French Leave Read Free Page B

the party for twenty people?
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    So you might say that it isn’t cowardice. You might allow that it’s actually wisdom. Acknowledge that we know when to stand back. That we don’t like to stir shit up. That we’re more honest than those people who protest all the time but never manage to change a thing.
    Or at least that’s what we figure, to make ourselves feel better. We remind each other that we’re young and already far too lucid. And that we’re head and shoulders above the ant farm, so stupidity can’t really reach us up here. We don’t really give a damn. We have other things, each other for a start. We are rich in other ways.
    All we have to do is look inside.
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    We have a lot going on in our heads. Stuff that’s light years from that man’s racist ranting. There’s music, and literature. There are places to stroll, hands to hold, refuges. Bits of shooting stars copied out onto credit card receipts, pages torn out of books, happy memories and horrible ones. Songs with refrains on the tips of our tongues. Mes­sages we’ve kept, blockbusters we loved, gummy bears, and scratched vinyl records. Our childhood, our solitude, our first emotions, and our projects for the future. All the hours we stayed up late, all the doors held open. Buster Keaton’s antics. Armand Robin’s brave letter to the Gestapo and Michel Leiris’s battering ram of clouds. The scene where Clint Eastwood turns around and says, “One thing though . . . don’t kid yourself, Francesca . . . ” and the one in The Best of Youth where Nicola Carati stands up for his patients at the trial of their torturer. The dances on Bastille Day in Villiers. The scent of quinces in the cellar. Our grandparents, Monsieur Racine’s saber, his gleaming breastplate, our country kid illusions and the nights before our finals. Our favorite comics: Mam’zelle Jeanne’s raincoat when she climbs on behind Gaston on his motorbike, or François Bourgeon’s Les Passagers du vent. The opening lines of the book by André Gorz dedicated to his wife, which Lola read to me last night on the telephone when we’d just spent ages bad-mouthing love, yet again: “You’re about to turn eighty-two. You’ve gotten six centimeters shorter, you weigh only forty-five kilos, and you are still beautiful, gracious, and desirable.” Marcello Mastroianni in Dark Eyes ; gowns by Cristóbal Balenciaga. The way the horses would smell of dust and dry bread when you got off the school bus in the evening. The Lalannes, each working in their own studio with a garden in between. The night we repainted the rue des Vertus, and the time we slipped a stinking herring skin under the terrace of the restaurant where that stupid ass Poêle Tefal worked. And the time we rode at the back of a truck, face down on sheets of cardboard, and Vincent read us all of Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier out loud. Simon’s face when he heard Björk for the first time, or Monteverdi, in the parking lot of the Macumba.
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    So much silliness and regret, and the soap bubbles at Lola’s godfather’s funeral . . .
    Our lost loves, our torn letters, and our friends on the other end of the line. All those unforgettable nights, and how we were forever moving house, and all the strangers we bashed into all those times we had to run to catch a bus that might not wait . . .
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    All of that, and more.
    Enough to keep our souls alive.
    Enough to know not to try to talk back to stupid idiots.
    Let them croak.
    They’ll anyway.
    They’ll die all alone while we’re at the movies.
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    That’s what we tell ourselves so we’ll feel better about not getting up and leaving the table that day.
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    Then there’s the obvious fact that all of it—our apparent indifference, our discretion, and our weakness, too—it’s all our parents’ fault.
    It’s their