Anne-Marie the Beauty Page 3

  On the way back my husband said, you didn’t tell her you have a son. I said, oh, that’s true. —You should have told her you had a son. —Yes, you’re right, I didn’t have time

  But I was happy, you see, because she remembered our little theater, our friendship

  I said to my husband, see how glad she was to see me? He said, she may have been glad, but she made no effort to see you again, did she? —So? Neither did I. We have separate lives now

  People who aren’t in the business cannot understand. I said to my husband, you didn’t have to shove your neck out like a guinea fowl to say hello. How do you think that made me look, me and my petrified husband?

  After meeting her that time, I looked for recent photos of Kikine in the papers. I found an article with a picture of the new family posing on a garden swing. Giselle, José Valadi, their baby Lola, and Kikine

  I mean Corinna

  Corinna was nothing like Kikine. Everything Kikine had been, the pudgy-cheeked little imp whom I dressed up as a proper lady or a little match girl (she liked playing the little orphan girl), everything that Kikine had been was gone

  At thirteen, childhood’s over, end of story

  She stood apart from the others in a display of boredom and disgust, with spiky hair and lipstick. A stuck-up little queen with none of her mother’s dazzle, completely full of herself

  At seventeen, she high-tailed it to Mexico with a drug trafficker

  I only say this because it’s a well-known fact. Everyone knows that Corinna Fayolle ran off with a gangster

  With his big mouth, José Valadi looked like Tony Curtis

  Now he’s little Mister Average. Except for his hair color. It was jet black then and now it’s jet black Plus. I saw him at the funeral. He gets invited on TV to comment on soccer

  I see life as a great arc. You raise yourself up and when you come back down, you return to your original form, shrunken, head hung low

  I went to see my sister at Rangé-sur-Mer. Had to take the cane because you can’t get down to the platform on those rickety steps, thirty feet off the ground. The lady inspector comes by and sees me in the vestibule between two carriages. I’ve been there since Amiens, the train only stops at Rangé for three minutes, so I have to get ready ahead of time. I say, madame, when I was twenty, I was quite the athlete, but time takes its toll . . . instead of saying, goddammit, woman, give me a hand down!

  I played Clytemnestra, mademoiselle, at an age when I was not yet a mother in real life

  Raymond Lice was Agamemnon

  Raymond Lice as Agamemnon was madness, complete absurdity. Raymond Lice, who always smelled of onions, playing the king of Mycenae! I told him he reeked of onions, and he said give me a mint instead of carping! No, Raymond, you need more than a mint, it’s your esophagus the problem. He was peeved that I’d criticized his digestion. Raymond was forty years older than the rest of us. His head sat directly on top of his torso. I had a Grecian coiffure, crimped with ribbons in a great rippling tower on top of my head. In the fourth act, I threw myself at his feet, discreetly removing a hairpin, and all the supernatural curls of the wig spilled down over my shoulders, face, and back. I tossed my head, and made them tremble all over. I put on a voice, at once breathless and inflamed, and Raymond did his cavern voice, and we were the Beauty and the king of the empire

  On stage I was sometimes Anne-Marie the beauty

  Yes, mademoiselle

  Yes, child

  Sometimes, we think we’re doing quite well, and some little thing proves it’s just the opposite

  My son comes over. He sits down in front of the evening news

  I don’t dare tell him that I just got fleeced by one of those fake EDF guys who came to replace my electrical panel

  My son takes a packet of Pépito biscuits from the cupboard and wolfs them down one after the other

  He’s gone bald at the back of his head. He’s running to fat

  The concierge makes him gingerbread cookies. She brings them in a confectioner’s bag with little pictures on it. I tell her, he’s forty-two years old, Madame Mehmeti!

  Women never stay with him for long. Or else he’s the one who loses interest. Who’s to know? I’ve stopped asking

  For a time he lived with a Basque girl who played the accordion. My husband was happy. He already saw himself in his dotage, playing pétanques with the in-laws in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

  I say, it’s stupid to fill up on sweets. I’ll cook you dinner, if you want. He says he doesn’t have time. If I dare comment on the news, he says, shh, let me watch

  Anyway, what do I care

  I don’t see what could save us from ruin now, monsieur, civilization is a washout. The only place where air pollution has declined is in the Middle East. Why? Because of war. Fewer cars, less hairspray. When Man is killed off, Nature takes a turn for the better. If the heads of state want to fix all that by fisticuffs, I have no objection

  When the weather report comes on, I admit to my son that I’ve been billed two thousand euros to have the electrical panel changed

  —Are you crazy? Who did you call?! —EDF, the number is in my address book . . . —Show me the quote . . . “Artisanal Service”? Where do you see Électricité de France? I said, the fellow was nice, he phoned his boss in front of me. —Of course he did, and the boss said, lay it on thick, give the old bag a nice fat quote! Why didn’t you phone me? You call four times a day to ask the name of a singer for your crossword, then you sign three postdated checks all by yourself?!

