“No, you can’t just cancel at the last minute. It’s not done.”
“You’ll have to take me to the shops, then. It’s too far to walk.”
She goes into the house. He hears her slam a door.
Richard goes over to his son. He slides his hand through the boy’s curly hair, puts a hand on his waist. “Did you stay with Mommy today? What did you do? Tell me.” Lucien doesn’t answer; he tries to escape from his grasp, but Richard insists. He looks tenderly at his little spy and rephrases the question. “Did you play? Did you do drawings? Lucien, tell me what you did.”
Adèle has moved the table into the garden, in the shade of the mirabelle plum tree. She has changed the tablecloth twice and has arranged a bouquet in the center, with flowers picked from the garden. The kitchen windows are open but the air is hot. Lucien is sitting on the ground, at his mother’s feet. She gave him a small board and a plastic knife and he is cutting up a boiled zucchini into tiny pieces.
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
Adèle is in a blue flower-print dress with thin straps that cross in the back, revealing her shoulders and her thin arms.
“Did you remember my cigarettes?”
Richard takes a packet from his pocket. He opens it and hands a cigarette to Adèle.
“I’ll keep the pack here,” he says, patting his trousers. “You won’t smoke as much that way.”
“Thank you.”
They sit on the bench outside the kitchen wall. Adèle smokes her cigarette in silence. Lucien carefully replants the boiled zucchini in the ground. They observe the Verdons’ house.
Early in the spring a couple arrived on their side of the hill. First, the man came a few times to visit the house. From the window of the little office Adèle could see him in discussion with Emile the gardener, with Mr. Godet the estate agent, and then with various contractors. The man was about fifty years old, very tanned and athletic. He was wearing a bright-colored sweater and what looked like brand-new plastic boots.
One Saturday a truck arrived and parked on the sloping road that the Robinsons had, up to that point, been the only ones to use. Adèle and Richard sat on the bench and watched the couple move into their new house.
“They’re Parisians,” Richard told her. “They’ll only be here on weekends.”
He was the one who went to say hello to them, one Sunday afternoon. He led Lucien by the hand and they crossed the road to introduce themselves. He offered to do them a favor: to keep an eye on the house while they were away, and to call them if there was ever a problem. And as he was leaving he invited them to dinner. “Just let me know when you’ll be here next. My wife and I would be delighted to see you.”
* * *
*
“What do they do for a living?”
“He’s an optician, I think.”
The Verdons are crossing the road. The woman is holding a bottle of champagne. Richard stands up, puts his arm around Adèle’s waist, and waves to them. Lucien clings to his mother’s leg. He buries his face in her thigh.
“Hello, you.” The woman leans down toward Lucien. “Aren’t you going to say hello? My name is Isabelle. What’s your name?”
“He’s shy,” Adèle says apologetically.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve got three myself, I know what it’s like. Enjoy him! Mine refuse to leave Paris. They’re not interested in spending the weekend with their old parents anymore.”
* * *
*
Adèle goes to the kitchen. Isabelle starts to follow her but Richard pulls her back. “Come and sit down. She prefers to be alone in her kitchen.”
Adèle hears them talking about Paris, about Nicolas Verdon’s office in the seventeenth arrondissement, and about Isabelle’s job in a press agency. She looks older than her husband. She has a loud voice and she laughs a lot. And even though they’re in the countryside, in the middle of summer, she is wearing an elegant black silk blouse and a pair of earrings. When Richard tries to pour her a glass of rosé she delicately puts her hand over her glass. “That’s quite enough for me. I don’t want to be tipsy.”
Adèle goes outside to sit with them, Lucien trailing at her heels.
“Richard was telling us that you left Paris for the countryside,” says Nicolas enthusiastically. “Quite right! You have everything you need here: earth, stones, trees, real things. I can’t wait to retire here.”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful house.”
They look over at the rows of lime trees that Richard planted along the driveway. The sunlight filters through the leaves and spreads a phosphorescent bright-green light over the garden.
Richard talks about his work, about what he calls his “vision of medicine.” He tells stories about his patients—funny, moving stories that he has never told Adèle before—and she listens, eyes lowered. She wishes their guests would leave, so the two of them could stay there in the cool of the evening. So they could finish the bottle of wine on the table, even in silence, even a bit annoyed with each other. So they could walk upstairs, one behind the other, and go to bed.
“Do you work, Adèle?”
“No. But I was a journalist in Paris.”
“Don’t you miss it?”
“Working forty hours a week to earn the same salary as a nanny?” Richard interrupts. “It’s really not worth it.”
“Would you give me a cigarette?”
Richard takes the pack from his pocket and puts it on the table. He’s had a lot to drink.
* * *
*
They eat unenthusiastically. Adèle is a bad cook. The guests pay her compliments, but she knows that the meat is overcooked, the vegetables tasteless. Isabelle chews slowly, her face tense, as though she is afraid of choking.
Adèle smokes constantly. Her lips are stained blue by the tobacco. She raises her eyebrows when Nicolas asks her, “as a journalist,” what she thinks about the situation in Egypt.
