He got up suddenly, grabbed his briefcase, stamped on the magazine on the floor, and walked down the duty-free area, looking for a telephone. He was shown an oddly exotic telephone booth with a green roof shaped like a Buddhist temple, and rang another telephone which he could visualize perfectly, a little cordless phone, midnight-blue, standing on a side table, next to a little jug of water and a holiday photo in which Sandrine, pregnant with Timothée, was turning her beautiful face into the evening breeze.
Back there in Cholong, at home, it was only ten in the morning.
“Hello . . . Darling . . . It’s me, darling . . .”
“Hello . . . Who’s that?”
“It’s me, darling! Philippe!”
“Philippe . . . Where are you?”
“I love you! I love you so much!”
“? . . .”
“Can you hear me? I love you! I love all three of you! So much . . .”
“You’re scaring me, did something happen on the journey?”
“You’re my only reason for living, you’re everything, without you my life has no meaning.”
“. . .”
“I’m getting the first plane back, and I’m never leaving the house again without the three of you.”
“What about Perseil?”
“He can go to hell, and the company too. Do you still love me?”
“See if you can guess.”
Then there was another wave of tears, this time of happiness, which washed all the misery out of his heart.
*
A young Belgian called David Moens, arriving from Macao and bound for LA, was waiting, bored stiff with the interminable transit through Bangkok. He could no longer even remember why he had suddenly decided to set off to the Orient, just like that, on the spur of the moment. It was certainly something to do with proving something to himself and to the world, but he had completely forgotten what it was. To go . . . to leave . . . Asia . . . over the horizon, far away . . . All travellers are poets . . . Surely he deserved his share of exoticism as much as the next man? Or at least he had to find out what it was, and for that, the only way was to travel, alone, far away, without a bean. Life, destiny and chance would see to the rest.
To sum up the result so far: in less than a week he had lost the little he had left in some less than thrilling gambling and struck up a few random, already forgotten acquaintances; he had not experienced a single moment of excitement, and he was now desperate to get out of Asia and get to America, which might turn out to be a little less impenetrable. In fact California was his last throw of the dice – there was a couple there he was supposed to stay with, some couple he’d met in Brussels last year, with whom he had sworn friendship and exchanged addresses over several Krieks, the usual thing. But a voice inside him was already whispering that nobody would be waiting for him in Los Angeles.
Besides, David was unable to say what part disappointment in love had played in this precipitous departure. He had left Brussels, not because of a woman, but because of all women. The three last years, devoid of either love or sex, had driven him to regard women as the enemy. He saw them all in each one, and each in all, all with the same faults, driven by the same urges, so different from his own. At the risk of sliding into obvious misogynistic clichés, even those of literature, he agreed with all the usual remarks about the female sex, and felt he could sum up all women with just a few well-chosen adjectives. When he bought that plane ticket, it was because he had subconsciously decided to find out if women on the other side of the world behaved in the same way. And he had convinced himself that this was the case before even meeting one.
He found out from the only representative of his airline in Thailand that his plane would be taking off three or four hours late. He turned back, exasperated, and lay down in a corner of the transit lounge, with his head on his rucksack. If only he had something to read . . . A novel, a magazine, a French prospectus, anything to pass the time. When he had packed his suitcase, the thought of reading hadn’t occurred to him. He wouldn’t read, he would keep a diary of his travels, one or two pages a day, to record new experiences as soon as they happened. Alas, as his pursuit of the exotic ran into the ground, he became bored of the exercise. He had written four days’ worth, and the last entry, Tuesday 17th June, consisted of one paragraph.
Wake up feeling tired. Enormous cockroach runs across the ground, where I’m lying, covered with a sheet. They advised me not to kill the insects, it just encourages more. Apparently you should just ignore them. I’ve turned off the fan; don’t want to catch a cold, that would be absurd in this heat. The laundry girl comes by every Tuesday apparently. Where will I be next Tuesday? I’d better look around the town, otherwise no one will believe I’ve come this far.
Suddenly he noticed a pile of crumpled paper under a row of seats on which he spotted the black-and-white squares of a crossword. It was an odd publication, the Jules Vallès Gazette, goodness knew how it had got there. But David Moens wasn’t concerned with that – it was in French! A chance to reclaim his language, and set his rusty brain to work again. There were texts, puzzles, drawings, lots of odd little items; he set to work at once on the crossword.
