“It would be harder to catch cold with Your dress than with Coco Dourede’s dress,” Johnny observed wryly. “Never seen so little cloth for such a big surface area. And she even told me that it washes as easily as a handkerchief. But I’d bet it takes less time.”
Lucile glanced over at Coco Dourede who, it was quite true, was meandering about half-naked under the dangling garlands of light bulbs. A deep, delicious smell of damp earth was rising up from the Bois de Boulogne.
“My little Lucile, You don’t look too chipper,” said Claire.
Her eyes were sparkling, and her hand was draped over Johnny’s arm. He, too, was keenly observing Lucile. And Diane, as well, intrigued by her silence, was watching her. “My God, these people are all wolves,” thought Lucile. “Wolves — and they would tear me to shreds with their curiosity, if they could.” And with a sheepish smile, she said, “I’m really cold. I’m going to go ask Charles for my coat.”
“Allow me,” said Johnny. “The guy in the cloakroom is very good-looking.”
He came back very quickly. After that first brush with Antoine as she arrived, Lucile hadn’t looked straight at him even once, but she was keeping an eye on him from the side, the way certain birds do.
“Oh, it’s a new coat!” exclaimed Claire. “That pastel gray is divine — I’ve never seen You in that color before.”
“Charles brought it back for me from New York,” said Lucile. And just then her gaze met Antoine’s, and what she read in it made her want to give him a slap. She turned away abruptly and walked off.
“Minks used to make me look radiant, in my younger days,” said Claire cheerfully. But Diane was frowning. Antoine, right next to her, had put on what she called his “blind façade” — he had gone immobile, and had a blank look on his face.
“Go get me a whiskey,” said Diane to him. Since she didn’t dare ask him any questions, now she was giving him orders instead. At least that comforted her a little bit.
Lucile and Antoine made no moves at all in each other’s direction all evening long. But towards midnight, they wound up accidentally seated at the opposite ends of a table, each one alone, as everyone else had gone off to dance. Without seeming extremely rude, he could hardly avoid joining her, and anyway, he didn’t want to alienate her yet further. What he had suffered over these past several days was crushing him. He had imagined her in Charles’ arms, kissing him, whispering things to Charles that she’d only said to him, Antoine. Worst of all, he’d imagined her face with a certain special expression on it, open but somehow also concealing a powerful secret. He’d seen her face with that special expression, and to see it again was now his sole aim. He was mortally jealous of this woman’s attention. And he walked around the table and sat down next to her.
She didn’t even look at him, and without warning he cracked, leaned forward. This was impossible, this was unbearable, this aloof stranger who only a few days earlier had been stark naked in the sunlight, right by his side.
“Lucile,” he said, “why are you doing this to us?”
“Me !? What about you?” she snapped. “Just because you have a tantrum, I’m supposed to cut things off within twenty-four hours? That was just too much.” She felt totally desperate and totally calm. Drained.
“This isn’t… it’s… this is no tantrum,” he said, his words tumbling over each other. “I’m possessive, and I can’t help it. I can’t stand lying any more, it’s killing me. Believe me. The idea that… that…” He paused, drew his hand across his face, and then went on. “Tell me — since Charles got back, have you… have the two of you…”
She looked daggers at him, and spat out, “Have I slept with him? Well, what do you think? He brought me back a mink coat, didn’t he?”
“You’re not thinking about what you’re saying,” retorted Antoine.
“No. But you — you were imagining us together. I saw it in your face a few minutes ago. And I hate you for that.”
A couple was coming back from the dance floor, and Antoine rose swiftly to his feet. “Come dance with me,” he said. “I’ve got to talk with you.”
“No,” she replied. “What I just said is true, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps… Sometimes one has stupid reflexes.”
“But not vulgar ones,” said Lucile, and she looked away from him.
“She’s making out that I’m in the wrong,” he thought. “First she cheats on me, and then she makes out that I’m in the wrong.” A wave of anger swept over him, and he seized her by the wrist, pulling her towards him with such a sharp tug that several heads turned. “Come on and dance.”
