Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  “So you’re a writer, then?” he asked once we were sitting at the terrace of a Moorish café. “What do you write?” “Yes,” I started to say, “I—” “Your scarf’s real cool,” he said to the girl at the next table, a sassy brunette who smiled at him and glanced at me hesitantly. “I mostly write novels, but also some—” “You should wear red, it would really suit you, you can trust me, I’m a photographer, I have the eye.” “Oh, you’re a photographer,” the brunette replied, interested. “I’m an actor, and you live…” She looked at me, not sure whether to include me in that “you.” “…You live around here?” “Yeah, just around the corner. And you?” “Yes, I’m rooming with a girlfriend in that building over there, at the end of the street.” “Are you a stage or film actor?” I asked, perusing her with my chameleon eyes that were not about to settle for being the color of the background wall. “Mostly stage,” she said, smiling, “but I dream of doing movies.” I moved my chair closer to hers. “And are you working at the moment? I’m a writer, I’d like to write for the theater.” Now deposed, Chris had already turned his attention to a group of young guys playing cards at another table. “Hey, Rasta,” he called to one of them, “I love your look, are you an artist? If you ever need photos, here’s my card. I’ll take a coupl’a shots, you don’t mind, do you?” He produced his camera and, not waiting for an answer, took a few pictures of the group, then he suddenly snapped several of me without warning. “Hey, stop!” I said, forcing a laugh (you know how I hate having my photo taken, Louis), “what about my photo rights?” He looked at his screen, scrolling through the images, and didn’t even look up as he said, “Chill, I’ll delete them, they’re all terrible, anyway.” After a second Kir, I made as if to get up and leave. “Wait,” he said, taking my hand, “are you hungry? We’re going to go eat, aren’t we?” And before I could answer he was leading me off down the street. We walked hand in hand till we came to a restaurant. “Do you have someone?” he asked me in the same voice he might use to ask if I had any cigarettes. I said, “No,” I said. “And you?” He let go of my hand. “Here, this place is good,” he announced. He sat down at an outside table next to a group of Canadian tourists and started handing out his business cards again. He took contact details from a girl who claimed she was an artists’ agent or wanted to be one, I wasn’t too sure in all the commotion. The young man next to me asked me what I did in life, I said I was a writer, he was very interested and asked a lot of questions. A Pakistani man selling roses offered a bouquet to Chris, who brushed him aside with a flick of his hand, the man persisted, putting the flowers in my arms. “God, this is such a pain,” Chris said, “everyone thinks we’re together, it’s crazy…” He ate quickly, savagely, satisfying his hunger but with no pleasure. When the time came to pay he went to the restroom, I settled the check. “You shouldn’t have,” he said when he came back, “by the way, do you have my dough for the photo? In cash?” I handed him the money, he counted it, standing right there in the street. The Canadian tourists watched us, perplexed, sitting there together like that they looked like a mosaic of bafflement. Chris and I went back to the bar, the pretty actor was still there, and she introduced us to her roommate, they were poring over a magazine, taking a personality test based on color preferences. I chose green and white, which meant I was a homebody and I liked money. “Well, well, well,” Chris said, his face serious, disapproving, “you’re the exact opposite of me.” He went on talking well-being and chromology with the girls. “I’m going home,” I said, standing up. “Hey, wait,” he said quickly, also getting to his feet. I thought he wanted to walk me back, but he stretched, revealing his forearms tattooed with birds, his russet-brown hair glinted amber in the lights. “You disappointed? Didn’t you find anyone? How about the Brazilian guy over there? Don’t you like him? I think he’s looking at you.” I turned to look, there was a man dressed in green and yellow, and yes, he seemed to like me, shame he needed to lose a hundred pounds. “Listen, I don’t need anyone,” I lied. “I’m tired, I’m going home.” “Okay, see ya then,” Chris said, and he sat back down next to the girls. I walked down the street, I was wearing my African dress, the one that makes people miss me when I’m gone, Joe used to say, it was a good formula, I could feel Chris watching my figure as I walked away, but perhaps it was just me needing to think he was, like a camera lens that didn’t turn away immediately. A little farther on two young black guys were sitting on a step with cans of beer, they were listening to rap, turned up too loud. “You’re ravishing,” one of them said as I passed by, and when I didn’t reply but hurried on past he yelled, “Hey, lady, that’s a compliment!” So I waved my hand without turning around and said, “Thanks for the compliment.” And that’s what I thought, I felt gratitude. I was mostly touched—must have been the old teacher in me—by his use of the word “ravishing,” I was pleased he’d used this old-fashioned word, keeping it alive in his own way, and going to that trouble for me, well, it felt as if it was for me. This feeling of gratitude kept me going to the Métro; as I went down the steps into Télégraphe Station, so deep underground, my longing for Chris was still a sharp pang, but my shame for feeling this desire was gaining the upper hand, thousands of girls were protesting inside me, a united clamor thrumming in my head: What an asshole! As I continued underground, I soon found I had only one phrase in mind, as if it was tagged on my every internal wall, although I wasn’t sure who it was intended for—him, me, Claire Antunes?—but then I knew, and I muttered it with each downward step, feeling better every time I said it to him, freeing myself of his image, his voice, his misleading messages, sinking, burying his memory in that subterranean dungeon, then in the metallic clang, then in the drunken, laughing Saturday night crowds, waving a virtual hand toward his pathetic ghost: “Go die!” I told him.

