He remembered that when he was a kid he and two or three of his closest friends had sworn in blood what they would do in case one of them ever contracted any illness that was diagnosed as hopeless. They all took an oath to take care of business if such a fate should ever befall any of them. When he was a teenager, he and the Dambiez children — Delphine and her brother Pierre — had been inseparable. And they had remained close through their adult years. Then Delphine was found to have cancer, and he had seen the terrible, inexorable destruction the disease had wrought on the once-ravishing creature. Her obituary spoke of the “long, cruel illness” she had suffered, and Paul remembered visiting her only a few months before she had died to find her curled up in a ball at the far end of her bed, a tiny, trembling creature weighing no more than sixty-five pounds and— the result of the chemotherapy — completely bereft of her long, flowing hair. And yet neither he nor her brother had been able to “take care of business” as they had sworn, for all sorts of reasons, starting with the fact that Delphine, even when she was alone with one of them, would go on and on about her future projects for the coming winter. She planned to rent a chalet in the mountains, she had endless business ventures she wanted to pursue. In other words, she was going on with life. A fantasy life, to be sure, and one that alternately broke the heart or gave comfort to her friends and family, who simply couldn’t cope with the widening gap between visible reality and her unassailable projects. Delphine’s physical suffering had been especially bad during the last four months of her life, and a dozen times Paul had been on the verge of asking her whether their oath was still valid. But each time he had refrained, for he realized that the mere fact of posing the question was tantamount to acknowledging that she was dying, and that she adamantly refused to admit. Or else she didn’t want to admit it any longer. When you spend several days in the full knowledge that you’re going to die, there comes a point when you can’t deal with it anymore. Actually, the window of opportunity to do something about it — to take care of business — is very narrow. Courage and lucidity, it would appear, yield quickly, very quickly, to hope and illusion. To the refusal in any event of that deplorable platitude, that banal carelessness, which would have you dead even before you’ve had time to cope with the idea.
Which brought him back to his own situation: after this first naked, unequivocal, and very strange day he was going through, it was not going to be easy facing up to his own death again. Maybe the first signs of pain, of physical suffering, would jolt you into recognizing the downward path you were facing. When that day arrived he would have to make sure he had all his ducks lined up. Then it would be too late to ask a doctor or pharmacist to give him what he needed. Too late to head for a gunshop to buy the necessary weapon. If all systems failed, he told himself again, there was always his hunting rifle. . . . And then he remembered that he had loaned the rifle to his brother-in-law — what a jerk, that guy; all he does is borrow things from me. Anyway, he must make a point of getting it back. He was in luck: it was September, and hunting season had just opened, so he had a built-in excuse.
Then he started imagining the hunting rifle, and the more he thought the more he realized that was not exactly a piece of cake either. You fire the damn thing with your big toe, he remembered reading somewhere. But he was so awkward, even using his hands, that he could picture firing the weapon with his clumsy toes and, instead of hitting himself, totally destroying one of Helen’s prize antiques. . . . There was also some other way to do it, where you tied a piece of string to the trigger, wound the string around the open door, and held the other end in your hand. . . . Lord only knows exactly how that might work. Anyway, the idea was to make sure the gun was pointed precisely in the right direction. Funny, but when he thought about killing himself, he could never picture its taking place anywhere but in his wife’s apartment. It was his apartment too, of course, but morally it was hers. Exclusively. As a sort of conjugal duty, one more, “the last duty but not the least” as Robert would have put it in his impeccable English. To kill himself at Sonia’s would have been the most odious, the most flagrant, infidelity, the final proof of a preference that Sonia would ultimately have happily forgone. (And Helen, too, for both women shared a similar pride in their respective homes.) So Helen had every right to blame him for this final “worse” of the “for better or for worse” vow they had solemnly made. The worst? Was this really the worst? A man who commits suicide in his own home? In any event, he knew for sure that he would not feel comfortable doing it anywhere else. . . . The classic idea of committing suicide in a hotel room seemed to him as terrible — if only because of the final solitude — as it was unacceptably conventional. People who committed suicide in a hotel did so because they were “orphans,” because they had nowhere else to go, Paul reflected. He had always planned his crazy escapades with meticulous care, while he had been utterly relaxed and haphazard about serious matters. This one fell no doubt into the madcap category, for even in a case like his, suicide was in a sense a provocation, an aggressive act against society. It was a crime of flight, a challenge, an act of refusal vis-a-vis the rest of the world, a final declaration of independence; and in that sense it was a narcissistic act, therefore ultimately pretentious.
He couldn’t have cared less. He would kill himself if he could pull it off, if he wanted to badly enough, if he could summon the courage to overcome his fear of death or, more precisely, if he was afraid enough of what he was going to have to live through. Tomorrow he would go out and buy some vials of morphine and a pack of needles. But he knew he couldn’t stand injections; so, however destructive it might be, he suspected the rifle would win out over the needle.
Now you walk through Paris, all alone,
Among the madding crowd but still alone . . .
