How many hours would she have to wait before her husband got back?
13
Concealed amid lilies and gladioli, Xavière was arranging bunches of peonies in vases and, from her shop, keeping an eye on the door of Number 8, where Faustina Valette, the publicist, lived, just to see if that hussy had changed lovers again. At the sight of the dashing mixed-race man who came out, her lips curled.
“Oh, no.”
She had recognized Maître Dany Davon, who had become famous in the media when he had defended Mehdi Martin, the sex maniac sadly legendary for his serial killing of little girls, the shame of Belgium.
“This is too much.”
As far as Xavière was concerned, Faustina had crossed the line: going to bed with Mehdi Martin’s defense lawyer was like going to bed with Mehdi Martin. Dany Davon was no longer the kind of person respectable people could associate with. Taking on Mehdi Martin, albeit for professional reasons, was enough to pick up some of his scandalous aura and become a criminal yourself.
“You didn’t go away for the Easter holidays, Xavière?”
Annoyed at being disturbed, Xavière turned and glared at Mademoiselle Beauvert. “No, I can’t afford it.”
Her creased forehead, knitted eyebrows, and surly expression signaled to her well-to-do customer that there was no room for idleness in her life.
“Closing for a day is too expensive. Flowers don’t understand that it’s a public holiday. Instead of resting, they wilt.”
Her tone meant: I don’t behave like a murderer but like a responsible human being.
Out loud, she went on, “So no point dreaming about taking time off. In another life, maybe . . . Money’s so hard to earn.”
These words implied: No, whatever people in the neighborhood might say, I don’t charge much for my flowers. I’m not making a huge profit here. If I were, instead of being poor, I’d be rich as King Midas.
Then, with the confidence of an expert who has consulted every item in a dossier, she added, “Especially nowadays.”
She had been dishing out this kind of comment from the very start, but since the European financial crisis and the breakdown in the world economy, it had produced a particularly powerful effect.
“Congratulations, Xavière,” Mademoiselle Beauvert stammered in embarrassment. “Even without time off, you still manage to look great.”
She marveled at Xavière’s smooth, golden complexion, which set off her quicksilver eyes.
Touched by the comment, Xavière thought of the pretty fisherman’s cottage she had refurbished by the North Sea, where she stayed secretly every Sunday and Monday. But since she wanted to make sure people didn’t know her true lifestyle, she shrugged. “It’s just a bit of makeup. You do your best with what you’ve got.”
“But you’re lucky you have such beautiful skin.”
Xavière liked the compliment, which had an unusual effect on her: it made her angry. Who did this Beauvert woman think she was? Such intolerable familiarity! Talking about her skin, trying to be nice . . . If the conversation carried on like this, she would have to smile and be gracious, and that was out of the question! She was not about to let people drag pleasantries out of her.
“So, have you made up your mind about your flowers, then?”
Not only did Xavière not like it when people felt comfortable with her, she could stand them only when she was able to bite and scratch.
Terrified, Mademoiselle Beauvert pointed to a vase. “A selection of peonies, maybe? Pink and ruby-red ones?”
“Excellent choice.”
The words had come out of her mouth automatically, since she had gotten into the habit of giving grades to her customers’ artistic choices, thus maintaining constant tension in her shop.
“Orion, a bouquet!” she bellowed toward the greenhouse in the backyard.
A tall, lanky old man appeared, skinny except around his stomach. His clothes were in disarray, his hair disheveled, his mouth open, and his eyes quizzical, as if he had just been awakened.
“A bouquet for Mademoiselle Beauvert, please, Orion, if you don’t mind?”
He took away the flowers and went off to execute the order. But before going through the door, he spun around, seized by a sudden realization, and approached the customer in an affable manner. “How are you, dear Mademoiselle?” he exclaimed warmly.
“Very well, Orion, very well.”
As he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, clearly driven by a genuine warmth, she shuddered in surprise.
