Brulard opened her eyes. Monsieur Rotor had disgustedly thrown the drool-soaked shoe at her feet.
“Come in, I’ll lend you a pair of mine,” said Madame Rotor, graciously.
Monsieur Rotor held back the Great Dane, his tanned face marked with the same severe and irascible expression as his dog’s, and Jimmy took Brulard’s arm to lead her toward the chalet. Brulard felt him shivering with relief, his terrified tension now waning. It wasn’t the dog that had most frightened Jimmy. He was afraid of finding himself thrown off the property by a Rotor couple who had no memory of meeting him in Paris a few months before, at one of the many receptions Jimmy frequented, nervous and joyless, hoping to meet people in a position to give him work, Jimmy taking it as given that he could do anything so long as people explained what they expected. So, it flashed through Brulard’s bored, morose mind, Jimmy must have enticed the Rotors efficiently enough to hear them toss out something like “Come by and visit us in the mountains.” But, Brulard now wondered, attaching no great importance to the question, had she herself been an element in Jimmy’s strategy from the start, or had the idea of bringing her along as a supporting player come to him only a little before, in the pizzeria where he’d insisted on taking her to dinner? Oh, what does it matter, Brulard had asked herself at the time, terrified by the prospect of any sort of resistance, what does one last bad pizza with Jimmy matter? Since after that everything will be over?
“They’ve seen the film. They’ll recognize you, and I’ll score big points,” Jimmy had said, adorable, almost imploring. Now, with a painful sense of vindication, Brulard observed that the middle-aged woman in her dark, out-of-place town clothes, trudging toward the Rotors’ chalet with evident reluctance, half-dragged along by Jimmy Loire, her features clenched with migraine and exhaustion, quite clearly did not remind the Rotors of the yellow-scarved adventuress who played a minor but, according to Jimmy, indispensable and compelling role in The Death of Claire Hassler. Was that not exactly what he was whispering into Madame Rotor’s ear? For she turned to cast Brulard a brief glance, surprised and polite, while Jimmy expressed his pride in his typical fashion, putting his hands on his thin hips and slightly puffing out his stomach, simultaneously displaying, Brulard was horrified to see, a pale green blot of olive-oil on his white shirt.
How was all this supposed to touch her now?
“I’d like. . if you would, two or three aspirin.”
The words hung before her lips as if someone else had whispered them beside her, in a comic falsetto.
“Eve Brulard. . ” Jimmy began.
“Is she feeling all right?”
“Just a little migraine. . overwork. . ”
“Are you all right?”
“Eve Brulard, you know, who. . Eve Brulard. . ”
“Is she all right?”
Brulard felt two firm hands pushing down on her shoulders, then the yielding surface of an armchair beneath her thighs. The chair dipped and rose.
At some point in the past, she was no longer sure when or in what, she used to play long scenes in a rocking chair, half-recumbent.
Could they stop rocking her? One more dip and she was going to bring up her pizza. Could they stop rocking her? How she was suffering — but what good would aspirin do? In spite of her spinning head, she sensed that she’d understood everything, though what she understood she didn’t yet know, even as she knew it was only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before it all became clear. She understood, but, oh God, how she dreaded learning what it was that she understood.
Could they please stop rocking her, right now?
She spoke or kept silent, they heard her or didn’t, impossible to say. A cold glass jarred her teeth, a bitter pill was dissolving on her tongue, too far back, next to her uvula. A dry hand stroked her cheek. She recognized Jimmy’s hand, hot and anxious. Dear poor kind Jimmy, thought Brulard, nearly weeping with pity, had he understood, for his part, that it was all over? That she’d be lost to him forever as soon as they left the Rotors’ chalet? He’d long been a deluded husband, but that was nothing next to the irreparable depreciation inflicted on his entire being, even his life story, his past, his name, since Brulard fell in love with another, so very much more glorious than Jimmy. But how to ensure that it all ended cleanly and definitively? Only, perhaps, Jimmy’s instantaneous death, she couldn’t help thinking, would deliver her of the disorder surrounding him, radiating expansively all around him, whereas the other one was all rigor, cool willfulness, precise desires.
“I thought. . she was called Claire Hassler,” said Madame Rotor, as if from a great distance, with a puzzled little laugh.
“Claire Hassler is only the name of the lead character, played by. . oh, another actress.”
That was Jimmy’s voice, overly loud, at once incensed and incredulous, disgusted.
“Claire Hassler doesn’t exist, for goodness’ sake! It’s a made-up name. It’s a story.”
“So who is Eva Brulard?” asked Madame Rotor, hesitantly.
“Eve Brulard. Not Eva. Eve. Eve Brulard. Eve Brulard.”
“Who is she?”
“What my wife wants to know, I presume, is whether that’s also the name of a character,” pompously intervened a Monsieur Rotor who seemed to be standing just behind Brulard’s back, as she thought she could feel his warm breath on her neck, odorless, thick, like a dog’s.
So is that Rotor who’s so hell-bent on rocking me? Brulard wondered, exasperated. But was she really being rocked? Or was it the unraveling of all her senses that was giving her this continual up and down feeling?
She wished she could tell Jimmy to relax, that for her, and even more for him, it was in no way essential to convince the Rotors that she was a remarkable woman. But now Jimmy was losing his temper, she could tell by the sudden quickening of his words, although, for the Rotors who knew him so little, he might still have seemed simply the typical Parisian, sarcastic, belligerent, rude, and utterly unaware of it.
“You make me laugh,” Jimmy was shouting. “Eve Brulard, a character? Don’t tell me you of all people have never heard of Eve Brulard? So supposedly I live with a character?”
Jimmy, we don’t live together anymore! Brulard exclaimed. We’ll never live together again! Isn’t that so? Relieved to find that the sound of her voice was not vibrating in her own ears, and that no one must have heard a word she had said, she shut her eyelids tight, determined to let herself be forgotten.
A doubt crept into Brulard’s mind.
What proof did she have that she wasn’t an impostor? For if she’d never acted in The Death of Claire Hassler, if the lovely woman in the yellow scarf was not Eve Brulard but some other actress, and if everywhere she went she nevertheless claimed, with Jimmy’s complicity, that it was her, who would ever disabuse her?
She protested inwardly, indignant with herself for thinking such things. She did have a part in that movie. She remembered it with the most perfect clarity. Did she really remember? Nothing very precise at the moment, thanks to her crushing exhaustion, but she would, she would, as soon as she got some rest. Yes, would she remember? She thought it impossible to ask Jimmy for reassurance, not because this wasn’t the time (Jimmy’s mollified voice flowed like fresh, cool water all the way to the rocking chair, interspersed with Madame Rotor’s appreciative “hmm!”s, and now the talk had apparently turned to some activity to be undertaken at once, a game to be organized before teatime, though of what sort Brulard had no idea), but because Brulard was now convinced that she’d have to be wary of Jimmy on that score as well.
On that score as well, she repeated to herself, tightly clutching the rocking chair’s arms so as not to be sucked into the drain of the enormous avocado-green sink she could half see beneath her closed eyelids — identical to the one in the hotel bathroom, she noted with a knowing snicker, frightened and flattered to observe that once again it was all fitting together. If Jimmy was using her, if Jimmy was inventing roles and a career for her to fascinate the Rotors, how could she use him?