Skinned Alive (12 page)

He had traveled so much that, paradoxically, the few authentic places left in the world looked especially fake to him, as though where Nantucket had once been, a real whaling village built by hardworking Quakers, now there was only a theme park that contained or embalmed it, as a ceramic crown reproduces in a dead material the still-living but whittled-down tooth it sheathes. In the same way the Ile Saint-Louis was no longer a place where people lived, shopped for food and worked but rather an ensemble of stately, empty investment flats that stood dark and untenanted eleven months out of twelve, the seventeenth-century façades concealing luxury twentieth-century interiors rarely visited by their owners, who were groups of American or Saudi—well, not even people but corporations. Key West—famous for its decrepitude, Cuban cigar makers, shrimpers and destitute artists—was now glistening with hasty but radical restorations perpetrated by retired tax accountants growing their gray hair long.

No, all that was real in the world was its despised, interchangeable platitudes, the suburban shopping malls, the millions of vernacular miles of California strip architecture or, on a lower level still, the sprawling concrete apartment buildings outside Cairo or Istanbul fissuring and rusting even before completed, open sewers between them seeping through the red mud.

From an airplane that’s all you could see no matter where you flew over the globe and anything that could be described as charming or picturesque—the snow-topped red barn in Vermont, the historic heart of Basel—was either a guest house or a neighborhood of psychiatrists’ offices, a self-conscious reference to itself, words between quotation marks, a boutique or about to become one. From an airplane Greenwich Village wasn’t visible, just miles and miles of Lefrak City. From a plane you couldn’t see Bourges, which in any event was composed of polyurethane half-timbering out of a kit tacked onto fresh stucco and new car-free cobblestones reflecting like fish scales the lights bouncing off the cathedral
son et lumière;
no, all that was visible from a plane was industrialized wheat farms and drizzle-flecked 1960s public housing, regular as tombstones in a military cemetery.

Worse, he had the same bleak view of himself, the feeling that the only parts that were genuine were those that had never been remarked on precisely because they were unremarkable. For a long time he’d told himself he was tough and unsentimental, but for the last two years he’d admitted he was simply numb and empty of sentiments, a hive that looked normal and functioning until closer inspection revealed it had long ago been burned out and abandoned. Two years ago his nephew had said to him, “There was a study in which all these women complained their husbands were incapable of showing their feelings, and then after lots of therapy it turned out the men just didn’t have any feelings.”

Charles said to his nephew, “I’m like that. I don’t feel anything.” He wanted to see if his nephew would protest or if some inner bell would start clanging to warn him he was plunging into deep nonsense. But nothing happened. His nephew flickered into a half smile. The words just hung there in the air, like the devastating truth a stand-up comic tells about himself, funny exactly to the degree that no one before had ever admitted so simply and with such chipper panache to something so sordid.

That’s why Charles could tolerate only the malls and council flats of his soul, the parts that functioned routinely, that were no better than or even different from comparable parts in everyone else. He doggedly admired the part that could watch four hours of CNN at a stretch or eat heavily sugared cornflakes at midnight as he stood half-nude and half-awake by the cryptic light of the fridge or talk about the weather to the grocer. Even those actions were too “typical,” too “revealing.” The person who filled out a registration form when checking into a hotel, who poked a hemorrhoid back into his arse after a shit, who ironed a shirt, that person was perhaps possible.

Perhaps that was also why he wobbled on the balance between equal weights of vanity and irritation at the idea of someone writing his biography. Charles “was the author of” (i.e., had somehow stumbled, both panicked and exhausted, to the end of) biographies of three twentieth-century French writers (Cocteau, Jouhandeau and Stuart Merrill) and he knew that no matter how diligent a biographer might be in sorting out the chronology and uncovering unpublished manuscripts and letters, no matter how skeptical in discounting the special claims the living might have on their dead subject, no matter how subtle he might be in tracing out the indirect, even reciprocal, links between the life and the work, what readers expected and publishers demanded was, quite simply, the
key
, or at least a
scoop.
The key was almost always sexual and
inserted into the nursery door; Virginia Woolf’s incestuous brush with her older half brother had been a capital moment in the locksmith’s art. Ideally the scoop, also sexual, would be the discovery of a previously hidden document that would confirm that Cocteau’s father had indeed committed suicide because he was a homosexual or that Jouhandeau’s wife had denounced her ex-lovers as Jews to the Gestapo or that Stuart Merrill had contracted syphilis during his brief return to the United States to attend a university (his American parents, long settled in Paris, had been horrified to discover that their son, who at seventeen was one of the original Symbolist poets, could scarcely speak English, but their plans to educate this exquisite dandy in the rough and tumble of Columbia University resulted only in his publishing a single slim volume in English,
Pastels in Prose
, before he sailed back to France, despite the pleas of America’s most eminent novelist, William Dean Howells, to stay in the New World, where his talent was much more needed than in a France already surfeited with genius).

