OSCAR

Chronicles of chaos


Bumped into Rebecca Latté in Paris. Memories came flooding back of all the extraordinary characters she played—the dangerous, venomous, vulnerable, poignant, heroic women—how many times I fell in love with her, the countless photos pinned up in countless apartments over countless beds where I lay dreaming. A tragic metaphor for an era swiftly going straight to hell—this sublime woman who initiated so many teenage boys into the fascinations of feminine seduction at its peak, now a wrinkled toad. Not just old. But fat, scruffy, with repulsive skin with that foul-mouthed, female persona. A complete turn-off. Someone told me she’s become an inspiration for young feminists. The fleabag sorority strikes again. Am I surprised? Fuck no! I curl up on the sofa in the recovery position and listen to Biggie’s “Hypnotize” on repeat.

REBECCA

Dear Dickhead,

I read your post on Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It’s shitty and unpleasant. Waah, waah, waah, I’m a pissy little pantywaist, no one loves me so I whimper like a Chihuahua in the hope someone will notice me. Congratulations: you’ve got your fifteen minutes of fame! You want proof? I’m writing to you. I’m sure you’ve got kids. Guys like you always reproduce, they worry about carrying on the line. One thing I’ve noticed, the dumber and more incompetent men are, the more they feel a duty to carry on the line. So I hope your kids die under the wheels of a truck, you have to watch them die without being able to do anything, their eyes pop out of their sockets, and the howls of pain haunt you every night. There: that’s what I wish for you. And leave Biggie in peace, for fuck’s sake.

OSCAR

Wow—seriously harsh. Okay, I asked for it. My only excuse is I never thought you’d read it. Or maybe, deep down, I hoped you would, but never really believed it. I’m sorry. I’ve deleted the post and the comments.

Still—that was pretty harsh. At first I was shocked. Later, I have to admit, it made me laugh out loud.

Let me explain. I was sitting a couple of tables from you on a café terrace on the rue de Bretagne—I didn’t have the nerve to talk to you, but I stared. I think maybe I was embarrassed that my face didn’t even ring a bell with you, and also by my own shyness. Otherwise, I’d never have written those things about you.

What I wanted to say to you that day—I don’t know whether this will mean anything to you—is that I’m Corinne’s little brother, the two of you were friends back in the eighties. Jayack is a pseudonym. My actual surname is Jocard. We lived in an apartment overlooking the place Maurice Barrès. You, I remember, lived in a housing project called Cali, your apartment block was called the Danube. Back then, you used to come over all the time. I was the kid brother, so I spied on you from a distance, you rarely talked to me. But I remember you standing in front of my toy race track, and all you cared about was showing me how to cause a pileup.

You had a green bike, a racer, a boy’s bike. You used to rob sackloads of LPs from the Hall du Livre, and one day you gave me David Bowie’s Station to Station because you had two copies. Thanks to you, I was listening to Bowie when I was nine. I still have that record.

Since then, I’ve become a novelist. Though I haven’t achieved anything like your level of fame, things have gone pretty well for me, and I’ve had your email address for ages. I got hold of it because I wanted to write a theatrical monologue for you. I never had the courage to get in touch.

Best wishes.

REBECCA

Dude, screw your apologies, screw your monologue, screw everything: there’s nothing about you that interests me. If it makes you feel any better, I’m even angrier at the dumb fuck who sent me the link to your post, like I need to be up to speed with all the insults being hurled at me. I don’t give a fuck about your mediocre life. I don’t give a fuck about your collected literary works. I don’t give a fuck about anything related to you, except your sister.

Of course I remember Corinne. I hadn’t thought about her for years, but the minute I saw her name it all came back to me, as if I’d opened a drawer. We used to play cards on a sled she used as a coffee table in her bedroom. We’d open the shutters and smoke cigarettes I stole from my mother. Your family had a microwave long before anyone else, and we used it to melt cheese and spread it on crackers. I remember going to visit her in the Vosges mountains—she was working as an instructor at some chalet where they had horses. The first time I ever went into a bar was with her, we played pinball and tried to look cool, like we’d been doing it all our lives. Corinne had a motorbike—though, given how old we were back then, it must have been a souped-up moped. She smoked Dunhill reds and drank beer with a slice of lemon. Sometimes she’d talk about East Germany and Thatcher’s politics—things no one around me gave a shit about back then.

I hated Nancy, I rarely think about the city, and I don’t feel remotely nostalgic about my childhood—I was surprised to find I had any pleasant memories of those times.

