Lie With Me
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In memory of Thomas Andrieu
(1966–2016)
You didn’t have to attract desire. . . . Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing.
—Marguerite Duras, The Lover
I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.
—Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
One day—I can say precisely when, I know the date—I find myself in the bar of a hotel lobby in a provincial city, sitting in an armchair across from a journalist, a low round table between us, being interviewed for my latest novel, which recently came out. She’s questioning me on the themes of the book, on separation, the act of writing letters, whether exile can ever save us. I answer her almost without thinking. I’m used to the questions so the words come easily, almost mechanically, as I allow my gaze to wander to the people walking across the lobby. I watch their comings and goings, and invent the lives of these people in my mind. I try to imagine where they are coming from and where they are headed. I’ve always loved to do that, to invent the lives of strangers in passing. It could almost be considered an obsession. I believe it started when I was a child. I remember its worrying my mother. “Stop with your lies!” she would say. She used the word “lies” instead of “stories,” but nevertheless, it continued, and all these years later, I still find myself doing it. I’m inventing these scenarios in my head while answering questions about the pain of abandoned women—I’m good at that, at disconnecting, at doing these two things at once—when I notice the back of a young man dragging a small rolling suitcase behind him. I stare at this man in the process of leaving the hotel. I know he’s young, his youth is emanating from him, in the way he’s dressed and in his casual allure. I’m dumbstruck. I think, This is not possible. This is an image that cannot exist. I could be mistaken, of course—after all, I don’t see his face, I can’t see it from where I’m sitting—but still I am absolutely certain I know what the face of this young man looks like. And then I tell myself again, No, it’s impossible—literally impossible, but still I call out a name. “Thomas!” I actually shout it. “Thomas!” The journalist who’s been sitting across from me trying to scribble down everything I’ve been saying raises her head. Her shoulders tighten, as though it’s her I’m shouting at. I know I should apologize, but I don’t. I’m too caught up in this image that’s now moving away from me, waiting to see if my shouting his name has any effect. He doesn’t turn around. The man keeps walking so I should assume that I’m wrong, for sure this time—that it really is just a mirage. That it’s just the comings and goings that caused this strange illusion. But instead, I jump up and go after him. It’s not so much verification I need, because in the moment I’m still convinced I’m right—right against all reason, against all evidence. I catch up to the man on the pavement just outside the hotel. I put my hand on his shoulder and he turns around.
Chapter One
1984
It’s the playground of a high school, an asphalt courtyard surrounded by ancient gray stone buildings with big tall windows. Teenagers with backpacks or schoolbags at their feet stand around chatting in small groups, the girls with the girls and boys with boys. If you look carefully you might spot a supervisor among them, barely older than the rest.
It’s winter.
You can see it in the bare branches of a tree you would think was dead planted there in the middle of the courtyard, and in the frost on the windows, and in the steam escaping from mouths and the hands rubbing together for warmth.
It’s the mid eighties.
You can tell from the clothes, the high-waisted ultra-skinny acid-wash jeans, the patterned sweaters. Some of the girls wear woolen leggings in different colors that pool around their ankles.
I’m seventeen years old.
I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don’t listen. Their words roll over me but don’t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck’s back. I’m an idiot. An easygoing idiot.
I’m a student in terminal C at the Lycée Elie Vinet de Barbezieux.
Barbezieux doesn’t exist.
Or let’s put it another way. No one can say: “I know this place, I can point to it on a map,” except perhaps for the readers (and they are more and more rare) of Jacques Chardonne, a Barbezieux native who in his writing extolled the town’s implausible “happiness.” Or those (and they are more numerous) who have a memory of taking Route 10 to formally begin their vacation at the beginning of August, in Spain or in Les Landes, only to find themselves stuck there—precisely there—in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thanks to a succession of poorly thought-out traffic lights and a narrowing of the highway.
It is in Charente, thirty kilometers south of Angoulême. The limestone soil lends itself to the cultivation of vines, unlike the cold, clay soil of neighboring Limousin. It’s an oceanic climate, with mild and rainy winters. There isn’t always a summer. As far back as I can remember, it’s the gray that dominates, and the humidity. The remains of Gallo-Roman churches, and scattered chateaux. Ours looked like a fortified castle but what was there really to defend? Surrounding us there were hills. It was said the landscape undulated. That’s about it.
I was born there. Back then we still had a maternity ward, but it closed many years ago. No one is born in Barbezieux anymore, the town is doomed to disappear.
