Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  So I went up to the apartment, I’d have to be seriously unlucky not to find a few Camels lying around there. I found an old packet in the key tray by the door. I sat down for a couple of minutes to think. What was I going to say to Claire? Tell her to get lost by text? That wasn’t very classy. But then her melodramatic comeback wasn’t exactly stylish either. What did she think? That I’d turned to stone, become a statue to eternal love when we had never even met?! Dream on, sweetheart! I didn’t know what to say. “Sorry, Claire, I’m living with someone. Her name’s Claire too.” Or just “So sorry, I’m not in Paris.” Or simply, “Welcome to France. Good luck, Claire. Bye.” Or nothing. Nada. No reply. Fuggedaboutit. While I sat there slumped on the sofa thinking about it, gazing at Ever’s little tartan slippers left under the table, as per usual, I thought back over our weird relationship, Claire’s and mine. She must be a bit crazy to issue that sort of ultimatum when she doesn’t know me. But I liked that, I had to admit. The impulsiveness, the follow-your-instincts approach, overcoming her own scruples, burning her bridges, basically. It was crazy, unreasonable—very like a woman, no?! A far cry from my steady humdrum life, which was sometimes so boring. I couldn’t end up like this, in the silence of cozy domesticity. I had to talk to her, explain things to her. She didn’t want me to call, she wanted me to be there: but I didn’t have to obey her, I could play this whichever way I liked. Okay, so there was a slight risk I’d be bewitched all over again by her voice, because I remembered the hold it had over me in its day. In its day…it was so long ago already. Ever had filled the void, right away, and her love had won mine over—at least, I had a good life with her. And yet I couldn’t make up my mind to go back to her at the restaurant. I needed to talk to Claire first.

  I looked at my phone for another minute, staring blankly like an idiot—I was concentrating on what I was going to tell her, or the message I would leave her if, as I thought (or hoped?), she didn’t pick up—and I eventually dialed her number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, after the fourth ring I hung up, my heart pounding, and I didn’t leave a message after the robotic voice. It wasn’t fear that stopped me but the incomprehensible fact that I could hear those rings not only on my phone but also, in exactly the same way and at the same time, in the apartment. I was so stunned by the coincidence that I immediately called Claire back again. Undeniable proof: it was ringing. There was a phone ringing in Ever’s bedroom.

  By following the sound, I very soon came across a cheap little device I’d never seen in Ever’s hands, she only used her iPhone. I flipped it open with a feeling that something catastrophic was happening: this simple action would blow up in my face, I was sure of it, I’d just unearthed the explosive truth.

  The texts I’d exchanged with Claire Antunes, the photos I’d sent her…they were all there. I scrolled frantically on the tiny keyboard but my torpedoed brain couldn’t come up with a realistic explanation. Had Ever pirated my phone and copied my texts? This woman I trusted so completely. But no, no, because the number on this phone, this fucking phone was Claire Antunes’s number. And in the contacts list I was now opening there was only one person: me. Only one number: mine. I pressed the button to listen to voicemail and just stood there, hanging in the emptiness of the bedroom like an unmatched sock on a washing line: my own voice, my voice as a pathetic dick (all mealy-mouthed, honeyed, miserable) whispered inane garbage in my ear, plans, regrets, promises. I sounded so stupid, no, I was.

  I stood there poleaxed for a good five minutes, my head spinning, before vaguely getting the hoax. It was so twisted that I couldn’t make the connection with Ever, who was so straight, so honorable. As well as feeling disbelief, mingled with an aftertaste of humiliation, there was a degree of admiration. Women, all of them, suddenly seemed to me to be a superior species, completely unknowable, spectacular, in a way. And in another way, totally out to lunch. Why the need for this whole circus?

  Jealousy. Women’s morbid jealousy.

