“Still don’t feel any better?”
He could drive as fast as he wanted, she didn’t care at all.
“You should just run the red lights.”
“You’re crazy.”
And he hurtled into the tunnel under Porte Maillot. He never stopped admiring his Italian sports car; he had even told her, one night, that there were only four people in Paris who had this kind of car, with an Allemano body.
The smell of his cologne nauseated her more than usual, but that too didn’t matter. On the contrary, she took a certain pleasure in noticing all the details about his person that repulsed her. His tan, which looked fake even though he had just come back from a ski trip, and the excessive care he took with his clothes: tiepin, vest, a pocket watch he never stopped taking out to look at. His oily, husky voice.
“So, still sulking? I don’t like girls who sulk, you know.”
He wasn’t usually so familiar with her. No mention of the record he wanted her to make. He had never believed in that record, she now knew. He turned up the volume on the radio, bobbing his head with the beat.
“I need money,” she said abruptly.
“Money? Are you serious?”
“Two thousand francs. I want you to give it to me.”
She herself was surprised at her sudden confidence, but all at once it was like she was not afraid of anyone, as if all her timidity and scruples had disappeared and she was ready for anything.
“I really need those two thousand francs. Tonight.”
“Well, we’ll see. You’ll have to be very nice to me…”
•
She walked behind Vietti, and the fluorescent lights blinded her, just like the first time, when she was sitting with Louis in the waiting room chairs. The same stagnant smell was in the air.
Vietti turned the key in the leather padded door and sat down behind his desk. She took refuge by the window. The street was empty and the large café opposite, where Louis had waited for her, was still lit. She looked at the lit sign: CAFÉ DES SPORTS. She felt like leaving and calling Louis from the café, to tell him that she would be back right away.
“Well, now you have to earn your money. Two thousand francs, that’s a lot, you know. It’ll cost you.”
He looked through a folder on his desk without raising his eyes to her. Then he took a record out of its cover.
“Here. Now this is a talented girl. My last discovery. You want to listen?”
He put the record on the player.
“Stand in front of me. Take your clothes off.”
He said it in an unctuous tone, a smile fixed to his face, like someone posing for a photograph.
“She’s really talented, don’t you think? You wish you could sing like that? I’m going to get her on Eurovision next year…”
The mischievous voice of a little girl, smothered by electric guitars.
“I’ll have to fuck her too, one of these days,” Vietti said dreamily.
She was huddled on the sofa. He put his hand on Odile’s neck and pulled her face down to his waist. After that, the worst part of it for her was feeling the pressure of his manicured fingers in her hair.
•
The lights at the Café des Sports were off. She took a right down boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. The roll of bills Viette had given her was buried in one of the pockets of her raincoat: two thousand francs. He had said, looking snide, that she “cost a lot for a whore,” but that it wasn’t any problem for him, because he had “always liked expensive whores” for as long as he could remember.
She crossed avenue des Ternes and looked down toward where Bellune had killed himself. Suddenly she felt his absence with such force that it was as though she had plunged into the void. What would Bellune have thought about all this? He hadn’t believed very strongly in her future as a singer either, and near the end he was obviously preoccupied with other things. But she remembered her afternoon visits to his office, and the deck of his apartment where you felt like you were on the bridge of an ocean liner. It was Bellune who had taught her “La Chanson des rues,” a song dating from the time when he had first come to France. He had always shown kindness to her. His face, bent over the tape player while the reel turned in silence. And the words he used to say, in a soft voice, before leading her out of his office:
“What do you say we go downstairs, Odile?”
And Louis? What would he think if he knew what had just happened? He would never know. She needed the money. Bejardy’s fifteen hundred francs was not enough, and the only way the two of them could escape was by having money.
She had earned more money that night than Louis’s monthly salary, and she was sorry she hadn’t demanded more from that bastard with the manicured fingernails. She heard again the nightclub manager’s laugh, after he told her she wouldn’t be singing there anymore. She should have gotten some money out of him too.
The dream was over. She would not sing again. She had not succeeded in making people hear; her voice had not freed itself from the dust and the noise like the voice of the singer she had read about. She did not have the courage.
She reached rue Delaizement, with the garage at the end. The light on the second floor was on and Louis was asleep on the couch. The large album where he glued photographs of his father was sitting on the floor, next to an open volume of the bound issues of the sports magazine. He had glued an article at the top of the album page and she read it mechanically:
“… In the following stage, Memling finally had the upper hand over Gérardin, who started too cautiously, and overtook him at the 3,625 meter mark…”
She turned out the light and curled up against Louis.
~ ~ ~
LATER, when the two of them talked about the past — but they did so only on very rare occasions, mostly after the birth of their children — they were surprised to realize that the most decisive time in their lives had lasted barely seven months. It was true: Louis had left the army in December, they had met in early January…
In February, Brossier found them a new apartment. One day, when he came to see Louis at Porte Champerret, he was shocked by how tiny the room was and the stifling heat from the enormous radiator.
“You can’t stay here, old boy. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
He knew about a “two bedroom” available just then, which he’d wanted to rent himself but then he had changed his mind, it was too far away from Cité Universitaire. It was at the start of rue Caulaincourt, on the other side of the iron bridge that crossed over Montmartre Cemetery. The rent? Reasonable, very reasonable. He would talk to Bejardy about it. Bejardy wouldn’t have the heart to leave Odile and Louis in such a miniscule, overheated attic.
They moved into the place on rue Caulaincourt the following month, and the apartment felt enormous. The main room was a studio. In one corner — the only things left from the artist who had lived there — there were a fan with huge blades and a semicircular bar. The bar’s chipped black lacquer was decorated with Chinese-inspired drawings like the ones on the shirt Brossier liked to wear at Cité. The windows looked out over southwest Paris.
Bejardy gave them a bed and an armchair with garnet-red upholstery, Brossier two cane chairs and a lamp. They even had a phone. And a well-furnished kitchen. When the concierge asked for their names to put on his list of renters, they said Mr. and Mrs. Memling, thinking he would feel better about a young married couple.
One night, they had their official housewarming party, as Brossier pompously put it. He said that Jacqueline Boivin, his fiancée, would unfortunately not be able to join them — from Cité Universitaire, rue Caulaincourt seemed like the other end of the world. You had to cross the Seine to get there, and the river was the frontier between two cities that had nothing to do with each other.