We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn. We all own and forge an image of others in our minds which is inviolable and private. We make those private images public at our peril. Revelation is an audacious move to be long pondered. Unfortunately, this impulse occurs when we are least able to control it, when we’re distracted by love — or hate …
But we can possess others without their ever being truly aware of it. For example, I possess Steve and Anneliese in ways they could never imagine.
I often wonder what Anneliese thinks about while Ulricke and I are fucking across the room from her. Is she irritated? Curious? Happy? The intimacy of our domestic setup causes me some embarrassment at first, but the girls seem quite unperturbed. I affect a similar insouciance. But although we live in such proximity we maintain a bizarrely prim decorum. We don’t wander around naked. Ulricke and I undress while Anneliese is in the bathroom, or else with the lights out. I have yet to see Anneliese naked. And she’s always with us too — Ulricke and I have never spent a night alone. Since her affair with César she has had no boyfriend. My vague embarrassment swiftly departs and I begin to enjoy Anneliese’s presence during the night — like some mute and unbelievably lax chaperone. One day, to my regret, she tells me how happy she is that Ulricke “has” me; how pleased she is that we are together. The twin sisters are typically close; Anneliese is the more self-composed and confident and she feels protective toward Ulricke, who’s more vulnerable and easily hurt. I reassure her of my sincerity and try not to let the strain show on my face.
With some dismay I watch Steve — an exotic figure in his Afghan coat and flowing hair — join Anneliese in the back of Bent’s VW. Ulricke and I wave them on their way, then we walk down the road from the apartment block toward the Promenade des Anglais. Although it is after nine o’clock the night air is not unpleasantly cool. For the first time the spring chill has left the air — a presage of the bright summer to come. We walk down rue de la Buffa and cut over to the rue de France. The whores in the boutique doorways seem pleased at the clemency of the weather. They call across the street to each other in clear voices; some of them even wear hot pants.
It’s not that warm. Ulricke wears a white PVC raincoat and a scarf. I put my arm around her shoulders and hear the crackle of the plastic material. The glow from the streetlamps sets highlights in the shine on her nose and cheeks … I worry about Steve and Anneliese in the back of Bent’s car.
I begin to spend more and more nights at Ulricke’s. Madame d’Amico, my landlady, makes no comment on my prolonged absences. I visit my small room in her flat regularly to change my clothes but I find myself increasingly loath to spend nights alone there. Its fusty smell, its dismal view of the interior courtyard, the dull conversations with my fellow lodgers, depress me. I am happy to have exchanged lonely independence for the hugger-mugger intimacy of the villa. Indeed, for a week or so life there becomes even more cramped. The twins are joined by a girlfriend from Bremen, called Clara — twenty-two, sharp-faced, candid — in disgrace with her parents and spending a month or two visiting friends while waiting for tempers back home to cool. I ask her what she has done. She says she had an affair with her father’s business partner and oldest friend. This was discovered, and the ramifications of the scandal spread to the boardroom: suits are being filed, resignations demanded, takeover bids plotted. Clara seems quite calm about it all, her only regret being that her lover’s daughter — who hitherto had been her constant companion since childhood — now refuses to see or speak to her. Whole lives are irreparably askew.
Clara occupies the divan. She sleeps naked and is less concerned with privacy than the other girls. I find I relish the dormitory-like aspect of our living arrangements even more. At night I lie docilely beside Ulricke, listening to the three girls talking in German. I can’t understand a word — they could be talking about me, for all I know. Clara smokes French cigarettes and their pleasant sour smell lingers in the air after the lights are switched out. Ulricke and I wait for a diplomatic five minutes or so before making love. That fragrance of Gauloises or Gitanes is forever associated with those tense palpitating moments of darkness: Ulricke’s warm strong body, the carnal anticipation, the sounds of Clara and Anneliese settling themselves in their beds, their fake yawns.
On the Promenade des Anglais the shiny cars sweep by. Ulricke and I stick out our thumbs, goosing the air. We always get lifts immediately and have freely hitched, usually with Anneliese, the length of the Côte d’Azur, from Saint-Raphaël to Menton, at all hours of the day or night. One warmish evening, near Aix-en-Provence, the three of us decided spontaneously to sleep out in a wood. We huddled up in blankets and awoke at dawn to find ourselves quite soaked with dew.
A car stops. The driver — a man — is going to Monte Carlo. We ask him to take the haute corniche. Cherry’s villa is perched so high above the town that the walk up from the coast road is exhausting. Ulricke sits in the front — the sex of the driver determines our position. To our surprise we have found that very often single women will stop for the three of us. They are much more generous than the men as a rule: in our travels the women frequently buy us drinks and meals, and once we were given a hundred francs. Something about the three of us prompts this largesse. There is, I feel, something charmed about us as a trio, Ulricke, Anneliese and me. This is why — quite apart from his rebarbative personal habits — I so resent Steve. He is an interloper, an intruder: his presence, his interest in Anneliese, threatens me, us. The trio becomes a banal foursome, or — even worse — two couples.
From the small terrace at Cherry’s villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbor lights and the headlamps of cars on the coast road. The dim noise of traffic, the sonic rip of some lout’s motorbike, drift upward to the villa, competing with the thump and chords of music from inside. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — Live, The Yes Album, Hunky Dory … curious how these LPs pin and fix humdrum moments of our lives — precise as almanacs. An ars brevis for the quotidian.
The exquisite Cherry patrols her guests, enveloped in a fug of genial envy from her girlfriends. It’s not her impending marriage that prompts this emotion so much as the prospect of the “real” Coca-Cola, “real” milk and “real” meat she will be able to consume a few days hence. The girls from Ann Arbor reminisce indefatigably about American meals they have known. To them, France, Nice, is a period of abstention, a penance for which they will be rewarded in calories and carbohydrates when they return home.
I stroll back inside to check on Steve and Anneliese. My mistake was to have allowed them to travel together in Bent’s car. It conferred an implicit acknowledgment of their “coupledom” on them without Steve having to do anything about it. Indeed he seems oddly passive with regard to Anneliese, as if content to bide his time. Perhaps he is a little frightened of her? Perhaps it’s his immense vanity: time itself will impress upon her the logic and inevitability of their union …? Now I see him sitting as close to Anneliese as possible, as if adjacency alone were sufficient to possess her.