I tell Ombline I cannot commit to her. She is not upset. She tells me she likes me best of all the technical consultants and she wants me to be her one and only lover and I) since I know she has the pick of the crop, and 2) since I know I’m not going to get any easier or better sex anywhere else, and 3) since I know that, someday, I am going to want to get married and have children, I might as well face reality and decide that, yes, I want to commit to her.
That’s when I tell Ombline about my feelings for S. Perhaps, I go into too much detail, explaining my whole conviction of destiny. Ombline tells me that I’m sick. She tells me I should be put back in the hospital (until that moment, I never knew she had known I’d been hospitalised). She tells me to get out of her bedroom or she’ll call the police.
I dress hurriedly, scurry through the living room, barely say goodbye to Ombline’s decrepit parents, hunched before the flickering TV screen.
I catch the Métro back down to the fifteenth. And while Maman sleeps in the next room, I write the email to S. I put it all down. Everything I feel. In 2,222 words. I find her address easily. Just as Maman knew I would. I send the message at 02.22. Two has always been my lucky number.
I will not tell you what I wrote to S. It is too intimate. It is between S. and me. At least, that is how I wanted it to be.
I barely sleep. In the morning, over breakfast, I tell Maman about the message I have sent.
Maman takes a bite of her croissant, chews contemplatively, then says, her voice thick with scorn, ‘She’ll never answer.’
‘Salut, Jean-Hugues,’ an unfamiliar, deep male voice says.
I am sitting in a corner booth in a café near my house, reading a Norman Spinrad sci-fi novel. It is late on a Saturday morning, early November – unusually, bitingly, cold for this time of year in Paris. I look up, expecting, of course, to see someone I know. Not one of my computer geek colleagues. I know their whiny voices too well. I brace myself for the sight of one of my old acquaintances from high school, someone who has recognised me as the troubled boy from their class, despite the fact that I have grown a thick beard, as a kind of disguise, since getting out of the hospital two years ago.
But as I look up, I see before me, in the smoky air of the café, two men I have never met before. They are practically identical, maybe forty years old, the two of them sporting shaved heads. Not cleanly shaved: each large, finely shaped skull bears a thin layer of greyish stubble. Both men wear black leather jackets and black pants. You might take them for a homosexual couple. But there is nothing remotely delicate about their appearance. If they are fags, they are tough, violent fags.
‘Do I know you?’ I ask, stupidly, since I am sure that I do not.
‘No,’ one of the stubbleheads says as they both sit down at my table. ‘But we know you.’
From this moment on, everything has a strange, dreamy feel about it. One of the stubblehead twins talks, the other never says a word. He just glares menacingly at me. The talking stubblehead tells me that they have read the email I sent to S. last week. They know that I was in a mental hospital. If I send another message to S., if I try to contact her in any way, they will make sure that I will be put back in the hospital. Or worse. I could very well be put in prison – for a very long time.
‘Think about how that would hurt your mother,’ he adds.
I think about it. I couldn’t care less. But I say nothing.
I assume these guys are part of the most private, inner security team that S. has. I cannot help but feel flattered by their attention.
The guy who has done all the talking asks if I understand what he has just said to me. I say yes. The stubblehead twins rise, tell me one more time to stay away from S.
Just as they are turning to leave, I blurt out the question: ‘Has she read my email?’
They both smirk at me. The talkative stubblehead nods, then says: ‘Do you really think she’d be interested in a guy who looks like a garden dwarf?’
Then they walk away, chuckling.
I take this, the entire encounter, as a challenge.
Over the next nine or ten hours, everything happens in a kind of dreamy haze. I wonder why the stubbleheaded goons only decided to confront me today, nearly a full week after I sent my email to S. It must be because she is making an appearance in a grande halle des expositions in my very arrondissement this Saturday night.
That is the immediate, specific reason for the goons showing up to try to intimidate me.
The larger reason is that they want to stop me from really making myself known to S., to confronting her face to face. Hell, for all I know, S. might have read my email and found me a fascinating young man, someone she would actually like to meet. Probably it was her husband – sorry, the man in her life, the father of her four children, who has never bothered to marry her – who sent the goons to try to intimidate me. He’s scared. Terrified that I will steal his woman from him. That she will see me, our eyes will meet, and she will experience a total coup de foudre - love at first sight.
This all seems so clear to me Saturday afternoon. I must make myself known to S. I must confront her. Face to face. Tonight. At the convention centre. I know the back exit, where all the featured guests, all the celebrities, leave the grand hall. I will be waiting there tonight. I will make myself known to S.
There is only one huge problem. The men who would thwart me now know my face. ‘A garden dwarf’ they called me!
That Saturday afternoon, I stand before the bathroom mirror, scrutinising the image before me. Yes, it’s true I have let my hair grow long, my beard is a bit bushy and unkempt. And, I see it for the first time, my nose is rather bulbous. A shocking moment of self-recognition. I do resemble a garden dwarf.
If I am to confront S. face to face I must make my face unrecognisable to the stubbleheaded security men. Standing before the bathroom mirror, I take in hand my dead father’s electric razor. I shave away my whiskers. I then apply the buzzing razor to my shock of head hair. By the time I’m finished, I look not unlike the stubble-head twins themselves.
This way, I should blend easily into the crowd outside the grand hall. Even the security men will not recognise me, for I will look so much like-one of them, so little like a garden dwarf. But S. will see me for who I am. The moment our eyes meet, she will realise that I am her salvation.
‘Aren’t you staying for dinner?’ Maman asks absentmindedly, not even looking at me, as I walk through the living room, wearing my winter coat on this cold November night. Then, just as I am about to pass her, she glances up, sees me with a clean-shaven face, a head of ultra-short stubbly hair. ‘Jean-Hugues!’ Maman shrieks.
I do not pause to explain or to comfort her. I just keep walking, right out the front door.
S. was smiling at me. I am sure of it. S. looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.
I am, for these last few moments before my eternal notoriety, just another face in the crowd. I stand with all the other ordinary citizens behind the police barricades that have been set up outside the back exit of the grand hall. Suddenly, the building’s metal doors swing open. A squad of scowling security agents streams out, clearing a path, scanning the crowd with menace in their eyes. I see the stubblehead twins. And I see that they do not see me, do not recognise my face in the crowd.
Then I see S., hurrying out of the building. The very sight of her, in the flesh, takes my breath away.