“But if it was our room, we would have no need to block out the world.”
This seems so impossible to me that I cannot properly imagine it.
“Flowers,” I say, continuing with our game. “I would fill it with bouquets of fresh flowers.”
“I would make it much larger,” says Adèle. And then, remembering the climb up the staircase, she adds, “And I would move it down a floor or two.”
The streaky light from the window catches the dust drifting through the air. The bed linens feel scratchy from overzealous washing. I roll over on my side and Adèle rolls over as well, so we are facing each other.
“I am writing some poems about us,” I say. “About our love. About you.” I say this tentatively because I know that she has often been the subject of Victor’s love poetry, and that she tires of being his inspirational material. “Do you mind?”
Adèle strokes my cheek. “No,” she says. “Make use of me, sweet Charles. Make use of me.” She slides her hand down to my chest, down my stomach, down through the patch of hair surrounding my sex.
And here, right here, I must stop the story for a moment.
It is now that I must tell you my secret.
I WAS NOT ALWAYS a writer, as I said. When I was a young man, I trained as a doctor, went for four long years to medical school, studied anatomy and dissection with the same avid attention I now turn to reading and writing.
I think I first became interested in medicine because I wanted an explanation for my body. I wanted to unlock the mystery of myself. My mother, when I was young and she was bathing me, had simply said that all men were different in that area. When I found the answer in the medical library, in the study of a corpse who had the same condition as me, I lost some of my interest in becoming a doctor and left the academy before I was fully qualified.
I believe that every man and every woman has a secret, and life is first about naming that secret, and then about making peace with it. Adèle’s secret is me—or rather, it is the fact that she is unhappy in her marriage to Victor. Victor’s secret is his desire for a noble birth, which is at odds with his other desire, to express the sentiments of the lowest common man through his writings.
My secret is more visible than both of these—more visible, and more complicated.
I have the sex organ of a man, although it is very small and incapable of becoming erect. I have the sex organ of a man, but on the underside, I have what resembles the sex organ of a woman. The medical texts refer to the condition as hypospadias, an affliction that is linked to hermaphrodism.
Mine is a more extreme case than some, and there is no cure for it. I was born with this condition and I will die with it, and in between I must find a way to make peace with it.
I cannot impregnate a woman. I cannot have what the doctors would call “normal” relations with a woman. But I have finally found a woman who does not want this normality anyway. Adèle is sick of being impregnated by Victor. She wants love without complications, and strangely enough, the complication of my body is the simplest of joys for her. She wants both Charles and Charlotte. More important, she desires both Charles and Charlotte.
My sex is no bigger than a working man’s thumb. Adèle can completely cover it with her hand. It lolls against her palm, and she strokes it gently, as though it is her strange, small pet.
The dust swirling about the room seems to be broken bits of light. Adèle runs her tongue over my nipples. I arch my back. One of my hands is in her hair, and the other reaches back to touch the tattered wallpaper behind the headboard. If I keep my hand on the wall, it seems possible that I will keep myself from floating up off the bed, that I will keep myself attached to earth.
Adèle lowers her mouth to my sex. It fits so comfortably. I try to stop from crying out, and then I don’t, and my wails fill the small room and overflow into the hallway, out through the window and into the blue bank of the sky.
What breaks from me in love is sorrow. Waves of it roil over me, and when I lie beached on the bed afterwards, I feel that I have been made new again, that I have been washed clean.
Adèle lies back on the sheets. Her hands grip the top of the headboard. I have a hand on her breast, for balance really, although I am pretending otherwise, tweak her nipple absent-mindedly whenever I remember. My other hand is inside her. She has her eyes closed. Her breath is ragged. The bed knocks rhythmically against the wall as I fuck her.
What is a man? What is a woman? Is it the sex, the clothes, the customs? I am never more of a man than I am in this moment, and yet there are many who wouldn’t call me a man at all.
You just have to be committed to a position and maintain it throughout. That’s the other secret I know. Commitment begs surrender.
“I won’t let Victor have me,” says Adèle. We are wrapped around each other. I have one of her legs between my own. Her hands are on my back.
“He can’t be happy about that.”
“I couldn’t bear it. I tell him that it’s because I can’t get pregnant again, that I don’t want to have any more children.”
The sun at the window has changed. There’s a smoky quality to the light. It must be late afternoon. We will have to leave this room soon, make our separate journeys back to Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
“That can’t last,” I say, meaning that this can’t last, that these moments we have are not enough to weigh against Adèle’s life with Victor. We will disappear like all the other lovers who have used this small room. Our love will not be remembered.
But I couldn’t be more wrong.
I TRY TO LUNCH with Mother every day. This isn’t always possible. Sometimes I must attend meetings at the newspaper, but most days I manage to leave the Globe offices at noon and return by two o’clock.
Luncheon with Mother is both reassuring and infuriating because it is always the same. Not the food, but the routine.
