Life, Only Better

by Anna Gavalda

  * * *

  The glitter of the candles, the velvetiness of the soup, the crumb of the bread, the filet mignon, the wild rice, the homemade chutney, the wine . . . this wine, that warmed you little by little, that breathed so much life into you by relieving you of the burden of so much of yourself; that . . . turned your soul transparent. The bursts of the little girls’ voices, coming farther and farther apart and more and more quietly (there was nothing accidental about that, according to their mother) (they were trying to be inconspicuous because they thought we’d forgotten about them, naturally) (could this be possible?) (were little girls already this wily at such a young age?) (no) (come on) (leave me with a few illusions, please, Mr. Heartbreak . . . ), the flow of our conversation, our laughs, provocations, debates, disagreements and agreements. I already knew I wouldn’t remember any of it (I would be—was already—much too tipsy), but I also knew I’d never forget any of it either. I knew this evening would be my cursor, my Jesus Christ. That from now on there would be a before and an after, and that Alice and Isaac—and it was still very confusing, but there it was, and it was the only thing I was sure of in that haze of alcohol and well-being—had become my benchmark.

  And I was already afraid.

  I could already tell that this was going to be an insurmountable hangover.

  In the chaos, jumping from one subject to the next and then to dessert, we talked about her work (dance instructor) (so that was it . . . ) ( . . . what a beautiful body she must have . . . ), about Michael Jackson and Carolyn Carlson, about Pina Bausch and Dominique Mercy and the Place du Châtelet, and Broadway and Suresnes and Stanley Donen (I asked her to pass me the water, the bread, the pepper, the salt, the butter, and who knows what else, for the simple pleasure of watching her arm unfold and stretch), about her mother, a pianist in a conservatory of classical dance, who had spent the best years of her life watching her little ballet pupils fly away, and who had died last year lamenting the “clumsy” performance of her “final fugue”; about cancer, about illness, about the Institut Gustave-Roussy and the great merit of its doctors and the nurses whom no one ever mentioned; about those times in life when grief seizes you without warning; the green heavens of childhood that were never really that green, about Heaven, period; God, his mysteries and contradictions, the film I was going to see this evening, that unforgettable scene where the parents resolve to lose sight of their son in order to free him from the weight of being their son. About my parents, and the ancient car my father had been lovingly restoring (off and on) for more than forty years, and which he had promised to finish for my sister’s wedding; about my sister, who had gotten divorced since then, and my niece, who, all of a sudden one day, had taken onto her slender, tattooed shoulders the great hopes of Papy and his Fiat Balilla beribboned in white. About the neighborhood, the local businesses, the baker who always spoke so rudely to us and who, when she turned around, could often be seen with white flour handprints on her large round ass. We talked about school, and music, which children never learn at the age when they need it most and when it would be easiest for them to learn while having fun at the same time; about what a waste that was, and the revolutions you had to have the courage to lead (Alice told me how she and one of her friends, a percussionist, went into nursery schools and daycares once a week to let the littlest ones play with instruments—a triangle, a little guiro, maracas—and added that there was nothing more comforting in the world than watching a baby’s eyes open wide when a rain stick swished in its ear). About Isaac’s theory that life, and I needed to remember this, hung by the slenderest of threads—he had come to understand this very young, at the age of reason, let’s say, when he was ordered to spell out his last name, and around him—always, and no matter where he was—the light changed depending on whether he put one or two dots above the i, and the cynicism, the recoil, and finally the strength that a revelation like that had put into his body, a single dot, one dot or two. For a child it was dizzying. We spoke about the ballets russes, Stravinsky, Diaghilev; about their cat who had been given to them by their neighbors in the South, and who had a southern accent when it meowed. We talked about the difference between the Chamonix biscuits of our childhood and the ones you could get today, and the same thing was true of Figolu cookies. Was it we or the recipe that had changed? About Mansart, and the Prince de Ligne, and cabinetry, and ironworking, and the books published by Editions Vial, and Bauhaus, and the little Calder circus, and the signage system in the Berlin metro.

