A Fleeting Sorrow

  “You know, papa, there was this man in the park today who tried to take my soccer ball away. So I told him that you had bought it and it belonged to you, and the man said he didn’t give a good goddamn. So I told him you were going to beat him up and he said no, he was going to beat you up, and then when he got up I saw it was true. He would have beaten you up, papa!”

  And as he pictured first the father, then the mother, Paul broke into a nervous laugh. He realized it was the first time he had ever used his size and physical strength to win an argument. Generally he made a point of doing the opposite, telling stories in which he was the fall guy, done in by some young whipper-snapper or other. At first Helen had found it amusing; then she had found it exasperating. He blamed her for having changed, but perhaps he should simply have changed his stories, which lost their spice and humor in the retelling. It was strange how, since this morning, he kept thinking how much he wanted to remove the disgruntled mask of the bitter woman from Helen’s face — a mask he had nonetheless endowed her with over the past few months. As he couldn’t wait to admit that, in the course of their pointless arguments, he’d been wrong and she had been right. Perhaps, he told himself — and the thought horrified him — perhaps it’s because I am going to need her, and because I couldn’t bear to be dependent on a woman I didn’t admire or didn’t love enough. Perhaps — and this was the worst possibility of all — I’m transforming her into a sensitive, wounded woman because I’m afraid that, when the chips are down, she won’t help me; and picturing her as a tender, loving woman again reassures me about her reaction as well as about the help she’ll give me. Or maybe it was a combination of all the above. Period . . . Am I lying to myself to this extent? he wondered, conveniently forgetting that it was only recently that he had tried, or been forced to, commune a little with himself. Very little.

  According to his appointment book, his meeting at five-thirty was with a man who wanted to construct several buildings on the banks of a pond in the near-suburb of Sologne — a spot he happened to know very well. He had been invited there by a friend of Mathilde’s, a man who owned a cabin and had years ago leased the hunting rights in the area. Paul had spent several weekends there. Had never fired a single shot, to be sure; Mathilde hated hunting, but they’d both loved these weekends. The cabin, built right over the water and in among the bulrushes, was cozy and warm during those autumn weekends, thanks to an old stove they kept going night and day, and they had spent long hours reading, making love, and eating out of tin cans. He could vividly remember Mathilde’s jacket, dark brown with red fur lapels, and her face flushed by the cold. When they came in from outdoors, her face was so bright and icy that when she buried her head in his neck she made him moan with pleasure and cold.

  His client had bought these acres, this nice piece of land, which included the pond itself and the cabins around it. He certainly wanted to retain the wild, unspoiled aspect of the place. A great spot for hunting and fishing, but now he would add a touch of class. . . . And with a restaurant, it went without saying, centrally located among the cabins; plus paved roads so you could drive right up to them. And the idiosyncratic showers, which in the old days switched back and forth from hot to cold without warning, would have to give way to proper bathrooms. Ten days ago he had accepted the job with the idea of doing the least damage possible to the environment. Today he didn’t give a damn.

  Even if he became incapable of taking on any project, he was never going to let anything deprive him of the wonderful stream of images that constantly unfolded in his mind and had for several years, all stemming from the cabin on the pond, without any need for him to call them up: the trees turning gold and russet at nightfall, and the pond, so gray, so smooth, so dark, the anthracite pond; and Mathilde’s face glowing in the heat of the stove. . . . While “waiting for Godot” — no, while waiting to die — he was not going to deprive himself of any distraction over the next six months. He wanted to watch time go by, he wanted to savor and welcome it, and it was not by canceling all his appointments that he was going to succeed in that effort. If he had been a great architect, a genius — some latter-day Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier — the notion of his death might actually have stimulated him, and incited him to bequeath to this planet everything that death was going to take away from him. Perhaps he would have turned out a number of rush jobs — hospitals, palaces, rich men’s showplaces, or intimate houses; perhaps he would have invented a whole new architecture, new shapes and forms, something that would have replaced the rabbit warrens that currently housed the poor, or the bizarre stucco constructions that those slightly better off chose as their domiciles. And perhaps, thanks to his creative faculties, he might have managed to transcend himself and forget the destruction of his body.

