Jean-Philippe Toussaint: The Truth about Marie

Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night — during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty — Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn’t have imagined at the night’s start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment. Seeing that Marie made it back home (to our place, or to her place rather, since it had been more than four months since I’d moved out) at almost exactly the same hour I made it back to my small one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living since our separation, not alone, I wasn’t alone — but who cares who I was with at the time, that’s not what matters — we can almost pinpoint the moment, at one twenty, one thirty at the latest, Marie and I were making love at the same time in Paris that night, both of us slightly tipsy, our bodies sweating in the half-light, the air heavy and stagnant in the room in spite of the open window. Thick, stormy, almost feverish, the heat weighed down our bodies, made our movements sluggish. It was a little before two in the morning — this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang. But I prefer to be cautious as to the exact chronology of the night’s events, as we’re dealing with one man’s fate, or rather his death, though it would be a while before we would know if he’d survived or not.

I never really learned his name, an aristocratic name, complete with particule, Jean-Christophe de G. Marie had returned to her apartment on rue de la Vrillière with him after dinner, it was the first time they were spending the night together in Paris, they had met in Tokyo in January at the opening of Marie’s show at the Contemporary Art Space of Shinagawa.

It was just after midnight when they got back to the apartment on rue de la Vrillière. Marie had gone to get a bottle of grappa from the kitchen, and they sat down in the room at the foot of the bed, amid a riot of pillows and cushions, stretching their legs casually on the hardwood floor. The heat was thick in the dark apartment on rue de la Vrillière, where Marie had kept the shutters closed throughout the day in a futile attempt to keep the place cool. Marie opened the window and poured the grappa while seated in the half-light, she watched the liquid fall slowly out of the skinny silver measuring spout as it filled the glasses, and the sweet fragrance of the grappa went straight to her head, the taste filled her mind before it reached her tongue, this taste ingrained in her after many summers, this fragrant, almost syrupy taste of the grappa that could only remind her of Elba, the memory of which abruptly and spontaneously came to her mind. She closed her eyes and took a sip, leaned toward Jean-Christophe de G. and kissed him, her lips moist, the sweet taste of grappa on her tongue.

A few months earlier, Marie had copied a program onto her laptop that allowed her to download music illegally. Marie, who would have been the first to be surprised if told that what she was doing was illegal, Marie, my pirate, who paid an enormous sum to have a whole staff of lawyers and international legal experts fight against any infringement of her fashion line in Asia, Marie now stood up in the half-light and crossed the room to download a sweet and catchy song on her computer. She found an old, slow song, the kitschiest and most sentimental imaginable (I hate to admit that we have, her and I, the same tastes), and she started dancing by herself in the room, unbuttoning her shirt, gliding back toward the bed, barefoot, her arms like sinuous snakes describing fantastic arabesques in the air. She sat back down next to Jean-Christophe de G., who slipped his hand gently under her shirt, but Marie arched abruptly and pushed him away in ambiguous exasperation, perhaps as a way of saying “get your paws off me” as she felt his warm hand on her bare skin. She was extremely hot, Marie was extremely hot, she was dying from the heat, she felt sticky, sweaty, itchy, she had trouble breathing in the stale, stifling air of the room. She ran out of the room and came back from the living room with a fan that she placed at the foot of the bed, plugging it in and setting it immediately on high. It started up slowly, its blades quickly and loudly gaining speed until they blew a steady current of air. Facing the fan, their faces were whipped by the blowing air and their hair fluttered in front of their eyes, with Jean-Christophe de G., the closest, struggling to catch a loose bang, and Marie, docile, head lowered, welcoming the blast of cool air, her hair flying about, a wild-eyed Medusa. Marie and her exasperating love of open windows, of open drawers, of open suitcases, her love of disorder, of chaos, of bazaars and fabulous messes, of whirlwinds and storms.

They had ended up taking off their clothes and holding each other in the half-light. Marie, at the foot of the bed, became still, she had fallen asleep in Jean-Christophe de G.’s arms. The fan had been switched to low and its cool air mixed with the heat of the stormy night. The room was quiet, lit only by the blue glow of the laptop screen on sleep mode. Jean-Christophe de G. slipped gently out of Marie’s embrace and got up, naked, in two stages, feeling weighted down, first helping himself up with one hand, then slowly standing up straight, he shuffled silently over the creaking floorboards to the window and he stood there gazing out at the street. Paris was numb with heat, the temperature no lower than thirty centigrade even at almost one o’clock in the morning. In the distance, an out-of-sight bar was still open and shouts and laughter broke the night’s silence. A few cars passed under the halos of the streetlamps, a pedestrian crossed the street heading toward the Place des Victoires. On the opposite sidewalk, directly across from the apartment, stood the Banque de France silent and imposing. Its heavy bronze security gate was closed, the surrounding street still and quiet, and suddenly Jean-Christophe de G. had a dark foreboding, convinced that something tragic would interrupt the calm of this humid night, that, at any moment, some scene of violence would erupt before his eyes, spreading shock and death, and alarms would go off behind the security gate of the Banque de France, and the street below would be the site of car chases and shouts, of utter confusion, of doors slamming and gunshots, the sidewalk immediately invaded by a swarm of police cars whose flashing lights would shine on the surrounding façades in the night.

Jean-Christophe de G. stood naked at the window of rue de la Vrillière apartment, and he was staring out at the night with a diffuse feeling of anxiety in his chest, when he spotted a flash of lightning in the distance. A sudden gust of wind struck his face and bare chest, and he noticed that the sky was completely black at the horizon, not a summer-night black, transparent and tinted blue, but a dense black, menacing and opaque. Large storm clouds were gathering in the neighborhood, drifting inexorably over the Banque de France and covering the last vestiges of blue in the night’s sky. Lightning flashed again in the distance, this time by the Seine, near the Louvre, mute, rippling, prophetic, with no proper bolt, no thunderclap to follow, just a long horizontal discharge of electricity that ripped through the sky and lit up the horizon with an uneven and silent blaze.