Julie.
It was when he met her that life had really gone off the rails. For good. One night.
He’d felt stifled, all alone in that huge, empty house. So he had set off for Rennes, to see a movie. There was a new Clint Eastwood picture playing. As he drove, he was really looking forward to it. But once he’d parked his car, on Quai Lamennais, not far from the movie theater, he hesitated. Suddenly afraid of running into Sophie and Alain. Or Éric and Annie. Or all four of them. Or someone else he knew. Afraid of letting them see him as he was, a man alone. Lonely and adrift.
So he had climbed the few steps leading to Rue Montfort and gone into the Chatham, a bar that stayed open until late. They served really good whisky there. It was packed, as usual. He squeezed his way to the end of the bar counter and made some space for himself. Just enough so that the barman noticed him. He ordered an Oban, without ice. Julie was sitting on a stool next to him, an empty glass in front of her. She looked as if she was waiting for someone who was clearly not going to show up.
She glanced at him. Dark eyes, like Léa’s. Rico could only say that now, having come to Marseilles because of his memories of Léa. But he hadn’t thought of her at the time. He had forgotten Léa. Or rather, he’d buried her so deep inside his head that he thought he had forgotten her. He’d once wondered aloud, “You know, maybe when you get down to it, I was always unfaithful to Sophie. That’s why it all went wrong in the end . . .” As usual, I hadn’t known what to answer.
Rico felt an immediate desire for this woman.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
The music was deafening. You had to raise your voice to make yourself heard.
“No,” she shouted. “How about you?”
He laughed. “No one’s waiting for me.”
“I see,” she said, with a smile.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure.” She leaned toward him and said in his ear, “Drinking’s my favourite game. I hold the record.”
Her voice was already thick with alcohol, but Rico didn’t notice. He was too busy looking Julie over from head to foot. A cute little thing, he thought. And for the first time since Sophie had left, he imagined himself in bed with a woman, this woman. Deep in her eyes, there was something he had recognized. An attraction. He hadn’t realized that it was nothing but an immense weariness with life. His sudden desire to sleep with her made him blind to the woman’s despair. And his own.
Everyone in the bar started singing at the tops of their voices:
The sun, I want the sun . . .
A song by Au Petit Bonheur, a group who were big at the time. Rico bought another round. The sun, yes, dammit! The sun!
They drank until the Chatham closed, at two in the morning. Julie wouldn’t let Rico drive her home. He walked her to the taxi stand on Place de la République. Julie had slipped her arm into his and laid her head on his shoulder. They were both a little unsteady on their feet, both silent and unsmiling.
Driving back to Saint-Malo, Rico told himself they’d drunk so much, they wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyway. The next time, he’d be careful. He really wanted her. He really wanted to love again. To rebuild his life. Why not? On the road—a straight, monotonous four-lane highway—he imagined days and weeks with Julie. Why not? he kept asking himself. Why not? He could still feel Julie’s lips on his. A fleeting kiss that smelled of Oban.
Julie. They met again, two or three times a week, and the sequence of events was always the same. The place too. The Chatham, where they would drink until closing time. Almost without talking. Sometimes, they would move on to other bars, between Place des Lices and Place Sainte-Anne. Julie would respond to Rico’s increasingly direct advances with “Not tonight” or “Some other time,” all the while snuggling up against him.
After a month, Rico still knew nothing about her, or about her life. But he didn’t give a damn. The way he told it to me, he was under her spell. Bewitched, and at the same time trapped, by his desire for her. A destructive spiral which in the end, although he wouldn’t admit it, suited him.
One evening when they hadn’t arranged to meet, Julie called him. From the Chatham. Rico could hear music playing. She was shouting into the receiver. She wanted to see him. To be with him. He had to get up early the following morning. He was going to Brest. It was fall, the time of year when he had the new collections to present. It wasn’t a good idea tonight, he told her, they could meet in two days.
“Please.”
A moan, which she was forced to scream into the phone.
“Julie . . .”
But she had hung up, abruptly. Shit! Rico had said to himself.
An hour later, the doorbell rang. It was Julie.
“Can you pay for the taxi?” she said as she came in. “It’s six hundred fifty francs. He’ll take a check.”
She laughed. She was slightly drunk, and fantastically beautiful.
By the time he closed the door behind him, Julie lay sprawled on the couch. It was startling to Rico to see her there. In this house filled with dreams of another woman.
“Do you have a drink for me?” she asked, still laughing.
He poured her a drink, and one for himself.
She drank, then said, “Come.”
As she snuggled up against him, her blouse opened and he saw the gentle curves of her bare breasts. Rico slid his hand inside, and his finger brushed against one of the nipples. It was hard and erect. With his other hand, he stroked her hair. She grabbed his cock through his pants, and squeezed it hard.
“Take it out,” she breathed.
He pulled her down onto the floor, and managed to undress her. Her skin was dark and silky. He felt her quiver when he ran his fingers over her flat stomach, taut between her pelvis bones.
