Kitabı oku: «Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder»
FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER
HOLIDAY IN A COMA and LOVE LASTS THREE YEARS
Two Novels
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY FRANK WYNNE
Contents
Title Page Holiday In A Coma Dedication Epigraph 7.00 P.M. 8.00 P.M. 9.00 P.M. 10.00 P.M. 11.00 P.M. 12.00 A.M. 1.00 A.M. 2.00 A.M. Interval 3.00 A.M. 4.00 A.M. 5.00 A.M. 6.00 A.M. 7.00 A.M. Love Lasts Three Years Dedication Epigraph Chapter I: Connected Vessels Chapter I: Endless Love Chapter II: The Gay Divorcé Chapter III: On The Beach Chapter IV: The Saddest Human Being I Ever Met Chapter V: Best Before Date Chapter VI: The End Of The Road Chapter VII: Some Tips For Surviving Heartbreak Chapter VIII: For Those Who Missed The Beginning Chapter IX: Rain Over Copacabana Chapter X: Palais De Justice, Paris Chapter XI: The Human Man At Thirty Chapter XII: Lost Illusions Chapter XIII: Flirting With Disaster Chapter XIV: Provisional Resurrection Chapter XV: The Wailing Wall Chapter XVI: Would You Like To Be My Harem? Chapter XVII: The Horns Of A Dilemma Chapter XVIII: Highs And Lows Chapter XIX: Flee Happiness Lest It Run Away Chapter XX: Things Fall Apart Chapter XXI: Question Marks Chapter XXII: Reunion Chapter XXIII: Leave Chapter XXIV: The Beauty Of Beginnings Chapter XXV: Thank You, Wolfgang Chapter XXVI: Hot Sex Chapter Chapter XXVII: Letters (I) Chapter XXVIII: The Depths Of Despair Chapter XXIX: The South Bitch Diet Chapter XXX: Letters (Ii) Chapter XXXI: L’amant Chapter XXXII: Dunno Chapter XXXIII: The Impossible Decrystallisation Chapter XXXIV: The Theory Of Eternal Return Chapter XXXV: Tender Is The Night Chapter XXXVI: Freelance Chapter XXXVII: The Romantic Cynic Chapter XXXVIII: Letters (Iii) Chapter XXXIX: Still Falling Chapter XL: Conversation In A Palace Chapter XLI: Conjectures Chapter XLII: The Cunning Plan Chapter XLIII: A Cheap Trick Chapter XLIV: Letters (Iv) Chapter XLV: So Chapter II: Three Years Later In Formentera Chapter I: D-Day –7 Chapter II: D-Day –6 Chapter III: D-Day –5 Chapter IV: D-Day –4 Chapter V: D-Day –3 Chapter VI: D-Day –2 Chapter VII: D-Day –1 Chapter VIII: D-Day Also By Frédéric Beigbeder Copyright About the Publisher
HOLIDAY IN A COMA
For Diane Β., I fell, Head over heels.
Let’s dance
The last dance
Tonight
Yes it’s my last chance
For romance
Tonight.
Donna Summer, ‘Last Dance’
Casablanca Records
Second novels are written in a secondary frame of mind.
Me
7.00 P.M.
He combs his hair, puts on or takes off his jacket or his scarf as one might toss a flower into a grave which is still open’
Jean-Jacques Schuhl
Rose Poussière
Marc Marronnier is twenty-seven years old, he has a beautiful apartment, a cool job and still he doesn’t kill himself. Go figure.
His doorbell rings. Marc Marronnier loves a lot of things: the photos in the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Irish whiskey straight up, the avenue Vélasquez, a song (‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys), chocolate éclairs, a book (les Deux Veuves by Dominique Noguez) and belated ejaculation. Doorbells ringing is not one of those things.
‘Monsieur Marronnier?’ asks a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet.
‘In the flesh.’
‘This is for you.’
The bell-boy in the motorcycle helmet (he looks like ‘Spirou and the Golden Bowl’) hands him an envelope approximately three feet square, jiggling impatiently as though he urgently needs a piss. Marc takes the envelope and gives him a ten-franc piece to disappear out of his life. Marc Marronnier doesn’t need a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet in his life.
Inside the envelope, he is utterly unsurprised to discover the following:
A NIGHT IN SHIT
* * * * * * * * *
Grand Opening Night
Place de la Madeleine
Paris
He is, however, pretty surprised to find, stapled to the invitation:
See you tonight, you old queer Joss Dumoulin DJ
JOSS DUMOULIN? Marc was sure he was living in permanent exile in Japan. Or dead.
But dead men don’t host club nights.
And so Marc Marronnier brushes his fingers through his hair, a gesture that indicates a certain inner contentment. It has to be said, he’s been waiting a long time for ‘a night in Shit’. Every day for the past year he’s walked past the construction site for the new club, ‘the biggest nightclub in Paris’. And every time he passes, he thinks, on opening night, there are going to be a truckload of honeys.
Marc Marronnier aims to please. This is probably why he wears glasses. When they’re perched on his nose, his colleagues think he looks like William Hurt, only uglier. (NB His myopia dates from his secondary school days at Louis-le-Grand, his scoliosis from his days studying at Sciences Po.)
It’s official: Marc Marronnier is going to have sexual relations tonight, whatever happens. He may even do the deed with more than one person, who knows? He has packed six condoms, for he is an ambitious young man.
Marc Marronnier senses he is going to die, in forty years or so. When he’s quite finished getting on our nerves.
Society scoundrel, armchair rebel, photo-opportunity mercenary, disgraceful bourgeois, his life consists of listening to messages on his answering machine and leaving them on other answering machines. All the while watching thirty channels simultaneously using picture-in-picture on cable TV. He sometimes forgets to eat for several days.
On the day he was born, he was already a has-been. There are countries where one dies at a ripe old age, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, you are born at an old age. Blasé before he had lived a day, he now cultivates his failures. For example, he boasts about writing slim volumes of barely a hundred pages with print runs of less than 3,000. ‘Since literature is dead, I make do with writing for my friends,’ he eructates at formal dinners, knocking back the dregs from the glasses of the girls sitting next to him. It is important that Neuilly-sur-Seine not give up hope.
A nightlife correspondent, copywriter–editor, literary journalist: Marc cannot commit to anything. He refuses to choose one life over another. These days, he says, ‘everyone is insane, the only choice left is between schizophrenia and paranoia: we are either many in one or one against all’. And yet, like all chameleons (Fregoli, Zelig, Thierry Le Luron), if there is one thing he hates, it is being alone. This is why there are multiple Marc Marronniers.
Delphine Seyrig passed away in the late morning, it is now 7 p.m. Marc has taken off his glasses to brush his teeth. I’ve just told you he is unstable by nature.
Is Marc Marronnier happy? Well, he’s got nothing to complain about. He spends vast sums of money every month and has no children. That, surely, is happiness: having no problems. And yet, from time to time he feels something like worry in his belly. The annoying thing is that he is unable to determine what kind of worry. It is an Unidentified Anguish. It makes him cry watching dreadful movies. He is definitely missing something, but what? Thank God the feeling invariably wears off.
In the meantime, it will be very strange for him to see Joss Dumoulin again after all this time. Joss Dumoulin, dubbed ‘the million dollar DJ’ in last month’s Vanity Fair: an old friend who hit the big time. Marc is unsure if he is really happy about the fact that Joss has become so famous. He feels like a sprinter still at the starting-blocks, watching his best mate ascend the podium to howls of adulation from the crowd.
In a nutshell, Joss Dumoulin is master of the universe, since he practises the most important profession in the world in the greatest city in the world: he is the best DJ in Tokyo.
Is it really necessary to remind you how the DJs seized power? In a hedonistic society as superficial as ours, the citizens of the world are interested in only one thing: partying. (Sex and money being implicitly part and parcel of the whole: money facilitates partying which facilitates sex.) And DJs have complete control. Not content just with clubs, they spawn the rave culture and have people dancing in warehouses, car parks, building sites, any available patch of waste ground. They are the ones who killed off rock and roll, inventing first rap and then house. They lord it over the Top 40 by day and the clubs by night. It’s getting hard to avoid them.
