Ladivine (32 page)

The man was taking his time looking over the car, and Richard Rivière saw the elegant drape of his navy-blue overcoat, unbuttoned and gracefully rippling as he circled the vehicle, bent down to inspect the wheel rims, then lithely stood up again, his body visibly honed by regular exercise.

The coat must be cashmere, he thought, and the dark-gray pinstripe suit a silk-and-wool blend. On his feet Richard Rivière had noted, with a fervid curiosity he knew well, and which always filled him with shame, a pair of polished, pointed-toe ankle boots.

And when the man first squatted down Richard Rivière was astonished to see he was wearing raspberry-red socks.

Astonishment gave way to envious loathing, and that, too, was an emotion he knew well, always depressed and disappointed to be feeling it, him, Richard Rivière, who aspired to be a sensible and thoughtful man, noble in his sentiments.

Why, then, could he not help feeling jealous and frustrated when a well-dressed man had the breezy audacity to display some accessory—gaudy socks or a comical tie—that Richard Rivière would never dare buy, lest he give himself away as what he thought he was in others’ eyes, a parvenu with odd and dubious tastes?

He was not unaware that such encounters with tall, thin, chic men also inspired in him, along with envy, an immediate, baseless respect, slightly craven and limp.

How stupid, and how pitiful!

He put on an aloof and superior air, checked his watch. He glanced at the ground-floor windows of his apartment building and was relieved to see no sign of movement behind the sheer curtains. He would rather Trevor not see him trying to sell the SUV to a man of this sort, exactly the type Trevor made a great show of mocking, with their tailored suits and their gym-room physiques.

“Okay, it’s a deal,” said the man, striding athletically toward him, his tan young face friendly and, Richard Rivière fleetingly thought, almost fawning.

“You’ll take it?” he asked, surprised.

Collecting himself, he added:

“You won’t be sorry.”

The man inside Richard Rivière who forever strove to decipher a customer’s uncertainties or unspoken misgivings thought he could make out an anxious little twinge behind the smile, a touch too unwavering, and the gaze, a touch too ostentatiously frank, of this man whose elegance was perhaps also, in the end, just a little too impeccable, he thought, every detail as if carefully weighed for its charismatic effect.

But why must those intuitions always be silenced by the Richard Rivière who was intimidated by wealth or its appearance, and anxious to sell what he had, to be rid of it, like some ill-gotten gain?

As the free, severe, impotent part of him whispered that question in his ear, he glanced again at the ground floor of his building and saw the kitchen window ajar.

That meant Trevor was up, eating his breakfast, perhaps observing his stepfather’s obsequious charade from his chair, with that awful little smirk he’d developed, full of smug, listless irony. Trevor’s pitiless judgments meant nothing to Richard Rivière, but he didn’t like being spied on, didn’t like feeding the young man’s mindless censoriousness at his expense.

He turned his back to the window, irritated, and grimaced a smile at his customer, who was explaining that he was planning to give the car to his wife as a present. Yes, yes, let’s get this over with, he thought.

His eye lit on the man’s white cotton shirt, darkened by two little sweat stains on either side of the purple polka-dot tie. A few drops of sweat, too, he observed, between the upper lip and the nose, so short and straight that it must have been artificial, surgically reshaped.

Richard Rivière felt preoccupied, out of sorts, he didn’t know why.

He’d forgotten about Trevor. He’d almost forgotten that an overdressed stranger was on the verge of buying a Grand Cherokee for forty-seven thousand euros without haggling, nearly five thousand more than he’d paid for it at the Jeep dealership.

Come on, let’s get this over with, he was thinking, depressed, his mind elsewhere, but fixated in spite of himself on such trivialities as the beads of sweat glinting on the man’s suntanned skin or the way he stuck out his lower lip after every sentence to blow at the lock of hair draping his brow. The lock fluttered up, and Richard Rivière saw the pale skin, fragile and tender, at his hairline.

He would later realize that the wide-awake Richard Rivière inside him had tried to sound the alarm. Wasn’t this man clearly nervous, though a skilled-enough actor to give himself away only by a sudden sweat in the chilly air of this autumn morning?

