A SORT OF HEAVEN
I waited impatiently outside the apartement in the block at the end of the Rue Soleil, I pulled the letter from my handbag with desperate hands and checked the address; this was the right one, the place where my brother lived. I was just contemplating whether I should have telephoned ahead, when the light on the red lacquer shifted and door opened.
The man behind the door. He isn't Leon. Have I got the address wrong? No, this was the address on the letter. Perhaps Leon had transposed the digits of the apartement number. But the building is small and this is the top floor. The young man is looking at me, strangely nervous, his breathing oddly rapid, his eyes growing wide. He staggers. Mon Dieu! He's having some sort of a panic attack. Or maybe he's allergique to the pollen of the roses I'm carrying.
I step through the half opened doorway and reach out to him bent nearly double with his the grey hair on his head brushing the very tops of his knees. And then he's standing, his breathing more measured and an uneasy smile on his lips,
"Je suis desolé. I have been somewhat nervous lately. You just surprised me, that's all."
He still looks rather weak on his feet. I'm just about to ask him if he's alright and stammer some muddled excuse that I've clearly arrived at the wrong apartement, when he draws himself up to his full height. That doesn't describe it really. It's not just that he stood up, that he pulled himself together, but rather he has poise, he assumes a quiet control of the situation, that he manages to reshape the world until it centres on himself and himself alone. I thought I knew only one person capable of such a feat, my brother, Leon Dupont, the owner of this apartement. Yet here is someone so alike, it is almost as if they were cut from the same cloth. It's not his looks that do this, not physical beauty, striking though it is with his silver hair and gunmetal eyes, but something inside, an inner confidence, and yet he panicked so, he let that façade drop. Then I think. It was not mere panic, but rather abject terror that flashed into those eyes. I've heard that eyes are a mirror to the soul, but now to look into them is like looking into a mirror you see nothing but what he wants you to see and that is precisely nothing. An enigma. A cipher. Smoke and mirrors to weave a web of deceitful charm. He is like a Greek statue, perfect in form and substance, muscular and lithe, yet the eyes, the face, nothing at all reveals his true mind.
It's a mask. A perfect mask. So perfect that it is indistinguishable from life itself, from reality even, totally indistinguishable until you have seen the actor hiding behind it, and then you see it as false. Once you have seen the man behind the curtain, you can never again believe in the false idol. Yet through seeing this true face, what you loose in innocence, you gain in knowledge. You know that he is a mere man hiding behind a mask of empty perfection.
I'm dragged out of reverie by the young man, the Adonis, the perfect youth,
"Madame, this is chez M. Dupont. I am afraid that he is at his office now."
His tone is polite, his movements graceful, but there is the slightest sense of menace to his pose, once you've seen what lies under the mask, you look more closely questing out imperfections.
"I am his sister. I have come to visit." Simple sentences. Do I really sound that curt, that hard? It's hardly polite, but I tell myself, that I'm just making sure that he understands. He must be an au-pair, I mean, there's no other explanation, especially with that apron on. I've neglected to tell you what he looks like, haven't I? It's almost laughable really, he's wearing dark pinstripe trousers with a crisp white shirt and a waistcoat of the same material, but the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up and he's wearing the most ridiculous apron, it's frilly and patterned with pink and orange flowers. My mind grasps at the incongruities, the shirt and what I can see of his suit are too well tailored, too expensive, to belong to a mere au-pair. And then there's…
"I'm terribly sorry, Madame, for startling you like that. M. Dupont ought to be returning soon. Please, come in, I'll put some coffee on tout suite."
…his French. It's too good for an au pair, there's no discernible accent. I really don't know what to make of this strange young man.
He's noticed the way I'm looking at him, hoping that somehow it would all make sense if only I stared hard enough,
"Oh. How remiss of me. I'm Jean-Paul Martin. I suppose you could say that I'm M. Dupont's assistant. Come on, the kitchen's just through here, I was preparing dîner when you knocked. Let me take your coat, it's rather warm in here."
