All My Friends

BRULARD'S DAY

So Brulard, Eve Brulard, slipped out of the Hotel Bellerive at the earliest possible hour, as if she knew with precision and certainty which way to set off.

She didn’t. So utterly didn’t she know that her right leg seemed intent on opposing her left leg’s decision to head toward the lake, and she stood walking in place for a few seconds before the veranda, shocked by the damp cold but still too stiff and sleepy to bother turning up the collar of her light jacket, and also vaguely telling herself, scarcely emerged from a dream: first thing this morning, if the money has come, I’ll go buy a coat. Then it occurred to her that any step she took to feel a tiny bit less cold in her jacket, turning up the collar or tugging down the sleeves, would misleadingly assure the forces guiding her luck that this little jacket was perfectly sufficient — and that, consequently, there was no need for the money. Better to act as though she didn’t even have a jacket to protect her.

It was so much colder here than where Brulard had come from.

It’s so much colder, she thought, and she gave a clenched little smile to the night clerk she could see through the glass door, preparing to make way for his daytime colleague, whose skeptical, scrutinizing gaze she studiously avoided whenever she passed by the front desk, her head high. From the start, she’d sensed that he thought her neither radiant nor carefree, despite all her efforts to seem just that. And so she’d taken to leaving her room at daybreak, heaving herself out of bed with difficulty and a dazed misery that filled her entire ill-rested body, so that she could breezily appear before the night clerk and exchange a few words on the color of the lake and the fog, painfully aware of the hurried, imprecise work she’d done on her face with foundation, tinted powder, and a shimmering lipstick up in her room, but hoping the night clerk would once again fail to see that she was still wearing the same black clothes as before, now a little shiny, and that her face, aspiring to a certain impersonal, indisputable harmoniousness with the help of the makeup, was in fact rumpled by an all-consuming exhaustion.

And so what if he did? Brulard asked herself out on the icy sidewalk, so what if the receptionist did notice that. . that what? She didn’t want to seem disreputable. She wanted people to think well of the woman she was, she wanted people to think her prosperous enough to pay for a few nights in a moderately luxurious hotel without troubling herself over it, she wanted to seem unique, casual, and proud. No one here had recognized Brulard. Neither the day clerk’s bored dubiousness nor the night clerk’s placid indifference suggested that they found Brulard’s face in any way familiar.

She told herself none of that mattered to her. Standing between the veranda and the road, shivering but, numbed as she was by fatigue, by a fatigue verging on stupor, not entirely aware that it really was her feeling cold, and not a cardboard cutout of her set up outside the hotel to publicize an exclusive engagement (but never had her unassuming fame propelled her to any such level of visibility, and now it never would), she limply decided to head for the lake. She stamped the ground to warm her feet, shod in brown tassel loafers. That she’d been reduced to wearing such shoes tormented and astonished her at the same time.

She sensed a presence above her, and, raising her eyes to the window of her second-floor room, she found Eve Brulard staring down at her with concern and benevolence, her elbows on the sill. The Eve Brulard at the window was at most twenty years old. What did she have to be concerned about? Irritated and stern, Brulard hissed through her teeth, tss tss, and, with a little cry of terror or derision, a strident plaint that drilled into Brulard’s eardrums, the young Eve Brulard evaporated into the fog that had rolled in from the lake. Thank goodness, she thought, no one but her ever heard the blood-curdling cries emitted by this shrieking snakewoman, who nevertheless always seemed to appear in a context of steadfast understanding and solicitude. Why, then, this look of concern on Eve’s youthful face, since Brulard had, in spite of everything, more reasons to rejoice than to worry? And was it not increasingly wearying to find the young woman she’d once been now showing up in all manner of circumstances and anywhere at all, anytime, never particularly wished for by Brulard, who never received from her any clear revelation on any subject whatever, who couldn’t even escape her by closing her eyes, who was forced to accept this friend’s sporadic company as one mutely endures a mysterious threat, as one passively accepts a message of regrets, of good wishes, of condolence? Brulard wished it would stop. Some days she encountered that figure so often that she forgot that her own face had changed, and, happening onto a mirror, momentarily wondered: who is that no-longer-very-young woman, and what’s she doing in my light?

She circled around the hotel and immediately found herself on the lakeshore. The water was gray that morning, and a thick fog hid the houses on the other side, giving Brulard, numb with fatigue, the disturbing feeling of an endless dawn, a suspended daybreak that would never stop spreading its cottony mists over a leaden lake for the sole purpose of wearing down her vital forces.

Because it was still far too early to seek some sort of escape. Where was there to go, what to do? Not even the cafés were open at this hour. As for the bank, the moment when Brulard could push open the double glazed doors, forcing herself to abandon all hope and pasting a stern, incensed look on her face, that moment still seemed so remote that she refused even to think about it, fearing her thoughts’ dizzying plunge into boredom, and the memory of all the boredom past, and all the wasted hours.

Nevertheless, she had more reasons to rejoice than to. . But how simply to get through these few days of solitude by the lake, Brulard couldn’t imagine.

She walked slowly, feeling the tassels on her shoes jump against the fine leather. Those shoes were an innocent presage of some subtly morbid change in her way of seeing things, for, in all her sometimes tangled and disappointing life, would she ever, at any time, have bought loafers of her own volition? Before last Saturday, when, alighting from the train, she saw lingering patches of muddy snow on the platform, realized she couldn’t stay here with only sandals to wear, entered the first shoe store she came to, and picked out these medium-heel slip-ons, before that April Saturday when she had, in a sense, fled her own house (as Brulard said to herself, not that she’d actually had to flee, not that anyone would have tried to hold her back or even thought of doing so, much less believed holding her back to be possible or desirable), before that Saturday her violent hatred of such shoes, so unmistakably designed for comfort, ease of mobility, and charitable deeds, was like a reflexive surge of free will in the teeth of the dictates of respectable taste. A Catholic lady’s shoes, thought Brulard, bewildered that she’d found it necessary, as punishment for deserting Lulu, to disguise herself in this way. But maybe that’s not what it was. Maybe she herself was becoming. .

Brulard felt the mountain behind her, watching. Still invisible, cloud-draped, the mountain sloped down to the lake. No matter which way she turned, Brulard felt the mountain nearby, and she sensed that this austere presence was only one of the many incarnations chosen by her mother, dead not long before, to weigh on Brulard’s conscience. But, oh, being watched didn’t scare her. She was on her way, resolutely, toward a new happiness.