Xavière was amused by Mademoiselle Beauvert’s disgust, knowing she was such a prude she couldn’t bear expressions of affection. Orion saw his gesture through to the end, and when the kiss hit her on her cheek, Mademoiselle Beauvert closed her eyes.
“Mademoiselle Beauvert, always so fresh and stylish,” Orion said.
“Thank you, thank you, Orion,” she replied, eager for the contact to end as soon as possible.
“I’m going to make you the most splendid bouquet ever, Mademoiselle. It can never be fully worthy of you, but I’ll do my best.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert grimaced and gave a brief, sharp giggle, embarrassed by both Orion’s attentions and the look Xavière was giving her.
As soon as he had left, she shook herself and went up to Xavière. “How is he?”
“Oh . . . ” Xavière raised her eyes to heaven, implying that her husband was deteriorating.
“I’m so sorry for you . . . ”
“Come on, he’s the one to feel sorry for . . . As for me . . . Well, at least for the moment he isn’t aware of anything.”
“Really? So much the better.”
“Of course . . . but for how much longer?”
To make sure that Mademoiselle Beauvert grasped the fact that this painful subject ended here, Xavière gave all her attention to arranging some arum lilies.
Four months earlier, seized with a sudden inspiration when dealing with a customer who irritated her by listing the various cancers afflicting her family, she had claimed that Orion had the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Her story made quite an impression. Not only had the customer been put in her place, but the whole neighborhood had subsequently paraded past to see the unfortunate man. Because, even though there wasn’t an ounce of truth in the story, everybody found it plausible, given that the florist’s husband had never behaved normally.
Orion overflowed with kindness and affection. Just like a dog, he would manifest joy to everybody he knew. No sooner did he spot a familiar face than the only thing that mattered was to run to that person. How many times had he crossed the street, ignoring the cars, stepped over a fence in a municipal park, and nearly lost the flowers he was out delivering, in order to give someone a warm greeting? If people let him get close, there would be an outpouring of exclamations and compliments. He would keep repeating how happy he was to see them, congratulate them on something wonderful about themselves—their tan, their hairdo, their scarf, their coat, their poodle. Cordial to the point of craziness, he would smile one more time then walk away, not even noticing that the person involved had barely responded.
Whenever someone asked him a favor, he would become enthused by the task requested of him and vow that he would do everything in his power to give satisfaction. Unfortunately, his abilities weren’t at the level of his goodwill, and since, in addition to a kind of universal incompetence, he was also absentminded, he always failed to keep his promises.
It was hard to hold a conversation with him. Either his joy at seeing you made him repeat the same sentence ten times, or he would walk away from you because he had seen someone else to say hello to. Those who invited Orion and Xavière for dinner had observed that only she spoke while he kept silent, listening with wide-open, even awestruck eyes to those who were talking. He intervened only rarely, and never appropriately. All it took was one word
to set his mind racing. For example, hearing a conversation about religion, he had interrupted the dinner guests with, “Jesus? Jesus is great! Always handsome, always young. Ever seen an ugly Jesus in a church or a painting? No. Nobody has ever seen him as ugly, artists show him as being sublime. What a success! Christianity is quite something, isn’t it?” From what kind of soul did these words come? What thoughts drove his quirky brain? Orion defied comprehension.
Xavière had met him twenty-five years earlier, at a time when she had been a free agent who often went out. One night she had seen him in a nightclub, standing tipsily on a table, doing a striptease while singing “La Vie en rose”—badly, at that. An accountant at the time, and the daughter of an accountant, she had immediately been drawn to the slim, distinguished thirty-year-old, a real party animal as only a Belgian can be. She had found him crazy, different, romantic. In addition, he kept pulling banknotes out of his pockets, treating his friends, and buying extravagant rounds for strangers.
They had gotten close on Xavière’s initiative alone.
