Delicacy

by David Foenkinos

  Her friends helped her bring up her belongings. But she wouldn’t let them come in with her.

  “I won’t ask you to stay, I’m tired.”

  “Promise to call if you need anything?”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  She hugged, kissed, and thanked them. What a relief to be alone. Other people wouldn’t have been able to stand being alone at that moment. Natalie had yearned for it. And yet, these circumstances added more of the unbearable to the unbearable. She walked into their living room, and everything was there. To the smallest detail. Nothing had moved. The blanket, still on the couch. The teapot, on the low table, as well, holding the book she’d been reading. She was struck by the sight of the bookmark, especially. The book was cut in two by it: the first part, read while François was alive. And at page 321, he was dead. What should she do? Can you keep reading a book interrupted by the death of your husband?

  Sixteen

  No one understands people who say they want to be alone. Desiring solitude is bound to be a morbid impulse. No matter how much Natalie tried to put everyone’s mind at rest, they wanted to come and see her. Which amounted to obliging her to speak. Although she didn’t know what to say. She was under the impression that she was going to have to go back and start again at zero, even relearn language. Maybe in the end all of them had been right to force her to socialize a bit, to force her to wash, dress, entertain. Her entourage took turns, which was horribly clear. It made her think of a sort of emergency-crisis committee, managing tragedy with the help of a secretary—her mother, obviously—who kept track of everything on a giant calendar in a way that adeptly varied family visits with visits from friends. She heard the members of the support group talking to each other, commenting on her slightest actions. “So, how’s she doing?” “What’s she doing?” “What’s she eating?” She had the impression of suddenly having become the center of the world, whereas her world no longer existed.

  Charles was the most frequent of the visitors. He stopped over every two or three days. According to him this was also a way of keeping her in contact with the professional milieu. He talked to her about the developmental reports in progress, and she looked at him like a lunatic. What in hell’s name could it matter to her whether Chinese foreign trade was undergoing a crisis at the moment? Were the Chinese going to bring back her husband? No. Fine. Then it was useless. Charles was perfectly aware that she wasn’t listening to him, but he knew that it would gradually have an effect. That he was filtering in elements of reality drop by drop, like an infusion. That China, and even Sweden, were reconstituting Natalie’s horizon. Charles would sit down very close to her.

  “You can start again when you feel like it. You should know that the entire company’s behind you.”

  “Thank you, how nice.”

  “And you know that you can count on me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Really count on me.”

  She didn’t understand why he’d begun using the informal form of the French word for you with her since her husband’s death. What was the real meaning of it? But why look for meaning in this abrupt change? She didn’t have the strength to. Maybe he felt some responsibility to show her that an entire side of her life was stable. But even so, his addressing her in this familiar way felt strange. But then, it didn’t really; there are certain things you can’t say using the formal word for you. Comforting things. You had to eliminate the distance to say them, had to get personal. He was stopping by a little too often, it occurred to her. She tried to make him understand that. But people who are crying aren’t listened to. He kept being there, and he was becoming insistent. One evening, while talking to her, he put his hand on her knee. She said nothing, but she thought he had a woeful lack of sensitivity. Did he want to take advantage of her grief and try to take François’s place? Was he the type to play second fiddle in this requiem? Maybe he had simply wanted her to understand that if she needed affection, he was there. Should she have a need to make love. It isn’t unusual for nearness to death to push you into the sexual realm. But in this case, not really. It was impossible for her to imagine another man. So she pushed away Charles’s hand, and he must have felt he’d gone too far.

  “I’ll come back to work soon,” she said.

  Without really knowing what this “soon” meant.

  Seventeen

  Why Roman Polanski Adapted

  Thomas Hardy’s Novel

  Tess of the d’Urbervilles for the Screen

  This isn’t exactly like having your reading of a book interrupted by death. But Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, before being savagely murdered by followers of Charles Manson, had pointed out this book to her husband and told him it was ideal for an adaptation. The film, made around ten years later and starring Natassja Kinski, was therefore dedicated to her.

  Eighteen

  Natalie and François hadn’t wanted a child right away. It was a plan for the future, a future that didn’t exist anymore. Their child would remain a virtual one. Sometimes you think about all those artists who died and wonder what their creations would have been like if they’d survived. What would John Lennon have composed in 1992 if he hadn’t died in 1980? Likewise: what would the life of that child who would never exist have been like? You’d have to think about all those fates that foundered on the banks of their potential.

