Affairs of Art (9 page)

I began to see you, slender and dark. Chestnut hair and eyes, the French say. But chestnuts are reddish-brown. Your brown eyes and hair are Prismacolor brown, and matte, a brown that no painter can render, they always add a highlight of ash or gold. I thought you were elegant, with your high turtleneck, a hint of ochre on your eyelids, your pale cheeks. Your name was Marie.

And mine, François. We decided to try all the rides, now that we were two, we had no children, and we would never come back to Mr. Disney's world. At three
o'clock we'd downed some ice cream, out of duty. It tasted of the refrigerator, of failed holidays. At six, we were in the parking lot, night was already falling, the clouds were opening at last, and it was the moon that turned us into friends. You had a Ford from Budget, I had an Avis Pontiac, we were about to go our separate ways, the light was shifting because of the halo around the moon. “That's a sign of snow,” you told me. We were so cold. I kissed you on the temple. I made sure that your car started, you told me you'd be at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg the next day at ten. It was a date.

I slept in a neat and tidy motel somewhere along U.S. Highway 19, which leads to the Dali Museum. The water was hot, the air dry, the TV clear. I devoured a pizza in the restaurant attached to the service station next door, while reading the
St. Petersburg Times
whose weekend edition had a feature on “Fragonard and His Friends,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts which I'd have to visit as well. Tomorrow I would invite you to dinner. Life had some happy detours.

To Dali and Fragonard we added Velasquez and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. On the second day, I moved to your Best Western in Clearwater, a ground-floor room with a view of the pool, we had drinks on your balcony, the weather kept turning a little milder, a little less grey. I drove, you deciphered the maps. You unearthed antique stores in Tampa, a vast antiquarian bookstore among the thrift shops of St. Petersburg. I gave you my red bear and you bought me a blue one.

The story is that of a man and a woman who meet and who then think of nothing else. It took five days to kindle, like the sun in the alleys of Tampa where cats and azaleas and little American girls with the eyes of Ramona grow. In a Puerto Rican restaurant we blazed with all the spices that make every mild fish sing, we toasted our imminent farewells with an inexhaustible American wine, we were drunk even on black coffee. It was in my Pontiac, I think, where we sat and waited to sober up as we told each other the stories of our lives, that the most syrupy of Neil Diamond's songs made us get out and start dancing in the narrow parking lot, I kissed your neck all the way to your heart and you were vibrating.
Don't leave me. I'll suffocate if you take me away from you. It's hot but I must cover you, I'm only a little taller, you just have to get under my skin.

I can still hear the silence as we drove home, no music now, windows open on the night that was finally warm. I drove like a little old man past the endless parade of malls, my hand in yours. If there'd been an open drive-in I'd have taken you to the movies where I'd have laid you across my chest and contented myself with dying of desire, I was so afraid. To lie down and find again the ways to love a woman, or to deceive you gently, or to not know what to do, or to lose you. I couldn't tell you the truth, you'd have run away or let yourself be taken as you closed your eyes to other bodies, with a shred of sadness in your pleasure. But you amassed miracles.

“We'll play wedding,” you said on the threshold of your room. We took the time to bathe ourselves and to perfume you, to dress you in your long white cotton nightgown and then undo each of the fifteen buttons, and you insisted that I enter you at once, like children who know nothing yet about mouths, about breasts, about kisses between the legs, about drinking sweat before the ultimate pleasure. Instead of gazing into one another's eyes you forced me to watch with you the movements of pleasure, our two roots joined that had now found their rhythm, I came in perfect innocence, the innocence that just then and for the first time, I regretted that I had lost.

Did you know, had you guessed that I needed to enter you without caresses, so that I could think of nothing, so that I could go on? Today you say no, you say you too had images to keep at bay, loves less full to erase. You say that you wanted to avoid words, words eternally the same, the distraught gazes that are less truthful than the body. I removed your nightgown afterwards. Only in sleep did I possess you fully naked, your beauty so disturbing it was interrupted at dawn. We started again and it was the same. I couldn't get over it.

