Pretty Things. Виржини ДепантЧитать онлайн книгу.
to be absorbed by a wildlife documentary. When it’s time to go, Pauline gets up, stands in the entryway, waits for Nicolas. He looks her up and down, not wanting to believe it.
“You’re planning to go out like that?”
“Yes. I do it every day.”
“You have to put on your sister’s clothes!”
“Don’t count on it, asshole, I don’t dress like a slut.”
“No one’s going to believe she’d go onstage like that!”
Nicolas, who saw Claudine often, had never seen her without makeup. Even when they slept in the same place, she made sure to get up first and get ready in the bathroom. Not to mention her obsession with clothes and the time she spent putting together the right outfits . . .
“Believe it or not, you can actually go onstage without dressing like a groupie.”
“Have you heard of a little something called a happy medium?”
“That’s for cowards.”
He turns toward Claudine, counting on her support. She shrugs her shoulders in a sign of helplessness.
“Don’t push it, there’s no way. You shouldn’t worry about it, there won’t be anyone who knows me anyway, it’ll be like I had a sudden grunge crisis. Could happen to anyone.”
With a forced smile, without a shred of enjoyment. She accompanied them to the door, Nicolas lingered on the landing, still hoping for a word of goodbye that would ease the tension. Claudine barely looks at him, murmurs, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
Monotone voice, closes the door, without the slightest sign of complicity.
Following Pauline down the stairs, he starts to detest her so badly he feels solidarity with those people who corner girls and force them to shit their little panties before using those same panties to suffocate them.
Rue Poulet smells like a butcher shop, whole creatures hanging from hooks. Women talking in front of packed displays of vegetables. On car hoods women sell underwear to other women, gesticulating, bursting into laugher, or throwing tantrums. A giant man lifts up a thong to get a better look, black lace stretched in the sun. Sidewalks strewn with crushed paper cups from KFC, food wrappers, green takeout boxes. Farther on, a guy sells pills in little plastic baggies.
It’s not easy to get by with so many people on the sidewalk.
Accompanied by Nicolas, who’s pouting because she didn’t want to change, Pauline heads toward the metro. He shakes his head, pointing toward the taxi stand on the opposite sidewalk.
“I can’t take the metro, I’m claustrophobic. We’ll take a cab, it’s not far.”
She rolls her eyes, follows him without saying a word. His stupid struggle, the metro stresses him out. I don’t give a crap about your whiny bullshit.
Her disdain evident since her arrival, her every look has been critical, condescending. She knows everything and judges instantly. How he would’ve liked plenty of disgusting things to happen to her, to break her in two and make her understand that everyone is doing what they can and that she isn’t any better than anyone else. It’s all relative. It’s easy being perfect when you live under a rock.
He stares hard at her profile; they both have the same features. It only adds to his dislike. As if she’d stolen something from Claudine, something precious: her face.
There’s always a truck at the street corner, either the cops or the Médecins du Monde.
At eight o’clock the doors of the Élysée Montmartre are still closed. The sound check is running late. A few bouncers are going up and down the stairs with worried looks.
At regular intervals the metro spits out people who clump together on the sidewalk, filing into groups. Some people recognize and call to one another as if they’d just seen each other yesterday. No one thinks of complaining about the wait, unexpected and prolonged. Sometimes someone turns their head, deceived by a murmur in the crowd, gets up on tiptoe to see if it’s moving, but it still isn’t moving.
A woman carves out a path through the crowd, a kind of stubborn urban crawl. A bouncer listens to her sweet-talking—they’re waiting for her inside for an interview—lets her flash her press pass. He pulls out his walkie-talkie to ask what he should do with her. He takes advantage of the wait to get a good look at her cleavage. Not because it actually pleases him, to look at her tits, he mainly just likes to make a show of it in front of his friends. As soon as she turns around, they’ll have a good laugh about it.
The guy who works with him avoids meeting her gaze. Embarrassed for the man who skewers a woman like that, embarrassed for the woman who exposes herself like that. And embarrassed for himself because his eyes can’t help themselves, they spring up and land on her. Every time he sees a woman like that—which is every time he works—he asks himself where it is she wants to go. He lets her pass, she climbs the stairs leading to the concert hall, pushes open the doors, and disappears. She scours the hall, looking for someone she knows.
She heads toward the food. Approaching the stage, she recognizes Claudine. That bitch made herself look like a total dyke. Some people aren’t disgusted by anything.
The journalist scampers toward the stage, ecstatic at the idea of approaching her, of Claudine coming to shake her hand. Not that she would be happy to see her, they barely know each other, and the snob is hardly friendly.
Nicolas intercepts.
“Save your breath, she doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“She’s getting a big head already?”
“No, but she’s freaking out. Anyway, how are you doing?”
She could have smacked him. And that whore, up onstage, pretending not to see her and acting like someone who can sing. Whatever, it’s not like they just filled the Zénith, she’s only an opener. She acts like she isn’t bothered.
“Listen, it’s dumb, but I really wanted an interview. I can still talk to her after the sound check, right?”
“Not today, she’s on edge, she doesn’t want anyone to talk to her. You know, to really concentrate. But tomorrow, if you want, she’ll give you a call.”
“Tomorrow? That’ll be too late. I’m afraid I’ll be too on edge.”
She turns on her heel and goes directly to the bar and orders a whiskey. Contemptuous anger: What is this bullshit? Does she want us to talk about her or does she want to die in obscurity? She didn’t even sell a thousand copies of her album and it’s turned her into this. But she knows very well that when creatives and journalists have common goals, plenty of things are forgotten.
Nicolas watches her walk away. For the moment, no one suspects a thing. Until now he’s only experienced this level of absurdity in dreams.
Just then, the label manager worms his way to Claudine-Pauline. He congratulates her for a while. “Everyone’s crazy about the album, I’m so happy to have done it.” Standing nearby, Nicolas’s heart comes out of his chest and he imagines causing a diversion by throwing it on the ground. But Pauline gets herself out of it, retorting, calm and dry, “Shut your fat mouth, I don’t want to listen to you talk anymore.”
Instead of being furious, Bermuda Shorts blushes, starts stammering, perfectly cheerful. “Well then, she’s got some balls, huh, when she wants something . . .” in a very administrative tone, which he never used while talking to the real Claudine, who had always made an effort to be friendly.
Nicolas walks across the entire venue, explains to the sound guy for the third time that it doesn’t make sense to put the vocals so far up front.
Three hours ago, he couldn’t have imagined that he would make all these back-and-forths because the sub-bass this or the equalizer that.
Pauline is