  For weeks, her point of view had come close to insanity: denying death. Imagining everyday life as if her husband were still there. She was capable of leaving notes for him on the living room table before going out for a walk in the morning. She’d walk for hours, with only one desire: to lose herself in the crowd. Sometimes she also went into churches, despite the fact that she wasn’t a believer. And was convinced she never would be. She had trouble understanding people taking refuge in religion, trouble understanding that you could have faith after having lived through tragedy. However, sitting there in the middle of the afternoon, surrounded by empty pews, she was comforted by the place. It was just a shred of relief, but for a split second, yes, she felt the warmth of Christ. Then she got onto her knees, and she was like a saint with the devil in her heart.

  Sometimes she went back to the place they’d met. To that sidewalk on which she’d walked, unknown to him, seven years before. She wondered, “And if someone else approached me now, how would I react?” But no one came to interrupt her meditation.

  She also went to the place where her husband had been run over. Where, jogging, in his shorts, with music in his ears, he’d blundered across the street. Made the ultimate blunder. She would stand on the curb and watch the cars go by. Why not kill herself at the same spot? Why not blend the traces of their blood in a final, morbid union. She’d stay a long time without knowing what to do, tears trickling down her face. Especially in the days following the funeral, she came back to this place. She didn’t know why she needed to hurt herself so badly. Being there was ridiculous, imagining the brutality of impact was ridiculous, wanting to make the death of her husband concrete in this way was ridiculous. Perhaps, deep down, it was simply the only solution? Does anyone know what to do next after such a tragedy? There aren’t any instructions. All of us read what’s written by our bodies. Natalie was giving in to an urge to be there, to weep at the curb, to drown in her tears.

  Nineteen

  John Lennon’s Discography If He Hadn’t Died in 1980

  Still Yoko (1982)

  *

  Yesterday and Tomorrow (1987)

  *

  Berlin (1990)

  *

  Titanic: The Soundtrack (1997)

  *

  The Beatles: A Revival (1999)

  Twenty

  The Life of Charlotte Baron

  Since the Day She Ran Over François

  If it hadn’t been for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Charlotte Baron certainly never would have become a florist. September 11 was her birthday. Her father, wh
o was traveling in China, had sent her flowers. Jean-Michel was climbing the stairs, not yet knowing that the times had just been turned upside down. He rang and discovered Charlotte’s pallid face. She couldn’t pronounce a single word. Taking the flowers, she asked, “You heard?”

  “What?”

  “Come …”

  Jean-Michel and Charlotte spent the day together on the couch, watching replays of the planes crashing into the towers. Living such a moment together created a powerful bond. They became inseparable, even had an affair for several months before concluding they were more friends than lovers.

  Somewhat later, Jean-Michel started his own flower delivery company and asked Charlotte to work with him. From then on, their life was about making bouquets. The Sunday the accident happened, Jean-Michel had prepared everything. The customer wanted to ask his girlfriend to marry him. When she received flowers, she’d get the message; it was a kind of coded signal between the two. Having the flowers delivered that Sunday was crucial, because it was the anniversary of their meeting. Just before leaving, Jean-Michel got a call from his mother: his grandfather had just been hospitalized. Charlotte said she’d take care of the delivery. She liked to drive the van a lot. Especially when there was only one stop to make and there was no hurry. She was thinking of the couple and the role she was playing in their story: a secret factor. She was thinking about all of this, as well as other things, when a man crossed the street haphazardly. And she hit the brakes too late.

  Charlotte was devastated by the accident. A psychologist tried to make her talk about it, to make sure she recovered from the shock as soon as possible, so the trauma wouldn’t eat away at her unconscious. Quickly enough, she wondered, Should I get in touch with the widow? She finally decided that it wouldn’t do any good. At any rate, what could she have said? “I’m sorry.” Do you apologize in such cases? Maybe she would have added, “It was stupid of your husband to run like that, without caring how; he’s screwing up my life, too, are you aware of that? You think it’s easy to go on living when you’ve killed somebody?” Sometimes she had genuine outbursts of hate for that man, for his thoughtlessness. But most of the time she kept quiet. She sat around in a state of blankness. The periods of silence linked her to Natalie. Both of them were floating in the anesthesia of a path of least resistance. For weeks during her recovery, without knowing why, she thought constantly of the flowers she was supposed to deliver on the day of the accident. The bouquet that never made it stood for time come to nothing. Incessantly, the event replayed in slow motion right before her eyes, including the sound of the impact, over and over. The flowers were always there in the foreground, blurring her view. They shrouded her day and became her obsession in petal form.

  Jean-Michel, very worried about her state of mind, worked himself into a lather trying to get her to go back to work. It was one attempt to rouse her that was as good as any other. And it worked, since she lifted her head and answered yes, like little girls sometimes do when promising to be good after having done something stupid. Deep down, she knew very well that she had no other choice. She had to go on. And it certainly wasn’t the sudden incitement coming from her colleague that talked her into it. Everything will go back to the way it was, thought Charlotte, her mind at ease. But no, nothing could go back to the way it was. Something had brutally shattered in the progression of days. That Sunday was there forever: you would find it on Monday and on Thursday. And it kept alive on Friday or Tuesday. That Sunday was never settled and began to look like goddamn eternity; it spread itself all over the future. Charlotte was smiling, Charlotte was eating, but a dark cloud covered Charlotte’s face. She seemed obsessed with a single idea. Suddenly, she asked, “Those flowers I was supposed to deliver that day … did you ever deliver them?”