  When he’s gone, I cry

  Children do not keep a person warm for long

  A little in the early years

  He’s a devil. I want nothing more to do with him

  Soon I can return to acting

  Olbrecht would have had me back on stage in the bat of an eye

  Back to normal after the summer, the new doc says. That’s the way they do things now. Zero risk

  He thinks I should lose weight

  He’s a comedian!

  I’ve had a few offers these past weeks, if you can imagine!

  I said, I’m on my way, darlings, if you don’t mind the crutches

  Do you know what my dream role is, monsieur? Mary Cavan Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night

  Or the Great Blackbird in The Bright Red Bird

  Or Arkadina. Same as every actress

  Or Lady Prior in Henry XV. I’m too old to play her now, though I played Clytemnestra at the age of twenty-seven, monsieur, younger than my daughter Iphigenia, but we can’t go back in time, only forward

  Mary Tyrone talks about her hair the moment she feels she is being watched. My mother did the same. Always the hand in the hair to fix the styling, flutter over the flat spots, replace the barrettes. I do it too

  All these women fretting over their hair when you look at them too hard

  We should give this some thought

  I miss Olbrecht. I had a soft spot for Olbrecht. I wonder if I might have invented a few aches and pains just to see him

  Did he have a soft spot for me?

  When I left his office, I’d hear him through the door, saying the name of the next patient in his abrupt, familiar voice. Right away, I felt a pang of abandonment. Did he tell them about his miniature cities and theme nights too? Monsieur, when a woman is in love, she bends over backwards, she dithers about, and runs herself ragged, while men quietly remain themselves

  Where is he now? Where does he live?

  Maybe he’s alone like me. He owned a farmhouse in the Bordeaux Landes that he’d been fixing up for years

  When anyone asked, how are you, doctor? he would answer, by definition, well, and probably quite well in reality, too

  People say the happiest lives are the least eventful

  I should think about buying my funeral urn

/>   An elegant brass model, discreetly engraved, like Poupi Canella’s

  My son will make a beeline for the cheapest one, and it will be shabby

  I do not want to end up in a shabby container

  My ashes will fly away to the North

  May they be scattered over the chicory fields near Saint-Sourd, or in the Bay of Somme with the dolphins

  Poupi had hers scattered on her first love’s gravestone, like icing sugar

  She’d had her funeral dress picked out for years. Pink silk organdy with a plunging neckline trimmed in rhinestones, waiting at the bottom of a closet, in a plastic garment bag that stank of mothballs

  When we took the dress out, we could have fit four Poupis inside. Not to mention the look of a plunging neckline on an emaciated chest butchered by a tracheotomy. I said, Poupi cannot be laid out in this getup. Let the undertakers do their job, her daughter said. So Poupi, the next time we saw her, lay in her coffin, stuffed and wizened from head to toe, with purple lips, her face and hair straight out of a flour barrel, and a Breton shawl wound around her chest

  Her children, the priest, everyone leaned over this cradle with compunction

  As for me, madame, I had such an irrepressible urge to laugh that I had to escape

  I went out in the hall and felt Poupi beside me, happy I was laughing, happy I was applauding her last performance

  She had done this all her life. She played Mother Ubu, Madame Sans-Gene, left entire music halls in stitches with Cabrioche. She played in vaudeville, dressed in the most outrageous outfits

  Poupi Canella wanted to hear people laugh

  Well, course I’ve gained weight

  Nice of you to say so, doc!

  Weeks of dragging myself between home and Picard with my cane

  I went to the BHV to buy an electronic scale. I saw a black one, very classy, the salesman boasted that it could also calculate my body mass index . . . Right

  On my way out, I passed La maison de la truffe, absurdly located on the same floor as the scales. I looked at condiments, honey, mozzarella with truffle oil on sale, I told myself well no, of course not! Then I saw jars of black truffle cashew nuts that made me think right away of the cashews infused with truffle oil at Saint-Julien des Vignes, a divine combination, monsieur, for people like me, who are mad for cashews and truffles, my two great loves, along with avocadoes. I got home with the scale and two jars of cashews, one of which I had completely emptied by dusk with a small glass of Meursault, watching silent images of people singing karaoke, and that is where inactivity, and perhaps a touch of loneliness, leads us, monsieur

  It wouldn’t bother me to be a grandmother

  Not of a shedload of kids, like poor Giselle

  But of one little tot, who’d just be there

  Though it makes no sense to bring people into the world these days

  When I saw her again, poor Gigi had five grandchildren. Five . . . And a sixth when Corinna adopted the Vietnamese kid

  After her days as a juvenile delinquent, Corinna turned Catholic, monsieur. She married a former sailor, who worked in marine insurance and gave her four kids, to which they added a Vietnamese boy

  At the burial service, she wore a culotte skirt

  As for Lola, she was pregnant at twenty by an unknown father, like her mother

  I don’t know if anyone has told you, madame, but in thirty years, the population of India (and I’ve come to think the Indians are sneakier than the Chinese) will be two billion

  According to my son, when our poor planet Earth is completely swamped and overpopulated, man will sally forth to colonize other planets

  This is a boy who has read Forbes since he was fourteen. He could tell you the amounts in dollars of the greatest fortunes in the world, and to whom they belonged, from the age of fourteen. My husband thought it was a positive sign for the future, and congratulated himself. The kid thinks big, he’d say