“Isn’t there a bed in this house?” she asked, amused, as he slid a cushion under her back.
She turned to face him, and he felt her breath against his neck. Gasping and intense. When she drew him into her, Rico felt as if his cock was on fire. He came very quickly. Too quickly.
“Oh, no!” she cried. “You bastard! You bastard!” Then she pulled him down onto her chest. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter,” she murmured.
He closed his eyes and thought of all the times he’d had Sophie like that. It brought tears to his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” Julie repeated.
She was smiling. She made him roll over on his side. She looked straight at him with her dark eyes. They were empty of all desire, of all passion, as if covered with a dull film.
“If we get a move on, we can finish the evening at the Chatham, can’t we?”
It was as he was driving back, alone, that Rico lost control of his car. Too many confused thoughts in his head and too much alcohol in his blood. He hit the barrier in the middle of the highway, bounced off it, and careered back across the road diagonally. A car coming from behind slammed into his rear, sending his own car into a spin.
On the radio, Alain Souchon was singing:
. . . I know it’s all gone
But I still can’t forget
And I sing till I’m breathless
Of all that regret
Then the radio stopped, and there was silence. And in the silence, his life came to an end without his even having had to turn the page. With that song echoing in his head:
All that regret, all that regret . . .
He and the other driver were both unharmed.
“You were lucky,” the cops said to him, after the Breathalyzer test.
His licence was withdrawn for a year. He had lost his work tool.
He didn’t see Julie again. He went to the Chatham several evenings running, looking for her. The barman there told him she often vanished like that. Sometimes for months. He didn’t know anything about her. Except that it was always the same man who showed up to settle her debts.
12.
SOMETIMES, EVEN LOVE
DOESN’T SOLVE ANYTHING
Julie’s real first name was Violaine. Rico didn’t find that out until a few months later. But he could never get used to calling her Violaine. Even in his head. She was and would always be Julie. It was in Brest that he met her again, by chance. He’d been there for two days, visiting customers. As usual, he was staying at a small, unpretentious hotel called the Astoria, on Rue Traverse, not far from Cours Dajot where he liked to go for a pleasant stroll at the end of the day.
He saw her when he entered the hotel dining room. Julie. She was having breakfast, alone. She looked as if she was miles away, mechanically dipping a croissant in her cup of coffee. Rico watched her for a moment, then walked to her table. She raised her eyes, and the look in them was the same as when they had first met. Eyes to capsize the world, as Rico put it. All the things that had been making him feel heavy-hearted since the night of the accident vanished immediately. Just because of the way she looked at him.
“May I sit down?” he asked.
Julie nodded. She hadn’t looked surprised to see him. Nor had she looked either pleased or displeased. And she was clearly not about to apologize for her silence. The only thing he could say for certain was that she wasn’t indifferent to his presence.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her, feigning coolness.
“I came with my husband,” she said unhesitatingly, in a flat voice. “He’s a naval officer. On the Foch. He’s just gone to sea again.”
She looked at him over her cup, waiting for a question. Rico didn’t ask any. He was overcome with emotion. And desire for her. What she had revealed of her life in those few moments was unimportant. The one thing that stood out was that her husband had just left, that she was alone again. He wanted to say, “It’s great to see you.” But she went on, in the same flat voice, “They’re sailing down to the Mediterranean. I have to join him in Toulouse at the end of the week.”
She put down her cup, then looked at her watch.
“I mustn’t be late. My train leaves in an hour.”
“That’s the train I’m taking.” He smiled, and lit a cigarette. “I’m going back to Rennes too.”
“By train?”
During the two-hour journey, which they spent in the buffet car drinking whisky, Rico told her about the accident. How they’d taken away his driving license and now he had to travel by train from town to town to see his customers, and take taxis when he was in town. It took him three times as long as before to move around, he told her. It was a tricky business timing his journeys so that he didn’t miss his connections.
“Brest to Caen,” he said with a laugh. “You can’t imagine what a nightmare that is!”
Julie was listening to him with obvious indifference, staring out at the landscape speeding by. As if her mind was on another life. Other misfortunes.
“I went to the Chatham a few times, hoping you’d be there.”
Still she said nothing, and Rico started to get a little irritated.
“One of the barmen told me he knew you well. That there were times when you came in a lot, then you vanished, and your husband—your husband, is that right?—would come in and settle your slate . . .” He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her close. Instead he said aggressively, “And that you weren’t shy with the men who bought you drinks.”
At last, she turned to face him. “What of it?”
Rico would have liked it if she’d defended herself, denied it, tried to explain . . . Anything, as long as she talked about herself. Just about herself. So he asked her the question he was dying to ask. “Do you love him?”
“No,” she replied, coldly, looking him straight in the eyes.
“So why do you stay with him?”
“Because that’s my life. Do you mind?”
Rico didn’t insist, and they sat staring down at their glasses in silence until they reached Rennes.
“What are you doing now?” Julie asked him when they got off the train.
