Love Story

by Janine Boissard

  Like a good publicist, at noon I reminded him of his lunch engagement. Could he tell me where he was meeting the people so I could accompany him?

  “Take me instead to a bakery,” he said with a smile.

  There was a line in the shop. People recognized him and cleared a space for us to pass. He chose rolls made with milk, with chocolate, and with raisins.

  “Is that all right with you, little Laura?”

  I took the opportunity to tell him that I was the daughter of a baker and so was pretty demanding. He laughed.

  “Bread and music: the two indispensable foods for life.”

  The other shoppers applauded.

  He asked me to buy drinks, a beer for him. I chose a fruit juice.

  “There’s a park not far from the hotel. Let’s go there.”

  It was called the Tree Park. We weren’t the only ones who had decided to picnic there. I chose a bench in a corner that seemed less popular than the others. The fragrance of the leaves and the ground lifted around us, pale, as though autumn had drained it of color. Claudio Roman tilted his head toward the singing birds, trying to name them for me.

  “Each song has its own color; each voice too. Mine is wild honey.”

  The lily and the wildflower?

  The incident happened after our snack. His eyes closed, Claudio offered his face to the sun. He had removed his glasses and I couldn’t keep myself from looking at him, with a little fear, as though he were going to open his eyes and scold me for my indiscretion.

  His fine, thin beard looked perfect on him; usually I didn’t like beards. His lips were full and appeared pink. His eyebrows were fine and well shaped. And in his chest, that voice: all the world’s happiness and pain. Of course, all women became infatuated with him.

  A pedestrian was walking on the path. He stopped for a few seconds, then rushed toward Claudio. His voice wasn’t honey.

  “Is that you, Mr. Roman?”

  The singer started, bounded to his feet. He was taller than the trespasser by a good head.

  “Go, sir. Go away.”

  The poor man went away, but returned several times. I was ashamed. Claudio remained standing. He put his sunglasses back on.

  “It’s rape,” he growled. “Rape, pure and simple. Why did you let him come up to us?”

  I hadn’t seen anyone coming.

  The guide, the excuse, should I also be the ramparts? You just have to crush the assassins.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  It was a truancy that didn’t end well.

  Corinne Massé called me at The Agency late Monday morning. When she introduced herself, it took me several seconds to remember who she was. Had David May told her that she had been replaced?

  “So how did it go?” she asked. The abrupt question surprised me.

  “Well, I think.”

  “Did he say anything about me? Did he complain?”

  “Not at all.”

  She said nothing, and I understood that my response hurt her. But I only spoke the truth: Claudio hadn’t mentioned her once.

  I remembered the nail file forgotten in the hotel bathroom.

  “I held out for three years, three years, night and day,” she said in a hollow voice in which one could feel tears and anger.

  She had abruptly slipped out.

  “You know,” I said, “I’m only here to replace you. He needed someone. I’m sure you’ll work for him again.”

  “Never again!” she cried. “Never again, not for all the money in the world. He’s a monster. You’ll see.”

  6.

  David May called me Wednesday morning at The Agency. This time Claudio Roman had a concert at the Nice opera house on Saturday night. Because of several appointments with the press, including a few local television stations and the national station, France 3, he would be obliged to stay in Nice for almost three days. Would I agree to go with him? Henri had agreed.

  “Sorry for the short notice again, Laura. I’m sure you have other engagements, but he asked for you.”

  Apart from work, Friday afternoon I was supposed to accompany a young singer to an important radio program to promote his first album. One could have a lovely voice and not know how to speak. I had promised to hold his hand. Saturday night I was supposed to go to a film and dinner with friends.

  Claudio had asked for me.

  “If you agree, you’d have to take the nine fifteen flight from Orly on Friday, returning Sunday afternoon.”

  Such trips involving the media are prepared well in advance. The seats on the airplane must have been reserved under the names Claudio Roman and Corinne Massé.

  “Can we meet, David? Face to face, if it’s possible.”

  I had no desire for a boss who made use of me without consulting me beforehand.

  “Would you like to have lunch?” he asked. “I’ll come to get you at one o’clock. I also have a present for you.”

  The present was a collection of Claudio’s CDs and a videocassette of Mendelssohn’s second symphony, in which Claudio would be one of the soloists in Nice. I didn’t know Mendelssohn very well.

  Bringing artists to restaurants was a part of my work as a publicist. I had a list of French bistros and other restaurants that I chose from according to my guests’ tastes. I usually took out singers at the beginning of their careers. The more renowned were taken by more…attractive publicists and were invited to more select places. When they were stars, Mathilde took care of them.

  Mathilde, forty-five years old, was the most experienced in the pool, a beautiful, solid, and decisive woman whom we sometimes wanted to call “Mother.” If she were entrusted with Plácido Domingo she would say, “Perfect!” then she’d do what had to be done, even go to the ends of the earth to do it. Then, her mission complete, the master would kiss her hands with gratitude.

  Accompanying David May through the double glass doors of the exclusive restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, I felt small in flats, jeans, and a T-shirt, not to mention my heavy shoulder bag, which contained my life. I hadn’t foreseen this invitation while dressing this morning.

