by Mary Fleming
“A year.”
I nodded. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not surprised.” It had something to do with that half beard, his animal presence, and his pepper smell.
“Actually, I shouldn’t have been either. He was with someone else in Aix when I met him.” She rolled her eyes. “What goes around comes around, right?”
“Sometimes, I guess.”
“You’d think at thirty-five I’d know better.”
“I don’t think that kind of mistake has an age limit.”
“That’s probably right. Anyway, at the moment my mind knows I’m better off without a serial cheater, but my gut is having trouble catching up. It will. My getting this studio is a sign that work and more work is the answer for me. And to hell with men.”
“Come on. Just because Curt acted like a jerk . . .”
She smiled and looked at me with an ironic, knowing smile: “Do you want something to eat? I didn’t have lunch. I’m starving.”
“Sure,” I mumbled, looking at the blackboard. Not only did I keep forgetting how much she knew about me, I kept forgetting what I knew about me. What I had done, peppery patchouli oil nowhere in sight. Then again, if Curt had been seeing someone else when they met, she wasn’t exactly a stranger to the dark side either.
We ordered some food and a carafe of red wine. Someone came out on the stage to check the sound system.
“Do you play that guitar next to the fireplace?” I asked.
“I played a lot when I was teenager. At school, for assemblies, parties. That kind of thing. Mostly now I play for myself. It’s a nice break from the easel.”
She told me about how she’d been to art school in London instead of going to university, and that as soon as she’d finished, she’d run to Aix, where she’d met Viviane and Cédric. Since then, she said, she’d always felt the need to move around. She was hoping that this year in Paris, where she’d be staying put as much as she could, would actually help her work, focus on it as well as on herself. “But my life is boring. What about you?”
I was saved by the jazz trio. Béa knew them too; more kisses were thrown around. The pianist tried to get Béa to come up and sing, but she turned red and refused.
“You sing too?” I asked.
“Only when I’m in the mood,” she answered, still flushed.
The musicians talked and made jokes between playing. Because it was a small space and they knew most people in the audience, we might have been sitting in someone’s living room. It was intimate and relaxing, comforting almost. When there was no music, Béa and I talked about inconsequential things, and that I also found easy. By the time we left, it was after midnight. In front of the door of the drab building that concealed the beautiful house, we paused.
“I’d totally forgotten about the bicycle,” Béa said, putting her hand to her cheek. “I’m sure I’ve got my checkbook in here.” She opened the mouth of the leather rucksack and it was a spring box of old paper, odd pens, and plain junk.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“No, come on.” She was still rummaging through the mess.
“Remember I told you we got it for free. It was just a couple hours of work. Plus I owe you for my dog practically knocking you unconscious. I won’t take a centime for it. Though it looks as though you’ve got plenty of those little coins running loose in that big bag of yours.”
She stopped rummaging and looked up, hand still in the bag. Seeing my smile, she let go that laugh again, just as I’d hoped. I wanted to leave with it in my ears. “All right. I’ll accept your charity. Thanks very much.” And she reached up to kiss me on both cheeks. “Let’s say I owe you a supper then.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll ring you soon.” And she disappeared behind the dark door, which closed with a firm click.
Making a wrong turn on the way back, I found myself walking along the side of Montmartre Cemetery. The tombs and mausoleums loomed in the dark. Though I had enjoyed the evening and found conversation with Béa effortless, I couldn’t shed thoughts of Mother’s illness and impending operation. On my way up to Montmartre, a haggard face on the boulevard de Clichy made me think of her. The hushed, grim building in front of Béa’s house was like a morgue. During our meal and the music, I kept imagining my mother in the hospital, nurses coming in, getting her ready for the next day’s operation. How lonely and scared she must be feeling, whether or not Edmond had been allowed to stay and help her settle. By now, in any case, she’d be lying alone, surely awake, with no food or drink in her, in preparation for the anesthesia. With my prolonged post-accident stay in the hospital, I could imagine it perfectly, right down to the crinkly noise made by the plastic bed pad under the sheet.