One night, she had admitted to him that she found him strange. He had replied, opening his arms wide, as if it was something blatantly obvious, “Of course. I’ve been like this since my swan dive.”
“Excuse me?”
“One night at midnight, when I was totally plastered, I went back to my parents’ house with some friends—they’d seen me home because I wasn’t in a fit state to drive. I took them into the garden and decided to leap from the diving board into the swimming pool. Except that I’d forgotten it had been drained the day before.”
“Did you smash you head?”
“I really enjoyed my swan dive. I remember it very well. It was absolutely the most heavenly swan dive I’ve ever done in my life. Pure, neat, with an extraordinary momentum, every second of it perfectly controlled, almost hanging in the air. It was a wonder. Only it was tough, landing on the tiles ten feet below. I think I even passed out.”
“What happened afterwards?”
“Oh, then it was all up to the doctors. To be honest, I had access to the best—my father knew everyone at the Saint-Luc hospital. They were sure they’d done a good repair job on me. They looked really pleased with themselves. But the truth is, nothing’s been the same since.”
With that, he had casually laughed and bought a round of whiskey for the patrons in the bar.
Orion and Xavière had become lovers, early morning lovers, exhausted bodies that leave the nightclub at closing time, just before daybreak, lovers trying to escape the grip of loneliness. They didn’t screw well, they screwed politely, indebted to each other for help in getting through the difficult hours of sobering up.
When, after many questions and enquiries, Xavière had realized that Orion had no plans for the future and was squandering his father’s inheritance, she had hastened to get closer to him, suspecting that if Orion kept spending at that rate, there would soon be nothing left of the nest egg.
One Sunday, at about six o’clock in the morning, as the rain lashed the windowpanes, after a passionless but polite bout of intercourse, she had expressed the wish to marry him. In his eccentricity, he had liked the idea.
They had a lavish wedding. Orion hadn’t skimped. Entrusting an idle old aristocratic lady with the task of making the event a success, he had managed to have the ceremony held at Sainte-Gudule Cathedral, with a choir, an orchestra, carriages, and the reception in a château, its vast grounds filled with fairground attractions.
Finally, the day after their wedding night—during which he and Xavière had been so drunk that no caress was exchanged—they had gone on honeymoon to Brazil, where they had drunk their way from one luxury hotel to another and gotten on intimate terms with local high society, to which the aristocratic lady had introduced them.
Upon their return, Xavière discovered that Orion’s fortune had all been frittered away. All he had left was a rented-out apartment—they turfed out the tenant in order to move in themselves—and a shop near Place d’Arezzo.
She had stopped him from selling it, suspecting that as soon as he had the money in his hands, it would melt like butter in the sun. Since one of her aunts had a shop in Liège, she had gathered some information and suggested to Orion that they open a florist’s. He had found the idea so ludicrous that he had agreed.
Much to their surprise, they had made a success of it, since the wealthy local population lacked such a shop. Not only had they discovered a taste for their skills, but Xavière had turned out to be a clever manager and Orion a tireless worker. The transformation was astonishing: the former amateur dandy would go to the Mabru wholesale market at dawn, bring back the flowers, open the metal shutter at nine o’clock, stay in the shop all day, then lock the doors at eight o’clock. This went on seven days a week.
Now the decadent thirty-year-old become an elderly man with blotchy skin—owing to the daily comings and goings in the cold rooms at the back of the shop—balding, with hair gathered at the sides, which made him look like a scarecrow in the fields.
Xavière was younger than him and had weathered the years better. Still slim—she hated cooking, and Orion ate as little as an alcoholic—and nicely dressed thanks to being an almost professional shopper at sales, she looked like her husband’s younger sister. She didn’t consider him a spouse but rather an aging child she was responsible for, a kind of family slave who had to work hard in order to justify all the effort he cost her.
“Is that bouquet coming, Orion?” Xavière bellowed, annoyed at having to wait so long.
