Difficult Women by David Plante

Author:David Plante
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781681371504
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

3

Sonia came back to London more and more often from Paris on what she called business trips, trips to see her lawyer about a lawsuit (or lawsuits) she would only talk about when drunk, and then so incoherently one couldn’t understand except for the great importance of it (or them) to her. She said, “Once I win—and I’ve put everything I’ve got into winning—I’ll kill myself.” There was a sense one got from her during these business trips that she was unable to explain her legal problems because they, complex as they were, had to do with something more complex in Sonia, which she did not want to go into—which she could not go into. Her drunken attempts to describe her litigation always ended with her saying, “It’s all much much more complicated than can be imagined, and much much more awful. It’s desperate.”

I went to Paris to visit her. She asked me, please, to come to lunch, to supper, to lunch the next day.

Nothing was going right for her.

She lived in a narrow, L-shaped room in a low building, like a cottage, at the back of an alley. There was a small kitchen and a bathroom off the kitchen where the air smelled slightly of escaping gas. She met friends in expensive restaurants, where she insisted, always, on paying the large bills.

In a dim restaurant—decorated with chamber pots on shelves—I said, “It must be wonderful living in Paris.”

“You don’t understand Paris,” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Even I don’t understand Paris. I’m a foreigner, and I realize I don’t, after all, speak French very well.”

“Will you stay?”

“I’ve got to stay.”

When the waiter came to the table to ask if there was anything we wanted, she shouted at him, “Laissez nous en paix,” and he, startled, stepped back and said, “Tres bien, madame.” She said to me, “Why did I do that? Why? Yesterday a young woman stopped me in the street to ask me the time, and I shouted at her, ‘Do you think I can give the time to everyone who stops me in the street?’ Afterwards, I wondered why I’d been so rude to her. Why? Why am I so filled with anger?”

I said nothing.

She said, “I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life.”

When I kissed her goodbye before getting into a taxi, I saw there were tears in her eyes.

In London, I visited her painter friend to talk about her. I felt a need to talk about Sonia with her friends. I sat with him at one end of a long room; bare bulbs hung on wires from the low ceiling. I asked him if Sonia had ever attacked him, as she attacked so many of her friends.

“No,” he said, “she never has.”

“Why, I wonder.”

He thought. “I don’t know why.”

“I suspect she’s never attacked you because she’s frightened of you.”

“Why should Sonia be frightened of me?”

“Because she’s frightened of people whom she thinks have succeeded totally in what they paint, write, compose. She’s

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