“What do you want to know?” Angèle says.
“What you can tell me.”
She smiles. “Let me introduce you to this afternoon’s patient.”
She gently moves the sheet back from the form on the gurney. I feel myself stiffening, as I had all those years ago when the sheet was removed from my mother’s body, but the face that appears is a peaceful, tranquil one. An old man with a bushy white beard. He is wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, a navy blue tie, and patent leather shoes. His hands are crossed on his chest.
“Come closer,” she says. “He won’t bite.”
He looks asleep, but as I come near, I can see the utter stillness of death.
“This is Monsieur B. He had a heart attack. He was eighty-five.”
“Did he come in looking this good?”
“When he came in, he was wearing stained pajamas, his face was crumpled up, and he was bright purple.”
I flinch.
“I start by washing my patients. I take my time. I wash them from head to toe. I use this special hose here.” She points to a nearby sink and faucet. “I use a sponge and detergent. While I do this, I bend and flex arms and legs, so that rigor mortis doesn’t set in too fast. I close the eyes with special little caps, and I suture the mouth, but I hate that word, so I’d rather say I close the mouth, and sometimes I use an adhesive because it looks more natural. I hate those small-stitched mouths some morticians make. If there has been trauma to the face or body, I work on those areas with wax or other methods. Sometimes that takes a while. Then I start the embalming process. Do you know what that is?”
“Not exactly,” I say truthfully.
“I inject the embalming fluid via the carotid artery. Right here.” She points to Monsieur B.’s neck. “I pump it in. Slowly. And I pump the blood out from the jugular vein. Do you know what the embalming fluid does?”
“No.”
“It restores natural color. It delays decomposition, at least for a while. When I pumped up Monsieur B., for instance, it took all the purple out of his face. After the arterial embalming, I use an aspirator to suck all bodily fluids away. Stomach, abdomen, heart, lungs, bladder.” She pauses. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say, and again, I am truthful. This is the first time I’ve seen a dead body, apart from the shape under the sheet that was my mother. I am forty-three years old and I have never laid eyes on death. I inwardly thank Monsieur B. for looking so peachy pink and content.
Did my mother look like this? I wonder.
“Then what do you do?”
“I fill all the cavities with concentrated chemicals and then I suture all incisions and orifices. That takes a while too. I won’t go into details. You wouldn’t like it. And then I dress my patients.”
I love the way she says “my patients.” They are stone dead, but they are still her patients. I notice that during the entire time she has been talking to me, her gloveless hand is on Monsieur B.’s shoulder.
“The last thing I do, which is what I was working on when you knocked, is makeup. It has to be natural. Sometimes I ask for recent photos of my patients so I can see what they looked like when they were alive. I try to stick to that.”
“Has Monsieur B.’s family been to see him yet?”
She looks at her watch.
“Tomorrow. I’m very happy with Monsieur B. That’s why I showed him to you. I’m less happy . . . with my other patients of the day.”
“Why?” I ask.
She moves away from the gurney and stands by the window. She is silent for a while.
“Death can be very ugly. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t get a body looking peaceful enough for the family to see it.”
I shiver, thinking about what she sees every day.
“How does this not get to you?”
She turns to look at me.
“Oh, but it does.” She sighs, puts the sheet back over Monsieur B.’s face. “I do this job because of my father. He committed suicide. I was thirteen years old. I’m the one who found him. I came home from school, and there he was, slumped over on the kitchen table with his brains splattered over the walls.”
“Jesus,” I breathe.
“My mother was in such a state that I had to make all the calls, do everything, organize the funeral. My older sister collapsed. I grew up that day. Became the tough cookie I am now. The mortician who worked on him did an incredible job. He reconstructed my father’s head with wax. My mother and family could look at the body and not faint. But I was the only one who had seen my father in death. I was the only one who could compare. I was so impressed by the mortician’s craft that I knew I wanted to do that later on. I passed my exam and became a mortician at twenty-two.”
“Was it hard?”
“At first, yes. But I know how important it is, when you’ve lost someone, to be able to have a last, peaceful look at that loved one’s body.”
“Are there many female morticians?”
