Never Anyone But You Read online

  “And you’ll meet Toinette,” she added casually.

  “Toinette?”

  “My mother.”

  Something lurched inside me. Something tumbled. I wasn’t sure if I’d been hoping to meet Madame Schwob, or dreading it.

  “I thought she was in a clinic,” I said.

  Claude shrugged. “Sometimes they let her out. She’s staying in a rest home nearby.”

  We arrived late in the evening, the trees motionless and black in a sky dense with stars, the air loud with the grating of cicadas. The next morning I woke early. I was in the drawing room, waiting for Claude to come downstairs, when I heard ponderous footsteps in the passageway outside. I stayed where I was, by the window, my back to the garden. I tried to tell myself it was just Claude’s grandmother, but I already knew that she was light on her feet and fidgety as a bat.

  At last a woman appeared, large enough to fill the open doorway, and dressed in dark-blue taffeta. Beneath her wide-brimmed hat, her jaw was bullish, determined.

  “Lucie?”

  I ought to have stood up and introduced myself, but I couldn’t speak, or even move. If I was ill-mannered, though, Madame Schwob didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she slowly advanced across the room, her feet and body at an angle to me, as if she were inching along a narrow ledge. I had no idea what was in her mind; it was possible that she viewed me as something unpleasant, even dangerous—a spider, for example, or a snake.

  When she was within touching distance, she bent down and peered at me. I still hadn’t moved.

  “You’re not Lucie,” she said.

  “I’m Suzanne,” I said. “Lucie’s friend.”

  Her gaze was attentive but veiled, and though I knew I was being scrutinized I also felt, oddly, as if I had not been seen.

  She stepped back and glanced down at her hands. Frowning, she began to remove her gloves.

  “Can you sing?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Sing for me.”

  She settled on a green divan, her gloves in her lap, and looked at me expectantly.

  I was on my feet and about to begin when Madame Courbebaisse walked in. She spoke to her daughter in a low voice and took hold of her arm. Shaking her off, Madame Schwob started shouting abuse. I slipped out of the room.

  Though Madame Schwob only appeared at the house towards the end of each day, there were many quarrels and altercations—Madame Courbebaisse seemed tormented by her daughter, who she referred to as “the lunatic”—and in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere Claude and I dreamed up a series of entertainments. One evening, we put on a play Claude had written. We took the male leads and cast girls from the village in the female roles. On another night, I sang songs made famous by Paul Delmet in the 1890s—“Petit chagrin,” “Les deux tulipes”…Once the concert was over, Madame Schwob clapped with her fingers separated, like a child. Her eyes were glistening with tears. Was it happiness she was feeling, or regret, or was she nostalgic for a part of her life that there was no returning to, before the madness wrapped her in its folds?

  1912. A spring afternoon in Nantes, the weather unseasonably hot. Claude and I sat in the Café de l’Europe, three doors down from where she lived. We had ordered a second iced coffee—or was it a third? As always, we were putting off the moment when we would have to say goodbye. Outside, the square was bleached white with sunlight, but the interior of the café was dark and cool. According to the newspapers, the attempts by Great Britain and Germany to reach an agreement about naval spending had foundered once again. The arms race was out of control.

  “The British will never back down.” Claude pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “My father thinks there will be war.”

  All the light from beyond the window seemed to have collected on Claude’s face. Her skin had its usual flawless pallor, and I could see the gold crazing in her irises. She looked at me and took a breath. She bit her bottom lip.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I just realized something. I’m not sure how to say it, though.”

  I smiled. “That can’t possibly be true. You always know how to say things.”

  “It’s going to sound strange.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t feel that I exist unless you look at me.” She seemed astonished then, as if what she had just said was some kind of revelation, one of those truths you only become fully aware of when you find the words for it. “When you’re not looking, it’s almost as if I disappear.”

  I wondered if I could say what it was in my mind to say. I decided that I could. “In that case, I’ll never take my eyes off you.”

  Her face held quite still. A single tiny movement, and the moment would evaporate. “Is that a promise?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her eyes and smiled. Then she stood up. “There’s a place I want to show you.”

  We left the café and walked to the offices of her father’s newspaper, Le Phare de la Loire. In the downstairs lobby, we met a young boy who told Claude that he had very much admired her recent theater review. She thanked him, but didn’t stop to talk. As we climbed the stairs, I asked her who he was. Jacques Viot, she said. He wasn’t even fourteen yet, but he had real talent. She thought he would soon be writing for the paper.

  On the first floor, we passed through a set of double doors.

  “The library,” she said.

  The air had a sweet, pungent smell. The glue used in the binding of books must have softened in the heat. In the distance, I heard the muffled tapping of a typewriter.

  “I come here to read,” Claude told me. “Late at night, when all the editors have gone home.”

