That response, the arguments used to justify A***’s refusal, were attempts to disorient me; in fact they did nothing but accentuate even more the imperative violence of my desire. They also left room for debate. All of the notions of love A***’s reasoning invoked seemed erroneous to me, and I set about proving it. Those reasons were only a pretext; I wanted the truth. I was ranting, using cunning to obtain it, and seeing that the facts were being concealed from me, I brazenly concluded that they must have been in my favor. We spent the night discussing, disputing the erroneous fables used to justify A***’s refusal, and the valid reasons for my desire. Through every tone I modulated the absolute demand and legitimacy of my passion.
In return, A*** took refuge behind a moderation far from the habitual impulsiveness to which I was accustomed. That night the inversion was complete: I made myself into a demon, and A*** symmetrically put on the mask of the angel that I had abandoned. A***’s final argument, pronounced on the threshold of the Eden, was of this order: “I rely on your friendship, and a physical relationship would annihilate it irremediably; so you must not love me, for such a relationship would be hellish. Don’t ask of me what I’m unable to give you without the risk of letting you down.” I relate neither the exact terms of this plea — they were much more trivial — nor the precise progression of A***’s personal logic, which was much less clearly defined. And I cannot relate them simply because A*** never formulated a link between successive sentences. From an unorganized mass of statements, of partial notes and arguments, I managed to extract a line of reasoning, a collection of synthetic propositions that I subsequently reiterated to verify their accuracy. For example, the following assertions emitted more than an hour apart: “If I agree to sleep with you, things won’t be the same afterward;” and, “I’m ill-tempered, no one tolerates me for long;” and, “We can’t sleep together, we’ll end up fighting because neither of us will want to let the other take the lead.” I concluded implicitly that A***, only able to imagine love as a system of power relations, could only envisage our relationship as a battle, leading irremediably to a violent rupture. I had to translate and arrange every word so that they became intelligible to me. Add to this some misunderstandings stemming from different mother tongues, and perhaps one can grasp the difficulty of my enterprise.
This resistance, despite being hard to define, did not disarm me: I persevered and kept at it for weeks, trying to prove to A*** through every means imaginable that to succumb to my pleas and do the deed, far from destroying our affection, would only deepen and reinforce it. I insisted, tactically, on this shocking fact: A***’s not-so prudish attitude could coexist with my moral rigidity, and a carefree practice of bodily exhibition could rub shoulders with an equally strong contempt and suspicion of the flesh. In other words, that A***’s excesses could go hand in hand with my moderation and decorum. Far from being enraged by my obstinacy or taking offense at my incessant urging, A*** found it all quite amusing. This was a good sign. Certainly the variety of my pleas was astonishing; one often finds oneself suddenly capable of deploying the treasures of rhetoric, imagination, and persuasion in order to convince someone to have sex — a very common ambition, and not so interesting when one thinks about it in the cold light of day. But voilà, the price that I seemed to attach to my conquest, measured in terms of the energy and ingenuity I was expending, was high enough to be flattering. What must have seemed at first to be a passing blaze of concupiscence was, over time, taking on real form.
Our daily telephone conversations were no longer anything but a game: a hypothetical reconstruction of our relationship if A*** were to succumb to my desires. We were presenting each other with illusions, visions, and tableaux. The object of this display was to figure out how to get along without drama, how to deal with the overcrowding engendered by a relationship that we hoped would not be temporary, but rather truly invested with stable affections, tastes, habits, and lifestyles — all of which differed radically, even more each day. We discussed everything down to the most trivial details. Would we live together? And if so, how would we divide up the household chores? Would we sleep in separate beds, thus shielding ourselves from the boredom of a complacent conjugality? And if not, what type of bedding would we choose? A*** was pushing for the classic pairing of sheets and covers, I for the more rational duvet.
The slow workings of this fiction, which didn’t shy away from any ridiculous or insignificant detail, were taking on the meticulous traits of familiarity. It was winning A*** over to the possibility of such a relationship. Its incongruity, its danger was dissipating in the soothing quietude of our constructed fable. Repetition and habit tend to diffuse excess. A*** was no longer systematically imagining the worst, no longer predicting disasters at every turn; the scenarios were becoming less catastrophic. Our union, by dint of simulation, was no longer completely inconceivable. The game of “and if” wore down A***’s reluctance; every day, we already belonged to each other in our imaginations. My desire was gaining power through a trick, was gaining life through a fiction.
Finally it no longer seemed to be a perilous trap to plan a vacation together, an idea I had secretly been entertaining for a long time now. I convinced A*** to go away with me to Munich for a few days just before Christmas, with no ulterior motive, in keeping with our “and if…” We left, pretending for a laugh that it was our honeymoon, where of course nothing scandalous would actually happen. One morning, after a night of work, we boarded the first plane for Munich and settled into a comfortable hotel room around noon.
The weather was astonishingly beautiful for the entire duration of our trip. A***, who had lived for some time in Munich, knew a lot of people there. I went along on some visits, but I saved three afternoons for myself to go from church to church and to make a rapid tour of some of the museums. It was important for me to prove to A*** that a relationship didn’t amount to servitude and suffocation. Nevertheless, I was trying to secure the promise that we would visit the church Saint*** together, a little Baroque gem that I thought A*** would like because of its excessive decorative style and outrageous ornamental magnificence. Indeed, this extreme manifestation of Baroque taste, magnified in the confined proportions of that church, swallowed up and overwhelmed the view, from the spiral trompe-l’oeil to the horrible allusion to the confessional placed under the sign of the skull and crossbones.
Catholic and as far as possible from the censorious tastes of the Puritans, A*** was the perfect antithesis to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation suited A*** perfectly, and, in guessing that, I had brought A*** a pleasure that might never have been discovered otherwise.
Munich also had some nightclubs to offer. Each night we visited three or four, where A***’s extensive notoriety was again made clear to me. Two years spent in Munich had sufficed to make A*** known in more or less all of the city’s social circles. In each of these clubs, we were always invited to a table where I was introduced to a mob of people I would have been incapable of recognizing if I were to meet them again.
The clubs in Munich closed earlier than in Paris and some of them legally had to shut down at two o’clock. This particular policy forced us into a transhumance around four in the morning, inevitably leading us to a rather snooty club — the Sans-Nom, the Bavarian equivalent to the Apocryphe, frequented moreover by the same fashionable idlers that can be found in all the major cities of the world.