Julia Deck - Viviane

He drops the coffeepot that lands on the tiles like clashing cymbals

opens his fists

takes a step forward

I look at him

he looks at me

tensing up his silly-little-tough-guy muscles

he’s so funny

he makes me laugh

so that I almost dislocate my jaw

then I’ve no idea what starts expanding inside me

I charge.

Lips on his trembling lips, impatience, edginess, bites, a swerve up to the ear, teeth attacking its outer shell, tongue against lobe, hands under the T-shirt, gooseflesh. Fingers that pinch, climb up the collar, grab the jawbone, and what a jawbone, so delicate, as if cut from crystal. Hand on the back of the neck, prey immobilized, completely pinned, tight grip. See what’s happening down below, if it’s up, if it’s sparking, gauge its potential, adjust aim. Strong turbulence in seismic zone. Flanking movement, pants in way, obstacle belt, buckle-fumbling fingers, new obstacle arises. Obstacle promising. Hands on hands, beneath layers of material, tips erect, redoubled vigor of obstacle. Pullovers tossed to floor, pants to follow, stuck on shoes, get shoes off, uncertain movements, counterproductive haste, shoes stuck worse but getting there, getting there. Majestic obstacle against white lace. Harpoon obstacle, insert. Obstacle quivers, fights for survival. But rout, retreat, useless struggle, enemy in flight, victory too easy, absence of peril, triumph without glory. *New strategy. Rekindle the battle. Hands everywhere, flying fingers, introduced, flicker turns to flame, going to work, going to work. Another flop. Find something else. Imagination, imagination. On your knees, Élisabeth. Open wide, back in business. Prey sighs, relaxes, coasting along boulevard, gliding on alone. Rabbit in tunnel, run over. Gets up, gets stuffed. Rabbit up in arms. Lasso, whoosh, obstacle under control. Obstacle furious, roars, spends everything, spent. Obstacle drowsy.

So, says Tony, you came to wait for me in the Gare de l’Est just to do me a little favor.

We’re lying on his parents’ bed having a cigarette. Men’s and women’s clothes are strewn all around us. Ours are still lying on the kitchen floor.

I have a thing for tabloid news, I say without compromising myself.

Maybe, replies Tony with a trace of a smile, but you must not be getting nearly enough love. And since I wait for the follow-up he says at your age, I hope I won’t still be consulting doctors, then he comes closer and I instinctively recoil.

What, he says with his naked savage smile, don’t want to play anymore?

I’m out of bed in one bound but he follows me out of the bedroom, grabs my wrist and I realize I’m losing the match. I try to think but everything gets mixed up in my head and I can’t figure out what attitude to adopt so I automatically defend myself, slapping him with my free hand. Tony lowers his head and rams into my stomach. I collapse against the wall, he comes on again, I straighten up and rain slaps on him that he deflects with his fists. When he grabs me by the forearms I drive my knee between his thighs then run toward the kitchen to get my things, but he catches me by the hair, tearing out a whole handful. I fall to the floor, dragging him down after me; we scratch each other with our nails, punch each other’s bellies, and I close my eyes tightly, thrusting deep into his scrawny flesh while he grabs fistfuls of my skin, twisting and biting it. Crawling over the tiles, I steel myself against his blows as I concentrate on recovering a minimum of my clothing and getting out.

This takes perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. I give up everything I can. I let him take possession of this body that I inhabit so briefly and intermittently, and at the same time I collect my things behind my back while still only inching my way along to allay his suspicions. Finally we’re at the foot of the front door, I no longer know what he’s doing to me but I raise a hand toward the doorknob as if from underwater. Calling on my strength, benumbed during all those minutes that have drowned in a parallel dimension of my memory, I shove him violently back to get out onto the landing where he doesn’t dare follow me. I dress hastily, run down the stairs. At two on the dot I ring the babysitter’s doorbell.

* À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire . (To vanquish without peril brings a triumph without glory.) Pierre Corneille, Le Cid , act 2, scene 2.—Trans.

A lovely three-bedroom with moldings and parquet floors, the apartment measures 915 square feet according to the prescriptions of the Carrez law determining effective usable surface area. The rooms branch off a central corridor enjoying an open view of a small paved square, southeast exposure. And if one were to lean out the window, braving the cold on this snowy Sunday, November 28—because it has been snowing for a week — one would see the Église Saint-Médard, surrounded by its tidy church garden. The net effect is charmingly postwar or opulently provincial.

You are not viewing the scene from outside the windows, however. Armed with a dainty watering can, you are refreshing the succulent plants that seem to thrive on a lack of regular care. No one is talking to them, or dusting them weekly with a soft moist cloth, and they keep growing. They must even be attached with adhesive tape to control their trajectories so that they stretch into the corners, toward the ceiling, along the interior stucco trim instead of overflowing their pots down to the carpet where they would blend into the design of vines and soon cover them up, vegetalizing the chevron-patterned parquet if you weren’t taking them in hand.

Then the objects on the television and coffee table are cleansed of their dusty film. One of these bibelots slightly resembles that object on the doctor’s bookshelves. This memory flits by you without pausing. You have no desire to meditate upon this relic, the history and provenance of which you know well. You also know the reason why it and not another knickknack sits there as a repository of special and arbitrary emotions, the legitimacy of which you do not challenge. You are sweeping.

Next you must open the bills, electricity, telephone, not the gas — cut off to economize and as a concession to reality. You check the columns of figures and put everything away in a trapezoidal writing desk. The clock says two thirty. Plenty of time left to vacuum the place before Julien arrives, which you do after closing the door to the middle room where the child is resting. At ten to three, you make a last tour of inspection, then go to stand at the window. He’ll be late, a habit of his, and in the end he is remarkably punctual in his delays. You begin your vigil at three on the dot, however, preparing — almost hoping — to be disappointed, because then events will be following the course you have anticipated.

How handsome he was, Julien, and that hasn’t changed since he left you. At three twenty, he appears in your launch window, creating an eclipse of memory: you imagine him coming toward you for the first time, naked, on offer, just as he presented himself three years earlier, free of all ties.

Your memory comes back. The breaches opened by the inevitable return to plodding reality, the pike staves that become lances, and you who couldn’t see it coming because you were expecting a child and the horizon was bounded by the circumference of your belly. The suspicions wiped away with the dust when business meetings began to last forever. The phone calls made behind the bathroom door, the hurt you kept inside on every occasion, for example the cocktail party at Biron Concrete in June when the newly recruited Héloïse cruised dangerously close to Julien and you had to struggle to keep yourself from blasting her whenever she crossed your line of fire.