Rabagny can't understand where I am and why I am not calling him back, although I did send him a text message yesterday explaining the accident on my way back to Paris, not going into any more detail. I hate the sound of his voice. High-pitched and whiny, like a spoiled kid's. There is a problem with the playground surfaces. The color is wrong. The consistency is wrong. He rants on and on, spits out his words. I can almost see his ratlike face, protruding eyes, oversize ears. I didn't like him from the start. He is barely thirty, as arrogant as he is unpleasant to look at. I glance at my watch: seven o'clock. I could still get back to him. I don't. I erase all his messages with satisfying savagery.
The next message is from Helene. Her soft, dovelike voice. She wants to know how Melanie is, how I am since our last talk a few hours back. She is still in Honfleur with her family. Since my divorce I have often been to that house. It overlooks the sea, and it is a happy, untidy, cozy house I feel good in. Helene is a precious friend because she knows exactly how to make me feel better about myself and my life. For a short while, anyway. What I loathed about the divorce was the split between our friends. Some of them chose Astrid, others chose me. Why? I never knew. Do they not find it strange to go have dinner at the house in Malakoff with him sitting at my place? Do they find it sad to visit me in the empty rue Froidevaux apartment, where it is obvious that I can't get myself together? Some of those friends chose Astrid over me because she exudes happiness. It's easier to socialize with someone happy, I guess. No one wants to sit around and brood with the loser. No one wants to hear about my lonesomeness, about how all at sea I felt those first months when I found myself without a family after eighteen years of being a paterfamilias. How silent those early mornings seemed in my IKEA kitchen, with just the smell of burned baguette and the jingle of the RTL News on the radio to keep me company. I used to stand there, numbed by the lack of noise: Astrid yelling for the kids to hurry up, the tremendous sound of Arno thundering down the stairs, Titus barking in excitement, Lucas shrieking because he couldn't find his gym bag. A year later, I admit that I have become used to the new morning silence. But I still miss the noise.
There are also a couple of messages from other clients. Some of them are urgent. The summer break is over. People are now back at work, into the swing of things. I start thinking about how long I should be staying here. How much longer I can stay here. It will soon be three days. And Mel can't be moved yet. Dr. Besson is not giving me more details. I think she wants to wait to see how Melanie is doing before she gets precise. More messages from the insurance company about the wrecked car and paperwork I need to fill out. I diligently write all this down in my little notebook.
I turn on my computer and use the phone line by the bed to check my e-mail. A couple from Emmanuel and a few business ones. I answer them swiftly. I then open AutoCAD files concerning projects I should be working on. I am almost amused at how uninterested I am by the sight of them. There was a time when imagining new office spaces, a library, a hospital, a sports center, a lab, gave me a thrill. Now it turns me off. Worse still, it makes me feel as if I've wasted most of my life and my energy in a field that simply does not fuel me. How did this happen? When did it all fizzle out? Probably when Astrid left me. Maybe I am going through a depression, maybe it really is a midlife crisis. I just didn't see it coming. But do you ever see these things coming?
I close the computer and lie down on the bed. The sheets still smell of Angele Rouvatier, which pleases me. The room is a small modern one, devoid of charm, comfortable enough. The walls are pearl gray, the thinning carpet a faded beige. The window looks out onto a parking lot. By this time Melanie has had her dinner, served ridiculously early, as always in hospitals. I have the choice between a McDonald's on the town's outskirts or a little pension de famille on the main avenue, where I have already been twice. The service is slow-moving, the room full of toothless octogenarians, but the meals are wholesome. Tonight I decide I shall fast. It will do me good.
I switch on the television and try to concentrate on the news. Political unrest in the Middle East, bombs, riots, death, violence. I flick from channel to channel, sickened by what I see, till I finally end up in the middle of Singing in the Rain. As ever, I am mesmerized by Cyd Charisse's sculptural legs and her tight-fitting emerald corset as she gyrates around a gawky, bespectacled Gene Kelly.
As I lie there marveling at those long, rounded, firm thighs, I feel a sort of peace come over me. I go on watching the movie with the placidity of a drowsy child. It is a quiet happiness that I have not felt for a long time. Why? I wonder. What on earth do I have to feel happy about tonight? My sister is in a cast from the waist up and will not be able to walk till God knows when, I'm still in love with my ex-wife, and I hate my job.
But the potent, peaceful feeling sweeps through me, stronger than all those negative thoughts. It wipes away the pain of the Astrid memories that keep popping back up like a jack-in-the-box, it soothes the worry about Melanie, it erases the anger and frustration of the job issues. I lie there and surrender to it. How beautiful Charisse is with that white veil wrapped around her, arms outstretched beseechingly against the purple stage set. Her legs are so long that even when she is barefoot, they seem endless. I feel I could lie there forever, comforted by Angele Rouvatier's musky smell and Cyd Charisse's thighs.
My phone bleeps, telling me a text message has come through. Regretfully I tear my eyes away from Charisse to pick up my phone.
Dream a little dream of me.
The phone number belonging to the text message is an unknown one. I smile. I know who this is. It can only be Angele Rouvatier. She probably got my number from Melanie's file, which she has access to as part of the hospital staff.
