Appropriate Place Read Online Free PDF

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abbey, and Gabrielle had trouble picturing Damien as a reader in the refectory.
Rather, she saw him devouring a book on medieval philosophy at the beach, coated
with luxurious suntan oil, between two naps in the sun. He did seem to know all
there was to know about Abélard, having thoroughly penetrated that vanity so
brilliant it had become theological, that faith in oneself that really does turn
certain men into images of the God they’ve created to invite comparison. That would
have been Damien’s style, had he persevered. But he also talked about cliffs, sea
spray, jellyfish with as much precision as the teachings of Abélard, with whom the
encounter finally seemed more like a vacation affair than a mystical experience
before an altar. Moreover he’d said nothing about Héloïse, whose spirit seemed to
Gabrielle, from the little she’d read about her, more riveting than that of her
illustrious seducer.
    â€œDamien always lied,” she says. And at that moment she senses, as if
it were in her windpipe, the slight bitterness he exuded when he was talking to her,
that flowed only in her, it had taken her months to understand why.
    She sends Pierre back to his work, the rest he wouldn’t understand at
all.
    Damien and Gabrielle had been colleagues at the university, vague
adversaries at the beginning of the school year, having quarrelled over the only
course on class structure offered in Quebec. The period of strikes was over, but
there was still plenty of fraternization between the few supervised hours of
teaching. It had all started in the office of the dean, who was very tall, very
handsome, very silent. They were drinking manhattans. Present were Damien,
pink-faced after one sip, skinny Alexandre, whose wife would wait for him, and
Serge, trying to discipline them into a six p.m. meeting with plans for another the
next morning. Gabrielle had worn a blue wool dress, the blue of the dean’s eyes,
with a full-length zipper nearly to her boots, which girls wore all day and from
which they never managed to scrape off all the salt from the streets. Alexandre was
talking about women’s underwear as a gauge of the changing times, he claimed he
often cheated on his wife. Gabrielle played scatterbrained because of that blue
which was suddenly unbearable, ice turned to silk to be torn between her and the
tall silent boy. Never would she be virginal enough for him. Something evil was
alighting, radiant, at the end of her twentieth year.
    Damien had seized the moment before they did, he had filled the
glasses, spattered some paper by suddenly raising his, challenged Gabrielle to take
off her clothes to test Alexandre’s thesis. With a sharp tug of her zipper she’d
done so. A few seconds and a few centimetres of the bra-slip she was so fond of,
that pushed up her small breasts in a double layer of lace which she washed by hand
with expensive soap flakes in the hope of preserving it for a long time. It was only
when half-naked that she was somewhat beautiful. And now there was at least that
between them, this perfect waste.
    The blue did not break, it even became the first laugh in the love of
a lifetime, one she would never recount.
    But Damien wouldn’t rest during the months and years when he would be
their mutual friend, until he tried to have a go at this miracle, marvelling at
having been the first witness while pretending to be its guardian.
    He was also a visitor to the home of the married lover, reporting to
Gabrielle the colours of the house and of the children’s curls, their mealtimes, all
those bits of answers to the questions that she didn’t ask. Little by little, in
front of the Alexandres and Serges, he had even played at being Gabrielle’s lover,
they all got drawn into that
trompe l’oeil
, as a favour to the lovers. One
night, at the faculty Christmas party, Damien had groped her in front of her
colleagues until she’d thought that he