Tell your sister I googled her name but couldn’t find anything, I’m guessing she’s married and she’s changed her name. Give her my love. As for you: drop dead.

OSCAR

Corinne has never had any social media accounts. Not that she’s a technophobe, she’s a sociopath. I remember when you used to come over. Then, later, you became a movie star and I couldn’t get my head around the idea that the girl who used to sit in our kitchen had her fifteen minutes of fame at the Oscars. Back then, fame wasn’t something within the grasp of most people, it was for the select few. It seemed insane to me that it could touch someone who came from our neighborhood. I don’t know if I’d even have dared look for a publisher for my first novel if I hadn’t known you. You were living proof that everyone in my family was wrong: I had the right to dream. I feel like a complete dick that I wrote something vile about you. You’re completely right: it was a particularly pathetic way of trying to get your attention.

* * *

You didn’t go to the same school as my sister, so I don’t know how you two got to be friends. When you were in elementary school, your favorite thing was to build housing projects for dolls out of huge cardboard boxes. It was a massive undertaking, and even my mother, who never had much imagination, let you get on with it and never complained about the mess you were making in Corinne’s bedroom. One Wednesday, you brought a fridge packing crate over, and you filled it with shoeboxes to make apartments. The ceilings were too low for Barbies, so you raided the collection of folk dolls my mother had on the shelves of the living room. I thought she’d go ballistic when she saw her precious dolls from Brittany, Seville, Alsace, and wherever living in your development. The moment is burned into my memory, because my mother couldn’t even pretend to blow her top. A sense of joy overrode her sense of propriety. She kept saying, “You’re pushing it,” but before she gave the order to put the dolls back in their clear plastic display cases and tidy the bedroom, she crouched down in front of the installation, shaking her head and saying, “I can’t believe it.” She was only grumbling for form’s sake, and it was obvious. We rarely managed to make Maman laugh, us kids. You managed to cut through her bad moods. Years later, whenever she saw you on the little television set in the corner, she’d say the same thing: “Remember the time she and our Coco took all my dolls down off the shelf and put them in her big cardboard housing project … She always had a way about her, that girl. And she was so pretty, even back then.”

I wasn’t even old enough to play Go Fish at the time, but I knew you were beautiful, but I only truly realized how stunning you were one year at the end of summer, a few days before school started, when you walked into our place and said, “Shall we have a coffee?” From that day on, there was no more playing with dolls. Suddenly, you were a grown-up. And I hardly recognized you.

REBECCA

Listen, honey, I’m guessing you know you’re not the first guy to tell me I’m beautiful, or to point out that I’m famous …

But I have to admit, you’re the first slimy bastard who’s had the nerve to insult me and, practically in the same breath, follow up with “We come from the same neighborhood, we’ve got shared memories.”

At this point, your sheer dumbfuckery commands a certain respect. But it doesn’t change the basics: I don’t give a shit about you. All my love to your sister, she was a wonderful friend.

OSCAR

I don’t know whether you ever figured out that my sister was into girls. She didn’t talk about it back then. I could see that she was rough, and cruder than most of her friends, and I was embarrassed that she didn’t make the effort to look better, but I never drew any particular conclusions. Years later, our parents had gone to Spain one August and I was staying in their place looking after the cat. There was a heat wave, and Corinne, who was already living in Paris at that point, came over because she wanted to make the most of their little garden. She would put down a towel and lie in the shade of the peach tree, reading or listening to CDs on her Discman. Sometimes, we’d take the car and go to the swimming pool. We were never particularly close during vacations. We gave each other a wide berth, each spending the day doing our own thing. Then one day she stumbled on a VHS box set of the Mad Max trilogy in a box in the garage, so we curled up on the sofa, closed the shutters, and drank cold beers while we watched Mel Gibson. We were both a bit drunk, and between movies I talked to her about this girl I was seeing who I didn’t have the guts to dump even though I was fed up with her. Corinne listened without laying into me like she usually did. I have to force myself to phone her, I was saying, because otherwise she’ll make a scene, but actually I’m happy she’s working all the time, because she stifles me, I’m bored to tears, it’s all a bit shitty. I just couldn’t understand why I was scared to tell her it was over. It’s not like we were living together. Deep down, I was afraid that if I left her, I’d end up single for the rest of my life, and I thought having a girlfriend who drove you up the wall was better than being alone all your life. But I didn’t dare say this aloud, so I asked my sister how things worked for her, dating boys. She never had a boyfriend. Not that that surprised me. She wasn’t very pretty, and she wasn’t exactly easygoing. I was scared of her, and I assumed she terrified other guys too.

