19 We Have the Words We Deserve #3
“Stay and talk. Until next week. I have tickets to go to Inverness before the real cold begins. You can stay here. Or do you have family waiting for you?”
“Me? No. And now . . . who would I be with? I haven’t had the luck to find someone like you.”
“Of course you have. Don’t fool yourself.”
“No, no . . . I’m telling you, I haven’t.
You only have to read the letters to know my mother knew true love.
It’s magnificent. Hats off to her, hats off to you two.
Me, on the other hand, I feel like I’ll reach forty and, yes, I’ve had a great time, I’ve laughed a lot, I’ve gone here and there, but it’s all been, how do I put it . . . light?”
“Banal?”
“Yes. Maybe. There’s never any commitment, I think.
All of us, for me just as much as them, I mean everyone, it’s nobody’s fault.
We’ve always kept the barriers down so the train could pass and we wouldn’t get hurt.
Light, banal. Skeptical about love, I’d say, as if love were an old-fashioned coat.
And you, on the other hand, you knew a woman for four or five days and you’ve lived more than thirty years without her but with an intensity I envy. ”
Jean-Pierre had the sense that for the first time since she’d walked through the door, that confident, decisive Gina was about to fall apart. He decided to shake her awake.
“You came here, you say, to know more about your mother. And I tell you she was happy because she loved. You yourself have brought me proof. So I wonder: What about you? Are you happy? Are you feeling it? Why don’t you allow it?
You’re not even forty, Gina. What are you waiting for?
Go out and let go. Love, love for real. Love even if it ends, even if it isn’t forever.
So what? How many people have you met who have never suffered because they have never loved? ”
“People of my generation? Many. I don’t know how many, but many.
I’m not the only one. We wear armor because we don’t want to suffer, and we settle for crumbs.
Sex is fun, yes, very. It’s pleasurable, it’s exciting, it’s everything for an hour, or fifteen minutes, but maybe it isn’t the point.
Maybe it isn’t enough. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s selfishness.
I don’t know what it is, but when I think about it and I realize it, I think: What the hell am I doing? ”
“Then don’t stop at the anecdote. Make use of the era you’ve been given.
You have the luck, the immense fortune, of living in a time when society doesn’t judge you, when there are no rules, when everyone lives with whoever they want, when you don’t have to tolerate the other person if you don’t like them enough.
You have the gift of history. You have conditions that should make it easier.
And yet, when anyone tells you you have it better than at any other point in human history, it seems precisely that lack of limits that holds you back, that slows you down. ”
“Yes, yes, maybe.” She hadn’t expected Jean-Pierre to speak with such vehemence. She defended herself: “But all that, the clarity you have now, you see it when you’re older, when you have whole days to take stock of how your story turned out.”
“It has nothing to do with age, Gina. I’m talking about commitment.
You’ve confused love with American romantic comedies.
Love isn’t a Meg Ryan movie. Movies, fairy tales, they’ve done you a lot of harm.
I don’t know what you’re looking for. If you want to be loved, love.
Love exists. Love exists, but you have to go all in. All in!”
Gina nodded, up and down, more out of reflex than agreement. Jean-Pierre realized he’d gone too far in tone and took a breath to come down.
“Forgive me, Gina. I don’t know anything about your life.
I wish everyone could have a story like ours, mine and your mother’s.
Of course I do. However it may have ended.
I do. When it comes to you, you’ll know it.
Don’t be afraid, dive in. But you have to want happiness, and you have to work for it.
Give yourself a chance to love. Let love shake you. Do you hear me?”
She closed her eyes to agree. He wondered if it was even appropriate to speak that way to someone he had just met.
“And that’s enough. I won’t say anything else. And forgive me for preaching, for putting my nose where I—”
“Not at all, Jean-Pierre. I liked hearing it. I liked slipping into my mother’s skin and hearing you.”
“I’m not used to speaking to anyone, and the one day I have an audience . . .”
“Can I ask you something?”
“I’m not sure I’m in a position to say no . . .”
“I’d really like you to tell me, everything that you can tell, of course, what happened in Paris between you, from Aunt Julie’s wedding until you took her to the airport. What happened in those four days to make a bond so strong, forever.”