  I followed her down the aisles between the stacks. From the back of the library, it was possible to look into the empty apartment opposite. The wallpaper was the same in every room—a tangle of orange roses with black stems. The street was so narrow that I could almost have stepped from one building into the other. Light filtered down from a sky that could not be seen.

  We were surrounded by scientific periodicals and monographs, all highly specialized, their pages musty, foxed. Claude read the titles out loud, one after the other, the language so obscure and technical that it sounded like an incantation or a spell, and then she knocked into me, almost clumsily, as if she had lost her footing. It seemed involuntary. An accident. But suddenly her mouth was close to mine, and my arms were round her waist, her small, urgent body pressed against me, her lips tasting of coffee.

  “I have longed for you,” she murmured, “night after night. My longing poisoned me. It was like tetanus or septicemia. It got into my blood and made me ill. I was like someone who was dying—slowly dying.” She reached out and touched the window, her forefinger leaving a faint print on the glass. “I never realized that something that wasn’t there could kill me. I didn’t know that could happen.”

  “I was dying too,” I said.

  “Were you? Really? I thought you had no interest in me. I thought I was the only one who felt something.”

  “No interest in you?” I laughed softly.

  I told her what I remembered of our meeting three years before—the dim light in the room, the rain, the smear of jam.

  “I had jam on my face?” she said.

  “Yes. Just here.” I touched the place. “I felt the same thing you were feeling. Didn’t you notice?” I stood back and looked at her. “You didn’t see me blushing?”

  “I thought I was making you uncomfortable. Because I was younger.”

  My face burned, as before. “It wasn’t that.”

  “What was it, then?”

  Before I could answer, she pressed her lips against my lips. I felt her tongue. Long, whirling moments. Our bodies seemed to want to merge. Incorporate each other.

  The door to the library opened. I tensed, my mouth still
close to hers.

  Footsteps approached. Claude’s father appeared at the end of the aisle. He looked startled.

  “I’m showing Suzanne the library,” Claude told him.

  “I thought someone had broken in,” he said. “An intruder…”

  She smiled. “No, father. It’s just us.”

  Just us. That summer I thought about Claude all the time. I lost my appetite, and found it hard to sleep. When darkness fell, I walked along the quays for hours, past freighters loading and unloading. I often ended up under the pylon that supported the north end of the transporter bridge, leaning against the metal stanchion and listening to it creak and tick as it cooled after the thick heat of the day. A decade later, a Polish daredevil would die attempting a leap from the middle of the bridge into the river. His photograph appeared in all the newspapers—his tense, hopeful face, his wiry hair, a white skull and crossbones on the front of his black leotard. On those warm nights, there was a queasy, prickling sensation around my heart, like pins and needles, as if it had been numb and was coming back to life. But perhaps it had never been alive—not until then. If I looked at myself in the mirror, my eyes seemed to glitter with a hectic, otherworldly light. My mother was so concerned about me that she spoke to my father, and he summoned me to his office for an examination. Though my father still practiced as a histopathologist, specializing in the study of disease in human tissues, he was also director of the École de Médecine. After conducting several tests, he satisfied himself that there was nothing wrong with me, but my brother had his own ideas.

  “I think she’s in love,” Jean said one day, at breakfast.

  I stared at my plate, my heart beating in my throat. How did he know? What did he know?

  “There’s a friend of mine,” he went on, “who sends her poems…”

  My father’s eyebrows lifted. “No daughter of mine is going to marry a poet. We already had one of them in the family. It was a disaster.” But he was smiling.

  “He’s not a poet,” Jean said. “He’s a doctor.”

  “That changes everything,” my father said.

  “Which friend?” my mother asked.

  Jean shrugged. “Ask her.”

  “I’m not in love with Patrice,” I said, “if that’s who you’re referring to.”

  My family exchanged knowing looks. They thought I was lying.

  From that moment on, Patrice became my alibi.

  Every time I left the house, no matter what my destination was, I made Place du Commerce part of my route, hoping for a glimpse of Claude. Once, as I passed through on a tram, I saw her leaving the Café de la Bourse, on the southeast corner of the square. She was wearing a sailor’s outfit, the trousers dark and loose, the blue-and-white collar on the tunic as wide as her shoulders, and she had a folded newspaper in her hand. Something shifted or dropped inside me, like a picture slipping in its frame. By then, we had already spent time in the bluebell wood again, this second visit far less chaste. Another time, we fell asleep in a field of ripe wheat. I had woken with Claude’s arm across my belly, a light rain falling miraculously from a sky that didn’t have a cloud in it.

