Piers' Desire

by Marianne Ackerman

  “Oh, I should think not,” she said, hoping to escape conversation. “In any case, I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do.”

  “Maybe the police know something,” Magali insisted.

  “No. I’ve telephoned. I’m sure it’s about the novel. He needs to get away sometimes when he’s close to a deadline. Frankly, this house has been a circus lately. I don’t know how a writer can manage to work at all. You’ve had guests, haven’t you? At night?”

  “No, Auntie. Well, a friend of mine came around a few times. Mouloud — but that was ages ago. I stopped him.”

  “Yes, well, Monsieur Le Gris spoke to me about the noise.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” The girl’s contrite stammer made her realize she’d been harsh. “I don’t mind if you have friends in,” she added hastily. “It’s normal. But during the daytime, all right? At a reasonable hour.”

  Magali nodded but didn’t move, as if she had more to say.

  She didn’t much care whether Piers Le Gris came home at dawn or never. What she wanted more than anything was to talk to Nelly about the diary, get answers to the deluge of questions it inspired. Do you have any pictures of Roland? What was he really like in those days? And why did you run off and leave him to—

  When she looked from a certain angle, sometimes caught a gesture or a way of thinking, Nelly had recognized uncanny resemblances between this sometimes gawky, often quite beautiful girl and her own younger self, especially in moments like this when she stood tongue-tied, incapable of saying what she was thinking or feeling, yet unable to hide it either. Magali should have been contrite; she’d just been spoken to for having a stranger in her room. Instead, her curious half-smile was ripe with questions.

  So you’ve read the story, Nelly wanted to say, but years of reticence closed off the possibility of a direct approach. She’d left the notebook in plain view, peeking out from under a scarf on her dressing-table chair, a hairpin hidden in the folds. Sure enough, the hairpin was on the floor when she returned, the scarf folded carefully. I needn’t have bothered, she thought. Magali’s outburst at the restaurant made her clandestine reading quite evident. Now they were both caught, sharing awkward corners of a secret. For the moment, she enjoyed knowing she had Magali’s full attention. No pressing need to give up the power.

  As she started down the stairs, Magali interrupted. “Auntie, wait. I was thinking, Piers has a cell phone. Maybe we should call him.” Telephone him?

  “Do you have the number?”

  “No,” she said weakly, wondering why she would take the phone number of someone who lived under her own roof.

  “He might have written it down. We could check in his desk,” Magali said brightly, and headed for his room as though she had every right to be there.

  Whereas the first venture had felt like a transgression, this one seemed like a practical necessity. While Magali chattered on about possible explanations for his absence, Nelly took charge of the search. She slid the passport under a pile of envelopes, leafed through his address book and, turning to the Ls, found Le Gris, Piers, 9 rue des Griffons and a number. How odd, a man who lists himself in his phonebook! She was tempted to look up the name on the passport for a possible clue to his other life, but Magali was watching. She scribbled the number on a scrap of paper and headed for the hall phone.

  Two rings, the sound of his voice, a deep authoritative bonjour unleashed a flood of relief, until she realized it was only a recorded message. Tucking the number away, she resolved to keep calling, if only to hear his voice.