  That didn’t explain everything, far from it, but it brought an end to any painful questions as to the part that (without even realizing it) I’d been playing for all this time in this obscure scenario. Jealousy is love. Love is an explanation that offers some relief. After the initial disbelief, another question needed answering: What was supposed to happen next in this ambush? I wasn’t meant to discover the tangle of lies, what was I supposed to do? Go back and sit down at the table as if nothing had happened and drink a glass of rosé with her? (Her victory.) Or go meet Claire Antunes at Bastille and…and what? Ever had probably planned to turn up herself and gloat at my amazement and shame, before ranting about my unfaithfulness, even if it was virtual, or bludgeoning me with insults. I was torn between fury and laughter, but mostly I had to accept one thing…and Ever’s smile, beaming at me from the photo of us hanging over her desk, was no consolation for the fact that was now so blindingly obvious: Claire Antunes didn’t exist. That angel was just a fake, my dream in avatar form; I’d been in love with thin air. The physical, organic sensation of being manipulated made me want to see this through to the end. At least I could keep the tangle going a bit longer and make her really suffer. What a monster she was, toying with her own fear after toying with me. I was lost, I didn’t know whether I admired her or despised her, whether her craziness thrilled me or disgusted me.

  I jumped to my feet, grabbed a travel bag, and stuffed some clothes and all my photo equipment into it, leaving my bedroom conspicuously empty. A real departure or a setup? I didn’t know myself. It was nearly nine o’clock. Before I left, I erased all trace of my two calls from her cell phone.

  She was drinking a glass of rosé on the terrace at Chez Tony, sitting half turned away so that I had only a fleeting view of her profile, which looked sad: the carafe was almost empty. I continued on my way, making sure she didn’t see me, and almost ran to the Café Français. I still loved her, but who?

  So now I’m sitting at the Café Français, drinking a pastis, looking out over the square, the cars, the buses. I should take a picture to immortalize the moment—the mortal moment. What if Ever doesn’t show up? What am I doing here with my bag packed if Ever doesn’t show, if the breakup has already happened? Will I sleep at my parents’ place in Sevran tonight, and drink coffee with Mom tomorrow morning and she’ll ask me why I always mess everything up? No, no, and no again, I want her to come, I want to make her pay for this perverse game. She loves me, I’m going to act incredibly cold before taking her in my arms—maybe. It’ll depend on her smile, I’m not her slave either. Memories come back to me, the past scrolling by as if I’ve had an accident. How did she hatch such a twisted plot? Inventing a life, inventing Gilles, inventing Portugal, inventing the impossible? Why did she need…

  That’s when I saw her. It was like an apparition. I turned around, looking for the waiter, to ask for another one, and there she was. All in black, her brown hair pulled back, a sad expression, but it’s her, I recognize her. My heart races, I don’t understand anything, but what a lot of anything! She’s a way off but we make eye contact. She looks at me, then looks away, with no change of expression, her eyes simply moving on to something else. This is all so confusing, I’m not designed for so much emotion, for so many enigmas. My chest is like a jigsaw puzzle threatening to explode.

  So I stood up, walked over to her table, and put my bag down on it. Claire? I asked almost sharply. She looked up, her mouth half open, her skin lustrous, her eyes look surprised, hovering on the brink of a smile, she does something adorable with one eyebrow, raising it slightly. My name’s Katia, she says.

  And that’s it. The end of the notebook. Strange, isn’t it? A document, but so much more. So how to explain? When I finished reading this, it seemed obvious to me that this woman’s life, well, this patient’s life, was dominated by guilt. Guilt so all-consuming that even when she imagined how the story could have been written differently and afforded her some happiness in real life, she came up with a sad ending, inflicting punishment on he
rself, leaving her alone with her remorse. Her pathology incontrovertibly derives from pronounced hysteria as presented in the definition we all know: a desire for dissatisfaction. It had to fail, that’s how this story could be summarized. I won’t insult you by reminding you how important masochism is to numerous subjects, particularly women—my own thesis was about “Destructiveness and the Death Wish in Women’s Neuroses.” In Claire’s case, in Madame Millecam’s case, well, in her novel, we could even go so far as to say there is a desperate quest for a “catastrophic moment,” a willful search for proof of her inability to be loved, I would readily call this a “disaster craving.” It is probably coupled with an unconscious desire to atone for something, to self-flagellate. Her niece’s suicide (which she refutes in her novel because it’s so unbearable for her) is clearly a factor in this—she punishes herself for failing to protect Katia despite the promise she made her brother—but her guilt is most likely rooted further back in the past: a repressed childhood incident, maternal postnatal depression, wishing someone in her family were dead, what do I know?

