Also in Toronto, I can remember an Indian summer a few years later that was especially mild, with a cloudless blue sky. We were having breakfast on a terrace. In the café, a television screen above the bar was playing. It was on mute and tuned to CNN. Suddenly a voice yelled from inside: Holy shit! And the sound was turned up full blast. Ten minutes later, you were spelling out that name for me that sounded like Aladdin — bin Laden. Your cell phone had lost its signal, as was the case for many devices dependent on a US transmitter, but mine, which used a French number, was still functioning. I was able to reach my office in Paris, and my assistant managed to call your parents at their home and let you speak to them. Thirty minutes later, nothing was working any more. We were cut off from the rest of the world. We felt as if we were in a film in which every image had been slowed down. Reality was distorted. Traffic was moving slowly. Every driver seemed to have succumbed to the same curse: they seemed dazed, their windows open, their radios at top volume. All of them weren’t listening to the same station, but for some strange reason the racket was reassuring. It produced an illusion of everyday normality.
Like all the New Yorkers, you hurried to rent a car. You left in the afternoon. I remember walking for a long time on sidewalks that were abnormally empty, passing stores that were closed, terraces that were deserted. Everyone was home, with their family. I spent the evening alone in my hotel room, sprawled in front of the television, thinking of my children. You waited in line all night to cross the border.
THIS MORNING CLARA ASKED ME WHY YOU AND I WERE FRIENDS. I told her I couldn’t explain it. But I spent the day asking myself that same question. Why do you, the American, the pragmatist, the businesswoman, the softhearted girl, occupy such a place in my life?
In no particular order:
Because you make me laugh, because you move me.
Because you’re indefatigable.
Because you always bring me back a souvenir from the countries you go to without me.
Because you know how to give presents that are unbelievable. I’ll never be without that ivory ball inside a black lacquered box that gives off a vanilla fragrance. I don’t know where you came across it, nor how the idea came to you. You gave it to me “for inspiration,” and for the last fifteen years I haven’t written a single line without having it next to me.
Because you never forget a special occasion or a birthday.
Because you love soul music, like me, and really soft pillows, peonies, hot water bottles, and earrings.
Because at every film festival we attend together, you find the best Japanese, the best cappuccino, the best bookstore, and because you send updates every year.
Because you know how to fix my telephone and my computer.
Because at the bottom of your bag you always have tissues, batteries, candy, Advil, a nail file, a bookmark, and a packet of Tabasco sauce, because you think there’s never enough in a Bloody Mary.
Because you know how to do card tricks.
Because you can put on nail polish in the back of a moving car without spilling it.
Because you have a good sense of direction.
Because you always read my horoscope when you read yours.
Because you never wear eye makeup but do put on lipstick, and I do the opposite.
Because your French is nonexistent, and I love to speak to you in English.
Because I can tell you everything.
WE’VE NEVER SPENT NEW YEAR’S EVE TOGETHER. When that date comes, you’re always in the sun, at the other end of the world, getting a tan. It’s your favorite pastime. You’ve always made fun of my enthusiasm for the Atlantic coast. “Me, I love it when the water’s seventy-seven degrees, the temperature’s ninety-five, and my suntan oil has zero-degree protection.” When I call you, as the clock strikes twelve, we usually sing together, butchering the chorus from Otis Redding’s “New Year’s Resolution”: “Let’s make promises that we can keep.”
This year it’s five minutes past midnight. For once I’m listening to the original version of the song, a duet with Carla Thomas, and I’m thinking of you.
What promises can I make you? What can I swear without lying to you? Tell you that you’re going to wake up and that life will return to normal? I’m less and less sure of that. The people taking care of you think you’re taking a lot of time to come back to life. One thing has been established: they’ve tried everything, nothing more can be done. Your life is in your own hands. Are you even in a state where you can know that?
This evening, your number wasn’t working. That has to be a blunder on the part of the nurse, who obviously forgot to set the answering machine. I’m sure her mind isn’t on her work. After all, it’s a holiday. She was probably thinking of her evening, of the friends she was going to be with, about what she was going to wear. All of a sudden, I was furious about it. Then I ended up admitting to myself that not being able to leave a message was awfully convenient for me.
It’s two in the morning. Everybody is asleep. I’m nibbling those chocolate-covered coffee beans that you’re wild about. I’d give anything for this new month that just started to be the one when you wake up and come back, the month of your resurrection.
While waiting, I wish you everything you want, everything you would desire if you were here to desire something. All I can promise is what I’m sure of because it depends only on me: I’ll be there for you, whatever happens.
If only you’d please wake up.
YOU SAID YOU’D TRIED EVERYTHING TO GET RID OF YOUR MIGRAINES. Changing glasses, mattresses, perfumes. Sleeping with the windows open. Washing your hair in cold water. Staying away from peanuts, white wine. Fleeing underfloor heating. You tried alternative therapies: acupuncture, relaxation therapy, osteopathy. Massaged your temples with essential oils. Plunged your head into an ice bucket … How many hours have you lost lying in the dark with a mask over your eyes, waiting for the attacks to end?