DJs remix our lives. Nobody gives them a hard time about it: if you’re going to hand over power to someone, a DJ is at least as qualified as a movie star or an ex-lawyer. After all, to govern, all you need is a good ear, a little general knowledge and the ability to segue.
Being a DJ is a curious profession. Somewhere between priest and prostitute. You give everything you have to people who give nothing in return. You spin discs so that other people can dance, have it large, come on to the pretty girl in the skin-tight dress. Then you head home on your own with your records under your arm. Being a DJ is a dilemma. A DJ exists only through other people: he steals other people’s music to get other people to dance. He’s a mix of Robin Hood (steals from one to give to the other) and Cyrano de Bergerac (living his life by proxy). All in all, the most important profession of our time is enough to drive anyone mad.
Joss Dumoulin didn’t squander his youth at the Institut d’Études Politiques like Marc. At twenty, he headed straight for Japan with nothing in his luggage except the three Bs of success: Bone Idleness, Bullshit Artistry and Bigging It Up. Why Japan? Because, he used to say, ‘If you’re going to take a gap year somewhere, you might as well head for the richest country on earth. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.’
Of course, Joss’s gap year turned into a gap life. In no time flat he was the mascot of Nippon nightlife. His club nights at Juliana’s, it is said, were bangin’. It has to be said he arrived at just the right time: Tokyo was just discovering the delights of capitalist decadence. Government ministers were increasingly corrupt, foreigners increasingly numerous. Tokyo’s gilded youth was having a hard time spending all their parents’ money. All in all, Marc Marronnier took the wrong turn.
He went over for a visit once. He can confirm that Joss Dumoulin has only to walk into Gold and suddenly every guy in the place is snorting loudly or popping little bits of blotter. As for the girls, they turn themselves into geishas as he walks by. Marc has Polaroids in a drawer somewhere to prove it.
Joss Dumoulin has lived Marc Marronnier’s life for him. Pulled all the girls he doesn’t have the balls to talk to. Taken all the drugs he’s afraid to try. Joss is the polar opposite of Marc; maybe this is why they got on so well once upon a time.
Marc only drinks fizzy drinks: Coca-Cola in the morning, Berocca in the afternoon, vodka and tonic at night. He fills himself with bubbles all day long. As he puts down his glass of Alka-Seltzer (just this once), he thinks back to Tokyo bay and that fantastically Pacific ocean.
He remembers the night he spent at Love and Sex on the top floor of Gold where a dozen of Joss’s mates fucked some Chink girl as innocent as she was handcuffed. It was here, after he’d had his turn, that Marc was introduced to Joss’s wife. You learn something new every night.
Marc is horribly unlucky: his parents are in great shape. Every day, they fritter away a little more of his inheritance. Meanwhile, the Digital Sampler, a machine invented in the mid-eighties, has made Joss Dumoulin rich and famous. The sampler makes it possible to nick the best bits from any piece of music and recycle them to make ‘dance’ tracks. Thanks to this invention, DJs, who were previously little more than human jukeboxes, have become musicians in their own right. (It’s as if librarians were writing books or museum curators painting pictures.) Joss was quick on the uptake: suddenly, his productions flooded the Japanese club market and from there the world. All he need do is drag out whatever he likes from his record collection and serve it up to his nocturnal public. He watches their reactions, ditches anything that doesn’t make them dance, notes what works. He feels his way: there is no better focus group than a dance floor. This is how you become an inter-national star while your old friend goes on uselessly studying.
Commercial success wasn’t long in coming. It was Joss who first mixed birdsong with Mesopotamian choirs: the record was number one in thirty countries including Sri Lanka and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Then Joss launched bossa-soukouss over a melody stolen from the Goldberg Variations: a huge hit which made it onto the heavy rotation playlist of MTV Europe. Marc still laughs when he thinks about that summer when, thanks to Dumoulin’s bossa-soukouss video (sponsored by Orangina), everyone was doing the dance where you yank the girl’s breasts.
And so on and so on: Joss chalked up a fortune pretty quickly. Georges Guétary dressed in Jean-Paul Gaultier singing traditional Israeli chants? Joss produced that one: twenty-three weeks at number one in the French charts. Techno-gospel? Joss. That instrumental with Archie Shepp playing sax over a drum solo by Keith Moon (of course you remember – the one that made acid jazz seem gay)? That was Joss. The Sylvie Vartan–Johnny Rotten duet? Joss again. Right now (Marc read about it in the Vanity Fair article where Joss was photographed by Annie Leibovitz drowning in a sea of quarter-inch tape), he’s working on a mix featuring an Airbus A320 crashing and Petula Clark singing ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’, a garage version of the speeches of Maréchal Pétain and a one-off concert at Wembley Stadium featuring Luciano Pavarotti singing with AC/DC. He’s got his work cut out for him. His kleptomaniac imagination knows no bounds, to say nothing of his CD sales. Joss Dumoulin understands the age in which he lives: he only makes collages.
And here he is, Joss Dumoulin organising the grand opening of Shit, the club all of Paris has been waiting for. It’s hardly a revelation: Joss does one-nighters all over the world. And not just anywhere: at Club USA (New York), Pacha (Madrid), the Ministry of Sound (London), 90° (Berlin), the Baby’O (Acapulco), the Bash (Miami), the Roxy (Amsterdam), the Mau-Mau (Buenos Aires), Alien (Rome) and – obviously–Space (Ibiza). Different sets where the same people are squirming, depending on the season. Marc is a little bitter but decides to look on the bright side. After all, Joss will be able to introduce him to the prettiest girls at the gig. Or at least the one he doesn’t want for himself.
Marc has access to a network of informants: PR sluts and certified star-fuckers. They phone him to tell him that Shit really was built in an old public toilet. They’ve built a giant toilet on the place de la Madeleine. A six-feet-high pink bog roll serves as an awning above the entrance. But the main attraction, the thing that will completely revolutionise clubbing in Paris, is that they’ve built a submersible circular dance floor in the shape of a toilet seat, equipped with a giant flush mechanism which plunges the dancers into a huge whirlpool at some unspecified point during the evening. Marc also learns that, to maintain the element of surprise, the guests for the opening were deliberately not sent their invitations until the day of the opening, at the last possible minute. He thinks that most of the interesting people will somehow manage to wriggle out of their multiple prior engagements.
*
Although tonight he is spoiled for choice. Marc’s coffee table groans under the weight of possibilities: a performance at a gallery opening on the rue des Beaux-Arts (the painter is scheduled to cut off both hands at around 9 p.m.), a dinner at the Arc in honour of the half-brother of Lenny Kravitz’s bassist’s best friend, a fancy-dress ball in the old Renault factory at Issy-les-Moulineaux to launch a new perfume (Assembly Line by Chanel), a private concert by the hot new English band (The John Lennons) at La Cigale, a themed party at Denise’s on the ‘Heterosexual Lesbians as Leather Queens in Drag’ and a rave at the Élysée Palace. In spite of everything, Marc knows that all over the city, the question of the moment is: ‘Are you going to Shit tonight?’ (The uninitiated who misunderstands risks betraying not only his ignorance but a personal incontinence problem.)
Marc poses in front of the bathroom mirror. Tonight he’s going to kiss girls he hasn’t been introduced to. He’s going to sleep with people he’s never met, people he hasn’t previously had fifteen intimate dinners with.
He’s impressing nobody, especially not himself. Deep down, he knows he wants the same thing all his friends want: to fall in love again.
He grabs a white shirt and a navy blue tie with white polka dots, he shaves quickly, douses himself with eau de toilette, howls in pain and leaves the flat. He refuses to panic.
He thinks: ‘Mythify everything because everything is mythic. Things, places, dates, people are all potential legends, you just have to find the right myth. Everyone who lived in Paris in 1940 will eventually be a character in a Patrick Modiano novel. Anyone who set foot in a London pub in 1965 will have slept with Mick Jagger. When you get down to it, being a legend is easy: you just have to wait your turn. Carnaby Street, the Hamptons, Greenwich Village, le Lac d’Aiguebelette, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Goa, Guéthary, le Paradou, Mustique, Phuket: it doesn’t matter if you’re bored shitless at the time, and twenty years from now you can brag that you were there. Time is a sacrament. Sick and tired of your life? Hang in there and you’ll be a legend.’ Walking gives Marc some peculiar ideas.
