That Mad Ache & Translator

  She went to the phone and dialed the old number of his office, saying a friendly hello to the switchboard operator. Charles was there. She had a strange emotional reaction to the sound of his voice and it took her a moment to regain her breath.

  “Charles,” she said, “I want to see You. I’m in a rough spot.”

  “I’ll send the car for You in an hour,” he replied, a calm head in the storm. “Is that all right?”

  “Oh, yes — yes,” she said. “I’ll see You very soon.” She waited a second or two for him to hang up, but then, as he wasn’t doing so, she recalled his impeccable manners and did so herself. She got dressed as fast as she could, and as a result had to wait another three quarters of an hour, forehead pressed against the window, for the car to pull up. The driver greeted her joyously and as she sat down on the familiar seat, a feeling of limitless relief swept through her.

  Pauline opened the door of the apartment and kissed her. Everything was still the same — warm, spacious, quiet — and the carpet under the English furniture was still that same blue, so soft on the eyes. For a moment she felt underdressed, and then she broke out laughing. It was a bit like the return of the prodigal son — but in this case it was he himself who was great with child. The driver had gone off again to pick up Charles, and she sat in the kitchen with Pauline just as in the old days, sipping a whiskey. Pauline muttered something about her having lost weight and having circles under her eyes, and Lucile felt like putting her head on Pauline’s shoulder and handing over her fate to her. At the same time, she was appreciating Charles’ thoughtfulness in having her come back alone to his place, as if it were still her own home, and in giving her a little time to refamiliarize herself with her past. It didn’t occur to her that this might be skill on his part. And when he entered the hallway and shouted “Lucile!” in an almost jolly manner, she suddenly felt as if she had traveled back six months in time.

  He too had lost weight and had aged. He took her arm and escorted her into the living room. Although Pauline protested, he asked her to bring in two scotch-and-sodas, then closed the door and sat down facing Lucile. All at once she felt intimidated. She cast a glance around the room, commented that nothing had changed, and he echoed her remark, saying that indeed, nothing had changed, even himself, in such a tender voice that she thought with panic that perhaps he was guessing that she was returning to him. She started blurting things out so quickly that he had to stop her and make her start over.

  “Charles, I’m expecting a child, I don’t want to keep it, I’ve got to go to Switzerland, I don’t have any money.”

  Softly, he said that this was more or less what he had expected. “Are You very sure that You don’t want to keep it?”

  “I can’t afford a baby. That is, we can’t afford one,” she blushed, correcting herself. “And also, I just want my freedom.”

  “Are You really sure that it isn’t just a matter of having enough resources or not?”

  “Completely sure of it,” she replied.

  He stood up, took a couple of steps, and then turned around with a sad little laugh. “Life is poorly designed, isn’t it? I would have given almost anything to have a child with You, and You could even have had two nannies, if You’d wanted… But I suppose You wouldn’t have kept a child of mine either, would You?”

  “No.”

  “You really don’t want to be burdened with anything, do You? Not with a husband, not with a child, not with a house… not with anything at all. It is really pretty strange.”

  “I don’t want to own anything,” she said. “You know that. I intensely dislike ownership.”

  He walked over to his desk, made out a check, and proferred it to her. “I have an excellent reference in Geneva. My only request is that You go there — I’d feel more at ease that way. Do You promise?”

  She nodded timidly. She felt her throat tightening up, and she almost wanted to blurt out to him not to be so kind, so reassuring, not to bring her to tears — the tears that she felt welling up under her eyelids, tears of relief, bitterness, melancholy. She stared at the blue carpet, inhaled the mixed scents of tobacco and leather that still pervaded this room, heard the voice of Pauline downstairs, as she laughed with the driver. She felt she had come in out of the cold, to a shelter.

  “You know,” said Charles, “I’m still waiting for You. I’m terribly lonely without You. I know it’s not very sensitive of me to say this to You today, but we see each other so very seldom.” And he gave an awkward little laugh that completely undid Lucile. She quickly stood up and stammered, “Thank You” in a hoarse voice, and made a beeline for the door. She went down the staircase in tears, just like the time before, and she heard Charles cry out after her, “Will You get back in touch with me, or with my secretary, afterwards? Please!”, as she headed out the door into the rain. She knew she’d been saved; she felt herself lost.

  “I won’t have anything to do with this money,” declared Antoine. “Can you imagine what that man must think of me? Does he think I’m some kind of pimp? First I steal his woman from him and then I make him foot the bill for my escapades?”

  “Antoine…”

  “You’ve gone too far this time — way too far. I may not be a paragon of moral virtue, but I have my limits. You don’t want my child, you lie all the time to me, you secretly sell off your pearls, you just do anything you damn well please. But I won’t go along with you borrowing money from your ex-lover so you can kill the new one’s baby. That’s beyond the pale.”

  “But I take it that you’d find it perfectly moral for me to go get myself sliced up by a butcher as long as you’ve paid for it? Someone who’ll operate on me in my living room, without any anesthesia at all, and who’ll just leave me to die if there’s the slightest infection? By your lights it would be moral for me to risk permanent damage to my body, just as long as Charles is kept out of the picture?”