You tried all the formulas, followed all the advice, except for mine: get an MRI.
The idea of the test freaked you out. You said you didn’t trust the concept of magnetic waves. That it had to be dangerous to your health. You claimed you were too claustrophobic to go and lie down inside that long white tube, even though you’d never had the experience beyond watching it on a movie screen.
You finally made an appointment.
You never went to it.
The day before you were hospitalized, you saw your company’s doctor. He suggested a nasal spray for sinusitis. He told you to slow down on the cappuccinos because your blood pressure was too high.
He didn’t prescribe putting your head in a machine to find out what was happening there, or try to understand why you had been suffering almost every day for the last ten years.
He should have.
During all those years, the blood was pounding against your temples. It was flowing in slow motion, drop after drop. A bit like the sand in your plastic bottle that ended up cracking.
An MRI would have detected the danger lying in wait for you, shown that it was necessary to operate immediately, to hold back the blood.
There was a bomb in your head, my darling ostrich.
A membrane was torn. The blood spread into your brain.
It’s called an aneurysm.
Last night I dreamed of you. You looked very elegant in one of those austere pantsuits that you’re fond of, with a perfect cut. It was a silvery chestnut color, and underneath it the collar of a cream-colored silk blouse could be seen. You’d braided your long hair. Your shoes were high lace-ups in chocolate patent leather. A pair brought back from Italy, where you’d just been. While you were telling me about your trip to Rome where you’d seen a first rough cut of a film, we were walking down a hallway; you pushed open a door and we sat down at a conference table where we were joined by other people. I was sitting next to you, and we were listening to someone speak, when suddenly you stood up, violently pushing back your chair, and shouted, “Look!” You were talking
about your hands, which you were holding out in front of you. Everyone noticed how much they were trembling. Then you fainted. I screamed and the sound woke me up.
Maybe that’s what should be done: shouting at you, instead of just staying muffled in silence, which is what I imagine your family is doing as they sit beside your bed. They often say you should frighten people with the hiccups, so the shock cuts off their breath and suppresses the spasm that is contracting their diaphragm. If I were alone with you, I’d grab you hard, shake your arm, and scream at you with all my strength, “Wake up!”
I’VE LEFT PARIS FOR SUNDANCE. Usually I arrive in New York in mid-January in the afternoon and we spend the evening together before flying to Utah, where we rent a car to get to this festival and spend ten days together there.
This time I could have taken a direct flight like the other French buyers. But since I can’t see you, I want to meet those close to you.
I have dinner with Suzie. Out of your New York friends, she’s the one you’ve talked about most often. She’s blond, of Yugoslavian extraction. Her handshake is more efficient than warm, and her face looks tense, as if she’s watching out for something. This isn’t the kind of girl with whom you can imagine gabbing until dawn. But the stiffness of her bearing forces me to get a grip and to choke back the sobs that rise in my throat when she speaks about you.
She tells me about what is going on behind the scenes at your hospital, the administrative hurdles your parents have encountered. She talks mostly about them, whom I don’t know and don’t dare call. Your father is the more shaken of the two. That surprises me. I would have thought that since he’s a dentist he’d be familiar with the medical world and better equipped to deal with it. What’s happening is the opposite. Apparently, your mother is as worried about him as about you. He feels guilty about not having made you take the tests that, like me (I find out), he was urging you to take. It all had to do with his promise to himself to stop meddling with your health.
When you were growing up, he’d had you follow a treatment regime that he claimed strengthened the enamel of your teeth to protect them more effectively against future cavities. It was a brand-new advance in medicine, and he was proud of being able to give you the benefits of it. Ten years later, he’d had to face facts: whereas he couldn’t say for certain that the treatment had helped, it was, on the other hand, overwhelmingly clear that swallowing those tablets every week had permanently turned your teeth yellow. Your father had never forgiven himself. Now he was feeling doubly guilty, for having done too much when you were little and not enough since.
I hadn’t been aware of the story and found it deeply distressing. If you only knew how difficult it is to be a parent! So many times I’ve said to my children, “I’m sorry about not being a better mother. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it is: you ended up with me.” It’s not an example of me sidestepping the self-satisfaction I really feel, a strategy to make them launch into some overdone denials of what I’ve just said. I’m saying it because I think it. It’s an observation I’ve ended up becoming resigned to. I’m not the mother I would have wanted to be; nor, even worse, the one I thought I could be. Day-to-day life has eaten away my ambitions, pulled me down a peg or two. Wear and tear, impatience, fatigue, exasperation have gradually whittled away at my reserves of sweetness and understanding, which I’d thought were inexhaustible. The love I have for my children, which sprang up in me at the very second when I knew that they were growing in my belly, is immense, infinite, and inextinguishable. Unfortunately, the qualities that should have flowed from it — patience, calm, control of myself and my nerves — didn’t come in addition to it. Instead of them, I’m in possession of reserves of guilt, that frustrating, useless emotion, which renders you lucid and therefore unhappy, but doesn’t allow making up for mistakes you’ve committed nor avoiding committing new ones in the future.
