Who You Think I Am

by Camille Laurens

  If you see a fair form, chase it

  And if possible embrace it,

  Be it a girl or boy.

  Don’t be bashful; be brash, be fresh.

  Life is short, so enjoy

  Whatever contact your flesh

  May at the moment crave:

  There’s no sex life in the grave.

  I read out loud, rereading passages ten times, compulsively, the tension dissipated as I read, I was masturbating with words, if you like, and not just words, because I sometimes found I chose Sade. And then I don’t know what happened—or rather I know, but this understanding came slowly—either way, a time came when it stopped working, my desire for words evaporated. Dead. Finished. They were no longer enough to soothe me, to fill the void left by a body, by another person. No book had the same effect on me as a living person. It was a very private disaster, the sort you see all the time here, the place where I’m writing now: people who’ve been killed by separation, who can’t be mended with words anymore. We don’t want symbols now, we need the real thing. We’re fed up with praying, what would really help is an act of grace. “Thank you, Oh Lord, at last I have someone to give me what I so desperately need, to rekindle my lust for life.” That’s what we want to be saying instead of dwelling on our frustration. Before they brought me here, they found a scrap of paper in my pocket and on it were three sentences that I don’t remember writing, but they were in my handwriting: “My kingdom for a horse,” and below it, “I’d give all of literature in exchange for love” and “Every word in the world for a mad horse.”

  Except I was the one they thought was mad.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, I need to finish my story first.

  Chris suddenly broke off our lovemaking and masturbated frenetically next to my mouth before—This is okay, right?— coming over it. He dropped back onto his side, “Phew, I needed that,” he said. Then he jumped to his feet, dressed without even looking at me, and left the room, followed by Daddy. When I joined him he was stabbing at the remote control before eventually settling for a reality show. “Yeah, no, but I’m a princess,” some girl was saying, she had lips like a grouper fish and leather hot pants, “It’s not easy to get me into bed, I know what I’m worth.” I sat down, the audience was clapping, I pretended to watch for a few minutes, but I was hungry and thirsty, I was a bit dazed, my internal parachute hadn’t really succeeded in slowing my fall.

  “You couldn’t uncork the bottle, could you?” I asked.

  “Where did you park?” he replied, his eyes still on the screen.

  I stood up. “I came by Métro,” I said, picking up my purse, “and I’ll leave the same way.”

  “No but you can sleep here if you like, I don’t mind, I usually stay watching TV on the sofa, I don’t like schedules and constraints, but use the bedroom if you like, it’s no problem.”

  I said no, I’d rather go home, he didn’t move. “See ya,” I said, pushing Daddy aside with my foot because he was trying to get out, and I slammed the door. He’s giving you the Métro treatment all over again, I thought as I headed for the Porte des Lilas. And he didn’t even give you the wine you brought yourself! Unbelievable! I didn’t understand anything about my humiliation, except that I needed to get the better of it. In the Métro I received a text: “Is everything okay?” Then another two minutes later: “Did you get home all right?” I didn’t reply, I would get home, yes, and everything wasn’t too bad, actually: I’d come away with the memory of my desire, it was stronger than shame, stronger than anything else. I’d stolen the fire, and paid the price—the lacerating shame in my entrails, like an eagle’s beak—but what did that matter? It hurt, yes, but, sitting there in the Métro, I thought it was worth it, it was worth suffering because coming back to life inside me was a longing for words and phrases, pooling together were fragments of sound, a mosaic, an opera, a stream of images, a novel, a film. In my mind I folded the bubble-wrap of memory around his fingers moving toward my breasts, his mouth, the elastic feel of his erect penis in my hand, his fist pulling my hair back as he got into his stride. I wrapped this desire up in my memory to stop it leaking away, or breaking, caution fragile, I wanted to keep hold of it for a while—if you can’t write with this, I thought, what do you need? The heat was already coming back to me, the desire I’d forgotten like a word on the tip of my tongue, the vital power of it like a seized motor coming to life. Wanting anything from Chris was probably a waste of time, but how is time ever wasted if it results in a book?

  He called me the next day, around midday, he was thinking of me, he couldn’t wait to see me again, what was I wearing? Right now he was in the corridor, thinking about my mouth, he was jerking off as he remembered it, “and you?” He was thinking about everything we did, but mostly about everything we hadn’t yet done, everything we would do, it was going to be so good, “I like everything about you,” he said, “your eyes, your mouth, your little breasts, your softness, you’re so soft,” everything about me turned him on, but most of all my ass, “never seen such a beautiful ass, can I see you this evening?” I said I didn’t know. “Don’t you want to see me?” he murmured…“Come on, come over. I’m waiting already. Tell me you’re coming, say you want to see me, it’s all you can think about.” I laughed. “Well, okay…” “Cool!” he exclaimed happily. “Come at eight o’clock. Do you remember the code?”