But, Brulard wondered, why was it so hard, now that she really was alone, to feel that unplanned isolation in all its plenitude and rarity, and to enjoy it in some way, rather than, as she caught herself doing at this very moment, turning her head to avoid the eye of the young Eve Brulard, who now sat on a bench facing the lake, staring at her loafers, wearing an extravagant pink chiffon dress that clearly displayed her pointed, youthful breasts, her little brown shoulders, her narrow, curved pelvis? And rather than, once she’d done that, immediately looking down so as not to glimpse the snow-covered mass of the mountain behind the clouds, now gradually unfurling, mutating into a sort of gauze not unlike the pink fabric of the dress t

Better, with the mountain so hostile and so indiscreet, to fix her gaze on the lake’s tranquil waters, or the bench, now rid of the exhausting presence of the beauteous Eve Brulard, whose eagle eye had not missed those tasseled shoes — and then, on her smooth face, was that the shadow of a surge of pity? Of a reproach, tinged by compassion and alarm? Brulard sat on the bench, her lids heavy. She rested one cheek on her shoulder and wrapped her arms around her knees. She felt the cold numbing her, drawing her toward sleep, toward surrender. She pictured herself in the place of Eve Brulard, possessed of all the self-assurance, the litheness, the punctilious critical sensibility of a twenty-year-old, and tried to see herself through those eyes — leaving the loafers aside, just this once. What did you see when you looked at Brulard? A slight, mild woman with a dark complexion, short black hair, an unsuitable, slightly shiny jacket and trousers, large, timid, obstinate eyes, and on her lips a faint quivering bitterness, increasingly difficult to transmute into joyous surprise? Or some vast, looming personage of ambiguous sex, a fine face, hard and square, a strong jaw hungry for conquest and success? Brulard had no doubt that at times she’d been exactly that, magnified by ambition and self-confidence even more than by her high heels, next to which the modest loafers looked like two runts shrunken into their own virtue, by her thick mane of bleached, champagne-blonde hair, carefully styled to halo her head, by the proud bearing of her shoulders, of her ramrod-straight neck. Which of those two Brulards did you see at this moment? And which was the one who was loved, or preferred? The tall, blonde, almost famous Brulard, or the Brulard of today, slighter, but whose expression, she could see in her every reflection, was that of a grave, discreet ecstasy, of passion without illusions, unbowed even if battered? Was this second one not inevitably the favorite? Of those two possible versions of Eve Brulard between forty and fifty years of age? By the grace of a sincerity that she herself found mysterious (for what her true current face had to do with her she had no idea, and this ignorance left her pensive, perplexed), but which that artificial ambitious blondness and that chin held a little too high professed less convincingly?

Brulard had a secret soft spot in her heart for the blonde, hungry Brulard, even if that one had misjudged the best way to go about succeeding, even though she’d given far too much of herself for very middling results. Brulard even felt a certain disdain for the simple, natural woman she seemed so quickly to have become, the very one who, to punish herself for racing toward a shining new future, now almost in sight, had snatched up the first pair of loafers she laid eyes on. She knew that no such need for self-mortification would ever have entered the mind of the ravishing Brulard of old, and certainly not for a reason like this, for behaving in a way that might bring something remarkable into her life, even if it came at the expense of great sorrow.

But, for the moment, how tired she was.

Day had now fully broken, giving the lake that cobalt blue tint that had intimidated Brulard when she first stepped off the train, a perfectly and literally honest blue that she had immediately seen as the emblem of this entire adventure. May what I’m now making my way toward, she’d said to herself, be just as. .

How tired she was.

Eyes half-closed, she gave a start. A warm, dry snout had brushed against her limply hanging hand. An ugly little dog with a drab coat was clasping a crumpled piece of paper between its teeth. Brulard smiled. It was the homeliest, most pathetic-looking dog she’d ever seen. She reached out to give it a cautious caress. The dog licked her fingers, the paper fell to the ground, and Brulard, having first pretended not to notice, quickly picked it up, faintly stunned. It was just what she thought she’d seen in that dog’s mouth — the word Hassler. She felt herself blushing stupidly. A jogger came into view, and Brulard, assuming he was the dog’s owner, gently pushed the animal his way with the tip of her shoe. The athlete sped past at a panting little trot in his luxurious white and gold outfit, never glancing toward the bench. Puffs of flatulence drifted along in his wake.

Brulard buried her head in her hands. She’d read that word Hassler on the paper — could it be? Was this a portent of good things to come? Or a questionable gift from the mountain that Brulard could no longer pretend not to see, now that the new day was extracting it from the fog, at once behind Brulard’s back and in front of her, almost up to the opposite shore — still snow-covered in its upper reaches, now unable to hide its likeness, in physiognomy and expression, to Brulard’s late mother, or rather old mother Brulard, as she was called in her village, off in the province of Berry, like a failed avatar or a ridiculous disguise? It was her, Brulard’s mother, impossible to catch in the act, watching and mutely disapproving of Brulard for the rest of time. Here a mountain, there a footpath or a hill — everywhere, in fact.

Who cares? Brulard asked herself.

Had she fallen asleep? A large cold sun was flooding her bench. A well-to-do crowd strolled along the promenade, lined leather boots, pastel down coats, a whole childish winter-sport elegance that demoralized Brulard, who, in her black clothes, seemed some sort of evil fairy alighted here to darken the children’s festivities. Had she fallen asleep? It was almost eleven. She’d missed the opening of the bank, and now she’d have to hurry to be there before noon. She stood up, then gingerly sat down again, shaken.

Had she been recognized?

Her head was spinning with impatience and apprehension. Who here knew of her private affinity with the mountain? A smile crossed her lips as she imagined the stunned dismay on these faces, so blessed by sunshine and money, if she told them just who that mountain was (and what vulgarity would they not immediately find in the presence of an “old mother Brulard” deep inside their costly mountain), and yet, thought Brulard, there was one thing she didn’t know: whether, for each of these vacationers, a mother Brulard of their own, named by each in their own secret way, might have adopted that mountain’s form and appearance, spying, judging, thinking herself alone, and every one of them, like Brulard, thinking her alone and unique.

* * *

It was nearing noon when Brulard returned to her hotel. Disappointment had granted her a glorious, go-for-broke daring. She took out her checkbook and, smiling boldly and broadly with all her hard-won technique, regretting as she strode toward the desk that she’d lacked this foolhardy courage a little while before, and hadn’t bought that much-needed coat on leaving the bank, she rested her elbows on the counter directly in front of the clerk. Thrusting forward her cold, shining, pinkened face, she exclaimed:

“Hello! I’d like to pay for the three days I’ve been here.”

All the while thinking to herself, trembling, oddly excited: the check’s going to bounce.

She slid the paper she’d taken from the dog — a pale yellow sheet, smoothed out by her own hand — toward the unsmiling clerk.

“They’re showing a film I act in at the Rio. . This one here. . The Death of Claire Hassler.”

Her smile widened still further, her jaw aching vaguely. How vicious must the shock of a letdown be to send you tumbling from hope into despair? She could feel herself teetering, and that unsteadiness energized her, cleansed her of her weakness.

“This one here, see?. . That’s right, I’m in it.”

“Oh, that. I’ve seen it,” said the employee.

