"Was it hard?"
"At first, yes. But I know how important it is, when you've lost someone, to be able to have a last, peaceful look at that loved one's body."
"Are there many female morticians?"
"More than you think. When I get babies, or children, the parents are relieved that I'm a woman. I guess they feel a woman will care more, will have a gentler touch, will pay more attention to detail and dignity."
She turns to me, takes my hand. Smiles that slow smile.
"Let me have a quick shower and I'll whiz you away. Let's go to my place."
We go into the adjoining office. Beyond is a white tiled bathroom.
"I won't be a minute," she says. She leaves the room.
I notice photographs on her desk. Black-and-white ones of a man in his forties. He looks so much like her, it has to be her father. The same eyes, the same chin. I sit at her desk looking at the paperwork, calendar, computer, letters. Paraphernalia. The usual clutter of a day's work. There is a small date book by her mobile phone. I feel tempted to reach out and pick it up. Leaf through it. I want to know everything about the fascinating Angele Rouvatier. Her dates, her rendezvous, her secrets. But I don't in the end. I feel content just sitting here and waiting for her, even if I am most probably just another boyfriend she keeps dangling on a string. I can hear the shower running in the next room. Water on her bare skin. I keep thinking about my hands on that skin and that smooth body. I keep thinking about her warm, wet mouth. About what I am going to do to her when I get to her house. I think about that very precisely. I begin to get the most monumental erection. Is this fitting, I wonder, in a morgue?
For the first time in a long while I feel as if my life has brightened up at last. Like that fragile, fresh sunshine right after the rain. Like the Gois passage emerging from the receding tide.
I want to make the most of it.
In late September, Melanie goes back home for the first time since the accident. I stand with her at the threshold of her apartment and cannot help noticing how frail and white she is. She still walks haltingly, with crutches, and I know the next weeks will be taken up with physiotherapy. She is so happy to be back home, and her smile lights up her face as she sees all her friends gathered for her return, laden with gifts and flowers.
Every time I turn up at the rue de la Roquette, she has somebody over, someone preparing tea or cooking, listening to music with her, or making her laugh. If all goes well, she tells us, she could be back at work in the spring. Whether she wants to or not is another matter. "I don't know if the publishing scene is as exciting," she admits to Valerie and me one evening over dinner. "I find reading difficult. I simply can't concentrate. I never was like that before."
The accident has changed my sister. She appears quieter, more thoughtful, less stressed. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and the silver strands shining through her dark locks suit her, giving her even greater class. A friend gave her a cat as a present, a black, golden-eyed creature called Mina.
When I'm talking to my sister, I often long to burst out with "Mel, do you remember what you were telling me just before we crashed?" But I don't dare. Her fragility still awes me. I have more or less given up waiting for her to recall what she was trying to tell me. But the thought never leaves me.
"What about your elderly, salacious admirer?" I ask her one day, teasingly, as Mina purrs on my knees.
We are in her large, bright sitting room. Rows and rows of books, pale olive walls, a large white sofa, a round marble table, a fireplace. Melanie did wonders with this apartment. She bought it fifteen years ago, without borrowing any money from our father, when it was still a row of poky service rooms on the top floor of an unpretentious building in a then unfashionable arrondissement. She had walls knocked down, parquet floors rehabilitated, a fireplace installed. She did all this without my help or suggestions, which in those days I found rather insulting. But eventually I understood that it was Melanie's way of standing up for herself. And I admired it.
She tosses her head. "Oh, him . . . He still writes to me and sends roses, and he even offered to take me to Venice for a long weekend. Can you imagine Venice on crutches?" We laugh. "God, when's the last time I had sex?" She looks at me blankly. "I can't even remember. Probably with him, poor old fellow." She shoots an inquisitive look in my direction. "And what about your sex life, Tonio? You're being most mysterious, and I haven't seen you look that perky in years."