  David was impeccably dressed, as he had been at our first meeting. The only consolation was that he was hardly taller than I was.

  “We kept your table, Mr. May.”

  We had to cross the entire dining room to get to the round table that overlooked a small flower garden. In the distance, a ribbon of cars flowed by and I felt as though I were on an island.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  We decided to order white wine to go with our seafood. In Normandy, I would never grow tired of the spray, the low and high tides, or the rough boulders that come through the taste of mussels, shrimp, langoustines, crab, and spider crab. I wasn’t fond of oysters. Agatha told me too often that they batted their eyelashes under the spray of lemon juice. And the beautiful one knew something about batting eyelashes.

  After the white wine was served, David raised his glass.

  “To your success, Laura.”

  Once again I was struck by his gaze. It made this frankly ugly man seductive; it was a gaze that had seen a lot and could understand everything. Henri had told me that he was a known and feared agent. And here he was, asking me for something, and I was withholding my answer.

  “What happened between Claudio Roman and Corinne Massé?” I asked.

  He knitted his eyebrows. Did he do that because I had approached a delicate subject before even having begun the meal? But I couldn’t enjoy the meal without clarifying the situation. Since Monday, the pained voice of the publicist had haunted me: He’s a monster, you’ll see.

  “And please, David, no bullshit,” I added.

  He gave something like a smile. Agents were used to dishing out bullshit.

  “OK, here goes,” he said. “Corinne Massé made the mistake of falling for Claudio’s charms, even though I told her to be careful. He’s very enterprising. Since you don’t want any bullshit, Laura, know that, for our tenor, seducin
g women, as many women as possible, is a way of reassuring himself.”

  “Is Corinne pretty?”

  The question—stupid, inappropriate—blurted from me. Whether Corinne Massé was pretty or not, what did that matter since Claudio couldn’t see her?

  Did he touch her hair? Did his finger trace her face? Did he inhale her perfume? Did she wear perfume?

  “Very pretty. Cultivated. A musician,” said David May, matter-of-factly. “For all those reasons, I had thought she was perfectly suited for the job. I was wrong. She imagined some things. Claudio fired her last Saturday after an agitated night.”

  “And that’s why you chose me: I’m the opposite.”

  I finally had the answer to my direct question: Why me? Not very pretty, not cultivated, not an expert in classical music. No risk of my developing any illusions.

  David laughed.

  “Let’s say that I asked Henri to find me someone a little more modest. If you want to know what I really think, Claudio doesn’t need another conquest; he needs a kind of sister…a little sister who showed herself to be very efficient in Auxerre,” he added.

  Now I laughed.

  “You should tell him that I’m ugly. That would solve the problem completely.”

  He shook his head.

  “Certainly not. Claudio would know that I’m lying to him. You have a lot of charm, Laura. That didn’t escape him. Since his accident, he has developed a sixth sense that allows him to read a lot from voices. And sometimes from words.”

  A waiter, accompanied by the maître d’, placed the platter of seafood in the middle of the table. The scent of seaweed brought me home. I became a child again; I walked along the waves, full of a fierce will to do something. What? I didn’t know anymore. Do something else. That’s all. I heard the mocking laughs of the gulls.

  We were served dark bread and lemon.

  “You spoke of an accident, David. How did Claudio lose his sight?”

  The agent was lifting an oyster to his mouth. He interrupted his movement.

  “You didn’t know? It’s true, the subject is taboo. No journalist would risk bringing it up. If I tell you how it happened, you must promise me not to tell Claudio.”

  “I promise you never to tell him that you told me.”

  “Ah, you.” Again, David’s look surprised me. “Stubborn too. You wouldn’t know that looking at you.”

  “It’s only because no one can imagine that I’ve become stubborn. But I prefer ‘obstinate.’”

  It was thanks to that quality, or fault, that I found myself in this extravagant restaurant, invited by the agent of one of our most well-known singers, in the middle of people who, rightly or wrongly, imagined themselves to be important. The story of the lily and the wildflower…but that would have taken too long to explain.

  “Claudio lost his sight three years ago after being attacked by two bastards who wanted to steal his car. His eyes were burned by some chemical thrown at him point-blank. He stopped singing at first. I managed to convince him to go back to it. With a more limited repertoire, of course.”

  It’s rape, the singer had cried in the park when the unknown person had surprised him. Rape, pure and simple.

  “Can’t something be done?” I asked.

  “One eye, the left, is completely lost. For the other, a cornea transplant would be possible, but he doesn’t want to hear about it.”

  “Why?”

  “With his right eye, he can distinguish between day and night. He says he sees silhouettes, shadows. He’s afraid he’ll lose that too.”

  Shadows, silhouettes. My heart was wrung.

  Open the curtains, Laura.

  “And of course he refuses to use a cane, to learn Braille, to have a guide dog. Don’t even speak about it,” said the agent. “That’s why he needs someone. If you agree to be the little sister, you can tell yourself that I’m a little bit the father.”

  We were silent for a moment. Speaking about the accident, his voice had been as rough as the oyster shells that he was carefully aligning on the edge of his plate. David sincerely loved Claudio.

