French Rhapsody Read online

  Yes, I’m cheating on him. He asked me last night while I was cleaning my teeth; he’d probably been mulling it over since the early afternoon. I looked at him in his pyjamas in the mirror and I felt like laughing – but I didn’t. I felt like saying, ‘Yes, I’m cheating on you – so what?’ just to see the look on his face – but I didn’t do that either. I just rolled my eyes, rinsed my mouth out and said irritably, ‘What kind of a question is that? Anything else you’d like to ask?’ Alain dropped it straight away and went to lie down with his hot-water bottle. It doesn’t take a lot to make people happy – usually they’ll settle for hearing what they want to hear. As soon as they’ve got their answer, they move on to something else. I’m cheating on him because I’m bored, because after twenty-five years of marriage and two well-brought-up children (which is more than can be said for most), I still feel alive. I’m cheating on him because I wasn’t always Dr Massoulier’s wife. If he’s become obsessed with trying to get back this demo tape from his youth – which, by the way, I find utterly pathetic – well, he’s not the only one who remembers being young. Having lovers, having men find me attractive, being taken home at the end of the night, leaving some of my dates at the door and taking others upstairs. I remember getting on planes to meet guys in Italy and Switzerland. I remember the same men – and others – taking planes and trains to come and see me in return.

  I don’t regret marrying Alain; it was the right time for both of us. Afterwards, I went into a long hibernation. It was an easy life; the kids grew up without too many problems – a few academic setbacks, adolescent crises and the odd falling-out during their school years, but nothing remotely out of the ordinary. We never had to deal with our children taking drugs or falling in with the wrong crowd and having to be picked up from the police station in the middle of the night. As for my career, for a long time it trundled along nicely and brought in a comfortable salary at the end of the month. I looked after five luxury retailers in Paris, designing different window displays for every season. Christmas was, of course, the busiest time. In recent years, business has gradually dwindled, and I’ve begun to work with mid-range brands and shops alongside my luxury clients. The Chinese have entered the fray, offering a similar service for half the price. Nowadays I only have two very loyal clients and, though I pretend otherwise to Alain, I know full well that sooner or later my business will go down the pan and younger, more dynamic visual merchandisers will come along with snazzy set-ups and props that will take over the market. Alain will never have to face these kinds of problems; he can always rely on the cycle of stomach bugs, hay fever, rhinitis and bronchitis to keep the wheels turning. People will always be ill. In three or four years my business will fold, but I’m not going to throw my hands up in despair – it’s out of my control. I’ve done my best, but there’ll be a time when it has to end. However long your winning streak continues, you’ll always lose some day and have to leave the table. And I also know that as I enter my late fifties, men’s eyes will, shall we say, dwell on me far less.

  The first time I thought about cheating on Alain … No, that’s not quite it; it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. What happened was that we were at our friends’ for drinks one evening and I looked at him. He was talking to the other guests, sitting on the sofa with a glass of whisky in his hand, and I was watching him. It must have been ten years into our marriage. I asked myself if I would have fallen in love with that man if I had met him for the first time there, that evening. If he would have won me over. The answer was no. I’d have found him pleasant, cheerful, certainly, but there was no way I’d have imagined making love to him after the party, still less marrying him and having his children. What makes us fall in love with someone at a given moment? Does what’s true of that moment hold true for ever? I’m sure plenty of other wives have looked at their husbands in the same way at some point; who knows what conclusions they’ve drawn – I don’t have very many female friends and it’s not something I’d discuss with them. Alain caught me looking at him, raised his eyebrows and asked, ‘Everything OK?’ Yes, I said, everything was fine. But it wasn’t.

