The Truth about Marie

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

  I opened the heavy door of the building and started up the stairs toward Marie’s apartment. Her apartment door was open on the landing, and I stepped inside, I made my way silently down the hallway. As I entered the room I noticed immediately the presence of a pair of shoes near the bed. It was the sole indication that the man had been in her room. Everything else of his had disappeared, nothing attested to his having been there, not the slightest trace of the medical attention he’d been given less than five minutes earlier, no stray medical equipment, bandages or tubes, left behind. I looked at this pair of shoes at the foot of the bed, abandoned carelessly (one was upright on its sole and the other was tipped over on its side), elegant Italian shoes, sharp and powerful and at the same time slender, of delicate material, rawhide or calf-hide leather, a classic pair of wingtips firm and smooth, certainly very comfortable, faithful to the reputed excellence of Italian shoes, the best of which truly fit like gloves over one’s feet, of an indefinable color, fawn or chamois, its laces extremely thin and sturdy like fishing line, with a velvety, almost fury upper, bordered by a multitude of tiny decorative perforations subtly underlining the topstitched line of the seams, and, traced in the lining — a new lining that likely retained a slight scent of fresh leather — a discreet and seemingly coded golden inscription. I looked at these empty shoes, abandoned at the foot of the bed, they were all that was left of the man. Of him, as in the fabled image of a lightning-struck man, nothing remained but his shoes.

  Marie heard me come into the room but she didn’t turn around. She waited for me to join her at the window, and we stood there side by side in silence, watching the ambulance speed off in the night. It went off toward the Seine, the echo of its siren fading little by little before disappearing altogether. Then, slowly, Marie moved closer to me, gently, sleepily, she touched my shoulder without uttering a word as a tacit sign of appreciation for my being there for her.

  I was soaked, dripping wet, water streamed down the sleeves of my coat to form a small puddle at my feet on the floor. When outside I didn’t feel a thing, I didn’t even realize I was wet. My coat was now like a formless wet rag hanging from my shoulders, my shirt stuck against my chest, the fabric of my clothes stretched and weighed down by this syrupy rain, even my socks, swashing inside my shoes at every step, left me with that awful physical sensation that can only come from wet socks. I took off my socks and shoes, which I left near the window, and I walked through the room barefoot, letting the water drip from my outstretched arms, leaving trails of rain in my wake. I unbuttoned my sticky wet shirt and I looked around the room. It had hardly changed since I’d left, there was a new desk, but all in all it looked the same as when I’d moved out. I saw my old dresser still right where I’d left it, with my clothes probably still inside, the bulk of my clothes I hadn’t had time to take. I crouched down in front of it and opened its drawers, rummaged through the clothes, a mess of sweaters, shirts, pajamas, an old bathing suit stretched out at the waist. I grabbed a shirt and some other clothes to change into, began undressing.

  Marie had remade the bed carelessly and sat against the wall to smoke a cigarette in the half-light, her legs making a Z under her XL T-shirt. She’d turned off all the lamps except for one near the bed, whose light was dimmed. She sat there silently for a long time, distraught, a vacant look on her face, then, in a soft voice and without looking at me, she started to tell me about Jean-Christophe de G., taking a drag of her cigarette from time to time, she told me she’d met him in Tokyo earlier that year at her exhibition’s opening at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa, she told me about his work and many projects, he was a businessman and art connoisseur, told me she saw him again a few times in Paris when she’d come back from Japan, three or four times in the first few months, then less frequently, they’d spent a weekend together in Rome, but really they hardly knew each other. Marie explained all this to me without considering the pain it might cause me, and I kept silent, asked no questions. I’d taken off my jacket and shirt and I was drying my back with a large white bath towel as I listened to her. I began to take my pants off, not without some difficulty as the material stuck to my skin, then I removed my boxers, letting them fall down to the ground at me feet. Marie continued to talk, her need to talk, to confide in someone was clear, she went over the night in detail, looking for the signs that could have warned her, a certain sluggishness, shortness of breath, spells of dizziness, the sense of unease he’d felt at the restaurant. I was standing naked in the half-light and no longer paying her much attention, I dried my neck, my sides, I rubbed the towel around my thighs, I scrubbed between my legs (and I must admit it felt quite nice).