  But he was not a genius in his profession any more than he was in life. In any case, he was less pretentious than those famous cooks or baritones or movie stars whose memoirs and insights are more and more sought after by publishers and clutter up bookstores to the point of nausea. He was a respectable, reasonably talented architect — at least so he had been told in the good old days when architecture seemed to him an art, an art whose primary goal was not financial gain. The word “genius” had disappeared from his vocabulary eons ago . . . disappeared very quietly, in fact, in direct proportion to Paul’s ability to solve the questions of “how” in his work, leaving the “whys” not only unanswered but unfaced. Why should he imagine that a writer, or an artist, learning that he had only a short time to live, would feel liberated enough to rush to his pen or his brush and create the scandalous work, or the triumph, that till then he had not felt he could dare attempt? The problem with that was: why had he — or she — not dared try it till now? As for scandal, who in this day and age of total freedom could have fashioned a work that might shock? Would those who revealed their inner secrets be embarrassed? Had life bestowed on them — the talented creators in whatever art form — staggering revelations? Did they think of the chaotic scaffolding of their existence as a superb example that they would toss, like manna from heaven, to a public fascinated by their honesty and distraught by their death? And even if the artist were to say to himself, “Wait a minute! The question before the house is whether or not I’m still capable — as I was when I was fourteen — of giving birth to a masterpiece,” the fear of failure, or skepticism about his own talent, would prevent the putative genius from creating anything whatsoever, let alone a masterpiece. The artist, wiser and more acute than ever, would snicker at seeing the work, the pencils and pens, that shoddy paraphernalia, the weary panoply that is supposed to be the mark of genius-at-work, which till now has lain dormant, or fallow, without any great regret. Ah, no! Spare me those speeches in which compassion and confusion mindlessly battle it out! If he were to be judged (and consoled) at all, let it be by women and women alone — for they knew him and he knew them — women who . . . that . . . where is this leading? . . . in short, women who had been his mistresses. Aside from that, no reproaches, no regrets. Even to himself. He had been through too much, heard too much, to take any more, and doubtless given as much as he had got. The six months he had left would not be spent listening to what other people thought or said. Actually, when he thought about it, he didn’t listen to others any longer and hadn’t for quite some time. Except on those rare occasions when something he was reading caught his attention. It was not that what people were saying was any less interesting; he had simply tuned out. Still, he had to admit that he had admired some people at certain times in his life, creative people in fact, but apparently admiration was a muscle, like intelligence, and if it wasn’t used it tended to atrophy. And so you began to be increasingly uninterested, without really noticing it, in those people you saw less and less, in those you listened to or read less and less. What was more, it seemed to Paul that this evolution — this self-leveling, this effort to accept his limitations, this painless shedding of his ambitions and intellectual pleasures — far from bringing him into
another circle of friends, less brilliant no doubt but more fun to be with, on the contrary had the nefarious effect of making him lonelier. A loneliness made all the more terrible in that it was, from the start, involuntary, with no compensating up side. Anything, he had decided, no matter how pretentious, no matter what the social situation, would have been preferable to this solitude.

  Enough of all that! Let’s drink to life! To loneliness! Unfortunately, life for a mortal only too aware of his allotted days was intolerable. How come, he wondered, when the notion of an accidental death did not affect him in the least; in fact, he found it quite bearable. And besides, there were these incredible accidents in which you felt no one would ever come out alive, and yet some came out without a scratch while others were toted off to the morgue. The point was, in an accident you were never sure of the results. Yes, that was it: the idea of imminent mortality could be made bearable, even romantic, if there was an element of doubt about it, an alternative, which gave you the possibility of an out. Made you believe a trifle less in its inevitability. “It’s not doubt that drives people crazy, it’s certainty that does,” Nietzsche said. Or was it someone else? And, man, was Nietzsche right on the mark! What was his first name again? Nietzsche? Nietzsche? Frederick? Ludwig? No, that’s not it. Not that it matters, for Chrissake. Who cares what the man’s first name was? But nonetheless his mind kept dredging for the answer in the murky waters of his subconscious. Or was it unconscious? Whichever, he came up empty.