  Nevertheless—and this is where you certainly can direct the blame at me—instead of helping her delve through her childhood to find out what it was that kept her in this depressive, guilty frame of mind for three years, switching from aggression to passivity and in a state of near aboulia, instead of doing that, I decided to try to find something in real life to extricate her from her isolation—her internment: to get her out of here. She reminded me of Roger, a patient I met when I was training at the Clinique des Ormeaux in Blois. He’d been running the beekeeping workshops for twenty years, it was all he did, tending the hives, harvesting the honey, planning to rear new queens…As my mentor, Dr. Aury, pointed out at the time, he’d turned into a bee. Well, it was rather like that for Claire: she’d turned into waiting. She waited, it took up all her time: waiting. What was she waiting for? Nothing, that’s just the point. Was she waiting for a dead man, for him to come back, waiting for love, for it to come along, waiting for forgiveness? To be allowed it? Perhaps. But it’s more likely she was waiting for nothing. It wasn’t negative, that’s not a negative statement, even if it is less objectively productive than tending bees. Waiting had become her whole persona, the waiting had dissolved the object of the wait. She had turned to stone in that state, one two three eternal sunshine, Penelope without the suitors, Penelope without a returning Ulysses, but who still doggedly unpicks whatever sort of life she may be living.

  When I started the inquiry about which you’ve been given information, my sole objective was to find her an escape route, to remove the burden of her crushing guilt, to set her in motion again, so that she could at least get out of this terrifying freeze-frame. Besides, I intuitively felt, and what happened next proved I was right on this point, I felt events hadn’t actually happened as she said. I knew that she first arrived here distraught and rambling after a serious decompensation, then returned after each discharge prey to renewed bouts of delirium—I’d read the reports. At first I thought she might be lying, fictionalizing from the start, inventing everything she said—to hide something else, or maintain control. Because she tries to control everything, using lies or laughter. My predecessor made a note of her fondness for fiction and amusing stories—stories in general. She likes telling stories. In fact he pointed out the difference, in what she related, between irony, which can hurt or destroy, and humor, which is a vital restorative force. Our patient is very good at using both, attacking or relaxing her listener, but it’s always a way of protecting herself. Jokes keep reality at arm’s length, irony tackles tragedy but also keeps it at bay, she uses her wit to survive. Or otherwise she invents, fabricates. Her idea of freedom is to be brilliant, and fables are her way of escaping unadulterated madness. A sort of organized delirium, you see. But it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true. What matters is her saying it. Or believing it.

  Anyway, one way or another, whether she was doing it deliberately or not, I thought there was something strange about this story: Chris, the Internet womanizer, the hustler who was used to plenty of action, committing suicide for a girl he’s only seen in photos…I know that sort of thing happens, that you can die because something doesn’t happen, that psychotic decompensation is always a possibility, that there are little boys lost inside grown men, that grandmas are really still little girls, but to go that far? It just didn’t feel right to me. Something didn’t fit. I didn’t believe it. Yes, he’d gone off-radar. There was no trace of him on the Internet, particularly as Claire had never known his family name, only his first name, Christophe, and his Facebook name, KissChris—it’s extraordinary when you come to think of it, a relationship between two pseudonyms: like something in a novel, in fact, fictional creations.

  So I decided to track down Joe, the only apparent witness to the whole story, in order to shed some light on what happened. I wanted to know, I have to admit, there was an element of pure curiosity—about human resourcefulness, human logic, human beings. What Claire had told me about Joe painted a classic picture of narcissistic perversion, and I was right about that. I managed, with what was an apparently casual question and without disclosing any of my plans to Claire, to get Joe’s family name from her. He wasn’t in the phone directory. I knew he had a house in Lacanau, I’m sure I could have found him that way, but I did something easier: I looked for him on Facebook. And there he was. I contacted him via private messaging, saying I was Claire’s doctor and I’d like to meet him. He agreed.

  I’ll spare you the details, you’ve read the transcripts I made of our conversations. There are instantly recognizable signs of the complete emotional indifference of a narcissist, but also a degree of naive pride in his successful manipulations. He admitted almost immediately that Chris wasn’t dead, that he’d invented the whole thing as revenge for Claire’s “betrayal.” What betrayal? I asked.

