Love Lasts Three Years
April 29, 2017 | Author: Jesse Stuart | Category: N/A
Short Description
English-language translation of the 1997 French novel by Frédéric Beigbeder....
Description
Love Lasts ree Years Frédéric Beigbeder Translated by Jesse Stuart
“I speak with the authority of failure.” SCOTT FITZGERALD
“What?! It’s true! It’s plain and clear! You have to tell it like it is. You’re in love, and then you’re not.” FRANÇOISE SAGAN (During a dinner with Brigitte Bardot and Bernard Frank at her home in 1966).
Préface
Frédéric Beigbeder est écrivain, critique littéraire, et réalisateur français. Il a obtenu en 2003 le prix Interaillié pour Windows on the World et en 2009, le prix Renaudot pour son livre Un roman français. L’amour dure trois ans est avant tout l’histoire d’un homme qui, tel un Sisyphe romantique, s’efforce de donner du sens à l’une des émotions les plus profondes de notre existence, quand les données biochimiques et statistiques indiquent que l’amour n’est qu’un « combat perdu d’avance ». Ce qui est le plus étonnant dans ce livre, c’est sa sincérité. Les relations amoureuses ont tendance à faire ressortir le meilleur ainsi que le pire, et Beigbeder excelle à tout décrire dans un style aussi sardonique que lyrique. Rien n’est interdit dans l’œuvre de Beigbeder—sexe, drogues, tentatives de suicide, misère, extase ; et le génie de Beigbeder consiste en sa capacité à capturer ces moments qu’en général on ne partage jamais : moments de honte insupportable, de joie viscérale, de confusion totale. Marc Marronnier, l’alter ego de Beigbeder, est peut-être une caricature de soi-même, mais il représente aussi une caricature de l’homme hétéro aisé au 21e siècle. Bien élevé, instruit, connu ; il se marie, puis vite se décide qu’il ne veut rien avoir avec
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le mariage—juste avant de se rendre compte que s’ennuyer avec quelqu’un, c’est peut-être mieux que de se trouver tout seul. Notre génération est si habituée à la vitesse, à la nouveauté, qu’on oublie parfois comment rester amoureux. L’amour dure trois ans est dans le fond l’histoire d’un homme qui apprend, petit à petit, que l’amour—malgré les statistiques, la biochimie, la phenethylamine—durera.
J. Stuart
I ZERO-SUM GAME
I Love fades with time
Love is a battle lost from the start. At first, everything is beautiful, even you. You’re amazed by how in love you are. Each day brings its own gentle delivery of miracles. Nobody on earth has ever known the passion you share. Happiness exists, and it’s simple—it’s a face. e entire universe is smiling. For a year, life consists of one sun-bathed morning aer another—even in the aernoon when it snows. You write whole books about it. You get married, as soon as possible—why think twice if you’re happy? inking will only bring you down; life will prevail in the end. e second year, things begin to change. You’ve grown complacently affectionate. You’re proud of the bond you’ve established. You know what your wife will say before she opens her mouth—how kind of you to save her the trouble. In the street, people mistake your wife for your sister; you find this flattering, but it starts to wear on you. You make love less and less oen but think it’s no big deal. You believe each day solidifies your love when in fact the end is nigh. You defend marriage to your single friends, who don’t recognize you anymore. Are you sure you even recognize yourself when you recite the lesson
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you know by heart, as you try not to look at the beautiful young women that light up the street? e third year, you’ve stopped trying not to look at the beautiful young women that light up the street. You’ve stopped talking to your wife. You spend hours with her at a restaurant listening to what the people at the table over are discussing. You go out more and more oen: this gives you an excuse not to fuck. Before long you can’t tolerate your spouse another second, because you’ve fallen in love with someone else. ere was one thing about which you weren’t mistaken: life does indeed prevail in the end. e third year, there’s good news and bad news. e good news: disgusted, your wife leaves you. e bad news: you’ve started to write a new book.
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II A Festive Divorce
e secret to driving wasted is to aim between the buildings. Marc Marronnier clutches the throttle which has the effect of increasing the speed of his moped. He totters between the cars. ey flash their lights and honk when he skims past them, like at a country bumpkin wedding. It’s sort of ironic: Marronnier happens to be celebrating his divorce. Tonight, he’s doing the Double-5 tour and he mustn’t waste time: five clubs in one night (Castel-Buddha-Bus-Cabaret-Queen) is arduous as is, so imagine the Double 5 which, as its name suggests, is carried out twice in one night. He oen goes out alone. Socialites are solitary people lost in a sea of vague acquaintances. ey comfort themselves with handshakes. Each new kiss on the cheek is a trophy. ey make themselves feel important by greeting famous people, while in fact they themselves are utterly useless. ey make sure only to visit noisy places so as not to have to talk. God gave mankind parties so they could hide their feelings. Few know as many people as Marc, and few are as lonely. is party isn’t like the others. It’s his divorce party. Hooray! He starts by buying a bottle at each club. It seems he’s made quite a dent in each, too.
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Marc Marronnier, you’re the King of the Night, everybody adores you, wherever you go the club managers kiss you on the lips, you get to cut to the front of the line, you get the best tables, you know everybody’s last name, you laugh at all their jokes (especially the least funny ones), people give you drugs for free, you show up in photos everywhere for no apparent reason, it’s incredible how popular you’ve become aer a few years in the gossip columns! You’re a social mogul! A socialite extraordinaire! Wait, why is it your wife ran off, anyway? “We split up due to a mutual disagreement,” mutters Marc as he enters e Bus. en he adds: “I married Anne because she was an angel—and that’s precisely why we’re getting divorced. I thought I was looking for love up until the moment I realized that all I wanted was to flee it.” Awkward silence. He changes the subject. “Fuck, the girls here look decent! I should have brushed my teeth before coming. Hello! Mademoiselle, you’re as cute as button. May I please take off your clothes?” at’s the way he is, Marc Marronnier: he pretends to be despicable beneath his slick velvet suit simply because he’s too ashamed to be sweet. He’s just turned 30: the bastard age when you’re too old to be young, and too young to be old. He does everything to live up to this reputation, so as not to disappoint anyone. He’s spent so long just trying to expand his pressbook that little by little he’s become a caricature of himself. He finds it
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exhausting to prove he’s nice or profound, so he takes to behaving like this superficial idiot, erratic and disgraceful. So he has no one to blame but himself if, when he yells out on the dance floor “Hooray! I’m divorceddd!”—no one comes to comfort him. e laser beams pierce his heart like swords. Before long, just putting one foot in front of the other becomes a difficult task. He staggers back onto his scooter. It’s freezing out. Jolting forward, Marc feels tears streaming down his face. Surely it’s just the wind. His eyes are impassive. He’s not wearing a helmet. La Dolce Vita? What Dolce Vita? What happened to it? ere are too many memories, too much to forget, it’s not easy erasing all that, you’d have to relive so many perfect moments to replace the beauty of before. He meets up with some friends at the Baron, on Avenue Marceau. e champagne isn’t cheap and neither are the girls. For example, to have sex with two is $1000, and one will set you back $500. You don’t even get a bulk discount. e girls only take cash; Marc gets money out of an ATM with his credit card; they lead him to a hotel, strip in the taxi, suck him off together, he presses on their heads; in the hotel room they cover themselves in scented lotion, he fucks one of them while she licks the other; aer a while, unable to come, he fakes an orgasm then rushes into the bathroom to discreetly throw away the empty condom. He takes the cab back as the sun starts to come up, and hears a song on the radio:
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« L’alcool a un goût amer Le jour c’était hier Et l’orchestre dans un habit Un peu passé Joue le vide de ma vie Désintégrée. »1 (Christophe, Le Beau Bizarre) He decides that, from now on, he’ll always masturbate before going out so as not to be tempted to do something stupid.
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Alcohol has a bitter taste e day was yesterday And a band wearing sharp suits Just out of style Plays the silence of my life Deserted a while.
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III Abandoned on the beach
Hey everyone, the author here. Welcome to my brain— please excuse me for intruding. No more cheating: I’ve decided to be my own protagonist. Usually, what happens to me is never particularly serious. My loved ones aren’t dying. I’ve never set foot in Sarajevo. e drama in my life unfolds in restaurants, clubs, and elegant apartments. e most upsetting thing to have happened to me recently was not being invited to John Galliano’s fashion show. And then, all of a sudden, I find myself dying of a broken heart. ere was a phase when all my friends drank, then when they all took drugs, then when they all got married, and now we’re all getting divorced before we perish. is all happens, ironically, in rather cheerful places, like here at the Voile Rouge, a super-hip beach in Saint-Tropez where the weather’s warm and people dance on the bar; to cool off the trashy sluts you douse them in champagne at $1500 a bottle before you suck it out of their belly buttons. I’m surrounded by forced laughter. I want to drown myself in the sea but there are too many jet skis. How have I let such superficiality so dictate my life? People always say that you have to “keep up appearances.” Personally I say you should assassinate them because it’s the only way to keep up yourself. 12
IV e saddest person I’ve ever met
During the winter in Paris, there are some places that get colder than others. We fill ourselves up with liquor, but it’s as if a blizzard was blowing through every bar. e ice age has come early. Even crowds make me shiver. I did everything I was supposed to: born into a well-off family, I went to the lycée Montaigne then to the lycée Louis-leGrand, I went to college and met all kinds of intelligent people, I invited them to dinner and some even gave me a job, I married the most beautiful girl I knew. Why is it so cold here? Where did I go wrong? I never wanted anything more than to make you happy. Don’t I have the right to be happy too? Why is it that, instead of the simple happiness that’s been dangled before me, I’ve found nothing but excruciating despair? I’m a dead man. I wake up every morning with an intolerable longing to go back to sleep. I dress in black because I’m in mourning for myself. I’m in mourning for the man I could have been. I traipse around mechanically, rue des Beaux-Arts—the street where Oscar Wilde died, like me. I go to restaurants and eat nothing. e managers are offended that I never order anything. But do you know many corpses that lick their plate clean 13
as they smack their chops? So whenever I drink, it’s on an empty stomach. Upside: rapid inebriation. Downside: stomach ulcers. I’ve ceased to smile. It’s more than I can manage. I’m dead and buried. I won’t have children. e dead do not procreate. I’m a corpse that shakes hands in cafés. I’m a rather friendly corpse, and very timid. I think I may be the saddest person I’ve ever met. In the depths of the Paris winter, when the thermometer drops below freezing, human beings seek out bright, cozy bars to take shelter in at night. ere, hidden among the crowd, you can finally allow yourself to shiver.
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V Expiration date
You can be an adult, dark-haired man and cry. All it takes is for you to realize suddenly that love lasts three years. It’s the kind of discovery that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy—which is a figure of speech, because I don’t have any. Snobs don’t have enemies, which is why they talk shit about everyone: to try to make some. A mosquito lasts a day; a rose, three days. A cat lasts thirteen years; love lasts three. at’s the way it is. First there’s a year of passion, then a year of comfortable intimacy, and finally a year of boredom. e first year, you say: “If you leave me, I’ll KILL myself.” e second year, you say: “If you leave me, I’ll suffer, but I’ll eventually get over it.” e third year, you say: “If you leave me, I’m breaking out the champagne.” Nobody warns you that love lasts three years. e conspiracy of love is a well-guarded secret. You’re led to believe that it’s for life when in fact love disappears, chemically, at the 15
end of three years. I read it in a women’s magazine: love consists of a rush of dopamine, norepinephrine, prolactin, luliberin, and oxytocin. A tiny molecule, phenethylamine (PEA), triggers feelings of happiness, exaltation, and euphoria. When you fall head over heels for someone, it’s just your neurons saturated with PEA. As for intimacy, it’s endorphins (the opium of lovers). Society has deceived you: you’ve been sold “true love,” and yet it’s been scientifically proven that these hormones cease to function aer three years. What’s more, the statistics speak for themselves: a relationship lasts on average 317.5 days (I wonder what happens during the last half-day...), and in Paris, two out of three married couples get divorced within three years of getting married. According to the demographic records of the United Nations, census experts have been studying divorce rates in sixty-two countries since 1947. e majority of divorces occur during the fourth year of marriage (meaning that the process was set in motion at the end of the third year). “In Finland, in Russia, in Egypt, in South Africa, for hundreds of millions of men and women studied by the UN, who speak different languages, have different jobs, dress differently, handle different money, whisper different prayers, fear different demons, nurture an infinite variety of hopes and dreams... yet there’s always a peak in divorces aer three years of living together.” e banality of divorce is just one more humiliation.
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ree years! Statistics, biochemistry, my own personal experience: love’s shelf-life is always the same. Disturbing coincidence. Why three years and not two, or four, or six hundred? Personally, this all confirms the existence of the three stages defined by Stendhal, Barthes, and Barbara Cartland: passionintimacy-boredom, a cycle in which each stage lasts one year— a triad as sacred as the Holy Trinity. e first year, you buy the furniture. e second year, you rearrange the furniture. e third year, you argue over who gets to keep the furniture. e song by Léo Ferré sums it up nicely: Avec le temps on n’aime plus.2 Who are you, to dare to stand up to glands and neurotransmitters that will let you down as soon as your time is up? You can try to make a case for the lyricism of poetry—but faced with the twin forces of science and statistics, love is doomed from the start.
“Love fades with time,” a well-known French song published in 1970. 2
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VI Tweaked out
I got home shit-faced. It’s fucking miserable to find yourself in this state at my age. Getting wasted gets old when you’re 18; at 30 it’s just pathetic. I popped half a tab of molly so I’d have the nerve to hook up with strangers. Otherwise I’d be too shy. e number of girls that I haven’t kissed for fear of getting turned down is incalculable. I think that’s what makes me charming: I always think I’m not. At e Queen, two cute drunk blonds asked me as they stuffed their tongues into my ears, creating a stereophonic gurgling sound: “Your place or ours?” Aer I’d made out with them both for a while (and bitten their four breasts), I responded proudly: “You go back to yours, and I’ll go back to mine. I don’t have any condoms and besides, tonight I’m celebrating my divorce, I’d be too nervous to get it up.” Getting off my scooter, I entered my deserted apartment. I felt my stomach clench with despair; comedown from E. What was I thinking? What good is it to spend the night hiding from yourself if it’s only to end the night alone again in your room? In my jacket pocket I found a bit of coke in an envelope. 18
Snorted it right down to the kra paper. at’ll soen my misery. A bit of white powder sticks to my nostril. Now I’m not tired. e sun’s come up and France heads off to work. And all the while a man who’s outgrown his adolescence doesn’t move. Too fucked up to sleep, read, or write, I’ll stare at the ceiling and grind my teeth. With my red face and white nose, I look like clown in reverse. I won’t be going to work today. Too ashamed of having turned down a threesome the day aer my divorce. Fed up with these girls you sleep with but hate to wake up next to. Beside a saucepan of milk boiling over, there are few things on earth as foul as I.
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VII Recipe for surviving heartbreak
Repeat the following three phrases regularly: 1) HAPPINESS DOES NOT EXIST. 2) LOVE IS IMPOSSIBLE. 3) NOTHING MATTERS. Seriously—this may sound stupid, but this method might have saved my life when I hit bottom. Try it the next time you have a breakdown. I highly recommend it. I’m also including a list of songs to listen to, to help you get back on your feet: April come she will by Simon & Garfunkel (20 times), Trouble by Cat Stevens (10 times), Something in the way she moves by James Taylor (10 times), Et si tu n’existais pas by Joe Dassin (5 times), Sixty years on and Border Song by Elton John (40 times), Everybody hurts by REM (5 times), Quelques mots d’amour by Michel Berger (40 times but don’t brag about it), Memory Motel by e Rolling Stones (8.5 times), Living without you by Randy Newman (100 times), Caroline No by e Beach Boys (600 times), the Kreutzer Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven (6,000 times). It’s a great idea for a compilation album—I’ve already figured out a great slogan: “Mixtape for the depressed: 20
Heartbreak and tape decks.”
