Bye Bye Blondie
Page 14
“I often think about you, Blondie. I wonder how you’re doing. I was so sad, you know, when you never replied to any of my letters, never called.”
“Memory failing you again? You should think yourself lucky I’ve even agreed to dine with someone who’s on TV. I’d forgotten you called me Blondie.”
“Does that bother you too?”
“No, I like it.”
“I’d forgotten how aggressive you can be. It makes me laugh. I can relax when you get cross, I always used to, back in the day.”
“Ah well, don’t worry, I’m still aggressive all right.”
“It’s weird, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Stop kidding. I’ve put on weight, my skin’s shot to pieces, I’ve lost one or two teeth, my fingers are yellow with nicotine, my hair’ll soon start falling out. You must have got a weird picture of me fixed in your brain if you think I haven’t changed.”
He looks hard at her, head to one side, agrees, and his big smile shows off his perfect teeth.
“You’re right, Blondie, you’re a realist. That must be why I want to fuck you so much.”
“You poor pervert. What brings you to Nancy anyway?”
Gloria has answered him quickly and leans against the back of the seat, lighting up while he explains how it works, making TV shows in provincial France. She listens, amused, relaxed, not fearful. At least that’s how it looks on the surface. Inside, there’s total panic and alarm. She heard perfectly well what he said. She’s playing for as much time as possible.
The restaurant where he takes her impresses her and prompts a nervous burst of laughter. Between two hiccups, she manages to say, “I didn’t know people were allowed to SET FOOT in here . . .”
“If it bores you, we can get room service.”
“No, it doesn’t bore me at all. But it’s strange. It feels like eating in a museum. Quite funny, really. Not ideal for your digestion, but funny as an experience . . .”
Then she collapses laughing again. Nothing in this place is normal, not the waiters, not the chandeliers, not the seats, the napkins, the glasses, the plates, the tablecloths . . . It’s as if everything is labeled refined, elegant, so overpowering that it’s stifling. She regains her composure, clears her throat, and has the distinct feeling that she’s a woman from the backwoods lost in some remote palace.
Three waiters stand around their table. It’s impossible to drain her glass without one of them hurrying to refill it. She leans toward Eric and whispers, “Are they going to stand behind us all night?”
He nods and remarks with a blasé expression, “They’re not listening. Between ourselves, I don’t think they could care less what we’re talking about.”
She sits like Tony Montana in Scarface, back braced against the chair, thighs apart. She smiles.
“I daren’t even drink the water in my glass. Understand? You’re too used to it. Do they serve beer here?”
He doesn’t take his eyes off her. He’s acting as if he’s an attentive suitor. It has been years since any man treated her this way. As if she were an enchanted creature. Strange, not unpleasant, but somehow odd as an atmosphere. He’s attracted to her, and it doesn’t wear off. On the contrary, the more they relax, the more considerate, playful, drawn to her, and seductive he becomes.
He tells her his life story, with much name-dropping of celebrities, the way she might talk about the habitués of the Royal. She’s on the lookout, but she can’t detect any affectation, it’s just what his everyday life is now, with people in his profession. He often repeats that he feels lonely, insisting on it: lonely at home, lonely when he goes on holiday, lonely in the morning, lonely with all his success, and lonely with his depression. He doesn’t seem to be doing it on purpose, but this solitude comes up as a leitmotif.
In the end she says, “Come on, don’t do a Kurt Cobain on me. You look pretty good, things can’t be as bad as you say . . .”
Eric finds that hilarious, like everything she says. Gloria is taken aback by the way the evening is turning out. Big surprise that she suddenly wants him.
She is torn between waking him up: “Hey ho, this is twenty years on, I don’t have this effect on anyone.” And another wish, just as tempting, to take advantage of the situation, without making a fuss, without thinking too much. Since sooner or later she’ll have to sleep with a man who isn’t Lucas. So it might as well be a guy who’s dying to do it. And it might as well be with a super good-looking guy with an impeccable suit, expensive shoes, and who’s shaved recently. She can’t make the connection between the man sitting opposite her and the boy who broke her heart almost twenty years ago. Some of his gestures, though, touch off something in her, like an electric shock, and make her incapable of reasoning more than a minute at a time, and her desire for him is so great that it surges up in waves and completely undoes her. It’s his fault, she tells herself in an effort to calm down, he should have been less explicit.