  Among other things.

  The rest is a bit hazy.

  At one point, Alice left us to put the little girls to bed, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking my host if it was true. If their story, the one they had just told me, was true. The way they’d met, and all that.

  “Sorry?”

  “No, I mean . . . ” I babbled, “you . . . did you really talk to her about a child that first night? In front of your door? Even though you barely knew her?”

  What a beautiful smile he gave me then. His eyes disappeared, and every hair in his beard wiggled with pleasure. He stroked the hairs to calm them down, leaned forward, and said to me, low:

  “Yann, my young friend . . . Of course I knew her. You don’t meet the people you love; you recognize them. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “Then I’ll teach you.” His face darkened, and he stared into the depths of his glass. “You see, when I met Alice, I . . . I was a very sick man. I really was forty-five years old, really an old man, and I really lived with my parents. With my mother, that is. Let’s see . . . how can I explain this to you? Are you a gambler?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not talking about Pope Joan or craps. I mean suffering, addiction. Games with winnings and a capital G: casino, poker, horse racing . . . ”

  “No.”

  “Then I highly doubt you’ll be able to understand.”

  He set his glass down on the table and continued, without meeting my eyes again:

  “I was . . . a hunter. Or a dog, rather. Yes, a dog. A hunting dog. Always restless, always on the alert, always howling, scratching, ferreting in corners. Obsessed by the idea of seeking and destroying, of tracking, of fetching. You can’t imagine who I was, Yann—or what I was, I should say. You can’t imagine. I could go thousands of kilometers at a time without sleeping; I could skip meals and keep myself from pissing for whole days. I could cross Europe on a hunch, on the idea of a stamp or a signature of the vague promise of maybe, just maybe, the arch of a back like this or a way of painting clouds like that. The certainty that there was, in Poland or Vierzon or Anvers or I don’t know where, a veneer to scratch or a false ceiling to remove or a drapery to lift. Thousands and thousands of kilometers to realize at the first glance that I’d been wrong, and that I had to leave again—quick!—because I’d already lost too much time, and someone might beat me out for another opportunity if I stayed even one second longer!”

  Silence.

  “I lost sleep, decency, the awareness of other living people. They say hunters have a taste for blood; well, when I gritted my teeth, what I tasted was the dust of auction rooms, the odors of wax and varnish, tapestries and old horsehair. And sweat and fear and those silent little farts that mean someone has a terrible case of the runs, and the awful funky breath of all those old nutcases that lose their minds over a titian-haired portrait but let their own teeth rot away in their mouths. What I tasted was the smell of diesel from the tailpipes of trucks, and of banknotes quickly counted and stuffed in a pocket, and grieving households, and families at war, and visits to hellish hospices and castles in dire straits, defeated and sad and soon to be stripped of everything. What I tasted was death, the kind that hovered over certain private mansions, and certain amateurs I knew, and certain collectors who, I knew, knew me. The cries of auctioneers and the dry crack of the hammer, the auction sales, death announcements in the daily
report, the confidences that were sometimes dropped along with the cigar ashes, the Savoyard rooms, the hours spent around tables with old country notaries. Reading the Gazette while driving to save time. The power struggles with the haulage contractors, the mafia of experts, the planes, the trade shows, the biennials . . . I don’t know if you read stories about trappers or poachers or Sioux hunters when you were a little boy, Yann. All those unbelievable stories of hunting and tracking and safaris. Ahab and his whale, Huston and his elephant, Eichmann and his Jews. Did you read those things?”

  “No.”

  “All of them were very sick people. Like me.”

  He smiled then, and met my eyes again.

  After pouring us each a little more wine, which we were nursing at this point rather than really drinking, he continued:

  “My great-grandfather was a merchant; my grandfather was a merchant, and so were my uncle and my father, and his offspring after him. The crazy Moïses—foxhounds, all of them, all down the line! (Laughter.) Do you know why my uncle came back from the camps? Because he wanted to bring a Bohemian crystal ashtray to his fiancée. He could barely lift it, and he didn’t survive long, but he came back with it! And when I met Alice, I was at that point too. I was also a ghost, nothing but skin and bones with a fixed stare, already dead—but who brought the shit back, goddammit! Who never came back empty-handed!”

