He nods in sympathy. ‘Did you see the fire, by the way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where were you?’
‘On my way back to Ste-Anne.’
‘From?’
‘Near Mont Tremblant.’
‘Oh yes. Another jaunt. And you arrived just in time to get a good view. And to help Gagnon to Will Henderson.’
‘Help him?’
‘Gagnon told me you were right there. He said you were the only one clever enough to think of addressing Henderson in English.’ He cackles with boyish delight. ‘It takes a separatist to recognize an Anglo, eh?’
I avoid the political dig. Contini still has his schoolboy ideas about me. ‘I thought you were implying something else.’
‘Maybe I was. You want to try some of this parfait? It’s good.’
‘No thanks.’
‘I’m ruining your appetite.’ He chuckles, all geniality again.
I say it now in the midst of his good humour. ‘I’d really like to read Madeleine’s journals.’
‘They make spicy reading. I can tell you that. You got any? I wouldn’t mind comparing them.’
I feel myself flushing as I shake my head. I take a sip of wine and force myself back into composure. ‘And what’s next on the agenda?’
‘Well, there’s the little matter of Mr. Henderson’s life. Apart from that the boys are going through Madeleine’s car. They should be at it right now.’ Contini pauses as if he wants the significance of that to sink in. ‘Maybe your prints will turn up in it. So don’t disappear on me again.’
‘Why? Am I a suspect?’ I voice the question that has hovered over our entire conversation like some hawk poised for the kill.
Contini laughs cheerfully. ‘Everyone’s a suspect, Rousseau. That’s what it means to be a good cop.’
12
_______
The Moon has risen in the darkening sky. It illuminates shafts of cloud, casts scurrying shadows on the massed snow.
I drive homewards in a grey stupor which owes far more to Contini than to my single glass of wine. Our conversation replays itself in my mind like a tape on an automatic loop. On its third journey round, I pause it at the question about Madeleine and my lack of a divorce and wonder how I could ever explain the tangle of our relations to Contini since I have never satisfactorily been able to explain them to myself.
Like a dentist prodding an un-anaesthetized tooth, I force myself into the nerve-centre of pain. I don’t want to be there. It is a part of myself I have split off, a terrain which exists only as a dull ache, never to be tongued or fingered. A cautious circling is all that can be allowed. But now I leap the perimeter and jab at the cluster of nerves, exposing them. A howl rises inside me.
When did I begin to hate Madeleine? For hate her I did in a hundred ways, small and large. I hated the way she came into bed at night when I pretended to sleep, her careful silence as loud as the thrashing of drums. I hated the greedy pleasure with which she spooned the froth from her coffee and then left the cup half full. I hated the casual manner in which she gathered up flowers and chucked them out at the first sign of a yellowing petal. I hated her with a fury which made me sense that what I hated most about her was my very attachment. She had become the stained mirror of all that I hated in myself, my stricken, masochistic dependence.
It took a long time for me to name it as hatred, perhaps as long as it had taken me to name our love. But the naming made things no better. The two emotions coexisted side by side, their passion so equally fierce as to make them indistinguishable.
Maybe it all crystallized when she coolly voiced her betrayal, evinced none of that guilt which might have given me a hold on her. Not that my jealousy needed a confession. It fed off the imaginary as easily as the real. But the voicing gave her an odd advantage. She now had honesty on her side, while I still only had the insatiable beast of my jealousy.
I battled against both hatred and jealousy. I tried to bury them deep within myself and pretend indifference. But the lid on the coffin wasn’t tight enough. It rose up and released ranked armies of dangerous emotion. I shot back opposing volleys, tried to negotiate a peace. But the war was interminable. And I was its principle victim.
The dilemma was that intellectually, reasonably, I could hold nothing against Madeleine. We had never promised each other a dusty fidelity. I had known her passionate nature from the start, intuited its workings that very first time when she had loved me and left me. She didn’t confess anything then, nor at any other time, but nor did she particularly hide anything. She was simply and grandly herself. And that self, that self for which I loved her, was unique. Uniquely alive, too, in its disparities, its shifts and surprises, its ever-changing, ebullient masquerade. It was what made her a great actress. I had no right to demand anything else.