Don’t blame your father. Raising someone is permanently fooling yourself. You pass on a sense of ethics, a morality, you create memories. But always with a feeling that it’s incomplete, an approximation, a waste. You want so much to do well that you do badly in comparison, too much so. Obviously there’s love. But your way of showing it is often awkward, and sometimes destructive. Your father’s suffering must be inexpressible.
I take a taxi from the Salt Lake City airport. It’s cold and dry. Last year the snow was falling so heavily that you couldn’t read the traffic signs. The flight had been late, night had fallen, and I didn’t feel at ease at all. You, looking imperial at the wheel of your Lincoln, were whistling, your cigarette and the wheel in your left hand while the right was looking for the radio station with road information, and on the way to that, shutting off the overhead interior light I’d turned on to try to read a road map unfolded on my knees. “You’re going to get nauseous! I’ve already spent the entire flight trying to keep your nose from pouring blood, and my nurse’s bag is empty!” I really had spent an hour with an ice cube pressed against my right nostril, which had begun to bleed as soon as we took off.
“Wait, that gives me an idea!” You’d taken out your cell phone to call highway emergency. When they’d arrived ten minutes later, you’d showed them the bloodstained handkerchief as proof of my illness and how urgent it was that I see a doctor in the city. So they’d given us a police escort, and you’d followed them. We’d been the first to arrive at our hotel and were able to get the best rooms. An hour later our suitcases had been put away and we were sitting in front of a gigantic fireplace, sipping our Bloody Marys, while our colleagues and competitors were still struggling along snowy roads.
This evening I have a drink with your work colleagues. Peter, who was once fat — you can tell by his withered cheeks — smokes like a chimney and speaks through his nose. Paul has a body like a rugby player and looks you right in the eye. It’s going on twelve years that you’ve been collaborating with them. We get a kick out of stringing your names together: Peter, Paul, and Molly. Almost like the folk trio who were so popular in the sixties — Peter, Paul, and Mary. I still have the photomontage made of you and your two partners in which you’re holding a guitar — you, who have never played any instrument.
I always thought that Peter and Paul were exploiting you. I’ve often noticed the way they treat you like an underling even though you’re partners. They were really lucky to have come across you. You’re unmarried, passionate about your work, determined, courageous, and a perfectionist. They’re fathers who go home at six to their families, but they’ve never had any scruples about calling you at inappropriate hours; and you’ve never dared turn off your cell phone, even on the weekend, in case “the boys” need to reach you.
They tell me that your accident took place right at the moment of the renewal of your agreement with the “major company” with which all of you are affiliated. I knew about that renewal date, which I had thought was further away, and I figured the deadline had been postponed because of circumstances. Not at all. The “boys” negotiated for you, in your place. And they hadn’t backed down on anything, refusing to have you excluded from the agreement, even temporarily, or agreeing that your health could be envisioned as a condition for suspension. Quite the opposite. They succeeded in having your name associated with all their decisions, no matter how long you might be absent.
They also arranged for your care to be entirely the firm’s responsibility, since your “accident” had happened in your workplace, twenty-four hours after the company doctor had judged your health didn’t warrant your stopping working because of illness nor your having any further tests. The fact that this professional had acted so thoughtlessly facilitated the negotiations. Your partners were able to guarantee that your parents wouldn’t sue if the firm behaved magnanimously and took care of all the bills that resulted from your condition.
So it was a case of the sordid versus the vile. But at least you’re financially protected from now on.
You’d just walked a visitor to the elevators. When you got
back to your office, you asked Tom, your new assistant, if he would be nice enough to get you a good cappuccino at the Italian place nearby.
It was raining, and it took him some time to get there and be served. Around twenty minutes. When he got back, he was surprised not to see you. When he came forward to put the cup on your desk, he found you at the foot of your chair, lying on your side along the length of the plate glass window. Unconscious.
It was about six o’clock, the first Thursday in November. An hour must have gone by before a doctor attended to your case. They’d taken you to Lenox Hill Hospital, and your two associates had to be the ones who signed the authorization to open your skull. The surgeon had refused to have your parents called instead: “There’s no time. It’s probably too late already. If I’m operating, it’s because she’s forty. If she was ten years older, I wouldn’t even try.”
The procedure took six hours. The “boys” waited until the next day to call your parents. Forty-eight hours to tell your close friends.
YOU CHOSE WELL WITH TOM. He’s exactly as I imagined: slim, elegant, polite. He blushes like a teenager when you look him in the eye. He has a sort of veneration for you. Is it completely sincere or politely hypocritical? He said that he’s occupying your chair temporarily but that he’s a long way from having the competence required, and that only a combination of circumstances justifies his current position. He’s aware of my status as your colleague and friend, but is clever enough not to try to intrude on my memories and make me talk about you. He’s warm and professional, ill at ease and touching. I’m certain you have a weakness for him. He’s tall, with a handsome smile, a retro side to his style, Butch Cassidy, but Newman more than Redford. Completely your type.
Mon amie américaine Page 3