Climates (6 page)

“Do they have a fortune?” asked my uncle Pierre, who was inevitably privy to the conversation.

“I don’t know,” said my mother. “They say this Monsieur Malet is an intelligent man but rather odd … They’re not people like us.”

“Not people like us” was a real Marcenat saying and a terrible condemnation. For a few weeks I thought it would be very difficult for me to have my marriage accepted. Odile and her mother came home to Paris a fortnight after I did. The Malets lived on the rue Lafayette, in a third-floor apartment. A door hidden in paneling led to Monsieur Malet’s offices, and Odile took me to see him. I was used to the rigorous order that my father demanded of his employees, both at Gandumas and on the rue de Valois. When I saw those three ill-lit rooms, the partly torn green
boxes, and the septuagenarian draftsman, I realized that my aunt’s informer had been right to describe Monsieur Malet as an architect with no work. Odile’s father was talkative, easygoing; he received me with a cordiality that was rather too perky, talked to me about Florence and Odile in affectionate terms full of emotion, then showed me the drawings for some villas he “hoped” to build in Biarritz.

“What I should really like to build is a large modern hotel, in Basque style. I submitted a project for Hendaye, but I didn’t secure the commission.”

As I listened to him, I pictured the impression he would make on my family with trepidation and discomfort.

Madame Malet invited me to dinner the following day. When I arrived at eight o’clock, I found Odile alone with her brothers. Monsieur Malet was in his office reading; Madame Malet had not yet come home. The two boys, Jean and Marcel, looked like Odile and yet I instantly knew we would never be close friends. They tried to be amicable, brotherly, but several times during the course of the evening I caught them exchanging glances and smirks that clearly meant, “He’s not much fun …” Madame Malet came home at half past eight and made no
apology. When Monsieur Malet heard her, he appeared like a good little boy, book in hand, and just as we were sitting down, the chambermaid showed in a young American, a friend of the children’s who had not been invited but was greeted with great cries of joy. In all this disorder, Odile still looked like an indulgent goddess. She sat beside me, smiling at her brothers’ quips and calming them down when she felt I was overwhelmed. She seemed as perfect as she had in Florence, but it pained me, although I could not properly define my pain, to see her surrounded by this family. Beneath the booming triumphal march of my love, I could hear a muted Marcenat motif.

My parents paid a visit to the Malets and, surrounded by the generous effusiveness of Odile’s parents, maintained an air of polite rebuke. Luckily, my father was very susceptible to women’s beauty although he never talked of it (and in that I knew I was similar to this stranger): he was won over by Odile from the first.

“I don’t think you’re right,” he said as we left, “but I can understand you.”

“She’s certainly pretty,” my mother said. “She’s unusual; she says such funny things; she’ll have to change.”

In Odile’s view there was another meeting more important than our families’: the meeting between her best friend, Marie-Thérèse (whom she called Misa), and myself. I remember feeling intimidated; I could tell that Misa’s opinion meant a great deal to Odile. In the event I rather liked her. Although she did not have Odile’s beauty, she was very graceful and had regular features. Next to Odile she looked a little hardy, but side by side, their faces formed a pleasing contrast. I soon grew accustomed to seeing them as a single image and thinking of Misa as Odile’s sister. And yet there was an innate refinement in Odile that made her very different from Misa, although by birth they were from the same social circles. During our engagement I took them to a concert every Sunday, and I noticed how much more attentively Odile listened than Misa. Eyes closed, Odile would let the music flow through her, she seemed happy and forgot about the world. Misa’s eyes were inquisitive as she looked around, recognized people, opened the program, read it, and irritated me with her agitation. But she was a pleasant friend, always cheerful, always satisfied, and I was grateful to her for telling Odile, who then told me, that she thought I was charming.

