Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 34

Sighs

As soon as the waiter set their drinks before them, Simone said, “I should tell you. I have written to my husband.” She had in fact not yet been able to get up the courage to do so. She was lying to Jacques not so much to force his hand as to force her own.

He sighed. (How well she would come to know these sighs of his over the course of their lives together.) “Yes?” he said, already dreading the answer to his question.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And?”

“And what did you say to your husband?”

“I told him everything.”

“Everything?”

“That I was here in Carcassonne, with you. That I was in love with you. That we had—consummated that love. That I had injected morphine…”

“Simone.” He dropped his head, supported it with his hands, as if it were too heavy to be held up by the mere muscles of his neck. “Simone, you oughtn’t to undertake these dramatic gestures. And certainly not without consulting me first.”

She had thought he would be proud of her, as he had been proud when she stood naked before Joë.

“What business is it of yours, how I choose to carry out my relations with my husband?” These words were false; she was trying to conjure another Simone out of the air. They both knew full well that there was nothing in her that was not his business.

“It is not unusual for such letters, written in angry passion, to get shown to solicitors, used as evidence. I do not know much about this husband of yours. But he is a solid member of the middle-classes, who views his wife as his property—a very special sort of property, but nonetheless his property—and he will not take it lightly, you being stolen from him.”

“I am not a thing. I can’t be stolen.”

Already, she was plotting her next lie: she would, after the passage of a week or two, tell him that Luc seemed never to have received the letter, that it must have gone astray. But then it would float through the air, threatening to land. Better to tell him she had forgotten, in her haste, to affix the proper postage, and it had been returned to her. Yes, but she would have to give it a few days, a week.

“It’s true, you’re not a thing. It might be better for you if you were. You are a living, breathing entity, you can’t simply be stuck on a shelf, you need a dwelling place, you need food and drink, you need to clothe yourself, you need to provide for your children—although your children may well be taken away from you, after what you have revealed.”

“I thought…I thought…”

“No. You didn’t think. Or rather, you had one thought, but you didn’t follow it through to its logical conclusion: if I take this action, there will be this corresponding reaction. Did you think that by this rash move you were going to put me under some obligation to you?”

“It seems you hate Sala for her excess of practicality…”

“And you thought I would love you for an excess of impracticality? Anyhow, I don’t hate Sala. I don’t know what I ever said that would make you think I hated her.”

“You speak of her so disdainfully.”

He jutted out his lower lip, inclined his head slightly to the right side. “Disdainfully? I think I see her rather clearly, as one sees anyone with whom one has such a long and daily acquaintance. I chafe at the yoke of marriage, it’s true—Ah, you needn’t pull that face, as if you have been seduced and abandoned. You were as eager for this connection as I was. More eager, I think.”

Three days later, after several glasses of wine, looking out at a crescent moon in the deep blue sky, she did indeed pick up a pen and write, “Dear Luc, I must tell you I have taken a lover…”