That Mad Ache & Translator

  “She was being unfaithful to me, You understand,” said Antoine. “The poor thing really believed that this was the thing to do — to sleep around with producers and journalists and the like. She lied to me day and night and I resented her, I acted proud, I acted ironic, and I judged her harshly. But by what right, my God — for she loved me — yes, there’s no doubt, she did love me — it wasn’t like she was mooching off of me… And then that evening, the day before she died, she practically begged me not to let her leave for Deauville. But all I said to her was: ‘Go on, go on — it’s what you’ve got your heart set on.’ What a fool, what an arrogant fool I was!”

  As they walked by a bridge, he inquired about Lucile’s life.

  “I’ve never understood anything at all about anything,” said Lucile. “Life mostly made sense to me until I left my parents’ home. I wanted to get a degree in Paris. But it was all a pipe dream. Ever since, I’ve been looking everywhere for parents, in my lovers, in my friends, and it’s all right with me to have nothing of my own — not any plans and not any worries. I like this kind of life, it’s terrible but true. I don’t know why it is, but the moment I wake up something in me feels things are going right. I’ll never be able to change. What could I do? Work? I don’t have any great talents. Maybe I’d have to love someone, the way You do. Oh, Antoine, Antoine, why on earth are You involved with Diane?”

  “She loves me,” he replied. “And I go for thin, tall women like her. Sarah was short and stocky, and that brought tears of pity to my eyes. Do You know what I mean? But she also got on my nerves.”

  Tiredness suited him well. They were walking up the Rue du Bac, and decided on a whim to go into a rather ghastly smoke-shop café. Inside, they looked at each other without smiling but unjudgmentally. The jukebox was playing some familiar Strauss waltz to which a tipsy customer was trying to dance, teeteringly, at one end of the bar. “It’s late, it’s very late,” whispered a little voice inside Lucile’s head. “Charles must be going out of his mind with worry. You don’t even like this fellow, so just go home.”

  And all at once, she found that her cheek was pressed tightly against Antoine’s jacket. With one arm, he was holding her against himself, wordlessly, with his chin on her hair. She felt a strange calm settling over the two of them. The bartender, the tipsy dancer, the music, the lights all seemed to be eternal — or then again, maybe she herself had never existed. She couldn’t figure anything out any more. They took a taxi and he left her at her door. They said good-bye to each other in a polite fashion, without even exchanging addresses or phone numbers.

  CHAPTER 5

  But the social whirl lost no time in reuniting them. Diane had made a scene and there was not one woman who’d been at that dinner who could possibly imagine inviting Diane back without inviting Charles, or more precisely, Antoine without Lucile. Diane had switched sides without warning: she had moved from the side of the executioners, where she had done very well for herself for twenty full years, over to the victims’ side. She was jealous, she had let it be seen, and now she was lost. The distant blare of hunting horns could be heard in the sweet Parisian spring.

  By one of those strange reversals that were so typical of this upper-crust crowd, everything that had once contributed to her prestige and power now became part of her vulnerability: her beauty was “no longer quite what it had been in her youth”, her jewels were now “no longer adequate” (whereas a mere week earlier the tiniest one of them would have been just fine for any of her friends), and even her Rolls-Royce, “which wasn’t going to leave her”, seemed impotent. Poor Diane: her craving had turned inside out just like a glove and now everything was exposed; no matter how much makeup she caked on her face, no matter how heavily she loaded herself down with diamonds, the only companion she would now be able to take for a spin in her fancy car was her Pekingese pooch. At last, at last, Diane had become an object of pity.

  Of course she knew all this. She was so familiar with her town, and she’d had the good luck, when she was thirty, to marry an intelligent writer who had given her a few lessons in the intricacies of Parisian high society but who then one day, completely turned off by it all, had simply flown the coop. Diane undeniably had pluck, which she owed in equal parts to an Irish background, a sadistic nanny she’d had when very little, and her personal fortune, which was sizable enough that she had never had to curry favor with anyone at all. But adversity, no matter what some might say, humiliates everyone, women in particular, and now Diane, who had essentially never succumbed to passion, who had only deigned to turn her gaze towards men who first eyed her with interest, all of a sudden found herself, to her horror, staring with longing at Antoine, who was looking in another direction altogether. And already she was calculating how to win him back without recourse to feminine wiles.