  After that, I fell back into my state of slumber, waking up a few years later in the arms of one of my clients, who was also married. I used to meet him at a hotel in the middle of the afternoon. We were forty-two and we knew neither of us was planning a divorce – we were just there for a few hours of secret pleasure. We had it all worked out – where I had been and who I had met and the brief summary I would give of my day at the dinner table, and he too must have prepared what to say about the meeting he had supposedly been to, and described it at the table as matter-of-factly as I did. It was easy. Surprisingly so, and I didn’t feel guilty about it; perhaps I would have done if I’d had to lie at length, make a convincing argument, come up with a variety of ruses, call on a third person in order to back me up – but no, there was none of that. Come the evening, Alain would utter a few words and the matter was closed. ‘How were your clients today, then?’ ‘It all went well; they were very happy,’ and that was that. This had the effect of making my rendezvous at the hotel seem totally unreal. When images from the afternoon came back to me like scenes from a porn film as I made the dinner, it was as if they were from a dream. None of it could really have happened because I was there in the kitchen, keeping an eye on an omelette while my husband watched TV and my children squabbled. The affair went on for a few years and then it came to an end. I fell asleep again.

  There have been other awakenings, some better or longer-lasting than others. Then, last week, I realised I would be fifty-eight in five years. And that it was apparent I had caught the eye of a thirty-eight-year-old salesman who had just turned up for the third time to tell me about his teak shelving, specially designed for shop windows. So I ordered some, shut my office door, and asked, ‘What are you doing for the next hour?’ He replied, ‘Nothing.’ He smiled, and so did I. And when we kissed, I felt totally alive.

  Thyristors and TRIACs

  If he had to go back to the start, to where the story began and everything that would later happen was set in motion, JBM would return to an afternoon when he was thirteen and walking back to school with his brother. Sometimes they didn’t eat in the school canteen but at home, which was only four bus stops from the lycée. After lunch with their mother, and sometimes an uncle or cousin who happened to be in Paris, they would return to school on the dot of quarter to two. After getting off at the closest bus stop, they had to cross the boulevard and take a side road before arriving at a junction from which they could look across at the tall pale stone façade and the students congregating outside, chatting and smoking in little groups.

  Pierre was seventeen, four years older than Jean-Bernard, who was not yet known as JBM. The age difference between the two brothers, which at fifty would seem like nothing at all, felt at the time like a chasm of canyonesque proportions. Pierre was tall, very tall, and already on the large side. He shaved every morning using a brush, shaving soap, and a double-bladed razor with a steel handle that had belonged to their grandfather. He would insert proper bendy razor blades made of bluish steel and screw them in with a little plate to hold them flush against the razor head. JBM didn’t shave and still had the smooth skin of a child. Only his melancholy eyes revealed something else in him, something beyond age, beyond any notion of maturity or even masculinity to come; they simply appeared to belong to another person. To a very old soul, returning for one last incarnation. A soul who viewed the world with compassion but feared nothing, having seen it all before.

  There was no melancholy in Pierre’s eyes; on the contrary, they were constantly alert, always on the lookout. They were the only things he kept right up to the end, those pupils darting about like a bird’s. Many years later, Pierre would let his beard grow and become grey and then white at the chin. He would put on thirty kilos and, with his floppy hair swept back, his colourful waistcoats and half-moon spectacles, look like an elderly gent. At the age of fifty, puffing away
on a cigar and stroking his beard with fingers laden with gold Roman signet rings, he looked fifteen years older. Hearing him talk, mid-puff, about Ingres, Corot or the marquetry of André-Charles Boulle only added to the strange sense that you were listening to a man who belonged to another time. Pierre had always had a good memory for stories about the great figures of the past, the history of France or local points of interest, and slipped them into conversation so naturally that it was as if he, Pierre Mazart, had seen it all happen himself, just last week.

