Happy Are the Happy by Yasmina Reza Read Free Book Online Page B

the floor lamp, turned on a smaller one with a pleated fabric shade, and sprawled backward on the sofa pillows, gazing at me. I was sitting on an inch or two of armchair, my back straight, my legs crossed, trying to give myself a Lauren Bacall air. Luc spread his legs and sank into the sofa. There was a sort of pedestal table between him and me, and on it stood a framed photograph of his wife, laughing with their two daughters, apparently at a miniature golf course. Luc said, Andernos-les-Bains. They have a family home in Andernos-les-Bains, near Bordeaux, which is where his wife’s from. My head began to spin a little. Moving very slowly – I found him almost melodramatic – Luc started unbuttoning his shirt with one hand. Then he pulled the shirt open. I understood that the idea was for me to do the same thing, to strip off my clothes in the same slow rhythm a few feet away from him. Luc Condamine has a great hold over me in this regard. I was wearing a dress under a cardigan. I bared a shoulder. Then, to get ahead of him, I pulled off one cardigan sleeve. Luc took off one shirt sleeve. I took off the cardigan and threw it on the floor. He did the same with his shirt. Luc’s upper body was naked. He was smiling at me. I pulled my dress over my head and rolled down one stocking. Luc removed his shoes. I took off my other stocking, knotted it into a ball and threw it athim. Luc unbuttoned his pants. I waited a little. He freed his sex, and all at once I realized that the sofa was turquoise. A turquoise that shimmered in the soft lamplight. Considering the rest of the room, I thought, it was rather surprising they’d chosen a sofa of that particular color. I wondered which member of this couple was responsible for interior decoration. Luc stretched out in a lascivious position I found both alluring and embarrassing. I looked around the room, at the pictures hanging in their false half-light, at the photographs, at the Moroccan paper lanterns. I wondered whose books these were, and whose guitar, and who claimed the horrible elephant’s foot. You’ll never leave all this, I told him. Luc Condamine raised his head and gazed at me as if I’d just said something immeasurably weird.

Ernest Blot
    My ashes. I don’t know what should become of them. Should they be shut up somewhere, or scattered? I ask myself this question while sitting in the kitchen in my bathrobe, my eyes fixed on the laptop computer. Jeannette comes and goes, like a woman glad to spread herself out on a holiday. She opens cupboards, turns on machines, rattles the cutlery. I’m trying to read the electronic version of a newspaper. I say, Jeannette, please! My wife replies, nobody forces you to occupy the kitchen the moment I start to make breakfast. A rumble of bad weather comes to us through the window. I feel worn out and stooped, I’m squinting in spite of my glasses. I gaze at my hand as it wanders the tabletop, clutching the tool called a
mouse
, part of my body’s struggle with a world to which it no longer belongs. The other day my grandson Simon said, old folks are people from the past stuck in the future. That kid’s a genius. The rain starts to beat against the windows and images come to me, images of the sea, of the shore, of ashes. My father was cremated and the remains placed in an ugly, square metal box. It was painted a shade of brown, the same color as the classroom walls in the Lycée Henri-Avril in Lamballe. My sister Marguerite, our two cousins, and I scattered the ashes from a bridge in Guernonzé. He wanted to be in the Braive. A hundred meters from the house where he was born. At six in the evening. In the middle of thetown. I was sixty-four years old, a few months after my quintuple bypass. There’s no spot that bears my father’s name. Marguerite can’t get used to the idea that he’s not localized. When I go there – once a year, it’s far away – sometimes I snatch a flower from somewhere nearby or sometimes I buy one,