He's so very polite. Elegant even, but part of me still sees this as a mask. Sure, he's pleasant enough, asking me how my journey was, the weather, my children; but he's asking all the questions, never saying anything about himself. It could just be that he is vraiment absorbed in chopping carrots and anything other than small talk is beyond him. But I doubt it.
I hear the door close. The boy's gone. I didn't see him move, I suppose I wasn't concentrating, distracted by the rapidly cooling coffee in front of me. I walk to the door into the hall and look out in rapt astonishment.
"Jean-Paul, don't argue, I've been waiting for this all day"
Leon seizes the boy in his arms, for a moment I think he's angry and means to shake some sense into the youngster, but then he pulls him close and kisses those boyish lips, smothering any cries that might escape from them with overwhelming passion. I drown in a sea of revulsion as my brother cradles the back of the boy's head and pushes it further into his mouth, yet part of me watches in fascination and just a little bit of envy. If only my husband knew how to kiss like that, to express himself with only his lips. And then the boy, Jean-Paul, pushes Leon away. All this in a few seconds that feel like eternity. Leon's confused desperately searching his face to find out what's wrong.
"Leon, votre soeur, elle est ici, dans la cuisine."
Leon freezes. And then I realise that I am perfectly silhouetted in the doorway.
He cannot meet my eyes. I don't know what to say. I know what I want, I want to scream, to shout, until this twisted perverted nightmare goes away. But the boy's here. He's an innocent party in all this. Well, he's not, he's just like Leon both in appearance and vices, but it wasn't he who deceived me, it wasn't he who lied and hid his true nature behind a mask of lies and half truths. Leon said he wasn't really interested in the opposite sex, said that his work was quite satisfying enough, that his life was perfect without a wife to complicate things. I look at him with angry boiling eyes. Yes, a perfect life indeed without the complication of a wife, a perfect life that went against every rule of nature…
Leon finally meets my gaze. All of his subtle masks are gone, all the lies are stripped away, and he looks at me with such old eyes, eyes that betray his relative youth, eyes that are dark like the bottom of a deep lake; cool, beautiful and lifeless. His voice is dry, like a martini,
"I suppose we have something to talk about."
I want to let rip right now. To scream about how he has betrayed us all. To shout that he has betrayed himself most of all, that he will burn for all eternity in the company of his lover. Yet I won't because the boy's here. And he's condemned his lover to burn with him and seduced him to his own destruction.
"Jean-Paul, dinner will stretch to three of us won't it?" The boy nods. Leon is treating this like a dinner party, I want to watch him choke as he eats it, but I don't really want that, do I?
"Jean-Paul, perhaps you can go out for a while, we have family matters to discuss, and you'd just get in the way. Look here's ten dollars, I'm sure there are some things you want."
For one moment the boy looks as if he's going to argue then he looks at Leon's eyes and reconsiders, there is a swift cry of "au revoir madame" and then he's out the door.
We sit awkwardly in the salle de sejour, the silence bristling with daggers of thought and invective. In spite of my burning desire to shout out, it is Leon who breaks it,
"I love him."
Three words and my world shifts. This is not lust, something in his tone of voice tells me that, it is not some Epicurean indulgence in sinful pleasure for the sake of it, it is more complicated. Yet can he truly love? I mean love is a gift from god, how can he love someone, something, that god disapproves of. Yet despite this, this uncertainty, this proclaimed love, I must be hard,
"How old is he? He's just a boy for god's sake, Leon, he's younger than your own nephew. And you've seduced him, led him away from god's chosen path."
Leon laughs (how dare he!),
"He's twenty-one. He's old enough. I didn't seduce him, I didn't set out with this in mind, Juliette, we just grew to love each other. We fell in love. People do that all the time. He wasn't following god's chosen path before I met him. If anything, I saved him from himself."
At that moment we notice the boy standing in the door, he's shaking, afraid; he must have had another panic attack and come back to the relative safety of the apartement. He catches his breath,
"Leon is quite right, madame. J' habitait en enfer, I lived in hell, but Leon has shown me heaven. Is it so wrong to love one's guardian angel?"
The rest of the evening continued without incident, as we ate the dinner, which really was quite exquisite, and made small talk as if nothing had happened at all.