How long has it been since she felt so light? Everything had become tragic, serious, gloomy. How long ago since she felt herself deeply moved? Boom, a magnetic boom deep inside, an enjoyable feeling of loss of control.
“You turn me on even more than I remember, and even then, in my memories it was pretty good. I’ve been wanting to get you into bed since we met in town in the rain, haven’t thought of anything else the whole time.”
“Concentrate on something else, we’re not going to start at the table. Or maybe yes? I don’t know the local customs. I don’t have any place of my own. Do you have a room in the hotel?”
She’s talking too much and too fast, she empties her glass and holds back.
To anyone observing them from a distance, Gloria simply seems unfazed by his suggestion and is giving as good as she gets. They might also simply think she’s had a bit too much to drink.
“BUT YOU DON’T have a girlfriend? Why not? Christ, you must be difficult.”
The bedroom is in the same style as the restaurant: improbable. Gloria walks around the huge room and looks down from the window at Place Stanislas. Leaning her forehead on the glass, she thinks in the future she’ll always think of this moment, this view from above, every time she crosses the square.
“You’re lucky you left Nancy. Such a little town. I feel I’m so useless to have stayed here.”
Eric takes a shower as soon as they reach the room. He’s left her a silver tube full of coke: “While you wait.”
“Okay, big boy, take your time then.”
She lays out the longest line she’s ever had all to herself, and it represents about as much as she’s ever taken since childhood. When he comes out of the shower, she feels relieved that he’s fully dressed. He returns her question.
“And you don’t have a man in your life?”
“If I did, it wouldn’t be reasonable to be here, would it?”
“But seriously, money apart, you’re really unhappy?”
“Doesn’t seem to be in the stars for me. When we were kids, we already thought I wouldn’t be happy. But we didn’t realize quite how disturbed I’d be.”
“What happened to you?”
“Well, nothing. That’s the point, nothing. Apart from watching some of my friends die, some getting to be complacent prigs, others getting into terrible messes, others trying as hard as they could and still getting nowhere. If it had just been me who was a failure, I’d have said it was up to me to get a grip. But it wasn’t anything personal. Nothing goes right for me now. Like lots of people, you’ll tell me. I don’t like the euro, don’t like CDs, computers, email, I don’t like the way things are now, I don’t like modern bands, I don’t like my face, I can’t stand the tarts prancing around on TV, I don’t like working . . .”
“Hush, it’s all over, I’m here now.”
“Oh, big deal, that really comforts me.”
Gloria points at the long line of coke she’s fixed him on the walnut coffee table. He rubs his eyes, then dares to say, “Shall we fuck first?”
“Oh yeah, that was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t have to. You don’t want to?”
“Why should I feel I have to? Are you thinking of paying me or something?”
“I didn’t want to come on too strong.”
“Well, you are, make no mistake, you are coming on strong. And if you want to pay me, well, if the price is right, I won’t take it amiss, you know.”
She’s still playing for time with this kind of banter, but she knows she’s going to have to do it. She practically wrenches the door off the minibar opening it, goes into ecstasy over the minibottles of Jack Daniel’s, drinks two, and feels him come up behind her, take her around the waist and pull her toward him. She tells herself she’s way past the age for her heart to be pounding like this, and lets herself fall back.
A really enormous bed, with a mattress half-soft, half-firm. Eric must have slept with millions of girls, or perhaps he just met one who explained things to him. Whatever it was, he has become a leisurely, expert, and considerate lover. He keeps his eyes open, she likes seeing that look, it holds both vice and trust. Gloria goes through all the motions, makes the right sounds and fakes it, without really committing herself. She doesn’t let go for a second. Because the situation is so strange, because she’s taken too much cocaine, because she is suspicious. There’s a feeling of arousal but it’s distant. She looks around the bedroom, which is several times bigger than any apartment she’s ever lived in. She looks at his wristwatch, a heavy one in precious metal. She strokes his shoulders, and low down on his back. She agrees to try everything, turn every which way.
