The Art of Regret

by Mary Fleming

  And I was getting nourishment of another kind. On Thursday and Friday evenings, though I didn’t see Béa, I spoke to her on my new touch-tone, cordless telephone, for over an hour each time. After the calls, I lay on my mattress with my head gently buzzing, my arms and legs a-tingle. It was funny in a way, given our geographic proximity, that I didn’t just rush up there and grab her. But both of us needed to get some distance from little Marie’s death, from Cédric’s and Viviane’s crushing sorrow. And I still questioned what would happen on that Saturday night. Because when we talked on the phone, it was quite superficial: what we’d done that day, how we thought Cédric and Viviane were getting on. Or we told each other stories about our younger selves.

  What was or wasn’t happening between us, just what these long calls did or didn’t mean, was not discussed. Though she clearly enjoyed talking to me, I still wondered—okay, worried— what Béa really thought of me. Had she embraced me the first time out of sympathy? And then had she allowed me to embrace her at Hautebranche because she needed some comfort that night herself? I kept thinking, with a rising panic in my throat: she knows all about me; how could she ever trust me? When I said to her on Friday night, just as we were hanging up: “I can’t wait to see you tomorrow,” spoken with all the breathlessness of a teenager, she just said: “Good night. See you tomorrow.”

  We in fact ended up going to a restaurant. Béa said she didn’t have the energy to cook, and anyway, she needed to get out. I of course wondered if this request wasn’t a ploy to keep me as far away from her bed as possible. After much agonized reflection, I decided to leave Cassie behind. Although she was fine at the Relais, she got overexcited in restaurants she didn’t know and took up too much space under cramped tables. And it was better not to assume that things would end up the way I wanted them to.

  When I got to the restaurant at eight thirty exactly, she wasn’t there yet. Béa would of course be late. I waited for twenty minutes. Finally she came rushing through the door, out of breath, the color high in her cheeks. When her eyes found me, a smile crossed her face—warm and wise and apologetic, all at once—and my pique at her tardiness dissolved.

  “I know,” I said, kissing her hello. “You’re sorry you’re late.” Her hair was still wet from the bath.

  “I—forget it.” Up came the laugh.

  From the first sip of wine until I put too large a tip on the table, I was enchanted, almost to the point of delirium. I didn’t pay attention to what I ate, to anyone else in the restaurant. I couldn’t get enough of her voice, of her eyes that lit up and went wide when she told a story, of her small, tapered hands that flew up when she was making a point. The whole dinner my head buzzed gently, my limbs tingled. And then we were out on the street and walking, locked arm in arm, and suddenly Béa stopped and asked: “Where are we going?” I said: “I have no idea.”

  This was the first pause the whole evening. Finally I said: “I have to walk the dog.”

  “Of course,” she said with a mischievous smile.

  “Would you like to come walk the dog with me?”

  She hesitated but was still smiling, gently playing with me. “Okay.”

  And so we walked, still arm in arm, but quieter now, toward the rue des Martyrs. I only panicked when we approached the building. Though I had warned her my studio was “stark,” a quick peek at my room might send her scampering back to the tasteful heights of Montmartre forever. In front of my door, I fumbled with the lock, as if I’d never opened it before. Cassie’s nails clicked against the floor in a frantic dance on the other side.

  “It can’t be that bad,” said Béa with one of her chortles.

  “The dog can’t wait,” I said, opening the door just wide enough to let the dog out and my hand in for the leash hanging from a hook inside. On the street, I asked, trying to sound casual: “Can I walk you home?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She still had that damn smile on her face. But now I started to laugh and said: “So—what—has this been your strategy right from the start? A way to penetrate the walls of my cell? To join the ranks of Cédric and Piotr and become the third human being to have crossed my threshold?”

  “No,” she smiled, but thoughtfully, and then seriously, not smiling anymore: “I do, though, want to know what I might be getting into. I mean, I have no interest in a fling. And I don’t think I could bear another Curt.”

