The attendant gave me the key, and I saw his surprise when I started out in reverse and nearly ran into one of the gasoline pumps. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stop at the next red light. That was how it happened in my dreams: the brakes had given out, and I was running all the red lights and driving down one-way streets in the wrong direction.
I managed to park the car in front of the hotel and asked the concierge for a directory. I looked up her address, but there was no Jacqueline at that number. She'd probably got married in the past fifteen years. But whose wife was she?
Delorme ( P.)
Dintillac
Jones (E. Cecil)
Lacoste (René)
Walter (J.)
Sanchez-Cirès
Vidal
I only had to call each of these names.
In the phone booth I dialed the first number. It rang for a long time. Then someone answered. A man's voice:
'Yes ... Hello?'
'Could I speak to Jacqueline?'
'You must be mistaken, monsieur.'
I hung up. I no longer had the nerve to dial the other numbers.
I waited for night to fall before leaving the hotel. I sat down behind the wheel and started the car. I knew Paris well, and I would have taken the most direct route to the Porte de la Muette if l'd been on foot, but in this car I was navigating blind. I hadn't driven for a long time, and I didn't know which streets were one-way. I decided to drive straight ahead.
I went far out of my way along the Quai de Passy and the Avenue de Versailles. Then I turned onto the deserted Boulevard Murat. I could have run the red lights, but it pleased me to obey them. I drove slowly, unhurriedly, like someone cruising along a seaside parkway on a summer night. The stoplights were speaking only to me, with their mysterious and friendly signals.
I stopped in from of the entrance to the apartment building, on the other side of the avenue, under the branches of the first trees in the Bois de Boulogne, where the streetlights created an area of semidarkness. The two swinging doors of the entryway, with their ironwork and glass, were lit up. So were the windows on the top floor. They were open wide, and I could make our a few silhouettes on one of the balconies. I heard music and the murmur of conversation. Several cars came and parked on the street in front of the building, and I was sure that the people getting out of them and stepping into the entryway were all headed for the top floor. At one point, someone leaned over the balcony and called out to two silhouettes walking toward the building. A woman's voice. She was telling the other two the floor number. But it wasn't Jacqueline's voice, or at least I didn't recognize it. I decided not to stay there any longer spying on them, and to go upstairs. If it was Jacqueline's party, I didn't know how she would react to the sight of someone she hadn't heard from in fifteen years walking into her apartment unannounced. We'd only known each other for a short while: three or four months. Not much compared to fifteen years. But surely she hadn't forgotten those days … Unless her present life had erased them, in the same way that the blinding beam from a spotlight throws everything outside its path into the deepest shadows.
I waited for more guests to arrive. This time there were three of them. One of them waved toward the balconies on the top floor. I caught up with them just as they entered the building. Two men and a woman. I said hello. It seemed clear to them that I was also invited upstairs.
We went up in the elevator. The two men spoke with an accent, but the woman was French. They were a little older than me.
I forced myself to smile. I said to the woman:
'It's going to be a very nice time, up there ...'
She smiled as well.
'Are you a friend of Darius?' she asked me.
'No. I'm a friend of Jacqueline.'
She seemed not to understand.
'
I haven't seen Jacqueline for a long time,' I said. 'Is she
well?'
The woman frowned.
'I don't know her.'
Then she exchanged a few words in English with the two others. The elevator stopped.
One of the men rang the doorbell. My hands were sweating. The door opened and from inside I heard a hum of conversation and music. A man with brown, swept-back hair and a dusky complexion was smiling at us. He was wearing a beige suit of heavy cotton.
The woman kissed him on both cheeks.
'Hello, Darius.'
'Hello, my dear.'
He had a deep voice and a slight accent. The two men also greeted him with a 'Hello, Darius.' I shook his hand without speaking, but he didn't seem surprised by my presence.
He led us through the entryway and into a living room with open bay windows. There were guests standing here and there in small groups. Darius and the three people I had come up with in the elevator were heading toward one of the balconies. I followed close behind them. They were stopped by a couple at the edge of the balcony, and a conversation started up.
I stood back. They'd forgotten me. I retreated to the other side of the room and sat down at one end of a couch. At the other end, two young people, pressed together, were speaking quietly to each other. No one was paying any attention to me. I tried to spot Jacqueline among the crowd. About twenty people. I looked at the man they called Darius, over by the threshold of the balcony, a slender silhouette in a beige suit. I thought he must be about forty years old. Could Darius be Jacqueline's husband? The clamor of the conversations was drowned out by music, which seemed to be coming from the balconies.
I examined the face of one woman after another, but in vain; I didn't see Jacqueline. This was the wrong floor. I wasn't even sure she lived in this building. Now Darius was in the middle of the room, a few meters from me, standing with a very elegant blonde woman who was listening to him intently. From time to time she laughed. I tried to make out what language he was speaking, but the music covered his voice. Why not walk up to the man and ask him where Jacqueline was? In his deep, courtly voice he would reveal the solution to this mystery, which was not really a mystery at all: if he knew Jacqueline, if Jacqueline was his wife, or what floor she lived on. It was as simple as that. He was facing in my direction. Now he was listening to the blonde woman and by chance his gaze had come to rest on me. At first, I had the impression that he didn't see me. And then be gave me a friendly little wave with his hand. He seemed surprised that I was sitting alone on the couch, speaking to no one, but I was much more comfortable now than when I came into the apartment, and a memory from fifteen years earlier came back to me. We had arrived in London, Jacqueline and I, at Charing Cross Station, about five o'clock in the afternoon. We had taken a taxi to get to the hotel, which we'd chosen at random from a guidebook. Neither of us knew London. When the taxi turned onto the Mall and that shady, tree-lined avenue opened up before me, the first twenty years of my life fell to dust, like a weight, like handcuffs or a harness that I never thought I would be free of. Just like that, nothing remained of all those years. And if happiness was the fleeting euphoria I felt that afternoon, then for the first time in my existence I was happy.