She didn’t beat around the bush, she just said: I date girls. That’s how she came out of the closet. She’d been living in Paris for three years by that point. I thought, my sister is lesbian, and it didn’t square with reality. “Dyke” wasn’t even one of the insults in my vocabulary. I had a whole bunch of pejorative terms for my sister—but “dyke” had never occurred to me. I’d never wondered whether women like that really existed, I certainly didn’t know any. Corinne warned me that if I told anyone, she’d smash my face in. I told her I never ratted her out, and she said, that’s true, at least you can keep your big mouth shut, that’s one thing I managed to beat into you. This made her laugh. Not me: when I was little, she’d whack me if I so much as went near her. I didn’t appreciate her smugness. I wanted her to tell me she was genuinely sorry.

* * *

We put on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and I was feeling awkward. It seemed crazy that something so shameful should happen to our family. Being a fat, ugly woman with no redeeming features was one thing, but being a dyke, well, that was something else entirely. I felt bad for her—imagining her life in Paris, people throwing stones at her in the street, girls laughing in her face and calling her a pervert, employers firing her because she made them sick. A few days later, she took the train back to Paris; we didn’t talk about it again.

I thought it would be a shameful secret we’d have to live with our whole lives. But a year and a half later, when the whole family was together for Christmas up in the Vosges and we’d all had too much to eat and drink, she and I went for a walk in the woods. I can see her now, the orange mittens she’d borrowed from our aunt, her nose red with the cold, smiling, surrounded by fir trees, reveling in her bullshit, talking about “boorish heteros” with infinite contempt. These days the word is banal, but this was the first time I’d heard anyone use it. The dignified, discreet coming-out phase was over. She was a butch dyke now, a “political issue.” I’d snuck some champagne out under my puffer jacket, and I watched her chug it straight from the bottle, I was shocked by her sense of joy. She should have fallen to her knees among the fir trees and begged the gods to let her be normal, have a bunch of kids with a decent guy, take out a loan, buy a car, have the kind of marriage the family could respect. I had some champagne myself, and that gave me the courage to ask her: “This thing with dating girls, you don’t think maybe it could be just a phase?” She stuffed her hands into her pockets. “I hope not. As a straight woman, I’m a dog, but on the lesbian market, I’m pretty much Sharon Stone.” Her answer shocked me. Ever since we were little, we’d both been losers when it came to love. That day, it felt like she was letting go of my hand and leaving me alone in the dark while she headed off to frolic on sunny beaches. She’d found her thing; I hadn’t.

We got lost on the way back, she couldn’t stop talking about the joys of being a lesbian. I could partly identify with what she was saying: I’d never wanted to be like the other members of our family either. Back then, I dreamed of being a journalist, but I’d never have admitted that at the dinner table. I knew exactly how everyone would react—the belly laughs and the rolling eyes, the “He always did think he was a genius,” “Come on, you really think they’d take someone like you?”—the whole litany of the middle class inured to the daily grind, to doing a job for the money rather than for love. The most important thing of all was knowing your place. As we walked, I got the sense that, for my sister, refusing to follow the path trodden by the women among our family and friends offered the same sense of liberation.

* * *

Later, I pieced together her evolution. In school, she’d had a couple of girlfriends who hooked up with her on the down-low but dated guys whenever they got the chance. She’d had a shitty time of it, secretly living through the heartbreak of lousy affairs, and I know what girls are like, they’re ruthless when it comes to losers. And back then, being a lesbian was worse than being a loser—lesbians had no right to exist. In the cage fight of traditional femininity, she couldn’t even get her gloves on.

As soon as she finished high school, Corinne left for Paris, enrolled in a university, and initially lived off odd jobs, though pretty quickly she found full-time work as a receptionist in a gym and dropped her classes. She fell in love with a girl at work, it was her first serious relationship, they shared loads of experiences, exhibitions, movies, gigs, weekends in Normandy. And then one day the girl told her she was getting married. Corinne was one of the witnesses at the wedding. She kissed her one last time in her white bridal dress. Assuming my sister actually has a heart, I think that was the day it shattered. After that, things were different—the gym closed down, she was on welfare for a few months while she hung around in bars. This was where she met the woman who changed everything, the one who would tell her, my folks know I’m a dyke whether they approve of it or not, fuck them and fuck anyone who has a problem with me. They moved in together. They hung out in lesbian bars and Corinne started to get into politics. She changed the way she dressed, got rid of every external sign of femininity—no long hair, no jewelry, no high heels, no makeup. All the things she had clumsily borrowed from the regulation-issue female repertoire but had never become a part of her. Like skin grafts that her body rejected.