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VIII For those who missed the start
At 30, I still can’t look a cute girl in the eyes without blushing. It’s rather disconcerting to be this sensitive. I’m too jaded to truly fall in love, yet too sensitive to remain indifferent. In short, too weak to stay married. What’s the matter with me? Of course, I’d love to just refer you to my last two books, but that wouldn’t be very nice of me, given how these contemporary masterpieces were remaindered shortly aer their critical success. So let’s sum up the previous episodes, shall we? I was an unrepentant viveur, a product of our useless, exorbitant society. I was born September 21st, 1965, twenty years aer Auschwitz, on the first day of autumn. I was born into the world on the day the leaves began to fall from the trees, when the days began to shorten. Which explains, perhaps, my disillusioned temperament. I earned a living stringing words together, for newspapers or advertising agencies: the latter having the advantage of paying more for fewer words. I made myself known throwing parties when no one threw parties in Paris anymore. at has nothing to do with words, but it’s how I made a name for myself, probably because these days people who string words together are seen as less important than people with their photo in the pages of some magazine. 22
I surprised those who knew me when I got married out of love. One day, as I gazed into her big blue eyes, I thought I’d glimpsed eternity. Me, always running from party to party, from job to job, all just to avoid the inexorable depression, all of a sudden I could picture myself happy. Anne, my wife, was unreal, a luminous kind of beautiful, it seemed impossible. Way too pretty to be happy—but that I didn’t realize until later. I would look at her for hours. Sometimes she’d realized what I was doing and would yell at me: “Stop looking at me,” she’d say, “you’re being annoying.” But just watching her live became my favorite pastime. Guys like me, who thought themselves ugly growing up, are generally so surprised when they manage to court a pretty girl that they ask for them in marriage a tad quick. What happened next isn’t particularly original: let’s just say, to keep it brief, that we moved into an apartment too small for so great a love. All of a sudden, we were going out too oen, and were swept away by a rather treacherous whirlwind. People would say: “ose two go out oen, don’t they.” “ey do, poor things. ings must be going so badly for them!” And they weren’t entirely wrong, even if they were quite pleased to finally have a pretty girl at their sleazy parties for once.
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And that’s the way it goes—as soon as you’re the least bit happy, life sees to it that you’re brought back down to earth. We were unfaithful, one right aer the other. We broke up like we got married: without knowing why. Marriage is a huge scheme, an infernal fraud, an organized deception in which we’ve perished like two children. Why? How? It’s quite simple. A young man asks the woman he loves to marry him. He’s scared shitless, it’s cute, he blushes, he sweats, he stutters, and she, her eyes light up, she laughs nervously, makes him repeat the question. As soon as she’s said yes, suddenly an unending list of obligations falls on top of them, family dinners and lunches, seating arrangements, dress fitting, reprimanding, it’s forbidden to burp or fart around the in-laws, stand up straight, smile, smile, it’s an unending nightmare and it’s only the beginning: next, you’ll see, everything is arranged to ensure they detest one another.
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IX Storm clouds over Copacabana
Fairy tales exist only in fairy tales. e truth is far more disappointing. e truth is always more disappointing, that’s why everybody lies. e truth is the photo of another woman accidentally discovered in my travel bag in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), on New Year’s Eve. e truth is that love begins a soppy romance and ends up sopping down the drain. Anne was looking for her hairbrush and wound up disheveled by a Polaroid of a woman accompanied by several love letters that weren’t from her. At the Rio airport, Anne dumped me. She wanted to go back to Paris without me. I wasn’t in a position to argue. She was sobbing in disbelief. e shock of someone who in twenty seconds has lost everything. She was an adorable little girl who in a single moment has discovered that life is dreadful and that her marriage was falling apart. She was unaware of everything around her, the airport, the line, the notice board, everything had disappeared, except me, her tormentor. It’s unbelievable how much I regret now not having taken her in my arms. But I’d have been so ashamed should my tears not cease to flow, and
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everyone was looking at me. It’s always rather embarrassing to be a dick in public. Instead of asking for her forgiveness, I said: “Hurry up, you’re going to miss your plane.” Just thinking about it now, my upper lip starts to tremble once again. Her face was imploring, sad, glazed over, hateful, defeated, anxious, disappointed, innocent, proud, scornful, and all the while her eyes looked so blue. I’ll never forget the look on her face as she discovered how it feels to hurt. I’ll have to learn how to live with all this guilt on my conscience. People pity those who suffer but not those who do wrong. Just deal with it like a man, bro. You’re the one who didn’t keep your promises. Remember the end of Adolphe: “e great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics doesn’t justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.” Later, I dragged myself around Copacabana, alone, my heart broken; I drank, twenty caipirinhas, I felt like shit, unfair and monstrous. I was like some kind of cold fish. For the first time in decades, it rained in Rio de Janeiro on New Year’s Eve. Divine punishment. Knelt down on the sand, the deafening drumming of the samba in my ears, I too began to rain. ere are days when falling asleep would be a luxury. To fall asleep, just to wake up from this nightmare. To imagine that none of this had ever happened. To press Command-Z on your life. Because it’s yourself you really ruin, when you make someone else suffer.
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Yes, it’s true, I remember quite well the day I stopped sleeping. Millions of Brazilians dressed in white, in the rain, on the beach. Huge fireworks before the Méridien. We were throwing white flowers into the waves as we prayed for our wishes to come true. I tossed a bouquet into a wave, wishing with all my heart that everything would just work out. I don’t know what happened: my flowers must have been ugly, or the gods absent. In any case, my wish was never granted.
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X Palais de Justice, Paris
Divorce is not something to be taken lightly. What kind of filth have we become to think that it’s not a serious act? Anne believed in me. She promised me her love, with God (and, more importantly, the French Republic) as her witness. I signed a pact promising to always take care of her and to raise our children. And I screwed her over. She’s the one who filed for divorce: a kind of poetic justice, given that I’m the one who asked for her hand in marriage. We’ll not bear children and thank God for their sake. I’m a traitor and a coward, which wouldn’t make for a very good family man. I plead guilty—if only to stop feeling riddled with guilt. Why does no one come to a divorce? At my marriage, I was surrounded by all my friends. But the day of my divorce, I am unbelievably alone. No witnesses, no bridesmaids, no family, no wasted friends to pat me on the back. I’d have preferred that someone throw something at me, at least rice, I don’t know, rotten tomatoes for example. is sort of projectile is commonplace as you leave the Palais de Justice, aer all. Where are all the friends that, happy to stuff themselves with hors d'oeuvres at my reception, now avoid me, when it should be the other way
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around: shouldn’t you get married alone, and divorce with the support of all your friends? I’ve heard that certain Anglican ministers see to it that divorce ceremonies are amicable occasions, with a blessing of the divorced couple and a solemn renouncement of the marriage vows. “Father, I give you this ring as a sign that my marriage is over.” I think they may be on to something. e Pope should look into this idea: it would bring people to church, and plus, reselling the wedding bands would bring in more money than the quest for the holy grail, wouldn’t it? It’s definitely worth looking into, I think to myself as the judge attempts to reconcile us. He asks me and Anne if we’re sure we wanted to get divorced. He talks to us like we’re four-year olds. I want to tell him that no, actually, we came here to play tennis. en I think about it and realize he saw right through us: we are four-year olds. Divorce is a mental abortion. In place of the “good war” that we deserved, this kind of disaster (a lot like losing your mother or father, finding yourself paralyzed aer a car crash, or losing your house aer getting fired because your boss is a dick) is the only thing teaching us how to be men. ...What if adultery has made me an adult? We pretend not to care about divorce, but the time will come when you realize you’ve gone from “Sleeping Beauty” to “We will never grow old together.” Farewell fond memories, we
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must abandon the adorable nicknames we’ve given one another, burn the photos from our honeymoon, turn off the radio when you hear that song we used to hum together. Certain phrases leave you beside yourself: “What should I wear?”, “What should we do tonight?”, because they bring back bad memories. You’ll find yourself crying inexplicably every time you witness a couple reunited at the airport. And even the Song of Songs becomes unbearable: “Your cheeks are beautiful like a morning dove, your neck like a string of jewels... You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride; you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.” e last time we see each other, it’ll be in the presence of a smiling lawyer who will be, just to top it all off, 8 months pregnant. We’ll kiss one another on the cheek like old friends. We’ll go out for coffee together as if the world hadn’t just fallen apart on us. Around us, people will go on living. We’ll chat playfully then, when we leave, as if it’s no big deal, that’ll be it. “See you later” will be the final lie.
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XI e 30-year old man
Around here, you never ask yourself any questions before the age of thirty, at which point, of course, it’s too late to answer them. Here’s how it goes: you’re 20, you’re fucking around, and when you wake up you’re 30. It’s over: never again will your age begin with a two. You should come to terms now with the fact that you’re ten years older than you were ten years ago, and ten pounds heavier than you were last year. How many years do you have le? 10? 20? 30? e average life expectancy grants you 42 more if you’re a man, 50 if you’re a woman. But that doesn’t take into account the illnesses, your hair falling out, turning senile, the spots on your hands. No one asks themselves these questions: Have we gotten enough out of life? Should we have lived differently? Are we with the right person, in the right place? What’s the world offering us? From life until death, we live our lives on autopilot, and it takes a kind of superhuman courage to deviate from that course. At 20, I thought I knew everything. At 30, I realized I knew nothing. I had just spent ten years learning everything I needed to know, only to have to unlearn it.
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It was all too good to be true. You should always be suspicious of perfect couples: they get too much pleasure out of being beautiful, they force themselves to smile, as if modeling in an ad for a new film in the Cannes Film Festival. e problem with getting married out of love is that it sets the bar too high. e only surprising thing that could happen to a married couple in love would be a catastrophe. What else? Life’s over. You’re already in paradise before you’ve even lived. You’ll live until the end of your days in the same perfect film, with the same perfect cast. It’s unbearable. When you have everything too soon, you end up hoping for a disaster, just to be liberated. A catastrophe to find relief. I’ve spent a long time confessing that I only got married for the sake of others, that marriage isn’t something you do for yourself. You get married to piss off your friends or to please your parents, oen both, sometimes the other way around. ese days, nine out of ten preppy-ass marriages are little more than an obligatory rite of passage, a social event allowing your parents to send out invitations. Sometimes, your prospective inlaws may check to see that their future son-in-law is listed in the Who’s Who, have the engagement ring weighed to calculate the carats and insist on selling the photos to the Sunday paper. But that’s a worst-case scenario. You get married for the same reasons you graduate from college or get your driver’s license: to fit into the same mold, to
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be normal, normal, NORMAL, at any cost. If you can’t be better than everyone else, it’s best to be like everyone else, for fear of ending up inferior. And it’s the perfect way to sabotage true love. And yet middle-class moralists are not the only ones endorsing marriage: it’s the focus of a massive act of collective brainwashing: advertisers, film-makers, journalists, and even novelists, all endeavoring to convince every little girl that what she really wants is a big white dress and a ring on her finger, when she otherwise would never have thought twice about it. True Love, yes—with its ups and its down, of course they would have dreamed of love, otherwise what’s the point of living? But Marriage, the institution-that-turns-love-to-shit, “the ball and chain of endless love and lifelong commitment” (Maupassant): never. In an ideal world, twenty year-old girls would never be attracted to such an artificial concept. ey would long for sincerity, for passion, for unconditional love—not some guy in a rented tuxedo. ey would wait for the Man who could offer her a lifetime of surprises, not the Man who could buy her Ikea furniture. ey would let nature—which is to say desire—take its course. Unfortunately, their frustrated mothers wish them to know the unhappiness they have known, and sadly the daughters themselves have spent their days watching endless soap operas. And so they wait for their Prince Charming, a pathetic marketing concept destined to turn lively girls into bitter, disil-
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lusioned old women, when all it would take is a single imperfect man to make them happy. Of course, the aristocracy will tell you that things are different nowadays, the times have changed, but take the word of a frustrated victim: never has the intimidation been more aggressive than in our era of illusory freedom. Every day, conjugal totalitarianism continues to perpetuate the same misery, generation aer generation. is bullshit is propagated in the name of spurious and outdated principles, in order to pass on time aer time a heritage of pain and hypocrisy. Ruining lives remains the favorite pastime of venerable old French families, and it’s a game about which they know a thing or two. ey’ve had practice. Yes, even today you can write: “Families, I hate you.” I hate you all the more because I didn’t rebel until it was much too late. Deep down, I was fine with it in a sense. I was a common redneck, descended from country bums from the Béarn, proud as a peacock to be marrying Anne, my alabaster aristocrat. I was irresponsible, smug, naive, stupid. And I’m paying for it now. I deserve this mess. I was like everyone else, like you reading this now, convinced I was the exception to the rule. Of course I was immune to the inevitable unhappiness, we would pass between the cracks unscathed. Failure was something that happened to others. en one day, the love was gone and I woke up with a start. Until that day, I’d been forcing my-
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self to play the happily married man. But I had been lying to myself for too long to not begin one day to lie to someone else.
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XII Lost Illusions
Our generation is too superficial for marriage. People get married like they go to MacDonald’s. en they change the channel. How are you supposed to live your entire life with the same person in the age of widespread channel surfing? In a time when celebrities, politicians, fashions, gender, and religions have never been so interchangeable? Why would love be any exception to our cultural schizophrenia? And where does this bizarre obsession come from, anyway—devoting oneself to being happy at all costs with a single person? Among 558 types of human society studied by anthropologists, only 24% are monogamous. e majority of animal species are polygamous. As for extraterrestrials, don’t even get me started: the Galactic Charter has long forbidden monogamy on all planets of type B#871. Marriage is caviar at every meal: a stomachache from what you adore, until you’re nauseous. “Go on, you’ll have a bit more, won’t you? What’s that? You’ve had enough? Why, you found it delicious not long ago, what’s the matter with you? Come on, you naughty boy!”
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e sheer force of love, its unbelievable power, should honestly terrify western society, in that it has succeeded in creating this system designed to make you disgusted by what you love. An American researcher recently demonstrated that infidelity has an evolutionary basis. Infidelity, according to this renowned researcher, is a genetically programmedmmed strategy to promote the survival of the species. I can imagine the scene playing out: “My love, I didn’t cheat on you for pleasure: it was for the survival of the species, would you believe it! You might not give a damn about it, but somebody has to worry about the survival of the species! If you think I’m amused!...” I’m never satisfied: when I’m attracted to a girl, I want to fall in love with her; once I’m in love with her, I want to kiss her; once I’ve kissed her, I want to sleep with her; once I’ve slept with her, I want to move in with her; once I move in with her, I want to marry her; once I’ve married her, I meet another girl I’m attracted to. Man is a perpetually unsatisfied animal, hesitating between a variety of frustrations. If women really wanted to fuck with men, they would continually turn them down, leaving the men to spend their lives chasing aer them. When you’re in love, the only question le is: at what point do you begin to lie? Are you still just as happy to come home, only to find the same person waiting for you? When you tell her “I love you,” do you really mean it? ere will surely—it’s inevi-
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table—be a moment when you realize that you’re faking it. Or else your “I love you” won’t feel the same. Personally, what did me in was shaving. I used to shave every day so as not to scratch Anne when I’d kiss her good night. And then, one night—she was already asleep (I’d been out late with some friends, in the pathetic way men are wont to do when they’re married)—and then, I didn’t shave. I thought it was no big deal, she was asleep, she wouldn’t even notice. Yet in fact it represented the end of our love. Anyone who’s gotten divorced has read Dan Franck’s La Séparation. I’ll never forget how moved I felt from the first scene: the man realizes that his wife no longer loves him when he takes her hand and she pulls away. He tries to take her hand again, but again she pulls away. I said to myself, what a bitch! How could she be so cruel? It’s not so hard, aer all, to hold your husband’s hand, fuck! Until, one day, the same thing happened to me. I found myself pushing back Anne’s hand again and again. She would tenderly reach for my hand or my arm, or else she’d place her hand on my thigh, and you know what I saw? A flabby, white hand, with the consistency of a latex glove. I shuddered with disgust. It was as if she had stuck an octopus onto my leg. I felt riddled with guilt, my God, how did things turn out like this? I had become the bitch in Dan Franck’s novel! She wouldn’t stop twisting her fingers around my hand. I tried to contain myself, but I couldn’t hold back a tiny grimace at the feeling of her pale flesh. I’d get up suddenly, saying I had
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to pee, but in reality I just had to get away from that hand. But then I’d have second thoughts, overcome with guilt, and I’d gaze at that hand that I had once loved. at hand that I had asked for in marriage before God. e hand that, three years ago, I’d have given anything to hold. Suddenly I felt nothing but hatred for myself, pity for her, indifference, then an insufferable longing to just burst out and cry. And I pulled that limp octopus to my heart and kissed it with bitter sadness. You know you’ve fallen out of love when you realize you can’t turn back. And that’s how it happens: it’s water under the bridge; you’ve already broken up, without even knowing it.