The toughest problem is managing to be mythic and alive at the same time. Joss Dumoulin might have pulled it off.
Does a living legend keep his hands in his pockets? Does he wear a cashmere scarf? Does he agree to spend ‘a night at Shit’?
Marc checks to make sure he has no signal on his mobile. No, not a single bar. There’s no need to worry, then. It’s perfectly normal that his phone isn’t ringing. Marc will be uncontactable for another six yards.
There was a time when he went out every night, and not just for professional reasons. Sometimes he’d run into a certain Jocelyn du Moulin (oh yes, that’s what he was called back in the day; the ‘du’ which indicates he’s part of the old French aristocracy is something he only dropped recently: now he’s pseudo-working class).
The weather is fine so Marc starts singing ‘Singing in the Rain’. It’s still better than humming ‘Le Lundi au Soleil’ when it’s raining (especially given that it’s Friday.)
Paris is a film set mock-up. Marc Marronnier wishes that it was all really made of pasteboard. He prefers the fake Pont Neuf, the one Leos Carax had built in the middle of nowhere, to the real one that Christo wrapped. He wishes that this whole city were deliberately fake instead of pretending to be real. It’s too beautiful to be real! He wishes the shadowy figures he can see behind the curtains were cardboard cut-outs moved by a system of electric pulleys. Unfortunately, the Seine is full of liquid water, the buildings are made of dressed stone and the passers-by he encounters are not paid extras. The special effects are elsewhere, better hidden.
Marc has been seeing fewer people recently. He’s selective. It’s something called ‘getting old’. He loathes it, even though it appears to be a commonplace phenomenon.
Tonight, he will pick up girls. Why isn’t he gay? It’s pretty surprising, given the decadent circles he hangs out in, his so-called creative work and his taste for provocation. But that’s just it: that’s where the shoe pinches. He thinks being gay nowadays is too conformist. It’s the easy way out. Besides, he loathes hairy people.
We might as well face facts: Marronnier is the sort of guy who wears polka-dot ties and picks up girls.
Once upon a time there was him and the rest of the world. Just a guy wandering down the boulevard Malesherbes. Desperately banal, i.e. unique. That’s him heading to the party of the year. Do you recognise him? He’s got nothing better to do. He’s an unforgivable optimist. (Though it must be said the pigs never pull him over and ask for his papers.) He heads towards the festivities with complete impunity. ‘The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected.’ (Roland Barthes, Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse.)
‘Shut the fuck up, you legendary stiff,’ grumbles Marronnier. ‘Wait long enough, you’ll ALWAYS get run over by a dry-cleaning van.’
A few steps later, Marc changes his mind. ‘Actually, Barthes is right. All I ever do is wait and I’m ashamed of it. At sixteen I wanted to take on the world, I wanted to be a rock star, or be a great writer, or be president of France, or die young. But here I am at twenty-seven, already resigned to my fate, rock is too complicated, cinema too elitist, great writers too dead, France too corrupt and nowadays I want to die as old as possible.’
8.00 P.M.
My good-for-nothing city-dweller lives and
is set free by the variety of the night.
The night is a long and lonely party
Mi callejero no hacer nada vive y se suelta por la variedad de la noche. La noche es una fiesta larga y sola.
Jorge Luis Borges
Casi Juicio Final from Moon Across the Way
It is important to live dangerously, but from time to time Marc likes to have a snack at Ladurée.
Careful not to be too punctual, he orders a hot chocolate and composes this bilingual haiku:
Un homme au cou de giraffe Mangeait des clous de girofle.
And in her mouth he came Drinking Château-Yquem.
The elderly waitress brings him his drink and he is suddenly seized by violent anguish: the cocoa almost certainly came from Africa, it had to be picked, shipped, before being processed in a Van Houten factory transforming it into soluble powder, then shipped again; one had to boil the milk which came from a cow locked up in another factory in Normandy (Candia or maybe Lactel), the saucepan had to be watched to ensure it didn’t boil over, in short, thousands of people had to work hard just so he could let it sit there and go cold. All those people for a simple cup of hot chocolate. Maybe some of the factory workers died, crushed by the fearsome machines which press the cocoa beans, just so that Marc could stir it slowly. He feels as if all these people are watching him, telling him: ‘Drink your chocolate, Marc, drink it while it’s hot, it’s not your fault that this single cup of hot chocolate represents a year’s salary for us.’ He gets up from the table and, wrinkling his brow, gets the hell out of there. As you’ve already been advised, his behaviour is not always entirely rational. He is easily terrified by geometrically patterned wallpaper, the numbers on a car licence plate, even an overweight man eating pizza.
The Church of the Madeleine has not moved from the Place. Already there is a crowd queuing outside Shit. A ballet of rubbernecks and paparazzi. The vast loudspeakers sing Schubert’s ‘An die Nachtigall’ in a remix with Julee Cruise’s ‘The Nightingale’. Undoubtedly the first vesperal invention of Joss Dumoulin.
The vast toilet bowl in white marble is bathed in a mist of dry ice and surrounded by vertical spots which light up the sky. They look like columns of light from a Star Trek teleporter, or a V2 alert during the Blitz. Inquisitive bystanders are clustered like spermatozoa around the egg.
‘And you are … ?’ asks the human pit bull guarding the entrance. Since an accurate reply to this question would have taken hours, Marc simply says: ‘Marronnier’. The security guard repeats the name into his walkie-talkie. There is a tumbleweed moment. It’s the same deal every time you go out. ‘Let me just check the guest list.’ People think of nightclub doormen as watchdogs, but it’s not true: in fact they are directly descended from the Sphinx of Thebes. Their riddles raise genuine existential problems. Marc wonders whether he answered correctly. At length, the pit bull receives a burst of approving crackle in his headset. Marc exists! He’s on the list, therefore he is! The chamberlain deferentially parts the velvet rope a fraction to allow him through. The crowd parts just like the Red Sea for Moses, except that Marc is clean-shaven.
On the wall, a mosaic inscription reads: ‘Built by Porcine Industries, Paris–Revin 1905’ and just above it, a small blue hologram shows a naked girl, smiling, with a tattoo on her belly that reads: ‘Shit, Paris–Tokyo 1993’.
Joss Dumoulin greets his guests at the entrance, behind the metal detector and the TV crews setting up their spots. His hair is slicked back, his dinner jacket double-breasted, his bodyguards brick shit-houses, his telephone mobile.
‘Heeeeeeey! If it isn’t the great Marc Marronnier! How many years has it been?’
They kiss warmly in a showbiz style, making it easier for them to hide their actual emotions.
‘Great to see you again, Jocelyn.’
‘Bastard – don’t call me that,’ laughs Joss. ‘These days I’m young.’
‘So this is, like, your club?’
‘The Bog? Nah, the club belongs to some Japanese friends. You know, the kind with at least one finger missing … Jesus, I’m really happy you came, Bro.’
‘What, when one of us has finally made it big for once – I wasn’t going to miss that. And anyway, I wanted to know what it takes to become “Joss Dumoulin”.’
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the star system for you. I’ll let you in on my secret: talent. Well? Don’t I get a laugh? Since I’ve been famous it’s mad how people always laugh at my jokes. Go on, go with the flow.’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ Marc forces a laugh, ‘what a wit! Well, it’s been real, but can you point me to the nymphomaniacs?’
‘What’s the hurry, you old Reuben! Baroness, how aaaaaaare you?’
Joss Dumoulin kisses the Baroness Truffaldine greedily like a starving man devouring a slice of fresh bread, when in fact she looks like a slab of butter someone has stuck a pair of trifocals into. Then he turns back to Marc:
‘Get yourself a drink, you old bastard, I’ll be right over. And don’t worry about nymphos, the place is full of them. I just have to greet my six hundred nymphomaniac friends. Like Marguerite here! Oh my God, Marguerite, you look like such a nympho!’
There he goes, mispronouncing the name of Marjorie Lawrence, a fashion model famous in the fifties and ever since the fifties. Marc kisses her hand ceremoniously (with just a hint of urbane gerontophilia). Twisting people’s names seems to be one of Joss’s favourite sports. With most people, DJs are as sympathetic as the nervous system of the same name: it’s fight or flight.
