All the Way (16 page)

She listens out for Loose-perm but there's no sign of her. It's leaking everywhere now, she makes do with the sheet, and while he seems to be sleeping (or recovering?) she finds her pad in the helmet and sticks it back in her underpants, quickly, and pulls her skirt down and starts to pant like him, to give the right impression.

She puts her head gently on his shoulder and they stay there like that, he calms down, she shuts her eyes and sees the blue bedroom with the Chinese screen and the window open onto the river and how the hot wind wafted over their faces.

‘How are you getting home?' asks Arnaud. He's doing up the buttons of his 501s.

She had thought that he might take her home, or that they might go for a walk together (by the sea), but she just has to make a call (to Bihotz) and
Someone's coming to get me.

‘Don't stress,' says Arnaud.

She's in Loose-perm's car and the countryside is unfolding in reverse, lake–river–Milord's–Cheap Carpet–silos. He didn't say when he'd call her again.

‘Are you okay? You look wistful.'

I'm okay.
Her bottom is a bit sore.

‘Are you hungry? There's some chocolate in the glove box.'

No thanks.
She'd like to get home quickly and wash herself.

‘I do like it when Arnaud's girlfriends come over, it brightens things up round the house. Arnaud doesn't have a sister, it's my biggest regret. I had such a dreadful time when he was born—I tore terribly, from my anus to my clitoris, months and months of incontinence—I didn't want to have any more children. It's sad, but that's the way it is.'

Fortunately there's no way she could be pregnant. And that disease her father was talking about, it takes two years, or three, and it's probably not that easy to catch. She'd be in high school or even older, she'd be grown up,
a young
woman
, and where would she be? She would have already lived a whole life. Perhaps with Arnaud? The entire future contained in those two unending years.

‘I wouldn't exchange Arnaud for anything in the world, it's just I would have liked to have a girl as well. Come over whenever you want to, I'll come and get you and I'll bring you home. The bike is dangerous with two people on it. I've told Arnaud but he takes no notice.'

The helmet? What's she done with Bihotz's helmet?

‘People are stupid when they live alone. Arnaud's father…I know your mother, she's got the souvenir shop in Clèves-le-Haut, she's told me that it's difficult with your father too. Your mother has great taste but she has no way to express herself, that's the tragedy with women. Your generation has to continue the battle, carry on what we started.'

Perhaps he'll call her about the helmet.

Bihotz is out the front of his place. Suddenly it's like she can see old Madame Bihotz there, huge and hunched, she's been growing there forever, lichen for hair and a skull and crossbones on her biceps. And while he chats to

Arnaud's mother, he's different again, he looks virile and responsible and a bit alarming and he looks at her as if he was deciphering her, half challenging her, half concerned, and she wonders: is that what it is,
to be fucked?
Or
raped
, is that what it is? Technically, was that my
first time
? She has to work it out before she tells Nathalie all about it.

III
DOING IT AGAIN

She doesn't know what to do with her arms. They've sprung out of her body and she's lugging them around attached to her shoulders. They used to follow her when she moved. Now she's been landed with arms that have heads on the ends. She's got them to worry about as well as her face. Hand-faces that she has to monitor as if several other Solanges had been joined onto her. She'd look self-conscious if she put them in her pockets. But taking them out means everyone will see these long creatures that have nothing to do with her and yet are horribly dependent on her, and everything she's thinking (which is nothing, except for her embarrassment) will be exposed, twitching, right down to her fingernails.

The folk dancers in the horse costumes are jumping as high as they can. Girls in red and white dresses are twirling round and round a flagpole, plaiting and unplaiting ribbons. Nathalie is playing the recorder and Concepción the tambourine.

Everyone is looking at what she, Solange, is doing with her hands. To see if she knows what to do with her body, this beaten-up body, that she wants to roll up in a ball and hide away and live without.

‘Stand up straight,' sighs her mother. ‘Stop acting like a baby. Look at Concepción, such lovely poise.'