  Now he also thinks far. He’d have no problem at all going to live on Mars. He sees nothing immoral in this every-man-for-himself business, because he’s convinced we are a superior species

  He thinks that human beings will adapt very well to life on Mars, or some other planet, the same way they adapted to rush hour on the ring road at six in the evening, which, he says, for men in the Middle Ages would have been a vision of the Apocalypse. What’s more, he claims that without knowing it, and despite my lyrical outbursts on ecology, I’m adapting admirably well to the disappearance of hedgehogs, the extinction of sperm whales, dragonflies, earthworms, and wild rabbits because humans adapt to everything, absolutely everything

  I don’t like him

  He’s a hollow man

  Even if he is right, I see nothing positive about being infinitely adaptable

  Not far from where we lived in Saint-Sourd there was a little forest on a hill. In winter the ground was completely covered in leaves. If you dug down, there were even more leaves, a hill of leaves

  In March we saw one or two wildflowers poke through

  Then one day, there were no more leaves. We don’t know where they went

  I don’t believe in God. But sometimes I pray to him under my breath

  Or let’s just say I try. I always start with, I know this isn’t your concern, I know my request is minor and you have other things to do . . .

  The moment I finish my intro, I stop, because it’s obvious that he has other things to do

  After my knee surgery, I was in so much pain that I gave the inner voice a try. Silent prayer, on the Q.T., soul to soul, you might say

  At the funeral, where I went dragging my feet, Corinna wore a culotte skirt

  A ladies’-church-auxiliary-style knee length corduroy culotte skirt

  Gigi had always condemned culotte skirts. She put up with Corinna’s electronic bracelet but the culotte skirt, no

  I found it infinitely sad, monsieur, that on the day of the funeral, the woman wore a garment famously criticized by her mother

  Everything eternally repeats itself. When we were young, we spat on religion. We thought we were done with that old bill of goods

  Now we have to get back down on our knees

  Ever since the fanatics, people have doted on the nice religious type. Who, in my opinion, has never been nice, and Gigi agreed. I don’t know why they gave her a funeral Mass. On the other hand, it brought people out. It drew a few celebrities, Giselle would have been happy

  When one is no longer belle of the ball, mademoiselle, one is quick to feel forgotten

  The ceremony was at eleven o’clock at St. Barberine. My son came to pick me up at ten. That’s how it is with us. We’re the first to arrive and stand in the wind with worried faces, watching for the motorcade. There were gawkers, photographers—no great pomp, but a bit of hoopla all the same

  We saw Anaïs Weber, and Jean-Louis Grozier and José Valadi, of course, climbing out of cars. I thought we’d see Alain Delon, but he didn’t show. We saw Félix Jarreau, who had just lost his wife. She wrote god-awful plays that no one performed. On her deathbed, she summoned all her “friends,” read: celebrities she’d never managed to hobnob with in life

  The secretary of state for culture arrived wearing a mask of affliction. I’d have thought the minister herself would make a point of being there, madame, seeing as she’d made Gigi a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. Giselle showed me the official letter with a handwritten note from the minister, saying what a great personal honor it was to present her with this grade, the highest of the four distinctions awarded by the government of the French Republic, as Gigi repeated for days, reveling in the word commander. And though there was no obligation, she even thought of arranging an official presentation of the medal, until she learned you had to buy it yourself at the cost of five hundred and forty-five euros, at which point she said they could stick their medal
where the sun doesn’t shine

  All those people, with their looks of devastation, had let Gigi go to rack and ruin, alone on rue de Courcelles

  Who ever came to visit her?

  Not much of anyone. Nobody important. Underlings. Florists’ deliverymen who brought the bouquets she sent herself, like Marie Bell****

  One night I slept at her place. At six a.m., I heard her yank the toilet-seat riser from the bowl. Gigi had to be elevated because she had wrecked her back. At the age of seventy-one, she had gone out in the snow with six-inch heels, slipped, and gotten all smashed up. She put the toilet-seat riser in a ripped bag from La Forêt and, with all her might, threw it on top of the wardrobe. She did this on weekdays so that no one could see that she shat six feet above ground. In the evening, the maid fit it back over the toilet bowl before she went home

  In Saint-Sourd, until my father’s mother died, my sister and I went to hear the Mass in Latin every Sunday. I understood bugger-all. I only grasped that the soul was an organ that could not be put on the same level as a regular organ in the body. I pictured a fluttering, shimmery lung. In ads for poultices to relieve congestion, there was a fire-breathing faun clutching a phosphorescent cushion to its breast

  For me, the soul was like that

  Giselle’s funeral Mass was celebrated by a Congolese priest. A double handicap for a deaf person, the echo from the mike in the church and the unintelligible accent. I’m a tad deaf. But I caught bits and pieces of it, madame

  In a voice that plunged into a bottomless abyss, a voice that would never be allowed onstage, the priest exhorted us to rejoice and make our hearts glad, because, and I quote, Giselle practiced her faith in a spirit of caring for others

  I looked around. No one to share that with, damn!