  I didn’t answer, just put my arm tightly around her shoulder and led her straight back to my room. With the dog walked and my excuses run dry, I opened the door all the way. Inside, the street lamps cast just enough bloodless light to highlight its emptiness. I turned on the low-watt lamp on my table, hoping that would cheer things up. Not much. Cassie had shredded a wrapper I must have left on the table and pulled the duvet halfway to the sort-of bathroom. I watched Béa run her eye over the flat surfaces. “Not big on knick-knacks, are you?” she said. “Or furniture, for that matter.” We were still standing, the last two players in a game of musical chairs: one chair left and who would get it?

  We settled on the mattress.

  THREE

  SUNDAY MORNING, ON a high that surely no drug could ever induce, I floated down to the shop, opened up, put out the bicycles, and waited in a sort of heavenly stupor for Piotr and Wanda to arrive.

  “Are you all right?” asked Wanda as she slipped her bag from her shoulder.

  “Oh, yes,” I said through the haze.

  And off I went again to gather more information about my father and our life in America from my mother. As soon as I left her early afternoon, I was back at the café, writing what she’d said and now, too, what I thought about it and how it had contributed to making me the adult I had unfortunately become. I found that the writing gave me a blessed distance from myself, an ability to take everything less personally. It was liberating. Thrilling, actually, especially with thoughts of Béa lingering in the background, the prospect of another night with her ahead of me.

  I had never and have never since felt as charged with life as I did during those few days with my dying mother and those few nights with my first real love.

  Then came Monday. I left Cassie with Piotr and Wanda, borrowed Edward’s car again, and drove out with Béa to unborn Marie’s funeral. Béa had her guitar with her, because Cédric had asked her to sing. Probably to fill his mind with something other than his dead child and grieving wife, he had organized the service like a professional. The little Romanesque church in the village next to Hautebranche couldn’t contain all the mourners. Their families were there, Viviane’s all the way from Aix-en-Provence. Friends from Paris drove out. Then there were people from Cédric’s school in Vernon. His students had requested that a bus be hired so that they could attend. Many teachers had come along too. Except for the school group and Béa, it was just like their wedding.

  By inviting so many, perhaps Cédric was trying to remind Viviane how much they still had in their lives. How important it was to carry on. Because Viv wasn’t carrying on very well. Her face behind the large dark glasses that gave her a strangely ill-suited Hollywood look was drained of all its usual expressiveness. She walked as if she’d been wound up and pushed in the direction of the church. According to Cédric, she’d just disappeared. “It’s as if all her insides had been scooped out,” he said. “Except when she’s talking about God. And that’s even worse.” Being Cédric, he didn’t say anything to her. He just circled around her, silent or accommodating.

  During the procession, where Cédric was the only pallbearer necessary for that shoe box of a coffin, Viviane’s face finally woke up. She began to look reverent, an expression I’d never seen on her face. She listened to every word the priest said, sang the hymns with a force verging on anger, and took Communion as if she’d been receiving the body and blood of Christ every week of her life since childhood. In a matter of days, she had turned into a person I didn’t recognize. I thought of Mother telling me how I’d changed from the smiling, loving child I’d been the day
it sunk in that Daddy wasn’t coming back. My father’s death had caused suffering capable of changing not only the course of my life but also of my very person. Or it had forced different aspects of my character to rise to the surface, while tamping down others. And the same thing was true with Viviane. The soft, generous person was still in there somewhere, but in her desperation, a pious and shriller self was emerging. The question was would the shift prove lasting.

  After the priest had given his sermon, where he said that God had his reasons for “taking la petite Marie to his side” (just what those were, we were not informed), it was time for Béa to play. She had been rehearsing all weekend, though not when I was there. I hadn’t, in fact, ever heard her sing. When I’d asked, there had always been an excuse. “I need to sustain the belief that I’m alone. So that I won’t lose it in front of the whole church.” I knew, too, that she was slightly embarrassed by Viviane’s choice, which was a song that Eric Clapton wrote when his four-year-old son fell out the window of a New York skyscraper, “Tears in Heaven.” “It’s just a little, you know, obvious,” she’d said, the wrinkles forming straight lines across her forehead.

  “At least she’s not asking you for a Gregorian chant,” I’d answered.

