The Other Story (9 page)

The rue du Laos duplex felt like a gigantic white box for the first two weeks. Nicolas kept waking up in the middle of the night, disoriented, wondering where he was and why Delphine was not in bed with him. Why did this space feel so huge, and he so puny? His mother, when she came to visit, said tentatively, “Hmmm … It’s big, isn’t it?” At first, he threw wild, loud parties where people danced, screamed, tossed bottles from windows till dawn, and the police were called. He was informed by the building management that if this went on, he’d be thrown out.

Six months after the breakup, Nicolas felt the need to get back to the book. The one that obsessed him, although he had not written a line of it. Why had his stamina fizzled out? What had happened to Rascar Capac and the blue haze? Where was the key to the secret world he used to disappear into?

Nicolas had Gaïa’s pink room (the one she never moved into) repainted a subtle and soothing blue, he bought a long and narrow black table from Vitra, a new chair, a new lamp, and he sat down to write. All he could see was Delphine’s face on the screen of his MacBook. After twenty minutes of nothing (nothing meaning a few sentences typed out at a snail’s pace and promptly erased), he pushed the laptop aside and tried pen and paper. Where was his father’s Montblanc? He searched high and low for it. He had not seen it since the move. He decided that he could not write his new book without it. He did not dare call Delphine; she was probably busy showing apartments to clients and would not appreciate being disturbed, especially by him. So he texted her. “Hi. Sorry. Do you know where my father’s Montblanc is, by any chance?” And she texted back. “No idea. Good luck.” He finally found it in a jacket he hadn’t worn for a while.

Armed with the Montblanc, Nicolas sat down once more, pen poised above the paper. His new cleaning lady shuffled about quietly, anxious not to disturb his concentration, and he felt so embarrassed that he actually pretended to write. He wrote a love letter to Delphine that he knew he would never send.

It soon became clear to Nicolas that he would get no writing done in the duplex. Its grandiosity somehow warped his creativity and accentuated his indolence. He tried to write in a nearby café on the avenue de la Motte-Picquet, but he became distracted by watching passersby come and go.

At his wit’s end, Nicolas decided to rent a seventy-five-square-foot room at the top of a nearby building on the avenue de Lowendal, five minutes away. It had the aspect of a monk’s cell, with a cracked, jaundiced washbasin in one corner and a scaly radiator in the other. It gave onto an identical bourgeois building on the other side of the courtyard and seemed perfectly peaceful. Nicolas was delighted. This was just what he needed to get the writing process back into swing and to put his sloth at bay. He bought an old school desk at the flea market, a plain wooden chair from Ikea. The only luxury was a tall, slim Costanza lamp. This is great, he thought, striding with energy and purpose to his new cubbyhole of an office with his Montblanc and his Moleskine. Humming, he took the derelict, antiquated elevator, which made alarming noises all the way up, and installed himself at the desk. Nicolas stretched his arms, unclenched his fingers, and started to write. Again, he wrote to Delphine. He wrote her a long, beautiful (he was convinced it was beautiful) love letter. This was an excellent beginning; it would turn out to be a moving, tender love story. He imagined Alice Dor’s enthusiasm—he could even see the cover of the book—and he already pictured himself talking about it to journalists, “After the breakup, I was so distraught…” As he gazed outside, he caught a flitting motion in the apartment directly in front of him. There were three little windows lined with green-and-blue curtains. The movement happened again, and Nicolas, astonished, saw a young nude woman running from one room to the other—or rather, prancing—arms outstretched, head held high with the grace of a ballerina. Her pert breasts bounced up and down enticingly; her dark hair rippled down her back. Nicolas could see her perfectly, her pale, smooth skin, her round buttocks, tight and muscular, her flat belly and the delta of trimmed pubic hair. Intrigued, aroused, he put his pen down and continued to look. Impervious, she continued her flouncing, and he wondered how it was possible that she had no idea she was being watched. Perhaps she did know, and she liked it. It was difficult to tear his eyes away from the naked ballerina and return to the sentences on the paper. Even more so when she effortlessly lifted her leg, an ankle in her palm, offering him a remarkable view of her pudenda. Nicolas felt his throat become uncomfortably dry. He was never going to get any writing done at this rate. Or he would have to paste paper in his window.