He examined Brulard’s check more closely than was polite. He was a young blond man, pale and cold, who, from the first day, Brulard thought, treated her as if awaiting the moment when he would at long last see through her, patient, sure it would come.

“Did you like it?” asked Brulard, slightly breathless.

The young man wouldn’t look her in the eye. He let a few seconds go by, with Brulard’s face, glowing in artificial eagerness, a little too close to his, and then he let it drop:

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought it was you.”

“Who?”

“The woman whose brain gets. . tinkered with,” he said delicately. “In the movie. I don’t recognize you.”

“That’s not me,” Brulard warmly cried out, suddenly so eager to win a little consideration from this boy that she shook her head and gave a chummy little laugh. “I play the other one, the heroine’s sister. You know, the one who’s so merry and bold.”

But he had no memory of that character, apart, he observed to Brulard in an irritable voice, from a yellow scarf that came loose and got stuck in a car door.

“Yes, that’s right,” Brulard murmured.

And then, considering the subject closed, the young man turned away. Speechless, wondering in a fierce fit of panic how on earth she could fill up the rest of her day, Brulard pulled her tremulous, weary face back toward herself, wistfully withdrawing it from the cold sphere created all around the young man by his indifference, his distant indolence. She reflexively touched her cheeks, her forehead — and so, without meaning to, evidently summoned up the meddlesome young Eve Brulard, who abruptly took the employee’s place behind the counter, making conventional obscene gestures at Brulard, still half clad in her translucent pink dress, now rumpled and torn. Never before had Brulard seen her show the least sign of spite, or at least of sarcasm and vulgarity. Afraid, she thrust out her fingers, and the girl disappeared with an overdone snort of derision. The boy had turned around again — had Brulard’s fingers unwittingly touched him, as if to give him a teasing little slap, a flirtatious flick? She thought they very possibly had, though she couldn’t be certain. She turned beet red, blurted out:

“Excuse me!”

He shot her a brief glance, conscientiously drained of all expression, but should she go on believing that no one but her could make out the hideous screeches of that half-naked girl in the chiffon dress? That girl who, no doubt — but Brulard had absolutely no desire to make sure, convinced that Eve was only waiting for her to look up to start shrieking again — was now flitting this way and that around the big crystal chandelier? Brulard herself could so clearly hear the pink fabric rustling overhead, and the mocking little sounds the girl’s mouth made for her benefit, but how was she to know? Suppose that girl was deliberately provoking the young clerk, so that she, Brulard. .

A tongue vigorously licked her hand, and there was that awful brown dog again, with the squashed nose and the slightly overlong ears, the unlikely crossbreed she’d encountered a little earlier, by the lakeside. Good-hearted and peaceable, it looked at Brulard with disinterested affection. It was dirty, repugnant.

“What’s that?” the employee grumbled from behind the counter.

“Oh, he’s with me,” said Jimmy’s voice.

“Wait, you have a dog now?” said Brulard with a stunned laugh, a yelp of pained incredulity.

Even more aghast, almost, to learn that this was Jimmy’s dog than she was to see Jimmy here in this hotel, so distant did that Saturday now seem, so like something from an entirely different age of their lives, that previous Saturday, when the idea of running away and the actual running away had taken shape in the space of two short hours, the hotel and the lake and the bank decided on with only a brief conversation, whispered and breathless, from cellphone to cellphone — and now Brulard, engulfed in melancholy, was regretting that that phone call lay behind her, that those quivering, conspiratorial minutes, full of something like ardent youth, were now in the past.

Suddenly, Jimmy was here, and with that how could Brulard not find her sense of impetuousness absurd?

“Where’s Lulu?” asked Brulard, wearily.

“On holiday with the Alphonses,” Jimmy quickly replied.

She scowled in distaste and surprise. She patted the dog’s head, hoping Jimmy might tell her something more about the animal, but her husband said nothing. In his pale eye, now fixed on her, she thought she made out a tinge of pity that filled her with alarm. Was it not in fact Jimmy who deserved a pitying gaze? Was it not him who’d been abandoned without one word of warning, not for fear of some anguished reaction, but in anticipation of the staggering boredom that his voice and his grim, gentle face always unleashed when he tried to prevail, to explain himself, to defend himself? Hey, Jimmy, there’s nothing to explain, Brulard would simply have said, no more than you can convince someone they’re loved. Hey, Jimmy, Brulard would have said, irritated, nobody can do that, can they? Instead of which, swept along by a passion, an inner lyricism she hadn’t felt for a very long time, she’d said nothing, and her leaving was like an escape, and the murmurs into the telephone like the whispers of two cautious accomplices, although there was nothing they had to protect themselves from, nor, truth be told, anything to protect.

And now Jimmy was here, and his mere presence made Brulard’s amorous adventures ridiculous, all the more implacably in that Jimmy was looking exceptionally sunny, and unexpectedly elegant (and just how, Brulard snickered to herself, had he paid for those pants and that leather jacket?), his unjustified but wholly convincing air of prosperity underscored by the contrast with the dog’s shabbiness, as if, out of nothing other than snobbery, Jimmy thought himself far too fine to associate with a handsome beast.

Brulard felt small and pointless. She recalled that the money hadn’t been deposited into her account, that she’d had in fact no word at all, despite all she’d been promised. Briefly pushed to one side, her exhaustion came flooding back. She felt a little vein throbbing in one eyelid.

“So, Jimmy, you got yourself this dog to replace me?” she said with a forced laugh.

“He was following me, and I adopted him because I thought he was you,” Jimmy said gravely.

“That dog, me?”

“I thought he was you. Granted, I might have been mistaken.”

Brulard’s telephone rang in her pocket. She couldn’t hold back a dry sob: she’d been waiting so long for this. She gently pressed the telephone to her ear, sidling away from Jimmy. At first, no one answered her meekly whispered “Hello.” Only a heavy silence.

“You’ve had your fun,” growled a man’s voice unknown to Brulard, so thrumming with malice that she frantically switched off the phone and thrust it deep into her pocket.

She raised two fingers to her lips. Help, help, she moaned. But she must not have made a sound, because Jimmy gave her a little wave from across the lobby, suddenly all smiles. Behind his counter, the employee was looking at Jimmy with a respectful benevolence he’d never shown Brulard, far from it. Who are my friends? Brulard asked herself. Who’s watching over me? Whose sympathy. . A piercing cry echoed in her head, though, to Brulard’s great relief, the young Eve Brulard was nowhere to be seen, and in a fit of wounded, pathetic pride she answered Jimmy’s smile with a similarly easy smile, decorous, distinguished. She was terrified. You’ve had your fun — but how could anyone, how could a humble soul generally and in every way doing the best she could, arouse so much hatred? And could it truly be said that she’d ever in her life actually had fun?

