12 Fifteen Minutes Before the End of the World #2
Jean-Pierre could have pretended not to hear Pauline’s question, or that she had no intention behind it, but that wasn’t the case. Before sitting down to eat, he figured this was the moment to face his past.
“We still owe each other a conversation.”
She was silent. She couldn’t really play dumb and say “Oh, really?” when she’d been waiting three whole days for Jean-Pierre.
“Anouk.”
“That’s right. You told me ‘I think it’s a woman’s name,’ when I asked about the gallery.”
“I know I owe you an explanation. Of course it’s a woman’s name. You asked me about the name of the gal—”
“No, not if you don’t want to.”
“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t tell you. But I want to, Pauline, because I don’t want there to be any secrets between us. I’m going to tell you something no one knows. ‘No one’ means absolutely no one. Only Anouk, of course.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth, with the gravity of a poet who has just torn up his last verses upon realizing they aren’t particularly good.
“If you’ll let me, I’ll start from the beginning.”
Paulina was startled by the serious air Jean-Pierre had taken on. For once, it seemed hard for the art dealer to begin the conversation.
“You may have noticed that there’s a photo of a little girl in my bedroom, on top of the cabinet.”
“No.” The lie didn’t hold up, and she apologized with a shrug. “Yes. Is that Anouk?”
“Anouk is her mother.”
“And you’re her father.”
Paulina had adopted her most neutral tone to show that she was not affected by whatever information she might learn.
She was neither hot nor cold. Everyone had a past life, and anyway, the two of them had only met on Friday.
It was now Tuesday, and in just a few hours she would be boarding a plane back to routine in hopes that Gina would be waiting for her at the airport with her father.
But she was surprised that Jean-Pierre didn’t respond, neither yes nor no.
She hadn’t asked. She had stated it as fact, and Jean-Pierre hadn’t denied it. But he hadn’t admitted it either.
“Monique. Her name is Monique. She was seven in that picture.”
She had hit the nail on the head. Paulina curled up on the sofa, tucking her legs in and placing a cushion behind her back.
She prepared to listen to the story. However convoluted it might be, nothing would change about what she had experienced on rue du Trésor or rue de Seine.
Jean-Pierre stood up to pour himself a little bit of malt into a cognac glass.
“Would you like some?”
“I’ll have a little of yours.”
“I always spent the summers with my parents and brother in Capbreton, in Aquitaine, right by the Basque Country.” He took a sip, set the glass down on the table piled with magazines—the monthly L’Oeil—and sat at the foot of the sofa.
“My father, a notary here in Paris, loved the sea and owned a sailing boat in the port of Capbreton. Whenever the Atlantic permitted it, we’d go out and get seasick for a while.
My brother, Nico, who’s four years younger than me, had it worse than me.
He was as wobbly as soup the first three hours on the boat.
When he got home in the evening, he was so pale he went straight to bed.
He’d lie there and be sick for two days until my father decided the weather was good enough to go out sailing again.
That’s how our summers went for ten or twelve years.
“We stayed in a somewhat isolated villa with beautiful views of the sea, though as a kid you don’t know how to appreciate these things, nor are you really even interested.
We did notice, however, that to do anything in town you had to bike ten minutes, back and forth.
Our next-door neighbors, the Letroux family, good friends of my parents who we saw every summer, had a big brown Great Dane, a beast that was taller than I was.
I liked dogs, but not horses. And especially not one that could cross the entire garden in two steps and looked like it was going to tackle you to lick you.
His face was bigger than mine. Nougat was Anouk’s dog.
“Anouk Letroux, the only child of an Alsatian father and a Norwegian mother, was my neighbor, and I couldn’t stand her for many years.
She was a—comment dirais-je—diabolical and twisted girl.
I was so afraid of her dog that I ended up disliking her.
My brother, who liked Nougat better than the boat, got along with Anouk.
They were the same age and both restless as all hell.
“Little by little, of course, we all grew up, and there was a summer that Anouk also changed when the Letroux family returned to Capbreton. Breasts. Lips. She had grown up and calmed down a bit.”
