Consequences (21 page)

The carcass of the buck was lying on the flatbed of a pickup truck, and although he'd called the management to ask them to get that nasty thing out of the parking lot, it hadn't been moved—all they'd done was send them a second bottle of champagne.
What hard luck
, he thought again, looking at the
animal whose blood had stained the back of the van, then dried, and blackened. He was standing at the balcony window where their bed had been placed, and had a fairly vertical view of the buck, whose eyes were open. He'd asked that it be covered with a tarp at least, but that idea seemed to have been forgotten a long time ago, and he wasn't thinking about complaining anymore. For no particular reason he accepted it. A mat of dried blood gleamed like lacquer around the muzzle of the animal. He wished he could go back in time and turn the wheel a second earlier. He got a cigarette. There was no movement in the parking lot. Only a few black birds that were impossible to identify wheeled above the horizon, and a few branches barely quivered in the balmy air.

Noticing how pale he was, Yannick Olso had invited him to sit down for a moment until he felt better. But his brain was still on boiling when he went home and parked behind Richard's Alfa Romeo. It was a miracle when the tablets got the better of his migraines—if he tripled or quadrupled the dose. But the only real remedy he knew, developed by experiment, consisted of lying flat with his head on Marianne's thighs and letting her take care of his forehead and temples; just placing her caring hands there was enough.

Richard's presence absolutely annulled such solutions.

Richard Olso. Not a single girl on campus managed to find something in him. Not a single woman would have thought of giving him a glance. Except one.

What had led Marianne to throw herself into his arms really didn't matter. Why did it matter what made a woman commit this kind of noxious absurdity? He didn't want to think about it anymore. He would have given his life a thousand
times for Marianne, and he'd proved it; but this was the result. Gut-wrenching. Outside, the blue sky was being copper-plated red.
Absolutely appalling, even
, he said to himself.
What's wrong with her
?

He leaned over the gas cooker in the kitchenette to light a cigarette because his lighter wasn't handy. Raising his eyes to gaze down on the parking lot, he again wondered about the scene below; was that a cloud of busy flies over the dead animal, which was exposed to the sun and covered with a lot of blood, or was it the effect of those migraines that had been following one another recently like waves, creating black spots that he took for flies?

He wasn't sorry about having shaken her up. That was nothing, compared to what she'd done to him. The reasons didn't really matter.

He looked at Myriam and wondered if God had created women to make men suffer, especially when women fell into the over-forty category and had that look of being deeply delighted and full of steely resolve. Obviously, he held nothing against her, had nothing to blame her for, nothing at all, because he knew she hadn't lied to him about the essential things and hadn't put up with his embraces like a bitter pill to swallow, but had sought them out aggressively and developed a taste for them, which she had no intention of hiding; now he understood what she meant when she looked him in the eyes and confessed that she was damned.

Between yesterday morning when they'd arrived at the cottage, and now, as night was falling, he estimated they'd had sexual relations about a half-dozen times, and each time had left him speechless—even after he'd taken certain measures,
obviously indispensable, but nothing he'd felt glad about. Despite everything, this weekend idea was turning out to be a fantastic one, he told himself as he leaned forward to examine Myriam's backside, leaned over her for a glimpse of her depleted, astonishing, swollen mollusk.

For a moment he slid onto her, onto her back. Not to indulge in some sinister session of sodomy under cover of dusk—although an inevitable erection went into action at the contact of the two hemispheres and the still moist and sticky parting—but to gauge the feeling he had for her beyond the betrayals and lies, to measure its strength and draw the comfort he needed from it.

There was a small chance that Marianne would prevent things from going too far. She was probably going to rally and convince Richard to keep it all the way it was; but what would the future be like from now on? To which lonely place could he go to scream if he and Myriam separated—and could he still keep it from happening?

