Billie Read online

  Why? Because it let me avoid having to ask something of a teacher . . .

  As he thought I was hesitating (no, actually, it was just, wow, the prospect of spending two weeks there), he added timidly:

  “She’s a seamstress . . . Maybe she could make us costumes.”

  I went to this lady’s house every day and each time stayed a little longer than the day before. I even slept there one night because the film version of Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace was playing on TV and Franck invited me to watch it with him.

  As for the Morels, for once, they didn’t bother me too much. It’s awful to say, but in our world, you get respect if you spend the night with someone early on.

  I had a boyfriend, I was dating. At fifteen years old, I was finally screwing, so I wasn’t such a loser after all.

  Of course, I couldn’t help having such totally humiliating and dirty thoughts; first of all, I was used to it, second, as soon as they let me run off, I no longer gave a damn.

  My stepmother even paid for me to get new clothes for the occasion. A boyfriend, that was impressive, more so than good grades.

  If I had known, I said to myself while looking at my first pair of passably stylish jeans, if I had known, I would have invented tons of “pelicans” before this . . .

  Without knowing it and in countless ways that were impossible to analyze at the moment, Franck’s simple existence—not even “in my life,” no, just his existence—changed the situation.

  Mine at least.

  It was the only vacation of my childhood and the most beautiful one of my life.

  Ah . . . what a pain in the ass . . .

  My little bolster.

  What really bothered me in the beginning was how calm it was. Since Franck’s grandmother left us alone and because he spoke so quietly, I felt as though there were a corpse in the next room. He wouldn’t stop asking, “How are you doing? How are you doing?”—because he saw quite clearly that I wasn’t doing well at all. I answered fine, fine, but really, I was super uncomfortable.

  And then I got used to it . . .

  Just like at school, I let my guard down and changed my attitude.

  The first time I visited, we went into the dining room where it was so clean that no meal could ever have been served there. It smelled strange . . . like old people . . . sadness . . . We sat facing each other, and he suggested that we begin by re-reading our scene together once through before figuring out how we would rehearse.

  I was embarrassed. I didn’t understand a thing.

  I understood so little that I read the text like an idiot. As if I were deciphering Chinese.

  Finally he asked if I had even read the play or at least our section, and when I didn’t respond right away, he closed his book and looked at me without saying anything.

  I felt my fangs coming out again. I didn’t want him to beat me over the head with that bullshit from the fourteenth century. I wanted to learn my required lines like gobbledygook from earlier times, you know, sounding it out but without regard for the meaning, but I didn’t want him to act like a teacher with me. I was fed up with people who put me in my place all the time by making me feel like a piece of shit. Already at school, I kept my trap shut to avoid any extra trouble, but not there, not in that room that reeked of Polident. He had to stop looking at me like that or I would leave. I could no longer stand anyone staring at me all the time. I just couldn’t.

  “I love your first name . . . ”

  It made me happy even if I thought to myself: well, for sure, it’s a boy’s name . . . but right away he set me straight:

  “It’s the name of a marvelous singer . . . Do you know Billie Holiday?”

  I shook my head.

  No, of course not . . . I didn’t know anything.

  He told me he would play her music for me someday and asked me to follow him.

  “Come, sit on the couch . . . There . . . I’m going to read to you . . . Here, take a cushion . . . Make yourself comfortable . . . Like you’re in a movie theater . . . ”

  Since I’d never been to the movies, I preferred to sit on the floor.

  He stationed himself in front of me and began.

  First he explained to me all the characters using language I could understand:

  “So, here it goes . . . There’s an old man called the Baron . . . when the play begins he’s all wound up because he’s expecting any minute now the return of his son Perdican whom he hasn’t seen in years—Perdican had left to study in Paris—and his niece Camille whom he’d raised when she was little and whom he hasn’t seen for a long time because he’d sent her to a convent . . . Don’t make that face, it was what they did at the time . . . The convent was like boarding school for the daughters of the aristocrats. They learned to sew, to embroider, to sing, to become perfect wives and also that way everyone was sure they remained virgins . . . Camille and Perdican hadn’t seen each other for ten years. They grew up under the same roof and adored each other. Like brother and sister and surely a bit more if you want my opinion . . . The education of these young people cost a pretty penny, and what the Baron wanted now was to marry them to each other. Precisely because they loved each other and also because it would allow him to recoup his costs. Oh yeah . . . 6,000 écus even . . . okay? You’re still with me? Good, I’ll continue then. Perdican and Camille each had a chaperone . . . Have you seen Pinocchio? So imagine a Jiminy Cricket if you prefer . . . Someone who takes care of them and keeps an eye on them forever so they stay on the right path. For Perdican, this was Blazius, his tutor, in other words, his personal teacher when he was a kid, and for Camille, this was Dame Pluche. Mâitre Blazius was a fatso who thought only about his next drink and Dame Pluche was an old bat who thought only about fondling her rosary and saying tsk tsk to all the men who came too close to her Camille. Dame Pluche was a mean, screwed up person, well, frankly, not screwed at all, and there was no reason to expect Camille to be any different . . . ”

  Even when he summed it up for me that way, I couldn’t get over it. I even started to have doubts . . . Was this really the assignment the teacher had given us? Was it really that risqué? I hadn’t gotten that impression . . . For starters, the guy’s name, Alfred de Musset, it made him sound like an old fogey in musty pince-nez and I . . . Okay, I was smiling, and since I was smiling, Franck Mumu was happy, too. He was exhilarated and turning cartwheels to keep my attention.