  I was still buttoning my shirt, my bare legs on the hardwood floor, when I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror on the mantel, one of those large gilded mirrors you find in Parisian apartments, its pediment in the shape of a decorative flame in plaster molding depicting an elegant tangle of intertwined acanthus leaves. I took a step forward and saw my reflection move in sync in the patinated depths of the mirror, its surface flecked and discolored and splotched by patches of darkness, my dark face disappearing into its shadows. The room around me faded into the surrounding darkness, the softened edges of the furniture could hardly be discerned, Marie’s desk where her computer was lit appeared without detail. I saw myself there, faceless, standing in the room where I’d lived for almost six years. Marie was still sitting against the wall. From where I was standing I heard nothing but her voice, her neutral and empty voice, telling me that Jean-Christophe de G. was married and that was why she wasn’t with him in the ambulance, an act of prudence in a way, so that his wife could be notified when he got to the hospital. But now she wondered how she’d find out about his condition, she didn’t even know which hospital they were taking him to.

  I walked around the room and took the bottle of grappa from the ledge of the mantle. Marie lifted her eyes toward me, and I saw her expression change immediately. Her attitude had taken a sudden turn, her look of sorrow gave way abruptly to one of coldness, of fierceness, she became distant and firm in her stubbornness, her face tensed in a grimace, her jaws clenched, this expression of cold rage and fury that I knew so well from when she tried to hide her feelings lest she begin to cry. Now she shot me an angry look, an expression I’d never seen splitting the corners of her mouth into tiny nasty wrinkles, and hate quickly flared up in her eyes. Why was it that each time we were together there was always a moment when, suddenly and without warning, she hated me with a passion.

  Marie must have felt caught when she saw me grab the bottle of grappa. Perhaps she’d understood that this bottle gave her away, that, here in this room at this time, it called attention to itself, glared immodestly, indecently even — and she was right. Once I’d noticed the bottle I knew she’d had some grappa with Jean-Christophe de G. this very night, and, from this, I could easily imagine what took place between them in this room. She knew right away that, given this one tangible detail, this lone bottle of grappa, I could imagine her whole night, could see in detail what went on between them — down to their very kisses, down to the taste of grappa in their kisses — as in dreams, where a sole detail from our own intimate experience can unleash a rush of imaginary details no less vivid, and she knew that, now having a tangible reference on the one hand (the bottle of grappa) and a visual reference on the other (my witnessing the stretcher leaving the building in the night), I was now able to fill in the empty space between these two points of reference, and reconstruct, recreate, or invent what Marie had lived in my absence.

  Marie remained seated for a while, silent, pensive, arms crossed, staring with an exasperated expression at my wet clothes on the dresser, then she jumped to her feet and told me to get rid of that dead weight, my dresser, right now and for good. This had gone on too long, she’d been living with this piece of shit in her room for five months now, it had to be moved to the ground floor immediately, not a second longer would this be tolerated, it had to go now. This
wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. She couldn’t bear to look at it any longer, this worthless commode, she said “commode,” she called my dresser “commode” with visible disgust, her contempt seemed to attach to the word itself: commode. Commode. She stormed over to this commode, her thighs bare under her baggy white T-shirt, and she tried to lift it, in a rage, with one hand, any which way, but there was nothing to grab onto, there were no handles or edges, its finished wood was all decorative curves impossible to grip. I walked over to the other side of the dresser to help her and we struggled to lift it up off the ground, raising it a mere ten centimeters at most, it was extremely heavy, before dropping it right back down, Marie let go of it, let it fall hard to the floor, made no effort to let it down gently, it pounded the floor violently, the angle of its feet crashing down loudly and chipping the hardwood floor. Marie, barefoot, jumped out of the way as it fell, she was losing patience, becoming enraged, she told me I knew damn well we couldn’t move it like this, it was too heavy, we had to empty it, and, opening the drawers, she started scooping up my clothes in armfuls, which she threw on the floor, telling me to move my stuff, to get my fucking junk out of that commode.