  They’d turned the red lamp off and were speaking very softly, as they were both so upset by the ugly things they were saying to each other. For the first time ever, they despised one another, they hated themselves for these feelings, and words just started bubbling out without check.

  “You’re a coward, Lucile — a selfish coward. When you’re fifty years old, you’ll suddenly wake up and realize you’re all alone, with nothing to your name. All that stupid charm of yours won’t do a thing for you any more. There won’t be a soul around to comfort you.”

  “Well, you’re every bit as cowardly as I am. You’re a hypocrite. What really gets you is not the prospect of killing this baby — it’s that Charles would pay for the operation. Your honor comes ahead of my physical well-being. So tell me, where are you going to put this great honor of yours on display, for all to admire?”

  They were both shivering, avoiding touching each other. They felt, weighing down on them, in this big bed — which for so long had been their only escape route — the weight of the world. They could foresee evenings spent alone, money troubles, wrinkles, they could see nuclear missiles being launched in a huge burst of flames, they could see a future filled with hostility and animosity, they could see life apart from each other, life without love. Antoine had the distinct feeling that if he were to let Lucile go off to Switzerland, he’d never forgive himself for it, that he’d resent her deeply for doing so, and that it would mark the end of their love. His intuition warned him that this intern was dangerous. His intuition also warned him that if he were to keep this baby, she would gradually be more and more overwhelmed by the daily grind, and she would lose interest in life and would stop loving him. Lucile was made for men, not for children — she would never be adult enough herself. And if, some day, she were to become an adult, she wouldn’t like herself.

  All day long he kept on thinking, “This is crazy. Sooner or later, every woman goes through this — they all have babies, they all have money problems — that’s just life. She’s got to understand this. All it is is selfishness on her part.” But then each time he lo
oked at her again, saw that bright face, carefree and unreflective, he suddenly started feeling that all of this wasn’t some shameful defect in her character but actually a deep and hidden animal power in her, which deflected her from engagement with life’s most natural flow. And he couldn’t keep himself from feeling a curious kind of respect for the very thing that, only ten minutes earlier, he had found contemptible. Unblemished; her intense craving for pleasure made her unblemished, made him relabel her selfishness as integrity, her indifference as detachment. And all at once a strange moan came forth from within him, a moan that felt as if it was drifting up all the way from his childhood, from his birth, from his entire destiny as a male human being.

  “Lucile, I beg of you, keep this child. It’s our only hope.”

  But she didn’t reply. After a few minutes, he reached his hand out toward her and touched her face, where he found tears rolling down her cheek and onto her chin, and he awkwardly wiped them off.

  “I’ll ask for a raise,” he went on, “and we’ll scrape by somehow. There are lots of students who do babysitting in the evenings, and you can always put babies in day care all day long… It’s not all that hard. And he’ll get to be one, then two, then ten years old, and he’ll be our kid. I should have said all this the very first day — I don’t know why I didn’t. We’ve got to try, Lucile.”

  “You know very well why you didn’t say any of this back then. You didn’t believe in it — no more than I do.” She was speaking in a calm voice, but the tears kept on rolling down her cheeks.

  “We didn’t start out this way. At the outset we hid what we were doing from our lovers, we pulled the wool over their eyes, we made them unhappy. You and I were made for the thrill of cheating and making passionate love, not to suffer together. We only got together because we wanted pleasure, Antoine, and you know that very well. Neither of us has the strength to… to be like all those other people.”

  She flipped over onto her stomach, nestling her head on his shoulder. “Sunlight and beaches, freedom and laziness — that’s what we’re made for, Antoine, and we’re powerless to change that. It’s part of our makeup, it’s under our skin. That’s just how things are. I suppose some people would say that we’re spoiled rotten. But the only time I feel rotten is when I act as if I believed their words.”

  This time it was he who remained silent. As he stared at the spot of light cast by the streetlamp on the ceiling, the memory came back of Lucile’s bewildered face when he’d tried to force her to dance that night at the Pré-Catelan. He remembered the tremendous wistfulness that her tears had induced in him then, he remembered how fervently he’d yearned that some night she would sob in his arms, so that he might console her. And tonight she was sobbing in his arms — he’d gotten his wish — but he was unable to comfort her, try as he might.

  There was no point in lying to himself — he wasn’t all that interested in having this child, he was only interested in having her — alone, elusive, free as a bird. The most central thing in their love was how restless, carefree, and sensual they were together. A sudden feeling of tenderness surged up in him, and he took this crippled, irresponsible half-woman, half-child, his treasure, in his arms, and he whispered in her ear, “Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’ll go out and get us airplane tickets for Geneva.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Five weeks went by. The operation had been quick and successful, and as soon as she was home she called Charles to reassure him. But he wasn’t at work and it was with a vague feeling of disappointment that she had left a message with the operator. Meanwhile Antoine was all wrapped up in a new literary series that he had been assigned, and his job situation was improving by leaps and bounds, thanks to one of the many upheavals that were taking place at that point in the publishing world. They ate out quite often with friends, co-workers, and acquaintances of Antoine’s, and she was amazed and delighted to see the sway he seemed to hold over them. The two of them never spoke of Geneva, but simply took certain precautionary measures from then on. Actually, doing so wasn’t particularly difficult, as she was often tired and he was often preoccupied, so that many nights they would just kiss tenderly before going to sleep, first facing each other, and after a while rolling over to face the other way.