I smile, thinking of Angele's smooth, creamy thighs. I'm not quite sure when I will be seeing her again, but the anxious wait somehow makes it all the more exciting. We talk on the phone every day, several times a day, and there are texts and e-mails as well, and in the evenings I can see her naked on my webcam, locking myself up in my bedroom like a guilty teenager. I more or less admit to my sister that I'm having a long-distance online relationship with a terrifically sexy mortician.
"Wow," she breathes. "Eros and Thanatos. What a Freudian brew. When can I meet this lady?"
I say I don't even know when I will be seeing her properly again. After a while, the webcam excitement will wear off, I am sure, and I will need to touch her in the flesh, to have her. To really have her. I don't say this to Melanie in those exact terms, but she gets my drift.
Later, in a particularly bold text message, I admit this to Angele. I get an instantaneous text message from her with the schedule of the next train from Montparnasse to Nantes. I can't make that train because of an important meeting for a new contract. Bank offices to be built in the twelfth arrondissement, near Bercy. Another tedious job, but yet again nothing I can afford to turn down.
My yearning for Angele thrives day after day. The next time I see her, I know it will be like fireworks. And just thinking about that keeps me going.
Down in my cellar one evening in October, I come across a treasure. I am looking for a good bottle of wine to offer to Helene, Emmanuel, and Didier at dinner, something they'd like and remember. But instead of coming back up with a bottle of Croizet-Bages, I triumphantly traipse upstairs with an old photo album. I didn't even remember that I had it. It was stuck in a cardboard box I hadn't bothered to open since the divorce, lost in a heap of report cards, maps, crumpled pillowcases, and moldy Disney beach towels. I fell upon it. How has this ended up in my possession, and how is it that I had no recollection of it? Old black-and-white photographs of Melanie and me. My first Communion. Seven years old. Long white robe. Serious face. New watch on my proud wrist. Melanie at four, plump cheeks and frilly smocked dress. The get-together at the avenue Henri-Martin apartment. Champagne, orange juice, and macarons from the nearby tearoom Carette. My grandparents gazing down at me benignly. Solange. My father. My mother. I have to sit down. There she is. Dark hair. Lovely smile. Her hand on my shoulder. So young. She had only three more years to live. It is difficult to believe, looking at that photograph. She is the very image of youth.
I turn the pages slowly, taking care not to get cigarette ash on them. They are musty from their stay in the cellar. Noirmoutier. The last summer, 1973. My mother must have stuck all these photos into this album, I realize. This is her handwriting, round and childish. I can almost see her, sitting at her desk at avenue Kleber, bent over the pages, concentrating. Glue and scissors. The special pen that wrote on black paper. Melanie standing on the Gois at low tide with her shovel and pail. Solange smoking a cigarette and posing on the pier. Did my mother take these photos? Did she have a camera? I can't remember. Melanie on the pier at the beach. Me in front of the casino. My father basking in the sun. All of us on the hotel terrace. Who took that one? I wonder. Bernadette? Another waitress? The perfect Rey family at their very best.
I close the album. As I do so, something white comes fluttering out of it. I bend to the floor to pick it up. It is an old boarding pass. I stare at it, perplexed. A flight to Biarritz back in the spring of 1989. In Astrid's maiden name. Of course. This is the flight I'd met Astrid on. She was attending a friend's wedding and I was renovating office
s in a new mall for the architect I worked for. I remember being secretly thrilled that such a pretty young woman was seated next to me.
She had a wholesome, outdoor Scandinavian look that immediately appealed to me. This was not your manicured, mincing Parisian. During the flight I racked my brains for something to say, but she had a Walkman clamped to her ears and appeared to be riveted by Elle magazine. The landing became suddenly atrociously bumpy. It seemed we had arrived in the Basque country as the mother of all storms was brewing. The pilot attempted to land the plane twice before backing off each time, engines whining and shuddering. Winds howled around us, and the sky blackened to an inky dusk although it was only two in the afternoon. Astrid and I exchanged apprehensive smiles. The plane wobbled to and fro, wrenching our guts mercilessly with each swoop.