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XIII Flirting with disaster
I ran into a friend tonight, while I was out—I don’t remember who, or when, and much less where. “What are you sulking about?”, he asked me. I just remember having responded: “Because love lasts three years.” Apparently, that did the trick: the guy wandered off. Now I say it all the time, it works great. If ever I’m looking down and someone asks me why, I automatically respond: “Because love lasts three years.” I think it sounds dope. In fact—I think it would even make a good title for a book. Love lasts three years. Even if you’ve been married 40 years, deep down you know that it’s true. You know well the sacrifice you’ve made; the moment you decided to give up everything. e fateful day you stopped being afraid. It’s not easy to hear that love lasts three years. It’s like a magic trick you fuck up, or being awoken by your alarm in the middle of an erotic dream. But we have to shatter the illusion of eternal love—the cornerstone of modern civilization, the fount of human misery.
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Aer three years together, a couple should break up, kill themselves, or have kids—three ways to guarantee its end. People always say that aer a while, passion becomes “something else,” more enduring and beautiful. at this “something else” is Love with a capital “L,” a less exciting feeling, of course, but also more mature. Just to be clear: I don’t give a fuck about this “something else,” and if that’s what Love is, I’m fine leaving it to the boring, the discouraged, the “mature,” holed up in their sentimental comfort. My love has a lowercase “l” but at least it soars; it may not last long but it least you can feel when it fades. eir “something else” that they’d like to off as love seems invented just to appease them, as they reassure themselves that there’s no better option. ey remind me of people who scratch the paint off expensive cars because they can’t afford one themselves. An apocalyptic end to the evening. Feel like ending it with a bullet in my chest. Around 5 in the morning I call Adeline H, to give you an idea what a shit show I was. It was her home phone. She answers: “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” Her voice sounds rough. I woke her up. Why didn’t she just let the answering machine get it? I don’t know what to say to her. “Um, sorry to wake you up... I just wanted to say hey...” “WHO IS THIS? ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS?” I hang up. Seated, motionless, my head in my hands, I hesitate between a bottle of Valium and just hanging myself. And why not both? I don’t have any rope, but a few
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Paul Smith ties strung together should do the trick. English designers always use durable materials. I stick a Post-It on the TV: “ANY MAN ALIVE PAST 30 IS A DUMBASS”. Good thing I picked out an apartment with exposed piping. Now just to stand up on the chair, like this, then to toss back the glass of Coke mixed with ground-up muscle relaxants. en you slide your head into the noose, and when at last you fall asleep—logically, it’s to never again wake up.
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XIV Provisional Resurrection
But you do wake up. You open one eye, then the other, you have a double headache—one because of the hangover, but another from the lump on your forehead that’s swelling rapidly. It’s past noon, and you feel like an idiot with this tangle of ties wrapped around your neck, sprawled out at the foot of an overturned chair and the cleaning lady standing above you. “Hey, Carmelita... Was I... Was I asleep long?” “You move please sir, need to vaccum, please sir?” And then you find the Post-It you le on the TV: “ANY MAN ALIVE PAST 30 IS A DUMBASS.” I’m astounded by my own psychic capabilities. Poor thing. You want all the girls to look at you, and now you’re all depressed because of a silly divorce. Should have thought about that earlier. Now I have nothing but my misery to keep me company. What a waste of time—trying to kill yourself, when you’re already dead. Suicidal people are truly unbearable. Anne gave me my freedom, and now look at me—resenting her for it. I resent her for leaving me to face myself alone. I resent her for letting me start all over again. I resent her for making me face up to my responsibilities. I resent her for making me write this paragraph. I used to suffer because I felt trapped, and now I hate my 43
life because I’m free. So this is what it’s like to be an adult, then: to build sand castles only to knock them down, and repeat the operation, again and again, when in fact you know quite well the ocean would wash them away anyways? My eyelids are heavy as nightfall. I’ve grown old this year. At what point do you admit that you’re old? When it takes three days for you to get over a hangover. When you can’t manage even to kill yourself. When you get wayyy too excited upon meeting younger people. eir enthusiasm pisses you off; their youthful illusions wear you out. You’re old when the night before, you said to a girl born in 1976: “Oh, ’76? I remember, that was the year of the heat wave.” With no nails le to bite, I decide to go out for a bite to eat.
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XV e Wailing Wall (Continued)
I know all too well that love is impossible, and yet I’m sure in a few years I’ll be proud to have once believed in it. Nobody could ever hold that against Anne and me: we believed in love, to the bottom of our hearts. We hurtled ourselves, heads lowered, into the reinforced concrete muleta dangled before us. Don’t you laugh—nobody makes fun of Don Quijote, and he tilted at windmills like a crazy old man. For a long time, my only goal in life was to self-destruct. en, one day, I wanted to be happy. It’s awful, I’m ashamed to admit it, please forgive me: I once had this plebeian desire to be happy. What I’ve since learned is that this is the surest path to self-destruction. Evidently I’m a consistent person at heart, without even intending to be. I don’t know why I agreed to this dinner at Jean-Georges’ place. I’m still not hungry. I’ve always been proud to say that I wait until I’m hungry to eat. It has a certain elegance: to eat when you’re hungry, to drink when you’re thirsty, to fuck when you’re horny. But fine, I’m not going to wait until I starve to death to see my friends. Surely Jean-Georges had invited the same group of sublime malades that I consider my best friends.
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Nobody talks about their problems because they know the others have just as many. You change the subject to outwit misery. I was wrong. Jean-Georges is alone. He wants to talk. He grabs me by the scruff of the neck and shakes me like a parking meter that swallows your money then refuses to print your receipt. “Last night, I asked why you were sulking around everywhere and you told me love lasts three years. Seriously! You think I’m fucking around or what? You think you’re a character in one of your books? I can tell you your divorce has got nothing to do with that! So are you going to cut the bullshit and fucking talk to me or not? Otherwise what good am I?” I lower my gaze to hide the fact that my eyes are welling up with tears. I pretend to have a cold so I can sniffle. I mutter timidly: “Uh... no, seriously, I don’t know what you’re talking about...” “Stop it. Who is it? Do I know her?” And then, my voice low, my heart heavy, my foot in my mouth, I confess at last: “Her name’s Alice.”
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XVI Would you like to be my harem?
So there you have it: Marc and Alice got married three years ago. e problem is—they didn’t get married to each other. Marc married Anne, and Alice married Antoine. at’s just the way it is: life sees to it that everything is complicated—or maybe we seek out complications ourselves? It was the photo of Alice that Anne discovered in Rio. A ravishing Polaroid of Alice in a bikini on a beach in Italy, near Rome. In Fregene, to be precise. Alice and I had an “extramarital affair.” at’s how the most beautiful romantic passions are referred to these days. People die of love every day for “extramarital affairs.” ey’re oen women you see in the street. ey have a way of blending in, because they’re hiding something; but from time to time you’ll see them crying senselessly while watching some dreadful soap opera, or smiling in a magnificent kind of way in the metro and then—then you’ll know what I mean. Oentimes the situation is lopsided: a single woman loves a married man, he doesn’t want to leave his wife, it’s awful, contemptible, uninspired. In our case, Alice and I were both married when we met. e 47
equilibrium was practically perfect. But I was the first to crack: I got divorced, while Alice had no intention of doing so. Why would she leave her husband for a lunatic who cries from the rooops that love lasts three years? I should have said to her that I didn’t really believe it—but I’d be lying. Now, I’m sick of lying. I’m sick of leading this double life. Polygamy is perfectly legal in France, provided you’re an adept liar. Having multiple lovers isn’t exactly rocket science. All it takes is a little imagination, and a lot of organization. I know plenty of guys in France who have had a harem of women, in the middle of 1995. Each night they choose which one they’ll call, and what’s worst is that this ‘chosen one’ just comes running. is requires that you be both diplomat and hypocrite—which amounts more or less to the same thing. But I’m fed up of this. I can’t bear it anymore. I’m already schizophrenic in my professional life, and I refuse to be so in my personal life. I think it would be wonderful to only have to do one thing at a time, for once. e outcome: alone once again. Love is a magnificent catastrophe: to know that you’re charging towards a brick wall, and accelerate nonetheless; to run to your downfall with a smile on your face; to wait inquisitively for the moment when everything goes to shit. Love is the only disappointment prescribed in advance, the only tragedy you can see coming and yet each time come back for more. I
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said all that to Alice before I got on my knees and begged her to run off with me. In vain.
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XVII Dilemmas
One day, misfortune entered into my life and, the dumbass that I am, I haven’t managed to rid myself of it. e strongest kind of love is unrequited. I’d have preferred to never have realized this, but it’s the truth: nothing could be worse than to love someone who doesn’t love you back—and at the same time it’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me. To love someone who loves you back is just narcissism. But to love someone who doesn’t love you back—now that’s true love. I was waiting for some kind of test, an experience, a profound realization that would be able to transform me: unfortunately, I got all that I wanted and more. I love a girl who doesn’t love me, and I no longer love the one that does. Women are for me a means to detest myself. Fan-Chiang asked: “What is love?” e master says: “To value the effort above the reward may be called love.” (Confucius)
anks, you swindling Asian, but personally I wouldn’t mind a bit of reward as well. In the meantime, I’ve been deserted. Ever since Alice found out my wife le me, she’s become
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scared, and beat a hasty retreat. No more phone calls, no more voicemails le on answering machine 3672, no more hotel room numbers on the Bi-Bop answering machine3. I’m like a clingy mistress waiting for her married lover to remember her tight little ass. Having always preferred broad, open avenues, suddenly I find myself haunting the backstreets. A single question torments me incessantly and sums up my entire existence: Which is worse: to make love without loving, or to love without making love? I feel like Tintin’s dog Snowy in the midst of an existential crisis, with a little angel on one shoulder telling him to do good, and a little demon on the other ordering him to do bad. Me, I’ve got a cherub wanting me to get back with my wife, and a devil insisting that I sleep with Alice. My head is a never-ending talk show between the two in front of a live studio audience (me). I’d have preferred that the devil order me to fuck my wife.
3
Bi-Bop and the 3672 Memophone were inventions of France Telecom destined exclusively to promote adultery, so as to excuse themselves for all the snitches enabled by the “redial” button, and the number of drug deals made possible by their pagers.
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XVIII Highs and lows
Life is a sitcom: a series of scenes that unfold always in the same settings, with more or less the same characters, forever awaiting the next episode with the same vaguely exhausted impatience. When Alice came into my life it was somewhat surprising, kind of like if someone from the cast of Sex in the City turned up on Friends. To describe Alice, I’ll get straight to the point: she’s an ostrich. Like this flightless bird, she’s tall, wild, and hides at the first sign of danger. Her never-ending slender legs (two in number) support a sensual body bearing stuck-up fruits (of the same number). Long, black hair runs across her face, which is as intense as it is gentle. Her body seems to have been designed with the express purpose of unsettling the lives of happily married men. at’s about the only thing that differentiates her from an ostrich (aside from the fact that she doesn’t lay twopound eggs). I remember the first time we met, at my grandmother’s funeral. I’d come without my wife, who understandably found such family gatherings boring—having to deal with your own family is bad enough without having to worry about your hus52
band’s. Besides, I was the one who insisted that, wherever she was now, my grandmother was hardly likely to realize if she didn’t come. I don’t know, I must have had a feeling that something big was about to happen. Everyone in the church was looking at my grandfather to see if he was crying. “PLEASE GOD, DON’T LET HIM CRY,” I prayed. But the priest had a secret weapon: he invoked grandma and grandpa’s fiy years of marriage. My grandfather’s eye—and he was a retired colonel, no less—began to well up with tears. As soon as the first tear slid down his cheek, it was as if the floodgates had opened; the entire family began to sob, staring in stunned silence at the coffin. It seemed impossible that grandma could be inside. It wasn’t until she was dead that I realized how much I appreciated her. Jesus Christ—when I wasn’t walking out on those I loved, they were dropping dead. I began to sob hysterically, for I’m a rather sensitive guy. When I was able to see through the tears, I noticed this cute brunette observing me. Alice had seen me cry. I don’t know if it was the emotion, or the strangeness of the situation, but I suddenly felt intensely attracted to this mysterious apparition wearing a tight black sweater. Later on, Alice admitted that she had found me very handsome: let’s chalk up that error of judgment to her overactive maternal instinct. All that mattered was that my attraction to her was reciprocated—she wanted to console me, that much was clear. is incident taught me that the best thing to do at a funeral is to fall in love.
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She was the friend of a cousin. She introduced me to her husband, Antoine, a nice guy—maybe too nice. As she was kissing my tear-streaked cheeks, she realized that I’d realized that she’d noticed that I’d noticed that she was looking at me the way I was looking at her. I’ll always remember the first thing I said to her: “Your face has excellent bone structure.” I had the opportunity to study it in detail. She was a young woman of 27, beautiful yet organic. e quivering of her eyelashes. A sulky laugh that makes your heart leap in your ribcage that all of a sudden feels too small. She was a marvel of sideways glances, her windswept hair, the curvature of the small of her back, the glistening of her magnificent teeth. She was Claudia Cardinale in e Leopard. Betty Page stretched out to 5’8”. She was tenderly wild, serenely flirtatious, shamelessly reticent. A friend, an enemy. How had I never met her before? What was the point of knowing so many people if I didn’t know her? It was cold in the churchyard. You know where this is going: yes, her nipples were getting hard beneath her tight black sweater. Her breasts were erect in unison—what symmetry! e purity of her expression belied the sensuality of her body. Precisely my type: there are few things I enjoy more than the contradiction between the face of an angel and the body of a whore. I have a thing for dichotomies.
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At this moment I realized I’d do anything to be part of her life, her mind, her bed, plus whatever else was on the table. Not just an ostrich, she was a lightning rod, inciting electrifying infatuation at first sight. “Have you been to the Basque country?” I asked her. “No, but I’ve heard it’s pretty.” “Not pretty, gorgeous. What a shame we’re both married, otherwise we could run away and start a family on a farm out there.” “Would we have sheep?” “Of course we’d have sheep. And ducks for foie gras, cows for milk, chickens for eggs, a cock for the chickens, an old short-sighted elephant, a dozen giraffes and a flock of ostriches like you.” “I’m not an ostrich, I’m a lightning rod.” “Well look at you! So if you can read my thoughts, what should we do now?” Aer she le, I wandered, happy and heedless, through the streets of Guéthary, the town where Paul-Jean Toulet was born, and where I had spent my idyllic childhood. I strolled about, carefree and animated, although I usually hate to go on walks (nobody seemed to notice—people always do weird things aer a funeral), I meandered along the shoreline, alive to every rock, every wave, every grain of sand. I felt my soul brimming over. Heaven itself belonged to me. e Basque coast brought me
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more luck than the beaches of Rio. I smiled up at the listless clouds in the sky and grandmother who held nothing against me.
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XIX Flee happiness lest it run away
At some point you have to decide: either you live with someone or you desire them. You can’t desire what you already have—it goes against nature. Which is why even a perfect marriage can be torn apart by any passing stranger. Even if you’ve married the most beautiful girl you can imagine, at any point a stranger could walk into your life unprovoked and hit you like a surprise overdose of aphrodisiacs. And Alice wasn’t just any stranger—she was wearing a tight black sweater. A tight black sweater can forever alter the course of two lives. All my problems are the result of my childlike fascination with anything new, my morbid desire to yield to the thousands of unbelievable possibilities that the future has to offer. It’s ridiculous the extent to which what I don’t have excites me more than what I do. But am I really any different from everyone else? Wouldn’t you prefer to read a book that you haven’t read before, see a play that you don’t already know by heart, vote for any old presidential candidate as long as he’s a new face? My most cherished memories with Anne date from before our marriage. Marriage should be criminalized: it’s a murderer of mystery. You meet this enchanting creature, you marry her and all of a sudden the enchanting creature has vanished: she’s 57
turned into your wife. YOUR wife! What a shame, how she’s fallen from grace! In fact men should spend their whole lives chasing aer someone they know they’ll never have. (For this, as it turned out, Alice was ideal.) e problem with love, as I see it, is this: in order to be happy you need to have security, whereas to be in love you need insecurity. Happiness requires confidence whereas love requires doubt and anxiety. us, in summary: marriage was conceived to ensure mutual happiness but not enduring love. And to fall in love is not the best way to find happiness; if it were, we’d all know by now, wouldn’t we. I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear, but it makes perfect sense to me: marriage mixes together things that weren’t meant to go together. When I got back to Paris, I could feel that something had changed. Anne had been knocked off her pedestal. We made love half-heartedly. My life was falling apart. Are you familiar with the ninth circle of hell? I had just moved into the flat below. ere’s so such thing as happiness in love. ere’s no such thing as happiness in love. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS HAPPINESS IN LOVE.
