Divisadero (27 page)

He wondered whether he was
like that to his own wife, knowing how dark their union was. When he returned
home he considered his role within the family, recognizing the controlling
element in himself. It was true he had found himself more compassionate and
empathetic to the woman he had spoken with on the train for those three hours.
He already missed her, even in his busy life. He began to invent the days and
nights of this woman without having taken a single step into her life. For more
than a year he wrote of Claudile and her belligerent companion, the rooms they
lived in, her visits to meet a writer in Auch for desire, and for a few thin
luxuries. He watched and described her exhausted face during sleep, the pace of
her breath during sexual excitement, the obsessive reading of the books the avuncular
writer smuggled to her. He lived almost fully in her world for a year. When he
completed the trilogy of tales about Claudile, he opened his study door and it
felt to him that an era had passed. He found a chaos of in-laws around him on
the estate at Marseillan. He was responsible for a many-headed family, and this
left him unable to act for himself anymore.

It is dif
fi
cult to recognize your own vices in a
son-in-law. He ought to have watched over the youth from a more neutral zone.
If Lucien was objective about what he was witnessing in the young man, he could
have blown whistles and surrounded the monster. His daughter would have hated
him for a season, but all would have ultimately been perceived and resolved.
Yet he felt mocked and
fi
nessed by the man, an up-and-coming poet, whom Lucien once caught
winking at his patriarchal role, which the young suitor did not believe for a
second, any more than Lucien believed in the man
’
s
fl
attery and attempts at family courtesy.

Whereas
the truth of what was occurring was more anarchic.
His daughter Lucette, now twenty-two, was engaged to Henri
Courtade. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Thérèse, was being courted by the
young poet Pierre Le Cras. Regarding these romances from a parental height,
Lucien could recognize an essential truth. Pierre Le Cras was drawn more to the
graciously mannered Lucette, and she was clearly unable to let go of any glance
that he threw towards her. Lucien watched their smothered gestures. He
witnessed a hand’s pressure in the passing of a napkin, the too-long stare as
Lucette entered the rowboat, the sharing of songs at the piano. And there was
the photograph that recorded everything. During a gathering when everyone was
formally watching the camera and no one was looking at
them,
Lucette and
Pierre gazed openly at each other, forgetting the witness of the camera itself.
Lucien kept the evidence of this now permanent gaze in his workroom.

Perhaps he should have
remained silent with this knowledge. There is no need for a father to oversee
his daughters’ territories for them. Adult children are no longer children;
they know more than they appear to, they can put up with more than a parent
thinks. But Lucien took these betrayals upon himself, coaxing each clue from
the shifting group around him. The lovers would hold their breath as he walked
the corridors of the large house at night. The youth had gall and the charm of
an
arriviste,
and disarmingly, he was a good poet. Lucien Segura did not
know what to do.

When Lucette con
fi
ded to her father that she was pregnant
and that her wedding needed to be moved forward, Lucien insisted they take a
walk across the
fi
elds and discuss it. But once alone with him, Lucette refused to
admit to Pierre
’
s existence
within her emotions. She stared at her father
’
s
seeming madness when he brought up the young poet
’
s
name, and took shelter in mentioning the very goodness of her own
fi
anc
é
. Then she
referred casually to the possibility of her sister
’
s marriage in the near future. Lucien began to doubt his suspicions;
perhaps his cast of mind had become jaded over the years. It was to be a brief
walk, and Lucette was married three weeks later, and at the wedding he
performed like a contented father. For all he knew, she had ended her affair
with the talented, deceitful poet.

Shortly afterwards, Pierre
Le Cras published a remarkable sequence of poems dedicated to his future wife,
Thérèse. They were vague enough to prevent any physical identi
fi
cations, so the poems had a ‘universal’
quality. But at the same time the emotion within the verses was heartbreaking
and generous, and soon Paris was celebrating the young writer. All this led to
plans for a second wedding. Thérèse was ecstatic, her mother delighted. There
was, Lucien felt, a fever in the household. It was all a false portrayal. He
watched them and listened to them and saw no awareness of an alternative truth.
The true portrait was the photograph in his study, where the two lovers simply
watched each other openly. This man had swept into their home as if under a
protected spell, which Lucien could not control. Lucette had grown up with a
natural grace and politeness, rising from her chair for any new guest or
messenger. She was determined to be a writer like her father, constantly
improving herself, perfecting herself, just as she would carefully erase her
faults on a page and pencil in a better rhyme or metaphor. In recent years, she
had even helped him clear away a sentiment or two in his own work. He’d watched
her small bony hand brush away the curled fragments that contained the erased
phrase from a page of his, so that she could write in a more modest word,
asking him tentatively with her eyes if
this
might be better. Sometimes
with a work, such as an astronomical treatise by Flammarion, he would purchase
two copies so he and Lucette could read simultaneously, so they could share the
landscape of the same book as each of them roamed through it. She had come to
think like him, he believed.

But during the capsizing
months on either side of the two weddings, he felt everything change. He knew
that while Lucette did not wish to harm her sister, she would enter the bedroom
of Thérèse’s intended and favour him in the dark. They would make love
disguised within the shell of a travelling
diligence.
She would be in
the garden shower—under which she had bathed as a child—at a certain hour and
would tie the gate closed with a string or ribbon, knowing he would be there,
already undressed. They synchronized their journeys to Paris, and drank
absinthe and slept together drunk within their hotel room. They consumed dark
coffee and stayed up all night writing. They were cautious, and yet nothing
kept them apart.

