A Fleeting Sorrow

  He was seated on the edge of the bathtub, his hands on his knees. All he wanted was to give vent to his tears in Mathilde’s arms; she would know how to deal with his grief. A natural, animal-like, instinctive grief. A grief that was almost sensual. And for some strange reason he related it to a film he had once seen, a jungle picture, in which a boy had befriended a monkey — or was it an ape? — anyway they had grown up together, and the monkey was dying, and the boy was holding the monkey in his arms, and you could see by the way they were looking at each other that they loved each other, their feelings transcending the fact that they were of different species, and the boy was “talking” to his friend, not in words but with grunts and cries, and tears were streaming down his cheeks, and death came to the jungle creature with boy and monkey holding hands. And then the boy turned in a rage and smote the man who had killed his monkey friend. Tenderness and rage combined, that was Mathilde. She would do anything for him. She would be with him, in body and in spirit, to the bitter end. It would be she who would close his eyes when it was all over. And then, having performed that final task, she would rise up in wrath against the doctor who had made him suffer, or who had allowed him to suffer. Unless of course she returned, having done her duty, to her Englishman. But Mathilde did love him, of that he was sure. She would stick by him no matter what, would not shy away from any task, however difficult or even repugnant. He imagined the last image of his life, folded in Mathilde’s arms.

  But she would probably get over his death more quickly than Helen. Helen, he knew, was not up to taking care of him, she would shake her head and say that she couldn’t bear to see him waste away, couldn’t, just couldn’t stand to remember him that way; and if anyone questioned her motives she would sigh and say it was “out of respect for him,” that she owed it to his pride, his virility, his God knows what. He could not picture Helen passing him the bedpan, for example. Not her style. But then, he had to admit, that thought turned him off, too (ah, yes, he really had to track down that hunting rifle, no question about it!). The same hypocrisy would obtain for Sonia, too, he knew. He could just hear her going on (to whom?) about how she couldn’t, no, she really couldn’t, bear to “see her dear, darling man, her great big loverboy, in that condition!” She loved him too much, loved him too much physically if you must know, to ruin all her happy memories of their times together. Especially their times in bed together. “But it wasn’t only that, doctor, there were so many other things too . . .” he could hear her saying.

  Thank God for Mathilde, whom he had loved as he had loved no one else in his life. Mathilde . . . who had also made him suffer as no one else ever had. And here he was slipping into bed beside her — into this vast, unknown continent of a bed, unknown that is except for the lingering odor of her perfume, which was still the same — slipping into her arms, taking the whole weight of the present with him. He lay there without moving, somehow completely at peace but also devoid of all desire, yet feeling no shame whatsoever for his state of flaccid tranquillity; all of which seemed to suit Mathilde just fine: she wrapped her arms around him, around his torso and neck, virtually lashing him to her, and when their knees touched and her legs found his, she bent them just enough so that they fit perfectly. Their faces were also touching, not in a kiss but cheek to cheek, and he felt her peaceful hand gently in his hair. That maternal hand, of whose persuasive power he had had ample proof, which was now making no effort to remind him of its ardent qualities or to rouse him from this strange state of paralysis. Especially strange, in fact, because for ten years he had been searching for and dreaming of this moment . . . And his inertia did not stem from the fact that her hips were a little fuller now, her breasts slightly less firm, her neck a trifle less swanlike. All of which would on the contrary have aroused him. In fact, under any other circumstances he would have spent hours caressing this less-seductive neck, these new folds of flesh, these defenseless breasts, these motherly hips — she had never been a mother, he suddenly realized, precisely because of the men in her life; all these men-children, all these self-centered adolescents, whom she had nurtured and pampered and turned into adults — too quickly for most of them, who would have preferred to remain under her loving protection — all these men who were on the one hand suffering from a mother-complex and on the other uncertain of their sexuality, all these young men who had paraded through her life and done their damnedest to avoid growing up. She had never had the time — or perhaps made the effort — to transform any of her lovers into fathers.

