I am not kind.
But all the images suddenly rose to the surface.
Everything I had buried for years. The way the events unfolded.
We were in the cafeteria at the modern art museum—the Tate Gallery, that was it, the names are coming back. It was a strange room with mirrors on the walls, so our reflections were multiplied ad infinitum. I was suffocating. We hadn’t said a word to each other for several minutes. We could sense the end was drawing near; I still couldn’t understand when it was that everything had suddenly changed, but it no longer mattered. Our four-month adventure would be ending there, and it was a pity, we could have made a fine couple, but anyway, I was aware of his change of attitude, the hurtful words, and I was withdrawing, accepting the fact it was over. I finished my tea—I had ordered tea even though I hate tea, simply because I was there, in London, and the moment itself was hateful—the smell of it made me feel sick—everything did, suddenly, that city, that country, that language, the man next to me staring absently into the reflections in the mirror. I said, “I’m going back to the hotel,” and there was no answer. I wasn’t expecting one.
My initial thought was that I would pack my bags and take the next train back to France. But when I realized that it would mean spending the night sitting up in an uncomfortable railway car, to be woken at one o’clock in the morning to take the cross-Channel ferry, then disembark at three o’clock in the morning, French time, to take the train from Calais to Paris, change stations in the fog then take another train for Troyes, and reach my destination late in the morning—broken, wounded, in pain,—no, I couldn’t do it. And anyway, I was sure that Philippe would not come back to the hotel. And if he did come back, then it would be to get things out in the open. Or to apologize. Maybe he would want me to reassure him again. He would want me to wait, with my lips against his shoulder. He would want us to be close again. Because, like an idiot, I still had this tiny hope. Not much. But still. I was sure we were missing out on a meaningful relationship. A real adventure. And that it hadn’t even begun yet.
The bed-and-breakfast was in a quiet neighborhood. Bloomsbury. Cartwright Gardens. I can still remember the name of the street. It wasn’t actually a street, but a crescent of buildings looking onto a tiny park with a completely incongruous tennis court, there in the center of London.
We had found it completely by chance, leafing through a guidebook in a bookstore in France. It was more than we could afford, but we decided we’d do without any souvenirs or presents for our friends in Troyes. A fortunate intuition.
I would have thrown everything out.
And yet.
During the night, I went to an all-night corner store and bought some water, a packet of cookies, a few snacks and, almost as an afterthought, a key ring. Two flags, the Union Jack and the English flag, the St. George’s Cross. I kept it for a long time. I wish I could say I had it on me at this very moment now that I’m reminiscing about all that. It would be so romantic—when in fact it was anything but. But I can’t. Valentine commandeered it when she was in high school, for the key to her locker, and she lost it. At the time, I didn’t even think about it. I just argued with her because she’d lost the lock.
And now I miss it. How stupid is that.
So we went to stay at this bed-and-breakfast that was too expensive. The room was old-fashioned and rundown; the sash windows didn’t close properly, the wall-to-wall carpet was patched here and there, and the wallpaper had seen better days—but there was a tiny balcony that looked out on the rooftops. That’s where I sat when I came back alone. I watched the evening descend in the English sky: clouds, swaths of clear sky, a warm wind, purple, blue, pink, yellow. I repeated the proverb I had learned a few years earlier, Every cloud has a silver lining. I tried to find the French equivalent: À quelque chose, Malheur est bon; Après la pluie, le beau temps. Misfortune is good for something; after the rain, fine weather.
I wanted some fine weather.
I sat right on the concrete balcony, my knees bent, my arms around my legs, and I hardly took up any room. I listened to the sounds of the city, the hubbub, and from time to time the dissonant note of an ambulance or the siren of a fire truck. Down in the park in Cartwright Gardens, a couple was diligently playing tennis. She played better than he did. Sometimes she would have him repeat his moves, drive, backhand. Before long they had to stop, it was getting dark.
