Read Men Online

Authors: Marie Darrieussecq

Men (5 page)

Olga stares at Solange, and at her reflection, one after the other. The cleanser gel has melted and Solange looks naked, transparent. She feels as if Olga can sense her thoughts—which are arising from some mysterious place, from the murky depths of her village, far from Los Angeles,
but lying low in the back of her head. She would like to apologise, tell Olga that we are all the same. She would like to open up her skin to show her universal Benetton colour.

Olga smiles but seems to hesitate before speaking. Even now, at this time of evening, sharing a bottle of Merlot in the dressing room, when everyone has left, Solange is her superior. Solange is the one on the screen, it's big budget, she's the Warner Bros girl, she's the one who ends up with bruises from the star. Olga purses her lips, half-disapproving, half-malicious. She laughs, her hand over her mouth. ‘Did he have a big one?'

IN THE GOLDEN NOCTURNAL LIGHT

She wasn't asleep. It didn't feel like it. Or else she was in a dream that, on waking, left her with the image of a rational world.

The phone rings and she knows it's him.

‘Hey.'

It's him.

There's a splintering in her chest and she wonders if he's saying
hey
because he's forgotten her name. ‘Hey,' she says in turn.

Trying not to shriek. So he wrote down her number. He didn't take the Post-it note on the coffee pot, but he wrote down her number. Looked for some paper and a pencil, made the effort. No, she's stupid, he must have put it straight into his phone.

He asks if he's disturbing her. It's not exactly polite small talk, at two in the morning. Questions, answers, possible strategies and responses—who cares: her chest is bursting with joy. ‘No, it's fine.' Her voice is husky.

‘Can I come by?'

‘Yes.'

There you go. That's it. He hung up. She drank a glass of water.

Still today she rubs the recollection against her memory and it produces heat, redness. Flashes of joy. Once again, she can see herself, feel herself entering the waiting state, as if entering an effervescent sea. Blissfully waiting for him.

If he is coming from Topanga, she has almost an hour ahead of her. She must have slept a bit: in the mirror she has sleep residue on her eyelids and mouth. She brushes her hair but leaves it a bit messy. No make-up. ‘Straight out of bed.' She's naked under her dressing-gown. Too much
.
She puts on one of her French camisoles. She has a collection of them, simple, cotton—American women don't realise how sexy camisoles are. But he is not American. What is a sexy woman for him? Jeans and a sweater, no shirt? The I-was-just-reading-quietly look. After all, she's at home.

She boils the kettle. No, better to open some wine. The Saint-Émilion her father sent her last Christmas. She puts on a dab of perfume, wonders whether to take a shower. Did she perspire a bit during the phone call? But there are men who like body odour. In fact, she does, too. Music.
The music she would have put on this evening if, instead of going to bed, she had been reading in the living room in her at-home outfit. What would he like? What woman listening to what music would he like?

No, he can take her as she is, dressing-gown and camisole. At two in the morning. She hesitates. Don't light the candle. The situation couldn't be clearer: no need to overdo it. Don't wear a bra. A woman at home doesn't wear a bra. Unless extreme measures are required. Her breasts are like those of a Japanese girl; she hopes he doesn't mind. Kouhouesso. Really, what sort of a name is that. Kouhouesso Nwokam.

She's so happy. So happy she'll get to see him. He's going to come. The certainty of it.

She's ready.

She rearranges her bouquet of peonies, cuts the stems a little, changes the water. Cleans the coffee table while she's at it.

She lies on the couch. She's hot. He should be here by now. She gets up. Grabs her book. Lies down again. She tries to read. Perhaps he changed his mind. That would be terrible. Perhaps he was held up somewhere. Or gave up, because it was so late?

She sends him a text. No answer. She nods off briefly. Later, she knows she's arrived at the edge of a cliff. At the tip of the waiting. The tip is embedded in her chest. She feels it, reddened by the flames. The edge of the cliff is a
narrow wire, a metal blade. She is burning up. It's almost four o'clock. She picks up her phone again, he definitely called, she didn't dream it, it's there on the screen. That short conversation. She puts his number into her contacts. Kouhouesso. Kouhouesso Nwokam.

It's early afternoon in France. She would be out walking. In the streets of Paris. In the freedom of the streets of Paris. A simple little skirt and heels. No ties to anything, daydreaming. Right now in France, Rose is at work. Text to Rose. Reply: call later on Skype. But the buzz of her phone already makes her feel better. In her apartment perched at the top of Bel Air, she has not disappeared. She has not disintegrated somewhere between Europe and America. At the juncture of the two continents. Separated by two fault lines, one that slices through the Atlantic, the other that will one day sever California from the rest of the world.

Kouhouesso. Kouhouesso. Nwokam. Up until now she had scarcely thought about Africa, other than to send off a cheque. Africa and its starving children. Africa and its machete massacres. Africa, where her father was born, although he never talks about it. The huge foreign land, a drop of liquid, hanging below Europe: never been on her itinerary. She worked in a pub in Moscow. Earned twenty thousand dollars for a one-hour performance in Hong Kong. Received a prize for
Musette
in Japan. From east to west and from west to east, but never south.

She turns on her computer, does a satellite search of
Africa. Cameroon is at the bottom of a right angle, one of many countries. The English-speaking part isn't marked. A band of mist follows the coastline, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, a string of lagoons and towns with names like Togo, Tegbi, Yemorasa, Akwidaa, Sassandra. When you get to Cape Palmas you end up in the ocean. If you head in the other direction, straight east, you find vegetation. You arrive in the Congo. Which extends a long way south. There are wide rivers with oval islands floating like leaves fallen from the trees. She learns that there are two Congos. The app can't decide where to mark the border between Kinshasa Congo and Brazzaville Congo. The two cities, K and B, are opposite each other on the two sides of the river, but further away each riverbank is marked by a red line indicating conflict. It's as if the islands were floating without a country, as if the river slipped stateless between its banks. Wide, but no wider (she turns the Earth around with her finger) than the Gironde and its mouth, where from Médoc you can see the lights of Royan, in the distance, through the grey.