Jimmy’s dog ran toward her, leapt up, dampened her cheek with a hearty lick. For the few seconds that the dog’s eyes were level with Brulard’s, she had the brutal feeling that she could see her own anxious soul reflected or submerged deep inside them. The dark mirror of the dog’s pupils seemed to be showing her not her own miniaturized face but something else, unexpected, inexplicable — as if, Brulard told herself at a loss, her appearance had suddenly changed beyond all recognition, or as if the dog’s incomprehensible black eye were reflecting Brulard’s true, secret being, of which she herself had no notion, which she couldn’t describe, even on finding it thus revealed in the gaze of that pitiful creature.

“I brought you some things,” said Jimmy, suddenly close enough to brush against her.

And he went on, very quietly, his chin wrinkling up, his hairless, satiny face suddenly contorted:

“Oh, why did you go away? Tell me why?”

A moment later he got hold of himself. He stood up straight, twisted his mouth into a self-deprecating little grin. Good old Jimmy, thought Brulard gratefully, brave, thoughtful Jimmy. Unless what brought Jimmy here was something very different from what she assumed (her husband’s slightly fussy and excessive thoughtfulness). Was there not once again a sort of free-floating pity in the surreptitious glances he cast at her, at her body, her hair? She felt a surge of anger and fear. But, smiling, she gently shook her head. What’s happened? Who is my friend, my guardian? How I wish I could lie down for a few minutes, Brulard thought. To her deep chagrin, she felt an embittered wariness toward Jimmy taking root in her.

“Who was that on the phone?” he asked.

“I think. . it’s none of your business,” Brulard mumbled. With difficulty, she added:

“The fact is, I have no idea.”

They stood face to face, tense and still, but knowing each other so well in adversity that a sort of weariness fell over Brulard, and she told herself she’d been through all this before, in different circumstances.

“Needless to say, Lulu stays with me,” said Jimmy in a hard voice.

He went on:

“Forever, no matter what.”

“Forever?”

And Brulard could feel the smile on her frozen face, her exquisite, imperceptibly mocking smile, at which Jimmy would certainly not take offense, for he knew her as well as she knew him, and he knew that the more insulting, painful, and unjust was her meaning, the more overt and delicious Brulard’s smile would be, and the more carefree her voice.

“I’ll come and see Lulu whenever I can,” she nevertheless said, in a tone so sharp and unbridled that a sort of alarm, an unease softened Jimmy’s intractable gaze, as she thought to herself: he doesn’t know how terribly I need to sleep, everything’s different when you wake up, even Eve Brulard finds it hard to pursue me when I’m well rested.

She gave Jimmy a gentle cuff on the chin. He scowled. Defying him, but purring, wheedling, she asked:

“How did you find out where I was? Who told you? Oh, never mind, I don’t want to know.”

Lulu’s pale adolescent face suddenly drifted into Brulard’s memory, replacing the face that had occupied her every thought since the previous Saturday, that broad, serious face, thoughtful and worn, whose solicitous gravity Brulard’s unquiet mind ceaselessly summoned up, and each time she came back from the bank she reassured herself a little with the memory of that dignity, of that loyalty, just as she did when, every evening before slipping into the hotel’s narrow bed, she found herself forced to acknowledge that another day had gone by with no phone call — Lulu’s sweet face, round-cheeked, confident, and tender, which Brulard hadn’t seen one last time before she went away, Lulu having spent all that Saturday at a friend’s, and would she have left had Lulu’s eyes been upon her, would she have raced off toward an exciting new life? Yes, yes, Brulard told herself, paralyzed by melancholy, she most certainly would have, for can you forego the possibility of a windfall of fate, of a miraculous down payment on freedom from doubt and monotony? Who would willingly spurn such a grace bestowed without explanation, with no need for thanks or gratitude? Who? — except, in her day, old mother Brulard, whose immortality in the form of a stern mountain was perhaps her only reward for her many renunciations.

Brulard’s drifting thoughts came and went around Lulu. She felt a dribble of saliva on her chin and realized she was drooling. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, thinking: It’s the exhaustion. If I could only. . Who’s stopping me?

But was it even imaginable that Jimmy would let her sleep?

He was talking with the clerk. Eyelids pinched with exhaustion, she let her gaze linger on Jimmy’s slender back, oddly youthful in that bottle-green, scraped leather jacket — which was strange, she thought, because she’d seen it as burgundy just a short while before, and she’d thought: is burgundy a tolerable color for an article of clothing, and now she found it to be, or saw it as, the same conscientious green as the hotel’s armchairs, which several guests just out of the dining room were approaching, preparing to drop heavily into them, and now they were sitting there, exhaling deeply, murmuring gravely, waiting for the sun to warm the shores of the lake, as if they had a time without limit before them, a distended, opulent time. How wonderful it will be, Brulard thought, to be old. Oh, how wonderful it would be to be rich.

She backed very discreetly toward the elevator, eyes trained on Jimmy. He was bantering with the clerk, swaying his hips and slightly raising his shoulders, and Brulard told herself she would slip away to her room, lock herself in, and sleep till early afternoon. For all she knew Jimmy would be gone when she woke, and perhaps she would even have forgotten his coming, perhaps even, in an abrupt return of mystery and good luck, she might find, languishing in one of those armchairs, the man for the love of whom she was here, alone and needy under the watch of the hated mountain.

Jimmy’s dog barked after her. That filthy animal’s onto me, Brulard thought. Supple, feline, Jimmy immediately glided across the lobby to her side.

“There’s only one free room,” he said, his brow anxious. “You’re not going to. . ”

“Why not?”

She gave a feverish, incredulous little laugh.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m on vacation,” Jimmy said, with a strangely pleased air.

Sliding airily over the wooden floor, as if letting himself be wafted along unawares, he arrived at the side of the silent, apathetic Swiss couple in the armchairs. He tossed the cinema program that Brulard had left at the counter onto the woman’s thighs. In his low, cajoling voice, she heard him intoning:

“There. . That’s Eve Brulard, look. . She’s my wife, she has a part in this film. It’s a. . wonderful film. I recommend. . ”

She thought she could also hear him telling them of a lemon-yellow scarf that stayed stuck in a car door as it started off.

“What about your wife? Inside the car, or out?” the man asked, bending down to hear better.

Jimmy burst into a charming laugh. Suddenly alarmed, the dog began to bark. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice, and Brulard observed that the clerk, so brusque with her, so clearly distressed to be mixed up with her in anything slightly strange or ridiculous, scarcely glanced up at the dog, before, with an understanding, fraternal little smile, going back to his work.

“I’ve never worn a scarf in my life,” Brulard heard, as she tentatively wandered past the Swiss couple, both of them still young and childishly blond and giving her an indifferent, dubious glance, as if, thought Brulard, they weren’t entirely convinced she was there.

“Yes, you did, you did — and a yellow scarf, furthermore,” the man insisted. “That day, you tied a yellow scarf around your neck.”

“A wonderful, wonderful film,” Jimmy said again, ingratiating and obsequious, with a certain lively, quick-witted grace.

