Delicacy

by David Foenkinos

  The months that followed were still marked by binge working. She’d even had two minds about studying Swedish in case she needed to take on new duties. You couldn’t say she was ambitious. She was just trying to use files as a palliative. Her friends and family were still worried, taking her habit of working too much as a sign of depression. That theory irritated her to the max. For her, things were simple: she just wanted to work a lot to keep from thinking, to live in a void. We struggle the best we can, and she would have liked those close to her to support her fight instead of holding forth with their murky theories. She was proud of what she’d managed to do. She went to the office even on weekends, brought work home with her, forgot about hours. Inevitably there’d be a moment when she’d collapse from exhaustion, but for the time being she was making progress thanks only to Swedish adrenaline.

  Her energy impressed everybody. Since she showed not the slightest flaw, her coworkers started to forget what she’d been through. François became a memory for the others, and perhaps this is what he could become for her as well. Her long hours made her constantly available, especially for the members of her team. Chloé, the last to arrive, was also the youngest. She in particular loved confiding in Natalie, specifically when it came to her problems with her boyfriend and her constant worrying: she was terribly jealous. She knew it was ridiculous, but she couldn’t control it and act more rationally. As a result, something unusual happened: Chloé’s stories, tinged as they were with immaturity, allowed Natalie to reconnect with a world she’d lost, that of her youth and the fears she’d had about not finding a man she’d enjoy being with. Something in Chloé’s words created the impression of a memory taking shape again.

  Thirty-one

  Excerpt from the Scenario Delicacy

  SCENE 31: INTERIOR. BAR.

  Natalie and Chloée walk into a bar. It isn’t the first time they’ve come to this place. Natalie follows behind Chloé. They sit down in a corner near a window.

  Exterior: the possibility of rain.

  CHLOÉ (in a very spontaneous way): How are you? You okay?

  NATALIE: Yes, great.

  Chloé studies Natalie.

  NATALIE: Why are you looking at me like that?

  CHLOÉ: I’d like our relationship to be more equal. For you to talk to me about you. It’s true that we only talk about me.

  NATALIE: What do you want to know?

  CHLOÉ: Your husband has been dead for a long time … and … and … does it bother you to talk about it?

  Natalie seems surprised. Nobody brings up the subject that directly. There’s a pause, and Chloé continues.

  CHLOÉ: It’s true … you’re young, beautiful … and look at that man over there—he hasn’t stopped looking at you since we came into the bar.

  Natalie turns her head, and her eyes meet those of the man who is looking at her.

  CHLOÉ: He’s really not bad, I think. I bet he’s a Scorpio. And since you’re a Pisces, it’s perfect.

  NATALIE: I’ve barely seen him, and you’re already making predictions?

  CHLOÉ: Well, astrology’s important. It’s the key to my problem with my boyfriend.

  NATALIE: Then nothing can be done? He can’t change his sign.

  CHLOÉ: No, that idiot will always be a Taurus.

  Shot of Natalie’s expressionless face.

  CUT

  Thirty-two

  Natalie felt ridiculous being here and having this kind of discussion with so young a woman. Moreover, as usual, she wasn’t able to live in the moment. Maybe that’s what grief is: a permanent disconnect from the here and now. She looked at the games adults played and felt detached. It was easy to tell herself: “I’m not here.” Chloé was speaking to her with the rash energy of the here and now, trying to keep her there and push her into thinking, “I am here.” She kept talking about that man. And quite rightly, since he was finishing his beer and looking like he was trying to decide whether to approach them. But passing from a glance to a conversation, from the eye to the word, is never simple. After a long day of work, he was in that leisurely mood that sometimes pushes you into bold behavior. Under every daring move, fatigue often hides. He was still looking at Natalie. What did he really have to lose? Nothing, except perhaps a little of the appeal he had from being unknown.

  He paid for his drink and left his observation post. His walk could almost have been called resolute. Natalie was several feet away from him: ten, twelve, not more. It dawned on her that this man was coming over to see her. Immediately a strange thought popped into her head: in seven years this man coming toward me may die by being run over. That flash of an idea shook her up inescapably and emphasized her fragility. Every man who approached her ineluctably reminded her of meeting François. However, this one had nothing in common with her husband. He was coming at her with his bedroom smile, his smile from an easy world. But once he got to the table, he was mute. A moment left hanging. He’d made up his mind to come up to them but hadn’t prepared the slightest conversation starter. Maybe he was just worried? Surprised, the girls took stock of the man, who stuck there like an exclamation point.

  “Hello … can I offer you a drink?” he finally let out uninspiredly.

  Chloé accepted, and he sat down near them with his feeling of being halfway to the prize. Once he’d sat down, Natalie thought, He’s stupid. He offers me a drink when mine has hardly been touched. Then, suddenly, she changed her mind. She told herself that his hesitation at the moment of approaching them was touching. Then once more aggression took the fore. Incessantly shifting, contradictory moods gripped her. She simply did not know what to think. Each of her gestures was quashed by an impulse against it.