I could feel a tingling in my fingertips.
I didn’t want to be an observer anymore. Someone who absorbs. Someone who keeps to one side and stares out at the spectacle of the world with indifference. I wanted to be in the world. Really in it. I didn’t want to be an artist. I wanted to be a protagonist. I wanted to live passionately, with love and hate and scorn, I wanted to throw myself on the bed weeping floods of tears, tearing my hair out in despair, jumping for joy, flinging my arms around people, holding their hands, holding a hand—and leading the dance.
Contrary to all expectations, it was a tender moment.
One of those rare moments when you take the time to think about what is all right, and what isn’t all right, and what could change, and what should change: you see the paths forming, and how to make your way past the swampy terrain.
The breakup was definite but I went to bed feeling calmer; I had packed my bag and was ready to go. The next morning I would leave a note on the night table or, if by chance Philippe had come back, I would place my hand on his forehead and say, “No hard feelings. See you around.” Unless. Then we’d have to see. Lay down conditions. Nothing like this, ever again.
I fell asleep in that state of mind.
The window was open, and I was in harmony with the city. Noise, fatigue, but also a tremendous desire for change. A desire to become someone else. Someone good. Or at least respected. The process had begun. It should have gone on naturally, taken its course in the months and years to come. In fact, the birth went very quickly.
And the obstetrician ruined everything.
I can feel my lips tightening with the first signs of the outskirts of Paris.
This is where I live now, the outskirts of Paris, along with hundreds of thousands of other people. But I am not an ant. I know what I want. And above all I know what I don’t want.
You, Philippe.
I don’t want anything to do with you.
Memories overlapping.
What an exhausting trip.
I didn’t need this.
The one thing I dream of, when we get to Paris, would be to find a hotel and sleep in an anonymous, comfortable room, where nobody would want anything from me. I would take the exit behind the Gare de l’Est, the one no one uses—Château-Landon—and book the first available room at the All Seasons, the elevator would be full of Japanese tourists out for a good time, and I would collapse on the bed. And when I woke up I’d be another person.
I really would like to be another person.
I’ve always wanted to be another person. Less disciplined. More intelligent. Brilliant. A meteor. Someone you see whiz by in the sky and you talk about them to your kids years later, all starry-eyed. Someone like Mathieu Coché. And yet it’s strange, when we were teenagers, you would never have expected anything like it. Mathieu was sort of my sparring partner. The guy who comes along with you to auditions to read you your lines, but who never gets chosen. I don’t know what made the difference. Adversity, perhaps. Nothing was easy for him back then, whereas for me, everything just landed in my lap—love, friendship, sex, it was all dead simple. Cécile Duffaut was actually the first girl who ever left me. How could she have done anything else?
I was unbearable.
I remember the end, in London. Don’t think I don’t. You might think you’ve forgotten everything, but that would be blatant hypocrisy. In fact, I’m convinced that people’s ability to remember is much better than they claim.
I wandered around, it was late afternoon. At first I was glad to be alone. At that age it’s hard to explain to the person you
’re with that you might need solitude, that you don’t want to be glued to them twenty-four hours a day. This was the first time we’d been together for whole days at a time. In a foreign city. I suppose it could have brought us closer if we had really been in love. But that wasn’t the case. I say, “I suppose,” because the more time goes by, the more I wonder if I’ve ever been in love. It was as if I was wrapped in a thin layer of plastic that kept me apart from other people. But maybe it’s the same for everyone. Every human being must wonder what it means “to be in love.” What came closest, for me, was a desire to spend my everyday life with another person: morning breath, the coziness of a night without sex, breakfast for two and then for four, X-Factor programs on TV on Saturday evenings. I know there’s nothing at all exciting about any of that.
In fact, I could easily have shared my everyday life with Cécile Duffaut. We got along well. It’s just that when you’re twenty that’s not enough. You dream about things that’ll blow you sky-high, full of incredible passion, you want to be beside yourself with emotion and euphoria and pain, your heart beating wildly. You’re convinced that unless you’re experiencing all that you must be heading down the wrong path, and the relationship is not worth the effort.