  She walked over to the chair with that delicate step of hers, toes pointing out. She sat down and crossed one leg over the other, rested the guitar on her thigh. After giving it a final tune, she looked up and in her English-accented French explained about the song she was going to play. “‘Tears in Heaven.’ ‘Larmes au Ciel.’” Then, with her eyes fixed on some point in the mid-distance, she started to play, and the entire world except for her in that chair melted into a blur. Her voice seemed to come from the same deep well as her laugh. It wasn’t loud, but every word was clear. I don’t think anyone in the church moved, all of us wishing she’d never finish, that we could forever be caught inside her beautiful song. Her cheeks became more flushed the longer she sang. Her big eyes glistened, but her voice never cracked. She never sped up or missed a chord. When she did finish, there were hankies out and noses sniffling all around. Béa returned quietly to the seat next to me, and I felt as if she were giving off a warm glow in which I had no right to be sitting. When she put her small hand on mine, it was shaking. I covered it with my other hand. She was still staring straight ahead, this time at the priest who was saying the final prayer before we walked out to the graveyard.

  The lowering of that little box into the ground was unbearable. It had been arranged that only family and close friends would attend the actual burial, and with our reduced numbers standing around that small hole—hardly bigger than the one I’d help Cédric dig the previous year for a young apple tree—the tragedy of a dead child was undiluted. The scene was immutably final, womb to tomb, with nothing in the middle. Not even one breath. Cédric was now holding André, who until then had been held by Viviane’s mother. Viviane stood next to him but side by side, not arm in arm. Not one of their body parts touched. They didn’t look at one another, didn’t seem connected in any way. It rendered the scene completely desolate, despite the sun that was shining in dappled spots through the trees, despite the birds chirping a lazy summer song and the breeze rising and falling. Despite another perfect summer’s day, here were Cédric and Viviane, the couple I’d held up as inviolate, standing like two shards of a broken bowl over the grave of their daughter.

  Back at the house there were canapés and wine. People moved around the garden, speaking in muted tones. Béa and I lingered to see if there wasn’t something we could do—of course there wasn’t—so we drove back to Paris.

  “Give it time,” Béa kept saying to my worries about Cédric and Viviane. But I was afraid of time, afraid of how it built up tensions and walls of silence and resentment that were hard to tear down.

  During the service, while the congregation had been filing toward the altar to take communion, I was thinking of Franny’s funeral. I remembered being in a church with my buttoned collar uncomfortably tight, with many grown-ups towering over me in dark clothes. I remembered how Franny had two pallbearers, my father and her godfather. Seeing that small box and thinking of my sister inside made me pull at my tight collar and gasp for air. Afterward, I remembered how the door to her bedroom was closed. Even though it had a knob, a point of entry that the coffin lacked, the room seemed as terrifying as the box. I avoided passing in front of it, and when I had to, I ran, took a leap, and held my breath. The weight of Franny’s absence, the density of that black hole, sucked up our lives. For my parents, it was as if they had ceased to be human beings, as if they’d become a pair of my lead soldiers. Or at least they’d become lead on the inside. Because they walked and talked and put meals on the table for me and insouciant Edward, who continued to smile and babble, as if nothing had changed. But there was a heavy dullness to everything they did, as if their running red blood had been replaced by dense grey lead. No one had bothered to give me an explanation, to talk to me. Along with the guilt, I felt abandoned, cut off, confused.

  After the first weeks, my parents began fighting, in a way they’d never fought before. As if the only thing that could make them come alive was an all-out row. Even in their grief, they were much too controlled to let their invectives hurl in our presence. They waited until Edward and I were tucked up in bed. But it was then that I began to have trouble sleeping, and I would creep out of bed, post myself in the corner at the top of the stairs, and spy on them. Through the bars in the banister, my ears would prickle at the sound of their voices distorted with anger, my nose would twitch at the air of strife that wafted up the stairs.

  The only actual words that stayed in my memory were spoken not long before my father’s death. I remembered them because he then stormed out of the house. “You should have married a banker,” he hissed, just before the back screen door slammed shut like a mousetrap. Later, the words seemed oddly prescient, but at the time I was just sick with fear that he wouldn’t come back.

  And soon of course he didn’t.

