Yes, I fight the drafts. I complain bitterly indeed about the trace of ice on the windowpane, the sound of wind in our vaulted fireplace, the enemy that sets the flame of the candle dancing. Do you know that I suffer acutely because one of my ears is always colder than the other? My feet begin to stiffen inside my thick socks and English shoes, the coldness of my hands
defies the most vigorous rubbing, reproachfully I tell Honorine that the walls are cold, that the fire is too small, that someone has left one of our thick oaken doors ajar. But you have heard my complaints. You have even remarked that an old chateau is no place for a man who sniffs out spiteful breezes in all seasons.
And yet you cannot know what it is to have cold elbows. The elbows are the worst. Because in them the little twin fiends of numbness and incapacity appear to sit most easily, comfortably, as if the nearly naked exposure of the bones in the elbows attracts most readily those sensations-those two allegorical envoys-of the ice that is already creeping and hardening across the very surfaces of our last night. Oh yes, Honorine is tolerant of this obsessive susceptibility of mine. She is forebearing, indulgent, good-humored, despite her critical comments and all these years of robes, hot fires, the soft and warming fur of dead rabbits. And yet hours after I have been restored as fully as possible to a condition resembling so-called normal body temperature, it is then that I am most aware of the coldness lingering in my elbows and of the fact that I can never be entirely comfortable while for her part Honorine is never cold. Actually, it is embarrassing to be unable to touch your wife at night without first warming your hands in a sinkful of scalding water. It is not pleasant to feel your wife flinching even in the heat of her always sensible and erotic generosity.
But I hope it is not too warm for you. Surely you can understand that tonight especially the heating regulator is set precisely and, I admit, at the highest possible degree. In this case the discomfort you are being made to feel is simply no match for that which I am avoiding. Don't you agree?
So you think that I am merely deceiving you with words. You think that I am trying to talk away the last of our time together merely in order to destroy the slightest possibility of my change of mind. You think that I am shrouding the last dialogue of our lives in the gauze of unreality, the snow of evasion. You think that euphemism is my citadel, that all my poised sentences are the work of mere self-protection, and that if only you can persuade me to accept head-on the validity of your word-that word-as the simplest and clearest definition of the car accident that is intended and that involves persons other than the driver, then you will have won the very reprieve which, from the start, I have tried to convince you does not exist. Well, beware, cher ami. Beware.
But perhaps you are right. Perhaps "murder" is the proper word, though it offends my ear as well as my intentions. However, mine is not a fixed and predictable personality, and you may be right. I too am open to new ideas. So let us agree that "murder" is at least a possibility. Let us hold it in store, so to speak, for the final straightaway. But I ask only that you then find new and more pertinent connotations of that ugly word and make your most objective effort to believe-believe-that there can be no exceptions to the stages, as I've sketched them, of what we may call our private apocalypse. It is like a game: I cannot accept the idea of "murder" unless you are able to refuse the illusory comfort of "reprieve." After all, how can the two of us talk together unless you are fully aware that the two of us are leaping together, so to speak, from the same bridge?
Which reminds me of a singular episode of my early manhood. It occurred when Honorine was hardly more than a seductive silhouette on my black horizon. And yet it was most instructive, this brief event, and may well be the clue to the beginning of my romantic liaison with Honorine and even to the lasting strength of my marriage. Certainly it determined or revealed the nature of the life I would lead henceforth as well as the nature of the man I had just become. It is something of a travesty, involving a car, an old poet, and a little girl. Perhaps we shall get to it. Perhaps. For now you must simply believe me when I say that, thanks to this singular episode, my own early manhood contained its moment of creativity. In my youth I also had my taste or two of that "cruel detachment" which was
to make you famous. More similarities between the canary and his friend the crow. But now you must realize that you have always underestimated the diversity, as we may call it, of the members of the privileged class.
At least you have always appreciated Honorine. Yet who would not? In her entire person is she not precisely the incarnation of everything we least expect to find in the woman who appears to reveal herself completely, and no matter how attractively, in the first glance? Think of her now, not sleeping in that massive antique bed of hers, but, say, outdoors and bending to her roses or better, perhaps, in our great hall and sitting on her leather divan and wearing her tight plum-colored velvet slacks and white linen blouse. Only another attractive, youthful-looking married woman of the privileged class, we assume. Only one of those conventional women framed, so to speak, by her bankbook and happy children and a car of her own. We see her against a background of yellow cloth on which has been imprinted a tasteful arrangement of tree trunks and little birds; we know that everything in her domain reflects a pleasing light, a texture of familiar elegance; we recognize that she is neither large nor small, neither beautiful nor plain, despite her golden hair cut short and feathery in the mode of the day; we expect her to be little more than a kindly person, a friend to other women, a happy mother, a fair athlete, someone who reads books and supervises the redecoration of an old chateau and secretly tries to imagine a better life. Large but studious-looking eyeglasses of yellowish shell, shoes that gleam with the aesthetic richness of the country from which they have been imported, a wedding band excessively studded with rare stones, an agreeable mind that complements the oval face, the willing personality that reflects the hot bath taken only moments before- all these telltale signs we both have scanned too often in the past, have we not? Haven't we here the young middle-aged woman who cannot quite compete with the paid models in the fashion magazine but who yet catches our eye? The young matron not quite distinguished enough to join the striking matriarch on the facing page, yet benign enough to make us think of a drop of honey on a flat square of glass? If this is she — the woman in tennis shorts, the person who smiles, the wife with trim legs in which the veins are beginning to show-then we have seen her kind before and cannot find her especially interesting. Everything about such a person suggests the bearded father, the hand prepared well in advance to tend the sumptuous roses, a certain intelligence in the eyes, but finally the undeniable indications of the female life that is destined, after all, for unfulfillment-which is not interesting. No, we are hardly about to spend time or undertake the risks of seduction for a mere drop of honey on a sheet of glass. Let her remain in her old chateau where she belongs, surrounded as she deserves to be by husband and children and all of her uncertain advantages. At best this woman will give us only pride or pathos, being too long descended, as she appears to be, from that original countess who in ageless vigor maintained who knows what naked dominion in the boudoir.
But how wrong it all is, how very wrong. Superficially correct, and yet totally wrong. Yes, you and I know better, do we not? Together we know that the beauty of our Honorine is that, deserving these various epithets as she surely does, still she contains within herself precisely the discretion and charm and sensual certainty we could not have imagined. On this you will bear me out. I know you will.