  He arrived at his office, parked his car in the clearly marked crosswalk, right in the faces of two shocked green-and-purple-outfitted lady cops, whose happy lot in life was to dole out parking tickets. For not only did the car’s driver park illegally but he made no effort to slip the necessary parking authorization under his windshield wiper. He then had the gall to walk over to the parking meter, rummage in his pocket for some coins, bend down as if he were listening to the meter, and give it a pat on its little defenseless metal head. And then he had the further gall to walk past them without offering any legal or logical explanation for his bizarre behavior, although there was no way he could not be aware of their presence. The only thing he said, which made no sense but which they duly noted, perhaps out of habit, in their little blue books, was “He’s an old pal of mine; he never wants me to pay. I keep trying, and he keeps saying no. Not a damn thing I can do about it!” and with that he disappeared into an office building, which, one may presume, was the site of his professional activities, assuming he still had any.

  Paul’s refusal to abide by the laws and civil codes of the city, however much a game, had also always been a source of pleasure to him, a pleasure made all the greater by the fact that he had so many parking tickets that he was more than a scofflaw — he was in a category all his own, and he knew that even with their creaky computers they could never catch up with him. Not now, anyway.

  He seemed in fine fettle as he walked through the corridors of his office. Before he had arrived he had looked in the elevator mirror at the tall, rugged, dark-haired, strange-looking fellow staring back at him. Objectively, he would never have believed the guy was sick. As the elevator had reached his floor, and just as the door opened, he suddenly remembered Nietzsche’s first name: Friedrich. Friedrich Nietzsche! That was it. He gave a sigh of relief, for while he was making fun of his mind search he was also relieved that he would not have to waste another hour or two dredging up the man’s first name (for his client, who was already seated in the waiting room, did not look like someone who could provide him with any cultural information, however trivial). Paul made a quick detour to his office to say hello to his longtime, utterly devoted, loving secretary, Irene.

  “You’re late,” she admonished him, “but at least you’re looking well.”

  That stopped him short, and he had a moment’s hesitation. But how could he tell Irene his news, his life and death news? In her modest dress and careful chignon, she was too prim and proper, too much a character out of some 1920s novel, for him to think of laying something this heavy on her thin shoulders. No, not Irene; she less than any other woman. Impossible. And the realization that he couldn’t tell her made it all the more imperative that he find someone to whom he could reveal the gory details of the hamster’s prognosis. And yet he had already told two people, Gaubert and Sonia — three if you count the guy at the gas station — and in all cases he had had the feeling he was playing a role in some comedy. In the first scene he felt he had missed his cue — or perhaps it had been Gaubert, it didn’t matter — and the second scene had been too absurd, too ridiculous for any audience, even the audience of one that he represented. No, at this juncture nobody really knew what he knew — maybe because nobody was interested.

  “You’re right,” he repeated mechanically, “and if I look good, it’s because I’m feeling good,” and for some reason he really didn’t fathom he felt pleased with Irene. He gave her a broad smile, and she, shaking her head, responded with her habitual look, half tender, half disapproving. He leaned over so that she could straighten his tie, dust off his jacket, and pull his sleeves down to their proper length. She had been making these same maternal gestures for twelve or thirteen years, and for twelve or thirteen years she had derived the same pleasure from them. He had too, he thought as he straightened up. In addition to these maternal-professional caring gestures, she was also a good secretary, with a mixture of ignorance and intuition that he liked and appreciated.

  “Any important information I should know about our client? What’s his name again?”

  “Pierre Saltiery. Some big wheel in the sports world, I believe. Sports clothes and the undergarments that go with them, I’m told.”

