A Fleeting Sorrow

  Sonia’s face softened, but a tinge of suspicion lingered in her eyes. She was standing in front of Paul, watching her pills dissolve in the water with the same concentration she brought to bear on all her “personal affairs,” that is, all the little things in her life that she took care of herself, with the knowledge and tacit approval of her lover, of course, but it was she who handled them. Her insurance, her taxes, her rent, her doctors’ bills — a whole host of details that she had not wanted to foist off on him, or rather on his secretary, despite his repeated offers to handle them for her. She jealously guarded these minor chores as if they were a treasure trove of private details, possessions that she kept from him, thinking that they would only upset or irritate him if he knew about them, whereas in truth he couldn’t have cared less.

  He watched her now, her pretty neck bent over her glass, staring at the painkillers, which had long since dissolved completely, more attentively, he thought, than she would deal with his own dissolution six months down the road. For her pleasant lifestyle, her regular salary checks, which she found reassuring — even if Paul was paying the lion’s share of her expenses — were part and parcel of her dignity, her self-esteem, her personality — in other words, part of the existence of Sonia B., part of its seriousness, therefore part of her health.

  Unfortunately, Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked. Even if he was aware that Sonia thought of herself as being serious not when she was naked but when she was fully clothed and busying herself with the ways of the world, both socially and professionally, in keeping with the tempo and mores of the time. It was then, and only then, that she felt herself free and responsible. To be sure, Paul did not picture himself, or define who he was, seated on the edge of a bed. But he would have liked a woman to do so in his stead. He would have considered this assessment of himself as accurate as any other.

  “Your migraine gone?”

  “Not a chance! It’s psychological, my doctor says. Any emotional upset, even a minor one, any shock to my system, triggers it immediately. . . .”

  “Poor darling! It’s all my fault!” Paul said softly, with a saintly smile, his face the picture of devotion and humility, of someone who should have forewarned his mistress.

  Unfortunately, Sonia, who was distracted, shrugged her shoulders and murmured: “It’s not your fault . . .” which only served to provoke a sudden, uncontrollable wave of rage in Paul. “That’s too much,” he said to himself, “I mean really too goddamn much!” Not only had he taken away from Sonia his aura of devil-may-care invincibility, not only had he allowed his name to be added to her sad and growing list of recent deaths, what was more, he had had the gall to give her a migraine. . . . Perhaps he owed her an apology for the unseemly shock he had given her, and while he was at it should offer his excuses for his untimely demise.

  “Didn’t your doctor ever warn you that, when your broken heart was coupled with an intense pain in your brain, there could be dire consequences? That it might lead to unbearable suffering? That you might end up devoid of any worry, any real thought, even any feeling?”

  “You’ve already told me that once,” she said. “I know I live like a silly, egotistical, unfeeling goose.”

  “But I’m not talking about a silly goose, Sonia. You have to admit that when I see you moaning and groaning today about your migraine, whereas six months from now I’ll be six feet under . . . well, it makes me wonder, to say the least. Can you understand my . . . my astonishment?”

  He felt himself petty, ridiculous, trivial in this unequal battle of comparative pains and sicknesses. Even if he were a thousand times right, so what? She was not devastated by his death; or, rather, her despair gave way to a migraine. And again, so what? Maybe the best thing to do was forget her as soon as humanly possible.

  “After all, you’re right,” he said with a laugh. “Let’s cut to the chase: for the time being I feel fine, and you don’t. So let’s take care of you. Six months from now we’ll see.”

  An expression of concern, verging on spite and fear, had etched itself on Sonia’s face, stripping it of all its beauty. At the same time it lent her a new expression, that ambiguous age — from her own to that of her mother — that aggressive acts often inflict on any woman. But Sonia suddenly realized the error of her ways and struck her forehead with her hand — not unlike the heroine of some grade-B movie overemphasizing her feelings — and threw herself into Paul’s arms without even taking her painkillers. The clouds disappeared, and she was magically transformed back into the pretty, charming person who had the kindness to give herself body and soul to Paul’s every whim and desire.

  “My darling,” she said, “my great love, you are so right! How could I ever have . . . ? I don’t know. . . . I’m so upset I don’t know what to do or say in times like this! I’m so afraid of hurting you I’m not sure what to do next. Tell me, sweetheart. You’ve taught me how to be happy, Paul. Tell me how to act now . . .”

  She paused.

  “I don’t want to teach you now how to be unhappy,” he said tenderly. “At least not willingly. On the contrary, I’ll do my best to make sure you’re not.”