He hadn't been to the house since the other day, when he'd surprised them sitting on high kitchen stools and given in to a fit of rage that his migraine, which had gotten worse and worse since he'd left the brother's store, certainly hadn't helped contain. He'd spent the night at the edge of the road in the Fiat, smoking cigarette after cigarette—which actually fed the migraine that was literally crushing the bones of his skull while he peered into the surrounding forest wincing with pain and perplexity. An ambulance went by, and later, as the moon was rising, he saw the ghost of his mother drifting across the sky and into the clouds over the mountaintops.

He placed a few kisses on Myriam's lovely breasts when she
rolled over to him on her back, and he sucked the tips a little while his mind took off elsewhere and his eyes went blank. He caressed Myriam's thigh and thought of his sister and the trauma of their separation. He ordered drinks and club sandwiches. You could hear voices, the soft reverberation of a plunge into the pool, the trilling of splashes, laughter, a few hundred meters from where they were.

It was obvious that the story would never sort itself out. That he could never set foot in that house again—their place, as they had still called it a few days earlier. And that is just what she'd told him while he was walking through the garden toward his car, his teeth clenched with all his strength—to the sound of the sowish squeals coming from Richard after he'd been splashed on the butt and back in the middle of his shag with a pot of boiling water. The situation was not going to work out.

The look he and his sister had traded before he left the premises—“Get the fuck out of here!!” she'd spit at him in a strangled voice, “Out of my sight, you piece of shit!!”—were definitive, at least. He reckoned it would take years—maybe dozens—before she'd be willing not only to speak to him again but to let him get within less than a hundred yards.

He wasn't very young anymore. Thinking of long stretches of time in the future was beginning to make him shudder. For a moment he wondered if he shouldn't have poured gasoline on himself to tip the scales in his direction; in a similar frame of mind, he'd stuck a potato peeler into his thigh one morning, forcing his mother to make an emergency call instead of raising her hand against him—and his father to take off his belt to use as a tourniquet.

He'd written a short story using this material in the
mid-seventies, after thinking he'd felt a strange emotion while considering a series of words forming in his mind, asking only to be typed out with a beginning and an end; but it was a false alarm. He remembered his sister's stubborness in repeating over the years that she believed in him and his potential as a writer, just because he was good at Scrabble and sometimes tried his hand at writing a few miserable lines of text. Obviously he'd failed, but at least Marianne's blind confidence and absolute certainty that her brother had a special gift had helped him keep his head high and prevented him from being destroyed by that horrible and complete tragedy he finally unleashed one evening after concluding that his mother would end up killing him—for hadn't she thrown him to the bottom of the stairs leading to the cellar not too long before, and used a cane on him?

Sometimes, in winter, when he was walking through the woods and an icy wind began to blow, his bones began hurting again in certain places. They'd said he had three fractures, but there had been more, he just hadn't pointed them all out; for example, his nose had only started turning black and blue two days later.

He'd waited to see the flames springing from the roof before thinking about drawing back, before thinking about reacting. He was barely fourteen and was standing before a kind of gigantic, sparking pyre that throbbed like a jet engine. The sight of it paralyzed him, and he stayed so long that the white-hot chunks of wood began raining around him like a shower of meteorites. Then his feet got entangled, and he fell awkwardly on the way to the tar road, leaving behind the skin on his arms and legs and nearly half his face as heaven's will was accomplished in back of him, and flecks of fire spun in the burning air. He'd passed out
before Marianne reached him. The first fireman who arrived knelt on the ground and held him against his shoulder, caressing his face and, with lips contorted by compassion, said, “Everything's okay, lit'l guy, oh my poor lit'l guy, everything's okay, oh my God.”

He tried to forget that now Marianne hadn't a hair between her legs and that such a ministration wasn't meant for him; but forgetting wasn't easy, the image stuck to the back of his mind.