The quiet, content feeling slowly wraps itself around me like a purring cat. I want to make the most of it because somehow, somewhere, I can see that it is not going to last. It is like taking shelter in the eye of a hurricane.
No matter how hard I try, I can never prevent myself, again and again, from going back in my mind to that fateful trip when Astrid met Serge. This was four years ago. The kids had not yet entered the turbulence of adolescence. We had booked a vacation in Turkey, at the Club Med at Palmiye. This had been my idea. We usually spent most of the summer with Astrid's parents, Bibi and Jean-Luc, in their house in the Dordogne region, near Sarlat. My father and Regine had a place in the Loire Valley, a presbytery Regine had transformed into another glaringly modern horror, where we were rarely invited and seldom felt welcome.
The summers with Bibi and Jean-Luc had begun to take their toll. Despite the grandiose beauty of Black Perigord, cohabiting with my in-laws grew tough. There was something fastidious about Jean-Luc's obsession with bowel movements, consistency of stools, frugal menus, calorie counting, and perpetual exercise. Bibi put up with all this, as busy as a bee in the kitchen, her moonlike pink face dimpling, her snow-white hair tied back in a bun, indulging in happy humming and plenty of good-natured shrugs. Every morning as I drank my black, sugared coffee--"So bad for you!" barked Jean-Luc, "you'll be dead by the time you're fifty!"--and hid behind a hydrangea bush to hurriedly smoke a cigarette--"A cigarette will reduce your lifetime by five minutes, did you know that?"--Bibi would walk briskly around the garden entirely swathed in plastic in order to perspire as much as possible, brandishing two ski poles. This was called the Nordic walk, and as she was Swedish, I supposed it suited her, although she did look ridiculous.
My in-laws' throwback to 1960s nudity around the swimming pool and in the house had also begun to tire me. They pranced about like aging fauns, impervious to the fact that their sagging behinds inspired nothing but pity. But I had not dared bring this up with Astrid, who was also into summer nudism on a more moderate scale. The alarm went off when Arno, just twelve, mumbled something at dinner about being embarrassed having friends over to the pool because of his grandparents' flaunting their genitals. By then we had decided to spend our summers elsewhere, although we did come back to visit.
I think she met him on the tennis courts. They had the same teacher, a smarmy Italian who wore tight white shorts and strutted his stuff like Travolta on the dance floor. I didn't sense anything was odd till later, during a trip to Istanbul. Serge was part of our group, fifteen of us from the Club Med, with a guide, an odd Turk who was educated in Europe and spoke with a surprising Belgian accent. Dazed with heat and exhaustion, we traipsed through Topkapi, the Blue Mosque, Saint Sophia, the ancient cisterns with the strange upside-down Medusa heads, the bazaar. Lucas was only seven and did a lot of complaining. He was the smallest child there.
What I noticed first was Astrid laughing. We were on a boat cruising up the Bosphorus, the guide pointing out the sights on the Asian bank, when I heard her laugh again and again. Serge was standing with his back to me, he had his arm around a girl, and they were all laughing together. The girl was young, fresh-faced, her hair tied back in a ponytail. "Hey, Tonio, come and meet Serge and Nadia." So I ambled over and shook hands, screwing my eyes up against the sun to be able to see his face. Nothing special about him. Smaller than I am, beefy. Unremarkable features. Except I noticed that Astrid kept looking at him. And he at her. He was there with his girlfriend, and he couldn't take his eyes off my wife. I felt like shoving him overboard.
What I also noticed, with rising anguish, was that when we got back to Palmiye, we kept bumping into him at every corner. Lo and behold, there was Serge in the hammam, there was Serge doing the customary Club Med Crazy Signs, dancing with the kids by the pool, there was Serge at the dinner table next to ours. Sometimes Nadia was there, sometimes she wasn't. "They're a modern couple," Astrid had explained. I had no idea what that meant, but I didn't like it one bit.
During the aqua gym classes, he was inevitably there, treading water next to my wife, kneading the back of her neck and shoulders during the mutual massage relaxing session at the end. There was nothing I could do to get rid of him. I began to understand with a dull hopelessness that I would have to wait till the end of our stay to see the last of him. I had no idea that their affair began just after we all returned to France. For me, Serge was an unpleasant part of our otherwise successful vacation. How blind I had been.
It was then that Astrid began to show signs of strain. She was often tired, short-tempered. We never seemed to make love anymore. She fell asleep early, cuddled up on her side of the bed, her back to me. Once or twice at night, after the kids had gone to bed, I caught her crying alone in the kitchen. She always managed to convince me that it was just sheer exhaustion or a problem at the office, nothing serious. And I believed her.
It was so easy, believing her. Not asking her any questions. Not asking myself any questions.
She was crying because she loved him and she didn't know how to tell me.