And yet that raging, guttural, voice inside myself resented everything, demanded everything, was contorted with loathing.
Soon after Madeleine announced to me that she had never come to me with a guarantee, she went off to Hollywood. She came back with a fat contract. She was excited, exultant, living on her nerves. I had never seen her more beautiful.
She was intent on buying a house before the production started. She found one in the leafy suburb of Neuilly, a splendid turn of the century villa, with rounded dormer windowns and a filigree of vines creeping up the portico and a lavish garden complete with boxed palms. She didn’t wait for me to make up my mind and say, ‘yes’. She purchased it and had it painted out all in white, brought in a modicum of furniture and announced a party, which was to be my welcome to the house, along with everyone else’s. The everyone included Mme Tremblay who was flown over for the event.
Madeleine had a genius for generosity. The champagne flowed. The patés and smoked salmon and caviar were unstinting. The guests laughed and glowed as animated in their chatter as in their dancing. A band played, everything from Edith Piaf to Cole Porter to the latest pop and the celebrity guests took turns to perform on the small platform. Madeleine, too, sang a number. She was shimmering and teasing, her smile as luminous as her gown. All her leading men, her directors and producers queued up in front of her and paid their respects. Paid them to me, their host, as well. To be fair, all her fellow actresses did too, though I didn’t observe them with half the attention. Everyone was unanimous in saying it had been a grand party.
Later, in that voluminous bed which was as yet the only object in the beautifully proportioned room overlooking the garden, I was impotent. Madeleine’s kisses and fluttering fingers could work no magic. I pretended a cold weariness which seemed to have everything to do with my recalcitrant body and nothing to do with my mind. As I watched Madeleine, infinitely desirable in that nudity she wore like a couture dress, draw the billowing curtains, I felt utterly defeated.
The sense of defeat together with a gnawing shame persisted over the coming months. Madeleine made light of it. Pretended not to notice. Perhaps she really didn’t notice. She was too busy and too excited with her preparations for Hollywood. And with the endless stream of rugs and chairs and ‘discoveries’ which daily found their way into the house.
But I noticed and my humiliation mounted, intensified by the crippling ravages of jealousy. Even while Mme Tremblay was there, I couldn’t stop asking Madeleine where she had been and with whom. The lightness I forced my voice into carried a telling burden of inquisitorial despair. It’s strange how jealousy can outlast desire.
Just before Madeleine left, like a peevish child I moved a sofa into the room at the top of the house which had been designated as my study and locked the door. Once at midnight, Madeleine knocked. When I let out a mock growl of sleepiness, she didn’t knock again.
On the day before she was due to leave, I made an effort to pull myself together. We lay out in the balmy springtime afternoon of the garden and sipped some lemony concoction of vodka that Madeleine had taken to making. There was something in her manner and demeanour which lulled me into the s
ense that we were children again in some golden age before sex. Laughing confidantes, hidden from the world in the secrecy of our garden.
Madeleine was so consummate an actress, she could even slip into herself.
When it grew chill, we walked upstairs still immersed in our pleasurable chatter and before I knew it, we were there, on that vast acreage of the bed I had designated as hers.
‘Okay, so tell me how many there have been?’ I asked playfully. And she took it up in that spirit, replaying the heartlessly romantic scene between Belmondo and Seberg in A Bout de Souffle, counting on her fingers one by one slowly, thoughtfully, then thrusting her hands out again and again in an infinity of repetition. She played it so well that once again I was cast into a no-man’s land between fantasy and the real.
I don’t know why but anger took me over then, a lightning bolt of rage, and I slapped her, slapped her once, twice and a third time so that my fingers tingled. She stroked her cheeks with a bemused air, the tears biting at her eyes, and suddenly I was hard, blissfully, furiously hard. And in that rage, composed of I don’t know what storm of hatred and love, I fucked her, fucked her so avidly that not a single extraneous image flew into my mind.