And then after a while you realize it’s not going to happen.
So either you become resigned, or you make believe. You waltz around like some nineteenth century heroine, sighing, moaning, weeping—and you lie. And all around you, people call it love.
With Christine there was never any of that. No love at first sight. We hung out with the same group of friends. So we saw a lot of each other and eyed each other and circled around each other for months. I invited her to a party. We went home together. Everything flowed, it was all completely natural. Since then I’ve been thinking of love as something that flows.
Did it flow between Cécile and me?
Yes.
There’s a woman in her thirties a bit farther down the car; she looks tired. A child asleep with its head on her lap.
Yes.
An adolescent nodding his head, listening to some music the other passengers will never hear, but in his ears it’s exploding.
Yes.
An older man muttering to himself while he reads a magazine about the private lives of the rich and famous.
Yes.
And the two of us, sitting next to each other—we could have been a couple. We could have made believe.
But I’m not sure that Cécile Duffaut is the sort of woman who would make believe. She’s recognized me. She doesn’t want to speak to me. She’s right.
I was almost at the hotel. I could see her on the balcony. I didn’t feel like going in, explaining, negotiating, arguing. I thought she would have packed her bags. I went to a pub on the corner of the street. I don’t remember the name, just the color. Red, with gilded letters.
It was starting to fill up with locals. I drank three or four pints. Enough to tear down the language barrier. I fraternized with a group of Brits my age who were planning a trip to France to go girl-hunting, because it was a well-known fact, aah, those French girls, etc.
Jerks.
The kind you find in every country.
You find them mainly in bars, after office hours. Herds of guys, with their coarse laughter, spilling booze on their T-shirts, and saying they’ll do anything to get laid. I couldn’t understand half of what these guys were saying but it hardly mattered. I felt good. I was a jerk. I’m not saying this out of bitterness. Or out of scorn. It’s just a fact.
One of them was making racist jokes about Pakistanis, and I laughed like an idiot. Laughed, maybe, but I was uncomfortable all the same, because back in France I wouldn’t have put up with intolerance. Later that evening I spoke with this guy Andrew, who was quieter. He was getting drunk methodically, to forget that he hadn’t had a girlfriend in over a year. The two of us went on to a nightclub.
It was one of those unlikely sorts of discotheques that you sometimes come across in Anglo-Saxon countries. A church turned into a dance floor. A place of worship, for the body, for appearance. The atmosphere was distinctly different, depending on whether you were in the chapel or the nave. In the nave, the music took up all the space and the light was dazzling; it was crowded and it was hard to make your way to the bar. The bass was pounding in your ears and you couldn’t think straight. Andrew didn’t want to dance. He sat down on one of the wooden pews the designer had preserved. He guzzled beer after beer, staring into space. At one point, he vanished. I can still see his face, just as he was. I picture him married and divorced with one kid, the manager of a mobile phone outlet in a London suburb.
If I saw him in the street I wouldn’t recognize him.
Any more than I’d recognize Kathleen.
Of course not.
Two days later I had already forgotten her. On the train to Paris I thought about the three days that had just gone by and I could not call up her face. Just her dyed blonde hair: you could see the dark roots. Just the opposite of Cécile Duffaut. Cécile Duffaut would never have dyed her hair.
I wonder if Kathleen still feels embarrassed. If in a relaxed moment, say, when she’s at a barbecue with colleagues or in the car with her kids, she suddenly purses her lips and makes a face because her memory has swerved in that direction. Her husband, in the seat next to her, will look surprised. She’ll wave her hand as if to say, it’s nothing. Something she ate. She’ll take a tablet when they get home. It will pass.
And what about me, did it pass?
Yes, it did. That’s the worst thing about it.
