She starts squealing like the girls on Canal Plus, so he’ll shut up. And that gives her a funny feeling, to be both directing the film and acting in it. She pushes her fingers down to rub herself, she lets Arnaud enter her, his biker pants, she focuses on the script—Angie, you’ve really got a lot of potential, bitch bitch bitch, soon she’ll start yapping. It feels rough and hard, horribly abrasive, she’s going to die if she doesn’t come. She’s got several minds, several bodies—one in the film, one on the couch, both looking at each other, one putting witty words into Arnaud’s mouth, the other directing the right rhythm for Bihotz’s hips—and a non-stop tick tock of an alarm clock running backwards, counting down this time of hers that is so exasperating, restricted, and fit to burst—
‘You are a strange girl, Solange,’ he says when they get their breath again (in his accent that makes ‘ange’ rhyme with ‘mange’).
He’s got a bit of poo on the end of his dick.
‘I’m so touched, Solange. It’s such a token of your confidence that you have given me right now…’ She’s going to kill him if he doesn’t shut up.
The next day, he leaves very early for the market in the clucking J7, to sell all his chickens. When he gets back they have a huge fight because he wants to give Lulu an injection, he says it’s the only solution, she yells at him that she’ll report him to the cops if he does.
‘Solange, I have to talk to you,’ says Rose’s mother when they’re having afternoon tea at Rose’s house.
She’s always had trouble finding her way around Rose’s house. It’s an old farmhouse that they’ve gutted, in which (like inside a whale) you wander around along ramps, mezzanines, staircases—she’s only just realised this instant that the father’s study is right next to the kitchen, whereas she would have gone the long way round, room after room, unwinding the house like a ball of twine.
‘Is it true, what Rose has told me? Has someone hurt you, Solange?’ What have Rose (and Nathalie) told her?
Rose’s mother is very intimidating. But there’s something in her red boots—this woman gets away with red boots when no one else wears them—something that suggests she might perhaps understand. Don’t we have the right to do what we want? (What do you want, Solange?)
‘Is everything all right, Solange?’
It’s Arnaud. But he lives in Bordeaux now, so everything’s not all right.
‘Do you want to come and live at our place in the meantime?’
At their place? At Rose’s house? But does Rose’s father know about it? There he is in his study, devoted to his Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas. In this house that is full of such beautiful objects. And there are Rose’s parents, who always do everything perfectly, who understand everything about everything. Her brain is completely scrambled—as soon as she has one idea another one comes and skittles it and it just keeps going like that, knocking over every square on the board, one by one; instead of making quick connections, she has to follow the whole path around the board and her brain gets stuck—as if it’s between two mirrors, reflected all the way to the vanishing point, she and Bihotz, she and Arnaud.
‘Seriously, Solange, are you using contraception?’
Peggy Salami changed foster families quite a few times. She left Clèves recently and was placed in a hostel, (apparently) so that she wouldn’t get pregnant (people like that should be sterilised, Georges said). Are they going to leave her with the Department of Human Services?
It’s so itchy down there. Rose’s mother doesn’t seem to understand.
She can feel the corners of her mouth forming creases, the creases that mean she’s going to cry, her chin wobbles and a huge bucket of tears spills, they pour down her like seeds, she points between her thighs. It really is itchy. Perhaps it’s (she’s terrified now) the first symptoms of the disease, the disease where you die in two years?
‘Vaginal fungal infections are common in the beginning, it’s nothing to worry about, just fungi, hasn’t your mother taken you to see someone?’
Rose’s mother opens a little notebook with a silver clasp. She talks on the phone while mushroom propagation is taking place in the humus of Solange’s cunt: cep mushrooms, chanterelles, trumpet of death mushrooms and puffballs. Everything in this house is clean and tidy and scrubbed—it’s another world, a world where these things down inside her, these misfit things, do not grow.
Arnaud is singing over the top of the radio: ‘Like a virgin, oh oh oh,’ he’s hamming it up, he’s so funny. ‘That Madonna chick has really got it. She overdoes the virgin so she can play up the whore. She’ll have an amazing career. If you can’t see the difference between her and Kim Wilde, you’re just not with it.’
