Vernon has the skin of an old man. The skin of a man his age. It is something she felt before, with Jean-No. People say men age better than women, but it’s not true. Their skin loses its elasticity more quickly, especially if they smoke and drink. It feels fragile, as though it might crumble between your fingers. She has never understood how young girls could bear to sleep with older men. The soft, supple skin of young men is so much nicer. She finds men her own age repulsive, when their balls hang down and look like fossilised turtle heads. The thought of having to touch them makes her want to throw up. She hates men who pant for breath when they’re fucking, or have to roll over on their backs after five minutes because they can’t carry on, leaving their partner to finish herself off. She loathes their pot bellies and their scrawny grey thighs.
Women evolve with age. They try to understand what is happening to them. Men stagnate, heroically, then suddenly they regress. The older they get, the more love and sex are linked to childhood. They long to whisper baby talk to girls who look like children, to do the naughty things boys do in playgrounds. No-one wants to hear about an old man’s desire, it is too embarrassing.
The more she drinks, the more she thinks that Vernon has aged well. He was always a laid-back kind of guy. All she would have to do is open a bottle of whisky and something was bound to happen. She knows that, when she’s drunk she forgets about her body, about how undesirable she has become. But though in theory the concept of sex is still tempting, in practice it is depressing. She completely lost her libido a few years ago and, to be honest, she has done very well without. They listen to Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”. Emilie did not know what to pick from her record collection. Looking through it to see what she could put on, she is irritated to realise that she had not listened to anything new or interesting for years. She no longer cares.
“Remember when you used to listen to Edith Nylon non-stop?”
“I don’t know what became of them. I’ve never been able to find their records on the internet.”
“Haven’t you got Snapz Pro? I’ll set it up for you when you’re done cutting my hair.”
“Did you leave all your vinyl back in Quebec?”
“I sold it all on eBay. After the shop went belly up, that’s what I lived off. Besides, you can stream everything on the net these days.”
“I’ve got some auburn dye left, do you want me to do your grey?”
“That would be great. I love it when you touch my hair.”
They have dinner, sitting side by side in front of the T.V. With the cut and colour he looks much better. The fucker, his eyes are as grey and as beautiful as always. She does not wait for him to finish eating before pouring herself another glass and, muttering that she is exhausted, folds out the sofa bed then shuts herself in her bedroom. At twenty, she would have felt guilty that Vernon was living on the streets while she had a cosy flat. She would have felt obliged to suggest he stay for a couple of days. Time was, her apartment was a crash pad for friends who were quick to turn their backs as soon as they had no need of her. She’s sick and tired of fucking poets. Of guys too sensitive to put in a day’s work. No-one ever gave a shit about her vulnerability. Emilie gives thanks for therapy, it has taught her to close her door now and then, it is thanks to therapy that she is still in the game. It doesn’t suit her to have him stay here, she has no need to justify herself, still less to feel guilty.
BARBÈS IS SWARMING WITH PEOPLE FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, he elbows his way through the crowds, rucksack slung over his shoulder. Bodies are on the alert, looking for money. Cartons of cigarettes, fake perfumes and handbags, people grab at his arm, eager to show their wares, he plays a guy in a hurry so he can avoid making eye contact with the men and women who try to engage him. He walks quickly, he knows that once he passes Pigalle it will be easier to move around. The Japanese, Chinese and German tour buses have not arrived yet. The Moulin Rouge looks like a cardboard film set. The Elysée-Montmartre is still a burned-out shell. The streets of Paris are a souvenir dispenser. He has always hated the place de Clichy, too much racket, too many cars.
Yesterday’s sun has vanished, it is cold and he is hungry. The familiar feeling of an empty belly. When he could stay at home, it did not bother him. Emilie’s idea of breakfast is girly cereals, things that keep you regular and taste like hay, he stoically ate a couple of spoonfuls, afraid it would give him a pressing urge to shit. Last night, he nipped into a McDonald’s for a quick wash. But most of them have keypads on the toilet doors so that people like him don’t have it easy.