*
High above an ocean whose colour he would never see, because it was dark and he wasn’t by the window, David now felt happier about his fate, safe in the aeroplane cabin, at peace with the world. Everything seemed luxurious to him, the hostesses’ smiles, the cool drinks, the fragrant wipes, the air-conditioning, the sharp sweets. Safe at last, he could now concentrate on the crossword, which presented no great challenge.
The young compilers had made no attempt to limit the number of black squares, nor to make the clues particularly difficult. But they had embarked on a ten-by-ten grid, which made it oddly complicated for the crossword-solver. David dealt easily with all the three- and four-letter words which fitted smoothly into one another. Most of his neighbours were already asleep, and the plane travelled through the night in perfect silence, as he sipped his tepid mini-can of Coke through a straw. “Party people,” eight letters? These snotty-nosed brats were beginning to slow him down. David had to admit that he was one of those occasional crossword fanciers who only enjoy it when it’s easy and soon feel humiliated by clues with several layers of meaning. The easy start had too quickly made him overconfident. Once he’d found “Noah,” the second word in the fourth vertical column (“sheltered a lot of couples”), revellers occurred to him for “party people.” In full flight now, he got an awesome adultery, for “half plus a third.” These kids from Cholong-sur-Avre, some dump in the back of beyond, were definitely more sophisticated than he thought. David had automatically written down the word adultery without wondering what the word could possibly mean to a child of twelve. What could someone of that age know about adultery, when he, David, at the great age of twenty-four, was full of self-pity about his miserable libido. Adultery? It was his dream! To be the lover of a married woman represented the pinnacle of sexual experience. He imagined passionate afternoons in a slightly seedy hotel near the Bruxelles-Midi station, a bottle of white wine on the bedside table and a fine-looking bourgeoise of fifty from the smart streets by the Chaussée d’Ixelles, pink with shame and excitement at finding herself naked in a squalid room, with a yob who made her come by treating her like a tart. Such were the images that sprang into David’s mind at the very word adultery. Either the kids from the Jules Vallès Lycée had used some classical definition from Favalelli or Scipio, or one of their teachers was having a bit of fun inserting his own racy contributions under the noses of colleagues, directors and parents. There was no way a twelve-year-old pupil could have thought up this clue. He was even beginning to think adultery such a strange word to find that perhaps it was wrong, and that finding such a sexual double meaning had just been a product of his own fevered imaginings. To try and expel such thoughts he moved on to the next clue, “public transport,” fou
r letters, which would need to end with a y in order to fit with the y in adultery.
“Orgy,” said a high voice just behind him.
“? . . .”
“Public transport: orgy,” she repeated.
A young woman of about his age stood, leaning her chin on David’s headrest, with a saucy smile.
“What’s that mag? It looks smashing.”
The word “smashing,” which seemed to come from another era, left David speechless. Taken by surprise, he was at first unable to appreciate the delicacy of the young woman’s smile, a half-smile which lit up her whole face, the blue of her eyes, the soft pinkness of her cheeks and the redness of her lips. In fact, David failed to realize at once that here was his perfect type of woman – small, with smooth skin and long silky blond hair. She possessed the sort of physique that would stand the test of time and of all life’s hazards.
“I don’t know, I found it in the airport,” he replied defensively.
“Orgy,” she said again.
“How long have you been reading over my shoulder?”
*
Two hours later, now sitting side by side, prodding each other in a familiar way, they still couldn’t finish the crossword.
“Perhaps we were wrong with ‘First jet,’ suppose it’s not . . .” he said.
“What do you suggest?”
“Caravel.”
“Sorry?”
“It was a sort of ancestor to the jet. The little bastards are trying to catch us out. All these air pockets made me think of it.”
“Don’t forget that this puzzle has been compiled not just by little bastards, but by perverted little bastards. This jet idea isn’t an aeroplane – ‘first jet,’ at their age, must mean something different . . .”
“Surely not . . .”
“First jet – you’re a boy . . .”
“Wanking?”
“Of course. We’d keep the a from adultery, but we’d have to find something else for ‘bodies in fusion.’”
“Debauchery?” she almost whispered.
“Would they have orgy AND debauchery?”
“Of course, it can only be debauchery.”
“‘Something sensual’ in four letters could be anything: lust . . . fuck . . . even love!”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“Let’s allow love, but that means ‘needs a helping hand,’ seven letters, would have to start with an o.”
“You know what I’m thinking?”
“I’m afraid I do . . .”
