Lie With Me

For a long time, I tried to write down words about his disappearance. I found a lot. I even classified them in alphabetical order, if you want to know: “abandonment,” “absence,” “death,” “departure,” “dissolution,” “erasure,” “escape,” “extinction,” “flight,” “loss,” “retreat,” “vanishing,” “withdrawal,”—the other ones I forgot.

A Character from a Novel, an intimate portrait of Emmanuel Macron during his presidential campaign

Who are you trying to convince? He continues: In His Brother, the hero is outright called Thomas Andrieu. Are you going to tell me that it’s a coincidence? I stop protesting. To deny it would be to insult his intelligence. He drives home the point: And in A Boy from Italy, you tell the story of a double life, a man who can’t choose between men and women. Your novels were like pieces of a puzzle. They were enough to assemble a picture that made sense.

Nureyev, was it? You know, in the early sixties, when he crossed the barrier between the Soviet camp and the Western camp at the airport in Bourget. Lucas sees in Nureyev’s gesture something dangerous and romantic, a manifestation of insubordination, an irrepressible desire for freedom.

is a married father who takes care of a farm in Charente. I am a novelist who spends six months of the year abroad. How could the circles of these two existences have even one point of intersection?

He intimates that the books are in their house, though not in plain sight; no doubt they’re tucked away in a closet somewhere or in the attic.

Lucas glances at his watch and I notice that he’s wearing Thomas’s digital Casio. He catches my surprise, without knowing what it is connected to (the image of his father lying naked next to me in bed a quarter century ago).

In the meantime, he takes off, walks down the stairs, barely saying goodbye before leaving. When the door closes, the silence is heavy enough to make your knees buckle. The trace of his scent, an intimate mixture of cigarettes and sweat, is the only thing that saves me

I say: Will you take me for a ride one of these days? I expect the raised shoulders and the smirk, reminding me of the rules. Instead he says: You want to? I believe that yes, definitely, something is changing.

I’m convinced that it was this hidden love that accounted for the transformation.