Bihotz's cousin is getting married. They're lucky, it's a beautiful day. Her father hasn't come. He hasn't been home for a few days. She has to stand up straight and smile, be a good advertisement for the shop. Her mother put eye shadow on her. They chose a mauve mascara from the Rimmel range. Then she wiped it all off in front of the mirror with cottonwool dipped in Embryolisse cleanser, while her mother yelled that they were going to be late. And she did it all again, exactly the same but by herself, pink eye shadow and the mauve mascara.

If her father was here he'd flash his dick again.

Christian and Rose are sitting on the stand opposite. Holding hands. So what. She saw Arnaud at the wedding reception. The sight of him (nobody wears 501s like he does) made her heart leap.

‘You don't have to turn your nose up like that,' says her mother. ‘All right, it might not be a Cure concert'—she pronounces it
kiiyure
—‘but they're local traditions and they're worthy of respect. They're part of who we are. It's where we come from.' Her mother has started to relearn the local language. Apparently her grandparents spoke only Basque, not even French or anything.

Monsieur Bihotz is very cheerful. He's with Delphine and her mother and the cousin's mother. She's given up trying to understand the connections in this
tentacular
family. In the early days of Clèves there must have been Bihotz stock that began the line and then they all reproduced among themselves. Just look how he's joking with Delphine and her cow of a mother. He's got on a suit she's never seen before, and he's actually wearing a
bowtie.

‘For heaven's sake, what is the matter with you?' grumbles her mother. ‘Do you think it's easy for me, in front of everyone? I should have asked Monsieur Bihotz to come with us. People take advantage of a woman without a man.'

Once the show's over, the breeze wafting through the stands makes her mother flutter like a curtain. She dreamed up the idea of having the local dressmaker make two matching harem-pants jumpsuits in Liberty print (how hysterical this morning when she accidentally put on Solange's oufit!). She made Solange add a mauve crossover top because the weather is cool for this time of year. Is it all because Papa is not around? Her mother doesn't usually behave like this. She doesn't jiggle from one foot to the other.

Actually everyone is really weird. They're all dressed up as if they're waiting for the giant spaceship that will take them into outer space. All of Clèves will blast off except for her. Her mother will scream out: ‘Solange!' Or Bihotz will. No, he's too busy
flirting
with Delphine's mother.

Planet Clèves 2000.

Bihotz's cousin has lost a lot of weight. And the bride is not the bombshell they were expecting. She's just a new Madame Bihotz, wrapped up in whipped cream with a veil and high heels. As if the name just flipped from one woman to the other. And Monsieur Bihotz, best man, playing the suitor. The groomsmen are all wearing formal suits. It's grotesque.

Georges is the civil witness (he's with his girlfriend and their little boy, who is also wearing a bowtie). When their eyes meet, he gives her a smile, but he's not really going to see her, and her mother isn't going to see him either. And she doesn't know what to do, what to say, and her hands are getting heavier still on the ends of her arms.

Oh, to be a child again. When she was little, the external world didn't seem to weigh so heavily on the surface of her being. She grew up without having to force her way out, like a plant into the open air. Without spilling out of herself under the crushing weight of the world. She would like to slide in between the cracks like a seed, grow differently, somewhere else.

The photographer tells them to say cheese. ‘
Ouistiti!
Not
cheese,
' the mayor calls out. ‘We're in France, here!' Everyone laughs, click, and Monsieur and Madame the Baron d'Urbide arrive. They don't want to intrude, they shake hands with the bride and groom, their daughter Lætitia still dressed in black, with enormous buckled shoes and unbelievable fingerless lace gloves.

‘She's completely crazy, that chick! Comes to a wedding dressed like a widow…' sniggers one of the Lavinasse women, pregnant for most of the last few years.

Arnaud is over there, on the other side of the stands. If he sees her with her mother, there'll be a midair collision.
It
was my father who died
, she'll explain.
I couldn't care less about my
mother.
She'll have a sublime expression on her face that'll make him fall silent, moved by her suffering. Sublime in her floral harem pants and mauve crossover.

‘Are you listening to me?' grumbles her mother. ‘Or does everything always have to revolve around you?'

