Get Well Soon

by Marie-Sabine Roger

  I just want to ignore her.

  But the only way to do that would be to get her to ignore me.

  So as not to have to deal with her unfathomable silences, from time to time I force myself to make conversation. It is a skill at which I’ve developed a certain expertise thanks to my brother Hervé, a past master at delivering platitudes and silence.

  “Did you find out what you wanted about names the other day?”

  “Yeah but no I dunno really.”

  “What were you looking up? Your own name?”

  “Nuh-uh, I know my name, so that’s sorted.”

  I laugh in spite of myself.

  She furrows her brows, thinks and then corrects herself.

  “No, that’s not what I meant, I meant, I already looked it up.”

  “So what is your name?”

  “Maëva.”

  She twists her chewing gum, pierces it with her tongue, and adds:

  “It’s Tahitian, it means ‘welcome’.”

  “Do you know where Tahiti is?”

  She shrugs.

  “Yeah, no, I’m not sure… like, Australia I think… Somewhere over there.”

  She bends over the keyboard, slowly, diligently hunting and pecking with her index fingers, a stray lock of hair across her face. She chews, she snuffles, she sighs.

  The girl is the living embodiment of osteoarthritis: a chronic pain to which one gradually becomes accustomed, but which never goes away.

  If you could get back something you had when you were twenty that you’ve lost with age, what would you choose?

  I don’t understand the question. I haven’t lost anything. I’m as innocent and high-spirited as I was when I was eighteen. A vestal virgin.

  It’s true, the years haven’t changed you a bit. That was the first thing I noticed when we met up.

  But seriously?

  Seriously? I don’t know. I’m thinking. What about you?

  I think it would be the urge to “do stuff”. I feel like I don’t really have any drive any more. I don’t get enthusiastic about anything, I don’t get carried away, I find everything a drag. It’s like there’s nothing in life that gets me excited any more, you know what I mean?

  Not at all.

  OK. Good. So we’re in the same boat, then. That’s reassuring.

  Even Nathalie is worried, she used to find me annoying, now she just thinks I’m depressing. I think she preferred me the way I used to be.

  Well then make an effort, work yourself up into a foul mood! It’s not exactly rocket science, for fuck’s sake!

  I can’t get angry any more. I whinge and I gripe and I piss people off, but it’s half-hearted, I’m not fooling anyone.

  You were never much good at it anyway. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve always been a nice guy, my pathetic friend.

  You think it’s to do with getting old?

  Absolutely not! Take me: insufferable as I ever was. No, it doesn’t wear off, quite the opposite, I’d say… Though I have to say you’re starting to sounding a bit maudlin. This existential crisis of yours wouldn’t just be liver failure, would it?

  I have to admit I am feeling pretty washed-out these days. Drinking too much chouchen, probably. That said, nothing succeeds like excess…

  I THINK I KNOW exactly what Serge means when he talks about his enthusiasm and his urges fading. I can feel them fading too. And I’ve started to become careful.

  Careful, me!

  When I was young, I took every risk going. I drank too much, drove too fast, accepted any dare, no matter how stupid or how dangerous. Coming within a hair’s breadth of getting killed or getting banged up, that was my whole life.

  These days, I’m happy if I can walk twenty metres without falling over. I hang onto my cane, my knees knocking, terrified I’ll injure myself. It’s shock from the accident, I know that. But thinking back, I realize that I’ve been too sensible for months now. Handling myself with kid gloves, like I was made of glass. I delude myself into thinking that sixty-seven isn’t old age, that I’m still in my prime.

  Whereas in fact I’m hurtling downhill on a bobsleigh. Clinging on for dear life.

  At twenty, I had more strings to my bow than a politician has offshore accounts: playing rugby, pumping iron, cycling, running, swimming. To pull girls, obviously. Why else would anyone risk pulling a muscle or breaking a bone? No one under the age of forty works out “to keep fit”. That’s the sort of thing you tell yourself when you’re middle-aged and single. Or just middle-aged.

  When you’re young, you exercise to make yourself stronger, more attractive to others.

  To reinforce your position as an alpha male.

  Back when I was a teenager, guys ranked each other based on simple, incontestable criteria: having bulging biceps, owning a hot car, being good—or claiming to be good—in the sack, and being able to hold your liquor.

  I’m sure it’s much the same today, even if the criteria are probably a little different. I’m no expert on the subject of teenagers—far from it—but as a species, they can’t have changed that much. Between the age of fifteen and twenty, life is like a wildlife documentary: a struggle to the death for love and for territory. If men pissed in a corner every time they were horny, schools would stink like urinals.

  “If youth but knew, if old age but could,” now there’s a bloody stupid saying…

  Health is something we think about only if we’ve never had it, or if it’s failing.

  Life is something we cling to only if it’s threatened.

  Youth is something we can talk about only in the past tense.

  “If youth but knew”, there would be no gratuitous acts, no hare-brained schemes hatched on distant comets. Everything would be premeditated, meticulously planned, carefully controlled. People would bet only on sure things. So there would be no pleasure in winning. We’d be bored shitless. Better to know nothing, since the prospect of future failures would only discourage us. And having a sneak preview of future happiness would be like opening a Christmas present in November. The present would still exist, but the joy wouldn’t be the same.