We spent our honeymoon in England and Scotland. I cannot recall a happier time than those two months alone together. We stopped in small hotels decked in flowers, beside rivers and lakes, and spent our days lying in flat, varnished boats fitted with cushions in pale floral fabrics. Odile gave me the lovely scenery as a gift, meadows invaded by the blue of hyacinths, tulips rearing up from tall grass, supple close-cropped lawns, and weeping willows trailing their leaves in the water like women with unkempt hair. I came to know a different Odile, even more beautiful than the one in Florence. Watching her live was enchantment itself. The moment she stepped into a hotel room, she transformed it into a work of art. She had a naïve, touching attachment to certain childhood mementos she took everywhere with her: a small clock, a lace cushion, and a volume of Shakespeare bound in gray suede. When, much later, our marriage broke down, it was still with her lace cushion under her arm and her Shakespeare in her hand that Odile left. She skimmed over the top of life, more of a spirit than a woman. I wish I could paint her as she walked on the banks of the Thames or the Cam, her footsteps so light they might have been a dance.

On our return, Paris seemed absurd. My parents and Odile’s assumed that our one desire would be to see them. Aunt Cora wanted to organize dinners in our honor. Odile’s friends complained they had been deprived of her company for two months and begged me to let them have her back some of the time, but all we wanted, Odile and I, was to carry on living alone. The first evening, when we took possession of our little home with its smell of paint and its carpets not yet laid, Odile, on a jubilant girlish impulse, went to the front door and cut the wire for the doorbell. It was her way of dismissing the world.

We went all around our apartment and she asked me whether she could have a small study next to her bedroom: “It will be my little corner … You could only come in if I invited you; you know I have a fierce need for independence, Dickie. (She had been calling me Dickie since hearing a young lady in England hailing a young man by this name.) You don’t know me yet, you’ll see, I’m terrible.”

She had brought champagne, cakes, and a bouquet of asters. With a low table, a couple of armchairs, and a crystal vase, she improvised a charming homely scene. We had the most cheerful,
tender evening meal. We were alone and we loved each other. I do not regret those times, although they were fleeting. Their last chords still resonate within me, and if I listen very carefully and silence the noise of the present, I can make out their pure but already doomed sound.

Nevertheless, it was on
the very morning after this supper that I have to register the first knock to send a fine crack through the transparent crystal of my love. An insignificant episode but one that prefigured everything to come. It was at the upholsterer’s, where we were ordering our furnishings. Odile had chosen curtains that I thought expensive. We discussed this briefly, very amicably, then she demurred. The salesman was a good-looking fellow who had energetically taken my wife’s part and had irritated me. As we were leaving, I caught sight in a looking glass of a glance of understanding and regret exchanged between this salesman and Odile. I cannot
describe how I felt. Since my engagement I had subconsciously developed an absurd conviction that my wife’s mind was now linked to my own and that, by constant transfusion, my thoughts would always be hers. The concept of independence in a living being by my side was, I think, incomprehensible to me. Still more so the concept that this being might conspire against me with a stranger. Nothing could have been more fleeting or more innocent than that glance. I could make no comment, I was not even sure of what I had seen, and yet I feel it is to that moment that I can trace the revelation of jealousy.

Before my marriage, not once had I thought of jealousy, other than as a theatrical emotion and one worthy of utmost contempt. I saw Othello as a tragic jealous figure, and Molière’s George Dandin as a comic one. Imagining that I might someday play one of these characters, or perhaps both at once, would have seemed quite ridiculous. I had always been the one to abandon my mistresses when I tired of them. If they were unfaithful to me, I never knew it. I remember when a friend told me he was suffering from jealousy, I replied, “I can’t understand you … I simply wouldn’t be able to carry on loving a woman who didn’t love me …”

Why did Odile make me anxious the moment I saw her surrounded by male friends? She was so gentle and even tempered but, I could not say how, she created an aura of mystery around her. I had not noticed it during our engagement or our honeymoon because our solitude and the total intermixing of our two lives at the time left no room for any mystery, but in Paris I immediately perceived a distant, as yet undefined danger. We were very close, very tender, but—as I want to be honest with you here—I have to confess that as early as the second month of our married life I knew that the real Odile was not the one I had loved. I did not love the one I was discovering any the less, but it was with a quite different sort of love. In Florence I believed I had met the Amazon; I myself had created a perfect mythical Odile. I was wrong. Odile was no goddess made of ivory and moonlight; she was a woman. Like me, like you, like the entire unhappy human race, she was divided and multiple. And she too doubtless now realized I was very different from the besotted man who had walked beside her in Florence.