“I’m sorry to have to say it, but onanism means ‘on fire,’ seven letters, can’t be kindled.”
“Why not amorous?”
“Yes, why not?”
The plane was about to land in Los Angeles. David no longer planned to call the American couple, who had probably forgotten his existence anyway; he suggested to Delphine that they might explore the city together. Twenty minutes later, the airport cleaners worked their way down the economy-class aisles, throwing all the rubbish into their binbags, including the Jules Vallès Gazette.
*
At the north corner of LA International Airport, the rubbish-disposal services piled up, ground and burned, in gigantic containers, the many tons of rubbish that arrived daily from the nine terminals. Some of the containers destined for recycling were waiting, that early morning, to be taken on trailers to the San Diego recycling centre. Four of the two-hundred-cubic-feet receptacles were piled high with thousands of magazines, newspapers and computer printouts, thrown out by the airlines by the pallet-load. Donny, like an insect caught in a matchbox, scrabbled around in the least full of the four.
Donny’s mother was dead, and he spent as much time as he could out of the house to spare his hard-up father any extra worries. He was fifteen and no longer expected to be fed, clothed, or even given any advice on life and its many vicissitudes, all of which his father had suffered. He hardly ever went to the cinema, never watched TV, and there was no decent male role model in his neighbourhood to guide him into adulthood. His father was in fact a kind of example – an example of what not to do, a perfect guide to failure in life. So Donny just got along on his own, and pretty well really, picking up tips about life here and there in his wanderings. After several jobs, most of which were only borderline legal, he had become a specialist in the recuperation of old newspapers, just as others had found their calling in old Coke cans. So, three times a week, he would visit the airport containers, and then sell his booty on to other sellers who were prospecting on behalf of collectors of strip cartoons, magazines, dailies – you could find a taker for anything. Danny had become a master of his art: the search, the redistribution amongst his contacts, the discovery of new depots, and, as long as he worked discreetly and alone, the rubbish authorities were happy to turn a blind eye to his business. There was no one like him, capable of plunging bodily into the container, pushing himself down through the layers, turning over the furthest corner, opening up a gap, leafing through, sorting, piling, and then coming up to the surface with his rucksack full of miraculous booty. LAX airport had become his exclusive territory, and he had become a familiar figure, to whom nobody paid any attention.
However, that particular morning, Danny felt he had wasted his journey: the Vogues were too recent, there were some fitness mags, hardly ten-dollars’ worth, possibly another five for a 1972 Playboy which he knew a bookseller in Catalina would take. You could always find takers for these old mags, and they weren’t just for nostalgic perverts; sometimes they were completely respectable people, researchers sometimes, or maybe a student writing a thesis about magazines in the past. The most unlikely titles would turn out to be collectors’ items, particularly Playboy – you really had to have money to burn to look at this outdated American myth. Naked women from 1972, what was that about?
In 1972 his mother and father hadn’t even met, and there was nothing anywhere to suggest the future existence of a Donny Ray. He would only be born fifteen years later, by which time the sense of the forbidden had given way to all-powerful merchandising, and the profit motive had broken through the last taboos. For Donny, who had never touched a woman, nonetheless found their bodies a source of inexhaustible raw material, always available, with not the slightest mystery or concealment. For him nudity had always, from the very beginning, been a fact of life, like running water, or the bus, a basic human right. He had never opened a girl’s legs, but he knew all about what was there. During his searches, he would glance coolly at the pin-ups in Hustler or Penthouse – to him all female shapes were equal and none aroused his curiosity any longer. Donny Ray just couldn’t imagine that, back in 1972, very pretty women were already taking their clothes off in magazines to be queen for a day, and that a boy of his age would have killed to get his hands on this copy of Playboy. He simply leafed through it to check it was in good condition, unfolded the centrefold and found the Playmate of the Month spread out over three pages. Miss May 1972 was called Linda Mae Barker; she was posing in a bubble bath, photographed face on and from above.
Crouched in his container, Danny studied the magazine, thinking. The central photo didn’t show much, not everything in any case. For the first time in his short life, he felt that something was being kept from him. And this girl didn’t look at all like the ones in the present-day magazines. Were women’s bodies that different then? Intrigued by the photos of young Miss Barker, so old-fashioned, so charmingly dated, almost to the point of being kitsch, Donny left the airport, still studying the magazine. Before climbing out of the container, he had picked up a crumpled rag, hardly glancing at it – the Jules Vallès Gazette, what was this crap? – just the right size to hide the Playboy from the curious eyes of passers-by. A gesture that betrayed his age.