Marc does as he is told and heads for the bar. It’s time to armour himself.
Hey – one important detail, he’s stopped frowning.
‘Two Lobotomies over ice, please.’
He is accustomed to ordering drinks in pairs, especially when they’re free. It gives him an excuse for not shaking hands with people.
While preserving the turn-of-the-century rococo style of the toilets, the architects have turned this vast hall into a high-tech neo-brutalist extravaganza which their Nippon backers will surely appreciate. Spread over two enormous floors is a toilet at least thirty yards in diameter. The ground floor, with its circular gallery dotted with small tables, represents the toilet seat. Below it is the dance floor set out with tables for dinner. Between the two, dominating the space, is the glass DJ booth, which looks like a giant soap bubble linked to the dance floor by two white water-slides. The place gives Marc the unpleasant sensation of being trapped in a Piranesi engraving.
For the moment, there aren’t many people. ‘A good sign,’ he thinks, ‘any party with crowds of people jostling outside and no one inside is off to a good start.’
‘Hey, Marc, getting warmed up?’ asks Joss who has joined him at the upstairs bar.
‘I like to get to a club early, just to build myself up.’
Feeling guilty, Marc offers Joss one of the drinks.
‘Thanks, I don’t drink. I’ve much better things to do. Come on, I’ll show you something.’
Marc follows him into a back room where Joss produces a Waldorf Astoria matchbox.
‘Listen, Joss, if you think you’re going to impress me with that … I’ve got an ashtray and a bathrobe from the Pierre at home …’
‘Just wait, darling …’
Joss opens the cardboard drawer. The box is filled with white capsules.
‘Euphoria. Pop one of these babies and you’ll become what you truly are. Each capsule contains the equivalent of six tabs of E. Go on, help yourself, from what I hear you can’t get anything in Paris these days.’
Marc doesn’t even have time to protest before Joss slips a tab into his pocket. Then he disappears towards the door, yelling out names as he goes. The lunatic actually likes him. But it’s wasted on Marc: he’s scared shitless of stuff like this. Usually, people take drugs because they’re cowards. With Marc, it’s cowardice that stops him taking them.
After all that, he’s still none the wiser. He still doesn’t know where the nymphos are.
Instinctively he fingers the pill in his jacket pocket: it might come in useful. The cocktail is already going to his head. The doctor distinctly told him not to drink on an empty stomach. But Marc loves feeling that first drink slip into his empty stomach. In fact, he wonders which is eroding his gut faster, the booze or the aspirin. The disease or the cure.
The music has moved on to a remix featuring the voice of Saddam Hussein and some syntho-rai. The screens are showing images of the war in Yugoslavia. Joss Dumoulin mixes it all up: that’s his job.
Marc thinks maybe he would have liked to have been a DJ; after all, it’s a good way of being a musician without having to play an instrument. Of creating something without having to have any talent. It’s a pretty good gig.
Slowly, the club, unlike the glasses, begins to fill. Marc, propping up the bar, watches the parade of guests. The major-domos relieve them of their coats in exchange for a cloakroom ticket. A famous arms dealer enters, a beautiful Houri on each arm. Which is the wife and which the daughter? Difficult to tell. The two mulattos have had themselves lifted more than once. Their sexy outfits are like them: borrowed. Every clique is represented: the Left Bank, the Right Bank, the Ile St-Louis, the northern slopes, the southern plains and the central valley of the seizième arrondissement, the quai Conti, the place des Vosges, a couple of flashy foreigners from the Ritz and the avenue Junot (75018), Kensington, the Piazza Navona, Riverside Drive …
The party swells its sails. Each new arrival represents a universe, each can be used later as ammunition, as an ingredient in Joss’s diabolic recipe. It’s as if he wanted to distil the earth itself into a single place, reduce the planet to a single night. A Jivaro party. Marc is on hand to witness the birth of the party live. There is no difference between clubbing and life itself: they are born in the same way, grow and decline in the same way. And when they die, you have to sort out the mess, pick up the overturned chairs and give everything a good sweep – those bastards, they’ve wrecked the place.
This type of tangent may perhaps be explained by the fact that Marc is currently finishing his second cocktail.
It has become almost impossible to impress the consummate dandy Marc Marronnier. He looks almost pitiful, alone at the bar, desperately pleading for a glance from the beautiful girls descending the staircase. Aficionados of body piercing set the metal detectors howling. Marc has arrived at the end of the night without making a Journey. He takes out a block of Post-it notes and jots down this last phrase so he can forget it.
He watches Joss Dumoulin flirting and orders a third sponsored drink. He wonders what has become of the idols of his youth. It’s true he didn’t know Jim Morrison: for him, his idols were Yves Adrien, Patrick Eudeline, Alain Pacadis. You have the role models the times bestow on you. Some of them are dead; for the others, it’s worse: we’ve forgotten them.
This time, Marc is no longer paying any attention to what is going on around him. He is feverishly writing on his yellow Post-its:
I’ve Forgotten
I’ve forgotten the eighties, the decade in which I turned twenty and thus that in which I became acquainted with my own mortality.
I’ve forgotten the title of the only novel by Guillaume Serp (who died of an overdose shortly after it was published).
I’ve forgotten the models Beth Todd, Dayle Haddon and Christie Brinkley.
I’ve forgotten all the magazines: Métal Hurlant, City, Façade, Elles sont de sortie, Le Palace Magazine.
I’ve forgotten the list of Hervé Guibert’s ex-boyfriends.
I’ve forgotten Number 7 on the rue Sainte-Anne and La Piscine on the rue de Tilsitt.
I’ve forgotten Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love,’ and Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’.
I’ve forgotten Yves Mourousi.
I’ve forgotten the collected literary works of Richard Bohringer.
I’ve forgotten the movement known as ‘Allons-z-idées’.
I’ve forgotten Bazooka comics.
I’ve forgotten Divine’s movies.
I’ve forgotten Human League records.
I’ve forgotten the unpopular Alains: Alain Savary and Alain Deva-quet (which of them is dead again?).
I’ve forgotten ska.
I’ve forgotten millions of hours of administrative law, public finances and political economics.
I’ve forgotten to live (song title by Johnny Hallyday).
I’ve forgotten what Russia was called for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.
I’ve forgotten Yohji Yamamoto.
I’ve forgotten the collected works of Hervé Claude.
I’ve forgotten the Twickenham.
I’ve forgotten the Cinéma Cluny which used to be on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Saint-Jacques, The Bonaparte on the place Saint-Sulpice and the Studio Bertrand on the rue du Colonel-Bertrand.
I’ve forgotten the Élysées-Matignon and the Royal Lieu.
I’ve forgotten TV6.
I’ve forgotten myself.
I’ve forgotten what Bob Marley died of and the brand of sleeping pills Dalida committed suicide with.
I’ve forgotten Christian Nucci and Yves Chalier (YVES CHALIER, who the hell has a name like Yves Chalier?).
I’ve forgotten Darie Boutboul.
I’ve forgotten ‘La salle de bains’ (was it a book or a movie?).
I’ve forgotten how to solve the Rubik’s Cube.
I’ve forgotten the name of the Portuguese photographer who went back to pick up his film from the Rainbow Warrior at just the wrong moment.
I’ve forgotten ‘Mental AIDS‘.
I’ve forgotten Jean Lecanuet and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. And Bjorn Borg.
I’ve forgotten Opera Night, the Eldorado and Rose Bonbon.
I’ve forgotten the names of all the Lebanese hostages apart from Jean-Paul Kauffmann.
I’ve forgotten the make of car from which they lobbed the bomb into Tati on the rue de Rennes (Mercedes? BMW? Porsche? Saab Turbo?).
I’ve forgotten there used to be two-tone black and brown Westons.
I’ve forgotten sweets like Treets, Trois Mousquetaires and Daninos.
I’ve forgotten Fruité used to come in a purple apple and black¬ currant flavour.
I’ve forgotten the Partenaire Particulier group and ‘Peter and Sloane’. And Annabelle Mouloudji. And ‘Boule de Flipper’ by Corinne Charby! (Actually, that’s one I do remember.)
