“Your boyfriend?” I cannot keep the bewilderment out of my voice.
She flashes her teeth at me. “Yes. I do have a couple of those.”
She gets up, passes into the bathroom. I hear the shower run briefly. She appears wrapped up in a towel. I watch her. I cannot help but find her fascinating. She knows it. She slips on her underwear, jeans, T-shirt.
“I’ll be seeing you again. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
She leans over and kisses me full on the mouth, hungrily.
“I’ll be back for more, Monsieur Parisian. You don’t have to suck your tummy in like that. You’re hot enough as it is.”
The door clicks. She is gone. I try to get myself together. I still feel wiped out, as if a tidal wave has hit me. I cannot help chuckling as I shower, recalling her boldness. But behind the audacity, there is something incredibly appealing about her, a warmth, an irresistible charm. She has achieved something excellent, I decide as I change into a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She made me feel good about myself, and this has not happened for ages. I catch myself humming and nearly laugh out loud.
I look at myself straight on in the mirror. I haven’t done that for a long time. My longish face. Thick eyebrows. Lean limbs apart from the big belly. I grin. The man facing me no longer looks like Droopy. No, he’s even rather sexy, I think, with his ruffled salt-and-pepper hair and a devilish glint in his chestnut eyes.
If only Astrid could see me now, I think. If only Astrid could want me as much as Angèle Rouvatier-who-is-coming-back-for-more did. I groan. When am I going to stop pining for my ex-wife? When am I going to be able to turn that page and move on?
I think of Angèle’s work. I have no idea what morticians do, exactly. Do I want to know? It fascinates me in some obscure way I do not want to delve into. I remember a TV documentary about what was done to bodies after death. Serums being pumped into them, crumpled-up faces smoothed out, wounds stitched together, limbs rearranged, special makeup applied. A grim job, I had remarked to Astrid, who was watching it with me. Here in this provincial hospital, what kind of deaths does Angèle Rouvatier get every day? Old people passing away. Car accidents. Cancer. Heart attacks. I wonder all of a sudden if a mortician tended to my mother’s body all those years ago. I remember the day we were taken to the hospital. I had closed my eyes. I wonder if Mélanie had too. The funeral took place at Saint-Pierre de Chaillot church, ten minutes away from the avenue Kléber. My mother was buried in the nearby Passy cemetery, at the Trocadéro. In the Rey family grave. I had taken the children there years ago to show them her grave, the grave of a grandmother they never knew. How is it that I have such little recollection of her funeral? Only short flashes of the dark church, few people, whispers, white lilies and their overpowering perfume, strangers hugging us over and over. I need to talk to my sister about this, to see what she remembers, if she remembers our mother’s dead face, but I know this is not the moment.
I think again about what Mélanie wanted to tell me when the car drove off the highway. This has not left my mind since the accident. It has been with me since, at the back of my mind, like a dead weight pressing down on me. I wonder whether I should talk to Dr. Besson, how I should put it to her, what she might think. What she would suggest. But the only person I want to talk to about this right now is my ex-wife, and she is not here.
I turn on my mobile phone and listen to messages. One from Florence about a new contract. Three from Rabagny. I had accepted his state-of-the-art day-care center project near the Bastille only because the pay was good and I couldn’t afford being fussy these days. The alimony I transfer to Astrid each month is considerable. Our lawyers had worked it out. There was nothing I could do about it. I had always earned more money than she had, and I suppose it was a fair deal. But by the end of the month I feel the pinch.
Rabagny can’t understand where I am and why I am not calling him back, although I did send him a text message yesterday explaining the accident on my way back to Paris, not going into any more detail. I hate the sound of his voice. High-pitched and whiny, like a spoiled kid’s. There is a problem with the playground surfaces. The color is wrong. The consistency is wrong. He rants on and on, spits out his words. I can almost see his ratlike face, protruding eyes, oversize ears. I didn’t like him from the start. He is barely thirty, as arrogant as he is unpleasant to look at. I glance at my watch: seven o’clock. I could still get back to him. I don’t. I erase all his messages with satisfying savagery.