  An empty evening stretched ahead. There was nothing to be gained by worry, she knew, yet could not resist thinking steps should be taken. But what steps? Hoping for distraction, she turned to the pile of books, Hervé Brunet’s request, which led her straight back to Piers Le Gris and the reception, how strangely he had responded to the Petit Palais’ collection of Madonnas. When she’d tried to interest Magali in paying a visit, he exploded and said they were all terrible, vindictive women. Probably modelled on the artists’ unhappy wives, he thundered. She’d had to change the subject, or risk ruining dessert. Now the outburst made sense. He’d been thinking of his past. She preferred the old image of a solitary writer with no other life. Taking a leatherbound volume off the shelf, she thought, what a shame they’re only in English. Opening at random, she came upon pages of short phrases liberally sprinkled with quotation marks. Who were these people? What were they talking about, she wondered? Was there a voice among them as deep and impressive as his? But it was no use, the words lacked meaning. She collapsed into the reading chair, forced her self to take a book from the top of the pile. On the cover was a shadowy silhouette of a young woman under the title, Vénus Erotica by Anaïs Nin. She tried to read, but the words resisted. The next was Justine, a weighty tome by the Marquis de Sade, tiny print, hundreds of pages. The hours it must have taken him to fill those pages — exhausting! She could hardly hold Sade’s tome on her lap. She wondered what it must have been like to spend so long immersed in a story. Did all authors experience the exhilaration she’d felt while scribbling the story of Roland? Writing had brought him back, unearthed so many moments she’d forgotten. An intoxicating experience, reliving those days and nights, remembering the risks they’d taken. There were moments she hadn’t dared write about. The sharpest memories were pure sensation: waiting for his train to arrive, keeping an unopened letter hidden until she could read it alone. She had been deeply in love with Roland. There would never be anyone as important to her. For years she’d been sure his loss was a kind of inoculation against dread. The sudden disappearance of Piers Le Gris proved otherwise.

  Sometime in the early hours of morning, Piers let himself in. The light was still on in the sitting room, Nelly asleep in her reading chair. He left a newspaper on the hall table as a sign of his return, and tiptoed upstairs. His room smelled of invasion. Someone had replaced the cap on his pen, moved his passport. Kicking off his boots, he set them down quietly, collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.

  Nelly was making tea when he came downstairs. She took a minute to compose herself before heading for the dining room with the breakfast tray. He had a nasty bruise on the side of his face, which she pretended not to notice, at least until Magali arrived.

  “What happened to your eye?” she blurted out. “Where have you been? We were worried silly! Why didn’t you call?”

  He stammered unconvincingly about a research trip to Marseille, the setting of his novel-in-progress. Nelly put the teapot down and listened intently. He said he’d tripped on a chink in the pavement, hence the wound. No mention of why he limped or wore a thick brace around his ribs, visible under his sweater.

  “What happened to you and Mouloud?” Magali was about to fire more questions when Nelly shot her a silencing look. Piers slipped further into the newspaper, obviously relieved.

  When she and Nelly were alone in the kitchen,

  Magali asked pointedly whether he’d said anything about the wounds. She assumed Nelly knew more than she was saying.

  “Monsieur Le Gris is in the final throes of his novel,” she declared, meaning, soft-soled slippers, whispers in the hallway and no more questions.

  Passing by his door that night, Nelly stopped to listen. All was silent. No fingers pounding on the keyboard. His espresso machine was dormant, lights out well before midnight.

  SIXTEEN

  WHEN ANAÏS NIN’S DIARIES first appeared in the late sixties, her doe-eyed profile was in all the magazines. Nelly read the tales of a free-spirited Bohemian life in Paris and New York with relish and resolved to keep a journal herself. But she got no further than a few scribbles on a blank page, judged ridiculous the next day. After the unreadable Marquis de Sade and Lawrence, the hysterical Englishman with his fascination for peasants, finding Nin’s Vénus Erotica among the eminent professor’s bequest to St. Anne’s was a pleasant surprise. A
somewhat obscure work, albeit a signed first edition, it was a collection of short stories commissioned by a wealthy patron who paid one American dollar per page, a considerable sum at the time.

  Opening the book at random, she fell upon the story of Linda, who was past thirty and concerned with her age, yet no less loved for being old. In fact she was more loved than ever, especially by young men eager to learn the secrets of lovemaking, men who (according to the author) felt no attraction to girls their own age, judging them “backward, innocent, inexperienced, and still possessed by their families.” Linda, happily married to a handsome rake, had love and leisure time to spare.

  One day, when her husband was away, she received an invitation to a masked party hosted by a sociable painter. She embraced transformation wholeheartedly, choosing a heavy satin gown that outlined her body like a glove. No underwear, no jewellery by which she might be recognized, her pale blonde hair tinted blue-black and styled as a spectacular pompadour. The image in the mirror was startling. That evening was the beginning of many athletic adventures, leading to page after page of titillating incident curiously mixed with bits of advice. According to her hairdresser, who kept his little moustache pointed and glazed, every woman should, at one time or another, perform the services of a whore. “It is the best way to retain a sense of being female.”

