A Very Bold Leap (9 page)

She was sitting across from him, smiling. She’d come just for him, no one else, her coat wide open displaying an exquisite pink silk blouse that followed the shape of her lovely breasts, and she was calmly waiting for the waitress to bring their coffees; elbows on the table, looking at him with pleasure in her eyes, as though the fact of being there with him, with nothing else to do, in a restaurant, in the morning’s slow advance, was for her a kind of reward, a reprieve. When she’d arrived, the waitress had given her one of those exaggerated, cautious smiles reserved for film stars and other important personages, then she had looked at Charles, who’d been waiting, taking nervous little sips from a glass of mineral water, and she’d stared at him for a moment with an air of respectful surprise: he was one of the initiates into the world of celebrity, one of those with a brilliant future; she was not.

Brigitte Loiseau raised the creamy foam to her lips and checked out of the corner of her eye that the waitress was out of earshot. She had returned to her post behind the counter and was busy with another customer, a man stamping his snow-covered boots on the floor. Brigitte turned her attention back to Charles.

“I’ve been wanting to see you for a long time,” she said, “but I was afraid.”

Charles made a vaguely embarrassed gesture and said nothing.

“It was you who called the police, wasn’t it? That day when I swallowed the bottle of Valium?”

He nodded.

“That’s what I thought. You saved my life, Charles. I was well off on that voyage from whose bourne no traveller returns.”

“I know,” he said. He pushed his spoon about in his cup with a trembling hand, his face blank, recalling the scene. “You… it scared me to look at you,” he said, looking up. “I nearly panicked.”

Her lips compressed, her eyes narrowed, and her face took on a hardness that made her look fierce and sad at the same time; she appeared tough, almost vulgar, but it lasted only an instant.

“I wanted to thank you, Charles. A lot of other people would have just left me there. Out of laziness, or indifference, or because they’d seen so many others in the same state, or maybe for no reason at all, who knows? But not you. You called for help.”

“I couldn’t have done any different,” he assured her, flushing with pleasure.

“I could never have left you like that, Brigitte… I’d have hated myself for the rest of my life. You’d been so kind to me … You didn’t treat me like some drug pusher, you know what I mean? You … I don’t know…”

He turned away, not trusting himself to continue.

“Even though that’s what you were,” she said, laughing.

“Not really,” he said. “And I haven’t been for some time. I’m ashamed of ever having been. That was a time in my life that I’ve come to hate. I wish I could just vomit it up or something, and get rid of it.”

She put her hand affectionately on his, and he turned scarlet.

“I feel the same way, as you can see. It was a hard lesson, but one I’ve benefited from.”

“And now everyone’s better off,” he said, with a broad smile. “You’ve become a big star. I went to see your film twice. I loved it. You were magnificent!”

She patted his hand with a skeptical but amused smile, then looked him in the eye and suddenly became serious.

“How are you, Charles? I mean, really?”

“I’m fine. Really.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I’ve taken up writing, if you can believe that. I want to be a novelist, no less! In the meantime, I’m working part-time at my father’s hardware store … that is, my adoptive father.”

Astonished, intrigued, she questioned him at length about his work as a writer, and he began talking openly about it, amazed at having something to say about himself that she would find interesting. He talked about the difficulties and pitfalls he’d come across in his new career. She encouraged him as much as she could, and promised to buy his novel the minute it came out.

“I’ll send you one, if it ever does come out.”

They fell silent for a moment, sipping their coffees, neither of them knowing where to take the conversation from there. Charles was floating in a sea of ecstasy at being with her; she was deeply touched and slightly embarrassed by the boundless adoration she seemed to have inspired in him without meaning to.

Behind the counter, the waitress interpreted their silence as that of two lovers, and she watched Charles closely as she arranged a row of cream puffs on a tray. She thought he looked a bit young for her, but he was still a very handsome boy.

“Charles,” Brigitte asked suddenly, leaning towards him, “tell me how I can thank you. What can I do to show you how grateful I am?”