And who knows Elie Vinet? They claim he was Montaigne’s teacher though this fact has never been seriously established. Let’s say he was a humanist of the sixteenth century, a translator of Catullus and the principal of the College of Guyenne in Bordeaux. As luck would have it, that brought him to Saint-Médard, an enclave of Barbezieux. The high school was named after him. We didn’t find anyone better.
And finally, who remembers the C terminals? They say “S” today, I think. Even if this initial does not represent the same reality. These were the classes in mathematics, supposedly the most selective, the most prestigious. The ones that opened the doors to the preparatory classes that in turn led to the big schools, while the others condemned you to local colleges or professional studies or vocational school or just stopped there, as though you had been left in a cul-de-sac.
So I’m from a bygone era, a dying city, a past without glory.
* * *
Understand me, though, I wasn’t depressed about it. This was just how it was. I didn’t choose it. Like everyone else, I made do.
At seventeen, I don’t have a clear awareness of the situation. At seventeen, I don’t dream of a modern life somewhere out there, in the stars, I just take what’s given to me. I don’t nurse any ambition, nor do I carry around any resentment. I’m not even particularly bored.
I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers. Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades b
ut because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.
* * *
I’m on the playground with everyone else. It’s recess. I just got out of two hours of philosophy (“Can one assume at the same time the liberty of man and the existence of the unconscious?”), the kind of subject we are told can show up on “the bac,” the French end-of-high-school exam. I’m waiting for my biology class. The cold stings my cheeks. I’m wearing a predominantly blue Nordic sweater. A shapeless sweater that I wear too often.
Jeans, white sneakers. And glasses. They’re new. My vision deteriorated drastically the year before. I became myopic over the course of a couple of weeks without knowing why and was ordered to wear glasses. I obeyed; I couldn’t do otherwise. My hair is fine and curly, my eyes greenish. I’m not beautiful, but I get attention; that I know. Not because of my appearance, but because of my grades. “He is brilliant,” they whisper, “much more advanced than the others, he will go far, like his brother, this family is one to be reckoned with.” We are in a place, in a moment, where nearly everyone goes nowhere; it garners me equal parts sympathy and antipathy.
* * *
I am this young man there, in the winter of Barbezieux.
* * *
With me are Nadine A., Genevieve C., Xavier C. Their faces are engraved in my memory when many others, more recent, have deserted me. They aren’t the ones I’m interested in though, but rather a boy in the distance leaning against the wall flanked by two other guys around his age. He’s a boy with shaggy hair, the hint of a beard, and a serious look. A boy from another class. Terminal D. Another world. There is an impenetrable border that stands between us. Maybe it’s contempt. Disdain, at the very least.
But I don’t see anyone but him, this slender and distant boy who doesn’t speak, who’s happy just to listen to the two guys talking next to him without interrupting. Without even smiling.
I know his name. Thomas Andrieu.
* * *
I should tell you: I’m the son of the teacher, the school principal. I grew up in a primary school eight kilometers from Barbezieux, in a first-floor apartment that was assigned to us above the village’s only schoolroom. My father was my teacher from kindergarten through middle school. Seven years of receiving his teachings, him in a gray button-down writing on the chalkboard, at the head of the room, us behind our wooden desks. Seven years heated by an oil stove, maps of France covering the walls; maps of an old France, with her rivers and tributaries, and the names of the towns written in a size proportional to their population, published by Armand Colin, and the shadow on the wall of the two linden trees outside the window. Seven years of saying “sir” during school hours, not because he asked it of me, but to make myself indistinguishable from my classmates, and also because my father embodied a quiet authority. After school, I stayed in the classroom with him to do my homework while he prepared the lessons for the following day, tracing in his big checkered notebook, filling the boxes with his beautiful handwriting. He turned on the radio to Jacques Chancel’s Radioscopie.
I haven’t forgotten. I came from this childhood.
My father insisted on good grades. I simply didn’t have the right to be mediocre or even average. There was only one place for me—first. He claimed that I would find salvation in my studies, that only study could “allow one to enter the elevator.” He wanted the top-ranking higher education establishments for me, nothing else. I obeyed, just as I had with my glasses. I had to.
* * *
I recently returned to this place of my childhood, this village that I hadn’t set foot in for years. I went back with S. so that he would know. The grid was still there with the ancient wisteria, but the lime trees had been cut down, and the school had closed a long time ago. There are housing units there now. I pointed out the window of my room to him. I tried to imagine the new occupants, but I couldn’t. After, we took the car out again and I showed him the place where a delivery truck (an old Citroën van that served as a sort of mini-market) came to town every two days, the stable where we would go to get our milk, the decrepit church, the little sloping cemetery, the forest that sprouted mushrooms at the beginning of October. He never imagined I came from such a rural, almost fossilized world. He told me, “It must have taken great will and determination to have lifted yourself out.” He didn’t say “ambition” or “courage” or “hate.” I told him: “It was my father who wanted it for me. I would have stayed in this childhood, in this cocoon.”