  A spurious idea, she thought. Surely Nin was writing to please the patron, who no doubt employed whores and liked to think they enjoyed their work. The only whores she knew of were two who’d come up from Marseille after the Germans occupied most of the Vaucluse in 1944. Tough-looking gals with wiry red hair and a disparaging attitude to life, they worked from a café frequented by soldiers. She’d walked past one day when they were sitting on the terrace, and tried not to look. One of them jeered at her to come and sit down. “Take a fag and talk to us. You might learn something, silly virgin.”

  She’d hurried away, embarrassed, but the words stung. Part of her had wanted to turn back and hear what they had to say. Virginity was a burden, but then everything was a burden in those days, it was the age of making do, a daily scramble. Food, privacy, petrol, even sex was in short supply, at least for some. Roland had insisted they wait. He said it was awful for a man, almost impossible. He taught her what to do so there would be no risk. Not a hint of awkwardness in his embrace, only urgent desire and a strange wave of sadness when she brought him to release. He was always grateful and tender. She wondered if he’d even noticed the thrill she felt while touching him. She wondered if he visited the whores.

  When the Allies came, any woman who’d had anything to do with German soldiers suffered humiliation or worse. The two she’d seen had had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets naked. No, she thought, all women do not want to be whores. The destiny of a whore or whorish type of woman is to grow old without a shred of dignity. After youth is gone, dignity is a woman’s most precious possession.

  And yet, a phrase in the story lingered: the sense of being female. She’d seen enough of prison life to know how thoroughly being deprived of sex robbed men of their maleness, reduced them to weak imitations of themselves. But women are different. It isn’t sex that saves them, it’s the gaze of desire. The look in a man’s eyes when he sees a woman he wants. For a woman, the worst of being old is the awful invisibility. Along the way, you disappear.

  One by one, Magali discarded the spoils of defiance. Chalky lipstick, unreadable books and jewellery she couldn’t bring herself to wear, thrown out; perfume flushed down the toilet; pens with thick nibs, left in the library. Nothing stolen held its value. The thrill was gone. She lost interest in the secret ways a person can redress a private wrong. Reading Nelly’s diary had brought on a new compulsion, more exciting and potentially more dangerous than the first. In a family so thoroughly civil that no one revealed anything of importance, the diary told the truth about wrong turns taken, decisions and regrets. It confirmed a pattern: her parent’s bad marriage, the accident of her conception. Mistakes were piling up. This was a family with no history of love. Even Mouloud, who claimed he loved her, flung the word around carelessly, sprinkling it in his poems, peppering his threats and pleas with love. But did he know what it meant? Maybe love was a precious, chance encounter that happens rarely, and not to everybody.

  Thinking through people she knew, how they lived, she decided there was only one true love story in the family, and it had ended tragically. Nelly’s story. Marc said she was a born spinster whose brief marriage had come and gone with hardly a trace. What else did he know? Obviously, nothing of Roland, or he would have told her. Only two people knew the truth, and they were very hard to question.

  The logic was thrilling. If Léonce had come home to marry Nelly, she mused, the dark-haired beauty in the flowered dress would be our grandmother. Or, there would be no us. At least we would have other names and bodies. She spent hours imagining Murielle and Roland and the life they might have lived. They would have gone to Paris after the war, she was sure. Everything would be different.

  Léonce found a parking spot outside the university gate and settled back to wait for Magali. A rare cloudy day, it suited his mood. Hoping for a weather report, he turned on the radio and found a panel of professors discussing the meaning of time, yet another pointless analysis of the end of the millennium, less than six weeks away. He let them drone on for a few moments before switching it off.