Rose's face appears at the top of the screen,
bilibili.
Rose is in her office at the Medical Psychology Centre on Boulevard Ornano in Paris. She mustn't have had time to have lunch. While Solange is in her camisole on the slopes of Bel Air. Day and night at the same time. You never get used to it, that's for sure. Rose looks at her: ‘Wow, you look beautiful.' Solange looks at Rose, her best friend for twenty
years. Tries telepathically to transmit what she'd like to say. Kouhouesso Nwokam. She wonders if it's operating between them, what Rose calls transference. Rose describes it as a continuous transmission of radio waves between shrink and patient, in both directions, wherever you are on the planet.

Kouhouesso Nwokam. Kouhouesso Nwokam telepathically. Probably a bit tricky. Was he going to come, after all? The screen image wobbles and there are crackling sounds, sandstorms are gusting, enormous cables have been cast into the ocean so that Solange can speak to her friend Rose.

‘What do you think—I'm speaking to you as shrink—a man sleeps with you and seems to have a good time, but then doesn't call you, and then, when he does call, he makes you wait again?'

‘What time is it?' asks Rose, and it's not clear if she's worried about her friend or her next patient.

‘Four o'clock.'

Four o'clock on her side of the globe. In the morning. The sky is mauve-blue over Bel Air.

On the other side of Earth, Rose looks up at her pale sky. Solange hurries on. ‘This time it's different. What I feel—even allowing for the fact that he might not feel it—is special, precious, it hasn't happened to me for a long time, perhaps since we were adolescents, although'—she silences her straight away—‘I don't want to go back there.'

Rose says, ‘Waiting is an illness. A mental illness. Often a female one.'

Solange says, ‘What I feel means so much to me that I'm fine to wait, I'm fine to wait a bit. Waiting isn't even that bad. And, you know, he's not like the others, the others you're thinking about, it's not a repeat performance.'

She doesn't feel like telling her that he's black. Nor that she's only known him for three days. Various ideas are running through her mind. Various details. On a couch, she wouldn't know where to begin.

A sudden image pops up: Saint Teresa made into a Bernini statue, spotlit by myriad beams, each one sharp but exquisite, each one leading her back to him. Which beam does she follow first? Which does she extend further? Rose wouldn't understand. At worst, she'd pronounce some platitude. Even shock would be hurtful. So he was black, surely there was no need to kick up a huge fuss about it? In the village where they were born, everyone was white, except—now that she thinks about it—Monsieur Kudeshayan, the grocer. Who was not exactly black: his skin was darker than Kouhouesso's, charcoal-grey, grey like lead, but he was from Pakistan or somewhere around there. You don't call those black people black. Oddly enough.

Perhaps something cropped up. But he could have called her. Perhaps he fell asleep. Surely he didn't have an accident? Another of those ideas that pop into her mind: do black people have a tendency to be late? Do Africans have a slightly idiosyncratic relationship with time? The beam pierces her. Is that a racist thought? Is she being bombarded by racist
beams? Is Kouhouesso black in the sense of—is Kouhouesso the black people? So she would be the Basque people?

She would like to talk about this with someone. She would like to talk about this with him. She would like to go to the nightclub with him. Basque, on the corner of Vine and Hollywood. She would like to speak to him about where she comes from.

And how about with women? Don't they have a slightly idiosyncratic relationship with women?

Those beams, they're flashes of lightning. Could Rose possibly accuse her—let's say, simply put her attraction down to the undeniable fact that he has dark skin, and, as well, an impossible name, African in any case—could Rose reduce her crazy desire for this undreamt-of man to the stupid stubborn fact that he is black?

The doorbell. It's him.

The precise object of her waiting—him,
here.
Him and not another. The waiting had been so immense that he had been, as it were, dissolved by it. He had become—him, this man—inconceivable. A constellation whose existence is known, visible in the sky, but beyond reach and consequently abstract, and in the end irrelevant.

She had the strange impression of possibly being content with something else, with someone else, another man or even a film she might have chosen. What would the
film have been about? And what other man—would he have been
black
? The annoying question appeared to her as if in a dream, involuntarily. An angry crowd was yelling at her, fists raised beneath the windows in her mind. A mechanical crowd, with huge keys in their backs.

Him. He was
here.
Did he want a coffee, some water, some wine? He chose wine. Or an orange juice? She had very good oranges. She was talking rubbish. Her pulse was pounding in her throat. She was not used to it.
Him.
He helped himself to wine. Didn't mention being late—was he in fact
late
? In the end, had he actually mentioned a time? He was sitting there, at ease, his magnetic field spread around him like a cape, and she no longer knew why she had expended so much energy waiting for him; why she had not simply waited for him, like you wait for someone who is coming, someone who is going to ring the bell and sit down with his glass, his ease, and his psychedelic coat.

She was hungry. Another image superimposed itself, an absurd image, on the TV one day, of a tall, thin Ethiopian woman leaning against a tree, eating the bark. She had no image in her mind for English-speaking Cameroon.

He was speaking to her. She was not listening. She got up to find some pistachios. She had waited for him so long that she was still waiting for him. The waiting kept cruising under its own momentum, like a boat. She was in the boat. And he was, too, sitting on his couch in the middle of the sea, floating, glass in hand, and only in a distracted and
enchanting way paying attention to the passing cruise ship packed with passengers talking furiously.

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