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How many times must you repeat it before you get it through your head, dumbass?
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XX Everything goes to shit
When a pretty girl looks at you the way Alice had looked at me, there are two possibilities: either she’s a tease and you’re in trouble; or else she’s not a tease and you’re really in trouble. ere I was, happy as a clam in my comfortable, hermetically-sealed shell, when all of a sudden Alice comes along and plucks me up, pries open my mouth and squirts me with lemon juice. “Dear God,” I repeated to myself continuously, “May this girl be in love with her husband, because if not, I’m in deep shit!” I didn’t contact Alice. I was hoping my feelings would fade over time. I was right: my feelings did fade over time, only not the ones I intended. It was Anne who suffered the consequences, much to my despair. ere’s so much sadness in the world, and yet little can compare to that which comes over a woman who can feel the love you once had for her fading away, ever so slowly, not from one day to the next, no, but inexorably, like sand through an hourglass. A woman needs a man’s admiration in order to blossom, at least that’s the way I see things. A flower needs sunlight. Anne was wilting before my absent gaze. 60
What could I do about it? Marriage, time, Alice, the world, the movement of the planets, tight black sweaters, the Maastricht treaty, everything seemed to be conspiring against our love. I was leaving my wife, and yet I felt it was to myself I was saying goodbye. e hardest part wouldn’t be to leave Anne but to abandon the beauty of our story. I felt like every person who has had to abandon an impossibly ambitious project: simultaneously disappointed and relieved.
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XXI Question marks
When I run into a friend on the street, more and more oen it goes like this: “Hey, what’s up? How’s life?” “Shit. And you?” “Shit.” “Yeah. Well, see you.” Or a friend will tell me a joke: “What’s the difference between love and herpes?” “...” “Come on... ink about it... Can’t you guess?” “...” “It’s easy, herpes lasts your whole life.” I don’t laugh. I don’t see what’s so funny about that. I must have lost my sense of humor somewhere along the way. It’s rather exasperating to realize that you ask yourself the same questions as everyone else. It’s a lesson in humility. Am I right to leave someone who’s in love with me? Am I a piece of shit? What is the meaning of death? Am I going to make the same stupid mistakes as my parents? 62
Can you really be happy, and if so, at what time? Is it possible to fall in love without it ending in blood, sperm, and tears? Couldn’t I earn WAY MORE while working WAY LESS? What kind of sunglasses should you wear in Formentera? Aer several weeks of agonizingly wrestling with my conscience, I arrived at the following conclusion: if your wife is starting to become a friend, it’s time to ask a friend to become your wife.
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XXII Reunion
e second time I saw Alice was at some birthday party not worth describing. Essentially, one of Anne’s friends had just grown a year older and thought it necessary to celebrate the event. When I recognized Alice’s supple silhouette (her fragile yet elastic skin), I was in the middle of pouring a glass of champagne for Anne. I kept filling the glass a little past the rim, soaking the tablecloth. Alice was toasting with her husband. I felt the blood rush to my face. I knocked back my whiskey. I had to watch my feet to keep myself from stumbling, which allowed me to hide my flushed face with my hair. Abandoning my wife, I rushed into the bathroom to check my hair, check my shave, take off my glasses, brush the dandruff off my shoulders, pluck the stray hair peeking out of my le nostril. What do I do now? Should I ignore Alice? To hit on attractive women, you mustn’t talk to them directly, you have to pretend as if they don’t exist. But what if she le? e thought of never seeing her again was already unbearable. So I had to talk to her, without actually talking to her. I went back into the living room, wandering past her while pretending not to see her. “Marc! Not even going to say hello?” “Oh! Alice! What a surprise! So sorry, I didn’t see you there! It’s so... good... to see you... again...” 64
“You too! How’ve you been?” She was fittingly polite, indifferent, nightmarish, constantly glancing over my shoulder. “You remember Antoine, my husband?” Icy handshake. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your wife?” “Uh... I think she’s in the kitchen putting candles on the birthday cake...” No sooner had I finished my sentence than the lights went out, the drone of ‘Happy Birthday’ began, and Alice vanished into the adversity of the crowd. I watched as she took Antoine’s hand and they dried away as if on a moving walkway, and all the while the birthday girl goes on laughing about her age, to cheers from her girlfriends of roughly the same age. Most of you reading this have surely seen on TV what an imploding building looks like: you know, when they bring down an entire apartment building with explosives. Aer a short countdown, you watch the building wobble and then collapse into itself in a cloud of dust and gravel. at’s exactly what my heart felt like. Alice and Antoine were heading for the door. I had to do something. I can see the whole thing unfolding in slow motion as if it were yesterday. I followed them into the coatroom. ere, as Antoine was rummaging through the cluttered coat
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hangers, Alice turned her dark, brimming eyes towards me and I whispered: “I don’t believe it, Alice, it can’t be you... Didn’t you feel anything between us last month in Guéthary? What about our ostrich farm?” Her face soened. She looked down and, speaking soly—so soly I wondered if I had only dreamt it—she whispered these two words as she discreetly brushed her hand against mine, before she disappeared with her husband: “I’m scared...” My fate had been sealed. Anne kept asking me, “Who the hell was that?” but the building was swily rising from the cloud of dust. e video of its implosion was rewinding. Brass bands were celebrating its inauguration. It was July 14th, with fireworks, and Chinese lanterns! e mayor of Parly 2 gives a speech! e whole thing is broadcast live on France 3! e crowd is suicidally overjoyed! Bang! Bang! e citizens are dying of jubilation! It’s a mass suicide! A Jonestown holiday! A Solar Temple rally! People go out guffawing in ecstasy! It’s madness, absolute fucking madness! e most beautiful parties are those that take place in your head.
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XXIII To leave
I’m fascinated by the intense tension that can build between a man and a woman who scarcely know each other— it’s electric, tremulous, palpable—without any particular reason, just like that, simply because they’re attracted to one another and will go to such great lengths to hide that fact. ey don’t need to speak. It’s a game of glances, of body language. It’s like a riddle, the most important brain-teaser of your life. e uneducated call this eroticism, when in fact it’s nothing less than pornography, by which I mean sincerity. e entire world could collapse into itself, but you’d still have eyes only for these other two eyes. Deep down, in this moment, you finally know. You know that you could leave immediately with this person with whom you’ve scarcely exchanged three sentences. “To leave”: the most beautiful phrase in the English language. And you know you’re ready to use it. “Let’s leave.” “We have to leave.” “One day, we’ll take a train and just leave” (Blondin). Your bags are packed, and you know that the past is no more than a muddled heap behind you that you must try to forget, because you’re only beginning to be reborn. You know that what’s happening is very serious, but do nothing to slow the pace. You know that there’s no way out. You know that you’re about to 67
hurt someone you love, that you’d prefer to spare them the pain, that you should reason with them, take your time, think things through, but “To leave,” “Leave!” is too strong to resist. To start over. To go back to square one. It’s as if your entire life had been spent underwater, a child holding his breath. e future is the bare shoulder of an unknown woman. Life has offered you a second chance; Destiny is reshuffling her cards. Some may think that this attraction is just superficial, and yet there’s nothing more profound; you’re ready to do anything; you’ll accept every flaw; you’ll forgive every imperfection; you’ll even seek them out, with amazement. We are only ever attracted by shortcomings. Alice was upset, I’d made her scared! Scared! And yet between the two of us, she was certainly the less terrified one. Nonetheless, I’d never been so ecstatic to scare the shit out of someone. I didn’t yet know that I’d come to regret it.
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XXIV e beauty of beginnings
During one of our secret hookups, aer having made love three times in a row while crying out in pleasure at the hotel Henri-IV (place Dauphine), I took Alice out to the Café Beaubourg. I’m not sure why, as I detest that atrocious place, like all “designer” cafés. e “designer” café was invented by the Parisians to gather up vacationers, so they themselves can dine in peace at the Café de Flore. Walking out onto the plaza, before the factory that is the Georges Pompidou, we stopped beneath the Génitron, the digital clock counting down the number of seconds le before the year 2000. “You see, Alice—this clock symbolizes our love.” “What are you talking about?” “e countdown has started... One day, you’ll get bored, I’ll annoy you, you’ll be pissed I didn’t put the toilet seat down, I’ll spend the entire night watching TV, and you’ll cheat on me, like you’re cheating on Antoine right now.” “ere you go again, Marc... Why can’t you just enjoy the present moment, instead of working yourself up about our future?” “Because we don’t have a future. Watch the seconds ticking away, they’re bringing us closer and closer to unhappiness... We only have three years le to love each other... Everything may 69
be wonderful today, but according to my calculations, it will be over between us by the... 15th of March, 1997.” “What if I just le you right away, to save time?” “No, wait! I take it back...” At this moment I realized that I’d be better off keeping my mouth shut regarding my stupid-ass theories. “Um...” I responded, “Why don’t you just break up with Antoine instead? en we could go live in the Little House on the Prairie, and watch our kids grow up in the Secret Garden...” “at’s right, make fun of me, while you’re at it! You’re a great guy, Marc, but why do you always have to ruin all of our nice moments with your bouts of depression?” “My love, if you ever cheat on me, I promise you two things: first I’ll kill myself, then I’ll show you a domestic dispute you’ll never forget.” We went on like this, an illegitimate couple, strolling side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes, but never holding hands in case we should run into friends of her husband or my wife. With Alice, I discovered what it meant to be gentle. I learned about character and lifelong lessons. I think that’s what attracted me to Alice. e first time you get married you’re looking for perfection—the second time you’re looking for the truth. e most beautiful thing about a woman is her health. I love a woman who radiates Health, that prison of pleasure! I want
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her to love to run, to explode into laughter, to stuff herself silly. Her teeth as white as the white of her eyes, her mouth as fresh as a newly-made bed, her cherry red lips from which every kiss is a precious gem, her skin taut like the head of a drum, her breasts round like soballs, her clavicle thin like the wings of fowl, her legs golden like the Tuscan sky, her ass round like the cheek of an infant, and above all, above all NO MAKEUP. She should smell of milk and sweat rather than perfume and tobacco. e final test was the swimming pool. People reveal their true character around a swimming pool: an intellectual woman will read in the shade of her hat, a sporty woman will organize a game of water polo, a narcissistic woman will work on her tan, a hypochondriac will smear herself with SPF 50... If you meet a woman who hovers at the edge of a swimming pool so as not to get her hair wet, run. If she dives in with a laugh, dive in aer her. Believe me: I did everything I could not to fall in love. Consider yourself in my situation: once bitten, twice shy. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Alice. ere were times when I hated her, when I truly despised her; when I found her ridiculous, poorly dressed, cowardly, crude; a falsely romantic bitch trying to save her pathetic little marriage; a wretched, selfish coward; an unpleasant, stupid Olive Oyl, with her grating voice and her fashion victim sensibility. en, a moment later, I’d
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look at her photo or hear her adorable sweet voice on the phone, or she’d appear before me and smile, and I would be in awe, in admiration, blinded by such delicate beauty, her breathtaking eyes, her velvety skin, her long, windswept hair; she was a wild animal, a dark-haired savage, a fiery squaw, she was Quasimodo’s Esmeralda and my God how I thanked heaven then for giving me the opportunity to have met such a creature. Here’s a simple test to determine if you’re in love: if aer four or five hours apart you begin to miss her, it means you’re not in love—if you were, 10 minutes apart would have sufficed to make your life utterly unbearable.
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XXV anks Wolfgang
Cheating on your wife isn’t particularly cruel in and of itself, as long as she never finds out. I even believe that a lot of husbands do it to experience a sense of danger, to step out of their comfort zone, like when they were first courting their wives. From this perspective, adultery could be seen as an affirmation of marital love. But maybe not. In any case, I think I’d have had a hard time convincing Anne of that. I remember our last dinner together. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Bad times, they say, make for good memories: I’d love for that to be the case. In my experience, they remain etched in my mind, filed away under ‘Bad Times,’ and I haven’t managed to feel any sort of nostalgia for them. I hope I’m reincarnated as a video recorder so I can just erase these images that haunt me. Anne blamed me for everything, then blamed herself for blaming me for everything, which only made me feel worse. I explained to her that everything was my fault. I had made my life into my own private film, why else would I have cut my hair so short during our three years of marriage? I used to have long hair, and now I was letting it grow back out. I was like Samson: without my hair, I was powerless! What’s more, I had never worked up the nerve to ask her father for his daughter’s hand in 73
marriage. Our marriage was thus invalid. She laughed soly at my jokes. I felt like a dick, but she smiled sadly as if she had always known that it would end like this, in this pretty restaurant, staring across this white tablecloth glowing in the candlelight, chatting like old friends. We didn’t even cry. You can break every tie with someone, go back on every promise you had made, and remain seated across the table from her like it’s no big deal. Finally she told me that she had found someone, better known, older, gentler. It was true (as I found out later—I was the last to know, apparently), she had met him at her workplace. I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I was beside myself. “A woman who sleeps with older men is just as bad as an old guy who sleeps with younger women. It’s too easy!” “I would rather have a handsome, reassuring older guy than a ugly, neurotic guy my age,” she responded. I don’t know why I imagined that Anne would remain a tearful, inconsolable widow. Nor do I know why this news hurt me so much. Actually, no—I do know why. It was a matter of pride. I was pretentious. You think you’re irreplaceable, but then you’re quickly replaced. What did I think would happen? at she would kill herself? at she would just waste away? While I was busy dreaming of Alice, imagining I was some kind of playboy surrounded by women, Anne was thinking about my replacement and cheating on me happily so everyone would know about it. I fell back to earth with a thud that night. A kind
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of poetic justice. On my way back home, I heard Mozart on the radio. Beauty ends in Ugliness, Youth will always Wither, Life is but a slow Putrefaction, we Die each and every Day. Luckily we still have Mozart. How many lives has Mozart saved?