The geopolitical debate going on between the sheets gives her the weird impression that for the first time she’s gone to bed with a grown-up. While still moaning and wriggling, she is trying to work out what makes it different, now that they are naked in bed and fucking, what makes him different from anyone else.
It’s his attitude, his gestures, everything she knows about him. It both attracts her and paralyzes her at the same time: an adult, a man. This is a grown-up story. She’s aroused, but it scares her stiff, she’s afraid not to meet expectations. Bombarded with thoughts running through her head. After a while, she starts to move her pelvis more sensually and faster, dancing at the end of his prick and moaning in a convincing way. She’s in a hurry for him to come, then they can stop fucking and snort some more coke.
He sends down for a bottle of champagne. She doesn’t know whether she thinks this is a ridiculous or a marvelous idea. She’s wrapped in a white bathrobe belonging to the hotel, never has she felt anything so soft and comfortable. She purrs with delight. He’s as pleased as punch, absolutely ecstatic now that he’s had his pleasure. He tells her it hasn’t been as good as this in twenty years, no other girl comes up to her ankle, he fumbles in his case and finds a tiny knife with an ivory handle to cut some fine lines of coke. A practiced hand. He’s radiant, compliments spill out of his mouth, he’s so delighted at finding her again. Not that she really wants to bring up the subject, but sooner or later it’ll be inevitable.
“If you have such a good memory of how we were as kids, why did you dump me like that?”
She’s surprised to see that he is genuinely embarrassed, as if it had happened last month. She’s also surprised to feel her own anger rising intact inside her, and she adds, bitingly: “How could you do it? How could you do a thing like that, Eric?”
And then he bursts into tears, this grown-up, this monsieur, he breaks down and offers any amount of excuses. Not explanations, but excuses and regrets. The only real reason he manages to give is still the same after twenty years. “I couldn’t do that to my mother.”
“I’ve missed you so much.”
“That’s funny. You must have met lots of people in your television world.”
“People don’t wipe each other out. Not necessarily. You and me, that’s my secret history. And it matters . . .”
“You didn’t answer, a while back, when I asked you if you had a girlfriend.”
“They make me sick. I always seem to go for girls who are totally impossible.”
Gloria bursts out laughing.
“Ah yes, that certainly fits, you always liked really difficult girls, I can vouch for that.”
More champagne, more coke, a bit more sex, she’s agreeing with everything he says, she’s even started to make a little speech saying there isn’t so much difference between someone on benefits and a TV presenter. She doesn’t believe a word of it, but the drugs have pummeled her brain so hard that all her ideas are in tiny fragments. Next day, when she’s sobered up, she’ll be ashamed at talking such a lot of nonsense.
Very soon, the coke starts to affect her throat, she has to have some more, and it’s still not enough to calm her anguish. For the first time in her life, there’s more than she can absorb. Lying on her stomach on the bed, she says, “So much, it’s kind of comforting.”
He comes and sits astride her back and massages the nape of her neck. A sudden flash of lightning, a mental chasm, twenty years ago, the same position, the same gestures. How happy she’d been with him, the calm it had brought, the sweet certainty, the need for nothing else. A feeling of total bliss. For the last time in her life. Suddenly she sees clearly how bitter and lacking in magic the years in between have been. She knew this man at a turning point in time, the last months of maximum innocence. She was already sleeping around, taking acid and drinking whiskey from the bottle, stealing from old women’s handbags, hitting herself with a baseball bat, and she’d thought she’d seen it all, she was an old experienced person. And then this boy, the first and the last, had made her truly happy. Before breaking her in two.
