Okay, I’ll stop, I’ll spare your ears. My attempt to confess failed dismally, he didn’t get the message, “just a fake ID” and all that…the only bit he latched on to was the end: “I wanted to say I love you / Love you because it feels real.” And he replied, “I do too, Claire, I love you,” while adding a gentle dig: “Catherine Ribeiro…did your parents listen to her when you were little?” I’d forgotten she was Portuguese by birth, like my avatar! You see, I wanted to reveal the real me but subconsciously I was still Claire Antunes.
Well anyway, it couldn’t go on any longer, I was getting bogged down in my fabrications and suffering in real life. He kept pressing me and I’d run out of reasons to refuse to see him, to have a coffee. I had to break it off, there was no other way out. It broke my heart, but one day when I was feeling strong I messaged him to say it was over, and he never replied. I called him and he didn’t pick up, I left a long voicemail message. I told him I was getting married to Gilles, that he’d found a job in Portugal and we were leaving at the end of the month, it was all decided: I had to leave the dream behind. I went on to say how much I’d loved him, how much I still loved him, although I knew that this virtual love could never replace love itself. I asked him to stop trying to contact me, besides, I was going to close down my Facebook account and change my cell phone number so that I couldn’t give in to my own longings or to his. I told him I was sure he would soon find true love (sadly, I really did believe that). I ended it with the words “kissing you tenderly,” and as I said it I wondered whether he would hear the words “tender lie.” I feel doubly guilty, do you see, it’s overwhelming. I lured him with a fake persona and then let him founder in my lies.
Yes. He let a couple of days go by, probably thinking that a bit of time would wear me down (and he was right: I was feverishly hoping to hear back from him). Then he sent me one last voicemail, a message that was so like him: calm but passionate, humble but self-assured. He said he was sure we were made for each other, that our destinies were bound by love. But also that he respected my decision, it made him very unhappy but he accepted it. He said he’d walk out of my life if that was what I wanted. He’d stop writing me and stop calling me. Peace and love, those were his last words.
It took a superhuman effort not to call him back. I fantasized a scene in which I admitted everything to him and he still loved me, but I didn’t believe it, I didn’t feel up to it and my self-esteem couldn’t take the fatal blow. I studied myself in the mirror and thought: “Impossible.” I couldn’t rival Katia’s beauty. And could he have accepted so many lies? So I held firm in my silence, helped out by a trip I made at that exact time—a conference about Flaubert in Brazil: I went without my laptop or my second cell phone. Those ten days were appalling. It was like a terrible, painful molting process: turning back into Claire Millecam, university lecturer, divorcee, single parent, mother of two. Leaving behind Claire Antunes, the happiness of loving and the joy of being loved, sloughing all that off like an old skin—the beautiful Claire, an old skin, a horrible dilemma!
When I arrived home I couldn’t take any more. I threw myself at my phone. No voicemails. I turned on my computer: no messages. I wanted to visit Chris’s page. It had disappeared. Completely disappeared. I couldn’t find his name anywhere, and every trace of his existence, his likes and posts, had been wiped from my wall. Only his private messages were left in my in-box. He’d been stronger than me, more radical, I thought. And it hurt that he’d had this strength, and that this strength was more powerful than his love. At the same time I was not exactly relieved, no, it was too heavy a weight to bear for that, but I felt I’d handed something on, I’d been freed of the duty to give him up. I no longer had to fight because there was no enemy now, or just a powerless enemy—myself. Still, I couldn’t give up straightaway: I called again but the call didn’t go through, my number was blocked, I couldn’t even leave a message. I also tried to get hold of Joe to have some news, indirectly. But Joe was playing dead. I thought he’d gone back to Goa or somewhere else, maybe farther, maybe with Chris. I waited several weeks before canceling my cell contract, but did it eventually. Then I burned the last bridge by taking down the Claire Antunes Facebook profile. And I went back to my old life as if closing the last page of a novel. Battered, crushed. Old.
No.