“You weren’t as scared of the dog anymore.”
“Exactly. We can put it that way. I don’t know what year it was.
I was seventeen and she must have been thirteen.
She had completely mellowed, and one night, under the pines beside her house, we kissed.
It was nothing, just a kiss. The next day we saw each other again, went out, and the relationship, if you want to call it that, lasted that whole summer.
We just kissed and nothing more. An innocent, childlike thing our families never knew about.
“During the school year, we wrote to each other three or four times.
I was in Paris, and she was in Colmar. The following summer, when we met again, it was as if nothing had ever happened.
But from then on, our friendship grew. She hung around with our group, with the older kids.
She maintained a certain character, which she always had, but it no longer had to be only her way all the time.
You could talk to her, laugh with her, and she was a pretty, normal, proper girl, like my brother or me.
Anouk told me everything, asked me questions, and we had a good time together.
But there was never anything else. We saw each other in the summers, and that was it.
“A couple years later, one day out of the blue, she calls me. She never called. And she asks if she can come to Paris for New Year’s, because she has something to tell me.
I say yes, of course. She takes the train from Strasbourg, shows up at the station, and the moment I saw her coming toward me on the platform that December 31 at seven in the evening, I saw the devil in her eyes again.
“She threw herself around my neck, hugged me, and started crying, sobbing. ‘You have to help me, Jean-Pierre, you have to help me.’ She kept repeating it, and she wouldn’t say why she was crying.
She slowly calmed down. I took her bag, and I held her.
We managed to make our way out of the station.
Maybe twenty minutes had passed, and I still didn’t know what was going on.
We sat on a stone bench in the square, in front of the Gare de l’Est, and I’ll tell you as directly as she told me: She was pregnant. ”
“I had guessed as much. At seventeen?”
“At seventeen. She had a hell of a problem, and she was begging me to help. She didn’t want to tell me who the father was.
She never told me, and I never asked either.
But she did tell me the boy wanted nothing to do with it.
He washed his hands of her, just like that, and left Anouk at seventeen years old like that without knowing where to turn.
He told her to do whatever she thought was best, because he couldn’t have gotten her pregnant.
“You can imagine what kind of New Year’s we had.
The two of us shut in my bedroom, sitting on the bed, her crying, and me offering solutions to a three-months-pregnant girl without the slightest idea of what I was doing.
Not even a little, no . . . Not at all. I was twenty-one, without having grown up with women in my family.
I didn’t know how any of it worked. I told her I had some money saved, that we’d find a doctor, a place where .
. . But she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted to have the baby, she said.
She wanted it no matter what. She wanted the baby, but she had to be able to say who the father was . . .”
“No . . .” Pauline saw the bind.
“With every chime of every hour, I kept asking myself what I was supposed to do. Anouk begged me to be the father, to be the father in everyone’s eyes.
Her parents would kill her for getting knocked up, but they would finish her off for being an unmarried mother.
They couldn’t be grandparents to a bastard.
She pleaded with me to help her, said she and I would be fine, but please, please . . .”
“And you let yourself be taken in? Please tell me you didn’t . . .”
“On the 20th of May, Monique Letroux was born, a wonderful baby girl. She was hairy, with dark hair . . . like her father’s, I suppose. We gave her Anouk’s surname, though. I gave up Zanardi—naturally . . .”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Those months, from the end of the year until Monique’s birth, were a nightmare.
We went to see her parents in Colmar, to show our faces and say it was an accident and that we didn’t know how it could have happened, but that we were prepared to go through with it.
You can only imagine how they took it. They were the kind of people who went to Mass and kept religious icons.
They wanted to kill her, but really they wanted to claw my eyes out.
I was of age, but Anouk . . . it was like I’d taken advantage of her.
“I remember they insisted for weeks that we get married before the child was born. They didn’t insist. They demanded it.
I pulled Anouk aside and told her I’d stepped into that situation out of friendship, to help her, to pull her out of the biggest mess of her life.
But not marriage, not in a million years.
And we didn’t. My mother, also upset beyond words, got involved too.
It was a debacle the size of a cathedral.