The next day, he (reluctantly but bravely) turned his desk away from the window so that the tantalizing ballerina was out of view. He managed to regain some sort of concentration. Just as he was happily scribbling away, describing Delphine’s hips under the shower, he heard a grunt, so loud and so near, he thought it came from just behind him. There it was again, masculine, low and rumbling, and definitely sexual. It came from the room on his left. His heart sank. He sat there, helpless, as the grunts gained in intensity and rhythm. How was he ever going to get any writing done at all with a nude ballerina and an audio version of the
Kama Sutra
behind paper-thin walls? The grunts became groans, and a foreign language could be heard. A loud thump made Nicolas jump, then a bang, followed by screeches that curdled his blood. He crept up to open the door a crack. More crashes, cries, and thumps. A silhouette stepped out from the next room and startled him. He made out a hugely tall person of undetermined gender and of pyramidal form, meaty latex-swathed thighs and stilettos. Another burly figure appeared, equally monstrous, wearing a Louis XIV–style wig of cascading platinum curls, knee-high black leather boots, fishnet tights, and a plastic minidress. Nicolas gaped as the two creatures lumbered toward the elevator, making the floorboards shudder, chatting in Portuguese. Hookers? Transvestites from Brazil? Whatever they were, he would only be able to write when they were not around.

Then, when things seemed to have calmed down, a young man whom Nicolas never saw rented the room on the right. He spent his life there, mournfully strumming away from morning till night on a badly tuned guitar and bleating out the same James Blunt song in an unbearable falsetto. Nicolas wanted to murder the young man. One afternoon, a female voice was heard along with the mewl. The young woman’s voice was perhaps even worse than the young man’s because it was so tragically off-key. Nicolas understood, with a sinking heart, that his neighbor had invested in a karaoke machine. The couple slaughtered “Imagine” and butchered “Let It Be.” Next came “Summer Nights,” “All by Myself,” and “My Way.” It was so excruciating to listen to that Nicolas began to laugh. He laughed so hard that tears came. He even taped some of the karaoke with his mobile so he could play it for his friends. The following day, the young couple went through endless successions of rapid, brutal sex. Nicolas endured it all—the bedsprings creaking wildly, the labored breathing. It did not turn him on in the least. It was perhaps worse than the karaoke. The young man squealed like a pig being slaughtered and the young woman remained stoically mute except for a final terrifying croak that did not sound human. Nicolas found he could not bring himself to bang on the wall to complain. What if one of them was a fan, the clinging kind? The kind that would come knocking every ten minutes? He could not risk that. So he bought earplugs at the pharmacy on the avenue de Lowendal. He shoved them as far as he could into his ears, so that the squeals and croaks became faint. Now he picked up the regular thump of his own heart. It was a strange and disconcerting sound, but infinitely better than the dreadful duo.

As Nicolas sat at his desk day after day, getting up from time to time to look out of the window (always hoping for a glimpse of the ballerina), he found his concentration to be disastrously fickle. Anything distracted him. Even the old lady on the seventh floor, a bent-over, century-old, white-haired granny, was interesting to watch. She spent the day reading, resting, then going out to her terrace and cooing at her plants, the birds, the blue of the sky. Once, she fell asleep in her deck chair, her head tilted to one side, her skirt askew, revealing frail, knobby knees, and she slept for so long, he feared she might have died. Luckily, she stirred, woke up, and hobbled off again. Nicolas felt like James Stewart in
Rear Window,
reveling in the permanent show his neighbors had to offer. On the fourth floor, a young mother played with her small children with patience and pleasure, and he enjoyed watching her. On the fifth floor, a woman who looked astonishingly like a Pedro Almodóvar movie actress (It had to be her! How could it not be her?) paced up and down, perpetually on the phone, a cigarette hanging from her lips. When she sat at her desk and opened her computer, if he strained his eyes, he could just make out what she was looking at.

A final fatal drawback came with a team of workers turning up one morning on his floor. A room was being redone. Through gritted teeth, Nicolas endured pounding, hammering, grating, drilling. The noise was horrendous, even with his earplugs. The workers gibbered away from dawn to dusk, portable radios turned on full blast, saluting him cheerily as he walked past, offering him sandwiches or a drink. He asked one of them how long the refurbishing was going to last and learned, to his dismay, that four rooms were being renovated, and then a scaffolding was to be installed, and the entire building restored, as well. The embellishments would take at least six months.

