Consequences (5 page)

There was something completely amazing, disconcerting about it. A few hours earlier, Richard had called him a charmer, and he had to face facts. His success with women was growing ever greater. What difference was there between the time when sleeping with a student was such an awkward, restrained, and easy-to-spot operation that it could take an entire school year, and today, when a woman called him in the middle of the night after only three informal encounters and was murmuring at the other end of the line?

Time and again, he'd looked in the mirror for what had changed in him, but what he saw wasn't too encouraging. He was missing some hair, the ones on his chin were turning gray; the lines in his face were deepening, and his eyes teared in the
cold—to name but a few—to the extent that everything seemed to be going in the wrong direction; and yet, strangely, it wasn't doing that at all. On the contrary, everything seemed easier. He'd acquired genuine confidence in this realm. Sometimes he almost felt nonchalant about it.

“No, Myriam, you're not bothering me,” he'd said, and climbed into bed in the dark with the telephone pressed to his ear and the small of his back propped up by a pillow, taking advantage of the time to clean his glasses. She had a pleasant, rather low voice. She asked him if he was doing anything special over there—now, at this precise moment—and he answered, yes. Which provoked a long silence on the line, broken by sounds of breathing, until she whispered, “Very well. In that case, goodnight.” And she hung up.

H
e spotted her from time
to time in different places, walking across campus, or even in the city, but she kept her distance—she'd abandoned a nearly full shopping cart to avoid being next to him at a mini-market checkout and had even gotten off the bus another time. They exchanged only furtive glances. When one of them smiled weakly, the other didn't, and vice versa.

It started to make him think he'd been wrong and didn't have the sex appeal he'd thought he had, which threw him into a sense of deep turmoil mixed with sadness.

One morning Richard Olso came into his class and whispered a few words in his ear. He bounded out and rushed toward the main building from which the flag of the European Union and the university coat of arms fluttered. The trouble was coming from the library.

The firefighters were there. They were putting away their equipment. Marianne was huddled in a chair, wrapped in a blanket that looked like aluminum foil, and she was pale as a corpse. Had she fainted? Of course. What else? When you eat nothing but cottage cheese, zero-percent fat content, what else could happen to you? How could you keep from conking out
at the top of a stepladder and just miss smashing your skull to smithereens?

He held her tightly against his shoulder. If she was incapable of eating anything else, there was nothing she could do about it. Blaming her didn't make sense. He thanked the firefighters. “Have her eat a good steak,” declared the youngest, packing up the first-aid kit. He nodded. Marianne's hand in his was still cold and reminded him of gloomy events lost in the jungle of their childhood. “Anyway, all's well that ends well,” declared Richard, gazing lovingly at her. “But Marianne, I might as well tell you, you gave us a terrible fright. Oh, c'mon now, be nice, and don't ever do that again, okay?”

She gave him a sheepish gesture of assurance with a still-weak white hand, while her brother slid a cigarette between her lips and resolutely conducted her to the parking lot. Spring had arrived two or three days ago, and the mimosa was in bloom; so were the hydrangeas.

“Let's not make a mountain out of a molehill,” she declared as he pulled out. “And keep the car on the road, would you?”

He let out a nervous chuckle. “Just wondering what the two of you were doing together in the library.”

“Pure chance. Don't be an idiot.”

He shifted down and revved the motor before launching into a sharp turn where there was no guardrail. The shock absorbers creaked. The sun was already high, and as they drove, birds flew away from their path, cheeping as if fleeing an army on the march.

“I'm getting nauseous,” she said.

“What? Sorry?”

“If you keep driving that fast, I'm going to be sick.”

“What?”

He pulled to the shoulder immediately, popped out of the Fiat, made it around the car in three bounds, and opened her door. “Marianne, please. Don't upchuck in my car. Please. Make an effort this time. Lean out. Want me to help you lean out?”