  Paul wondered what the terms “big wheel” and “undergarments” meant to her. A manufacturer of ski clothes and thermal underwear? Some wheeler-dealer in the world of competitive sports? Or the man behind the slightly risqué Icecapades?

  He headed toward his office, stopped to shake Saltiery’s hand and lead the way. He sat down on the professional side of the desk. A few hours earlier he had been seated on the other, the bad side.

  “Tell me how you got to me?”

  That was always his first question. The answer may not have been a hundred percent truthful, but it was inevitably enlightening.

  “We’ve known each other for, oh, twelve, maybe thirteen years,” the man said.

  That caught Paul’s attention, and he looked more closely at the man. He was thin and ruddy, a combination that Paul found slightly disconcerting. He pegged him as a sporting ascetic. Type A. He was wearing a purple corduroy suit, which did not suit him at all well. He was a man, Paul decided, who had not yet made his choice in life — the choice of who he was — and that Paul found reassuring, for he could not help comparing him to this morning’s hamster, a man already fixed and frozen in time and space, whose personality was reflected in his professional finery: spotless white coat, carefully controlled voice, his gestures and movements those of a professional underling. No question, Paul loathed this type, quite independently of the man’s deadly diagnosis. . . . But what if the hamster had said to him, “All your tests are fine. You’re in very good health. Come back and see me in a year?” Would he have hated him just as much? No, but he would never have gone back to see him. On the other hand, he could never have brought himself to hate Dr. Jouffroy, who he knew would have handled the situation with kid gloves. He would have started by telling Paul that he wanted to redo a couple of the tests, they didn’t look right the first time, and then he would have said something about Paul’s not being quite up to snuff and we’ll have to discuss what we’re going to do about it. This morning he had felt so helpless, so alone in the presence of the hamster, who (at best) didn’t give a damn, or who (at worst) was delighted that a rugged six-foot-two specimen was going to die long before the skinny, five-foot-four pretentious abortion who had somehow, presumably, managed to get through medical school. It was a crying shame: compassion should be an obligatory part o
f any doctor’s education and baggage. They should have a course called Compassion 101. Compassion and all its various implications.

  Roughly thirteen years. That would make Paul twenty-six, twenty-seven, at the time. He had not yet made a name for himself, was not very well connected, not very well heeled either. But those were the years when he was still a kid, verging on manhood, and madly in love with a woman who still loved him, or who had already begun to love him less, depending on the month we’re referring to in that year.

  “We met at Bligny, in fact,” Saltiery said. “You came there with Mathilde. I loaned you my cabin on the pond.”

  So it was he, the man of the cabin. Paul had been jealous of him at the time, but till now he had not remembered his name. Jesus! between his Nietzsche void and completely forgetting Saltiery, no chance of an A in the memory department this week.

  “Of course, of course,” Paul said, getting to his feet and offering both his hands across the desk to his long-lost client-friend, as if two veterans of the Mathilde campaigns ought to embrace, pat each other on the back, cling to each other as if they were the survivors of some terrible shipwreck — the irreparable happiness that came from having lived with or loved Mathilde. And Saltiery must have felt the same way, because he too got to his feet and took Paul by both arms before sitting back down. His expression was both playful and a mite sad, that of a knowing accomplice, the precise expression that Paul would have liked to have as well.

  “What a great spot it was,” Paul went on. “Incredibly beautiful. And that’s the place you want to . . . change? That’s too bad, no? A pity.”

  “A pity but necessary,” Saltiery said. “I bought the whole area a short while ago, including the pond. Bought the land, really, for the hunting cabins had all fallen into rack and ruin. So I have no choice but to rebuild. It will still be a hunting preserve, but catering to the . . . how shall I say . . . to the urban wealthy. Snobs if you prefer. Places for duck hunting. Bungalow-style buildings, set far enough apart so people have their privacy. Living room, one or two bedrooms, and a kitchen big enough to eat in. You know, American style. The kind of duck-hunting lodge people of this kind deserve.”