Molly, I hate watching movies without you. I miss you. I miss your presence. I miss the smell of chewing gum you chomp on furiously wherever you can’t smoke. Depending on the day, it scents your breath with mint, strawberry, or cinnamon. Like your magic pen, which becomes a flashlight when you unscrew it and, when you’re bored, allows you to check how long the film we’re watching is and at what hour the next one we want to see will start. I love your way of concentrating incredibly hard when you like the film, becoming so motionless that you forget to breathe, and when you finally inhale you do it so deeply that it sounds like snoring.
I miss your professional opinions. The way you look at films has always differed from mine. You’re more sentimental, quicker to be moved. Melodramatic pathos, which makes me bristle and immediately alienates me from the story being told, doesn’t bother you. Just the opposite — you go for it. Which doesn’t prevent you, as soon as the film is over, from appraising it negatively if it’s not a film you’re planning to buy. That capacity of yours to separate yourself from your own emotions, abandon your identity as a spectator, and put on a buyer’s hat, has often irritated me.
How can you not take into consideration your own opinion to such a degree?
It’s something we’ve ended up discussing a number of times. That’s what I miss the most. Arguing with you. Getting annoyed with you. Finding arguments to oppose yours. Comparing your culture with mine, your sensibility, my sentimentalism and vice versa. Realizing that tastes are formed as a result of our memories, childhoods, wounds, delights; and understanding that there’s nothing objective about liking a film. A film speaks to us or it doesn’t. It moves us or gets on our nerves. It softens our heart or makes our hair stand on end. That’s our job. Choosing one story from all the ones they tell us.
You said that if you ever decide to start your own company, you’ll call it Once Upon a Time. You’re right: it’s a magic saying, the open sesame that makes me get up in the morning.
But tell me, Molly, how can you want me to be interested in the slightest story alone in my chair, while you’re lying in a hospital bed in that ultraconventional decor you see in all those American series where the doctors always end up curing their patients? They’re handsome, overworked, omnipotent, fragile. They have our lives in their hands. What about the one who’s been looking after you all these months? Which episode is he in? Does he know the story? Is he truly dedicated to it? Does he find you fascinating or hopeless? Does he know — he, at least — if it has a happy ending?
THIS MORNING I WAS TIDYING UP THE CHILDREN’S ROOM, and the big ceramic Pinocchio that watches over Benoît’s bed made me think of you. Pinocchio also ended up by accident in the belly of a whale. It closed its mouth around him, and he was imprisoned in its guts. He must have been cold, hungry, and afraid to be plunged into the dark like that. I forget how he got out of there. And what about you? Which belly, inside which giant fish have you gotten lost? However, you’re an experienced swimmer. You love underwater diving, and the sea is your element, unlike me whose drowning phobia prevents me from going anywhere that my feet can’t touch the ground. Why can’t you remember your reflexes? Why don’t you make that lifesaving kick that will bring you back to the surface?
But then, you’re not a wooden puppet who has to pay for her lies. Isn’t this bad joke going to be over soon? What is this bottomless pit of sorrow, sadness, unanswered questions? Hundreds and thousands of questions to avoid asking myself the only one that counts, the same one that in the morning has awoken me with a start for the last three months, after keeping me from sleeping the night before; the same one that, after an hour turning and twisting in my bed on one side and then the other, then on my back, stomach, and then without a pillow, sends me into the bathroom to take a quarter of a tablet in order to dodge that nagging, ridiculous, selfish, inevitable question: Why you and not me? By virtue of what order, what secret arrangement, what great book? What nonsense. Life goes on, life stops. The light turns red or green. The heart beats, then stops beating. At night mine beats too hard. Over where you are, yours is tracing jagged, irregular lines on a machine.
The nights when I don’t resort to pills, I look out the window. The neighbors’ lights. The shutters, which are open or closed. The lives you can make out. In the building opposite this one, who is going to get sick? Who’ll get better? How to stop thinking about it? How to keep from going crazy? Molly, you love playing cards, and you’ve drawn the Old Maid. Life’s accident. The one each of us fears having. The one that makes voices lower during conversations. Couldn’t talking about it bring down bad luck on our heads? So we fall silent, ashamed of admitting that we’re relieved to have been spared by someone else’s bad luck.
Even your singlehood is playing against your side. To how many of us are you really essential? Aside from your father, your mother, your sisters? No child, fiancé, none of those relationships that people around me are saying it’s a relief you don’t have in your life. But what if the opposite were true? What if those were the only forms of love that would allow you to find the strength to fight deep inside? And what if friendship, no matter how sincere, isn’t enough? What song of what siren could give you the determination, the unremitting will to open the throat of the whale? In the seven notes of the scale, is there a magic combination, a series of sounds to discover, like those François Truffaut invented in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to establish a connection with the extraterrestrials? What melody could create a path all the way to your planet Comma?