What was he supposed to do now? In less than twelve hours, it would be sunrise again, life would continue, and everything would again become intolerable. Monday morning had usually been the worst day of the week, even during normal times. Richard would begin spouting the list of new bookstore titles, the weekly delivery. If there was any trash among them, an author completely without interest, you could be sure Richard would start praising him, vaunting his majestic writing, dazzling style, rich language, etc.—you could count on it like clockwork. And then he'd have to teach a class and claim that literature could save lives or cure lepers or God knows what.

He imagined Richard's back covered with blisters and wondered if his academic career still had a future. This time, he was bound to get kicked out; Richard would point to the door, and there'd be nothing he could do about it.

It wasn't the best of times, in such an uncertain economy, to be losing your job. The banks were tough and full of tricks, and the treasury department had an iron fist. He finished his sandwich feeling a kind of anxiety. Then he stopped thinking about it.

Apparently, being in love wasn't enough. Or rather, being in love was no longer enough. The lettuce leaves had gone a bit soft, the toast a little cold. Of course it was pleasant to think you
had a choice in life, but the truth was entirely the opposite, a lot less amusing.

He grazed her calf with his fingertips and told her it was clear he owed her the best moments of his life, that he hoped she'd be blessed for that, for this feeling she'd made him discover; he hoped that, because of him, the gift would be returned to her a thousandfold. The put-on she'd used to approach him didn't matter, all that malarkey about a husband disappearing in the mountains of Afghanistan; all of it seemed so incredibly minor compared with what he'd obtained.

He wondered if she'd invented it all herself, or if they'd helped her put together that story about a sergeant lost in the middle of a mountainous desert. No matter what, it was pretty disturbing to imagine somebody fighting for you, at that very moment, in you-didn't-know-exactly what corner of the world, having to imagine blood flowing, men getting their heads lopped off, women being raped.

Quite an actress he'd been dealing with. He chuckled to himself at the thought, actually appreciated the way she'd conned him, the sheer truth within the lie. He raised his glass in her direction and for the moment gave up claiming to himself with all his heart that he didn't mind being thrown into prison if it happened at her own adorable hands. Then he took his phone out of his pocket and began scrolling through some photos of them together, sitting against the back of the bed with the sheet pulled over their legs, looking like disheveled but contented messes. “Wow, they're good. I like 'em,” he said. “Soon you won't even need a flash. They're coming out with something new every day.” He examined them with tenderness, became worried by her wanness, the lack of color in her lips, her pale cheeks.

Annie Eggbaum called to see if he could give her a date, and he answered that all she had to do was name one, and it was hers, and Annie pricked up her ears for an instant, wondering about this new attitude of his. “They say a woman's mind keeps changing,” he told her, “but we men are pretty much the same as you. We don't know any more about where we're headed than you do. At least we have that in common. All our U-turns. Our erring ways. Do you follow me, Annie?”

“My father's waving his hand at me. Wants me to give you his regards.”

“Good, Annie. Message received.”

“Listen, Marc. Can I tell you something?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“It'll be great, you'll see. Try to be cool. I'm not going to ask you to marry me. Relax. The only danger is your getting to like it. I'm being honest with you.”

She certainly did want to have an affair with him. She went after it endlessly, with a consistency you had to respect, as if somebody had cast a spell on her. The girl was priceless. No way was she going to let up. They seemed to be made that way, in that family. Not into giving up.

Any night of the following week was fine.

“Okay, let's say Wednesday. My period will be over.”

“Wednesday's perfect.”

“Marc, it's about time I saw you.”

“We can just meet in my office. You'll help me grade papers or something like that. I'll bring the condoms.”

“Don't fly off the handle so easily. Think of that poor Zuckerman character in the Roth novels, what he'd give to be in your place. Come back down to earth a little, from time to time.”

“Those details about incontinence send shivers down my spine, I admit it, but have you noticed what a sharp eye that writer had, what a sure step, how pricked up his ears were? Have I ever put you on? Sometimes I think we should only read poetry. Have you taken a look at Frederick Seidel? Astounding, isn't he? Took your breath away, I bet.”