  Silence. Long silence.

  “And then?” I ventured, to steer him back on track.

  “Then? Nothing. Then, Alice.”

  Teasing smile.

  “Come now, neighbor, come now . . . don’t look at me like a shocked choirboy. I told you I had an eye. An unfailing eye. And I saw the way you looked at her on the landing when she came out behind me; I saw it! Honestly, what can I tell you about her that you haven’t already seen and loved?”

  He had asked the question very gently, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry again.

  Because of the standing stones of Pergat, high percentages, my Opinel knife, and this whole thing.

  Overwhelming.

  Fortunately—or maybe it was out of delicacy—he’d gone back to speechifying:

  “You know, it was a major challenge for my mother to find panties that she liked! Girdle panties, that’s what she wanted, I remember. Which means that I had time to observe this young woman—a dancer, I could tell—surreptitiously, while she looked at lingerie that was more and more luscious, and assessed each item, knitting her brows, as if they were cartridges or gunpowder. Her solemnity intrigued me, and her neck . . . ah . . . her neck, the way she carried her head, her style . . . Of course, she eventually sensed me looking at her. She looked up, and looked at me, and looked at my mother, and then looked at me again, and she smiled at us gently, while hurriedly dropping her little bits of lace as if afraid of shocking us. And there, Yann, right there, in that second, I died and came back to life. Some would call that a cliché, right? Some would say I’m just being romantic, but I’m telling you, because you’ll understand, and because I already love you, that it’s the pure truth. Off/On. I came apart and was put back together in one flutter of her eyelashes.”

  After the almonds, he peeled clementines for me, too. He inspected each segment and delicately peeled off all the white strings before lining them up single-file around my plate.

  “Then,” he sighed, “then I said to myself, oh, you big lug, a pretty little thing like that won’t come around twice. And my ancient Moïse blood, mine and the blood of three generations of rabbit hunters, didn’t have to think twice. If this dream of a woman passed right under my nose and I let myself get beaten to the punch, there’d be nothing left for me to do but bow out. But how to go about it? How? She was already turning away, and my mother, oy, was already starting to mutter the kaddish she reserved for bad days, cursing her worthless son, the size of her rear end, and the Eternal. I was frantic! Which is where the pink tights come in, because something I’ve learned in my career, and this applies to any occasion where fate comes into play that way, I would think . . . there comes a time when you have to give destiny a bit of a nudge. And by that I mean you have to take the initiative. Yes. There always comes a time when you have to go grab luck by the scruff of the neck and try to steer it in your direction by staking everything you’ve got on it. All the chips, all the cash, everything that can be bid on. Your comfort, your pension, the respect of your peers, your dignity, everything. In a case like this it isn’t ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ it’s ‘Make God laugh and maybe he’ll reward you.’ I came out of that dressing room like I was playing a hand of poker, like I was putting my life on the table, just to see, and I launched into a ridiculous imitation of Sophia Loren—being very careful to avoid the appalled face of my mother, who was clinging to the plastic thighs of an Eminence mannequin so she wouldn’t keel right over. My goddess laughed, and I thought I was victorious—but no. She was still looking at garter belts.”

  He broke off and smiled.

  We could hear snatches of Alice’s voice in the distance, at the end of the hall, reading a story to the girls.

  “I mean, what was I expecting to happen? She was so young and beautiful, and I was so old and ugly. And I looked like such an idiot! Wearing panties! Panties under pink tights, with my gnarly, hairy little Louis XV hooves! What was I expecting? To bewitch her? So I got dressed again, vanquished but not despairing. After all, I’d made her laugh. Besides, the best players of the game of Chance share this quality: we like to win, but we also know how to lose. A true gambler is a good sport.”