  “Trying to pick up my buddy when we were together. One evening I recognized her voice in a message she’d left for Chris, those mannered intonations, the fucking idiot wanted me to listen to it too so I could savor the smooth sound of her voice. Claire Antunes? My ass! Fucked up, yes! Bitch! I didn’t say anything to Chris, how was that going to make me look? I’m not some guy who gets cheated on, no way; but revenge is a dish best eaten cold. What a whore! And what’s she up to now? Are you doing her, is that what’s going on? She wants them younger and younger! So she didn’t die of a broken heart, then? Ah, ah! I’d’ve been surprised! I could see she took it hard when I fed her that red herring. But she didn’t wait long before finding herself some consolation, from what I can see. I tried to track her down a year ago—I’m the sentimental type! No, I’m kidding, I thought I’d do her again, she’s still pretty good for her age, isn’t she?—but she’d gone out of circulation: she wasn’t on Facebook, there was no answer on her number, she’d stopped teaching at the university, she’d moved…I even went and stood outside her ex’s house one time (the guy remarried, by the way, a real bombshell, a brunette with these tits, I can’t tell you). I saw her kids, that pair of brats. But no sign of her. Well, I gave up. So how is she, how is the bimbo? You’re her doctor? So she’s sick? She doesn’t have AIDS, does she?”

  I didn’t reply, in my personal capacity I had to restrain myself from punching him, I have to say. I asked him about Chris. Joe said evasively that he was no longer in touch with him. That after “Claire Antunes” defected, going off to get married in Portugal, Chris was a bit depressed, so Joe recommended he change his Facebook profile, shake himself up a bit, which he did. Christophe—KissChris—just turned into Toph. Joe discreetly blocked Claire’s number on Chris’s phone, just in case. “Undesirable,” that’s what she’d become, “and the bitch deserved it,” he told me. Then the two of them went to Mexico on a reportage Joe had managed to find, and Chris met a girl out there. Joe and he fell out over money, Joe came home alone and it was then that he saw Claire again and announced the invented suicide.

  Joe asked me wher
e Claire was living now, and obviously I didn’t tell him that thanks to him, she’s been wasting away in a psychiatric clinic for three years. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  I went home completely dazed, but I had what I wanted. Just to be sure, I looked for Toph on Facebook. Not being a “friend,” I didn’t have access to much, but there was a picture of a man of about forty with auburn hair, a photographer born in Sevran, living in Mexico City, with a signature that ended in a little flower. A father of one.

  That was when I made my second mistake, I know. I showed a lack of judgment, or of professional lucidity. I thought that truthfulness would have a beneficial effect on this patient. That by drawing her out of the imaginary world that was destroying her, by showing her she’d been manipulated, that she was the victim—she hadn’t killed anyone, she was the one who’d been killed—I’d be helping her, rescuing her, even. I wanted to save her.

  I don’t know. Maybe. You couldn’t call it countertransference because she didn’t transfer much onto me, I don’t think. But I probably failed to take advice, to refer to one of you. I entered into an interpersonal relationship with her.

  Love? I don’t know. Either way, I wanted her to start loving again. Me or someone else. Someone else…or me.

  The opposite happened. I thought I was bringing her fresh hope: no one had died for her. And I brought her despair: no one had died for her. I realized too late that this death was what was keeping her alive. This tragic passion justified her existence: she’d been loved to distraction, to destruction. Deep down, she was living here, at La Forche, only so she could continue to live with this love. A psychiatric clinic is the perfect place for her, the place to be: the mad are the same species as those who are in love, we even say “madly in love.” There was no one here to disturb her morbid enjoyment. Her tragedy was glorious. She spoke to me so readily in our interviews for the sheer pleasure of staying in the story. And I destroyed everything. I thought the truth would bring her back to life. But not everyone is ready for the truth. People couldn’t give a damn about it, the truth, I mean. What matters is what they believe. They write over the truth. They make it disappear with all their fabrications and narratives. And they live off that, off the stories they tell. Their lives are a palimpsest. No point trying to see what’s underneath. Meanwhile, we psychiatrists claim to want the truth. That’s garbage. A psychiatric hospital is the very opposite: it protects from the truth.