Bye Bye Blondie (28 page)

ALONE AT HOME
, Eric's sitting in an armchair. Quietly.
Let her go
. It's the only possible solution, he's tired. His head's swimming, he's felt stifled now for weeks. Too much yelling, too much pain he can't deal with. He's breathing freely, without the straitjacket he's felt around him these last weeks. He's full of a clear kind of exaltation, but devastated as well as liberated. There had been something so promising in this story, a saga that he'd loved, sincerely, that went beyond him and had haunted him since his adolescence. When he'd found her again, it had brought him back to life, sure of what he wanted and what he should do. But then it had all turned so complicated, he doesn't want to be destroyed by it. He doesn't know how to deal with it. He thinks about his sister, whom he'll tell tomorrow. She never believed in it. Yet she's used to it by now and has let him go ahead. Still, pragmatically, she has always taken the view that a girl you meet in a psychiatric ward isn't going to make you happy. He wanted to play against the rest of the world, to be right in the face of the evidence, he'd thought this was love. He wanted to take the risk with her and then they'd arrive on the far side, safe and sound. But they'd only managed to drag each other down. It's time to give up. To give in to the damned evidence. After all this time struggling, letting go will be like a holiday. He knows the months to come will be painful, like a hangover. Returning to a reality that he was running away from when he went back to find her. Their story's not romantic anymore, it's just pathetic and sordid. It's terrible, he tells himself, to feel relieved because the woman you loved has left you at last. But that's life, he clears his throat, and thinks about it magnanimously. It happens all the time, and it happens to everyone. It was stupid pride to expect that it would somehow be different for them. He gets up and smokes some grass at the window. Down below, the poster on the Morris column has changed.
Bye Bye Blondie
. His heart contracts. These
little blows of chance. What seemed obvious a moment before suddenly trembles and seems to be no more than a mirage.

THE KID SHAKES
his can of beer over his open mouth to catch the last drops. He nudges her with his elbow.

“You better go home, lady, it's time for the last metro.”

Then he does up his jacket, waves goodbye, still grumbling, and wanders off. Even this clueless idiot has dropped her. Yes, she must be a total pain in the neck.

She doesn't have a centime in her pocket. She looks again at the poster, all that fuss about—well, what? Now she's amazed that she found the energy to get so worked up about it, about the screenplay that got away. The little producer, his pals, his milieu—each as lamentable, disagreeable, and toxic as the other. Acting astonished if chickens sometimes come home to roost. “Oh really, people get angry when they're constantly humiliated? But what else can you do?” Amazed that anyone dares answer them back. “They've got it in for us? But why? And who would give these losers a living if we weren't here?”

Everyone's kindly neighborhood bosses, cheerful owners of everything. Sincerely surprised that anyone could want to get compensation from them. The hell with them all, she doesn't give a damn.

She's full of a new exaltation—and it's certainly paradoxical. She doesn't get angry. She's ready to leave. Let it go. She feels old. She wants to go back to her local bar, find her friends. It's over, this adventure, the scandal, the fuss she made, and all this self-harming, just because she was cheated. She feels older, wiser, ready to set off.

THE DOORBELL WAKES
him. He'd dropped off to sleep on the couch, a dead sleep. The window's wide open, outside it's pouring rain. The Taxi Girl vinyl he'd put on before going to sleep is crackling on the song he kept playing over and over when he was a kid: “
Et son regard si triste
/
une croix tracée dans la chair sur son front”
(“And her eyes are so sad / A cross scratched in the flesh of her brow”). It's three thirty-three, he knows it's got to be her. She's soaked through, standing at the door.

“I didn't mean to come back. But I didn't know where else to go.”

“Come in.”

He lets her go past, for once she's not attacking him.

“I don't want to ruin your life. I just didn't have anywhere to sleep.”

“You saved my life, guess I can put you up . . .”

“Cool, I see you've got your sense of humor back. I'll take off tomorrow.”

She'd like it if he objected, say he wants her to stay. But he just goes over to the fridge, helps himself to orange juice, and offers her some. They sit down in the kitchen, he switches on the radio, classical music.

“See the poster down there?”

“I've come all the way here from Gambetta on foot. I've seen every poster in Paris. Honestly, it's like in a sitcom. If God really wanted to stick it to me, he would have done exactly that. Mind if I get a dry towel for my hair?”

“Go ahead, this is your home.”

“Don't overdo it, please.”

She comes back from the bathroom, rubbing her hair energetically.

“But it's so weird. When I do something stupid, I pay a price a thousand times higher
than anyone else, don't I? They could have not managed to make the film, they could have not done a big promotion for when it came out, or they could have advertised it when I wasn't around. But no, it's just the night when I walk all the way across Paris. And, you might say, I've never walked that far before in my life.”

“Well . . . and you didn't smash all the glass fronts of the posters to tear them down?”

“Not even. Surprised myself.”

“You seem quite calm.”

“I walked a lot. And now I've stopped making such a fuss, now that it's totally fucked-up, because I went over the top.”

By turns sad and exalted, relieved and torn to shreds, they are looking at each other in silence, hesitating between effusion and distance, between speaking and remaining silent. They're circling each other, without knowing quite what to do. She gets up and makes them tea, fetches the milk from the fridge. Gestures full of habit, her body knows where things are kept, where everything is. Eric watches her move around, his arms folded. Since she's come back, they haven't touched each other.

She avoids his eyes, then declares: “Don't look like that. As if you were responsible for something. Nobody can live with me. Even me. I don't find it easy to live with myself. But I can't leave myself. If I could, I'd run a mile.”

“I'm not looking any particular way. I'm just tired. It's been a long day. And don't be so pretentious, I'm going to bed.”

He gets up, leaving her alone in the kitchen.

Out loud, to nobody, she announces: “I'm going to have a shower.”

Then scratches her head and mutters: “Why did you call me pretentious?”

Under the hot water she closes her eyes and wants to cry, but she must have done too much of it lately, her eyes sting and nothing much comes. She admits to herself finally, what her body already knows: she's at home here, she's in the right place, with him. What she doesn't know, on the other hand, is how the hell they are ever going to be able to make it work.

The bedroom's in half darkness. The moon's shining onto the sheets. He's already asleep on his side of the bed. Gloria lies down quietly beside him and goes to sleep quickly, her head pressed into his back.