But she resisted, with tears of anger and hurt welling up in her eyes. “I don’t feel like dancing.”
Antoine felt trapped inside himself, no more capable of letting go of her than of dragging her off by force. And at the same time, he was fascinated by her tears, and a strange thought flashed through his mind. “I’ve never seen her cry… How I wish that some night, she would cry on my shoulder over some childhood sorrow — I’d so love to console her.”
“Let go of me, Antoine!” she said quietly.
Things were becoming grotesque. He was far stronger than she was, and he’d pulled her halfway to her feet; at this point, she was no longer capable of smiling in a silly, casual manner, as if he were merely kidding around with her. No — people were watching them. He was crazy — crazy and mean — he frightened her — yet he appealed to her still.
“Now that’s what they call the hesitation waltz…” chimed in Charles quite unexpectedly, standing right behind Antoine. In a flash, Antoine let go of her and spun around, fully intending to punch this old man in the face and then to hightail it out of there, leaving this crowd behind forever. But standing right by Charles, there was Diane — smiling, elegant as always, and a little intrigued, or so it seemed, and remote.
“So You’re trying to get Lucile to dance with You by force?” she asked.
“That’s right,” replied Antoine with a glare, and suddenly he knew that he was going to break off with her that very evening, and a great sense of calm surged through him. Yet there was also great pity, for she mattered so little in this affair; he’d never cared one whit about her.
“But You’re no rocker-boy,” sneered Diane. “You’re too old for that.” And she was already starting to sit down.
Charles, too, was already leaning towards Lucile and was asking her, with a smile that belied the tension on his face, what had just taken place. And Lucile smiled right back at him. She knew she should just make up some random answer — she had no lack of imagination. In fact, every person here was overflowing with clever ploys for worming their way out of a faux pas, clever ways to be phony, clever tricks to nourish and maintain their petty secrets. That is, every person here except for him — Antoine. For a moment he teetered in indecision, then abruptly swiveled about, almost making an entrechat, and rapidly strode off into the night.
CHAPTER 14
It was raining outside. She heard the drops splattering on the sidewalk in one of those summer showers, melancholy and gentle, that seem more like the whim of some gardener at loose ends than the fury of the elements. Thin slivers of dawnlight were already creeping onto the carpet, and she was lying in her bed, unable to fall asleep. She could feel her heart beating hard, growing more agitated, sending her blood in powerful bursts to all the furthest reaches of her body. She felt the tips of her fingers becoming heavier, and the blue vein that crossed her left temple like an arrow was throbbing. For almost two hours now, she hadn’t been able to calm this wild heart of hers, but had just accepted its frenzy with a mélange of irony and despair. This had been going on ever since they’d returned from the Pré-Catelan, shortly after she’d spun about and become aware of Antoine’s disappearance, Diane’s sudden pallor, and the collective frisson of delight among all present at the sight of this little scandal.
She no longer felt any anger, and even wondered what had provoked it in the first place. That l
ook on Antoine’s face when the coat had been mentioned had seemed insulting to her, essentially implying that she was a venal woman. But in a sense, what else was she, if not that? She was living off of Charles and was very responsive to the gifts he gave her — surely responding more to the feelings behind them than to how much they had cost — but in any case accepting them all. That she couldn’t deny, and in fact she had never even thought about it, so natural did it feel to her to be the mistress of a man who could afford it and whom, moreover, she valued highly. In a word, Antoine had made a huge error of judgment: he had concluded that she was dropping him and sticking with Charles for material reasons alone. He had thought her capable of such crass calculations, had judged her for it, and without any doubt had found her contemptible. She knew well that jealousy almost inevitably leads to ugly thoughts, acts, and judgments, but she couldn’t tolerate this in Antoine, no matter how jealous he might be. She believed in him, in some sort of blood bond between them, believed in their spiritual intertwinedness, and she felt as if she had been dealt, through no fault of her own, a low blow.
