Babylon Read online

  I don’t know how that idea for a Spring Celebration got started in my head. We never did that kind of thing in the house, neither drinks nor celebration, much less for springtime. When we have friends in, it’s never more than six people sitting around a table. Early on I’d wanted to do something with girlfriends from the Pasteur, along with a few of Pierre’s colleagues, and then I thought of other names, I began to envision some more or less fruitful interactions, and right away the question of chairs came up. Pierre said, “Borrow some chairs from the Manoscrivis upstairs.”

  “Without inviting them?”

  “Yes inviting them. She could even sing!”

  The Manoscrivi pair didn’t interest Pierre, but if anything he found Lydie more amusing than Jean-Lino. I sent out forty or so invitations. I immediately regretted it. I lay awake the whole night. How was I going to seat all those people? We had seven chairs, counting the Moroccan thing. The Manoscrivis probably had about the same number. The big Moroccan chair was a pest but how could we get it out of the way? Aside from the chairs, the soft hassock and the couch together could, given an ideal synergy-combination, seat another seven people. Three times seven makes twenty-one. Plus a stool from the basement—so all right, twenty-two. (I’d considered the chest as well, but the chest had to serve as another surface along with the coffee table.) We’d need ten more chairs, but folding ones. They’d have to be foldable so they could be unfolded as needed and not stand there open as if they were waiting for spectators, but where would I get folding chairs? The apartment wasn’t spacious enough to allow for thirty unfolded chairs, not to mention the icy uniformity of rental chairs. And why would we need so many chairs? When you give that kind of informal buffet supper—yes, informal!!—people don’t all sit, they talk standing up, they move around, you have to expect some back-and-forth, random sitting, people perch on chair arms or squat on the floor, relaxed, leaning against the wall, of course! About the glasses . . . I got up in the night to count how many we had. Thirty-five, various kinds. Plus six champagne goblets in another cupboard. In the morning I told Pierre, We have no glasses. Got to buy twenty champagnes and some wineglasses. Pierre said he’d seen plastic champagne goblets. I said, Ah no, absolutely not, I’m already unhappy having paper plates, the glasses have got to be glass. Pierre said it’s stupid to buy goblets we’ll never use again. I said, We’re not drinking champagne out of plastic like at some office retirement party! Pierre said, They sell these superrigid imitation-glass flutes that are just fine. I looked on the Internet and ordered three boxes of ten “Elegance” champagne flutes each and three boxes each holding fifty disposable knives, forks, and spoons in metallized plastic, stainless-steel style. That calmed me down until the Saturday afternoon of the party when I had a new crisis about the glasses. We had champagne goblets but no wineglasses. After wandering around the Deuil-l’Alouette shops, I came home with thirty wineglasses. And a carton of six champagne goblets. I pulled out a never-used tablecloth, laid it on the chest, and set out all the cups, the champagne glasses, the wineglasses, the hybrids, and even four little vodka glasses in case someone wanted vodka. There were more than a hundred glasses counting the ones from the kitchen. Lydie came to the door at six o’clock, already partly done up, with a chair on either arm. We went upstairs to get the others. There was a yellow velvet armchair in the bedroom. I had never seen their bedroom. The same space as ours except ten times as colorful, ten times more bordello-like, icons on the wall, a poster of Nina Simone half-naked in a white string dress, and the bed in a different position. Eduardo the Cat lay among the pillows, mistrustful and languid. “What are you doing there!” Lydie cried. She clapped her hands and the cat took off. She said, “I don’t allow him in the bedroom.” I saw what looked like a chamber pot with a wooden lid. In a glance I could tell that Jean-Lino had had no say in the interior decoration, not that you could make out his personal touch elsewhere either, but the rest of the apartment had more the feel of the random compromise between lives. The window was half-open, framed in silky panels like a British candy box, floating gently; in the distance over the apartment buildings you could make out a bit of the Eiffel Tower not visible from our flat. Their bedroom seemed gayer, more youthful than ours. Lifting the very heavy armchair, I was jealous of their bedroom. I have often been weighed down by the bedrooms in my life. Childhood room. Hospital rooms. Hotel rooms with a lousy view. It’s the window that makes the room. The space it outlines, the light it brings in. And its curtains. Those sheer panels! I’ve been in the hospital three times in my life, counting childbirth. Each time I’ve been oppressed by the hospital room with its big, slightly frosted windows showing a symmetrical row of buildings, or lopped branches, or an overexpansive sky. The hospital room drained me of hope each time. Even with the baby nearby in his glass cradle.

