All the Way (18 page)

‘He's someone you can really talk to. People think it's cool to diss someone else. Well, actually it isn't; with him you can talk properly about others. Did he say stuff about me to you?'

No. And about me to you?

‘All he said was that you were a bit young. But he didn't say it in a nasty way. He told me it was a bit like you were playing with yourself.'

An avalanche of snow is about to freeze her brain.

That old joke. I just unleashed my sensuality on him. That's
what frightened him. When I want to be, I'm a total nympho.

‘It's true that his problem is that he doesn't accept his own desires. You have to guide him. He never takes the initiative. He's like, so
phobic.

Anyway, once you've seen his mother, you get why he's messed up.

‘You know, I don't like people badmouthing others, and if I happen to have done nasty things to other people, I didn't mean to. But I really don't trust myself now…'

Why?

She'd like to keep talking about Arnaud and clear the debris from the avalanche but she has to be polite, especially on her first visit here.

‘I used to be good all the time but I've got repressed feelings, buried very deep, which keep coming up—and you can't do anything about it if they overwhelm you. Take Delphine, for example, I know for a fact that she says horrible things about me, but she's just too much, and I'm no Good Samaritan.'

The truth is she's a hick.

‘You can't say that, it's not like it's her fault. But she is really annoying. I can't tell her, and I never would tell her anyway, but she's self-centred. And she's got a big head.'

Exactly. She thinks she's so great, it's crazy.

‘It's normal for her to talk about herself, and she does it endlessly, as if she's the only person in the whole world. She can't see beyond her own navel.'

According to Lætitia, Delphine is very sensitive, and that explains everything.

She's a megalomaniac
, adds Solange.

‘Megalomaniac?'

Yes, she's always going on about her father who died or whatever
and her working-class mother
.

‘Domestic servant,' corrects Lætitia. ‘Delphine is like my sister. My parents had a daughter before me and she died, Blue Disease. I think about her all the time, I imagine being buried underground and I say to myself: why is she rotting with the worms and my heart is still beating?'

Lætitia looks exceptionally beautiful when she utters these words, the extraordinary Blue Disease seems to be flowing in her veins; it's obvious now why she always wears black. She's smoking, and frowning.

What was her name?

‘Lætitia.'

Lætitia the same as you?

‘Lætitia d'Urbide. It's my mother's favourite first name.'

Veins in the shape of L and U pulse on her pale forehead. She reaches her arm towards the ashtray but the table is too far away and she tips back into the cushions as if it was too much effort, and that's exactly what Solange wants—that style and that elegance—she tips back too, onto the pouffe, and sighs.

It's really fantastic. You and I have so many things in common,
as well as Arnaud. We understand each other
so
well.

Delphine's mother brings in a tray with glasses and Coca-Cola. ‘Straws,' demands Lætitia. They wait in silence for her return with the straws.

Lætitia is wearing a pencil skirt, patent leather court shoes that she flips on and off, a little black jacket that she removes because it's hot, and a sort of body stocking in black lace, transparent across the shoulders and opaque across her breasts, with long gauze sleeves.

‘The difference between being girlfriends and being friends,' Lætitia continues, ‘is that girlfriends get on really well together, whereas true friendship is stronger but potentially more destructive.'

That doesn't frighten me. I can be really intense when I want to be.

‘Are you still friends with Rose?'

She hasn't changed at all and I have a lot. She's a nerd, she
doesn't smoke dope, doesn't take drugs or do anything.

‘There are things she just couldn't understand. She is too…not intense enough. I have to think of my own interests and it's something I just can't accept.'

I so agree with you. She's become frivolous, trivial. She's got a
Ciao, it's the same as a moped but better.

‘I know. It's frivolous, trivial.'

She's a girl who doesn't have the courage to be humble, to ask others for help. I've got too much self-respect to put up with that. I
have to do what's right for me.

‘She doesn't know how to be in the background. She's got too much personality. When you think about it, it's just unrestrained personality. She always has to be the centre of attention. I'm hypersensitive. My mother's always telling me. I could have ended up with a big personality too, but thanks to the fact that I'm hypersensitive, I think about other people.'

I so agree. At least you aren't conventional. You've avoided all
that image stuff. Not like Arnaud.

‘Yes. But sometimes not doing things like others gets to be so common it becomes conventional. Do you see what I mean? I imagine myself as I imagine others imagine me and I do the opposite. I don't try to be different, I just am, because to be like others think you are, or to want to be like you think they think you are, is straight-out frivolous, trivial.'

For sure.

Lætitia is gesturing with her long gauzy arms in front of her face, and her bouffant hair smells incredibly good—expensive shampoo, expensive air held inside the puffy mass of hair.

‘My problem is that I'm so perceptive. The fact that I know where I am means I'm terribly lost. Because where I am is not pretty at all.' As she says this, Lætitia seems to be on the edge of tears.

How could it be possible not to be happy with your lot in a chateau with a pool—

Why?

‘I know perfectly well, I have one failing: I'm perceptive.'

Lætitia seems suddenly distraught, leaning back in the cushions. She should
console
her (for what?), pat her soufflé of chestnut hair, or try to distract her, put a pillow on her head and pretend to be Napoleon like Jacques Dutronc in
The Most Important Thing: Love
that she secretly watched on TV without Bihotz knowing.

She leans towards the hair that is still as fluffy as ever and buries her nose in it, there is no end to this marvellous cloud of hair.

Lætitia lowers her eyes to her straw. A thin black streak outlines the length of her eyelids (how does she manage not to go over the edges?). Her face is right up close, large and flat like an object. Then it comes alive and turns towards Solange; the eyes open and the gaze radiant; Lætitia, Lætitia's mouth finds her mouth.