  “Are his parents still alive?”

  “They’re separated. His father is an international lawyer. He travels a lot. His mother lives in Bordeaux, but she visits from time to time. I don’t have the impression that he’s eager to see her.”

  “He was never married?”

  “Neither wife nor children.”

  “But who takes care of him? Apart from you, of course.”

  “His ‘nana,’ as he calls her. An elderly woman who lives in Neuilly, close to his house. She runs to him every time he needs her.”

  “He lives alone?” I said.

  “With millions of admirers, all the women he wants, calls from everywhere, more mail than a politician gets—but he’s not interested. A secretary replies to them.”

  Alone. That was exactly what I thought.

  We finished our seafood and went on to red mullet with herbs. The calm of this place was incredible. Silence and space, a great luxury. No voice louder than another. I felt great, at ease. I learned late in life the proper way to eat fish, with a fish knife and fork, to rinse my fingers in a little bowl, which glass to choose. David was ultra refined in all his moves. He never stopped wiping his lips. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had come from a modest background. I had a sixth sense in spotting someone who grew up with waxed canvas rather than a damask tablecloth.

  He talked about Claudio’s schedule in Nice. Most of the journalists would meet him at the hotel. We’d only have to leave for the television interviews, and for the brief rehearsal before the concert, in order to get acquainted with the hall and check the acoustics.

  Claudio knew the Nice opera house; he had sung there when he could still see.

  “But I’m talking as if you had already replied to my question,” David said with a confident smile.

  “The little sister agrees,” I said.

  7.

  Barbara Cartland’s heroine, and the prince’s guide, had just left her palace in Nice and was greeted by a man in uniform, respectful and keen.

  “Good evening, miss.”

  She walked along the famous Promenade des Anglais, by the border of flowers punctuated by palm trees. The air smelled of dreams and fairy tales; even the sea was pink under the sinking rays of the sun.

  Mom would have loved it.

  My diploma in hand, I had discovered the Riviera at age seventeen when I had gone down to camp near Cannes with some friends. What impressed me the most was the constant presence of the sea. Our sea in Normandy ebbed so low that you lost sight of it; the Mediterranean contented itself with a little curtsey.

  Somewhere, church bells chimed six o’clock. Claudio’s rehearsal at the opera house was going to be over soon. Hélène Reigner, one of the sopranos who would sing the Mendelssohn symphony with him, offered to accompany him back to our hotel, where she was also staying. He had briefly introduced me to her: about thirty, tall, beautiful, blonde, radiant. I had read on the program that she had received several prizes and that they often sang together.

  Since our arrival late Friday morning, I had been in a whirlwind. The journalists had come one after the other to the small room reserved for Claudio at the hotel. I’d had to coordinate the appointments, offer drinks to the impatient ones, and provide a portrait of the singer to those who hadn’t been accompanied by a photographer.

  I had stolen one of those portraits.

  The journalists’ questions were mostly the same: the work Claudio was singing on Saturday, how he maintained his voice, how much time he spent practicing, his plans.

  He responded to them with patience and sometimes humor—until the moment one of them said he was sorry not to hear some of the operatic airs performed as most of the great tenors now performed them. Claudio’s face froze.

  “And why not in a stadium? With microphones? Opera is finished for me, didn’t you know that?”

  And he slammed the do
or.

  I had to tell David.

  I went down to the beach. A few people were still walking there, dressed warmly since it was getting cool. The pink sea, hills of ocher and mauve, parasols of green-blue…From the perspective of an artist’s palette, we Normands had certainly been bested. But our beaches were of sand, not shingle as this one was.

  The vast, round theater was filling. People in the red and gold dress circles, all in their finest clothes, were seating themselves, showing themselves off, and waving to people they knew.

  I was seated in the third row, orchestra level, close to the stage.

  On the ceiling, a huge chandelier, with seemingly six hundred bulbs, illuminated a fresco representing the break of day: moon, stars, gods and goddesses surrounded the sun’s chariot, which was drawn by four white horses with eyes staring out of their heads.

  Sun and night, darkness and light—I knew that these were the subjects of the symphony Song of Praise that we were getting ready to hear, but I didn’t know any more. As in Auxerre, I had the booklet with the words in my hands, but I only gave it a quick glance, as I was too taken with what surrounded me, the flamboyant décor.

  It was the first time that I was, for real, in an opera house. Until then, I had only seen opera on television: Carmen, La Traviata, Cosi fan tutte…among my favorites. The splendor both dazzled and crushed me. I felt alone. Weren’t great moments like this one meant to be shared?

  In brief, I didn’t know where I belonged anymore.

  As though he noticed my unease, my neighbor, an elderly man with white hair, very elegant, smiled kindly at me. Stupidly, I wanted to tell him whom I worked for.

  The orchestra was already in place. The choir, men and women dressed in black and white, made its entrance as the audience applauded. The applause grew stronger when Claudio and the two sopranos appeared. Claudio was facing the audience, his face serious and handsome. My heart beat hard. Two hours ago, my good neighbor, I had that man for myself. Then the conductor appeared.