I’ve forgotten the International Diplomatic Academy, France– America, the American Legion, the Cercle Interallié, the Automobile Club de France, the Ermenonville Pavilion, the Pavilion des Oiseaux, the Pré Catelan and the swimming pool at Tir aux Pigeons.
(That’s not quite true, who could forget THE SWIMMING POOL AT TIR AUX PIGEONS skinny-dipping at four in the morning with the dogs right behind us?)
Downstairs, dinner has been served. Marc finally tracks down his table. His name is written on a small manila card between Irène de Kazatchok (the décolleté deaconess) and Loulou Zibeline (a pretty cool entrepreneuse). They haven’t arrived yet. Which one will Marc hit on first? Unless maybe they decide to take turns snogging him? His right hand down someone’s blouse and his left hand on the other’s arse. Marc’s penis is almost hard at the thought.
God be praised! Marc’s daydream is interrupted by a useful ally: Fab. This useful ally is wearing some sort of skin-tight, fluorescent lycra outfit. His head is shaved so that you can read the word ‘FLY’ on his bleached blond temple. Fab could be the result of Jean-Claude Van Damme mating with a Ninja Turtle. He speaks only in trance-speak. He is the sweetest moron on the planet, it’s just a pity for him he was born a century too early.
‘Yo chestnut tree.* Lookin’ pretty fresh there!’
‘Yeah, Fab. Actually, we’re at the same table.’
‘Phat! I gotta feeling this is gonna be massive!’
Tedium, it would seem, is not an option.
* Author’s note: Marronnier in English is ‘chestnut tree’. English is very trance.
9.00 P.M.
As I write, night is falling and people are going to dinner.
Henry Miller Quiet Days in Clichy
Groups form, forms group. Sooner or later we will sit down. The people standing around might be considered the elite of Western nightlife civilisation. Hundreds of Α-list celebs and a smattering of Bs who might well be dubbed the ‘Indispensable Ineffectuals’.
Money drips from everywhere. Anyone carrying less than 20k in hard cash on him looks suspect. And yet no one is showing off. All these despots secretly want to be artists. You have to be a photographer, an editor (even a deputy editor), a TV producer, ‘just finishing a novel’, or a serial killer. Nothing could be more suspect here than the absence of an opus. Marc Marronnier filched a copy of the guest list so as to have a better idea of the guests. Glancing through it, he is reassured: the same faces he met last night, the same ones he will meet tomorrow night.
Those placed upstairs are happy to have a table. Those downstairs are happy not to be at one of the tables upstairs.
A NIGHT IN SHIT
Inaugural Dinner – VIP List
Gustav von Aschenbach
Suzanne Bartsch
Patrick Bateman
The Baer Brothers
Henri Balldur
Gilberte Bérégovoy
Helmut Berger
Lova Berandin
Leigh Bowery
Manolo de Brantos
Carla Bruni-Tedeschi
The Castel Family
Pierre Celeyron
Chamaco
Louise Ciccone
Clio
The Albans of Clérmont-Tonnerre
Matthieu Cocteau
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Francesca Dellera
Jacques Derrida
Antoine Doinel
Boris Elstine
Fab
The Favier sisters
His Excellency Geoffrey Firmin, consul
Paolo Gardénal
Agathe Godard
Jean-Michel Gravier
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
The Hardissons
Faustine Hibiscus
Ali de Hirschenberger
Audrey Horne
Herbert W. Idle, IV
Jade Jagger
Joss + friends
Solange Justerini
Foc Kan
Irène de Kazatchok
Christian and Françoise Lacroix
Marc Lambron
Marjorie Lawrence
Serge Lentz + the tigress
Arielle Levy +2
Roxanne Lowit
Homero Machry
Benjamin Malaussène
Marc Marronnier
Elsa Maxwell
Baron von Meinerhof
Virginie Mouzat
Thierry Mugler
Roger Nelson
Constance Neuhoff
Masoko Ohya
Paquita Paquin
Roger Peyrefitte
Ondine Quinsac
Guillaume Rappeneau
The Rohan-Chabots and family
Gunther Sachs
Eric Schmitt
William K. Tarsis, III
Princess Goria von Thurn und Taxis
Lise Toubon
Baron and Baroness Truffaldine
Inès and Luigi d’Urso
José-Luis de Villalonga
Denis Westhoff
Ari and Emma Wiz
Oscar de Wurtemberg
Alain Zanini
Zarak
Loulou Zibeline
(Marc notes with some relief that no government ministers have been invited.)
He declaims the list aloud to emphasise the musicality of proper names.
‘Listen to this,’ he declares to no one in particular, ‘it is the music of the diaspora of existence.’
‘Hey, Marc,’ interrupts Loulou Zibeline, ‘did you know that Angelo Rinaldi mentions these public toilets?’
‘Oh?’
‘Of course. It’s in Confessions from the Hills, if memory serves …’
‘Wow, so the Shit served as a confessional? That’s a new one! Let’s drink to that!’ (Marc often says this when he doesn’t know what else to say.)
Loulou Zibeline, forty, journalist with Italian Vogue, specialises in Biarritz-school thalassotherapy and tantric orgasms (two not necessarily incompatible interests). Her long nose props up a pair of red-rimmed glasses. She has the disaffected air of a woman nobody tries to seduce any more.
‘Madame,’ Marc goes on, ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’re sitting next to a sex maniac.’
‘Don’t be sorry. It’s a dying art,’ she replies, staring at him intently. ‘But I find what you say a little worrying. All men are sex maniacs. It’s when they begin to talk about it that one has to be careful.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, I never said I was a good fuck! One can be obsessed with something in theory and still be poor in practice.’
Marc always boasts that he is the worst lay in Paris: it makes women want to make sure for themselves and usually makes them non-judgemental.
‘Tell me, since you seem to know a lot about it,’ he interjects, ‘could you give me a short list of the best pick-up lines? You know the idea – “Do you live with your parents?”, “Your eyes are like limpid pools”, that kind of thing. It might come in handy tonight, because I’m a bit out of practice.’
‘My dear, the pick-up line is immaterial, whether or not you pick a woman up depends entirely on your face, full stop. But there are a number of questions which all women fall for. For example: “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” Banal, but reassuring, or “You’re not a supermodel, are you?” No one in the world will rebuke you for a compliment. Although insults work rather well too: “Would you be so kind as to move your enormous arse, as it appears to be blocking the aisle?” might work (though with someone not too callipygous, you understand).’
‘That’s really interesting,’ Marc declares, reaching for a couple of Post-it notes. ‘What about something along the lines of “I don’t suppose you have change for 800 francs?”’
‘Too absurd.’
‘What about: “What do you say we pretend there’s nothing between us?”’
‘Too pathetic.’
‘What about this one – it’s my favourite: “Do you take it in the mouth, mademoiselle?”’
‘Risky. Nine times out often you’ll go home with a black eye.’
‘Yes, but the tenth almost makes it worth a try, don’t you think?’
‘If you look at it like that, then yes, I suppose. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
Marc has just lied, for his preferred line when addressing a strange woman is ‘Mademoiselle, may I offer you a glass of lemonade?’
Their table is quite well placed. Joss’s table is just next door. A flotilla of waiters wearing white dinner jackets arrive with the platters of pearl oysters. It is an amusing diversion: one shucks the oysters oneself and there are people shouting:
‘Look, there are two pearls in mine!’
‘Why didn’t I get a pearl?’
‘Look at this one, it’s HUGE, isn’t it?’
‘You should have it mounted as a pendant.’
‘Darling, you are the only pearl in my life!’
It’s like Twelfth Night: Marc can almost see the three wise men wandering through the club, the only thing that’s missing is the smell of frankincense.
Irène de Kazatchok, a British fashion designer of Ukrainian ancestry, is chatting with Fab. Born on 17 June 1962 in Cork (Ireland), her favourite writer is V.S. Naipaul and she loves the Pogues’ first album. At university, she had a lesbian affair with Deirdre Mulrooney, the captain of the women’s rugby XV. Her elder brother is called Mark and he takes Mandrax. She has had two abortions: one in 1980 and one last year.
Fab listens, nodding. They don’t understand each other, but they are getting along famously. In the future, all conversations will be like this. Each of us will speak a different gibberish. Then, perhaps, we will finally be on the same wavelength.