He’s forgotten to put in his contact lenses and he’s driving with his nose against the windscreen. She’d like to stroke his back (but she doesn’t dare). There’s a copy of Le Monde scattered under the seats. She doesn’t know any other boy who reads Le Monde. This is Clèves, fishing competitions, new roundabouts, diamond wedding anniversaries and cattle shows.
Kim Wilde is sweet, she’s nicer. And I think she’s much more attractive.
‘Who gives a stuff about attractive? It’s her tits that matter.’
He’s making fun of the local louts. A bit like Madonna does with women. That’s the problem when everything he says is tongue-in-cheek: you never know exactly what he’s saying.
Kim Wilde shows her bra.
‘I’m sceptical. Kim Wilde is your typical good girl. A bit wimpy, not wild, the sort of girl who gets all reproachful after you’ve done it, and if you marry her she’ll think she’s won the lottery. Madonna will end up leaving you, but she’ll be fun while you’re having her.’
The car is heading towards a world without Kim Wilde. There’s still time to go back to the cave with Bihotz (Bihotz loves Kim Wilde almost as much as France Gall, and he would know what she’s trying to say, that the most important thing is kindness).
Arnaud lets go of the gearstick for a second to take her hand and plants a kiss on it, she could die of happiness. Then he puts it on his fly, she rummages inside boxer shorts full of pubic hair and pulls out the dick, she jerks him off the way he likes it, not too hard, not too tight.
He parks behind the new apartment block they’ve built on the site of the old gravel pit. In the village, the d’Urbide chateau used to be the only building over two storeys. This is not the moment to be wondering about the passage of time, right now he’s urging her to suck him off as well, ‘If you love me, you have to swallow.’ Whether or not that’s tongue-in-cheek, he holds her head firmly so she doesn’t miss a drop. Afterwards he’s kind enough to offer her a piece of chewing gum. So that when the door opens and Jennifer greets Arnaud with a peck on the lips, she is chewing a gob of about fifty million spermatozoa, the population of France, strawberry-flavoured and swirling around in her mouth.
She’d like a glass of water. She throws the chewing gum in the bin in the kitchenette. Then she retrieves it and sticks it inside a napkin ring monogrammed Jeannine.
‘I’m sceptical,’ says Arnaud. It’s his new word. He’s commenting on the wallpaper that was hung on the weekend by the fabulous Jennifer’s parents. It’s yellow. The curtains match, there’s a black sofa bed, yellow and black pouffes, a low wicker table, and a hyperrealist poster of an enormous dripping tube of yellow paint. It looks like a painting on top of paint. It makes you a bit dizzy. As if the picture was a representation of itself. Or like when you see a truck transporting a truck. Or like when you think about thinking. It also vaguely conjures up sex. She’d have trouble explaining why.
She’s hungry but there’s nothing in the fridge. Not even a crust of bread. She’s never seen a kitchen like it. From where she’s standing, she can see Arnaud and this so-called Jennifer, sitting side by side sharing a beer. They look a bit like Solange’s parents did when they were young, in their black-and-white wedding photo. From the louvre window she can see Arnaud’s
car (actually it’s his mother’s car). She feels like Kiki the soft toy monkey, nothing about any of this is really true.
They’re supposed to be waiting for a guy called Fred and a guy called Jean-Marc who have apparently gone to find some dope, and also someone called Stéphane, who’s in charge of booze. Véro should be arriving on her motorbike but it’s not definite. Arnaud opens some more beers. ‘Come and sit with us, Angie.’
‘Is that her real name?’ Jennifer asks.
Much later, another Jean-Marc (not the one they were expecting) comes by to tell them that there’s a party at Franck’s but that he doesn’t have a car, and a guy with a girl studying nursing has set himself up in front of the cassette recorder to listen to the latest Police single, and Arnaud and Jennifer haven’t stopped kissing on the sofa bed. But she’s got to be broad-minded, Jennifer is in Year 12 and she’s Arnaud’s official girlfriend (in addition to the one from Bordeaux). She, Solange, is the secret favourite (not to mention how young she is). The only one who knows—she’s the one he tells everything to.