  I was in the street when he called back two hours later, I didn’t hear it ring, I was walking with all the majestic power, the blatant aura of desire, everyone can see it, I made eye contact with other people and could see they were turned on or curious, aroused or envious, when you’re desired you’re desirable, that’s the law, it’s the idiot’s theorem, but it’s easy to demonstrate, you can read it in people’s eyes, the body is an open book. “Listen, this is such a pain,” his message said in a glum voice, “I’d completely forgotten I’m meant to be somewhere this evening, I suddenly remembered, so basically, we can catch up tomorrow evening, ciao.”

  This little game of hide-and-seek went on for several weeks, we saw each other, we missed each other, he had to see a friend or his father, it was a merry-go-round of yes and no, and I played along but it wasn’t very merry. Sometimes when he was just too boorish, I thought of breaking it off, particularly as the sex itself was disappointing, like a trip you’ve dreamed of for ages that turns out to be a letdown. But my desire had built so many castles in the air that the ruins were enough for me. Besides, I wasn’t really looking for gratification—I was getting enough pleasure from my desire. And anyway, with me the desire for love is always coupled with a desire for familiarity. Curiosity is the sign: suddenly wanting to know someone, to decipher them. When the other person becomes a secret. Where there was simply a body, there’s now a story. When a physical form becomes a bottomless mystery. I was curious and I wasn’t the only one: Claire also wanted to know who Chris was, and which one of us brought out the real him.

  One evening he invited me to go see him in Sevran, his parents were away for the whole weekend. I took the high-speed subway, pleased to be seeing him in his usual habitat. He was waiting for me at the station in his Citroën, he proudly talked me through it—“It’s gorgeous,” I said. My father had one when I was little, I didn’t say. After driving for a few minutes we pulled into the parking lot of a housing project. “I warn you, it’s very basic.” It was a stiflingly clean two-bedroom apartment which felt empty despite the olive green velvet in the living room and the ornaments on the black sideboard. No plants, no books, no magazines, no paintings, except for a small Poulbot cartoon in the hallway and a plate with a fish design hanging on the kitchen wall: it was like a show home—showing what exactly? What deficiencies, what anxieties, what fears about life? What crime against happiness? Chris’s room had more life to it, but it was a past life: soccer club flags, model cars, photos of school picnics, a Guns N’ Roses poster, a baseball cap. “So this is my place,” he said, taking me in his arms. I huddled close to him, touch
ed. “Will you take me out to a restaurant?” he asked, pushing me away.

  It was a strange dinner, us hovering between mute old couple and cute e-couple. That must be Chris’s problem, I thought—maybe it was everyone’s problem? What role to give sex in a relationship? No role at all? Or center stage? When he looked at me I could feel myself switching constantly between sex bomb and old friend. You see, Louis, if I’d decided to write a novel about this sorry affair, I’d have described every aspect of our sexuality, I’d have literally written a sex report. I know lots of people don’t like that, particularly men, if it’s a woman writer, maybe you most of all, you think it’s vulgar, or you think we should leave it to men, it’s their field. Well, I’m fascinated by sexuality. In life. And therefore in books. I don’t know anything about a man till I’ve slept with him. Nothing important. Nothing real. At best, whatever I’ve glimpsed by talking to him and spending time with him can be confirmed by sex. But it’s often contradicted instead. The whole social construct dissolves when two bodies come together or, if the construct stays standing, then that’s because it’s all there is: an obsession with control, with fear or negation of the other person, a longing for power. Otherwise, sex is the truest and most fragile form of sharing, when desire and tenderness make us generous, when the present moment looks deceptively like love, and we often are deceived, we surrender to the fire, we throw ourselves in without realizing it will burn, like innocents, but it’s a beautiful deception, this deception is far from deceitful, we are innocent in our desire and that’s what we’re hoping for, to be literally innocent, for there to be nothing noxious about us, nothing harmful, to do no harm, in fact, to want only the best, to receive only the best, an exchange of breath and tongues, of something real and real words. To describe sex is to illustrate humanity, its potential goodness, its transfiguring power as well as its shared weakness, an acceptance of a common fate that acts as a backdrop to life. Otherwise it shows hate, domination, and shame. Either way, sex is familiarity, instant knowledge, it may well be volatile, it may lead to oblivion, but surely then it’s up to literature to catch it on the wing?

