NOW, IN THE WHITE afternoon, past the bare trees of the avenue, the car glints along. There is almost no traffic. The town seems abandoned. He turns down Boulevard Mazagran, turns again, and then stops, parking carelessly, at a slight angle to the wall, outside the Jobs’.
Dean has begun tutoring three times a week. It came about rather unexpectedly, although the idea must have been flickering in Madame Job’s mind for some time. When she asked me about it, what my opinion would be, I was taken by surprise. I had no chance to adjust myself.
“A tutor?” I said. “Of what?”
“But English, naturally.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I suppose if he were interested he might be able to.”
“Comme il est gentil,” she pleaded. She was thin as a ferret.
“You can always try it.”
“Do you think?”
“Oh, yes. Why not?”
She tried to hide her pleasure. It annoyed me.
He is completely the young student for her, brilliant and clean. Her children adore him. He fashions a set of those cards with a picture on one side and the word on the back. His drawings are very clever, of course. The automobile is his, the one outside, except even longer and slightly uneven. The chicken looks like Claude Picquet.
His life assumes a nineteenth-century air. He rises at eight or eight-thirty and has coffee. Then he reads the morning paper to strengthen his vocabulary. The headlines are underscored these days, the front pages filled with fragments of that terrible divorce, Algeria, which is in its final agony. Many French still cling to the possibility of triumph, the dominance of will. La guerre est la domaine de la force morale. They are like widows, dispossessed tenants, martyrs, maniacs. In the last frenzy, desperate schemes appear. The violence becomes grotesque. Citizens, some with decorations in their lapels, are machine-gunned in the streets. The assassins are practically children. They are sickened by their act. They sit on the curbstone and weep.
In the evenings he’s home before midnight. He almost never spends the night with her. Her bed is very small, and then, I think he prefers to be able to leave. Besides, they have the weekends in every old hotel, shutters drawn, door bolted from the inside.
He is elated with his first pay from giving lessons, they go to Avallon. Napoleon has stayed in the hotel there. It breathes of his glory. In the hallways there are prints of the campaigns, Rivoli, Jena, the Mamelukes. The girl at the reception desk has a gold tooth which shines when she smiles.
They sit in the dining room quietly inspecting the menu, prices first. She has changed upstairs, and beneath her suit she has nothing on. Dean knows this. As he reads, his thoughts keep returning to it. Her body, portions of it, seem to become luminous in his mind. Everything he touches or looks at, the fork, the tablecloth, somehow, by their homeliness, their silence, seem to celebrate that flesh which only a single layer of cloth conceals, does not even conceal, proclaims. She eats a large meal. She even drinks a little wine. Dean gazes at her through his empty glass. A brilliant, irregular world appears. The chandeliers glitter like stars. Her face swims away, crowned in soft hair.
“We make movies tonight,” she says.
In confusion he tries to think what that might mean. She sits across the table, smiling at him. Their napkins lie crumpled to the side.
Could she, I have often wondered over the empty plates in restaurants, in cafés where only the waiters remain, by any rearrangement of events, by any accident could she, I dream, have become mine? … I look in the mirror. Thinning hair. A face marked by lines, cuts they are, almost, that define my expressions. Strong arms. I’m making all of this up. The eyes of a clever and lazy man, a passionate man…
She removes her jacket. Those splendid breasts illuminate the room. She steps out of her skirt, and one hungers for nothing but her, that complaisant her which is so ready to yield. It was by glances, exhausted glances across a nightclub that I discovered her, and I confirmed her only in silence, in stealth, and now all of it is clapped around my consciousness like a ring of iron. Those sovereign breasts, freed of cloth. She loves to be naked. She swims in the light. She is drenched with it.
Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gestures, and my thoughts begin to tumble. I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life.
Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult. And besides, how is one to distinguish between conditions which are valuable, which despite their hatefulness give us strength or impel us to great things and others we would be far better free of? Which are precious and which are not? Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible? Why, whenever I am idle, sometimes even before, in the midst of doing something, do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts.
Silence. I listen to it, the silence of that room which leaves me faint. Those calm phrases to which she knows so well how to respond as barefoot now, unhurried, she crosses to him in the dark.
I have not gone deep enough, that’s the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone.
“There was a lot,” she says.
She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet.
“How long does it take to make again?” she asks.
Dean tries to think. He is remembering biology.
“Two or three days,” he guesses.
“Non, non!” she cries. That is not what she meant.
She begins to make him hard again. In a few minutes he rolls her over and puts it in as if the intermission were ended. This time she is wild. The great bed begins creaking. Her breath becomes short. Dean has to brace his hands on the wall. He hooks his knees outside her legs and drives himself deeper.
“Oh,” she breathes, “that’s the best.”
When he comes, it downs them both. They crumble like sand. He returns from the bathroom and picks up the covers from the floor. She has not moved. She lies just where she has fallen.
They always drive somewhere the following day. They rise late and plan a journey. These are the first mild weekends. It’s good to be outside. They put their things in the car: her small plastic suitcase, the radio, a copy of Elle. She gets in and slams the door.
“Do you have to do that?” he says.
“Sorry.”
“One of these times it’s going to come right off the damn car.”
“I am sorry,” she repeats.
“It’s all right,” he says and really, he is content. Her period started that morning. Everything is fine.
They leave town through a long corridor of trees. The country opens to receive them. Squares of warm sunlight drift across their laps. The rich murmur of the engine flows beneath them. They talk about her friends, Danielle, whose parents own the grocery. And Dominique, who went to live six months with a German family. She liked it very much. Better than France. Anne-Marie would like to go there herself. What about Italy? Oh, yes, of course, Italy. Perhaps they can go to Italy together, she suddenly suggests. In the summer. They could drive.
“Sure,” he says. It’s all vague and far off.
After a while she begins to move about on the seat.
“Oh, Phillip,” she says, “my Tampax is not good. You must stop in Saulieu.”
“All right.”
“Is it far?”
“Not very,” he says.
She gives a faint hiss of dismay. It’s really just like her. He admires that. Sometimes she will go into the woods to pee.