Beautiful Nights

1

It happened to people, this longing, emerging from an unknown void, grabbing the soul with a firm hand, the urge to simply let go and sink to the depths of the ocean. Deeper and deeper, without resistance, throwing away yourself and your life, as if you had come from the gorges of the sea and were destined to return there one day.

Vertigo marée, the old Breton fishermen called it, that desire that came from nowhere—­to erase the self, to be free, free from everything. It usually came on the most beautiful of nights, that was why fishermen avoided looking into the deep, and hung thick curtains at their sea-­facing windows when on dry land.

The thought of this occupied Claire as she dressed, and the stranger asked: “Will I see you again?” He lay naked on the bed; the brass ceiling fan turned sluggishly, tracing a revolving star of shadowy stripes on his bare skin. The man stretched out an arm as Claire zipped up her pencil skirt at the back. He reached for her hand.

She knew he was asking whether they would do it again. Share a secret hour behind closed doors. Whether this would start to mean something, or end here and now, in Room 32 of the Hotel Langlois, Paris.

Claire looked into his eyes. Dark-­blue eyes. It would have been easy to sink into their depths.

In every gaze, we seek the ocean. And in every ocean, that one gaze.

His eyes were the ocean at Sanary-­sur-­Mer on a hot summer’s day, when the mistral shakes the overripe figs from the trees and the dazzling white pavements are speckled with their purple juice and windswept blossoms. Eyes he had kept open the whole time, looking at Claire, holding her gaze as he moved inside her. The unfamiliar ocean of his eyes was one reason she had sought him out on the terrace of Galeries Lafayette. That, and the fact that he wore a wedding ring on his finger.

Just like her.

“No,” Claire said.

She had known that it would only happen once. No surnames. No exchange of telephone numbers. None of the intimacies of an all too banal conversation about their children, or shopping at the Marché d’Aligre, steak frites at Poulette, movies, travel plans, and why they were doing this to each other. Why they had left their lives for an hour to press themselves against a stranger’s skin, trace unfamiliar body contours, enclose unfamiliar lips, before slipping back into the regular outline of their lives.

Claire knew her own reasons.

His were none of her business.

Their hands separated simultaneously. Slipped apart. The last touch and perhaps the tenderest. He didn’t ask why, he expressed no regret. He let Claire go just as she did him, a piece of flotsam on the tide of the day.

Claire picked up her open handbag, which had fallen from the cherrywood coffee table by the garret window earlier, when the man had pressed her gently against one of the pillars and lifted the hem of her dress, feeling the silk edge of her stockings and smiling as he kissed her.

Claire had planned to seek out someone like him among the thousands of faces in Paris. The sudden vision of one’s own body pressing against the other. The same vision, mirrored in the other’s gaze.

After her last lecture before the two-­month summer break, she had put the stockings on in her office at the university for that sole reason. And quietly slipped away from the obligatory end-of-­term staff party after half a glass of ice-­cold champagne. The other professors were used to Claire withdrawing discreetly from festivities. “Madame le Professeur always leaves before the moment normal people switch to first names,” Claire had once heard a lecturer say to a new research assistant in the ladies’ room. Neither of them knew that Claire was in one of the cubicles. She had waited until the women were gone. Up till then, she hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t on first-­name terms with any of her colleagues.

Some were afraid of her knowledge: as a behavioral biologist, she knew the anatomy of human emotions and actions. They feared her insights into volition and choice in the same way that many people fear psychologists, hoping the experts will see right through them to the very backbone of their being and understand what has made them what they are, with all their transgressions, compulsions, and guiltless wounds, yet dreading what such a tomograph of the soul might uncover beneath the layers of good manners and secrets.

She wouldn’t put the stockings on again, but dump them straight in the black and gold waste bin in the small ensuite with its art deco tiles on her way out.

Claire gathered together her keys, mobile, leather notebook, and university ID card, without which no one could get past the armed guards outside the Sorbonne and its associated institutes, and put them all back into the silk interior of her bag. She fastened it and twisted her dark-blond hair into a neat chignon at the nape of her neck.

“You’re beautiful in the light from the window,” the man said. “Stay like that for a minute. That’s how I’ll carry you around with me. Until we forget about each other.”

She obliged. He wanted to make it easy for them. He had tasted of milk and sugar, of coffee and desire.

The attic room, with the dark wood Provence dresser, the round white table, the dove-­gray Versailles chairs, the bed with the summer linen, was now quite still, and the melody of Paris city life was stirring outside. The hum of air conditioners, fans, engines. As if she was emerging from a faraway sea after floating in a liquefied existence broken only by her own breath, and materializing into the old Claire, in the overheated intensity of a Parisian day.

She looked out over the roofs of Montmartre. At the rows of clay chimneys along their narrow ridges. It was after five in the afternoon, the June sun burning a cavity in time, making the roofs shimmer in the silvery gray that resembled the moment of awakening. When the dream ends and reality fades in, still blurred. The moment Spinoza once described as the “place of the one true freedom.”

Roofs like one of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies.

That’s what Gilles would say. His observations on the world were always musical. He preferred hearing to seeing.

Opposite the hotel was a balcony terrace. A man was laying the table with blue plates; a small boy clung to one of his legs, chuckling with delight as he rode on his papa’s foot.

Like Nicolas, Claire thought.

Her son, her child, back in the days when he was so small that her arms reached all the way around him, that little parcel of trust and curiosity, smelling of pancakes and untapped hope. Nowadays her arms barely reached to Nico’s broad shoulders.

What was she doing here?

Standing by the window of a run-­down, midrange hotel, her back to a strange man who still had her taste on his lips, thinking about her son, full of helpless, tender love, thinking of her husband, who used to sing when she entered the room until one day he stopped, thinking of his familiar face that she knew so well, in every variant. The lover’s face, the liar’s face.

Opposite, a woman in cutoff jeans and a strappy vest came out of the kitchen onto the terrace. She wrapped her arms around the child’s father from behind. He smiled and bent to kiss her hand.

Claire turned away from the window, stepped into her open-­toe leather pumps, hung her bag over her shoulder, inhaled, and straightened up, looking the man on the bed in the eye.

“It’s a privilege,” he said slowly, “to know you’re losing someone. That way you can remember the moment. Often, we lose someone without warning.”

A wordless minute passed, then she left Room 32.

She pressed the button for the old lift and deep below her it shuddered into life in its wrought-iron shaft. Too slowly. She didn’t want to wait, just a few meters from the bed, from the man, from that moment of freedom.

Vertigo marée: it existed on land too; if she had looked into the depths of his eyes for too long, she would have let herself fall. First, they would have talked about their favorite markets and travel plans, and soon they would have begun to ask each other the dangerous questions: what do you dream about, what are you afraid of, haven’t you always wanted to . . . ? They would have gotten to know each other. And they would have begun to hide from each other.

Claire walked briskly down the narrowly winding staircase of the Langlois with its worn red carpet, distancing herself from the room.

On the second floor, she heard the voice.

“Ne me quitte pas,” it whispered.

It was coming from Number 22.

Ne me quitte pas. Don’t leave me.