* * *
Thomas Andrieu, I don’t know who his father is or even if that matters. I don’t know where he lives. At that moment, I don’t know anything about him, except for terminal D. And his shaggy hair and somber look.
His name I know because I found it out for myself. Just like that, one day in the most casual way, before moving on to something else. But I didn’t find out any other details.
I absolutely didn’t want him to know that I was interested in him, because I didn’t want anyone to wonder why I was interested in him. Asking that question would only fuel the rumors about me. They say that I “prefer boys.” They say that I move like a girl sometimes. I’m not any good at sports, incapable of lifting weights or throwing the javelin, and completely uninterested in soccer and volleyball. Also, I love books, I read all the time. I can often be seen coming out of the school library with a novel in my hands. And I don’t have a girlfriend. That’s enough to give me a reputation. The insults blend together regularly: “dirty fag” (sometimes just “faggot”), yelled from far away or murmured right next to me. I try to ignore them, to never respond, to manifest a perfect indifference, as though I didn’t hear anything (as though it would have been possible not to). But that only makes it worse: a real heterosexual boy would never allow that kind of thing to be said about him. He would vehemently deny it and beat up the person who gave the insult. To allow it to be said is to confirm it.
* * *
Of course I “prefer boys.”
But I’m not capable of saying this sentence out loud yet.
I discovered my orientation very young, at eleven years old. Even then I knew. My attraction was for a boy in the village who was two years older than me named Sébastien. The house that he lived in, not far from ours, had an addition, a sort of barn. Upstairs, after climbing a makeshift staircase, you would enter a room full of anything and everything. There was even a mattress. It was on this mattress where I rolled around in Sébastien’s embrace for the first time. We had not gone through puberty yet, but we were already curious about each other’s bodies. His was the first male sex I held in my hand, other than my own. My first kiss was the one he gave me. My first embrace, skin against skin, was with him.
We took refuge in my parents’ camper, which was parked in our garage for the winter at the end of the season. (At the beginning of spring it will be found in the Saint-Georges-de-Didonne campground, where we spend weekends walking on the beach, buying churros at the waterfront and fresh shrimp at the market that will end up in bowls later when it’s time for drinks before dinner.)
I knew where the key was. It was dark and the air was stale but while the gestures could have been more precise, we were not modest.
Today I’m struck by our creativity because at the time, there was no Internet, not even videocassettes or cable TV. We had never seen any porn, and yet we still knew how to do it. There are things one knows how to do even as a child. By puberty, we would be even more imaginative. That would come fast.
I was not at all troubled by this revelation. On the contrary, it enchanted me. First, because it played out in the dark and children are fond of secret games. And then also because I didn’t see the harm in feeling good; I had experienced pleasure with Sébastien and I couldn’t conceive of associating that pleasure with anything wrong. Finally because this union crystallized my difference. So I would not resemble the others after all. In this one regard, I would stop being the model child. I wouldn’t follow the pack. Out of instinct, I despised pac
ks. That has never changed.
Later I’ll hear the famous insults, the obscene insinuations. I’ll see the effeminate gestures that are overplayed in my presence, the limp wrists, the rolling eyes, the mimed blow jobs. If I shut up, it’s just to avoid being confronted by violence. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. I prefer to see it as a kind of necessary self-protection. But I will never change. I will never think: It’s bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they’ll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.
I remembered the name. Thomas Andrieu.
I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity. I don’t know yet that one day I will write books, that I will invent characters and I will have to name those characters, but I am already sensitive to the sound of identities, to their fluidity. However, I do know that first names can betray a social origin, a context that anchors those who carry them to a particular era.
I will discover that Thomas Andrieu is ultimately a misleading name.
First of all, Thomas was not a common name given to boys during the sixties in France (“my” Thomas is eighteen years old in 1984). Usually the boys then were named Phillippe, Patrick, Pascal, or Alain. In the seventies, it’s the Christophes, Stéphanes, and Laurents that will prevail. The Thomases will make their breakthrough in the nineties. So the black-eyed boy is ahead of his time. Or rather it’s his parents who are. That’s what I deduce. And then yet again, I will discover that that’s not the case either. It was the name of a grandfather who died prematurely, is all.
The Andrieu surname is an enigma. It could be the name of a general, of a man of the cloth, of a farmer. All the same, it strikes me as an everyman’s name without my knowing enough to justify that thought.