Philippe Djian - Betty Blue

“How’s it going?” I said. “You know you really don’t have to worry-girls like you, they look great in anything.”

She pulled the curtain back sharply, and what I saw made me choke. I put my hand over my mouth. She’d put on all the clothes at once, in layers. She looked like a two-hundred-pound fat-lady, with hollow cheeks and a very determined look.

“Jesus fucking Christ… no…” I said.

I closed the curtain quickly and looked around to see if anybody had seen us. Now I was breathing through my mouth. The curtain opened again immediately.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “In thirty seconds we’re outside.”

“Betty, please. I’m really not into this. We’re going to get caught, I can feel it…”

“Hahaha,” she said. “Us? Caught?”

She gave me a fevered look and grabbed my arm.

“All right, let’s go,” she said. “Try and look a little less nervous.”

Off we went. I felt like we were walking through rice paddies with Viet Cong hidden in the trees all around us. I was sure we were being watched. I wanted to scream: SHOW YOUR SELVES, YOU BASTARDS! LET’S HAVE IT OUT ONCE AND FOR ALL! It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, with some invisible claw tearing at my guts. The closer we got to the exit, the higher the tension mounted. Betty’s ears were red, and mine were whistling. Sweet suffering Christ, I said to myself, two or three more yards and we’re home free.

Outside, the light seemed supercharged. I was seized by nervous laughter. Betty reached for the door. In the end it was all rather exhilarating. I was close on her heels, ready to take off like a shot, when I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. That’s it, I’m dead, I thought-it’s over. I saw myself lying in the gutter in a pool of blood.

“STOP! DON’T MOVE!” the hand said.

Betty was out the door like a jet plane.

“Don’t stop! Lose him!” she advised me.

Like an idiot I turned around. I don’t know why. A taste for defeat sleeps somewhere in us all. The guy had two arms, two legs, and a badge. He thought I was going to follow Betty’s advice. He was wrong. I was actually in a state of shock. For me the war was over-I had half a mind to start citing the Geneva Convention. Still, the bastard took matters into his own hands: he gave me a good one, right in the eye.

My head exploded. I flapped my arms and fell backward against the door. It opened, and I landed on the street on my back, my legs tangled together. I lay there looking at the sky for a second, before the guy’s head appeared over me like a mushroom cloud. I could see out of only one eye-the film started turning at high speed. He leaned over and grabbed me by the lapel.

“Get up,” he said.

A few people had stopped on the sidewalk. Free show. I hung on to the guy’s arm as he lifted me up. I was planning to make a gallant last stand-a surprise kick in the balls, perhaps-but it turned out I didn’t have to. This fat girl came at him, with her foot to the floor in a head-on collision while he was still half bent-over. I fell backward again and the guy plastered himself like a pancake against the door of a parked car. A ray of sunlight shone on me. The fat chick put her hand out.

“You’re not my type,” I said.

“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Let’s get out of here, quick.”

I got up and took off behind her, her long black hair waving in the wind like a Jolly Roger.

“Hey, Betty… is that you?” I asked. “Is that you? Hey, Betty…”

I opened a beer and sat down in a chair while she got the ice pack ready and took all the clothes off. My eye looked like a sea anemone with the flu. I’d had it up to here with her bullshit.

“I’ve had it up to here with this bullshit,” I said.

She came over with the ice pack. She sat down on my lap and put it on my eye.

“I know why you’re upset,” she said. “It’s because you got beat up.”

“Don’t make me laugh. I didn’t get beat up. I let him have a free shot, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s not the end of the world. It hardly shows. It`s just a little swollen around the edges.”

“Right, just a little swollen around the edges, she says. Barely even red…”

I looked at her with the one eye I had left. She smiled. Yes, exactly, she smiled-and against that I was defenseless. The world became insignificant. She disarmed the slightest attack. I could carry on all I wanted for show, but the poison had already reached my brain. What was this little dried-out, shriveled-up world next to her? What was anything worth next to her hair, her lungs, her knees, and all that went with it-could I ever need anything else? Wasn’t what I had something enormous, alive? It was only thanks to her that I didn’t feel like a total piece of shit. I was willing to pay any price for that. It wasn’t that I’d reduced the whole world down to Betty-it was that I just didn’t care about the rest. She smiled, and my anger disappeared like a wet footprint in the burning sun. It would always amaze me.

She put on one of the things she’d stolen and circled around me, posing.

“So… what do you think? How do I look?”

I finished my beer first. Then I sent her a valentine.

“I just wish I could see you out of both eyes,” I whispered.

When I received my sixth rejection letter I knew that my book would never be published. Betty didn’t. One more time, she spent two days without unclenching her teeth-mood black. Everything I tried to say was worthless. She wouldn’t listen to me. Every time it happened she would wrap the manuscript back up and send it oft to someone else. Great, I said to myself-it’s like subscribing to the torture-of-the-month club, like sipping the poison down to the last drop-but of course I didn’t tell her. My nice little novel just kept taking potshots in the wing every time it passed overhead. But it wasn’t the novel I was worried about. It was her. Ever since she’d sworn off painting the town red it bothered me to see her with no way to blow off steam.

In moments like these, Eddie did his best to lighten things up. He joked around constantly and filled the place with flowers. He sent me wondering glances, but there was nothing to be done. If I ever really needed a friend it would be him that I’d choose. But you can’t have everything in life, and I had little to give.

Lisa was also great-gentle and understanding. We all did our best to help Betty get her spirits up, but it was all in vain. Every time she’d End one of my manuscripts stuffed into the mailbox she’d look up and sigh-and off she’d go again.

As if things weren’t bad enough, it got very cold outside-icy winds blew through the streets, Christmas was on its way. In the morning, we’d wake up to a blizzard. In the evening we’d find ourselves hip-deep in slush. The city started to get me down. I started dreaming of faraway places-silent painted deserts, where I could let my eyes wander across the horizon, musing peacefully about my new novel or what to make for supper, lending an ear to the first call of a nightbird, falling through the sunset.

I knew perfectly well what was wrong with Betty. The damn novel had nailed her to the floor-tied her legs together, her hands behind her back. She was like a wild horse who’s cut his hocks jumping over a flint wall and is trying to get back on his feet. What she thought to be a sunlit prairie had turned into a sad, dark corral, and she’d never known what it was to be cornered; she wasn’t built for it. Still, she went at it with all her might-rage in her heart-and with each passing day she worked her fingers further to the bone. It hurt me to see it, but there was nothing I could do. She had gone someplace where nothing and no one could follow. During these times I knew I could grab a beer and do a week’s worth of crossword puzzles without her bothering me. But I stayed close by, just in case she needed me. Waiting was the worst thing that could have happened to her. Writing that book was surely the stupidest thing I’d ever done.