“Hello! I’d like to pay for the three days I’ve been here.”
All the while thinking to herself, trembling, oddly excited: the check’s going to bounce.
She slid the paper she’d taken from the dog — a pale yellow sheet, smoothed out by her own hand — toward the unsmiling clerk.
“They’re showing a film I act in at the Rio. . This one here. . The Death of Claire Hassler.”
Her smile widened still further, her jaw aching vaguely. How vicious must the shock of a letdown be to send you tumbling from hope into despair? She could feel herself teetering, and that unsteadiness energized her, cleansed her of her weakness.
“This one here, see?. . That’s right, I’m in it.”
“Oh, that. I’ve seen it,” said the employee.
He examined Brulard’s check more closely than was polite. He was a young blond man, pale and cold, who, from the first day, Brulard thought, treated her as if awaiting the moment when he would at long last see through her, patient, sure it would come.
“Did you like it?” asked Brulard, slightly breathless.
The young man wouldn’t look her in the eye. He let a few seconds go by, with Brulard’s face, glowing in artificial eagerness, a little too close to his, and then he let it drop:
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought it was you.”
“Who?”
“The woman whose brain gets. . tinkered with,” he said delicately. “In the movie. I don’t recognize you.”
“That’s not me,” Brulard warmly cried out, suddenly so eager to win a little consideration from this boy that she shook her head and gave a chummy little laugh. “I play the other one, the heroine’s sister. You know, the one who’s so merry and bold.”
But he had no memory of that character, apart, he observed to Brulard in an irritable voice, from a yellow scarf that came loose and got stuck in a car door.
“Yes, that’s right,” Brulard murmured.
And then, considering the subject closed, the young man turned away. Speechless, wondering in a fierce fit of panic how on earth she could fill up the rest of her day, Brulard pulled her tremulous, weary face back toward herself, wistfully withdrawing it from the cold sphere created all around the young man by his indifference, his distant indolence. She reflexively touched her cheeks, her forehead — and so, without meaning to, evidently summoned up the meddlesome young Eve Brulard, who abruptly took the employee’s place behind the counter, making conventional obscene gestures at Brulard, still half clad in her translucent pink dress, now rumpled and torn. Never before had Brulard seen her show the least sign of spite, or at least of sarcasm and vulgarity. Afraid, she thrust out her fingers, and the girl disappeared with an overdone snort of derision. The boy had turned around again — had Brulard’s fingers unwittingly touched him, as if to give him a teasing little slap, a flirtatious flick? She thought they very possibly had, though she couldn’t be certain. She turned beet red, blurted out:
“Excuse me!”
He shot her a brief glance, conscientiously drained of all expression, but should she go on believing that no one but her could make out the hideous screeches of that half-naked girl in the chiffon dress? That girl who, no doubt — but Brulard had absolutely no desire to make sure, convinced that Eve was only waiting for her to look up to start shrieking again — was now flitting this way and that around the big crystal chandelier? Brulard herself could so clearly hear the pink fabric rustling overhead, and the mocking little sounds the girl’s mouth made for her benefit, but how was she to know? Suppose that girl was deliberately provoking the young clerk, so that she, Brulard. .
A tongue vigorously licked her hand, and there was that awful brown dog again, with the squashed nose and the slightly overlong ears, the unlikely crossbreed she’d encountered a little earlier, by the lakeside. Good-hearted and peaceable, it looked at Brulard with disinterested affection. It was dirty, repugnant.
“What’s that?” the employee grumbled from behind the counter.
“Oh, he’s with me,” said Jimmy’s voice.
“Wait, you have a dog now?” said Brulard with a stunned laugh, a yelp of pained incredulity.
Even more aghast, almost, to learn that this was Jimmy’s dog than she was to see Jimmy here in this hotel, so distant did that Saturday now seem, so like something from an entirely different age of their lives, that previous Saturday, when the idea of running away and the actual running away had taken shape in the space of two short hours, the hotel and the lake and the bank decided on with only a brief conversation, whispered and breathless, from cellphone to cellphone — and now Brulard, engulfed in melancholy, was regretting that that phone call lay behind her, that those quivering, conspiratorial minutes, full of something like ardent youth, were now in the past.
Suddenly, Jimmy was here, and with that how could Brulard not find her sense of impetuousness absurd?
“Where’s Lulu?” asked Brulard, wearily.
“On holiday with the Alphonses,” Jimmy quickly replied.
She scowled in distaste and surprise. She patted the dog’s head, hoping Jimmy might tell her something more about the animal, but her husband said nothing. In his pale eye, now fixed on her, she thought she made out a tinge of pity that filled her with alarm. Was it not in fact Jimmy who deserved a pitying gaze? Was it not him who’d been abandoned without one word of warning, not for fear of some anguished reaction, but in anticipation of the staggering boredom that his voice and his grim, gentle face always unleashed when he tried to prevail, to explain himself, to defend himself? Hey, Jimmy, there’s nothing to explain, Brulard would simply have said, no more than you can convince someone they’re loved. Hey, Jimmy, Brulard would have said, irritated, nobody can do that, can they? Instead of which, swept along by a passion, an inner lyricism she hadn’t felt for a very long time, she’d said nothing, and her leaving was like an escape, and the murmurs into the telephone like the whispers of two cautious accomplices, although there was nothing they had to protect themselves from, nor, truth be told, anything to protect.
And now Jimmy was here, and his mere presence made Brulard’s amorous adventures ridiculous, all the more implacably in that Jimmy was looking exceptionally sunny, and unexpectedly elegant (and just how, Brulard snickered to herself, had he paid for those pants and that leather jacket?), his unjustified but wholly convincing air of prosperity underscored by the contrast with the dog’s shabbiness, as if, out of nothing other than snobbery, Jimmy thought himself far too fine to associate with a handsome beast.
Brulard felt small and pointless. She recalled that the money hadn’t been deposited into her account, that she’d had in fact no word at all, despite all she’d been promised. Briefly pushed to one side, her exhaustion came flooding back. She felt a little vein throbbing in one eyelid.
“So, Jimmy, you got yourself this dog to replace me?” she said with a forced laugh.
“He was following me, and I adopted him because I thought he was you,” Jimmy said gravely.
“That dog, me?”
“I thought he was you. Granted, I might have been mistaken.”
Brulard’s telephone rang in her pocket. She couldn’t hold back a dry sob: she’d been waiting so long for this. She gently pressed the telephone to her ear, sidling away from Jimmy. At first, no one answered her meekly whispered “Hello.” Only a heavy silence.
“You’ve had your fun,” growled a man’s voice unknown to Brulard, so thrumming with malice that she frantically switched off the phone and thrust it deep into her pocket.
She raised two fingers to her lips. Help, help, she moaned. But she must not have made a sound, because Jimmy gave her a little wave from across the lobby, suddenly all smiles. Behind his counter, the employee was looking at Jimmy with a respectful benevolence he’d never shown Brulard, far from it. Who are my friends? Brulard asked herself. Who’s watching over me? Whose sympathy. . A piercing cry echoed in her head, though, to Brulard’s great relief, the young Eve Brulard was nowhere to be seen, and in a fit of wounded, pathetic pride she answered Jimmy’s smile with a similarly easy smile, decorous, distinguished. She was terrified. You’ve had your fun — but how could anyone, how could a humble soul generally and in every way doing the best she could, arouse so much hatred? And could it truly be said that she’d ever in her life actually had fun?