I went to get breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. I felt frightened again, seeing you wolf down the over-sweetened orange juice, the toast with overly salty
butter, the overly watery coffee. Everything was too much. You drew up the day's program, which was not to move, to bask for a while in the sun that had finally come for a brief stay, to walk on the beach, to read, and to love one another again around noon, and after. You said nothing about planes, yours was tomorrow, already, Tampa-Montreal. I panicked. In my room when I went to change, the order there made me fall apart. I had laughed, chatted, moved, loved from afar and then from up close all week long, I'd found treasures in the heart of the silliest America, whose pavement I would now have gladly kissed. I'd never been so happy, a forbidden word in my oasis. No one was happy, everyone knew that if they were able to read, knew that simple feelings lead to the worst, they make fools of us, and knew that one doesn't do an intellectual's work in the moonlight. And thus I had never been so unhappy.

In a Burger King at noon, I talked. It's easier between two mouthfuls of fries to say for a start that there's no official girlfriend, that I should in fact say no boyfriend, because, you see, for some years now I've been more involved with boys. The sweeper goes by, two children already obese spill a Seven-Up on the next table. You assume a detached air as if I had just described the outline for my courses or a book. I dared not even detect the retreat in your eyes, I know it's over, I know you will gently send me back to my Persian cat. You pick at your fries, you say they need vinegar, I go to fetch some, I meet the sweeper again, Americans are as clean and smooth as their floor-tiles. The air is very conditioned. You tell me you've never made love with a woman, though one summer you were troubled by a waitress who became your friend, who had straddled a man, a casual acquaintance, in front of you in a kind of shed that was also the water tower in your northern town. You wonder if it was a little because of her, of her perfect orgasm before your very eyes, that you finally left your Slavic husband, he was handsome and kind, he was preparing to make children with you, the light in your house was blue also, in the bungalow that he'd surrounded with an openwork fence, white, like those in Dallas where he wanted to go and live.

I devour an apple dessert but in my eyes I am kneeling, you are the Mary of the Hail Mary who bestows grace, but you're far more beautiful, brunette among all the darknesses held out to me by the darkness that is auspicious for allaying my pain. I go to get coffee, the sweeper has left, he's having his lunch, the waitress is built like your friend, she says, “Have a good day.” Americans have a talent for good days. “Come out on the terrace,” you say. We eat hot food under the cruel sun. Don't pray for us poor sinners, for the Virgin Mary does not deal in forgiveness, she understands nothing of it, we are together amid the light of the innocents. It's time to go for a swim.

***

I don't want to die. I want to go back to your house as it was that March, when we were both wrong about each other. Under the comforter we'd become crazy, the walls crackled from the cold, the fire was out, I told you that you still smelled of the sun, and I said it again. In the darkness that was just turning to the grey of dawn, there was only your voice:

It is found again.

What? - Eternity.

It is the sea

Gone with the sun.

I have not read all the books but by chance I identified Rimbaud, who had no business under your frost-covered window, who changed the tone of our games and the texture of your words. I was lying at your back, I believed I was commencing another life, finding you here again every day, in your neighbourhood of entrenched Anglos, grinding your coffee, carrying the bags to the market, counting the days till summer when I would fuck you in their parks, beneath their foliage at midnight, when they'd all have gone inside to sleep to the sound of their air-conditioners. I had found my island, I was circling it now, I would set foot there soon. Rimbaud was an intruder, Ferré's lyricist, and I hadn't talked about your sun just so he could run away with the sea and lose himself in our eternity.

You told me, you announced, that you'd bought the house in order to sell it, to have your own garden that you'd remember when you were in Abyssinia, that you didn't really like Rimbaud but that you'd decided, just like that, during the eight-hour journey between your two lives four years ago, that you needed the green of coffee trees and the hyenas of the suburbs of Harar to be done with aspens and soft-water sparrows, and winter.