He looked at her for a second, unable to reply, then blurted out without thinking, “Oh, just be the person you are …”

It was a phrase she’d heard a dozen times, a heartfelt but idiotic declaration of absolute love. She’d probably even used it herself once or twice. But now it stopped her in her tracks. So that was how it was going to be: she would have to repay his goodness with pain, and there was no hope of it being otherwise.

Now she had to leave and not see him again, despite the pleasure it would have given her, because seeing him would just make things worse. Affection bordering on pity was what inspired her to cut things off now; she found it small and mean. And she could tell by the expression on his face that he understood, too, although he was trying hard not to let it show. She smiled at him (if such a forced grimace could be called a smile); his hand was gripping the edge of the table, and she almost placed her own on it but restrained herself in time. The meeting had become painful to her. She looked at her watch, let out a sigh. Nearly ten o’clock. She had to go to a rehearsal. She was sorry she had to leave so soon. What could she leave him as a memento?

“Give me your address,” she said, taking out a small notebook. “A month from now I’ll send you tickets to
La Locandiera
, by Goldoni. I’ve got the title role. You like the theatre, don’t you?”

“Yes, very much,” Charles replied, looking away. He, too, was in a hurry to leave.

“And your … friend?”

“Loves it.”

“I don’t know where my career is going to take me, Charles,” she said, after quickly writing down the address he had given her in a dull, almost distracted voice, “ft could be nothing but a will-o’-the-wisp, you know? It all hangs so much on luck and fifty thousand other things that nobody knows about. But I can tell you this: you’ll never have to pay a cent to see any of my performances, neither you nor your girlfriend. It’s not much, I know, but I’m just a poor actress, after all…. And if you ever need my help, for anything, you’ll call me, won’t you? Any time, day or night. Promise?”

He nodded, annoyed, already doing up his coat. She kissed him on both cheeks and reached for the bill, but he snatched it up almost angrily. A few
moments later he was on the snow-covered street, hands thrust into his coat pockets. He was furious with life, furious with himself, and nearly overcome by a desire to be disagreeable to someone. The next person he met would be in real trouble!

“C
ome in, come in, you look like a frozen rat,” said Parfait Michaud with a catch in his voice. “Amélie has just made a delicious vegetable soup that’ll warm your insides for you. But before we eat, if you don’t mind, I want a few words with you in my office. Is something wrong?” he added, looking more closely at Charles.

“Wrong?” said Charles morosely. “No, nothing’s wrong.”

The notary hesitated a second, then decided to let it go. He ushered Charles into his office and carefully shut the door.

“What’s up?” Charles asked, shooting him a worried look.

“Something very strange, my dear boy, and it concerns you. Did you know a certain Conrad Saint-Amour, the man who died about a year and a half ago in the fire that burned down your apartment building on Rachel? I seem to recall meeting him somewhere, but it was a long time ago and it’s all very blurry.”

Charles turned pale. “A bit,” he murmured after a moment. “When I was a kid, working part-time at Chez Robert, delivering pizzas. That’s all.”

“Well, then, I’m even more confused!” exclaimed the notary, sitting behind his desk. He began rummaging through a pile of papers and finally extracted a brown envelope, from which he drew a document. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, spreading the paper out in front of him.

Charles sat in an easy chair with stiff, jerking movements. The lower part of his face trembled, a small tic.

“Here’s the situation. I ran into a colleague yesterday who was probating this Saint-Amour’s will. During the course of the conversation, the fire came up, and I happened to mention your name. To my astonishment, this colleague told me that you were one of Saint-Amour’s beneficiaries! He’d been trying to get in touch with you for ages but hadn’t been able to find hide nor
hair of you. I don’t understand a thing about this whole business. Would it be rude of me to ask you to explain it to me?”

“I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you,” Charles replied sulkily, his chin twitching more conspicuously than ever.