But, wondered Brulard, what did he really want from these people? Or did he not want anything from them at all, but wanted only to keep her from leaving, by creating a diversion from her distress, from her sorrow — for surely one glance at Brulard’s face had shown him she hadn’t found that state of joy and superiority without which her flight had no purpose?

* * *

A sort of gauzy veil imprisoned Brulard’s head as she walked through the flag-draped streets, Jimmy on her right, holding her elbow so delicately that at first she didn’t feel it, and when she did finally take note of that discreet support, the unpleasantness of having to express anything at all dispensed her from stepping away from Jimmy. Was he desperately wanting to touch her before he never had the chance again? Or was this a way of holding her captive, of pretending that, so gently herded, she’d allow herself to be led, unresisting, to the train, to the house?

Those days are over, she wanted to tell him, my life’s different now, and I’m so far away from you that. . But she feared that the slightest word might shatter her skull.

The dog trotted along obediently on her left. Framed by Jimmy and his hideous dog, Brulard felt pathetic, ridiculous. A wave of pity and anger welled up inside her. A vague indignation struggled to poke through her fogged thoughts, born, she knew well, of a painful awareness that she was not going to be left alone.

“Lovely town,” Jimmy was saying. “Ah, how nice.”

And then, whispering a still-stunned desolation into her ear:

“Why did you go away? Why?”

Brulard looked, unseeing, at the pale yellow and almond green facades, the luxurious shop windows, the souvenir stores with awnings weighed down by multiple cowbells, a whole landscape that she now knew so well, having paced through it each day since she came here, and toward which she had come to feel only resentment. Those same little flower-decked bridges straddling the canals, those same cobblestone streets, overlooked by those same charming balconies that Jimmy was now stopping to admire, his chin raised and his hand pressed visor-like to his forehead, letting out half stifled gasps of pleasure, had seen her morning after morning, fighting back a mounting despondency, an everless-latent panic, as she made her way back from the bank where the same circumspect, taciturn woman had once again shaken her head and tersely informed her that no deposit had been made to her account, and Brulard had learned to despise this whole delightful setting, wondering in panic to what extent all these pretty things were laughing at her.

Had Jimmy not just raised that very question of money?

He’d started walking again, sharply tugging Brulard along, his pace brisker now, and Brulard thought he’d asked her an uncomfortable question about money. Brulard was feeling more carefree. She realized that, for her part (and it wasn’t yet time to start suffering for Jimmy, and when that time did come her own good fortune would smother any overly burdensome remorse in Brulard, so she hoped), she had no real reason not to go on waiting and hoping. A delay, an unforeseen complication, something she didn’t yet know of, something she would soon learn: that was probably the whole cause of her despair, because she didn’t know. And, in a way, that ignorance wasn’t real.

“Well?” Jimmy was asking in a troubled voice.

“Am I really here with you now?” Brulard asked in surprise.

“How are you managing financially?”

“Oh, I’ve got some money these last few days.”

“From him? You sure?”

“Yes,” Brulard firmly answered.

“Then. .” (All at once Jimmy’s voice was so slow, so quiet, that Brulard could scarcely hear it.) “If that’s true, then I suppose. . you might be able to help me out. It wouldn’t have to be much, but. . ”

Brulard’s thigh began to vibrate. With labored nonchalance, she took out her telephone. Uniformly tall, good-looking, and athletic, happy passers-by jostled her, not seeing her, with her diminutive build and, that morning, her gray face, and all around them, from what Brulard could make out here and there, the sole subject of conversation was the quality of the snow and the food.

The mountain had come closer. Now it was perfectly clear.

Brulard let out a small laugh, thinking: my mother never protected me from anything at all.

She held the telephone a few centimeters from her ear, saying nothing. Jimmy anxiously looked on, but she couldn’t bring herself to give him a smile or still her trembling chin for his sake. Turning off her phone, she silenced the voice that was, beyond all doubt, speaking specifically to her, uttering her full name with such fury but also such hateful grief that her legs were still weak and burning hot.

Jimmy asked her no questions. Brulard concluded that he would ask her nothing more about these phone calls. He knows what all this is about, or can guess, from something he knows and I don’t, something he knows I don’t know, she thought, calmly perceptive, her mind suddenly clear, almost cold, impassive, capable of accepting the worst and not seeking it out but encouraging it, if it had to be, to reveal itself. What he knows and is afraid I might learn: that might even be why he came here, she went on to think. But is it because he wants me to know, or because he wants to make sure I don’t?

“Jimmy, why did you come here?” said Brulard, very quietly, so as not to frighten him.

“To take you home with me. So you wouldn’t be alone,” said Jimmy, looking straight ahead, his jaw hardened.

A progressive reddening revealed a network of dilated capillaries on Jimmy’s thin, hollow cheeks.

“What makes you think I’m alone?”

“I think you are. You’re out walking with me and my dog, aren’t you?”

And Brulard realized he was putting on this breezy display to conceal his discomfort and apprehension. Suddenly she saw him, despite his new clothes (new, but made of cheap leather, she observed), as a pitiful and ridiculous person, although often managing to hide it with a certain grace. Jimmy cut a sad figure, not that it was really his fault. Quickly and instinctively, she caressed his cheek. For had Jimmy ever once attained even a modicum of success in anything he’d done? Jimmy had made a life for himself, in a mediocre, half-baked way, always overestimating his abilities, and whenever luck smiled on him a little he wasted no time losing the money in cunning, vaguely demeaning ventures, such as, Brulard recalled, a certain kiosk built and manned by Jimmy in a suburban mall, where he offered to make his customers a pin bearing their likeness while they waited, with the aid of an implausible machine bought at an exorbitant price through a want ad, or else a pizzeria, sadly situated at the intersection of two highways, which Jimmy had taken over, aiming to make it a regular haunt for people in Brulard’s circle, and which to this day he hadn’t managed to sell, so strongly did the walls and the site exude failure, unhappiness, stupidity.

Now Jimmy was here, stubborn and tireless, hard-headedly confident in his ability to put up a good front, even if, as Brulard could see in the luminous air, the brilliant light of the lake, he’d so flagrantly and definitively aged — which is to say that no trick, no subtle arrangement of the hair on his forehead, or his high-buttoned shirts, could now prevent anyone noticing, before anything else, his hunched back, his bowed legs’ irreversible thinness, the coarsened grain of his skin, the shadowy veil over his eyes, which, for a few seconds, when Jimmy thought himself out of sight, turned lost, evasive, and devious.

Exhausted, Brulard abruptly veered toward a bench on the edge of a vast lawn that sloped gently off to the lake. She sat down, despite the presence of Eve Brulard on the other end, the newly hostile and oppressive presence of a young Eve grown remarkably thin and bony. How this Eve Brulard looks like Lulu, Brulard said to herself, with a pang of displeasure and guilt. She pretended not to notice. She closed her eyes, fretfully wondering why the young Eve should now be appearing to her in the form of an enemy. When she half-opened her eyes, she noted that the splendid, high-spirited young people strolling past the bench were the very ones who’d jostled her in the streets of the old town.