  One of Robert Frank’s best-known photos is a view of Butte, a mining town in Montana, taken from the window of a hotel room. Rooftops, warehouses. Smoke in the distance. Half the landscape is blocked on either side by net curtains. The childhood bedroom I shared with my sister Jeanne looked out partly on the wall of a gymnasium. The stucco was crumbling off in great chunks. If I leaned to the left, I could see a street without people but with a bus stop. We lived in Puteaux in a brick apartment house, since demolished (I’ve gone by there, I recognize nothing). We had exactly those same curtains, the same weave, the same slightly rumpled broad vertical border. They opened on the same dismal picture of the world. The window ledge was the same too. A ledge in soiled stone, too narrow, supporting nothing. The Butte hotel room looks out on some dreary shacks and an empty highway. The one in Puteaux gave onto a rear wall with no openings. You would never have put that kind of fabric in front of a glorious thing. I told Lydie, “I worry this armchair will be bulky.” “Yes, yes, at worst we can take it down later.”

  She led me into the living room. She had created a little jungle on the balcony, the boxlike kind of terrace they put on modern buildings, the sort you don’t go out onto much. There was a big mimosa spreading its branches that you could see from below.

  Potted shrubs were budding. Sometimes the water she poured on them would splash down onto our terrace. I said, “It’s wonderful, your balcony.” She showed me her sprouting tulips and some crocuses that had bloomed that very morning. “You need anything else? Plates, glasses?”

  “I think I have enough.”

  “While you’re here, could you sign a petition against grinding up baby chicks?”

  “They grind up baby chicks?”

  “The males. They can’t become hens so they’re chopped up alive in the grinding machines.”

  “How horrible!” I said as I added my name and signature to a list.

  “Napkins? I have these napkins in a crumpled linen that don’t need ironing.”

  “I have everything I need.”

  “Jean-Lino went down to buy some champagne. And to smoke his little Chesterfield.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Please.”

  She was much more excited than I was. My anxiety attacks had exhausted me and the party loomed like a punishment. Her pleasure made me ashamed. I found her touching and sweet. She hadn’t expected this invitation from neighbors she saw as condescending. We left the flat with three more chairs. Downstairs I said, “This is perfect, thanks so much, Lydie, now let’s go make ourselves beautiful!”

  She gripped my wrist in a show of complicity. “One of these days I’ll have to do a readjustment on your aura.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll check you out with my crystal. Clear whatever’s clogged, cleanse the organs. Restore the flow.”

  “That’ll take years.”

  She laughed and disappeared into the stairwell,

  shaking her orange hairdo.

  More on the curtains: my friend in early adolescence (before my Denner years) was named Joelle. She was beautiful and funny. We were never an inch apart, day or night. Her family was even cra
zier than mine. Among all kinds of nutty stuff we used to do oil paintings—I still have a few of them, overloaded with gunk—we wrote songs, stories, we lived in Pataugas boots and boys’ sweaters, it was the beatnik period. Myself, I never did more than grass and a little alcohol, Joelle got into acid and other freak-out things, and our friendship began to fall apart. One year she came back from Asia by air ambulance, she had taken some hallucinogenic mushroom that unhinged her. She’d just turned eighteen. Twenty years later she telephoned me. She’d found me through my sister on Facebook. I went to see her in Aubervilliers, in a flat that looked out on an interior courtyard. Joelle was just back from the Antilles with a child by a Martiniquais guy who took off into the bush. She had gotten a nursing certificate, she was looking for work. They were living in two connected rooms, an entry hall with a table in it and a bedroom. Dark rooms, made still darker by faded curtains. While it was still late daytime Joelle lit a lamp. We sat talking in that mixture of daylight and electric light that brings back the oppressive atmosphere of Sundays. Sunday was the only day in our house when we could relax about saving electricity, normally we had to turn out the lights in a room even before we left it. Jeanne and I had got used to living in darkness, I much preferred an un-sad darkness to this lugubrious combination. Joelle made me tea, I watched her sitting there with her anxious little boy against the yellowish background. I thought, We’re not going to get anywhere. I left at the end of the afternoon, abandoning her for the second time in my life.

  An hour before the party things were pretty much under control, the platters filled, the quiches ready for the oven. Pierre would take care of the salads. On the clothing front, two outfits had been set out for a few days now in the full understanding that in the end I would wind up putting on the no-problem no-risk black dress. I swallowed a Xanax and went to pretty up with a new anti-aging product prescribed by Gwyneth Paltrow. Intellectually I disapprove of the term “anti-aging,” which I find guilt-inducing and dumb, but another part of my brain buys into the therapeutic terminology. I recently ordered Cate Blanchett’s favorite cream over the Internet, on the claim that every stylish Australian carried it in her purse. There must be something a little wrong with me. On the radio people talked about the psychological fatigue of the French people. Despite the vagueness of the idea, I was pleased to learn that the French were in the same condition I am. The French had definitively lost their sense of safety. The same old song again. Who can call themselves safe? Everything’s uncertain. It’s the basic condition of life. On top of that, over the air they were saying people are alarmed about the weakening of the social bond. Neoliberalism and globalization—those two calamities—are apparently obstructing the creation of bonds. I thought to myself, You’re creating a social bond tonight in your apartment in Deuil-l’Alouette. You’re lighting candles, you’re plumping cushions for your guests, you put the onion tarts in the fridge and you’re applying your face cream with circular upward motions as prescribed. You’re giving a little touch of youth to existence. A woman is supposed to be cheerful. Unlike a man, who is entitled to spleen and melancholy. After a certain age a woman is condemned to good spirits. When you sulk at twenty it’s sexy, when you do it at sixty it’s a drag. They didn’t say “create a social bond” when I was young, I don’t know when that phrase—in the singular—dates from. Nor what it means: the bond reduced to its abstract form has no virtue in itself. Another one of those hollow expressions.