She doesn’t tell him that she never reads newspapers anymore. That she never turns on the television. That she has even given up watching films. She is too afraid of intrigues, of love, of sex scenes, of naked bodies. She is too nervous to bear the agitation of the world.
“I’m not a specialist in Egypt. Par contre . . .”
“En revanche,” Richard corrects her.
“Yes, en revanche, I have worked quite a lot in Tunisia . . .”
The conversation becomes generic, dull. The silences grow longer. Once they have exhausted all the subjects that strangers can discuss without risk, they find they don’t have much to say to one another. The only sounds are of forks scraping plates and food being swallowed. Adèle stands up, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, a plate in each hand.
“It’s exhausting, all this fresh air!” The Verdons repeat the joke three times and finally leave, practically pushed out of the garden by Richard, who waves good-bye to them from the gravel driveway. He watches them enter their house, wondering what secrets, what flaws that dull couple might be hiding.
“What did you think of them?” he asks Adèle.
“I don’t know. Nice.”
“And him? What did you think of him?”
Adèle does not look up from the sink.
“I told you. I thought they seemed nice.”
Adèle goes up to the bedroom. Through the window she sees the Verdons closing their shutters. She lies down and does not move. She waits for him.
* * *
*
Not once have they slept in separate rooms. At night Adèle listens to his breathing, his snoring, all those guttural sounds that comprise a couple’s life. She closes her eyes and curls up very small. With her face at the edge of the bed, her hand dangling over the side, she doesn’t dare turn around. She could bend a knee, reach out with an arm, brush his skin as she feigns sleep. But she doesn’
t move. If she touched him, even accidentally, he might get angry. He might change his mind and throw her out.
When she is sure that he’s asleep, Adèle turns over. She looks at him, in the trembling bed, in this room where everything seems to her so fragile. Never again will the slightest gesture be innocent. This terrifies and enraptures her.
Back when he was a junior doctor, Richard did an internship in the emergency room at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. It was the kind of place where you are constantly told that here “you’ll learn a lot—about medicine, and about human nature.” Richard mostly treated flu cases, people hurt in car accidents, assault victims, and vagus nerve disorders. He had expected to encounter extraordinary cases, but the internship proved deeply boring.
He has a very clear memory of the man who was admitted that night. A tramp, his trousers soiled with shit. His eyes were rolled back in his head, there was froth on his lips and his body was shaken by convulsions. “Is he epileptic?” Richard asked the department head.
“No, he’s in withdrawal. Delirium tremens.”
When they stop drinking, alcoholics suffer unbearably violent withdrawal symptoms. “Three to five days after ceasing to drink, the patient suffers vivid hallucinations, often visual and associated with animals such as snakes and rats. The patient is agitated, in a state of extreme disorientation, prone to paranoid delusions. Some hear voices, others have seizures. If untreated, sudden death is possible. As these symptoms are often worse at night, the patient will need company.”
Richard watched over that tramp, who banged his head against walls and waved his arms in the air to shoo something away. He administered tranquilizers and prevented the tramp from hurting himself. Calmly he cut off the soiled trousers and rubbed the tramp’s skin. He cleaned his face and trimmed his beard, which was thick with dried vomit. He even gave him a bath.
In the morning, when the patient had recovered the few wits that he had left, Richard attempted to explain the situation to him: “You mustn’t stop like that. It’s very dangerous, as you can see. I know you probably felt like you had no choice, but there are methods, special protocols for people in your condition.” The man did not look at him. His face was swollen and purple, his eyes yellowed by jaundice. From time to time he would shudder, as if a rat had just crawled over his back.
* * *
*
After practicing medicine for fifteen years, Dr. Robinson feels confident that he knows the human body. That there is nothing that can deter or frighten him. He is able to detect signs, cross-check clues. Find solutions. He even knows how to measure pain, asking his patients how badly they’re suffering “on a scale of one to ten.”
With Adèle, he has the feeling that he’s been living with a sick person who showed no symptoms, that he was in the presence of a dormant cancer, spreading from cell to cell without declaring itself. When they moved to the new house he kept waiting for her to suffer. To become agitated. He fully expected her to lose her mind, like any other addict deprived of her drug, and he was prepared for this eventuality. He told himself that he would know what to do if she became violent, if she tried to beat him up, if she screamed through the night. If she cut herself, if she stabbed a knife under her fingernails. He would react rationally, scientifically. He would prescribe the right medicine. He would save her.
* * *
*
The night he confronted her, he was bereft. He had not made any decision about their future. He just wanted to unburden himself, watch her collapse before his eyes. He was still in shock, and Adèle’s passivity infuriated him. She did not attempt to justify herself. She didn’t try to deny it. She was like a child, relieved to have her secret discovered and ready to take her punishment.
She poured herself a glass of wine. She smoked a cigarette and said: “I’ll do whatever you want.” Then she stammered: “Saturday is Lucien’s birthday.” And he remembered. Odile and Henri were supposed to come to Paris. It had been arranged weeks beforehand, and Clémence, the cousins, and lots of friends were expecting to see them. He didn’t have the courage to cancel everything. He knew it was ridiculous, that such a minor social event had no importance compared with the destruction of their marriage, but even so he clung to it as to a piece of driftwood.