  Cultured beyond his years from a young age, Pierre soon caught the eye of the old antique dealers and collectors, who entrusted him with the role of broker at auctions and markets: he would buy the objects dealers were looking for and sell them to them at a profit, so that they in turn could sell them on to their clients at an even greater profit. Pierre made a decent living from brokering for twelve years before taking over one of his client’s shops along with the flat above it, renaming it Au Temps Passé and finally living his dream of spending his days surrounded by the relics of yesteryear and occasionally agreeing to part with them for a fee. At the height of his glory days, he took part in the Biennale des Antiquaires on several occasions. Pierre married a museum curator, had a son and lived happily for fifteen years until the day his wife decided to drive to their country house in the Auvergne, while Pierre stayed behind to man the shop for the Carré Rive Gauche antiques week. She lost control of the car on a steep B-road, and she and her son were killed. Pierre never remarried, never rebuilt his life, and retreated further into his old books and remnants of the past. During the last years of his life, it was not uncommon to see him wandering around the shop in his dressing gown in the middle of the afternoon, a cigar in his hand, repositioning a crystal chandelier or moving a spotlight whose glare was not to his liking. ‘Eccentric’ was a word often used to describe him.

  Then the economic crisis came and Pierre looked on as a succession of his eldest clients died and the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century art that made up the bulk of his stock went out of favour. He saw the younger generations turn their noses up in distaste at the Louis XV rosewood display cabinets, Napoleonic-era secretaire desks, oil paintings in the style of Claude Gellée and portraits of old aristos in powdered wigs. Those with a vaguely artistic bent and a degree of purchasing power had eyes only for 1950s design: industrial lamps, desks, stools and chairs. Furniture from canteens and architects’ offices with which to deck out their living spaces. An artist of limited imagination like Jean Prouvé was now top dog; Prouvé’s Trapeze table, made of folded sheet steel in 1956 for the Antony campus student canteen, was auctioned for €1,241,300, including commission. Pierre began to cheer himself up with the odd glass of cognac. Then Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog was sold at Christie’s for $58.4 million. For weeks afterwards, Pierre went round telling anyone who would listen that the world had gone mad, it was only a metal dog that looked like it was made of balloons, a decoration fit for a funfair. The glasses of cognac began mounting up until Pierre was drinking a bottle a day, sometimes two. It reached the point where he occasionally lay down on a Louis XV day bed in the shop and slept until lunchtime. His brother would come and see him but Pierre would never listen; the words ‘nervous breakdown’ and ‘detox’ went in one ear and out of the other.

  If Pierre were to be believed, the French were not only indifferent to their own country’s history and culture, they had no interest in the modern world either. In conversations with his brother, he never failed to remind him that the majority of the great iconic inventions of our time were French: photography, cinematography, cars, aviation, chip and pin cards and even the domestic internet, with its predecessor the Minitel. According to Pierre, this country, which had led the rest of the world, had routinely done its best to let everyone else steal its ideas and patents, so that it hardly benefited from them and roundly forgot them – adding to the general negligence that lay at the root of the country’s problems.

  In the last weeks of his life, the shop increasingly represented to him one of the last surviving fragments of the past, a kind of island separated from the modern world by no more than a big sheet of glass. Soon passers-by would stop and stare, not to look at any of the items on display before coming in to enquire about the price, but to watch Pierre against the backdrop of the shop, like the waxwork models improperly named ‘tableaux vivants’ at the Musée Grevin. Pierre’s waxwork figure would be captioned ‘A man from the olden days’. You could observe him sitting at his Mazarin bureau, reading an old Léo Larguier book by the light of an Empire-style Bouillotte lamp, surrounded by furniture and unusual objects whose purpose nobody knew any more. He had spent so long selling curiosities, he had become one himself.