  My mother died ten days ago. I didn’t see a lot of her, the death doesn’t change much in my life except that somewhere on earth there used to exist my mother. Yesterday I had a visit from the home health aide who had taken care of her through the last period, and whom I owed money. A huge woman who always scared me and who pants when she talks. She had heard about the drama in our building and was obviously hungry for the details. Disappointed at my reticence, and all the while munching on a St Michel cookie, she switched to the story of a woman baker in Vitrolles who had killed her children on Christmas Eve. In the nighttime she had wrapped the gifts, set them beneath the tree, then went into her son’s room and pressed the pillow over his face till he smothered. Then she went to the daughter’s room and did exactly the same thing. The aide said, “She wraps the presents, puts them under the tree, and she goes right upstairs and kills the kids.” She said, “What I don’t like is, they tell you all that and then afterward it’s total silence. You hear the story over all the radio stations and then zero. They lure you in and then they slam the door in your face. The wars, the massacres, all that’s too global,” she said, picking up another cookie. “To me, the global stuff, that doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t take me out of myself. A story from regular life, yes. It fills out the day. People talk about it. You don’t think about your own problems anymore. I’m not saying it’s consoling, but in a way yes. Like, why did she put the presents under the tree, in your opinion? I got along real well with your momma, she was so nice that lady!”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “A nice lady. And nice with everybody.”

  “I should let you go, Madame Anicé, I’ve got a job to finish . . .”

  She rearranged the waistline of her T-shirt, whose print reminded me of the Formica countertop patterns from the 1960s, and slowly got to her feet. “I’ve got a theory on the Christmas presents . . .” In Ginette Anicé’s physical person, just two elements reveal an interest in self-presentation: earrings—two gold studs of the sort used to cover the puncture, and the spit curls along her forehead. Her hair is short all over except for some length at the forehead, inch-long extensions, enough to allow the fingers to shape little ringlets . . . They’re barely noticeable, it takes someone like me who’s alert to hairdos to see them. They run along the top rim of the forehead at regular intervals, but make no mistake, they’re not just some natural curly border, this is bangs worked into separate locks, with decorative intent; they’re actual spit curls.

  “My theory,” said Ginette, “is that it just hit her while she was busy doing the presents. It was life-fatigue that hit her.”

  “That could be . . .”

  She picked up her felt coat.

  “Madame Anicé, would you like to have a crocheted pillow cover?”

  “Ah, those covers your momma used to make . . . That’s kind but I don’t have any cushions at home.”

  “Or maybe a doily for the back of the chair?”

  “A doily, as a keepsake—sure! . . . And that there, that’s the picture that was in your momma’s bedroom!”

  It annoyed me that she kept saying “your momma.” I can’t stand those infantilizing expressions. She was talking about a picture of (our son) Emmanuel at La Seyne-sur-Mer. My mother kept that photo in a frame on her night table. A picture of her grandson at twelve, in a bathing suit with a sun hat. She also had an old birthday picture of Jeanne’s children. I always wondered what those pictures meant to her, I mean emotionally. In my view, she didn’t see them, those frames were set beside her bed by convention. We live under the rule of convention. We run on rails. Before she left, Ginette Anicé announced that she had quit the health agency and only wanted to work private home-care jobs. So actually she was unemployed. I said I would ask around, when in fact I would never recommend her to anyone. I closed the door behind her and looked at the photo. I looked at Emmanuel’s little body. His skinny arms. He was the busiest child on the beach. Always with a bucket in hand, carrying it empty or full, going from the water to the brush at the end of the sand to build who knows what miniature world, back and forth dozens of times, looking for stones, chunks of wood, shells, all kinds of creatures in the foam. When he went into the water, it was never to swim. Standing in the water up to his waist, he would say, “Momma, tell me who you want to see die?” I would say the name of one of his teachers at school (that was the game).

  “OK, yes—Monsieur Vivaret! . . . What are you doing there, Emmanuel?!” Pcch pcch! Pcch!!

  And he’d splash into the waves with huge leap
s.

  “Madame Pellouze!” I’d say.

  “Emmanuel, will you put down that Kalachnikov!! . . .”

  Splash splash pchhhh bang bang!

  “Madame Farrugia!”

  We’d kill them all off one by one.

  These days you’re a “Content Champion” for an ad agency. When people ask what you do, you say Project Chief/Editorial Consultant (the English title is so much nicer!). The photograph gives me back your body from before. I had stopped thinking about it. I never open the albums I used to put together. Those thin arms—I’d like to feel them circling my neck again. Me too, I don’t care about the global stuff either, she’s right, that Anicé.