I didn't believe you, I still don't believe you. “In any case, Ethiopia is at war,” I told you, going along with the game. But you weren't going to Eritrea or to the deserts, you would teach French to the rich beauties of Addis Ababa, the most magnificent women in the world, who languished in the presence of any foreigners able to take them away from the purgatory that is their land. “They'll go north and we'll meet along the way.”

I laughed at your flight, which was so obvious. I thought I was already strong enough to get you back, I thought you were trying a little too hard to leave, and for nothing — your Slavic husband and one troubled summer, already so remote. And there you have it. We were going to tie up the loose ends, I was perfectly willing, just for fun, to buy Abyssinian coffee and even to model myself too on Rimbaud, who had loved men before he loved women.

I have studied the magic

of happiness, which none eludes

He irritated you, Rimbaud, what you liked in him were his words, and Abyssinia. I thought you resembled his sister and his mother, who were dark and who loathed him even as they hovered over him, and who lost him again and again. They were called Vitalie. And suddenly you were more Vitalie than they were, you took me as if you were famished, then you threw me out of bed, there was snow to look at, and a scarf to buy for the consumptive you suspected I would become, and melting butter to spread on toasted bread. We went out side by side at eight o'clock, I noticed the hammock that you hadn't put away in the fall, a snowdrift hanging from a bare maple, I lay down in it for a laugh. You caressed me through layers of wool, I came hot and cold, I named you Vitalie howling very softly, I baptized you in the palm of your gloved hand.

We were lost without knowing it. We laughed, do you remember, when we were both mistaken.

From that day I pretended to believe in Abyssinia and you pretended to be preparing to go there. We would not be a little couple who went to the movies, the market, the museum, who picnicked on the mountain. There was your house for loving, such a strange choice, in an inner suburb where the very streetlamps cast their light in another language. We were fifteen kilometres from Mentana Street, in a diffident Great Britain, signed with Canadian flags on a few balconies, imprisoned inside brick cottages the boldest of which tolerated some ivy in the spring. You had chosen the house from a cat­alogue, not knowing the neighbours, you were only passing through and you wanted to climb stairs to go to sleep. I guessed your obsessive fear of overly bright bungalows, I laughed at it.

It was you, so you said, who had chosen to be my mistress rather than my wife. To make your house an elsewhere unknown to all my friends, the university, the magazine, art. Leaving me Rockland Avenue, my piano, my blue cat whom you would not meet. To agree that at some point life would separate us, that we were certainly in no hurry, but it would happen. And then you would go to Abyssinia.

I know perfectly well that you were lying very gently. That it was as certain, as clear as this March day, that I could love you until you were old and gaunt, and still magnificent in your high turtlenecks. That you would not survive for three weeks in Abyssinia, speaking French to the hyenas and English to the warriors. But you love me, Vitalie. And you allowed me to choose deceit: to change nothing about the texts, the symposia, the boys I no longer had sex with but made a show of accompanying here and there. I didn't even take down the seven of hearts. And I was even able to run into you without greeting you at a concert of ancient music one night, I was with Jean-Pierre who thought he was still in favour, I was teaching him about the prophetic for­malism of the harpsichord, I hadn't known that you too liked unaccompanied strings — you who used to caress me to the velvet of Pachelbel. One morning I thought I saw your icy Toyota on my street, moving as slowly as jealousy. If it was you, Vitalie, I was alone.

I never meant to hurt you but I am evil, and that is killing me now. We played at being the heroes of fash­ionably grey novels, free lovers, the only things lacking were the alcohol, the cigarettes, and the weary tirades taken from Robbe-Grillet. I would have taken you to
Laval, to a fourth-floor flat, to mak
e a ball of rosy pink and rose in a big square bed that w
ould have been our only chance. But we lost one another between two houses filled with the sounds of art and of a journey to Abyssinia, both of them so beautiful and so false.