Nicolas gradually understood that no writing would go on in his monk’s cell. And after that, an even more bitter realization emerged. There would be no writing at all. There would be no book.

H
OW PEACEFUL IT IS
to be here, tucked away from the turmoil of the world, the worrying news of a global crisis, bloody bombings, the sexual scandal involving a New York hotel maid and a French politician.

Nicolas’s hand is itching for his BlackBerry, but he knows he cannot look at it with Malvina sitting next to him. Especially with a new BBM from Sabina. Sometimes he marvels at this woman he has seen only once, sending him such intimate messages. What is he sure of? Very little. In the beginning, when their messaging was still trivial, she mentioned she was married, that she had two daughters, not much older than he. She lived in Berlin, in Prenzlauer Berg, with her husband. Nicolas likes to think back to the short moment she stood in front of him when he signed the book for her. He can bring it all back: her trench coat, the way the belt was drawn tightly around her slender waist, her sleek ash-blond bob, and the way she looked at him. Younger women never had that expression. They were too coquettish—they tittered; they minced—or they were drunk and swaggered vulgarly like men. She stared down at him with a tiny smile, and those catlike eyes—translucent, like little pools of water—never blinked. When she handed him the piece of paper with the BBM PIN code on it, their fingers had touched, but that was the only time their skin made contact. To take his mind off the unread BBM and its enticement, Nicolas reaches for his father’s Hamilton Khaki, tucked away next to his phone in his bathrobe pocket. He looks at it quietly and feels a kind of peace flow through him. He thinks of his father going to buy the watch for his son’s tenth birthday. Did his father already know what he was going to purchase, or was he advised by a salesperson? He thinks of the Hamilton Khaki lying in his father’s palm, the blue eyes gleaming down at it, examining it, and then, later, the memory of the long fingers fixing the strap on to Nicolas’s wrist. He can still feel those fatherly fingers against his own skin.

One last boat roars in. At first, Nicolas thinks it has to do with a trick of the setting sun, some sharp gleam of the light on the sea, an odd reflection. That face on the boat. He puts the watch away, takes off his sunglasses, places his hand visorlike above his nose, has another look. His pulse quickens. The face comes steadily closer with the approaching boat. He puts his sunglasses back on, a little too fast, fingers fumbling, and looks again. His notebook and the Montblanc fall to the ground with a thump. The boat is near now, bobbing up and down as it begins its approach, weaving its way through the other Rivas lined up along the pier, the purr of its motor subsiding. He leans forward, gropes around under his deck chair for his cap, screws it tight to his head.

“What is it?” asks Malvina, intrigued. Nicolas does not answer.

Mesmerized, he watches the woman clumsily get out of the boat, helped by a hotel attendant in black. There are two people with her, but he barely notices them. She is the last to set foot on the concrete beach. Her bulky figure is swathed in a white djellaba. He makes out the telltale snow-white ponytail à la Karl Lagerfeld beneath the panama, the curve of the nose, the tight red stretch of the lips. He has never met her in real life, never seen her in the flesh, but he has seen enough television appearances and read enough articles to know it is unmistakably her. She lumbers up the stone steps toward the hotel elevator, holding on to the attendant’s arm. She moves slowly, and Nicolas sees what a big, sturdy woman she is, much larger than she appears to be in photographs, massive, even. Her skin is alabaster white, speckled with a swarm of freckles. There is no grace about her, yet he cannot help thinking she has a dramatic majesty, like a medieval queen assessing her kingdom. She never glances down. Her square chin is raised high, giving her a fierce arrogance heightened by the ironic set of her mouth. She disappears into the elevator.

Nicolas lies back on his chair. Malvina pinches his arm, startling him.

“Nicolas! Who is that woman?”

He takes a deep breath. “Dagmar Hunoldt.”

The name means nothing to Malvina. Her only solace lies in the fact that Dagmar is over sixty, overweight, and about as attractive as a beached whale. But she cannot understand why Nicolas has gone silent, scratching the top of his head, which he does when he is confused or upset.