I made up a whole bunch of stories.
That in France I was studying to become a helicopter pilot, to rescue stranded mountaineers. That sort of rubbish. And the more lies I told her, the more I started to believe it. At last I was becoming another person. Kathleen hadn’t lost that sulky look she had when I went up to her, but nor had she walked away. She couldn’t help but smile, sometimes, because of my accent. We were in the other room, in the chapel. It was much darker there, with red seats and dim lights. We could hear the music from the dance floor, muted, just the bass causing the walls to vibrate. Around us, only couples in various stages of intimacy. A back room in a church. The England I had hoped to see. Not the one where tourist couples wander through rooms in a museum or stroll through parks pointing at swans and daffodils.
She wanted to dance.
She was wearing one of those black lace dresses that were in fashion. With a leopard skin scarf in her hair. Bold red lipstick. A come-hither sort of attitude. An ersatz Madonna let loose on the streets of London. One among thousands.
At one point she let out a graceless yawn, and I thought that was it, but she said it was just that she was tired, she’d had a rough week, she lived all the way on the edge of London, quite far away, there were no more trains or underground, the taxi would cost a fortune and in any case they would never agree to take her way out there at that hour of the night, was I staying at a hotel?
“Yes.”
“Can we go there?”
“There’s just one problem. I … actually, I’m sharing the room with my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Yes, we came to London together.”
“Ah-hah.”
“But she shouldn’t be there anymore, she was supposed to leave for France this evening.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“Right. Otherwise we can find a room in another hotel.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“I never said you were.”
“Either we sleep at your place, or it’s nyet.”
“What, nyet?”
“Well, come on then.”
I remember our walk through the London night. We didn’t talk. I didn’t even know her last name. And everything she had learned about me was untrue. Anyway, she was no fool. She felt like spending the night with me and, while we were at it, she’d have a place to sleep. I prefer to think it went in that ord
er.
While we were walking, I wondered if I could stop it right there. If I could explain and say, “Actually, Cécile and me, you see … I don’t know what came over me. It’s not right. Can we meet again tomorrow or another day? Really, tonight’s no good, but I would really, truly, madly like to kiss your breasts.”
But the words didn’t come.
It took us half an hour to walk from the cathedraltemple of the night to Cartwright Gardens, and I found myself praying to the Holy Ghost that Cécile really had left in the end, and everything would be easy, we could make it up back in France, I would grovel before her with apologies, I would make promises, and she would never find out a thing about Kathleen No-Name. Or maybe the aforementioned Kathleen would remember a very important appointment at three o’clock in the morning, and she absolutely had to get back to her suburb, she would slip me her name and her phone number, and then she would say tomorrow, same time, and the next day at the same time I would be there, I would have dealt with the Cécile problem, Cécile would be gone, bag and baggage, bye now, air kisses on both cheeks, no hard feelings, right?
Sometimes, when you’re twenty, you don’t really know how to deal with certain situations.
Sometimes, when you’re forty-seven, you’re no better.
I am sitting next to Cécile, and I wish I could tell her I am sorry.
Even if it is no longer the least bit important now.
Even if what is important, now, is that I am on my way to see Mathieu, possibly for the last time.
And that all these years are rising up before me on this innocuous 6:41 train which has just gone past the huge shopping mall at Rosny 2. The Paris suburbs, spread out before me there just beyond the window: I could never live here.
And yet maybe my life would have been better, here.
I cannot stop the stream of images. And yet how I wish I could. I’m worn out. The weekend with my parents was worse than expected. It was the first time I’ve ever found them old, really old, not just older than me, but on the threshold of everything inevitable—physical decline, retirement home, dependency, everything I haven’t wanted to think about until now, everything I have avoided by choosing for a companion an independent man who has no family ties. He cannot imagine living anywhere but Paris, he needs the big city, the capital, the constant movement of crowds, the noise, distraction, anonymity.
The 6:41 to Paris Page 8