What else could she have said to him? “Sure, Charles brought me back this coat, and sure, it made me happy. Sure, I’ve shared his bed since he got back, as will happen from time to time between us. But of course none of that has the least to do with what happens between you and me in the physical arena, because what you and I have is pure passion, and passion is unlike anything else on earth. Only when it’s with yours does my body come alive and act creative and insightful, and by now you should realize that.” But even then, he wouldn’t have understood. It was a commonplace, a thousand times repeated and a thousand times confirmed, that men simply didn’t get this quintessentially feminine type of message. She felt herself falling more and more deeply into an anti-male frame of mind, and this troubled her greatly.
“So should I bring up his physical relationship with Diane, and tell him that I’m not jealous? Does that make me some kind of monster? And even if I am a monster, what can I do about it? Nothing.” But if she wasn’t going to do anything, she would lose Antoine, and this thought made her tremble, made her toss and turn in her bed like a fish thrashing about on the grass. It was four in the morning.
Charles came into her bedroom. He sat down gently on her bed, his face drawn. In this harsh dawnlight, he really looked fifty, and the casual, almost sporting way he had thrown his dressing gown around himself didn’t help at all. He placed his hand on Lucile’s shoulder and sat there motionless for a short while.
“Weren’t You able to sleep either?”
She made a feeble gesture of denial, tried to smile, to blame the food from the Pré-Catelan. But she just didn’t have the will power any longer. She closed her eyes again.
“Maybe we should…”, Charles started to say, but then he stopped and started again in a firmer tone. “Would You be able to take a trip? Either alone or with me, to the Côte d’Azur? You always told me that being at the seaside cured You of all ills.”
She didn’t ask him what kind of ill or cure he was alluding to — something in his way of questioning made it obvious that there was no point in asking.
“The Riviera,” she repeated dreamily, “the Riviera…?” And behind her stubbornly closed eyelids, she could see the sea rushing up onto the beach, she could see the color of the sand in the evening when the sun abandons it. Just what she loved — just what she needed, surely.
“I’ll leave with You as soon as You can arrange it,” she said, reopening her eyes to look at him, but he turned his face away from her. She was astonished for a moment, but then she felt, with a type of horror, the wet warmth of her own tears on her cheek.
In early May, the Côte d’Azur is rather sparsely populated, and the only restaurant that was open was theirs for the taking, as was the hotel, as was the beach. After a week had gone by, Charles was beginning to regain some hope. Lucile was spending long hours in the sun and the sea, was reading avidly, was discussing her books with him, was gulping down one grilled fish after another, was playing cards with the few couples that they ran into on the beach — in a word, was seeming happy. Or at least content. It was just that she was also drinking a lot in the evenings, and one night she’d made love in a violent, almost aggressive fashion that he’d never seen in her before. He didn’t realize that all these acts were rooted in a hidden hope — that of seeing Antoine again. She was tanning to please him, eating a lot so as not to look scrawny to him, reading books published by his company so they could talk about them together; and she was drinking in order to forget him, and also in order to sleep.
To be sure, she didn’t admit to herself that she was nourishing any such hope; she was simply living like an animal resigned to being slaughtered any day now, but once in a while, in a moment of distraction, when she would momentarily let go of her clinging dependence on the elements, briefly forgetting the sun’s warmth, the sea’s freshness, and the sand’s softness, then the memory of Antoine would come crashing down on her like a boulder, and she would submit to it in a weird blur of joy and desperation, stretching herself out to form a cross on the beach, feeling herself being crucified — not by nails piercing her hands, but by terrible sharp spears of memory plunging straight through her heart.
At such times, reeling in shock, she was astounded to feel her heart tip over and her emotions drain out, leaving it empty yet still unbearably heavy. What did she care about this sun, this sea, even her body’s physical well-being, what did she care about those things that once had been all she needed to be happy, if Antoine wasn’t there to share them all with her? She could have swum with him, could have tugged his blond hair, sopping wet and made even blonder by the Mediterranean waters, could have kissed him between one wave and the next, could have made love to him in the dunes right over there behind those still-deserted huts, could have lain motionless right next to him as dusk fell, and together with him watched the swallows swooping and gliding over the pink roofs. And time would then have been something not merely to kill — time would have been something to hold onto dearly, to cherish, not to let slip by.