Irène: ‘The clothes must rester stable sur la body parce que if you put les trucs comme ça and it hangs comme ça, c’est affreux, you don’t see the fabric, it’s just too crasseux, you know? Oh my God: look at this pear, elle est gigantic!!’
Fab: ‘Irie, in trance there’s, like, no after-effects, I’m totally in the rhomb, for real. Do you, like, percute l’hypnose mental? I’m like a space-time vector, like a fucking mononuclear biologist. It’s like space and its fly! Can I call you Perle Harbor?’
Irène is wearing a corset of plaited barbed wire over a PVC lingerie combo. The latest trend. Marc is doing his best not to miss a word of this historic conversation, but Loulou interrupts him.
‘So, I hear you’ve taken a job in advertising?’ she interjects. ‘I have to say, I’m really disappointed in you.’
‘The thing is, I don’t have much in the way of imagination: I only started working as a paparazzo to be like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita and I got a job writing advertising copy to be like Kirk Douglas in The Arrangement.’
‘When in fact you look like an ugly William Hurt.’
‘Thanks for the compliment.’
‘But doesn’t it bother you that you’re contributing to the manipulation of the masses? To the blank generation. To all that shit?’
Multiple choice questions. Loulou has never forgotten May 1968 when she visited the Latin Quarter in her Mini Cooper and discovered multiple orgasms at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. She has regretted her revolutionary spasms ever since. As does Marc, in a way. He would like nothing better than to bring society crashing down. It’s just that he doesn’t know where to start.
‘Since you insist, madame, let me explain my theory: I think that it’s important to get involved in “all that shit” because no one is ever going to change things by staying at home. Instead of swearing at the passing trains, I’d rather hijack planes. Okay, end of theory. In any case, I’ve wound up in a complete disaster area. I feel like an investor ploughing all his money into steel.’
‘Still, I felt you let me down …’
‘Loulou, can I tell you a secret? You’ve put your finger on my greatest ambition: to let people down. I try and let people down as often as possible. It’s the only way to keep them interested. You remember your report cards at school when the teachers wrote “Could do better”?’
‘Oh, please!’
‘Well, that’s my motto. My dream is that all my life people will say “Could do better”. Making people happy gets old very quickly. Making them unhappy is pretty scummy. But systematically, meticulously, letting them down, now that’s success. Letting someone down is an act of love: it fosters loyalty. “How on earth is Marronnier going to let us down us this time?”’
Marc wipes a drop of spit which has just landed on the cheek of his interlocutor.
‘You know,’ he continues, ‘I’m the baby of the family. I like coming second in everything. It’s something I’m pretty good at.’
‘At least you have no illusions about your abilities …’
Marc realises he is wasting his time blethering with this duenna. On her cheek, he notices a wart which she’s painted black to make it look like a beauty spot. Has anyone ever seen a 3D mole? Well, yes, but only a real mole. Loulou Zibeline has unveiled a new concept: the ugly spot.
*
Irène lights her cigarette from the candelabra. Marc turns towards her. He finds her attractive, but the feeling is not mutual: she’s only interested in Fab.
‘But you must agree,’ she is telling him, ‘that la mode, il n’est pas the same en France and in England. Le British people, they love les habits qu’ils sont strange et original, very uncommon, mais les français, they are not interested in le couleur or la délire, don’t you think?’
‘Okay, okay,’ Fab retorts, ‘it’s hardly a techno diva but you’ve still got atomic bombs in a murder stylee and if you get the supersonic babe on the dance floor, I gotta tell you, you don’t fuck with it, you more grooving on, like alpha and theta waves, capito?’
The vast speakers are blasting ‘Sex Machine’. A song recorded before Marc Marronnier was born and one which will probably still have people dancing long after he is dead.
Marc samples the soirée, turning full circle. Transformed into a human periscope, he tries to sort the sexy dogs from the ugly babes. He spots Jérémy Coquette, dealer to the stars (best little black book in town). And Donald Suldiras, kissing his boyfriend in front of his wife. The Hardissons showed up with their three-month-old (uncircumcised) baby. They’re getting him to smoke a joint for a laugh. Baron von Meinerhof, former female toilet attendant at Sky Fantasy in Strasbourg, is laughing in German. The attentive barmen jiggle their cocktail shakers in slow motion. People come and go, they can’t stand still. It’s difficult to sit when you’re eagerly waiting for something to happen. Everyone is so beautiful and so unhappy.
Solange Justerini, ex-smack addict turned soap star, stretches out her long arms like sneering seaweed. All the holes have been filled in. Her sylph-like waist seems almost too narrow. How many ribs has she had sawn off since Marc fucked her last?
The lights dim, but not the commotion. Joss Dumoulin is spinning a Yma Sumac – Kraftwerk remix over a soft background of crickets in Provence. Ondine Quinsac, the famous photographer, walks by, naked under a tulle dress, her face painted green. Someone has painted stripes on her back with nail-polish. Unless maybe they’re real.
Marc is surrounded by superwomen. Fashion celebrates models who have been nip/tucked. The most famous supermodels are posing at Christian Lacroix’s table. Marc admires their seasonally-adjusted fake breasts. He’s already felt such things: silicone breasts are hard with huge nipples. A million times better than the real thing.
Marc is their voyeur. He stares at these life-size models straight out of a fan-boy comic, a pornographic paint box. These creatures are the modern-day Brides of Frankenstein, synthetic sex symbols in patent leather thigh-boots, studded bracelets, dog-collars. Somewhere in California some lunatic with a workshop is mass-producing them. Marc can imagine the factory. Roofs in the shape of breasts, a vaginal doorway with a new girl stepping out every minute! He wipes his forehead with a hanky.
‘Hey Marco, you done eyeballing the vamps?’
Fab must have noticed his eyes on stalks. Marc downs his oyster in one (pearl included).
‘Just remember, Fab,’ he shouts, ‘you used to think the world was yours for the taking. You used to say: “All you have to do is bend down and pick it up.” Remember? Do you remember when you still believed that shit? Look me in the eye, Fab, do you remember back when girls placed bets on us?’
‘Chill, man. Where there’s collagen, there’s no fun.’
‘Bollocks. Double bollocks. Look at them, they’re the twelfth wonder of the world! Fuck nature! These cybersluts should be right up your street.’
‘They’re just a bunch of Klaus Barbie dolls!’ declares Fab, which makes Irène smile.
‘I think someone should work on plastic surgery for men,’ Loulou butts in. ‘There’s no reason why they shouldn’t. They could start with a scrotal lift for men who wear boxer shorts. Now that would be a good idea, don’t you think?’
‘No way, José,’ says Fab, ‘I go commando, no problemo!’
‘She’s right,’ says Marc. ‘Everyone needs something done. Look at Baroness Truffaldine over there! There’s plenty there to liposuck. And what about you, Irène, you wouldn’t say no to a 46-inch bust, would you?’
‘What did he say?’ asks Irène.
Marc is having it large. He’d give anything to be a hot girl for a couple of hours. It must be exhilarating to have such power … Right now, he doesn’t know where to look, there are so many!
Question: Is the world a wonderful place, or is it that Marc can’t hold his liquor?
For his part, Joss Dumoulin is still more or less on top of the situation. Though the assembled company is anything but disciplined. But for the moment, everyone seems to be laying the groundwork, warming up. In a book of lesser stylistic ambition, the author would say this is the ‘calm before the storm’.
Impotent millionaires knock back carafes of wine as they wait for the outbreak of hostilities. Underlings snub their masters. No one is eating the food.
Marc decides to subject the girls at his table to his famous ‘Triple Why’ experiment. Usually no one survives it. The ‘Triple Why Theorem’ is simple: when you pose the question ‘Why?’ for the third time, a person’s thoughts invariably turn to death.
‘I feel like some more wine,’ says Loulou Zibeline.
‘Why?’ asks Marc.
‘To get hammered.’
‘Why?’
‘Because … I feel like having a good time tonight and if I have to sit here listening to your jokes, there’s not much chance of that.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do I want to have a good time? Because you’re a long time dead, that’s why!’