  It was true that she was doubtless as distraught by the situation as he himself had been earlier in the day. It was possible that his presumed role had seemed to her as false and overwhelming as hers had seemed to him. What right did he have to ask others to be warm and loving and intuitive about him when he was incapable of transcending himself when it came to others? Was there anything so wonderful about somebody who didn’t bay at the moon and don sackcloth and ashes? What else had he done that was so amazingly wonderful? Or unique? Poor Sonia! Pretty Sonia! Exquisite Sonia! Sonia who sought refuge in egotism because she was simply incapable of feeling tenderness! This was not an era when people even knew how to be tender: tenderness had been replaced by toughness, and people were exposed to anything and everything — including things they should not have to submit to. Today, nobody knew any longer how to express true feelings. The only thing that mattered was the frenetic, utterly boring pursuit of money; or an apathetic, and sometimes mortal, desire to evade issues. Pleasure itself had become a diabolical danger.

  Poor little Sonia, he thought as he folded her in his arms. For she was vulnerable like all little girls, even if they were grown-up and wise in the ways of the world. Poor little Sonia, about whom he had realized not too long ago that what excited him was the fact that she was dumb. Yes, he, Paul-the-kind, Paul-the-decent-guy. No, it wasn’t so much her stupidity that aroused him, it was the effect her silliness had on his friends, even the best and the brightest. Their expressions — a combination of sympathy and lust — when Sonia took part in their conversations were meant to embarrass him, but all they did was heighten his desire. However bored he might have been by what he heard her say, he was inevitably aroused by the knowledge of what she was going to do. This banal spice, which was typically bourgeois, this affinity between disdain and desire, was something Paul had discovered early on in his life in the family library. He had not believed in it when he had read it in novels; in fact, he had found the notion revolting. Could you love a woman you didn’t respect? Could you worship someone without believing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn’t admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more.

  In his case, perhaps all this was little more than a thinly disguised attempt to disown Helen; or perhaps it stemmed from a natural tendency in men to underestimate women. He had never really given this a great deal of thought. He had simply accepted it. All he knew was that, in his eyes, there was less difference between Sonia’s intelligence, or lack thereof,
and that of the smartest businessmen he knew than there was between her and some half-smart undergraduate philosophy major. Therein lay the real hierarchy: ten years later — starting at whatever point you chose — what made the difference was what you assimilated along the way, how you fed your mind, not the degree of native intelligence you had to start.

  “What do you mean when you say someone’s intelligent?” Sonia said in that kind of half-pitched, infantile voice that women over thirty often assume.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it means having the greatest number of viewpoints on any given subject . . . being able to see things from several different angles, plus having the capacity to change your mind . . . and to learn. . . .”

  “In that case, we learn all the time, since we’re forever changing our point of view.”

  “No, no! The older you become the more you adopt viewpoints that coincide with your own self-interest. Or you don’t change your mind at all simply because you’ve grown lazy. Or you adopt what your peers think or do, or what life at that stage dictates. As we grow older, our viewpoints shrink and decrease. Inevitably. Little by little we become real jerks. From there we move on to become old farts. At least I will have been spared that awful fate! I’ll never have been anything but a young jerk, then a jerk who was well on his way to middle age . . .”

  “Stop that,” Sonia cried. “I forbid you to say things like that!”

  And at long last Sonia did what she should have done from the start: she pulled him to her and smothered him with kisses, first his face, then his neck, then his shoulder, then his hands, paying homage to the life she still felt coursing through him, that rash and sensual life, that life that did not seem for one second in any way consistent with the one his mind had been trying to convince him of for the past six hours.

  An hour later, lying on the bed next to Sonia, who was still half asleep, Paul looked at the rug where a ray of sunshine had slipped through the heavy drapes that had been inserted between the afternoon and love. He felt himself there where he ought to be, both for his pleasure and his morale. He was on the narrow ridge between his duty and his rights. He was relaxed, comfortable, distracted, back again in the faithful refuge of his entire life. Very simply, he asked himself, for the first time, what it was that compelled him to count his heartbeats, and the ticks of his watch, and try to establish some sort of relationship or equilibrium between the two — an illogical effort, since he had no fever.

  And he also asked himself why he was utterly bored.

  Sonia’s good-byes were heartrending: he must come back that evening. No? well, tomorrow for sure. “No, I can’t wait for tomorrow. Please come back tonight. Just for an hour. Anytime you can make it.” As if she didn’t trust him, as if he were liable to die before he returned, as if death for her lover were a foregone conclusion — one more in a long line — and he was completely responsible for it.

  “Let’s not exaggerate,” he felt like saying. “After all, I have another six months.” But she seemed so determined to make their separation as painful as it was distrustful he didn’t have the heart to say no. And since he couldn’t bring himself to turn his back to her, he exited by walking backward across the landing toward the stairway, which might easily have resulted in his making a misstep and falling down the stairs, which would have been no big deal given the circumstances, except for the embarrassment. Any minor accident or illness, even a cold, was superfluous, unworthy of so much as a comment. That, too, was something he should constantly bear in mind.