“That’s odd,” she said cautiously.

Then Jimmy bent over and whispered in her ear:

“You see who’s sitting over there?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Lulu,” said Jimmy with a stunned little scowl. “Can that be?”

Brulard buried her face in her hands, shivering in fear and bewilderment. She thought she could hear Jimmy whispering, then nothing more, and when she peeked up again Jimmy had replaced the emaciated girl beside her. At her feet, the dog was looking up at her with what she could only interpret as avid affection. And those eternal young people from before strode by over and over, their long legs grazing Brulard’s and Jimmy’s knees. Did Jimmy realize that these abnormally healthy, good-looking young men and women seemed determined never to leave them again? Brulard wondered.

“What would Lulu be doing here?”she asked in an infuriated voice.

“I left her with the Alphonses. The plan was that the Alphonses would take her skiing,” said Jimmy, casual and patient. “What, may I ask, is the problem with that? What is the problem?”

“Everywhere I hear people saying there’s no more snow. So, you know, it’s strange.”

“There’ll always be more than enough snow for fatsos like the Alphonses and a kid like Lulu who can’t stand snow,” said Jimmy sententiously.

“But why should Lulu be so skinny all of a sudden?” Jimmy kept quiet, in that heavy, mired way of his.

“So supposedly she got skinny, just like that, in the space of a week?” said Brulard. “Because her mama chose to. . ”

She sniffed dubiously.

“I didn’t notice what Lulu was wearing,” she then said. Jimmy’s spirits revived, and he answered:

“She was wearing what I bought her for this Easter holiday with the Alphonses: a silver down coat with matching ski suit and fluorescent green ankle boots. I wanted her to make a good impression. The Alphonse girls have all that and much more.”

“The girl I saw on the bench wasn’t dressed in silver,” said Brulard, calmly triumphant.

“No one who looks at you would ever say you’re wearing loafers, because they couldn’t imagine you wearing such shoes, and yet that’s how it is, and you’re wearing loafers,” said Jimmy.

“Oh, why won’t these young people leave us alone?” Brulard sighed, on the brink of tears.

They kept coming and going, three girls and two boys with similar builds, towering and long-limbed, their stiff, light blond hair down to the girls’ shoulders, the boys’ napes, and Brulard found in them a glacial, unearthly beauty that, far from delighting, pained the heart.

How worn, how faded seemed their two little selves, hers and Jimmy’s, on their bench — how poor and ugly they were, crumpled under the wreckage of the life they’d led together, exasperated by each other exactly when they knew they’d be exasperated, knowing each other so well, so well, without tenderness or sympathy.

“Everything would be different if I had money, or even just an inheritance to look forward to,” said Jimmy with spiteful but placid assurance.

The memory of recent evenings when another man had spent freely for her pleasure, elegant dinners, outings to the opera and sophisticated bars, not with a view to seducing her, for she’d been long since seduced and in love, but simply to place that fine gem of love and seduction in a setting of conventional delights and established practices — those memories surfaced in Brulard’s mind like episodes from a very ancient, irretrievable past, and while all that was desirable, delicious, it was also attached, now that Jimmy was here (poor, eternal Jimmy), to something vaguely and stupidly disloyal, even if she’d been drawn to the other man long before she knew how much he had.

But what could she do for Jimmy? What was she supposed to do for Jimmy, assuming she even could? And hadn’t he in fact come here to do something for her, to come to her rescue, as much as to help himself? What gave him the idea (she’d seen his misgivings, his concern) that she needed to be rescued?

A violent migraine was battering the back of her skull. She couldn’t speak a word. The young people began to laugh, howling in a way that struck Brulard as parodic and malevolent. Why were they so bent on following her, spying on her? Were they there beside her as friends? At the same time, if the idea was to keep watch over her, was such beauty uniformly distributed on five arrogant faces strictly necessary?

Could she see them as friends?

* * *

Brulard and Jimmy walked uphill toward the residential neighborhoods, toward the well-heeled heights overlooking the lake and the city, where Jimmy thought they would find the house he’d been told of. It was a chalet, brand new, made of blond wood, with deep eaves, multiple balconies laden with long chairs and poufs, cushions and dog toys: yellow hedgehogs, rubber bones, balls of all sorts.

Breathless from the climb, her skull painful and pounding, Brulard staggered and half-fell, one knee on the ground. Her shoe slipped off her foot. Jimmy was just bending down to pick up the loafer when a Great Dane burst out from behind the chalet, knocked Jimmy head over heels, and snatched up the shoe in its maw. It stood looking at them defiantly, with no intention of playing. Metallic glints gleamed in its short, gray fur. Jimmy’s dog whined as it edged away, terrified, submissive. Not a sound from the chalet or anywhere around them, only the faint rustling of the larch trees, Jimmy’s dog panting in fright.

Brulard stood up. She watched as Jimmy slowly crawled away, knees dragging over the gravel, and then, eyes fixed on the Great Dane, rose to his feet with calm, unhurried movements. She heard him whisper:

“Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

“What about my shoe?”said Brulard with a nervous little laugh.

She groaned and raised her hands to her head. The pain filled her eyes with stinging tears. Suddenly a man and woman appeared, and Brulard wasn’t sure if they’d come from the house or the forest.

“The Rotors!” Jimmy murmured, with a delight that made it clear to Brulard just how afraid he had been.

Would the other man have felt such fear? Or were deluxe guard dogs his allies right from the start, by virtue of his upbringing? Brulard then wondered if Great Danes could smell the odor of money, of class, of chateaux, if they recognized the authority of elegant manners.

She closed her eyes for a brief moment. She heard Jimmy’s insistent, beguiling voice, and from its slight desperate edge she realized he was playing his final card. Then Brulard heard the woman cordially exclaim:

“Why yes, of course, it’s Jimmy Loire. Hello, Jimmy.”

Brulard opened her eyes. Monsieur Rotor had disgustedly thrown the drool-soaked shoe at her feet.

“Come in, I’ll lend you a pair of mine,” said Madame Rotor, graciously.

Monsieur Rotor held back the Great Dane, his tanned face marked with the same severe and irascible expression as his dog’s, and Jimmy took Brulard’s arm to lead her toward the chalet. Brulard felt him shivering with relief, his terrified tension now waning. It wasn’t the dog that had most frightened Jimmy. He was afraid of finding himself thrown off the property by a Rotor couple who had no memory of meeting him in Paris a few months before, at one of the many receptions Jimmy frequented, nervous and joyless, hoping to meet people in a position to give him work, Jimmy taking it as given that he could do anything so long as people explained what they expected. So, it flashed through Brulard’s bored, morose mind, Jimmy must have enticed the Rotors efficiently enough to hear them toss out something like “Come by and visit us in the mountains.” But, Brulard now wondered, attaching no great importance to the question, had she herself been an element in Jimmy’s strategy from the start, or had the idea of bringing her along as a supporting player come to him only a little before, in the pizzeria where he’d insisted on taking her to dinner? Oh, what does it matter, Brulard had asked herself at the time, terrified by the prospect of any sort of resistance, what does one last bad pizza with Jimmy matter? Since after that everything will be over?