  What did he covet? He didn’t care at all for money. He earned a pathetic little salary from his publishing house and when he couldn’t afford to invite her out, he simply refused to go to restaurants. And thus she was condemned to having frequent tête-à-tête dinners with him at her place, a situation that would have seemed ludicrous to her only six months ago. But luckily, there were premières galore, and an endless succession of society suppers and fancy banquets — all those delights that Paris offers with no strings attached to those who are sufficiently well-heeled.

  From time to time Antoine said, in a vague tone of voice, that all he cared about was books and that one of these days he would make it big in the publishing world. And it was true that at these dinners, he only grew lively if he ran into someone who was willing to chew the fat about literature at least a little bit with him.

  That year, as it happened, sharing one’s bed with an author was quite the fashion, which inspired Diane to suggest to Antoine, “Maybe you could win the Goncourt!” He, however, retorted that he was lousy at writing and that you had to be top-notch to tackle a book at all, let alone win a prize. She didn’t give up, and urged him, “But I’m sure that if you tried…”, or “Don’t you remember old X, who…?” — but Antoine, never one to shout, just shouted back, “It’s out of the question!” No, he would wind up as an editor at Renouard, pulling down 200,000 francs a month, and even fifty years down the road he’d still be dripping endless tears for Sarah. And yet, despite it all, Diane loved him.

  After that terrible dinner, she had not slept a wink: Antoine had finally returned to his apartment at dawn, drunk without any doubt. She had phoned him every hour, poised to hang up the moment she heard his voice; all she wanted was to know where he was. At 6:30, he’d finally answered, whispering just “I’m very sleepy” in a childish voice, and without even asking who was calling. He must have hung out in those bars along Saint-Germain, and quite likely with Lucile. But she had better not mention Lucile to him — one should never name what one is afraid of. The next day, she called up Claire to apologize for her hasty exit; she’d had such a frightful headache all evening.

  “It’s true — You looked pretty awful,” said Claire in a friendly and understanding manner.

  “Well, I’m not getting any younger,” said Diane bitterly. “And these young studs can be pretty demanding.”

  Claire gave a knowing laugh. She took great delight in hearing hints, or, more precisely, specific descriptions of lascivious activity, and there’s no one on this earth who can be more specific and precise about the virility of her lover than one Parisian socialite talking to another. It was as if the constant use of passionate adjectives for their dress designers left them no choice but to use raw physical terms in describing their lovers. And thus, after a few rather favorable comments had been exchanged about Antoine, Claire was growing edgy while Diane was talking in circles. But then Claire took a daring plunge: “That little Lucile is quite annoying, with her stupid schoolgirl giggling. How old is she, anyway — thirty or so?”

  “She’s got lovely gray eyes,” said Diane, “and if it’s good enough for our fine friend Charles…”

  “Two
years with her has got to be a damn long stretch,” sighed Claire.

  “But it’s with him as well, my treasure, and don’t You forget it!” With that witticism, both women burst out laughing and hung up feeling delighted. Diane felt she’d somehow made up for the scene the night before. And Claire could say that Diane, who never had second thoughts about anything she did, had called up at noon to apologize. The thing was, Diane had forgotten a key principle of Parisian society, which is that one must never apologize for anything at all, and that whatever one does must be done with an insouciant air.

  And so Johnny, following Claire’s instructions, had Charles Blassans-Lignières invited to the première of a play where Diane too was supposed to show up. It was agreed that afterwards, they would all go out — “just us friends” — to dinner somewhere. Aside from the amusement that the Lucile-Antoine reunion would provide her, Claire had the assurance that Charles would cover the dinner all by himself. And this was most convenient, since Johnny, after all, was scraping the bottom of the barrel these days, and it was inconceivable to ask Diane to pay, and Claire couldn’t remember if she’d had the sense to invite any other rich male — a precious species, by the way, that was rapidly growing endangered in this day and age when pretty much the only decently upkept people were men belonging to men. In any case, the play would certainly be most entertaining because it was by Bijou Dubois, and if anyone knew what good theater was, it was Bijou Dubois.