The first candidate for the Triple Why experiment passes with the jury’s congratulations. But in order to scientifically establish a theorem, it must be repeatable and verifiable. And so Marc turns to Irène Kazatchok.
‘I work too hard,’ she says.
‘Why?’ Marc asks, all smiles.
‘Well … to make money.’
‘Why?’
‘Get out of here! Because we all have to eat, that’s why.’
‘Why?’
‘Gimme a break. Because otherwise you die, my boy.’
It goes without saying that Marc Marronnier is jubilant. His experiment is utterly pointless, but he enjoys rigorously testing the futile theories he dreams up to kill time. The only drawback is that now he’s riled Irène, leaving the field open for Fab. Never mind: the advance of science is surely worth a few setbacks.
*
‘Hey, Marc, the tall man over there with the walking-stick, that’s not Boris Yeltsin, is it?’ asks Loulou.
‘Looks like him. We’re being invaded by Eastern Europeans, what can you do …’
‘Shhh. Here he comes.’
Boris Yeltsin has clearly been working on his nouveau capitalist look. He is particularly overdressed (in rented tails) and he thrusts out his hand two seconds too early, like Yasser Arafat with Yitzhak Rabin. He has not yet worked out that at society events, unlike standoffs in Hollywood westerns, it’s best to draw last. His spongy hand hovers in the void. Overcome with compassion, Marc takes the hand and kisses it.
‘We welcome great Russia to our Luna Park,’ he cries.
‘You’ll see, soon we shall be as rrrrrich as you, we shall rrrrise above the rrrrabble by selling our nuclearrr weapons to your enemies [Boris rolls his ‘r’s with application]. One day, we shall wearrrr Mickey Mouse costumes of finest orrrrgandie.’
‘Good, good! Party on!’
‘Do you know,’ Loulou murmurs in a confiding tone, ‘I have a friend who is so racist and so anti-communist that she has always refused to drink Black Russians.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Boris laughs. ‘Now, perrrhaps she will change herrr mind!’
‘I adore your cane,’ says Irène. ‘It’s marvellous, really.’
‘Fo’ shizzle, man,’ chimes in Fab. ‘The stick is shabby.’
‘Hey, wow,’ yells Marc, ‘it’s not just my table, it’s a global village!’
‘Look, I have amassed thirrrteen pearrrls,’ brags Boris, brandishing a small purse full of small nacreous spheres.
‘Why?’ asks Marc, with something in mind.
‘As a souvenirrrr of this soirrrrée!’
‘Why?’
‘So that I can tell the storrry to my grrrandchildren!’
‘Why?’
‘So they will have something to rrrremember me by when I pass away …’ intones the Russian President gravely.
Marc’s inner glee can be read in the gleam in his eyes. Pythagoras, Euclid, Fermat – watch out! The Nobel Prize for Mathematics can’t be far off.
The service isn’t slack. Already they’re bringing on the main course: rack of lamb with Smarties. Marc gets up to go for a piss. Just before he leaves the table, he leans over to Loulou and whispers in her ear:
‘I swear, when you really need to take a piss, well, it’s almost as good as shooting your load. So there!’
Marc knew the party would be a success when he saw the mob at the ladies’ toilets, touching up their make-up or snorting coke (which amounts to the same thing since cocaine is simply brain cosmetics). On a Post-it, he writes: ‘The twenty-first century will take place in the ladies’ toilets or not at all.’
10.00 P.M.
I sense that I shall only feel truly sad after having dined.
Paul Morand Tendres Stocks
On his way back to his table, Marc runs into Clio, Joss Dumoulin’s girlfriend, who is having trouble negotiating the stairs. Her legs are ten yards long with a pair of wedge-heel flip-flops at one end. Her almost perfect body is violently shoehorned into a latex dress.
‘Mademoiselle, may I offer you a glass of lemonade?’ Marc asks, offering his elbow so that she can support her weight.
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, now, little girl,’ Marc changes tack, ‘you’re very late, you deserve to be punished!’
‘Oh, yes please!’ the girl replies, with a flutter of her gargantuan fake eyelashes. ‘I’m a naughty girl!’
She clutches his arm as she talks.
‘As punishment, you shall sit at my table.’
‘But … I have to see Joss …’
‘The sentence is irreversible!’ bawls Marc.
And thus he takes Clio by her pretty bare wrist and leads her to his table.
He has barely seated himself before his plate of dead sheep when he must endure a heated interrogation from his neighbours.
‘So,’ asks Loulou Zibeline, mockingly, ‘are you working on your second novel?’
‘Yes,’ Marc answers, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. “French literature” is about as significant nowadays as Noh theatre. Why bother writing when a novel has a shorter shelf-life than a TV ad for pasta? Besides, look around you – there are as many photographers as there are stars. Well, in France, literature is the same: there are as many writers as there are readers.’
‘So, why bother?’
‘Yeah. Why bother … As a writer, I’m stillborn, spoiled by happiness. My only readers live in a couple of blocks around Mabillon metro station. I don’t give a fuck: all I ask is that one day, after my death, in some foreign land, I be rediscovered. I think it would be cool to bring pleasure in one’s absence, posthumously. And maybe one day, in a hundred years, a woman like you will be interested in me. “A minor, neglected fin-de-siècle author.” Patrick Mauriès will have written my biography In 2032. I will be reprinted. My public will be elderly aesthetes who are resolutely paedophile. Then, only then, will this mad circus not have been in vain …’
‘Nnnyes …’ Loulou is dubious. ‘That’s just vanity … I’m sure there must be more to it than that. The quest for beauty, for instance. There must be some things you find beautiful, no?’
Marc gives the matter some thought.
‘It’s true,’ he says after a pause, ‘the two most beautiful things in the world are the violins in Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” and a woman in a bikini wearing a blindfold.’
Clio is sitting in Marc’s lap. She may well be thin, but she is quite heavy.
‘Aren’t you bored of dating a star?’ Marc asks her. ‘Wouldn’t you rather sleep with your chair?’
‘What?’
She stares at him, her face blank.
‘Well, since you’re sitting on me, if you were to go out with your chair, that would be me … [He makes a sweeping gesture.] Just a joke … Forget it.’
‘This guy is weird,’ says Irène to Clio.
Marc’s sense of humour does not meet with universal approval. If this keeps up, he will begin to suffer self-doubt, which is inadvisable when attempting to seduce. Suddenly, he has an idea. He slips his hand into the pocket of his jacket and finds the tab of Euphoria Joss gave him on page 27. He discreetly opens it and tips the powder into Clio’s glass of Oxygen vodka just as she grabs the glass and drains it, all the while chattering to Irène. It’s like a movie. Marc rubs his hands. Now all he need do is wait for the drug to take effect. Long live drugged dating! No need to impress, to spend a fortune, to have candlelit dinners: one capsule and so to bed.
The air is redolent with costly perfumes, fermented grain drinks and societal sweat. HRH the Princess Giuseppe de Montanero has managed to gatecrash the party thanks to some transves-tite friends who spent some time distracting the doorman. Everywhere are unattainable women wearing inestimable jewellery. Some of whom are men, for all that. (In the toilets, Marc even saw a bulge beneath the dress of an elegantly dressed lady powdering her nose – inside and out.)
Joss Dumoulin waves to his girlfriend. He could get up, come over, kiss her, pay her a compliment, offer her a drink. But Joss doesn’t get up, doesn’t come over, doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t pay her a compliment, and Clio finishes her drink alone. Welcome to the twentieth century.
*
Meanwhile, the Hardissons are force-feeding their child foie gras; forlorn PR people stare at the TV screens (can there be anything more depressing than a solitary Director of Communications?); Ali de Hirschenberger, distinguished producer of porn films, affectionately slaps Nelly, his wife, a sybarite who is wearing a leash; millionaire playboy Robert de Dax is standing on a chair acting the fool (long-time lover of a number of depressive actresses, he will die a month from now in a bumper-car accident).
Tonight raucously brings together CEOs in punk outfits and tramps in dinner jackets. Love stories spring up between holidaying nomads and the sedentary jet set. The fist-fights are filled with tenderness. The same people are introduced to the same people ad infinitum but nobody complains. We are in the presence of a Europarty.