An ecstatic voice came from the back of the shop. “Almost . . . The masterpiece is on its way.”
Xavière resolved to resume her conversation with Mademoiselle Beauvert. “He does everything his own way. He’s getting worse and worse.”
“Is he losing his memory?”
“Sometimes . . . Yesterday, for instance, he couldn’t find his way to the shop.”
“Poor Xavière . . . What do the doctors say?”
“They won’t make a prognosis. You know, Alzheimer’s is an umbrella term for various different kinds of degenerative illness.”
Just then, quick as a bullet, Orion suddenly reappeared. “Here you are, my dear Mademoiselle Beauvert, I’ve done my best.”
He went down on one knee and, theatrically but sincerely, handed her the bouquet. Meanwhile, Xavière was counting the money.
Mademoiselle Beauvert thanked them, took her purchase, begged Orion to get up, and left, relieved that she had managed to get through the test—buying something in this shop was always a test—without encountering too many obstacles.
“That Mademoiselle Beauvert is so pretty!” Orion said ecstatically.
Xavière carried on working without replying. She never listened to him. Certain that most of the time his babbling contained nothing interesting, she paid no more attention to it than she would to the yapping of a dog.
Orion was returning to the back of the shop when he pointed at a yellow envelope on the counter. “Did you see you’ve got mail?”
Xavière didn’t react, so he picked up the letter and brought it to her.
“Here.”
Xavière frowned in a hostile manner. “Thanks, there’s no rush. I’m not usually in any great hurry to read my mail.”
“It might be good news.”
“You really think so? In forty-five years, I’ve never known the mailman to bring me good news. Poor Orion . . . ”
He bowed his head pathetically. Whenever she wanted to put an end to a discussion with her husband, she would let out an exasperated “Poor Orion.” Hurt, he once again took refuge at the back of the shop.
Once he had disappeared, she opened the mail.
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
Annoyed, Xavière swallowed, checked that nobody was watching her, stuffed the paper into her po
cket, and left the shop.
When she got to Place d’Arezzo, she walked up the front steps of Number 6. Séverine de Couvigny smiled when she saw her.
In the hallway, once the door had been shut, Xavière stood facing Séverine, grunted some incomprehensible sounds, then, at the end of her tether, gave her a loud slap on the cheek.
Once the slap had been dispatched, she relaxed and recovered the power of speech. “Have you gone crazy, Séverine? Don’t ever do that to me again. Orion nearly read your note.”
14
As he walked across Place d’Arezzo, Tom stopped dead at the sight of the gardener, so stunned that he held his breath.
That perfect torso, those tapered legs, that chiseled, pure, virile face . . . Why was such magnificence being inflicted on him? And without prior warning? He took a furtive look around to make sure nobody had detected the emotion that had just stabbed him through the heart.
The beauty of men was torture to him, arousing him to such an extent that he didn’t know if it was misery or bliss he felt—probably both, since desire both galvanizes and torments us.
Gasping for breath, Tom stood and gazed at Hippolyte. His heart was pounding as if he was running, and yet his legs were rooted to the ground. For a moment, in an attempt to overcome his emotion, he tried to erase the initial bedazzlement, to go against his own judgement, to criticize that athletic body, to downplay its perfection. But in vain. The more he searched for a repulsive element, the more he discovered that everything, from the ebony hair to the slender ankles and the powerful muscles bulging beneath his soft skin, made Hippolyte irresistible.
A question began going around and around in Tom’s brain, a question he often asked: did this guy like girls or boys? Tom was wary of answers too easily prompted by his own appetites, which led him to see homosexuals everywhere. All the same, he exclaimed narcissistically, “Too handsome not to be gay.”
He continued on his way, circling Hippolyte in slow motion, casting dark, passionate, feverish glances at him, his jaw tensing, his Adam’s apple quivering from repeated swallowing, which seemed to suggest: I could eat you up.
The Carousel of Desire Page 11