dressed like a blind princess or a spirit from another century.
Magali was smiling into the window, watching herself reflected in the glass. She knows what’s on his mind, Mouloud thought. French girls have a special pose for panting men. She’s teasing. As if she’d read his mind and decided to torture him, she said, “Do you want to go in? Look, Piers is inviting us.”
“No,” Mouloud said, turning away. “You go if you like.”
“Never mind.” Wrapping her arm around his, she steered them away. That made twice she’d touched him in one day. He wanted to believe the embrace was real, that it was meant for him and not just a taunt for another man. But he knew better: she was using him to get Le Gris’ attention.
Turning around, he saw Piers standing on the sidewalk, watching them walk away. No pride at all, he thought. Tongue hanging out in broad daylight. So, why not take advantage? He slipped his arm around Magali’s waist. Of course she didn’t protest. With French girls it’s all a game, he reminded himself. She would have to learn another way of love. He tightened his grip and vowed to teach her.
Nothing went as Piers had imagined. The m
oment Chanelle sat down, he knew everything had changed. There would be no more Tuesday afternoons at Les Angles, no more delicious time free from conversation and consequence. Conversation was what Chanelle had come into town to get. She began by describing her husband’s heart attack, a dramatic brush with mortality that had acquainted him with hospitals and inspired a re-evaluation of priorities. He’d emerged with a permanent scar and a renewed interest in life.
Piers was tempted to laugh. Instead he emptied his glass while Chanelle rambled on. They’d had a calm talk about their marriage and decided that as long as no one was harmed, there was no need to resort to the tired dictates of melodrama. (Piers translated: no need to resort to telling the entire truth which will lead inevitably to shouts and tears.) Nevertheless, she said she had more or less decided against affairs (the plural caught his attention) at least for the time being. He wondered if he was expected to protest. Since it seemed unlikely anything he said could save Tuesdays, he nodded gravely and muttered, “Of course, I understand.”
“What about you?” she said, folding her arms.
“How are you? More to the point, who are you?” His laugh came out as a hiccup. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes brimmed with mischief. The question was a test.
He pinched his cheek. “If you cut me, I bleed.” Ignoring evasion, she pressed on. “I know you’re a writer but that’s about all I know.”
“Then you know everything worth knowing about Piers Le Gris. Besides, I thought you wanted it that way. You’ve told me almost nothing about yourself.”
“Untrue. You’ve been in my home. This is me,” she beamed, stretching out her arms.
“Chanelle?” he said, defensively. “I don’t even know your real name.”
“What are you saying?”
“Isn’t Chanelle your Tuesday name?” She reached into her handbag and, taking out a wallet, opened it to a photo ID showing a shiny face above the name Chanelle Lambert.
Piers' Desire Page 5