The bearded man sitting across the aisle seemed to have turned green. With a neat gesture he reached for the paper bag tucked into the seat pocket, opened it deftly, and, with a monstrous, greasy belch, threw up into it for what seemed to be an eternity. A sour stench of garlic and vomit wafted toward Astrid and me. She glanced at me helplessly. I could tell she was scared. I was not. What frightened me was not the chance that we might crash, but that I might spew my spaghetti bolognaise over this beautiful girl's knees. All we could hear was the sound of passengers being sick. As the plane spun dizzyingly round and round and I fought with all my might not to look at the bearded man, who had now filled a second bag with purple puke, her trembling hand came creeping into mine.
That was how I met my wife. And the fact that she had kept that ticket for all those years warmed my heart. The fifteen years between my mother's death and Astrid seem like a blur, a drive down a dark tunnel. I don't like thinking about those years. I was like a field horse with blinders, overcome by a frozen loneliness that ate at me, that I could not get rid of. Once I left the avenue Kleber and went to live on the Left Bank with two fellow students, my existence seemed slightly less dreary. There had been a girlfriend or two, trips abroad, discovering Asia, America. But when Astrid came into my life, all of a sudden there was light. And happiness. And laughter. And joy.
When my marriage broke down, when it finally hit me that Astrid no longer loved me, that she loved him, Serge, the bottom fell out of my world. I was back in the long, dark tunnel. Fragments of my life with Astrid came whirling back to me in my dreams and during the day. As we moved relentlessly toward the divorce, I incredulous, she determined, I frantically grasped at every memory I had to keep me going. One kept coming back to haunt me. Our first trip together as a couple. San Francisco. We were all of twenty-six, the year before Arno was born. We were young and carefree, as they say. Madly in love. There is a flock of memories I can conjure from that trip--driving across the Golden Gate in a convertible with Astrid's hair blowing into my face, the little hotel in Pacific Heights where we made love with mad frenzy, the riotous rides in cable cars.
But it is Alcatraz that comes back to me. We had taken a boat to visit the island and were given a guided tour. You could glimpse the city in all its glittering, hilly glory, barely three kilometers away, across cold and treacherous water. So close, yet so far away. Because the sun came pouring through the windows, the cells on "Seedy Block" were the desirable ones. The prisoners preferred being on this side, explained the guide. These cells were warmer, less chilly, even on cold winter nights. And on some nights, he went on, like on New Year's Eve, for instance, if the wind was coming from the right direction, the prisoners could hear the sound of parties drifting in from the St. Francis Yacht Club across the bay.
For a long time I have felt like an Alcatraz inmate, desperately feeding on the scraps the wind sends my way--laughter, singing, and music, the hubbub of a crowd I can hear but will never see.
Afternoon of a dreary November day. Four weeks to Christmas. Paris is decked out in scintillating tinsel, like a gaudy courtesan. I am sitting at my desk, working on a complicated layout for the Bercy bank offices for the fifth time that morning. I keep having to reprint it. The printer makes a moaning noise like a woman in labor. Florence has a cold. I still have not had the heart to fire her. There is something profoundly pitiful about her. Today, she never seems to stop blowing her nose. Every time she does so, she thrusts sturdy Kleenex-covered index fingers up her nostrils and rotates them like propellers. I itch to reach out and swipe her across the face.
The past two months have been a whirlwind of conflicts and fights. Arno is in serious trouble at school. Astrid and I have been called in twice to talk with the teachers. If he goes on like this, we are warned, he will not only be held back, he'll be expelled. Low grades, insolence, vandalization of school property, cutting class--we discover to our horror the extent of Arno's dark deeds. How did our charming, easygoing son morph into this rebellious thug? As quiet as her brother is boisterous, Margaux is wrapped up in a cool world of silence and contempt. She hardly talks to us, wears her iPod day in and day out. The only way to communicate with her is to send her a text message, even if she is in the next room. Only Lucas remains reasonably agreeable. For the moment.