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XXVI Sex chapter
It’s time we got to the heart of the matter, by which I mean sex. Most of the stuck-up girls I grew up with think that having sex consists of lying on your back while some shitfaced idiot in a suit jacket jiggles above you before he ejaculates inside you and begins to snore. eir sexual education was conducted in a series of society parties, private members’ clubs, and SaintTropez nightclubs by the worst fucks on earth: daddies’ boys. e sexual failings of daddies’ boys stem from the fact that, from their earliest childhood, they’ve grown accustomed to getting whatever they want without having to work for it. It’s not that they’re selfish (men are ALL selfish in bed), it’s just that nobody has ever told them that that there’s a difference between a girl and a Porsche. (When you ruin a girl, dad doesn’t come bitch you out.) Luckily, Anne didn’t fall into this category, but she wasn’t particularly interested in sex either. e wildest sex we ever had was on our honeymoon in Goa, aer smoking Datura. Squirting, pumping, panting, coming. We had to smoke down just to relax in the thick monsoon air. But unfortunately, this sexual high point was but a hallucinogenic exception: in fact, I was so starry-eyed during our trip that I even let her beat me at ping76
pong, which just goes to show that I wasn’t in my right mind. at’s right, Anne, I’m letting you know now, if you’re reading this book: during our honeymoon, I intentionally lost at pingpong, okay?? Sex is a lottery: two people could each love it on their own, and still be incompatible. You think that it will get better with time, but it doesn’t. Sex is skin-deep, which is to say it’s unfair (as is everything skin-related: racism, facial discrimination, acne...). What’s more, our affection only made things worse. With love, you know you’re in trouble when you’ve gone from hardcore pornography to baby talk. As soon as you’ve gone from saying: “I’m gonna fuck your face, you little slut” to: “My cutie wootie baby pumpkin muffin give me a smoochie woochie,” it’s time to sound the alarm. You can see it happening quickly: people’s voices start to change aer just a few months of living together. A big manly stud with a booming voice will start talking like a toddler sitting on momma’s lap. A vamp fatale with her husky voice becomes a cooing little girl who appears to have mistaken her husband for a kitten. Our love was vanquished by inflection. And then there’s this monstrous, chilling concept, the most powerful sleep aid ever invented: Conjugal Duty. One or two days without fucking, no big deal, it goes unmentioned. But after four or five days, the anxiety of the Duty becomes a topic of
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conversation. Another week without sex and both of you are wondering if something’s wrong, and pleasure starts to feel like an obligation, a chore, you let one more week pass and the pressure becomes unbearable, you’ll end up masturbating in the bathroom staring at pornos just to get it up, it’s inevitable, it’s the antithesis of desire; and there you have it, that’s the Conjugal Duty. Our generation is extremely poorly educated when it comes to sex. ey think they know everything because they’re bombarded with hardcore porn, and our parents claim to have led the sexual revolution. But everyone knows the sexual revolution never happened. With sex as with marriage, nothing has changed a bit in over a century. It’s nearly the year 2000 and the traditions are the same as in the 19th century—and even less modern than in the 18th century! Men are macho, awkward, shy; and women modest and uncomfortable, confused by the idea of acting as if they were nymphos. e success of sex-filled radio and television shows, and the minuscule percentage of teenagers who use a condom, are proof that our generation is hopeless when it comes to sex. It just goes to show that nobody is capable of having a casual, normal conversation about it. And if regular teenagers are sexually inept, just imagine the rich kids... a catastrophe. As for Alice, she was never part of those disgusting circles. She considers sex not as a duty, but as a game in which it’s good to learn the rules in advance, before eventually changing them
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to her liking. She finds nothing taboo, collects fantasies, wants to try everything. I made up for thirty years of lost time with her. Alice taught me how to caress. Women have to be stroked with the tips of your fingers, teased with the tip of your tongue; how was I supposed to figure all this out if nobody ever told me? I discovered you could make love in all sorts of places (a parking garage, an elevator, bathrooms in nightclubs, bathrooms on trains, bathrooms on planes, and not just in bathrooms, in grassy fields, in the water, in the sunshine) with all sorts of accessories (sadist, masochist, fruits, vegetables) and in all sorts of positions (upside down, upside up, with others, tied up, unbound, e Flagellant of Seville, e Gardener of Tortures, e Ball Juice Dispenser, e Petrol Pump, e Snake Swallower, e Demonic Dominatrix, 3615 Nibs, free gangbang at Les Chandelles). For her I became more than hetero-, homo-, or bisexual: I became omnisexual. Why limit yourself? I want to fuck animals, insects, flowers, seaweed, trinkets, furniture, stars, anything that will have us. I even found I had an astonishing ability to come up with stories, each more ridiculous than the last, just to be able to whisper them into her ear while we were at it. Some day, I’ll publish a collection of stories that will shock people who thought they know me.4 I’d become a bona fide polymorphous pervert; in short, a bon vivant. I don’t see why only dirty old men shouldn’t have the right to be lewd. 4
Short Stories on Ecstasy (ISBN: 2070413586)
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In summary: if a fuck buddy can turn into the love of your life, the opposite is quite unlikely.
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XXVII Letters (I)
First letter to Alice: “Dear Alice, You are a wonder. I don’t understand why it is that, just because your name is Alice, nobody will tell you that you’re a wonder. My head is spinning. Women like you should be forbidden from going to the funerals of my grandmothers. Sorry for this short note. It was the only way to feel close to you this weekend. Marc.” No response. Second letter to Alice: “Alice, Seriously—are you the love of my life, aer all, or not? You say that you’re scared. What am I supposed to say to that? You think that I’m playing around, but I’ve never been more serious. I don’t know what to do. I want to see you, but I know that we shouldn’t. Last night I performed my marital duty while thinking about you. It’s indecent. You’ve torn my world apart,
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but I don’t want to do the same to yours. is will be my final letter but I will not soon forget you. Marc.” P.S.: “When you lie, when you tell a woman that you love her, you may believe you are lying, and yet something compelled you to say those words to her, and thus they are true.” (Raymond Radiguet) No response. It was not my final letter.
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XXVIII e depths of despair
Hey everyone—it’s me again, the knight of the living dead. I’d have loved to just be melancholy, it has a certain elegance; yet instead I vacillate between liquefaction and deliquescence. I’m a zombie baying at the moon because I’m still alive. e only cure for my migraine would be 1000mg of aspirin but I can’t take any because I already have stomach pains. If only I could hit bottom! But no. I’m falling, further and further, and yet there’s still no bottom to bounce back off of. I wander Paris from end to end. I come to stare up at the building where you live with Antoine. I thought I’d been flirting with you just for the fun of it, and now here I am, wandering breathless outside your door. Warning: love may cause respiratory problems. e lights in your apartment are on. Maybe you’re having dinner, or watching TV, or listening to music while thinking of me, or not thinking of me, or maybe you’re... you two are... No, oh God, please tell me you’re not doing that. I stand here bleeding in the street, but there’s no blood, I’m bleeding from within, asphyxiating in plain daylight. Passersby stare at me—is there some magnificent architectural detail we’ve perhaps missed? Or could this poorly-shaved young man with disheveled hair be a new hobo in the area? “Look babe, even the homeless wear 83
agnès b. in our neighborhood.” “Shut up, idiot, can’t you see he’s a dealer!” Oh May, the miserable month of May. Its unending succession of long weekends: May Day, Armistice Day, Ascension, Pentecost. e long weekends without Alice begin to pile up. It’s a terrible deprivation imposed by the French republic and the Catholic church, as if to punish me for having disobeyed them. A crash course in suffering. Nothing interests me anymore besides Alice. She occupies my every thought. Going to the movies, eating, writing, reading, sleeping, dancing to techno, working, all these concerns that used to dominate my idiotic six-figure lifestyle now seem meaningless. Alice has drained the color from the universe. Suddenly I’m 16 again. I even bought her favorite perfume so I could inhale it as I think about her, but it wasn’t the same sweet scent of dusky drowsy skin long loving legs stunning slender languid siren hair. You can’t fit all of that into a bottle. Twentieth century love is a telephone that never rings. It‘s entire aernoons spent fixating on footsteps on the stairs, like so many false hopes, since you already le a message on our secret answering machine at noon canceling our tryst. Another story of an adulterous arrangement gone wrong—I know, it’s not particularly original, I’m sorry; I can’t help it if it’s still the worst thing to ever happen to me. is is a book about a spoiled child, dedicated to all the idiots too righteous to be happy. A
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book about bad guys whom nobody feels sorry for. A book about the people who shouldn’t be suffering from a loneliness they’ve brought on themselves, yet suffer nonetheless, a suffering all the more unbearable because they know they have no one to blame but themselves. Because love is not simply to hurt or be hurt. Sometimes it can be both.
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XXIX Depressive diet
Being alone has become a shameful illness. Why is everybody afraid of solitude? I’ll tell you—because it forces you to think. If Descartes were alive today, he wouldn’t write: “I think, therefore I am.” Instead he’d write: “I’m alone, therefore I think.” Nobody wants to be alone, because it leaves too much time to just sit around and think. And yet thinking leads to intelligence, which serves only to make you even sadder. I don’t think anything exists. I don’t believe in anything. I’m of no use to myself. My own life is useless to me. What’s on TV tonight? e only good news: depression makes you lose weight. Nobody ever talks much about this diet, which is the most effective one of all. e Depressive Diet. Put on a few extra pounds? Get divorced, fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, live alone and wallow in your sorrow—then watch those extra pounds melt away. You’ll find yourself fit and beautiful—if you ever make it out of your depression, that is. What a shame that I’m in love, I can’t even make the most of my newfound bachelorhood. When I was in college, I loved being single. Every woman seemed beautiful to me. “ere’s no such thing as ugly women,” I used to say, “Only glasses of vodka 86
too small.” ese weren’t merely the ramblings of a budding alcoholic, I really believed it. “Every woman has something, it may be an amused kind of silence, an absent-minded sigh, the way she twists her ankle, or a wayward lock of hair. Even a complete troll contains a hidden treasure. Maybe even Mimie Mathy has hidden talents!” And then I’d burst out laughing, the laugh I’d use to punctuate my own jokes, back before I discovered true loneliness. ese days, when I get drunk off watered down bourbon, I just mutter to myself like a bum. I head to jack off in a video booth at 88 rue Saint-Denis, flicking between 124 channels of porn. Some guy sucking a 12-inch black cock. Zap. A girl in bondage having wax dripped on her tongue with electrodes attached to her shaven pussy. Zap. A peroxide blonde with fake tits swallowing a mouthful of sperm. Zap. A guy in a hood piercing a Dutch girl’s tits as she howls “Yes, Master.” Zap. A young inexperienced girl forcing one dildo up her ass and another up her vagina. Zap. Triple cum shot over two lesbians with clothes-pins attached to their nipples and clitoris. Zap. Fat pregnant woman. Zap. Double fist-fucking. Zap. Some guy pissing in a tied-up ai girl’s mouth. Zap. Fuck, I’ve run out of change and I haven’t come yet, too drunk to keep it up. I talk at the top of my voice in the sex shop and wave my arms around. I buy a bottle of poppers. I try to make friends with the alcoholics on the rue Saint-Denis who stumble about yelling that in their day the most beautiful women in the world couldn’t resist
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them. But they wouldn’t let me in their club: instead they offered to beat me up, to show me what it meant to suffer for legitimate reasons. So I crawl home, my crestfallen face inundated with the odor of alkyl nitrate, smelling like shit, it’s been years since I’ve been this drunk, I feel a terrible urge to vomit and shit and the same time, but I can’t do both at the same time, I’ve got to choose. I decide to begin by expelling the diarrhea, an appalling, stinking purée splatters onto the porcelain, but suddenly the urge to puke is too much, I turn around to throw up this bilious acid as it tears at my throat, squatting ass naked in a cloud of disinfectant, when all of a sudden I get the shits again and I end up projecting a liter of pestilent liquid shit all over the bathroom door, sobbing and bawling for my mom.
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XXX Letters (II)
e third letter did the trick. ank you, Post Office: telephones, fax machines, and the internet will never surpass in romantic beauty the good old peril of communicating by mail. “Dear Alice, I will wait for you every night at 7 P.M., on a bench, at Place Dauphine. Come or don’t come, but I’ll be there, every night, starting tonight. Marc.” I waited for you Monday, in the rain. I waited for you Tuesday, in the rain. Wednesday it didn’t rain, and you came. (Sounds like a Yves Duteil song.) “You came?” “Guess so.” “Why didn’t you come Monday or Tuesday?” “It was raining...” “I should maybe just... get you a cellphone.” You smiled. A phantomess veiled behind a mane of hair foreshadowing pleasures to come. A fresh-faced girl sprung from a Manga comic smiling at me without any concern for the consequences. I took hold of your hand as I would a precious 89
artifact. en a moment of awkward silence, which I tried to break: “Alice, I think I’ve got it bad...” But you interrupted me: “Shh...” en you leaned over to kiss me on the lips. at’s impossible, was I dreaming? Could something so wonderful still happen to me? I tried again: “Alice, this has got to stop, now, because if not, it’ll be too late, I’ll be too much in love with you, and you don’t know me, but I can be hard to deal with in this kind of situation... But this time it was your tongue that interrupted me and all the violins from all the most beautiful love songs in the world would have sounded like nails on a chalkboard compared to the symphony that resounded in my head. And if you think I’m ridiculous, then fuck you.
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XXXI e enamored divorcé
I rarely go to place Dauphine these days, except on nights I’m sufficiently wasted to face it, like tonight for example, when I’m here sitting on our bench out of pure masochism. e passing riverboats bathe the Pont-Neuf in their light. A few more yards along, and we would have been “lovers on the bridge.” I’m cold and I’m waiting for you. It’s been six months since our first kiss here, and still I wait. I never thought I’d end up here like this. It must be that I’m being punished for something, I must have to atone for something, why else would somebody put me through this? I weep when I awaken, I whine when I go to sleep, and in between I just feel sorry for myself. I had dreamed of being Laclos and wound up Musset. Love is incomprehensible. It’s impossible to understand it when you see others in love, much less when it happens to you. When I was twenty I could still keep my emotions under control, now I feel like I don’t have a say in anything I do or feel. What’s most upsetting for me is to see the extent to which my love for Alice has replaced the love I felt for Anne, as if my love life was some kind of zero-sum game. I’m horrified by how little I hesitated. ere’d have been no vaudeville, no having to decide between the “legitimate” lover and the mistress, simply one person replacing another, quietly, with no big fuss, as if tip91
toeing into my mind. Can’t it be possible to love someone without it being at the cost of somebody else? at’s surely the crime I’m paying for now... It’s so strange, here I am at place Dauphine and yet it’s you, Anne, my ex-wife, that I’m thinking about... Maybe some day, Anne, later on, much later on, we’ll run into each other in some brightly-lit place; with people all about, and trees, a beam of sunlight, I don’t know, maybe some birds chirping like on the day we got married, and in all the commotion our eyes will meet, we’ll think back fondly about the past, back when we were twenty, when we shared our first hopes, our first defeats, when we dreamed together, when we kissed the sky, before it caved in upon us, because those days, Anne, those days are ours and nobody can ever take them away from us. It’s called: Adolescence.
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XXXII I dunno
ere were many secret hookups at place Dauphine. Many dinners hidden away at chez Paul or Delfino. Countless stolen aernoon at the Hôtel Henri-IV. Eventually, the receptionist knew us so well that he spared us the knowing look, the awkward: “No luggage?” since we had our room booked by the month. Room 32. It smelled like sex whenever we le. Between orgasms, I couldn’t help but interrogate you. “Goddamn, Alice, I love you from the tips of your toes to the tip of your nose. Where is this thing going?” “I dunno.” “You think you’re going to leave Antoine?” “I dunno.” “Do you want to move in together?” “I dunno.” “Would you prefer we just stay lovers?” “I dunno.” “Well what the fuck are we going to do?” “I dunno.” “Why do you always say, ‘I dunno’?” “I dunno.” I was too logical. “I dunno” was something I would come to hear oen; I should have just gotten used to it. 93
And yet sometimes I lost my shit: “Leave him! LEAVE HIMMM!” “Stop it! STOP ASKING ME!” “Just get divorced, for fuck’s sake!” “Absolutely not, Marc! You scare me too much, I’ve always told you that. Our love is beautiful only because it’s impossible, and you know that. e day that I leave Antoine, you wouldn’t even love me anymore. “NOT TRUE, NOT TRUE, ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE!” But in my heart of hearts, I was afraid she might be right. I was crazy about her because I couldn’t have her. e deaf and the hard of hearing could have better discussions than ours.
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XXXIII e impossible decrystallization
I suppose I should tell you how I died. You remember Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean? In it, a group of idiotic teenagers entertain themselves by accelerating their car towards the edge of a cliff. It’s a game they call “chicken.” e point of the game is to brake at the last possible moment. Whoever brakes last is the ballsiest of the group. Let’s just say the size of his dick is proportional to the time elapsed before he brakes. Of course, inevitably, one of the idiots ends up at the bottom of the cliff, in a Chevrolet crushed like a sardine can. Well—the more time Alice and I spent together, the more we were like these rebels without a cause. We were accelerating towards the edge of a cliff, pedal to the floor. What I didn’t know is that I would be the dumbass who wouldn’t break until it was too late. e most important rule when you’re having an affair is not to fall in love. You meet up in secret, for the fun of it, for the secrecy, for the thrill. It’s an easy way to feel heroic. But do not ever let your feelings get mixed up in it! You’ll end up confusing pleasure with love. And you might never find your way back. If Alice and I fell into this trap, it’s for good reason: it’s so much easier to make love when you’re actually in love. Being in love makes women feel like foreplay lasts longer and men feel like it’s over more quickly. And this was our undoing. We were 95
indulgent. Alice and I pretended to be in love, to make our orgasms more intense. And we ended up believing we were. When it comes to love, nothing is more powerful than the power of suggestion: what a shame that it only works one way. You think you’re just playing around, which is true—but you’re playing with fire. We were already floating above the abyss, like those cartoon characters who look at the camera, then down at the chasm beneath their feet, then back at the camera, before beginning to plummet for real. “at’s all folks!” I remember when Anne and I split up; no matter what party I set foot in, everyone I ran into would ask me in a stilted tone: where was Anne, what was Anne up to, why wasn’t Anne there, how was Anne doing these days? I’d respond with one of the following: “She had to work late tonight.” “Isn’t she here? I was just looking for her, I have a date with my wife.” “Between the two of us, she was right not to come to this lame-ass party: I should have listened to her, she’s got a sixth sense when it comes to these things, oh, sorry, it’s your party isn’t it...” “Anne? We’re in the middle of a divorce! Ha ha! Just kidding.” “She’s been working so late recently!” “Everything’s fine, I’ve got curfew at midnight tonight.” “She’s at a seminar with the Congolese football team.”