Or maybe a little. He was no longer prey to my tricks. My imposture crumbled in the face of the power I attributed to him, a power I’ve always attributed to all men, often with good reason: the power to bounce back, forget, move on. Whereas a woman wages a constant battle to avoid being a victim, to stay strong, or at least dignified. I won’t ask whether you’ve read Dangerous Liaisons, I’m sure you haven’t. The Marquise de Merteuil says in a letter to Valmont: “For you, for men, the defeats are merely absences of success. In this very unequal match, our fortune is not losing and your misfortune is not winning.” There’s always another possible woman for a man. Always one he can go back to, at least one. This certainty is engraved in their very structure, that the beloved woman isn’t the only woman. That’s what I thought, does that make sense? As I saw it, he’d ended up emerging victorious from the fight that I’d always dominated.
No. I saw a psychiatrist to get some sleeping pills, that’s all. Come hell or high water, I carried on living, you know. I hadn’t lost, that was quite something in itself. My children thought I was sadder than before, that’s all. The joy had gone along with Chris, and that was it. I swamped myself with work, comparing the conjunction mais in Ronsard’s love poems with “but” in Shakespeare’s.
No. I found out a month later, maybe more, maybe less, I’ve lost track of time. One day, when I was bored, I was looking at my Facebook page—my one, the real one, Claire Millecam’s page, where nothing ever happened—and I saw I had a message. It was from Joe. Very friendly. He asked for my news, said he still thought about me. Fancy a coffee? I accepted.
He hadn’t changed. Still just as…But I didn’t give a damn. I couldn’t wait more than five minutes before asking with fake nonchalance whether he was still living in Lacanau with his friend, what was his name again, Christian, Christophe?
“Chris?” he asked brightly. “Well, he’s no longer with us, would you believe. Right now he’s six feet under, the idiot.”
I thought I was going to pass out, all the blood drained from my heart, I heard my own voice coming out muffled as if through cotton wool, saying, “But what happened? Chris is dead? What—”
“Yeah! Fucking stupid, his Citroën went into a tree at ninety miles an hour, not a pretty sight!”
“But—how did it happen—his accident?” I held back my tears as best I could while Joe kept talking in the same jaunty voice.
“Pfff, it wasn’t an accident. He drove into that tree on purpose. Committed suicide, the poor guy.” “Suicide?” “He’d been really low for a while, he even cried sometimes. A real wreck. And according to the cops there were no braking marks on the road. All that for some broad who strung him along for months. And not just strung him along, strung him up, strung him out, and hung him out to dry. There are some real bitches out there.”
“What? Who?” I was shaking, I couldn’t breathe.
“Wha’who, wha’who,” Joe mimicked me. “Yeah, some chick he met on Meetic or Facebook, I don’t remember, her name was Claire, like you—see? I was right to be wary! And he fell head over heels in love with her, and she just kept dangling the carrot on the end of a stick, and when she dumped him he completely lost it, he didn’t know what to do with himself, he trailed around like a tortured soul and in the end he offed himself. For a stupid bitch he’d never even met. Lost the will to live. Love makes people so fucking stupid, and he wasn’t that clever in the first place…that’s why, in case you hadn’t noticed, I steer clear of love myself.”
No.
Maybe.
No. Leave me.
2
HEARING OF DR. MARC B.
I know exactly why I’m here before you, my de
ar coworkers. I have no intention of shirking my responsibilities, I acknowledge and accept whatever sanctions you decide to impose on me. But it is essential, before you judge me, that you fully understand the tenets and outcomes of the affair that brings us here today. Of course you’ve all read Claire Millecam’s file, some of you met her long before I did, and my position as a “newcomer” in the establishment as well as my general lack of experience are probably not unrelated to the mistakes I make. Nevertheless, there’s a text I’d like to read to you, a text several pages long, one I’m sure none of you has seen, and one that sheds a different light—at least I believe it does—on the decision that I took in all good faith, independently of the consequences. It is an extract of the novel that Claire wrote here, in the writing workshop, over the course of several weeks—to be more accurate, it consists of large extracts copied from the second part of this novel, in which she imagines what her life with Chris could have been like if, without admitting to her initial imposture, she’d had the courage to try embarking on a love affair with him, a love affair she felt was possible and that she dreamed of having. When I read it, I remembered Lacan’s words: “Relationships start in the imagination.” She entrusted it to me after our first conversations, so I’m not betraying her—not entirely—by reading it to you, and this reading strikes me as vital if you are to get inside Claire’s head and if you are to try, by understanding her, to understand me too.