In the morning, she disappeared without waking me. I fingered the pillow and I think I cried. At least it felt like crying.
There was a note for me at the breakfast table. Brief. Little more than an address and a ‘come and see me if you feel like it.’
I didn’t think I’d feel like it. I was trying to regain some sense of who I thought I was. On and off I met Christiane with whom everything seemed unproblematic. Conversation, bed. work.
But by the fourth week of Madeleine’s absence, I felt I would decompose if I didn’t see her. The sound of those slaps had set off too many alarm bells within me. And I couldn’t seem to get rid of them. They punctuated my dream images of her. Everytime she appeared with a different man, the slap resounded, until it amplified into infinity, like the fingers of the hand on which she had purportedly counted her lovers.
I flew to L.A. without telling Madeleine I was coming. I don’t know what accident of chance or fate determined it, but I arrived at her Malibu address just as she was leaving it, a blond hunk of a beach boy on her arm - or so my malice characterized him. Madeleine was golden too. Her arms and throat and laugh burnt through me.
They got into a sports car of a red so audacious that it jangled the senses. Like an underemployed Philip Marlow, I tailed them in my taxi, watched them emerge arm in arm to saunter into some overblown architectural concoction of a restaurant. I followed them in. The following did something strange to my nerves. I felt both humiliated and excited. I wanted to be invisbile yet I wanted to be found out.
I hovered by the bar and sipped some sugary cocktail and watched them furtively in the mirror. Madeleine, though her eyes sparkled in my direction several times didn’t see me. Afterwards, I lost them. I couldn’t find a taxi quickly enough. The next day I got a flight back to Paris, with a stop over in Montréal to revisit old haunts and to see my father who had just buried a second wife. I didn’t mourn my stepmother. In fact had it not been so utterly inappropriate, I would have congratulated him on a loss which could only be a gain.
When Madeleine returned, things got worse. She was light and breezy and full of the adventure of filming in America, full of new projects, too. Her blitheness only served to fuel my darker emotions.
Over dinner I started to interrogate her. She played along for a while, then got up and turned on me abruptly. ‘You would have made a great inquisitor, Pierre. But I have no intentions of qualifying for sainthood. I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.’
I didn’t sleep. I roamed the house, pursued by furies, each one of them wearing Madeleine’s face. I had stupidly allowed myself to go and see her first film again and its poses and encounters flitted in and out of every room, trapping me wherever I went.
When, towards the middle of the night, I heard noises in the kitchen, I rushed downstairs. Madeleine was pouring herself a glass of juice.
‘Jet-lag,’ she murmured.
‘Shall I come and lie with you?’
She gave me a searching look. ‘No, I think not.’ She took her drink into the salon, settled herself on the sofa and with an oblivious self-sufficiency, started to leaf through magazines.
I watched her. I had no intention of saying anything and even when I heard that voice rumbling within me, I had no clear realisation that I had spoken outloud. ‘Who did you fuck this time?’ the voice asked.
She glanced up at me for a second then down again at her magazine. ‘Genghis Khan,’ she said flippantly and carried on flicking pages.
‘Who else?’
‘Caesar. Oh and Napoleon.’
Suddenly, I was pulling her out of the sofa, shaking her by the shoulders.
‘Who?’
‘Mark Anthony.’
I hit her hard across the face. She stared at me for a moment, her eyes blazing and then she hit me back. The slap tingled. I could see that the risk of it had excited her. Her face shone. She launched a kick at me. I caught her foot and she tumbled back on the sofa, rolled over as I came at her. There was an animal smell in the air, a mounting sense of danger between us, more potent than an aphrodisiac.
We stalked each other, thrust and parried. Madeleine was strong, agile too. In a contest which called for more than brute strength, she would easily have been my match. But when she tripped on the corner of the rug and I heaved down on her, the contest was over. Her vulnerability was all in my power.
