forehead, tan beneath the luxuriance of his thick, straight hair, his brown eyes slightly veiled by uncertainty (maybe he’s a virgin, she told herself in a flood of protective tenderness), she saw his dusky, just barely pink skin, his full lips, the vigorous health of a very young man in the springtime of his life, and she silently mused that she would never love another like him, and silently thought of her existence to come and imagined it wholly devoted to two commandments that were two aspects of a single charge, to renounce Malinka’s mother and adore Richard Rivière, but never to fail in even her tiniest duty toward either.
—
Because, in all that time, she would never once skip her monthly visit to the servant, just as, she thought, she would never break her promise of absolute, passionate love for Richard Rivière.
—
They married three months later in Langon’s city hall, on a Thursday, so it wouldn’t seem like a special occasion.
The elder Rivières came from Toulouse for the day, and Clarisse, who hadn’t yet met them, thought she could feel the mother’s particularly dubious gaze studying her head to toe and doing nothing to hide it.
When their eyes met, Clarisse had to look away. The mother paid Clarisse a dishonest compliment on her interesting hair. Asking her maiden name, and hearing Clarisse stammer out the name of the servant as flatly and neutrally as she could, she inquired where it came from.
“From the north,” Clarisse mumbled.
And she knew Madame Rivière didn’t believe her, and also that, in a spirit of something like tact, Madame Rivière would never speak of it to Richard.
—
Clarisse found a job as a salesgirl in a clothes shop, then quit it to sign on as a waitress in a newly opened pizzeria.
The work was harder, but she loved taking the stage amid that unvarying spectacle, hearing the furious little music of her heels tapping the tile floor, feeling her arm muscles tense and harden when she brought out the plates, her response perfectly calibrated to the demands of the task, just as she loved the feeling, at the end of a shift, as she sat with a cigarette in the now-clean, empty room, of having once again successfully transmuted potential disarray, with the customers pouring in and all demanding quick service, into a smooth and efficient mechanism, so discreet as to seem effortless, of which, with her clacking heels, her youthful muscles, her quick thinking, she was at once the inventor and one of the gears.
She never told herself this in so many words, but she understood her new status made her love her work all the more.
Because she was now Clarisse Rivière, and that Clarisse Rivière had a husband who sometimes came to pick her up at the pizzeria, and everyone could see them together, affable and charming and wonderfully normal, and when they talked about her they would say: “Clarisse Rivière, you know?” never guessing that she might bear any other name or be anything other than she appeared, a simple and ordinary person.
And that awareness never left her as she strode briskly between the tables, the awareness that she was a married woman who would be named Clarisse Rivière until the end of her days, and never again, because now that was all over forever, a very young girl with no link to the world save the painful sense that she didn’t legitimately belong to it.
How she loved her husband’s gravity, his quiet but stubborn ambition, his uninquisitiveness! The few questions he’d asked about her childhood in the suburbs of Paris she’d answered cheerfully and laconically, inventing an existence so peaceful and happy that there was nothing more to say of it. And was that not, in fact, the truth? she thought. Her father was dead by that time, and then her mother died when Clarisse was…sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn’t quite recall.
Once, and the incident soon came to seem as unreal as a dream, she spoke the name Malinka in front of her husband. She
—
Because, in all that time, she would never once skip her monthly visit to the servant, just as, she thought, she would never break her promise of absolute, passionate love for Richard Rivière.
—
They married three months later in Langon’s city hall, on a Thursday, so it wouldn’t seem like a special occasion.
The elder Rivières came from Toulouse for the day, and Clarisse, who hadn’t yet met them, thought she could feel the mother’s particularly dubious gaze studying her head to toe and doing nothing to hide it.
When their eyes met, Clarisse had to look away. The mother paid Clarisse a dishonest compliment on her interesting hair. Asking her maiden name, and hearing Clarisse stammer out the name of the servant as flatly and neutrally as she could, she inquired where it came from.
“From the north,” Clarisse mumbled.
And she knew Madame Rivière didn’t believe her, and also that, in a spirit of something like tact, Madame Rivière would never speak of it to Richard.
—
Clarisse found a job as a salesgirl in a clothes shop, then quit it to sign on as a waitress in a newly opened pizzeria.
The work was harder, but she loved taking the stage amid that unvarying spectacle, hearing the furious little music of her heels tapping the tile floor, feeling her arm muscles tense and harden when she brought out the plates, her response perfectly calibrated to the demands of the task, just as she loved the feeling, at the end of a shift, as she sat with a cigarette in the now-clean, empty room, of having once again successfully transmuted potential disarray, with the customers pouring in and all demanding quick service, into a smooth and efficient mechanism, so discreet as to seem effortless, of which, with her clacking heels, her youthful muscles, her quick thinking, she was at once the inventor and one of the gears.
She never told herself this in so many words, but she understood her new status made her love her work all the more.
Because she was now Clarisse Rivière, and that Clarisse Rivière had a husband who sometimes came to pick her up at the pizzeria, and everyone could see them together, affable and charming and wonderfully normal, and when they talked about her they would say: “Clarisse Rivière, you know?” never guessing that she might bear any other name or be anything other than she appeared, a simple and ordinary person.
And that awareness never left her as she strode briskly between the tables, the awareness that she was a married woman who would be named Clarisse Rivière until the end of her days, and never again, because now that was all over forever, a very young girl with no link to the world save the painful sense that she didn’t legitimately belong to it.
How she loved her husband’s gravity, his quiet but stubborn ambition, his uninquisitiveness! The few questions he’d asked about her childhood in the suburbs of Paris she’d answered cheerfully and laconically, inventing an existence so peaceful and happy that there was nothing more to say of it. And was that not, in fact, the truth? she thought. Her father was dead by that time, and then her mother died when Clarisse was…sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn’t quite recall.
Once, and the incident soon came to seem as unreal as a dream, she spoke the name Malinka in front of her husband. She
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