‘Are you mad, or just very sporty?’ said Luc.
‘I’m mad.’
‘That’s what I thought, and I was proud of you. When I said to myself that you were diving from so high up to come back to me, I was very happy.’
‘Are you happy? I am happy. At least I must be, because I am not asking myself whether I am or not. It’s a well-known maxim, isn’t it?’
I was speaking without looking at him directly because he was lying on his stomach and I could only see the back of his neck. It was firm and tanned.
‘I’m going to return you to Françoise in good shape,’ I said jokingly.
‘You cynic!’
‘You are much less cynical than we are. Women are very cynical. You are just a little boy compared to Françoise and me.’
‘You’re pretentious!’
‘You are much more pretentious than us. Women who are pretentious immediately look ridiculous. But it gives men a false appearance of manliness which they cultivate in order to …’
‘Have you nearly finished with your maxims? Talk to me about the weather. It’s the only subject permitted on holiday.’
‘It’s a lovely day,’ I said. ‘It’s a really lovely day …’
And, turning over on my back, I went to sleep.
When I woke up, the sky was overcast, the beach was deserted and I felt exhausted, with a dry mouth. Luc was sitting next to me on the sand, dressed again. He was smoking and looking out to sea. I watched him for a moment without letting him know I was awake; for the first time I was watching him with a purely objective curiosity: ‘What can this man be thinking about?’ What can any human being think about on an empty beach, faced with an empty sea, beside someone who is asleep? I imagined him to be so crushed by these three absences, and so alone, that I stretched my hand out towards him and touched his arm. He wasn’t even startled. He was never startled, he was rarely astonished by anything and even more rarely did he utter expressions of surprise.
‘Are you awake?’ he said idly. And he stretched regretfully. ‘It’s four o’clock.’
‘Four o’clock!’ I sat up. ‘Have I been asleep for four hours?’
‘Don’t panic,’ said Luc. ‘We have nothing to do.’
Those words sounded ominous to me. It was true that there was nothing for us to do together, we had no work nor any friends in common.
‘Do you regret that?’ I asked.
He turned to me, smiling.
‘I love it. Put on your sweater, darling, you are going to be cold. We’ll go and have tea at the hotel.’
La Croisette was sinister and sunless and its old palm trees were swaying slightly in a listless wind. The hotel slumbered. We had tea sent up. I had a hot bath and came back to lie alongside Luc, who was reading on the bed, from time to time flicking the ash from his cigarette. We had closed the shutters because the sky was so gloomy, so there wasn’t much light in the room and it was warm. I was lying on my back, with my hands clasped on my stomach, like a corpse or a fat man. I closed my eyes. Only the sound of Luc turning the pages interrupted the far-off breaking of the waves.
I said to myself: ‘There. I’m near Luc, I’m beside him, I have only got to stretch my hand out to touch him. I know his body, his voice and the way he sleeps. He’s reading, I’m getting a little bored, it’s not unpleasant. We’ll presently go for dinner, then we’ll go to bed together and in three days’ time we’ll part. Things will probably never again be as they are just now. But this moment is here, it’s ours; I don’t know whether it’s love or just an understanding we have; that’s not important. We are each of us alone. He doesn’t know that I’m thinking about him; he’s reading. But we are together, and next to me I have whatever warmth he may feel for me and his indifference too. In six months, when we have gone our separate ways, it won’t be the memory of this moment that will come back to me, but other foolish, involuntary memories. And yet it’s probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.’ I reached out and picked up The Fenouillard Family,24 which Luc often reproached me for not having read, and I began to laugh, so that Luc wanted to join in, and we pored over the same page, cheek to cheek and, before long, mouth to mouth, with the book eventually falling to the floor, while pleasure cascaded over us and night descended over the rest of the world.
Eventually the day of our departure arrived. Out of a hypocrisy largely based on fear – fear on his part that I would become emotional and fear on my part that, conscious of how he felt, I would indeed end up becoming emotional – we had not alluded to it the previous day, during what was our last evening. But in the night I had woken up several times, seized by a kind of panic, and I had sought Luc out with my forehead and my hand, to make sure that our sweet togetherness in shared sleep was still there. And every time, as if he had been on the look-out for those fears and had been sleeping very lightly, he had taken me in his arms, held the back of my neck firmly in his hand and murmured: ‘There, there,’ in a strange voice, as if he were comforting an animal. It was a confused night full of whisperings, heavy with the scent of the mimosa that we would be leaving behind, and with half-sleep and balminess. Then morning had come, and breakfast, and Luc had done his packing. I did mine at the same time, while talking to him about the route and the restaurants along it and so on. I was rather irritated by my artificially calm and courageous tone, for I didn’t feel courageous and I didn’t see why I should. I felt nothing, except perhaps vaguely helpless. For once we were putting on an act for each other, but I thought it safer to stick to it, for things could well end up with my having to suffer before parting from him. It was best to be restrained in manner and in one’s actions and appearance.