There was a local train for Saint-Malo in five minutes.
“I don’t really want to be alone,” she said, her dark eyes fixed on him. She seemed exhausted.
“My train leaves from the other platform,” Rico replied. “Come on.”
He took her by the arm and drew her toward his train, which was already waiting at the platform. She made no attempt to resist. The alcohol they’d drunk during the journey had again created a bridge between their two solitudes.
In the living room, Julie looked at the couch with an amused smile, then at the floor on which they had made love a few months earlier.
“So,” she said, “is there a bed in this house?”
Rico laughed. “Yes, in my bedroom.”
“What are you waiting for? Show me the way.”
Her body seemed more fragile this time, her skin even softer. She trembled when he entered her. As if it was the first time she’d had a man inside her.
Her eyes, when she opened them, were not sparkling with happiness. They were like an ocean of sadness. But Rico was sure Julie had reached orgasm. They had made love slowly, until he had felt her nails plowing his back. But—and Rico did not realize this until later—they had used each other for their own pleasure, rather than taking pleasure in each other. The bodies of two strangers, enjoying a fleeting happiness.
“My husband killed the man I loved.”
They had been lying there, smoking in silence. Julie was staring at some unspecified point on the ceiling. She had said these words in that flat, monotonous voice she had whenever she talked about herself and her life.
“Killed him?” Rico said in surprise.
“My husband scared him so much, with his gun and his threats, that he vanished, just like that. Didn’t even say goodbye to me. Didn’t say a word . . .”
“Was this before we met?”
She nodded. “A long time before. I was ready to give up everything for him . . . I’d been staying at my parents’ place in Lamballe for two days. My husband drove all the way there. To take me home, he told my father.”
She turned to the bedside table and grabbed the bottle of whisky that Rico had brought into the bedroom.
Rico ran his eyes down Julie’s body. From her narrow shoulders to her small round buttocks.
She filled the two glasses and handed one to Rico.
“He slapped me in front of them, and they didn’t say anything . . . They like my husband a lot. Having an officer in the family . . . that means something. The prestige of the uniform and all that . . .”
“Why did you marry him?”
“My mother doesn’t understand what I have in my head. That’s what she told me that evening, in the kitchen. She also said I ought to think about having children, like my sisters . . . who also don’t understand me, by the way.”
She finished her glass.
“It isn’t love that matters. It’s the appearance of love. That’s how life works. All that ever matters is the appearance. Love . . .”
Rico didn’t repeat his question. Now that Julie was talking, now that she was opening up to him the way he’d wanted her to do when they first met, he didn’t know what to say. Or what to do. Or especially what to think.
He’d started wondering if what she was telling him was true. Or at least, how much of it was true. The more she revealed, the less he seemed to understand her. So he’d stopped really listening to her.
There was a moment when he imagined Sophie in bed with Alain, telling him about the terrible life she’d had with her husband, the way Julie was doing right now. Probably exaggerating how bad it had been in order to arouse his pity and win him over. No man, Rico thought, could resist hearing about a woman’s disastrous love life. It was a thought that made him feel thoroughly sick.
“After dinner, when we were back in the bedroom,” Julie went on, “he threw himself on me and pushed me back onto the bed. He raped me. You know what I’m saying? He raped me. He was saying all these horrible things, and I was yelling and screaming. He could have been kill
ing me . . . But my father and mother didn’t do a thing. I was his wife and . . . it was his right, he . . . That’s what my parents must have been thinking too. My mother . . .”
Rico desired her again. In fact that was the only thing he was thinking about right now. The sight of her small buttocks a few moments earlier.
“Come,” Rico said, drawing her to him.
“I can’t,” she murmured.
There was no emotion in her voice. She seemed to be looking at him from another world. A world where all passion was dead. And the last hope Rico had of making love to her again vanished.
“I have to go home. Will you call me a taxi?”
The following evening, they met at the Chatham and drank to excess. When the bar closed, she wouldn’t let him come to her house, so they went in search of a hotel. They ended up in a room at the Atlantic on Place des Lices.
When Rico woke up, Julie was gone. He knew he would never see her again. Late in the night, he had said, partly as a boast, but mainly because he wanted her, “You know, your husband wouldn’t scare me. If you wanted . . .”
“But I don’t love you,” she had replied wearily. “I don’t love you.”
Rico’s blood had frozen. Julie had destroyed the last vestiges of life and hope remaining to him after Sophie had left. She had carried them away with her in her fall. Julie, as he realized later, had taken him to the edge of the abyss into which she had long since plunged. He had let himself be led. And his own fall came when he was summoned to Paris to account for his disastrous results for the first quarter of the year. The man who appeared at that meeting was a lost man. They didn’t give him a chance.
Maeva’s crying made Rico jump. He had settled again on the couch, after another swig of neat pastis. Now he got up. By the time Monique came into the kitchen, Rico had made more coffee.
She lit a cigarette and found a bowl.
A Sun for the Dying Page 9