Emilie’s attitude is like a metal stake through his chest. Right up to the last minute, he was sure she would give him a set of keys to her place. At least for the day. She could tell he was in dire straits. On the pavement, she stuffed a couple of twenties into his hand, careful not to look him in the eye, and headed to her Métro station almost at a sprint. Seeing what Emilie has become is the saddest thing he has ever known. There is something rank in the air she breathes, something rancid that seeps into her and contaminates her energy. That said, she has become sexier with age. She is not as fresh-faced, she’s put on weight, but she carries it well. Her confidence makes her attractive, she was a bit of an airhead back in the day.
He haggled like a madman for her to lend him her MacBook. He felt ashamed, nagging her like that over breakfast – but he had no choice. He needed to get online. In the end, he had to beg. He dug Alex’s videotapes out of his bag and waved them around like they were Moses’ Tables of the Law – “It’s his last testament, Emilie, don’t you get it? I didn’t want to bring it up, but this is one of the reasons I came back to Paris. I’ll leave them with you as security – lend me your laptop for a week, max, and when I give it back, I’ll pick up the videos. I swear, they’re the most important things in the world to me.” She does not need the laptop, she has an iPad, an iPhone and a huge fuck-off thing she uses as a television. She was reluctant, he insisted. Eventually she gave in, disgusted to see him grovelling. He is familiar with the look she gave him – it is the same look he used to give junkie mates who came to hassle him in the record shop because they needed a little cash, “I’ll let you have it back tomorrow, I swear”, and Vernon would reluctantly give in, wanting to be rid of them.
Out in the street, when she took out the two twenty-euro notes, he could have said “What the fuck are you doing?”, instead he looked away and stuffed them in his pocket.
She was angry with him, really angry, for not calling her when Jean-No died. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would be a big deal for her. Jean-No never talked about her. Never.
Passing a Starbucks he wonders for the umpteenth time what is so special about the place that there are hundreds opening all over Paris. He goes in, it’s like McDonald’s but more homely, the smell of fries replaced with the scent of moist muffins. He finds everything surprising, from the baristas’ outfits to the ordering system. But he realises he has just stepped into dope-smoker’s heaven: sweet treats, plush sofas, soft music, subdued lighting – if weed were legal, they could turn the place into a “coffee shop” and everyone would want to live here. He talks to the young woman at the counter, there is no-one waiting behind him. She is about twenty, a pretty black girl with high cheekbones, eyebrows that have been savagely plucked, and a warm voice. Vernon wants to know everything there is to know about the coffees on the menu. She answers coolly, not at all like a girl being chatted up. She talks to him as she would to some dirty old man who’s escaped from the local halfway house and is just discovering the third millennium. He wishes she found him attractive, found him unsettling, he would like to move in with her, spend the winter in her bed. But nothing about her manner is encouraging. He leaves with a serious black coffee for €2.60.
Slumped on one of the sofas, he plugs in the laptop and catches his reflection in the screen. At least Emilie made a decent job of the haircut. He looks around the café. The difference between this place and a real bar is the bar itself. What mak
es a bar a bar is the actual bar. Otherwise you might as well be in a tearoom. It is thanks to the counter that you feel able to walk into a bar alone, there’s a space there waiting for you. There was a counter in his record shop. A place for people to prop their elbows and perch for hours, talking mostly to themselves. The antithesis of the psychiatrist’s approach: standing, facing the person you are speaking to, with no time limit. God knows, he listened to a lot of shit in the twenty years he ran the record shop.
He logs in to Facebook and posts a video of The Cramps live at Napa State Mental Hospital, a blindingly solid track, guaranteed to solicit as much sympathy as possible. Posts about Alex’s death have blossomed during the night. May he rest in peace, fuck him and his shitty stadium rock, may he find the end of the rainbow, and everyone is posting their personal photo, their own little anecdote – I met him in a bar, he was reading Novalis; I slept with him; I was the inspiration for such-and-such a song; he once gave me a stick of chewing gum; I was buying toilet paper, he was buying ham; I saw him one night completely smashed and bought him a beer; I saw him lying in the street in his own shit and I felt sorry for him; he was a gifted poet, my heart bleeds for him.