‘Well, that’s us ready,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ring for the luggage to be collected.’
I became fully alert again.
‘Let’s lean over the balcony one last time,’ I said melodramatically.
He looked at me anxiously, then, seeing my expression, began to laugh.
‘You are a hard little thing, a real cynic. I like you.’
He had taken me in his arms in the middle of the room and was shaking me gently.
‘You know, it’s a rare thing to be able to say to someone: “I like you” after a fortnight of cohabiting with them.’
‘It wasn’t cohabitation,’ I laughingly protested, ‘it was a honeymoon.’
‘All the more reason!’ he said, detaching himself from me. That was the moment when I really had the impression that he was leaving me and I felt the desire to catch him by the lapel of his jacket. It was very fleeting and very unpleasant.
The return journey went well. I drove a bit. Luc said that it would be night-time when we got to Paris, that he would phone me the next day and that we would have dinner soon with Françoise, who would be back from the country, where she had been spending that fortnight with her mother. It all seemed rather worrying to me, but Luc advised me simply not to mention our trip: he would sort things out with her. I could easily enough see myself spending the autumn in their midst, meeting Luc occasionally to kiss him on the mouth and to sleep with him. I had never envisaged his leaving Françoise, firstly because he had told me that he wouldn’t and then because it didn’t seem possible that he would do that to Françoise. If he had offered to do so, I would probably not at that time have felt able to accept his offer.
He told me he had a lot of work to catch up with but that it didn’t interest him greatly. As for me, it was a new year of study, which meant having to go deeper into things that had already bored me enough the previous year. In a word, we were going back to Paris in a dejected frame of mind, but I was happy enough with that, because it was the same sense of dejection for each of us, it was the same problem and consequently we each had the same need to cling to the other, to that person who was other, yet the same.
We got to Paris very late at night. At the Porte d’Italie25 I gl
anced at Luc, who seemed rather weary, and it struck me that we had come through our little escapade rather well, that we were really adult and sensible and civilized; and then suddenly, with something like rage, I felt that I had been incredibly humiliated.
PART THREE
One
I had never had to rediscover Paris. When I had first discovered it, it had been once and for all. But I was astonished now by its charm and the particular kind of pleasure I found in walking in its streets, still with a summer holiday feel about them. For three days, that took my mind off the emptiness and the impression of meaninglessness that Luc’s absence had left me with. At night I looked to see if he was there and reached out for him with my hand, and each time his absence seemed senseless and unnatural to me. Our fortnight together was already taking on a certain shape in my memory and was striking a note that was simultaneously harsh and resonant. Strangely enough, I had not been left with a sense of failure but, quite the contrary, one of achievement. However, it was a type of achievement that I could well see would make any similar endeavour difficult, if not extremely painful.
Bertrand would be returning soon. What would I say to him? Bertrand was going to try to get me back. Why should I take up with him again and, above all, how could I tolerate someone else’s body or someone else’s breath when they were not Luc’s?
Luc did not phone me, not the next day nor the day after that. I put this down to complications with Françoise and that made me feel both important and ashamed. I walked a lot, reflecting in a detached way and with only a very vague interest on the year ahead. Perhaps I would find something that it would make more sense for me to study than law, since Luc was supposed to be introducing me to one of his friends who was a newspaper editor. Even though my inertia, up to then, had prompted me to seek emotional forms of compensation for what had happened, it was now making me think of compensation in career terms.
After two days of waiting, I could no longer resist the desire to see Luc. Not daring to phone him, I sent him a little note that was both casual and friendly, asking him to ring me, which he did the next day. He had gone to the country to fetch Françoise and had not been able to phone me sooner. I thought his voice sounded strained. It occurred to me that he was missing me and, for an instant, while he was actually telling me so on the phone, I had a vision of the café where we would meet and where he would take me in his arms and tell me that he could not live without me and that those two days had been an absurdity. All that I would have to do would be to reply: ‘Neither can I,’ which was not too much of a lie, and then let him decide further. But although he did in fact arrange to meet me in a café, it was just to assure me that Françoise was fine, that she wasn’t asking any questions and that he was swamped with work. He said: ‘You are beautiful,’ and kissed the palm of my hand.
I found him changed – he had started wearing his dark suits again – changed but still desirable. I looked at that sharp, tired face of his. It seemed strange that he no longer belonged to me. I was already beginning to think that I had not really been able to gain any ‘benefit’ – and the word was repugnant to me – from my stay with him. I talked to him cheerfully and he replied in the same way, but there was nothing natural in the manner of either of us. Perhaps it was because we were surprised that it was so easy to live with someone for a fortnight, surprised that it had gone so well and surprised that no greater harm had been done. Only, when he stood up, I felt a burst of indignation and I felt like saying: ‘Where are you going? You’re not going to leave me on my own, are you?’ He departed, and I was left on my own. I had nothing much to do. I thought: ‘This is all quite comical,’ and shrugged my shoulders. I walked around for an hour and went into one or two cafés, hoping to meet the others, but no one was back yet. I had always the possibility of going to spend a fortnight on the Yonne. But, as I was due to have dinner with Luc and Françoise in two days’ time, I decided to wait until after that before setting off.
