Life, Only Better
Page 16
An awful silence.
A sepulchral silence under the pale neon lights.
The man looked me straight in the eyes. His face didn’t betray any emotion. Did he think I was crazy? Had he thrown in the towel a long time ago? Had he already signed something? Would he have preferred me to be from the insurance company? Or a liquidator? Or a notary clerk? Was he thinking up a reply scathing enough to send me back where I’d come from?
Was he racking his brain for words to remind me of the presumptuousness and arrogance it took for a gawky little Parisian middle-class liberal like me to come here like it was some adventure-quest?
Was he deaf? Or simpleminded, maybe? Uh . . . was he even the boss? Was he Pierre Cavanès? Did he even know my neighbors? Was he a farmhand? Or a tractor repairman, maybe?
Did he understand French?
Yoo-hoo, noble aborigine, you understand what me say to you?
It lasted for hours. Dang, it was gettin’ kinda dangerous there . . . as my bricklayer friend would have said. I didn’t know if I should take a step forward, or run away.
The problem was that I didn’t want to leave. I’d traveled too far, and come such a long way, since last night. I couldn’t.
The neon lights buzzed, the TV crackled, the dog counted grease spots, and I waited. I still had their label in my hand, and I was following my friend Isaac’s instructions. I was giving destiny a nudge.
Was I ridiculous? Was the situation ridiculous? Too bad. Too bad for me. I might be asking to get kicked in the teeth again, but I wouldn’t abandon my nest. Not again. Never again.
I’d had it up to here with being polite. It didn’t pay.
“Just how much of that wine did you drink?” he asked me, finally.
His face was still impassive, but there, clinging to the question mark, was the faintest, tiniest teasing note.
I smiled.
He looked at me for a minute longer and then turned back to his engine.
“So Moïse sent you, then.”
“The man himself.”
Silence.
Long silence.
Grosses Têtes.
Awkwardness.
After . . . I don’t know . . . ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe, he looked up at me, and then, with a glance, indicated the steering wheel.
“Go ahead. Start it up, just to see.”
And I started it up.
Just to see.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Paris in 1970, Anna Gavalda’s first published work was the critically acclaimed collection of short stories I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, which sold over half a million copies in her native France and was published in the US by Riverhead in 2003. She is also the author of Someone I Loved and the international best-selling novel Hunting and Gathering (Riverhead, 2007), which was made into a film starring Audrey Tautou and Daniel Auteil. Gavalda lives in Paris.