Hi,
We have things to sort out. I didn’t mean to behave that way last night; I couldn’t help myself. I’m going away from the house for a few days. I’ll be at the manor.
Rémi shows Lucienne the note Victor left behind.
She squints.
“Boy, does he ever write badly.”
She hands the paper back without comment.
“Me, I gotta hurry. Odette’s husband’ll be here soon. You sure you don’t wanna come with us?”
“Would I really belong between two village gossips?”
She laughs.
“Not really. But at least you could set the record straight about yourself.”
“Lucienne! I…”
“Hee, hee, hee, my turn to get you. Don’t worry, I ain’t like that. Odette left the village a year ago, she’s lonely, and she ain’t all there anymore. She loses bits and pieces, if you know what I mean. I might end up talking to myself.”
“Don’t you want me to drive you?”
“That’s real nice, but I told you, Odette’s husband is coming.”
“Have you ever slept with him?”
She stops short, rapidly turning red.
“What kind of question is that? There’s more than bed in life!”
Rémi does not lower his gaze and holds his ground. She finishes pinning up her bun.
“Well, no! But his brother, yes… more than forty years ago! I don’t even remember if he was hairy or not!”
She lowers her arms and looks at herself sadly in the mirror.
“Hey, it’s been a good seven years since I made love… It’s like an old song in my head now.”
She breaks into a broad smile.
“I like hearing it, but it ain’t like when I was young and couldn’t get the tune outta my head all day, you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m sure that if I found myself in bed with someone, I wouldn’t enjoy it the same way. I wouldn’t ask for the same things. But I understand the ones who keep at it.”
With one finger, she corrects an imperfection in her lipstick.
“So long,” she repeats.
A honking horn signals the arrival of Odette’s husband.
“All right, I’m off. I won’t be home late.”
She kisses him.
“I’ve got my keys if you wanna go out!” she says before closing the door.
He looks through the window to make sure it really is Odette’s husband. Lucienne turns towards him and waves before getting into the car. He is still holding Victor’s note. He reads it again, then crumples it. He would like to swallow it.
The house is quiet. Victor is not there, as usual. It is comforting and suffocating at once. He looks at the furniture, the hypothesis that he could lose it all written in his eyes. Begin all over again. With Stéphane? Nothing is less certain. To begin again, he would have to make the journey in reverse, towards a simplified past—return to France, for example, and drive out the intruder who has taken his place beside Fernand.
Owning furniture is no help to him. Nevertheless, he takes inventory. The kitchen belongs to him, so to speak: the hanging utensils, the useful odds and ends, the bourgeois comforts. Beyond it lies the domain of Victor and his decorator friend. Refined furniture, a few paintings from Victor’s private collection. Rémi has never taken an interest in his wealth. He does not know whether it is modest or more substantial, a treasure Victor dares not display because of his profession, to the point that he lives in a house that is charming, certainly, but probably beneath his financial means. They have never lacked money in their joint account. Rémi does not even know the accountant’s name.
He stands facing the patio door and looks at the pool dug into the barren ground. Paradise, almost. Good, soporific, indolent happiness. He goes out onto the patio. Émile is already on his roof. Music from Irène’s, always jazz, occasionally drifts over to him. So does laughter. Shouts, rather, from people tickling one another or pretending to wrestle before moving on to other games. It sounds like a sauna, he thinks. All he has to do is close his eyes and remember.
His thoughts skip like an old record, until the purity of the sound derives its full value only from the crackle of wear. He raises his eyes to the sky. The evening is already a ripe fruit, denim blue, worn by the summer wind. The air is mild; one might even believe it is happy. But the wind is simply the wind, which itself is nothing more than the skin’s interpretation. When Rémi is alone, he becomes serious, calm and immortal. He waves to Émile, who unsurprisingly returns the gesture.
He goes back inside and upstairs, entering Victor’s bedroom. The drawers have been opened and half emptied. Victor has taken more than seems necessary.
Rémi touches the unmade bed sheets and spots stains here and there, dried pools whose origin he recognizes. Which seed belongs to whom? He brushes them with his fingers, lacking the tactile intelligence to pursue the analysis blindly. He lies down and sniffs. There, that is Victor; he always sleeps on the same side of the bed, and Rémi recognizes his scent. And there, then, is the other man. Both smell good, and their fluids, in this silence, are ageing well on the surface of happiness. Why did Victor not have the decency to do the laundry before leaving? It proves he has had enough. Truly had enough.
Rémi undresses, lies on his back and soaks in scents that do not belong to him. He feels no disgust for these dead lakes. His skin comes into contact with foreign bacteria. Nothing serious; he has known others, and more active ones at that. He turns onto his stomach and rubs himself against the sheets, the better to remember and no doubt the better to possess, to control. To act as though it does not bother him. Everything mingles, everything fights and resists, and if Rémi has the strength, his heart will achieve immunity and learn to face failure.
Undo his life again, rebuild and continue with new scaffolding.
He emerges from his reverie because, for the moment, his thoughts are instead leaving him soiled. He rises, dresses, gathers the sheets into a ball and throws them into the hallway. A distended condom falls to the floor. Rémi purses his lips. He bends down. Fortunately, the condom contains nothing, but its glistening walls say too much. Rémi nervously tears several tissues from a box on the dresser and picks up the object, crushing it as though it were an insect. He carries it to the toilet, kicking the sheets along the way.
Like a dog marking its territory, he urinates on the condom, then flushes, washes his hands and punches the tiled wall near the mirror. A tile cracks under the impact. Too bad. Perhaps there has not been enough violence in this house. Neither violence nor desire. Only a long daily absence punctuated by bouts of sex.