I have a key to Mother’s new house on rue du Montparnasse, and I let myself in rather than waiting for the housekeeper to open the door for me. The housekeeper is old, older than Mother. I have pointed out, repeatedly, that perhaps this is not such a good idea, but Mother will have none of it. She is fond of her elderly housekeeper. Her elderly and mostly deaf housekeeper. This is another reason why I don’t ring the bell to Mother’s house, but instead let myself in with my own key.
I shake out my umbrella, if it is raining, and put it in the umbrella stand in the hall. I remove my coat and hat and hang them on one of the wooden pegs above the red embroidered bench. I go upstairs. Mother likes to sit in the sunny room at the front of the house on the second floor, and I know that I will find her there. Invariably I meet the housekeeper, either in the foyer or on the staircase, or sometimes in the upstairs hallway. Because she is mostly deaf, she doesn’t hear me and I often startle her. Then she shrieks. Sometimes she drops whatever she is carrying. The housekeeper’s shriek announces my arrival, and Mother shuffles out of her sitting room to reprimand me.
“Must you,” she says, as though I am four years old and have been pulling the tail of the housecat.
My upsetting the housekeeper upsets Mother, and my being scolded by Mother upsets me, so we always sit down to lunch in a foul temper. The first course is eaten in silence. But eating improves both of our moods, as does a glass of wine, and by the second course, lamb chops, we are ready to converse. I always think I have given up trying to impress Mother, but it never appears to be so.
“My reviews are becoming even more popular,” I say. “I get so many letters about them that it’s hard to respond to all my admirers.”
Mother’s eyes glaze over with boredom.
I try shorthand.
“I’m very popular,” I say. “More than ever.”
“Did you notice whether the baker on the corner has that nice bread I like in the window?” asks Mother. “He doesn’t make it every day, and I’m never sure which day he does make it.”
I spend a moment separating the meat from the bone on the cho
p.
“Tuesday?” says Mother. “Or is it Wednesday? What day is it today, Sainte-Beuve?”
“Thursday.”
“Oh, perhaps it’s Thursday, then.”
“It is Thursday.”
“The bread, the bread. Perhaps he makes it only on Thursdays.”
It is a great shame that my father is dead, that he died before I knew him. I have to believe that he was possessed of a brain, and that my intellect comes from him. There is nothing remotely intellectual about Mother. Nobody was ever so obsessed with the trivial and the meaningless as Mother. And yet she is all I have. I stab at my potatoes. There seem to be bits of dirt on my lunch, as though the food was dropped and then hastily shoved back onto the plate. Perhaps the housekeeper is losing her eyesight as well as her hearing.
I look over at Mother. She’s finished her food already and is picking at something on the tablecloth. She is a much better eater than I am, altogether more robust. I suddenly feel like weeping and have to dab at my eyes with my napkin.
Luckily, the housekeeper usually comes in to clear when I am having my emotional moment, and I am distracted from my feelings by her rough handling of the crockery and silver.
After the meal is over, I sit with Mother in the sunny front room on the second floor and we have coffee. If Mother can be stopped from commenting on what objects the sun is shining on, or how sore her feet get in winter, or whether Madame Lamarche will recover from her illness, she will sometimes ask after my health, or express concern that I am not dressing warmly enough for the weather, or tell me that someone has told her that it seems I am clever. In these moments everything is forgiven and redeemed, and there is suddenly the desire to do this whole performance over again the very next day.
Sometimes, when I am shrugging on my coat in the foyer and I look back up the stairs, I see Mother standing on the landing, watching me go. She doesn’t wave or call out, and I don’t either. I simply put on my coat and hat, collect my gloves and umbrella, and step out into the Paris afternoon. But it is in these moments that I feel we are most aligned, that Father’s early death shipwrecked us both and we cling to this little raft of habit to stay afloat. It is not the vessel either of us hoped or expected to make our voyage on, and yet here we are and there is the desire, in both of us, to make the best of it.
ADÈLE AND I WALK through the Montparnasse cemetery. This is not one of our regular haunts, but today there is not enough time to journey to the church or the hotel, and Victor has taken the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, so we cannot risk a visit to the orchard.
The cemetery is close to our houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. It is where I myself will be buried. Mother has already reserved our spaces. Adèle and I walk along the paths between the rows of raised stone tombs, and the thought of my dead self makes me greedy for life.
I grab my beloved, but she twists away.
“Someone might see,” she says. There are indeed other people in the cemetery, and because the graves block their presence, they are apt to pop up suddenly in front of us on the path.
“Passion must have no regrets,” I say.
“Passion is nothing but regrets,” says Adèle.
In the beginning, I had fantasized about seducing Adèle. I had thought that with my clever words and my sensitive nature I would slowly persuade her to yield to me. My attentions would ripen her like a fruit, and she would drop easily into my hands. But really, from the beginning, Adèle has controlled the tempo of our love. She is not a ripe fruit. She is not easily swayed by my words. If she does not want my touch while we walk through the cemetery, then she will not have it.
But I am a better man only in my mind. My body simply longs for her, and it is the stronger force.
“We will be dead soon,” I say. “Encased in stone, like all these good people.” I wave my hand over the graves. “I’m sure they all thought they had longer to love.”