Gloria crosses her fingers and stretches with her arms behind her head, leaning back to declare: “You were always good at being Prince Charming, rock-and-roll style.”
As the dawn breaks, he explains, while rolling some joints of pure grass, “I understand, I do, that you’re still furious with me. I knew it then, when I wrote that letter from the Swiss school, I knew I shouldn’t have. But until I wrote exactly what they wanted me to, they wouldn’t leave me alone. I know it’s hard for you to understand that, because giving in isn’t the kind of thing you’d do. But try to imagine . . .”
“Oh, you know, I did try, at times.”
“I was locked up for two years minimum there. And my mother, with her cancer, I thought I’d never see her again and I was sure it was all my fault . . . Please try and understand, Blondie, try not to be always just seeing it from where you are. I never forgot you, never denied you, it wasn’t a case of ‘wake up to real life.’ I was trapped, they didn’t give me the choice. But I couldn’t get you out of my head, out of my heart. Sometimes, as time went by, I thought I had, but then some thing, some little detail always brought you right back for me. Do you believe me?”
“Oh, I don’t think I care anymore, Eric, it’s too late now. What kind of grass is this? It must’ve grown on Neptune, it’s unbelievable. Don’t look at me like that, it’s no big deal. We’re so far apart now, I’m not angry at you anymore.”
“When you’re in my situation, nobody feels close. That’s what’s so strange.”
“Asking for pity now?”
“When you’re in my situation, that’s just the point, nobody pities you, and that’s so awful in the end. I want to be able to complain like everyone else . . . I have a right to, don’t I? I have to pay a shrink, otherwise nobody in the world will hear my groans. It’s not fair.”
“Oh, cool it, Eric, you’re getting tiring. If with all your cash you haven’t found a shoulder to cry on, it’s because you’re not gifted for it, that’s all. Is there anymore of that extraterrestrial grass?”
They spend the day in the bedroom with the TV on, too exhausted to keep up a conversation. They grind their teeth and see stars under their eyelids, then collapse into an uneasy sleep for a few hours. And that night, Sunday, Eric has to leave. He has to record a show on Monday.
She lies, says no, with the would-be comic face of a girl who regrets it, so as not to have to talk about it. She claims: “No, we just took these fantastic drugs.”
“I can see that, lucky beggar.”
“No, no sex. Can you imagine the kind of girl he can pull?”
Michel nods—a little too fast for her taste. How quickly it resurfaces, the pleasure of receiving compliments.
From the loudspeakers, the first notes of “We Are Family” start to play and she improvises a little dance with her hands, looking dopey. Michel smiles and she asks him: “So, when are you leaving?”
“We’ve started packing . . . Oh, I hate moving, so much hassle.”
“That’s life, you’ve got to get on with it. That’s how it is.”
Then Gloria slumps into drowsiness as he opens a newspaper.
TUESDAY, IN THE post office, an old lady is practically lying across an official’s desk. He is trying to make her understand that she can’t withdraw any cash. He keeps repeating “TOMORROW” loudly and clearly. She’s wearing a shabby dressing gown and has very little hair left. She doesn’t understand. The official explains, at a loss for what to do, “They don’t pay out on Mondays, you’ve only got forty centimes in your account, come back tomorrow, TOMORROW.” She moves away, the next person takes her place.
In the queue, there’s a little kid who’s annoying everyone by talking too loudly, while his mother tells him to be quiet in the soft voice of a perpetual victim. Gloria glances at her and finally mutters: “If he doesn’t hear his mother saying no when he’s four, how’s he ever going to listen to girls who say no when he’s fifteen?” The woman, who hadn’t asked her anything, turns around, at a loss. Taken aback. Visibly, she hasn’t understood what Gloria’s got against her. A black guy in a pink suit is standing stiffly upright, an idiot with a Walkman is listening to Slayer turned up loud, a fat man with a mustache is staring into nowhere. A woman complains that there’s always a line at the post office. Gloria, never at a loss for something to say, looks her up and down and retorts: “Perhaps that’s because you only come here at busy times, you silly bitch.”