The Reinvention of Love
Charles and Charlotte.
My sex is no bigger than a working man’s thumb. Adèle can completely cover it with her hand. It lolls against her palm, and she strokes it gently, as though it is her strange, small pet.
The dust swirling about the room seems to be broken bits of light. Adèle runs her tongue over my nipples. I arch my back. One of my hands is in her hair, and the other reaches back to touch the tattered wallpaper behind the headboard. If I keep my hand on the wall it seems possible that I will keep myself from floating up off the bed, that I will keep myself attached to earth.
Adèle lowers her mouth to my sex. It fits so comfortably. I try to stop from crying out, and then I don’t and my wails fill the small room and overflow into the hallway, out through the window and into the blue bank of the sky.
What breaks from me in love is sorrow. Waves of it roil over me, and when I lie beached on the bed afterwards, I feel that I have been made new again, that I have been washed clean.
Adèle lies back on the sheets. Her hands grip the top of the headboard. I have a hand on her breast, for balance really, although I am pretending otherwise, tweak her nipple absent-mindedly whenever I remember. My other hand is inside her. She has her eyes closed. Her breath is ragged. The bed knocks rhythmically against the wall as I fuck her.
What is a man? What is a woman? Is it the sex, the clothes, the customs? I am never more of a man than I am in this moment, and yet there are many who wouldn’t call me a man at all.
You just have to be committed to a position and maintain it throughout. That’s the other secret I know. Commitment begs surrender.
“I won’t let Victor have me,” says Adèle. We are wrapped around each other. I have one of her legs between my own. Her hands are on my back.
“He can’t be happy about that.”
“I couldn’t bear it. I tell him that it’s because I can’t get pregnant again, that I don’t want to have any more children.”
The sun at the window has changed. There’s a smoky quality to the light. It must be late afternoon. We will have to leave this room soon, make our separate journeys back to Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
“That can’t last,” I say, meaning, this can’t last, that these moments we have are not enough to weigh against Adèle’s life with Victor. We will disappear like all the other lovers who have used this small room. Our love will not be remembered.
But I couldn’t be more wrong.
I TRY TO LUNCH WITH MOTHER every day. This isn’t always possible. Sometimes I must attend meetings at the newspaper, but most days I manage to leave the
Globe
offices at noon and return by two o’clock.
Luncheon with Mother is both reassuring and infuriating because it is always the same. Not the food, but the routine.
I have a key to Mother’s new house on rue du Montparnasse and I let myself in rather than waiting for the housekeeper to open the door for me. The housekeeper is old, older than Mother. I have pointed out, repeatedly, that perhaps this is not such a good idea, but Mother will have none of it. She is fond of her elderly housekeeper. Her elderly and mostly deaf housekeeper. This is another reason why I don’t ring the bell to Mother’s house, but let myself in with my own key.
I shake out my umbrella, if it is raining, and put it in the umbrella stand in the hall. I remove my coat and hat and hang them on one of the wooden pegs above the red embroidered bench. I go upstairs. Mother likes to sit in the sunny room at the front of the house on the second floor, and I know that I will find her there. Invariably I meet the housekeeper, either in the foyer, or on the staircase, or sometimes in the upstairs hallway. Because she is mostly deaf, she doesn’t hear me and I often startle her. Then she shrieks. Sometimes she drops whatever she is carrying. The housekeeper’s shriek announces my arrival, and Mother shuffles out of her sitting room to reprimand me.
“Must you,” she says, as though I am four years old and have been pulling the tail of the house cat.
My upsetting the housekeeper upsets Mother, and my being scolded by her upsets me, so we always sit down to lunch in a foul temper. The first course is eaten in silence. But eating improves both of our moods, as does a glass of wine, and by the second course, lamb chops, we are ready to converse. I always think I have given up trying to impress Mother, but it never appears to be so.
“My
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