  Chloé took charge of the conversation, piling on positive stories about Natalie, building her up. To hear her, this was a modern, brilliant, amusing, cultivated, dynamic, scrupulous, generous, uncompromising woman. All of it in under five minutes, so complete that the man only had one question in mind: what was the hitch? During each of Chloé’s lyric transports, Natalie had tried to emit believable smiles, to relax the planes of her face, and in rare flashes, she seemed natural. But the energy had drained her. Why put on a face? Why use all her strength to seem affable and agreeable? And then, what would come next? Another date? The need to be more and more candid? Suddenly, everything that was simple and easy was cast in a dark light. Underneath a harmless conversation, she could detect the monstrous mechanism of the life of the couple.

  She excused herself and got up to go to the ladies’ room. For a long moment, she examined herself in the mirror. Every detail of her face. She splashed a little water on her cheeks. Did she think she was beautiful? Did she have an opinion about herself? About her femininity? It was time to go back. But she stayed there for several minutes without moving, thinking, afloat in her reflections. When she got back to her table, she grabbed her coat. She made an excuse, without taking the trouble to make it seem believable. Chloé said something that she didn’t hear. She was already outside. A little later, as he was going to bed, the man wondered if he’d made a fool of himself.

  Thirty-three

  Astrological Signs of the People on Natalie’s Team

  Chloé: Libra

  *

  Jean-Pierre: Pisces

  *

  Albert: Taurus

  *

  Markus: Scorpio

  *

  Marie: Virgo

  *

  Benoît: Capricorn

  Thirty-four

  The next morning, she apologized to Chloé without going into detail. At the office, she was Chloé’s boss. She was a strong woman. She simply explained that, for the time being, she didn’t feel able to go out. “It’s too bad,” murmured her young colleague. That was all. They had to pass on to something else. After that exchange, Natalie stayed in the hallway for a moment. Then she went back to her office. All the files finally appeared to her under their real light: holding absolutely no interest.

  She had never completely
withdrawn from the world of the senses. She had never really stopped being a woman, even during moments when she wanted to die. Maybe it was homage to François, or merely came from the idea that sometimes it’s enough to put on makeup to seem alive. He’d been dead for three years. Three years of frittering away a life lived in emptiness. They’d often suggested that she leave her memories behind. Maybe it was the best way to stop living in the past. She remembered the expression: leaving your memories behind. How do you give up a memory? She’d accepted the idea when it came to objects. She couldn’t tolerate having those he’d touched around her anymore. As a result, there wasn’t much left, except for a photo she’d put away in the big drawer of her desk. A photo that seemed lost. She looked at it often, as if she were persuading herself that their story had really existed. In the drawer, there was also a small mirror. She took it out to take a look at herself the way a man would if he were seeing her for the very first time. She got up, began walking back and forth in her office, her hands on her hips. Because of the carpeting, her spike heels made no noise. Carpeting can murder sensuality. Who could have possibly invented the wall-to-wall carpet?

  Thirty-five

  Someone knocked. Discreetly, with two knuckles, not more. Natalie gave a start as if those last few seconds had made her believe she could be alone in the world. She said, “Come in,” and Markus entered. He was a fellow employee from Uppsala, a Swedish city that doesn’t interest many people. Even the inhabitants of Uppsalaf themselves are embarrassed; the name of their city sounds almost like an excuse. Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world. One alternative to suicide is emigrating to France, something Markus must have thought of. Physically, he was rather unpleasant, which is not to say that he was ugly. His way of dressing was always a bit odd: you couldn’t tell if he’d salvaged his clothes from his grandfather, at an Emmaus shop, or at a hip secondhand store. All of it formed an ensemble that wasn’t very coordinated.

  “I came to see you about file 114,” he said.

  His appearance was weird enough; did he also have to come out with statements as foolish as that? Natalie had no desire to work today. It was the first time in a long stretch. She was feeling something resembling despair; would have almost been ready to go on vacation in Uppsala, in other words. She was staring at Markus, who wasn’t moving. He was looking at her in amazement. For him, she represented a certain kind of inaccessible woman, doubled by the fantasy that some people develop toward all superiors, or anyone in a position to hold sway over them. So she decided to walk toward him, slowly, very slowly. You’d almost have had the time to read a novel while she made her approach. She seemed not to want to stop, so much so that she found herself nose to nose with Markus, so close that their noses really did touch. The Swede had stopped breathing. What did she want? He didn’t have the time to formulate that question in his mind at greater length, because she’d begun to kiss him for all she was worth. It was a long, intense kiss, the intensely adolescent kind. Then suddenly she pulled away.

  “We’ll see about file 114 later.”

  She opened the door and suggested Markus leave. Which he did with difficulty. He was Armstrong on the moon. That kiss was one giant leap for mankind—for him. He stayed there at the door to her office for a moment, without moving. Natalie herself had already completely forgotten what had just happened. What she’d just done had no connection to the series of other actions in her life. This kiss was the expression of a sudden insurrection among her neurons, what could be called a gratuitous act.

