Chéri

Léa de Lonval is forty-nine years old, with a necklace of forty-nine pearls, a great bed of wrought iron and chased copper, and a twenty-five-year-old lover who dances before the sunlit pink curtains, silhouetted entirely in black like a graceful devil against a furnace. His name is Fred Peloux, but no one calls him Fred—he is Chéri, and always has been, ever since his long childhood curls, ever since the orris-root milk baths in his mother’s tub and the fistfuls of gold louis an American lady used to slip him in an underground gambling den while calling him a little masterpiece. That morning, he is playing with Léa's pearl necklace, slipping it around his neck, contemplating himself in the full-length mirror set between the two windows—his chest matte and hard, his hair as blue-black as a blackbird's plumage—and he lets drop a word that falls into the pink bedroom like a pebble into calm water: the trousseau. His wedding trousseau.

Léa does not flinch, or hardly. She notes the socks tossed upon the mantelpiece, the drawers draped over the writing desk, the necktie tied around her own sculpted bust, and she smiles in spite of herself at this warm, masculine disarray. A well-endowed courtesan, a good-natured woman whom life has spared from flattering catastrophes and noble sorrows, she has navigated a fortunate career with the composure of a woman who loves order, fine linens, matured wines, and carefully considered cuisine. Six years earlier, on a June evening in the Neuilly conservatory, chance had brought Chéri back to his mother’s house, exhausted, green around the gills, and coughing from his throat. Léa had swept him away to Normandy to gorge him on strawberries, heavy cream, and corn-fed chicken, harboring no ulterior motive, trusting in her long-standing familiarity with the boy. Then he had said kiss me, ordering it with knitted brows, and she had shaken her head, but only until the instant their mouths met—then she had remained perfectly motionless, holding her breath, like someone listening.

Six years have thus passed, in an intimacy wherein Chéri surrendered nothing of himself but himself, as mysterious as a courtesan, tender only in involuntary cries and the clasping gesture of his arms. And now he is to marry Edmée, the daughter of the beautiful Marie-Laure, a young girl with frothy, ash-blonde hair, with anxious, hiding eyes, and a mouth that restrains itself from speaking. Léa greets the news with a frank laugh that vexes Chéri—she jests, speaks of remodeling the bathroom in glass paste, and takes him to Schwabe to select a white pearl for his shirtfront. But when he murmurs that she, Nounoune, will always be there the moment he needs a favor, she falls silent, picks up a fallen tortoiseshell hairpin, and drives it into her hair while humming, proud of mastering herself so effortlessly, proud of having held back the words that must not be spoken.

The marriage takes place. Léa goes for coffee at the home of Charlotte Peloux, Chéri’s mother—that little barrel with implacable wide eyes, a former dancer turned nasal trumpet and high-society poisoner—where she encounters the old parasites: the Baroness de la Berche with the shoulders of a peasant priest, Mother Aldonza swaddled in rheumatism, old Lili with her adolescent lover and her chest like the waffled skin of a tough turkey. Léa looks at these ruins and wonders which of the three she will resemble in ten years’ time. Then she returns home, goes to bed, and clenches her teeth to keep them from chattering. She wanders from image to image, trying to steer clear of the empty hall door framed by red salvias, the door where Chéri will appear no more. Suddenly, an agony so sharp she initially mistakes it for physical illness heaves her up, twists her mouth, and tears a sob and a name from her with a hoarse breath. She fetches a thermometer: thirty-seven degrees. It is not physical. She is suffering. She will have to cope.

She copes: she leaves. Five days spent running about Paris, sending telegrams and southward letters, and she departs the city, leaving Charlotte Peloux a brief note in which she calls herself a great, incorrigible fool. Meanwhile, Chéri returns from Italy with his young wife and moves into his mother's house while awaiting the completion of their new mansion on the Avenue Henri-Martin. He feels cold in his white wool pajamas. He wanders the hospital-green corridors of his childhood home, bumps into wardrobes he no longer recognizes, marvels at the ugliness of the washroom, and when he enters Edmée’s bedroom without knocking, he contemplates her without approaching the bed—this fresh, unfinished, and somewhat distant tableau, those low and elegant shoulders, that swollen, full lower eyelid unmarred by a single mark. He asks her age, looks at himself in a blond tortoiseshell mirror, discovers at the corner of his eye two fine lines drawn by a hand so formidable and so light, then throws himself naked into the bed, seeking a place for his head on a young shoulder where the delicate collarbone still protrudes. But a moment later, he springs away and rolls himself up in the sheet on the far side of the bed.

Edmée is patient. Her childhood beside Marie-Laure, that unfeeling mother of ivory and gold, has taught her patience, hope, silence, and the facile wielding of the weapons and virtues of prisoners. Chéri parades his authority, orders a blue smoking room with a purple carpet and black-and-gold furniture—the white vase will be his naked self—but he yields nothing of himself to her. One evening, in the hall, he embraces her like a comrade and murmurs that they are something akin to orphans, then tilts a magnificent, despairing face toward the chandelier, two unshed tears glittering on his lashes, and Edmée cries out in startlement. On another day, she rummages through his drawers in search of love letters, and he informs her, astounded himself, that he has none—that he never could have had any, since he and Léa did not write to each other, having never been apart long enough for that, save once, a single letter speaking of honeysuckle climbing a window, which he has lost.

Léa returns to Paris after months of absence. She has traveled, she has tried other lovers—a young man in Biarritz, another in Monte Carlo—but they have all brought back the taste of Chéri like a dish she could not digest. She returns to her pink bedroom, her mirrors, her old maid Rose, and examines herself with a newfound severity: the double chin, the thickened neck, the arms that are still beautiful but the hands that betray her. She decides to grow old, to renounce, to eat butter and cream, to stop dyeing her hair—she cuts the mooring lines with a kind of castaway’s cheerfulness.

Then one evening, Chéri returns. He has wandered all night, slept at Viscount Desmond's, driven around in an automobile in the early dawn, and his steps have led him back to the Avenue Bugeaud as in the old days, upon his winged, silent feet. He finds her changed, thickened, her gray hair cut short, but he collapses against her, burying his brow and nose in his familiar place, calling her Nounoune like a cry for help. And for an hour, in the pink bedroom where the great wrought-iron bed still gleams like armor, they are reunited. He speaks, at last—he says he loves her, says he wants her, says he can no longer live without her. She trembles with joy, cradles him, holds him, watches him sleep. Then day breaks, and the light falls upon them without pity. Chéri opens his eyes and sees Léa as she is in the morning clarity—the ravaged neck, the double chin, the crinkling skin of her arm. And Léa, who has seen him looking at her, understands.

She sends him away. She rises, sits at her vanity, and in a firm, almost cheerful voice, speaks to him as to a child being coaxed from a nightmare. She tells him that he is young, that he has his whole life ahead of him, that he has a wife who loves him, that he must go home. She tells him that she is an old woman, that he must leave her to her old woman's habits, to her morning chocolate and her fine linens. And she laughs, she jokes, she pushes him toward the door with an unwavering gaiety. Chéri dresses himself, buttons his waistcoat, smooths his hair. He descends the staircase. He opens the gate. Léa, leaning out the window, watches him walk away. She wants to scream, to call him back, but she does not scream. She clenches her teeth over a great, mute cry. Then she turns away from the window and calls out to Rose for her morning coffee.