“We’ll celebrate his birthday and then we’ll see.” He gave her instructions. She was not to sulk or cry. She had to be cheerful, smiling, perfect. “You shouldn’t have any problem with that: you’re good at pretending to be something you’re not.” The idea that someone might find out, that the truth would be revealed, was enough to induce a panic attack in Richard. If he and Adèle were going to split, he would have to come up with an explanation: something simple and believable. Say that they didn’t get on anymore. He made her swear not to tell anyone. And never to speak Lauren’s name in his presence.
On Saturday he blew up balloons in silence. They decorated the apartment and Richard made a superhuman effort not to yell at Lucien, who was running from room to room like a madman. He didn’t reply when Odile expressed surprise that he was drinking so much in the middle of the afternoon. “It’s a children’s party, isn’t it?” she said.
Lucien was happy. At seven in the evening he fell asleep fully clothed, surrounded by his new toys. The two of them were left alone together. Adèle moved toward him, smiling, her gaze luminous. “That went well, didn’t it?” Lying on the sofa, he watched her tidy up the living room. Her calmness was monstrous, he thought. He couldn’t stand being near her. Everything she did irritated him. The way she swept her hair back behind her ears. The way she dabbed with her tongue at her lower lip. The way she banged the dishes as she washed them in the sink. The way she never stopped smoking. He saw nothing charming or interesting about her. He wanted to beat her, to watch her disappear.
He went up to her and in a firm voice said: “Pack your bags and go.”
“What? Now? What about Lucien? I haven’t even said good-bye to him.”
“Get out of here!” he yelled.
He hit her with his crutches and pushed her into the bedroom. Steely-eyed, without a word, he threw her things into a bag. He went into the bathroom and, with a single hand movement, swept all her toiletries, all her perfume bottles, into a clutch bag. For the first time, she begged him. She went down on her knees. Eyes red with tears, her words torn by gasps and sobs, she swore that she would die without them. That she would not survive the loss of her son. She said she would do whatever it took to be forgiven. That she wanted to get better. That she would give anything for a second chance with him. “That other life meant nothing to me. Nothing.” She told him that she loved him. That no other man had ever mattered to her. That he was the only one she could imagine living with.
He had thought he was strong enough to throw her out into the street, without money, without work, with no option but to go back to her parents’ seedy apartment in Boulogne-sur-Mer. For a minute or so he even felt he would be able to answer Lucien’s questions about her absence. “Mommy is ill. She needs to live far away from us so she can get better.” But in the end he couldn’t do it. He didn’t manage to open the door, to push her out of his life. He couldn’t bear the idea that she might exist somewhere else. As if his anger were not enough. As if he needed to understand what had led them both into such madness.
He dropped the bag on the floor. He stared into her pleading eyes, her hunted animal’s eye, and he shook his leg to prevent her clinging to it. She fell to the floor and he left. It was bitterly cold outside but he felt nothing. Holding tight to his crutches, he hobbled along the street to the taxi rank. The driver helped him lay his plaster cast on the backseat. Richard handed him some money and asked him to drive. “And turn off the music, please.” They kept crossing bridges over the Seine and driving along its banks in an interminable zigzag. They sped along, his pain following close behind. Richard had the feeling that if they stopped moving forward for even an instant
he would be crushed by sorrow, incapable of moving a muscle, of breathing. Finally the driver dropped him off near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Richard went into a brasserie. It was full of people: old couples who’d just been to the theater, noisy tourists, divorced women looking for a new life.
He could have called a friend, cried on someone’s shoulder. But how could he have told them? What could he have said? Adèle probably believes that it’s shame that has stopped him confiding in anyone. That he would rather save face than ask a friend for support and compassion. She must think that he is afraid of the humiliation, of being seen as a cuckold. But he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of him. What he fears is what people will say about her, the way they will stereotype her, reduce her. The way they will caricature his sadness. What he fears the most is that they will force him into a decision, telling him confidently: “In these circumstances, Richard, you have no choice: you must leave her.” Talking makes things irreversible.
He didn’t call anyone. He just sat there, alone, stared into his glass for hours on end. He sat there for so long that he didn’t even notice the bar emptying. He didn’t realize it was two in the morning and that the old waiter in the white apron was waiting for him to pay his bill and leave.
He went home. Adèle was sleeping in Lucien’s bed. Everything was normal. Horribly normal. He couldn’t believe that he was still able to live.
* * *
*
The next day he delivered his diagnosis. Adèle was sick, and she was going to get better. “We’re going to find someone who can help you.” Two days later he took her to a medical laboratory, where she gave dozens of blood samples. When he received the results, which were all good, he told her: “You were very lucky.”
He asked her questions. Thousands of questions. He didn’t give her a minute’s respite. He would wake her in the middle of the night to confirm a nagging suspicion, to demand further details. He was obsessed by dates, coincidences, cross-checking facts. She kept repeating: “I don’t remember. Honestly, it never mattered to me.” But he wanted to know everything about those men. Their names, ages, professions, the places where she met them. He wanted to know how long each affair had lasted, where they had gone, what they had done.
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