Consequences (13 page)

He lowered his eyes. “We better leave separately. Let things stay as they are for today. And talk about it all later, at a more appropriate time and place, don't you think? I'm really not myself today. You'd be amazing. I was so crude with you that I can hardly expect you to . . .”

“Kiss me. Take me in your arms and kiss me.”

“Annie, Annie, Annie,” he sighed. “I don't think you understood very well.”

“Do it now. I'm giving you three seconds. Or the deal's off.”

His hands closed quickly on Annie Eggbaum's shoulders—she was obviously no great beauty, but what a body; and he wanted to keep her from carrying out her threat, which could even amount to shouting sexual harassment if the idea came into her head. This was one determined student, not your common garden variety; and determination was one quality that was indispensable for a writer's career—but only one, and you needed a lot of others.

He forced himself to smile. “Kiss you how? On the mouth? Is that what you want?”

“And hold me in your arms while you're doing it.”

“Annie,” he said, shaking her gently, “wake up. It's not dark, and we're not on some remote country road. We're surrounded by people. Hello? It's a minefield out there for me. I might as well stick my head into a swarm of bees. Martinelli's there. The president, in person. Less than sixty feet away. Do you want to kill me?”

“Okay. Let's go into a bedroom.”

“What? No, I'd rather stay here. We're going to do it here. It's in God's hands!”

“Think you can handle it?”

“I'll do my best.”

He'd made up his mind to do it. Better to cut off a hand than an arm. Immediately she plunged her tongue into his mouth. He took advantage of it to grab her by the waist and spin around with her so they weren't in front of the window anymore.

There certainly were tougher chores, more repellent tasks. Annie was glued to him as if she were trying to make a mold of her body using his. She was also boldly caressing his neck and feeling his crotch. There was a time when he would have appreciated such passion, such an approach—someone had put on “Focus Please” by Be My Weapon, a song that was a must-have, and Annie's hair smelled nice—but the days when he'd had these feelings already seemed far away, as if they belonged to another time. Luckily, he'd been able to pull back all the way to the wall and was against it; a second more and he might have fallen backward with her on top of him.

He tried to muster up a maximum of spirit for the task, but his heart just wasn't in it. To put her off track, he put his hand on her ass and pressed his groin against hers. These gestures weren't too complicated to carry out, and he could see that they turned her on. His migraine hadn't gone away, but at least it hadn't gotten worse, so he pushed on resolutely. He bit her lips. That seemed to be a plus.

All in all, he came out of it well. He felt a bit badgered, but if this was the way to get out of this unfortunate situation, if this was the guarantee, he figured he was totally satisfied. There
was no doubt about what a scare it had been, yet he'd handled it the best anybody could—reacting to the danger, pulling hard at the oars to keep from foundering. There'd be a reward. Regardless of everything, it had been a good lesson. Never drop your guard. He who did was dead. He'd had more than the usual amount of ordeals to testify to that.

A bottle rolled across the parquet. The din from outside barely reached them—asymmetric double glazing filled with argon. He saw a few blue plumes of smoke coming from the barbecue; the whole area reeked of it. The little group of students at the other end of the room seemed to have entered an advanced state of numbness, and that was also going to help matters. Meanwhile, the hands of the clock were turning, and Annie kept crossing swords inside his mouth with grim resolve, without showing the slightest sign of fatigue or any signal that this kiss would ever end.

When he wanted to push her away, she hung on to him even harder. “C'mon, be reasonable,” he said, trying to loosen the stranglehold she had around his neck. “Stop acting like a child, would you. A promise is a promise. I was joking about a lot of things, Annie, but not about that. You asked for a kiss and got it. Isn't that what we just did?”

This little game could end up costing him a lot—somebody could come in at any moment. He pulled harder at Annie's arms, which stiffened around him even more. “Listen, it's simple enough. How can I trust you after this? Let's suppose we were to end up seeing each other. How could I, if you play tricks like this on me at the first opportunity?”