The only positive news around me right now, beside Angele, is Melanie's speedy recovery. She now walks at a normal pace, with no hesitation, and regular exercise and physiotherapy have given her the extra strength she lacked. Getting back to work is not her priority. I guess she is making the most of her sick leave. She finally did go to Venice with the old beau, but there are new, younger men around her who seem never to stop taking her out to dinner, concerts, and openings.
I turn my back to the plastic Christmas tree squatting in the entrance, flashing green and red lights. Our second Christmas as a divorced couple is coming up. Astrid is in Tokyo with Serge, who has an "important sushi shoot" (the expression made Emmanuel hoot with laughter) for a glossy food catalog. She won't be back for another week. The children are spending the entire week with me, and so far their stay has been a grueling one.
My mobile phone buzzes. Melanie. We stay awhile on the phone, reviewing Christmas presents, who needs what, who would like what. We discuss our father. We both are convinced that he is ill in some sort of way, but he's not telling us anything. When confronted, Regine replies flatly that she knows nothing. I once tried to get something out of Josephine, but she admitted sheepishly that she hadn't even noticed our father was looking that bad.
Melanie teases me about Angele. "Your Morticia" she calls her. I've already admitted to Mel, not that I have anything to hide, that this woman is what keeps me going right now. Even if I've managed to see her only a couple of times since the summer, Angele is a new energy in my life. Yes, she is exasperatingly independent, yes, she probably sees other men, yes, she sees me only when she wants to, but she keeps my mind off my ex-wife. She has resuscitated my manhood in every sense of the word. All my friends have noticed a change. Since Angele Rouvatier has waltzed into my life, I've lost weight, I'm cheerful, I've stopped complaining. I'm more careful about my clothes. I like my shirts very white, very crisp, my jeans, black now, like hers, perfectly cut. I wear a long black coat that Arno finds "cool" and that even Margaux looks upon with approval. And every morning I splash on the eau de cologne Angele gave me, a zesty Italian fragrance that always makes me think of her, of us.
During my long conversation with Mel, a beep goes off in my phone. Call-waiting. I quip, "Hold on!" and glance at the screen. It is Margaux's number. Margaux calls me so rarely that I tell my sister I need to take this call and I'll get back to her later.
"Hi, this is your dad!" I say breezily to my daughter.
The only thing I hear in return is silence.
"You there, Margaux?"
A strangled sob. My heart starts to pump.
"Honey, what is it?"
Florence's inquisitive, ferretlike face turns to me. I get up, walk briskly to the entrance of the office.
"Dad . . ."
Margaux seems to be miles away. Her voice is faint.
"Speak up, sweetie!"
&nb
sp; "Dad!" Now she is screaming. The sound of it rips through my skull.
"What is it?"
My fingers tremble so much I almost drop the phone.
She is sobbing, the words tumbling out helter-skelter. I can't make heads or tails of them. I say, "Margaux, honey, please calm down, I can't understand you!"
Behind me, floorboards groan as Florence stealthily moves forward, not wanting to miss a word of this. I swivel around, confronting her with a glacial look. She freezes in midstep and cowers back to her desk.
"Margaux, talk to me. Please!"
I retreat to the entrance, finding shelter behind a large storage closet.
"Pauline is dead."
"What?" I gasp.
"Pauline died."
"But how?" I stutter. "Where are you? What happened?"
Her voice is flat now, devoid of all emotion.
"It happened during gym class just after lunch. She collapsed."
My mind races. I feel helpless, confused. I scramble back to my desk, grab my coat, my scarf, my keys.
"Are you still at the gym?"
"No. We're back at school. They took Pauline to the hospital. But it's too late."
"Have they called Patrick and Suzanne?"
"I guess so."
I almost wish she would start crying again. I can't stand her robotic voice. I tell her I will be right there. I don't look at Florence as I rush out. I run to the school in a frantic daze.
In the back of my mind, I think, with utmost dread, Astrid is not here, Astrid is away, you are going to have to deal with this alone--you, the father, you, Daddy. You, the guy your daughter has hardly talked to for the past month, you, the guy she won't even look at.
A Secret Kept Page 13