  Paul understood all these things dimly and confusedly as he lay there in Mathilde’s arms, in the protective embrace of Mathilde, in the warmth and energy of Mathilde, in her devotion to and affection for him. That night of rediscovery, that romantic, violent, sensual night with its confessions and explanations and tears and sighs — everything he had imagined as the only excuse for his former suffering — ended thus, to Paul’s great regret. Just that. Nothing more. She, his ex-mistress, filled with an undeniable tenderness for him, he enveloped in a feeling of complete confidence in her — the woman who had dropped him. The upshot, or the moral, of their story became confused, like everything else. Paul stopped trying to figure it out and fell asleep. He thought he was dreaming, and in fact he was, and he believed he was enjoying his dream. He thought he was in love with a woman he had never seen before. He thought he had fainted and died in a hospital bed. He thought he was very young and in the best of health. He thought that someone he cared about very much was shaking his shoulder. And this last dream was real: Mathilde, who was propped up on her elbows, was holding his face firmly in her left hand and smothering his neck, his chin, his right cheek with tiny, tender kisses. It was dark outside.

  “Darling, it’s nine o’clock,” she whispered. “You can go back to sleep if you like, but I thought I heard you mention you had to go somewhere to dinner at nine o’clock.”

  He smiled, sat up, kissed her shoulder, and made no reference to the innocence of their encounter. It was all too obvious. Unless, of course, he were to drop dead in the street or be rushed howling to the hospital emergency room or commit suicide within the hour or leave without Mathilde for parts unknown . . .

  “I’d like you . . . I want you to go away with me. Somewhere. Maybe to the country. Any old place. You pick it.”

  “That’s fine with me,” she said blithely. “I’d love to. All I ask is that you give me a couple of days’ notice — whether it’s Helsinki or North Africa — so I know what clothes to pack.”

  “And what about your Brit?” he said without looking at hen

  He was knotting his tie, his back to her, registering without really seeing some tiny signs of her straitened circumstances. Maybe so, but she had a devoted man in her life. Someone who cared and shared. Yes, shared: that was the key word. For instance, that bulky blue-and-green sweater hanging over there: was it Mathilde’s or the Englishman’s? And what about that framed photograph of a country house? He’d never seen that before. And that crumpled raincoat: his or hers? “Theirs,” was the answer. It was all “theirs.” Whereas he . . . he who was paying rent for two apartments had nothing in either he could call his own. So what if he had paid for it? That didn’t mean it was his. Whether it was Sonia’s or Helen’s, the world would be quick to recognize that everything in either place belonged not to him but to one of them. Her taste. Her property, in the eyes of society and the law.

  “And what about your English friend?” he said again. “Do you really think he’ll agree to this arrangement?”

  “I can’t say he’ll be overjoyed,” she said slowly, “but he loves me. And he knows that I love him, as he’s also aware that I loved you deeply. . . . No . . . no, now that I think about it, I suspect it’s best to keep him in the dark as long as possible,” she said evenly, turning to face him. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth was never exactly the idol we worshiped, was it?”

  She burst out laughing, and suddenly Paul remembered with absolute clarity the ear
ly days of their love. The images were for some reason in black and white. They were both involved with someone else, and they were both trying to figure out how they could break off the relationships and be together. They were walking along the rue de Varenne, near the Rodin Museum, for their clandestine rendezvous point had been behind Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss,” and they had both agreed that when they told their partners of the moment that it was all over it was essential they do so with elegance and grace. But they had still not made love — precisely because they were still attached — and each time they met next to Rodin’s “The Kiss” their desire increased severalfold. Which struck him in retrospect as a bit strange, since the sculpture itself was probity and decency incarnate. Yet it was nonetheless arousing. . . . But then, he thought to himself, what didn’t arouse them both in those days, in the first flush of their desire? A desire that both of them saw — to their amazement, fear, and utter delight — turning into love. Yes, Rodin’s “The Kiss,” so formal and yet so passionate.

