PrologueAs soon as the car had driven off along the road, I headed back toward the house. Hugging the walls, I walked around the facade where the real estate agents had attached their for rent sign, which was already starting to crack. I wanted to take it down but, out of superstition, I didn’t. We’d been happy here once, could we be again? More accurately, I
thought we’d been happy but had no recollection of it. My brain seemed to be emptied of any reality, and all that remained was a single word, the word
happiness, which could just as easily have applied to the last two days alone. The key that opened the back door to the kitchen, on the side with the Japanese garden, was in its usual place under the third stone. Japanese garden is generous: a square of bare earth with some scrawny bamboo and a pathway of six flat stones. Even though it doesn’t get much light, it could possibly have been made into a vegetable patch—I’d had the same idea on our first visit five years earlier, but the beautiful trees and flowers on the south side of the house had made me forget it. For now, everything was dry.
I opened the shutter that I’d deliberately left unhooked when we’d closed all the exits ten minutes earlier, and then unlocked the door. Moving through the half-light, I went straight to the small writing desk in the hall, the one that his mother, who’d given it to him, called a bonheur du jour, a “happiness of the day,” and whose open lid was a useful spot for keys and loose change. I’d always thought the four drawers were a trompe l’oeil—however hard anyone tugged at the gilded handles, they never opened—but earlier I’d spotted Gilles in the mirror taking something from one of them. Reflected in the mirror where I was checking that my eyebrows weren’t unruly, it looked like a blister pack of medication, and he’d surreptitiously popped out a pill and swallowed it. It was mortifying to have lived in this house for years without knowing the secret to this piece of furniture; I was intrigued by it but not as much as I was by the secret within the secret. Was he hiding some illness from me? It took me a good three minutes to understand the mechanism, you really had to know it, the spring was very well hidden. Sure enough, inside there were two blister packs of capsules, but their names didn’t mean anything to me, I would google it; and a piece of paper folded in four, a typed business document on letterhead that I opened, relieved that it wasn’t a prescription or a love letter. I went over to the shaft of yellow light coming from the skylight. It was then that I heard someone open the gate and a car,
the car, drove into the garage. I turned my attention back to the piece of paper. That’s how it all started. And finished. It ended there, the story did. You know what happened after that. For those who attach importance to words, escritoire would have been far more appropriate than bonheur du jour. But it’s not always possible to keep a secret, or to be happy for a day, it seems.
It felt good writing the last page, well, one of the last pages, the beginning of the end, when Claire, my narrator, finds
proof, by which I mean a fact that isn’t open to any possible interpretation, a monolithic fact that is new but irrefutable, labeled, dated, a raw fact unacquainted with any subjectivity. This discovery brings to a close the fraught investigation to which I’ve subjected her life for several months, circling around crumbs, memories, testimonies, and contradictory hypotheses, without really finding either substance or meaning, still less certainty. The book needs to end like a crime novel: with the truth. Because there is a truth, with apologies to harbingers of nuance, champions of ambivalence, and adherents of universal fiction. At any given point in the full scope of a life, something is true or false, fact or fable. It might last only a moment, but it’s a moment of truth. We drag our heels, approach it reluctantly, procrastinate. We don’t want the truth, we want some peace. No, not peace. Peace of mind. The truth is an adventure, when what we want is just a quiet life, at any price. But a novel shouldn’t sacrifice the truth, whatever that truth may be. If you’re not writing to find it, then don’t write. And if you don’t read to get closer to it, what’s the point? That’s why I always start by writing the end. To give me the strength to tread the book’s path. To be sure I’ll go the distance and not be spineless. I will write this book because I’ve already finished it. I’ve gotten to the end of it. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve gotten to the end of the illusion, even if it’s an illusion in itself to believe I’ve achieved that. After all, it’s the journey that counts. Never been dazzled by the truth at the end? Oh, I’d settle for a ray of light. I also have a glimpse of how to embark on the narrative, with this epigraph from Heraclitus (I don’t deny myself anything): “Whoever searches for truth must be prepared for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and, once found, disconcerting.” But then, that adjective isn’t right. Disconcerting? The truth? It’s monstrous. It’s murderous. Why wouldn’t happiness want to protect itself from that? We’re so much happier because of the things we
don’t know than those we do.