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“Anne? Anne who? Marronnier? What a coincidence, a girl with the same last name as me!” “Anne’s in the hospital... A terrible accident... She begged me to stay with her as she shrieked in pain, but I just couldn’t pass up this great party. ese salmon eggs are delicious, don’t you think?” “On the other hand, the way she’s been working, I’ll be filthy rich soon.” “Marriage is an imperfect institution.” “Where’s Alice? Do you know Alice, by any chance? You haven’t seen Alice, have you? Do you think Alice is coming?” On the other hand—every time I heard someone say the name “Alice,” it was like a knife through the heart. “Dear friends, would you please be so kind as to never again say l name in my presence? anks in advance, Marc.” Heaven is other people—but it’s important not to overdo it. More and more oen I heard people gossiping about me and Anne. I didn’t really mind that people were gossiping about me; they’d been spreading rumors since before they were even true. Personally, I’d never been bothered by the worldly jealousy and superficiality of these nightlifers, but I was frankly disgusted to hear that they’d been talking shit about Anne. If I went out at night, it was to just make life slow down—I couldn’t bear the thought of existence coming to a halt at 8 P.M. I wanted to steal the hours of life being wasted by people that went to bed early.
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But this—this was too much. I would stop going out. I realized that I hated these people that would feed off of my misery. I was just like them, a scavenger. But I’d had enough: I wasn’t amused anymore. is time I wanted to make the most of the situation. ey would have to carry on without me. I had to give up writing gossip columns in pop magazines. Farewell, my fair-weather Parisian friends, I will not miss you. Carry on your slow putrefaction without me, I do not envy you; on the contrary, I pity you. at’s the great tragedy of our society: even the rich aren’t enviable. ey’re fat, ugly and rude, the women are disfigured by plastic surgery, the men are doing time, the kids are doing drugs, they have the fashion sense of hobos, they’re posing for trashy photos in Gala magazine. e rich have forgotten that money is a means, not an end. ey don’t know what to do with it all. At least when you’re poor, you can tell yourself that everything would work out if only you had money. But when you’re rich—you can’t tell yourself that with a new house in the countryside, another sports car, another pair of thousand-dollar shoes, or another supermodel on your arm, everything would be better. When you’re rich, you’re out of excuses. at’s why all millionaires are on Prozac: nobody dreams of being them anymore, not even themselves. Writing about Parisian nightlife was a vicious circle that I had gotten sucked into. I would go out and get shitfaced in or-
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der to write a column about the last time I went out and got shitfaced. I had to stop, face the daylight. Let’s see, what kind of columns could an unemployed freeloader write? Imagine Count Drinker in broad daylight: how would he make ends meet? What kind of job are bloodsuckers good at? So that’s how I became a literary critic.
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XXXIV e theory of eternal return
When I told my parents (separated in 1972) about my divorce, they tried to reason with me. “Are you sure about this?” “ere’s no way to make things work?” “ink long and hard about this...” Psychoanalysis had had a considerable influence in the 60s, which probably explains why my parents blamed themselves for everything. ey were much more worried than I was; suddenly I didn’t feel I should bring up Alice. One disaster at a time is enough. I explain to them calmly that love lasts three years. ey disagree, each in their own way, but they’re not particularly convincing. Aer all, their own marriage scarcely lasted much longer. I can hardly believe that my parents spent so much time hoping, thinking, and finally believing that I would be any different. We exist solely to relive the actions of our parents, in the same order, just as they have made the same mistakes as their own parents, and so on. But that doesn’t matter. What’s worse is when you make the same stupid mistakes that you yourself have made before. And yet that’s exactly what I do. I wind up in the same rut every three years. I live in a perpetual state of déjà-vu. My life is series of reruns. It’s like I’m a CD player programmed to endlessly repeat the same song. (I 100
love comparing myself to machines—they’re easy to fix.) is isn’t the comedy of repetition, but an all too real nightmare: imagine a white-knuckle roller-coaster with stomach-churning corkscrews and heart-stopping plunges. You let yourself ride it once, but that’s enough. You step off the ride and yell, “Oh my God, I nearly puked up my cotton candy three times. You won’t get me on that thing again!” Me? I get on it again and again. I have a season ticket to this diabolical ride. Space Mountain is my home. I finally understand what Camus meant when he wrote: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” He meant that we spend our lives making the same mistakes—but maybe that’s what happiness is. I suppose I should just get used to the idea. To love my unhappiness because, aer all, it’s full of new beginnings. I keep having the same dream: I’m pushing my rock up the boulevard Saint-Germain. I double-park it. A police officer tells me to move my rock or he’ll give me a ticket. So I try to move it when suddenly it slips away down the rue Saint-Benoît, picking up speed as it goes. I’ve lost all control of it—hardly surprising given that it’s a six-ton block of granite. When it reaches the corner of the rue Jacob, it crashes into a little sports car, crushing the hood, the car door, and the pretty boy who was driving it. Ouch! I fill out the accident report next to his hot sobbing widow. I nibble her shoulder. Where it says “Registration,” I write: “S.I.S.Y.P.H.U.S.” (second-hand model). en I roll my
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rock back up the rue Bonaparte, inch by inch, sweating blood, and leave it in the parking lot at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Tomorrow, this spectacle will begin again. And one must imagine me happy.
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XXXV Tender is the night
Ever since I decided I’d had enough of Parisian nightlife, I’ve been going out every night; we have to say our goodbyes, aer all. Word starts to get out that I’m single. A single omnisexual of my age, in Paris in 1995, is as unheard of as a homeless person staying at the Gstaad Palace Hotel. Nobody seems to notice that I’m dying of a broken heart, since I’ve always been quite thin, even when I was happy. I wander around the city, my misery slung over my shoulder. Tonight, yet again, Alice has told me that she can’t bring herself to lie to her husband any longer and that she’s breaking up with me. Usually she dumps me on a Friday to have a guilt-free weekend, then calls me up again Monday aernoon. So I called Jean-Georges to ask him if he wanted me to bring some wine for his dinner party, or something for dessert. I’ve decided to cheat on Alice with her best friend. She didn’t need much persuading before agreeing to come to the dinner party with me: I told her that I’d been feeling like shit— I’ve noticed that women can never resist when their best friend’s boyfriend tells them he’s feeling like shit. It must bring out a sense of duty in them, the devoted nurse, her inner Little Sister of the Poor.
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Julie’s problem is that she’s super hot. She’s always complaining that guys never fall in love with her. And it’s true that whenever men meet her they have an unfortunate tendency to want to perform a breast exam, if not a complete physical. ey don’t much respect her, but that’s partly her own fault—there’s no law requiring that she wear shirts made for eight-year-olds that barely come down to her belly button that’s pierced with a gold ring. “You know, guys would be more likely to fall in love with you if you didn’t give in right away. Guys are like cheap cuts of meat, you have to let them marinate.” “You’re saying that I should treat men the way Alice treats you?” Not so blonde aer all, is she. “Um... On second thought, no. Be gentle with them, it’s best feel sorry for them—guys are sensitive creatures at heart.” Jean-Georges did it up for this party. Here, tranquil souls can converse in perfect harmony. Belligerence is forbidden at his house, even though his parties are packed with celebrities. Actors, directors, fashion designers, painters, even people who don’t yet realize they’re artists. I’ve noticed that the more gied people are, the gentler they behave. It always holds true. Julie and I sat down on the couch to nibble on canapés. “So... You’ve known Jean-Georges for a long time?” she asked me.
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“Since forever. Don’t be fooled by appearances: tonight he probably won’t say two words to me, and yet he’s my closest friend, in fact, one of the only people of my own gender I can stand to be around. We’re like two queers except we don’t sleep together.” “So,” she whispers, sitting up, bringing her two spheres of flesh up to the tip of my nose, “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” “Alice le me, my wife le me, and my grandma’s dead. I never would have thought I’d find myself so alone.” Feeling more and more sorry for myself, I edge closer to her on the sofa. Seducing a girl at a party essentially consists of closing the gap: you just have to move closer, inch by inch, without being too obvious. If you notice a girl you find attractive, move a little closer (6 feet away). If you still find her attractive, start talking to her (3 feet away). If she smiles at your lame jokes, ask her to dance or offer to get her a drink (18 inches). en sit down next to her (12 inches). When you see a gleam in her eyes, gently brush a stray lock of hair behind her ear (6 inches). If she doesn’t protest, bring your face a bit closer as you talk to her (3 inches). If her breathing becomes heavy, press your lips against hers (0 inches). e objective of this strategy, of course, is to reach a negative distance as a result of the penetration of a foreign body inside of hers (roughly -4.5 inches according to the national average).
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“I’m miserable as a stone,” I say, narrowing the distance that separates me from the irreparable. “No, no—more miserable than that, because nobody breaks up with a rock, and rocks can’t die.” “Yeah, sounds rough... So you’re pretty bummed out, huh.” I begin to ask myself what Alice sees in this ravishing idiot. I must have misunderstood—this couldn’t be her best friend. But I go on with my plan. “I suppose I only have myself to blame, though... Writers are never happy...” “Oh, you’re a writer? Do you write books? I thought you were an events organizer?” “Um... Yeah, that’s true, but I’ve published, let’s see, I don’t know, a couple books,” I say, looking down at my nails. Journey to the End of Whatever, maybe you’ve heard of it? “Um...” “Well, I wrote that. I’m also the author of e Unbearable Futility of Being and I’m currently working on e Sorrows of Young Marronnier...” “So... When’s your next party? You gonna put me on the guest list?!” Some girls are so bovine, they make you feel like a country vet. But I force myself to keep going—if I start dating Julie, Alice would be devastated, I have to push on, no matter what it takes.
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“You know, Julie, the best part about getting divorced is being able to wash your hands without getting soap stuck between your fingers.” “Why’s that?” “Because of the wedding ring.” “Oh, right, now I get it... You’re funny!” “Are you seeing anyone at the moment?” “No. I mean, yeah, a few guys. But nothing serious.” “Yeah, same as me.” “But you’re in love with Alice, aren’t you?” “Yes, of course, but it’s complicated. I think my problem is I fall in love but never manage to stay in love.” As I say these words, I position myself just millimeters from her lustrous lips. I wonder if there isn’t a bit of collagen in her overly-plump upper lip. I’m about to move in when she turns her cheek to me. Rejected. at’s it. I’ve had enough. I get up and walk away, abandoning her on the sofa. Poor bitch, now I understand why guys treat her like a disposable razor. Let’s face it—even if I screwed this girl right in front of you, Alice, you wouldn’t even care (on the contrary, it would probably turn you on). I love you, no one but you, you’ll just have to accept it, even if you aren’t prepared to turn your life upside down. In the same city you live in, there is a man who loves you and suffers for your love, whether you like it or not. Constantly reminding you of this is the best hope
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I have to make you give in. I’ll be your patient lover, your calm torture, a silent temptation. Call me Tantalus. A couple hours later, as I was flipping through an old copy of Tender is the Night, I noticed Julie flirting with a father and his son, triggering a heated family feud. I spent the weekend getting completely shitfaced. I didn’t leave Jean-Georges’ place for three days. Living off of Pringles and Four Roses. e only thing we listened to was the album Rubber Soul by the Beatles. At one moment, I thought I heard Julien composing a song at the piano. I staggered to my feet every three hours just so I could keep drinking, because—no matter what they say—the best way to avoid regretting something is to forget it ever happened.
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XXXVI Freelance
I settle into waiting mode—on the upside, it keeps me busy. I fill my Desert of the Tartars with whatever I find. So I was recently asked to do a pitch for the release of a new perfume: Hypnosis by David Copperfield, Las Vegas. I’ll get paid ten grand (five if we don’t get the contract). e trick is to find a phrase—something short, punchy, and provocative—that communicates simultaneously how the consumer will directly benefit from the product as well as suggesting why this is the perfume to buy. To put it plainly, my job is to demonstrate that this perfume—thanks to a patented formula—enables women (the target) to seduce men (the target of the target) but not just for one night: for a lifetime of enduring love. I go back aer a week of reflection with the following list of slogans: You don’t need a wedding ring when you wear Hypnosis by Copperfield. Hypnosis by Copperfield. It’s not a perfume—it’s a magic trick. Hypnosis by Copperfield. For tonight, and tomorrow night, and every other night. Hypnosis by Copperfield. Every secret compartment hides a love story. Spray on Hypnosis and watch it change your life. 109
Hypnosis by Copperfield. is perfume is rigged. Hypnosis: the scent of amnesia. Hypnosis by Copperfield. Aerwards, you’ll pretend you can’t remember. e meeting doesn’t go well. Nobody is impressed by my ideas, not even me. I listen to their advice, leave Paris the same aernoon for Verbier, a Swiss winter sports resort in the Valais. It’s from there that, aer three weeks of working, I fax back the slogan you all know and which, in less than a year, was to make Hypnosis the market leader in mass-market fragrances: HYPNOSIS
COPPERFIELD. BECAUSE LASTS THREE YEARS. BY
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WITHOUT IT, LOVE
XXXVII e sentimental cynic
I’m sitting here in the same café where I sit every night, trying to figure this all out. I keep telling myself that I’m dead, and yet I still go on living. I’ve nearly died many times: I was almost was run over by a car (it missed me by a hair), I’ve fallen out of a window (I landed in some bushes), and I almost contracted a lethal virus (but I wore a condom). What a pity. Death would befit me well. Prior to my descent into hell, I was afraid of dying. ese days, it would be a blessing. I can’t even bring myself to understand why people are so worried about dying. Death has more surprises in store for us than does life. Now, I look forward to dying. I can’t wait to leave this world and find out what awaits us in the next. I think people who are afraid of dying just aren’t very curious. My problem is that you’re the solution. It’s always the most cynical and pessimistic people that fall the most violently in love—it matches their temperament. My cynicism couldn’t wait to be refuted. ose who criticize love are usually the ones who need it most: in the heart of every Valmont sleeps a hopeless romantic who just can’t wait to break out his flute. And there we go again—the trap snaps shut once more, the machine is set in motion. Once again I’m caught up dreaming 111
about sunlit gardens in country houses, of the song of the rain on the roof at dusk, of picking a bouquet of violets, hand in hand with her, far from the city so we can make love again and again, until we’re bursting with joy, crying out in pleasure, holding each other close as we revel in how perfect we are for each other, chilled melon and Parma ham, or Florence, or Milan, if there’s enough time...
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XXXVIII Letters (III)
Fourth letter to Alice: “My dear ostrich, I think about you all the time. I think of you in the morning, as I walk through the morning frost. I walk slowly on purpose so I have more time to think of you. I think of you in the evening, when I begin to miss you at parties, where I get drunk to think about anything but you, which has only the opposite effect. I think of you when I see you and when I don’t. I’d love to be able to do something other than think of you but I haven’t the strength. If you have any tips on how to forget you, kindly let me know. is has been the worst weekend of my life. I’ve never missed anyone like I’ve missed you these past few days. Without you, my life is just a waiting room. What could possibly be more horrid than a hospital waiting room, with its harsh fluorescent lighting and linoleum tiles? Is it even humane to do this to me? What’s worse is that I’m completely alone in my waiting room, there’s nobody severely wounded and bleeding everywhere to reassure me, no magazines on the coffee table to distract me, no numbered tickets to give me hope that my waiting may one day come to an end. I have a stomachache and there’s
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nobody to make me feel better. Being in love is a stomachache for which you are the only cure. Alice. I never knew this name would come to mean so much to me. I had heard about sorrow but I never knew its name was Alice. Alice, I love you. It’s like these words are inseparable—your name isn’t Alice, but ‘Alice-I-love-you.’ Your miserable Marc.” As expected, Alice called me up the following Monday. She swore that she was crazy about me, and promised that she would never leave me again. I undressed her tenderly in an apartment borrowed from a friend. To say that our reunion was pleasurable would be an understatement. e pleasures we experienced that aernoon should be filed as the benchmark in Sèvres under “exceptional sexual pleasure as experienced between a human couple of complementary genders.” And then, in spite of her promise, Alice went home to her husband around 9 P.M., exhausted, and once again I found myself alone to face the empty hours.
