Bye Bye Blondie (20 page)

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was given the wrong soul. Perhaps I was meant to be a fighter, man or woman, doesn't matter, anything that would let me go and fight. Really fight, beat people up, smash their faces in, knock out their teeth and get massacred myself. Let's suppose there was some crossed wires in the 1960s and something went wrong and I got a bloodthirsty maniac's soul in the body of a poor girl on benefits. Do you get what I'm saying?”

He blinks his eyelids to say yes. Gloria, when she starts telling her theories to people who haven't heard them, can be totally exhausting, and they don't even try to understand, but Eric doesn't let himself be impressed.

“The way things are going, your aggressive superpowers could be useful. But yes, it's possible, I've thought that way too, people who are useless and a total pain in the ass in peacetime can become heroes when war breaks out.”

“Hey, steady on, I didn't say I was useless or a pain in the ass!”

“Yeah I know, but I'm trying to develop your idea.”

“Leave my idea be, and don't call me a pain in the ass, please.”

Eric puts up a finger saying to listen while he develops his theory about war heroes, but his phone goes off again, and although heaving a big sigh, he answers it and launches into a conversation. She moves closer to him and finds a way of snuggling under his arm. When a relationship is still okay, when she thinks this time's going to be different, this time she'll be able to keep her mouth shut, it could always go wrong. It's as if she's holding a ball of transparent crystal in both hands.

The taxi driver, a young crew-cut kid with a closed face and rings around his eyes, a Hand of Fatima dangling from the rear mirror, is talking aloud into his radiophone. His loud comments in a language she can't understand make it a futuristic scene, like something out of Philip K. Dick.

Eric strokes her wrist. “I'm glad you're here. Makes a change.”

“From what?”

“Everything.”

Gloria tries to look like a girl who understands what he means.

HIS PLACE IS
so clean and white that she can scarcely believe anyone lives there. Below in the street, cars glide by, a string of lights. When she leans her forehead against the window, she feels the cold burn into her a little. She's intimidated. All her excitement has drained away, she feels worn-out above all. She slowly drinks her glass of vodka on the rocks. After one more of the same, her mood lifts.

He's taken three whole days off to be with her. Gloria whistles appreciatively when she finds out. “Kind of like a sabbatical year, is it?” When the exaggerated ringtone of Eric's phone goes off, he presses silent automatically and says, “I've never done that since I've had a phone, right?”

“Poor you!”

Mornings last till afternoon, making tea and listening to the radio. She likes it when Eric
tells her what else he'd like to do with his life, or imagines the trips they could go on together. By turns intrigued, irritated, and seduced, they're examining each other and coming face to face. He's alarmed at the hostile bad faith with which Gloria accuses him of being rich while she's poor.

Systematically, she keeps returning to that, it's her excuse for everything, her open sesame to, “Leave me alone, I'm just a poor working-class girl, I've got nothing, you've got too much of everything, it's your fault, go fuck yourself.” Her painful neurotic worrisome credo, sometimes bordering on the obscene.

“Tell me, Gloria, you keep complaining, but your father ended up with a good job as a manager, didn't he?”

“Leave my dad out of it. Do you think one generation's enough to wipe out a whole load of ancestors grubbing away in the lumpenproletariat? Anyone can see you don't come from there, right? If you don't believe me, look how I live. I'm on minimum benefits, it's not like I'm living a bohemian life. There's a
big
difference. If you're capable of understanding it.”

“You could have made things turn out differently.”

“Anyone ever tell you Zorro doesn't exist in real life?'”

He stretches his legs and clasps his hands behind his head with a smile.

“You're going to tell me
the world's not fair
and I'm a privileged moneybags? Do me a favor, Blondie, lay off, you're spoiling my digestion.”

When she tries to find out how much he earns at his job, the sums he mentions leave her flabbergasted. He gets over €20,000 a month. Not to mention various perks. If he ever gets fired, his severance has been calculated in some clever complicated way but it'll come to something like €200,000. She contemplates these figures in her head for a few moments before concluding: “
Now
I understand why we don't understand each other!”