  He called me three days later, apologized for “not being exclusive the other evening.” “That’s how I am,” he added, “I like people.” He was calling for two reasons: first, he needed to deliver the picture I’d paid for (I hadn’t forgotten, had I? TO HAPPINESS!); but also, he’d had an idea—“We should do a book together.” He’d done some research, he hadn’t read any of my work, didn’t have time, but a friend had told him I was a good writer, and since he was a very good photographer, “it might be cool.”

  I was going away to the country with my mother, I said yes, maybe, we could talk about this some more another time. I went to the Auvergne region, he called me every day, his voice was there in forests, near beehives, beside streams. He didn’t hear Claire Antunes’s voice in mine, but he liked mine, liked listening to it. The idea was to do a book about rural folk: we’d drive off along the back roads of France in “the old girl”—his vintage Citroën—and stop in villages. To get a better understanding of how people live in the country—other people’s lives are important—we’d find accommodation in people’s homes, staying on farms, in barns. It would look good, too.

  “Okay,” he said, “so I’m a little scared where all this might take the two of us.” I pretended not to hear, or not to understand, he pursued the idea: “In the hay together, just picture it! Not really your style, though. Are you scared too? But do you feel like going on this trip with me? You’re bound to be the wrong person but hey…I bet you dreamed about it last night, I can tell you it made me completely…Whoa, what am I saying? Let’s just allow life to bestow its blessings on us…”

  I sent him pictures of sheep, garbage devoid of all sex appeal, selfies with the local farm laborer, he made teasing remarks about the city chick playing farm girl—I actually know the place like the back of my hand, I’ve been going there since I was four, my grandfather was born there, I can milk a goat, I’ve watched cows calve and pigs die, and seen depression kill the winter on the end of a length of rope, I know the rural world far better than he does. But he wasn’t listening. He was doing everything he could to charm me on the phone, compliments, double-entendres, plans, promises.

  The less I responded to his performa
nce, the more he wound me up; his voice had these shifting modulations, it was very erotic—much more than it had been with Claire Antunes. But sometimes I got caught up in his game, I played along, and he immediately came back with a sort of condescension—we were just friends, if that, on Facebook, going away together, of course not, he’d never said that, what was I thinking? It was as if he couldn’t decide which role to play in the conventional carve-up of stereotypes: the man’s or the woman’s: he displayed either all the characteristics of a bold hunter or all those of the elusive prey that had to be won over with a mighty struggle if you could first break down its impressive indifference. I didn’t like this coming and going from one role to the next, because there was no leeway between the two, no flexibility, he was one or the other, two parodies of subject and object, outrageous seducer or rebel resisting seduction, conquering knight or dame sans merci. Louis, you need to understand (I can hear you from here), this isn’t against you. A woman within a man is fine if it’s harmonious, not when it fights to the death. He didn’t leave room for complicity, and forced me to be careful what I said, to pretend. How could I capitulate to an appeal that immediately reversed into rejection? How could I take a refusal which would turn back into begging? Whatever I did I was wrong. I thought his mood swings might be due to his recent disappointment in love, which excused and justified his ambivalent wariness of other women. But I didn’t feel at liberty to confide in him as Claire Antunes had. I was on a tightrope and I could easily fall, I could tell, although I soon forgot that. And yet—or because of this?—my desire was back, different from the desire I’d felt when I was her, more fretful, the longing to touch him and smell him was less tender, more avid, this urge to let my senses decide which game I should play for which candle.

