Bye Bye Blondie

by Virginie Despentes

  They walk around Paris, she goes with him to buy a jacket. In shops that make her feel so out of place that it verges on panic. Even the bouncers and salesgirls look down their noses at her, as if they own the place. No one is creepier than rich people’s hangers-on. It’s not just the clothes, the prices, the customers, but something about the surroundings, the lights, the rhythms, and the sounds that all say the same thing: we’re above that hoi polloi out there, we deserve the best.

  The prices in the windows look to her like a bad joke. Everything here seems to say that she and all the people she knows are nothing, not just on their uppers, they don’t even exist, because the wealthy can simply afford not to notice them. And here she is, with her minimum benefits, her grubby friends, the IKEA furniture they’re only too glad to have because it means they’ve got a place to live, their petty scrimping and saving to survive. She feels her entire world is crushed by the arrogance of these shop windows, these price tags and these people—old ladies who’ve been face-lifted till they look like zombies. She’d like to be able to laugh at it all. The wealthy hold themselves very upright, convinced of their own importance.

  She waits in front of the luxury delicatessen, Fauchon’s, smoking a cigarette. She looks people up and down as they go in, actively detesting them. Elderly dyed-blonds, all twig-slim with ridiculous little dogs, hordes of frantic Japanese women, young anorexic girls with strained faces, old ladies with white hair and Hermès scarves. The clichés aren’t misleading. Rich people are just like you’d imagine them: weird, ugly, and pleased with themselves. They can spot each other at a glance. Even when one of them dresses down, they keep something about them that says to their equals, “I’m one of us.” She waits for him opposite Colette’s, smoking another cigarette.

  “Come in with me, don’t be silly.”

  “I tell you I’ll freak out.”

  “You look like a horse stamping its foot outside. You’re scaring everyone.”

  She wants to run between the aisles waving her hands in the air and screaming, pushing people over into the displays. Breaking all the glass, the mirrors, the windows. Punching the old hags in the face, kicking the salesgirls, jumping up and down on the fashion victims, smashing the balls of the bouncers.

  “These shops smell of death, they make me want to throw up.”

  “Just one more call and I’ll take you around somewhere different, Barbès district in a taxi if you like.”

  “You’re so droll, ha ha.”

  In fact, she does find him funny. She waits for him in front of Ladurée while he puts up with a long line at the counter.

  She lights up and thinks aloud: “What a pathetic bunch of assholes, if you have to wait five minutes in the post office, you start moaning, but for a box of fancy biscuits at fifty euros a throw, you don’t mind standing in line for half an hour. You are really so unbelievably stupid, down inside your souls you’re poor, just poor sods, hear what I’m saying?”

  From their astonished expressions, she understands that her insults have at least had the merit of surprise. Eric looks down as he comes out with an enormous shopping bag, he drags her away, hiding his smile.

  “Now you’ve had your say, you won’t be so worried how much they cost, you’ll gobble them all up and say they’re delicious.”

  “I won’t eat one of them, hear me, not one! Never!”

  She points at them and pounds her chest, she likes doing that, it resounds. She calms down quickly, because she knows quite well she’ll wolf the lot. Eric sighs.

  “Don’t you ever give it a rest? Too much aggression kills aggression and you’re exhausting in the end.”

  “Yes, but I’m the bomb in bed.”

  “You’re the bomb, period, you freak everyone out.”

  “You love it, I bet. If you wanted someone nice and quiet, you wouldn’t have come looking for me.”

  “So you feel obliged to carry on like that as much as possible?”

  “That’s my style.”

  And she sings him this Johnny Hallyday song, “Je suis né dans la rue,” about forty times a day. As if it explains everything.

  Eric grumbles: “Oh, it’s all the street’s fault, is it . . .?”