When Gloria listens to Eric outlining his arguments, part of her, the grown-up part, tries to understand how it works, while the other, the teenager, screams and shouts and wants to know why, why, why. Everything seems normal to him, the compromises he has to make every day to keep his job, not to have problems with the neighbors, to get on with his friends, and earn plenty of money. Everything he's prepared to tolerate in the way of stupidity, lies, bootlicking. At the same time, and for the first time, she is seeing at close quarters someone capable of making an effort without giving up immediately and saying, “Oh, I can't be bothered,” someone who doesn't use pride as a way of avoiding difficult encounters.

They walk around Paris, she goes with him to buy a jacket. In shops that make her feel so out of place that it verges on panic. Even the bouncers and salesgirls look down their noses at her, as if they own the place. No one is creepier than rich people's hangers-on. It's not just the clothes, the prices, the customers, but something about the surroundings, the lights, the rhythms, and the sounds that all say the same thing: we're above that hoi polloi out there, we deserve the best.

The prices in the windows look to her like a bad joke. Everything here seems to say that she and all the people she knows are
nothing,
not just on their uppers, they don't even exist, because the wealthy can simply afford not to notice them. And here she is, with her minimum benefits, her grubby friends, the IKEA furniture they're only too glad to have because it means they've got a place to live, their petty scrimping and saving to survive. She feels her entire world is crushed by the arrogance of these shop windows, these
price tags and these people—old ladies who've been face-lifted till they look like zombies. She'd like to be able to laugh at it all. The wealthy hold themselves very upright, convinced of their own importance.

She waits in front of the luxury delicatessen, Fauchon's, smoking a cigarette. She looks people up and down as they go in, actively detesting them. Elderly dyed-blonds, all twig-slim with ridiculous little dogs, hordes of frantic Japanese women, young anorexic girls with strained faces, old ladies with white hair and Hermès scarves. The clichés aren't misleading. Rich people are just like you'd imagine them: weird, ugly, and pleased with themselves. They can spot each other at a glance. Even when one of them dresses down, they keep something about them that says to their equals, “I'm one of us.” She waits for him opposite Colette's, smoking another cigarette.

“Come in with me, don't be silly.”

“I tell you I'll freak out.”

“You look like a horse stamping its foot outside. You're scaring everyone.”

She wants to run between the aisles waving her hands in the air and screaming, pushing people over into the displays. Breaking all the glass, the mirrors, the windows. Punching the old hags in the face, kicking the salesgirls, jumping up and down on the fashion victims, smashing the balls of the bouncers.

“These shops smell of death, they make me want to throw up.”

“Just one more call and I'll take you around somewhere different, Barbès district in a taxi if you like.”

“You're so droll, ha ha.”

In fact, she does find him funny. She waits for him in front of Ladurée while he puts up with a long line at the counter.

She lights up and thinks aloud: “What a pathetic bunch of assholes, if you have to wait five minutes in the post office, you start moaning, but for a box of fancy biscuits at fifty euros a throw, you don't mind standing in line for half an hour. You are really so unbelievably
stupid
, down inside your souls you're poor, just poor sods, hear what I'm saying?”

From their astonished expressions, she understands that her insults have at least had the merit of surprise. Eric looks down as he comes out with an enormous shopping bag, he drags her away, hiding his smile.

“Now you've had your say, you won't be so worried how much they cost, you'll gobble them all up and say they're delicious.”

“I won't eat one of them, hear me, not one! Never!”

She points at them and pounds her chest, she likes doing that, it resounds. She calms down quickly, because she knows quite well she'll wolf the lot. Eric sighs.

“Don't you ever give it a rest? Too much aggression kills aggression and you're exhausting in the end.”

“Yes, but I'm the bomb in bed.”