He yanked. She resisted. Obviously she had a lot of her father in her. He amped up his pressure. She grimaced. He twisted a
wrist. Another young woman he'd known had refused point-blank to get out of bed, every time, to the extent that he'd had to pick her up, drag her to the edge of the mattress, and send her tumbling onto the floor, or she would refuse to get dressed. This was a little like that. The scenes women were capable of making. Unbelievable.
Too bad the outcomes were so often disastrous
, he thought to himself as he unfastened her from his neck, which she was hurting seriously at this point. Too bad they so often wound up in such a mess.

“Calm down,” he repeated. “We'll talk about all this tomorrow, Annie. Anyhow, that kiss was dynamite.”

“Dynamite?”

“Sure was.
Boom.
We're going to talk about all of it again. Promise. But not now. Tomorrow. Okay?”

She gazed up at him.

“Get going, now. You go out first,” he said, pointing her in the right direction. “I said tomorrow, Annie. Now run along.”

He watched her go off—after having given her one of his light slaps on the bottom, viewed, as a rule, in such a terrible light. Just as she was about to pass the big window, she turned around. “Dynamite,” he uttered, giving her a thumbs-up. “Everything's cool, Annie.”

It had been a close shave. Now that he saw her going back to the world, joining the others, the icy veil of fear—exactly that—slid along his shoulders for an instant, as he thought about what had just happened. The truth was that he'd almost gone to the edge. Really had. He'd come close to death, and that was the truth. He was exhausted. God knew what kind of a jam he'd be in now if he hadn't had adequate, instantaneous reflexes to the problems Annie caused. At this point, God
knew into what kind of terrible vortex he was still endlessly falling these days, taking several others with him.

The thought of it brought back his migraine. He swallowed two or three more tablets and found a washbasin so he could cool his face and neck.

Making a narrow escape had a richness to it, but also a kind of violence, something close to orgasm that could be compared to parachute jumping—if what they said about it really was true. He splashed water on his face and neck for a while longer, then went back to the garden, pasting a casual expression on his face and without noticing the slightest lingering glance in his direction nor anything else out of the ordinary.

Marianne asked him where he'd been but barely listened to his answer; it didn't seem to interest her very much. It was early in the afternoon, and the sun beat down; most people were crowding into the shade where he was unlikely to find the peace he was hoping for and that he needed to pull himself together.

Richard Olso lived in a quiet, wooded neighborhood where every family must have owned a half-dozen vehicles, to judge by the near impossibility of parking nearby, without a miracle occurring. Slipping out discreetly was a cinch, as was straightening up in the street. But thinking about where he'd parked the Fiat became sheer torture, because of the terrible light falling from the sky—white, throbbing—more powerful than the five or six grams of aspirin he'd gulped.

Hesitantly, he covered the neighborhood the best he could, without seeing a soul who could tell him where he was.

He wandered around like that for at least a quarter of an hour, disoriented by the pressure on his temples—that gnawing,
underground pounding of blood—as well as the flood of light pouring from the sky and making him squint because he'd left his sunglasses in the glove compartment.

The first thing he did was put them on the moment he climbed into his car. What a relief that was, to begin with. What a relief to be able to turn down the light, soften it some. He hung his head and for a long time kept his hands pressed against the steering wheel, his eyes closed; then he started the car and only just managed to drive away, swerving constantly to the left, verging on the other side of the road as cars coming the other way honked; or he'd go through a yellow light, which caused the same reactions that bore into his eardrums.

Until his nose began to bleed. At a red light, a woman studied him with glowering disgust mixed with fright, making him understand that something wasn't right. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the blood flowing down his chin, dribbling all the way to the front of his shirt. The other cars leaned on their horns because the light on the avenue had turned green and he wasn't moving. He was too busy frantically rummaging through his pockets in the hope of finding a handkerchief, or anything similar at all. Luckily, a roll of paper towels had been left on the backseat, so he tore off a few sheets and plastered them against his nose as a kind of collective hysteria took over the drivers behind him, who launched into a symphony of honks.