“More than you think. When I get babies, or children, the parents are relieved that I’m a woman. I guess they feel a woman will care more, will have a gentler touch, will pay more attention to detail and dignity.”
She turns to me, takes my hand. Smiles that slow smile.
“Let me have a quick shower and I’ll whiz you away. Let’s go to my place.”
We go into the adjoining office. Beyond is a white tiled bathroom.
“I won’t be a minute,” she says. She leaves the room.
I notice photographs on her desk. Black-and-white ones of a man in his forties. He looks so much like her, it has to be her father. The same eyes, the same chin. I sit at her desk looking at the paperwork, calendar, computer, letters. Paraphernalia. The usual clutter of a day’s work. There is a small date book by her mobile phone. I feel tempted to reach out and pick it up. Leaf through it. I want to know everything about the fascinating Angèle Rouvatier. Her dates, her rendezvous, her secrets. But I don’t in the end. I feel content just sitting here and waiting for her, even if I am most probably just another boyfriend she keeps dangling on a string. I can hear the shower running in the next room. Water on her bare skin. I keep thinking about my hands on that skin and that smooth body. I keep thinking about her warm, wet mouth. About what I am going to do to her when I get to her house. I think about that very precisely. I begin to get the most monumental erection. Is this fitting, I wonder, in a morgue?
For the first time in a long while I feel as if my life has brightened up at last. Like that fragile, fresh sunshine right after the rain. Like the Gois passage emerging from the receding tide.
I want to make the most of it.
In late September, Mélanie goes back home for the first time since the accident. I stand with her at the threshold of her apartment and cannot help noticing how frail and white she is. She still walks haltingly, with crutches, and I know the next weeks will be taken up with physiotherapy. She is so happy to be back home, and her smile lights up her face as she sees all her friends gathered for her return, laden with gifts and flowers.
Every time I turn up at the rue de la Roquette, she has somebody over, someone preparing tea or cooking, listening to music with her, or making her laugh. If all goes well, she tells us, she could be back at work in the spring. Whether she wants to or not is another matter. “I don’t know if the publishing scene is as exciting,” she admits to Valérie and me one evening over dinner. “I find reading difficult. I simply can’t concentrate. I never was like that before.”
The accident has changed my sister. She appears quieter, more thoughtful, less stressed. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and the silver strands shining through her dark locks suit her, giving her even greater class. A friend gave her a cat as a present, a black, golden-eyed creature called Mina.
When I’m talking to my sister, I often long to burst out with “Mel, do you remember what you were telling me just before we crashed?” But I don’t dare. Her fragility still awes me. I have more o
r less given up waiting for her to recall what she was trying to tell me. But the thought never leaves me.
“What about your elderly, salacious admirer?” I ask her one day, teasingly, as Mina purrs on my knees.
We are in her large, bright sitting room. Rows and rows of books, pale olive walls, a large white sofa, a round marble table, a fireplace. Mélanie did wonders with this apartment. She bought it fifteen years ago, without borrowing any money from our father, when it was still a row of poky service rooms on the top floor of an unpretentious building in a then unfashionable arrondissement. She had walls knocked down, parquet floors rehabilitated, a fireplace installed. She did all this without my help or suggestions, which in those days I found rather insulting. But eventually I understood that it was Mélanie’s way of standing up for herself. And I admired it.
She tosses her head. “Oh, him . . . He still writes to me and sends roses, and he even offered to take me to Venice for a long weekend. Can you imagine Venice on crutches?” We laugh. “God, when’s the last time I had sex?” She looks at me blankly. “I can’t even remember. Probably with him, poor old fellow.” She shoots an inquisitive look in my direction. “And what about your sex life, Tonio? You’re being most mysterious, and I haven’t seen you look that perky in years.”
I smile, thinking of Angèle’s smooth, creamy thighs. I’m not quite sure when I will be seeing her again, but the anxious wait somehow makes it all the more exciting. We talk on the phone every day, several times a day, and there are texts and e-mails as well, and in the evenings I can see her naked on my webcam, locking myself up in my bedroom like a guilty teenager. I more or less admit to my sister that I’m having a long-distance online relationship with a terrifically sexy mortician.