That’s what he explains to her in the kitchenette when she demands that he take her home. She was allowed out to midnight (and only because she told Bihotz that she was going to see Flashdance with Nathalie). Arnaud tells her that she’s pissing him off with her whole Cinderella line. To which she replies that in fact she has to go home to be with her boyfriend. With whom she lives.
One thing leads to another and they’re in the car park behind the building and Arnaud is saying again that he is sceptical, really sceptical. That he doesn’t know who to trust anymore. Or what he should believe about how things seem. That it’s not going to be possible. He doesn’t share. How can a girl like you be shared? Who is the other guy?
She describes the surfer with the peeling lips and Arnaud pins her against the car, and while she outlines the plans for their trip and how they’re fitting out their van, he has already pulled down her underpants and the car door is very hard against her buttocks—she can’t feel much else but it’s terribly exciting, metal on skin, glass and flesh, hot and cold—and the thrilling possibility that Jennifer is looking out the louvre window of the kitchenette! Or that someone will suddenly turn up in the car park!
He starts again a bit further away (in the Clèves forest). Arnaud says that he wants her all to himself, that it’s driving him crazy. She lies back and moans: she is beautiful, desirable, a woman, a woman with you, I finally felt like a woooman, like in that Nicole Croisille song her mother loves, she arches back a bit more and her hair catches on the windscreen wipers, help, he’s ramming it into her even harder, it hurts a bit and her coccyx is going clunk-clunk on the icy bonnet, but as long as he looks at her, and doesn’t make a mess of it, as long as he screws her, gives it to her, works her over properly. As hard as she tries to picture herself in her mind—to picture the whole set-up, expanding the number of images and imagining herself as both Arnaud and this woman offering herself—she gets nowhere. Too bad, anyway he’s finished.
‘Where will we go?’ Arnaud asks.
She’s recaptured that marvellous connection with him. Where they can talk so well together about things…The future will take shape at last, they’ll be together again: after all these twists and turns they will finally be able to live together in love, he’ll be all hers, and she’ll be all his.
Why don’t we go to the sea?
He thinks that’s a great idea. He’s seeing the real Solange now. That’s it, now he really understands her: romantic and whimsical, funnier than he’d expected, and more seductive too. He must love her, for sure. Otherwise he wouldn’t be driving this far.
The road heads out among the lighthouses. Villages, fields, villages. They’re singing along to a Michel Jonasz song, Even one day spent without her, It’s sorrow, And my heart on the end of a string, Hanging, he’s holding the steering wheel with one hand and sticking his other hand in her pussy. It hurts a bit (his guitarist’s nails) but it’s funny too, she’s never seen anyone driving in this position before. And the storms passed and we were…the creeks and the cliffs, Ice and a furnace, Heat from the embers. This is real life, a man, a car and singing. In the moonlight the sea stretches the windscreen to the size of her happiness—she’s made it, this is exactly what she wanted, her heart filled with dreams of the sea, sensuality, and a future of tough times followed by peace.
The sand dune is all sand (not even a tiny bit of grass so she can avoid getting itchy). She lies languidly on his shoulder listening to him breathe over the murmur of the waves. The Whole Universe. What her mother talks about, but for real. They’re part of the cosmos and the stars are twinkling, and if they set out straight across the water they would see the Statue of Liberty rising up into the sky. ‘Montreal is straight ahead,’ Arnaud corrects her. Montreal is fine too.
In the car she tries discreetly to get rid of the sand; it’s set off her thrush again.
The sun is rising when he drops her outside Bihotz’s house. There’s a light on in the kitchen. She’s in for it.
Bihotz’s face is all puffy from crying. Lulu is on the formica table, wrapped up in Madame Bihotz’s patchwork quilt, stiff as a board.
Damn.
She’ll wait until tomorrow (well, whenever she wakes up) to tell him that they’ve got to stop. In the meantime, she’s dying of hunger, because she and Arnaud didn’t eat at all. She gets out some leftover chicken from the fridge (‘wait, let me heat it up for you’), it’s a bit awkward eating in front of him (and not that appetising with Lulu dead right there, but he’s in the middle of wiping everything down with bleach).