  So when I returned to Paris I agreed to see him. He had hassled me every day I was in the Auvergne to find out when I’d be back, but once I was actually back he was less impatient, and made a date to see me three days later. He was staying near the Porte des Lilas at his cousin’s place—“he’s an airline steward, he’s often out of town,” Chris explained, and because he loved his cousin’s cat, Daddy, he often came to cat-sit. So that accounted for the pictures of a cat sprawled on a saggy old sofa that he’d posted on Facebook, I’d thought it was at his parents’ place in Sevran. He gave me the address and the entry code, “it’ll be better than a café for work,” he said. I arrived with my MacBook and a lace dress I’d bought the day before, thinking he’d like it; but I wasn’t planning on taking the initiative, and I’d prepared for the fact that nothing might happen, like the first time. Let’s say I was playing “to see,” to give this virtual love a second chance to become real, like starting a book that’s going to end up in a drawer. I didn’t really believe in it, I even wondered whether he had some kind of problem, but the Claire Antunes in me still hoped, I could feel the energy of her love moving inside me like a baby about to be born.

  Chris showed me in. I’d brought a bottle of wine and a packet of pistachio nuts, he took them from me and went off to the kitchen while I walked through to the living room, where I recognized the shapeless sofa. I’d taken an antihistamine, I’m allergic to cats. But for now Daddy was nowhere to be seen.

  The window was open onto the evening air, it was warm, there was a tree nearby, its branches reaching toward me. Chris came back empty-handed and sat in a chair to my left. We talked about one thing and another, not even about our vague plans for a book, I found it hard tearing my eyes away from the crook of his neck, hard not to look where Claire Antunes would have wanted to. We didn’t have much to say to each other and I started wondering vaguely what the hell I was doing there without even a drink in my hand, when he reached out to me and started stroking me with the tips of his fingers, casually, as you would a cat, while he continued talking. He stroked my breasts, my thighs, my stomach through my dress, gently but in a very sexual way—not my hair or my neck as he would have done with Claire, I thought. I don’t remember what he whispered at that point, my name perhaps, or questions about what I like—I let him touch me, my ears burning red. Is that good? How can I speak or think, the question’s already there, I’m turning to liquid, shapeless, although his hands remind me of the precise shape of my body’s every contour. Tell me, Camille, do you like that? His deep, authoritative voice is unfamiliar. He takes my hand and puts it over his penis, he has an erection, a wave of heat rises to my hairline, there are no words in my mouth. Claire Antunes is disintegrating, I forget about my dress with its simpering dreams, I’m the one with Chris’s body up against mine, and what a body, we’re not on Facebook paying each other lip service, our lips have found another service to render, we’re here and this is love, love is being there. His erection is my trophy, I stroke it through the fabric of his pants, and unbutton them. A man with an erection is wonderful for a woman, he’s her scepter, I wonder whether men know that—oh, okay, Louis, you don’t have to answer that one—I find it intoxicating, it’s both domination and abdication, the vanishing point of all mistrust, consorting with a stiffened phallus I become both queen and consort.

  Then he kissed me, his lips barely rested on mine, his tongue was soft and secretive, slow, his eyes closed, his hands cupping my face, thoughtful, his tenderness melted my heart, he’s kissing Claire Antunes, I thought, he wants me but he’s kissing Claire Antunes. He stood abruptly, “Come, we’re going to another room,” and led me by the hand down a corridor toward a bedroom. We stopped on the way there, by the front door, to kiss again. He took off his shirt, his movements slowed by the half-light, I put my hand on his bare shoulder, it was curved like the handle on a shutter, we’re immortal, it opened out onto a summer landscape, a fiery shiver of sensations, the world had grown immeasurably, it was expanding between my ribs in a blaze of air that burned everything, we’re eternal, it was palpitating in infinite space, nothing existed but us, life’s never like this, except in that moment, galloping bareback on a demented horse.

  What I want to explain to you, Louis, is that everything that happens next in the story has just one motive, and only one: getting back to that moment. Reliving it. Starting over. Grabbing the demented horse by the mane in all that vertiginous speed that brings tears to the eyes. Nothing else. Virginia Woolf says nothing has happened until you’ve written about it. That’s true of almost everything, but not of being in someone’s arms. The clinch clinches it, it’s an event. Even if we never talk about it, even if there are no words to describe it and we silence it forever, when we make love, we are, we matter, we’re relevant.

  “My love,” he murmured as he stroked me and kissed me skillfully, slowly, “my love.” I said, “Yes, yes,” I was his love, I let him do whatever he wanted with me, I was a flower to be smelled, a fruit to be eaten, I seemed to be sprouting leaves, buds, branches, oh, the changing season! Then he pulled away, pushed down gently on my shoulder and I knelt—my intoxication didn’t entirely stop me realizing that he was brutally channel-hopping between two performances: hard actor in an X-rated movie and swooning lover in a romantic soap opera, between Camille and Claire. His heart’s in the balance, I thought. But all of it gave me pleasure, I felt at home both here and there, I was auditioning for both parts, I was happy to have it all, with no sharing or compromising, my desire accepted all the contradictions, and with good reason, this man was here, I was taking him, I loved all the different men in him, even the one who felt only contempt for me. He groaned as he let me work on him, gradually releasing his grip on my hair, the exquisite pain of it passed, then he pulled me back up very gently, “You’re soft, you’re so soft,” he said, and held me to him, “I can feel your love,” he whispered, and it was true, desire is the moment when love is possible.

