I wish he were far away . . . I fight my need to rest, to unwind, to raise one hand and implore:
“Time out! Stop!
I don’t know this game.
If I feel like it, we’ll start it again; but I don’t have the strength to follow you, and I get caught every time, as you clearly see . . .”
His watchful eyes come and go, rapidly, from my eyelids to my mouth, from my mouth to my eyelids, seeming to read my face . . . Suddenly he stands up and turns away, abruptly discreet.
“Good night, Renee!” he says in a quieter tone . . .” Please forgive me for staying so late, but Hamond had urged me . . .”
I protest, with an embarrassment like a society woman’s:
“Oh, that doesn’t matter . . . on the contrary . . .”
“Is your concierge very hard to awaken?”
“I hope not . . .”
We’re so pitifully silly that a little of my mirth comes back to me.
“Wait!” I say, all of a sudden. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t wake up the concierge: you’re going to leave by the window . . .”
“By the window?
Oh, Renee . . .”
“We’re on the ground floor.”
“I know.
But aren’t you afraid . . . someone might see me?
A tenant of the building might be coming home just then . . .”
“What’s that to me?”
In spite of myself, I have displayed such a scornful indifference in replying and shrugging my shoulders that my admirer no longer dares to show his pleasure.
At bottom, this departure through the window at one in the morning—and from my bedroom, if you please!—must be filling him with a student’s joy.
Oh, what youth! . . .
“Jump!
Right!
Good night!”
“See you tomorrow, Renee?”
“If you wish, my friend . . .”
What youth! . . .
And yet this man is thirty-three! . . .
As I am . . . Thirty-four in six months . . .
I’ve heard him running on the sidewalk, in a clinging drizzle that coats the pavement and wets the windowsill, on which I remain leaning, like a woman in love . . .
But, behind me, nobody has rumpled the big bed, ordinary and fresh, spread with uncreased sheets, a bed that, in the insomnia I’m resigned to, I won’t even ruffle.
He’s gone.
He’ll be back tomorrow, and the days after that, since I’ve given him permission.
When he returns, he’ll be almost happy, awkward, full of hope, with that air of saying “I ask for nothing” which in the long run irritates me like a beggar’s mechanical request . . . When it would have been so easy to hurt him with a refusal that still involved no danger, so that he’d go away with a fresh, curable wound! . . .
In the square of my lighted window the drizzle comes down, white against the black background of the street, like a rain of flour from a mill . . .
I succumbed, I admit it—I succumbed when I gave that man permission to come back tomorrow—to the desire to retain in him not an admirer, not a friend, but a greedy spectator of my life and my person.
“You have to get awfully old,” Margot said to me one day, “to give up the vanity of living in someone’s company!”
Could I sincerely declare that, for some weeks now, I haven’t reveled in the attentions of this passionate spectator?
I refused him my keenest glances, my freest smiles; when speaking to him I regulated the sound of my voice; I made my face a blank in his presence, but . . . But wasn’t it so that, hurt and humbled, he’d realize that all my reticence was for his benefit, that for his sake I was taking the trouble to impoverish my own existence?
There’s no disguise without coquetry, and it takes as many pains, as much vigilance, to make yourself ugly all the time as to make yourself beautiful.
If my admirer is watching my open window in the darkness, he can be proud!
I don’t miss him, I don’t want him here, but I’m thinking of him.
I’m thinking of him as if I were taking stock of my first defeat . . .
The first?
No, the second.
There was one evening—oh, what a poisoned recollection, and how I curse it for coming back to life at this moment!—one evening when I leaned like this, looking down at an invisible garden.
My very long hair was hanging down from the balcony like a silken rope . . . The certainty that I was in love had just swooped down on me, but, far from buckling under it, my adolescent strength bore up under it proudly.
Neither doubt, nor even the most gentle melancholy, sobered that triumphal, solitary night garlanded by wisteria and roses! . . .
The man who aroused that blind, innocent excitement—what did he do with it?