‘What’s for dessert?’ asks Clio. ‘I hope it’s not Space Cake with laxatives again. That I don’t need.’
Her voice has changed. Usually, a drug diluted in a glass takes an hour to reach the brain. Unless the drug is very strong.
‘People are so superficial,’ she whines, ‘I have so many things to tell you. I’m still thirsty. Is it late or is it me? Why didn’t Joss come over and say hi?’
Clio is fast becoming very talkative and very depressed. Her eyes well up with tears. This was not exactly the desired effect.
‘YOU MEN,’ she shrieks, ‘you’re all so égoïste! Boorish, ugly bastards!’
‘She’s got a point,’ says Loulou Zibeline, of whom – it would appear – nobody sought an opinion.
And Clio starts to sob on Marc’s shoulder and the coward takes advantage of the situation to caress her neck, run his fingers through her soft hair and murmur sweet nothings in her ear.
‘Easy now, It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m one of the good guys …’
Result! She kisses him on the lips. The sound system is playing ‘Amor, Amor’ and Marc hums along with Clio as if he were rocking a baby. A tiny baby dribbling mascara onto his jacket. A little baby who is getting heavier by the minute and sniffling back mucus. A little baby whose breath smells like an ashtray.
‘Amor, amor,’ hums the gigantic little baby. ‘Marc, could you do me a favour and go and get Joss … please …’
Marc’s result was short-lived. But he takes it philosophically. Clio smiles at him, smearing mascara over her cheeks. Chemical seduction has its limitations, and Marc is not entirely unhappy to palm the baby off on someone else.
Joss Dumoulin darts between the tables, the impulsive catalyst of this eclectic soirée. Marc waves him over. When he gets there, Clio throws her arms around him, blubbering.
‘MY LOOVE!’ she cries.
‘Um …’ says Marc, ‘I think your girlfriend is a bit tired.’
‘Wait a minute, what the hell’s going on here?’ says Joss. ‘Don’t tell me … you didn’t slip her that tab of Euphoria, did you?’
‘Me? Of course not, why do you say that?’
‘You stupid bitch! You promised me you were off the stuff!’ yells the DJ. ‘Last time, she nearly didn’t come back!’
Joss puts his girlfriend over his shoulder and takes her somewhere to throw up. Marc tries to look innocent but he’s sweating like a pig. He’s sorry now he didn’t have time to conduct the Triple Why test on her. At his table, everyone acts as if nothing has happened. Loulou breaks the shamefaced silence.
‘If truth be told, Marc, I thought your first book was very well written.’
‘Oh, fuck!’ whimpers Marc. When somebody tells you that your book is well written what they mean is that it’s boring. If they say it’s funny, that means it’s not well written. And if they say it’s ‘really great’, that means they haven’t read it.
‘Well, what do you want me to say?’
‘Tell me I’m the man.’
Marc loves ‘fishing for compliments’, as they say in English. At least when he masterminds the flattery, he knows that nothing is expected in return.
‘Go on,’ he insists, ‘repeat after me: “Marc, you da man!”’
‘Marc, you da man.’
‘Loulou, I think I love you. What was it you recommended as a chat-up line again? Oh, yeah, “Would you be so kind as to move your enormous arse as it appears to be blocking the aisle?”’
‘Clever, clever …’
While this is going on, Fab is discussing tonight’s playlist with Irène.
‘Comprehension, truth, drumandbassism. His mix is pretty wack, but Joss got the sense of realitude.’
At precisely that moment, the music suspends its flight and an orchestra of twenty bonzes descends from heaven on a suspended footbridge. Ondine Quinsac is playing percussion to tumultuous applause. ‘Good evening, we are Fuck Yo Mama. We trust your shit evening will be utterly ruined by our presence and that you all snuff it as soon as possible.’ Then a landslide of electric decibels rains down on the diners. In the background, a trio of choristers sway their sulky hips.
Loulou Zibeline has to shout to be heard over the music. Marc thinks she talks too much. The more she talks, the less he wants to listen. It’s an amusing paradox: chatterboxes wind up as social misfits. Marc thinks: ‘The nicest things I’ve said in my life have been when I kept my mouth shut.’
‘D’YOU KNOW THIS BAND?’ she asks him.
‘What?’
‘I ASKED IF YOU KNOW THIS BAND!’
‘Stop yelling in my ear, you overripe slut!’
‘WHAT? WHADDYOU SAY?’
‘I said a bunch of people have slaved their balls off to give us this rack of lamb. First they had to rear the beast, then take it to an abattoir, kill it with a bolt-gun to the brain. Then someone had to cut it up, a butcher had to come to the wholesaler and choose the meat. Lastly, the caterer picked it out after haggling over the price. How many people had to work so I could nibble on the cutlet I’ve got in my hand? Fifty? A hundred? Who are all these people? What are their names? Can someone give me their names? Tell me where they live? Do they holiday in Les Alpilles or on the Côte d’Argent? I want to send each and every one of them a thank-you note.’*
‘WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR A THING!’ screams Loulou.
Marc hasn’t got very far. The woman on his left despises him and the one on his right is a Klingon. To top it all, he nearly killed the ringmaster’s fiancée. It would probably be best for him to head home while there’s still time. By the way, Clio is feeling better: she is sleeping soundly on a banquette near the DJ booth. The ruckus doesn’t seem to be bothering her unduly.
The food fight breaks out immediately. The vacherin flows, the coulis flies, the vol-au-vents glide. Cream is spilled on the canapés, canapés are spilled on the sofas. Is that smell of vomit parmesan, or vice versa? Does the chicken smell of egg or the egg smell of chicken?
‘I’m not standing for this shit!’ mumbles Marc as he sits down.
A few virgin sodomites modestly begin the first stripteases. Roger Peyrefitte has the Hardissons’ baby sniffing glue in front of Gonzague Saint Bris who is flagellating himself with a studded belt which provokes a coughing fit. Fuck Yo Mama are massacring ‘All You Need Is Love’, smashing plates on the microphones. Sauce-boats and dry biscuits mingle in the firmament. Marc even thinks he spots a Haribo crocodile flashing its teeth.
‘THIS CHEESE IS PRETTY GOOD!’ screams Loulou into his auricular pavilion.
‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘now all I need is a rope with a knot like the cheese: running.’
‘WHAT?? DID YOU SAY SOMETHING??’
Let us not delude ourselves: Marc Marronnier will soon be inebriated. Already the night is upending its hierarchies. Important things seem suddenly trivial and the most insignificant details seem critical. TV programmes, for instance. Suddenly he clings to them. TV programmes, at least, he can depend on. He does not know the meaning of life, he doesn’t know what love is or death is or whether or not God exists, but he can be certain that Wednesday night is ‘Sacrée Soirée’ on TF1. TV programmes never betray you.* This is why Marc despises each ‘new season’, when TV channels systematically rearrange their schedules. Terrifying days of metaphysical doubt!
‘FAB!’
Lise Toubon pounces on Fab as Dracula might on a van from the National (uncontaminated) Blood Transfusion Service.
‘How’s things?’ she asks him.
‘Hypnogogic, in an ionisation phase.’
Fab does not despise the powerful. He recently accepted a commission to spray-paint his tag on the Palais-Royal. But he is embarrassed that people might find out. So even in a techno-stable universe, he would rather that Madame Tubon didn’t hang around indefinitely. This is probably why he uses a hackneyed trick to make her feel uncomfortable: he kisses her only on one cheek, letting her offer the other to the void. The ruse works perfectly and Lise soon drifts away from the table with a nervous grin.
‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ says Marc.
‘Everybody knows Lise!’ declares Irène, who certainly does not know her. ‘Don’t you think she looks scary without make-up?’
Irène is now seriously getting on his nerves. He loathes this tendency among arrivistes to constantly name-drop, pretending to be on first-name terms with every celebrity. ‘Yesterday, Pierre and I were round at Yves’ house and – can you believe this? – his fax wasn’t working.’ ‘The other day, I met Caroline at Inès’ place and we were gossiping about Arielle …’ Implication: there’s no need to mention surnames since we are all intimate friends of the personalities in question. It’s the acme of social-climbing white trash. This gives Marc an idea. Taking advantage of a lull in the performance, he launches into a conversation.
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