But what would this Mr. Tremble dig up on him, Charles? What keys would he insert, one after another, into the frozen lock? Perhaps the most obvious theme to develop would be how he, Charles, who’d written about two homosexuals and one aesthete, was, in spite of his small stature, soft voice and diplomatic ways, an insatiable and improbably successful womanizer. (But he hoped Mr. Tremble wouldn’t dwell on that too much; after all, his wife, Catherine, even after thirty years of marriage, was still jealous and, above all,
pudique
about what strangers might say and think).

Or Mr. Tremble might build up the paradox that Charles, a Jew from Lebanon born to an Egyptian father and Turkish mother, had moved to France after the fall of Beirut and devoted himself entirely to—well, to what? Here the lines of the design became tangled, since Cocteau (the plural of “cocktail”)
had played host to modernism, whereas Jouhandeau, that dreadful little clown who couldn’t stop writing and had penned almost a hundred books, had ignored the present entirely and harnessed the pure language of Racine to his own petit bourgeois mixture of Catholicism and sexual slumming
(Don Juan’s Breviary
, the subtitle of one of his books, said it all). If Cocteau and Jouhandeau were major writers, Merrill was just a curiosity, although the late poems he wrote in Versailles about the Great War achieved a certain marmoreal (the English would say “Georgian”) grandeur. No, one could always propose that Charles the eternal outsider had a fine psychological take on Cocteau, who was at once the very heart of Paris
frivole
for five decades and almost carelessly despised by all the men who mattered most to him (Gide, Picasso, Stravinsky). Or Mr. Tremble could play up, rather crudely, Charles’s heterosexual Don Juanism as the basis of his grasp of Jouhandeau’s “abjection” amongst butcher boys (this prospect made Charles bristle). Or Merrill the Marginal—but then, who didn’t consider himself to be marginal? In France, every
vieux con
conservative government minister, born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and graduated from Sciences Po, dressed in Sulka suits and Weston shoes, would smile, show his palms and declare during a long television interview that he was something of a “dreamer” and “misfit,” despite his rich wife and his own aristocratic parents and his teenage daughter off riding to hounds in Ireland. Oh, no, everyone was “marginal,” just as everyone was “passionate” about his work. It was all part of the aristocratization of everyday French life; no one could dare admit he worked to get rich or out of habit or just to eat. No, work had to be a “passion.” …

He’d have to pretend, no doubt, to Mr. Tremble that passion had driven him to write his autobiography and his three biographies, though in fact he’d become a writer to escape the drudgery of door-to-door canvassing for an electronics firm, the
job he’d landed when he was washed up on the coast of Brittany after he’d escaped from Beirut. He’d never been a good worker or student. In fact he’d never been a good adult. He’d been happiest as a boy when he’d lived amongst his mother and sisters and girl cousins, something like the pasha’s son in the harem, the only other intact male. He despised work and if he were a millionaire he’d never write another line.

What he did like—what he was passionate about, if to be passionate meant you couldn’t stop doing it—was research. He wanted to know everything, not because he was vain of his knowledge. No, he’d never been after honors or even passing admiration and had nearly flunked out of school, though he did like it when a woman would smile at him because he’d murmured the name or word or title all the big, important men had been vainly seeking. No, his research was linked to his sexuality, though to say so sounded like biographical key-rattling. He wanted to see the insides of dossiers, bedrooms, bodies, he wanted access to archives and intimate secrets, and the first “No,” far from discouraging him, only made his eventual conquest more piquant. Difficult people, even impossible people, fascinated him.