Choosing from his list of friends feels complicated. There are lots of them. On his timeline, he sees an amazing photo of Harley Flanagan Jr, it’s a story that has been doing the rounds for three months now – Harley Flanagan Jr stabbed the guy who replaced him when Cro-Mags re-formed. He clicks “Like” like a madman. The coffee is not bad, he drinks half a litre of it and completely fucks up his stomach.
FIVE MINUTES IN MONOPRIX AND XAVIER FEELS LIKE BLOWING the place sky high. His local Monoprix is run by fuckwits. It never fails: they wait until the place is full of customers and then tell the staff to stack the shelves. Doing their utmost to ensure it is impossible to manoevre a shopping trolley. They could stock the shelves in the morning before they open, they could do it when business is slack. No, they prefer to do it at peak hours: stack three palettes across the aisle, make it as difficult as possible for the cretinous customers to do their shopping.
All the retrograde fucking packaging winds him up. The thought of guys in offices spending weeks deciding what colours to use on a jar of gherkins . . . all that intelligence gone to waste. Marie-Ange has been busting his balls to do the shopping – and bitching about how he never helps out, how she gets lumbered with all the work, and why should she always have to . . . Always the same patter. The shopping list she texted him is so detailed that it must have taken her more time than if she had done the shopping herself. For God’s sake, she can’t really care this much about the brand of sandwich loaf . . . Right now here he is, like an arsehole, looking for fat-free yoghurts that contain no aspartame, because madame is watching her figure, but aspartame makes her fart like a gasworks.
Xavier feels like giving the fat Arab woman wearing the hijab in front of him a good kick up the arse. Would it be possible, just for once, to walk two hundred yards down the street without having to suffer their hijabs, their hamsas dangling from their rear-view mirrors and their belligerent little brats? A filthy race, hardly surprising everyone hates them. Here he is doing the shopping instead of working because his wife does not want to be mistaken for a maid, and meanwhile these lazy ragheads are strutting around while their jobless husbands are doing fuck-all, taking it easy, getting fat Social Security allowances and spending their days sitting in cafés while their women slave away. If it wasn’t bad enough that they do everything around the house without complaining and go out to work to support their husbands, they still feel the need to wear the veil to flaunt their submission. It’s psychological warfare: they do it deliberately to make the French male realise how devalued he is.
What’s even more depressing is that they’ve got the choice, these Arab girls. Back in the eighties and nineties, they were working everywhere and doing pretty well for themselves – though usually it was obvious that they were just on the lookout for a rich husband, they’re not dumb. But they were working, and they were more successful than most women. Since then, they’ve backtracked. They decided to withdraw from the job market and don the veil so as not to humiliate their brothers. You wouldn’t catch his wife giving up her job to bolster his sense of masculinity . . . Shit. Truth be told, they wouldn’t be in the financial hole they’re in if she did . . .
He is exhausted. Last night has left him completely wiped out. The little digs have festered in his head during the night. He had dinner with Serge Wergman, who suggested he might want to come on board, write a couple of episodes for a T.V. series. They both knew the whole thing was bogus – the scripts were all written years ago, but still the channel can’t decide whether or not to green-light the production, it will probably never happen. The whole premise of the series is for shit – a surgeon falls in love with the drug dealer she’s just performed open-heart surgery on. Wergman is a decent guy, Xavier knows he will get paid. He accepted. He’ll tidy up a couple of loose ends, rework a few lines of dialogue, otherwise his job will mostly consist of suffering through endless, interminable, pointless, deathly meetings with the arseholes from the T.V. channel . . . twenty-four-year-old trustafarians, functionally illiterate, who will run their fat fingers, their bitten nails under highlighted passages and say “See, this bit here, it doesn’t work”. As though the fucktards had the faintest idea of what might grab an audience. The only reason these kids are running the show is because their parents made a few phone calls.
