Hunting and Gathering (23 page)

“Yeah, that's what I thought when I was leaving her place. It's lucky for her it's you guys. You two must be the only people on the planet I know who could wear anything so ugly and not look completely ridiculous.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Hey, do you realize you just said something nice?”

“You think it's nice when I treat you like a clown?”

“I thought you meant that Philibert and I have a certain natural class.”

He paused, then said, “Nah, I was talking about your . . . sense of freedom, I guess. How lucky you are to live the way you do and simply not give a damn.”

His cell phone rang. Bad timing—just when he was trying to say something sort of philosophical.

 
“Hey, boss, yeah, I'm on my way. Yes, it's fine, I'm ready . . . Well, hey, Jean-Luc can do them . . . Hey, wait, boss, I'm in the middle of trying to get off with some girl who's way more intelligent than I am, so, yeah, it is taking longer than usual . . . What? No, I haven't called him yet . . . Anyway, I told you he wouldn't be able to . . . Yes, I know they're all swamped, I know . . . Okay, I'll take care of it . . . I'll call him right away . . . What was that? . . . Forget about it, with the girl? Yeah, I'm sure you're right, boss . . .”

 
“That was my boss,” he announced, flashing her a goofy smile.

“Oh, really?” She acted surprised.

He dried his mug and went out, catching the door just in time to stop it from slamming.

 
Okay, the girl could be a bitch but she was anything but stupid, and that was good.

 
With any other girl, he would have hung up and that was that. Whereas in this case he'd said,
That was my boss,
to make her laugh. And she was so clever that she'd feigned surprise to return the joke. Talking with her was like playing Ping-Pong: she kept up the pace and sent you a smash ball into the corner just when you least expected it, and as a result you got to feeling that perhaps you weren't so clueless after all.

 
He went down the stairs holding on to the banister and he could hear the creaking of the cogs and gears inside his head. Philibert had the same effect on him, which is why he enjoyed talking to him. Because Franck knew he wasn't as thick as he might seem; his problem was words, that was all . . . He could never find the right words so he tended to get frustrated trying to make himself understood. It was true, and it really pissed him off in the end.

 
That was one of the reasons he didn't feel like leaving . . . What the fuck was he supposed to do over at Kermadec's place? Booze, smoke, watch DVDs and leaf through car maintenance magazines on the toilet?

Great.

Back to being twenty years old again.

 
He had trouble concentrating during his shift.

The only girl in the universe who could wear a scarf knitted by his grandma and still look pretty, and she'd never be his.

Life sucked.

 
He stopped off to see the pastry chef before leaving, got told off because he still hadn't called his former
commis
, and went home to bed.

 
He slept for only an hour because he had to go to the laundromat. He picked up all his clothes and stuffed them into the comforter cover.

40

INDEED.

 
There she was again. Sitting next to machine number 7 with her bag of wet laundry between her legs. Reading.

 
He sat down opposite her and she didn't even notice. That was something that had always fascinated him. How she and Philibert could concentrate like that. It reminded him of a commercial he'd seen of a guy slowly savoring his Boursin cheese while the whole world collapsed around him. Lots of things reminded him of commercials these days. He'd probably watched too much TV when he was little.

 
He played a little game: imagine you've just come into this rotten Lavomatic on avenue de La Bourdonnais on December twenty-ninth at five in the afternoon and you see this figure for the first time in your life, what would you think?

 
He slumped into the plastic seat, put his hands deep in his jacket pockets and squinted.

 
First of all, you'd think it was a guy. Like the first time. Maybe not a drag queen but a really effeminate guy all the same. So you'd stop staring. Although . . . you'd still have your doubts. Because of his hands, his neck, the way he was rubbing his thumbnail along his lower lip. Yes, you'd hesitate. So maybe he would turn out to be a girl, after all? A girl dressed in a sack, as if she were trying to hide her body? You'd try to look elsewhere but you wouldn't be able to help yourself, and you'd look back again. Because there was something going on. There was some sort of special air around this person. Or a special light?

Yes. That was it.

If you just came in this crummy Lavomatic on the avenue de La Bourdonnais on December twenty-ninth at five o'clock in the afternoon and you saw this figure in the dreary neon lights, this is exactly what you would say to yourself: Holy shit. An angel.

 
Camille raised her eyes just then, saw him, did not react right away as if she had not recognized him, then finally smiled. A very faint smile, a slight brilliance, a little sign of recognition among regulars. “Got your wings in there?” he asked, pointing to her bag.

“Sorry?”

“Nah, nothing.”

One of the dryers stopped turning and she sighed as she glanced at the clock. A bum went up to the machine and pulled out a jacket and a ragged sleeping bag.

Now this was interesting. A theory he had, about to be tested against the facts: no normally constituted girl would put her things in to dry after a bum had used the dryer. And he knew what he was talking about, he'd clocked nearly fifteen years in laundromats in his life.

He watched her closely.

 
Not the slightest movement of recoil or hesitation, not the slightest grimace. She got up, quickly shoved her clothes into the dryer and asked him if he had any change.

Then she sat back down and picked up her book.

He was a bit disappointed.

Perfect people could be really boring.

 
Before plunging back into her book she called to him, “Say—”

“Yes?”

“If I give a washer-dryer to Philibert for Christmas, d'you think you could hook it up before you leave?”

Franck couldn't say a thing.

“Why are you smiling? Did I say something stupid?”

“No, no.” He waved his hand: “You wouldn't understand.”

“Hey,” she said, tapping her middle and index fingers against her mouth, “you've been smoking too much lately, don't you think?”

 
“In fact, you're a normal girl.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I'm a normal girl.” Silence. “Are you disappointed?”

“No.”

 
“What're you reading?”

“A travel journal.”