  At Franny’s funeral I remember calculating with great relief that the coffin was not quite big enough to hold me. My childish reasoning had been, as the service droned on and on, that if I couldn’t fit in the box, I therefore couldn’t die myself. Not yet, anyway. A year later I tried similar reasoning at the sight of my father’s coffin, that it was too big for me, but it didn’t work. Nightmares have haunted me ever since, dreams where I find myself in a space of suffocating proportions—a low-ceilinged room where I have to crouch, a closet so narrow I have to stand with my shoulders at an angle, a staircase so constricted that I have to slither up the steps like a speleologist in an underground passage of rock. The places are always very dirty and dark, and I spend the entire dream gasping for air, desperately trying to find light and oxygen.

  As we entered a particularly long tunnel on the autoroute, I thought how little Marie’s service was not just déjà vu. It was also a dress rehearsal for the fourth funeral I would soon add to my list: Mother’s. I wondered who would be at that one. Who were my mother’s friends, besides my godmother Tiffy in New York? Unlike Edward and Stephanie, Mother and Edmond’s social life was almost exclusively French. Except for her spotty churchgoing to the American Cathedral and the work she did at the American Library, Mother had avoided the expat scene, had melted into Edmond’s world almost entirely. Maybe too many Americans, too often, brought back memories of the life she’d left behind and couldn’t talk about.

  I looked over at Béa, who had her arms folded across her chest and was staring intently at the road ahead. What made her different, I wondered for the umpteenth time, as the toll machine spat back my credit card? In a strange way, it seemed as if Béa had always been there. At least an awareness of her, of all the things I would need in a person. As if the sum of all those Casuals, plus Jacqueline, plus Stephanie equaled a certain latent knowledge of the right person. Without consciously picking apart the strands of each woman and each relationship, my mind had performed i
ts own sorting job. And Béa was the sum of those parts. Right from the start, she’d seemed to understand me completely. At first I’d assumed it was because Viviane had told her so much about me, but maybe that was wrong. Maybe the pieces just fit, and there was no need to hold them to the light to make sure one side didn’t have too large a gap, another too sharp an edge.

  Maybe now, too, I was finally ready in a way that I hadn’t been. I mean, how can a person who looks with arrogant disdain at the rest of the world love another human being? How is there room for love when anger and resentment take up so much space? Perhaps my humbling and the suffering that that mortification caused had added up in a parallel equation, to a new version of me that meant I was now able to love someone else. Then again, there was still no assurance I would meet my Béa. That had to be attributed to luck, a word I’d never held much stock in.

  Of course being me, I couldn’t help tagging on a caveat: perhaps what looked like luck today was just setting me up for greater sadness down the line. For Cédric and Viviane next to the grave of unborn Marie.

  Now Mother faded, every day a little weaker. She was so thin, her body under the bedcovers just looked like extra wrinkles. The morphine doses increased and she was often not conscious. With the cancer having chomped its way into every vital organ, the incontestable victor, it seemed to me that the body should give up, elegantly accept defeat, and bow out. That through evolution, we should have developed some mechanism for knowing all was lost, some body chemical that would kick in and finish us off. But day after day, she hung on.

  Whether she was aware of us or not, we never left her alone. A nurse did the nights, and one of us stayed by her during the days. The room began to feel stuffier and smaller, as if oxygen was being consumed but not replaced. Edmond rarely went out. He spent most of his time shuffling between the bedroom and his study, where Edward had set up a camp bed for him. He sat by Mother’s side or read his books on the Great War. How he could have been dividing his time between the trenches and his dying wife, I don’t know. Lisette wheezed around the apartment, a hankie constantly at hand. She resented the presence of the three rotating nurses. The bossy one she undoubtedly imagined would take her place. The second, young one she thought was “too pretty by half.” And the third, Solange, the one who had told me about the morphine and who was actually the most helpful, reassuring, and quietly efficient, Lisette instinctively didn’t like because she was black. She was so vociferous on the subject, we sent her over to help Anne-Sophie the days Solange was on duty. On Edward’s new wife, she pronounced: “She’s certainly better than the Other One.” Then, her bulgy eyes staring at me portentously: “But the less said about that subject the better.”