Jean-Philippe Toussaint - The Truth about Marie

I walked around the room and took the bottle of grappa from the ledge of the mantle. Marie lifted her eyes toward me, and I saw her expression change immediately. Her attitude had taken a sudden turn, her look of sorrow gave way abruptly to one of coldness, of fierceness, she became distant and firm in her stubbornness, her face tensed in a grimace, her jaws clenched, this expression of cold rage and fury that I knew so well from when she tried to hide her feelings lest she begin to cry. Now she shot me an angry look, an expression I’d never seen splitting the corners of her mouth into tiny nasty wrinkles, and hate quickly flared up in her eyes. Why was it that each time we were together there was always a moment when, suddenly and without warning, she hated me with a passion.

Marie must have felt caught when she saw me grab the bottle of grappa. Perhaps she’d understood that this bottle gave her away, that, here in this room at this time, it called attention to itself, glared immodestly, indecently even — and she was right. Once I’d noticed the bottle I knew she’d had some grappa with Jean-Christophe de G. this very night, and, from this, I could easily imagine what took place between them in this room. She knew right away that, given this one tangible detail, this lone bottle of grappa, I could imagine her whole night, could see in detail what went on between them — down to their very kisses, down to the taste of grappa in their kisses — as in dreams, where a sole detail from our own intimate experience can unleash a rush of imaginary details no less vivid, and she knew that, now having a tangible reference on the one hand (the bottle of grappa) and a visual reference on the other (my witnessing the stretcher leaving the building in the night), I was now able to fill in the empty space between these two points of reference, and reconstruct, recreate, or invent what Marie had lived in my absence.

Marie remained seated for a while, silent, pensive, arms crossed, staring with an exasperated expression at my wet clothes on the dresser, then she jumped to her feet and told me to get rid of that dead weight, my dresser, right now and for good. This had gone on too long, she’d been living with this piece of shit in her room for five months now, it had to be moved to the ground floor immediately, not a second longer would this be tolerated, it had to go now. This wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. She couldn’t bear to look at it any longer, this worthless commode, she said “commode,” she called my dresser “commode” with visible disgust, her contempt seemed to attach to the word itself: commode. Commode. She stormed over to this commode, her thighs bare under her baggy white T-shirt, and she tried to lift it, in a rage, with one hand, any which way, but there was nothing to grab onto, there were no handles or edges, its finished wood was all decorative curves impossible to grip. I walked over to the other side of the dresser to help her and we struggled to lift it up off the ground, raising it a mere ten centimeters at most, it was extremely heavy, before dropping it right back down, Marie let go of it, let it fall hard to the floor, made no effort to let it down gently, it pounded the floor violently, the angle of its feet crashing down loudly and chipping the hardwood floor. Marie, barefoot, jumped out of the way as it fell, she was losing patience, becoming enraged, she told me I knew damn well we couldn’t move it like this, it was too heavy, we had to empty it, and, opening the drawers, she started scooping up my clothes in armfuls, which she threw on the floor, telling me to move my stuff, to get my fucking junk out of that commode.

Then she didn’t say anything, she fell completely silent, she watched me do as she’d asked, standing still, her head slightly lowered, a vacant look on her face, her impatience having subsided, or now held in check. Her rage gave way to sorrow, a cold sadness, a passive despondency, she was spent, she gave up, she left everything to me. I tried to calm her, appease her, I continued to empty the dresser, drawer by drawer, making piles of clothes of more or less equal size on the floor, T-shirts, pullovers, dress shirts, a wild heap of underwear, of gloves, of scarves, of winter hats, then other piles, smaller, spread thin, disparate and variegated, a belt, balled-up ties, my old nut-hugger bathing suit stretched at the waist, whose touching, ridiculous presence here was rather humiliating for me. It seemed like a pitiful display of ragged gear at a secondhand dealer’s stall, set up there in the dimness of the room, and there was something macabre in this display, as if the clothes, when not being worn, signified the absence or disappearance of their owner. And wasn’t that precisely what this was about, my disappearance, the gradual effacement of my presence in this room where I’d lived for several years?

We started on our way, holding the dresser barely above the ground as we moved forward, but we failed to make it through the door on the first try. We had to put it down again and tip it on its side, lift it at an angle to pass through the doorframe and reach the hallway. Bent by the weight of the dresser, Marie in a T-shirt and me in my shirt and no pants, we shuffled down the hallway wearing next to nothing. Marie wasn’t speaking, but she’d calmed down, she was silent, careful, focused on the task at hand, she jutted out her bottom lip and blew a stray hair out of her eyes. She looked at me pleadingly (but there was nothing I could do, my hands were full too), and then she smiled at me, she gave me a shy, complicit smile from across the dresser, her whole face beaming, maybe the first time she’d smiled at me in five months. Our eyes met and we considered the absurdity of the situation, the madness of trying to haul this piece of junk to the ground floor in the middle of the night. We continued to smile at each other as we shuffled down the hall, our two bodies on each side of the dresser moving in unison, bound together, united, close to one another, as though we were dancing, borne along by the dresser’s own force which, like a song or tune, imposed its rhythm on us and dictated our speed, with only a couple of feet separating us, joined in the intimate promiscuity of this impossible task. There was a mutual feeling of complicity, of affection even, an attraction drawing us together, communicated through our eyes and spreading down to our hands, an invisible pull, a sort of magnetic charge, strong, powerful, ineluctable, as if, during the five months of our separation, an irresistible swell of emotion had been rising in us undetectably that could only end with us in each other’s arms this night. Marie’s pain that night could only be assuaged with her in my arms, she had an irrepressible, physical need to be comforted, to be caressed and held, to feel loved, cared for, and perhaps I also needed this, the fear and concern I’d felt this night gave me the same need to hold and caress her since the moment I stood by her at the window, when I was incapable of taking her into my arms immediately to console her, hold her body tightly against mine. We stopped there in the hallway, put the dresser down at our feet, and we were looking at each other in the half-light, speechless, but we understood each other, we’d always understood each other. I loved her, yes. It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.

I’m not sure if I was the one who approached her first, gently closing the small gap that separated us, or if it was she who had tacitly beckoned me on by taking the first step in my direction, but we were facing each other now, motionless in the half-light of the hallway, silent, we were looking at each other with infinite intent. I thought we were going to kiss, but we didn’t, our tongues or lips didn’t touch, we did nothing more than stand there with our bodies pressed together in the dark, our cheeks and necks grazing, like trembling horses, frightened and touched. Without venturing anything bolder, our hands filled with lightness, with reserve, with delicacy and consideration, as if we were dangerously brittle, or our skin scorching hot, and our touching unthinkable, taboo, we barely grazed shoulders and touched each other with only the tips of our fingers, our eyes wild and our bodies sensitive to every touch, I nuzzled my nose into the crease of her neck to breathe in the scent of her skin. Then, like rushing water held behind a dam for too long and suddenly released, we threw ourselves violently at one another, entangling our bodies, locking together in complete abandon of body and soul, holding each other tightly, feeling the warmth, comfort, and consolation of the other, our arms appearing suddenly to be many, hurried, flung every which way, hands soft, feverish, groping wildly, I squeezed the back of her shoulders, ran my hands over her cheeks, her forehead, through her hair. I touched her cheeks gently with my hands, and I looked her in the eyes. The hands and the eyes, the only two things that matter in life, in love, in art.