  He got up, filled the kettle, and put it on to boil before continuing:

  “I was out in the street with my pain-in-the-ass mother hanging on to my arm and the memory of my beautiful ballerina before my eyes, and I . . . I was sad. Yes, I had died and come back to life, but frankly, I was wondering why, since my new life seemed much less fun than the old one. And my mother was still there, on top of it! But mostly I was annoyed. The underwear she’d wanted hadn’t fit at all. With a body like that she could squeeze herself into silk or cotton, but not that horrible nylon, you see. I sighed and distracted myself from old Jacqueline’s whining by imagining what pretty chemises and other lingerie I would have draped her in, if she had let me love her, and . . . well, I was lost in these agonizing daydreams when I lost my balance, and would you believe it, there she was, out of nowhere, grabbing my arm so hard she almost wrenched it out of the socket, the crazy woman!”

  As he poured boiling water into an old teapot filled with lime-blossom tea leaves, he unleashed his second-most beautiful smile of the evening.

  “You’re lucky,” I murmured.

  “It’s true. I am. Though women’s tights are bloody difficult to put on . . . ”

  “I didn’t mean only you, I meant the two of you. You’re both lucky.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Listen. Since it’s you,” he continued, “since it’s you, and since it’s now, I’m going to confess something to you that I’ve never had the guts to tell anyone before. Of course, my mother is still alive, of course. Since I was born she’s been haranguing me about her imminent death. When I was little she traumatized me with it, and she’s spent my whole adult life blackmailing me emotionally with her phony ‘this is it’s, and now I’m sure she’ll outlive me. She’ll outlive us all. And that’s fine. But she’s an old lady now. A very old lady, who can barely walk, and she’s deaf, and she can hardly see anymore. But none of that keeps the Eternal from fixing her right up every Thursday, you see. Every Thursday I take her to lunch in a little bistro downstairs from her flat, and every Thursday, after the coffee, we go through the same ritual; we walk with tiny little steps to the Allée des Justes, near the Pont Louis-Philippe. We stroll, we dawdle, we practically crawl, and she hangs onto my arm, and I support her . . . hold her up . . . carry her, almost. Her legs hurt, her rheumatism’s practically
making a martyr out of her; her neighbors are killing her; her home-care worker’s about to finish her off, the new mailman is making her crazy, the TV is poisoning her, this world is persecuting her, and this time, this time, it’s definitely over, she’s done for. This time she can feel it; this time, my dear, I’m really going to die, you know. And I’ve been taking her word for it for ages now! But when we get there she stops complaining, and finally shuts up. She shuts up because she’s waiting for me to tell her, again, the names of all the human beings engraved there in the stone. The first and last names. Of course I do it every Thursday, and while I’m filling her ears with this little laic litany, I can feel—physically feel—the weight on my forearm getting lighter. Touched, all at once, her gaze softened, and with an angelic smile, my old Jacquot stands up a little straighter and perks back up. And there, exactly like on a mobile phone screen, I can see them. I can see, in her cataract-whitened pupils, the little bars of her internal battery, more and more bars the more names I read. And then after a minute she remembers that her legs hurt, and we leave as slowly as we came. Just as slowly, but much more valiantly! Because these people existed, and because they did what they did, my God, it must have been hard, but . . . for them, and especially for me, she wanted to try to stay alive for just one more week. And you see, for me, Alice’s voice has exactly the same effect.”

  Silence.

  What can you say, after that?

  I don’t know about you, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “But you know, the real key to happiness, I believe, is to laugh. To laugh together. When Gabrielle—Alice’s maman—passed away, it was terrible because I couldn’t make my beloved laugh anymore. I’d never been so unhappy in my life—and believe me, I come from a family that knows something about unhappiness! I was simple; I was raised on herring, and not even a whole lot of that. But here, I’d tried everything. She smiled, yes, but she didn’t laugh anymore. Fortunately,” he added, wriggling with pleasure like a young girl, “fortunately, I had one last secret up my sleeve . . . ”