He didn’t dislike the idea. To remember was to relive. But—
“One day I promised your mother I wouldn’t make a book of it.”
“The statute of limitations has run out, Jean-Pierre.”
Having Gina in front of him felt like hearing Pauline. They knew how to get what they wanted. Seduction, it was called.
“There’s no crime. Love is never punishment, never a sentence. And now you’ll think this old man has lost his mind, but sometimes I’ve wondered whether all this should be written down and known. You could write it, the book. A novel about happiness.”
“And?” She was confident, already certain she’d get her way.
“We’ll have dinner and I’ll tell you. In the basement downstairs I have a truffled Brie de Meaux, and we’ll find some wine, I suppose, that you will like. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you everything, yes. I’ll be delighted.”
“Perfect!”
“First, I ask you one favor . . .”
Gina nodded, bien s?r, he could count on her. She agreed without conditions.
“Come with me.”
Jean-Pierre rose from the chair with practiced mechanics, as if nothing hurt. He bravely refused to take the cane. He needed to appear in good form before Pauline’s daughter, as if the visit had miraculously invigorated him. In the end it was vanity, the pride of coquetry.
Slow as an ox, with Gina watching wide-eyed, they crossed the corridor, passed the front door, and reached his bedroom. The bed was made, the coverlet smooth, clothes hung in the wardrobe arranged by color, the whole room neat as a hotel rented by the hour.
“I don’t have a gift for you. I didn’t expect you . . .” He pointed at the dresser. “But I’d like you to keep something.”
On top of an English antique secretary were three black-and-white landscape photos, each mounted and framed. In all three she recognized at a glance Pauline and Jean-Pierre at their best.
“You’ve never seen this. A first time.”
“Never!” Enthralled, she bent her knees to get closer. “My mother was radiant!”
“She was beautiful. This one was taken by a waiter at Brasserie Lipp after dinner.” He spoke with the manners of a dignified man. “Your mother never got to see them. I had them developed the very day she left. I couldn’t send them to her, of course.”
“And this?” The lovers were laughing face-to-face, coffees on the table, in a leafy terrace.
“Below my place. One afternoon, on rue du Trésor. I lived two doors down. At ground zero.” He surprised himself with the sarcasm. “The dangers of love.”
“She looks so happy.” Gina thought that yes, now that she was older than her mother had been, she resembled her a great deal.
“I love seeing these photos, Jean-Pierre, but when I have her right in front of me, it makes me furious not to remember my mother with a laugh like that. Do you know what I mean? It makes me angry not to remember her. Not knowing what her voice sounded like—”
“Exactly like yours. The voice. You have it exactly. I assure you. And this one”—he picked up the third photo. “You know where it’s from. No need to say anything, right?”
A group of laughing friends, perhaps twenty of them, with the newlyweds, Aunt Julie and Alain, in the middle, and Pauline, elegant as an actress, at one end in her blue dress.
And four heads away, Jean-Pierre, seductive, proud in his white artist’s blazer, pipe attached, the night they met.
Gina adored old photographs. The more people, the better.
She studied faces, imagined lives, and always thought the same thing.
They’re all dead. In that photo, not all.
Her mother and Aunt Julie were, yes. Someone else surely too.
Jean-Pierre himself looked like a resurrected man.
“Take them into the living room. We can’t see them here very well.” He turned off the light. “I have to put in stronger bulbs.”
They shut the bedroom door, retraced their steps, and sat again with the Atlantic at their feet, with an irrepressible desire to talk and listen.
The Brie waited in the basement at room temperature.
Jean-Pierre, attentive to detail, began his account with the wedding night.
Gina discovered not only that her mother was a graceful rock-and-roll dancer, that she was fascinated by mentalism, that she could guess exactly how many steps lay between two Parisian churches.
She also understood why Pauline had fallen for that gallery owner who, from certain angles, seemed to resemble Marcello Mastroianni to her in his final years.
Darkness fell. Little by little the sun set over the glass room.
It was the artwork Jean-Pierre contemplated each evening.
That sunset, however, he didn’t notice the ocean fading or the final setting of light.
Absorbed in the story, they missed every reddish stroke of dusk.
So long as fate allowed him, he was grateful that nature framed, day after day, the last drops of honey in the bay window of his life.