  We made our way to the bedroom, intertwined, there was a clotheshorse with a woman’s clothes drying on it. “I’ll leave the light on in the corridor,” he said, as he took off all his clothes, “I broke the bedside light.” I undressed too, and we lay down and took each other
in our arms again.

  What I’d like to tell you, Louis, to tell you but not describe, because I’m lazy or I simply can’t, because I’m weak or frightened, just tell you, is the strength of that moment. Oh, I don’t doubt for a minute that you’ve experienced it yourself, Louis, I’m not trying to teach you anything, I want to immortalize it—because anything written bears witness. We write in order to have proof, that’s all. Books are made up of these memories piling up on each other like leaves becoming soil. Pages of humus. I guess you’ll think I’m crazy, but I’ve often made love so that I could write. Well, I made love to make love, but I’ve never seen much difference between desire and a desire to write—it’s the same vital impulse, the same need to feel the materialness of life. You’ll say it’s the opposite, that the one compensates for the absence of the other, that we exile ourselves from life in representations of it, that we write because we’ve stopped fucking—I remember you telling me one time, “literature is for want of flesh”—or that when we write we override our animal instincts, that body and language are not the same thing. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and anyway, just remember the other word for language: “tongue,” a ridiculous obscenity. I’ve never been able to use the word “tongue” in its linguistic sense without thinking of the other meaning, without feeling the thing inside my mouth at the same time as the word, without picturing tongues in front of my very eyes, probing for each other, touching and melding together. I need all the depth of language when I write, and its finer qualities too, its softness and its abrasive aspects. I wallow savagely in the French language, I can’t imagine doing the same with any other. I lick, and suck, taste and draw things in, I kindle the beginnings of desire with my tongue, and my tongue has its own desire to know. I kiss the dream of a narrative, and kisses always tell me stories. The most beautiful stories are those silently invented by kisses; and anyway we don’t actually need words to be loved. Every time I’ve had writer’s block, I’ve gone out to look for a man, to find life. That’s why I saw Chris again, in spite of everything. Not for sex itself, not to orgasm (and did I actually orgasm that first time?) but to feel the strength of desire, to incarnate it, have it in my skin. Because it’s not sex I’m interested in, it’s desire. The attraction rather than possession. The light-headedness rather than the spasm. My pleasure comes before the moment of ecstasy. I don’t aspire to that petite mort, to a momentary death, but to the vastness of life, to extreme existence. It’s not so much that I desire pleasure as I get pleasure from desire. Love isn’t the subject of my books, it’s their source. I’m not looking for a story, but the feeling of being alive, and writing that down would ultimately be defeat, and climaxing would be its downfall. Feeling desire for a man is like dreaming a book: everything is wide open, huge and chaotic, there’s nothing to stop the galloping horse, and there’s fear too, vast vertiginous fear even though we can tell that nothing will make us fall, our power is infinite yet disarmed, oh my, how we run, how hot it is, it’s the sun coupled with the wind, reconciled. And the chaos becomes orderly or settles, we know it does even if we do forget this, it becomes a sentence or a blank space, the beginning of something or silence, a story or not. But finding that chaos, that primal force, within words? That will never be achieved. Sitting at a desk, looking at a screen, at a page, the loss is palpable, I can feel eternity withdrawing, low tide. So when there’s nothing but sand left, desert as far as the eye can see, I want to find that driving force again, find that pure presence, this absence made up of words is too violent, my flesh needs other flesh to define itself. In the past when I suffered this, when I couldn’t write and, because I was alone, I couldn’t feel the desire of a physical body, I’d go and scour my bookshelves for something to fill the hole that had been bored open by my fear. I had my own objects of desire, my body of delectation, I knew which page would ease my tension, my urgency, my longing, I often found it straightaway, or I’d rifle through the book shaking in the same way I sometimes do when I’m very hungry, I was hungry for words, I gorged myself on Baudelaire’s Voyage or La Rochefoucauld’s maxims or the end of Bérénice. My menu couldn’t have been more classic, Louis. But if I really think about it, it wasn’t only the French language that sated me. In fact I found even more satisfaction with English or Italian poems, a foreign body was even more satisfying than a familiar one.