I spent those two days at the cinema or lying on my bed, sleeping and reading. My room seemed alien to me. Finally, on the evening of the dinner, I dressed with care and went to their flat. I had a moment of fear as I rang the bell, but Françoise came to open the door to me and I was immediately reassured by her smile. I realized, as Luc had said, that she could never look ridiculous or play a role that was incompatible with her exceptional kindness and dignity. She had never been duped and most likely never would be.
It was a strange meal. We were all three of us together and it worked very well, as previously. Quite simply, though, we had drunk a lot before sitting down at the table. Françoise appeared to know nothing, though perhaps she did look at me more attentively than usual. From time to time Luc looked into my eyes when speaking to me and I made it a point of honour to reply light-heartedly and in a natural way. The conversation got round to Bertrand, who was due back the following week.
‘I won’t be here,’ I said.
‘Where will you be?’ asked Luc.
‘I’m probably going to spend a few days with my parents.’
‘When will you be back?’
It was Françoise who asked that question.
‘In a fortnight.’
‘Dominique, I’m going to call you tu,’26 she exclaimed suddenly. ‘I find it tiresome to call you vous.’
‘Let’s all use tu,’ said Luc with a little laugh, as he headed for the record player. My eyes followed him and, turning back to Françoise, I saw that she was watching me. I returned her gaze, feeling rather anxious, and especially anxious not to appear to shy away from her. She laid her hand on mine for a moment, with a sad little smile that upset me.
Calling me vous but then correcting herself, she said: ‘You’ll send me a postcard, won’t you, Dominique? You haven’t told me how your mother was.’
‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘She …’
I stopped short because Luc had put on the tune they’d been playing on the Côte d’Azur and everything had suddenly come flooding back to me. He had not turned round. For a moment I found my thoughts in a whirl, what with the couple, the music, Françoise’s seeming to turn a blind eye, Luc’s similarly feigned sentimentality – in a word, the whole combination. I felt a powerful urge to run from the place.
‘I really like that tune,’ said Luc placidly.
He sat down and I realized that he had been thinking of nothing in particular, not even of our acerbic conversation about records as memories. The tune must simply have come back to him once or twice and he had bought the record to get it out of his system.
‘I like it very much too,’ I said.
He looked up in my direction, remembered and smiled at me. He smiled with such obvious tenderness that I lowered my eyes. But Françoise was lighting a cigarette. I was at a loss. You couldn’t even have said that there was a pretence going on, for it seemed to me that the situation would have needed only to be mentioned for each of us calmly and objectively to have given our opinion of it, as if we were not personally implicated.
‘Are we going to see this play or not?’ said Luc.
He turned to me to explain.
‘We’ve had an invitation to a new play. We could all three of us go …’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
I almost added, with an incipient giggle: ‘Considering everything else!’
Françoise took me into her bedroom to try on one of her coats, which was more stylish than mine. She got me to put on one or two, made me turn round, stood the collars up. At one moment, while doing so, she held my face between the two lapels of the collar and I thought, stifling the same laughter: ‘I’m at her mercy. Perhaps she is going to suffocate me or bite me.’ But she merely smiled.
‘You’re drowning a bit in this.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, not thinking of the coat.
‘I really must see you when you come back.’
‘That’s it,’ I thought. ‘Is she going to ask me to stop seeing Luc? Will I be able to??
?? And the answer came to me straight away: ‘No. I couldn’t do it.’
‘Because I’ve decided to take you in hand and dress you suitably and introduce you to things that are more fun than those students and libraries.’
‘Oh, goodness,’ I thought, ‘this is not the moment, it’s not the moment to be saying that to me.’
‘Should I not?’ she went on, in response to my silence. ‘I rather felt I had a daughter in you.’ (She laughed as she said that, but in a kindly way.) ‘If that daughter is going to be rebellious and purely interested in intellectual things …’
‘You are too kind,’ I said, stressing the word ‘too’. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Just let yourself be done to,’ she said, laughing again.
‘I’ve really landed myself in it,’ I thought. ‘But if Françoise is fond of me and if she really wants to see me, I shall get to see Luc more often. Perhaps I’ll tell her. Perhaps it’s really all the same to her, after ten years of marriage.’
‘Why are you so fond of me?’ I asked.
‘You have the same nature as Luc. You have both rather unhappy natures and your fate is to be consoled by creatures from Venus like me. There’s no escape for you …’
Mentally I threw my up my hands in horror. Then we went to the theatre. Luc laughed and talked. Françoise explained to me who the various people were, who they were with and so on. Afterwards they dropped me back at my residence and Luc kissed the palm of my hand in a quite natural way. I went in feeling rather dazed, fell asleep and the next morning caught the train to the Yonne.