“It’s not a line you say to a dressed-up girl in a hotel bar in Davos?” She didn’t mean this at all, but she had to take the charge out of the atmosphere.
“I’ve never been to Davos,” Jules said, blushing unnecessarily, “and besides, it’s too long to be a line. It’s something true that I said to a beautiful girl in my house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but at my age you can say such things without being suggestive.”
“Really?” she said. “You think so?”
“I hope so. I hope I haven’t offended you. I apologize if I have. I look upon such things like someone who’s pulling away from them. The fact of departure is now so strong that I no longer fear it. You can look upon them as someone who’s arriving.”
“Theoretically, and I’m not much one for theory myself,” she said, “would it not be possible to meet in the middle?”
“Nature punishes the effort. December/May makes for a great story as long as you can skip the end. It’s maybe what stimulated Goethe to write Faust. It’s not that it’s inherently evil, but that the way things are renders it impossible – except perhaps for a few bright moments contrasting with a sad decline.”
élodi took this as a rejection of an advance she was not sure she had either made or wanted to make, because like him she moved between strong attraction and a kind of repulsion that was, in fact, an artifact of attraction. It was confusing to both of them. His love for her was benevolent and giving, as it would be for someone much younger. At the same time it was a desire for her as a woman, pulsingly sexual, intolerant of anything standing between them, even the thinnest silk, or air. Like two positive charges, the magnetic attractions flared in alternation and were not compatible or even present at one and the same time. As one rose on the horizon, the other declined, but only to return and drive out what had driven it out before.
So teacher and student maintained their distance, each thinking that they would do so forever. This became so highly charged that, to escape, Jules took the lead and returned to the matter of music. “The difference in the spirit of one age with the spirit of another,” he said, “despite the constancy of both nature and human nature, is legible in music. Death, pain, and tragedy still rule the world, though in the rich countries of the West we insulate ourselves from them as never before in history. But when death, pain, and tragedy were as immediate as they were to everyone, even the privileged, in the time of Bach and Mozart, you have darkness and light coexisting with almost unbearable intensity. Which is why in all of these great pieces – although neither in dirges, which I cannot stomach, nor in silly, triumphal marches – you have the tension between the most glorious, sunny exultation, and the saddest and most beautiful mourning.
“The Bach we did today is just that. It was my father’s favorite piece, on this very instrument.” He held it out, and brought it back. “He knew how joyful it was, and yet how sad. It was the first piece I heard him play, and the last.”
“I do love it,” élodi said, after which followed, to their surprise, their satisfaction, and even to their excitement, a perfect, contented, extended silence.
III.
Loyal à Mort
The Sun Comes Out for Armand Marteau
EDGAR AUBAN HAD been kind enough to extend the probation of Armand Marteau to March the first. This was because although Armand had failed miserably during the fall – moving not a single policy from mid-October until Christmas – in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve he had sold a half-million-Euro policy to someone old enough and in ill-enough health to generate a decent premium.
But as the new year crept forward and he moved not a single contract, he began to talk to himself a lot. Although he disguised it by pretending he was on the phone, you could tell by his expression and the fear in his eyes, as well as the fact that he had no earpiece, that he wasn’t selling anything but rather making imagined exhortations and asking imaginary questions.
As he went, the way his insurance colleagues across the Channel might have put it, ’round the twist, he became even more isolated and reviled, which is what happens to herd animals when they limp, suffer, and cannot keep up. That no one looked at him gave him the kind of privacy no one wants, every second of which is shame and torment. The worse it got, the worse it got. They still called him hippo, elephantus, le Titanique, butter blob, and other such names – Cherbourg in pants, wonder whale (they thought they were creative) – but now it was less with amusement than with hatred, as if each insult, whether to his face or behind his back, was intended to cut a piece off him and batter him down until there was nothing left and, to their intended relief, he was gone.
In February, when in France there is not a single holiday to relieve the gray weeks, long nights, and wet cold, some genius had hypnotized the office staff into believing that the eighteenth was a semi-holiday because it was the feast day of St. Colman of Lindisfarne. Although no one had ever heard of St. Colman of Lindisfarne, everyone took a long lunch with a lot of drinking in an ugly restaurant in La Défense: that is, everyone but Armand Marteau. He was the only person left in the office, charged with taking messages for three hours, in the time slot when new business seldom came in, because people went home to eat. Four to six were the hot hours, as were ten to eleven forty-five in the morning.
In twelve days he would be gone. The Marteaux were practically starving. He had a toothache and could not afford to go to the dentist. His wife cried at night. The children cried during the day. They acted up in school. That morning, as he slept on the way in, someone getting off the train at a stop somewhere where it was drizzling in the dark had slapped him hard on the side of his face, either just for fun or out of hatred. He hadn’t been able to see who it was except that when the train started up again some excited youths on the platform were laughing and sticking their tongues out at him as the train pulled from the station.
Then, at the office, they had all slipped away. Everyone. Armand had just unwrapped his sandwich and flattened out the wax paper around it when the phone rang. Assuming that it was someone else’s client, for whom he would only relay a message, he wouldn’t have answered – out of spite, fastidiousness, and misery. But he hadn’t begun his sandwich, so, expecting yet another blow to his pride, he picked up, announcing the name of the subsidiary.
“You’re a subsidiary of Acorn?” asked the voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, we are Acorn.”
“Am I in the right place for term life insurance?”