Poor Monsieur Bihotz. She was especially kind so he’d have happy memories of her. It was a bit weird doing it so quickly after Arnaud. Perhaps the two sets of sperm cancel each other out? Like in a physics class, when you put water in a test-tube with oxygen and it explodes, leaving just a tiny bit of vapour?
It’s touching when he snores, his nose still blocked from being so emotional before. He so deserves to be loved. And perhaps in another life, in other circumstances—but it’s like his dick doesn’t really make him into a man. In any case not a man like her father or like Arnaud. It’s tiring to think about all that. She tries to get up, she doesn’t want to sleep there—she’s got to get up.
Dear Monsieur Bihotz,
I have left with Arnaud. I have chosen my path. I’m sorry but I’d rather tell you because I don’t want to hurt you. I send you my sincere condolences for Lulu. I know it will annoy you that I’m saying this but you know soon you’ll get another replacement dog. I wanted to thank you for all the good times we’ve had together. Forget me and start a new life. I’ll never forget you. Lots of kisses.
Solange.
P.S. Don’t make a fuss or else I’ll tell everyone.
♥♥♥♥
Bihotz is in his garden, he looks like he’s getting on just fine. He’s banging and tapping on something.
Arnaud said he’d be coming. She doesn’t know yet whether she’s going to be living in Bordeaux with him, or if he’s got somewhere else in mind (because of his official girlfriend).
Her heart leaps when she hears the garden gate open, but it’s her mother, who is dropping by briefly to collect the mail and check that everything’s okay.
‘Are you eating properly?’ Her mother has lost a lot of weight (or got old). She’s found an internship for herself in a language camp at a farm, French immersion for students (except that because of the shop she’s saddled with two hours of driving a day). Being married is one of the main reasons behind her amputating herself from her roots, what with the scorn Solange’s father has for everything she is, all her values—for the way she lives her life like a tourist, as he calls it, and for what he claims is her colonialist vision, yes! As well as the scorn he has for the female experience. Thank goodness she can relax knowing Monsieur Bihotz is here. He shouldn’t worry. Papa must be sending him a cheque soon. She’ll visit them again soon when she has more time. Give me a big
kiss, my darling. Lots of kisses for my big girl. Everything will be better very soon.
She could even come and live at the language camp, on the farm.
Lulu is dead (she tells her mother on the doorstep).
‘Poor Monsieur Bihotz. Be kind to him. I trust you.’
He’s still banging away outside. Perhaps he’s weeding—with more fervour than usual? From her bedroom window, she can see him under the oak trees. He’s digging a hole. Breaking up the earth with huge swings of his spade. Acorns, last year’s leaves, the spring catkin flowers. His big frame sends everything flying as he mulches it all up.
Did he find her letter? She put it under his pillow. And what if he tells everyone? What if she got sent to reform school? What if they took her away from Arnaud?
Their eyes meet, she quickly shuts the curtains with Statues of Liberty all over them.
Monsieur Bihotz is in hospital. He drank weedkiller. Rose’s mother tells her, with a funny look on her face. Apparently he drank weedkiller on purpose. And if he doesn’t die he’ll probably lose his kidneys.
Kidneys are for peeing. And you can eat them.
Her brain is frozen, congealed in a white sauce. She has a vision of herself back at the restaurant with him, her plate of kidneys in front of her. She’s always regretted not ordering the confit de canard. The girl at the next table, the birthday virgin, had ordered the confit. Perhaps everything might have been different if she had. Perhaps then Bihotz wouldn’t have the kidney problem. But if Stalin, let’s say, hadn’t gone to Yalta, it wouldn’t necessarily have changed the world, given that it would have been a different world.
‘What could make an old bachelor like Bihotz behave like a schoolgirl? Don’t tell me it was that old dog dying? People can be way too sentimental.’
Rose’s father was very disturbed (so they say) by what Delphine did. Anyway it’s nice to be able to walk around under his watchful eye without feeling judged or worried about getting a bad name (the worst thing would be for this man to think of her as being like Slurp or, worse still, like Delphine). According to Rose her mother is sexually frustrated. You wouldn’t think it looking at Rose’s father.
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