  “If age but could”, it would barrel along, never looking back, never getting any wiser, forever ploughing the same furrow, getting bogged down in the same mire. Galloping along at breakneck speed, clinging to the reins. Like an ageing dictator, unable to let go.

  It is because we can no longer do certain things that we move on to others. We have no choice. Life drives us down the road, there is no hard shoulder, no junction where we might do a U-turn.

  On with the countdown!

  But we don’t just wake up old one morning, we grow old, we have time enough to prepare ourselves. It’s not as though it creeps up on us unawares, so why act surprised?

  If I had known, there are two or three pitfalls I might have avoided, certain words I would never have said. Others I would have thought to say more often. Maybe I would have got less worked up about things that didn’t matter, I would have made the most of the menu but, broadly speaking, now that I’ve got as far as dessert—who knows, maybe as far as the coffee—I think that “had I but known”, I would have lived the same life.

  And “if I but could”, aside from ripping off this itchy plaster cast and going home tonight to cook a dinner worthy of the name, I wouldn’t change anything. Even hopped up on analgesics on this bloody awful bed in this fucking awful room, I’m happy with the life I’ve lived.

  It suits me, being alive.

  I’m not ready to shuffle off my coil just yet, I’m planning to live to be a hundred.

  MAXIME STRETCHES, heaves a sigh, massages his neck and shoulders. He yawns like a lion, jaws gaping wide, a clear view of his pink palate.

  “Rough day?”

  “Rough night, more like it. We staked out a building until four in the morning all for nothing, no result… Then at six, I was called to a domestic… My head’s all over the place.”

  “Your life is an action-packed thriller!�
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  “Yeah, not so much. In the movies, there’s two hours of action and in the end the bad guys get banged up. We spend most of our time pushing paper, taking statements, filing charges, and endless hours doing surveillance in unmarked cars. Not to mention the dealers, the fuckwits who beat their wives, the pickpockets, the guys running protection rackets that we arrest only to release for lack of evidence or who some judge gives a suspended sentence to because the jails are full. It’s not Columbo, let me tell you. In the real world, we spend more time dealing with low-level pimps rather than gangsters and serial killers…”

  “Maybe, but you like your job, don’t you?”

  “On days when it goes well and I feel like I’m making a difference, I like it…”

  He falls silent, engrossed in his thoughts, or in the haze of lost sleep.

  I’d rather change the subject.

  Maxime is a truly decent guy, and obviously people hate cops on principle, but when we need them we’re relieved that they’re there. That said, I’m still wary, for genetic reasons. You don’t grow up with a militant left-wing father without feeling a certain caginess when dealing with the police.

  I ask him:

  “Do you think you could get a message to Camille for me?”

  “The kid who pulled you out of the river?”

  “The very same.”

  He thinks.

  “… We’ve got his details in the incident report, it shouldn’t be too difficult. What should I tell him?”

  “Just tell him I’d like to see him, if he’s got a moment free. Try and be diplomatic about it, he’s temperamental.”

  “Really, I found him quite shy…”

  I decide not to say any more.

  Then Maxime starts telling me about some movie he’s planning to go and see, and I don’t recognize the title, the director or the main actors, and certainly not the co-stars.

  It feels like being slapped with a senior citizen’s card.

  I have the choice, I can change channels, because I’m culturally ignorant, or I can take an interest. I shrug off my irritation and listen. This guy is a real movie buff. He only ever watches a film in the original language and tries to convert me to the joys of subtitles. I tell him I’m all in favour, except for my eyes, which refuse to read the tiny lettering at the bottom of the screen.

  He sympathizes with my infirmity, and I tell him to shut up. Next thing you know, he’ll be pushing me into the grave.

  FOR THREE or four days I had peace and quiet.

  I thought the snot-nosed little madam had gone home. But I celebrated too soon, here she is, on the dot of eleven o’clock, just before lunch, carrying a parcel. Something about her appearance has changed, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  I put on my glasses.

  I see it all at once: the deflated belly that makes her breasts look even more enormous and, swaddled in the yellow blanket, a little sprog, three stray hairs on its head, tiny hands balled into fists, mouth red, eyes screwed shut.

  “His name is Justin,” she says with a satisfied air.

  “Is he… is he yours?” I stammer.

  Subtle as always, that’s me.

  She nods, masticating her greenish chewing gum, then reels off a list of statistics, never pausing for breath, in serious danger of suffocating.

  “He was born the day before yesterday at 5.20 p.m. weighing 2.53 kilos and measuring 48 centimetres, he’s an Aquarius, I had to have a Caesarean because otherwise there was no way he was coming out.”

  I nod sagely, unsure whether it is a blessing or a curse to be called Djustin, to be an Aquarius, to weigh about five pounds and to be born by Caesarean to a girl of fourteen.

  I think it only fair to admit that it never even occurred to me that she was pregnant.

  How could I have been so blind?

  She doesn’t seem surprised.