Claire Millecam
FALSE CONFIDENCES
a novel
The story I want to tell is of a love affair that is always possible even when it appears impossible to those far removed from the writing of it—since writing is not concerned with the possibility or otherwise of the affair.
—Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair
At this stage I couldn’t get Chris out of my head, I thought about him all the time. It was unbearable to think nothing would ever happen between us; breaking it off would be like turning my back on life. After all, I was crazy about this man, he loved me, he’d said he did, so why give up? Our destinies were bound together, he kept saying so, he was sure of it. Why not put that to the test? It was like being in a film: it would have been unthinkable to take out the pivotal scenes. He’d messaged me saying he’d soon be returning from Lacanau, living with Joe was getting difficult. (I privately sympathized. How could it not be difficult?)
“Really?” I wrote, “What happened?” In fact, Joe was refusing to let Chris work on the Goa reportage, he’d even destroyed some of the videos and photos taken there; and his family was coming for the summer vacation. Chris had already bought his ticket, he was coming back on a Monday, in three weeks’ time, he hoped to meet me at last. The time had come to try my luck. And so I decided to meet him for real, as me, Claire Millecam: we’d soon see what happened to love. To do this, I had to eliminate Claire Antunes, or at least make her disappear from Chris’s sight lines if not from his memory. I thought about the best way to free up the space taken by this virtual rival for whom I experienced surges of inexpressible, visceral jealousy, a feeling of powerlessness in the face of her youth and beauty. There’s no worse rival than one who doesn’t exist. Confronted with her, I felt as the sister of a dead child must feel about her parents: quite sure that in their hearts she will never triumph over this ideal. My niece Katia, who was languishing in a psychiatric hospital after her suicide attempt, was the focus of only part of my aggression. Granted, Chris was in love with an image of her; but that was my fault. And I knew she was so messed up by her last failed relationship that I couldn’t project my unforgivable resentment on her.
The best way to get rid of Claire Antunes was still…for her to get rid of herself. So I decided to have her go abroad, and as I’d astutely given her a Portuguese name, she could go set up home…in Lisbon. It wasn’t really an impulsive move, she explained to Chris in a firm but affectionate message; it was just that her parents lived there and they’d found her an interesting job, better paid than the slavery of her temporary contract, and as things weren’t going very well with Gilles, she was leaving to take stock of things—“I might be back in a few months,” she said, then added a final “And even if we never meet, I’ll always love you.” I wasn’t making her close the door for good, sensing that I might well want or need to open it again someday.
Chris replied, saying he was very sad, really unhappy, but he’d wait for me. He could come see me in Lisbon too, after all he had no commitments in Paris, nothing to keep him there; he didn’t know Portugal, the light there must be glorious, paradise for a photographer. He’d even worked out a perfect route to take in his old Citroën, using minor roads, his imagination fired by the names of villages along the way—Zambugo, Picoto, so pretty! He hoped I’d invite him to join me—which I didn’t, for obvious reasons. This move abroad was also convenient because it meant that, because of the cost, I had to stop our phone conversations. I wanted him to forget my voice so that I could talk to him a few weeks later without running the risk of being unmasked in my other identity. But I wasn’t too worried. First of all, you don’t hear a voice in the same way on the phone as you do in person. And anyway, to make a connection like that, you’d have to imagine it was possible.