  The first days in Paris, the sex is just as bad as that first night. She doesn’t care, she pretends it’s fine and he seems to believe her. But gradually, almost without realizing it, she starts to concentrate, to open up, to reach for him. She allows arousing images to come into her head, she murmurs words she likes to hear, she starts to show what she wants, how fast or slow. He’s considerate, good at it, sensual, and he loves her. In the end, she joins in the game. The first time she actually comes, it’s a few seconds before him. And it makes her go into a long swoon. Because this time it works, it opened up, the dam broke and she can fill herself with him without reserve, no safety net, she lets him have what he wants. She’s not afraid anymore.

  HE GOES OFF to work every day at about ten, and doesn’t get back until they’ve recorded the show, about nine at night. She watches him and talks to him when he’s on their TV. She starts to get interested in the stories, the questions, what he’s wearing, his guests, the audience, the editing . . . she gets fascinated by the whole show. She gradually realizes why people who make TV shows have such a different perspective from the people who watch them. Two populations, quite different. The upper classes in Paris are obsessed with television, the only thing that interests them. Making TV shows, being on TV, knowing how it works. The power of the small screen, its secrets, the money that’s poured into it, the power struggles. Ordinary people simply watch it, with less interest than the ones who make it, and less credulity than the rich like to think.

  When she phones the Royal for something to do, out of boredom, nostalgia, and also out of a sense of loyalty, she feels as if she’s won the lottery. From Jérémy’s delighted tone, she gathers with brutal clarity just how much everyone had thought until now that she was a hopeless case. She’s shocked, because she hadn’t realized that. The people she thought were her friends, now that she’s so far away, it becomes clear they felt sorry for her, as if she were a homeless waif. Even Véronique, whom at first she’d been phoning regularly, is “so happy for her”: “From your voice, I can tell you’re having a marvelous time now.” Gloria doesn’t know what to say, it’s crazy the way these provincials are reassured that she’s back in the land of the living.

  Regretfully, she realizes she must avoid her Nancy friends as long as she stays with him. The trap of congratulations, the bittersweet taste of envy. She starts telling lies, spontaneously, keeps quiet about some events, tries to downplay her pleasure at being with him, as vengeance for everything else, for the years of her systematic downhill slide. She’s afraid of their jealousy, that they’ll make her pay for it when she gets back, and also that they’ll steal what she has. By telling them about it, she’ll give herself away, it’ll become distorted and she won’t enjoy it.

  And yet, it lasts, this fragile, magic moment when they have nothing to blame each other for. Neither of them has shown the other their worst side. For now, they’ve just been playing and making up, with their respective pasts.

  He likes it just as much as when he was a teenager, watching her get into a rage, climb up the curtains, confront people, without being willing to let go or understand. He likes fighting with her. They’re like a couple of Italians, always ready to scream and shout, then hug each other and make completely different sounds.

  Then he takes her in his arms, even as she pulls away, rocks her, and she starts to laugh and grumble, “I don’t want to be in love with you, leave me alone.”

  It’s a warm bath of affection, tenderness, caresses, and sex, everything she’s been missing so much. She’s beginning to trust him, to believe in him differently. Then it starts again, on the slightest pretext.

  “Stop being such a hippie, it’s so tiring.”

  “You talking to me? You sick or something?”

  “Listen to y
ourself, Blondie. You’re NOT in a remake of Scarface, or Taxi Driver, or the Godfather, or Goodfellas. You’re not a man, you’re not in the Mafia, you’re not Cuban or Sicilian, you’re nearly thirty-five, you still talk like some kid who watches too much TV.”

  If they’d been in a bullring and he’d waved a red rag under her nose, she couldn’t have been more furious.

  “So sorry I grew up where I did, you poor mama’s boy! How d’you think you talk, you wimp? Normally? You and your bourgeois friends, you can’t pronounce a syllable without thinking you’re king of the fucking with-it world and you tell me off when I get cross. You’re joking? Tell me you’re joking, you can’t mean it.”

  “Blondie, I’ve had enough of the class struggle every day at home.”