“What’s this all about, Charles? Here’s a poor fellow who has left you a legacy of five thousand dollars … but with conditions attached that are, at the very least, perplexing. You cannot use the money for any other purpose … than to pay for treatments by a psychologist!”

At that, Charles burst into laughter, although it was forced, bitter laughter, painful to hear.

The two men sat looking at each other.

“In all my career I’ve never seen anything like this,” murmured the notary, pinching the end of his nose in puzzlement. “Charles,” he said gently, “you’re not absolutely obliged to tell me what this is about, because it has nothing at all to do with me. But I have the impression that something happened between you and this Conrad Saint-Amour.”

“Lunch is served!” Amélie trilled happily from the kitchen.

Charles was gripping the arms of his chair, staring at the tips of his shoes and fighting against the tic that was threatening to stretch his mouth half open. Finally he raised his head. His eyes were filled with a cold fury, and he began to mutter in a flat, toneless voice.

“He raped me one afternoon when I was nine years old. As for his money, let it rot with him in the graveyard.”

And he stood up and left the house without another word, much to the dismay of the notary and the astonishment of his wife, who had come out of the kitchen into the hallway and watched him go out the door.

The string of annoyances continued. Charles received a phone call from lean-Philippe L’Archevêque, and the next morning he found himself in the editor’s office. It was ten-thirty in the morning and an irresistible odour of coffee was rising from a lilac-coloured porcelain cup set on the desk in front of the literary editor.

When Charles had once again asked Fernand Fafard for the morning off, the latter had agreed with a slight nod, but for an instant his expression had
changed gears and he’d rolled his eyes. Now, Charles would have liked to have been able to see L’Archevêque’s eyes, but they were lost behind the glinting lenses of his wire-framed glasses. The editor’s chin was square, his luxurious blond curls were firmly in place, the knot of his tie was impeccable, his shirt was quietly sumptuous, and he stared at Charles for a moment with an enigmatic smile that the young man found more and more disquieting the longer it lasted.

“Do not labour under the impression, my dear friend,” he said at last (and although he spoke like a Parisian of the old school, Charles had in fact just learned that he’d been born in Joliette, a small, industrial town not far from Montreal), “that I invite everyone into my office who does us the honour of submitting his manuscript to our firm. If I did I’d be working eight days a week to see them all! Besides, ninety-five per cent of the masterpieces they send us aren’t worth the paper they’re badly typed on.”

“I see,” said Charles. The editor’s words might have been taken as encouraging, but they served only to increase his nervousness.

“I finally read yours,” L’Archevêque went on, slowly stirring his coffee with a spoon. “I read it right to the very last page.”

He stopped and smiled at Charles again, the light still glinting from his glasses. If Charles had been less intimidated, he would have got up and closed the curtains.

“And, after giving the matter a great deal of thought, and having discussed it with my colleagues here at the firm, I came to the conclusion that the best thing we can do for you is to not publish your text.” I see.

“To be frank, it would be doing you a disservice.”

“Well, in that case, thank you very much.”

lean-Philippe L’Archevêque ignored the impertinent smile that accompanied Charles’s remark and continued as though the young man had not spoken, drawling on in the self-satisfied, pedantic tone he had perfected years before and that by now had become as much a part of him as his most intimate emotions.

“There is a certain talent here — that is, of course, undeniable — but it is as yet a nascent talent. You have written the kind of novel, my dear fellow, that is best kept carefully hidden away in a drawer somewhere. It is a — how shall I put it? — a preparatory novel. Its sole purpose ought to be to help you in
writing the next one. Do you follow me? In that sense it is irreplaceable, but only in that sense. You no doubt possess a certain amount of learning, you have a certain facility in the manipulation of words and the expression of emotions, but you have not yet found that
unique
way of writing that is essential for the true writer.”

The shimmering light suddenly disappeared from the man’s left lens, and Charles caught sight of a brown eye, oily and slightly dilated, that overflowed with the sweet drunkenness that comes with power.