I started engineering our first meeting. It had to be natural, as if chance was taking responsibility for shaping destiny. Accosting him on Facebook or meeting through some intermediary was out of the question. I wanted to play this differently, to be unique. Luckily he’d told me what time he’d be arriving at Montparnasse Station on Monday the twelfth. I would wait for him at the end of the platform—I was sure I’d recognize him even in a crowd, he’d sent me several pictures of himself, and he was tall, with that distinctive hair color, rare on a man, chestnut verging on red, auburn hair. He should be alone. I guessed that to reach Sevran, he’d take the Métro, then the high-speed RER, and it would be there, sitting opposite him in the carriage, that I would talk to him, we would meet. I had three weeks before me in which to prepare, I wanted to be beautiful, with not one gray hair, not one pound overweight, sexy but also reassuring, I wanted to be likable, I wanted to be loved.
So it’s now Monday. The Métro isn’t crowded, I sit down opposite him. I’m forty-eight but I don’t look it, he looks up, sees me. I smile at him, he shifts his legs, smiles at me too, sadly—he must still be thinking about his beautiful “one who got away.” I wait for one station, time enough to regain some semblance of calm. He’s handsome, with a sort of nobility to his face, his eyes an unusual gray-green color, but there’s something tired, almost bitter about him that ages him, and there are quite a few gray hairs in among the russet. I feel pleasantly satisfied about this, first because this means the age difference is almost imperceptible, I’m sure of that; but also because I now have a mission: I’m going to make this man happy. I’m frightened, though, I daren’t make a move. But I’m scared he’s about to get off so I pretend to look at him searchingly and I say, “Excuse me. I feel like I know you. You’re not a friend of Joe’s, are you? You’re a photographer, right?”
He has all his equipment in an open bag on his knee so I look pretty dumb. But he raises his eyebrows in surprise.
“You mean Joël S?” he asks. “Yes, why? Do you know him?”
“I’m Claire Millecam, his former—well, a former friend.”
“Oh yes!” he says guardedly. Joe must have talked about me in strictly sexual terms, and he’s embarrassed, hindered by the recollection. Or perhaps it’s that my name is a painful reminder of his lost love—I’m suddenly annoyed with myself for giving my own name to my rival, how stupid, what poor judgment! But perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps it’s thanks to my name that I too can work my way into his imagination.
“We no longer see each other, Joe and I, we fell out,” I explain, then add casually, “But don’t you live with him?”
“Not anymore. We fell out very recently, but we did it properly, real angry,” he smiles conspiratorially. “Joe falls out with eve
ryone. We could set up a club.”
He’s silent for a while, looks at me very kindly—the visual equivalent of his first messages—courteous, humorous, and with restrained curiosity. I’m afraid that this very restraint will make him stop right there, so I pick up quickly.
“He sent me some selfies of the two of you, that’s how I recognized you, and one time he sent me some of your pictures. I really liked them, actually—landscapes, places you’d seen on your travels. Do you do portraits too?”
“Yes, yes,” he laughs. “And not just baobabs and giant pandas. People too.”
I say bashfully that I’m just finishing a monograph on Marguerite Duras and my editor will need a portrait for the press.
“He usually sends the photographer he works with. But I could ask him to change…If you’d be interested?”
“Of course I’d be interested. To be honest, I’m looking for work, I’m down to my last cent. That would be real cool.” He looks at me more closely, more appreciatively. “And it would be a pleasure too. When would you like to do it?”
I blush, not because of the compliment but the subtext of “do it,” it sends a shiver through me as if he’s put his hand on my knee. I also feel the hot rush of jealousy at the easy way he strikes up an acquaintance, being so frank with another person, so confidently straightforward. I think of all those women on Facebook, all the women in the Métro, on the train, all the women in every street.
“Um, I don’t know. Do you live in Paris?”
“No, I’m staying in Sevran, with my parents—temporarily, I hope. But I can come over whenever you like in my old Citroën, then we can take some shots in the country, it’ll make a change. Unless you’d rather have the perennial author pose sitting at the Café Flore, chin in hand.”
Who You Think I Am Page 7