I picked up my step, walking as fast as I could to get past the chill that the tombs from the cemetery seemed to emanate over the wall. I didn’t slow down, even once I was back into the lights of Paris nightlife, and by the time I reached my blue door I was out of breath. Inside, when I switched on the light, it looked as if a natural disaster had occurred. During my prolonged absence, Cassie had removed all the covers from the mattress, dragged my towel from the bathroom, and shredded a couple of newspapers that had been on the table. She greeted me sheepishly, but I couldn’t scold her. I knew that she was frightened when left alone. That having changed owners twice, she was always afraid it would happen again. The same latent fear had haunted my childhood. People are there, then suddenly not, and your life is never the same afterward. I grabbed the dog, happy to feel her body’s warmth and exuberance, but she wriggled away. Now that I was back, her anxiety had vanished and she just wanted to go out.
The next day, late morning, I flipped through the pages of my small leather address book, a Christmas present from Edward in bygone days. Its green calf-leather cover was soft and smooth, the pages inside crisp and fine, cream-colored and gilt-edged. The best, even though the present was half meant as a joke. “Let’s see if you can fill up a quarter of it,” King Rolodex had laughed as I’d opened it that Christmas Eve. As for his coordonnées, I’d taken Tipex to the entry because of course everything had changed: his work number, his home address and number, the name of his wife.
The phone rang several times. Edward had in fact not moved far. He and Anne-Sophie now lived—“very comfortably,” was the way Mother had put it—on the rue de Bellechasse. I imagined echoing halls and cavernous salons making passage to the phone a spatial challenge, until it suddenly occurred to me that I might get Anne-Sophie, or even worse, one of the children. It was Wednesday, and they would be home early. I hung up. I phoned his portable number.
“What news?” I asked.
“Nothing yet,” I heard through background static. “It would be good if you could be there when she wakes up this afternoon.”
“I’ll be there by two.”
“Caroline has a piano recital this afternoon. Then I have to stop by the office again, but I’ll come early evening.”
The clinic was outside Paris, in the leafy, swank suburb of Neuilly, and public transport was inconvenient. For the first time in many years, I took a taxi. It rolled down boulevards and avenues lined with imposing apartment blocks set safely back from the public thoroughfare behind black iron fences. The clinic had no black fence and was marked with a large cross; otherwise it looked just like the buildings around it. Behind some trees there was a parking lot, mostly filled with Jaguars and Mercedes, one of which must have been obscuring Edmond and Mother’s little Renault. I paid the driver and walked up the path at the side to the entrance. The thick glass doors opened automatically with what almost sounded like a human sigh. The hushed lobby was paneled with light, cheery wood and adorned with a fake Chagall here, a fake Manet there. A pert woman with bleached blonde hair and a white coat that barely covered a short, tight skirt and tanned legs sat behind the front desk. After phoning upstairs to confirm I was really expected, she sent me up the elevator to room 33. It was not until I was walking down the corrido
r to Mother’s room that I got my first pungent whiff of hospital, and I might as well have been right back in there myself, aching and bandaged after my bicycle accident. They could get rid of the harried staff and the yellowed walls of a public establishment, but ultimately they couldn’t mask that smell of illness and death.
I gently pushed open the door to Mother’s room. She was lying like a marble pillar under the sheet. Without the bleeping machinery and tubes attached to her, she might already have been stretched out in her coffin. Leaning forward in a chair at her side was Edmond. He looked up expectantly, obviously hoping for a doctor or a nurse. Somebody helpful. Anyone but his spiteful, disaffected stepson. Because his already sagging face fell farther at the sight of me. It was a look that confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that my long-term campaign had been an unmitigated success. But instead of being buoyed by victory, I felt punctured with shame.
“She hasn’t woken up yet?” I asked quietly as he stood up. Since the last time I had seen him five years ago, he had shrunken noticeably, and his deeply set grey eyes had taken on a sad droop. Only his aquiline nose and the protruding, almost diaphanous forehead resisted the assault of aging.
