~ ~ ~
On my way out of class (what did those two virgins in burkas care about that revolting queen, that self-proclaimed analist, Jean Lorrain? did their fathers realise what they were reading in the name of literature?), I bumped into Marie-Françoise, who proposed lunch. Clearly, it was going to be a social day.
I liked the old bag. She was funny, she was an insatiable gossip, and she’d been at the university long enough, and spent enough time on the right committees, to have better information than anyone would ever entrust to the likes of Steve. She led us to a Moroccan restaurant in the rue Monge. Clearly, it would be a halal day, too.
She got going as soon as the waiter brought our food. Big Delouze was on the way out. The National Council of Universities had been in session since June, and it looked as though they’d choose Robert Rediger to replace her.
Glancing down into my lamb-and-artichoke tagine, I raised my eyebrows. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s huge. And it’s not just talk — I have it on good authority.’
I excused myself, and in the men’s room I slipped out my smartphone. You really can find anything on the Internet nowadays. A two-minute search revealed that Robert Rediger was famously pro-Palestinian, and that he’d helped orchestrate the boycott against the Israelis. I washed my hands carefully and went back to the table.
My heart sank: my tagine was already getting cold. ‘Won’t they wait for the elections?’ I asked, after I’d had a bite. This struck me as a sensible question.
‘The elections? The elections? What have the elections got to do with it?’ Not so sensible after all, I guessed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just, in three weeks we might have a new president …’
‘Please, that’s all settled. It will be just like 2017, the National Front will make it into the run-offs and the left will be voted back in. I don’t see why the council should fart around waiting for the elections.’
‘But there’s the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re an unknown quantity. If they got twenty per cent, it would be a symbolic benchmark, and could change the balance of power …’ I was talking utter bullshit, of course. Ninety-nine per cent of the Muslim Brotherhood would throw their votes to the Socialists. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you’d been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I was also rather pleased with symbolic benchmark. In any case, Marie-Françoise nodded as if I’d just expressed an idea, and she launched into a long disquisition on the possible consequences, for the university leadership, if the Muslim Brotherhood was voted in. Her combinatory intelligence was fully engaged, but I wasn’t really listening any more. I watched the hypotheses flicker across her sharp old features. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.
My afternoon seminar was exhausting. Doctoral students tended to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on France 2.
That night the National Front candidate was on. She proclaimed her love of France (‘But which France?’ asked a centre-left pundit, lamely), and I wondered whether my love life was really and truly over. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent much of the evening trying to decide whether to call Myriam. I had a feeling she wasn’t seeing anyone new. I’d run into her a few times at the university and she had given me a look that one might describe as intense, but the truth was she always looked intense, even when she was choosing a conditioner. I couldn’t get my hopes up. Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was, inarguably withering away.
‘Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.’ So begins the article Maupassant published in Gil Blas on À rebours. In general, literary history has been hard on Naturalism. Huysmans was celebrated for having thrown off its yoke, and yet Maupassant’s article is much deeper and more sensitive than the article by Bloy that appeared at the same time in Le chat noir. Even Zola’s objections make sense, on rereading: it is true that, psychologically, Jean des Esseintes remains unchanged from the first page to the last; that nothing happens, or can happen, in the book; that it has, in a sense, no plot. It is also true that there was no way for Huysmans to take À rebours any further than he did. His masterpiece was a dead end — but isn’t that true of any masterpiece? After a book like that, Huysmans had no choice but to part ways with Naturalism. This is all that Zola notices. Maupassant, the greater artist, grasped that it was a masterpiece. I laid out these ideas in a short article for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, which, for the several days it took me to write it, was much more engaging than the electoral campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.
She must have made a ravishing little goth as a teenager, not so long ago, and she had grown into a very classy young woman, with her bobbed black hair, her very white skin and her dark eyes. Classy, but quietly sexy. And she more than lived up to her promise of discreet sexuality. For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, and no one had ever given me more pleasure than Myriam. She could contract her pussy at will (sometimes softly, with a slow, irresistible pressure; sometimes in sharp, rebellious little tugs); when she gave me her little arse, she swivelled it around with infinite grace. As for her blow jobs, I’d never encountered anything like them. She approached each one as if it were her first, and would be her last. Any single one of them would have been enough to justify a man’s existence.
I ended up calling her, once I’d spent a few more days wondering whether I should. We agreed to meet that very evening.
~ ~ ~
We continue to use tu with our ex-girlfriends, that’s the custom, but we kiss them on the cheeks and not the lips. Myriam wore a short black skirt and black tights. I’d invited her to my place. I didn’t really want to go to a restaurant. She had an inquisitive look around the room and sat back on the sofa. Her skirt really was extremely short and she’d put on make-up. I offered her a drink. Whisky, she said, if you have it.
‘Something’s different …’ She took a sip. ‘But I can’t tell what.’
‘The curtains.’ I had installed double curtains, orange and ochre with a vaguely ethnic motif. I’d also bought a throw.
She turned round, kneeling on the sofa to examine the curtains. ‘Pretty,’ she decided. ‘Very pretty, actually. But then, you always did have good taste — for such a macho man.’ She turned to face me. ‘You don’t mind me calling you macho, do you?’