“Is it good?”

“It's great.”

“What's it about?”

“Oh, I don't know if you'd be interested.”

“No, to be honest, I'm not interested at all,” he scoffed, “but I like it when you tell a story. You know, I listened to Marvin's record again yesterday.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Well, the problem is, I don't understand a thing. That's the reason I'm going to go and work in London, to learn English.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Well, I was supposed to have a place after summer, but it's all fucked up at the moment. Because of my grandmother. Because of Paulette.”

“What's wrong with her?”

He sighed. “I don't really feel like talking about it. Tell me about your travel journal instead.”

He drew his chair closer.

 
“Do you know Albrecht Dürer?”

“The writer?”

“No, the painter.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No, I'm sure you've seen some of his drawings. There are some very famous ones. A hare. Grass growing wild. Dandelions.”

He stared at her blankly.

“He's my personal god. Well, I have a few, but he's my number one god. D'you have any gods of your own?”

“Uh . . .”

“In your work? I don't know, like Escoffier, or Carême, Curnonsky?”

“Uh . . .”

“Bocuse, Robuchon, Ducasse?”

“Oh, you mean role models? Well, I have some but they're not well-known, or at least not as well-known. Not as flashy. You know Chapel?”

“No.”

“Pacaud?”

“No.”

“Senderens?”

“You mean the guy from Lucas Carton?”

“Yes. That's wild that you know about him. How d'you do it?”

“I just know his name, like, but I've never been there or anything.”

“He's a really good chef. I even have one of his books in my room. I'll show you. To me, he and Pacaud are the masters. And maybe they're not as well-known as the others, but that's because they're in the kitchen. Well, I mean, as far as I know. That's just how I imagine them. Maybe I'm completely wrong.”

“But when you're with other chefs, you talk, don't you? Tell each other your experiences?”

“Not a lot. We're not very talkative, y'know. We're too tired to spend our time blabbing. We show each other stuff, tricks we've picked up, we exchange ideas, bits of recipes we find here and there, but it doesn't usually go any further.”

“That's a pity.”

“If we knew how to express ourselves, put words together in nice sentences and all that, we wouldn't be doing this kind of job, that's for sure. I would quit in a second.”

“Why?”

“Because . . . it's not leading anywhere. It's slavery. You've seen my life. You call that a life? Anyway I don't like talking about myself. So what about that book, then?”

“Yes, my book. Well, it's the journal Dürer kept when he traveled through the Netherlands between 1520 and 1521. A sort of road journal or logbook. Above all it's a kind of proof that I'm wrong to think of him as a god. Proof that he was a normal kind of guy too. He was stingy, he got mad when he was ripped off by the customs officers, he was always disappointing his wife, he consistently lost when he gambled, he was naive and gluttonous, and macho and self-centered. But, in the end, that's not so important, really—it just makes him seem more human. And—should I go on?”

“Yes.”

“Initially, when he wanted to go on this trip, it was for a really serious reason, for his own survival and his family's and that of the people who worked for him in his studio. Up to that point he'd been under the protection of Emperor Maximilian I. A total megalomaniac who'd just given him the most insane commission: to represent him, the Emperor, at the head of a procession and immortalize him forever. The work was finally printed a few years later and it measured over a hundred and sixty feet in length. Can you imagine?

“For Dürer, it was manna from heaven. Years of work guaranteed. Then, as luck would have it, Maximilian died not long after that and as a result Dürer's steady income was no longer a sure thing. Major drama. So off he goes on the road with his wife and servant in tow to suck up to Charles V, the future emperor, and Marguerite of Austria, the daughter of his former benefactor, because he absolutely had to have the official income continued.

“Those were the circumstances. So he was sort of stressed out at the beginning but that didn't stop him from being the perfect tourist. Amazed by everything he saw—faces, customs, clothing—as he visited his peers, and other craftsmen, admiring their work. He also visited all the churches, and he bought a ton of trinkets straight off the boat from the New World: a parrot, a baboon, a tortoise shell, branches of coral, cinnamon, a stag's hoof, stuff like that. He was like a kid with it all. He even went out of his way to see a whale that had washed up on the shore of the North Sea and was decomposing. And of course he was drawing. Like a crazy man. He was fifty, he was at the height of his art and everything he touched—a parrot, a lion, a walrus, a chandelier or the portrait of the innkeeper—it was, it was . . . ”

“Was what?”

“Well, here, look.”

“No, wait, I don't know a thing about art.”

“You don't need to know anything! Look at this old man, isn't he great? And this handsome young man, see how proud he is? How sure of himself he looks? He looks a bit like you, actually. Same haughtiness, same flared nostrils . . .”

“Oh, yeah? You think he's handsome?”

“Though he looks like the sort who deserves a good slap in the face.”

“It's his hat that makes you think that.”

“Yeah, you're right.” She smiled. “It must be the hat. And what about the skull, there, isn't it incredible? You get the feeling he's thumbing his nose at us, provoking us, ‘Hey, you too, this is what's waiting for you.' ”

“Show me.”

“There. But what I like best are his portraits, and what kills me is how casually he just tosses them off. In this case, during his trip, they were mostly like hard currency, something to barter, nothing more: your know-how for mine, your portrait for some dinner, a rosary, a trinket for my wife or a rabbit-skin coat. I personally would have loved to live in those days. I think barter is a great type of economy.”

“So what happened in the end? Did he manage to get his money?”

“Yes, but the price he paid . . . Fat Marguerite looked down her nose at him, even went so far as to refuse the portrait of her father that Dürer had made just for her, fat cow. So what did he do, swap it for a sheet! What's more, he came home sick, some nasty bug he picked up when he went to see the whale, actually. Marsh fever or something. Look, there's a free machine now.”