The next message is from Hélène. Her soft, dovelike voice. She wants to know how Mélanie is, how I am since our last talk a few hours back. She is still in Honfleur with her family. Since my divorce I have often been to that house. It overlooks the sea, and it is a happy, untidy, cozy house I feel good in. Hélène is a precious friend because she knows exactly how to make me feel better about myself and my life. For a short while, anyway. What I loathed about the divorce was the split between our friends. Some of them chose Astrid, others chose me. Why? I never knew. Do they not find it strange to go have dinner at the house in Malakoff with him sitting at my place? Do they find it sad to visit me in the empty rue Froidevaux apartment, where it is obvious that I can’t get myself together? Some of those friends chose Astrid over me because she exudes happiness. It’s easier to socialize with someone happy, I guess. No one wants to sit around and brood with the loser. No one wants to hear about my lonesomeness, about how all at sea I felt those first months when I found myself without a family after eighteen years of being a paterfamilias. How silent those early mornings seemed in my IKEA kitchen, with just the smell of burned baguette and the jingle of the RTL News on the radio to keep me company. I used to stand there, numbed by the lack of noise: Astrid yelling for the kids to hurry up, the tremendous sound of Arno thundering down the stairs, Titus barking in excitement, Lucas shrieking because he couldn’t find his gym bag. A year later, I admit that I have become used to the new morning silence. But I still miss the noise.
There are also a couple of messages from other clients. Some of them are urgent. The summer break is over. People are now back at work, into the swing of things. I start thinking about how long I should be staying here. How much longer I can stay here. It will soon be three days. And Mel can’t be moved yet. Dr. Besson is not giving me more details. I think she wants to wait to see how Mélanie is doing before she gets precise. More messages from the insurance company about the wrecked car and paperwork I need to fill out. I diligently write all this down in my little notebook.
I turn on my computer and use the phone line by the bed to check my e-mail. A couple from Emmanuel and a few business ones. I answer them swiftly. I then open AutoCAD files concerning projects I should be working on. I am almost amused at how uninterested I am by the sight of them. There was a time when imagining new office spaces, a library, a hospital, a sports center, a lab, gave me a thrill. Now it turns me off. Worse still, it makes me feel as if I’ve wasted most of my life and my energy in a field that simply does not fuel me. How did this happen? When did it all fizzle out? Probably when Astrid left me. Maybe I am going through a depression, maybe it really is a midlife crisis. I just didn’t see it coming. But do you ever see these things coming?
I close the computer and lie down on the bed. The sheets still smell of Angèle Rouvatier, which pleases me. The room is a small modern one, devoid of charm, comfortable enough. The walls are pearl gray, the thinning carpet a faded beige. The window looks out onto a parking lot. By this time Mélanie has had her dinner, served ridiculously early, as always in hospitals. I have the choice between a McDonald’s on the town’s outskirts or a little pension de famille on the main avenue, where I have already been twice. The service is slow-moving, the room full of toothless octogenarians, but the meals are wholesome. Tonight I decide I shall fast. It will do me good.
I switch on the television and try to concentrate on the news. Political unrest in the Middle East, bombs, riots, death, violence. I fli
ck from channel to channel, sickened by what I see, till I finally end up in the middle of Singing in the Rain. As ever, I am mesmerized by Cyd Charisse’s sculptural legs and her tight-fitting emerald corset as she gyrates around a gawky, bespectacled Gene Kelly.
As I lie there marveling at those long, rounded, firm thighs, I feel a sort of peace come over me. I go on watching the movie with the placidity of a drowsy child. It is a quiet happiness that I have not felt for a long time. Why? I wonder. What on earth do I have to feel happy about tonight? My sister is in a cast from the waist up and will not be able to walk till God knows when, I’m still in love with my ex-wife, and I hate my job.
But the potent, peaceful feeling sweeps through me, stronger than all those negative thoughts. It wipes away the pain of the Astrid memories that keep popping back up like a jack-in-the-box, it soothes the worry about Mélanie, it erases the anger and frustration of the job issues. I lie there and surrender to it. How beautiful Charisse is with that white veil wrapped around her, arms outstretched beseechingly against the purple stage set. Her legs are so long that even when she is barefoot, they seem endless. I feel I could lie there forever, comforted by Angèle Rouvatier’s musky smell and Cyd Charisse’s thighs.