The next day, Melanie's closest friend, Valerie, turns up with her four-year-old daughter, Lea (Melanie's goddaughter), her husband, Marc, and their Jack Russell terrier, Rose. I had to wait outside with the child and the dog while they went in to spend some time with Melanie. The dog is the snappy kind that cannot keep still, seems to be built on springs, and barks persistently. The little girl is just as bad, despite her angelic looks. In order to try to pacify them both, I walk them round and round the hospital, holding one on the lead and the other by the hand, much to Angele Rouvatier's amusement as she watches me from a first-floor window. I feel a slow heat irradiate my pelvis as her eyes flicker over me. But it's hard to look sexy with a howling child and a yelping dog in tow. Rose inelegantly straddles and pees on anything she can, including the front wheel of Angele's Harley, and Lea wants her maman and can't think why she has to be lumped with me in the heat of an August afternoon in some worthless place where there isn't even anywhere decent to play or any ice cream to be bought. I realize how lost I am, confronted with a child of that age. I have forgotten how tyrannical they can be, how obtuse, how noisy. I find myself longing for the nebulous silences of adolescence I have become accustomed to, which I think I know how to deal with. Why in God's name do people have children? I muse, as the combination of Lea's wails and Rose's growls is now causing nurses to open windows and glance at me with despair or disdain.
Valerie finally emerges from the building and takes over the screaming pair, much to my relief. I wait till Marc comes out and whisks Rose and Lea off for a walk, and I sit down with Valerie under the shade of a chestnut tree. The heat is worse today, the white-hot, drying-out kind that makes you long for icy, bottomless fjords. Valerie is majestic and tanned, just back from a vacation in Spain. She and Melanie have been friends for years, through the Sainte-Marie de l'Assomption school they both went to on the rue de Lubeck. I suddenly wonder if Valerie remembers my mother. I want to ask her but don't. Valerie is a sculptor, quite well known. I find her work good, although overtly sexual and far too explicit to have hanging about a house full of kids, but I guess that's because I'm a "bourgeois, uptight boy from the sixteenth arrondissement." I can almost hear Mel's voice poking fun at me.
Valerie looks upset. In the past couple of days I have become used to Melanie's state and have to keep reminding myself that the first time is inevitably a shock. I reach out and take her hand.
"She looks so fragile," she whispers.
"Yes," I say, "but she is looking better than she did on the first day."
"You're not hiding anything from me, are you?" she asks sharply.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, like is she going to be paralyzed--or something hideous?"
"Of course not. But the truth is, the doctor is not telling me much. I have no idea how long Mel is going to have to stay here, when she is going to be up on her feet again."
Valerie scratches the top of her head. "We saw her doctor while she was in there. Nice woman, I thought."
"Yes, she is."
She turns to look at me. "What about you, Tonio? How are you bearing up?"
I smile and shrug. "I feel like I'm in a sort of daze."
"It must have been awful, especially after such a nice weekend. I spoke to Mel on her birthday. She sounded like you were having a great time."
"Yes," I said lamely, "we were."
"I keep wondering why this happened."
She looks at me again. I don't know what to answer, so I look away.
I finally sigh. "She just drove off the road, Valerie. That's all there is to it. That's how it happened."
She puts a tanned arm around me. "Tell you what, why don't you let me stay here a couple of days. You can drive up with Marc to Paris and I'll stay and look after Mel for a while."
I toy with the idea in silence.
She goes on: "There's nothing much for you to do here for the moment. She can't be moved, so why don't you go back home, let me take over, and we'll see how it goes. You need to get back to your job, see your kids over the weekend, and then you can come back with your dad, for instance."
"I feel bad leaving her."
She scoffs. "Oh, come on. I'm her oldest, closest friend. I'm doing this for her, and for you too. For both of you."
I squeeze her arm. I pause. Then I say, "Valerie, do you remember my mother?"
"Your mother?"
"You've been friends with Mel for so long, I thought maybe you remembered her."
"We met just after she die
d. We were eight, I think. I do recall my parents telling me I should never ask Mel about it. But Mel showed me photos of her, letters, little things that belonged to her. And then your father remarried. And then we grew into frivolous teenagers, and we became interested in boys and all that. We didn't talk about your mother much. But I felt so sorry for both of you. You were the only children I knew whose mother had died. It made me feel guilty and sad."
Guilty and sad. I remember friends at school acting that way too. Some friends were so shocked that they couldn't talk to me normally anymore. They ignored me or blushed when I spoke to them. The headmistress had made an awkward speech, I remember, and there had been a special Mass for Clarisse. The teachers were all very nice to me for a couple of months. I became the boy whose mother died. Whispers behind my back, nudges, the thrust of chins. Look, that's him, his mother died.
I see Marc coming back with the little girl and the dog. I know I can trust Valerie to look after my sister. She explains that she has a bag with her stuff, she can stay for a couple of days, it is easy and necessary, and she wants to do it.
So I make up my mind quite quickly. I decide to leave with Marc, Rose, and Lea. I just need time to pack, tell the hotel that Valerie will be needing a room, and say goodbye to my sister, who is so happy to see her best friend that she doesn't seem upset by my taking off.
I hover outside what I believe is Angele's office, hoping to catch her. She doesn't seem to be around. I think about what she is doing right now, what corpse she is attending to at that very moment. As I step away, I see Dr. Besson and explain to her that I will be leaving my sister in the care of a close friend and that I will soon be back.
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