French Girl with Mother by Norman Ollestad

Author:Norman Ollestad
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028630
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

forty

It was some kind of arrangement; it had to be. The threat of other men, perhaps younger men, had become a kind of aphrodisiac for him, I surmised, and maybe for her as well. They’d been married twenty years and I wondered how long it took them to get to this point. The various perversions to excite them, to allow them to stay together.

Lying on the bed that I shared with Anaïs, I thought over the riddle. She didn’t seem aware of her parents’ erotic game, at least not the details, but its mere existence would be felt and probably contributed to her conflicted feelings about her mother.

Abruptly, my love affair with Anaïs turned unfamiliar, as if I were just meeting her now. No longer sure of what we had, I questioned how real or imagined our relationship had been all along. How much she truly believed in my work, if she had simply planned to use me for her reproduction business with her uncle, all of it, and it brought back those eyes in the forest, the bird watcher and his binoculars, the voyeur in the bedroom window, being swept along in the river’s current, susceptible, trapped in a maze. Although she feared her mother’s seductive prowess, she’d invited me to the château. Why? Was it part of some larger scheme? Or was it only about showing off the portraits in order to remind her mother of everything she’d given up? And did Sophie really need the attention from younger men? Or was the game only for Jean Luc’s benefit?

It was like a gale-force wind whipping the world into a frenzy in my head, a blizzard of questions. Despite the chaos, one thing stood out, clear as a bell: I was a pawn in the service of the Blanchon family.

But if I walked away, I’d be sacrificing the double portrait and all that it promised. I’m the only one that loses in that scenario. They go traipsing on and I have to start over, hoping not to fade into obscurity. No. I couldn’t bear that.

Much like losing myself in a drawing, the intricacies of the Blanchon puzzle consumed me, and instead of taking a step back, I wanted to know more, see more of the ape beneath the clothing. The deeper I comprehended them, the stronger the double portrait would turn out. It was all fuel for the fire. A fire I would need to complete my work.

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