  “YOU started it. You’re the one who doesn’t understand the way you are, NOBODY wants to be like you, I’m sorry, people imitate Tony Montana, not people out of Desplechin movies. Guess why! NOBODY wants to be like you. Everyone would like your money, yeah, but not your pathetic style, get it?”

  And she goes out for a walk. Or the contrary. Other weeks, they stay calm. She likes walking in Paris, it quickly disarms her. She likes the statues of winged lions, gilded eagles, sphinxes, she likes the houses built around the edge of parks, the courtyards, the little round turrets, the roof gardens and the great glass studios. She likes going from a working-class district to an arty one, and then into the really rich parts of town, wide and well lit, where there are no shops anywhere near. She likes the fountains, the Concorde obelisk, the old churches, the angels with swords that turn up unexpectedly, the whole improbable catalog, illogically juxtaposed, with nothing predictable.

  She doesn’t always understand the role she’s playing alongside Eric. And yet, she seems to be indispensable to him, as time confirms. He clings to her, bombards her with text messages and phone calls when he’s out. She thinks she must be his guiding thread, his beacon. He needs a girlfriend, like a kid who’s been left alone, abandoned. He needed her at this particular moment, because he’d been suffering from some kind of massive panic, perhaps because of his success. If she grumbles and flies into a rage over nothing, her tempestuous brutality reassures him, paradoxically it seems to protect him—from ennui, from death, from apathy. He likes it when she yanks girls away from him when they come up too close, he likes it that she pulls funny faces at the dinner parties he drags her to, when she hears the stupid things people say. He likes it when she jumps five feet in the air in shops when she sees the prices of things. She’s an element of the human race he wants to hang on to, his bit of wildness in the world, she feels like an endangered species being protected by this wealthy patron who’s in love with her. She trusts him. She loves it that he manages to live in this big city and get by, talks to people without flying off the handle. That he insists on going to see films that aren’t funny—worthy documentaries—that he believes in the virtues of effort and work done well. Even when it’s to tease him to death, she likes it that he’s like this. That he reads boring, long, books, always trying to find out more stuff, understand better. She loves it that he’s fond of her, that he’s tender toward her when he shouldn’t be, when she’s being super annoying. She loves it that he loves her, and that he contradicts her all the time, opens her eyes to the depressing complexities of life, that he calls her a hippie and a nutty leftist. Both of them have the feeling that they’re looking down on the teenagers they used to be in a benevolent way, catching up for lost time, repairing what was damaged.

  Eric shuts himself up with her at home whenever he can. They lock the doors, touch, have sex, explore each other’s bodies in all sorts of ways, with variations more or less disturbing. It’s lasted a few months. Their epidermises have had time to learn each other, become acquainted, discover each other in every way, desire each other, identify the other’s pleasure, become an extension of each other, mingle, melt, know all the doors that open so willingly now. They’ve had time to unlock each other’s secrets, to roll up and unroll each other.

  It weaves their bodies ever closer. He cradles her, caresses her inside, makes her float, become more beautiful. She feels she was made for this. She wriggles and pulls up her knees so that he can fuck her deeper, so she can feel him inside her, opening the door to her womb and helping her take off.

  He often brings her presents. He likes going to shops or ordering via the Internet. He likes things, just like a kid with toys. Gloria finds it exciting to be treated like a girl from his milieu. It’s such forbidden fruit in her universe, as disturbing as finding yourself being fucked from behind by strangers, with a blindfold on—and discovering you like it. Nobody wants to find out that kind of thing about themselves. She likes having private access to his perversion, his weaknesses, and his dark side. He knows this, he brings out the gift, laughing, “You’re not going to throw this in my face, are you? It’s jewelry, it’s heavy. I’m on air tomorrow, I don’t want to have a scar on my face, okay?”

  She senses that she gives value to his wealth. Added value. For reasons she can’t fathom, he feels guilty, and yet he was brought up with this idea of getting on in the world, upward social mobility, domination. Guilty about conforming, possibly.