She leans in from her side, the taste is sparkling fresh, her elbow slides, their teeth smash, the Coke glasses clink together—they both pull back.

(Is Lætitia a
lesbian
?)

(At one point in
The Most Important Thing: Love
you see a woman who is disguised as a man with an actual false dick tied on with a sort of harness, and a completely naked girl who looks mad or on drugs, and we're supposed to interpret that, well, the whole thing seems impossible but it's nevertheless strongly hinted at.)

She has to say something.

(Does Lætitia have hairs on her breasts?)

That's the first time I've done it with a girl.

Which makes it clear that, on the other hand, she's done it with boys.

‘Me too,' whispers Lætitia.

It'll be our secret. We won't tell anyone. Promise me? Promise.

‘I promise,' says Lætitia solemnly. She shakes her legs and wiggles her hips to rearrange her clothes.

We won't tell anyone but I'm happy if we talk about it together.

Lætitia lights a cigarette and doesn't say anything.

I mean I'm happy if we talk about it, so that we don't end up
embarrassed or whatever—as if that could even be embarrassing, and
as if we'd never talk about it.

It feels like she's split in half and she can see herself talking, serious and apprehensive, sitting on the edge of the bed with Solange and Lætitia—where's the first Lætitia gone, the one who wanted to kiss her?

I'm sure we'll remember this moment for the rest of our lives
, she perseveres.
The rest of our lives. I'm absolutely certain.

Lætitia is also absolutely certain. With the tips of her fingernails she plays with a ladder in her stay-up stockings. On the other hand (says the young baroness), it's not as if you can
decide
what you'll remember; she manages to forget far more important things, and also to have moments when she's struck by the certainty that what she (Lætitia) is experiencing right then she will remember forever, and yet afterwards she forgets. Or else, oddly, she remembers tiny details. For example, a flash of landscape out of the window of the Audi, something completely outside herself and which, God knows why, is imprinted on her memory forever. At the time it seems like nothing at all, and in fact it's an intense moment embedded in her brain like, she doesn't know, a diamond.

Solange agrees completely.

That leaves them both musing.

Apparently Delphine is a
nympho.
Not exactly a whore or a slut. Nor a
loose girl
. She's more verging on the pathological side (explains Nathalie). That means she can't help herself, not to harm anyone but simply because she can't think of anything else. Even worse than Slurp. And she's itching to do it so much that she does it with anyone. She's even dyed her hair purple. She's deflowered half the boys at school, apparently. Including Arnaud, apparently (and recently).

And she's the daughter of a single mother.

‘I don't see the connection,' Rose interrupts.

For a few months now Rose has been making threatening comments in a super-responsible tone but with a really open mind. Like her parents. She'd probably get on well with Lætitia (except they can't stand each other).

‘If her mother had had the right to have an abortion'—Rose continues—‘Delphine wouldn't even be here to be called a nympho.'

Concepción makes the sign of the cross discreetly.

(Apparently if you make the sign of the cross upside down you go to Hell.)

‘Do you think it was out of pleasure'—Rose is adamant—‘that her mother fell pregnant at our age?'

A world without Delphine. In that world, she's certain that she, Solange, would be the one doing what Delphine's doing. Sleeping with all the boys. Not in a superior, stylish way like Lætitia, or cool and liberated like Nathalie, but in a grubby I-can't-help-myself way. That's her problem. She's a nympho. That's her disease.

The others (Rose, Nathalie, Concepción) have got their heads bent over their history-geography books. They're all at Concé's for a study session. The Yalta Agreement. There are only men in the photo.

Is she really the only one to be seeing this—only seeing dicks under those thick overcoats? All those dicks surrounded by pubic hair (brown, blond, grey, white), flopped onto the bellies of those seated men, hanging in the boxer shorts of the ones standing behind? The crotch is all creased on the one in the middle, the only one whose pants you can see. Can you really manage to concentrate when you have a dick? Weren't they thinking about their dicks when they were signing those agreements? Wouldn't their dicks have started going hard
inadvertently
right when they were in the middle of dividing up the world? Dicks living their dick lives in all those pairs of pants, little gnome dicks on each of those men, dicks doing their dick business. The Yalta dicks, washed or unwashed, limp or erect, stinky or clean-smelling, chafing or still, dicks that no one bothers about or, on the contrary, dicks that are the focus of each of those men's thoughts.

That's what she wants to learn, the History of the Dick, what you do and how you live when you have that instead of this.

She tips back and forth on the hard wood of her chair, the seam of her jeans gently rubs the flesh between her legs, she wiggles her hips discreetly. Solange has an
unbridled
sensuality
.

This afternoon of history-geography is so boring (she's got to stop using
so
). She'll get them to focus on her. Make it all a bit more exciting, this scene, those heads bent over those books, those fannies stuck on those chairs.

Lætitia wanted to sleep with me.

An atomic bomb. Nathalie looks so stunned, it was worth it just to see that. Rose giggles and Concepción crosses herself again, it's a tic, like some people twist their hair or bite their fingernails or say ‘Oh my God'. Nathalie and Rose want all the details, of course (Concé as well, even though she stays mute).

She asked me when I went to see her at the chateau.

She waits for a moment. For effect, but also because she's hesitating. What should she tell them? What's the best thing to tell them?

She made out with me, it was divine, better than with all the
boys I've kissed.

Nathalie's mouth is wide open, her eyes are rolling and she topples off her chair and falls on the ground, miming groans of agony.

Seriously, only girls know how to kiss. When I think how we
waste our time with boys.

Rose decides to be
self-possessed.
While Nathalie is yelping on the carpet demanding to know, did you smoke or what, she says that when she, Rose, did it with girls, it was not quite as good as with boys. Because, come on, there's penetration. You can say what you like.