  The Twentieth Century: whenever he heard the phrase, he pictured the words chiselled into a tombstone. What was a century, anyway? An arbitrary span of time outside the memory of a single individual, yet bound to inspire abstraction, an abundance of pointless generalizations. For those who had experienced it, History rang false: everything he’d read and heard about events he knew first-hand was wrong. Over the years, he’d watched the Resistance waft in and out of fashion. At the time, it had been a desperate dream binding a few strangers together. Most of the people he knew had been all too willing to kiss Nazi ass, though most of them complained, of course.

  As soon as the Allies moved in, the rush was on for membership in the Resistance. Suddenly, a mythical nation of silent, stealthy heroes rose up out of nowhere, as if everyone had been involved. Then along came the rebels of ’68, who cut the hoard of heroes down to a ragtag bundle of ineffectual bandits. Eventually, the intellectuals settled somewhere in the middle, and nostalgia took over. At least once a month, another shaky-voiced combatant turns up on the radio to recount the glory years of clandestine activity, backed up by the sonorous strains of Charles Trenet or Fernandel. If he didn’t turn the radio off immediately, the tune would ring in his head for days. Nobody knew anything, he concluded. And those who did were too tired to talk.

  Looking through his pile of CDs, he pulled out his current favourite, Lynda Lemay, and slipped it into the player. She’s better than Piaf, he thought. He loved the way she hurled tragic lyrics into the air with innocent gusto. The contradiction thrilled him. The music of his youth bored him. Is there something wrong with me, he sometimes wondered? For years he’d been too busy to follow trends. But lately a string of young singers, most of them women, were coming out with clever, tuneful torch songs. A little wicked and never sentimental, they knew how to lift him out of a blue mood. He was grateful and hardly ever longed for another kind of company.

  Finally Magali appeared, and they drove off. Listening to Lemay in her presence embarrassed him. He was glad when she suggested changing the CD, even if her choice was an excruciating foreign band he would classify as noise. As they headed out of the city, he made an effort to hide his annoyance.

  A feeble late-November sun burned the night frost from the air. Wisps of cloud circled Mont Ventoux. Some of the vineyards had already been pruned back, revealing stark rows of gnarled trunks, like exotic dancers caught in a difficult pose. The woods were green and gold, a welcoming sign of winter in abeyance. As Magali chattered on about her classes, end of term assignments and new fri
ends she’d made, he waited for the right moment to mention a touchy subject. He wanted to get it over with before they reached their destination.

  “Magali, you know I don’t like to pry, but Mouloud Mourabed …”

  What was there to say? He’s a dangerous character? Ahmed’s mood as they’d driven back to Les Hirondelles after a fruitless search had been grim. Whatever he knew, he wasn’t telling. He wanted to caution Magali, but had no idea how to do so without sounding like a meddlesome old fool. He was loath to disturb the easy camaraderie between them.

  “I guess I should ask you: what’s happening to him? He isn’t studying in Toulouse. His father’s concerned, naturally.”

  “I know,” she said, sinking back into the seat. She reached up and turned off the music, for which he was grateful.

  “Are you and Mouloud …?” But he was already in too deep.

  She finished the sentence. “Do you mean, in love?”

  Not quite. But to keep things simple, he said, “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what the word means,” she sighed. “I don’t think he does either, though he uses it all the time. ‘If you loved me, then …’ Stuff like that. I can’t stand it, he’s so … Ah!”

  As they drove in silence, Léonce squeezed his thoughts for a sensible remark. “I just hope you’ll be careful,” he waffled. “People in love can do strange things.”

  She shot him a sideways glance and smiled. As warnings go, he was sure his rated low on the scale of usefulness. Be careful of what? Of a crazed Arab who squandered his time playing guitar and smoking dope? Ahmed’s leniency angered him. Understandably, he was still reeling from his wife’s death. But why waste a life’s savings on trying to educate a layabout? If the Mourabeds had unrealistic ideas about the boy’s future, they had Brigitte to blame. She’d filled Fatiha’s mind with illusions. Send a kid like that to university? A spell in the Foreign Legion was what he needed, Léonce fumed. He blamed himself for not keeping Magali away from the boy, though in truth, he’d never made the slightest effort to dictate her behaviour. He would not have known how to begin.