The Ingredients of Love (29 page)

I shrugged my shoulders and said nothing. What could I have said anyway? If I were to come clean with Monsignac, that would be my next problem.

“You can talk to me about anything, André, I hope you know that.”

I smiled tensely. “That's very nice of you, Monsieur Monsignac, but I'm afraid that you are precisely the one person I can't talk to about it.”

He leaned back in astonishment, crossed one leg over the other, and gripped his ankle in its dark blue sock with both hands.

“Now you've made me curious. Why can't you talk to me about it? What nonsense!”

I looked out of the window, where the spire of the Church of Saint-Germain thrust into a rose-colored sky.

“Because then I'd probably be out of a job,” I said gloomily.

Monsignac burst out laughing. “But my dear André, what have you done that's so bad? Have you been stealing the silverware? Groped one of the female staff? Embezzled money?” he rocked back and forth in his chair.

And then I thought of what Mademoiselle Mirabeau had said and decided to make a clean breast of it.

“It's about Robert Miller. I haven't been totally honest with you about the matter, Monsieur Monsignac.”

He leaned forward with interest. “Really?” he asked. “What about Miller? Are there problems with that Englishman? Out with it!”

I swallowed. It wasn't easy to tell the truth.

“The reading was magnificent.
Mon Dieu,
I laughed till I cried,” Monsignac continued. “What's up with the fellow? He said he was going to give us his new novel very soon.”

I groaned softly and put my hands in front of my face.

“What's wrong?” asked Monsignac with alarm. “Now, André, don't get melodramatic, just tell me what's happened. Surely Miller will go on writing for us, or were there problems between you two? Have you by any chance fallen out?”

I shook my head almost imperceptibly.

“Has someone poached him?”

I took a deep breath and looked Monsignac in the eye.

“Promise me that you won't fly off the handle and that you won't shout?”

“Yes, yes … now
tell
me!”

“There will be no next novel by Robert Miller,” I said, and paused briefly, “for the simple reason that in reality there is no Robert Miller.”

Monsignac looked at me, astounded. “Now you're really losing the plot, André. What's up, have you got a fever? Have you lost your memory? Robert Miller was in Paris, don't you remember?”

I nodded. “That's just the point. The man at the reading was not Robert Miller. He was a dentist who pretended to be Miller to do us a favor.”

“Us?”

“Well, yes, Adam Goldberg and me. The dentist is his brother. His name is Sam Goldberg and he doesn't live alone in a cottage with his dog, but with his wife and children in Devonshire. He has as much to do with books as I do with gold inlays. The whole thing was a setup, do you see? So that the whole story wouldn't come out.”

“But…” Monsignac's blue eyes fluttered in alarm. “Who did write the book then?”

“I did,” I said.

And then Jean-Paul Monsignac did start shouting anyway.

The bad thing about Monsieur Monsignac is that he becomes a force of nature when he gets worked up. “That's monstrous! You've deceived me, André. I trusted you and would have put my hand in the fire to guarantee your honesty. You've hoodwinked me—that will have consequences. You're fired!” he yelled, and jumped from his chair angrily.

The good thing about Monsieur Monsignac is that he calms down as quickly as he gets angry and that he has a great sense of humor.

“Unbelievable,” he said after ten minutes in which I imagined myself as an unemployed editor with the whole industry pointing the finger at me. “Unbelievable, what a coup you two brought off there. Leading all the press around by the nose. Takes a lot of nerve to get away with something like that.” He shook his head and suddenly began to laugh. “I must admit that I was a bit surprised when Miller said at the reading that the hero of his new novel was a
dentist
. Why didn't you tell me from the very beginning that you were behind it, André? My goodness, I had no idea that you could write so well. You really
do
write well,” he repeated, and ran his hands through his graying hair.

“It was simply a sort of spontaneous idea. You wanted a Stephen Clarke, do you remember? And at that time there wasn't an Englishman writing amusingly about Paris. And we weren't intending to fleece you or do the company any harm. You know that the advance for that novel was an extremely modest one—and we made that back long ago.”

Monsignac nodded.

“None of us could have suspected that the book would take off so well that anyone would be interested in the author,” I continued.

“Bon,”
said Monsignac, who had been walking up and down in my office the whole time, and sat down. “That's sorted that out. And now we will talk as man to man.” He folded his arms over his chest and looked sternly at me. “I withdraw your dismissal, André. And your punishment is to come with us to the Brasserie Lipp this evening, understood?”

I nodded with relief.

“And now I want you to explain to me what this whole intrigue has to do with your broken heart. Because Mademoiselle Mirabeau is really worried. And for my part I have the feeling that we're getting toward the heart of the matter.”

He leaned back comfortably in his chair, lit a cigarillo, and waited.

The story turned out to be a long one. Outside, the first streetlights were coming on when I finally finished speaking. “I've no idea what to do, Monsieur Monsignac,” I concluded unhappily. “I've finally found the woman I've always been searching for, and now she
hates
me! And even if I could prove to her that there really is no author called Miller, I don't think it would be of any use. She's so incredibly angry with me … her feelings have been so hurt … she won't forgive me for it … never…”

“Pah-pah-pah!” Monsieur Monsignac interrupted me. “What do you think you're saying, André? The way the story's gone so far, nothing is yet lost. Believe a man who has a little more experience of life than you do.” He tipped the ash off his cigarillo and jiggled his foot. “You know, André, three phrases have always helped me get through difficult times:
Je ne vois pas la raison, Je ne regrette rien,
and not least,
Je m'en fous!
” He smiled. “But I'm afraid that in your case neither Voltaire nor Edith Piaf will be of any use, let alone slang words. In your case, my dear friend, only one thing will help: the truth. And nothing but the whole truth.” He stood up and came over to my desk. “Follow my advice and write this whole story up just as it happened—from the first moment that you looked through the window of that restaurant to our conversation here. And then send the manuscript to your Aurélie, pointing out that her favorite author has written a new book and that it is very important to him that she should be the first person to read it.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “It's an incredible story, André. It's just great! Get writing—start tomorrow morning, or better still tonight! Write for your life, my friend. Write yourself into the heart of the woman you already seduced with your first novel.”

