Marie Ndiaye - All My Friends

“No one who looks at you would ever say you’re wearing loafers, because they couldn’t imagine you wearing such shoes, and yet that’s how it is, and you’re wearing loafers,” said Jimmy.

“Oh, why won’t these young people leave us alone?” Brulard sighed, on the brink of tears.

They kept coming and going, three girls and two boys with similar builds, towering and long-limbed, their stiff, light blond hair down to the girls’ shoulders, the boys’ napes, and Brulard found in them a glacial, unearthly beauty that, far from delighting, pained the heart.

How worn, how faded seemed their two little selves, hers and Jimmy’s, on their bench — how poor and ugly they were, crumpled under the wreckage of the life they’d led together, exasperated by each other exactly when they knew they’d be exasperated, knowing each other so well, so well, without tenderness or sympathy.

“Everything would be different if I had money, or even just an inheritance to look forward to,” said Jimmy with spiteful but placid assurance.

The memory of recent evenings when another man had spent freely for her pleasure, elegant dinners, outings to the opera and sophisticated bars, not with a view to seducing her, for she’d been long since seduced and in love, but simply to place that fine gem of love and seduction in a setting of conventional delights and established practices — those memories surfaced in Brulard’s mind like episodes from a very ancient, irretrievable past, and while all that was desirable, delicious, it was also attached, now that Jimmy was here (poor, eternal Jimmy), to something vaguely and stupidly disloyal, even if she’d been drawn to the other man long before she knew how much he had.

But what could she do for Jimmy? What was she supposed to do for Jimmy, assuming she even could? And hadn’t he in fact come here to do something for her, to come to her rescue, as much as to help himself? What gave him the idea (she’d seen his misgivings, his concern) that she needed to be rescued?

A violent migraine was battering the back of her skull. She couldn’t speak a word. The young people began to laugh, howling in a way that struck Brulard as parodic and malevolent. Why were they so bent on following her, spying on her? Were they there beside her as friends? At the same time, if the idea was to keep watch over her, was such beauty uniformly distributed on five arrogant faces strictly necessary?

Could she see them as friends?

* * *

Brulard and Jimmy walked uphill toward the residential neighborhoods, toward the well-heeled heights overlooking the lake and the city, where Jimmy thought they would find the house he’d been told of. It was a chalet, brand new, made of blond wood, with deep eaves, multiple balconies laden with long chairs and poufs, cushions and dog toys: yellow hedgehogs, rubber bones, balls of all sorts.

Breathless from the climb, her skull painful and pounding, Brulard staggered and half-fell, one knee on the ground. Her shoe slipped off her foot. Jimmy was just bending down to pick up the loafer when a Great Dane burst out from behind the chalet, knocked Jimmy head over heels, and snatched up the shoe in its maw. It stood looking at them defiantly, with no intention of playing. Metallic glints gleamed in its short, gray fur. Jimmy’s dog whined as it edged away, terrified, submissive. Not a sound from the chalet or anywhere around them, only the faint rustling of the larch trees, Jimmy’s dog panting in fright.

Brulard stood up. She watched as Jimmy slowly crawled away, knees dragging over the gravel, and then, eyes fixed on the Great Dane, rose to his feet with calm, unhurried movements. She heard him whisper:

“Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

“What about my shoe?”said Brulard with a nervous little laugh.

She groaned and raised her hands to her head. The pain filled her eyes with stinging tears. Suddenly a man and woman appeared, and Brulard wasn’t sure if they’d come from the house or the forest.

“The Rotors!” Jimmy murmured, with a delight that made it clear to Brulard just how afraid he had been.

Would the other man have felt such fear? Or were deluxe guard dogs his allies right from the start, by virtue of his upbringing? Brulard then wondered if Great Danes could smell the odor of money, of class, of chateaux, if they recognized the authority of elegant manners.

She closed her eyes for a brief moment. She heard Jimmy’s insistent, beguiling voice, and from its slight desperate edge she realized he was playing his final card. Then Brulard heard the woman cordially exclaim:

“Why yes, of course, it’s Jimmy Loire. Hello, Jimmy.”

Brulard opened her eyes. Monsieur Rotor had disgustedly thrown the drool-soaked shoe at her feet.

“Come in, I’ll lend you a pair of mine,” said Madame Rotor, graciously.

Monsieur Rotor held back the Great Dane, his tanned face marked with the same severe and irascible expression as his dog’s, and Jimmy took Brulard’s arm to lead her toward the chalet. Brulard felt him shivering with relief, his terrified tension now waning. It wasn’t the dog that had most frightened Jimmy. He was afraid of finding himself thrown off the property by a Rotor couple who had no memory of meeting him in Paris a few months before, at one of the many receptions Jimmy frequented, nervous and joyless, hoping to meet people in a position to give him work, Jimmy taking it as given that he could do anything so long as people explained what they expected. So, it flashed through Brulard’s bored, morose mind, Jimmy must have enticed the Rotors efficiently enough to hear them toss out something like “Come by and visit us in the mountains.” But, Brulard now wondered, attaching no great importance to the question, had she herself been an element in Jimmy’s strategy from the start, or had the idea of bringing her along as a supporting player come to him only a little before, in the pizzeria where he’d insisted on taking her to dinner? Oh, what does it matter, Brulard had asked herself at the time, terrified by the prospect of any sort of resistance, what does one last bad pizza with Jimmy matter? Since after that everything will be over?

“They’ve seen the film. They’ll recognize you, and I’ll score big points,” Jimmy had said, adorable, almost imploring. Now, with a painful sense of vindication, Brulard observed that the middle-aged woman in her dark, out-of-place town clothes, trudging toward the Rotors’ chalet with evident reluctance, half-dragged along by Jimmy Loire, her features clenched with migraine and exhaustion, quite clearly did not remind the Rotors of the yellow-scarved adventuress who played a minor but, according to Jimmy, indispensable and compelling role in The Death of Claire Hassler . Was that not exactly what he was whispering into Madame Rotor’s ear? For she turned to cast Brulard a brief glance, surprised and polite, while Jimmy expressed his pride in his typical fashion, putting his hands on his thin hips and slightly puffing out his stomach, simultaneously displaying, Brulard was horrified to see, a pale green blot of olive-oil on his white shirt.

How was all this supposed to touch her now?

“I’d like. . if you would, two or three aspirin.”

The words hung before her lips as if someone else had whispered them beside her, in a comic falsetto.

“Eve Brulard. . ” Jimmy began.

“Is she feeling all right?”

“Just a little migraine. . overwork. . ”

“Are you all right?”

“Eve Brulard, you know, who. . Eve Brulard. . ”

“Is she all right?”

Brulard felt two firm hands pushing down on her shoulders, then the yielding surface of an armchair beneath her thighs. The chair dipped and rose.

At some point in the past, she was no longer sure when or in what, she used to play long scenes in a rocking chair, half-recumbent.