[ for bellepoquedelux ]
~
He can barely read his own scribbles at this point. Emptying his full coffee cup in one go, he squints at his notes. Well, the first part makes a bit of sense. Somewhat. The latter must be re-done, for the third time. It doesn’t go together well at all. And the argumentation... Drawing a thick, inky-black line across the entire last paragraph, he shakes his head to clear it and pulls out a clean sheet of paper. Staring at his handwriting, his tired mind ends up with a blank and little else. Please. He can’t even see straight, let alone compose the beginnings of a proposition with any semblance of standards. The presentation, he thinks with some resignation, is going to be a big embarrassment.
It’s not that he doesn’t care about his job. Au contraire, clearly, or he wouldn’t waste his time dealing with everything that it demands of him. Despite his ridiculous position as foreign minister, his job is still a high-level political achievement. It’s a step-up from his deputy position, definitely, though it wasn’t what he really wanted. With a huff of anger, he crumbles up his scrapped notes and throws them to the floor. To join at least a dozen others. He can’t do this, he thinks, leaning back in his chair and shutting his eyes. He can’t fool himself into thinking that this is about his lack of professional motivation when in reality it’s only about the past month and everything it has failed to leave him with.
They’re at a standstill, Mireille and him. She, stuck in the Barrault mansion with her pitiful husband, locking her away to prevent himself from losing his precious composure. And Jean Louis, doing what he can to smooth out the creases of the Paris trip, aware that while in total it was a subtle success, it didn’t live up to his usual standards. Neither of them capable of moving onwards, as if their evenings in Paris were the end result, rather than a new beginning. He’s not waiting for her to act - obviously not. But he’s definitely waiting somehow, or he wouldn’t be here, in the middle of the night, once again re-affirming general opinion in parliament that he’s too young and uncaring for his position.
It’s a lack of focus. A lack of... well. A lack of sex, yes, but that’s less problematic. Rather, it’s the entire situation, from his basic, physical needs to everything else. Stagnation. Lack of progress. He can’t stand it. And tomorrow will merely be more of the same. The old man will scold him and make him re-do this thing from scratch and then, the grand meeting. Steps upon steps, like a thread-mill. With Mireille Deberend caught squarely in his fantasies, being simultaneously right there for the taking - and completely, utterly inaccessible.
He hears, more than feels himself slam his fist against the table top, the sound reverberating through his apartment. His coffee cup tumbles to the floor, the cheap china rolling over the floor boards, undamaged. Heavy footsteps from the living room break the ensuing silence as Marcel pauses in the doorway. Waiting quietly, perhaps for another round of verbal abuse. Jean Louis ignores him and turns slightly in his chair, kicking the cup across the floor in his direction. Marcel simply picks it up and leaves to fill it up again; good for him. Jean Louis has no patience to direct minutia tonight.
Instead, he returns his attention to his papers. Starts anew. It will get done one way or another, this thing, and he’ll move beyond it, pulling Mireille along by her hand. Anything less would be too little for him; less than he would expect from the both of them but especially from himself. This is the real problem, isn’t it? While he doesn’t much care either way what other people think, what Barrault thinks or Raul or Potos... The fact remains that he’s disappointed in his own lack of progress; that he wants something that he doesn’t have, that he has no plans for getting. From where he’s standing now, he sees no other option but to wait.
He’s always considered himself capable of patience. So long as the end result is satisfying, surely he can deal with another week or two of silence. As he puts his pen to the paper again, though, he knows that something will have to change soon or he’ll end up acting upon his frustrations. The only problem being that even if something does change, it’ll have to happen outside of his influence. His pen scratches against the coarse surface of the stationary. He tries not to break the tip, anger and frustration mixing with images, past perfection contrasting with the present continuously behind his eyes. The oil lamp next to him strips his floor in golden shades of brown and black as he works through yet another sleepless night.
~