“Wow,” she breathes. “Eros and Thanatos. What a Freudian brew. When can I meet this lady?”
I say I don’t even know when I will be seeing her properly again. After a while, the webcam excitement will wear off, I am sure, and I will need to touch her in the flesh, to have her. To really have her. I don’t say this to Mélanie in those exact terms, but she gets my drift.
Later, in a particularly bold text message, I admit this to Angèle. I get an instantaneous text message from her with the schedule of the next train from Montparnasse to Nantes. I can’t make that train because of an important meeting for a new contract. Bank offices to be built in the twelfth arrondissement, near Bercy. Another tedious job, but yet again nothing I can afford to turn down.
My yearning for Angèle thrives day after day. The next time I see her, I know it will be like fireworks. And just thinking about that keeps me going.
Down in my cellar one evening in October, I come across a treasure. I am looking for a good bottle of wine to offer to Hélène, Emmanuel, and Didier at dinner, something they’d like and remember. But instead of coming back up with a bottle of Croizet-Bages, I triumphantly traipse upstairs with an old photo album. I didn’t even remember that I had it. It was stuck in a cardboard box I hadn’t bothered to open since the divorce, lost in a heap of report cards, maps, crumpled pillowcases, and moldy Disney beach towels. I fell upon it. How has this ended up in my possession, and how is it that I had no recollection of it? Old black-and-white photographs of Mélanie and me. My first Communion. Seven years old. Long white robe. Serious face. New watch on my proud wrist. Mélanie at four, plump cheeks and frilly smocked dress. The get-together at the avenue Henri-Martin apartment. Champagne, orange juice, and macarons from the nearby tearoom Carette. My grandparents gazing down at me benignly. Solange. My father. My mother. I have to sit down. There she is. Dark hair. Lovely smile. Her hand on my shoulder. So young. She had only three more years to live. It is difficult to believe, looking at that photograph. She is the very image of youth.
I turn the pages slowly, taking care not to get cigarette ash on them. They are musty from their stay in the cellar. Noirmoutier. The last summer, 1973. My mother must have stuck all these photos into this album, I realize. This is her handwriting, round and childish. I can almost see her, sitting at her desk at avenue Kléber, bent over the pages, concentrating. Glue and scissors. The special pen that wrote on black paper. Mélanie standing on the Gois at low tide with her shovel and pail. Solange smoking a cigarette and posing on the pier. Did my mother take these photos? Did she have a camera? I can’t remember. Mélanie on the pier at the beach. Me in front of the casino. My father basking in the sun. All of us on the hotel terrace. Who took that one? I wonder. Bernadette? Another waitress? The perfect Rey family at their very best.
I close the album. As I do so, something white comes fluttering out of it. I bend to the floor to pick it up. It is an old boarding pass. I stare at it, perplexed. A flight to Biarritz back in the spring of 1989. In Astrid’s maiden name. Of course. This is the flight I’d met Astrid on. She was attending a friend’s wedding and I was renovating offices in a new mall for the architect I worked for. I remember being secretly thrilled that such a pretty young woman was seated next to me.
She had a wholesome, outdoor Scandinavian look that immediately appealed to me. This was not your manicured, mincing Parisian. During the flight I racked my brains for something to say, but she had a Walkman clamped to her ears and appeared to be riveted by Elle magazine. The landing became suddenly atrociously bumpy. It seemed we had arrived in the Basque country as the mother of all storms was brewing. The pilot attempted to land the plane twice before backing off each time, engines whining and shuddering. Winds howled around us, and the sky blackened to an inky dusk although it was only two in the afternoon. Astrid and I exchanged apprehensive smiles. The plane wobbled to and fro, wrenching our guts mercilessly with each swoop.
The bearded man sitting across the aisle seemed to have turned green. With a neat gesture he reached for the paper bag tucked into the seat pocket, opened it deftly, and, with a monstrous, greasy belch, threw up into it for what seemed to be an eternity. A sour stench of garlic and vomit wafted toward Astrid and me. She glanced at me helplessly. I could tell she was scared. I was not. What frightened me was not the chance that we might crash, but that I might spew my spaghetti bolognaise over this beautiful girl’s knees. All we could hear was the sound of pas