My phone bleeps, telling me a text message has come through. Regretfully I tear my eyes away from Charisse to pick up my phone.
Dream a little dream of me.
The phone number belonging to the text message is an unknown one. I smile. I know who this is. It can only be Angèle Rouvatier. She probably got my number from Mélanie’s file, which she has access to as part of the hospital staff.
The quiet, content feeling slowly wraps itself around me like a purring cat. I want to make the most of it because somehow, somewhere, I can see that it is not going to last. It is like taking shelter in the eye of a hurricane.
No matter how hard I try, I can never prevent myself, again and again, from going back in my mind to that fateful trip when Astrid met Serge. This was four years ago. The kids had not yet entered the turbulence of adolescence. We had booked a vacation in Turkey, at the Club Med at Palmiye. This had been my idea. We usually spent most of the summer with Astrid’s parents, Bibi and Jean-Luc, in their house in the Dordogne region, near Sarlat. My father and Régine had a place in the Loire Valley, a presbytery Régine had transformed into another glaringly modern horror, where we were rarely invited and seldom felt welcome.
The summers with Bibi and Jean-Luc had begun to take their toll. Despite the grandiose beauty of Black Périgord, cohabiting with my in-laws grew tough. There was something fastidious about Jean-Luc’s obsession with bowel movements, consistency of stools, frugal menus, calorie counting, and perpetual exercise. Bibi put up with all this, as busy as a bee in the kitchen, her moonlike pink face dimpling, her snow-white hair tied back in a bun, indulging in happy humming and plenty of good-natured shrugs. Every morning as I drank my black, sugared coffee—“So bad for you!” barked Jean-Luc, “you’ll be dead by the time you’re fifty!”—and hid behind a hydrangea bush to hurriedly smoke a cigarette—“A cigarette will reduce your lifetime by five minutes, did you know that?”—Bibi would walk briskly around the garden entirely swathed in plastic in order to perspire as much as possible, brandishing two ski poles. This was called the Nordic walk, and as she was Swedish, I supposed it suited her, although she did look ridiculous.
My in-laws’ throwback to 1960s nudity around the swimming pool and in the house had also begun to tire me. They pranced about like aging fauns, impervious to the fact that their sagging behinds inspired nothing but pity. But I had not dared bring this up with Astrid, who was also into summer nudism on a more moderate scale. The alarm went off when Arno, just twelve, mumbled something at dinner about being embarrassed having friends over to the pool because of his grandparents’ flaunting their genitals. By then we had decided to spend our summers elsewhere, although we did come back to visit.
So we swapped oak-dotted, forested Dordogne, bichermuesli, and nudist in-laws for the teeming-hot, overly cheerful, and calorific Club Med. I had not noticed Serge at first. I didn’t pick up any sign of danger whatsoever. Astrid went off to her aqua gym classes and tennis lessons, the kids went to the Mini Club, and I spent hours on the beach or in the sea, snoozing, swimming, tanning, or reading. I read a lot that summer, I remember, novels that Mélanie passed on from her publishing house, talented new authors, confirmed authors, foreign authors. I read them breezily, easily, not completely concentrating. Everything I did that summer, I did lazily. I should have kept my guard up. Instead, I lolled in the sun, convinced that all was right in my small world.
I think she met him on the tennis courts. They had the same teacher, a smarmy Italian who wore tight white shorts and strutted his stuff like Travolta on the dance floor. I didn’t sense anything was odd till later, during a trip to Istanbul. Serge was part of our group, fifteen of us from the Club Med, with a guide, an odd Turk who was educated in Europe and spoke with a surprising Belgian accent. Dazed with heat and exhaustion, we traipsed through Topkapi, the Blue Mosque, Saint Sophia, the ancient cisterns with the strange upside-down Medusa heads, the bazaar. Lucas was only seven and did a lot of complaining. He was the smallest child there.