Our eyes met for a moment over the rasp of our breathing. There was a small ooze of blood at the corner of her brow where she had grazed herself. I licked it clean while we made love or hate, I could no longer distinguish the two.
Afterwards we both slunk away to our separate rooms. We didn’t look at each other. We weren’t capable of speech. I showered and went out. It was almost time for work, in any case. I didn’t go back home that night. I couldn’t face her. Maybe I was already afraid.
For a few days we were careful not to be alone together for more than a few minutes at a time. We saw friends. We talked platitudes or business. We slept in our separate beds. I wondered whether our violence had lifted us into a kind of purgatory where the worst was over. But then it surfaced again with its peculiarly shaming mixture of danger and excitement and pain. And again - each time a little more intense, each time with an escalating quotient of anguish and brutality, so that I realised that even during the periods of purgatorial calm, the satanic fires of my jealousy still blazed.
The turning point came with the visit of a friend of Madeleine’s from L.A.
He wasn’t the beach boy, more of a businessman. He was dark with a bronzed narrow face and a slightly receding hairline and he oozed power and wealth. We met at the Ritz, ate in the elegance of the restaurant. He addressed a few questions to me and then focussed the full force of his attention on Madeleine. Towards the middle of dinner, he told her in a voice grown husky that he had seen some of the rushes of the film. He eased his fingers beneath his bowtie and unconsciously loosened it a little, as he mouthed a silent, ‘Wow’. Madeleine smiled seraphically.
Without thinking, I pushed my chair back from the table, and with a mumbled apology about a story that was about to break, left them.
I walked back to my office. There was no story, but it was a safe place. I wondered as I walked why I had left. Was I performing some kind of ghost marriage rite - giving my wife away to other men as if I were already dead? The thought niggled and I cut short my time at the office and went home. I wasn’t dead. Not yet.
I lay on her bed in the dark and waited for her and counted the quarter hours and then the minutes. At 3.12, she appeared. She was humming a little tune beneath her breath. It stopped as soon as she switched on a lamp and saw me. But she couldn’t hide the radiance of her face.
‘Where have you been?’
‘What do you mean where have I been? I’v
e been at the Ritz.’
‘In what room at the Ritz?’
Madeleine didn’t answer. She undressed slowly, her back to me, as if I weren’t there. She threw her clothes down on the armchair, her dress and then her stockings and her garter belt and her bra. When she got to her knickers, she turned on me.
‘I saw you, you know. In L.A. Saw you watching me, tailing, spying. You have no right. No right.’
That suprised me. ‘I have every right,’ I blurted.
‘What gives you the right?’
‘I love you.
Madeleine was silent for a moment. Then with the haughty iciness of an examining magistrate, she glanced down at my limp prick and uttered a ‘Ha!’.
My hands are around her throat. I don’t remember putting them there. I don’t know how long they have been squeezing and squeezing, but Madeleine is clawing at me, scratching at my arms, my chest, my groin. Her fingers close round my penis, which is hard now and thrusts between us, stupidly looking for a home.
I push her away from me, down onto the bed. She rubs her throat. Rubs and rubs. Her eyes never leave my face. She is staring at my confusion and suddenly she kneels, puts her arms round my waist, nuzzles me, takes my cock in her mouth, softly, firmly.
She loves me. She is saying she loves me. She says it with her tongue. She says it with her lips which meet mine now. She says it with her voice, a whisper in my ear as she pulls me down on top of her. ‘I love you too, Pierre.’
We love each other. For the length of that magical night we love each other. There is no one else. There are no shadowy intruders. Only the two of us. The one of us.
At one point, I open my eyes and catch hers, half closed, glowing. She has that look of rapture on her face. It is the second time I see it. It is also the last.
We lie next to each other and watch the dawn rise. Rosy streaks of light flush the curtains. A soft breeze flutters through the window and cools the lingering heat of our bodies. Madeleine talks to the light, to the wind. Her tone muffles despair with resignation. But her words are addressed to me.
The Dead of Winter Page 25