As soon as I was back in France, I had to take a serious part in running the factory in Gandumas and the office in Paris. My father, who had considerable
parliamentary commitments, had been overrun with work in my absence. When I met with them, our best clients were quick to complain of being neglected. The business quarter was a long way from the home we had rented on the rue de la Faisanderie. I soon realized it would be impossible for me to return home for lunch. If you add to this the fact that I had to spend one day a week at Gandumas and that this hasty journey was too tiring to allow me to take Odile with me, you will understand how our lives were immediately separated against our will.

On my way home in the evenings, I felt happy knowing I would soon see my wife’s beautiful face. I liked the furnishings with which she had surrounded herself. I was not accustomed to living among lovely things, but it seemed I had an innate need for them, and Odile’s taste delighted me. In my parents’ house in Gandumas, too many pieces of furniture accumulated over three or four generations cluttered salons whose walls were hung with fabrics in blue-green tones, featuring crudely drawn peacocks wandering between stylized trees. Odile had had our walls painted in soft single colors; she liked bedrooms to be almost bare, with great deserted plains of pale carpeting. When I went into
her boudoir, I felt such an acute sense of beauty that I found it obscurely disturbing. My wife would be lying on a chaise longue, almost always in a white dress, and beside her (on the low table of our first supper) stood a narrow-necked Venetian vase bearing a single flower and sometimes some scant foliage. Odile loved flowers more than anything, and I in turn was learning to love choosing flowers for her. I learned to follow the changing seasons in florists’ windows; I was happy to see chrysanthemums or tulips appear once more, because their strident or delicate colors gave me an opportunity to solicit from my wife’s lips the happy Odile smile. When she saw me come home from work with a crisp-edged white paper package in my hands, she would jump up happily: “Oh! Thank you, Dickie …” She admired them, enchanted, before becoming serious and saying, “I’m going to arrange my flowers.” She would then spend an hour finding the correct vase, stem length, and lighting to ensure a single iris or rose curved as gracefully as possible.

After this, though, the evening would often become peculiarly sad, like on sunny days when the shadows of huge clouds take the world by surprise as they envelop everything. We had little to say to one
another. I tried often enough to talk to Odile about my business, but she had no interest in it. She had exhausted the novelty of listening to me describing my youth; my ideas did not change much because I had no time to read, and she was uncomfortably aware of this. I tried to bring my two closest friends into our life. Odile instantly disliked André Halff, whom she found sarcastic, almost hostile, and indeed he was so with her.

“You don’t like Odile,” I once said to him.

“I think she’s very beautiful,” he said.

“Yes, but not very intelligent?”

“True … There’s no need for a woman to be intelligent.”

“Anyway, you’re wrong; Odile is very intelligent, but it’s not your sort of intelligence. She’s intuitive, concrete.”

“You could be right,” he said.

It was different with Bertrand. He tried to have a deep, confidential friendship with Odile and found her rebellious, defensive. Bertrand and I could happily spend an entire evening sitting together, smoking, and putting the world to rights. Odile preferred to spend the end of the day at theaters, cabarets, or amusement parks. One evening she made me spend
three whole hours roaming around between shops, fairground rides, raffles, and shooting galleries. Her two brothers came with us; Odile always had fun with these two spoiled, boisterous, and slightly unpredictable children.

“Come on, Odile,” I said toward midnight, “haven’t you had enough? Can’t you see that it’s rather ridiculous. Surely you can’t actually enjoy throwing balls at bottles, going around in circles in fake automobiles, and winning a boat made of spun glass on the fortieth attempt?”

She replied with a quote from a philosopher I had told her to read: “What does it matter if a pleasure is false, so long as we believe it is real …” And, taking her brother’s arm, she ran off toward a shooting gallery; she was a very fine shot and, after hitting ten eggs in as many shots, went home in good spirits.