  Thirty-six

  The Invention of the Wall-to-Wall Carpet

  It appears difficult to discover who invented the wall-to-wall carpet. According to the Larousse dictionary, the carpet is merely “a rug sold by the yard.”

  Here we have an expression that offers undeniable proof of the pathetic nature of the wall-to-wall carpet, which has no relationship to calling somebody on the carpet.

  Thirty-seven

  Markus was a punctual man and loved to get home at exactly seven fifteen. He knew the schedules of the suburban trains like other people know their wife’s favorite perfumes. He wasn’t unhappy with his well-oiled daily schedule. Sometimes he would get the impression that he was friends with the unknown people he ran into each day. That evening, he wanted to shout and tell everybody about his life. His life with Natalie’s lips on his lips. He wanted to get up and get off at the first station that came, just like that, to give himself the feeling of deviating from the usual. He wanted to be crazy, which was excellent proof that he was not.

  As he walked home, images of his Swedish childhood came back to him. It certainly had happened fast. Childhood in Sweden is like old age in Switzerland. All the same, he remembered those moments when he’d sit at the very rear of the class, just to look at girls’ backs. During those years, he’d admired the napes of Kristina’s, Pernilla’s, and Joana’s necks, and those of so many other girls in row A, without ever being able to come anywhere near all the other letters. He didn’t remember their faces. He dreamed of finding them, just to tell them that Natalie had kissed him. To tell them that they hadn’t been able to see his charm. Ah, how sweet.

  When he reached his building, he hesitated. We’re forced to memorize so many numbers. Cell phones, Internet access codes, bank cards … so, inevitably, there comes a moment when everything gets mixed up. You try to get into your building by punching in your telephone number. Markus, whose brain was perfectly organized, felt as if he were at the threshold of this kind of derailment, and that’s exactly what happened to him that night. It was impossible to remember the door code. In vain he tried several combinations. How can you forget by evening something you knew perfectly that morning? Will the welter of data unavoidably push us into amnesia? Finally, a neighbor arrived and stood in front of the door. He could have opened it immediately but preferred to savor this moment of obvious one-upmanship. From the look in his eyes, you’d almost have thought that remembering your door code was a sign of virility. Finally the neighbor got moving, pompously declaring, “Please, after you.” Markus thought, You stupid ass, if you only knew what was going on in my head; I’ve got something so beautiful it obliterates useless data … He took the stairs, immediately forgetting about this hapless setback. He still felt just as lightheaded, and a loop of the scene of the kiss kept playing in his head. It was already a cult film in his memory. Finally he opened the door to his apartment and found his living room much too small in comparison with his appetite for living.

  Thirty-eight

  Code for the Door to Markus’s Building

  A9624

  Thirty-nine

  The next morning, he got up early. So early that he wasn’t even certain he’d slept. He waited impatiently for the sun, as if it were an important date. What was going to happen today? What kind of mood would Natalie be in? And what should he do? Who knew what to do when a beautiful woman kisses you without giving the slightest reason for it? Questions bombarded his mind, and that was never a good sign. He needed to take some calm in-and-out breaths (…) and (…), whew, like that (…), very good (…). And tell himself that it was just a day like any other.

  Markus loved to read. It was a nice point in common with Natalie. He used his trips on the suburban railway to satisfy that passion. He’d recently bought a number of books and had to choose the one that was going with him on this great day. There was that Russian author he liked a lot, an author who was read markedly less than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, for no real reason, but it was too bulky a book. He wanted a text he could peck away at when he felt like it, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. That’s why he chose Cioran’s Syllogisms of Bitterness.

  Once he arrived, he tried to spend as much time as possible near the coffee machine. To make it seem normal, he drank several cups. After an hour of this, he began to feel a little too worked up. Black coffee and white nights with no sleep were never a good combination. He went to the men’s room, felt peaked. Went back to his
office. No meeting with Natalie was planned for today. Maybe he should just go and see her? Use file 114 as an excuse. But there was nothing to say about file 114. It would be stupid. He was fed up with letting himself be eaten away by indecision. After all, she was the one who should come! She was the one who’d kissed him. You had no right to act like that without giving an explanation. It was like stealing something and then running away. It was exactly that: she’d run away from his lips. However, he knew she wouldn’t come to see him. Maybe she’d even forgotten that moment; for her was it just a gratuitous act? He had good intuition. He sensed a terrible injustice in that possibility: how could the act of kissing be gratuitous for her while it was inestimable for him? Yes, priceless. That kiss was everywhere in him, storming his body.

  Forty

  Excerpt from an Interpretation of the Painting

  The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

  Most of Klimt’s work gives rise to a host of interpretations, but his earlier use of the theme of the embracing couple in the Beethoven frieze and the Stoclet frieze allows us to see in The Kiss the ultimate accomplishment of the human quest for happiness.