Who in the devil was that by? Ah, yes, Apollinaire. From the piece called “Zones” that precedes “The Song of the Man Unloved.” Less well known, in fact, but it was the piece he preferred in the whole volume called Alcohols:
Close beside you herds of lowing buses lumber by. . . .
The agony of love tightens its grip upon your throat,
As if love will never pass your way again. . . .
Never loved again . . . He would never be loved again. . . . Now, right now, there was this sweet but — let’s face it — not very bright young woman who thought she was in love with him. . . . And who therefore did love him; it came to the same thing after all. He loved and hated out of habit; he too was loved and hated by a woman his own age whom he had wronged without wanting to; but also by doing nothing to make sure she didn’t suffer. There it was in a nutshell: his emotional life was a useless game, sometimes fun, sometimes not. You can conjure up all the lines you want from Apollinaire, he thought, but it comes down to that. Besides, how many people quote Apollinaire to embellish or conceal the shallowness of their own feelings? At least he had known what it was to be truly in love, and to be loved in return, for a period of several months. That was something. Was it really? Ten months, maybe a year? Yes, it was in fact tremendous if he compared it to the lives of some men he knew. All he had to do was think of the way any number of men his age reacted when they saw an uncommonly beautiful woman. They giggled like schoolboys, exchanged winks of complicity, they fell all over themselves competing to see who would be most smug. Whereas what they should have done once they had laid eyes on that beauty, that inaccessible beauty, is let the blood drain from their faces, let their hearts fill with desire and regret, knowing that beauty would never be theirs. Actually, that was the way Paul reacted. Besides, whether in a museum before a painting that truly moved him or in life, in the presence of a beautiful woman, beauty had never made him laugh or cry or reflect. It always sent him away from its presence filled with desire and repressed anger, with a feeling that stupid fate had conspired to make sure that the painting, or the woman, would never be his.
V
AS MUCH AS, in times gone by, it had seemed absolutely essential to Paul t
hat he be able to pick up the phone and talk to Mathilde, now that he had a pressing reason to do so the urgency had somehow disappeared. She had become a hope among others, a kind of duty owed this sentimental, nostalgic Paul, this sensitive, vulnerable dreamer who presumably was hidden behind the cynical, womanizing Paul, behind this mask and this shield.
Meanwhile, Paul was driving aimlessly through the streets of Paris. In the past ten years Mathilde had moved. She had moved from the rue de Verneuil to the rue de Tournon; she had left the banks of the Seine for the flanks of the Luxembourg Gardens. In short, she had crossed the boulevard Saint-Germain. And in his mind Paul pictured her in her long, fur-collared housecoat, her feet bare in her slippers, her trademark shawl draped casually around her neck, absentmindedly crossing the boulevard Saint-Germain followed by a cohort of lovers — those he knew about, those he did not, and those still to come — all of them bent low as they carried her hundreds of suitcases. And behold! the long line of cars came to a halt on the boulevard like the Red Sea parting for Moses. And to his great surprise he found himself not only driving up the rue de Tournon but, miraculously, finding a parking space in front of a porte cochère, which might well be Mathilde’s. He had had no intention of coming here, or parking in this spot, and yet here he was in front of this new porte cochère, completely vulnerable, and he panicked.
What if this was the door to her apartment? What if she came out and saw him sitting here? What in the world would she think? How could he ever pick up the phone then and call her? For he had not planned to contact her till later. After Sonia. After Helen. After his other women, these “next-in-line,” these copies of femininity whom he had married, whom he had tried to love and cherish after Mathilde had left him . . . He was turning into a major boor, he told himself. Phony and ruthless. And he was exaggerating everything. He turned the key in the ignition and drove off, heading toward Sonia’s. He would park and call her from a pay phone downstairs — for Paul never called on any woman, even if she was the acknowledged mistress, without calling ahead. First out of courtesy, but also because he hated scenes. The role of cuckold was the one he loathed more than any other, and if he was made to play it he preferred not to know about it. “In short,” he told himself, “I’m a coward. And a vain coward to boot.”
For a long time now Sonia had been working at the fashion house mornings only, except when there was an emergency, and she normally finished up at about one in the afternoon. That timetable enabled Paul to spend what were known at the office as “business lunches” but in reality were three-hour siestas, from which he returned at four o’clock with a smile on his lips and his mind clearly elsewhere. He loved these early-afternoon “thefts,” as he called them — thefts from work, from the day’s obligations, thefts from the ordinary round of human affairs. That is, he used to love them. For he realized that it had been quite a while since he had sneaked away to Sonia’s place; in fact, the idea never even crossed his mind anymore. He simply no longer enjoyed these interludes. And in the light of today’s events, the very thought of such an assignation struck him as crude, forced. As much as nights were made for lovers, afternoon assignations, he felt more and more strongly, were the stuff of vaudeville, and he had lost his taste for them. Of course, when he and Sonia went out in the evening he stayed over at her apartment, but his amorous appetite stopped there. Did that mean he was getting old? Or that he loved Sonia less? Both questions, which would have been matters of serious concern the previous day, now seemed trifling. That was the first positive point, the first happy detachment, that he could chalk up to his new situation. He was sure that others would surface in due course.