Not your favorite songs, at any rate; your playlist was already tried, in vain. Soul, blues, light music, the classics, even the original music from your bedside movies. The tape that plays our recorded messages is still sliding off your ears. Like the words of love murmured by your family. On the walls of your room, where I saw photos, there are now film posters, postcards showing your favorite beaches, pictures of your friends, Post-its in every language and color. It’s no longer a hospital room but a mortuary room, minus the flowers. We wouldn’t have put your funeral service together any differently: favorite songs and poems, the voices of those closest to you. And what if, instead of bringing you back to life, we’ve been building your tomb?
IT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT. You were alone with your machines. In any case, no human being would have been able to put a finger on that incredible moment that was invisible to the naked eye and that the doctors, like good seismologists, spotted immediately, interpreted, and transmitted to your family.
You have come out of your deep coma and passed into another stage, which indicates that in all likelihood you’re going to move through all of them, resurface by plateaus, until you reach the surface of the world, of consciousness, and finally come back to yourself, to us all.
You’re finally returning to the world of the living. The doctors say so. But instead of celebrating your return elatedly and holding our breaths impatiently, the way you swell your lungs with all your strength to blow out all the candles on the cake in one breath, our anguished wait has given way to a gnawing anxiety that everyone drags around on his own, which no one can mention, as if verbalizing it was going to make it happen, as if saying the words was going to cast an irremediable jinx on you.
In what kind of state are you returning to us? What traces of this long dive without an Aqua-Lung will you retain? Has planet Comma correctly oxygenated your head and lungs? Have you forgotten anything in the belly of the whale? Is there a price to pay for reassuming human form? Have you had to give up speech, like the little mermaid? Will your body recover all its functions? Is it enough to recharge its batteries, do a reset, as you often did with my cell phone when it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to? Are you going to recover completely? Will you, will everything, be “like before”?
MOLLY, I’M WARNING YOU, THE STORY I’M GOING TO TELL YOU IS APPALLING.
It’s banal, clichéd, in bad taste, disgraceful, shameful, stupid, vulgar, or, as Godard would say, dégueulasse.
T
his story has no interest.
But it has become mine.
A nasty business.
All it took was three words on the screen of a cell phone.
Words loaded with innuendos.
Words speaking of desire, frustration, impatience.
If they’d been on your cell phone, I would have found it delightful.
These are words that I could have said to the man I love a long time ago.
The words you say at the beginning, when you can’t live without the other person.
Vincent was dozing in the living room. His cell phone, lit up, was lying next to him.
I rushed to it to keep the beep signaling a message from waking him. Didn’t have to because he was deep asleep; I’m the one who’s always been the light sleeper.
When I read the three words, I let go of the phone, which fell softly onto the couch cushion without breaking.
It was my heart that was in pieces.
“I miss you.”
Three words, like the three strikes of a bell in a theater to announce the beginning of a show. Three words that set off an earthquake.
Molly, how can I describe to you what that did to me? Did you have the same symptoms before you lost consciousness? Your body starts to disobey you. It slips away from you. You’ve lost control of it. Your back curves under the violence of the blow to your solar plexus, and cold makes you go numb. Your jaw hurts from the force of your teeth clenched to keep any sound escaping from your asphyxiated lungs, into which the air has stopped entering. You shake your head to keep the bad thoughts from entering it, but they’ve already invaded everything.
Molly, honestly, at that exact moment, I would have willingly changed places with you, to keep from feeling that sludge sucking me up and thrusting its way into me, that rage, that disappointment, that anger, that powerlessness. I would have wanted to smash that telephone and lose consciousness. Disappear into that planet Comma where the loss of consciousness that anesthetizes the mind perhaps would have prevented me from suffering.
I, who always claimed that jealousy was foreign to me, am now discovering that it’s a rat, a worm, something indefinable but physical gnawing away at the insides of my intestines, burning the digestive tube, sending acid into my throat, paralyzing my limbs and ravaging my brain. Which has suddenly been emptied of all its data — to devote itself compulsively to the study of a single piece of it, to the dissection of one obsessive thought.
I was the confident half of a couple I thought was happy.
I was an imbecile, Molly, I know now.
I didn’t want to see, guess, feel anything.
I was curled up comfortably in my placid sense of content.
Coming to is brutal.
The rat has moved into my entrails. I can feel it making itself at home.
Molly, you’re the only one I can tell this to — this story.
It makes me feel ashamed.