He went over to the door and turned round once more. “And no matter how things end up”—he winked at me—“we'll make a Robert Miller of it!”

 

Seventeen

There are writers who spend days on the first sentence of their novels. The first sentence must feel right, and then everything else will follow automatically, they say. I believe that there has now actually been research into novel openings because the first sentence, the beginning of a book, is like the first glance between two people who do not know each other. And then there are writers who say that they cannot begin a novel without knowing what the last sentence is. John Irving, for example, is said to work conceptually from the last chapter back to the beginning of his books, and only then to begin writing. I, on the other hand, am writing this story out without knowing the end, in fact without being able to exert the slightest influence on that ending.

The truth is that there is as yet no ending to this story, because the final sentence must be written by a woman whom I saw one spring evening about a year and a half ago through the window of a little restaurant with red-and-white-checked tablecloths in the Rue Princesse in Paris. It's the woman I love.

She was smiling behind the window—and her smile enchanted me so exceedingly that I stole it. I borrowed it. I carried it around with me. I don't know if such a thing is possible—that you can fall in love with a smile, I mean. Nevertheless, that smile inspired me to write a story—a story in which everything was invented, even its author. And then something unbelievable happened. One year later on a really horrible November day, the woman with the beautiful smile was standing in front of me, as if she had fallen from the sky. And the wonderful—and at the same time tragic—thing about that meeting was that she wanted something from me that I could not give her. She had only one wish—she was obsessed with it, just like princesses in fairy tales are obsessed with the forbidden door—and it was precisely that wish that it was impossible to satisfy. Or was it? A lot has happened since then—lovely things and horrible things—and I want to write them all down. The whole truth after all the lies.

This is the story as it really happened, and I'm writing it like a soldier about to go into battle, like an invalid who doesn't know if he'll see the sun rise tomorrow morning, like a lover who has put his whole heart into the tender hands of a woman in the rash hope that she will listen to him.

Since my conversation with Monsignac three days had passed. It had taken three days for me to get these first sentences down on paper, but then all at once everything went with a rush.

In the following weeks I wrote as if I was being guided by a higher power; I was writing for my life, as my employer had so aptly put it. I wrote about the bar where a brilliant idea had been concocted, about an apparition in the lobby of a publishing house, about a letter to an English writer in my mailbox, a letter I tore open impatiently—and about everything else that had happened in those exciting, remarkable weeks.

Christmas came and went. I took my laptop and my notes to Maman's in Neuilly, where I spent the holidays, and as we sat around the big table in the salon with the whole family on Christmas Eve praising the
foie gras
with onion confit that was on our plates, Maman was right for the first time when she said I'd lost weight and was not eating enough.

Did I eat anything at all in those weeks? I must have, but I don't remember it. Good old Monsignac had given me leave until the end of January—on a special assignment, as he told the others—and I got up in the morning, put on any old thing, and stumbled over to my writing desk with a cup of coffee and my cigarettes.

I didn't answer the telephone, I didn't answer the door when the bell rang, I didn't watch any TV, the newspapers piled up unread on my coffee table, and some days I walked through the
quartier
to get a bit of fresh air and to buy anything that was absolutely necessary.

I was no longer in this world, and if any disasters occurred they passed me by. I knew nothing at all in those weeks. I only knew that I had to write.

If I stood in front of the bathroom mirror I caught a fleeting glimpse of a pale man with disheveled hair and shadows under his eyes.

I wasn't interested.

Sometimes I walked up and down in the room to stretch my stiff limbs, and when I couldn't go on and the flow of the narrative faltered, I stuck the
French Café
CD into the player. It began with “
Fibre de Verre
” and ended with “
La Fée Clochette
”; all those weeks I listened to nothing but that CD.

I'd become fixated on it like someone autistic who has to count everything that they come across. It was my ritual—when the first bars rang out I felt secure and after the second or third song I was back in the story and the music became a kind of background accompaniment that let my thoughts soar high over the wide seas like a white seagull.

From time to time it flew closer to the water, and then I was listening to Coralie Clément's
“La Mer Opale”
and could see Aurélie Bredin's green eyes in front of me. Or I heard Brigitte Bardot's
“Un Jour Comme un Autre,”
which made me think of how Aurélie had been deserted by Claude.

Every time
“La Fée Clochette”
played, I knew that another hour had passed, and my heart grew heavy—and tender at the same time—at the memory of that enchanted evening in Le Temps des Cerises.

At night I would turn out the lamp on my desk at some time or other and go to bed—often enough I would get back up because I thought I'd been struck by a fantastic idea—which next morning often turned out not to have been quite so fantastic.

The days became hours, and the days began to blur without any transitions into a transatlantic, dark blue sea where every wave is the same as the others and your gaze is directed at the thin line on the horizon where the traveler thinks he can see
terra firma
.

I don't think any book has ever been written as quickly as this one. I was driven by the desire to win Aurélie back, and I was longing for the day when I could lay my manuscript at her feet.

By the final days of January I had finished.

On the evening when I laid the manuscript at Aurélie Bredin's apartment door it began to snow. Snow is such a rare occurrence in Paris that most people are delighted.