He took the overground railway at Aviation Avenue and settled down on a bench at the end of an empty carriage. He began to study Lin
da Mae Barker’s body from head to foot, amazed by all of it, starting with the dark-brown hair with its darker roots, held back by a schoolgirl’s red ribbon. An ordinary brunette, like any of the ones you might see in the street, no more nor less sophisticated than usual; he had passed thousands like her in real life: there was the dental technician who never looked up from her work in the little office in Placid Square, or even that social worker who was always begging him to keep appointments with the psychologist. The playmates Donny looked at nowadays had great blond manes which could have covered their whole bodies. Linda Mae Barker was a gazelle compared to lionesses like that. Donny, with infinite patience, studied her every feature, her hardly visible freckles, her sweet smile, her adorable little face. He was touched by such innocence, by the way she seemed to say so little while showing so much, her shyness at being naked, the slight vulnerability of her expression, the reason for which you could only guess at, and which was invisible to those who didn’t study her properly. He recognized that look in the women he saw every day; they had no pride, and were simply curious about everything, capable of being amazed by the smallest thing. The modern-day pin-ups had eliminated every shred of that naivety from their expression, gazing out as they did, beyond the photographer, at the millions of men, all connoisseurs of the power of naked flesh. You could read in Linda Mae Barker’s face the challenge she had set herself – to pose naked in front of the whole of America – and her victory could be read deep in her eyes.
And the most extraordinary thing was that the rest of the body, from the shoulders down, also reflected this modesty that Donny was finding so confusing. Linda Mae Barker’s breasts! High on the torso without being insolent, almost fragile despite their splendour. He searched for a word to describe them and, for want of a better one, picked “imperfect.” Yes, they were imperfect, their shape slightly unfamiliar, something between an apple and a pear, and a very long way from a melon. Before discovering Linda Mae’s, Donny had always thought breasts were like geometrical spheres, all the same size, pumped up until they almost leaped out at the reader’s face. Linda Mae’s imperfect breasts made one long to spend some time remodelling them by hand, just so that they could spring back to their original shape, which was in the end the best one. Linda Mae’s chest pre-dated surgery and silicone. And the innocence was compounded by the way the whiteness of Linda Mae’s breasts contrasted with the rest of her tanned body, showing a clear bikini line. Donny couldn’t get over this. White breasts? It was unheard of! It was almost indecent. What, no sunbeds in 1972? No instant tan? No one topless on the beach? Had Linda Mae never shown herself naked to anyone else? He got off the train at Long Beach station, still clutching the Jules Vallès Gazette wrapped around Linda Mae Barker’s body. The more he stared at her, the more he wanted to protect her from sight. He got on a bus going to Lynwood, where his mate Stu lived, a childhood friend now working as a debt collector. Stu had often tried to teach him the art of breaking debtors’ thumbs, but Donny, finding most forms of violence unattractive, had preferred to specialize in the old newspaper business; he saw it as a kind of contemporary treasure hunt, and here was the proof: he had found Linda Mae Barker at the bottom of a rubbish container. A young girl who had given herself to Playboy as one might give oneself to a first lover. With enormous care, he turned to the bottom half of the centrefold to see what was going on below the waist. The pubic area was almost entirely concealed by a mound of bubbles, just showing some edges of barely shaved pubic hair, which appeared to be the same colour as her hair – an exotic touch on this nymph-like body. Donny was more and more surprised. He had seen several thousand pubic regions in his time, in every possible shape: hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs, and every shade of blue and pink, and the most usual kind were entirely shaved. He knew more about labia than his own father. Linda Mae Barker, whose left leg was raised slightly inwards, preserved her most intimate parts, kept them hidden for ever; men, and Donny in particular, would just have to imagine. He regarded this pose as both unfair and completely legitimate. In a daze, Donny got off the bus and walked a hundred yards down Josephine Street. He entered a black brick building, nodded to the old Puerto Rican sitting in the hallway – he was a sort of unpaid doorman who had been there for ever – and rang the bell of Stu’s ground-floor flat. While he waited, he had a last look at the astonishing twenty-one-year-old girl from back in 1972, when a hundred million Americans had seen in her the epitome of eroticism. Donny was worried by this unsettling feeling of annoyance that pervaded him – could this be what was known as arousal?
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