Appropriate Place Read Free Page B

later, in the living room,
it would be too quick. He lay down awkwardly in fact, didn’t know how to caress her
in the open air, she’d teach him in the days to come. She guided him into her, and
his slight movement before he collapsed created a flash in her belly, made her flow
again, so wet. She was surprised and still hungry, she mustn’t.
    Madeleine would have recommended buying a vibrator instead. After
wearing out a good many overly young lovers, she had something against them all —
youngsters who interfere with your life for months, who insult the rules of spelling
in their love notes that take the form of praise of older women, and then one
morning, with their bare eyes, look you up and down with contempt, leaving you more
withered than you are. And that’s without counting the sense of incest, which makes
you come with guilt. But Gabrielle would say nothing to Madeleine, this one was
going to be brief. It would be over when the painting was, and the apartment wasn’t
all that big.
    Around three o’clock, after Pierre had left, she poured herself some
ice water and savoured her new life, resign-ing herself to her recent folly. This
child whom she’d teach about sex, everything she had sought and so rarely found,
would be a mere rite of passage. He had the eyes of autumn, of a wolf, maybe, as in
Peter and the Wolf
, do you remember, Gabrielle, Prokofiev and the
night?
    Oh yes, she remembered, the first of the wolves.
    There is winter and a girl of sixteen, neither very pretty nor very
tall, and she’s spending the weekend at her friend Guylaine’s. They are studying
piano, but they consider the lessons old-fashioned and prefer gatherings where you
mix with boys and with ideas about resistance. That day, in Guylaine’s enormous
bedroom — she has rich parents and a house in the suburbs with a driveway so long
that they need a snowblower — they are drawing up the bylaws of their student
association, copying them from a model being used at the university, everything from
obligatory dues to rules of meetings, from election regulations to the disciplinary
committee. They have hopes of retaining the key elements when the time comes to
adopt them. The nuns are leaving the veil one by one, only the last holdouts are
still at the college, the chaplain preaches a secular moral code and the nuns don’t
dare to stop him from discussing democracy with girls who are, even so, not as
rebellious as Marie-Claire Blais, whose novels are beginning to win praise.
    Guylaine’s mother has a maid who makes beds and does dishes, to
Gabrielle her friend is a princess. Guylaine though is modest enough to serve her.
For it’s Gabrielle who knows everything, why to found associations, with whom to
correspond to register for the national congress, how to start the fundraising by
inviting a chansonnier, the shyest of them, the one who sings about the sea without
grumbling, he won’t cost too much. Gabrielle intends to dress all in black to meet
his agent, she dares to laugh at the lace that fills her friend’s bedroom, that
trims the dressing table and the windows and the canopy bed. Guylaine doesn’t defend
herself well, except for the Icart prints, they’re worth a lot of money, her father
chose them, he’s a connoisseur of everything. The father is a pharmacist, that’s the
only thing that is clear in Gabrielle’s eyes, he doesn’t say much, is lost in
thought behind his cigarettes and his books, an avant-garde Christian, says his
daughter. Gabrielle sees him as a kind of hermit, resigned to his women — wife,
daughter, maid — in another life he’d have been a saint, he sighs constantly and
goes to the art galleries by himself on Saturdays, where he unearths old works. He
says that art is now deteriorating, and his daughter repeats it.
    Gabrielle doubts that, because the new art appeals to her, but
Guylaine’s father is the sole