  It seemed to JBM as if the futures of the two brothers had somehow been fixed that early afternoon as they stood at the crossroads leading back to school. They had separated on the pavement and, if the sequence could be played back now, you would see JBM walking towards a trench that had been dug in the road, and Pierre heading for the window of an antique shop. Having spent the past several weeks with his nose buried inside a biography of Napoleon, Pierre had been captivated by the sight of a snuffbox that, according to the sign in the window, had been carved out of the wood of a tree cut down on St Helena at the site of the Emperor’s tomb. While Pierre stood transfixed by this relic which had passed through many hands over a century and a half, JBM could not take his eyes off the trench, freshly dug by pneumatic drill. Thick black cables lay alongside thinner red ones, tumbling together in neatly entwined braids before disappearing into the earth. JBM looked up at the surrounding buildings. These cables must feed the blocks of flats with electricity, powering the televisions, radios and telephones of every flat. This scalpel cut in the skin of the city was proof that when it came down to it, Paris was simply an enormous body, an organ with nerves, veins and muscles he could almost feel pumping beneath his feet. His vision extended to the whole neighbourhood, the arrondissement, then the metropolitan area, the country and the world, which he thought of in terms of a tennis ball, slightly flattened at the two poles, floating weightlessly, its electronic circuits functioning like neurons at the four cardinal points in a constant flow of information, images, voices and light.

  Whoever entered this flux would control the future. Everything would happen via screens that would receive data within the home, not like televisions with their set schedules, but a different kind of screen, screens on which you could transmit images from one side of the globe to the other, images you had made yourself and wanted to share with people you knew or with complete strangers. And not only images, but words. Letters, novels, encyclopedias, newspaper articles, messages. People would be able to talk on screen. Anything was possible, because all the wires already existed – it was simply a matter of changing their contents and speed. That Christmas of 1973, Pierre asked for a cheque which, combined with his savings, would allow him to purchase the Emperor’s snuffbox. JBM asked for the same thing, to buy his first books on computing. Each boy took to his bedroom to study his own destiny, Pierre holding a magnifying glass to every little detail of his precious acquisition, JBM annotating books with such esoteric titles as Thyristors and TRIACs: Electronic Circuits no. 4 and Digital Integrated Circuits by Henri Lilen. He knew he would never be a great programmer, but he at least wanted to understand the theory before moving on to the next stage.

  JBM’s admiration for his brother never waned. He always considered Pierre to be the talented one. So talented, he had even written song lyrics. Yes, they were in English and the chorus was borrowed from Shakespeare, but he had done it. All JBM had done was to finance the recording. All that was left of Pierre now was a porphyry urn sitting behind the strong door of a safety deposit box belonging to JBM. Pierre had requested in his will that his ashes be scattered ‘in a place of beauty and history’ of his brother’s choosing. JBM had still not found the place.

  Au Temps Passé

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur, th
ere’s a notice that says “Closed for good” on your neighbour’s shop.’

  The owner of the shop next door was smoking a cigarette in his doorway, but he didn’t reply.

  So Alain pressed on. ‘I can see that behind the curtain everything is still in the shop. Has he moved recently?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man slowly, drawing on his cigarette, ‘he has moved, but not recently.’

  ‘Do you know where I can reach him?’

  ‘In an urn, if he’s still there.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  The man took a deep breath then explained. ‘He’s dead, Monsieur, a year ago. Did you know him?’

  ‘Yes, but I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Did he have an accident?’

  ‘An artistic accident, yes,’ murmured the neighbour, before telling the full story.

  Pierre was known for his staged window displays, and the final one had been a corker. In the middle of the night, the antiquarian had lain down in the magnificent eighteenth-century bathtub that had been on display in the window for some weeks. Then he had overdosed on barbiturates. The next morning, passers-by had been treated to an arresting sight: the bath partly covered by a white sheet, Pierre’s head in an old-fashioned bathing turban resting on his shoulder, and his right hand trailing on the floor holding a pen. His left arm rested on a plank covered in green material and held a farewell letter which his brother was later to read out at the funeral. Pierre had reproduced David’s famous painting The Death of Marat down to the last detail.

  ‘I will say it created quite a stir,’ concluded the shop owner.

  According to him, JBM had pulled strings to ensure that no hint of the macabre staging had appeared in the press, and particularly not in Le Parisien, which was known to have a voracious appetite for that sort of story. Freelance journalists who had started to prepare articles must have been told by their editors that it would not be worth their while to pursue them since they would be neither published nor paid for – orders from ‘above’.