  Then she didn’t say anything, she fell completely silent, she watched me do as she’d asked, standing still, her head slightly lowered, a vacant look on her face, her impatience having subsided, or now held in check. Her rage gave way to sorrow, a cold sadness, a passive despondency, she was spent, she gave up, she left everything to me. I tried to calm her, appease her, I continued to empty the dresser, drawer by drawer, making piles of clothes of more or less equal size on the floor, T-shirts, pullovers, dress shirts, a wild heap of underwear, of gloves, of scarves, of winter hats, then other piles, smaller, spread thin, disparate and variegated, a belt, balled-up ties, my old nut-hugger bathing suit stretched at the waist, whose touching, ridiculous presence here was rather humiliating for me. It seemed like a pitiful display of ragged gear at a secondhand dealer’s stall, set up there in the dimness of the room, and there was something macabre in this display, as if the clothes, when not being worn, signified the absence or disappearance of their owner. And wasn’t that precisely what this was about, my disappearance, the gradual effacement of my presence in this room where I’d lived for several years?

  We started on our way, holding the dresser barely above the ground as we moved forward, but we failed to make it through the door on the first try. We had to put it down again and tip it on its side, lift it at an angle to pass through the doorframe and reach the hallway. Bent by the weight of the dresser, Marie in a T-shirt and me in my shirt and no pants, we shuffled down the hallway wearing next to nothing. Marie wasn’t speaking, but she’d calmed down, she was silent, careful, focused on the task at hand, she jutted out her bottom lip and blew a stray hair out of her eyes. She looked at me pleadingly (but there was nothing I could do, my hands were full too), and then she smiled at me, she gave me a shy, complicit smile from across the dresser, her whole face beaming, maybe the first time she’d smiled at me in five months. Our eyes met and we considered the absurdity of the situation, the madness of trying to haul this piece of junk to the ground floor in the middle of the night. We continued to smile at each other as we shuffled down the hall, our two bodies on each side of the dresser moving in unison, bound together, united, close to one another, as though we were dancing, borne along by the dresser’s own force which, like a song or tune, imposed its rhythm on us and dictated our speed, with only a couple of feet separating us, joined in the intimate promiscuity of this impossible task. There was a mutual feeling of complicity, of affection even, an attraction drawing us together, communicated through our eyes and spreading down to our hands, an invisible pull, a sort of magnetic charge, strong, powerful, ineluctable, as if, during the five months of our separation, an irresistible swell of emotion had been rising in us undetectably that could only end with us in each other’s arms this night. Marie’s pain that night could only be assuaged with her in my arms, she had an irrepressible, physical need to be comforted, to be caressed and held, to feel loved, cared for, and perhaps I also needed this, the fear and concern I’d felt this night gave me the same need to hold and caress her since the moment I stood by her at the window, when I was incapable of taking her into my arms immediately to console her, hold her body tightly against mine. We stopped there in the hallway, put the dresser down at our feet, and we were looking at each other in the half-light, speechless, but we understood each other, we’d always understood each other. I loved her, yes. It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.

  I’m not sure if I was the one who approached her first, gently closing the small gap that separated us, or if it was she who had tacitly beckoned me on by taking the first step in my direction, but we were facing each other now, motionless in the half-light of the hallway, silent, we were looking at each other with infinite intent. I thought we were going to kiss, but we didn’t, our tongues or lips didn’t touch, we did nothing more than stand there with our bodies pressed together in the dark, our cheeks and necks grazing, like trembling horses, frightened and touched. Without venturing anything bolder, our hands filled with lightness, with reserve, with delicacy and consideration, as if we were dangerously brittle, or our skin scorching hot, and our touching unthinkable, taboo, we barely grazed shoulders and touched each other with only the tips of our fingers, our eyes wild and our bodies sensitive to every touch, I nuzzled my nose into the crease of her neck to breathe in the scent of her skin. Then, like rushing water held behind a dam for too long and suddenly released, we threw ourselves violently at one another, entangling our bodies, locking together in complete abandon of body and soul, holding each other tightly, feeling the warmth, comfort, and consolation of the other, our arms appearing suddenly to be many, hurried, flung every which way, hands soft, feverish, groping wildly, I squeezed the back of her shoulders, ran my hands over her cheeks, her forehead, through her hair. I touched her cheeks gently with my hands, and I looked her in the eyes. The hands and the eyes, the only two things that matter in life, in love, in art.