  “I know, I wasn’t showing, everyone said so.”

  I manage to affirm without a blush that her superfluous weight was barely detectable.

  “Could you take a photo of us?”

  She hands me a digital camera. I can hardly refuse. I take two or three shots of the young mother and her newborn. She holds herself straight, she doesn’t smile.

  Then she asks if I want to hold her little brat for a minute; horrified, I politely refuse on the pretext that I might drop him.

  She pooh-poohs my excuses.

  “It’s just so I can get a picture of the two of you. You just need to support the head, hang on, there, that’s fine.”

  She deftly places the tadpole into my arms with surprising skill for a girl her age who has been a mother for all of two days. The baby smells faintly of sour milk and vomit.

  I stifle the urge to retch.

  Once safely cradled in my arms, he opens his eyes, long narrow slits, stares at me as though I were far away, and seems about to laugh.

  Stupidly, I announce:

  “He’s smiling!”

  “He’s probably pissing. Babies smile when they’re peeing, the nurse told me.”

  Illusions exist only to be lost.

  That said, I understand the kid, and this wave of wondrous contentment. Over the past few weeks, I’ve caught myself smiling happily when I finally manage to empty my bladder.

  There are two or three questions I’d like to ask the gymslip mother. Out of sheer intellectual curiosity, no emotions involved.

  For example: why the devil has she decided to keep the baby? What exactly is she planning to do with it? She’s fourteen, has she any idea of the hell her life is going to be?

  But she doesn’t seem bothered, not at all. She takes snaps of me and the bonsai from every angle, zoom on, zoom off, with flash, without flash.

  The nurse comes in with my lunch and is so startled she nearly drops the tray.

  She goes into raptures over the baby, all coochie-coochie-coo, buh-buh-buh, with that sickening facility women have of getting emotional about nothing at all. When she congratulates me on being a grandfather, I am so shocked I’m speechless.

  Maëva doesn’t even notice, she just says:

  “I better go change his nappy, besides it’s time for his feed.”

  And, as she leaves:

  “I won’t be able to come back until tonight, to go on Facebook…”

  *

  I only just managed to stop myself saying, “Don’t worry, come by whenever you can.”

  It’s not good for me being here, it wears me down.

  WHEN SHE HAD her third miscarriage Annie was thirty-nine years old, she had her tubes tied and threw out all the magazines with decorating ideas for nurseries.

  We tried to carry on, to make do, and then we tried to make believe.

  But it’s impossible to live surrounded by things unsaid. The questions left unasked and the words unspoken litter the ground like shards of broken glass. After a few years, it is impossible to move without drawing blood.

  Everything reminds you of the emptiness: your friends’ children, the giggling of kids in the local school; knowing you will never say, my son, my daughter; watching your wife suffer and being helpless.

  It contaminates your whole life.

  It is like nuclear radiation: nothing is visible, everything is destroyed.

  Slowly, we drifted apart, Annie and me, without even realizing. Our mattress developed a hump in the middle, each of us huddled on our side of the bed.

  Annie dried up, she shrivelled like a dead leaf. She gave up.

  People who have lost all hope are like desecrated places, like burgled houses. A warren of ransacked rooms, broken lights, shattered doors. Gusts and draughts that nothing can stop.

  Silence and emptiness.

  I was travelling more and more frequently, I lost myself in my work. My days were busy, active, to me they seemed as short as shadows at noon.

  And Annie was left alone with her solitude.

  Unconsciously, I think I chose not to notice her thinness, the overflowing ashtrays, her
uncombed hair, the fluff balls under the furniture, the bags under her eyes.

  Say nothing, see nothing, a comfortable cowardice.

  The day she died, I was in Novorossiysk working for a grain importer.

  By the time my parents managed to get in touch, and I made it to Gelendzhik airport to catch a plane, I got back too late, much later than young Maxime with his father.

  There was nothing but a slab of marble covered with fresh flowers and mournful tributes: To our darling daughter—To our dearest daughter-in-law—To my departed sister.

  The funeral had taken place the day before. My in-laws had taken charge of everything.

  I had asked them to lay flowers on my behalf, a spray of blue thistles, her favourite flowers. No ribbon. They could not bring themselves to do it. Thistles at a funeral, without so much as a note? What would people think?

  Instead I was represented by a wreath of red roses garlanded with a ribbon bearing the hackneyed words: To a dearly beloved wife. That same phrase—words I would never have written, much less said aloud—was also engraved on the marble plaque surmounted by a pair of stilted doves gracelessly pecking at each other, looking vaguely ridiculous.

  I had been cheated of my own goodbyes by that irresistible force, the uncriticizable rectitude of people who mean well.

  Sometimes, I would whisper to no one in particular those sweet nothings I had never thought to say to her.

  Annie and I had not made love in a long time. So what? We made a curious couple. A cohabitation of two room-mates who dreamt different dreams in a shared bed. But even when hearts no longer beat as one, when a partner dies, a part of us dies with them. When we share our lives with someone, they keep a sliver of it in their pocket. It is their light that is snuffed out, it is we who miss the radiance.