  “I had other things on my mind. I went to find you right away.”

  “But the man didn’t call?”

  “Yes, of course. I talked to him on the phone the next day. He wasn’t happy about it at all. His girlfriend didn’t get anything.”

  “And then?”

  “And then … I explained it to him … I told him you’d had an accident … that a man was in a coma …”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I don’t remember very well anymore … he apologized … and then he muttered something … I think he saw it as some kind of sign. Something very negative.”

  “You mean … you think he didn’t ask the girl to marry him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Charlotte was disturbed by that story. She took the liberty of calling the man in question. He confirmed that he’d decided to put off proposing. This news really left a mark on her. It couldn’t happen like that. She thought of the sequence of events. The marriage was going to be put off. And maybe a lot of events were going to be changed like that? It upset her to think that all these lives were going to be different. She thought, If I fix them, it’s as if it never happened. If I fix them, I’ll be able to go back to a normal life.

  She went into the back of the shop to put together the same bouquet. Then she got into a taxi. “Is it for a wedding?” the driver asked her.

  “No.”

  “For a birthday?”

  “No.”

  “For … a graduation?”

  “No. It’s just for doing what I ought to have done the day I ran somebody over.”

  The driver continued the journey in silence. Charlotte got out. Put the flowers on the woman’s doormat. She stayed there before that image for a moment. Then decided to take a few roses out of the bouquet. She left with them and climbed into another taxi. Since the day of the accident, she’d kept François’s address with her. She’d preferred not to meet Natalie, and it was definitely the right decision. It would have been even harder to pull her own life back together if she’d put a face to a shattered life. But at that moment, she was carried away by an impulse. She didn’t want to think. The taxi drove along; now it was stopping. For the second time in the past few minutes, Charlotte found herself on a woman’s landing. She placed those few white flowers in front of Natalie’s door.

  Twenty-one

  Natalie opened the door and asked herself: was it the right moment? François had been dead for three months. Three months, so few of them. She didn’t feel the slightest bit better. On her body, the sentinels of death paraded nonstop. Her friends had advised her to start working again, not to let herself go, to occupy her time to keep it from becoming unbearable. She knew very well that this wouldn’t change anything, that it might even make it worse, especially evenings when she got back from work and he wasn’t there, wouldn’t ever be there. Not to let yourself go, what a strange expression. You’re letting yourself go whatever happens. Life is about letting yourself go. That was all she wanted: to let herself go; or rather, to let go. To stop feeling the weight of each second. She wanted to rediscover lightness, be it unbearable.

  She hadn’t wanted to telephone before coming. She wanted to arrive just like that, spontaneously, which would also make the event less of a to-do. In the lobby, elevator, hallways, she’d run into a lot of her coworkers, and all of them had tried as best they could to show her a little warmth as she went by. A word, gesture, smile, silence sometimes. There were as many attitudes as there were people, but she’d been deeply touched by their unanimous, discreet way of supporting her. Paradoxically, it was also all these demonstrations that were now making her hesitate. Did she want that? Did she want to live in an environment where everything was nothing but compassion and uneasiness? If she came back, she’d have to play-act her life, see to it that everything went all right. She wouldn’t be able to stand seeing kindness in the eyes of others if it led directly to pity.

  She was stuck at the door to her boss’s office, unable to make up her mind. She sensed that if she walked in, it would mean she was definitely returning. Finally, she decided, and walked in without knocking. Charles was absorbed in reading the dictionary. It was a fetish of his; every morning, h
e read a definition.

  “How are you? I’m not bothering you, am I?” asked Natalie.

  He looked up, surprised to see her. She was like a ghost. Something caught in his throat, he was afraid he couldn’t move, was paralyzed with emotion. She walked up to him.

  “You were reading your definition?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it today?”

  “The word delicacy. It’s not surprising that you appeared at that moment.”

  “It’s a lovely word.”

  “I’m glad to see you—here. Well. I was hoping that you’d come.”

  Then there was silence. It was strange, but a moment always came when they didn’t know what to say to each other. And in those cases, Charles always offered tea. It was like gasoline for their words. Then he continued, in a very excited voice, “I was speaking to the shareholders in Sweden. Did you know that I speak a little Swedish now?”

  “No.”

  “Yes … they asked me to learn Swedish … just my luck. It’s really a shitty language.”

  “…”