“You're the bomb, period, you freak everyone out.”

“You love it, I bet. If you wanted someone nice and quiet, you wouldn't have come looking for me.”

“So you feel obliged to carry on like that as much as possible?”

“That's my style.”

And she sings him this Johnny Hallyday song, “Je suis né dans la rue,” about forty times
a day. As if it explains everything.

Eric grumbles: “Oh, it's all the street's fault, is it . . .?”

The first days in Paris, the sex is just as bad as that first night. She doesn't care, she pretends it's fine and he seems to believe her. But gradually, almost without realizing it, she starts to concentrate, to open up, to reach for him. She allows arousing images to come into her head, she murmurs words she likes to hear, she starts to show what she wants, how fast or slow. He's considerate, good at it, sensual, and he loves her. In the end, she joins in the game. The first time she actually comes, it's a few seconds before him. And it makes her go into a long swoon. Because this time it works, it opened up, the dam broke and she can fill herself with him without reserve, no safety net, she lets him have what he wants. She's not afraid anymore.

HE GOES OFF
to work every day at about ten, and doesn't get back until they've recorded the show, about nine at night. She watches him and talks to him when he's on their TV. She starts to get interested in the stories, the questions, what he's wearing, his guests, the audience, the editing . . . she gets fascinated by the whole show. She gradually realizes why people who make TV shows have such a different perspective from the people who watch them. Two populations, quite different. The upper classes in Paris are obsessed with television, the only thing that interests them. Making TV shows,
being
on TV, knowing how it works. The power of the small screen, its secrets, the money that's poured into it, the power struggles. Ordinary people simply watch it, with less interest than the ones who make it, and less credulity than the rich like to think.

When she phones the Royal for something to do, out of boredom, nostalgia, and also out of a sense of loyalty, she feels as if she's won the lottery. From Jérémy's delighted tone, she gathers with brutal clarity just how much everyone had thought until now that she was a hopeless case. She's shocked, because she hadn't realized that. The people she thought were her friends, now that she's so far away, it becomes clear they felt sorry for her, as if she were a homeless waif. Even Véronique, whom at first she'd been phoning regularly, is “so happy for her”: “From your voice, I can tell you're having a marvelous time now.” Gloria doesn't know what to say, it's crazy the way these provincials are reassured that she's back in the land of the living.

Regretfully, she realizes she must avoid her Nancy friends as long as she stays with him. The trap of congratulations, the bittersweet taste of envy. She starts telling lies, spontaneously, keeps quiet about some events, tries to downplay her pleasure at being with him, as vengeance for everything else, for the years of her systematic downhill slide. She's afraid of their jealousy, that they'll make her pay for it when she gets back, and also that they'll steal what she has. By telling them about it, she'll give herself away, it'll become distorted and she won't enjoy it.

And yet, it lasts, this fragile, magic moment when they have nothing to blame each other for. Neither of them has shown the other their worst side. For now, they've just been playing and making up, with their respective pasts.

He likes it just as much as when he was a teenager, watching her get into a rage, climb up the curtains, confront people, without being willing to let go or understand. He likes fighting with her. They're like a couple of Italians, always ready to scream and shout, then hug each other and make completely different sounds.

Then he takes her in his arms, even as she pulls away, rocks her, and she starts to laugh and grumble, “I don't want to be in love with you, leave me alone.”

It's a warm bath of affection, tenderness, caresses, and sex, everything she's been missing so much. She's beginning to trust him, to believe in him differently. Then it starts again, on the slightest pretext.

“Stop being such a hippie, it's so tiring.”

“You talking to me? You sick or something?”

“Listen to yourself, Blondie. You're NOT in a remake of
Scarface
, or
Taxi Driver
, or the
Godfather
, or
Goodfellas
. You're not a man, you're not in the Mafia, you're not Cuban or Sicilian, you're nearly thirty-five, you still talk like some kid who watches too much TV.”