  After dinner we went back to his childhood bedroom. We didn’t make love, he came too quickly and turned to face the wall straightaway. In the night he howled like an eviscerated animal and held me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. “Oh Camille,” he cried, “oh Camille, my Camille,” then he went back to sleep with an agonized sob, not relaxing his grip. I was suffocating, I extricated myself as best I could, disturbed by his behavior, and I shivered with cold the rest of the night because he’d wound himself up in the duvet like a swaddled baby. In the morning he put a spoonful of honey in my tea, which he handed to me like a precious gift. There was nothing to eat, not even a crust of bread. I think it was then, amid my brutally disappointed desire, in that moment of nocturnal weakness when my name—Camille, not Claire—intruded, that the story of Chris and me, in all its arid inadequacy, started to be written in my mind.

  We continued seeing each other like that, at my place or his cousin’s, in rocky but increasing intimacy. Each of us had shown something of ourselves to the other: his desire, his fear—which was hesitantly abating. He was less afraid of being misjudged and scorned, I was less frightened of not being loved—what is love exactly? What is it if not a longing to be repeatedly reunited with the same body, and the narrative we’ve constructed about it? But the question of money still hung in the air. He never had any, he borrowed Métro tickets from me, ten euros to buy cigarettes, a hundred to fill the car with gas, never gave me the change, suggested the gifts I could bring back for him from my trips—the latest Nikes from New York or some piece of junk from Cambrai. I think he even scooped up the tips I left for waiters at café tables, or those other people left. He criticized the way my apartment was decorated, wanted me to replace all the paintings with photos he’d taken, which I could buy at “buddy’s rates.”

  Every time we saw each other he told me how fed up he was with Sevran and his view over concrete, he took beautiful pictures of the suburbs, the corridors in their high-speed subway stations, the residential skyscrapers, the gray faces. But what he wanted was the sky, the sea, wide open space, snapping blue and wind and expanse. And I wanted to give him what he wanted; and also another taste of the life you can have at home with a man—since Joe, I hadn’t had that sweet feeling of a confined space, and the relationship that develops between that intimate space and the space in which your body relaxes surrounded by the smell of coffee, of old lofts and fireplaces. So I decided to rent a house at Cap Blanc-Nez. It was wild and beautiful, out of season, we’d be fine there. I liked how happy he was when I told him—a child who’s never seen the sea.

  His Citroën broke down three days before we left—“Not cool,” he said on the phone. It was in a garage in Sevran, it was the carburetor, it was likely to cost several hundred euros. Not to mention the lens that was stolen from his bag during a shoot and that he’d have to replace. He couldn’t see how to cope, and our vacation would have to fall through, unless I could lend…I told him I’d rent a car, the house was already paid for, we weren’t going to give up. I didn’t have too much money myself, my advance had been eaten up long since, Louis, my not very stupendous advance, Louis, but I so wanted a vacation and to be with him. The next day Chris called me when I was about to go to my local car rental. He would take care of renting something in Sevran, his father was lending him the money to fix his car. He’d come over with the rental car that same evening, and we’d set off the next morning. I said okay—cars are a man thing. He texted me to ask if I could transfer the rental money into his account, which I did right away.

  That evening he parked on the street outside my apartment and called out to me from the sidewalk, “My beloved! I forgot the code.” I went down to open the door, he took me in his arms and danced me around: “You’re my little woman! You’re my little fairy.” It was a tender night, wrapped snugly around us. In the morning we stuffed all our bags in the trunk and set off excitedly, hoist ’em high, sailor. He drove the whole way and I slept. I woke to hear the radio blaring at the top of its lungs, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a Beatles song from 1964. “Never heard that song before,” Chris said, “have you? It’s cool.”

  “I have, yes, vaguely,” I said, stretching. “But I was only a little girl in ’64.”

  The car—a red Citroën DS Special Series, an over-equipped descendant of his vintage model—swerved and ground violently to a halt in a deserted rest area. We can’t have been far from the sea, the air coming through the open window smelled of salt. Chris turned to me, both hands clamped on the wheel, his jaw set like iron.

  “What’s the—?” I said.

  He scowled at me harshly. “You’re over fifty?” He pinched his lips together and asked again, louder: “You’re over fifty?” I looked at him but didn’t answer. “Well, that really flips me out,” he said, and he climbed out and slammed the door savagely.