  VI

  HE LEFT SONIA’S APARTMENT in a far better frame of mind than when he had arrived. In the final analysis, it was better for her, and for himself, that he was not madly in love with her. He only had to think how terrible he would have felt to be separated from Mathilde — when she still loved him — because of something as stupid as an illness. For in such a case cancer would suddenly have ceased to be something both terrible and banal and become an unholy hell, hopelessly cruel and untimely: an obstacle, not a whim of fate. With Sonia he was moving steadily and stoically toward death, whereas with Mathilde he would have desperately wanted to move toward love, and death would have been a dreadful detour. But if on the other hand Mathilde had been taken from him, if she had been the one who had died, that would have been even worse. And for a moment he felt a sense of relief: at least he had been spared the worst.

  It was almost five o’clock, and he had an appointment at five-thirty. A business appointment, but between now and then he needed to inform himself more fully about his illness. No question of paying a return visit to this morning’s Cassandra. Nor did he have any intention of asking some other doctor out of the blue, who would only prescribe the same tests he had already been given and who, out of a sense of professional ethics, would send him back to his physician of record. No, he would buy a book on the subject. He remembered there was a medical bookstore not far from where he was, in which he found a work entitled The Various Forms of Carcinoma, which he purchased only after he had checked with the bookseller and made sure that “carcinoma” was indeed the highfalutin name for cancer. He climbed back into his car and drove over to the Luxembourg Gardens, where he sat down on a bench between two elderly ladies, who were sulking and apparently not speaking to each other, but who now seemed to be sufficiently suspicious of the newcomer in their midst (his hair was mussed, he looked no doubt more than a little distraught) that they closed ranks and left, chirping away like two birds.

  Paul began leafing through the book at random, then closed it as soon as he saw that the illustrations were less than reassuring. He opened it again to the table of contents, looking for the chapter on lungs, found it, and read the following first line: “Lung cancer is almost always fatal.” He read on as if he were searching for information about somebody else’s problem. “The skill and caution required in intrathoracic operative procedures . . . etc., etc. requires that only experienced chest surgeons undertake the operation.” That flight of medical rhetoric was suddenly interrupted as his book itself took flight, wrenched from his hands by the impact of a soccer ball. Paul scooped up both book and ball and set them beside him on the bench. Looking up, he saw a youngster of nine or ten galloping toward him at full steam, looking incensed if not downright hostile.

  “My ball,” he said dryly.

  “Little jerk,” he thought, “and rude to boot.”

  “I’ll give it to you as soon as you say you’re sorry,” he said firmly.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “About knocking my book out of my hands.”

  There was a silence. The child seemed to be completely alone and independent. No maternal voice calling, no friend yelling to find out where he had gone to.

  “What are you reading anyway?” he asked.

  “A book on carcinoma. In its various forms.”

  The boy began to circle the bench, repeating in an annoyingly nasal voice: “In its various forms . . . in its various forms . . . in its various forms . . . in its various forms . . . ,” hopping on one foot like some kind of cripple or village idiot. Paul looked at him with a mixture of disdain and disgust.

  “What’s that mean, ‘in its various forms’?”

  “It doesn’t mean you in any case. You’re a unique species, called ‘total drip,’” Paul said with a self-satisfied snicker, his nasal tone reminding him of the kid’s. The illness would be untreatable for a little bastard like him.

  And he returned to his book, the soccer ball held firmly under his arm. But he didn’t understand a word of what he was reading; the presence of his newfound adversary kept him from concentrating.

  “I want my ball!”

  “Ask for it politely.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  The kid was clearly lying. Playing the dead-end kid, the homeless brat, to try to soften up Paul. Well, it wasn’t going to work.

  “You can try, can’t you?” Paul was doing his best not to lose his temper.

  “Any
way, you don’t have no right to keep the ball. It’s not yours to keep. It’s my father’s, he paid for it!”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn who bought it.”

  “I’m gonna get my father.”

  “Go ahead. And when you bring him back, I’m going to knock his block off,” Paul said with conviction.

  For a moment the kid stopped in his tracks; an expression of horror and disbelief came over his face.

  “No, mister, he’s going to knock your . . .”

  “Think so?” And with that Paul stood up, stretching to his full six feet two and squaring his rugby shoulders for the little monster, who was not only possessive but cowardly to boot.

  “Well, shit,” the kid managed. “Fact is, my father’s not big enough to take you on, that’s for sure!”

  His outburst calmed Paul down. “Listen,” he said, “just say ‘I’m sorry’ and you can have your ball.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m sorry,” the kid muttered under his breath.

  Paul set the ball down on the ground, aimed, and gave it a kick that send it spinning into the wild blue yonder, while his adversary watched respectfully as it sailed away. Still, Paul could not help thinking, if his deep thoughts about life and death led him to terrorize footloose kids in the ways and byways of public parks, that was not exactly a good sign either. What was more, the kid did not look at all terrorized. All he had done was yield to the demands of an adult, which had surely done him some good. Paul could picture in his mind the dinner scene that night as the kid related his adventure in the park.