  Without knowing it, he was giving me my first break. The first performance of my life.

  When he had finished presenting the characters to me, he checked that I had everything down by asking me a bunch of very specific little questions:

  “Sorry, it’s not to trick you . . . It’s just to be sure that you’ll be able to follow the play later, you understand?”

  I said yeah, sure, but I really didn’t give a shit about the play. All I understood was that a human being was paying attention to me and speaking to me nicely. It was no longer schoolwork but science fiction.

  Then he read me Don’t Fool with Love. Or rather, he acted it out for me. For each character, he used a different voice and when the chorus was speaking, he climbed on a stool.

  For the Baron, he acted like a baron; for Blazius, he acted like a fat little half-drunk grandpa; for Bridaine, a dirty little grandpa who thought about nothing but food; for Dame Pluche, an old bat who spoke through pursed lips; for Rosette, a pretty country girl, but totally naive; for Perdican, a handsome boy who no longer knew if he wanted just to fuck or to get hitched; and for Camille, a girl who wasn’t all that hip, but rather straight as an arrow, unimaginative. Well . . . in the beginning . . .

  An eighteen-year-old girl who knew nothing about life and who was like one of those candles you light in church: super simple, super pure, and super white, but burning like crazy.

  Yes, completely exploding on the inside . . .

 
I was . . . enthralled.

  Exactly like before when I tilted my head to hold back my tears and saw the whole sky.

  It was as if I had planted a smile on the cushion I was grasping in my arms.

  I did nothing but smile.

  At one point, when he was playing Perdican saying to Camille in a slightly drunk and disdainful tone: “My dear sister, the nuns taught you what they know; but believe me, it’s not all you’ll know; you won’t die without falling in love,” he snapped the book shut.

  “Why are you stopping?” I asked, worried.

  “Because it’s the end of our scene and it’s time for a snack. Are you coming?”

  In the kitchen, while drinking I no longer remember what, some Orangina I think, and while eating his grandma’s rubbery madeleines, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking out loud:

  “It sucks for the teacher to make us stop there . . . I’m dying to know how she answers.”

  He smiled, “I agree, but the problem is that after this scene, there are massive amounts of texts . . . long, long monologues . . . It would be tough to learn them . . . But it’s really a shame because the most beautiful part of this scene, you’ll see, comes all the way at the end, when Perdican gets upset and explains to Camille that yes, all men are scoundrels and yes, all women are sluts, but there’s nothing more beautiful in the world than what happens between a scoundrel and a slut when they love each other.”

  I smiled at him.

  We didn’t say anything else to each other, but at that moment, the two of us already knew what would happen next.

  We pretended to finish our drinks as if it were no big deal, but we knew.

  We knew, and each knew the other knew too.

  We knew it was our last chance and we were getting our revenge for all those years of solitude spent amid the scoundrels and the sluts of the whole world.

  Yes, we said nothing and looked out the window to reduce the tension, but we knew.

  We knew it was true, that we were beautiful too.

  I could spend the whole night telling you what happened next. Those two weeks with him, talking, learning, working, rehearsing, arguing with each other, reconciling, throwing my book, getting irritated, giving up, having a fit, starting over, rehearsing one more time and working again . . .

  I could spend the night telling you because for me, my life began then.

  And that’s not just a figure of speech, little star, it’s a quote from a birth certificate, so don’t fool with that, please. You’ll upset me.

  * * *

  We had decided to meet each other every afternoon to practice the scenes we had learned that morning and very quickly I realized I needed to find somewhere besides that lovely home of mine in order to get some peace and quiet.

  I tested out several places: the back of a wrecked car, the porch of an old sawmill, the washhouse, but it became a game for my stepsister’s little rug rats (or let’s say the kind of stepsister someone like me would have, the type from the Morels) to follow me nonstop and get on my nerves, and finally, I ended up in the cemetery and sat down in a crypt.

  All those crosses, all those bones, all that debris of shattered stones and rusted iron, it calms you down right away, and it was perfect for coaxing out that pain in the ass Camille with her mania for crucifixes.

  I hadn’t intended to end up there, but really, it turned out well . . .

  I don’t know if it was the location, if the dead had decided to give me a little help because they were bored and wanted to kill time, but I still can’t get over how quickly and easily I learned my lines.

  Since I kept the old book with the play safe and sound, I ended up re-reading our scene for fun and, each time, I had to pinch myself to believe it. How did we do it? How did I do it? I, who still don’t know the multiplication tables and who was at a loss as soon as a teacher asked us to learn five lines by heart?

  I don’t know . . . I think it was in order to be worthy of Franck Muller . . . So I wouldn’t let him down . . . to thank him for having spoken to me so nicely the first day . . .

  That’s silly, isn’t it?