What I noticed first was Astrid laughing. We were on a boat cruising up the Bosphorus, the guide pointing out the sights on the Asian bank, when I heard her laugh again and again. Serge was standing with his back to me, he had his arm around a girl, and they were all laughing together. The girl was young, fresh-faced, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “Hey, Tonio, come and meet Serge and Nadia.” So I ambled over and shook hands, screwing my eyes up against the sun to be able to see his face. Nothing special about him. Smaller than I am, beefy. Unremarkable features. Except I noticed that Astrid kept looking at him. And he at her. He was there with his girlfriend, and he couldn’t take his eyes off my wife. I felt like shoving him overboard.
What I also noticed, with rising anguish, was that when we got back to Palmiye, we kept bumping into him at every corner. Lo and behold, there was Serge in the hammam, there was Serge doing the customary Club Med Crazy Signs, dancing with the kids by the pool, there was Serge at the dinner table next to ours. Sometimes Nadia was there, sometimes she wasn’t. “They’re a modern couple,” Astrid had explained. I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t like it one bit.
During the aqua gym classes, he was inevitably there, treading water next to my wife, kneading the back of her neck and shoulders during the mutual massage relaxing session at the end. There was nothing I could do to get rid of him. I began to understand with a dull hopelessness that I would have to wait till the end of our stay to see the last of him. I had no idea that their affair began just after we all returned to France. For me, Serge was an unpleasant part of our otherwise successful vacation. How blind I had been.
It was then that Astrid began to show signs of strain. She was often tired, short-tempered. We never seemed to make love anymore. She fell asleep early, cuddled up on her side of the bed, her back to me. Once or twice at night, after the kids had gone to bed, I caught her crying alone in the kitchen. She always managed to convince me that it was just sheer exhaustion or a problem at the office, nothing serious. And I believed her.
It was so easy, believing her. Not asking her any questions. Not asking myself any questions.
She was crying because she loved him and she didn’t know how to tell me.
The next day, Mélanie’s closest friend, Valérie, turns up with her four-year-old daughter, Léa (Mélanie’s goddaughter), her husband, Marc, and their Jack Russell terrier, Rose. I had to wait outside with the child and the dog while they went in to spend some time with Mélanie. The dog is the snappy kind that cannot keep still, seems to be built on springs, and barks persistently. The little girl is just as bad, despite her angelic looks. In order to try to pacify them both, I walk them round and round the hospital, holding one on the lead and the other by the hand, much to Angèle Rouvatier’s amusement as
she watches me from a first-floor window. I feel a slow heat irradiate my pelvis as her eyes flicker over me. But it’s hard to look sexy with a howling child and a yelping dog in tow. Rose inelegantly straddles and pees on anything she can, including the front wheel of Angèle’s Harley, and Léa wants her maman and can’t think why she has to be lumped with me in the heat of an August afternoon in some worthless place where there isn’t even anywhere decent to play or any ice cream to be bought. I realize how lost I am, confronted with a child of that age. I have forgotten how tyrannical they can be, how obtuse, how noisy. I find myself longing for the nebulous silences of adolescence I have become accustomed to, which I think I know how to deal with. Why in God’s name do people have children? I muse, as the combination of Léa’s wails and Rose’s growls is now causing nurses to open windows and glance at me with despair or disdain.
Valérie finally emerges from the building and takes over the screaming pair, much to my relief. I wait till Marc comes out and whisks Rose and Léa off for a walk, and I sit down with Valérie under the shade of a chestnut tree. The heat is worse today, the white-hot, drying-out kind that makes you long for icy, bottomless fjords. Valérie is majestic and tanned, just back from a vacation in Spain. She and Mélanie have been friends for years, through the Sainte-Marie de l’Assomption school they both went to on the rue de Lubeck. I suddenly wonder if Valérie remembers my mother. I want to ask her but don’t. Valérie is a sculptor, quite well known. I find her work good, although overtly sexual and far too explicit to have hanging about a house full of kids, but I guess that’s because I’m a “bourgeois, uptight boy from the sixteenth arrondissement.” I can almost hear Mel’s voice poking fun at me.
Valérie looks upset. In the past couple of days I have become used to Mélanie’s state and have to keep reminding myself that the first time is inevitably a shock. I reach out and take her hand.