  Our bodies entangled and our eyes closed, we caressed each other frantically, but we weren’t kissing, we couldn’t kiss, a sort of ban prevented us from doing so, an unspoken rule, imperious and invisible, too many things were converging at this moment, too many emotions, such as pain, concern, and love, all mixing together in our hearts, there must have been a slight lull, a pause to catch our breath, she swept a loose curl from her face, and I saw then a wild gleam in her eyes, a look of freedom, of lust. Her back arched against the wall, her thighs bare under her white T-shirt, Marie was challenging me with her eyes — there was a sort of defiance in her gaze, something taunting, sexual, perverse, as if willing and ready for anything. She leaned back against the wall as if to invite me, and I pressed my body to hers, feeling her pubic hairs through the threadbare fabric of her T-shirt. She had nothing on under her T-shirt, and I slid my hand up her shirt, felt the smooth skin of her quivering stomach under my fingers, our bodies fused together, caught in the moment, she moaned as she dug her face passionately into my neck, her thighs were hot, moist, I caressed her stomach and slid a finger into her vagina, gently, and a shiver, hot, wet, sweet, ran up my spine.

  It lasted only a minute before Marie slipped away gracefully, she slid out of my arms and was gazing at me tenderly in the half-light. Tears had run down her cheeks when I was holding her, and she hadn’t tried to hold them back, nor had she dried her eyes, they were silent tears, almost invisible, tears that had streamed down her cheeks as naturally as a heartbeat or a breath of air. Marie, stunning, her eyes welling with tears in the half-light, Marie, torn between contradictory impulses, a passionate desire competing with her self-restraint, Marie who’d had as much need to give herself to me as to keep her distance, Marie who’d needed to hold me as tight as possible for comfort and consolation and who’d put up no fight against the physical desire she felt rising in her when I’
d taken her in my arms, Marie who’d drawn me to her with that defiant look, as if challenging me to touch and caress her, no sooner had she felt all this than she broke away from my arms, whose clasp she undid with care, as though she’d simply realized the impossibility of loving each other at this moment.

  I hadn’t realized it right away, not immediately, nor shortly thereafter, but much later the thought came to mind, in a flash and by chance, in a sort of panic and shock — in spite of the difficulty, impossibility even, of putting into words what had transpired, what, in the course of my life, had occurred to me in a natural sequence of silent and ineluctable facts, but which, once articulated, suddenly became incomprehensible, or shameful, as, perhaps, certain homicides evoked before an Assize Court, seemingly plausible acts when committed, become shocking, unspeakable, abstract with the passing of time and once placed under the implacable light of words — that this was the second time, that night, that I’d stuck my finger into a woman’s body.

  Back in my small one-bedroom apartment on rue des Filles-Saint-Thomas, the place was deserted, Marie had left. The bed was empty and unmade in the drab light from open window, its top sheet tossed on the floor, wrinkled, balled-up. I bent down to pick it up and saw then in the middle of the bed, on the bottom sheet, two or three drops of dried blood. These were not round, red or regular spots, but rather two parallel streaks, a large and a small one (the smaller was a miniscule replica of the larger), which, after some sort of contact or friction, had spread over two or three centimeters, the stain of which had almost disappeared, its edges hardly discernible, two streaks ingrained in the white cotton of the sheet, my bed marked by two russet dashes in the form of small and skinny cephalopods or of the armored limbs of a shellfish.