  “What the hell, my darling,” Claire was saying to Johnny as they rode together in a taxi to the Atelier, “I really can’t take any more of Your modern theater. When I watch actors seated in big plush chairs droning on and on with platitudes about life, I’m bored to tears. And I won’t hide it from You,” she added with verve, “I far prefer the lighter fare on the boulevards… Johnny, are You listening?”

  Johnny, who was hearing this same refrain of Claire’s for the umpteenth time this season, nodded sagely. Claire was a dear but her intensity exhausted him, and suddenly he had a strong yearning to jump out of the taxi, saunter up the Boulevard de Clichy, swarming with people, buy himself a cone of sizzling frites, and, who knows, maybe even get beaten up by a mugger. The schemes Claire cooked up struck him as so simplistic, and he was always amazed when they actually worked.

  At the Place Dancourt, all the guests were mingling nicely, saying hello and earnestly telling each other that this was without any doubt Paris’s loveliest theater but that this little square where it was located was frightfully provincial. Out of the blue, Lucile appeared, emerging from a café with Charles, and she sat down on a bench to devour a huge sandwich. After a moment or two of tsk-tsking, a couple of hungry guests followed suit. Just then, Diane’s car pulled up with its noiseless purr and parked more or less randomly very close to the bench. After Antoine got out, he opened the door for Diane and then turned around. He spotted Lucile with her mouth full of food and looking happy, and Charles as well, who was rising in embarrassment to greet Diane.

  “My goodness — you’re all having a picnic? What a splendid idea!” said Diane. She had already glanced about and noticed Edmée de Guilt, Doudou Wilson, and Madame Bert, who were all following Lucile’s lead and eating at various benches.

  “It’s nine o’clock, and they won’t start for at least a quarter of an hour. Antoine, be a good boy and trot over to that café for me, would You? I’m starving.”

  Antoine balked. Lucile watched him look at the café and at Diane, weighing things in his mind, and then make a resigned gesture and head off across the street. When he pushed open the café door, Lucile saw the owner rise immediately, walk around the counter, and shake his hand with a look of deep commiseration. Then the waiter came over as well. Lucile could only see Antoine’s back, but she had the impression that he was recoiling, slowly collapsing almost as if under a hail of blows. And then all at once she recalled: Sarah. This same theater, the rehearsals, the café where Antoine must so often have waited for her. And to which he’d never returned.

  “For Heaven’s sake, is Antoine hoisting a few in there, or what?” said Diane. As she turned around, she saw Antoine trying to back out of the café door, as if apologizing, and without a single sandwich for anyone. Right then the owner’s wife entered, nodding her head warmly and taking Antoine’s hand in hers. How often he must have laughed with her, in the old days, while waiting for Sarah. It was always so merry in the cafés next to theaters during rehearsals.

  “What’s eating at him?” asked Diane.

  “Sarah,” replied Lucile, without looking at her.

  That name troubled Diane but she knew that one shouldn’t ask Antoine any questions about her, one shouldn’t even talk to him about her. He came back to the group, his face white as a sheet. In a flash Diane understood, and she turned around so abruptly that Lucile had to jerk backwards to avoid being hit.

  “So,” thought Diane, “this girl knows the story, too — but by what right?” Antoine belonged to her, Diane, and so did his laugh and so did his grief. It was on her shoulder that he dreamed, late at night, of Sarah. It was over her, Diane, that he preferred the memory of Sarah. It…

  But the theater bell was ringing. Diane took Antoine’s arm and ushered him in. He let himself be led along, distractedly. After politely greeting a few critics — friends of Diane’s — he helped her sit down. The traditional three knocks resounded in the hall, and, in the darkness, Diane leaned over him, saying, “Oh, my poor baby.”

  And he offered no resistance when she took his hand.