  “Do you remember our statue?” he said. “He is seated, so is she, I forget the exact setting. He is leaning over her, his hand on her hip. Her head is thrown back, yet at the same time is straining upward toward him: she is already somewhere else. Mathilde . . .”

  Once again she allowed Rodin to influence her private life. She looked up at Paul’s face, he for whom she meant everything, he for whom she no longer meant anything. She let him compare her to his young mistresses, to her disadvantage or to his, with all the sadness and tender indifference that you can feel for someone who is going to die and whom you no longer love. As for Paul, he wondered — and took no pleasure in the thought — whether Mathilde’s face had always been as coarse and poetic at the same time. The thought gave him no pleasure, but he did not find it amusing, and it filled him with tenderness.

  IX

  CONTRARY TO HIS INGRAINED HABITS as an adulterer or a man-who-was-always-late, Paul rang his own doorbell, the intention being to surprise Helen, thereby, or so he hoped, putting the bug in her ear that all was not well, the purpose being to make his own task easier. It was not every day you had to inform your wife of her impending widowhood.

  For some strange reason, he had serious qualms of conscience, not to mention considerable remorse, about telling this woman, who did not love him and had told him so, the awful truth. This said, he could not help thinking that his ringing his own doorbell was as odd and incomprehensible as his odd notion of showing up at Sonia’s with his arms laden with chrysanthemums.

  Looking at it another, more practical way, however, all he was doing was giving her back the keys to her apartment. Nothing inside this place was his — with the exception of the bills, of course — and that included the absolutely useless smoking-room desk that she had had her decorator boyfriends install, as well as his own bedroom, which was separated from Helen’s by not one but two bathrooms. He had never felt at home here anyway, at least not any more than he had in a nondescript hotel room; all of which didn’t matter when all was said and done, because the only places he ever had felt at home were other people’s houses: not that many “other people,” but there were some who had loved him a lot, or more than most, or differently. You could count the places on the fingers of one hand: his parents’ house, his grandmother’s, his room on the rue Colbert when he had been an architect student (the first room he had found and paid for himself). And of course Mathilde’s apartment, which for quite a while had given him the impression that he was living on the edge of a volcano but one that was rumbling for him and him alone. How wrong he had been.

  Meanwhile, he definitely did not feel at home in this apartment, but that was something he’d never tell Helen. In fact, he would not say a word to Helen tonight about today’s news. Tomorrow maybe, if he could bring himself to. Tomorrow morning or tomorrow evening. Today he was still in too confused a state, his feelings were too mixed up and unclear, he was liable to make no sense whatsoever. If he had opened his big mouth earlier in the day, rack it up to chance and chance alone. Well, chance and fatigue.

  Helen opened the door to reveal a face that was — how could he describe it? — resolute, and a decollete evening dress that told him (a) they were dining out tonight and (b) he was very late. Instinctively he glanced at his watch: it was not only after nine o’clock, it was, truth to tell, a quarter to ten.

  “You’re late,” Helen said as if to confirm the obvious. Fatigue, disdain, regret, and reproach fought for the upper hand in her voice; her full array of vocal arms, whose intent was to overwhelm and submerge him, which she managed to do most of the time with a fair degree of success.

  “Oh, no, not today!” thought Paul, suddenly freed from any feeling of guilt. Tough titty: so she’ll learn of her impending widowhood a trifle earlier than planned. But it’s her own fault. The problem with Helen was that she had no notion of how moody she was, or in fact that she even had moods. Her inner life required a plot, generally in two acts, and the moral of the story had to be made eminently clear, so that she could lay the blame or, on the contrary, decide in favor of her protagonist. That is, lay blame on him and decide in favor of herself. Before she could put her conflicts behind her, it was necessary for her to settle them once and for all.

  “Not all that late,” he said. “I’m not really that late.”