He would also realize, later, that he’d refused to understand out of sadness and weariness, perhaps even that he had understood but wouldn’t accept it, because sadness had suddenly got the better of him.

He looked past the man’s shoulders at the mountain, still covered with snow, and the bright, frozen sky beyond.

Nine years he’d been living in Annecy, and he’d never got used to the mountains. They left him cold, wary, vaguely hostile, because he enjoyed none of the pleasures they seemed to offer, and he found them unfriendly, stupid, and portentous in the way they loomed over the city.

He’d never wanted to learn how to ski, he didn’t like the atmosphere of the resorts, the pointlessness of such arduous exertions.

Sometimes he woke with a start in the night, shivering as if shaken by a huge icy hand, and then he got up, went to the window, and found the mountain looking at him in the dull-gray darkness.

The idea that it would always be there, when he got up and when he lay down and long after he was dead, immovably there and watching, discouraged him.

He would lie down again with the disagreeable feeling that he wasn’t his own master, that at any moment the mountain could blow a cold breath down his neck.

It could feel his dislike, and it scorned him, that was what he was thinking, and he had no one to tell of it.

“I’d like to be paid by wire transfer,” he heard himself announcing, his voice almost hostile.

“Of course,” the man answered warmly.

Richard Rivière took a contract from his briefcase and handed it to the man, who sat down behind the wheel of the car to look it over.

He stayed outside, shivering, suddenly unable to rejoice at having so effortlessly made a sale that would bring him a tidy profit. What would he do now, what desire would enliven the days to come?

For the past several months, ever since he took out a loan to buy that SUV for resale, each new day dawned with that question, which he’d managed to turn into something exciting and even ennobling: Would this be the day that he sold the car?

Much of the pleasure he felt on waking each morning, much of the good cheer he displayed both at home and at work, came from the idea of earning five thousand euros for doing virtually nothing. And now it was done, and he felt only a weary gloom, and now he dreaded the prospect of an existence stripped of that motivation.

And what, for that matter, would he do with the money? Nothing tempted him that he didn’t already own, and what did he actually have? Nothing much, compared with what his colleagues or wife thought important.

Sometimes he thought he spent money only to justify his urge to make money, and he alone knew his enthusiasm was feigned, that his interest in clothes, and now even in cars, was an act, borrowed from a personality he scarcely remembered as his own, now alien to him, and unpleasant, too. Outings to the city’s most lavish restaurants, multicourse menus, pricey wines he couldn’t appreciate, every delight he felt obliged to indulge in left him bored or withdrawn.

Nothing in this world, he thought, quite met his desires, but what those desires were he couldn’t say.

That reticence before everything that should have made him happy, everything he seemed to want from his work, from his cogitations and calculations, dated back to the year after he’d left Langon. Oh, he saw it now, even if he’d denied it at first. He saw it.

He was sick, in a way, but his illness had no name, and wasn’t easily described, even to himself. Was it nostalgia?

It wasn’t what he once knew, what once was, that he missed, what he missed was what should have been, or could have been, had he only known how to go about it.

Because he missed not Clarisse Rivière but the woman Clarisse Rivière should or could have been, a woman he didn’t know, a woman he couldn’t so much as imagine, and that, he thought, was nobody’s fault but his own.

Looking through the windshield, he saw the man sign his name at the bottom of the contract, where he himself had already signed. That was that.

The buyer got out of the car, displaying a broad expanse of raspberry socks and, just above them, two slender shins, orange tanned and hairless like his face and his soft hands, every fingernail highlighted by a white pencil line under the tip.

There was something comical about such fastidious grooming, Richard Rivière said to himself, and yet once again he felt inadequate before that younger, taller, fitter, better-looking man; he felt horribly heavy and worn and provincial.