I need to return to the beginning now. Perhaps in everything that begins, its own end can be found, besides it’s always there already. That’s true of plenty of stories if you think about it. With this novel, it’s a little different. I wrote the end because I couldn’t get started. Not at all. Complete block, and I know why. It’s because at the point where this book begins, I’m breaking a promise. When I made the promise, ridiculously, I was convinced I would keep it. Well, I don’t know about “ridiculously.” When we make a promise, isn’t believing in it a bare minimum? On that day seven years ago, we joked about whether someone was released from their word of honor if and when the other person went back on theirs. I maintained that they were: It was like a contract, a marriage, a tenancy agreement, one person’s breach canceled out the other person’s commitment. He disagreed, saying we make the commitment to ourselves—“A promise is a promise.”
Let’s call him Gilles. It’s the first name I give my father in most of my novels but too bad, or maybe that’s a good thing, people can read into it what they want in years to come—it’s almost certainly not a coincidence, as my therapist used to say. Neither he nor my father is called Gilles in real life, as I’m sure you realize. Unless real life is what happens in books, and there are those who say it is. My own name isn’t Claire, we’re living in an imaginary world. What matters for now is that I like the sound of it, of Gilles, it gives us a sort of feminine plural version of the masculine singular pronoun
il, coupled with that soft
g, like the first person singular
je; boy, girl, a hodgepodge of genders and people in just one syllable, even if what I’m really trying to do by rebaptizing him—and it’s a feeble ruse—is to fraudulently keep my promise intact. As for my narrator’s name and its hints at clarity, that’s out of irony: The fog in which she’s drowning is her own inner landscape, Claire is anything but clear. And yet, I’m searching for clarity through her. It’s up to her to shed some light.
1It was Gilles, then, who initiated the solemn turn that our dinner by the sea suddenly took. It was summer, the sun was all pinky blues, very low on the horizon—did you know that when you see it that low, the sun has actually already set? What you see is just its reflection. The candles flickered over weighted-down white tablecloths, erasing any ugly marks—by the light of a flame, the whole world is beautiful. People were getting up to go choose their fish, tanned women in chiffon dresses, children tired of waiting or clinging to their mothers. Other kids ran about on the sand. Russian was being spoken nearby, I picked up a few words when they raised their voices. Gilles was wearing a midnight blue shirt that he’d picked to please me, I’d seen him checking himself out in the mirror before we left. I’d never known a man who paid such close attention to charming me (my husband, maybe, in the early days), and oh, how attractive I found him, plus he looked as if he knew perfectly well. That smile, for goodness’ sake. We’re not young but I’d like us to be pictured young, age would be a mistake here. We’d known each other for six months, and ahead of us lay eternity. The sea was mimicking love. The graveyard that it was—we’d read about this fact again in the paper that same morning—the hopes of a different life, and people set sail, and there are shipwrecks and everything, but even though we knew this, we didn’t think about it. I was wearing the bracelet he’d bought me the previous day when we’d strolled around Juan-les-Pins, I had my elbows on the table and was turning it around between my fingers—it’s golden with green stones. When I was a child, Juan-les-Pins was the town that my mother walked around with her lover while I was with my grandparents, and then they would go to Antibes to listen to jazz. In photos she has a huge beehive piled on her head and he has a bow tie, there’s an upturned bottle in the champagne bucket, I wonder where my father was when this was going on.