  And then . . . I would be incapable of explaining it properly, but it seemed to me that I had gotten my lousy revenge on a world and on people who, in reality, had ignored me for so long.

  I had nothing left to prove to anyone.

  Nothing.

  I just wanted to make Franck happy and to escape.

  I was too young at the time to understand and I don’t have words enough to articulate it today, but I had the impression—when I was curled up in my crypt learning the lines of this girl who wouldn’t stop nagging and nagging and nagging some more, to get an answer to the crazy questions that were eating at her—that I was taking advantage of it too. Yes, that I was worming my way into her obsessive mind so that I could steal a little bit of her courage and get the hell away by following her example.

  What I must have told myself without knowing it is that if I gave the right answers and in so doing allowed Franck Muller to perform his role as well as possible, well, I would no longer be from the Morels.

  I would be . . . my own person. Just me. I would be from this abandoned crypt. From my minuscule chapel.

  Yes, I was hidden there, sitting in the middle of the rubble, listening to the delirium of this little bourgeois girl who had never suffered and who wanted everything, who wanted to take the whole kitty before even playing a hand, or who preferred not to play, or rather who preferred not to live at all than to live like the others, and all I had to do was hold her close so she could help me reach her outsized desires.

  Because even if I didn’t agree with her obsessions, I admired her.

  I knew she was wrong. I knew that the good nuns had brainwashed her and that it suited her, because she was afraid to go out into the unknown. I knew she would let her pride get the better of her and that she was going to screw up her life because of her lousy, stubborn prudishness about sex. I knew that if she, like me, had just taken a little detour to the Morels she would have calmed down right away and would have imagined her life with more humility, but in the meantime, for that reason precisely, she was the best teammate I could hope for in order to escape.

  She was so stubborn and uptight that she would never give up and if I took care of my side, everything would work out.

  Yes. Two people as stubborn as mules, we were going to do it, make our fucking getaway.

  Of course, none of this was conscious, but I was fifteen, little star . . . I was fifteen years old and I would have grabbed on to anything to get away.

  Yes. I could spend the whole night telling you about this, but since I don’t have the time, I’m going to speed up and include only two important moments from this little adventure.

  The first is the discussion that we had after his reading the first day and the second is what happened after our “performance.”

  By the way, are you still there, little star?

  You’re not dying on me, right?

  When you’re fed up with my stories, just send me a kit and a stretcher and two nice boys to resuscitate my Francky, and I’ll leave you alone, promise!

  Hey, don’t wear yourself out . . . Swipe them from Abercrombie. That way, no assembly required.

  She’s dead. Adieu, Perdican!

  And then Franck stopped and gestured, as if to say, “Ta-daaaaaa! Stay tuned until after the commercial break!”

  And I was waiting impatiently for the rest.

  Yes, I wondered how those two were going to manage to salvage the situation again, since the death of a pathetic human being, in those frilly clothes, was meaningless, and a good story, especially a love story, always ends with marriage, and singing, dancing, a tambourine, and so on.

  But no.

  It was over.

  He found it moving. I found it irri
tating.

  He said it was great. I said it was dumb.

  He insisted it was a good lesson. I insisted it was a big waste.

  He defended Camille, her honesty, her purity, her pursuit of perfection, and I thought she was repressed, too easily influenced, never able to feel pleasure, masochistic.

  He despised Perdican while I . . . I understood him.

  He was convinced that she returned immediately to her convent. Sad and disappointed, but reconfirmed in her bad opinion of men. I was sure, though, that after receiving a few conciliatory love letters, she would surrender to him behind a bush.

  Basically, it was like we were fighting over a piece of meat and refused to let go.

  You could say we were wrestling with words.

  Excuse me?

  What is it, little star?

  You’re lost?

  You don’t remember the play?

  Ah, okay, wait. Don’t move. I’ll give you my version and then Franck’s and, with a bit of luck, between the two you’ll have more or less Musset’s . . .

  a) (My version) Camille leaves the convent after having heard throughout her entire adolescence the jeremiads of the nuns, who were simmering with bitterness, disappointment, or despair. Either they had been cheated on, or were ugly, or both, or their family didn’t have the means to pay a dowry. Sure, there were likely a few who were more virtuous and dedicated than the rest, but they don’t dupe young girls. They pray.

  Camille is still crazy about her cousin Perdican whom she had fantasized about for all those years, sealed up as she was in her Tupperware. Yes, in love, wet with desire, pining and all that, but as she is really arrogant, she complains that he was surrounded by tons of other girls when he was in Paris, which seriously straightened his handlebar mustache, and she harassed him in every possible way so that he would say, like, getting down on his knees and grasping her woolen petticoat, “Fine, yes . . . it’s true, yes, I’ve screwed other girls . . . but it was just for my health, you know . . . I’ve never given a damn about all those girls . . . Plus, they were nothing but whores . . . You know very well I’ve never loved anyone other than you, my darling . . . Besides, I will never look at another woman for the rest of my life . . . I swear to you on a cross . . . C’mon, forgive me . . . Forgive me for having fallen into dark and dangerous places where I couldn’t see farther than the end of my cock . . . ”