Angry with himself, he leaves the bathroom, picks up the sheets, makes sure they contain no other surprises and throws them into the washing machine on the main floor. He pours in twice as much detergent as necessary, fills the bleach dispenser to the brim—too bad, too bad, too bad for the fabric’s pattern—selects the most vigorous cycle and starts the machine, which obeys without protest, spraying the sheets with hot water.
He searches his wallet. Shit, he thinks, he left the scrap of paper with Stéphane’s phone number at the bakery.
He cannot help laughing.
He returns to Victor’s bedroom, and his anger quickly dissipates. There is no point fighting what was already absent. He enters Victor’s office. Victor has not touched his bookcase or his personal effects. It is only a bad patch, Rémi tells himself, a brief skirmish. He catches himself hoping the situation will turn around.
He does not want to be alone. He turns on the computer. It is not fast enough for him. Downstairs, he hears the washing machine digesting Victor’s filth. He taps on the keys, rises and goes to the window. Nothing, except Émile, who is merely an intoxicated void. The computer signals that it is ready. He returns to the desk and opens the application that will connect him to the planet.
To his great surprise, the public spaces are almost empty. He checks the time. It is not normal, but it is possible. Rui is not there either.
He goes downstairs for a beer and brings back two bottles. If his thoughts resist, he will drown them twice over. He drinks from the bottle; the hops quickly flood his stomach and make him belch. Yes, if his thoughts resist, they had better have serious reasons for doing so. If his body protests, he will know how to use his charms to distract it.
Cobra is not online either. Rémi needs to avenge the day. When few people are around, a newcomer who connects is quickly noticed and assessed. His profile is read, his chances weighed. Does one have the physical assets to take on the beast? The humour, social ease, large cock or beautiful eyes that will compensate for the imperfection of one’s existence?
He receives a few conversation requests. He does what everyone does, wanting to know whom he is dealing with, and reads each requester’s profile. Like a jaded regent, he presses the “Decline” button. In a bar, this is called “pretending not to notice.” On the Internet, politeness does not exist; it has been replaced by the inalienable right to browse privately. Rémi drinks his beer greedily. Let us sail, sailors, he tells himself, let us sail, the ocean belongs to us; we are whales, we are ships, we have harpoons, we have pennants. May the most beautiful win, may the loneliest swallow. Sometimes the voyage is amusing, the waves like carnival rides. Sometimes nausea takes over, as it does now. Beer, anger, anger, beer.
Little by little, the spaces fill up. The service probably suffered a temporary outage. The troops arrive as reinforcements. Icons appear and disappear and, before long, the lid flies off the pot in a broth of loneliness and orgasm.
Rémi merely watches the game; he reaches a depth of sadness that gradually dilutes his anger. There is nothing to be done. He understands Victor too well and almost wishes him luck already. He clicks an icon representing a public space where men masturbate for anyone willing to watch and imitate. Each nevertheless reserves the right to limit the number of voyeurs and banish the less stimulating ones. It resembles a suburb, Rémi thinks, with its little houses brimming with unspeakable secrets. It resembles a city, where every Internet user is a haggard citizen roaming saunas, false petticoats and true illusions. It resembles an entire universe. Or a single thought shimmering in the water of possibility. It resembles Rémi himself, bubbling with stories.
He clicks a name. According to his profile, the fellow, a big lug, is friendly and well travelled. This other one, “old but still loving it,” is indeed old. Rémi is tempted to say hello, but he has been fooled before; the man at the other end will only want to see him naked, not learn anything more about his youth. And this other one here, “married, beautiful children, seeking adventure”—a Luc and his mirror. Ass.
The stories all gather beneath the bell jar of probability. The shadows they cast upon the screen are both evanescent and incalculable, like the hypothetical trajectories of those electrons which, despite the apparent virtuality of their existence, form the skin on which lips so easily place kisses. Only the gaze is nauseating. When we close our eyes, we once again become the atoms we are meant to be.
Rémi calms down completely. Without realizing it, he has opened the second bottle of beer, the juice of oblivion. The washing machine has reached the spin cycle. The desire is not there. The Internet is empty tonight because Rémi knows other intensities, tangible ones, infinitely more dangerous. He drinks. The battle descends into anarchy inside his body. He goes to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. The lie has failed. Silence, except for the washing machine endlessly tumbling the laundry.
He vomits again, but his stomach is already empty. Only spasms remain, anger dismembered by the alcohol’s successive attacks. His belly knots.
“Christ!”
The cry pronounces every letter of the Lord’s name, and his fist strikes the tile, which resists this time. Staggering, he returns to Victor’s bedroom and stares at the bare mattress that witnessed their love as much as their solitude. A smile is reborn within him. A nasty smile, no doubt. The beer has swollen his bladder. Pissing on the mattress would feel good. His soul and his mind breathe enough decency into him to turn him away from the plan. He returns to the bathroom. The nausea and drunkenness vanish almost by magic. The washing machine has fallen silent. There are things to do. Put the sheets in the dryer, or they will acquire creases and mechanical smells.
He goes downstairs, transfers the sheets, adds an anti-static sheet and starts the machine. Permanent press cycle. He belches. Bad beer. He goes back upstairs to brush his teeth and watches himself in the mirror while the electric toothbrush scrubs his gums. No judgement. His mind, his entire body, are tired. He returns downstairs, pours a glass of water and gulps it in one go. He pours a second, then a third. He has to go back upstairs to urinate; the process eventually brings him back from his altered state, as though awakening from a bad dream.
Sleep suddenly overtakes him. He goes outside and stretches out on the lounge chair beside the pool. In no time, he is asleep.