“They’ve seen the film. They’ll recognize you, and I’ll score big points,” Jimmy had said, adorable, almost imploring. Now, with a painful sense of vindication, Brulard observed that the middle-aged woman in her dark, out-of-place town clothes, trudging toward the Rotors’ chalet with evident reluctance, half-dragged along by Jimmy Loire, her features clenched with migraine and exhaustion, quite clearly did not remind the Rotors of the yellow-scarved adventuress who played a minor but, according to Jimmy, indispensable and compelling role in The Death of Claire Hassler. Was that not exactly what he was whispering into Madame Rotor’s ear? For she turned to cast Brulard a brief glance, surprised and polite, while Jimmy expressed his pride in his typical fashion, putting his hands on his thin hips and slightly puffing out his stomach, simultaneously displaying, Brulard was horrified to see, a pale green blot of olive-oil on his white shirt.

How was all this supposed to touch her now?

“I’d like. . if you would, two or three aspirin.”

The words hung before her lips as if someone else had whispered them beside her, in a comic falsetto.

“Eve Brulard. . ” Jimmy began.

“Is she feeling all right?”

“Just a little migraine. . overwork. . ”

“Are you all right?”

“Eve Brulard, you know, who. . Eve Brulard. . ”

“Is she all right?”

Brulard felt two firm hands pushing down on her shoulders, then the yielding surface of an armchair beneath her thighs. The chair dipped and rose.

At some point in the past, she was no longer sure when or in what, she used to play long scenes in a rocking chair, half-recumbent.

Could they stop rocking her? One more dip and she was going to bring up her pizza. Could they stop rocking her? How she was suffering — but what good would aspirin do? In spite of her spinning head, she sensed that she’d understood everything, though what she understood she didn’t yet know, even as she knew it was only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before it all became clear. She understood, but, oh God, how she dreaded learning what it was that she understood.

Could they please stop rocking her, right now?

She spoke or kept silent, they heard her or didn’t, impossible to say. A cold glass jarred her teeth, a bitter pill was dissolving on her tongue, too far back, next to her uvula. A dry hand stroked her cheek. She recognized Jimmy’s hand, hot and anxious. Dear poor kind Jimmy, thought Brulard, nearly weeping with pity, had he understood, for his part, that it was all over? That she’d be lost to him forever as soon as they left the Rotors’ chalet? He’d long been a deluded husband, but that was nothing next to the irreparable depreciation inflicted on his entire being, even his life story, his past, his name, since Brulard fell in love with another, so very much more glorious than Jimmy. But how to ensure that it all ended cleanly and definitively? Only, perhaps, Jimmy’s instantaneous death, she couldn’t help thinking, would deliver her of the disorder surrounding him, radiating expansively all around him, whereas the other one was all rigor, cool willfulness, precise desires.

“I thought. . she was called Claire Hassler,” said Madame Rotor, as if from a great distance, with a puzzled little laugh.

“Claire Hassler is only the name of the lead character, played by. . oh, another actress.”

That was Jimmy’s voice, overly loud, at once incensed and incredulous, disgusted.

“Claire Hassler doesn’t exist, for goodness’ sake! It’s a made-up name. It’s a story.”

“So who is Eva Brulard?” asked Madame Rotor, hesitantly.

“Eve Brulard. Not Eva. Eve. Eve Brulard. Eve Brulard.”

“Who is she?”

“What my wife wants to know, I presume, is whether that’s also the name of a character,” pompously intervened a Monsieur Rotor who seemed to be standing just behind Brulard’s back, as she thought she could feel his warm breath on her neck, odorless, thick, like a dog’s.

So is that Rotor who’s so hell-bent on rocking me? Brulard wondered, exasperated. But was she really being rocked? Or was it the unraveling of all her senses that was giving her this continual up and down feeling?

She wished she could tell Jimmy to relax, that for her, and even more for him, it was in no way essential to convince the Rotors that she was a remarkable woman. But now Jimmy was losing his temper, she could tell by the sudden quickening of his words, although, for the Rotors who knew him so little, he might still have seemed simply the typical Parisian, sarcastic, belligerent, rude, and utterly unaware of it.

“You make me laugh,” Jimmy was shouting. “Eve Brulard, a character? Don’t tell me you of all people have never heard of Eve Brulard? So supposedly I live with a character?”

Jimmy, we don’t live together anymore! Brulard exclaimed. We’ll never live together again! Isn’t that so? Relieved to find that the sound of her voice was not vibrating in her own ears, and that no one must have heard a word she had said, she shut her eyelids tight, determined to let herself be forgotten.

A doubt crept into Brulard’s mind.

What proof did she have that she wasn’t an impostor? For if she’d never acted in The Death of Claire Hassler, if the lovely woman in the yellow scarf was not Eve Brulard but some other actress, and if everywhere she went she nevertheless claimed, with Jimmy’s complicity, that it was her, who would ever disabuse her?

She protested inwardly, indignant with herself for thinking such things. She did have a part in that movie. She remembered it with the most perfect clarity. Did she really remember? Nothing very precise at the moment, thanks to her crushing exhaustion, but she would, she would, as soon as she got some rest. Yes, would she remember? She thought it impossible to ask Jimmy for reassurance, not because this wasn’t the time (Jimmy’s mollified voice flowed like fresh, cool water all the way to the rocking chair, interspersed with Madame Rotor’s appreciative “hmm!”s, and now the talk had apparently turned to some activity to be undertaken at once, a game to be organized before teatime, though of what sort Brulard had no idea), but because Brulard was now convinced that she’d have to be wary of Jimmy on that score as well.

On that score as well, she repeated to herself, tightly clutching the rocking chair’s arms so as not to be sucked into the drain of the enormous avocado-green sink she could half see beneath her closed eyelids — identical to the one in the hotel bathroom, she noted with a knowing snicker, frightened and flattered to observe that once again it was all fitting together. If Jimmy was using her, if Jimmy was inventing roles and a career for her to fascinate the Rotors, how could she use him?

“Jimmy!” she called out, imperiously.

* * *

Now Brulard was looking out one of the chalet windows, toward the larches that rose almost to the roof. Monsieur Rotor and Jimmy were searching for something amid the stones and patches of snow, bending down, then cheerfully standing up again and heading into the blue shadows beneath the trees, while, from the edge of the woods, Madame Rotor urged them on with nods and grave little shouts, her hands in the pockets of her pale blue down coat, her long hair blowing free, graceful and golden.