“No. But soon,” he said.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“As well as can be expected, I think. But you know,” he paused and lowered his voice even more, then shrugged.
We both looked down at her pale, frozen face. Edmond gestured to the other chair, and I sat down too, putting my eyes right at the level of Mother’s white shroud. The sheet was clean and still, but all I could think about was what lay underneath, what that body had been subjected to earlier today. How it would have been sliced open with a razor-sharp, sterilized scalpel, how the doctor would have peeled back her skin like his breakfast fruit, before sawing through the muscle wall and honing in on the murderous intruders, which he would have scooped out like peach pits. What did they do with the tumors? Did they plop them into a metal bowl, then cart them off for more slicing? It sent a nauseous shudder through me, and I forced myself to focus on the plastic drip suspended above Mother’s head. For many minutes I watched the transparent liquid fall, pregnant drop by pregnant drop, regularly and relentlessly, at once soothing and tortuous.
After awhile Edmond said: “Edward will be here early evening.”
“So he said.”
I returned my attention to the drip and thought about how much more burdened than mine other people’s lives were. Edward not only had a grueling job but also a sprawling family. Besides the three children with Stephanie and the other he’d had with Anne-Sophie, another was on the way, he’d told me. And here, I, Trevor so-proud-of-his-name McFarquhar, had shop hours and a dog to worry about, with help from Piotr on both fronts. And then there was Edmond, who’d had the prime of his life poisoned by me. What must that have been like? To come home every evening from a job he didn’t much like to my scowl, to my disdain?
Edmond sighed and shifted in his seat. I looked down at my dirty fingernails, at the grease I could never quite get out of the small crevices in my hands. “I’m sorry, you know, for all the trouble I’ve given you, over the years.”
His bushy eyebrows raised then settled again above the deepset eyes. He exhaled, almost as if in physical pain, shifting on his chair. “Well. Yes. Thank you.”
“I mean . . .” I stopped because his attention was elsewhere, back to Mother, whose eyes were now open. We both stood up, shifting into her line of vision so that she wouldn’t have to move her head. “Hélène,” Edmond croaked, putting his hairless, freckled hand gently on her shoulder. “Trevor is here,” he said, and Mother’s eyes turned slowly toward me, then closed again with reptilian languor. “The doctor said it would be like this for the rest of the day. Mostly sleep.” We sat down again.
For the first time I could imagine what it must have been like for her, sitting at my bedside after the bicycle accident. How utterly terrified she must have felt at the idea that, after having already lost two members of her family, she might be about to lose another. While I was ruminating about how extraordinary it was that this hadn’t already occurred to me at some point in my albeit solipsistic existence, the doctor swept into the room. He beamed energy and competence, and though it was hard to imagine maintaining such a friendly, confident air amid all that death and disease, his manner was reassuring. After checking Mother’s machines and charts, he called us out into the corridor.
“The cancer has spread everywhere,” he said, now serious and earnest. “I’m afraid there is little we can do except make her as comfortable as possible. She’ll be heavily sedated until tomorrow.”
“How long?” said Edmond, who seemed to have shrunk several more centimeters in the last minute.
“That’s always hard to know. Probably not more than six months.” BP shifted on his feet; I instinctively took his arm.
When the doctor left, we looked at each other but didn’t speak. After awhile, he asked me in a whisper about the shop and the bicycle business. I asked him about how he was spending his time, now that he was completely retired. Mostly, he said, reading history. The First World War, “the last time the world as it had been was turned on its head,” he said.
By early evening Edward still wasn’t there, and I started worrying about getting back to collect Cassie before Piotr closed up the shop. Not wanting to disturb Mother, who was again sleeping, I asked Edmond if he had a mobile phone.
“No.” He waved his hand as if trying to keep all of modernity at a great distance.
I walked down the corridor to look for a pay phone, thinking that we weren’t completely at odds, my stepfather and I. We shared a recalcitrant relationship to time, a greater interest in the past than the present that meant we did everything in our power to resist the frantic age that was buzzing around us.