At least I’ve avoided that bad made-for-TV-movie suspense where the deceived wife tries to find out who the other woman is. There was a name attached to the three words, a name I know. The enemy has a face. Sometimes I see her at conferences, dinners. One student among many, one of the multiple variations of a model renewed every school term and nearly unchanging through the years: young, impressed, admiring, wanting to be noticed and achieving it, but in vain, since noticed does not mean esteemed. Vincent has never been taken in by the students fluttering around him, not that this prevents him from purring with pleasure when one of the more ravishing, sassier, cleverer of them corners his attention for the span of a dinner. On those evenings, as I’ve already explained to you, I’d rather slip away and go home alone, try to convince myself that my leaving has perhaps ruined a bit of the simpleminded pleasure Vincent takes in feeling devoured by eyes. I can describe to you what comes next. He’ll drink a little too much, come back careful not to make any noise, but never miss banging against the foot of the bed. Then he’ll fall asleep immediately, wake up looking pasty, shamefaced and falsely contrite, and try to prove to me with anecdotes how lost but how nice that poor girl was, a little silly, but rather entertaining; and he’ll leave it at that, comforted by the certainty that I’ve already let him off the hook, forgotten the end of an evening so devoid of interest that it only provoked indifference on my part. And it’s true that I’d gotten into the habit of thinking of these young girls with amused condescension, that I pitied such creatures for imagining an affair with their French literature teacher was possible, as if whoever it was could meddle with our intimacy, bolstered as it was by twenty years of cozy complicity.
Molly, you’ve always lived alone, and you were living well. You would say that it was too late, that you couldn’t adapt any longer to someone else’s ways. However, with time, living as a couple becomes comfortable — believe me. The other person has adapted to your habits and accepted your eccentricities. After a certain number of years, worry, irritation, any form of emotion likely to start a discussion that could grow into a conflict loses urgency and intensity.
You substitute a sluggish acceptance of the other person’s thinking for your need to speak your mind no matter what or show how you’re different. When you know the other person to the point of guessing what will make him fly off the handle, you’ve reached a time when it’s less of a kick but more advisable not to argue. What good is displaying your point of view when you can guess which arguments are going to be used to counter it, when you know that when you’re finished each of you will feel that much more offended because the issue can’t be settled?
Decorating your apartment took up all your time and energy in the weeks before your coma; well, two people living together evolves the way a living room gets furnished. You move from confrontation, with each of you sitting opposite the other in a chair, your spines very straight and wedged against the chair back, to more of a slump that feels ever so much more comfortable, on a two-person sofa on which each has his favorite side, just like the bed you share to such an extent that instead of looking at each other, you’re both looking at the same wall. Renouncement means the absence of argument and leads to forgetting to discuss anything at all. You stop asking the other person his opinion; you simply want to keep track of his state of mind: “You all right?” “Yes, what about you? Everything OK?”
Each has blunted his claws. However, life hasn’t lost its harshness. Battles grow more numerous outside, with others. So, when you’re home, you long for a little peace and quiet to replenish your strength. You savor the harmony, the feeling of well-being. With both of you having reached the summit, it’s sweet to take a breath together, side by side, before climbing back down the mountain. You take the time to live, before watching yourself grow old.
You and I had that conversation again very recently, in London. I was explaining to you that Vincent and I were coming out of that trouble spot you encounter when the children are very little, that time was flying by fast and moving pretty much in a straight line, that Benoît and Clara were getting bigger and taking up all the room there was, and that they were also practically the only cause of our arguments.
A student. Can you imagine how ridiculous that is? What does he talk to her about? What does a barely legal teenager understand about the problems of an adult’s life? How could she change the course of an existence like Vincent’s, which is so full already?
I’m asking you that question. It helps me. It reminds me of what I’m sure of, something three words on a cell phone have chucked out the window.
I know what your answer is.
Opposites attract. That’s what it’s about.
Obviously. It’s stupid to cry. She’s young, free, available. Getting involved with her is coming closer to a world where everything is possible because it all still remains to be lived. For Vincent, it’s as if he’d discovered that he had the use of a pause button. It’s our family life that he’s bringing to a standstill. He’s gone off the beaten path. He’s experimenting. He’s discovering th
e pleasure of wasting time, frittering it away, squandering it. And in this unhoped-for time he’s discovering and taking a kind of pleasure whose taste, fragrance, memory he’d lost track of. It’s from a fleeting period when nothing weighed on you, hurried you, where every day was like an open window and your own desire was law, where you went forward and faced the rest of the world with a swagger. It’s a time that neither you nor I really savored, because we were in such a hurry to learn, understand, accumulate experience; and now Vincent is rediscovering it with delight, now that he’s an adult. He needs to fill his lungs with that ultrahackneyed elixir so distrusted by those who’ve left it forgotten behind them. And I’ve suddenly discovered, Molly, that I’m one of them. It’s so very simple. This isn’t a demon, it’s a rediscovery. For Vincent, it’s unexpected. Youth. Feeling young again. Giving yourself the illusion that life is a road still to embark upon, when in reality, you’ve already covered half the path. How could it be possible to resist such a temptation?
There were other students before. Some even more beautiful, more brilliant, more available. But it wasn’t the right moment.
Why now? Now, exactly? Our life is pleasant, our children thriving … our family harmonious … Is the fact that everything is so calm what’s boring him? I never imagined that this stability we built together could fulfill me to such a degree and weigh on him so terribly. I don’t know when we stopped having the same dreams. You see, while I was only seeing us, he began to question himself. While black screens were telling me stories, he was rethinking his.
Mon amie américaine Page 4