Could they stop rocking her? One more dip and she was going to bring up her pizza. Could they stop rocking her? How she was suffering — but what good would aspirin do? In spite of her spinning head, she sensed that she’d understood everything, though what she understood she didn’t yet know, even as she knew it was only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before it all became clear. She understood, but, oh God, how she dreaded learning what it was that she understood.
Could they please stop rocking her, right now?
She spoke or kept silent, they heard her or didn’t, impossible to say. A cold glass jarred her teeth, a bitter pill was dissolving on her tongue, too far back, next to her uvula. A dry hand stroked her cheek. She recognized Jimmy’s hand, hot and anxious. Dear poor kind Jimmy, thought Brulard, nearly weeping with pity, had he understood, for his part, that it was all over? That she’d be lost to him forever as soon as they left the Rotors’ chalet? He’d long been a deluded husband, but that was nothing next to the irreparable depreciation inflicted on his entire being, even his life story, his past, his name, since Brulard fell in love with another, so very much more glorious than Jimmy. But how to ensure that it all ended cleanly and definitively? Only, perhaps, Jimmy’s instantaneous death, she couldn’t help thinking, would deliver her of the disorder surrounding him, radiating expansively all around him, whereas the other one was all rigor, cool willfulness, precise desires.
“I thought. . she was called Claire Hassler,” said Madame Rotor, as if from a great distance, with a puzzled little laugh.
“Claire Hassler is only the name of the lead character, played by. . oh, another actress.”
That was Jimmy’s voice, overly loud, at once incensed and incredulous, disgusted.
“Claire Hassler doesn’t exist, for goodness’ sake! It’s a made-up name. It’s a story.”
“So who is Eva Brulard?” asked Madame Rotor, hesitantly.
“Eve Brulard. Not Eva. Eve. Eve Brulard. Eve Brulard.”
“Who is she?”
“What my wife wants to know, I presume, is whether that’s also the name of a character,” pompously intervened a Monsieur Rotor who seemed to be standing just behind Brulard’s back, as she thought she could feel his warm breath on her neck, odorless, thick, like a dog’s.
So is that Rotor who’s so hell-bent on rocking me? Brulard wondered, exasperated. But was she really being rocked? Or was it the unraveling of all her senses that was giving her this continual up and down feeling?
She wished she could tell Jimmy to relax, that for her, and even more for him, it was in no way essential to convince the Rotors that she was a remarkable woman. But now Jimmy was losing his temper, she could tell by the sudden quickening of his words, although, for the Rotors who knew him so little, he might still have seemed simply the typical Parisian, sarcastic, belligerent, rude, and utterly unaware of it.
“You make me laugh,” Jimmy was shouting. “Eve Brulard, a character? Don’t tell me you of all people have never heard of Eve Brulard? So supposedly I live with a character?”
Jimmy, we don’t live together anymore! Brulard exclaimed. We’ll never live together again! Isn’t that so? Relieved to find that the sound of her voice was not vibrating in her own ears, and that no one must have heard a word she had said, she shut her eyelids tight, determined to let herself be forgotten.
A doubt crept into Brulard’s mind.
What proof did she have that she wasn’t an impostor? For if she’d never acted in The Death of Claire Hassler , if the lovely woman in the yellow scarf was not Eve Brulard but some other actress, and if everywhere she went she nevertheless claimed, with Jimmy’s complicity, that it was her, who would ever disabuse her?
She protested inwardly, indignant with herself for thinking such things. She did have a part in that movie. She remembered it with the most perfect clarity. Did she really remember? Nothing very precise at the moment, thanks to her crushing exhaustion, but she would, she would, as soon as she got some rest. Yes, would she remember? She thought it impossible to ask Jimmy for reassurance, not because this wasn’t the time (Jimmy’s mollified voice flowed like fresh, cool water all the way to the rocking chair, interspersed with Madame Rotor’s appreciative “hmm!”s, and now the talk had apparently turned to some activity to be undertaken at once, a game to be organized before teatime, though of what sort Brulard had no idea), but because Brulard was now convinced that she’d have to be wary of Jimmy on that score as well.
On that score as well, she repeated to herself, tightly clutching the rocking chair’s arms so as not to be sucked into the drain of the enormous avocado-green sink she could half see beneath her closed eyelids — identical to the one in the hotel bathroom, she noted with a knowing snicker, frightened and flattered to observe that once again it was all fitting together. If Jimmy was using her, if Jimmy was inventing roles and a career for her to fascinate the Rotors, how could she use him?
“Jimmy!” she called out, imperiously.
* * *
Now Brulard was looking out one of the chalet windows, toward the larches that rose almost to the roof. Monsieur Rotor and Jimmy were searching for something amid the stones and patches of snow, bending down, then cheerfully standing up again and heading into the blue shadows beneath the trees, while, from the edge of the woods, Madame Rotor urged them on with nods and grave little shouts, her hands in the pockets of her pale blue down coat, her long hair blowing free, graceful and golden.
These people are younger than we are, Brulard then told herself, with a pang in her heart.
Slowly she walked toward the front of the house and the opposite window, wearing the delicate red booties she’d been given, flat-heeled and a full size too small. Brulard thought she saw someone moving behind the Rotors’ SUV. She pressed her forehead to the glass. She was just turning away, having seen nothing, when a brief vision of the two dogs, the Great Dane straddling Jimmy’s mutt, brought her back to the window, alarmed. Jimmy’s dog was invisible beneath the Great Dane’s spine, which glistened as if coated with oil. Brulard saw her mangled shoe lying in front of the car.
She hurried away from the window and out the door to join Jimmy and the Rotors.
“You come look too,” Madame Rotor called to her, jolly and affable.
Brulard trotted obediently toward the tall pines. A small smile of feigned triumph on his blue lips, Jimmy was displaying a chocolate rabbit with a pink ribbon.
“We put together several Easter-egg hunts like this every year,” Monsieur Rotor was saying, visibly pleased with Jimmy. “What do you think, Loire?”
“It’s great,” said Jimmy. “I’m having a wonderful time.”
“You’re having a wonderful time?”asked Monsieur Rotor, at once gratified and vaguely dubious. “Looks to me like you’re freezing, Loire.”
“No,” said Jimmy, “not at all.”
“Well, your wife seems to be, Loire.”
“Brulard. Eve Brulard,” said Jimmy in a despairing voice. Monsieur Rotor grunted, then suddenly bent over to pull a large nougat egg from beneath a small mound of moss.
Surely a bit later, but after a span of time that Brulard, mechanically digging through the snow and the pine needles, was unable to gauge (an hour or an afternoon or a full day), the frantic reappearance of Madame Rotor, who had gone in to make tea, broke the single-minded silence that reigned over the hunt.
“It’s horrible,” she cried. “Come see. No, not you, Jimmy, and you neither, Madame Loire. It’s so horrible. Valentin’s never done such a thing.”
Читать дальше