His very success in all domains made the going harder now, since in the past, before he was known to be a Don Juan, each woman had thought she must be the first to take pity on him, so uncomely was he with his gap teeth, frail body, balding head, just as each doddering French book collector had thought there could be no harm in showing an
inédit
to such a diplomatic little Lebanese Jew who skirted so cleverly all Parisian literary feuds and belonged to no
chapelle.

Now things were closing in on him, at least in Paris, precisely because of his all-too-conspicuous literary and amorous successes. To be sure, now that he was infamous certain women wanted to know what all the fuss was about, just as certain collectors were charmed to be seduced by the man
who’d already deflowered libraries long thought to be beyond approach.
The Seducer in Letters and Love
—would that be the subtitle of Mr. Tremble’s clumsy little effort?

He’d been delighted to accept this yearlong appointment in New England, because he thought it would give him a breather. To tell the truth, he wasn’t the least bit like Don Juan, since he, Charles, never dropped anyone, loved everyone and remained true to them all after his fashion.
Tant pis
, since that meant he had to listen to a lot of weeping and had to run frantically from one rendezvous to another all day every day. Now his women would have a year to cool off.

Although Catherine, as tiny as he, was stunning and always elegant, in his extracurricular romances he specialized in women who were a bit … “homely,” to use the cozy, domestic American word, as well as those who were just a bit “over the hill” (his English was improving; he kept long lists of expressions that amused him or “caught his fancy” and he eschewed any more diligent approach to the language). Cocteau and Jouhandeau worshiped their lovers (Cocteau thought of them as gods, Jouhandeau as God) and needed them to be beautiful (for Cocteau they were gleaming, well-carved chessmen the Poet advanced in his brilliant but losing game with Death; for Jouhandeau they were altars before which he knelt, at once defiled and exalted by these boys). Charles didn’t worship his women. He made them laugh. He was tender with them. He liked knowing where a woman was vulnerable. In Beirut he’d once even made love to a woman with a wooden leg and he’d finally convinced her to let him unharness her.

One of his women now was Jade, a Chinese stockbroker in her fifties who’d not been touched once in the last ten years by her handsome, scholarly husband, head of a now-discredited cultural organization founded by the Chinese Nationalists that had attempted to “regild its coat of arms”
(redorer son blason)
by offering courses in computer science to unemployed Chinese
hooligans in the fifteenth arrondissement. Jade had clearly given up on love and had been astonished when Charles, whom she’d met at a dinner given by the grandson of Stuart Merrill’s best childhood friend, had invited her to lunch. She’d assured him she wasn’t that kind of broker, she only handled corporate portfolios, but he’d persisted. By the end of the lunch she’d already told him she’d long ago been a tennis champion as a teenager in Singapore—and she’d given him her private number at the office. At the Bibliothèque Doucet he’d met other women, young and old, intelligent and not. As he’d grown more successful with each biography, he’d become more handsome—better dressed, better coiffed, more confident.

But he resented the way Catherine had slowly domesticated him. They’d lived together a long time before they married. That had been the exhilarating time when they’d met in Beirut where she, a proper Breton girl, had come in search of adventure. His father was still rich then with his Renault dealership and Charles had worked freelance in advertising only very occasionally. He’d sometimes gone to his family’s seaside house for weeks on end with Catherine, each of them outfitted with a suitcase full of books. Hers were English comic novels in French translation (Austen, Waugh, Lodge) and his were detective stories in any language at all. But then after his father had lost his money (the bit that he hadn’t gambled away at the Beirut casino just days before they’d been forced to evacuate the city) Charles had had to work full-time in Brittany, where they’d taken refuge with Catherine’s parents. His idle, bohemian existence had come to an end. In the Breton drizzle he’d had to go from apartment building to building in Rennes ringing doorbells and subjecting those who responded to questionnaires that took an hour to fill out. Fortunately, the French were complacent, pedantic and bored—a combination that made them wonderfully susceptible to such imbecile bureaucratic exercises. Whereas they would have bridled if they’d
been asked personal questions, their vanity tweaked to a probing of their least significant habits. Far from brushing him aside or rushing through the form, his respondents made a substantial meal out of the absurdly detailed interviews. One of his first respondents had been Milan Kundera, newly arrived from Czechoslovakia to teach literature at Rennes. He assumed the questionnaire must have been issued by a government agency and accordingly answered each question with dogged application. Later Charles liked to joke that he had in his possession a long interview of Kundera that had never been published and that showed him in an unusual light.