  One very rainy February afternoon, Lucile bumped into Johnny at the Café Flore. He was flipping through an art magazine somewhat distractedly because there was a very good-looking young blond fellow sitting at a nearby table, so at first she just walked by him discreetly, but he noticed her and called her over very warmly, so she joined him at his table. As was to be expected, he was sporting a most prominent tan, and he kept her in stitches for quite a while, recounting Claire’s latest escapades in Gstaad. It also turned out that Diane had traded in her Cuban diplomat for an English novelist who was sleeping around behind her back with various youths — all of which clearly delighted Johnny. In a rather perfunctory fashion he inquired about Antoine, and she answered in a similar fashion. It had been ages since she’d had such a rollicking, laugh-filled gossip session, Antoine’s friends being bright as a rule, but dreadfully humorless.

  “You know that Charles is still waiting for You,” said Johnny. “Claire tried to set him up with Clairvaux’s girl, but it fizzled in no time flat. I’ve never in my life seen a man yawn so much. In the hotel, each time he walked from the lobby to the restaurant to the bar, he’d depress every soul he passed along the way. It was downright scary. What ever did You do to him? What kind of power do You have over men in general? I could use some tips from You!”

  He smiled at her. He’d always been fond of Lucile, and it troubled him to see her in such a dowdy old suit and with her hair in disarray. She still had her same adolescent charm, with her eyes seeming both far away and yet twinkling at the same time, but he found her too pale and too scrawny. With concern, he asked, “Are You happy?”

  She said yes, but very quickly — too quickly — from which he deduced that she was wasting away in boredom. And then it somehow crossed his mind that he could try to bring Lucile back to Blassans-Lignières, who, after all, had always been very well disposed towards him. Now that would be a good deed. And in thinking about why he was inclined to do this, he completely forgot about the intense pangs of jealousy that had overcome him eight months before, when he saw Lucile and Antoine gazing at each other, frozen and flushed with desire, at that trendy American’s cocktail party, the very day after they’d first made love.

  “You really ought to give Charles a call one of these days. He doesn’t look at all well. Claire even suspects that he may have some frightful disease.”

  “Do You mean…”

  “Oh, everyone bandies the word ‘cancer’ about so glibly these days. But in this case, I worry that there may be some truth to it.”

  He was lying. And he noticed with amusement that Lucile was growing slightly pale. Charles… Charles — so kind, so alone in his huge apartment. Charles, so abandoned by all those people that he didn’t like and who didn’t like him, by all those girls that people threw at him simply because he was rich. Charles, sick. She had to phone him. And this whole week, Antoine was all booked up with important lunches and dinners, anyway. She thanked Johnny for having let her know the situation, and only then did he remember, a bit on the late side, that Claire couldn’t stand Lucile. She would doubtless be furious if Lucile were to get back together with Charles. But Johnny didn’t mind playing an occasional dirty trick on his dear friend Claire.

  So one morning Lucile gave Charles a call and they agreed to have lunch together the next day. It was a beautiful, crisp, clear winter day, and he insisted that she have a couple of apéritifs to warm herself up while he did likewise. The hands of the maîtres d’hôtel were darting all about their table just like swallows, it felt wonderfully toasty inside, and the soft and — you could just tell — utterly empty chatter of all the patrons made for a most soothing background noise. Charles ordered their meals with his usual precision, flawlessly recalli
ng her preferences. She, meanwhile, was watching him closely, trying to discern any telltale traces of his illness on his face, but the truth was that he actually looked somewhat rejuvenated since the last time she’d seen him. She wound up telling him this, in a somewhat resentful tone, and he replied, with a smile, “Well, I did have some little problems this winter. There was this bronchitis that I just couldn’t shake for the life of me. Then I had three rough weeks skiing, but that was the end of it.”

  “But Johnny had given me to believe that You had some serious health problems…”

  “Me? Not in the least!” replied Charles, quite cheerfully. “Believe You me, I’d tell You about it if that were the case.”

  “Do You swear this is all true?”

  The look of surprise on his face was very sincere. “My goodness — of course I swear it’s true. Do You still have this nutty thing about people saying things under oath? It’s been a good long while since I’ve had to swear that something was true.” He gave a tender little laugh and she laughed with him.

  “Johnny had given me the impression that You had some kind of cancer — that’s the simple truth of the matter.”

  Charles stopped laughing instantly. “And so that’s why You called me up? Basically, You didn’t want me to die all alone?”

  She shook her head. “Well, I also wanted to see You again.” And to her great surprise, she realized that it was so.

  “I’m alive and kicking, ma chère Lucile, deplorably alive, although the dead probably have more fun than I do. I’m still working, and since I don’t have the courage to stay at home all the time, I go out now and then.”

  He paused and then resumed, in a softer voice, “Your hair is still every bit as black, Your eyes still just as gray as ever. Truly You’re in bloom today.”