Later, it was dark, and we were walking aimlessly in the area of Ennismore Gardens. We walked along the iron fence surrounding an abandoned garden. There was laughter, music, and the hum of conversation coming from the top floor of one of the houses. The windows were wide open, and a group of silhouettes stood out against the light. We stayed there, leaning on the garden fence. One of the guests sitting on the edge of the balcony had noticed us and had motioned for us to come up. In big cities, in summertime, people who have long since lost track of each other or who don't even know each other meet one evening on a terrace, then lose each other again. And none of it really matters.
Darius had come over to me:
'Have you lost your friends?' he said with a smile.
It took me a moment to understand who he meant: the three people in the elevator.
'They're not really my friends.'
But I immediately wished I hadn't said that. I didn't want him asking himself what I was doing here.
'
I haven't known them long,' I told him. 'And they had
the idea of bringing me here ...'
He smiled again.
'The friends of my friends are my friends.'
But he was uncomfortable because he didn't know who I was. To put him at his case, I said, as quietly as possible:
'Do you often throw such nice parties?'
'Yes. In August. And always when my wife is away.'
Most of the guests had left the living room. How could they all fit on the balconies?
'I feel so lonely when my wife is away ...'
His eyes had taken on a melancholy expression. He was still smiling at me. This was the time to ask him if his wife's name was Jacqueline, but I didn't dare risk it yet.
'And you, do you live in Paris?'
He was probably asking just to be polite. After all, I was his guest, and he didn't want me to be sitting alone on a couch away from all the others.
'Yes, but I don't know if l'm going to stay ...'
Suddenly I felt a need to confide in him. It had been three months, more or less, since I had spoken to anyone.
'My work is something I can do anywhere, as long as I have a pen and a sheet of paper ...'
'You're a writer?'
'If you can call it that ...'
He wanted me to tell him titles of my books. Maybe he'd read one.
'I don't think so,' I told him.
'It must be exciting to write, hmm?'
He must not have had much practice with one-to-one conversations on such serious matters.
'I'm keeping you from your guests,' I told him. 'For that matter, I think I might have driven them all away.'
There was almost no one left in the living room or on the balconies.
He laughed lightly:
'Not at all … Everyone's gone up to the terrace ...'
There were still a few guests left in the living room, ensconced on a couch across the room, a white couch like the one where I was sitting next to Darius.
'It's been a pleasure to make your acquaintance,' he told me.
Then he moved toward the others, among them the blonde woman he had been speaking with a few moments before and the man in the blazer from the elevator.
'Don't you think we need some music here?' he asked them, very loudly, as if he were only there to keep the party going. 'I'll go put on a record.'
He disappeared into the next room. After a moment, the voice of a
chanteuse
came forth.
He sat down with the others on the couch. He had already forgotten me.
It was time for me to leave, but I couldn't tear myself away from the sound of conversation and laughter coming from the terrace and, from the couch, the voices of Darius and his guests occasionally breaking through the music. I couldn't quite make out what they were saying, and I let myself be lulled by the song.
Someone was ringing the doorbell. Darius stood up and walked toward the front door. He smiled at me as he passed by. The others went on talking, and in the heat of the discussion the man in the blazer was making broad gestures, as if he were trying to convince them of something.
Voices in the entryway. They were coming nearer. I heard Darius and a woman speaking in low tones. I turned around. Darius was standing with a couple, and all three of them were at the threshold of the living room. The man was tall, brown-haired, wearing a gray suit, with rather heavy features, his blue eyes shallow-set. The woman was wearing a yellow summer dress that left her shoulders bare.
'We've come too late,' the man said. 'Everyone has already left ...'
He had a slight accent.
'No, no,' said Darius. 'They're waiting for us upstairs.' He took each of them by the arm.
The woman, whom I had seen in three-quarters profile, turned around. My heart jumped. I recognized Jacqueline. They were walking toward me. I stood up, like a robot.
Darius introduced them to me:
'George and Thérèse Caisley.'
I greeted them with a nod. I looked the so-called Thérèse Caisley squarely in the eyes, but she didn't blink. Apparently she didn't recognize me. Darius seemed embarrassed not to be able to introduce me by name.
'These are my downstairs neighbors,' he told me. 'I'm happy they came ... And in any case, they wouldn't have been able to sleep because of the noise ...
Caisley shrugged:
'Sleep? … But it's still early,' he said. 'The day is only beginning.'
I tried to make eye contact with her. Her gaze was absent. She didn't see me, or else she was deliberately ignoring my presence. Darius led them across the room to the couch where the others were sitting. The man in the blazer stood up to greet Thérèse Caisley. The conversation started up again. Caisley was very talkative. She hung back a little, with a sullen or bored look. I wanted to walk toward her, take her aside, and quietly say to her:
'Hello, Jacqueline.'