  CHAPTER 6

  At the intermission, they split into two smaller groups. Lucile and Antoine smiled at each other from afar, and, for the first time, each of them felt a little spark for the other. He watched her talking, absent-mindedly leaning on Charles’ powerful shoulder, and the curve of her neck and the slightly amused flair of her mouth attracted him. He wished he could just cut his way through the crowd and kiss her. It had been ages since he’d felt desire, out of the blue, for a woman he didn’t know. Just at this moment she turned around and her gaze met his and she froze, recognizing the meaning of his look, but then she forced an awkward little smile. She had never before paid any attention to Antoine’s good looks; it had taken his desire for her to awaken in her a sensitivity to his attractiveness. The truth of the matter was that she had been this way her whole life, never taking any notice — whether by sheer luck or out of a nearly pathological fear of involvement — of anyone but men who took a fancy to her. But now, as she turned away from Antoine, imagining his sensual mouth and the golden light in his eyes, she wondered how it could possibly have happened that they had failed to kiss, the other evening.

  Charles, feeling her pulling away from his shoulder, glanced at her and at once recognized that soft, pensive, nearly resigned look that came over her face whenever she was warming up to someone. On turning around, he saw it was Antoine.

  At the play’s end, the little group pulled back together. Claire was raving about the acting as well as the jewels of some maharani she’d spotted, and also about the weather’s unusual mildness — all in all, she was in a quite euphoric mood. People were having trouble settling on a restaurant, but in the end they decided to go to a place out in Marnes, as it was clear to everyone that the greenery and the evening air would please Claire no end. Diane’s driver was waiting patiently, when all of a sudden Charles walked up to Diane and said, “Would You mind taking me in Your car, Diane? We arrived in Lucile’s convertible but this evening I’m feeling a bit decrepit, and I may be coming down with a cold. Let Antoine go with Lucile.”

  Diane didn’t blink; instead, it was Claire who stared and then rolled her eyes in disbelief.

  “Well, why not?”, said Diane. “I’ll see You in a bit, Antoine — just don’t drive too fast.” And so Charles and Diane joined Claire and Johnny in the Rolls, while Lucile and Antoine remained on the sidewalk, slightly stunned. Neither Charles nor Diane looked back at them, but Claire sent them a such a merry conspiratorial wink t
hat they were shocked, and both pretended not to have seen it. Lucile was puzzled. It was perfectly in keeping with Charles’ character to bring suffering upon himself, but how, she wondered, could he possibly have picked up on a desire in her that even she herself had only become aware of an hour earlier? This was quite annoying. The only times she’d ever been unfaithful to Charles were with young men she knew he would never run into anywhere. If there was anything she hated, it was when two lovers made secret little plots behind the back of a third, and the amused titterings that this gave rise to in observers such as Claire. Lucile did not want to be a party to anything of the sort. And so, when Antoine placed his hand on her shoulder, she shook her head. But on the other hand, life was simple, it was a lovely evening, and she was drawn to this new fellow. So, wait and see. The number of times she’d said “wait and see” to herself in her thirty years of existence was way beyond counting. She found herself chuckling.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Antoine.

  “Oh, I was just amused at myself. The car’s up the hill there. Let’s see — where are my keys? Do You want to drive?” And so he drove. They stayed silent at first, just taking in the fresh night air in the open convertible, both feeling ill at ease. Antoine was driving slowly. Only when they reached the Place de l’Étoile did he turn towards her and ask, “Why did Charles do that?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Lucile. And as soon as they had exchanged these words, they both realized that they amounted to an admission, a confirmation of their furtively exchanged smiles at the intermission, and now it was undeniable that something was up between them and that there would be no going back. She was thinking, “Why didn’t I just say, ‘Oh, that?’ and cast Charles’ act as the very sensible decision of a man who’s catching a cold?” But she’d been too slow on the uptake. Now all she wanted was to get to the restaurant quickly. Or else for Antoine to make some out-of-line remark or a crude pass at her, and she’d then quickly send him on his way. But Antoine was staying silent and driving calmly through the Bois de Boulogne. As they followed the twists of the Seine in their purring convertible, they must have looked for all the world like two golden lovers — she the daughter of the Dupont textile empire, he the son of the Dubois confectionery kingdom, with their wedding set for one week hence in the Palais de Chaillot, with both families in full accord. They would have two children.