Impurity Larry Tremblay (novels for students .txt) 📖

call her. Awkwardly, he explains that a photo session would be fine with him. He’s thought it over. Now that his wife is no longer there, he has to do everything possible to make her work a success. The journalist shows no surprise, thanks him politely. They arrange to meet the next day.

Instantly, he regrets the call. There was no hint in the journalist’s voice of any particular reaction, not the slightest positive note to make him believe that she would be happy to see him again. He’s no longer hiding it from himself: he wants this young woman, he desires her – and at the same time he hates himself for having allowed this thing to happen. This thing. He assigns no precise words to the unsettling feeling that takes possession of him when he thinks of her. It’s some dark thing that the city’s humid heat exacerbates and that takes him by surprise, leaving him breathless and so ashamed that he shuts his eyes before the framed photo of his wedding that faces him every night when he looks up from his bed.

Claire Langlois is late. Antoine hopes she won’t come. But when he hears a car parking in front of the house, his heart races faster, a sign of how anxious he is to see her, and how let down he’s been by her absence.

He barely recognizes her when she comes in, accompanied by a photographer. She’s wearing faded jeans and a loud red blouse so different from the lacy dress, light and airy and so flattering, that she had on when they first met. She has pulled her hair back into a childlike pony tail.

She does not apologize for being late, just introduces the photographer: Tom Linton, early twenties, very fair hair, sandals, shorts, and a stained T-shirt. He’s excessively muscular. Antoine’s eyes go immediately to the tattooed tapestry coating his arms.

Tom, without a word, inspects the room, sees where the light is coming from. The heat is stifling. Antoine prepares a pitcher of lemonade and invites them to sit down. Tom empties his glass in a gulp. Claire drinks hers in little sips, and finally gives Antoine a small smile.

“If you don’t mind, Monsieur Ste-Marie, we’d like to begin with your wife’s study.”

He leads his guests into the former summer kitchen where Alice had set up her work space.

It’s an annex to the house that arcs its way into the backyard. A tremendous glass wall lends the room a joyous luminosity, tempered by the foliage of the columnar maples at the back of the garden. In winter, the room changes its nature completely, surrounded as it is by the dazzling whiteness of the fallen snow. Alice used to pull down the shades so as not to be blinded. The room is Zen-like. Not much furniture. Two low bookcases, a simple board on trestles by way of a worktable. From her armchair, Alice could watch the squirrels chasing each other in the maples, jumping from branch to branch. She called her office her “aquarium” and described herself, mockingly, as an “authorfish.” When she was about to write, she would say that she was going to make bubbles. And she began making bubbles after she left her job in a communications firm where she composed copy and ads vaunting products as disparate as video games and kitchenware. Given the surprising popularity of her first two novels, she opted to live by her pen despite the misgivings of Antoine, who advised her to wait a few years. How could she be sure that her next novel would be as successful as the others? Alice did what she wanted and had no regrets. She liked to say that advertising had been her only school. There she had learned to form sentences with a specific end in sight. “Words are never innocent. They mask the secret intentions that guide the reader, call up pictures for her, awaken desires, create needs,” she would repeat.

Claire, entering Alice’s office, comes to life. She walks around, bends down to read the titles of books on the shelves, touches the worktable with reverence.

“It’s a very beautiful space.”

“Yes. Alice loved it.”

“I’d like Tom to take a few photos of the office from the garden. Would that be possible?”

“Everything is possible.”

Antoine slides the glass door open. The garden’s wetness invades the room. Tom goes out and takes a few shots.

“Can I move this?”

Tom points to a box on the worktable.

“It would be better if we don’t see it.”

Antoine gets up and goes to move it out of the room. Claire follows him.

“Have you just bought it?”

“What?”

“That, the iMac. You haven’t taken it out of its packing case.”

“Ah, no. In fact, it’s … it’s my wife’s Christmas present … I wanted to surprise her … I … I was never able to give it to her, she died … as you know … just before …”

“Yes, I know, just before Christmas.”

Antoine has just lied to her. He himself doesn’t know why.

“I’m going to buy myself the same thing.”

“Good choice.”

“Did your wife always write on the computer?”

“It depended.”

“On what?”

“Actually, I don’t know. Alice didn’t talk to me about her work as a writer. You understand, it was a … personal zone. I know that she took a lot of notes when she was travelling. She always had a notebook on her.”

“Interesting. A notebook. Could we …”

“Yes?”

He moves closer to her, he can smell her perfume.

“Could we get a few shots of her notebooks? We’ll lay them out on the work table.”

“Well, that would be a bit complicated. Alice’s papers are all in boxes. After her death, I stowed them away, but in no particular order.”

“That’s too bad.”

“If you want, you can come back tomorrow, that will give me time to find them.”

“Not possible. Tom won’t be available.”

“Do we really need him?”

Claire looks at him with amusement.

“Monsieur Ste-Marie, if I come back alone, it would be to do what sort of photos, exactly? And with what equipment?”

Antoine blushes. He wasn’t