But it’s a living. He’s glad to have anything. He was thrilled that Serge invited him to a high-class Italian on the canal Saint-Martin. They talked about the new collective agreement that was about to be signed and bitched about how the unions were killing art-house cinema . . . And Xavier, knowing Serge also produces low-key social dramas, did not offer the man his unvarnished opinion on art-house cinema. It had been a pleasant enough evening. Until Elsa showed up. On Jeff’s arm. Xavier hadn’t heard they were together. He hid his surprise, but instantly he felt a burning in his gullet, he could not stomach it.
Jeff had been another screenwriter. But two years ago he had moved on to directing. One hundred and twenty minutes of tractors filmed against a louring sky, of factories full of silent plebs with greasy skin and heads bowed. No music – too expensive – no script, the sort of raw film the critics love – because it’s ugly and they’re bored out of their skulls, they truly believe it speaks for the working classes. When the film was released, Xavier couldn’t open a newspaper without stumbling on some rave review and a livid ulcer gnawed away at his entrails. He had not expected that Jeff, a complete nonentity, would pip him to the post. Not a single one of the scripts Xavier has written in the past fifteen years has succeeded in getting financial backing.
Jeff is working on his second movie. He has offered Elsa a role. They arrived together, flanked by a girl with lank brown greasy hair who introduced herself as personal assistant to the director. They all gave little yelps of pleasure at this coincidental meeting when in fact none of them could stand each other. Only Jeff’s pleasure was not feigned. It must have been great for him, to run into a guy he had often worked with and crush him with his shitty little success. He was triumphant. He was not about to pass up such an opportunity to gloat. He wallowed in it, like a pig.
Xavier has never slept with Elsa. He doesn’t cheat on his wife. He’s not the kind to go around saying “I’m a good Christian, me, monsieur”, and then go sticking his cock in some pussy other than his wife’s. He has principles. He was young once and he sowed his wild oats then. These days he is a husband and a father and he keeps his nose clean. But it is more difficult with Elsa than it was with the others. It’s not just that she excites him; she turns his world upside down. He feels the urge to protect her to fall asleep curled around her to ask her about her day he wants to kiss his way down her back make her read Sympathy for the Devil and listen to blues he wants to take the train with her fall asleep in a room with a view of the sea he wants to smell
her scent in the morning he wants to go with her to audition and cheer her up if she does not get the part he longs to celebrate good news by hugging her to him. With Elsa, he wants everything. And it has not gone away. He has had moments of madness like this before, but they pass, one day you see the girl and you feel nothing. Worse, you realise her breath stinks, her complexion is sickly, her voice irritating or you don’t like the way she carries herself. But fate constantly brings him and Elsa together, it never stops. He knows she feels the same. She is simply waiting, waiting for him to make a move. She feels what he feels and she knows why he is holding back. She respects that. Because, she is a decent girl – not some tenth-rate slut who thinks that being “liberated” is an excuse for screwing up other people’s marriages. She is a lovely girl, much too nice to be an actress, and in fact she has had trouble getting a break despite the fact that she is much prettier than most of the cocksucking anorexics you see hanging around on film sets. And it is because of Elsa that, when Jeff said “Let’s all go back to my place – I’ve just bought an apartment – let’s go back to mine, there’s not enough room here, we’ll have something delivered”, Xavier followed the crowd. Jeff has bought a shitty apartment. The guy is obviously hiding something, he stinks of old money and pretends he owes nothing to his family, but this apartment is obviously part of the family inheritance, even a fuckwit like Jeff would not buy such a dump. Though he insisted that it cost him 400,000 euros, just to emphasise that he has the means to pick up anyone he likes. It was a dismal evening. They sneered at Delarue, as though they had only just discovered that the guy was a douchebag who surrounded himself with servile sycophants and would kill his own mother and father to get a story that might make tomorrow’s headlines. Xavier kept his mouth shut – he did not want to screw up his chances with Serge by losing his temper. Or to let Elsa see how disgusted he was. He would have liked to take her aside, to tell her what was on his mind – how attractive he thought she was, how much he thought about her even when they did not see each other for six months . . . Except that saying I fancy you is like asking Can I kiss you. There is only one way to be faithful, and that is to maintain a physical distance. Stay at least three metres from the object of your desire and the chances that things will get out of hand are considerably reduced.
Vernon Subutex One Page 5