These people are younger than we are, Brulard then told herself, with a pang in her heart.

Slowly she walked toward the front of the house and the opposite window, wearing the delicate red booties she’d been given, flat-heeled and a full size too small. Brulard thought she saw someone moving behind the Rotors’ SUV. She pressed her forehead to the glass. She was just turning away, having seen nothing, when a brief vision of the two dogs, the Great Dane straddling Jimmy’s mutt, brought her back to the window, alarmed. Jimmy’s dog was invisible beneath the Great Dane’s spine, which glistened as if coated with oil. Brulard saw her mangled shoe lying in front of the car.

She hurried away from the window and out the door to join Jimmy and the Rotors.

“You come look too,” Madame Rotor called to her, jolly and affable.

Brulard trotted obediently toward the tall pines. A small smile of feigned triumph on his blue lips, Jimmy was displaying a chocolate rabbit with a pink ribbon.

“We put together several Easter-egg hunts like this every year,” Monsieur Rotor was saying, visibly pleased with Jimmy. “What do you think, Loire?”

“It’s great,” said Jimmy. “I’m having a wonderful time.”

“You’re having a wonderful time?”asked Monsieur Rotor, at once gratified and vaguely dubious. “Looks to me like you’re freezing, Loire.”

“No,” said Jimmy, “not at all.”

“Well, your wife seems to be, Loire.”

“Brulard. Eve Brulard,” said Jimmy in a despairing voice. Monsieur Rotor grunted, then suddenly bent over to pull a large nougat egg from beneath a small mound of moss.

Surely a bit later, but after a span of time that Brulard, mechanically digging through the snow and the pine needles, was unable to gauge (an hour or an afternoon or a full day), the frantic reappearance of Madame Rotor, who had gone in to make tea, broke the single-minded silence that reigned over the hunt.

“It’s horrible,” she cried. “Come see. No, not you, Jimmy, and you neither, Madame Loire. It’s so horrible. Valentin’s never done such a thing.”

“Why, what did Valentin do?” Monsieur Rotor shot back, defensive.

“Your little dog, Jimmy. . Valentin’s torn him to pieces. That funny little dog of yours. He. . ohh. . he cut him in two!”

“I would never have expected that from Valentin,” said Monsieur Rotor.

He looked at Jimmy, offended and disappointed.

“Valentin’s so gentle,” said Madame Rotor, hurt. “He’s the most sensitive, loving animal I’ve ever known. Never had. . a better dog than Valentin.”

Brulard saw Jimmy’s eyes darting miserably this way and that. He blushed violently, and Brulard was moved to observe that he had the face of an alcoholic. Lost, Jimmy stammered incomprehensibly.

“It’s nothing,” he finally mumbled. “Oh, it’s nothing. He. . hadn’t been my dog all that long.”

He looked at Brulard with such anguish that she turned away, deeply pained, telling herself that from now on they were alone, apart, forever.

* * *

“You know what I’m craving? A nice fondue,” Madame Rotor had said.

She’d draped her long blue down coat over her chair, and now she was sitting up very straight, her back nestled in the cushiony heart of her rich angelic raiment, glowing with such indisputable health, self-assurance, and youth that Brulard was half blinded, punch drunk.

They were sitting in a restaurant the Rotors had chosen. The Great Dane lay under the table, and Brulard saw the corners of Jimmy’s dry lips twitch whenever Valentin licked his calf, which he did to Jimmy more than to anyone else.

Whisking her hair behind her neck with a silken toss of the head, Madame Rotor repeated in a very slightly authoritarian voice:

“Do you know what I’m craving?”

“A nice fondue,” Jimmy murmured.

Lulu came in.

At first Brulard paid her only a distracted and weary sort of mind, for was this not yet another new form adopted by Eve Brulard in an attempt to convey all manner of unintelligible things? This Lulu, her short hair dyed orange (Brulard had left behind a Lulu with a long mane untouched since childhood), was entering in the wake of a loud, oversized family Brulard recognized as the Alphonses. Brulard had scrupulously avoided all contact with the Alphonses for years. She lowered her eyes. But how likely was it that Eve Brulard could divide herself into so many replicas, and take on the appearance of four expansive, guffawing Alphonses? It wasn’t likely at all.

Lulu pulled out a chair and sat down with the same wondrous nonchalance as when she wore her hair long. Blinded and deafened by their own deafening racket, the Alphonses seemed not to have noticed Jimmy or Brulard. Then Lulu’s eyes coldly met Brulard’s, and Brulard realized that this was indeed her daughter Lulu, and not, by some miracle, herself as a girl.

Jimmy was very pale. He started to his feet, about to go talk to Lulu. Then he thought better of it and slowly turned away to hide from the Alphonses. Was he still thinking about his dog? Brulard wondered, deeply moved. Was he thinking about his dog with sadness and guilt?

Lulu was laughing with the Alphonses.The indecency of their laughter covered Brulard’s forehead with a delicate cold sweat. She sensed Lulu’s gaze, landing sometimes on her and sometimes on Jimmy, and that gaze, Brulard felt sure, was heavy with scorn and resentment. Were the four Alphonses, Lulu seemed to be saying, in their flawless camaraderie, in their full-hearted gaiety, not better than them, her inconstant, poisonous, penniless parents?

“Those people are very annoying,” said Madame Rotor aloud.

She went on, her square chin extended toward Jimmy:

“Aren’t those people annoying, incredibly annoying? Loire?”

Surely alerted, thought Brulard, by the use of his last name rather than the usual jocose “Jimmy!” and also, thought Brulard, by the very perceptible cooling, which he must have felt just as she did, of his newfound relationship with the Rotors in the wake of the dog incident, which the Rotors unmistakably blamed on him, Jimmy thought it best to exclaim, in a sharp little voice:

“They are indeed! Very annoying.”

Her parents were absolutely not to approach her, neither the one nor the other: that, Brulard realized, was what this young orange-haired Lulu was proclaiming, mutely but clearly, with her hard, vindictive gaze over the tables between them, protected by the beaming Alphonses, impregnable in their crassness. And also that her parents had betrayed her — and how was she supposed to get over that?

At the end of the meal, all through which Brulard felt only a vague awareness of her own silence, Madame Rotor picked up one of the many newspapers hung from wooden rods on the wall beside her. The wine had left her very merry and full of quips. As a joke, she read out the headlines, adopting a joyful tone when the news was grim, and a gloomy one when it was trivial. Brulard wasn’t listening, and heard none of the words that involved her. Nevertheless, she saw Jimmy staring at her with a sort of panic.

“What an idea,” said Monsieur Rotor, “doing yourself in when you’ve got it all. People in movies have it all. That guy had it all. Oh yes, they’ve got it all. Isn’t that right, Loire?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Jimmy slowly, never taking his eyes off Brulard.

The last tranquil, almost cold thought that came to Brulard was that no one had ever looked at her with so much compassion or friendship. hat. .?