At such times he always feared a resurgence of the faint southwestern accent he’d struggled to disguise even when he lived in that part of France, as a precaution, on the theory that losing it couldn’t possibly hurt and might one day prove useful and because it made him secretly proud not to speak like his parents. But his accent hadn’t gone away, he knew, he’d only tamed it, and emotion could always bring it back. He had particular difficulty saying
cette
rather than
c’te,
and so at work never referred to a car as
cette voiture,
sticking to the far less risky
ce
véhicule.

“You can pick it up as soon as the money’s in my account,” he said, casually kicking one foot toward the SUV.

“You’ll have it the day after tomorrow,” the man said.

He blew on his forelock, flashing a practiced, perfect smile. How charming and slim he was in the blue mountain light! A master skier, obviously, able to cut pure, complex lines in the snow, like his signature’s long, self-assured strokes.

Richard Rivière had planned to offer him a cup of coffee in the apartment if the deal went through, but now he didn’t feel up to it. Suppose Trevor appeared in his old pajama bottoms, holdovers from his teenage years, and possibly bare chested, his hair unkempt; suppose he spoke to the customer with that irritating way of giving a caustic turn to the most ordinary words, having already judged you too dull-witted to notice the sarcasm, the scorn—between his exasperating stepson, whose every supercilious little maneuver he knew all too well, and this man who to his deep shame intimidated him, Richard Rivière had lost all confidence in his ability to stifle his accent.

What cruel joy Trevor had felt, one evening when they were celebrating his mother’s birthday and Richard had drunk a full bottle of champagne, on hearing his stepfather wisecracking with a Toulouse accent! Weeks afterward, Trevor was still forever shouting
Merci
bieng!
and erupting into a mirthless laugh, hard and triumphant, as if he’d finally put his finger on the most contemptible thing about Richard Rivière.

The man drove off in the strange, battered little car he’d come out in—not his, he’d immediately made clear, but on loan from the garage while his own was in the shop.

Wasn’t it odd, Richard Rivière mused, that a man so obsessed with his appearance should go putting around in such a ridiculous car? Or was that merely the sign of an elegance too self-assured to care what others might think? If so, why was the man so bent on informing him that it wasn’t his car? What did he care if Richard Rivière was surprised?

His inexplicable dejection faded, and for a few minutes, as he stood in the parking lot of his building, he congratulated himself on selling the SUV.

In the distance, the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds.

Now he could see only the pink and brown roofs of the old town below him, only the gentle green slopes halfway up the mountains, like the hills between Langon and Malagar, where, some Sunday mornings, he used to go walking with his daughter Ladivine.

How much better he felt with the snow out of sight!

But that relief led his memory, suddenly roused and enlivened, to bring back old images of long drives with Clarisse Rivière, early in their marriage, leisurely jaunts through the vine-covered hills in their old 304, the top down, both smoking and talking, he thought at the time, in his happiness, in the bliss of a young man deeply in love, with a sweet, innocent frivolity—or his walks on those same roads with his serious, attentive, very young daughter, starting from just behind their house, and so exquisite sometimes was the feeling of the child’s hand in his, of the forthright, benevolent sun, of the child’s limpid, upturned gaze, that he would have wept with gratitude and trembled in terror had he not held himself back lest he frighten the girl.

Such memories did him no good.

Colleagues his age, even his wife, however luckless with her children, seemed to love reminiscing about their days as young parents, when their joys were stronger and deeper than now, they said fatalistically, now that their job was essentially to resist as best they could those charmless children’s demands for money or favors and fight off their own disappointment.

Richard Rivière was not at all disappointed at the young woman his little girl had become. In his eyes, she was an entirely successful adult.

And the two children she’d brought into the world, whose pictures she often sent him, those two little Germans he’d never seen, seemed two perfect little human beings themselves.

He had nothing to regret but his own agonizing unease. Because he could no longer bear to see his daughter Ladivine, nor even to think about her for long.

He himself found this scandalous. What kind of a father was he?

He wasn’t much good in that way. He was no good at all, now, in that way.

But how could it be helped?

Every meeting with his daughter, every phone call, every daydream about his child, brought him back to the awful feeling that the three of them had lived an existence deformed by something huge and unnameable, hovering over them but never taking shape or fading away, making of their life a hollow travesty of life.