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XXXIX Still falling
I should let you know now—I’m not sure this book will have a happy ending. e past few weeks have been among the most miserable and most magnificent of my life, and I have no reason to believe that things won’t go on like this. I’ve tried so much to shape my destiny, only to realize that destiny isn’t playdough. e end of the world took place last week. Alice called me to say that she and Antoine were going on vacation to try and save their marriage. is time, she said, it was really over. We hung up without saying goodbye. Hiroshima mon amour. You see what happens when you’re in love—before you know it, you’re referencing Marguerite Duras. I watch a fly bashing its head against my bedroom window and realize that—like me—there’s a pane of glass between it and reality. Separated from happiness by an invisible prison. Living a double life is a luxury reserved for schizophrenics. Alice got to have her cake and eat it too—her forbidden passion with me, and her cozy little life with her husband. Why settle for one life when you can have several? She switches between guys like they’re TV channels (I just hope I’m Eurosport). It’s over. I.T.S. O.V.E.R. It’s funny how I’m able to write these words, incapable as I am of believing them. From time to time I 115
have these flashes of megalomania: If she doesn’t love me anymore, I tell myself, then I don’t love her! She’s not on my level? Too bad, you cunt! And yet these bursts of pride are short-lived, because I have an underdeveloped will to live. You’ll have to forgive me—writers are oen quite miserable, I hope I’m not boring you too much with my suffering. To write is to complain. ere isn’t much of a difference between a novel and a complaint to the Post Office. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t spend my life holed up in my apartment, typing away at a computer. But I don’t: I’m not sure I’ll never be able to talk about anything else. Look at what I’ve become... I’m writing the same book as everyone else... Two lovers switching places... You leave a wife who loves you for a woman who doesn’t... What’s wrong with me? What became of my shamelessly decadent soirées? I got so wrapped up in my Le Bank problems... It’s like new French cinema... Love is the problem of those who don’t have any other problems... And yet, it’s the first time in my life that I feel a physical need to write... People used to tell me about the need to write, and I’d pretend to understand, but I was so naive... Even this self-deprecation is just self-defense to the nth degree... (ank you, Drieu, ank you, Nourissier.) I don’t have anything else to write about... is had to come out sooner or later... If you haven’t written the story of your divorce, you haven’t written at all... Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to make
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what’s personal, public... If what I write is uninspired, it’s because it’s universal... We should avoid originality, stick to what’s timeless... I’m a student of sincerity... I know that somewhere beneath all this suffering is a flowing river, and if I can manage to make the source of it spring forth it might be of some comfort to the “happy few” who have known such despair. I want to warn them, to explain things, so that they never experience the disappointment I’ve felt. is is the task that I’ve set myself, and it helps me see things clearly. And yet it may be that the river remains entirely underground...
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XL Conversation in a palace
Jean-Georges has never seen me like this. He tries desperately to cheer me up, like someone reaching out a hand to a drowning man. We’re sitting in a bar at some big hotel, but I don’t remember which because we’ve hit them all up at some point. I ask him: “So do you think love lasts just three years?” He looks at me with pity. “ree years! at’s optimistic! My God, three days is more than enough! Who’s been telling you such bullshit, my love?” “It’s something to do with hormones, or biochemistry or something... Aer three years it’s all over, and there’s nothing you can do about it... Don’t you find that sad?” “Not at all, pumpkin. Love lasts as long as it’s meant to, it doesn’t matter in the end. But if you do want it to last, you need to learn to get used to boredom. You need to find someone you want to be bored shitless with. Because if eternal passion is impossible—the best we can hope for is a pleasant state of boredom.” “Yeah, maybe you’re right... Do you think I’ll ever stop running aer ghosts?” “You’re looking at the problem the wrong way. e more you seek passion, the more you’re disappointed when it comes 118
to an end. What you have to do is seek out boredom, because then you’ll always be pleasantly surprised when you’re not pissed off. e problem is that passion should never have been institutionalized; boredom should be the norm, and passion just the cherry on top. Remember, fear of boredom...” “Is the first sign of self-loathing... I know, you tell me all the time... Ugh... When I see all these couples who despise each other, bore each other, cheat on each other and grimace all just for the sake of their marriage, I’m glad I got divorced... At least I’ll remember my love stories with a happy ending.” “Honey, I’m not talking about Anne, but Alice. Here you are fantasizing about her, when you don’t even know her. at’s what your problem is: you’re in love with someone you don’t even know. Do you really think you’d be able to put up with her if you had to live with her? What turns you on is the fact that you can’t have her. If I were you, I would call Anne.” “Jean-Georges?” “Yes, sweetie?” “Stop talking shit. You want another drink?” “Sure, if you’re paying.” “Jean-Georges, can I ask you something?” “Always.” “Have you ever had your heart broken?” “You know I haven’t. I’ve never fallen in love. It’s my one great tragedy.”
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“Sometimes I envy you. I can never STAY in love, which is even worse.” Jean-Georges falls silent, and suddenly I was sorry I had asked. He turns away and his eyes glaze over. He says, serious now: “Don’t try and turn this around on me. You know I envy you, and always have. I’ve been suffering since the day I was born. You’ve discovered a pain that I would give anything to feel. Let’s change the subject, if that’s okay.” ere you have it, my depression is contagious. Now we’re both depressed—clearly, we’re making progress. “Do you think I’m a dick?” “No, of course not. You’re just figuring things out yourself, you’re just a beginner. You’ve still got a lot to learn. On the other hand...” “On the other hand what?” “On the other hand, you’re a big fag, and if you don’t shut up I’m gonna stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.” And with that the son of a bitch grabs me and we roll on to the floor, flipping over the table, knocking over our drinks and chairs in a fit of laughter, while the bartender thumbs frantically through the phone book to find the emergency number for the Sainte-Anne Psychiatric wing.
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XLI Conjectures
It was at this point that something terrible happened: I started leaving my socks on when I went to bed. I had to do something, otherwise I would start drinking my own urine. I tossed and turned in my bed as I thought about what JeanGeorges had said. What if he was right? I had to call Anne. Alice wasn’t ready to be with me, aer all, so maybe I was wrong to get divorced. All was not lost: plenty of couples get back together not long aer getting divorced. Just look at Adeline and Johnny Hallyday. No—bad example. Uh, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Ok, not much better. I could get Anne back. I had to get Anne back. It could be done. We hadn’t tried everything yet. We were going to try everything. We were so busy trying to spare each other the trouble that we never really tried to talk things out. We would be together again, and soon we’d look back on our divorce and laugh. We had been through worse. No, on second thought—we hadn’t been through worse. It used to be that marriages held up in spite of these kinds of flings. ese days, marriage is a fling. We live in a society founded on selfishness. Socialists called this individualism, but there’s a simpler way of putting it: we live in a society of soli121
tude. ere are no families, no villages, no God. Our ancestors delivered us of these oppressions and turned on the TV. We’ve been le to our own devices, incapable of taking an interest in anything but our own belly buttons. I’ve nonetheless devised a plan. I had hoped not to be driven to such extreme measures but the departure of Alice with her husband calls for a counterstrike of nuclear proportions. ere’s no time for dignity. My plan is to call Anne. I pick up the phone with a smile I believe is Machiavellian, but which actually is just quite intimidated.
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XLII e Stirring Strategy
“How long’s it been?” I ask Anne, pulling out the table so she can sit on the bench. We used to love sitting side by side at this restaurant, but that was then, and tonight we’re sitting face to face. She looks at me curiously and then says: “Four months, one week, three days, eight hours and” (she says, checking her watch) “sixteen minutes.” “And forty-three, forty-four, forty-five seconds...” We begin by making conversation, talking about all the things that let us avoid discussing why we’re really here—our jobs, our friends, our memories. As if everything had never happened. But Anne could tell that I was miserable, and it made her miserable to not be the cause of my misery. By the time we get to dessert, she asks, vaguely annoyed: “Look, you didn’t ask me to dinner to talk about old times. What did you want to say?” “Well... You le some of your things at the house, and I was wondering if you wanted to come pick them up. But while you’re here, I thought we might spend the weekend together and see if...”
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“Excuse me? Are you out of your mind? We’re divorced, Marc! I know you’re not in love with me anymore, and besides—I’m not your fucking play toy you can just drag around!” “Shh, not so loud...” I turn to the guy at the next table. “We’re divorced, I just asked her to spend the weekend with me, but she said no. ere, now you know everything. Would you kindly stop listening now? Or maybe your life with that slut you’re having dinner with is so fucking pathetic that you have to eavesdrop on other people’s lives.” e guy gets up, I get up, our women have to pull us apart— at least now you can’t say there isn’t any action in this book. en I pay the bill and we leave the restaurant. Outside, it’s even darker than before. We walk for a bit, laughing. I tell her I’m sorry. She says it’s okay. She seems to be doing better with all this than I am. “It’s too late, Marc... We’re just past the point of no return. I’m in love with someone else, and so are you—there’s just no point in trying to make this work anymore.” “I know, I know, I’m being ridiculous... I just thought there was some way we could work things out... You sure you don’t want me to give you a ride home?” “No, it’s okay, I’ll take a cab... Hey Marc, I want to give you a bit of advice for your future girlfriends. Try to empathize, learn to see things through their eyes.”
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And then, just as we’re about to part ways, the feelings build up. We fight back our tears, but in our hearts they trickle down. Never again will I hear her cute, childlike laugh. My loss is her new boyfriend’s gain, if he knows how to make her laugh. Anne has become a stranger to me. We leave each other to follow our own paths. She steps into the taxi, I gently close the door behind her, she smiles at me from behind the window, and the car drives away... If this were a romantic comedy, I’d start running aer the taxi, the rain in my eyes, and we’d fall into each other’s arms when the cab reached a red light. Or maybe it would be her that would suddenly change her mind, begging the driver to stop, like Audrey Hepburn/Holly Golightly at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But life isn’t a romantic comedy. In real life, taxis keep driving. First you leave your parent’s house, and then, sometimes, the house you lived in with your first wife, and yet it’s always the same pain, in which suddenly, you feel like an orphan all over again.
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XLIII Cheap Trick
Spouses have dinner, lovers have lunch. e next time you notice a couple at a bistro having lunch, try taking a photo—they’ll cuss you out. Try the same thing with another couple at night and they’ll smile and pose for the camera. Alice called me as soon as she got back from her vacation with her husband. Aer making sure to empathize with her, imagining what she must be feeling, I calmly suggested we have lunch. “I’ll bring a slide projector.” She didn’t find that very funny, which was fine because I wasn’t trying to be. Since she got back, she’s been telling me that it was miserable, swore that they never had sex, but I interrupt her: “It’s fine. I’m leaving town this weekend with Anne.” We all know this is a lie, except Alice, who looks as if she’s just taken a Scud missile to the face. “Oh.” “So,” I say, nonchalantly returning to the topic of conversation, “Have a good trip?” Alice slaps me, and yet she’s the one who bursts into tears. I’ve been collecting melodramatic meals recently. Fortunately, this time there’s nobody sitting at the next table. Unfortunately, 126
Alice leaves too. Suddenly the restaurant feels a bit empty. And I try to savor my revenge, “Here I am alone, with my heart full of alms” (Paul Morand), and I go back to drinking gallons of wine until I can’t hold myself up, standing or seated. Yet another liquid lunch. Revenge is a dish you can’t eat. What’s astonishing isn’t that all the world’s a stage—it’s the fact that there are so few people in the cast.
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XLIV Letters (IV)
One week later. Last letter to Alice: “My love, e weekend with Anne solved nothing. It’s not even worth talking about. I needed to be certain, like you, that I had made the right choice. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I also wanted you to feel how much it hurt me when you went away with Antoine. It’s stupid, I know. But you’ll never know how much you’ve hurt me. Alice, we are made for one another. It’s insane. Everything is beautiful when I’m with you—even me. But I’m afraid that you’re afraid. I can’t stand that I’m not the only man in your life. I hate your past, because it stands in the way of my future. I just hope that all of this pain serves some purpose, in the end. Why don’t you trust me? Because I’m crazy? at’s no excuse, because you’re crazy too. Do you think we love each other only because things are complicated? In that case, we’d be better off if we just split up. I’d rather be miserable without you than with you. Our love is indelible—I can’t understand why you don’t see that. I am your future. Here I am, I’m real, you can’t go on living 128
as though I don’t exist. I’m sorry, but in the words of Leonard Cohen, “I’m your man.” We have no right to run away from happiness like this. Most people aren’t as lucky as we are. When they’re attracted to each other, they don’t fall in love. When they’re in love, the sex is bad. Or else the sex is good, but they have nothing to talk about. We’ve passed all of the tests with flying colors, yet none of this means anything because we’re still not together. What we’re doing is unforgivable. We should just stop making each other miserable. It should be a crime not to jump at the chance to be happy when the opportunity presents itself. We’re being cruel to ourselves. How much longer can we go on like this? For whose sake? It’s immoral to put ourselves and everyone else through all this pain, and for nothing. No one will blame us if we seize this opportunity to be content. is really is my last letter. I can’t keep playing this game of cat and mouse. I’m worn out, exhausted, lying at your feet, just waiting for you to deliver the final blow. When you’re in this much pain, you lose all sense of pride. I’m writing not to beg to you to come back, but to tell you that I’ll always be here waiting. Just one word from you, and we can start our ostrich farm. No word, and I’ll still be here, somewhere, living on the same planet, just waiting for you. I’m crazy about you, I want no one but you, I think of no one but you, I belong only to you, body and soul. Marc, who cried while writing this.”
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XLV So
So I pick up my pen to put into words how much I love her, how she has the longest hair in the world and I’m drowning in it, and if you find that ridiculous I pity you, her eyes are mine, she is me, I am her, and when she screams I scream too and everything I ever do will be for her, forever, I’ll give her everything always and until I die she will be the reason I get up every morning, to kiss again and again her wrists, her shoulders, her breasts, and then I realize that when you’re in love you write sentences with no end, there’s no time to put in periods, you have to keep writing, keep writing, run faster than your heart, and the sentence doesn’t want to end, love knows no punctuation, and tears of passion trickle down your cheek, when you’re in love you wind up writing never-ending things, when you’re in love you always wind up thinking you’re Albert Cohen, Alice came back, Alice le Antoine, she le, at last, at last, and we took off, literally and figuratively, we took the first flight for Rome, of course, where else, Hotel d’Angleterre, Piazza Navona, Fontana di Trevi, vows of undying love, singing ballads on a Vespa, when we asked for helmets the rental guy understood everything and said it was too hot, and love, constantly making love, three, four, five times a day, it makes your dick hurt, you’ve never come so much, and then you start all over, you’re no 130
longer alone, the sky is beautiful, without you I was nothing, finally I can breathe again, we walk above the pavement, hovering a few inches above the ground, nobody sees it but us, we’re on cushions of air, we smile for no reason at locals who think we must have Down’s syndrome, or are members of some cult, the Cult of the Levitating Smilers, suddenly everything is so easy, you put one foot in front of the other and it’s happiness love life tomato and mozzarella salad drenched in olive oil and pasta parmigiano and we never finish our plates, too busy gazing into each other eyes, stroking each other’s horny hands, I don’t think we’ve slept in ten days, ten months, ten years, ten centuries, the sun over the beach in Fregene we take photos like the one Anne found in Rio, it’s enough just to look at one another and to breathe, this is forever, forever and always, it’s unbelievable, it’s mind-blowing how overcome with joy we are, I’ve never felt like this before, do you feel like this too, you could never love me as much as I love you, no I love you more, no me, okay it’s us, it’s wonderful to be so completely incapacitated, to run towards the sea, you were made for me, how can I describe something so beautiful with mere words, it’s as if, as if you’d stepped from the dead of night into the dazzling daylight, like the rush of coming up on molly but it never goes away, like a stomachache suddenly disappearing, like the first gulp of air aer holding your breath, like a single answer to every question, days pass like minutes, you forget the world around you, you’re reborn in every second, you think no ugly thoughts, you’re in a
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perpetual sensual sexual adorable invincible present, nothing can stop us, you know our love is strong enough to save the world, we’re appallingly happy, you go up to the room, wait for me in the lobby, I’ll be right back, and as soon as the escalator doors close I take the stairs four at a time so I can open the door for you when you reach our floor, oh there are tears welling up in our eyes just from the three minutes spent apart, remember when you bit into a ripe peach and the juice trickled onto your tanned thighs oh fuck I want you all the time, again and again, I’m gonna come on your face, oh Marc, oh Alice, I’m coming, it’s longgg, it’s harddd, we didn’t spent a single minute sightseeing, and now she’s all giggly, what did I say to make you laugh like that, nothing I’m just nervous, I came so hard, I love you, baby, what day is it?