She declined his offer. There was a very nasty-looking bump on her temple. She gave him a gesture meant to say she was okay. “Really?” he said with a glimmer of hope in his tone. “It's gone? How do you feel? You sure? Sure-sure?” In her survival blanket, she looked like a lush of about fifty he'd picked up at the edge of the road.

The surrounding woods were silent, and as the motor cooled down, it clattered like a skeleton. He decided to let her get some air. It certainly couldn't do her any harm, if a gust of wind didn't blow her away, given her obviously weak condition. He felt a little ashamed about not having been more observant, not noticing that she wasn't doing well—and God knows that the zero percent was an important clue to which he'd remained blind, having had other fish to fry.

He should have spotted all of it, her paleness, for example, the fact that she was happier sitting down than she usually was and that she was talking less, but his mind had been elsewhere—irrevocably.

“Are you all right? You'll be all right?” he asked.

“Obviously,” she uttered, annoyed. “Give me a cigarette.”

He lit two and handed one to her. The air was cold, but the sun was out. On the lake, a Lilliputian regatta was involved in some dispute. “I'm going to order in, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he began dialing.

When they got home, he offered his arm for the walk from
the front seat of the Fiat to the living room couch, which he quickly swept clear of its magazines, TV guides, and literary thingamajigs so that she could stretch out.

She claimed she felt all right now and didn't need any help, and that it was too early for bed. He maintained that she'd done enough today, that her only job was to rest until evening, and that he didn't want to hear another word about it—she shouldn't even try.

“Eating a little raw fish will do you good,” he declared, settling her among the pillows. “Some raw meat, too, by the way.” They agreed on a cigarette, then were silent as the sun set behind the dark crests and inundated the horizon with a gilded mist.

“I'm going to the drugstore. I'll bring you some videos. What would you say to a good series?” They'd watched
Twin Peaks
together in similar circumstances, one summer that had left her weakened and absolutely ready for some long water-therapy sessions at La Baule or peaceful walks in Tuscany, entirely at their own expense. The emergency had required all of that, and he wondered what he'd do if Marianne's health called for new outlays of the same order. Their number of credit cards had fallen sharply—Diners Club had just canceled his, and HSBC was refusing to reconsider the line of credit they'd been given during the period when the world was rolling in it.

The thought was perplexing, and he brooded about it. Then the delivery person from Matsuri rang and he put it out of his mind—
eating Japanese is becoming a luxury,
he thought, shaking his head as he paid.

“I don't want to see anything left when I get back, not a crumb,” he uttered as he put on his parka. “Don't try getting up before I do. Just relax. Don't go smashing your skull a second time.”

She shrugged. “Come on, this is stupid, I'm fine . . . ,” she sighed distractedly, checking out the contents of the bag from the corner of her eye. They'd brought those tasty little things made with tuna (the
Thunnus obesus
variety) and salmon (from nurseries in Norway), which were making her mouth water but turning her stomach at the same time. Whatever the case, she was very careful not to put a single foot off the couch. Seeing that she was beginning to behave, he lowered his eyes to his parka and zipped it up in one stroke. Time to leave, and it got cold out there at night early.

Jets of vapor streamed from his mouth as he walked through the door and back to the Fiat, which was starting to gleam in the moonlight. His phone rang. “Whatever you do, bring back cigarettes,” she told him. “Whatever you do, don't forget that.” He turned toward the house. The windows were lit up, but he couldn't see her. “Right now I'd rather you eat than smoke,” he answered belatedly as he drove down toward the city, using low gear instead of braking.

Ten minutes later, he pulled into the shopping mall parking lot and went into the pharmacy, where he stocked up on bandages, Zopiclone, and Bion 3 with ginger. The stores were about to close. Security guards were starting to walk up and down aisles flanked by enormous, ferocious-looking dogs.

He was examining an antiaging cream by Biotherm—Age Fitness Power 2 with olive leaf—when he noticed Myriam opposite him, at the eyeglass shop across the way.
She certainly has a gift for surprise appearances
, he thought. He hadn't spotted her for several days, and at that moment, it occurred to him that he'd kind of missed her.