  “Why, did you accept another dinner?” she said. “I told you we were invited tonight to the Jackys’, and furthermore I reminded you it was an invitation we had accepted three weeks ago. An invitation for nine o’clock. To make things worse, I ran into Elaine Jacky the day before yesterday and she left me saying, ‘See you on the twelfth!’”

  “And is today the twelfth?” Paul asked, suddenly interested. “What’s today? Thursday?”

  “Today’s Tuesday the twelfth,” she corrected him, after having seemed for a moment to be taken aback by his question. “Why? Did you schedule another dinner?”

  “No, but tomorrow would have been Friday the thirteenth, and I would have found that amusing,” he responded, sitting down on the hallway bench — the spot where their mutual antipathy had stopped them. His initial compassion to spare her the news had vanished the moment she had reminded him of dinner at the Jackys’, which was already hard to take when he was in good health.

  “Listen, I have to talk to you. Cancel that dinner.”

  “You mean what you have to discuss is important enough to justify our unforgivable rudeness? Am I supposed to believe that?”

  She had nonetheless grown pale as she said those words. She was trying to pinpoint what specifically would have made him say that. Not the real reason, of course, something else. Maybe divorce. Was it possible, considering how absurd their life was together, that she really didn’t want to let him go? Did she still care about him? A whole series of vain questions rushed forward and made their bows and curtsies before the throne of his pride but with an absence of charm and warmth that made Paul banish them without further ado.

  “No,” he said. “That is, yes. I’m sure this dinner is of no importance. This morning I went to see . . . what’s his name, the hamster who is Dr. Jouffroy’s replacement?”

  She looked at him more closely now, clearly concerned. It was true that she had never laid eyes on Dr.Jouffroy, in fact barely knew who he was, since Paul’s robust good health was taken for granted by their friends and acquaintances. No one would ever have said, or even thought: “Paul doesn’t look well today.” Well, he had news for them. Bad news. Or maybe good, depending on how they really felt about him.

  “My doctor,” said Paul. “My doctor gave me a whole battery of tests, including CAT scans, and to make a long story short I’ve got this lousy thing on my lungs and I’m going to die a lot sooner than expected.”

  Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say, “Six months. I’ve got six months to live.” The fact was, he was more afraid of her reaction than he was of that of the other two women in his life who loved him, or at least claimed to. As if she, the
beautiful Helen, was more fragile than the others. Helen the sadist, the proud, and the puritan. When all was said and done, she was the one he worried about the most, as if in fact her indifference, her pride, had stripped her of any protective armor, the armor that protects the vulnerable of this world and allows them to give vent to their feelings by crying their hearts out, sobbing or gnashing their teeth in the face of the inadmissible horror of the death of a loved one. Helen had never suffered anything but appropriate grief, that is to say grief brought about by the appropriate next of kin or friends — assuming of course that grief can ever be appropriate. One was an uncle whose head had been more in the clouds than focused on his business, who went bankrupt and shortly thereafter — probably as a direct result — suffered a heart attack; another was one of her fellow students in college, who was as enormously talented as she was mean-spirited and, unable to bear the mediocrity of her existence, decided to cut it short; still another was one of her ardent suitors, whose speed to win her heart was matched only by his speed on the highway, with disastrous results. In other words, grief that she could allow herself to indulge in and feel good about, both in public and in private. But when it came to Paul, the unfaithful husband, the pathological liar, the intimate stranger whom she thought she had loved, blinded as she was by his youth and charm, how was she going to handle that? Of course, in the eyes of the world she would be an admirable widow, self-controlled, proper, a widow with great poise and perfect taste. But once she was by herself, away from the eyes of the world, when she had to deal with the low blows of memory, the songs they had heard together, the impassioned, carefree times they had shared — all those happy moments that nonetheless constituted a fair portion of their life together and that she would do her best to erase from her mind, how was she going to deal with those? Which of her “dear friends” — either the snobs or the slaves or the two combined — could she call at four in the morning to moan or groan or complain to her heart’s content? She’d find someone she could turn to, someone who “would understand her grief,” as her right-thinking friends would put it.