The sea bass in a salt crust was very good, we weren’t sure about having a dessert, and then thought yes. We looked into each other’s eyes, or watched the sea, we loved and were loved. To our left, at the top of the steps down to the beach, stood a mimosa, a very young evergreen in its granite pot, with the yellow pompoms to justify its presence. We’d made love in the afternoon after swimming out far beyond the buoys and a dead-to-the-world siesta, and late that night we’d make love again, we’d be reunited in the dark. His cock in my hands, there was a precision to it, I thought about it—how dense and hard and soft it was—a scepter. He’d given it to me like someone giving their word, he wouldn’t take it back. I was the queen.
“My love. What if,” he wraps my hand gently in his, “what if we made each other a promise?”
“A promise? Oh, my lord . . .” I laugh. The ice cream has melted on the plate, we’re no longer hungry. “Okay, then, go on. What do you want to promise me? Or rather, no, sorry: What do you want me to promise you?” “No, you first.” “Wait, no, it was your idea! And anyway, I need time to think.
I don’t have a ready-prepared request for a vow. Whereas you look like you already know.” “Yes, that’s true,” he says. “Well, go ahead then, I’m all ears.”
He looks at me. The seaweed-green depths of his eyes.
“Promise you won’t be angry?” “Is that the promise?” I laugh. “No.” “So?”
He takes a deep breath.
“I’d like you to promise you’ll never write about me.”
“I can tell you why I promised, Mrs. Niepce,” I say to my attorney. “Yes, of course, I can tell you just as I told him. To my mind, it would be easy to keep the promise, very easy. Why? Because with happy people there’s no story, that’s why. A novel about him and me? What the heck would it have to say? The candles on tables, the blue sea, the bracelet? Seriously? Readers would lose interest after two pages. Even if I rewound to when we met, when he wasn’t yet free, there was no grist for the mill. Happiness in books bores everyone, starting with me. I mean, can you think of a single book in which nothing happens except happiness? There isn’t one. Happiness isn’t a subject, unless it’s threatened. No tension, no suspense, zero conflict? Zilch interest. People don’t write about happiness. You have to write black on white, otherwise there’s nothing to see. The only subject for literature is sadness. Or passion, which amounts to the same thing after a while. And from the very first day, I genuinely couldn’t see how this man, this wonderful man, could ever make me suffer. The obviousness of a happy relationship—how do you write about that?”
“Because I,” he added, given that I hadn’t replied, “I want to be in your life, not in your books.”
I still said nothing. You’re much better in my life, I thought to myself. What would you be doing in my books? He can’t have read them all, I thought, otherwise he’d know. He’d know that love goes wrong in my books. That each book is a coffin where I bury the corpse of a relationship. That they’re the chapters of an executor’s inventory. Or of course, it could be precisely because he does know this, he
has read them, and this is his way of asking for us to love each other forever, for our relationship not to end up in a book. For our relationship not to end. His way, being a reserved sort of man. I pictured a procession of the heroes from my novels, they were so unlike him. Day and night. Borderline characters, macho men, bad boys, narcissists, losers. “Love’s Tomb,” the press headlines often ran about my books, referencing the title of my first novel. “Passion is a labyrinth, and Claire Lancel takes pleasure in losing us in it,” wrote another. “Destination Worst-Case Scenario,” ran the title of one article. I’d come to be seen by my detractors as a man-hater, perhaps a perennially disappointed Bovary. “We get the relationships we deserve,” one critic had even concluded. Others wondered to what extent I sabotaged my real-life relationships in order to have material for a novel—strange that people think writers don’t want their lives to work. But with Gilles all that was behind me, I just knew it. At last, I wasn’t taking the wrong turn. I welcomed this innocence. Honored my good luck to have met him. I wouldn’t make him step over the frontier that separates the man from the character. I wouldn’t nail him to the four planks of a novel, I’d keep him warm and alive in my arms, I would always sleep with him, we would stay on this side of life, he would never be put in the box.
“I promise I won’t,” I said.
My love, I thought. My sweet, my tender, my wonderful love.
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