With one bloody hand awkwardly covering his nose, he put on his turn signal and cautiously cut across the right lane, but not without difficulty, since every one of his attempts at intrusion nearly caused an accident. But he needed to get out of the flow of traffic and take care of this umpteenth problem fate had
laid on him and that required keeping his head tilted back, for lack of a better strategy.

He'd worked up quite a sweat. Nose bleeding, a raging migraine hounding him since morning; but at least he'd reached the emergency lane of the road. He turned off the motor, flipped on his hazard signal. It wasn't the best place to rest, but that was overshadowed by the relief he felt at having avoided a fatal accident on the beltway along the lake.

He kept his head tilted back, soaked up the blood with several more sheets of paper towel while the traffic rumbled next to him like an underground river. The blue sky of afternoon was changing in places to pink.

The police officer knocked on his window and gestured for him to open it.

He hesitated for a second, then made up his mind to do it, with fluttering eyelids. The police officer drew back at the sight of a face in such bad shape. “My God, what's happened to you, sir? Were you beat up?” Marc shook his head. “Are you in any shape to drive, sir?” He nodded. “In that case, sir, we'll begin by vacating the emergency lane. You'll take the first exit. I'll follow you.” He was riding a motorcycle. Wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Looked as hard as nails.

When he was this overwrought, he usually went to his bedroom or found a dark corner as fast as he could, or made do with several covers over his head; it was better like that. The worst was to stay outside performing one of life's dismal daily obligations, such as putting up with the questioning of a police officer whose brain must have been the size of a marble, judging from that faint glimmer coming from his distrustful eyes.

“Sir, do you want me to take you to a hospital?” Marc shook
his head. “Are you sure?” Absolutely. So sure that each word pronounced by the policeman was like a sharp-edged stone somebody was trying to drive into his skull.

“Sir, are you under the effects of any drug?” He shook his head again. He was so annoyed, so full of contained rage. Was the steering wheel going to explode between his fingers? He remembered a chair rung he'd broken with his hands while his back was being thrashed with a belt. He'd always had powerful hands—as well as a pigheadedness that had to be taken in hand one way or another.

“Sir, take your hands off the wheel and get out of the car, please.”

“Get out?”

“Sir, get out of this car. I'm not going to repeat it.”

“No need to. I'm not deaf, you know. Let's not go overboard here.”

He knew he was in no state to stand up to a police officer. His brain was about to explode, the blood beat against his temples, throbbed behind his eyes, coagulated in his nostrils. He'd known himself to be more resilient, but an impulse had seized him and he hadn't thought first, hadn't known how to rein in his first reflex. Sometimes, the cup overflowed, sometimes a person refused to be nothing more than a pitiful little puppet, and he got out wondering what the coming fit was going to cost him. He'd seen enough movies to have an idea of the methods keepers of the peace used.

The police officer had had them drive onto a service road, which had been overtaken by rubbish, thistles, rusted scrap iron, weeds.

“Sir, are you in possession of a weapon?”

“A weapon? Of course not.”

“Sir, place your hands on the hood of the car. Spread your legs apart. I've got to make sure. I'm going to frisk you.”

“Wait, I'm dreaming.”

“Do as I say.”

“Listen, I've got a headache worse than all tarnation.”

“So do I.”

O
bviously, the chances of finding
her home at this hour were slim. Night was falling, and the setting sun poured buttercup yellow from its low position. Its intensity would have required sunglasses, but those had ended up in pieces. What woman in Myriam's situation would have wanted to wander around her empty ghost of an apartment when the evening had hardly begun—unless she was planning on dying an inch at a time.

As for him, the question wasn't relevant. Not for a single second had he thought about staying alone in the state he was in; he was losing it and needed somebody at his side in case of an emergency.