Whenever she reached her wits’ end, she would get up from the sand, looking a bit dazed, and head for the bar, for its most remote part, where Charles, lying in his chaise longue, couldn’t see her. There she would order a cocktail or two and drink them under the vaguely sarcastic gaze of the bartender, who assumed she was an alcoholic cringing in shame, but she couldn’t care less. In any case she’d most likely turn into one. Then she would walk back down to the beach, stretch out at Charles’ feet, and close her eyes. The sun would become a white spot, and she could no longer tell its warmth weighing down on her skin from the alcohol’s warmth coursing through her veins, and all she could see beneath her eyelids was a vague, blurry distortion of Antoine, no longer capable of hurting her. For a few hours then she’d regain a very primitive sense of autonomy from him, almost a vegetative state, thanks to which she could at least breathe a little.
Charles seemed happy, which was already quite something for him, and whenever she watched him walking towards her in his flannel pants, his dark blue blazer, and his loafers, with his scarf so precisely tucked into his shirt collar, she would powerfully fight off the image of Antoine, with his bare feet, his hair in his eyes, his shirt open to show his chest, and his narrow hips and long legs stuffed into an old pair of cotton pants. She’d known young men aplenty in her day, and there was no question that what she loved in Antoine was not his youth. She would have loved him if he’d been old. But in fact, she loved him for being just as old as he was, just as she loved him for being blond, loved him for being so very moralistic, loved him for being sensual, loved him for having loved her, and even loved him for not, it now was clear, loving her any longer. Thus it was. Her love was there, solid, standing there like a wall separating her from the sun and from life’s comfort, even from the desire to live at all. And of all this she was quite ashamed. The pursuit of happiness had always been her guiding li
ght, and unhappiness, if you brought it upon yourself, had always seemed inexcusable to her (a philosophy that had, incidentally, always earned for her, from her fellow human beings, a complete lack of understanding, and indeed, a nearly perpetual sense of being resented).
“So now I’m paying the price,” she thought to herself with disgust — a disgust that was all the more intense since she’d never believed in the fairy-tale notion of moral debts, and since cultural and social taboos had always infuriated her, and since the fear she’d seen in a thousand other people of wrecking their own lives had always caused in her a shudder of revulsion, as if from a shameful illness. But now, she herself had caught this illness, she was suffering from it, and was suffering without any solace provided by telling herself so, which is doubtless one of the most unpleasant ways of suffering.
Charles had to go back to Paris. She took him to the station, promised she’d behave herself, was tender with him. He would be back in six days, and in the meantime he’d call her every evening, which he indeed did. But on the fifth day, around four in the afternoon, when Lucile absent-mindedly picked up the receiver, it was Antoine’s voice that she heard. It had been exactly two weeks since she’d seen him.
CHAPTER 15
After having stormed out of the Pré-Catelan, Antoine had crossed the Bois de Boulogne on foot, talking to himself all the while, like someone crazed. Diane’s driver had dashed off after him, offering his services, but to the fellow’s great astonishment, Antoine had shoved 5,000 francs his way while muttering, “Here, take this for all the things You’ve done — it’s not a lot, but it’s all I’ve got on me.” It seemed that Antoine, so ardent was his desire for things with Diane to be over and done with, figured that he had to spill the news to everyone. After that, he had rapidly covered the whole length of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, explaining along the way to some eager prostitute that he knew plenty of women of her type, then spinning about to go back and apologize to her. But by then she had disappeared, probably having instantly forgotten his remark, and he spent a full half-hour vainly trying to find her. Next, he had stepped into a bar somewhere along the Champs-Élysées, tried to get plastered, and eventually wound up sloppily locking horns with another drunk customer — on the face of it over some murky political issue, but in actual fact because the unfortunate fellow had stubbornly decided to block access to the jukebox, whereas Antoine, for his part, was adamantly determined to put on, as many times as possible, some song that he’d danced to, listened to, and hummed with Lucile.