  The following spring, while exploring the countryside to the northwest of the city, we happened to cycle along a track that led to a disused quarry. Nearby was a small two-story house with a garden so overgrown that the ground floor was hardly visible. Trees crowded in behind, making it feel overlooked but safe. We climbed in through a broken window and crept from room to room, but found no evidence of human habitation, only mouse droppings, bird lime, and a smell so dry and peppery that Claude began to sneeze. The stairs had rotted. Some of the floorboards too. Hanging from the ceiling in the room by the front door was a black metal chandelier with frosted green glass panes. Like something from a pirate ship, I thought. We made a bed of grass and weeds under the window and covered it with a pair of torn velvet curtains. Though we felt less exposed than we had in the woods or the field, there was still the fear that somebody might come, and we pulled a wardrobe across the door as a barricade. Claude christened the place La Maison sans Nom—the House without a Name. It became our refuge, a kind of home.

  One afternoon, as we lay side by side in the green gloom, Claude asked if I would ever marry.

  “I suppose so,” I said, “at some point. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t think my father wants me to.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s worried I might have children and pass on my mother’s illness.” One arm behind her head, she stared up at the chandelier. “He has never actually said so, but I know that’s what he’s thinking.”

  “That’s terrible, Claude.”

  “Not necessarily. A husband, children—maybe it’s not what I want. Maybe the whole thing’s a blessing in disguise—” She broke off, then she said something strange. “Will you give me a year?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t do anything for a year. Don’t make any big decisions.”

  Though I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to, I nodded. “All right. But this has to remain a secret.”

  “This.” She was mocking me gently. “Actually, there’s a part of me that wants people to know about us. I mean, I’m not ashamed. Are you ashamed?”

  “Of course not. But that’s not the point.”

  “So what is the point?”

  I sighed. “Imagine what our parents would do if they found out.”

  “They’d probably send us to Bondy-la-Forêt or Amélie-les-Bains.” Claude was grinning. But these were places where her mother had spent time.

  “That’s not funny.” I stood up and began to straighten my clothes. “You have to be discreet. Can you do that?” I looked at her across one shoulder. She was still sprawling on our makeshift bed, her shirt unbuttoned, the shallow slope of one breast showing.

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she said.

  Claude’s announcement in the Café de l’Europe had startled me—touched me too—but in a wider sense it amounted to a kind of provocation. She had implied that she didn’t need men in order to exist. All she needed was me. In the world in which we lived, though, women didn’t exist except in relation to men. If a woman stepped outside the confines of the behavior assigned to her gender, it could be seen as a symptom of madness. Any subsequent efforts on the part of that woman to appear rational could be viewed as dissimulation—which was also, of course, a symptom of madness. If, in other words, she tried to prove she was sane, it would be taken as evidence that she was not. She would be locked up, and stay locked up. Psychiatric practice served a system that was overtly patriarchal, a system that Claude, a natural iconoclast, longed to overturn. The fact that she wasn’t allowed to articulate or even acknowledge her feelings frustrated her, and her mood would veer from one of reckless defiance to the deepest melancholy and despair.

  One September evening I called at the apartment on Place du Commerce with a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed that Claude had lent me. I hadn’t finished with the book; I just needed an excuse to see her. The front door opened to reveal Claude talking to her father in the entrance to his study. When she noticed me, she broke off in midsentence, ran down the hall, and launched herself at me. In her enthusiasm, she seemed to take flight, and though she weighed almost nothing I staggered backwards, into the stairwell.

  “Lucie!” her father called out. “You’ll knock poor Suzanne off her feet.”

  But Claude was whispering, her warm breath in my ear. “I love you, I love you, I love you…”

  Over her shoulder, I could see her father watching. I made a face to let him know I was embarrassed by Claude’s show of affection, but also powerless. He shook his head and disappeared into his study.

  Claude was always testing the border between what could be expressed and what had to be concealed. She liked to exploit the fact that our feelings for each other
lay beyond most people’s imaginations. This is Nantes, she said once. A sexual liaison between two women is unthinkable. She chuckled. It might be ironic, she went on, and it was certainly paradoxical, but there was a sense in which we were actually protected by convention. We were safer than we realized.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Take a picture of me.”

  We were upstairs in the little house in Le Croisic. It was a spring afternoon, and gold light from the harbor rippled across the ceiling. Claude lay on her back in bed, the sheet pulled up to just below her chin. She reminded me of someone who had been imprisoned or restrained. Was she thinking of Toinette? I picked up the Kodak camera she had borrowed from her father and opened it and stood beside the bed.

  “Not like that,” she said.

  I looked up from the viewfinder. “How then?”

  “You should be looking straight down from above. As if you were on the ceiling.”

  I glanced at the ceiling.

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “Stand on the bed and look down at me.”

  I did as she said, my feet on either side of her.

  “How does it look?” she asked.

  “Strong.”

  “Good. Take a picture. No, wait.” She reached up and pulled her hair away from her face, arranging it in such a way that it fanned out on the pillow, all around her head, like a halo, like foliage. Like strange, dark flames.

  I peered at her through the viewfinder, her head and shoulders trapped in the small tight frame. “That looks astonishing.”

  “You can take the picture now.”