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II THREE YEARS LATER AT FORMENTERA
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I D-Day – 7
Casa le Moult. Here I am at Formentera to finish my book. is will be the last book in the Marronnier trilogy—in the first, I fell in love; in the second, I got married; in the third, I got divorced and fell in love with someone else. e wheel has come full circle. Everyone tries to be innovative in their writing—with their style (fancy words, Anglicisms, odd sentence structure, advertising slogans, etc.) or with the message (clubbing, sex, drugs, rock and roll), but soon you realize that what you want most is just to write a love story with simple sentences—which is, of course, the most difficult thing in the world. I listen to the sounds of the sea. I’m finally beginning to slow down. e fast life makes it impossible to truly be yourself. Here, you can read the length of the days in the sky. In Paris, my life had no sky. Constantly churning out a slogan, or faxing an article, answering the phone, hurry up, rushing from meeting to meeting, eating on the go, quick, quick, swerving through traffic on my scooter only to arrive late to a cocktail party. Given the breakneck absurdity of my existence, I thought I had deserved to put on the brakes for once. To focus. Concentrate on one thing at a time. Appreciate the beauty of the silence. En-
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joy the slowness of life. Listen to the perfume of the colors. All the things the world would like to take away. We have to start over. Society needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. ese days, those who have money don’t have any time, and those who have time don’t have any money. Getting out of work is as hard as getting out of unemployment. e idler is public enemy number one. People get chained to money: they give up their freedom to pay their taxes. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the real issue to discuss in the next century will be how to eliminate the tyranny of capitalism. Formentera, you little island... A satellite of Ibiza in the constellation of the Balearics. Formentera is like Corsica without the bombs, Ibiza without the clubs, Mustique without Mick Jagger, Capri without Hervé Vilard, the Basque country without the rain. White sunshine. Spin on a Vespa. Heat and dust. Withered flowers. Turquoise sea. Scent of pine. Song of cicadas. Yellowbellied lizards. Goats gently butting. “No buts!” I tell them. Red sun. Gambas a la plancha. Vamos a la playa. Orange moon. Gin gimlets. I was searching for relief, and it’s here, where it’s too hot to write long sentences. You don’t have to be in a coma to be on holiday. e sea’s overflowing with water. e sky is forever moving. e stars are shooting by. Breathing should be a full-time job.
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is is the story of a guy who holes up on an island to finish this book, which isn’t called Paludes. is guy leads a hectic life, and so he finds it totally weird to be all alone in the middle of nowhere with no phone and no TV. In Paris, he’s in a hurry, he’s dynamic; here, he barely moves, goes on walks in the evening, always by himself. Barnabooth in Florence, Byron in Venice, the panda in the Venice zoo is his model. e only time he speaks is to say hi to his San Francesco maid. is guy wears a black shirt, white jeans, and Tod’s sandals. Drinks nothing but Pernod and gin gimlets. Eats nothing but chips and quesadillas. Listens to just one album: Rubinstein’s recording of the “Kreutzer” sonata. Yesterday, you might have spotted him cheering a goal in the France-Spain match, a courageous gesture, albeit in poor taste when you’re the only Frenchman in a Spanish bar. If you were to run into this guy, you’d probably say to yourself: “What the fuck is this Parisian asshole doing in La Fonda Pepe in the off-season?” But that would piss me off a little, because that guy is me. So kindly shut your mouth, okay? I am a hermit smiling at the warm west wind. In one week I’ll have been with Alice for three years.
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II D-Day – 6
Okay, fine. When Alice le Antoine—and then when we moved in together in the rue Mazarin (the street where Antoine Blondin died)—I admit I freaked out a bit. Happiness is even more terrifying than sadness, in a way. Finally having what I wanted most in the world filled me with joy, but also made me wonder: would I make the same mistakes all over again? What if I was just a serial monogamist? Now that I had Alice, did I really want her? Would I become a pushover? Would I get bored of her? When would I stop asking such stupid fucking questions? Antoine wanted to kill me, to kill her, to kill himself. Our relationship rose from the ashes of a double divorce, as though it required two human sacrifices to create one new love. Schumpeter called that “creative destruction,” but Schumpeter was an economist, and economists are rarely romantics. We had destroyed two marriages in order to remain together, like a blob absorbing its victims to grow larger. Happiness is a monster that, if it doesn’t kill you outright, will force you to take a few lives yourself.
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Jean-Georges came to stay with me in Formentera. Together we put the world to rights and then went snorkeling to visit the fish. He’s writing a play, so he’s drinking as much as me. A poem to be read while drunk: In Formentera You’ll ferment-a-lot. We meet old hippies, completely stoned, who have been living here since the sixties. How have they managed to stay together so long? I have tears welling up in my eyes. I buy weed from them. Jean-Georges and I get drunk and play pool in cafés. He tells me about his love life. He’s just met the love of his life—for the first time, he’s happy. “To love—what else is there to live for?” he says to me. “Having kids?” “No way! Bringing a child in to a world as fucked up as this? at would be criminal! Selfish! Narcissistic!” “I give women something better than a child—I give them a book!” I declared proudly, raising my finger. We wink at the waitress. She’s stunning, wearing a bolero, a light down covers her olive skin, she has large dark eyes, she arches her back, wild like a squaw. “She looks like Alice,” I say. “If I slept with her, I wouldn’t really be cheating.”
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Alice is in Paris; she’s coming to join me here in a week. In six days I’ll have been with her for three years.
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III D-Day – 5
e waitress with the backless dress is named Matilda. She’s fucking hotttt. Jean-Georges sang her that Harry Belafonte song: Matilda she take me money and run Venezuela. I think I could fall in love with her if I didn’t miss Alice so much. In the bar at Ses Roques, we asked her to dance. She clapped her bronzed hands, waved her hips, whipped her hair around. She had armpit hair. Jean-Georges asked her: “Excuse me, miss, we need a place to sleep. Do you have any room at your place, por favor?” She was wearing a thin gold chain around her waist and another around her ankle. Unfortunately, Matilda didn’t take our money and didn’t run off to Venezuela. But she was happy to sit and roll joints with us until we fell asleep beneath the stars. Her fingers were long and nimble. She licked the cigarette paper meticulously. I think we all felt a little muddled, Matilda included. Back at the Casa, completely shitfaced, Matilda grabbed my cock. She has a cavernous but muscular pussy that smelled like vacation. Her hair reeked of pot. She screamed so loudly that Jean-Georges had to fill her mouth to shut her up; aer that we 140
switched places before ejaculating at the same time on her large firm breasts. Immediately aer I came, I woke up—sweating, dying of thirst. A real hermit shouldn’t mess around too much with narcotic plants. In five days I’ll have been with Alice for three years.
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IV D-Day – 4
e single man quickly returns to being a Neanderthal. After a few days he stops shaving, stops showering, starts to grunt. It took millions of years for mankind to build civilization, but less than a week for him to revert to Homo erectus. I find my gait becoming increasingly ape-like. I scratch my balls, eat my boogers, move about in short hops. At mealtimes, I mash everything together and eat it with my hands, mixing sausages with gum, chips with chocolate milk, Coca-Cola and wine. en I burp, fart, and begin to snore. Such is the life of a young avantgarde French writer these days. en Alice arrived early. ree days before she was supposed to show up, she crept up behind me and put her hands over me eyes: “Guess who?” “No sé. Matilda?” “Asshole!” “Alice!” We fell into each other’s arms. “If you were hoping to surprise me, it worked!” Did I feel obligated to say that? “Admit it, you weren’t expecting me! And who the hell is Matilda?” 142
“Oh no one... Just somebody Jean-Georges was hitting on last night.” If this isn’t happiness, it’s close enough. We gnaw on Jabugo on the beach, the water is warm, Alice is tan, which makes her eyes turn a beautiful shade of green. We nap in the aernoon. I lick the sea salt off her back. We don’t sleep much other than that. While we make love, Alice lists all the boys in Paris who have begged her to break up with me for them. I recount in detail my erotic dream from last night. Why do the women I love always have cold feet? Jean-Georges and Matilda meet up with us for dinner. ey seem quite besotted. ey just discovered they both lost their fathers this year. “But it’s worse for me because I’m a girl,” says Matilda. “I hate girls who are in love with their fathers, especially when their fathers are dead,” says Jean-Georges. “Girls who never loved their fathers are either frigid or lesbian,” I suggest. Alice and Matilda dance together, looking all the while like a pair of slightly incestuous sisters. We rub up against them. Everything is going well, things could have taken an erotic turn—unfortunately we go our separate ways, but we each make up for it in our own rooms.
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Before I go to bed, I succeed in doing something unprecedented for me—I take off my watch. If love is to last forever, you have to live outside of time. Modern life is what destroys love. What if we just moved here? Everything is cheap. I could fax everything back to Paris, get a couple of advances from some publishers, from time to time I could expedite some advertising campaigns by DHL... And we’d be bored to death. Dammit, I’m starting to panic again. I can feel the danger approaching. I’m sick of being me. I’d love if someone could just tell me what I really want. It’s true that sometimes our passion begins to feel more like affection. Has the machine been set in motion? We have to secrete more endorphins. I love her and yet I’m terrified we’ll get tired of each other. Sometimes we’ll pretend to be bored as fuck on purpose. She’ll say: “Alright... I’m going to run some errands... See you soon...” And I respond: “When you get back, let’s go for a walk...” “Pick some rosemary...” “Have lunch on the beach...” “Buy the paper...” “Do nothing...” “Or kill ourselves...” “e only appropriate way to die in Formentera is to fall off a bicycle, like Nico.”
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I tell myself that if we can joke about it, maybe things aren’t so bad. e suspense is building. In four days I’ll have been with Alice for three years.
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V D-Day – 3
Alice and I make love less and less, but it gets better and better. I tenderly caress the few square inches of skin I know she loves best. She gently shuts my eyes. She used to have an orgasm every other time, now she comes every time. She lets me write all aernoon, as she lies out in the sun. She comes back around six and I make her an iced Moorish coffee. en I make sure she’s evenly tanned all over. I squeeze her grapefruits. She sucks me off, then I fuck her in the ass. She reads this over my shoulder, and asks me to take out “I fuck her in the ass.” I agree, and change it to “I take her from behind.” en when she walks away I press Command-Z on my Mac. is is what it costs to write fiction—the history of literature is a long litany of such betrayals, I hope she’ll forgive me. I refuse to finish Tender is the Night, I have a terrible feeling that things won’t end well for Dick Diver and Nicole. I listen to the Kreuzter sonata and think about the eponymous short story by Tolstoy. e story of a man who kills his unfaithful wife. e couple was inspired by the violin and the piano in Beethoven’s sonata. I listen to them sing together, interrupt each other, leave each other, forgive each other, hate each other, and finally come together for the last big crescendo. It’s the sound of a couple liv-
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ing together. e violin and the piano are incapable of playing alone... If our relationship falls apart, I’ll be completely indifferent. I could never give as much of myself to anyone else. Will I end up fucking high-class whores and watching porn alone? is has to work. We have to get past the three-year mark. I change my mind every two seconds. Maybe we should live apart. Living together is exhausting. I have no reservations; I’m not opposed to the idea of wife swapping. Aer all, if you’re going to cheat on each other, you might as well do it together. An open relationship, maybe that’s the answer: prearranged adultery. No. I know: we need to have a baby, and fast! I scare myself. e countdown inches toward the Damocletian sword. In three days I’ll have been with Alice for three years.
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VI D-Day – 2
My mistake was in wishing for life to stand still. We all want time to stop, love to last forever, nothing to ever die, to bask forever in some pampered childhood. We put up walls to protect ourselves, and then one day we realize those same walls have become our prison. Now that Alice and I are together, I’ve stopped putting up walls. Every second I spend with her is a gi. I’ve realized that you can be nostalgic about the present. Sometimes there are moments so wonderful that I stop and say: “Damn, I’m going to miss this moment later on: I don’t ever want to forget this memory, so I can think back to it when things have gone to shit.” I’ve discovered that in order to stay in love, a person must always have a bit of mystery. You have to avoid boredom—not through feeble, artificial attempts at novelty, but by learning to appreciate the beauty of daily life. To be generous and honest. You know you’re in love when you put toothpaste on someone else’s toothbrush. Above all, I’ve learned that in order to be happy, you first have to have been extremely depressed. Until you have learned to suffer, happiness will never endure. e love that lasts just 148
three years is the love that has neither scaled mountains nor lingered in the depths of despair, but the kind of love that is handed to you on a plate. Love only lasts if everyone involved knows what it costs, and it’s best to pay in advance, or else you might find yourself having to settle the bill later on. We weren’t prepared for happiness, because we weren’t yet used to misery. We had grown up in the religion of comfort. You first have to know who you are and who you love. You have to be a finished person to live an unfinished story. I hope that the deceptive title of this book hasn’t exasperated you too much: of course love doesn’t last just three years, and I’m glad I was wrong about that. And it’s not just because this book is published by Grasset that I’m coming clean. I don’t know what the past holds for me (as Sagan used to say), but I carry on, filled with wondrous dread, because I have no other choice, I carry on, not quite as carefree as before, but I carry on nonetheless, I carry on in spite of everything, and I swear it is beautiful. We make love in the translucent waters of a deserted creek. We dance on the balcony. We flirt in a dimly-lit alley, drinking Marqués de Cáceres. We eat and eat. We’re finally living the life. When I asked her to marry me, she responded, gently, romantically, delicately, beautifully, poetically: “No.”
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e day aer tomorrow I’ll have been with Alice for three years.
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VII D-Day – 1
e sun is ineluctable. It may not be obvious, but I spent hours forming that sentence. e birds are chirping, which is the only way I know it’s day. Even the birds are in love. It was the summer that e Fugees covered Roberta Flack’s Killing Me soly and I knew I’d always remember it. “Marc, you know tomorrow is our three-year anniversary?” “Shhh! Shut up! Who cares, I don’t want to know!” “I think it’s cute, I don’t know why you have to be so mean about it.” “I’m not being mean, I just need to work.” “You want to know something? You’re a selfish, pretentious bastard, and you’re so in love with yourself that it makes me sick.” “To be able to love someone else, you first have to love yourself.” “Your problem is you love yourself so much, there’s no room for anyone else!” She drove off on my moped, kicking up a magical trail of dust behind her on the bumpy road. I didn’t go aer her. When she came back a few hours later, I apologized and kissed her feet. I promised her we’d have a barbecue, just the two of us, to
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celebrate our anniversary. e flowers in the garden were yellow and red. I asked her: “How long until you leave me?” “About twenty pounds from now.” “Hey! I can’t help it if happiness makes you gain weight!” At the same moment in Paris, an artist named Bruno Richard writes in his journal: “Happiness is the silence of unhappiness.” Now he can die happy. Tomorrow will mark three years that I’ve been with Alice.
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VIII D-Day
e last day of summer has arrived. You can smell the end approaching on the beaches of Formentera. Matilda took off without leaving a forwarding address. e wind whips through the low stone walls and between our feet. e sky is inexorable. Silence spreads across the Balearics. Epicurus’ advice is to content oneself with the present, with its plentitude of simple pleasures. Must we prefer pleasure to happiness? What if—instead of constantly questioning how long love will last—simply reveling in the present moment is the best way to prolong it? We will be friends. Friends who hold hands, who lie making out on the beach, who delicately fuck up against the wall of a villa while listening to Al Green, but friends just the same. We’re graced with magnificent weather the day of our anniversary. On the beach we swam and slept, happy as can be. e Italian bartender at the tiny kiosk recognized me: “Hello, my friend Marc Marronnier!” I responded: “Marc Marronnier is dead. I’ve killed him. From now on it’s just me, and my name is Frédéric Beigbeder.”
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He didn’t hear any of that because of the blaring music. Alice and I shared a melon and some ice cream. I put my watch back on. I had finally become one with myself, reconciled with Earth and time. And evening came. Aer a detour to Kiosko Anselmo, where we had a Gin-Kas while listening to the waves splashing against the pontoon, we returned home. e night was alit with stars and candles. Alice had fixed a tomato and avocado salad. I lit a stick of incense. An old flamenco tune could be heard through the static of the radio. e lizards were hiding out under the azulejos. Suddenly the crickets fell silent. Alice sat next to next to me, smiling happily. We’d each drunk two bottles of rosé. ree years! e countdown was over! What I had failed to understand is that a countdown is just a beginning. At the end of every countdown is a fuse— ready to ignite. Hallelujah! And to think how I’d been worrying like an idiot! e most wonderful thing about life is that it goes on. We kissed slowly, holding hands beneath the orange moon, listening to the future. I looked at my watch: it was 11:59 p.m. Another sixty seconds, and we had made it. Verbier-Formentera, 1994-1997
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