Besides, she was already
married to the sweet and lackadaisical Henri Courtade, was she not? And yet
here was her sister’s suitor, languid and brilliant, quick-hearted, for he was
humorous with all of her family, not just her (which Lucette loved in him),
deceiving them all so that he could be close to her.

‘If you will not break off
your engagement,’ Pierre Le Cras had warned her, ‘and marry me, then I will
slip into the stockade of your family in any way I can.’ ‘I dare you,’ she had
responded. ‘I shall propose to Thérèse,’ he had said, ‘and if she will not have
me, I will become an architect and build a house for your father, or become the
gardener for this estate.’ ‘Tante, our neighbour, keeps an eye on the garden.’
‘Then I will become your father’s biographer.’ ‘He wishes for no biography,
he’s famous enough.’ ‘Then I’ll make you pregnant and hell will break loose.’

There were scarcely any
rules for the two of them. Or there was only one—whatever allowed them to be
together. ‘If I have a child, then it must be yours,’ she said. That became the
second rule.

She accepted everything
about him, ached for him.
I want to . . . Let me.
This.
Here?
Yes.
She knelt on the turned earth, they were in someone
’
s
fi
eld, he

came
into her mouth, and she stood up
again. Around them suddenly was the rest of the world.

Lucien was halfway up the
steps to the garden tower when he glanced down and saw his very pregnant
daughter bathing under the shower, shielded partially by a birch. Few used the
shower anymore, not since the children had grown up. When they were young the
whole family bathed there during summer months. Lucien paused and watched the
quick movement of Lucette’s hands as she soaped herself, and all at once, in
that moment he became happy and was at ease. He accepted whatever the love was,
and wherever it came from. He had at one time surely been as foolish as they
were. What did it damage? There was in the end an order, even to this.

He was certain his
daughter was pregnant by Pierre but things would be all right. A torch of
desire sometimes sprang up in the strangest half-lit rooms, but a family could
somehow envelop and contain that. He knew this from his own life. He continued
up the steep iron stairs, looked down once more, and saw Lucette run her wet
hands through her light brown hair, darkening it. Then she seemed to hear
something and she turned her back and bent over, and the slim naked body of
Pierre Le Cras stepped between Lucien and her.

What had been innocent—a
celebration!—abruptly made him a voyeur. His daughter
’
s
forearms and open palms were
fl
at against the mildewed wall as Pierre tugged her white hips and
shoulders towards him, his body digging into her again and again, and again as
if she were the very centre of the universe. Lucien thought of her small hand
brushing away the erasure rubbings from his pages.

He turned quickly to go
down the
fl
ight of
stairs to the level of the earth, to the normal perspective of a human. Ten
metres up, you saw over walls, witnessed an unexpectedly revealed house. You
were a writer in mid-air. It was what Japanese artists called the ‘lost-roof
technique.’ Cursed with omnipotence, he had seen the blunt truth of their
romance. The girl he had carried in his arms during a childhood nightmare now
had the needs of an adult. It was something a father should not have shared, although
as a young man he had bathed with this same person under that very same water
spout.

She had
been as tall as his knee.

There were nights when
Lucien startled himself awake at his daughter’s wildness. How had she, the one
daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a
person? Was it simply that Pierre was the man she demanded above every other
principle? There was this live coal of desire on her tongue that had altered
her, so that she could no longer be sheltered by the husk of a family. And he
realized he loved even more this proud indelible daughter, his Flammarion
companion, who had leapt beyond him into the life of this dangerous stranger, a
man he was unable to like except through the knowledge that Lucette had placed
herself in the cup of his hand, just as she had bent over and moved back into
his body, defenceless with pleasure in the garden shower.

Sometimes truth is too
buried for adults, it can be found only in hours of rewritings during the
night, the way metal is beaten into
fi
neness.
Whereas children are a generation with
immediate clarity.
He could not comprehend how the sequence of poems by
Pierre had been so powerful and believable. He did not understand how his two
daughters seemed so close and yet uncareful with each other. Once he had
pockets full of wisdom to give his children.
Had he not been
the one who taught them where exactly to climb a fence, or how much to feed a
dog?

Perhaps he’d ‘done enough’
in his life, as a novelist said to him in a salon before the war. She meant he
had written enough to be signi
fi
cant, or at least he had as much chance of being signi
fi
cant as one could expect in a literary
career. Even then it was not what he wanted to be comforted by. Fame was not
what he
wanted,
fame was as foreign to him now as it
had been when he was twenty. He’d protected himself from it by becoming a
splintered creature. (When he made journeys, he would go with one friend, never
two, then bid farewell and meet the second acquaintance in Lapalisse perhaps
and walk with him into Burgundy.) Anyway, he had been dancing with that
bird-slim novelist at a salon on the avenue Hoche, one of her hands on his
shoulder, the other a light goose-wing at his neck. These were gestures towards
possibility, and he had often imagined her as a lover. She was a graceful
writer who had her own honours in her career. But for Lucien, writing was a
place of emergency. He wanted what he had done those
fi
rst few times, without awareness, when
the page was a
pigeonnier
flown into from all the realms one had
travelled through. There had been the gathering then, the thrill of diversity.
There was no judgement. He had not sought judgement when he began to write, but
it had somehow become crucial to his life.
When all he had
wanted was to dance with no purpose, with a cat.