Vignettes - Short Stories

Excerpt:
“All Love Stories Are Failures, Except the One we are Currently Living” 

I nearly grew old.
Just like that – I didn’t pay attention.
Too close to call.
It was Laurette who prevented me. She strictly forbade it.
She refused to see me as a castaway or even consider it as an option. She blew my sail, firmly grabbed my rudder, straightened out my mast, and sternly lay across my big bad bow. She puffed and she blew, sloshed around in my internal sewer and flushed me through the gills, brought me back to life, and I grew addicted to her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A mermaid run aground for my sake, she was banished to thick air, and I wined her in celebration.

I emerged.

Laurette is a 90-pound categorical imperative, with eyes like fjords exquisitely drowning her whole face, then radiating their intensity around, absorbing the dullest of landscapes or fragmenting it into prisms and luminous mirrors, bathing its most innocuous objects in greyish-blue hues and making them as precious as aquamarines: devouring, bulimic eyes whose voracity I craved, desperately hoping that their cannibalistic workings would make them my last resting place. Once you have seen this miracle, my friend, once you have taken possession of that beauty, it becomes the only filter giving you a coherent, permanent and acceptable vision of the world, and there is no way you can still look at the murky puddle of everyday life, however sacramentally blessed it might have been, and find in it the crystalline virtues of spring water.

********

She enters the room, tiny and lit up by her own radiance, and day breaks out, silence descends, souls hum celestial melodies, a pregnant pause sets in. One day, that Aphrodite had frivolously decided to come down among us mortals, probably for lack of purpose, because it is said that the Gods get very bored with their eternal mission of just being there, and just for believers. She found herself a fallen angel’s occupation as a waitress in a greasy spoon where people ate hamburgers and listened to rockabilly. I would go there every day at opening time, I couldn’t help myself, and watch her flutter from one table to another, her bust tightly strapped in a black blouse that gave her face the crisp radiance of a summer morning, her feet in modest Cinderella’s ballet slippers from which emerged ankles of a slightly milky, aristocratic flesh imploring the desperate peeping Tom that I was to uncover them, paw them, discover their rosy tints, disconcert them, debauch them before I would randomly uncover another part of her mystery. My nose in my beer, I watched the noses of the other customers, also in their beer, and savoured with rapture the injustice of which I was the inexplicable, unfair beneficiary, because even though I couldn’t pierce the mystery, I was at least invited to penetrate it regularly, with a dart overwhelmed by its own power but diligent and love-crazed.

To be tolerable, beauty must be moral and virtuous, in other words it must make itself available: sell itself or offer itself. Although Laurette had offered it to me, I had insisted at that moment on giving her a modest sum, a kind of subsidy, or rather an offering that suited the liturgical character of our relationship, because without it I wouldn’t have considered myself worthy to receive her, and only saying a word would have damned me. We thus had a unique and respectable arrangement by which the fifty-something-year-old that I was avoided being ridiculous by competing in the realm of husbands, fiancés, boyfriends or other possible lovers of this young girl, without being stuck with the vulgar label of sugar-daddy. In my field I would be the best, and even, with a bit of luck, the only one, and I could then aspire to a total and exclusive love.

And I received and still receive a total and exclusive love.

That kind of love at least.

********

As pitiful as I may sound, there is one strength I recognize I had: I dared give in to my weaknesses, capitulate before everything that was beautiful or pleasant, had the immense strength of character to throw myself deliberately at pleasure when I knew perfectly well, like everyone does, that it was immoral and that it led nowhere. For everything else, work, family, country, I stalled, I calmed things down, I pulled the wool over people’s eyes, I limited the damage. But I nevertheless gave life and it still overjoys me.

So it happened just like that. With coherence and determination and in all the proud, dauntless legitimacy of my free will I surrendered to Laurette, to her obvious superiority, her devastating beauty. And then, I who thought once again that this would be a dead end, I have been rewarded for this honesty, this courage and this lucidity, I have reaped the dividends and the interest, even though I didn’t even know that it was an investment and I certainly didn’t have the soul of a stockbroker. And besides, who’s counting?

Suddenly, I was forbidden to grow old.

On pain of death.