The two mothers get together at the beginning of the reception dinner. They went to school together at Sainte-Marie-du-Bas-Bourg.

‘Your son is lovely,' sighs her mother. You can see her bra through the Liberty print.

Arnaud keeps going backwards and forwards between the tables. Her mother stares at him, it's really embarrassing. As if her mother was calling up some inner landscape, some immense mental wasteland of her own. Where Solange has no place. Her mother's trying to look intriguing. Or she's had too much to drink. She herself has managed to drink four glasses of wine, right under her mother's nose.

She'd prefer to not even think about the wedding cake, about the puff pastries stacked up there in the caramel, a landslide of puff pastry for anyone to eat. After she's stuffed herself with all the crazy salads, the vol-au-vents, the jellied salmon, the apple granita, the ox tongue in capers, the curly endive salad with diced ham and the vast array of cheeses. For two days she'd managed to eat only tomatoes.

‘These children only think about themselves,' says Arnaud's mother. ‘I can't begin to tell you. I know what you've been through. How brave of you. You and your husband. Such a good man.'

Her mother smiles her shopkeeper's smile. Actually she's really out of it. Bernadette of Lourdes at the cave. Tonight she'll go to bed with two Valium and three Di-gesics.

Arnaud is talking with Delphine and Lætitia d'Urbide. Apparently they're going on to Milord's because the music here is so atrocious (The Chicken Dance). That's the very moment Bihotz chooses to ask her for a dance, ‘Come on Solange,' with that accent that just swallows her name, his yawning ‘o' and ‘an' sounds, Salaannngeuh.

Instead she asks for a coffee (her very first coffee). Lukewarm, bitter, horrible. ‘So you drink coffee now?'—Bihotz laughs and so does Delphine's mother. What's so funny? They go off dancing.

‘Monsieur Bihotz looks like he's full of beans,' her mother manages to say. Then she nods off, her chin in her bra, a landslide like the wedding cake.

The bride is a bit dishevelled, she's pulled off her veil, her hair looks like Concepción's on her first day at school, but her ringlets are mussy, bobbing around, she seems completely happy, completely fulfilled, married for better or for worse, before the
honeymoon
. (‘All of a sudden she was gripped by a sharp pain; and she started groaning, writhing in his arms, while he possessed her violently.') (But surely they've already slept together, even if she is wearing white.)

Arnaud has moved right in close to Lætitia d'Urbide and Solange knows what that's about, she's already seen it with Rose and Christian. Yes, and between her father and the pharmacy woman too, and her father and the air hostess. And other women, come to think of it.

She takes a pastry, swiftly, discreetly. Delphine's mother is laughing so loudly you can hear her shrieks above the music, shrieks emerging from her wide-open mouth, out of her plump little body in Bihotz's clutches.

Legs leaping, dresses ballooning, hands stretched out and squeezing each other. She wipes her fingers on the tablecloth. She feels too solidly grounded and, at the same time, as if she's been turned to vapour, unable to stay within the boundary of her own body or even stay in a particular spot in the room. What should she do about this huge void, inside her, devouring her? She could smoke and drink and eat and swallow, fill herself up with the whole wedding banquet, with the whole village, with everything that's missing—and everything would still be missing.

She thinks about the cream puff pastries and about Arnaud. About Arnaud and the cream puff pastries. They are superimposed over each other, so filling, so hideously desirable. To love is to want to breathe the air the other person breathes (or something like that). She gets up and heads towards him, between the tables.

He yells out: ‘Angie!'

He pronounces it Heyndjiii. No one has ever called her that. It's so sexy and rock'n'roll. So not Solange. So
it.
It's the name of that girl who is hidden inside her, buried under the sticky girl full of pastry. Angie, whom he, Arnaud, can see.

And apparently Lætitia can too. She's inexplicably friendly. As if they've known each other forever. Or rather, no—quite the reverse—as if Lætitia was discovering her, Angie, the girl behind Solange. And she's instantly in agreement—at how dumb this party is and how dumb it is to get married. And how dumb Arnaud is too, with his new haircut, short at the front and long behind; just because it's fashionable doesn't mean it suits him.