  She often can’t sleep at night, gets out of bed at about three in the morning. From their kitchen window, you can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, and it lights up and flashes several times a night. Gloria rolls herself a joint, takes her Walkman, and dances around the apartment, looking at everything and wondering, If tomorrow I decide I’ve had enough of you, would I ever have the courage to walk out and go back home? She starts to understand the women she meets when out with Eric, who are married to repulsive pigs, but who stay and don’t complain. You wouldn’t want to be kicked out when you live in luxury like this. You don’t want to go backward, back to your underprivileged town. So Gloria cultivates her hostility to these people, to their luxury, as if she were grooming her wings. Keeping her faculty of being able to piss off all the same. If ever . . . “Come on, suck me off again.”

  Every morning he jumps on her when he wakes up. Although she explained to him firmly the first days that she’s not a morning person. But he pretends not to hear and she ends up pretending she never said it. There seems to be no limit to their sex getting better and better. If for four days running it isn’t terrific, she starts to conclude it’s over. Then every time, the fifth day, something new happens, an orgasm so stupefying, pleasure coming from some outer space, or simply a torrent of love enveloping them both. She thought she knew all about physical love and he thought he was a stud. They’re like two beginners, amazed at what’s happening to them. He likes it that she’s always ready. In fact, he’s astonished.

  “You know, I can tell you, other women don’t like sex. Maybe for a couple of months and then bingo, it’s over. Don’t believe me? They’re all like that, I’m telling you.”

  “That’s because you’ve only ever fucked bourgeois girls, they’re not brought up with the idea of freedom.”

  “Can’t you give it a rest?”

  AS LONG AS they’re inside their bubble with the door shut against the outside world, things go well. She touches the palms of his hands, feels the softness of his lips, all distress is left outside.

  But regularly they have to go out. Then the fear returns, metal wheels riding along and slicing her flesh down to the bone.

  In the corridors of the metro, the atmosphere’s about as joyful as a waiting room in a slaughterhouse. Discouragement, anxiety, poverty can be read on all the faces, a dark unhappy mass covering everything. Extinguishing their bright gazes, making their mouths turn down at the corners. Ashes and bitterness, burning cinders tended by undertakers, mouths of death thrilled with the smell of fear. The palpable and mystical expectation of an anonymous punishment, because in Paris, more than in the rest of France, people fear bomb attacks. Or some other kind of explosion. The imminent menace is almost tangible, in their bodies. And yet people’s eyes resist, they t
ry to remain calm.

  Because at the same time there’s a real kind of gaiety, energy. Kids laughing, girls dolled up to the nines, drunks guffawing in corners, tramps of the holiest kind. Gloria reads the graffiti scrawled on the billboards with spray cans, anonymous hands that deform the messages, so that for once the posters become interesting. Tell you something different. You never know quite what’s coming.

  In January 2004 poor people of a new kind had started appearing underground in Paris. People you’d never have expected to be there, and who are holding out their hands for the first time. An elegant woman, heavy makeup, in her forties, expressing herself in perfect French, but with a choking voice, standing in the carriage, explaining how many children she has, and what her situation is.

  She’s hawking some magazine produced for the homeless. People turn around to look at her quickly, surprised to hear that kind of accent. She can’t keep her composure, goes on talking in the corridors, the words pour out unstoppably. Her hands are impeccable, she holds herself very erect. The kind of lady you expect to be teaching catechism classes in the vestry, not begging in the metro. Nobody gives her a centime. Farther along, on the steps up to the street, a girl of about twenty, all in black, nice hair, nice shoes, holds out her hand. She looks more like a student than a homeless teenager. Surely she must have a little place somewhere, a room, a wardrobe, a university degree? Sitting on the stairs, leaning against the wall, avoiding people’s eyes, she is begging for charity. An entire slice of the population, educated, brought up to think they would have jobs, has collapsed suddenly, the ground giving way underneath them. They’re not completely resigned, but they’re not exactly on their feet either. Gloria thinks of Paris in the eighties, when she used to beg for money too. Those years seem very far away, and strangely festive, in retrospect.