But the sound of a squabble attracted his attention—near
the phone store, they were ejecting a young, shaggy-haired guy who'd already slipped into his sleeping bag with the intention of spending the night right there. When he turned his attention back to Myriam with the beginnings of a smile, less than a few seconds later, as he prepared himself for news of the sergeant if that had to be, she was gone. Had disappeared. Had been dreamed?

He certainly was no expert on ghosts, but he had dealt with his mother's for a long time—nerve-wracking—so after all these years he stopped letting himself be thrown by such phenomena, duplicitous as they were.

He calmly finished his errands. The supermarket was emptying out, and walking around deserted shelves wasn't at all unpleasant: reading labels, comparing prices, etc. He lingered a bit, not in the slightest upset by his hallucination.

The important thing was not to forget those cigarettes. The important thing was to bring back something to clean the wound—caused by the contact of the library floor tiles with his sister's temple, which had split open a bit and swelled up like a pigeon's egg. He had to focus, keep from being invaded. He had to act like he was driving a racing car, like the slightest second of inattention could put him into a tailspin—had to think of life as a race, keep his eyes fixed on the road. That was the plan of action he'd chosen, and carrying it out left hardly any room for ravings.

A kind of conversation pulled him out of his musing—a man pushing a mop more than six feet wide and towing a pail of liquid bleach on wheels told him the store was closing soon and that people had to go home now without trying to make a fuss.

Make a fuss? He was surprised for a moment, then followed the employee's eyes, which were looking at the cigarette he'd unconsciously lit.

Every time he tried to stop, he would start again with a vengeance, dragging Marianne down with him, and right now other safeguards were collapsing. The verdict was clear. Soon he'd be found smoking in a church or hospital or in the corridors of a sanatorium. Nostalgically, he thought of the days when you could do it in trains and planes and elevators, without so much as a thought of the worst, of the damage you were doing. He apologized. They knew him in this store because he left a good part of his salary here and didn't steal anything, break anything, so he was going to make it back to the exit without being taken straight to the police station or, more simply, having the shit kicked out of him first and then locked in a cell overnight to learn some respect for law and order.

He was one of the last customers; there was only one register open, and the poor girl left at it was yawning her head off. All around, salesgirls were closing their shops and hurrying to different locations in the night, like troopers on a mission. He wasn't sure he wanted to take the elevator, but finally stepped into it because, at this point, he'd nearly mastered his phobia about them breaking down, even if this particular car didn't inspire confidence and had the size and appearance of a beat-up cattle truck. The slightest self-mastery, he thought to himself, came only at the price of bitter struggle. Who could claim the contrary? How many people had inherited an easy world, could get everything they wanted?

The parking lot was on the last, open-air level. Halfway there, the elevator stopped with a jolt, broke down. The lights
went out to the sound of a death rattle. He felt like a bullet had just hit him in the center of his chest or that he'd been struck by lightning. His legs gave way for a moment, he couldn't breathe, and his mouth got as dry as if he'd chewed plaster; but from deep inside he drew the strength to overcome the ordeal and grabbed his cell phone. Using it as a flashlight, he looked for the buttons on the elevator panel, especially the one for the alarm. He rang for emergency help, but nothing happened. Then he shouted out for it, also unsuccessfully.

Bent forward, his hands on his knees, he took some deep breaths. Then he straightened and turned back to the button panel, seriously manhandled it. His fist was still raised and his mouth full of curses when the light came back on and the elevator suddenly started moving.

He wiped his glasses and mopped his forehead while the tin can that called itself an elevator, into which he'd had the rotten luck of setting foot, hoisted him to his parking level. Despite the no-smoking sign, he lit up a Winston.

The elevator doors opened, and he saw the parking lot bathed in moonlight. The cold air swallowed him. There wasn't a soul to be seen at that hour; the place was deserted. Under a pristine, starry sky, he began walking to the Fiat. The air was biting. He winced.