“I know, I know,” L’Archevêque went on, “you will hardly find my words pleasing, but you will thank me one day for having delivered them. If there is ever…”

“Right,” Charles interrupted. “Nothing to be done?”

“I fear not.”

“Not even a rewrite?”

“Not even a rewrite. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot change a sow’s ear into a silk purse…. Obviously, I could be wrong,” he added, seeing the scowl that had come over Charles’s face. “We all are, sometimes, are we not? But I would be the most astounded man on earth if this novel achieved even a modicum of success. No. It would earn you nothing but a bad reputation — or worse, no reputation at all.”

Charles rose and reached his hand out for his manuscript. “Thank you for having given me so much of your time,” he said. “I’ll take it to another publisher. He may think differently about it.”

“One never knows, does one?” said the editor with a sympathetic smile. “Good luck, then.”

He stood, intending to conduct his interlocutor to the lobby, then thought better of it, judging that a nobody like Charles was not worth the twenty-two steps it would take to get him there and back. He settled for shaking Charles’s hand over his desk. His jacket fell open and the subtly spiced fragrance of his eau-de-toilette blended with the aroma of coffee, which was beginning to fade.

Céline avoided Charles for four days. He called her several times, but she had been out, or busy, or sleeping, or taking a shower; she would call him back as soon as she could, but she hadn’t called him back. Lucie could see that the
two had quarrelled and wanted to know what had caused it, but her solicitude earned her a rebuff such as she had never had from her daughter before. Finally, worried sick, Charles came to the house. Fortune smiled on him: just as he was coming in, Céline was on her way out, and she couldn’t ignore him. They spoke in muted tones in the vestibule for a while, and then Charles persuaded her to go with him to his apartment, where he launched into a long explanation interrupted from time to time by tears, accusations, and impassioned pleas. Céline took the line that she was nothing more to him than a temporary fling, that his true love was for that former drug-head of an actress, the one who had bowled him over in the middle of the restaurant by favouring him with a few words. She bet they had met the next day, and that they had probably slept together; and even if they hadn’t, they might as well have, because what counted most in human relationships was not what actually happened, but how people felt about each other. And Charles’s feelings for the actress had been all too apparent. So she might as well give him his freedom now, if indeed there had ever been anything between them in the first place, because she was not the kind of person who would ever allow herself to take a back seat to anyone.

Charles defended himself passionately, denying he had ever felt the slightest attraction to Brigitte Loiseau, that even the sight of her brought back too many bad memories; and for a moment or two he honestly believed what he was saying. Yes, at her request, he had met her for coffee the next morning, but it had been a painful encounter, for reasons he surely didn’t need to spell out. She had thanked him for saving her life, asked him how he was getting on, and then offered him tickets for her next performance. If that was what Céline meant by a lovers’; tryst, then so was taking a bunch of torn shirts to a seamstress!

Charles’s words and the passion with which he spoke them gradually succeeded in calming Céline. She heaved a deep sigh, smiled weakly, took his hands in hers, and looked him straight in the eye.

“I love you too much, Charles. It scares me…. I’ve loved you ever since I was a little girl! I’ve never loved anyone like I love you. What would I do if you left me?”

You’d do what everyone else does
, Charles answered wordlessly —
you’d console yourself with someone else
.

He smiled and stroked her cheek. “I’m not going to leave you, Céline,” he said aloud. “It’s as simple as that.”

But the truth was that the intensity of their attachment disturbed him, too. It even slightly annoyed him. Are people predestined to love one person and one person only for their entire lives? And wasn’t there something in her attachment to him of the adoration a dog has for its master? It was touching, but also pathetic and slightly ridiculous. Despite his profound attraction to Céline, he didn’t feel that he was chained to her. In fact, he felt he was in love with two women — it was just that one of them had about as much need of his love as she had of an empty Pepsi bottle. Despite the pain and suffering her indifference caused him, however, he accepted the situation. Because you can love only when love is freely returned.