It was the birth of my daughter that really changed things between us. My sister might like to scream and yell that she’d never re-create the concentration camp of grotesque neuroses that is the nuclear family, and that the lesbian’s superiority over the straight woman lies in that fact that she doesn’t feel obliged to be a mother in order to exist—but she took to the role of auntie with a seriousness bordering on fanaticism.

We can rely on her for anything. My daughter’s name is Clémentine, and even I wouldn’t claim that she’s easy to live with. In fact, if being a pain in the ass was a sport, she’d be an Olympic champion. But she never complains when we tell her she’ll be spending a couple of weeks with my sister. The mother of my daughter, Léonore, who is suspicious of everything and everyone, is happy for my sister to take her.

My sister lives near Toulouse in a vast, ramshackle house where Clémentine has a bedroom up in the attic, and I remember the first time we dropped her off there, I was convinced as we drove away we’d have to turn around and collect her before we got to the end of the street. But Léonore didn’t insist that we cancel our weekend plans. She trusts Corinne completely. And she’s right. I’ll tell her you send your love, she’ll like that.

REBECCA

Don’t you have any friends you can talk to? Before I even had time to ask how your sister is, you’ve gone and sent me a full-length biography. Luckily, I’m interested; I spent the afternoon reading your email.

No, I never guessed that Corinne liked girls, but now that you’ve told me, I can’t help but wonder why I didn’t catch on. When I picture her at the local youth center in a pair of shorts using her ping-pong paddle to bash people’s heads in, it’s obvious that she was almost a caricature of a dyke. But no one thought about it back then. There were a couple of queer guys in our group. But back in the eighties, as far as I knew, girls were straight and that was that.

I could easily have fallen for her. Thinking about it all now. There was something special about her—I wouldn’t have laughed in her face. But at the time, the whole thing didn’t seem ambiguous. Looking back now, I realize it was. She treated me like a princess back then, I called her a really good friend. It’s quite possible that there were times when I was tactless. If so, please apologize to her for me. I spent a lot of time talking to her about guys I liked.

Our mothers had worked together at the Geiger factory. Mine couldn’t put up with factory life for very long, but that’s how Corinne and I first met. It’s weird that I completely forgot that you existed—I mean, Oscar’s not a particularly common name. I forgot you, but I can remember every detail of your apartment, the little kitchen on the left as you went in, the living room straight ahead, Corinne’s bedroom on the right at the far end of the corridor. It overlooked the place Maurice Barrès. Back in the day, people had a sick sense of humor when it came to naming places and buildings. We lived in a seedy housing project called California. If that wasn’t a “fuck you!” I don’t know what is. Though I don’t feel nostalgic about my childhood, it wasn’t a bad neighborhood to grow up in. The fact that our apartment was tiny and cramped was annoying. I had two older brothers who made a deafening racket and exuded an animal energy that made the place feel like a cage. I liked going over to your place. Corinne had her own bedroom. Your parents were never there. It was quiet. I really liked the neighborhood. It never occurred to me that where we lived was ugly.

But these days, when I go back to visit my family, I see where we grew up through other people’s eyes. It’s not the terrible poverty. It’s something different. It’s neglect. It’s having grown up in a place that no one gives a damn about.

* * *

When I went to high school in Nancy, some of my new friends lived in spacious apartments in the city center, or in charming little houses in new developments. I found that as boring as I did my own home. And their parents were no better. It was obvious that their mothers were hitting the bottle and their fathers were pretentious assholes. It never occurred to me to feel ashamed. During that brief period I turned fifteen. I didn’t give a shit that at home we didn’t buy Nutella but a cheap store-brand spread. I had only one thought, to get the hell out of that hick town and go to gigs in Paris or London. And I wasn’t about to change my mind because of a Hermès scarf worn by some dumpy airhead on the terrace of the Café du Commerce. I wanted to leave that whole life behind.


Copyright © 2022 by Virginie Despentes and Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

Copyright © 2024 by Frank Wynne