When I got back, Edward had just arrived. He and Edmond, previously almost exactly the same height, were whispering shoulder to shoulder. I could feel their intimacy, their complicity, and for once, instead of bristling, I felt envious.
“You two need to go home,” Edward said. “I’ll stay until closing at ten.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said, leaving first.
And the next and the next, I thought, passing through the sighing glass doors of the entrance into a beautiful spring evening.
FIVE
‘“I HAVE NEVER been able to lie to your mother,” Edmond said to Edward and me as we convened the next morning under a fake Picasso in the wood-paneled lobby of the clinic. “Even to spare her feelings,” he added mysteriously. “We have to tell her the prognosis.” I looked at Edward, but his mind was as always on how to proceed, the future rather than the past.
“If it would be easier for you, I’ll tell her,” he said. “Or we’ll come with you, if that would be more helpful.” He looked at me; I nodded.
After a moment, BP said: “You know, I’d planned to tell her myself, alone, but now I think it would be better if we were all there. Seeing her two boys together might give her strength.”
“I agree,” I said, looking down at the ground. “We should all be there.”
So the three of us took the elevator upstairs and walked silently down the corridor to her room, gloomy as executioners. We stood around her bed. She was propped up now against the pillows.
“Hélène,” Edmond said, taking her hand and smiling. “You look much better today.” It was true, she did, and I could see him hoping, as we would all hope at some time over the next weeks, Mother included, that she would defy nature and the medical profession and recover.
“I feel a bit better. Thank you.” She looked at each one of us, but her eyes lingered on me. “And you’re all here.” Then the tears welled up and spilled over one by one, just like the drip I had watched so attentively the day before. Edward took her other hand.
“Anything can happen,” he said, then looked apologetically at Edmond for such a misleading remark.
“Hélène,” BP st
arted again. “We have spoken to the doctor.”
“You don’t have to say another word, Edmond,” she said quietly but firmly, perfectly in control despite two wet lines down her pale cheeks. “I know.” And then she closed her eyes. The three of us exchanged glances.
“But . . . ,” Edward started but stopped himself. The force of his optimistic nature made bad news almost impossible for him to accept. He was always sure a way out could be found, if the search was thorough enough and the effort sufficiently determined.
“What can we do for you, to make you more comfortable?” Edmond asked, looking up and down her bed, as if he’d lost something and was sure it was to be found in the folds of the bed covers.
“This is what I would like,” said Mother, eyes still closed. “I would like to go home as soon as possible. You’ll have to get a nurse. Don’t let Lisette convince you she can do this on her own. But I want to be home. That’s all.”
I was searching for something to do or say, anything other than standing there like my usual sullen self. “Once you’re settled at home, we’ll have a big family lunch,” I finally spluttered. Edward and Edmond stared at me in shock.
“Absolutely,” Edward said, never disarmed for long.
For the next week, Mother stayed at the clinic. She was so uneasy, we took turns sitting with her all through the visiting hours. Being caught up in trying to make her comfortable, all of us pushed aside past troubles and resentments, and it was as if nothing had ever ruffled the seas of our domestic tranquility. But every day I thought a little more urgently that it was time for things to be said. That if I didn’t try to chip away at that wall of silence soon, the opportunity would be literally buried forever.
On a clear, spring morning, Mother was wheeled down the corridor, into the elevator, through the hushed lobby and the sighing automatic doors. Edward pushed the chair, and I carried two plants that had been sent by friends. Plants that would certainly outlive the owner.
Edmond had pulled their small car out front. Edward and I helped Mother from the wheelchair into the front seat of the Clio. It was a horrible moment, her skeletal elbow poking into my hand, the effort required for her brittle, pained body to fold up and fit in. Once settled, she pushed the button to open her window and lifted her face to the two of us. “I’m sorry it always takes something unpleasant like a stay in the hospital, but thank you both for being here.” Then Edmond moved slowly forward, as if he were driving a breakable antique, and Edward and I were left side by side, watching our mother and stepfather disappear down the leafy avenue. After a moment, I said to Edward: “Do you think she’ll ever make it to another family lunch?”