Adèle links her arm in mine. “You, dear Charles,” she says, “will have more than just a simple grave. You will have a grand statue.”
“It won’t be as big as Victor’s,” I say.
Adèle laughs at me. “Well,” she says, “perhaps it will be a good deal prettier.”
We walk on in silence.
“Boulanger wants to paint me,” she says after a while.
Louis Boulanger is a friend of Victor Hugo’s. He has already done a portrait of the great poet.
“What did you say?”
“I refused.”
“Why? Boulanger is a good painter. The portrait would be pleasing.”
Adèle stops me on the path. “I want no other portrait,” she says, “than the one engraved on my lover’s heart.”
I always think that I am the poet, that it is the power of my words that moves our love forward. But really, sometimes I must be honest: Adèle is often a much better wordsmith than I am.
I have not seen the man before. He storms into my office at the Globe practically frothing at the mouth.
“Sainte-Beuve, I challenge you to a duel,” he shouts. Not another duel!
“What for?”
“You have rejected my poems.”
He is a very young man, the first flush of youth lighting his face. He stands across from me. We are separated only by my oak desk. I don’t remember his poems.
“Come now,” I say. “If you submitted them for publication, surely you entertained the idea that they might be rejected.”
“I did not.”
“Well, I must have said something encouraging.” I am in the habit of mixing the good with the bad, of turning someone down but letting him know what it is he got right.
“You called them ‘trifling.’ You said they were ‘weak.’” Just the memory of my cruel note causes the young man to mop the sweat from his brow.
Well, then, they must have been truly terrible, I think.
There was recently a much-publicized duel involving a poet. Perhaps this young man has been inspired to take action because of that. The bullet that killed that poet passed through his manuscript, which he had tucked inside his waistcoat. His poems were published posthumously, with a blank space left on each page, in the middle of the words, to show where the bullet had sliced through the manuscript en route to the poet’s heart. Perhaps posthumous publication is what this poet hopes for.
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I don’t want to fight you. I was entirely within my rights to reject your poems.”
“You have disgraced me,” says the young man. “They were poems to my beloved. They were my most secret thoughts, and you scorned them. Choose your weapon.” He shouts this last part, and I can see, through the open door behind him, the heads of my colleagues turning towards us with interest.
And then I do remember his poems. He compared his love to a fleet of ships setting sail for the New World. He compared his love to a budding tree. In one terrible poem, he compared his love to a wingless dove. I remember that the manuscript itself had bits of food stuck to one of the pages, and that on another page there was a boot print. The grammar was appalling. The word use was juvenile. The whole thing was such an amateur effort that a child of six could have done a better job.
How dare this idiot march into my office in the middle of the day, demanding revenge for my honest criticism!
“If you can’t take rejection, you are no poet,” I say.
“Choose your weapon.”
“All right.” I lean across my desk, looking him in the eye, staring him down. “I choose spelling. You’re dead.”
When I get home that evening, there is a note from Victor summoning me to the house. I am in a panic about what it might mean. I have been avoiding Victor, and he must have noticed. He must have found out about Adèle and me, and he is calling me over to hand me a loaded pistol. We will stomp out to his back garden, and he will shoot me through the heart by the pond.
By the time I get to their house, I am sweating profusely. My hair sticks to my forehead, which sticks to my ha
t. There are big wet patches under the arms of my waistcoat.
I don’t feel that I can just walk into the Hugo household anymore. My intimacy with Adèle has meant that I compensate for the guilt by becoming more formal with Victor. So I stand on the front step and knock loudly. It takes a while before someone comes, and it is not the maid who answers the door but one of the children.
Victor is in the parlour. Adèle, thank God, is nowhere to be seen. The room is a mess: packing crates sit in the centre of the rug, and the pictures are off the walls.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“We’re being evicted.” Victor motions me into the room. “We have to move.”
“But why?”
“It seems that our landlord is conservative and was very offended by Hernani.”
“But he didn’t have to go to the play.”
Victor waves his hand over an open packing crate, as though he’s about to conjure a rabbit from it. “The talk, Charles,” he says. “The talk of what happens each night at the play is all over town. One doesn’t need to actually go to the play to know what is going on.”
I suppose this is true. I have been so concerned with my own life lately that I have forgotten all about Victor’s play and the controversy surrounding it.
I collapse into a chair. “Where will you go?”
“We’ve taken an apartment on rue Jean Goujon.”
“But that’s on the other side of the river.” Rue Jean Goujon is a small street near the Champs-Élysées, but it may as well be the other side of the world.
“I need to be close to the theatre.” Victor looks at me shrewdly. “And, Charles,” he says, “I have not seen much of you lately. I thought, in fact, you might be avoiding me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Yes, why would you do that?”
“You are writing your novel,” I say weakly.
Adèle has told me that Victor has become obsessed with the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, and that he is writing a story set there. He lives in his room and comes out only at night, when he walks to the church. She has told me that he requests his meals in his room, and that he writes standing up at a tall desk, wrapped dramatically in a cloak.
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 39