As he pulled up near her house, Paul asked himself how he was going to break the news to her. There was a florist on the ground floor of her building, whose bouquets had graced Sonia’s living room countless times throughout the years, and for a brief moment Paul thought of buying her a big bouquet of chrysanthemums, or better yet of setting up a long-term chrysanthemum account for her at the florist’s, so that she wouldn’t ruin herself buying flowers for him or his grave. Unfortunately, Paul realized that Sonia would not get the deeper meaning of the floral gift: she would ooh and ah over the chrysanthemums as if he had given her a dozen roses. “Still,” he thought, “if she has half a brain she ought to get the message,” and he laughed at himself and his own cleverness. And while he was being clever, why didn’t he just draw her a little map leading from her apartment to the Saint-Augustin Church, where he would want the funeral services to be held, and from there to the Montparnasse Cemetery, where, if memory served, his family still had a plot? That would be in good taste, with just the proper touch of frivolity thrown in. Paul had never spent much time plowing through the manuals of good manners, but he doubted if any of them contained a chapter entitled “How to Announce to Your Mistress That in Six Months She Will Be Without a Lover — or At Least Without the Current Lover.” In any case, tomorrow he would have to make arrangements to take care of her financially; today when he saw her he would reassure her that everything had already been taken care of. Women worry about such things, even if they’re very young, and even if they play Back Street to a dozen suitors.
Paul finally settled on a bouquet of two dozen roses, his usual choice, which Sonia adored. He tried to call her three times from a pay phone downstairs, but her line was constantly busy, so he went upstairs and rang her doorbell. She opened the door, and Paul saw a young man seated in an easy chair, dressed in blue jeans and one of those silver-buttoned black leather jackets that Paul detested. They exchanged smiles, as forced as they were ridiculous, and all Paul could think of was that for a moment at least he felt relieved. A few well-aimed barbs aimed at Sonia’s infidelity — even if they were not rooted in truth — would make him feel less guilty. For the fact was, however strange it may have seemed, Paul felt guilty about having to tell Sonia the news of his impending death. He was depriving her of one basic element of her life, which she was not only used to but counted on. And for him to play the double role of herald and hero of his sorrow represented for Paul a part beyond his abilities, not to mention that it was inconsistent with his happy-go-lucky attitude.
Sonia was flushed with pleasure — or was it embarrassment? In any case, she simpered, she purred like a cat, it was visible. She had always liked conventional roles. No, not liked — loved, adored. And yet this ambiguous situation — or what could be taken for such — did not seem to bother her in the least. As for the young man, he seemed distracted, almost to the point of boredom, which augured poorly for possible future amorous exploits. What was more, Paul thought, what the young man was wearing was so tight-fitting that it would clearly take him so long to undress — especially to divest himself of his jeans — that he would doubtless have to think twice before indulging in any sport, be it indoors or out.
So Paul sat down in one of Sonia’s stuffed chairs, stretched out his legs, and gazed over benevolently at the young man. This rising generation, Paul thought, apparently complains bitterly that the generation immediately above them refuses to yield its places. Well, the members of Generation X — if that’s what the new generation was called — ought to lift him onto their shoulders and parade him through the streets, for here he was, just pushing forty, about to pass them his torch.
He heard himself inwardly deploring the complete craziness of today’s fashion, and the inconsistencies of the specialized press, and then he was on his feet shaking the young man’s hand and saying, nonsensically, “Hope to see you soon.” He also saw himself, when Sonia came back into the room, take her in his arms and press her warm, supple body against his, felt her soft hair against his cheek, pulled her right hip and the rest of her body tight against his own hipbone and left leg, pressing against them like the motionless, salacious dancer he sometimes became when he was holding a willing partner in his arms. Sonia laughed. She laughed, and Paul said to himself that before long she wouldn’t be laughing anymore, she might even be suffering, and his
hope was that she would not suffer all that much. In any event, he would be responsible for the fact that she wouldn’t grieve deeply: either because he had not done enough to make her love him profoundly or because he had not been worthy of her love. And if he was hoping that the news that he had only a short time to live would devastate her, it was, he knew, out of pure egotism on his part. And he blamed himself, for if there was one constant in this more or less intelligent comedy that his emotional life had been it was the sure knowledge that he — unlike many men — hated to make a woman suffer, even if she was his own wife.
But would Sonia perhaps blame him one day for not having made her suffer enough? For not having shared the daily ups and downs of cohabitation, not having given her a taste of the “worse” which was part and parcel of the “better” in a real relationship? For Sonia would never have known anything but the “better” (if he could call it the better) of him. What he had given her was only the lighter, the more pleasant side of his present life.
Or would it be Helen whose grief would be greater? Helen, to whom he had indeed given the “worse,” Helen who already remembered only that negative aspect of their relationship. Well, Helen was wrong. Actually, he had not given her the “worse” for the simple reason it was not part of his makeup. It just wasn’t there. There was “less good,” or at most “disagreeable.” And besides, they had both enjoyed a good deal of the “better,” even if Helen preferred not to remember it now.